| Melvin Sterne: Writer, Teacher, Editor, Photographer |
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Thanksgiving (originally published in South Carolina Review)
First April stopped loving me. Then she left me and ran off with the guy who read the gas meter. I heard they got married in Reno.
They drove up there in the gas company truck, so it was all over the county paper, and folks around here talked it up for weeks. And if
that wasn’t enough, all this happened right before Thanksgiving. I had turkey with her mom, anyway. “She’ll come back,” Helen said,
patting me on the arm.
A few years later I heard April left the gas meter guy and ran off with her yoga instructor, and she and the gas meter guy got a
quickie divorce in Nuevo Laredo. After that, I lost track. Ten years went by and I almost gave up on her. Then one day she called and
said she was passing through and wondered could she stop over.
Checkerboard is not the kind of place people pass through by accident. It’s not on the road to anywhere, but I didn’t question her
on the point. A few hours later, there she was, bouncing up the front steps with a big grin on her face, like she’d just got home from
shopping. Except for the little boy tagging along behind her, she looked just like she did the day she left me. I didn’t know she had a
kid. He was a pale little six-year-old, a redhead, at the gangly stage—all arms and legs, knees and elbows. He wore blue jeans rolled
up over his shoes, a red tee shirt, black high-top sneakers, and a blue cap with a silver star on it.
“The place looks the same, Frank,” April said, and it did. “Looks like you haven’t changed a thing,” she said, and I hadn’t. We sat
on the same couch and looked out the same window with the same curtains pulled back with the same sashes she’d made because
we were too cheap to buy the ones that came with the curtains we bought at J.C. Penny’s.
“You look funny,” Tommy said, dangling his feet from the couch. “What happened to your head?”
April leaned over, slapped Tommy on the thigh, and hissed in his ear, “it’s not nice to talk about other people, Tommy. Everybody
looks different somehow.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s true. You see, Tommy, my grandpa was a Flathead Indian, and my grandma was a grizzly bear. They lived
in a cave up on Mount Baldy. That made my dad half-and-half, and me a quarter. I got the bear’s head from my grandma’s side of the
family. But if you think I’m ugly, you should see my sister.”
“What’s wrong with her?” asked Tommy.
“She’s covered with hair and got claws this long,” I said, gesturing with my hands. “She lives up in the mountains and only comes
down when she gets hungry.”
April rolled her eyes and looked away. She knows how I am when I get started with my stories.
“What does she eat?” asked Tommy, inching closer to his mom.
“Mostly Popsicles. But she’ll eat anything if she’s hungry enough. See that stump out in the yard?”
Tommy looked out the window.
“That used to be a big pine tree. She came by last week when I wasn’t home and ate the whole thing.”
“Did not.”
“Yup,” I said, “Pine cones and all. You can still see the teeth-marks if you look at the stump.”
“Looks like chain saw cuts to me,” April said. “Next thing you’re going to tell me is what she didn’t eat she stacked around the
side of the house to dry.”
“Nope, she ate the whole thing. The only thing sis won’t eat is my cooking.”
“What’s wrong with your cooking?” Tommy asked.
“My cooking is so bad, I throw it out and the coyotes won’t eat it.”
“Can I have a Popsicle? Mom said you always had Popsicles.”
“Sure,” I said. “I got a whole freezer full.” I got Popsicles and we sat on the couch and ate them.
“Still work at the mill?” April asked.
“Yup. You know me. Steady Eddy. Mr. Dependable. Eight-for-eight, never late.”
“Have you made foreman yet?” she asked, and I laughed.
“No. Dean-o still runs the show. He’ll be there till he retires, or dies. But he treats me OK. It’s still the best job in town.”
“More like the only job in town.”
“How ‘bout you,” I asked, leaning forward on my elbows. “How’re you keeping these days?”
April stroked her hair back from her eyes and took a deep breath. She’s in her middle thirties, but she’s got the kind of young
looks that still get her ID’d in bars. She’s petite, with dark, smooth skin. She cuts her hair short in a pageboy look, and it never looks
out of style on her. Other than a few fine lines around her eyes, she looks just like the morning I saw her last. It was a Friday. She
served me bacon and eggs for breakfast and packed my lunch. I kissed her on my way out the door and she reminded me that we
had a date for dinner with her mom that night. When I came home she was gone—no note—no nothing. I called the cops and filled out
a missing person report, climbed the walls all weekend. It wasn’t until the gas company reported their truck stolen that we put two
and two together. I got a card in the mail a few weeks later from San Antonio. Sorry, it said. Since we weren’t officially married, there
was no divorce. She was gone, and that was that.
“I’m fine, Frank,” she said, and then she laughed and leaned back into the couch and covered her eyes. “I’m O.K. Well, actually,
things aren’t so good, but I’ll get by. Hell,” she said, and then she looked at Tommy and said “Whoops” and Tommy said “Five cents,
please,” and held out his hand.
April opened her purse and felt around in it. Then she got off the couch and sat cross-legged on the floor and emptied it out in front
of her and rooted through the contents. There were car keys and a tube of lipstick, a comb, some Kleenex, a box of condoms, a pack
of chewing gum, a little blue plastic vial of breath freshener, a tiny stuffed bear attached to a keyring with no keys on it, a coin that
looked like a St. Christopher, and a photo of a dark-complected man with a short beard and sad, brown eyes. At the bottom of the pile
were some coins and April sorted through them until she found a dime. “He fines me every time I swear,” she said, handing it to
Tommy. “This is for next time, too, honey, OK?” Tommy nodded and slipped the dime into his pocket. April looked up at me and said:
“actually, my life’s a wreck. I was wondering if I could stay a few days and think things over.”
“Sure,” I said.
April arrived in a green VW pop-top camper with Tennessee tags, a crumpled fender, and one headlight dangling from a wire like a
cartoon eye popped out of its socket. I helped her carry her bags into the guest room. “Makes it kind of hard to drive at night,” I said,
standing in the driveway and kicking at the tires.
April laughed and said, “yes it does.” The tires were bald, too.
“Do you need to park it around back?” I said. “Maybe in the garage?”
“No. It’s not stolen, if that’s what you mean. I mean, I have permission to take it. Sort of. Anyway, I don’t think it’s been reported
stolen, and even if it was, he wouldn’t press charges. We’d just call it a misunderstanding.”
“A misunderstanding?”
“Look, I don’t feel like talking about it right now. If it makes you feel better, you can park it in the garage, if you want.”
I parked the van in the garage and made a mental note about the headlight. I called a friend in the junk business and he said he if I
could hammer out the ding he could round up a used headlight assembly for me on the cheap. I asked April if she was hungry and
Tommy looked up at her but said nothing. April said she was, so I drove them to the Royal Fork in Bozeman and sprung for an all-you-
can-eat buffet. Tommy ate like he had a hollow leg and I kidded him about it, pulled his hat down over his eyes and rubbed him on the
tummy. “Where are you putting all that?” I asked. He squealed and wriggled away.
April bought a bottle of wine on the way back and drank it in the car. When she got home she said she was tired and wanted to
sleep, so I made up the bed and she and Tommy laid down. I went out in the garage and hammered on the VW for a while, and when I
came back in Tommy was watching TV.
“Hello, sport,” I said, “would you like another Popsicle?” He nodded. I got one for me, too, and sat down on the couch beside him.
“You watch much TV?”
He shook his head. “We sleep in the van, mostly. So we don’t got one.”
“Do you like camping? I bet you got to see some beautiful places.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not supposed to talk about it,” he said.
“Talk about what?”
“Where we been.”
“I didn’t ask where you were, I just asked if you saw some pretty places.”
“I guess so.”
“What’s your favorite.”
“Cal’fornia, I guess, but I’m not supposed to tell you that.”
“Why is that?
“Mom says it’s a secret.”
“Then I won’t tell. What did you like the most about it?”
“It was hot. When it’s cold or rainy I can’t go out.”
“What do you like to do?”
Tommy squirmed on the couch. “I like to play soccer. I used to play on a team.”
“What else do you like?”
“When it’s rainy I like to read.”
“You read all ready? Who taught you to read?”
“I don’t know. I think I always knew.”
* * * * *
Tommy went to bed and I poured myself a beer and went out on the back porch. The wind blew steady down from the north and
there was a chill in the air. A few dry leaves blew by. The porch swing swayed in the breeze, its chain creaking softly.
I went to bed and was almost asleep when I heard a clunk on the front porch. It’s nothing, I thought, its April getting a drink of water,
or Tommy, he can’t sleep. But after a while I knew I wouldn’t sleep until I checked it out, so I went to the front door and looked
outside. There was a man standing on the porch. I turned on the light and opened the door. “What do you want?” I asked.
The man seemed surprised to see me. He was about my height, but skinny, with a short, scruffy beard. He wore Levis and a blue
denim shirt, cowboy boots, a cowboy hat pulled down low over his eyes. “Is April there?” he asked.
“April who?”
“You know who I mean.”
“There’s nobody here that concerns you,” I said. “Go on back where you came from.” I shut the door but he stuck his boot in the
jam. “What are you…drunk?” I asked.
