Fine Just the Way It Is (2 page)

“Well, no, of course not, but I should just mention that the less fortunate residents might see him as privileged, even a little high-hat if he holes up in his room and watches rodeo instead of joining the community choice—”

“Fine,” said Beth, cutting past the social tyranny of the Mellowhorn Home. “That’s what we’ll do, then. Get him a snooty, high-hat television. Family counts with me and Kevin,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have a satellite hookup, do you?” she asked.

“Well, no. We’ve discussed it, but—maybe next year—”

She brought Ray a small television set with a DVD player and three or four discs of recent years’ rodeo events. That got him going.

“Christ, I remember when the finals was in Oklahoma City, not goddamn Las Vegas,” he said. “Of course bull riding has pushed out all the other events now, good-bye saddle bronc and bareback. I was there when Freckles Brown rode Tornado in 1962,” he said. “Forty-six year old, and the ones they got now bull riding are children! Make a million dollars. It’s all show business now,” he said. “The old boys was a rough crew. Heavy drinkers, most of them. You want to know what pain is, try bull riding with a bad hangover.”

“So I guess you did a lot of rodeo riding when you were young?”

“No, not a lot, but enough to get broke up some. And earned a buckle,” he said. “You heal fast when you’re young, but the broke places sort of come back to life when you are old. I busted my left leg in three places. Hurts now when it rains,” he said.

“How come you cowboyed for a living, Grandpa Ray? Your daddy wasn’t a rancher or a cowboy, was he?” She turned the volume knob down. The riders came out of a chute, again and again, monotonously, all apparently wearing the same dirty hat.

“Hell no, he wasn’t. He was a coal miner. Rove Forkenbrock,” he said. “My mother’s name was Alice Grand Forkenbrock. Dad worked in the Union Pacific coal mines. Something happened to him and he quit. Moved into running errands for different outfits, Texaco, California Petroleum, big outfits.

“Anyway, don’t exactly know what the old man did. Drove a dusty old Model T. He’d get fired and then he had to scratch around for another job. Even though he drank—that’s what got him fired usually—he always seemed to get another job pretty quick.” He swallowed a little whiskey.

“Anymore I wouldn’t go near the mines. I liked horses almost as much as I liked arithmetic, liked the cow business, so after I graduated eighth grade and Dad said better forget high school, things were tough and I had to find work,” he said. “At the time I didn’t mind. What my dad said I generally didn’t fuss over. I respected him. I respected and honored my father. I believed him to be a good and fair man.” He thought, unaccountably, of weeds.

“I tried for a job and got took on at Bledsoe’s Double B,” he said. “The bunkhouse life. The Bledsoes more or less raised me to voting age. At that point I sure didn’t want nothing to do with my family,” he said and fell into an old man’s reverie. Weeds, weeds and wildness.

Beth was quiet for a few minutes, then chatted about her boys. Syl had acted the part of an eagle in a school play and what a job, making the costume! Just before she left she said offhandedly, “You know, I want my boys to know about their great-granddad. What do you think if I bring my recorder and get it on tape and then type it up? It would be like a book of your life—something for the future generations of the family to read and know about.”

He laughed in derision.

“Some of it ain’t so nice to know. Every family got its dirty laundry and we got ours.” But after a week of thinking about it, of wondering why he’d kept it bottled up for so long, he told Beth to bring on her machine.

They sat in his little room with the door closed.

“‘Antisocial,’ they’ll say. Everybody else sits with the door open hollering at each other’s folks as if they was all related somehow. A regional family, they call it here. I like my privacy.”

She put a glass of whiskey, another of water and the tape recorder, smaller than a pack of cigarettes, on the table near his elbow and said, “It’s on, Grandpa. Tell me how it was growing up in the old days. Just talk any time you are ready.”

He cleared his throat and began slowly, watching the spiky volume meter jump. “I’m eighty-four years old and most of them involved in the early days has gone on before, so it don’t make much difference what I tell.” He took a nervous swallow of the whiskey and nodded.

“I was fourteen year old in nineteen and thirty-three and there wasn’t a nickel in the world.” The silence of that time before traffic and leaf blowers and the boisterous shouting of television was embedded in his character, and he spoke little, finding it hard to drag out the story. The noiselessness of his youth except for the natural sound of wind, hoofbeats, the snap of the old house logs splitting in winter cold, wild herons crying their way downriver was forever lost. How silent men and women had been in those times, trusting to observational powers. There had been days when a few little mustache clouds moved, and he could imagine them making no more sound than dragging a feather across a wire. The wind got them and the sky was alone.

