The Summer Son (14 page)

W
HEN
I
CAME
into the living room, Dad stood up and cut across my path to the kitchen. I followed him to the refrigerator. He turned away toward the dining room table. I poured a glass of orange juice and walked a line toward the seat opposite him. Dad stood up and glided back to the living room.

We chased each other around that house until midmorning, wordlessly, without circus music to highlight our movement. Only when I jangled my keys and reached for the door did Dad speak.

“Where are you going?”

“Grocery store.”

“You need any money?”

“I’ve got it covered.”

At Pioneer Park, I settled in at a picnic table away from the walkers and the din of the playground and the steady thumping of tennis players drawn by a sunny day. Given what I had come to do, I needed whatever solitude I could grab in such a public place.

I’d scrawled the number, fetched from directory assistance, on my left palm: 406-794-1978.

My phone sat in my right hand, open and ready to go.

I couldn’t bring myself to punch in the numbers.

I closed the phone and stood up. I needed a walk first, if not a stiff drink.

I tried to noodle the situation out logically, even though the circumstances defied logic. The park fell behind me as I crested the hill. I played point-counterpoint the entire way.

To an extent, Dad was correct when he said it was his life. If there were things he wanted to keep close, what business was it of mine to contradict him?

And yet nearly everything that was screwed up about my family—the one I was born into, and the one I was raising—traced back to secrets. Some things need to be dragged into the light. This, I was certain, was one of those things.

OK, but what about this Kelly person? She bowed out years ago and said she was done. What if she had moved on with her life? What if it were an intrusion to bring this up now?

“Just stop,” I said, aloud. She didn’t step away because she lost interest. I needed only to think back a couple of days to remember that I was the guy who stared at a house I barely knew in a flailing hope that I would find a deeper understanding of not just my own life but also the lives of people I loved. Did I really think she had let this go?

I heard my own voice in my head. “If you don’t make this call, you leave, right now. You go back, you give your old man a hug, you pack up your stuff, and you haul ass out of here. This is where the trail forks. Keep going, or go home. Do you think you will ever find peace—with him, with Cindy, with the rest of your life—if you do that?”

I jogged back to the picnic table.

Despite my resolve, I stared at the phone for twenty minutes more, rehearsing what I’d say and how I’d retreat if backpedaling were needed, cataloging my questions (many) and my answers (few). Finally, I punched in the number.

The call was picked up on the first ring. A friendly sounding female voice, crinkled with age, beckoned with “Hello,” and I nearly hung up.

“Hello,” she said again.

“Kelly Hewins?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Mitch Quillen. Do you know me?”

Silence came back at me. Four, five, six seconds of it. I pulled the phone away from my ear to see if the call was still connected.

“Hello?”

“I know who you are.” The clear voice diffused. She said, “I always hoped I might hear from you.”

“I found your letters to my father.”

Her voice faltered. “Is Jimmy gone?”

“Oh no,” I said. “He’s still here in Billings.”

“Oh good. Do you live in Billings, too?”

“Mrs. Hewins, I don’t mean to be rude. But who are you?”

“Jimmy didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

She paused. “I’m your aunt. Jimmy’s sister.”

“What?” I said.

“I’m Jimmy’s sister.”

I scrambled to slow the scattering of my thoughts.

“His parents died in a wreck. He was an only child.”

“Yes, I know. He and I were adopted out of the St. Thomas home in Great Falls.”

“I’ve never heard of this. He said he lived at the orphanage until he joined the Navy.”

“Well, I’m sorry to tell you that’s not what happened. Jimmy and I grew up on a farm up here.”

“Why wouldn’t he tell me that?”

“Well, Mitch, I don’t know. But I have some ideas.”

This struck me as more than just another Jim Quillen lie. I was talking to my aunt, a relative I had discovered only by intruding on Dad. Time and circumstance had taken so many people from me, and here was someone I had found. I fumed that Dad, alone, had decided that I didn’t need to know her.

Kelly’s words filled my ears, and I watched the people in the park through a long gaze, one that rendered their movement in slow motion. They stepped through the minutia of their lives, oblivious to the fact that a fresh hole had been shot through mine.

“OK,” I said. “What are your ideas?”

“Mitch, I’ll tell you everything I can, after.”

“After what?”

“After you tell me all about Jimmy. I haven’t seen him since 1954.”