He pushed the hat up from his eyes. “She can’t run forever.”
I flicked on the porch light. He was not the same man as the photograph in April’s purse.
“Has she told you about the canoe?” he asked.
“No.”
He stepped towards me like he was going to come in but I caught him under the throat with my left hand and shoved him down the
steps. He sprawled on his back in the yard. “I’m going to go get my shotgun,” I said. “Be gone when I get back.”
I closed the door and paused in the hallway. I could hear him through the door, laughing, big belly laughs coming from the front
yard. I didn’t know why I said I was going to get a gun, the beer must have gone to my head. I have a shotgun but I don’t keep it loaded.
I wasn’t even sure I had shells for it. I sat down in the living room and later, when I looked outside, he was gone. He’s crazy, I thought,
now that’s just perfect.
The door to the back bedroom opened and April peeked out. “What was that?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “A fella got lost on the highway and needed directions.”
* * * * *
The next morning was Saturday and I baked biscuits, cooked up bacon and eggs and hash browns. Tommy was hungry, but not so
hungry as he was the night before. April didn’t eat much at all, she sat in the swing on the back porch sipping her coffee and looking
at the mountains. To the north they’re covered with pine and fir, and they are a pleasant, hazy blue color. Right outside of town, of
course, they were clear-cut years ago, and eroded to bare, brown rock. But the Musselshell River flows down from the north, through
a gap in the hills, and the valley there is wide, green and pretty, and we used to go up in the summer and pick blackberries, or fish the
beaver dams for brookies.
“You think the blackberries are still out?” April asked.
I sipped my coffee and thought about it a while.
She knew darn good and well the blackberries were out—she grew up here, too—and I took the question to be a sly reminder of
all the fun we used to have up in the mountains. Picking blackberries usually meant lunch in the meadows, a roll in the hay, and then,
late in the day, we might pick a few berries. We fished the same way. Back when April and I were dating, and her mother was still
alive, I remember Helen asking us what kind of fish we intended to catch, seeing as how we sometimes forgot our tackle.
“A few,” I said, searching her face for a sign. But there was no nod, no wink, no knowing smile.
We went blackberry picking and came home with our fingers and tongues stained purple, our arms and legs scratched and full of
prickles. That night I made fresh blackberry ice cream and Tommy, who had never made ice cream before, sat up on the counter with
me and helped. When we were done, he thought I was the greatest. He was worn out from hiking and fell asleep on the couch
watching TV. April tucked him into bed and then came out and sat with me. I lit a fire and poured us a couple of glasses of wine. After
a while April said, “I never wrote you about him, did I?” and I said “No.”
“He was from my second marriage. That was the one to Vaarni, the yoga instructor, you knew about him, right?”
I nodded. Checkerboard is a small town and I saw April’s mom at least once a week, if not for dinner, then because she ran the only
gas station. She kept me pretty well up on things and always ended our visits with a motherly pat on the arm and her assurance that
“April will be back, someday, you know. She just needs time to sort things out.” She was always good to me—Helen was. I suppose I
was like a son to her. She had a son, once—older than April—but he died in a helicopter crash in Desert Storm. So when she took
sick, I looked after her until she died. And even though she left the station to me, I sold it and wired the money to April. I didn’t feel
right keeping it. I was doing OK, and April needed the money more than me.
“The problem was that Vaarni had had a vasectomy.”
“That does complicate things.”
“So I got divorced in Nuevo Laredo, again, and married Flip six months later in Denver. He’s not Tommy’s dad, either. Of course,
Tommy doesn’t know any of this.”
“Of course” I said. “And how did you meet Flip?”
“He was an exotic dancer. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t trouble you with all this. You don’t want to know.”
April changed into a man’s tee shirt that she wore for a nightgown. The tee shirt had a picture of a candy-apple-red eighteen
wheeler on the front of it with the words: Big Red Rolls for You! written underneath. The shirt hung down to her knees but her nipples
showed through where it rubbed against her breasts.
She took her wine out on the porch and turned her back to me, leaned against the railing and looked at the moon. The tee shirt
rode up on her thighs and I thought her legs were still fine. She always had good legs. Her breath came out in a faint cloud that hung
over her and reminded me of a halo. It was an odd image and for some reason I remembered then that Mary Magdalene was a
reformed prostitute.
April stood up on her tiptoes and arched her back like a cat, the tee shirt climbing up almost to her ass. Her skin was perfect, her
thighs tight and tan, without a trace of cellulite. I popped a woody and had to wriggle on the couch so it didn’t stick out. She looked
over her shoulder and saw that I was looking at her, and then she turned away and stood on her right leg and lifted her left foot and
scratched the back of her right calf.
I couldn’t take it any more—I tossed my wine and pecked April on the cheek good night. I crawled into bed and tugged the covers
up tight around me, but before I fell asleep the door creaked and April appeared, silhouetted in the doorway. She slipped the tee shirt
over her head and climbed into bed with me. “You don’t have to do this,” I said, but she did not answer me. Instead, she only stopped
me from talking with a warm, wet kiss. After we made love we cuddled on the bed and I whispered “stay with me,” but she was
asleep.
* * * * *
In the middle of the night I heard the garage door open and I reached for April but she was gone. I slipped on a pair of shorts and
looked down the hall. The nightlight was on the guest bedroom. I crept to the door and peeked inside, saw April curled up under the
covers with Tommy. I went to the hall closet and took down the shotgun and a flashlight. I found three shells and stuffed them in the
magazine. I slipped out the back door and snuck around the side of the house. There was an old 4x4 pickup truck in the drive, and a
man sitting in the garage wrapping a chain around the axle of April’s VW.
I chambered a shell and said in my deepest voice, “stay very still and don’t move.” The man froze. I looked around the yard
carefully to make sure he was alone, and when I was satisfied I walked around and shined the light in his face. It was the same fella
who was on my porch the night before. “You’re about half-stupid aren’t you?” I said.
“Can I get up now?” he asked.
“No,” I said, and I used my foot to push him face down on the concrete. “Keep your hands where I can see them.” He did and I laid
the barrel of the shotgun on the back of his head and said “very still” and he nodded quietly.
I patted him down and he said, “I’m not packing.”
I said, “that’s nice but I’m going to make sure, just the same.” I pulled his boots off, too, because sometimes folks hide a pistol or
a knife in them. But he was clean, and when I was sure I said: “OK, you can get up.”
He sat up and pulled his boots on. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.
I said, “Go ahead.”
He took a pack out of his shirt pocket and dug a lighter out of his jeans. He flicked the lighter and his face lit up in the flame. “I’ve
got some beer in my truck,” he said. “Would you like one? They’re cold.”
“Sure,” I said. “What the hell,” and we walked over to the truck, me on one side and him on the other. He had a cooler on the seat
and he opened it and handed me a bottle of Coors. The cab was littered with bottles. I leaned the shotgun against the door and we sat
down and he turned on the radio. The only station he could find was a country station out of Bozeman and it sounded tinny. After a
while I said, “so do you want to tell me about it?”
“You’ve been with her,” he said. “I can smell it on you.”
“Look. I’ve known April since we were kids, and she used to be my old lady. What we do in my house is our business, and since I
got a shotgun and you don’t, I get to ask the questions. So tell me, what the hell are you doing here?”
He didn’t say anything, and I started getting fidgety. “OK. We’ll play twenty questions. Are you from Tennessee?”
“Enid, Oklahoma.”
“Well that explains a lot. Is your name Flip?”
He raised the eyebrow over his right eye and looked at me. “Flip’s dead.”
“Oh,” I said. “I suppose I’m sorry to hear that. Besides stalking April, what brings you to Montana?”
“Tommy’s my son. I love April, but I want Tommy back.”
“Your son?”
“Yeah.”
“So what are you gonna do, kidnap the car and trade it for the kid?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“Did you ever break a horse?”
“No. I’m not much into horses.”
“Well you can’t just throw a saddle on them and ride, and you can’t tie them down, either. You got to hobble them, tie their legs so
they’ll stand in one place. Then you can get close enough to rub a blanket on him, get them used to the smell. After a while you slip a
bridle on, get them used to being touched. When get over being afraid, you saddle break ‘em.”
“Have you tried going to court?”
“Sure, but every time I find out where she is, she runs off on me.”
“So you figure you steal the van, she’s got to stay put?”
“Exactly.”
“Listen. I got no control over April—never have. But if I promise to try to make her sit still for a while, will you promise not to come
sneaking around anymore?”
“OK,” he said, offering me his hand. “That would be mighty decent of you. My name’s Jake.”
“Frank,” I said. I shook his hand. “Where’re you staying?”
“Motel Six, in Billings.”
“Go home. Get some sleep.”
I finished my beer and dropped the empty onto the floor, climbed out of the truck and slung the shotgun over my shoulder.
“One more thing,” Jake said.
“What’s that?”
“Did she tell you about the canoe?”
“No. What’s up with the canoe?”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“It’s a lie. She killed that fella. Don’t believe a word she says.”
“You’re drunk, Jake,” I said. “Go home. And stay there.”
