East of Denver

by Gregory Hill

  “You know, Shakespeare, I like the fact that you don’t judge people.”

  I said, “I don’t know about that. I got opinions.”

  “You take things as they come. You don’t fight it when something bad happens. You know? With your mom and now your dad. It’s tragic, but I’ve never seen you get overwhelmed. Even with Vaughn, you’ve been real calm. And when we canceled the bank robbery, you could have freaked out, but you didn’t. You just accepted the reality of it. You’re like that poem about changing things and not changing things and having the wisdom to walk on the beach alone.”

  When someone compliments you, you can either say thank you or give them some brouhaha about aw, you’re just bein’ nice. I kept my mouth shut altogether and instead tried to kiss her.

  She turned her head and I ricocheted off. She sat up real straight, like she had an idea. “I was being stupid. Those oysters were too much too soon. I should try something easier.” She went back into the kitchen. I heard her poking around in the cupboards. Cranking a can opener. Pouring something into a bowl. Clanking around the silverware drawer.

  She came back into the living room with two spoons and a bowl full of peaches. With a fake English accent she said, “Fruit, anyone?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve been eating too damn many peaches lately. Anyway, I’m not a big fan of sweets.”

  “This isn’t sweets, it’s fruit.”

  “When you don’t have a sense of smell, peaches is sweets.”

  “But if you can’t smell, then you can’t taste. Right?”

  “That’s what everybody thinks. They’re wrong. My nose doesn’t work, but there’s nothing wrong with my tongue. I get all the salt and sweet and bitter and sour I could hope for. Probably even better than you. It’s the subtle stuff that I miss. Oregano tastes the same as pencil shavings. But canned peaches, they’re sweeter than anything should ever be. Plus, I don’t care for the fuzz.”

  Clarissa shrugged. She sat down on the couch and cut off a piece of fruit with the edge of her spoon. She put it on her tongue and savored it. Her eyes rolled up. She moved it from cheek to cheek, chewed twenty times, and swallowed. She waited a moment to make sure it stayed down and then took another, bigger bite.

  I watched as she finished the whole bowl of peaches. It took a while because she ate so slow. It was fun how her lips would wrap around the spoon. When the bowl was empty, she brought it back to the kitchen and returned with it filled up with cold SpaghettiOs. She shoveled a spoonful into her mouth. “I can’t believe how good this is.” She held the bowl toward me. “You want some? It’s not sweet.”

  I grabbed hold of her earlobe, real gently, and said, “You’re pretty sweet.”

  She winked at me. “Sounds like somebody wants to fool around.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  She took another bite of SpaghettiOs. There was tomato sauce on the corners of her mouth. “Lemme finish this.” She took another bite. A pasta O was stuck to one of her eyeteeth. “I’ve never been so happy in my life.”

  I stroked her eyebrow and said, “You could be happier, I bet.”

  “In a minute.”

  “Yeah, but—” I tried to sound jokey. I even used a fake English accent. “Shouldn’t we have some fun now before you start gaining it all back?”

  Her face changed. She frowned, her eyes got wet. She looked fat again. Fat and sad. She shook her head. She tried to say something, but nothing came out of her mouth. She pointed to the door.

  I got up. “Fine. You slept with my dad.”

  “I did not.”

  “You said you did.”

  “I felt sorry for him. I didn’t sleep with him, though. I just wanted him to think I did. What would be the point? He’d just forget about it anyway.”

  “Yeah, well, so would I.”

  * * *

  Pa was still in bed when I got home. I went to sleep without reading any more Back to the Future. I thought about what I said to Clarissa. Sometimes you do stupid things.

  CHAPTER 21

  HERMITS

  Me and Clarissa didn’t work out. Not as drinking buddies, not as bank robbers, and not as whatever it was we didn’t become that night in her trailer. If we’d been destined for some kind of big relationship, it would have started back in high school anyway. As for that night in her trailer, we just proved what should have been obvious already. We tried and it didn’t work out. Just because you’re the last two people in the world, that doesn’t mean you’re gonna restart civilization.

