East of Denver

by Gregory Hill

  I said, “Here I am.” I didn’t feel much like talking. “Is Mr. Crutchfield in today?”

  Charlotte half-rolled her eyes. “He sure is. But he’s pretty darned busy.” She shrugged apologetically.

  “I was hoping I could talk to him.”

  She squinted at me. “You look so much like your dad. How is he doing, anyway?”

  I do not understand why some people feel compelled to screw up a perfectly normal conversation by bringing up the most depressing subject they can think of.

  “He’s on a long, slow decline.” I said it with a smile.

  “Well, tell him hi for me.”

  “Will do. Can I see Mike?”

  “He’s awful busy. You understand.”

  “Charlotte, I need to talk to him about that airplane he’s been flying. It’ll take five minutes. I just want to talk to him.” My voice was getting loud. I tried to sound calm. “Tell him I’m here, willya? It’s important.”

  She stopped smiling. She pointed to the one of the goofy signs on the wall behind me. There will be a $5 charge for whining. I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. Please.”

  Without speaking, she turned and walked toward the back of the bank. A moment later, she returned. “He said he can spare you a few minutes.”

  * * *

  Mike Crutchfield, master of the Keaton State Bank, was staring at a laptop. He was just a skinny guy with thick ears and a big chin. In his fifties, probably. Brown suit and bolo tie. He moved the computer aside. He grinned at me and his whole face stretched.

  “Mr. Williams,” he said. He didn’t stand up. He leaned back in his chair. “Thanks for taking the time to come by.”

  The people of Strattford County have an accent. It’s not Southern, it’s not cowboy, and it definitely isn’t Texas. A linguist might say that the Strattford County accent can be identified by the fact that “pen” and “pin” sound the same, or that, depending on the usage, “do” sometimes has one syllable and sometimes has two. In reality, the Strattford County accent is defined by the layer of bullshit that coats every word, like the speaker is always messing with your head. I’ve seen funerals where I wasn’t sure if the preacher wasn’t maybe glad that the so-and-so had died. I don’t know what it is, but it’s there and, even though I grew up with it, I can never tell what people are saying.

  Mike Crutchfield didn’t have that tinge. He sounded completely sincere. And he pronounced every vowel in every word he spoke.

  He said, “I understand you’re living with your father now. It is noble of you to take on this responsibility. Emmett is a great man. He has always been an upstanding member of this community. He lives a respectable life, he is known throughout the region for his wits, and, together with your mother, he contributed a great deal of time and money to those who needed both.

  “Unfortunately, things have changed and now your father has neither a great deal of time nor money. I cannot speak on the subject of the thing that has shortened his time other than to say that his most precious years are being robbed of him, plain and simple, by a universe whose ultimate plans for us all are as mysterious as they are unfair.

  “I can say more about the subject of money and perhaps what I say will be of help to you. Before his capacity to manage his affairs became overly restricted, your father enrolled much of his land in the Conservation Reserve Program, of which I am sure you are aware. Income from this program was instrumental in maintaining his quality of life. CRP contracts last for ten years. Unfortunately, your father’s contracts expired two years ago and he was not able to renew them in time for the payments to continue. What’s more, a quirk of the latest farm bill makes it impossible to bring land back into the program once its contract has expired.

  “Without being farmed and without the government handouts, the land has no value to your father. I suppose you could attempt to rent it for pasture or even sell it, but I am not currently aware of anyone who would be willing to pay anything, much less a fair market price, for that land at this moment. I work with most of the farmers in this community and I can tell you that the economy is not strong. Plus, the land has been in your family for generations and, in spite of the fact that you currently do not have plans to farm it, I suspect you are very reluctant to sell it outright.”

  He was correct and he knew it. He smiled so that his eyes deepened in their sockets.

  “Naturally, you’re also curious about the subject of your father’s airplane.” He reached into his desk and pulled out a piece of paper. “This should answer any questions you have. What you’re holding is a copy of a good faith contract signed by your father and me.”

  I looked at it. There were lots of words.