“When I was a kid we lived hard, let me tell you. Coalie Town, about eight miles from Superior. It’s all gone now,” he said. “Three-room shack, no insulation, kids always sick. My baby sister Goldie died of meningitis in that shack,” he said.

Now he was warming up to his sorry tale. “No water. A truck used to come every week and fill up a couple barrels we had. Mama paid a quarter a barrel. No indoor plumbing. People make jokes about it now but it was miserable to go out there to that outhouse on a bitter morning with the wind screaming up the hole. Christ,” he said. He was silent for so long Beth backed up the tape and pressed the pause button on the recorder. He lit a cigarette, sighed, abruptly started talking again. Beth lost a sentence or two before she got the recorder restarted.

“People thought they was doing all right if they was alive. You can learn to eat dust instead of bread, my mother said many a time. She had a lot a old sayings. Is that thing on?” he said.

“Yes, Grandpa,” she said. “It is on. Just talk.”

“Bacon,” he said. “She’d say if bacon curls in the pan the hog was butchered wrong side of the moon. We didn’t see bacon very often and it could of done corkscrews in the pan, would have been okay with us long as we could eat it,” he said.

“There was a whole bunch a shacks out there near the mines. They called it Coalie Town. Lot of foreigners.

“As I come up,” he said, “I got a pretty good education in fighting, screwing—pardon my French—and more fighting. Every problem was solved with a fight. I remember all them people. Pattersons, Bob Hokker, the Grainblewer twins, Alex Sugar, Forrie Wintka, Harry and Joe Dolan…We had a lot of fun. Kids always have fun,” he said.

“They sure do,” said Beth.

“Kids don’t get all sour thinking about the indoor toilets they don’t have, or moaning because there ain’t no fresh butter. For us everthing was fine the way it was. I had a happy childhood. When we got bigger there was certain girls. Forrie Wintka. Really good looking, long black hair and black eyes,” he said, looking to see if he had shocked her.

“She finally married old man Dolan after his wife died. The Dolan boys was something else. They hated each other, fought, really had bad fights, slugged each other with boards with nails in the end, heaved rocks.”

Beth tried to shift him to a description of his own family, but he went on about the Dolans.

“I’m pretty set in my ways,” he said. She nodded.

“One time Joe knocked Harry out, kicked him into the Platte. He could of drowned, probably would of but Dave Arthur was riding along the river, seen this bundle of rags snarled up in a cottonwood sweeper—it had fell in the river and caught up all sorts of river trash. He thought maybe some clothes. Went to see and pulled Harry out,” he said.

“Harry was about three-quarters dead, never was right after that, neither. But right enough to know that his own brother had meant to kill him. Joe couldn’t never tell if Harry was going to be around the next corner with a chunk of wood or a gun.” There was a long pause after the word “gun.”

“Nervous wreck,” he said. He watched the tape revolve for long seconds.

“Dutchy Green was my best friend in grade school. He was killed when he was twenty-five, twenty-six, shooting at some of them old Indian rock carvings. The ricochet got him through the right temple,” he said.

He took a swallow of whiskey. “Yep, our family. There was my mother. She was tempery, too much to do and no money to do it. Me, the oldest. There was a big brother, Sonny, but he drowned in an irrigation ditch before I come along,” he said.

“Weren’t there girls in the family?” asked Beth. Not content with two sons, she craved a daughter.

“My sisters, Irene and Daisy. Irene lives in Greybull and Daisy is still alive out in California. And I mentioned, the baby Goldie died when I was around six or seven. The youngest survivor was Roger. Mama’s last baby. He went the wrong way. Did time for robbing,” he said. “No idea what happened to him.” Under the weeds, damned and dark.

Abruptly he veered away from the burglar brother. “You got to understand that I loved my dad. We all did. Him and Mother was always kissing and hugging and laughing when he was home. He was a wonderful man with kids, always a big smile and a hug, remembered all your interests, lots of times brought home special little presents. I still got every one he give me.” His voice trembled like that of the old horse catcher in the antique sleet.