I drew the outlines of the father I knew, a task beyond my means, given how scant my knowledge seemed to be. I gave Kelly the broad outline of how he and Mom met. I told of Jerry’s arrival in 1960, mine several years later, the divorce, the rich years, the lean years when he and I never spoke, the years when he married Helen and the frost between us melted into a stormy spring of occasional phone calls.

Kelly proved a good listener and questioner. She expressed sympathy where I expected to hear it, such as when I told her about losing Jerry and Mom, and at other points she pressed for details, some that were beyond my grasp.

“Did Leila ever say anything about us? I sent all those letters through the years, and I half hoped that she or…what was the second wife’s name again?”

“Marie.”

“That she or Marie would press the issue with him.”

“I couldn’t say. Mom knew what Dad told her, but she never talked about it with me. Marie, I don’t have a clue. I haven’t seen or talked to her in almost thirty years.”

“It doesn’t matter, I guess,” Kelly said. “I never heard from them. Or him.”

Finally, I told Kelly about the phone calls that had drawn me to Billings—leaving out the bit about my own marital discord—and how I had found her letters.

“I have to tell you something,” I said. “It’s damned frustrating to try to figure out what his problem is now, why things happened the way they did all those years ago and now having this new stuff. I keep trying to get close to him, and I keep ending up farther and farther away.”

Kelly laughed, but not in a manner suggesting that she found what I said to be funny.

“You’re not alone,” she said. “When Jimmy left the farm, he told us he would never come back and that we would never see his face again. I went down into the basement after he walked out, and I cried until I didn’t have any tears left.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew he meant it. Because I was happy for him.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Have you got a little while, Mitch?” It was an odd question. We had been on the phone more than an hour.

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’ll tell you why.”

Tears spilled down my face, driven by something so beyond my ability to rein it in that all I could do was turn at the picnic table and hide my eyes behind a hand lodged against my forehead.

Homer and Dana Elspeth chose a boy and a girl not to give lost children a home but with the craven hope of doubling the labor force on their tiny dairy farm. They got their wish through a legal transaction. They enforced it with threats, coercion, and beatings.

“I got it bad,” Kelly said, recounting how Dana grabbed her long locks and pulled her to the ground when housework wasn’t satisfactory. “Jimmy got it worse.”

“Worse how?”

“He got whipped with straps. He got whipped with chains. I saw Homer bounce a horseshoe off his head one time.”

“Jesus.”

The taste of tin seeped into my mouth, and I realized that I had bitten my tongue.

“I saw Jimmy kicked face-first into cow manure. One time, he dropped a basket of fresh eggs, and Homer clubbed him with a two-by-four until Jimmy screamed for mercy.”

“Just stop, OK? Please, just stop.”

“I’m sorry,” Kelly said.

Orphanages, scheming adoptive parents, a house marked by abuse and neglect—these things smacked of a century earlier. I knew nothing about it, of course, having not even a hint of it until that day, and still I reeled at the notion that Dad, just a generation older than me, would have known such horror. The naïveté he always accused me of harboring? Apparently, I was guilty of it.

“Didn’t you go to school? Church?” I asked her.

“Sure. We both went.”

“And nobody found out? Nobody did anything?”

“Who would find out? I can’t speak for Jimmy, but I was too terrified to say anything. Who would have believed us? We were just poor farm kids. The families we knew, even if they knew what was going on, none of them were going to tell other people how to raise their kids.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I guess…God. I always figured Dad was so closed-off because of his folks dying in that car crash and growing up in an orphanage. I never imagined that it was because he was getting the shit knocked out of him by people who were supposed to love him.”

“They didn’t love us.”

I reminded Kelly of the letter about Dana’s death and burial. “Why did you bother? Why didn’t you get away after you grew up and got married?”

“Mitch, I’ll tell you something. She was a wretched woman. But…I don’t know. I cared about her. That sounds strange, and maybe I can’t really explain it, but she was as much a prisoner in that house as Jimmy and me. She got beat on just as much as we did. After Homer was gone, she was just an old, lonely woman, pining for this man that she knew she shouldn’t have loved, but she did anyway. She didn’t have anybody else.”

“I guess I understand why Dad would run away from it all and never look back.”

“That’s why I never pushed him. We didn’t have choices when we were kids. Later, he made a choice and left. I wanted to respect that. But I missed him, you know? I loved him. I still do.”

On and on we talked, about happier times, too. I got details on her kids and their families, and her nine grandkids. I told her about Avery and Adia and our frustrating, joyful arrival at parenthood. We agreed that we owed it to our kids to be better examples of family than we had been given in our own lives. Long after we hung up, those words lingered in my ears. I knew that I had some work to do at home, just as soon as I could get back.