* * * * *
Sunday morning I slept late. April and Tommy woke me with breakfast in bed. April shuttled back and forth from the kitchen
bringing pancakes and syrup and bacon and refilling my coffee. Tommy bounced up and down on the bed until he upset the tray and
spilled our orange juice. Then he started to cry. April made it worse by snapping at him. Tommy really started bawling, then, and he
headed for his room. I spilled my coffee to make him feel better, dumped it right over, and he stopped at the door. But that really set
April off. “You are two of a kind,” she said.
“No big deal,” I said. “Honest. They were due for a wash anyway.” I looked at Tommy and winked. “I wash my sheets once a year
whether they need it or not.”
“Ewww,” April said, wrinkling her nose.
“Ewww,” Tommy said, giggling.
April gathered the sheets and hauled them to the laundry room. Do you mind if I throw a few things in with these?” she asked.
“Make yourself at home.”
Later that afternoon we drove to the junkyard and picked up the headlight assembly for the van. My buddy, Ernie, runs the place,
he’s a big Swede who used to work at the mill and started scrapping cars on the side. He started out with a tow truck working
weekends, but it got so profitable that he quit the mill and went into the junk business full time. He picks up wrecks and impounds off
the interstate, DWI’s, the occasional recovered stolen car. He charges storage by the day and often, by the time folks get around to
picking their cars up, the fees are more than the car is worth, so he gets them for nothing. He fixes up the ones he can and sells
them. The rest he lays out in neat rows in what used to be the laydown yard of a sawmill that went belly-up. He had a half dozen VW
vans. “The dead heads used to leave ‘em regular as clockwork,” he said. “They were dependable as geese. Every summer I’d bag
one or two. But now that Jerry’s gone, they’re getting harder and harder to come by.”
I took that to mean he was going to jack the price on me, but then April came around the corner and Ernie’s face lit up. “Well,
lookee who’s back in town! The prodigal daughter has returned. Good to see you, girl.” And then turning to me he asked, “so does
this mean you two are an item again?”
I opened my mouth but April cut me off laughing. “We’re old friends,” she said. “I’m just passing through.”
“Well I’ll give you the old friends price then,” Ernie said, which was next-to-nothing. “Provided you come for dinner sometime this
week.”
I looked at April and she shrugged her shoulders.
We used to do a lot of this stuff after we got out of high school. I couldn’t tell you how many weekends we spent listening to Lynryd
Skynyrd and ZZ Top, passing a bong and a bottle of Wild Turkey around up in Ernie and Eleanor’s cabin out Sulfur Springs Road. Ernie
and Eleanor are still together. They’ve got four kids now, and I know Eleanor doesn’t do the wild thing anymore. I think Ernie still sells
a little grass on the side, though I haven’t smoked a joint in years, so I couldn’t say for sure. The cabin burned down a while back, and
Ernie built a house on the hill overlooking the junkyard.
“Sure,” April said. “That would be great.”
“You still make enchiladas?” Ernie asked. “You used to make the best enchiladas.”
“Of course I do. I’ll make us a double batch.”
About that time Tommy came around the corner with a black puppy in his arms, the mother and the rest of the puppies following
him. Before April could shout put that thing down! Tommy was toe to toe with her shouting “can I keep him? Can I? Can I? He’s the
best one and he followed me so I have to take him. You never let me have a dog.”
Ernie busted out laughing.
The mama dog ran circles around Tommy. She was a scrawny, high-strung lab-cross with a prickly ridge of hair running down her
spine like a razorback, a little white patch on her throat. The pups were still in the fuzzball stage and it was hard to tell what they
might grow up to look like. The rest of the brood sat down in the dirt beside their mama and wobbling around and biting one another’s
tails. But the pup in Tommy’s arms rested like he’d been born there.
“The daddy’s a shepherd from across the road,” Ernie said. “So they got some good blood in ‘em.”
“I don’t care if he was the first dog to walk on the moon,” April replied, “we ain’t getting a puppy.”
April took the pup from Tommy and held him by the nape of his neck. He looked at her while the mama yelped and nipped at April’s
free hand. Tommy sat down in the dirt and started to bawl. I took the pup from April and looked at his feet, felt around his rib cage, and
squeezed his jaw to make him show me his teeth.
“Tommy’s got a good eye for a dog,” I said. “He’s the pick of the litter. Got more lab in him than shepherd. Gonna be a big one.”
“Her daddy was a Newfie,” Ernie said. “She was the runt of the litter, which was why I got stuck with her. You know, you’d be
doing me a big favor taking him off my hands. I had to drown the last batch.”
That started Tommy off bawling again, and he snatched the pup and held it protectively to his chest with one hand while he fought
of the mother with the other. “We can’t let him drown Newton,” he said. “You got to let me keep him.”
“You’re a cruel man,” I said.
“He’s probably got fleas,” April said. “Or worms.” April sat down on her haunches and took the pup from Tommy and set him
down at arms length. “Honey, she said, “we got no place for a dog.”
The pup wobbled back to Tommy and Tommy took him in his arms and turned to me. “Mr. Frank,” he said, “you got a place for a
dog. Please?”
* * * * *
Newton peed on my carpet first thing after he got in the house. I rolled up a newspaper and whacked him over the head with it,
rubbed his nose in the wet spot, and tossed him out in the backyard. That set Tommy to howling again, until I explained that I loved
Newton, too, but we couldn’t have him peeing all over the house. And the newspaper didn’t really hurt, it just scared him up a bit, and
to illustrate the point I whacked Tommy a few times and then got down on all fours and let him whack me. He whacked me pretty
good, whereupon I reminded him I was part bear and chased him around the house growling until I caught him and tickled him half to
death. I told Tommy it was his job to clean up after Newton and I showed him how.
After that Tommy and Newton were inseparable. They spent most of their time outside and when they came in, Tommy was always
careful to watch for signs that Newton needed out. They ate supper together on the back porch. We warned Tommy that Newton was
still too young to eat grown up food and he seemed to understand, but I think he cheated when we weren’t looking. They played until
dark and then they came in and curled up in front of the fireplace and fell asleep. I carried Tommy off to bed and April laid Newton
down on a towel on the floor, but he started howling, so we laid him on the bed beside Tommy, and then he was all right.
April went off to the garage to fetch a bottle of wine she had stashed in the VW and after a while I went out after her and found her
smoking a joint around the side of the house. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said, and I said that I didn’t, even though I kind of did.
April held the joint out to me, but I shook my head. “It’s been years. No sense starting back now.”
“They drug test at the mill?”
“Yeah, but only for cause. I could probably get off if they caught me. Half the crew is stoned to the gills.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“Got tired of feeling stupid.”
“Isn’t that the point?”
“To feel stupid?”
“To stop thinking about things.”
“I suppose, if your thoughts make you uncomfortable.”
“Mine do.”
“There’s other ways, you know.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, but there must be.”
“I ain’t going to no counselor.” April sucked on the joint and held it in. After a minute she exhaled a cloud of blue smoke and it
clung to her with that halo effect again. “A miracle might help.”
The days were getting shorter, the nights cold. While we watched, the frost made spidery silver lines on the dry leaves and on the
edges of the windows. Goosebumps raised on April’s arms. I thought about offering her a sweater, but I didn’t want my clothes
smelling like dope.
“What are you looking at?” April asked.
“You,” I said. “You got a halo.”
April looked up and then turned around and looked behind her. “I smoke dope and you see things. Only angels get halos, and I sure
as hell ain’t no angel.”
“Do you remember when we were together?”
“Don’t go getting sentimental on me.”
“But do you remember?”
“Course I do.”
“Was I good to you?”
“Sure, Frank, you’re a swell guy. I thought about you lots. You’d make a great husband, a great father. A girl would be lucky to have
a man like you. You ought to get married someday.”
“Then, why’d you leave?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and then she laughed. “I’ve only got one weakness…I can’t resist temptation!”
“But it wasn’t me? It wasn’t anything I did?”
“No, Frank, it wasn’t you. I was stupid, and young. I got bored. I started fooling around with Wally while you were at work, and then I
felt guilty about it. I knew I couldn’t give you what you deserve. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to—it just ain’t in me.”
“Can I be the judge of that?” I asked.
“No, not when it comes to me, you can’t. Can we go inside? I’m getting cold.”
We went inside and then April remembered that she went out to get a bottle of wine in the first place, so she went back and got
that, and then we sat down on the couch. I got up and built a fire while she fooled around with the corkscrew. “I bought a couple of
bottles of this on sale in Omaha,” she said. “It was supposed to be really good, but I didn’t realize I needed a corkscrew to open them.
I been meaning to buy one ever since, but I keep forgetting. It’s easier just to buy another jug. I spent a few days outside of Laramie
and got so thirsty that one night I took a rock and busted the top off a bottle and drank it down.” She giggled. She was slurring her
speech.
I almost had the fire going when I heard the cork pop and April shouted: “Shit!” She spilled the wine down the front of her shirt and
got some on the couch, but it wasn’t too bad. I blotted it up and stood back and looked at it. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s an old
couch.”
