Same Kind of Different As Me (21 page)

It just didn’t make no sense. I knowed he was a smart man that maybe thinks he knows what he’s doin. But bein smart don’t mean he’ll ever see his truck again—that takes faith.

I expect I never had no more than $20 or $30 of my own at one time, ’cept for once when Mr. Ron slipped me a hundred. Then he gives me
$700
cash
and a
$30,000 truck
fulla TVs, furniture, and stereos. I just couldn’t let the man down.

He drawed me a map, thinkin I could read it, and explained the best he could what signs to look for and how to get there. After we finished loadin the truck, he pointed me in the gen’l direction of Colorado. Then, when I was pullin out, he kept runnin by the truck, hollerin, “Two-eighty-seven! Two-eighty-seven!”

Now, I’m gon’ be honest with you: With all his talkin and pointin and hollerin, I was real nervous and couldn’t remember everthing he told me. But I did remember him sayin if I miss 287, I’m gon’ wind up in Oklahoma. And the way I’m gon’ know it is I’d cross a big bridge over a big river and the sign’d say “OKLAHOMA,” and the river’d say “RED.”

And that’s exactly what happened. I knowed I had a problem so I stopped at a gas station and told a fella I was lookin for Highway 287 to Colorado. He told me a different way to get there, and I was a little worried about that ’cause he didn’t look too smart. I took outta there again and was drivin purty slow ’cause I was afraid all Mr. Ron’s daughter’s stuff gon’ blow out the back. I figured he’d rather me be gettin there late with the goods than on time with a empty truck.

Part of the $700 he give me was for a motel room, but I slept in the truck ’cause ain’t nobody ever trusted me before with that much stuff, and wadn’t no way in the world I was gon’ take a chance on somebody stealin it.

Things was goin purty good. The folks in the gas stations kept me goin in the right direction. Now, when I got into Colorado, I started seein mountains away off, and I was thinkin how purty they was. But I figured Mr. Ron’s daughter’s camp musta been
around
on the other side of them mountains, ’cause for sure ain’t nobody gon’ drive up over em in a truck. The more I kept on drivin, the bigger them mountains got. I could see snow on top of em, but I couldn’t see where they ended so I started worryin about how I was gon’ get around em. Next thing I knew I was smack up next to em with the road headin straight up!

I stopped at another gas station and asked a lady how I was s’posed to get to Winter Park. She looked at me and pointed
up
the mountain. And when I asked her where the Crooked Creek Ranch was, she pointed to the top.

“The road is narrow,” she said. “Once you head up there, there’s no turning around.”

That caused me and myself to have a little talk.
I’m a strong fella
, I thought.
Ain’t no reason to be scared.
So I got back in the truck and headed up the mountain. Real slow.

The drive was mighty purty, the sky spreadin out from the mountain blue as a lake, and the trees all red and orange and yella like they was on fire. ’Bout halfway up the mountain, I decided to do me a little sightseein, so I pulled over to take a look over the edge and see how far could I see.

That was a mistake.

I couldn’t see no bottom. The edge of that road dropped off into the biggest nothin I ever saw in my life. I got back in the truck right quick and squeezed that steerin wheel so tight I thought it was gon’ break off in my hands, and I started pourin sweat even though it was freezin outside. I didn’t go no more than about five miles an hour the rest of the way and by the time I got to Winter Park, I had about a hundred cars stacked up behind me like a freight train.

37

When
Denver failed to make the meeting with Regan, my faith slipped off the mountain. First I thought of calling the highway patrol to report an accident. But I changed my mind as I imagined the dispatcher breaking into a belly laugh when I told what I’d done. Besides, Denver was supposed to have crossed three states, and I had no idea where to tell the authorities to look for him.

It ate at me that Denver had all my numbers but that I had not heard from him in two days. I remembered how wide his eyes got when I handed over the $700—it must have seemed to him a small fortune. I flashed back to a lecture I’d gotten from Don Shisler about the fate of a buck in the hands of a bum. Maybe the temptation had been too great.