  I suppose I could have apologized. Except I didn’t want to. I just didn’t want to. So long Clarissa. Other than Pa, she was the only other person in the world I cared to spend time with. Now she was out. Fine. Life would be easier without her or anybody else. Just me and Pa. For real, this time.

  So we settled in. A pathetic, silent good-bye. Pa would grow more and more senile and I’d make sure he didn’t do anything to hurt himself. At some point, the bank would take the farm away and then we’d move to a trailer park in Sterling. Once there, I’d get a job at the prison. That’s a good job; I’d make enough money for us to enjoy three meals a day. Eventually, Dad would die and I’d be able to find a dream and follow it to its unsatisfactory conclusion.

  But before any of that happened, I had a garden to tend.

  * * *

  It was morning, after breakfast, and I stepped out of the house. The biting flies had arrived. Biting flies look like houseflies but they behave like starving dogs. They latch onto your skin and chew. They’re quicker than mosquitoes; try slapping them and you only end up giving yourself bruises. With biting flies, you spend a whole lot of time being sore and angry. That is, until you give up, which takes willpower. You have to pretend they aren’t there. Sweat drips out of your eyebrows. But eventually you cross a threshold and you become used to them. As they eat their fill, blood trickles down your arms and neck and ankles and you go on with your life. That’s how it works. Flies gotta feed their families, too.

  Dad was still inside, in the bathroom. He was working on his morning shit, which could take up to half an hour. As I stood in front of the house appreciating the silence, a fly buried its snout into the back of my neck. I didn’t move. I let that fly eat itself into happiness. It hurt and then it didn’t. Then the fly flew away. I walked to the garden, ready to admire our great, bountiful potential.

  * * *

  At first, I thought the plants had disappeared, like some magical anti-miracle. They were gone, almost all of them. But then I saw the footprints. Deer tracks all over the garden. Big, medium, small. Papa, mama, and baby. Over the night, they’d eaten the carrots, onions, corn, and peppers, all of them right into the ground. You could even see how they’d pulled up the carrots and onions so they could get at the soft parts. Deer are smart.

  They didn’t touch the tomatoes. Every single tomato plant remained upright and glorious. I knew better than to think the deer had left those tomatoes out of decency. They left them because they knew that, in a few days, those tomatoes would ripen and taste better than anything they’d ever eaten in their whole entire lives.

  I couldn’t blame the deer for eating our garden. Deer have to feed their families, too. It was a beautiful garden. How could they resist? Except this was the first time I’d ever seen deer tracks this close to the house. Growing up, when I saw deer, they were either lounging in a wheat field, bounding across a pasture, or lying dead on the side of the road. Sometimes, after the grasses were covered by a big snow storm, you’d see signs that the deer had been gnawing on trees. But the deer never came all the way up to the house. It wasn’t worth the risk; there was plenty of corn, wheat, and grass for them to eat elsewhere, especially in the summer.

  From the front door of the house, Dad shouted, “Anybody out there?”

  I hollered back, “Me. Just me.”
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br />   He joined me in the garden. Even though it was at least eighty-five degrees, he was wearing a winter coat. He didn’t seem to mind. He said, “Got something important?”

  “Just some tomatoes.”

  “They’re looking good. Did you grow those?”

  “We did. Yep.”

  “That’s a hell of a garden.”

  He was right. The tomatoes were looking good and I sure did grow them. Plump, brownish green, free of insects, well watered, and unmolested by hail or deer.

  I figured the deer would get those tomatoes one day, but until that day, I’d enjoy watching them.

  * * *

  A few days passed. Each morning, I’d go out to the garden, expecting to see the tomatoes all eaten up. I suppose I could have sat out nights with a shotgun on my lap. But I probably would have fallen asleep. And if I did stay awake, I can’t imagine that I’d actually have the guts to shoot a deer. But let’s say I did shoot a deer. Then I’d have to either slaughter it so we could eat it or I’d have to drag it out to a pasture and let the coyotes go at it. Neither of those scenarios seemed worth the trouble. Instead, I relied on hope, but without feeling hopeful.

