Old Man

by David A. Poulsen

  I looked at my watch. “It’s twenty after three.”

  3

  “Saigon.”

  That was it. One word. No explanation. Not even where exactly Saigon was. I’m not bad on geography. So I’d heard of it. Watched some war movies, so I had an idea about the place, but that was it. What I didn’t have was an idea as to why people would go there. Why I was going there.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Saigon. Vietnam. Southeast Asia.”

  “I know where it is,” I said. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are we going there?”

  “You might learn something.”

  I was getting tired of people saying that. “I learn crap all year long. That’s what school’s for. I don’t need to learn in summer.”

  “School’s about half of one percent of what you need to learn to get along in life.”

  “What’s the other ninety-nine and a half percent?”

  “That’s what you’re going to find out. Starts with Saigon.”

  “Does my mom know you’re insane?”

  He laughed hard at that. “I think she’s got a pretty good idea.”

  “What if I just say no. Like drugs. Just say no to your old man who’s a couple of beer short of a case?”

  He laughed again and reached over to change the station on the radio. Back to country music.

  “All this conversation is cutting into my two hours.”

  4

  I kept waiting for him to call me “kid.”

  Most of his sentences sounded like they should end with “kid.” You might learn something, kid. Starts with Saigon, kid. But he didn’t call me kid. Come to think of it, he hadn’t said my name either. Which fit in perfectly with the weirdness of this whole thing.

  I had a couple of other questions I wanted to ask him. But I knew he wouldn’t answer me during his two hours of radio time. I watched scenery go by for a while. Then a sign: Minneapolis 439 kilometres. I did a calculation. Four hours. Maybe a little more. And then what? That was the biggest question of all.

  I discovered there’s an upside to country music. Or maybe it was just the driving and the total boredom. Anyway, something put me to sleep. I’m betting it was Garth and Clint and Reba and all their friends. I woke up from one of those dreams you want to keep going. Jen Wertz and I were at this lake. She was lying on a rubber raft, and I was in the water pushing it along. Every little while she’d lean her head over the edge and kiss me.

  Except some of the time she wasn’t Jen anymore. Sometimes she was a different girl, who was totally hot too, except that I couldn’t remember her face after I woke up. I could only remember that she was gorgeous and hot. And weird. The non-Jen girl kept singing all the songs from The Lion King. Yeah, a lot of hot babes do that. But then she was Jen again and had just finished telling me she could kiss me a lot better if I’d get up on the rubber raft with her. That’s when I woke up.

  I looked over at the old man. He wasn’t tapping or bopping or singing along. He was just driving. “Do we ever make bathroom stops on this trip?”

  He smiled. “Town coming up. Last town before the border. We’d best pee, get rid of all the drugs in the car, and dig out our passports. We need fuel anyway.”

  I was having trouble figuring out when he was trying to be funny. His face didn’t change much when he said stuff, so it was hard to tell. But I figured the drugs-in-the-car thing must have been a joke.

  Or a warning. Like if I had something stashed that I shouldn’t have, last opportunity to get rid of it. I’d never been in the States in my life, so I didn’t know what to expect at the border. Although right then I didn’t care. I was at the point where a pee stop was all I was thinking about.

  That and Jen Wertz. On a rubber raft.

  We pulled into the pumps at a Gas Rite service station, and getting to the can I practically ran over a lady holding a totally ugly dog — one of those squished-face ones that looks like an alien with fur. I yelled “sorry” over my shoulder, but I didn’t slow down. The emergency was now a stage-four crisis.

  When I came out of the can, the old man was checking out the chips display. “You wash your hands?”

  I looked at him. Who asks you that? I didn’t bother to answer.

  “Lots of guys don’t. Think it’s manly, maybe.”

  “Guess I’m not manly. I washed.”

  “Cool. Want something?”

  I reached over and took a bag of Crunchits and headed for the counter.

  “Just put it there with that other stuff. I’ll pay for it.”

  “I’ve got money.”

  “I know you have. You can pay next time.” He started in the direction of the bathroom.

  “Make sure you wash,” I called.

  He waved over his shoulder without looking back, but I could tell he was laughing.

  I threw the Crunchits on the counter with some other stuff he’d put there — a couple of bananas, some little cartons of yogurt, and a Cherry Blossom chocolate bar. And some baseball magazine. Then I went outside.

  The lady had put the dog on a leash, and it was sniffing around some pretty much dead flowers along the front of the service station. I watched the dog for a few seconds then looked up at the old lady. She was glaring at me. Another drug-crazed teenage pervert purse snatcher.

  “What kind of dog is that?” I asked her.

  She told me it was a cross between two words I’d never heard before.

  “They all look like that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That is one very unattractive dog.”

  She picked up the dog and kind of held it to the side to keep it away from me. Like I was an animal killer. I thought about telling her I wasn’t, but if I ever became one, I’d start with her dog. I didn’t, though, and the door of the place opened, and the old man came out with a bag full of the stuff he’d bought.

  He flicked the fingers of one hand and a few drops of water hit me.

  “Good for you,” I said.