Maybe he’d taken the money, the truck, and Regan’s stuff and set up housekeeping in Mexico. Or Canada. He’d always said he wanted to see Canada.

I hated to tell Deborah that Denver was missing, but I knew she could hear, each time Regan and I touched base on the telephone, that our voices had climbed the octaves from concern to worry to panic. So I went into the bedroom and told her.

Her response was vintage Deborah: “Well, why don’t you stop worrying and let’s start praying for Denver’s safety?”

I knelt beside the bed, and we held hands and prayed. We’d been like that for only a few minutes when the phone rang. It was Regan: “He’s here!”

38

Late
the next day, the doorbell rang and there stood Denver, wearing the biggest grin I’d ever seen in my life. In the driveway sat the truck, washed and waxed.

We sat down at the kitchen table and he told the tale of his trip. Finally, he said, “Mr. Ron, you got more faith than any man I ever knowed. Things got a li’l shaky, but I just couldn’t let you down.” Then he handed me a ball of wadded-up cash—about $400.

“How come there’s so much left over?” I asked.

“’Cause I slept in the truck the whole time and ate at McDonald’s and 7-Eleven.”

I hadn’t expected there would be any money left after expenses, so I said, “You keep it for doing such a good job.”

“No, sir,” he said quietly. “I ain’t for hire. I did that to bless you and your family. Money can’t buy no blessins.”

Humbled, I stood there and looked at him, not sure if I’d ever received a more gracious gift in my life. I couldn’t let him go away empty-handed, though, so I told him to take it and use it to do some good for someone else.

The trip turned out to be life-changing for both of us—for him, having proved he was trustworthy, and for me, having learned to trust. Two weeks later, I sent Denver to Baton Rouge in a Ryder truck loaded with paintings and sculptures valued at more than $1 million. According to my client there, Denver guarded the contents of that truck like it was the gold in Fort Knox.

39

Between
May and November, it seemed we wore ruts in the road between the suburbs and the chemo clinic. Mercifully, surrounding Thanksgiving, Deborah had a two-week respite from all chemotherapy.

We always celebrated that holiday at Rocky Top. On Thanksgiving morning, I rose before daylight to hunt deer. Saw a nice buck, just wasn’t in the mood to kill him. Deborah, meanwhile, prepared a grand feast for about twenty-five friends and family, including Denver, who by this time fell into the latter category. The chemo was working to shrink the tumors, and during the break from it, Deborah had regained a few pounds and a flush of color. Had our guests not known her condition, they wouldn’t even have suspected she was ill.

By December, the chemotherapy had shrunk the tumors enough to make Deborah a candidate for liver surgery. On December 21, she had fourteen tumors burned off—removed by ablation—and after the four-hour operation, we had our miracle.

“Cancer free!” exclaimed her surgeon, who had scoped her entire body cavity for cancer during the procedure and could find no trace.

Deborah burst out laughing and crying at the same time, and I nearly burned up my cell phone spreading the good news. We considered it our Christmas present from God.

40

Our
joy was short-lived. Like an enemy that seemed vanquished but had only been lying in wait, the cancer flanked us. By the end of January, it was back with a vengeance. By March, Deborah’s doctors were weighing another liver surgery, but felt it too risky only three months after the ablation. More chemo didn’t knock the tumors back, but instead seemed to feed them. They rose like an evil regiment, and fighting back was like throwing rocks at an advancing platoon of tanks.

By that time, Denver was spreading his wings, tooling around town in a car he called “manna” because, he said, it fell from heaven. (Actually, Alan Davenport gave it to him.) He often stopped by to visit, and every time I saw him it was like going to the bank and clipping bond coupons: I was growing richer, collecting dividends from his wisdom. Seldom was there any idle chitchat. He always got right to the point—my lesson for the day.

One day he stopped by and, as usual, got down to it. He looked straight into my eyes and said, “Mr. Ron, what did God say when He finished making the world and all that is in it?”

Knowing Denver wasn’t much for trick questions, I gave him a straight answer: “He said, ‘It is good.’”

