Crow Fair (2 page)

Evidently, I’d had a flat tire as I pulled up to the site, left front, and it was a motherfucker getting the spare out of a three-quarter-ton Ford, the Ford jacked up on the soft ground, and the whole muddy wheel into the bed to take to town. At the tire shop, Dad looked weird in his slacks and loosened tie, amid all the noise from impact wrenches and the compressors screaming and shutting down, but nobody seemed to notice. He gazed admiringly at the big rough kid in a skullcap running a pry bar around the rim and freeing up the tire. The kid reached inside the tire, tugging and sweating, and presented me with an obsidian arrowhead. I nearly cut myself just taking it from his hand. “Six plies of Jap snow tire and it never broke,” he said. I went up front and paid for the repair.

The next day, a cold, rainy day, Dad stayed at my place while I took my crew up to Martinsdale, where we’d hired a crane to drop the bed of an old railroad car onto cribbing to make a bridge over a creek. We’d brought in a stack of treated planks for the deck, and I had a welder on hand to make up the brackets, a painfully shy fellow with a neck tattoo who still had his New York accent. Five of us stood in the downpour and looked at the creek rushing around our concrete work. The rancher stopped by to tell us that if it washed out he wasn’t paying for anything. When he was gone, Joey, the welder, said, “See what a big hat can do for you?”

I’d left Dad at loose ends, and I learned later that he’d driven all the way to Helena to see the state capitol and get a lap dance and then slept it off at a Holiday Inn a half mile from Last Chance Gulch.

I’ve been told that I come from a dysfunctional family, but I have never felt that way. When I was a kid, I viewed my parents as an anthropologist might view them and spent my time as I sometimes spend it now, trying to imagine where on earth they came from. I was conceived soon after Dad got back from Vietnam. I’m not sure he actually wanted to have children, but Mom required prompt nesting when he returned. I guess Dad was pretty wild back then. He’d been in a lot of firefights and loved every one of them, leading his platoon in a daredevil manner. He kept wallet pictures of dead VC draped over the hood of his jeep, like deer-camp photos. His days on leave had been a Saigon fornication blitz, and it fell to Mom to stop that momentum overnight. I was her solution, and from the beginning Dad viewed me skeptically.

One night, I crept down the stairs in my Dr. Denton footies
to the sound of unusually exuberant and artificial elation and, spying from the door of the kitchen, saw my father on his knees, licking pie filling from one of the beaters of our Sunbeam Mixmaster, tearful and laughing, his long wide tongue lapping at the dripping goo. The extraordinarily stern look on my mother’s face above her starched apron, as he strained upward to the beater, disturbs me to this day.

I have a million of these, but disturbance, as I say, is not trauma, and besides I moved away a long time ago. I came to Montana on a hiking trip with my girlfriend after college and never went back. I’ve left here only once, to join a roofing crew in Walnut Creek, California, and came home scared after two months. I saw shit at parties there that it’ll take me years to forget. Everyone from the foreman on down had a crystal habit. I had to pretend I was using just to get the job.

Dad returned from Helena and sat in my kitchen with his laptop to catch up on business while I met with Dee and Helen Folsom out on Skunk Creek, leaving the whir of the interstate and veering into real outback within a quarter mile. I was building the Folsoms’ first house, on a piece of ground that Dee’s rancher uncle had given him. Not a nice piece of ground: it’d be a midwinter snow hole and a midsummer rock pile. The Folsoms were old enough to retire, but, as I mentioned, this was their first home. They were poor people. Dee had spent forty years on a fencing crew and constantly massaged his knotty, damaged hands. Helen cooked at the high school, where generations of students had ridiculed her food. I could see that this would be a kind of delayed honeymoon house, and I wanted to get it right.

The house was in frame, and Helen stood in what would be the picture window, enchanted by not much of a view—scrub pine, a shale ledge, the top of a flagless flagpole just below the hill along the road. Her expression would not have been out of place at the Sistine Chapel or on the rim of the Grand Canyon. One hand was plunged into the pocket of her army coat while the other twirled a pair of white plastic reading glasses. Dee just paced in his coveralls, happy and worried, pinching the stub of his cigarette.