“Mitch,” Kelly said, “are you going to tell Jimmy you talked to me?”

By way of answering, I first told her about his reaction to my finding the letters, and she wept again.

“I’m in the doghouse already, but yeah, I’ll tell him. It’s not going to matter much if I dig a deeper hole.”

“There’s something you should know, then.”

“What’s that?”

“I know why Jimmy won’t talk to me. He’s ashamed.”

“I understand being ashamed. But I can’t understand fifty-something years of silence.”

Her voice cracked.

“It’s bigger than that.”

“Bigger how?”

She grew silent.

“Kelly?”

“Mitch, you need to know. Homer did bad things to him out in that barn.”

My muscles went slack.

“What? What kind of things?”

“Jimmy would come into the house sometimes and he’d just walk past me as if I wasn’t there. I’d look in his eyes, and it was like looking into a pit. He wasn’t in there, you know?

“We would buck each other up. When things were bad at the house, we’d give each other a pep talk and try to keep our spirits up. But then there were other days when I couldn’t reach Jimmy, when it was like I was all alone, because Jimmy had gone vacant.”

She wept.

“I did the wash. Sometimes I found blood in Jimmy’s underwear.”

“Jesus Christ.”

She whispered. “Yeah.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Once,” she said, “Jimmy told me, ‘I’m going to kill that son of a bitch.’ That shook me to my bones, because I knew there was a chance that he’d do it, or get himself killed trying.”

I swallowed, clamping down on the bile in my throat.

“Remember how you said it didn’t make sense, me crying for both sides when Jimmy left?” Kelly said. “It makes sense now. You can see that, right?”

I could. On the last warm day of the year, a chill blew through me, propelled by all the things I once yearned to know and now wished I had never heard.

D
AD PAID THE BILL,
and we stepped into the dusk. The summer evening, like a magnet, had pulled the people of Split Rail into town. Dad tipped his hat to old ladies who scooted past us on the uneven, weather-beaten sidewalk. They offered quick smiles and then turned back to their clucking. We walked on.

From the direction of the small town park—a strip of green with a swing set and a basketball hoop—I heard children laughing and smelled burgers grilling. I started toward the park, but Dad had other ideas.

“This way,” he said, squeezing my right shoulder and turning me. In the wake of a passing pickup, we jogged across the asphalt to the front door of the Livery.

A good number of the town’s men, and some of the hardier women, found their way to the bar that night. When Dad ambled in with me in tow, I saw that he had managed to make friends in town, judging from the hands raised in acknowledgment.

“Jim.”

The proprietor came around the bar and headed our direction. He was a short man, with stubby legs that worked in double time to bring him to us. His eyes, tiny and intense, twinkled, and he mopped at the beads of sweat forming a conga line on his bald pate.

“Jim, great to see you. But he can’t be in here.” He pointed at me.

“Nick, this is Mitch,” Dad said. “Mitch, Nick Geracie.”

I nodded at the man, who twitched nervously.

“Pleased to meet you, young man,” he said. “Jim, he can’t be in here.”

My father gripped Nick by the shoulder and pulled him in. “We’ve had a hell of a day, Nick, just a hell of a day. Wife’s gone”—the cowboys nearest us tuned in—“and it’s just us men now.”

“Yes, well…”

“Your wife ever left you, Nick?”

“No.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something. It ain’t too much fun.”

“I guess not, but…”

“I came in to get a liquid remedy, if you know what I mean.”

“Jim, the boy can’t be in here.”

Dad’s eyes widened. I had seen this before. Nick didn’t know that the joke was on him.

“Well, Nick, what do you think I ought to do here? This is my son.”

“I don’t know, Jim.”

Dad cupped his hands around his mouth. “Anybody here want to buy a kid? He ain’t much of a worker, but he’ll talk a blue streak. I’ll cut you a hell of a deal.”

Laughter pealed through the room.

Dad shrugged.

“No takers, Nick.”

“Very funny.”

Dad leaned over to me. “You still want to go to that park?”

“Sure.”

“Get going. I’m going to have a couple of beers, and then we’ll head on home.”

The fullness of night dropped on Split Rail. The last of the picnickers doused the flame in the grill, and the smaller children I’d heard zipping back and forth across the park had wound down. Now they sat in the grass or had already headed home.

