East of Denver (9 page)

Once, he drove a whole day without the belt on the mower deck. It must have snapped and dropped off into the weeds. He didn't mow a damned thing that day. I found a replacement and installed it. I got him going again. Didn't even bloody my knuckles.

I fixed squeaky door hinges. Replaced the rubber washer in the dripping faucet. Painted the front door. Little stuff like that. The place started to look okay.

Breakfast, piano, garden, housework, yard work, lunch, nap, watch the clouds, eat dinner, TV, sleep. Sometimes the phone would ring. If Dad felt like answering, he did. It was always somebody selling something. He'd talk to them until they hung up. Nobody we knew ever called us. The people of Dorsey were always willing to leave you be. I appreciated that.

Every day was beautiful. Sometimes it was windy and we'd stay in the house all day. Huge winds would fill the world with corn shucks blown from miles away. Most afternoons, we'd get some nice weather. A few clouds. Maybe a drop of rain.

The garden came up. The tomato plants got big. The rest of the plants were runty. But it was all growing. Dad wasn't allowed to hoe. He killed things when he hoed. While I worked, he sat in the shade and watched the jets drag their contrails across the sky.

I found a kite in a closet. It was a nice canvas kite. Mom gave it to me for my birthday a long time ago. It came from a store in Boulder. Pa loved that thing. The string was a couple hundred feet long. Pa was always nervous to let it out all the way.

He'd point at the contrails of the jets that crisscrossed the sky. “I suppose they can see it, but I'd hate for it to get in their way.”

“I think they're farther up than that kite can reach, Pa.”

“I dunno. It's gotta be a quarter mile.”

I'd let the string all the way out and he'd slowly reel it in. I could weed the whole garden in the time it took him to bring the kite down.

One day, a giant gust ripped the kite off the string just as Dad was reeling it back in. The string slid back to earth. The kite flew higher and higher and got smaller and smaller. When it disappeared, Dad looked at the spool in his hands and said, “What the heck is this deal for?”

I'd occasionally find Pa wandering around the shed, poking in the pile of parts that was his old motorized bicycle. We hadn't touched it since we'd dragged it out of the granary. I still wanted to get that thing going again.

I took my time. I wasn't gonna push him. If we were going to put that motorbike back together, I wanted him to initiate the process. Let him feel like he's running the show.

One day, he said, “What's this?”

“Your bike.”

“Why's it all apart like that?”

“Hard to say.”

He said, “It'd sure be neat to put it together again.”

I said, “Maybe we could go for a ride.”

“Real fun.”

“Too bad I don't know the first thing about engines and stuff.”

“You're ignorant.”

Another day I found him out there, holding the piston in his hands, like it was a newborn baby.

“Whatcha doin'?”

“I was thinking how it'd be neat to put this thing back together.”

“There's thinking and there's doing.”

He said, “Well?”

I said, “Well.”

“Then get off your duff and get to work.”

“Where should we start?”

He squinted his eyes at me for being stupid. “The engine. You can't propel yourself without an engine.”

I squatted and stared hard.

He squatted next to me, looked at the parts for a moment, and said, “You're missing a carburetor.”

“That all?”

“Looks like it.”

I ran to the granary, poked around. Found something that looked like a carburetor and brought it back to Pa, who was still staring at the pile of parts.

“Will this do?”

“Depends. You trying to carburete something?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, that's what a carburetor does.”

Something good happened. Pa's switch flipped to the “on” position. There's this look that he used to get when he was working. His eyes would dart around and his mouth would flatten out with a tiny hook of a smile on one corner. As a little kid, I'd ask him what was so funny and he used to say, “Nothing.” He loved to work.

I watched him. He watched his hands. The half-smile arrived. We began assembling the engine, I anticipated when I could. I knew he would want to clean grime, so I filled a coffee can with gasoline from the tank out back and dipped greasy things into it. I gave him wrenches. I became ten, he became forty. The morning turned to afternoon. We took a break. Drank water from the hydrant outside. Spat on the dirt.

