East of Denver

by Gregory Hill

  Pa said, “Potential sunset, son.”

  CHAPTER 17

  CEMETERY

  “I don’t want you driving anymore.”

  Pa was quiet. We were eating breakfast. Canned peaches with syrup.

  Pa said, “I’ll drive where I want.”

  “I reckon you will.”

  “I’m going to go for a drive right now.” He put down his fork and went to the garage.

  I’d hidden the key. He wasn’t gonna go for shit.

  He came back. “Where’s the?” He twisted his hand like he was turning a key.

  “I ain’t seen it.”

  “Bullshit.” He was mad.

  “Maybe you lost it.”

  His eyes went into slits. He wouldn’t lose that key. He placed it on the dashboard every time he shut off the engine. Every single time. You could see him thinking, Do not lose the key. He had trained himself. He did not lose that key and he knew it.

  “I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Get out.”

  “Get out?”

  “Leave this place.”

  I said, “Who’s gonna cook your dinners?”

  “I know how to work the microwave.”

  “You gotta get food into your belly.”

  “I can make belly.”

  “You can’t find your key.”

  “What key?”

  “Touché.”

  “Get out.”

  He made a fist. I got out.

  * * *

  I took my car. First, I drove by Vaughn’s place. His mom’s car was in the driveway, so I went to Clarissa’s. She wasn’t home. I went inside anyway. I was hungry. Her fridge was empty. I sat down on her couch and started reading Furious Desire.

  It was early afternoon when she came home. Before she came thru the front door, I closed the book and hid it behind my back.

  When Clarissa saw me, she said, “Your dad kick you out of the house?”

  “You hear that at the bank?”

  “You just looked kicked out.”

  “He’s in a bad mood.”

  “That’s because you don’t trust him.”

  “He’s never trusted me.”

  “The hell he doesn’t. He adores you. He follows you everywhere. Does anything you say. Thinks you’re the bee’s knees. He’s like a puppy when he’s around you.”

  “He ain’t my dad anymore.”

  “No kidding. He’s your son. You ain’t figured that out?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Figure it out.”

  I said, “You been losing some weight.”

  She stood sideways. “I know.”

  “You’re gonna need to get some new clothes.”

  “I’m hungry all the time.”

  “How is that?”

  “It’s something.”

  “I think I’m gonna go home.”

  Clarissa said, “You still wanna rob the bank?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any new ideas on how we should go about it?”

  “Nope. I think our plan’s good.”

  “Really?”

  “Good enough.”

  “Me and Vaughn are ready when you are.”

  I said, “Don’t tell Vaughn about Dad kicking me out.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Good enough.”

  Clarissa approached me, put her hand on my shoulder, and made me lean forward. She lifted up Furious Desire from where I had hidden it behind me. She said, “What do you think?”

  “It’s not as furious as I expected.”

  * * *

  When I got home, Pa was poking a jack handle into the juniper bush.

  “You sure like to do that.”

  Pa said, “What are you doing here?”

  “You still mad?”

  “I ain’t mad.”

  I said, “You sound mad.”

  “Who gives a shit?” Pa poked the bush some more.

  “Why do you keep doing that?”

  “Cause God’s in there.”

  “You wanna tell me what you’re mad about, Pa?”

  “I don’t have to tell you things.”

  “You’re just mad, then.”

  “That’s right.”

  He cocked his ear. He put down the jack handle. Looked at the sky.

  I said, “Something up there?”

  He didn’t reply. He kept looking up. His frown stretched into longing. I figured he was looking at his airplane and Mom and death and freedom. I listened. Faint, way away up there, was honking. Geese. Tiny specks spelling out a V. We watched them cross the sky. From all the years he spent hammering iron, he should have been deaf. But he heard those geese.

  I said, “You want to go for a drive?”

  “I reckon.”

  * * *

  We looked for the pickup key all over the place. In the kitchen, in the junk drawer, in the truck, under the floor mat, next to the gas cap. All over the place. It was in my pocket. When Pa wasn’t looking, I wedged it on the concrete floor under the left front wheel.

  I said, “Let’s look under the truck.”

  He tapped the dashboard. “It should be here. On this thing.”

  “Come on. Under.”

  I wanted him to find it.

  He squatted and looked and he found it. “There she is!”

  He held the key high.

  Everything was okay. I said, “Let’s go for a drive.”

  “Where should we go?” It was crazy how happy he was.

  “How about a cemetery?”

  * * *

  Dad drove, of course. I figured we’d go to the old Mennonite church and poke around my great-grandparents’ tombstones, maybe stir up some shred of nostalgia in Dad’s head. Instead he drove north and west and north and west, following the right angles of the roads. The land grew hilly. Draws and gullies. Places where rustlers once hid. It was a bright, cloudless afternoon. Neither of us wore sunglasses. Dust devils swirled across the prairie. Instead of an intersection every mile, the road became a crooked, meandering thing. Houses, with their Quonset huts and patches of trees, became rare.