April wadded up her shirt and threw it on the floor. “I didn’t like that shirt much, anyhow. It was a present from a guy I didn’t like.”
I sat down, careful to keep the wet spot between us, and then April got up. She was wearing old jeans and a black, spaghetti-string
bra, the kind that pushes a girl’s tits up and makes the most of them. She picked up the shirt and threw it in the fire. Then she said
“Fuck!” and grabbed a fire poker and took it out, burned her foot stamping on it.
I watched, laughing.
After she put the fire out she reached in the shirt pocket and pulled out a baggy of bud. “Thank God” she said. She threw the shirt
back in the fire. “Do you mind if I roll another one?”
“Do you do that stuff in front of Tommy?”
“No. Well, sometimes, but he doesn’t know what it is.”
“Go ahead.”
April rolled another joint and when she was done I asked, “So what’s the story about the canoe?”
She had just lit the joint and she coughed hard, almost fell off the couch. “He’s been here, huh?” she said.
“Who?”
“You know who I mean.”
“How could I possibly know who you mean?”
“Well, he’s full of shit,” she said, “and besides that, he’s crazy. He says I killed Flip, but he’s just trying to blackmail me into
marrying him. I shouldn’t have slept with him. I don’t know what I was thinking. I must have been drunk. Anyway, if he comes around
again, let me know. I’ll get another restraining order.”
“So did you?”
“What?”
“Kill Flip?”
“Hell no! Flip killed himself. He quit taking his medication. He’d tried it before. This time there was nobody around to stop him.”
April took a deep breath and sighed. “I met Flip in Atlanta. I was working as a stripper at Peaches. Don’t look at me like that, where
else can a girl with no diploma make 200 bucks a night? Flip worked there too, but only on ladies’ night. He was a hunk, but lost. He
was like a big, dumb puppy. Except when he danced. Boy could he dance. He could do things… Well, anyway, he was good. And he
was a sweet guy, too, but clueless. He had been abused by his father and his uncle, so he was confused about his sexuality and stuff.
He had issues. We started hanging out. I liked him. He was gentle. He wasn’t all over me like most guys are. He liked to go rafting on
those slow, muddy southern rivers. Did I tell you he was an ex-junkie? That was why he didn’t like taking his medicine. He didn’t
believe in changing the way you feel with chemicals. He wanted to do it himself, naturally.
“Anyway, Flip and I decided to make a clean break from stripping and drugs and all. This was about a year ago, in the spring. In the
meantime, I had met this Okie at Peaches and he had a crush on me. He had an inheritance—some kind of oil money or something—
and he didn’t have to work, so he just drove around the country hanging out. He wanted to marry me, too. I don’t know what it is with
men. You sleep with them once and they think they own you. OK, I shouldn’t have done it—and it would have hurt Flip if he knew—but
we needed the money. Flip was itching to use again, and we were talking about splitting town and starting over, someplace where we
didn’t know anybody.
“Technically, I was still married to Vaarni—just on paper—so we stopped off in Nuevo Laredo to it annulled. But while I was at the
courthouse Flip freaked out and bought tar from some creep he met in the cantina. So he was all fucked up when I got back with the
papers. Well, he told me he didn’t have any more, but he did—he tried to hide it in his backpack—and they nabbed him at the border.
So I got stuck in Laredo with no money and no place to stay—and I don’t have to tell you that was no picnic. The state took Tommy
away and put him in a foster home, for christsakes. I got him back, but it took me six weeks. I had to jump through a whole bunch of
hoops—see a counselor, join a church, get a job, that kinda stuff. When Flip got out of jail we caught the first bus to Albuquerque and
got married. Then we headed out to California to start over.
“But when Flip got busted they took away all his pills, and when he got to jail he didn’t say anything about needing his medication.
He didn’t tell anybody. He just quit taking it. Well at first I didn’t notice, but after a while Flip stopped being himself. He got withdrawn.
He took to talking to himself, and laughing in this little high-pitched tee-hee-hee; which I guess he thought only he could hear. Every
time I asked him ‘What’s so funny?’ he’d say ‘I’m not laughing.’
“It isn’t something you’d think about, you know, because he’d been doing so good—except for the little incident in Nuevo Laredo—
and I had never seen him have a breakdown. But I remembered that one night, after he told me he was clean, I asked him why he took
pills every morning, and he told me they were mood elevators and they didn’t really do anything except moderate his thinking ‘cause
he got crazy without them. And then he told me that he had flipped out in class one day—that was why they called him Flip—and he
started throwing things and yelling and screaming at people that weren’t there. ‘It’s hard to explain,’ he said. ‘But when I had these
thoughts, or heard voices and such, my brain couldn’t tell the difference between what it was thinking and what was real.’
“They sent him to the looney bin and put him on medication. He got better and they let him out. But after he got better he thought he
didn’t need the medication anymore, so he quit taking it. That was the first time he tried to kill himself. He jumped off a bridge, but
somebody fished him out before he drowned.”
April took a drag off the joint, but it had burned out. She felt around in her jeans for the lighter.
“There,” I said, pointing down by her foot.
She picked it up and lit the joint, took a deep drag and held her breath. When she finally exhaled she said, “this is some good shit
but it’s really green. I got it from an old friend of Vaarni’s, in Humbolt. He he’s got acres of the stuff. His family’s Mexican—I mean
really old Mexican. Before the Anglos came west they were settled there. So the cops leave him alone. Either that, or he pays them
off. Where was I?”
“You were telling me about the canoe.”
“Oh, yeah. So me and Flip and Tommy drove out to Yosemite for our honeymoon, and Flip stole this canoe in Merced so we could
go rafting. It seemed like the trip was going to be a good thing. It calmed his nerves. For a few days, he was just like the old Flip again,
quiet and shy, caring and kind. I was thinking maybe he didn’t need the medication after all.
“You can only raft so far down the river because of the falls. They have a cable strung across the water and a sign that says: if you
go in the water, you will die. Well, the last night we landed there. I built a campfire. I was about to cook supper when, out of the blue,
Flip said ‘they’re here,’ and I looked around and said ‘Who,’ thinking maybe he meant the park rangers or something. And he said
‘Oh, it was nothing.’ And the next thing I knew, he hopped into the canoe and headed for the falls.
“I shouted after him, but he didn’t seem to hear. I ran down the bank screaming, but he didn’t say a word. He looked at me, and
smiled, and then he threw the paddle away. There was nothing anybody could do. He ducked under the cable and laid down in the
canoe, and as God is my witness, I could hear him laughing. And then he was gone. They never did find the body. Flip would have liked
that. He would say: ‘of course not—I told you they were here!’ The rangers said they would likely find it in the summer under a snag
when the runoff went down. And that,” April said, standing up and arching her back, “was how I lost my third husband. Sad, isn’t it?”
The joint had burned out and April lit it again, took a big hit, and then got up and crushed it out on the hearth. “So now you know
why I do all this stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“All this dope and drinking and shit.”
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t understand at all.”
April tried standing on one leg in the middle of the room. She spread out her arms like wings, tilted her head back, and then
brought her right index finger to her face and touched her nose. The she threw her arms out and stepped forward and said “Ta Da! I
practice my field sobriety tests all the time so I can pass them when the cops stop me.”
“Do you get stopped often?” I asked.
“All the time,” she replied. “I fucked a state trooper last week outside of Olympia just for the hell of it.”
I didn’t say anything and after a minute April went limp and collapsed onto my shoulder sobbing. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t
know why I do half the stuff I do. I don’t know why I liked Flip, or Vaarni, or any of them. They were all assholes. None of them loved me
half as good as you did. I don’t know why I ever left.”
April’s sobs turned to kisses and soon we were liplocked on the couch. “It’s not a good time for me right now,” she said, “do you
have any condoms?” I said that I did, but when I got back she was out like a light.
I wrapped her up in a blanket and left her on the couch. The next morning, when I got up she was still there, and she didn’t budge,
even when I kissed her goodbye. I left two twenties on the counter with a note to buy herself and Tommy some lunch, but when I got
home from work she was gone. But a few minutes later I heard the VW chugging up the drive. Then I heard Tommy playing in the yard
with Newton and April came in with an armload of groceries. “Can I cook for you tonight?” she asked. “It’s the least I can do.”
And that was how it started. April put Tommy in school and he was pretty good about going. He made April solemnly swear (on the
yellow pages) that she would look after Newton every day while he was gone. In the mornings, if April got him ready in time, he would
walk down to the highway to catch the school bus, and I would see him and wave on my way to work. If not, I would drop him off, even
though it wasn’t on my way and made me late sometimes.
Dean-o didn’t mind. He seemed happy for me, and the guys said something good had come over me. But if you asked me, I would
have said that what was changed was that I had was what I was supposed to have had from the beginning. And one morning when I
got up, and April was sleeping off her wine, and it was just me and Tommy making breakfast and packing our lunch, I stopped in front
of the mirror on my way out the door.