“Remembering this stuff makes me tired. I guess I better stop,” he said. “Anymore two new people come in today and the new ones always makes me damn tired.”

“Women or men?” asked Beth, relieved to turn the recorder off as she could see her only tape was on short time. She remembered now she had recorded the junior choir practice.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Find out at supper.”

“I’ll come next week. I think what you are saying is important for this family.” She kissed his dry old man’s forehead, brown age spots.

“Just wait,” he said.

After she left he started talking again as if the tape were still running. “He died age forty-seven. I thought that was real old. Why didn’t he jump?” he said.

Berenice Pann, bearing a still-warm chocolate cupcake, paused outside his door when she heard his voice. She had seen Beth leave a few minutes earlier. Maybe she had forgotten something and come back. Berenice heard something like a strangled sob from Mr. Forkenbrock. “God, it was lousy,” he said. “So we could work. Hell, I liked school. No chance when you start work at thirteen,” he said. “Wasn’t for the Bledsoes I’d ended up a bum,” he said to himself. “Or worse.”

Berenice Pann’s boyfriend, Chad Grills, was the great-grandson of the old Bledsoes. They were still on the ranch where Ray Forkenbrock had worked in his early days, both of them over the century mark. Berenice became an avid eavesdropper, feeling that in a way she was related to Mr. Forkenbrock through the Bledsoes. She owed it to herself and Chad to hear as much as she could about the Bledsoes, good or bad. Inside the room there was silence, then the door flung open.

“Uh!” cried Berenice, the cupcake sliding on its saucer. “I was just bringing you this—”

“That so?” said Mr. Forkenbrock. He took the cupcake from the saucer and instead of taking a sample bite crammed the whole thing into his mouth, paper cup and all. The paper massed behind his dentures.

At the Social Hour, Mr. Mellowhorn arrived to introduce the new “guests.” Church Bollinger was a younger man, barely sixty-five, but Roy could tell he was a real slacker. He’d obviously come into the Home because he couldn’t get up the gumption to make his own bed or wash his dishes. The other one, Mrs. Terry Taylor, was around his age, early eighties despite the dyed red hair and carmine fingernails. She seemed soft and sagging, somehow like a candle standing in the sun. She kept looking at Ray. Her eyes were khaki-colored, the lashes sparse and short, her thin old lips greased up with enough lipstick to leave red on her buttered roll. Finally he could take her staring no longer.

“Got a question?” he said.

“Are you Ray Forkenknife?” she said.

“Forkenbrock,” he said, startled.

“Oh, right. Forkenbrock. You don’t remember me? Theresa Worley? From Coalie Town? Me and you went to school together except you was a couple grades ahead.”

But he did not remember her.

The next morning, fork poised over the poached egg reclining like a houri on a bed of soggy toast, he glanced up to meet her intense gaze. Her red-slick lips parted to show ocher teeth that were certainly her own, for no dentist would make dentures that looked as though they had been dredged from a sewage pit.

“Don’t you remember Mrs. Wilson?” she said. “The teacher that got froze in a blizzard looking for her cat? The Skeltcher kids that got killed when they fell in a old mine shaft?”

He did remember something about a schoolteacher frozen in a June blizzard but thought it had happened somewhere else, down around Cold Mountain. As for the Skeltcher kids, he denied them and shook his head.

On Saturday Beth came again, and again set out the glass of water, the glass of whiskey and the tape recorder. He had been thinking what he wanted to say. It was clear enough in his head, but putting it into words was difficult. The whole thing had been so subtle and painful it was impossible to present it without sounding like a fool. And Mrs. Terry Taylor, a.k.a. Theresa Worley, had sidelined him. He strove to remember the frozen teacher, the Skeltcher kids in the mine shaft, how Mr. Baker had shot Mr. Dennison over a bushel of potatoes and a dozen other tragedies she had laid out as mnemonic bait. He remembered very different events. He remembered walking to the top of Irish Hill with Dutchy Green to meet Forrie Wintka, who was going to show them her private parts in exchange for a nickel each. It was late autumn, the cottonwoods leafless along the grim trickle of Coal Creek, warm weather holding. They could see Forrie Wintka toiling up from the shacks below. Dutchy said it would be easy, not only would she show them, they could do it to her, even her brother did it to her.