  “The contract clearly states that your father is selling me his airplane for a discounted rate in exchange for my extraordinary helpfulness in helping him organize an auction of most of his farm equipment last year. I’m sure you’ve noticed that several tractors and implements are no longer on his property.”

  I hadn’t, and it made me feel bad.

  “‘Extraordinary helpfulness.’ Those were your father’s words, not mine. I presume that his copy of the contract has been misplaced. I’ll be happy to have a duplicate mailed to you if you’d like.”

  Before I could answer, he rotated his laptop so I could see the computer screen.

  “Here’s a photo taken the day your father sold me the airplane.”

  It looked like Elvis and Nixon shaking hands. Except, instead of shaking hands, Dad was accepting a twenty-dollar bill from Mike Crutchfield. Dad was wearing jeans and a clean shirt. The banker was wearing a leather jacket and a goofy fighter helmet. They both looked delighted.

  “As you can clearly see, your father is not under duress. He was, in fact, very happy that day. He told me it would be a relief not to have to worry about how his airplane would be taken care of. His exact words were, ‘You’ll be a good daddy to my girl.’”

  Crutchfield pressed a button on his computer and the printer started working. “Mr. Williams, I worked very hard to help your father get along after his wife passed on and as his illness has progressed. With my assistance, he was able to sell much of his unused equipment for more profit than he otherwise could have. He was simultaneously grieving and suffering from a degenerative brain disease. He was all alone.”

  The banker looked right into my eyes.

  “What I did for your father was nothing that I wouldn’t do for any other long time customer of any of the banks I own. What your father did for me, however, was a kind and generous act, the likes of which I’ll not soon forget. He insisted that I accept the airplane on the very terms on that contract. Consequently, every time I climb into that cockpit, I feel nothing but pride and humility.”

  Crutchfield handed me the piece of paper from the printer. It was the photo of him and Pa. He walked me to the door, shook my hand, and said, “Thank you so much for coming in.”

  I didn’t notice Charlotte as I walked out of the bank. All I could see were the photos on the wall, mingled among the goofy diner signs. All those photos of Mike Crutchfield shaking hands with jolly farmers.

  On my drive home, I tossed the picture out the pickup window and watched in the rearview mirror as it fluttered in the wind.

  * * *

  When I got back, Dad was burning the trash. In the country, there is no Wednesday garbage truck that rolls down the alley at six in the morning. Instead, you cut the top off a fifty-five-gallon drum, set it down several yards from any flammable buildings, and burn your trash. As a kid, I learned to set trash afire in any weather. Windy, winter, whatever. It was like Boy Scout training but without the dopey outfits. Bring three strike-anywhere matches, tear some junk mail envelopes into strips, light them, baby them, feed them with cereal boxes until the fire can take care of itself. Everything has its own way of burning. Cardboard burns h
ot and smoky with a skinny yellow flame shooting out of each corrugated hole. A stack of magazines won’t burn completely unless you crumble them up. Aerosol cans aren’t as dangerous as everyone says.

  We kept an iron rod next to the burning barrel so we could stir the trash, open it up for air. At the moment, Dad was poking the rod into the barrel, playing with a piece of plastic that looked like the remains of a busted-up laundry basket I’d put in the throw-away pile a couple of days ago. He didn’t know I was watching him. He got a glob of the melting plastic on the end of the rod and held it in the flame until it started burning. The plastic dripped burning drops of itself into the barrel. Like tiny bits of napalm. Even though I was standing behind him, I could tell Dad was fascinated. I’d done the same thing a hundred times. You could watch that stuff drip for hours and it would never stop being amazing. It was lava and water and a really pretty window into hell.

  By now, the end of the rod was all aflame with that glob of plastic. With two hands, Dad held it upright, straight above his head. The flames sent up black smoke. The glob started to ooze toward his hands. Then he said, “Hyaaa!” and swung the iron around like a samurai.