I do have a big head, and my face is round, but it’s big in a friendly way, or so I always thought. And my nose is crooked, and my
ears are little, and they stick out. I have some gray in my whiskers, but my hair is still thick and black—that’s the Indian in me—and I’
ve got crow’s feet around my eyes. I might not be the best-looking guy that ever lived, but I never did anybody any harm on purpose. I
felt like a daddy. And when I stopped in front of the mirror and combed my hair, Tommy stopped with me and combed his hair, tried to
part it the same way as mine, even though his hair is blonde and wavy and wants to stick out all over. And when we went outside
there was a note stuck under my windshield wiper that read: Meet me at Boondock’s on your way home, and I knew who it was from.
I had a bad feeling about things I couldn’t keep my mind on the job. I left work an hour early telling Dean-o I didn’t feel well. I didn’t
wait long at the tavern, either. I high-tailed it out of there thinking I shouldn’t have gone to work at all. I got home and the VW was
gone. It looked like they’d left in a hurry, too. There were dishes in the sink and clothes in the washer. Newton was tied up on the back
porch. When I let him loose he went straight to Tommy’s room, and then room to room through the house, until finally he came back
and sat down beside me and laid his head on his paws.
After a while I heard a car in the drive and I crept around the side of the garage and hung back until Jake got out and headed for
the front door. A rage boiled up inside me. I don’t lose my temper much, but I was on Jake before he was halfway to the porch. He
didn’t try to fight me. I clipped him in the jaw once, maybe twice, and then he was on his back and I was on top of him with my hands
knotted around his neck. He didn’t flinch. Newton brought me to my senses running around all excited and barking and biting me on
the hand, his baby teeth like needles.
I got off Jake and he laid on the ground holding his throat, gasping for air. I stood over him and sucked the blood off my knuckles. “I
don’t blame you at all,” he said. “Not one bit. I’d have done the same thing myself, if I was you.”
Newton barked and ran back and forth nipping first at Jake’s ear and then at my foot. Jake finally corralled him and sat up,
scratching Newton behind the ears and rubbed his belly until he quieted down. “Cute little guy, ain’t he?”
“Are you alright?” I asked.
Jake rubbed his jaw. “You got some powder in the keg,” he said. “I got a tooth loose.”
“Can I get you some ice?”
“I’ll be alright. How ‘bout a beer?”
“Sure,” I said. “What the hell.”
We sat on the porch. The sun was setting. Jake lit a cigarette. After a while he said, “I came by to tell you face-to-face what
happened, and to thank you.”
“For what?”
“For keeping April around until I could get a court order. You’re a man of your word and I appreciate that.”
“To tell you the truth, I’d forgot about it. I was hoping you’d gone back to Oklahoma.”
“Oh, no,” Jake said, shaking his head. “I can’t give up. That boy’s my flesh and blood, and I’d give everything I got to give him a
good home.”
“He had a good home.”
“Yes sir, and I appreciate that. I sure do. But I’m sure you can appreciate my predicament.”
“He’s not your son, Jake.”
“Well, I say he is, and I aim to find out. You can’t fault a fella for trying, now can you?”
I took a long pull off my beer. It was almost dark, the moon was just peeking out over the eastern horizon. There was still a line of
pink to the west, and it tinted the moon red. A crow cawed and I could see its silhouette pass by in the distance. Just behind it flew a
larger bird, a hawk, maybe, or an owl, and it landed high in a tall pine. I could see the branch sway where it perched.
“Anyhow,” Jake said, “I got a lawyer down in Bozeman, and he got a court order for the test. The sheriff come out this morning
and served papers. She was supposed to take Tommy over to Sulphur Springs to draw blood. But April sweet-talked the cop into
letting her shower and clean up—on her solemn promise to drive straight over—no doubt. But of course, she never showed. I reckon
she’s half-way to Canada by now.” He sighed. “Anyhow, I wanted to tell you myself. No hard feelings?” Jake said, extending his hand.
I shook it without much enthusiasm and Jake gave Newton one final scratch and then stood up to go. “By the way, did she ever tell
you about the canoe?”
“Yeah.”
“Which version?”
“What do you mean…which version?”
“I mean which version. Was it the poor old Vietnam Vet who got shot down over Hanoi and spent seven years in a tiger cage? Or
was it the tank commander from Desert Storm who breathed too much toxic dirt in Iraq? Or maybe it was the one about the poor kid
who was abused by his daddy and never got straightened out?”
“That sounds more like it,” I said. “It was more along those lines.”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings or nothing, but that story was a lie. She made the whole thing up.”
“Then what is the truth?” I asked—as if Jake would really know, or tell me if he did.
“Truth is she substituted some other pills for the ones he was supposed to take. He didn’t know the difference. She just kept
throwing out his prescription and giving him something else until nature ran its course.”
“And you believe that?”
“It’s a fact.”
“Why would she do that? April might be a lot of things, but she’s not a killer.”
Jake scratched his face and looked back over his shoulder at the moon. “She did it for the money,”
“What money? She doesn’t have any money.”
“He had an inheritance. Oil money, or something like that.”
“I thought you had all the money.”
Jake laughed. “Me? Did she tell you that?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“All that money and I’m staying at the Motel Six, except when I’m sleeping in my truck. And look at it. Why it must have cost me
five hundred dollars. I’m just floured in thousand dollar bills.”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” I said. “I think you’re both crazy.”
“Some things you know,” Jake said, “and others you take on faith. Do you know what the Bible says about faith, Frank?”
“What does the Bible say about faith, Jake?”
“The Bible says that faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of reality, though not beheld. I
walk by faith, Frank, not by sight.”
“Like believing that Tommy’s your son, even though he don’t look anything like you?”
“He takes after my mother’s side of the family.”
“You’re fucking crazy, you know. I should have blown you to hell the first night you set foot on my property.”
“Now why would want you do that?”
“Because you’re nuts, Jake, following April all over the country. There’s laws against that kind of stuff. It’s called stalking. You got
her scared half to death.”
“Would you say a man was crazy to follow a woman he thought stole his son, a woman who drank and did drugs and God-knows-
what-all? A woman who might—just might, mind you—have murdered an innocent man? Would that make me crazy, Frank? To try to
get my son away from such a woman?
“How ‘bout this, Frank, what would you say if I told you I knew a man who pined away ten years for a woman who ran off with a guy
who read meters for the electric company? What would you say if I told you he threw away the best part of his life waiting for a
faithless woman who couldn’t say no to a man? A woman who didn’t have the decency to leave a note and say good bye. And after he
waited ten years she came back with somebody else’s kid and he took her in like she had never left. What would you say about that
man, Frank? Would you say that he was crazy? Look at me, Frank. What would you say?”
“It was the gas company,” I said.
“Come again?”
“It was the gas company. He read the meter for the gas company.”
Jake walked back to his truck. “Think about it, Frank,” he said. Then he drove away, to Canada, I suppose.
* * * * *
The snow held off for the longest time, but the weekend before Thanksgiving it hit hard and made up for the delay. It blew
sideways for forty-eight hours and piled up on the back porch so deep I couldn’t open the door. I let Newton out to pee Friday and he
never came back. I stood out front and called his name for hours, like to froze to death looking, but I never found him. Saturday
morning I couldn’t see to the end of the drive, and I could barely hear myself shout over the wind.
I stood on the porch Monday morning with a bottle of beer and understood what April meant when she said she drank so she didn’t
have to feel. The snow drifted half as high as the roof, but there were streaks of blue opening up through the clouds, and only a few
flakes floated down. It was no use thinking about work—the highway wouldn’t get plowed until Tuesday or Wednesday, and even if I
went in, nobody else would show up.
I thought about Flip, and wondered if there was such a man, and what he was really like, and if they would find his body in the
summer when the water was low, the same way as I would find Newton when it thawed this spring. April said Flip couldn’t tell the
difference between what he was thinking and what was real, and I wondered if that was what people said about me. But what would
happen if I lost faith? A vision crossed my mind of me laying down in a canoe, looking up at the sky, laughing as I float over the falls.
I’d bought a fifteen-pound turkey and two bags of stuffing, sweet potatoes, a frozen cherry pie, dinner rolls, and a carton of ice
cream. I don’t even know if they celebrate Thanksgiving in Canada, but I’d hate to think of April drinking wine under a bridge, alone, or
Tommy sleeping in the van. I suppose that’s why I waited all these years, and why I'll probably be waiting next year, too. Somebody’s
got to do it, and sometimes I’m all we got.
First April stopped loving me. Then she left me and ran off with the guy who read the gas meter. I heard they got married in Reno.
They drove up there in the gas company truck, so it was all over the county paper, and folks around here talked it up for weeks. And if
that wasn’t enough, all this happened right before Thanksgiving. I had turkey with her mom, anyway. “She’ll come back,” Helen said,
patting me on the arm.
A few years later I heard April left the gas meter guy and ran off with her yoga instructor, and she and the gas meter guy got a
quickie divorce in Nuevo Laredo. After that, I lost track. Ten years went by and I almost gave up on her. Then one day she called and
said she was passing through and wondered could she stop over.