Everything had a place. The piston and the crank and the flywheel. We did not move quickly. We spent several afternoons working on it. I started to get an understanding. I don't know how, but I eventually turned into the point man on the project. Actually I do know how. Dad was slow. His bursts of genius were followed by hours of searching for tools he'd set down in random places. I stared at that engine and it metamorphed from a block of bolted-together bits of metal into a tangible collection of parts. Like when you understand that an Elvis song is not just noise coming from your stereo; it's a collection of sounds made by guitars and a giant bass and a singer. When constituent parts become visible, you can begin to understand how they cooperate to make music or move a bicycle or, if you go far enough, why the last two surviving members of a family are squatting on a concrete floor trying to locate a lock washer.

I dreamt of valve lifters and ignition points. There was a linear path from fuel to fire to kinetic motion. I didn't understand the guts of the thing like Dad did, but I understood that it had guts. It got to the point where I'd send him on an errand and work by myself. He'd spend an hour trying to locate the 9/16" combo wrench while I put the rings on the piston.

And then we were ready to start the engine. Everything was in place. The engine was sitting on two four-by-fours on the floor. I checked the spark plug. I made sure there was gas.

I said, “We're ready.”

Pa was impressed. “We did some real good work.”

I said, “Let's wait and see.”

“Step on it.”

I stomped the kick start. Nothing. I stomped again. Nothing. I opened the choke. Closed the choke. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Sweating. Piece of shit. It should be working. Pa watched patiently. To him, each of my attempts was the first one. But he saw me getting riled up and he enjoyed that.

I said, “I gotta take a break.” I walked around back of the shed and took a piss. As I was walking back, I heard the engine come to life.

Dad was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching the washing machine engine putt-putt.

Delighted and mystified, I said, “What'd you do?”

“I fixed it.”

Things like that made me wonder if he wasn't faking it all.

With the engine restored, we started working on the bike frame. My dad was ten years old when he did this the first time. That young version of my pa acquired a bike frame, removed the pedals, built a pulley mechanism that would operate as a variable-speed centrifugal clutch, welded a contraption that would hold the whole thing together, and then rode it all over the place.

The frame was in pretty good shape yet. Unlike the engine, there wasn't much to it. All we had to fix was bearings and rubber. The bearings were easy. We unpacked them, soaked them in gasoline until the grit floated off, slathered them with grease, and put them back together. Cleaned and packed, everything spun smooth.

Using some vulcanizing fluid and the rubber from an old inner tube, we patched a dozen holes in each tube. Before we put them on the wheels, we filled them fat with air and ran them thru a bucket of water. No leaks. Not now, at least. But that wouldn't last long.

There's a plant called the goathead. It grows flat the ground. The seeds are hard as rocks and pointy as the devil. Goatheads kill bike tires. We had goatheads everywhere. It didn't use to be like that. Back when, we fought them hard. I fought them hard. For my seventh birthday, Dad built me a special tool. It was a hoe handle with a little V-shaped blade on the end. It slid under the plant and allowed you to snip it off right above the taproot. Pa would give me two dollars for every five-gallon bucket I could fill with those weeds.

I spent many summer days walking thru ditches, looking for yellow flowers. Any time I wasn't working with him on farm stuff, I was expected to fill a bucket with those damned plants. Homework? You can do your homework after dinner, when it's dark out. I killed so many of those plants I used to hallucinate them.

Pure, boring misery, and all so we wouldn't have flat tires. The thing is, the goddamned things were too short to puncture a car tire. The only danger was to bare feet—which wasn't a problem since we always wore shoes outside—and bike tires. I stopped riding my bike when I was twelve years old, which made the entire endeavor a waste of time. I argued that we were engaging in a pointless war. I drew analogies to Vietnam.

