Faraway Places Page 2

  Besides the sky and the graveled road and the fence with the red triangles hanging on it, and the power lines, and the fence on the other side of the road, this is what you could see from the second flag up there on the plateau: you could see the road, straight as an arrow. Mormons built that road, which is the only thing Mormons are good at besides having kids, my mother would say, crossing herself: making things straight. That road went straight to the river, but never crossed it because Matisse County was low on funds for a bridge. The fences on both sides of the road were just as straight as the road. Mormons built them too, I figured. On the other side of the fences, there was barley planted, or sugar beets, or spuds, or alfalfa, depending on the rotation. But it was always green, on the other side of the fences—in the spring, that is—and after that things got gold and brown, but mostly brown, and especially that year.

  You could see our house sticking up out of the world like the tip of a sword that pierced the round ball and stuck out just that far on the other side. You could see the barn too, broad and tall. Looked more like a castle to me, brick, and heavy, not like the sky.

  You could see the toolshed. In the sun, the tin square toolshed with its sloping roof was so bright you couldn’t look at it. Sometimes I used to think that the toolshed in the sun—sky all around it—was like God. You couldn’t bear to look. And even if you could, you couldn’t see. And that long, cool rectangle of shade from the barn was Jesus. By the end of the day, Jesus always cooled down God enough so you could look at Him. Sometimes the toolshed was Communism and the shadow of the barn creeping toward it was America. And sometimes the toolshed was the Mormons and the shadow of the barn was Catholicism. Sometimes the toolshed was my father, and my mother the shadow.

  You could see the river from up there on the plateau. Well, not the river exactly, but the trees that lined the river. Out there on the cookie sheet, trees only grew along the river, except for the four poplars in front of our house. At one time there was a fifth, but lightning got to it. You could also see the stand of cottonwood trees up there where the river dog-legs, all twenty-two of them. You could see the catalpa tree that stuck up alone on the other side of the river, upriver about a quarter-mile from the stand of cottonwoods; and under that catalpa tree, you could barely make out the lean-to where the Indian woman, Sugar Babe, lived with the nigger. Then, to the southeast, downstream and across the river, you could see that big bunch of trees that I never counted, where Harold P. Endicott lived in his big stone house with his five dogs, Dobermans. Hellhounds, my mother called them, and crossed herself when she called them that.

  You couldn’t really see the big stone house for all the trees, but you could always see Harold P. Endicott’s big American flag snapping in the wind up there in the sky.

  You could see the road start up again on the other side of the river, beyond the trees, and keep going and going until the sky got to it.

  And that’s it. You could see the Oldsmobile maybe, and maybe sometimes my mother or my father walking across the yard, but most of the time you just thought you could see them, when really you couldn’t at all.

  Of course, when you got closer, say, between the last of the red flags and the house, you could see the Virginia creeper on the side of the house, and the horses and the holsteins in the corral, and the gas pump, and the lawn by the back porch with the fence around it, and my father’s chair on the front porch, and the picnic table, and in the yard the machinery parked around: the tractor, the plow, the disc, the harrow, and all those things, all of them John Deere.

  And the most remarkable thing: the closer you got to the house, the more you could hear, and generally the hearing didn’t catch up with the doing, so my mother could walk out the kitchen door, and that spring—when it was hooked up right—would slam the screen door back into home, but my mother would be on her second step out of there before the slam got to you.

  I didn’t like to think about that slam too much because it was more proof of that illusion stuff, or else that my ears were slower than my eyes. I couldn’t decide which, but I already had more than my share of things not making any sense; I figured I wouldn’t dwell on troubling matters anymore than was necessary.

  At sunset sometimes I used to like to go out on the road in front of the house, under the poplars, and sit so that the sun looked like it was going down right in line with the road. I wondered if you could ever fly a plane fast enough into the sun so that it was always sunset. Or maybe you could shoot an arrow as big as an electric pole right at the sun. You could sit on the electric pole and hang on tight, flying right into the big red ball, going fast enough to stay ahead of any sound, silently headed for bull’s-eye.

  We never said much, my mother, my father, and me, when we drove to Mass in the Oldsmobile on Sunday morning. My mother didn’t allow the radio—said it was a time for reflection—so we were all quiet and examined our consciences for sins, which I was getting to have a lot of—one particular mortal kind especially. My father drove—he was always the one who drove—and we reflected, me in the back seat, like always, looking out at the red flags, counting them like mortal sins to the main road, and then on the main road the fifteen miles or so to Wind River and then to the St. Joseph’s Church for nine-o’clock Mass that we always got to at eight-thirty so we could make it to confession.

  On the way home it was different, but not a lot; still no radio. We still didn’t talk much, but we weren’t reflecting anymore. We were in the State of Grace. We always stopped at the Wyz-Way market, where my mother bought groceries and my father smoked Viceroys and talked business with the other Catholic men whose wives were buying groceries too. I usually read comics and had a Snickers candy bar and a Coke. Actually, that is what I used to do, before that year: read comics. I was still having Snickers and Cokes like other years, but that year I was reading other things at the magazine stand.