  As Pa steered us farther and farther from civilization, we neither one spoke. A pheasant rooster scared up from the ditch and we both pointed at it. A jack rabbit raced alongside us. Dad turned the truck down a cattle trail. We called it a cattle trail, but it wasn’t a cattle trail. It was a road that hardly ever got drove on. Two ruts with grass down the center. The ride got bumpy. The wildlife grew older. Tiny basking lizards scattered at our approach. Dad swerved to avoid a box turtle.

  Finally, the road ended. We continued driving thru the grass. Sagebrush scratched underneath the truck. Dad had that half-smile he got when he was building something. I had that sense of dread I used to get when I rode copilot in his plane. He drove slowly, maybe twenty miles an hour. There were no fences, no power lines, no windmills. I looked behind us. I couldn’t see any kind of road.

  I said, “I never been out this far.”

  “Something, isn’t it?”

  “You know where you’re going?”

  “Where’s that?”

  “You know where you are?”

  “In my pickup. In a pasture. Wearing clothes.”

  I saw a critter on the horizon ahead. On the crest of a short hill. Even though it was a long ways off, I could tell it was big, like a bull. There shouldn’t be any cattle here. There weren’t any fences. I blinked and it was gone.

  “You see that?” I pointed to where the thing had been.

  “Up there?”

  “It looked like a cow or a bull or some
thing.”

  “Maybe a heifer.”

  “Coulda been.”

  “Up there?”

  I didn’t speak. We continued to roll thru the grass. The truck bounced over a badger mound. On the horizon, the bull thing appeared again, this time with another next to it.

  “Pa?”

  “Son.” He stomped on the throttle. “Let’s get a look.”

  The animals skitted down the hill, away from us. The truck crested the hill. Dad stopped it there on the crest of that little gut valley. Staring up at us were a dozen buffalo, scared and dirty.

  * * *

  People sometimes raise buffalo in Strattford County. A man named McDonagh used to have a herd on Highway 59. But these buffalo didn’t look like they were being raised. They looked like they hadn’t ever seen a person. I asked Pa if he thought they were wild.

  He said, “They’re buffalo.”

  “But they’re not the property of anyone.”

  “It’s hard to say who belongs to what.” He turned off the engine. The animals watched us with flared nostrils. A bull, some cows, a couple of calves. They were big. If you’ve seen them in Yellowstone or on the other side of a fence, that’s one thing. But sitting in a truck in Strattford County with the window down, looking at a family of wild buffalo, it was like seeing Bigfoot. As far as I knew, outside of national parks, there simply weren’t any wild buffalo, anywhere.

  Satisfied that we weren’t dangerous, a couple of the beasts resumed chewing on the grama grass. Dad opened the door, made like he was going to get out of the truck.

  I said, “Hold on. Those things’ll put a hole in your liver.”

  “Yep,” he said, “and I hear they smell bad.” He stepped out. The buffalo raised their heads again. Pa said, “Lean forward.”

  I obliged. He unlatched the seat back and tilted it forward. He pulled out a shotgun. “Open that deal there.” He was pointing at the glove box. I opened the glove box. A couple of shotgun shells rolled out and landed at my feet.

  Pa said, “Hand me them things.”

  I’m a good son, but I’m not a complete idiot. I didn’t hand him the shells.

  With an irritated grunt, he leaned into the cab and plucked them off the floor.

  I said, “You mind enlightening me as to your ambitions?”

  He ignored me as he loaded the shotgun.

  “You are not going to shoot a wild buffalo.”

  The animals formed a nervous line. The big one scratched the dirt with its toe.

  With a jerk, Pa pointed the gun toward the sky and pulled the trigger. The air around us popped with a twelve-gauge explosion. The buffalo scattered up the other side of the gut valley and over the hill. The calves sprinted to catch up. Dad laughed. My ears rang.

  In the wake of their dust, we were looking at tombstones.

  “Look,” said Pa. “A cemetery.”

  * * *

  The ground was dented with human-sized dimples, presumably from where the earth had sunk into caved-in coffins. There were maybe twenty of these dimples. At the north end of each one was a chunk of sandstone. Wore down, broke over. Only a couple of stones were still standing. No higher than my knees. We walked thru the graveyard in the footprints of the buffalo, looking for a legible word on one of the stones, a belt buckle, anything. Pa turned over a stone with the toe of his shoe.

  “That one says something.”

  I squatted and cleaned the rock with my fingers. Carved indentations, stained the color of tobacco. There wasn’t much to read: SHA–ES–EAR– –ILL–AMS. Looking at my own damned grave in a pasture haunted by wild buffalo. Time traveled in both directions at once.

  Pa said, “Did you know you had a great-great? I don’t know how much, but you had an uncle. We were going to name you after him. We decided not to because it’d be troublesome. But we called you it anyway, sort of. We named you one thing but called you something else. They said they called him that because he wanted an English name. The people at the place where his boat landed. Don’t know when he died.”

  I said, “Thank you very much, Ellis Island.”