  An arc of flaming spit flew off the end of the rod. Halfway thru his spin, Dad saw me standing there several paces away. His eyes widened. His mouth said, “Oh shit!” He let go of the iron, but it was too late. Napalm flung toward me. I turned sideways and got splattered with whizzing pelts of liquid fire.

  I know you’re supposed to stop, drop, and roll. But, really, it was a few drops of burning plastic. They stuck to my shirt and jeans. I patted them out. By the time Dad had run up to me, there was nothing but some smoking holes in my clothes. Little things, no bigger than a raisin.

  “Gee whiz,” said Dad. He took deep breaths.

  I showed him my palms. There were little bits of charred plastic stuck to them. “Not even a blister.”

  “I dang near burned you up.” He touched my shirt, making sure all the fires were out.

  “Aw, hell.”

  “I thought I was all alone.”

  “You were. I mean, I just got back from Keaton. I was talking to the banker.”

  “Crotchfield?”

  “Crutchfield, yep.”

  Pa nodded. “I believe he’s flying my airplane these days.”

  Something popped in the burning barrel.

  “Yep, he’s flying it.”

  Pa’s eyes squinted. He got a look. It was real quick and then it was gone. “Let him fly her. I don’t have any business in that thing.”

  I wanted to say, “What are you talking about?!? He stole your plane!” But I didn’t say anything. In that little chunk of brain that still held his soul, Pa knew what that banker bastard had done. Pa also knew that he couldn’t fly a plane anymore. And he knew that between the two of us, we didn’t have the money, wit, or mean-headedness to get back what Crutchfield had took.

  We played with the fire until it went out and then we ate dinner and watched TV and went to bed.

  I didn’t sleep very good. First, I contemplated doing cruel things to the banker. Then I thought about Clarissa McPhail and whether I’d ever want to look at her again. Then I wondered what kind of dreams Pa was having downstairs in his bed.

  CHAPTER 11

  LIVERS, TONGUES, AND KIDNEYS

  When I got up the next morning, things were clear. Sometimes that happens when you go to sleep with a lot of things on your mind.

  First off, we’d been screwing around too much. I’d been screwing around too much. Drinking and going to softball games and putting us in dangerous situations. In a world full of temptation, the only way to keep out of trouble is to keep out of the world. We had to hole up.

  I resolved to never let anyone take advantage of Pa ever again. Not a banker, not a drunken anorexic, not a paraplegic fuck-up, and definitely not me. Henceforth, Pa and I were going to hunker down. Avoid the townsfolk.

  Food and gas, that’s all we needed. We had both of those in abundance. We had a three-hundred-gallon fuel tank, a deep freeze, and a pantry full of canned food, and in a couple of months, we’d have a garden. On top of that, we had a shed full of tools and piles and piles of scrap metal. There was nothing we couldn’t do.

  In the country, your home is the universe. If you do it right, you don’t ever have to see anyone, ever. That’s how my ancestors did it. They dug a well with shovels. Made a house out of dirt. Grew crops, milked cows, shot jack rabbits.

  We could do it just as good as them.

  * * *

  Just like turning a switch, the outside world disappeared. Me and Pa on the farm. Like Huck and Jim floating on the river, without the river. Every morning, while Pa was figuring out how to put on his britches, I took a walk around the property. The birds would gather in our little stand of trees and make their morning racket. The cottontails liked to sit on bare patches of dirt and bask in the morning sunlight. Dad had quite a few guns. I figured that someday I’d use one of those guns to shoot one of those rabbits. I’d skin it, spit it, and cook it on a fire. For now, they were pleasant to look at.

  After my walk, I’d go inside and help Dad reassemble his razor. It was an electric, which he dismantled every single morning. He’d unplug the power cord, remove the head, take out the blades, and shake the grey beard dust into the sink. He could never put it back together. The parts would migrate to the kitchen or his nightstand, but I always found them. Put it together, then turn it on and put it in his hand. He shaved pretty good except for his throat. Every few days, I’d make him tilt his head back so I could run the razor over his Adam’s apple. He enjoyed it with a look of a dog when you’re scratching its ears.