Illuminated by a street light, three boys, all of them looking to be about my age, took turns flinging a basketball at the hoop.

I approached slowly. One by one, they became aware that I was closing in.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey back at you,” said a skinny boy a few inches taller than me. He was stripped down to cutoff jeans and wore knee-high tube socks that left visible a chunk of thigh. His white hair, drenched with perspiration, flopped across his forehead and down his neck. The other two looked at me but didn’t speak.

I stepped onto the blacktop, keeping my distance.

“Can I play with you guys?”

“Think fast,” the skinny boy said, and he rifled the ball in my direction. I batted it and started dribbling. After I got a feel for the size and the texture of the ball, I lined up a shot from about fifteen feet. The ball ripped through the rim and settled into the chain net with a metallic snap.

The skinny boy retrieved the ball.

“All right, two on two,” he said. He pointed at me. “Me and this kid against you guys.”

My teammate—he introduced himself as Jeff—and I made short work of the game. Playing make-it-take-it basketball, we put a 15–2 loss on the other two boys. I’d played a lot of basketball in my life, and I made an instant connection with Jeff. We ran picks, made extra passes, and chased down rebounds. It was damned fun, at least for us. The other two, after absorbing their beating, said they had to go home.

“What about you?” I asked Jeff as the two boys cut opposite paths across the park.

“I can shoot baskets for a while.”

I bounced a pass to the free-throw line, and he swished a shot. He slid to his right, and I gave him the ball. Another swish.

“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” I asked.

“Right here.”

His next shot caromed off the rim, and I gathered the ball, then dribbled backward and let my own shot fly. It clanged loudly off the backboard and into Jeff’s hands.

“Where are you from?” he asked. “It sure ain’t here.”

“Nah, my dad lives here. I’m just visiting.”

“Who’s your dad?”

“Jim Quillen.”

“I know him. Him and my dad are friends.”

“Who’s your dad?”

“Charley Rayburn.”

“The cop?”

“The police chief.”

“I met him tonight.”

“Cool. He lets me hang out in town while he works.”

He passed me the ball, and I sent it soaring toward the hoop. The sweet jangle of the chain net heralded my accuracy. Swish.

Split Rail’s coming slumber could be seen across the town with each doused window light. Under the cover of the moon, my friend and I whipped through the dark, two boys without tether exploring the underside of town.

First, we headed to the Livery. I wanted to make sure Dad knew where I would be—and, just as important, that I knew where he was. Jeff suggested that we cut in behind the bar, up the alley. There, we slipped into the open back door, through the stockroom, and to the entryway to the bar proper. I peered around the corner and picked out Dad. He stood with two ranchers, his arms slung over their shoulders.

I waved but couldn’t draw his attention. Mindful of Nick, whose back was to me, I took a step into the bar and flagged with vigor. Finally, one of the cowboys tapped Dad and pointed toward me. Dad sauntered over, and I could see in his uncertain steps that he had taken on a fair bit of alcohol in my absence.

“What’s up, sport?”

“I’m going to be hanging around with Jeff.”

“Jeff who?”

My friend stepped up, and Dad’s face registered recognition.

“Where at?” he asked.

“Just around town.”

“OK. Be good.”

“I will.”

Dad lurched back toward the bar.

“OK, let’s go,” I said to Jeff.

We beat a hasty exit back to the alley.

“Here,” Jeff said. He plopped a warm can of Budweiser into my hand.

“What the—”

“Hey, the opportunity was there.”

Before I could object, or decide if I wanted to, Jeff was off and running up the alley. I gave chase as best I could, the stumpy legs my father saddled me with rat-a-tat-tatting up and down on the gravel. Jeff’s longer, graceful gait put steady distance between him and me, until I saw him only in silhouette, half in and half out of the street light when he came to a stop at the far end of the town’s main drag. He waited for me to catch up.

Our evening was a smorgasbord of skulking, sneaking, and small-time crime. After I caught Jeff, he wrenched open a back door on the building and beckoned me to join him inside. I looked down the alley, making sure that I wasn’t being watched, and then I slipped through. The darkness fell across my eyes as I stepped from half light to full-on dark.

“Jeff,” I whispered. “
Jeff
.”

I rubbed my eyes. I dared not move until I could make out a crude outline of what was around me.

“Baaaaaaah!” When the hand hit my back and the sound hit my ears, I leapt from my skin and sent my can of beer rocketing skyward. It crash-landed in front of me and split a seam, spraying my pants with warm foam.