Denver’s face lit up in a smile. “Exactly.”

Launching into a sermon, he assured me that God didn’t make cancer because cancer is not good, and he cautioned me not to blame God for something He didn’t make. The theology lesson helped, for a little while.

Spring arrived and with it the rites of Rocky Top. Ill but determined to enjoy the season, Deborah watched expectantly for the first budding of our bluebonnets, then for the birth of our longhorn calves. She named two of them Freckles and Bubbles, and I didn’t roll my eyes. We watched the eagles feast on spawning sand bass and marveled at the savage midair battles they sometimes waged over a catch. At night, stars frosted the sky like jewels and moonlight rippled on the Brazos, fish arcing in the cool glow. The only sound for miles was wind shimmering in the post oaks and the low, lonely whistle of distant trains.

Denver went with us to the ranch. I had invited him to the Cowboy Spring Gathering, an annual event where about two hundred people camped together at the Rio Vista, our friends Rob and Holly Farrell’s ranch, right across the river from Rocky Top. We’d met there for more than twenty years to pitch teepees, ride and rope, enjoy chuckwagon cooking, and read cowboy poetry around campfires.

“I heard cowboys don’t like black folks,” Denver said when I invited him. “You sure you want me to go?”

“Of course I want you to go,” I said, but I still practically had to rope and drag him.

Denver pitched his teepee reluctantly that first night, and the next morning I found him sleeping in the backseat of a car. It wasn’t that he minded sleeping outdoors having done so for decades in downtown Fort Worth. But there weren’t many rattlesnakes there.

Soon, though, he found his cowboy legs and began feeling comfortable among us all. He didn’t ride, but he did want to have his picture taken on a horse so he could show his buddies in the hood. If we had had one, we could’ve used a forklift to get his 230-pound butt in the saddle.

The campfires and camaraderie worked magic on Denver as he began to know what it was like to be accepted and loved by a group of white guys on horseback with ropes in their hands. Exactly the kind of people he had feared all his life.

Back in Fort Worth, Deborah continued to shed pounds, her skin growing slack on her tiny frame. Still, she fought.

“Do you know what I’m going to do today?” she asked me brightly one March morning. “I’m going
shopping
.”

She felt like her old self, she said. I suspected she just ached to feel normal again, but I didn’t say so. She hadn’t driven a car in a year. I stood by the window, watched her pull away in her Land Cruiser, and worried the whole time she was gone—burned to follow her, actually, but stayed put. When I heard her purr back into the garage about an hour later, I scrambled outside to help her unload.

But there were no packages. Eyes red and swollen, tears streaming down her cheeks, she looked at me, her throat working.

“Am I ‘terminal’?” she asked finally, seeming to hold the word at a distance like a distasteful science specimen.

Terminal
is a harsh word when used in the context of death and not one we’d ever uttered aloud. But according to
Webster’s
, it’s also a place people pass through on their way to somewhere else. Deborah knew her “somewhere else” was heaven. She was just hoping the train was delayed.

I scooped a tear off her cheek and tried to slip around her question. “We’re all terminal,” I said, smiling gently. “None of us makes it out of here alive.”

“No, tell me straight up. Am I terminal? Is that what people are saying?”

At the mall, she told me, she had run into an old college friend who’d heard about the cancer. Very sweet and concerned, not meaning to upset Deborah, the friend had said, “I just heard you were terminal.”

Unwilling to appear shaken, Deborah replied, “No one has told me that.”

Then, fighting to remain calm, she made a dignified escape, only collapsing when she reached the safety of her car. She cried out loud all the way home, she told me. It was the last time she ever left the house alone.

In April, doctors performed a second surgery on Deborah’s liver and warned that her body couldn’t take another such invasion for at least nine months to a year. Still, the following Sunday, she insisted on going to church, where we met Denver. But during the prayer time before the service, she fell ill and asked me to take her to the home of our friends Scott and Janina Walker. Janina was home recovering from surgery of her own; maybe they could do each other some good.