Fifty Acres and a Poodle

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  It occurs to me that I really should stop referring to this countryside as “the middle of nowhere.” Because as this stone woman knows, it was once the center of everywhere, it was the thread, it was the link, it was the “cement of the nation.” It was once the path to a new frontier, and for me it still is. I wonder why it has taken me so long to come to respect my own dream.

  “Um,” Alex says, “remember how I said I was keeling over? Well, I’ve keeled.”

  “All right.” I touch the stone woman. “Well, good-bye,” I say to her. “Good-bye, Madonna of the Trail. It has been very nice meeting you.”

  We go west on 40 and finally spot a restaurant announcing “home cookin’ and beer” with a sign featuring a cartoon turtle holding a hamburger and a mug of beer.

  “Well, that looks good,” Alex says.

  “It does?”

  “It does,” he says. “There is food in there.” The sign says “Tradesmen’s Inn,” which doesn’t really have anything to do with a turtle. But then again, what does a hamburger have to do with a clown, when you think about it. Anyway, we go rolling into the gravel parking lot, feeling short.

  “Do you feel short?” I say.

  “Extremely short,” Alex says.

  Our little sedan is the only vehicle here that is not actually a pickup truck.

  We walk past all the pickup trucks and marvel at how many different styles of pickup trucks there are. Huge pickups, tiny pickups. Pickups with giant tires, pickups with tops, and topless pickups. Pickups with lots of extra lights and pickups with little backseats and pickups with mud flaps adorned with shiny, silver naked girls.

  Most of the pickups appear to be hauling nothing, leading me to wonder why, exactly, people have pickups.

  We open the door to Tradesmen’s Inn, and in one gigantic blinding moment—I mean, one intergalactic explosion—we step into a sea of orange. Orange everywhere. I mean, the brightest damn orange. My eyes take a moment to calm down, to stop pulsating, and soon I see that orange is the color of the men, of which there are many, occupying the barstools of Tradesmen’s Inn. Every barstool, a man. A man dressed in orange sitting next to another man dressed in orange, next to another. All of these men have on orange hats. The hats turn in unison, perhaps fifty of them. They look at us, the only two hatless people in the place, the only two nonorange people in the place. They look at us as if to say, “Who are you?”

  Or maybe that’s the way we are looking at them.

  Hunters. Now there’s one thing I hadn’t figured on. I sort of forgot about the fact that country equals wildlife equals hunters. This is part of the 3-D that looked so much better as 2-D. This explains all those booms in the distance. But what are the chances? I mean, what are the chances that we would decide to begin our move down to the farm on opening day of buck season?

  One out of 365, that’s what the chances are. And here we are. We learn about opening day from a guy at the bar downing some chili. He says, “You guys gotta try the chili.” He’s a bulky man with a wiry beard, a generous neck, and deep-set eyes that smile even when he isn’t smiling. He says he bagged a buck two hours after sunrise this morning. He says the snow helped. Because as anyone knows—or as we now know—you can track a deer very easily in the snow. Especially a deer like that six pointer he hit this morning but didn’t kill, and so of course that deer started running, bleeding to death, because he shot him in the “brisket,” and with the snow you can track a blood trail with no problem, a child could do it, an idiot could do it, until you find that rascal curled up in a ball, dead.

  He seems to be waiting for us to say something.

  “Um,” I say.

  “Well,” Alex says.

  “Six points,” the hunter says. “Ain’t nothin’ to brag about. But I’ll take it.” He says the only problem with getting a buck within two hours of buck season starting is now you have nothing to do, because you can bag only one buck during all of buck season.

  “Yep,” I say.

  “Well, then,” Alex says.

  “Lucy!” the man calls to the waitress. “How about two bowls of chili over here for these people. Put it on my tab!”

  “But—” I say.

  “He looks hungry,” the man says, motioning toward Alex with his left hand, which I now notice is missing two fingers.

  “Well, thanks,” Alex says. “But listen, you don’t have to, buddy….”

  Buddy? Oh, dear.