It didn't matter. Pa was stronger than me. He didn't have to raise a fist; when I told him he was an idiot, he said, “That's fine. Now go fill that bucket up.” I'd fill it up, burn the weeds. Cuss under my breath. Sing Billy Joel songs angrily. It didn't matter. It's daylight, so work. I wore that V-blade down to a sliver on those damned weeds. Eventually, I got them under control. Or they got me under control. Whatever it was, I took pride in it. When I'd go to another farm and see a mat of green vines, I'd feel contempt for the lazy bastards who couldn't bother to kill the goddamned goat.

I pointed to the sole of my shoe. It was covered with burrs. “Pa, unless we take some preventative measures, our maiden journey won't last long.”

I got an idea. I went to the paint shelves. I said, “Maybe we can put some rotten paint in the tubes and it'll act like that hole sealant stuff they advertise on TV.” Dad ignored my brilliant idea. Instead he pulled out a sheet of copper from behind the workbench. Using tin snips, he sliced it into two strips.

“Try these.”

I lined the tires with the copper. Put the tubes in the tires. Put them on the rims. Filled them with air until they were tight and hard. Bolted the wheels on. We had a frame. We had thorn-proof tubes.

We bolted the engine to the frame, found a V-belt, linked the chain, filled the fuel tank. The bike was ready.

“It needs paint,” said Pa.

“Sure,” I said. “We'll give it a coat after we test-drive it.”

“I think we should do it now.”

“It'll run fine without paint.”

“It doesn't look good.”

“It's beautiful.”

“It needs paint.”

It's about aesthetics. We painted the thing. Not a five-minute spray-paint job. No, we had to look thru the entire shed until we found the compressed-air spray gun, then stir and mix some red and yellow paint into a perfect shade of orange, then tape off everything, and then deal with Dad taking the spray can out of my hands because I was getting drips.

The bike was orange, the engine black, the racing stripes freshened up and tidy.

As we watched it dry, Dad said, “It needs a . . .”

“A horn?” I said.

“No! A word. A thing to call it by.”

“A name?”

“Close.”

“A logo? A company? A means of identifying it by manufacturer?”

He snapped his fingers. “Like Ford.”

“Williams Bicycle Company?”

“Just the letters.”

“WBC?”

“And another word.”

I looked around the shed for ideas. My eyes stopped on the half-finished jet-tractor resting under the tarp.

“WBC Rocket?”

“That's it.”

Dad let me pencil the letters on the frame. He painted the letters in black using a tiny paintbrush. The words looked shaky. We agreed to let it dry overnight.

The sun went down as we walked from the shed to the house. Pa was in charge. I was the best helper in the world.

Pa said, “You wanna race?”

Before I could say, “Yes,” he started running.

I didn't let him win. I ran as hard as I could and he won anyway.

I made chili with canned beef and canned beans. We sopped it up with busted-up crackers. We watched TV for a couple of hours and then I helped Pa brush his teeth. When I put him to bed, he said, “What's the big plan for tomorrow?”

“We're going to take the WBC Rocket for a spin.”

“What's that?”

“The WBC Rocket? It's your old bicycle. The one with the washing machine engine.”

“That thing? It's just a pile of bones.”

“You'll see.” I turned off the light and started out of the room.

“Say,” said Pa.

“Yes?”

“It's real good having you out here.”

I said, “You, too.”

He said, “Sounds like a personal problem.”

I sat in bed and read the novelization of the second Star Trek movie,
The Wrath of Khan
. It's pretty good for a novelization. There's a lot of blood and torture. Khan hangs people by their ankles and slits their throats. In the book, the brain-eating worms are a million times nastier than the puppets in the movie.

I finished the last chapter just after one
A.M.
When I got to the part where Spock dies, I swear to God, I cried. It didn't matter that he comes back in the third movie. He was dead. I rubbed the tears away, turned off the light, and went to sleep.

I woke up at 3:23. I remember because I looked at the clock. There was a noise downstairs. It sounded like it came from the kitchen.

I thought of Clarissa McPhail. Was she sneaking into our house to take advantage of my pa? I heard Dad laugh. Was he watching TV? Probably watching TV. He was talking. Having a conversation. An argument. Maybe he was on the phone.