Checkerboard is not the kind of place people pass through by accident. It’s not on the road to anywhere, but I didn’t question her
on the point. A few hours later, there she was, bouncing up the front steps with a big grin on her face, like she’d just got home from
shopping. Except for the little boy tagging along behind her, she looked just like she did the day she left me. I didn’t know she had a
kid. He was a pale little six-year-old, a redhead, at the gangly stage—all arms and legs, knees and elbows. He wore blue jeans rolled
up over his shoes, a red tee shirt, black high-top sneakers, and a blue cap with a silver star on it.
“The place looks the same, Frank,” April said, and it did. “Looks like you haven’t changed a thing,” she said, and I hadn’t. We sat
on the same couch and looked out the same window with the same curtains pulled back with the same sashes she’d made because
we were too cheap to buy the ones that came with the curtains we bought at J.C. Penny’s.
“You look funny,” Tommy said, dangling his feet from the couch. “What happened to your head?”
April leaned over, slapped Tommy on the thigh, and hissed in his ear, “it’s not nice to talk about other people, Tommy. Everybody
looks different somehow.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s true. You see, Tommy, my grandpa was a Flathead Indian, and my grandma was a grizzly bear. They lived
in a cave up on Mount Baldy. That made my dad half-and-half, and me a quarter. I got the bear’s head from my grandma’s side of the
family. But if you think I’m ugly, you should see my sister.”
“What’s wrong with her?” asked Tommy.
“She’s covered with hair and got claws this long,” I said, gesturing with my hands. “She lives up in the mountains and only comes
down when she gets hungry.”
April rolled her eyes and looked away. She knows how I am when I get started with my stories.
“What does she eat?” asked Tommy, inching closer to his mom.
“Mostly Popsicles. But she’ll eat anything if she’s hungry enough. See that stump out in the yard?”
Tommy looked out the window.
“That used to be a big pine tree. She came by last week when I wasn’t home and ate the whole thing.”
“Did not.”
“Yup,” I said, “Pine cones and all. You can still see the teeth-marks if you look at the stump.”
“Looks like chain saw cuts to me,” April said. “Next thing you’re going to tell me is what she didn’t eat she stacked around the
side of the house to dry.”
“Nope, she ate the whole thing. The only thing sis won’t eat is my cooking.”
“What’s wrong with your cooking?” Tommy asked.
“My cooking is so bad, I throw it out and the coyotes won’t eat it.”
“Can I have a Popsicle? Mom said you always had Popsicles.”
“Sure,” I said. “I got a whole freezer full.” I got Popsicles and we sat on the couch and ate them.
“Still work at the mill?” April asked.
“Yup. You know me. Steady Eddy. Mr. Dependable. Eight-for-eight, never late.”
“Have you made foreman yet?” she asked, and I laughed.
“No. Dean-o still runs the show. He’ll be there till he retires, or dies. But he treats me OK. It’s still the best job in town.”
“More like the only job in town.”
“How ‘bout you,” I asked, leaning forward on my elbows. “How’re you keeping these days?”
April stroked her hair back from her eyes and took a deep breath. She’s in her middle thirties, but she’s got the kind of young
looks that still get her ID’d in bars. She’s petite, with dark, smooth skin. She cuts her hair short in a pageboy look, and it never looks
out of style on her. Other than a few fine lines around her eyes, she looks just like the morning I saw her last. It was a Friday. She
served me bacon and eggs for breakfast and packed my lunch. I kissed her on my way out the door and she reminded me that we
had a date for dinner with her mom that night. When I came home she was gone—no note—no nothing. I called the cops and filled out
a missing person report, climbed the walls all weekend. It wasn’t until the gas company reported their truck stolen that we put two
and two together. I got a card in the mail a few weeks later from San Antonio. Sorry, it said. Since we weren’t officially married, there
was no divorce. She was gone, and that was that.
“I’m fine, Frank,” she said, and then she laughed and leaned back into the couch and covered her eyes. “I’m O.K. Well, actually,
things aren’t so good, but I’ll get by. Hell,” she said, and then she looked at Tommy and said “Whoops” and Tommy said “Five cents,
please,” and held out his hand.
April opened her purse and felt around in it. Then she got off the couch and sat cross-legged on the floor and emptied it out in front
of her and rooted through the contents. There were car keys and a tube of lipstick, a comb, some Kleenex, a box of condoms, a pack
of chewing gum, a little blue plastic vial of breath freshener, a tiny stuffed bear attached to a keyring with no keys on it, a coin that
looked like a St. Christopher, and a photo of a dark-complected man with a short beard and sad, brown eyes. At the bottom of the pile
were some coins and April sorted through them until she found a dime. “He fines me every time I swear,” she said, handing it to
Tommy. “This is for next time, too, honey, OK?” Tommy nodded and slipped the dime into his pocket. April looked up at me and said:
“actually, my life’s a wreck. I was wondering if I could stay a few days and think things over.”
“Sure,” I said.
April arrived in a green VW pop-top camper with Tennessee tags, a crumpled fender, and one headlight dangling from a wire like a
cartoon eye popped out of its socket. I helped her carry her bags into the guest room. “Makes it kind of hard to drive at night,” I said,
standing in the driveway and kicking at the tires.
April laughed and said, “yes it does.” The tires were bald, too.
“Do you need to park it around back?” I said. “Maybe in the garage?”
“No. It’s not stolen, if that’s what you mean. I mean, I have permission to take it. Sort of. Anyway, I don’t think it’s been reported
stolen, and even if it was, he wouldn’t press charges. We’d just call it a misunderstanding.”
“A misunderstanding?”
“Look, I don’t feel like talking about it right now. If it makes you feel better, you can park it in the garage, if you want.”
I parked the van in the garage and made a mental note about the headlight. I called a friend in the junk business and he said he if I
could hammer out the ding he could round up a used headlight assembly for me on the cheap. I asked April if she was hungry and
Tommy looked up at her but said nothing. April said she was, so I drove them to the Royal Fork in Bozeman and sprung for an all-you-
can-eat buffet. Tommy ate like he had a hollow leg and I kidded him about it, pulled his hat down over his eyes and rubbed him on the
tummy. “Where are you putting all that?” I asked. He squealed and wriggled away.
April bought a bottle of wine on the way back and drank it in the car. When she got home she said she was tired and wanted to
sleep, so I made up the bed and she and Tommy laid down. I went out in the garage and hammered on the VW for a while, and when I
came back in Tommy was watching TV.
“Hello, sport,” I said, “would you like another Popsicle?” He nodded. I got one for me, too, and sat down on the couch beside him.
“You watch much TV?”
He shook his head. “We sleep in the van, mostly. So we don’t got one.”
“Do you like camping? I bet you got to see some beautiful places.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not supposed to talk about it,” he said.
“Talk about what?”
“Where we been.”
“I didn’t ask where you were, I just asked if you saw some pretty places.”
“I guess so.”
“What’s your favorite.”
“Cal’fornia, I guess, but I’m not supposed to tell you that.”
“Why is that?
“Mom says it’s a secret.”
“Then I won’t tell. What did you like the most about it?”
“It was hot. When it’s cold or rainy I can’t go out.”
“What do you like to do?”
Tommy squirmed on the couch. “I like to play soccer. I used to play on a team.”
“What else do you like?”
“When it’s rainy I like to read.”
“You read all ready? Who taught you to read?”
“I don’t know. I think I always knew.”
* * * * *
Tommy went to bed and I poured myself a beer and went out on the back porch. The wind blew steady down from the north and
there was a chill in the air. A few dry leaves blew by. The porch swing swayed in the breeze, its chain creaking softly.
I went to bed and was almost asleep when I heard a clunk on the front porch. It’s nothing, I thought, its April getting a drink of water,
or Tommy, he can’t sleep. But after a while I knew I wouldn’t sleep until I checked it out, so I went to the front door and looked
outside. There was a man standing on the porch. I turned on the light and opened the door. “What do you want?” I asked.
The man seemed surprised to see me. He was about my height, but skinny, with a short, scruffy beard. He wore Levis and a blue
denim shirt, cowboy boots, a cowboy hat pulled down low over his eyes. “Is April there?” he asked.
“April who?”
“You know who I mean.”
“There’s nobody here that concerns you,” I said. “Go on back where you came from.” I shut the door but he stuck his boot in the
jam. “What are you…drunk?” I asked.
He pushed the hat up from his eyes. “She can’t run forever.”
I flicked on the porch light. He was not the same man as the photograph in April’s purse.
“Has she told you about the canoe?” he asked.
“No.”
He stepped towards me like he was going to come in but I caught him under the throat with my left hand and shoved him down the
steps. He sprawled on his back in the yard. “I’m going to go get my shotgun,” I said. “Be gone when I get back.”
I closed the door and paused in the hallway. I could hear him through the door, laughing, big belly laughs coming from the front
yard. I didn’t know why I said I was going to get a gun, the beer must have gone to my head. I have a shotgun but I don’t keep it loaded.
I wasn’t even sure I had shells for it. I sat down in the living room and later, when I looked outside, he was gone. He’s crazy, I thought,
now that’s just perfect.