  “Don’t mention it,” the hunter says.

  And in no time Lucy, a large blond woman with a high forehead, brings over two bowls with puffs of steam swirling out. She gives us each a spoon and a napkin with a picture of a turtle on it.

  “Thank you,” I say to the man.

  “That was mighty neighborly of you,” Alex says, blowing on the chili, slurping it.

  Mighty neighborly? Oh, dear.

  “It sure is beefy chili!” Alex says to the hunter. “I love beef. I’m a meat eater, you know. Oh yeah, I’ve always been a meat eater.”

  Oh, dear.

  I’ve never really tested Alex out on how good he is at faking being a country-person.

  I wonder what this hunter thinks of us. I look at Alex, me. I’ve got Eddie Bauer labels all the hell over me. Alex has Lands’ End labels all over him. We’re both done up in Polartec fleece gear with only the finest-quality lining designed to radiate body heat. Oh, God. This is embarrassing. We believed these were the clothes of country-people.

  But no. Of course not. These are not the clothes of country-people. These are the clothes of country-wannabes.

  Because these are the clothes of country-people: blaze orange numbers that may very well be doing a lot of damage to a lot of optic nerves.

  “Hey, that stuff will keep you warm,” the hunter says, smiling, taking a swig of his beer. “Lucy makes that chili herself. By hand.”

  “Super!” Alex says, rubbing his belly. Alex is enjoying the hell out of this hunter. I half-expect him to ask to try on his orange coat.

  “We have to go,” I say.

  “We do?”

  “French fries?” I say. “The movers?”

  “Oh,” Alex says. And then he calls Lucy over. Calls her over like he’s been coming here all his life. “Lucy, can you get us three orders of fries to go?”

  “Coming right up, Alex!” she says.

  Oh, brother. One big happy family here. I miss the Madonna of the Trail. I liked her better. When Lucy comes back with the fries, Alex stands and says good-bye to his new friend. “And hey,” he says, earnestly, “congratulations on your … dead deer.”

  Congratulations on your dead deer? Oh, God.

  We make our way out the door, past the pickups to our car. “A hunter!” Alex says excitedly as we get in the car.

  “Congratulations on your dead deer?” I say.

  “He was proud of it.”

  I don’t even know where to begin.

  “Well, wasn’t he a nice guy, though?” Alex says.

  “He murders helpless little animals,” I say bluntly, forcefully.

  “Well, that’s what people do in the country,” he says.

  “Well, that doesn’t mean we have to endorse it,” I say.

  “But we’re country-people now!”

  “Country-people,” I say. I don’t even know where to begin. Number one, no. We are not country-people. And if we were to become country-people, we would not be the kind that murder helpless little animals. And if we were to lose our minds and all our teeth and a few fingers and actually become the kind that murder helpless little animals, we would not say “Congratulations on your dead deer” to anyone. I’m trying to explain this to Alex.

  “Uh-huh,” he says. But he is distracted. He is probably wondering if he should have asked that three-fingered man over for dinner some night.

  I am feeling very much alone.

  • • •

  WHEN WE GET BACK TO THE FARM, THE MOVERS are finished, and no, they don’t want to hang around for chil
i. But sure, they’ll take the fries with them. They’re worried about this snow, which is starting to pile up. There’s already maybe three inches out there. Alex sees this as an opportunity.

  “I can plow!” he says. He’s been dying to drive the tractor. He used to fly small airplanes. He loves machines. He’s good at mastering complicated equipment. You don’t think of a middle-aged shrink with little intellectual glasses as being good at such things. But he really is.

  We let the dogs out of the basement, and they come bounding out into the snow as if it is some amazing gift. We go down to the barn and approach the tractor. It’s a beauty, all right. I loved this tractor the first moment I saw it. It looks so … farmy. It looks like something you’d see in a coffee table book about farms of yesteryear. The body is red and skinny and almost delicate. It looks like a giant rooster standing there. And on the side it says “Farmall” in white letters that have slipped and become crooked over the years. The tires are huge, almost as tall as my five-foot-six frame. The stuffing is long gone from the seat.