  Every morning I went to the garden expecting to see the tomatoes destroyed. Every morning they were still there.

  And then, one day, the tomatoes turned ripe. When I went to bed they were green; when I woke up they were red. The plants hung thick with fruit. There wasn’t a deer in sight. Maybe those fuckers just plain didn’t like the taste of tomatoes.

  I found a five-gallon bucket and brought Pa to the garden. It was harvest time. Standing there in front of those plants with Pa, I felt like a farmer. Well, not a real farmer. But someone who had managed to not preside over the destruction of everything he planted. Bullshit. I was a farmer. This was our farm. We made food out of dirt, water, sun, and seeds. It was something, just to stand there and breathe and let the biting flies chew our ears.

  A dove made cooing sounds. Robins and blackbirds and sparrows flirted with one another around the big locust tree.

  Pa took off his shoes, so I did, too. The dirt was hot and sandy and fine. It was like walking in powdered cocoa.

  Pa held the bucket perfectly still while I pulled tomatoes off the vines and dropped them in. He became spacey. The handle slipped out of his hand. The bucket landed on the ground. I wrapped his fingers around the handle and helped him lift it up again.

  “Hold the bucket.”

  “Kick the bucket.”

  “Funny man. Hold the bucket.”

  We filled the bucket with tomatoes and then brought them to the house, where we piled them on the kitchen counter. There were a lot of tomatoes. Bushels. We went for bucket after bucket. We took lots of breaks for naps.

  We brought the last of the tomatoes in just as the sun was starting to lean over. Probably around seven thirty. It was hot inside the house so we sat on the back step and watched the tiny leaves on the locust tree go from green to gold. As it got duskier, the millers came out.

  A miller moth is about an inch long. They get into everything. They sleep all day. Open the door to the shed and they fly out at you like bats from a cave. Pick up a piece of wood and a hundred of them look at you like they just woke up. Leave the clothes on the line overnight and you’ll find them in your underdrawers.

  Millers are easy to kill, but they’re gooey and their wings leave a shiny flour on your fingers. You’d best leave them alone. There’s nothing evil about them. They’re not like those biting flies. They’re a nuisance, is all.

  That twilight, after we’d brought in as many tomatoes as we could, the millers were something to behold. They gathered all around the big locust tree next to the garden. There were so many of them, the birds got scared. A dozen robins and blackbirds and sparrows flapped out of the branches. Millers kept gathering around the tree. Before long, the locust tree was surrounded. I’m not talking about a couple hundred moths. I’m talking about millions. They swirled around like electrified lint. There must have been something sweet in the bark that they wanted to lick with those curled tongues of theirs.

  A robin decided to try to eat some of the millers. Birds eat bugs. It’s only natural. A robin’s gotta feed its family, too. The bird launched itself at the tree and then landed on a springy branch toward the top. The millers went crazy. They stirred up thick enough that you could hardly see thru them. They attacked that robin and he flew right out of there.

  Pa said, “I never saw anything like that in my life.”

  * * *

  When the sun got low, we walked to the road so we could get a fair view of the western horizon.

  “There she goes,” said Pa.

  “Watch for the green flash.”

  “What’s that?” said Pa.

  “They say that when the sun goes down, right after the last bit of sun gets below the horizon, you see a green flash.”

  “I heard that, too. I think.”

  “You think it’s real?”

  He pondered for a moment. “I think it’s just your eyes. You ever accidentally look at a welder without a helmet on? For a couple of minutes you have that, um, bright color in your eyes, even when you close them.” He paused. “I’m not sure what we’re talking about right now.”

  “That was pretty good, Pa.”

  The sun became a tiny arc and then it disappeared. I closed my eyes. The tiny arc was still there, in green. “You did good.”