  With enough time, he usually dressed himself good. He’d put on two or three shirts. He took them off, one by one, if he got hot. If it was hot enough, he’d take off all his shirts and walk around sweating thru his grey chest hairs. You get used to it.

  He didn’t always put on socks on his own. But I was strict about socks. I made him put them on even if he didn’t want to. When you don’t wear socks, your feet sweat and you can catch a fungus.

  Breakfast was whatever. We didn’t differentiate between meals. Kidney beans and frozen peas. A TV dinner. Graham crackers. It was all food. Find something in the pantry or the deep freeze, heat it up, eat it. Pa, especially, didn’t care what we ate. He had strong teeth. Once, when I wasn’t paying attention, he ate half of a frozen sausage before I could thaw it out.

  After breakfast, we pulled weeds in the garden. The tomato plants were growing. Most of the rest of the seeds—the onions, carrots, cabbages, and corn—had poked themselves up from the dirt. The garden was doing all right.

  After weeding, we’d take a walk around the farm or go inside for a nap. Then lunch, then more weeds or walking or wandering or a nap. After dinner, it was TV time, then brushing of teeth, then bed.

  We didn’t talk much.

  * * *

  In the third week of June, it rained for five days straight. It was the monsoon season. The landscape shifted from bleached brown to sage. Buffalo grass turned green. Dew hung on everything. The bare wood of the granary was soaked dark.

  One afternoon, it rained too hard for us to go outside. Not a downpour, but the kind of rain that made you want to stay in and listen to the pat-pat on the roof.

  I pulled out the old photo album. All photo albums are the same. Just like all dreams are the same. They mean the world to the person who owns them and they’re boring as dirt to everybody else.

  Funny-looking ’70s pants. Dad with an Amish beard. The family in front of the Christmas tree. Always the family in front of the Christmas tree. Trying to imagine that the baby in that picture is you. Trying to imagine that the pretty gal in the tintype is your grandma, or that the woman sitting at the piano is your mom.

  That woman was my mom. I held the
photo for Pa to see. “There she is,” I said.

  Most senile people lose their short-term memory but hang on to the old stuff, the foundations, the bygone days, which they recite over and over until you want to kill them. You know, Great Aunt Beatrice can’t remember what happened five minutes ago, but she knows exactly what she was doing the day Kennedy was shot. Pa’s senility was weird. First, it had hit him early. He was only sixty-two and his brain was already three-quarters gone. Second, he didn’t have his foundations anymore. He was losing everything.

  Pa looked at the picture. Mom at the piano in the church. She was wearing a crafty Christmas sweater. Her mouth was open. I imagined she was singing “Glo-o-o-o-o-o-ria.” The preacher’s wife probably took the photo. I’m sure Dad and I were standing at a pew just out of the frame. There would have been maybe thirty people in the church. Dad and I would have been singing like clowns and elbowing each other. Mom would hear us but say nothing. She was just glad to have us there for our annual Christmas Eve appearance. They let everyone hold candles on Christmas Eve.

  I think both of us would have gone to church more often if Mom hadn’t played piano. Since she was always at the piano, we never got to sit next to her. What would be the point of going to church if we couldn’t sit with the person who invited us?

  Dad said, “Merry.” He was trying to read Mom’s sweater. “Merry Christmas.”

  “You know who that is?”

  “Seems like I should know that gal,” said Pa.

  Sometimes it’s necessary to leave the room. Come back a few minutes later with a handkerchief and a runny nose. He didn’t notice that kind of thing.

  It was raining real gentle.

  * * *

  When it stopped raining, we cleaned out the deep freeze. The deep freeze was in the well house. Before the Rural Electric Association rolled thru the country, farms got their water by way of a windmill. The windmill pumped water up from the Ogallala Aquifer and into a huge tank, which was planted on top of the well house. Like everyone else in Strattford, we had converted our well to electric fifty years ago. This made the windmill unnecessary. Over the years, Dad had dismantled it and reused the metal for various projects.