  I think this tractor is going to be very good for my inner tomboy. I think of how I would have loved something like this when I was a kid. I am hoping that this farm adventure—minus the dead animal part—reawakens the tomboy I once was, have gotten away from, have abandoned in favor of, well, the mall.

  I hop on, pretend I’m driving. I push the many pedals, some of which go down together if you push one lever, or by twos if you push a different lever. The pedals require every ounce of my leg strength. They must have made farmers stronger back in the 1950s, when this thing was built. But then again, they didn’t make tractors for farm wives. But then again, I’m not a farm wife.

  “Okay, start ’er up,” I say to Alex, as I hop off and give the beast over to him.

  “I love this!” he says, turning the key.

  Nothing.

  He turns it the other way. Nothing.

  Betty and Marley are sitting before us, like, “Hello?”

  Alex pushes pedals and turns dials, does everything he can think of before concluding, “Battery must be dead.”

  So we hook up the electric battery charger that came with the tractor that came with the farm. But it quickly becomes apparent that there is no electricity in the barn. So we hook up the many, many extension cords that came with the battery charger that came with the tractor that came with the barn. We run the extension cords through the branches of the trees all the way up to the house and plug it in. We figure we better give it overnight to charge.

  “You know, I wonder if the Elly May Clampett truck actually works,” Alex says. Good question. We refer to the pickup that came with the farm, a light blue ’84 Chevy, as our “Elly May Clampett truck” not only because it looks like something you’d see on The Beverly Hillbillies but also because the tailgate doesn’t stay up, so you have to use a C-clamp to “clamp it” closed. We never did think to ask why the hood has all those bullet holes in it.

  Alex hops in the truck, and lo and behold, it turns over. This cheers us up. The truck even has a valid state inspection sticker on it.

  “Which expires … tomorrow,” I point out, on further examination.

  “Oh,” he says, sighing.

  “We’ll take it in tomorrow morning,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  We are getting tired. One thing I’m noticing about life in the country is, it makes you very, very tired. The snow continues to fall. The sun is beginning to set. The movers are long gone. The wind starts to whip the falling flakes and whistles through the bare branches of the maple tree near the barn door.

  We go up to the house, choosing the second door from the left to enter. We make a fire in the fireplace, and Betty and Marley curl up in front of it. We don’t have any sherry to sip, as we used to do back when a day in the country was just a fantasy trip to some romantic country inn.

  Let’s stay in this moment forever. That’s what we should be saying. We should be sipping sherry and saying “Let’s stay in this moment forever.”

  But then again, we are in this moment forever.

  SIX

  JOE CROWLEY’S GARAGE IS A FEW MILES DOWN THE road. When I called to make a truck appointment, Joe said we didn’t need an appointment. He said we should knock on the kitchen door and he’ll come on out.

  “A kitchen door at a garage?” Alex asks.

  “That’s what he said.”

  When we pull up to Joe’s, we see that his garage is, well, a two-car garage attached to a house. “Hey, the wife made pancakes,” Joe says, emerging, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He is a short, balding man in a T-shirt, his arms documenting at least part of his love life in tattoos.

  “You ever had pancakes with pineapple?” he says, shaking his head back and forth, like, she did it again, that wife, she did it again.

  “Pineapple?” Alex says. “Can’t say’s I have.”

  Oh, dear. Now he’s doing Mayberry RFD talk.

  We show Joe the truck, saying we want an estimate on the cost of inspecting it. Privately, we’ve already agreed that if he wants more than two hundred dollars, we’ll say forget it. That is our cutoff price. Because the truck probably isn’t even worth two hundred dollars. It’s an old truck that probably needs all kinds of repairs. But we’ve heard prices are cheaper in the country than they are in the city.

  Joe says, “Wait here.”

  He pulls the truck into the garage, while we wait in the front yard. There are a lot of kids running around. There are dogs and there are chickens. We stand here looking at the kids and the dogs and the chickens. Warm air has moved into the valley, and already the snow is melting. The booms in the distance, which neither the kids nor the dogs nor the chickens seem to notice, continue sporadically.