  He nodded and we climbed into the truck. As he put it in gear and we pulled away, I looked back at the lady and the dog. She was talking to it. Probably telling it, “Don’t worry, Pookey, I’ll protect you from that acne-covered little bastard.”

  “What’s so funny?” The old man was looking at me and grinning.

  “People,” I said. “People are what’s funny.”

  He nodded. “No argument there. You got your passport handy?”

  “It’s right on top of my backpack.”

  “Better fish it out.”

  I did and handed it to him. He put it beside him with his own passport and an envelope with Mom’s writing on the front. All it said was permission letter.

  “Mom said you played professional baseball.”

  He looked like he was going to turn up the radio but changed his mind. “Yeah, a little.”

  “What were you?”

  “You mean what position did I play?”

  I nodded.

  “Mostly third base. But I wasn’t good enough, so I was a utility player. That means I played all the infield positions. Only got in the game if someone was hurt or we were blowing someone out or getting blown out ourselves.”

  “So you were a crappy fielder.”

  “No, I was a pretty good fielder. I was a crappy hitter. Couldn’t handle the curve ball.”

  “Mom said you got hurt. Had to quit.”

  “Tore up a knee. But I wasn’t going to make it to the big leagues anyway. So it didn’t matter. I just quit a little sooner than if I’d stayed healthy, that’s all.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then what … what?”

  “What did you do after you quit baseball?”

  “Got a job.”

  “What kind of job?”

  This time he did reach over and turn the sound up on the radio. I muttered “rude” under my breath, but if he heard me he didn’t say anything. And then it was all ab
out Alan Jackson telling us how great it was “way down yonder in Chattahoochee.”

  5

  The next part of the drive was almost as boring as the part that had gone before. When I pointed that out to the old man, he said, “That’s your favourite word, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Boring.”

  I didn’t bother to answer.

  The old man was nervous about crossing the border, I could tell — he was doing this thing with his hair, kind of curling the part by his ear with his index finger. He hadn’t done that until we were about a half-hour away from the border. Now he was doing it all the time.

  I figured, Sweet, the old man’s a convicted drug dealer in the States, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life in some prison with bad food and black and white TV.

  But actually getting through the border wasn’t that bad. The big thing was me. Like, had the old man kidnapped me at some mall and was sneaking me across the border with a fake letter from a fake mom in some fake town?

  They told us to park and come inside, and they put us in separate rooms. A guy named Granfield, who was big enough to be a defensive end and soft enough to be an angel food cake, took me into a room and closed the door. He offered me a granola bar, and I shook my head. Then he told me about fifteen times that I didn’t have to be afraid, I could tell him the truth, and there was nothing the man in the other room, whether he was my dad or not, could do.

  Apparently, the permission letter from my mom wasn’t cutting it with the border police. I knew that I could put an end to the whole summer-with-the old-man gig right then and there. All I had to do was say something like there I was drinking a slurpee and minding my own business and that nasty man in the other room came up to me and told me my cat had been run over by a car so I got in the pickup that he hadn’t even bothered to wash and the next thing I knew here we were at the border and please save me Officer Granfield. That’s all it would have taken, and I’d be spending the rest of my summer reading Catch-22 and drinking milk shakes and quite possibly doing amazing things to Jen Wertz’s body.

  I didn’t do that. Partly because I figured even somebody as stupid as Granfield, who didn’t smell real good, especially in a room that wasn’t all that big and had like zero air flow, would eventually figure out I was lying. And also it wouldn’t have been fair. The last thing I wanted to be doing with the next few weeks of my life was going to freaking Saigon with the old man. But he’d been fair about it. He’d phoned Mom, and he’d obviously put out some serious money to pay for the trip, and he was even trying to make it okay for me. So I couldn’t really do something as dirty as rat him out at the border for something he hadn’t done.

  Instead, I said to Granfield, “Why don’t you just phone my mom, and she’ll tell you if the letter is the real deal.”

  I could see Granfield was pissed. He’d been all excited about the possibility of a big international case and saving some poor kidnapped child, and I’d just burst his bubble. We were out of there about five minutes later.

  Back on the endless highway. The old man didn’t talk much, but I noticed he wasn’t twirling the hair anymore, and he was bopping to the music again.

  We stopped at a diner in a place called Thief River Falls. There was a poster on the outside of the door advertising a PBR Bull Riding at the arena that night. I’d seen a couple of bull riding events and thought they were pretty cool. But I knew we wouldn’t be going to this one because we had to get our asses to Minneapolis so we could carry on to Saigon. Sweet.

  “Have anything you want. I’m buyin’,” the old man said as we sat down. “They charge for airplane food except for the pretzels, and the food’s crap anyway. So let’s load up here.”

  I ordered an open-faced western sandwich and the old man ordered a double order of veal cutlets. I figured anybody who ate double orders of stuff would have to be part of the North American Obesity Problem you read about all the time, but one thing I could say for the old man — he was as far from obese as you can get.

  That didn’t stop him from tucking away the whole veal cutlet extravaganza. He ate fast at first, then slowed down and talked between pretty well every bite. Didn’t say a lot, but he was doing more talking now than at first.