  * * *

  Early the next morning, Pa woke me up by poking me in the side. He said, “I want to ride the Rocket.”

  * * *

  On the way to the shed, we passed by the ruins of the granary.

  “What happened there?” asked Pa.

  I said, “It fell down.”

  “Entropy,” said Pa.

  * * *

  The Rocket had a flat tire. I patched it up, put fuel in the tank, and cranked up the engine. It sputtered, chattered, jittered, and settled into an idle. The exhaust was black smoke. I retrieved a screwdriver and twisted a screw on the carburetor until the smoke turned less black.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” said Pa.

  “I have no idea.” I really had no idea. I’m sure I’d seen Pa do it a thousand times but I had no idea what I’d actually done. Turn a screw and the engine works better.

  Dad climbed on the seat, tested the clutch, and then rode the bike out of the shed and onto the farm. “Yippeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

  While he played, I went into the house. The tomatoes were still stacked in pyramids on the counter. I looked thru Mom’s recipe box until I found instructions on canning. Her handwriting was pretty. Cursive, with thin loops all leaning to the right at the exact same angle. Nobody writes like that anymore.

  Boil water, insert tomatoes, remove tomatoes, put tomatoes in cold water, remove skin, add tomatoes to jars. Poke air out of jars with the handle of a wooden spoon, put lids on jars, boil jars for thirty minutes. Easy.

  It was a big, wet mess. Tomato skins got stuck to my shoes. Boiling water spilled on the countertop. My fingers started to hurt from holding hot, wet tomatoes. Satisfaction. I made jar after jar, stacking them up in the pantry, which we had damn near cleaned out. With these preserves, we’d be able to make spaghetti sauce thru the winter. What else do you do with tomatoes? Soup. Other stuff. We had food.

  * * *

  I started to believe we could survive in this landscape, live off the land. If I could grow and can tomatoes, I could sure as hell raise chickens. You feed them, you steal their eggs. When you get hungry for meat, you twist their head off. Pluck the bird, boil it, gut it, cook it, eat it. No need to shoot a deer. Food is simple.

  Dad was out there somewhere, riding the Rocket. I was doing domestic stuff. Not domestic stuff—survivor stuff. This is how life should be. This is how it should end. We could live
like this forever. Fuck the future. Fuck the banker. Fuck Clarissa. Fuck the hospital.

  Even after we got kicked off the farm, we’d settle on a spot in a pasture. Maybe in the cemetery where we saw the buffalo. We’d live just like my ancestors. Great-grandpa Williams didn’t need a bank. Or a granary. He built his house out of dirt. When his wife died, he buried her in a hole. And he didn’t get any hospital bills in the mail.

  The mail. I looked at the clock. It was after one. Time for the postman. Time for Dad to bring in the bills so I could ignore them. I hadn’t heard anything from Dad in a while. No putt-putts from the Rocket. I turned off the stove, wiped the counter clean, and went outside.

  First, I listened. No putt-putts. Next step, I looked for him in the shed. That’s right where he was. Sitting on the floor, surrounded by the Rocket. He was holding a combo wrench, sitting with his ass on the concrete.

  “I believe I got her,” he said, smiling proud.

  Every piece of the Rocket was dismantled. The parts were spread around him. Engine out of frame. Piston out of engine. Rings removed from piston. Wheels out of frame, tires out of wheels, tubes out of tires. Reduced to a kit without instructions. Pa’s hands were black with grease. His long-sleeved shirt was spotless.

  He was proud. He was a little kid. He was my father. He ruined the Rocket.

  I said, “Father.”

  He nodded at me. “Yes, son.”

  “Dammit, Pa.”

  “You got a problem?” Cocky.

  “The Rocket.” My face started curling up like it was about to cry.

  He said, “What about the Rocket?” Perhaps he sensed that he’d done something wrong. Mostly, he sensed that I was mad at him. No shame. Just contempt at me for losing my cool.