The door to the back bedroom opened and April peeked out. “What was that?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “A fella got lost on the highway and needed directions.”
* * * * *
The next morning was Saturday and I baked biscuits, cooked up bacon and eggs and hash browns. Tommy was hungry, but not so
hungry as he was the night before. April didn’t eat much at all, she sat in the swing on the back porch sipping her coffee and looking
at the mountains. To the north they’re covered with pine and fir, and they are a pleasant, hazy blue color. Right outside of town, of
course, they were clear-cut years ago, and eroded to bare, brown rock. But the Musselshell River flows down from the north, through
a gap in the hills, and the valley there is wide, green and pretty, and we used to go up in the summer and pick blackberries, or fish the
beaver dams for brookies.
“You think the blackberries are still out?” April asked.
I sipped my coffee and thought about it a while.
She knew darn good and well the blackberries were out—she grew up here, too—and I took the question to be a sly reminder of
all the fun we used to have up in the mountains. Picking blackberries usually meant lunch in the meadows, a roll in the hay, and then,
late in the day, we might pick a few berries. We fished the same way. Back when April and I were dating, and her mother was still
alive, I remember Helen asking us what kind of fish we intended to catch, seeing as how we sometimes forgot our tackle.
“A few,” I said, searching her face for a sign. But there was no nod, no wink, no knowing smile.
We went blackberry picking and came home with our fingers and tongues stained purple, our arms and legs scratched and full of
prickles. That night I made fresh blackberry ice cream and Tommy, who had never made ice cream before, sat up on the counter with
me and helped. When we were done, he thought I was the greatest. He was worn out from hiking and fell asleep on the couch
watching TV. April tucked him into bed and then came out and sat with me. I lit a fire and poured us a couple of glasses of wine. After
a while April said, “I never wrote you about him, did I?” and I said “No.”
“He was from my second marriage. That was the one to Vaarni, the yoga instructor, you knew about him, right?”
I nodded. Checkerboard is a small town and I saw April’s mom at least once a week, if not for dinner, then because she ran the only
gas station. She kept me pretty well up on things and always ended our visits with a motherly pat on the arm and her assurance that
“April will be back, someday, you know. She just needs time to sort things out.” She was always good to me—Helen was. I suppose I
was like a son to her. She had a son, once—older than April—but he died in a helicopter crash in Desert Storm. So when she took
sick, I looked after her until she died. And even though she left the station to me, I sold it and wired the money to April. I didn’t feel
right keeping it. I was doing OK, and April needed the money more than me.
“The problem was that Vaarni had had a vasectomy.”
“That does complicate things.”
“So I got divorced in Nuevo Laredo, again, and married Flip six months later in Denver. He’s not Tommy’s dad, either. Of course,
Tommy doesn’t know any of this.”
“Of course” I said. “And how did you meet Flip?”
“He was an exotic dancer. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t trouble you with all this. You don’t want to know.”
April changed into a man’s tee shirt that she wore for a nightgown. The tee shirt had a picture of a candy-apple-red eighteen
wheeler on the front of it with the words: Big Red Rolls for You! written underneath. The shirt hung down to her knees but her nipples
showed through where it rubbed against her breasts.
She took her wine out on the porch and turned her back to me, leaned against the railing and looked at the moon. The tee shirt
rode up on her thighs and I thought her legs were still fine. She always had good legs. Her breath came out in a faint cloud that hung
over her and reminded me of a halo. It was an odd image and for some reason I remembered then that Mary Magdalene was a
reformed prostitute.
April stood up on her tiptoes and arched her back like a cat, the tee shirt climbing up almost to her ass. Her skin was perfect, her
thighs tight and tan, without a trace of cellulite. I popped a woody and had to wriggle on the couch so it didn’t stick out. She looked
over her shoulder and saw that I was looking at her, and then she turned away and stood on her right leg and lifted her left foot and
scratched the back of her right calf.
I couldn’t take it any more—I tossed my wine and pecked April on the cheek good night. I crawled into bed and tugged the covers
up tight around me, but before I fell asleep the door creaked and April appeared, silhouetted in the doorway. She slipped the tee shirt
over her head and climbed into bed with me. “You don’t have to do this,” I said, but she did not answer me. Instead, she only stopped
me from talking with a warm, wet kiss. After we made love we cuddled on the bed and I whispered “stay with me,” but she was
asleep.
* * * * *
In the middle of the night I heard the garage door open and I reached for April but she was gone. I slipped on a pair of shorts and
looked down the hall. The nightlight was on the guest bedroom. I crept to the door and peeked inside, saw April curled up under the
covers with Tommy. I went to the hall closet and took down the shotgun and a flashlight. I found three shells and stuffed them in the
magazine. I slipped out the back door and snuck around the side of the house. There was an old 4x4 pickup truck in the drive, and a
man sitting in the garage wrapping a chain around the axle of April’s VW.
I chambered a shell and said in my deepest voice, “stay very still and don’t move.” The man froze. I looked around the yard
carefully to make sure he was alone, and when I was satisfied I walked around and shined the light in his face. It was the same fella
who was on my porch the night before. “You’re about half-stupid aren’t you?” I said.
“Can I get up now?” he asked.
“No,” I said, and I used my foot to push him face down on the concrete. “Keep your hands where I can see them.” He did and I laid
the barrel of the shotgun on the back of his head and said “very still” and he nodded quietly.
I patted him down and he said, “I’m not packing.”
I said, “that’s nice but I’m going to make sure, just the same.” I pulled his boots off, too, because sometimes folks hide a pistol or
a knife in them. But he was clean, and when I was sure I said: “OK, you can get up.”
He sat up and pulled his boots on. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.
I said, “Go ahead.”
He took a pack out of his shirt pocket and dug a lighter out of his jeans. He flicked the lighter and his face lit up in the flame. “I’ve
got some beer in my truck,” he said. “Would you like one? They’re cold.”
“Sure,” I said. “What the hell,” and we walked over to the truck, me on one side and him on the other. He had a cooler on the seat
and he opened it and handed me a bottle of Coors. The cab was littered with bottles. I leaned the shotgun against the door and we sat
down and he turned on the radio. The only station he could find was a country station out of Bozeman and it sounded tinny. After a
while I said, “so do you want to tell me about it?”
“You’ve been with her,” he said. “I can smell it on you.”
“Look. I’ve known April since we were kids, and she used to be my old lady. What we do in my house is our business, and since I
got a shotgun and you don’t, I get to ask the questions. So tell me, what the hell are you doing here?”
He didn’t say anything, and I started getting fidgety. “OK. We’ll play twenty questions. Are you from Tennessee?”
“Enid, Oklahoma.”
“Well that explains a lot. Is your name Flip?”
He raised the eyebrow over his right eye and looked at me. “Flip’s dead.”
“Oh,” I said. “I suppose I’m sorry to hear that. Besides stalking April, what brings you to Montana?”
“Tommy’s my son. I love April, but I want Tommy back.”
“Your son?”
“Yeah.”
“So what are you gonna do, kidnap the car and trade it for the kid?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“Did you ever break a horse?”
“No. I’m not much into horses.”
“Well you can’t just throw a saddle on them and ride, and you can’t tie them down, either. You got to hobble them, tie their legs so
they’ll stand in one place. Then you can get close enough to rub a blanket on him, get them used to the smell. After a while you slip a
bridle on, get them used to being touched. When get over being afraid, you saddle break ‘em.”
“Have you tried going to court?”
“Sure, but every time I find out where she is, she runs off on me.”
“So you figure you steal the van, she’s got to stay put?”
“Exactly.”
“Listen. I got no control over April—never have. But if I promise to try to make her sit still for a while, will you promise not to come
sneaking around anymore?”
“OK,” he said, offering me his hand. “That would be mighty decent of you. My name’s Jake.”
“Frank,” I said. I shook his hand. “Where’re you staying?”
“Motel Six, in Billings.”
“Go home. Get some sleep.”
I finished my beer and dropped the empty onto the floor, climbed out of the truck and slung the shotgun over my shoulder.
“One more thing,” Jake said.
“What’s that?”
“Did she tell you about the canoe?”
“No. What’s up with the canoe?”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“It’s a lie. She killed that fella. Don’t believe a word she says.”
“You’re drunk, Jake,” I said. “Go home. And stay there.”
* * * * *
Sunday morning I slept late. April and Tommy woke me with breakfast in bed. April shuttled back and forth from the kitchen
bringing pancakes and syrup and bacon and refilling my coffee. Tommy bounced up and down on the bed until he upset the tray and
spilled our orange juice. Then he started to cry. April made it worse by snapping at him. Tommy really started bawling, then, and he
headed for his room. I spilled my coffee to make him feel better, dumped it right over, and he stopped at the door. But that really set
April off. “You are two of a kind,” she said.
“No big deal,” I said. “Honest. They were due for a wash anyway.” I looked at Tommy and winked. “I wash my sheets once a year
whether they need it or not.”
“Ewww,” April said, wrinkling her nose.
“Ewww,” Tommy said, giggling.
April gathered the sheets and hauled them to the laundry room. Do you mind if I throw a few things in with these?” she asked.