  “I’ve crossed the border dozens of times, and I still don’t like it. A lot of the border guards are pretty good guys, but every once in a while you get somebody who thinks he’s Dirty Harry — and the women can be just as bad.”

  I didn’t know who Dirty Harry was, and I didn’t get a chance to ask.

  “How was your guy?”

  “Granfield? Fat. Stupid.”

  The old man nodded. “A lot of ’em carry guns now.”

  Granfield with a gun. Scary.

  “He wanted me to say you’d kidnapped me. I think he would have liked to make a big arrest. Get some headlines.”

  The old man nodded. “Dirty Harry.”

  “Why are we going to Saigon?”

  “We won’t be in Saigon the whole time.”

  I’d noticed that I didn’t get a lot of direct answers to my questions. “Where to after that?”

  “The countryside.”

  “The countryside where?”

  “Vietnam … that’s where Saigon is.” He cranked his head around. There was a mark on his neck, a scar or something. “Can we get a little more coffee, please?”

  The waitress brought the coffee pot and topped up the old man’s cup.

  He looked at me over what was left of the cutlets and mashed potatoes. “How about pie, you want some pie?”

  I shook my head.

  “No, thanks,” he said.

  “No, thanks,” I repeated. Great, now he was starting to act like a father.

  He looked up at the waitress. “What kind of pie do you have?”

  “Coconut cream and cherry.”

  “We’ll have two pieces of coconut cream.”

  She looked at me, shrugged, and walked away.

  “How is it that she gets that I didn’t want pie, and you don’t?”

  “I’ll eat it if you don’t.”

  “Why don’t you weigh four hundred pounds?”

  “Metabolism.”

  The pie came, and I ate one bite. I’d never had coconut cream pie before and based on that bite didn’t plan to ever have it again. I pushed it away. The old man dusted both pieces, but I noticed that he hadn’t finished the carrots that came with the veal cutlets, so the man was probably starving.

  We sat for a while. He ate and I watched him eat and looked around the diner. There were pictures on the walls, all of them of people fishing. Some were guys standing in streams fly-fishing and the rest were pictures of people with the fish they’d caught. Some of the pictures were pretty old, like black and white old, so maybe they were famous people who’d caught fish nearby.

  “Grab me that paper, will you?” The old man nodded at a mess of newspaper pages on a table across the diner.

  I got up and went over there and tried to organize the thing so it looked like a real paper. When it was more or less sorted out, I brought it back to our table.

  He read and I read. I sat, sipped on my chocolate milk and looked at the back pages of the paper as he flipped through the sections. Sometimes he’d fold the paper over, and I’d get to look at more than just the back pages.

  56 Die in Wave of Iraq Suicide Bombings

  California Wildfires Threaten Thousands of Homes

  Yankees Romp Over Red Sox — Win Streak at Eight

  J.K. Rowling Pens Adult Novel

  Global Economic Recovery Slower Than Expected

  Aryan Supremacy Group Stages Rally in Idaho Town

  Unlikely Songstress the Toast of Britain

  Man Expresses Remorse After Beating Three-Year-Old

  Education Budget Slashed

  I wasn’t one to read the paper much. Sometimes we’d look at what was going on in the world in social studies class, but it wasn’t like I paid a lot of attention
to current events. I mean I wasn’t stupid — I knew about Afghanistan and 9/11 and I could name the prime minister of Canada and the president of the United States, which was more than some of the kids in my school could do, but I wasn’t into the news.

  Out of what I was reading that morning sitting across from the old man, I was most interested in the J.K. Rowling thing. I’d read the Harry Potter books and thought they were amazing, and I’d also read somewhere that the author was now mega-rich. Maybe I’d ask her to marry me. Right after I got back from my lovely Saigon vacation.

  Then it was back in the truck and Steve Earle singing “Copperhead Road.” There’s a line in the song, something about running whiskey in a big black Dodge. And some stuff about Vietnam too. The war. I liked Steve Earle. If all country music was like that we wouldn’t have needed rule number two. I sat back and thought about what other rules might make sense.

  6

  I must have fallen asleep again, but this time no great dreams starring Jen Wertz and the mystery girl. When I woke up, we were parked in one of those pullouts on the side of the highway. The old man was sitting with his arms resting on the wheel. He was holding the envelope that said permission letter in Mom’s handwriting. He didn’t look over at me, but he must have known I was awake.

  “Your mom used to leave little notes on a table in the living room when I was out at night. She’d write a couple of lines about her day and said she hoped my evening had gone well. I’d be out drinking or … whatever, and she’d write me a note for when I got home. Never ever missed. Always ended it with something like, ‘I hope you know how much I love you.’ ’Course she didn’t know that I was drinking or —”

  “Screwin’ around.”

  “Because I guess I was a pretty good liar. Those notes were probably the nicest thing anybody ever did for me. Your mom’s a … a … very good person.”

  He still hadn’t looked over at me. He set the envelope back on the seat between us and started the truck. He pulled out onto the highway, and for the first time since we’d left, there was no loud music pounding out of the radio.

  7