  There was one Sunday in particular I recall. It was just before Easter. I’d given up Snickers for Lent that year, so I was only drinking Coke. The day was sunny and cold. I was wearing my blue parka—my winter coat that year—and two pairs of socks along with long johns that were getting too short. Those long johns wouldn’t stay stuck in my socks even when I wore two pairs. They’d slowly ride up, making big lumps where there weren’t supposed to be any, especially on Sunday. I was catching up on what interested me most. The only woman in Elvis Presley’s life was his mother; and Montgomery Clift had a secret death wish, though I never got to find out why Montgomery Clift wanted to die so bad. My father told me to stop filling my head with that movie-star crap and get in the car.

  That was the Sunday, too, that we drove home a different way. I forget for what reason; I think my mother just wanted to try something new, so we drove across town, under the viaduct. When you drove that way, you had to drive past West Center and First Street by the railroad tracks, the warehouses, the St. Anthony’s Hospital, Niggertown—five or six houses all clumped together—and the bars. It was there that we saw that woman’s car, Sugar Babe’s blue ’49 Ford, sitting in front of a cinder-block building with a garbage can knocked over and garbage all over in front of it. There was a neon sign that said “WORKING MAN’S CLUB” in pink letters with a blue neon half-moon rising above in the window. We stared at the car and at the neon sign and the garbage all over and my mother crossed herself. I imagined Montgomery Clift in there drinking martinis in that special kind of glass, just wanting to die, and some guy from one of those houses in Niggertown playing a saxophone.

  “That’s her car, all right,” my father said. “That woman Sugar Babe’s.”

  My father slowed down the Oldsmobile. My mother moved closer to the window and so did I.

  “Pat Mulekey back at the Wyz-Way was just saying today that’s where that woman works,” my father said. “Waitressing.”

  “Isn’t she an Indian?” my mother said.

  “Full-blood Sho-Ban,” my father said. “Daughter of one of them old True Shots out there. Straight off the
reservation.”

  “Forevermore!” my mother said, which was something my mother always said.

  “Doesn’t figure!” my father said. “Those Injuns out there don’t like niggers no more than we do, and there she is, a full-blood, waitressing in that place. And living with one of them, too, out there in that lean-to!”

  “Shh!” my mother said, and pointed to the back seat with her head.

  “Means trouble! But those kind of people just got a nose for it,” my father said.

  THIS IS WHAT my room looked like: the wallpaper was brown with big green leaves on it and bluebirds flying. It was upstairs, the only room there was upstairs. It was the attic. My window looked out onto the yard. In winter my father put plastic on the window so when you looked out it was like looking through someone’s glasses who was nearsighted. In the mornings in winter the sun coming in the window made it glow orange.

  There was my single bed with a green bedspread, the chest of drawers, the nightstand with a lamp on it that looked like a wagon wheel, with cowboys on the lampshade. There was a statue of St. Joseph that glowed in the dark. The door to the closet slanted with the roof and on the floor was linoleum that looked like somebody had spilled raisins all over it, and there was a green throw rug on the floor by the bed.

  The only other thing in the room was a picture of a guardian angel helping two kids across a bridge. When I got confirmed I put my Holy Confirmation certificate on the wall next to the picture, so there was that too.

  There were thirteen steps up to my room from the hallway that had the wallpaper with the butterflies and the dice. I always counted the steps when I went up and when I went down.

  There were sixteen steps up to the loft of the barn. Whenever you walked up those stairs you heard the sound that the pigeons made with their wings. It didn’t matter how quiet you went up there, you always scared the pigeons enough to get them flapping. They would fly through the loft till their wings made waves in the dust they had stirred up. You could see those waves in the light that bored down through the holes in the roof.

  There were two windows up there in the barn’s loft, one at either end, set in the triangles cut by the roof. They were big windows—big enough to get the hay through—though we’d stopped stacking hay up there long ago. The wood had gotten too old; the floorboards were rotten. In some places you couldn’t even walk anymore, let alone stack hay. The front window was always closed, its swinging doors nailed shut, but the back window was perpetually open: the doors to it had fallen completely off. We used them as wood panels for the pig pen.

  The back window of the barn was like another window: the rose window in the St. Joseph’s Church in town, which was in the back too, in the choir loft. On Sunday at eight-thirty when you were standing there in line waiting for confession, reflecting and examining your conscience, somebody up there in the choir loft would turn the electric organ on. The sound of that organ starting up was like the sound the pigeons made when they flew through the light coming down from the holes in the roof.

  The rose window in the St. Joseph’s Church, which was mostly blue, presented a picture of the Holy Pentecost, which is when the Holy Ghost came down onto the apostles in the form of tongues of fire over their heads, even over Jesus’. The Holy Ghost, in the shape of a dove, appeared high above their haloed and inflamed heads. I figured the sound He made that Pentecost Sunday was just like the sound of the electric organ turning on, or like the sound the pigeons made once you got them going. It was the same sound the crows were making that night that I found the nigger hanging there.