I had cut this one to the bone—crew salaries and little else. The crew—carpenter, plumber, electrician—sensed the tone of things and worked with timely efficiency. Dee had prepared the site himself with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. We had a summer place for a plastic surgeon under way at Springhill, and if I’d looked a little closer, I might have seen it bleeding materials that managed to end up at the Folsoms’.

While I was at work, Dad was wandering the neighborhood, talking to my neighbors. After a few days, he knew more of them than I did, and I would forevermore have to be told what a great guy he was. But by the time I got home, he was in his underwear with the portable phone in his lap, nursing a highball and looking disconsolate. “Your mother called me from the club,” he said. “I understand there was some dustup with the manager over the sneeze shield at the salad bar. Mom said she couldn’t see the condiments, and it went from there.”

“From there to where?” I inquired peevishly.

“Our privileges have been suspended.”

“Golf?”

“Mm, that, too. Hey, I’ll sort it out.”

I nuked a couple of Rock Cornish hens, and we sat down in
the living room to play checkers. Halfway through the game, my father went into the guest room and called my mother. This time she told him that she’d bought a car at what she thought was the dealer’s cost. Dad shouted, “Asshole, who got the rebate? I’m asking you, goddamn it, who got the rebate?” I heard him raging about the sneeze shield then, and after he quieted down I heard him say plaintively—I think I heard this—that he no longer wished to live. I always looked forward to this particular locution, because it meant that they’d get back together soon.

I’m not lacking in affection for my parents, but they are locked into something that is so exclusive as to be hermetically sealed to everyone else, including me. Nevertheless, I’d had a bellyful by then. So when my father came back to finish the checkers game, I asked him if he’d enjoyed the lap dance.

“ ‘Enjoy’ isn’t quite the word. I’m aware that the world has changed in my lifetime and I’m interested in those changes. I went to this occasion as … as … almost as an investigator.”

“You might want to withhold the results of your research from Mom.”

“How dare you raise your voice to me!”

“Jump you and jump you again. Checkers isn’t fun if you don’t pay attention.”

“I was distracted by the club thing. I’m red, right?”

At some point, I knew he would confide that he and my mother were considering a divorce. They’ve been claiming to be contemplating divorce for half of my lifetime, and I have found myself stuck in the odd trope of opposing the idea just to please them. I don’t know why they toss me into this or if only children always have this kind of veto power. I do care about them, but what they don’t know, and I would never have the heart to tell
them, is that the idea of their no longer being a married couple bothers me not at all. My only fear is that, separate, no one else would have them, that I’d get stuck with them one at a time or have to watch them wither away in solitude. These scenarios give me the fantods. Am I selfish? Yes and no. I’m a bachelor and hope someday to be an old bachelor.

My father picked at a bit of imaginary dust on his left shirt cuff, and I suspected that this was the opener to the divorce gambit. Cruelly, I got up and left the game half finished.

“Can you pardon me? I was slammed from daylight on. I’m all in.”

“Well, sure, okay, good night. I love you, Son.”

“Love you, too, Dad.” And I did.

When my father came home from the war, he was jubilant about all the violence he’d seen. Happy to have survived, I suppose. Or perhaps he saw it as a game, a contest in which his platoon had triumphed. He worked furiously to build a business, but there was something peculiar about his hard work. He seemed to have no specific goal.

When I was fourteen, my mother said, “Do you know why your father works so hard?”

I thought I was about to get a virtue speech. I said, “No.”

She said, “He works so hard because he’s crazy.” She never elaborated on this but left it in play, and it has remained with me for more than a quarter of a century.

The only time my father ever hit me was when I was fifteen and he asked if I was aware of all the things he and my mother had done for me. I said, “Do you have a chart I could point to?”
and he popped me square on the nose, which bled copiously while he ran for a box of Kleenex. His worst condemnation of me was when he’d mutter, “If you’d been in my platoon …” a sentence he always left unfinished.

My mother was a scientist; she worked in an infectious-disease lab until my father’s financial success made her income unnecessary. Even then, she went on buying things on time, making down payments, anxiety from their poorer days leading her to believe that she wouldn’t live long enough to pay off her debts, even with her Coca-Cola money. Once they were comfortable with affluence, they became party people, went to the tropics, brought back mounted fish, and listened to Spanish tapes in the car. But they were never truly comfortable away from the smoke and rust of their hometown.