  In ten minutes, Joe is back, rubbing his hands on a rag.

  “Well, I’m done,” he says.

  Done?

  “Sixteen dollars,” he says.

  We look at him, incredulous.

  “It runs good,” he says. “I checked everything. I put the sticker on.”

  We look at him. In Pittsburgh a state inspection on even a brand-new car will run you at least fifty dollars. In the city they fix things that may not even have been broken before they put the sticker on.

  “Sixteen dollars?” Alex says.

  He looks at us, wondering what the problem is. “You don’t have to pay me now if you can’t,” he says.

  I hand him a twenty. He puts it in his boot, pulls out four ones.

  “Hey, thank you for your business,” he says. “Outa there, Mandy,” he says to his dog, who has climbed into our truck. “Mandy!”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “We have dogs.”

  “A poodle,” Alex says. “We have a poodle.”

  Now why in the name of the good Lord in heaven did he have to bring that up? I’m sorry, but having a poodle is a private matter. (I have a poodle in my closet.)

  “A standard poodle,” I say. “Not one of those little yappy things.”

  “Is that right?” Joe says, clearly unsure of what he is supposed to say here. Mandy, a German shepherd mix, is now at his feet. Joe introduces us to his children. We talk about hunting. I ask him if he knows where we can buy a load of rocks.

  “Rocks?” he says.

  “For our driveway. You know, like, to pave it?”

  “Oh, stone,” he says. “Limestone. Or red dog?”

  “Limestone,” Alex says, seeming more confident about his choice than I know him to be.

  “Joe Crowley,” he says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Joe Crowley can deliver you some,” he says.

  I look up at the sign on top of his garage, which definitely has “Joe Crowley” on it. He can see my confusion.

  “Oh no, not me. A different Joe Crowley,” he says. “No relation. You want his number?”

  “Sure.”

  He writes it down, hands it to me. “Now make sure you ask for Joe the son,” he says. “Because hi
s pap is Joe Crowley, too…. Oh hell, I’ll just call him for you.”

  There are two more Joe Crowleys?

  We follow him as he ducks into the garage, dials the phone. “Hey, Joe?” he says. “Joe. Joe around? What? Nah, I didn’t get your papers this time. I got my own papers. Well, I don’t know, Joe. Did you check your mailbox? Yeah, they’re my papers, because I checked. Yeah, I’ll hold.”

  He looks at us. “Me and Joe got our divorces at the same time, so we’ll get each other’s support papers in the mail sometimes.”

  “Ah,” Alex says.

  “Well, then,” I say.

  “Joe?” he says into the phone. “Hey, I got a customer for you. The new people. Yeah, I got the new people right here.”

  The new people? We have a reputation already?

  Joe schedules a time later in the day for Joe to come over to look at our driveway and see what we need.

  We thank Joe for the inspection, and for the other Joe, and we head back to the farm, thinking about all we have learned.

  BOOM!

  This, again, is what greets us as we return to the farm. As we get out of the truck, we note that the booms here sound a lot louder than Joe Crowley’s booms.

  BOOM!

  I jump. Alex jumps. Betty dives under the pickup, and Marley runs over to Alex and leans on his leg.

  “That one was close,” I say.

  “I feel like we’re in Europe during the air raids,” he says.

  We wonder how long the shootings will go on. We wonder how long it takes to get used to it like those kids and those dogs and those chickens.

  Alex says, let’s install phone lines. He loves doing stuff like this. I love that he loves doing stuff like this. I say I’d rather go get the mail.

  “How many phone lines did we order?” he asks.

  “Four,” I say. That sounds like a lot of phone lines, I know. But I have my reasons: one for the business, one for personal, one for the fax, one for the Internet. I think: Connect me. If I’m going to be working out here in a place that at least feels like the middle of nowhere, I’m going to need access to the outside world. It’s important to have access. Solitude is one thing, but you could turn into the Unabomber if you don’t have some connection to people.