  From out the back window of the barn you could see how the roof jutted out in a V shape, and under the eave there the winch was attached, the winch we used to haul heavy things up with a rope, and then from the winch two tracks of flat iron went right down the middle of the barn lengthwise, under the ridge-pole, from one end of the barn to the other, from one window to the other. It was broke too. No way you could slide anything down those tracks. All they were good for was the pigeons sitting on them. And of course, those tracks were covered with crusty piles of pigeon crap, and the floor too, in some places up to your ankles. It was that high. When the pigeons were sitting up there or when they were flying out, you had to be careful that they didn’t crap on you, even though my mother said that her mother, Grandma Hannah, always said that it was good luck when a bird—a dove or a pigeon, or even better, a crow—singled you out that way.

  From the back window of the barn you could see the swing hanging from the biggest limb of the biggest cottonwood in the stand. To get to that swing in the cottonwood trees, you had to go through the gate at the back of the corral behind the barn. That’s where the haystack was, fenced in by snow fence. The dirt road that went by the corral and the haystack pretty much followed the river up to the cottonwoods. I liked to take my boots off and walk on that powdery dirt barefoot with the river on one side of me and the field of alfalfa on the other.

  That place up there in the stand of twenty-two cottonwood trees smelled like the wind—a hot smell full of dry June grass and sagebrush and big round crusty cow pies and horse turds all mixed. It smelled like the river up there too—cool and shady and wet—making the air soft when you breathed in, and that summer, when the river went down and kept on going down to almost nothing, it was strong with dead fish—trout and suckers.

  Under those trees that sound that the leaves made made you feel like you were having secrets whispered to you, and I whispered secrets back—like my secret name that I only said aloud there.

  The sound of the leaves made you feel safe; a bunch of sticks shaking together—the sound gravel makes when you let the rocks pour out of your hand into the river. It was the only place around besides the loft in the barn where the sky got stopped some. In the barn you knew the sky was all around outside there, but as long as you were inside, in the loft, the high roof made you feel covered up from infinity. Under the cottonwood trees it wasn’t quite so covered up as in the loft of the barn, but between the big jut of lava rock and the sagebrush and the twenty-two trees, you could find little niches where no one, nothing—not even the sky—could find you.

  Sometimes up there under the cottonwood trees you could smell food cooking from the lean-to across the river: usually beef stew and sometimes pie or roast chicken. You could smell those things every once in a while, but not for very long, and you never heard a thing from where that woman Sugar Babe lived under the catalpa tree with the nigger—couldn’t; it was too far away.

  And there were times up there, too, under the cottonwood trees, when the wind was right, that you could hear old Harold P. Endicott’s big American flag snapping in the wind, sounding like when the older guys would roll a wet towel and whip you a good one in physical-education class.

  It wasn’t far downstream from the stand of twenty-two cottonwood trees that Harold P. Endicott lived in his big house in his own cluster of trees. Even before the chinook blew in and everything started to happen, that house seemed haunted to me, and so did those five dogs of his that he lived alone with: five Dobermans—hellhounds—dogs even meaner than old Endicott himself, as it turned out. Those five hellhounds ate Harold P. Endicott alive in his very own home, the flag snapping away that night while it rained. After all that time the sky picked that night to open up and pour.

  My father was too drunk that night to remember anything, and the nigger died after that, crows got to him, and dogs, not Harold P. Endicott’s dogs—the sheriff shot those right off—but other dogs, strays, I guess, and that woman Sugar Babe had been dead for almost four months by then. And besides my father, Harold P. Endicott, and the nigger, there’s only me to know. It was only the four of us there that night: my father, Harold P. Endicott, the nigger, and me. We were the only ones there besides the hellhounds.

  After that first night of the chinook, nothing was ever the same. The Chinook started it all in February, but it wasn’t until that night in October that trouble showed itself outright, appeared to
all of us like a ghost, like the Holy Ghost did at Pentecost, or angels, or the way Satan came to Jesus in the desert.

  Harold P. Endicott had the deed to our farm in his Bank and Trust. With it being so dry that year, my father couldn’t make but half the farm payment. My father had made the farm payment on the twenty-second of October for twelve years in a row without fail, but that year of the chinook, my father couldn’t make but half the farm payment because of the drought, and Harold P. Endicott took our farm away, even though it only happened that one time after twelve whole years that my father could only come up with half.

  They found Harold P. Endicott about a week after that, nine days to be exact, nine days after the twenty-second of October. On Halloween they found him, and they said Harold P. Endicott had probably been dead for about a week as far as they could tell from what was left of him. That’s what I heard the sheriff say that evening in my room at the St. Anthony’s Hospital: all that was left was a pile of bones.

  They found the nigger the next night, on All Saints’ Day, the day when all the saints disconnect themselves from heaven and search around for lost souls between here and there. That was the day—the night—that I snuck out of my room at the St. Anthony’s Hospital because of what I had heard the sheriff say, and hitched a ride with Mona Lisa and Wolf and the rest of them in the Studebaker and went back to the farm in the hope of seeing the nigger again before we moved away to someplace like Rock Springs or Lava, or wherever my father decided to go; in the hope of seeing the nigger and asking him if he could tell me some more about illusion—how it was sometimes more than something you were always making up; and in the hope, too, of asking him if what we did that night in the rain with the hellhounds was the right thing to do.