The last year I lived with them, my father came to the bizarre conclusion that he lacked self-esteem, and he bought a self-help program that he was meant to listen to through headphones as he slept. From my bedroom, I could hear odd murmurings from this device attached to his sleeping head: “You are the greatest, you are the greatest. Look around you—it’s a beautiful day.” You can’t make this shit up.

We were nearly done with the plastic surgeon’s vacation home. I had a big crew there, and everyone was nervous about whether we’d have someplace to go next. We had remodels coming up, and a good shot at condominiumizing the old Fairweather Hotel in town, but nothing for sure. I met with Dr. Hadley to lay out the basement media room. He was a small man in a blazer and bow tie, bald on top but with long hair to his collar. I asked him,
“Are you sure you want this? You have beautiful views.” Indeed, he had a whole cordillera stretched across his living-room window. He was gazing around the space we were inspecting, at the bottom of some temporary wooden stairs. Push brooms stood in a pile of drywall scraps in the corner. There was a smell of plaster. He lifted his eyes to engage mine, and said, “Sometimes it rains.” One of the carpenters, a skinny cowboy type with a perpetual cigarette at the center of his mouth, overheard this and crinkled his forehead.

No checkers tonight. Dad was laying out his platoon diagram, a kind of spreadsheet, with all his guys, as he called them, listed. “When I can’t fill this out, I’ll know I have dementia,” he said. It was remarkable, a big thing on butcher paper, maybe twenty-five names, with their specialties and rankings designated—riflemen, machine gunners, radiomen, grenadiers, fire-team leaders, and so on. There was, characteristically, a star beside my father’s name, the CO. Some names were crossed out with Vietnam dates; some were annotated as natural-cause eliminations. It was all so orderly—even the deaths seemed orderly, once you saw them on this spreadsheet. I think this was how Dad dealt with mortality: when a former sergeant died of cirrhosis in his sixties, Dad crossed out his square on the spreadsheet with the same grim aplomb he’d used for the twenty-somethings in firefights; it was all war to him, from, as he said, “the erection to the Resurrection.”

Although he complained all the time, Dad lost weight on my regimen. When he got below the magic number, Mom didn’t
believe my scale or my word, and we had to have him weighed at the fire station, with a fireman reading the number to her over the phone while Dad rounded up a couple of guys to show him the hook-and-ladder. He’d made it by a little over a pound.

When I came home from the plastic surgeon’s house that night, Dad was packing up. He had a glass of whiskey on the nightstand, and his little tape player was belting out a nostalgic playlist: Mott the Hoople, Dusty Springfield, Captain Beefheart, Quicksilver Messenger Service—his courting songs. My God, he was heading home to Mom again!

“Got it worked out?” I said, flipping through one of the girlie magazines he’d picked up in Helena, a special on “barely legals.”

“We’ll see.”

“Anything new?”

“Not at all. She’s the only one who understands me.”

“No one understands you.”

“Really? I think it’s you that nobody understands. Anyway, there are some preliminaries in this case that I can live with.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t go to the house. I have to stay at a hotel.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“Why wouldn’t I be? A lot of surprising stuff happens at a hotel. For all intents and purposes, I’ll be home.”

And now I have to figure out how to work around Dee and Helen Folsom, who are on the job site continuously and kind of in the way. One night, they camped out on the subflooring of what will be their bedroom, when we barely had the sheathing on the roof.
The crew had to shoo them away in the morning. I think the Folsoms were embarrassed, dragging the blow-up mattress out to their old sedan.

I have no real complaints about my upbringing. My parents were self-absorbed and never knew where I was, which meant that I was free, and I made good use of that freedom. I’ve been asked if I was damaged by my family life, and the answer is a qualified no; I know I’ll never marry, and, halfway through my life, I’m unable to imagine letting anyone new stay in my house for more than a night—and preferably not a whole night. Rolling over in the morning and finding … let’s not go there. I build houses for other people, and it works for me.