  CHAPTER 18

  TEST RUN

  He actually allowed me to drive back. I took Highway 36, which brought us past the school. Dorton Elementary/Middle/High School. K–12. In a good year, the enrollment for the entire school would reach one hundred and twenty kids. When the new school was built in 1954, it was state-of-the-art. Now it was in a state of disrepair. The windows were stained powdery white, the grass was trampled, leaky gutters left rusty streaks on the beige bricks.

  Pa said, “There’s a neat old building.”

  I slowed the truck. “Wanna go?”

  “Why not?”

  I pulled in. No cars in the parking lot. Thirteen years waiting for the bus, getting chased around the flag pole, trying not to watch car windows steam up while I got in my car to drive home alone after homecoming.

  I parked right square in front of the building. We didn’t have anything to be ashamed of. We were simply revisiting the old stomping ground.

  I opened the glove box and found a Phillips screwdriver, which I put in my pocket. “Pa, let’s go to school.”

  * * *

  We circumnavigated the building. It remained as square as ever. The doors would be locked, of course, but the window into Mr. Schickle’s room had a bad latch and, more important, it was on the back side of the building, hidden from the highway. I squatted, jimmied the screen out, and lifted the window. It slid up with an aluminum screech.

  Pa said, “You know what you’re doing?”

  “I gotta pick up something I left here.”

  “Why don’t you use the door like everyone else?”

  I said, “It’s locked.”

  “You know what you’re doing?”

  I was halfway thru the window. “Come on. It won’t take a minute.”

  He followed me into Mr. Schickle’s history room.

  It still had the same shitty desks. Chalkboard. Lectern. Window-shade maps. All the lights were off. Ghosts lurked in the corners. Dorton was a small school. Elementary students were two grades to the room. In seventh grade, you moved to the west wing with the big kids. From then on, you had the same history teacher, English teacher, math teacher, and so on until you graduated. Everyone got to know each other real well. It’s no good talking about it. But the air in that room was thick. No need to stick around and pry things out, we had a mission to complete. I had to steal something. I wasn’t sure what that would be. I figured I’d know it when I saw it. I didn’t see it in Mr. Schickle’s room.

  Pa followed me out the door and into the hall.

  He said, “It’s dark.”

  Sure was. It made things creepier. The lockers. The tile floor. Pa took a drink from the water fountain. He smacked his lips. “Good stuff.”

  Into the gym. Hopes and dreams and P.E. and dances and lunchtime lounging. We crossed the floor in our street shoes. Nothing worth stealing here. Not even a basketball.

  On the other side of the gym was the entrance to the school shop. The door was locked. I gave Pa the screwdriver and said, “Can you pop out those hinge pins for me?”

  He said, “We’re not supposed to be here.”

  “Nope. But I don’t give a damn.”

  He looked at me for a moment. “Me neither.”

  He whacked the handle of the screwdriver with the heel of his hand and worked the pins out. The noise echoed in the gym. We jittered the door out of the frame, leaned it against the wall. There, before us, was the shop. I wasn’t so good in shop.

  The Future Farmers of America creed was inscribed on a plaque nailed to the wall.

  I believe in the future of agriculture, with a faith born not of words but of deeds—achievements won by the present and past gen
erations of agriculturists; in the promise of better days through better ways, even as the better things we now enjoy have come to us from the struggles of former years . . .

  I used to know that thing by heart. I suspect Dad did, too, when he was a kid.

  The shop was clean. All the tools were put away, the welders in a row, the floor swept. It was nothing like the chaos of Pa’s shed. I should have excelled here, but everything I made came out crooked and flimsy. I couldn’t weld, saw, route, measure, hammer, or screw. I tried chewing tobacco and puked on my shoes. No regrets. Some people aren’t built for chew.

  There wasn’t anything in the shop that I felt like bringing home with me.

  The shop was adjacent to the music room. They were connected by a door whose purpose no one ever ascertained. It was kind of like one of those doors that links two hotel rooms. I crossed the floor, tried the knob. This door wasn’t locked.

  * * *

  A word about our music teacher. Mr. Pridgon was his name. He didn’t care for music or children. As far as I knew, he was still the Dorton music teacher. When I was in school, he yelled at us and pounded on the piano and generally made our lives crummy for forty-five minutes a day, three days a week, from kindergarten thru sixth grade. Even so, me, Vaughn, D.J., Clarissa, and the rest of the bums in my class would do our best to sit and sing “Old Black Joe” like good little boys and girls because if we acted real nice Mr. Pridgon would sometimes let us have Music Free Time.

  Music Free Time meant we all got to go into the instrument closet, pick out anything we wanted, and play it as loud as we could for ten minutes. The first three minutes of MFT were typically spent arguing over who got to play the snare drum. Once we sorted ourselves out, the class became an avant-garde symphony. Snare drum, bass drum, piano, horns, out-of-tune guitars, and an assortment of percussive things. Mr. Pridgon never tried to teach us how to play anything. He just counted to four and away we went with our barbaric commotion. It was pure joy. It was like vandalizing the air itself. Something as simple as sliding a mallet up and down a glockenspiel could make you feel wild and free, as if you were throwing rocks thru windows.