“Oh shit.”

Behind me, Jeff exploded into giggles.

“You jerk,” I said.

That aggravated his laughter, so much so that I had to join him, despite my best intention of being pissed off.

“That was hilarious,” he said.

“What is this place?” I asked.

My eyes made the inevitable adjustment, and I could see Jeff and the outlines of the room. Just beyond Jeff, I saw something that looked like a staircase. To my right was a long, tall table, like a bar.

The sense that came most heavily into play, though, was smell. The air hung heavy, as if it had been trapped there a long time, and the acrid combination of must and mildew assaulted my nose.

“It’s the old hotel,” Jeff said. He knelt and rooted through what I figured to be the front desk. He stood up with a flashlight. He flipped it and put the bulb end under his chin, giving a wicked illumination to his face. He cackled.

“Knock it off,” I said.

Jeff swept the flashlight across the room. The beam cut the darkness and brought ghosts to life, if only for a moment. It had been a long time since anyone had lingered here, and the items of value had long since been taken. The carpet had been pulled up, the telltale padding left to rot. The railing from the stairway had been wrenched off. A few chairs sat scattered around the place, many missing a leg or two.

“How long has it been empty?”

“Forever,” Jeff said. “My dad remembers coming here when he was a little boy, but I never saw it while it was open.”

I pointed at the stairs. “You ever go up there?”

“Hell no,” he said. “Those things are shot.”

“It’s so…spooky.”

“Yeah, I know. I like coming here when Dad lets me hang out in town. It’s why I have the flashlight. I’m going to cut it off, though, so nobody sees us.”

Darkness dropped on us again.

“Let’s have our beer,” Jeff said.

“Mine’s gone.”

“I’ll split mine with you.”

Jeff pulled back the tab, dropping it through the open hole to the bottom of the can. He took a hearty swig, used his shirt to clean around the mouth of the can, then handed it to me.

The beer diffused when it entered my mouth. I hated the taste but thrilled at the sin. After I choked down a swig, I took another.

“Slow down,” Jeff said. “Half of that is mine.”

I handed it back. He chugged about half of what remained.

“You can have the rest,” he said, handing the can to me. “I didn’t backwash.”

I downed the suds in two gulps. They tasted like turpentine. I wanted to wring out my tongue with a clean towel.

It was the coolest thing I’d ever done.

We returned to the heart of town by the sidewalk. Jeff pulled some breath mints from his pocket and gave me a couple. “Just in case,” he said.

Ahead, Dad emerged from the Livery and came to a halt on the sidewalk. He put his hands on his hips and pushed his pelvis forward, stretching.

“Time for me to go,” I said.

“Me too,” Jeff said. He cut across the street to his father’s office. Charley stood at the window, looking out on his seemingly quiet town. I wondered how much went on that he didn’t know about. His own son could probably account for a good chunk of it, from what I’d seen.

I jogged up to Dad.

“Ready?” I asked.

The pickup sat a half block down the street, in front of the Tin Cup.

“All right,” I said. “Walk straight. Charley’s watching you.”

“Aren’t you a sneaky little bastard?” Dad said. He put an arm around my shoulders—for balance, from the weight he shifted to me, but also as a misdirection should Charley have been following us down the street.

“Get your keys,” I said. “Are you OK to drive?” I worried what we would have to do if he said no.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Leaning more heavily on me, he fished the keys out of his pocket and tried to spin them around on his index finger. Only my quick hands kept them from hitting the ground.

Dad opened his door and climbed in. He popped the lock on the passenger door for me.

“Slow and easy,” I said after he started the Ford.

“I know, Mitch.”

He jammed the stick shift into first and eased the Ford into the street. I looked back through the rearview mirror, and no lights flashed on behind us. As the last of Split Rail fell away, I knew we were home free. I expelled my pent-up breath in a long whistle.

“I smell beer,” Dad said. “Have you been drinking?”

I feigned surprise. “No. But you have.”

A couple of seconds later, Dad jerked the Ford off the road, pushed his door open, dropped his head out, and leveled a blast of vomit at the ground. He scrambled out of the truck and staggered behind it, and I listened to the spasms as his stomach rebelled. The pungent scent of beer and stomach acid floated into the cab, and I slipped my mouth and nose into my shirt.

I jumped when Dad rapped his knuckles against the passenger-side window.

“Slide over,” he said. His skin looked almost olive in color, and sweat pooled under his eyes.

I was driving after all.