“Make yourself at home.”
Later that afternoon we drove to the junkyard and picked up the headlight assembly for the van. My buddy, Ernie, runs the place,
he’s a big Swede who used to work at the mill and started scrapping cars on the side. He started out with a tow truck working
weekends, but it got so profitable that he quit the mill and went into the junk business full time. He picks up wrecks and impounds off
the interstate, DWI’s, the occasional recovered stolen car. He charges storage by the day and often, by the time folks get around to
picking their cars up, the fees are more than the car is worth, so he gets them for nothing. He fixes up the ones he can and sells
them. The rest he lays out in neat rows in what used to be the laydown yard of a sawmill that went belly-up. He had a half dozen VW
vans. “The dead heads used to leave ‘em regular as clockwork,” he said. “They were dependable as geese. Every summer I’d bag
one or two. But now that Jerry’s gone, they’re getting harder and harder to come by.”
I took that to mean he was going to jack the price on me, but then April came around the corner and Ernie’s face lit up. “Well,
lookee who’s back in town! The prodigal daughter has returned. Good to see you, girl.” And then turning to me he asked, “so does
this mean you two are an item again?”
I opened my mouth but April cut me off laughing. “We’re old friends,” she said. “I’m just passing through.”
“Well I’ll give you the old friends price then,” Ernie said, which was next-to-nothing. “Provided you come for dinner sometime this
week.”
I looked at April and she shrugged her shoulders.
We used to do a lot of this stuff after we got out of high school. I couldn’t tell you how many weekends we spent listening to Lynryd
Skynyrd and ZZ Top, passing a bong and a bottle of Wild Turkey around up in Ernie and Eleanor’s cabin out Sulfur Springs Road. Ernie
and Eleanor are still together. They’ve got four kids now, and I know Eleanor doesn’t do the wild thing anymore. I think Ernie still sells
a little grass on the side, though I haven’t smoked a joint in years, so I couldn’t say for sure. The cabin burned down a while back, and
Ernie built a house on the hill overlooking the junkyard.
“Sure,” April said. “That would be great.”
“You still make enchiladas?” Ernie asked. “You used to make the best enchiladas.”
“Of course I do. I’ll make us a double batch.”
About that time Tommy came around the corner with a black puppy in his arms, the mother and the rest of the puppies following
him. Before April could shout put that thing down! Tommy was toe to toe with her shouting “can I keep him? Can I? Can I? He’s the
best one and he followed me so I have to take him. You never let me have a dog.”
Ernie busted out laughing.
The mama dog ran circles around Tommy. She was a scrawny, high-strung lab-cross with a prickly ridge of hair running down her
spine like a razorback, a little white patch on her throat. The pups were still in the fuzzball stage and it was hard to tell what they
might grow up to look like. The rest of the brood sat down in the dirt beside their mama and wobbling around and biting one another’s
tails. But the pup in Tommy’s arms rested like he’d been born there.
“The daddy’s a shepherd from across the road,” Ernie said. “So they got some good blood in ‘em.”
“I don’t care if he was the first dog to walk on the moon,” April replied, “we ain’t getting a puppy.”
April took the pup from Tommy and held him by the nape of his neck. He looked at her while the mama yelped and nipped at April’s
free hand. Tommy sat down in the dirt and started to bawl. I took the pup from April and looked at his feet, felt around his rib cage, and
squeezed his jaw to make him show me his teeth.
“Tommy’s got a good eye for a dog,” I said. “He’s the pick of the litter. Got more lab in him than shepherd. Gonna be a big one.”
“Her daddy was a Newfie,” Ernie said. “She was the runt of the litter, which was why I got stuck with her. You know, you’d be
doing me a big favor taking him off my hands. I had to drown the last batch.”
That started Tommy off bawling again, and he snatched the pup and held it protectively to his chest with one hand while he fought
of the mother with the other. “We can’t let him drown Newton,” he said. “You got to let me keep him.”
“You’re a cruel man,” I said.
“He’s probably got fleas,” April said. “Or worms.” April sat down on her haunches and took the pup from Tommy and set him
down at arms length. “Honey, she said, “we got no place for a dog.”
The pup wobbled back to Tommy and Tommy took him in his arms and turned to me. “Mr. Frank,” he said, “you got a place for a
dog. Please?”
* * * * *
Newton peed on my carpet first thing after he got in the house. I rolled up a newspaper and whacked him over the head with it,
rubbed his nose in the wet spot, and tossed him out in the backyard. That set Tommy to howling again, until I explained that I loved
Newton, too, but we couldn’t have him peeing all over the house. And the newspaper didn’t really hurt, it just scared him up a bit, and
to illustrate the point I whacked Tommy a few times and then got down on all fours and let him whack me. He whacked me pretty
good, whereupon I reminded him I was part bear and chased him around the house growling until I caught him and tickled him half to
death. I told Tommy it was his job to clean up after Newton and I showed him how.
After that Tommy and Newton were inseparable. They spent most of their time outside and when they came in, Tommy was always
careful to watch for signs that Newton needed out. They ate supper together on the back porch. We warned Tommy that Newton was
still too young to eat grown up food and he seemed to understand, but I think he cheated when we weren’t looking. They played until
dark and then they came in and curled up in front of the fireplace and fell asleep. I carried Tommy off to bed and April laid Newton
down on a towel on the floor, but he started howling, so we laid him on the bed beside Tommy, and then he was all right.
April went off to the garage to fetch a bottle of wine she had stashed in the VW and after a while I went out after her and found her
smoking a joint around the side of the house. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said, and I said that I didn’t, even though I kind of did.
April held the joint out to me, but I shook my head. “It’s been years. No sense starting back now.”
“They drug test at the mill?”
“Yeah, but only for cause. I could probably get off if they caught me. Half the crew is stoned to the gills.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“Got tired of feeling stupid.”
“Isn’t that the point?”
“To feel stupid?”
“To stop thinking about things.”
“I suppose, if your thoughts make you uncomfortable.”
“Mine do.”
“There’s other ways, you know.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, but there must be.”
“I ain’t going to no counselor.” April sucked on the joint and held it in. After a minute she exhaled a cloud of blue smoke and it
clung to her with that halo effect again. “A miracle might help.”
The days were getting shorter, the nights cold. While we watched, the frost made spidery silver lines on the dry leaves and on the
edges of the windows. Goosebumps raised on April’s arms. I thought about offering her a sweater, but I didn’t want my clothes
smelling like dope.
“What are you looking at?” April asked.
“You,” I said. “You got a halo.”
April looked up and then turned around and looked behind her. “I smoke dope and you see things. Only angels get halos, and I sure
as hell ain’t no angel.”
“Do you remember when we were together?”
“Don’t go getting sentimental on me.”
“But do you remember?”
“Course I do.”
“Was I good to you?”
“Sure, Frank, you’re a swell guy. I thought about you lots. You’d make a great husband, a great father. A girl would be lucky to have
a man like you. You ought to get married someday.”
“Then, why’d you leave?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and then she laughed. “I’ve only got one weakness…I can’t resist temptation!”
“But it wasn’t me? It wasn’t anything I did?”
“No, Frank, it wasn’t you. I was stupid, and young. I got bored. I started fooling around with Wally while you were at work, and then I
felt guilty about it. I knew I couldn’t give you what you deserve. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to—it just ain’t in me.”
“Can I be the judge of that?” I asked.
“No, not when it comes to me, you can’t. Can we go inside? I’m getting cold.”
We went inside and then April remembered that she went out to get a bottle of wine in the first place, so she went back and got
that, and then we sat down on the couch. I got up and built a fire while she fooled around with the corkscrew. “I bought a couple of
bottles of this on sale in Omaha,” she said. “It was supposed to be really good, but I didn’t realize I needed a corkscrew to open them.
I been meaning to buy one ever since, but I keep forgetting. It’s easier just to buy another jug. I spent a few days outside of Laramie
and got so thirsty that one night I took a rock and busted the top off a bottle and drank it down.” She giggled. She was slurring her
speech.
I almost had the fire going when I heard the cork pop and April shouted: “Shit!” She spilled the wine down the front of her shirt and
got some on the couch, but it wasn’t too bad. I blotted it up and stood back and looked at it. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s an old
couch.”
April wadded up her shirt and threw it on the floor. “I didn’t like that shirt much, anyhow. It was a present from a guy I didn’t like.”
I sat down, careful to keep the wet spot between us, and then April got up. She was wearing old jeans and a black, spaghetti-string
bra, the kind that pushes a girl’s tits up and makes the most of them. She picked up the shirt and threw it in the fire. Then she said
“Fuck!” and grabbed a fire poker and took it out, burned her foot stamping on it.
I watched, laughing.
After she put the fire out she reached in the shirt pocket and pulled out a baggy of bud. “Thank God” she said. She threw the shirt
back in the fire. “Do you mind if I roll another one?”
“Do you do that stuff in front of Tommy?”
“No. Well, sometimes, but he doesn’t know what it is.”
“Go ahead.”
April rolled another joint and when she was done I asked, “So what’s the story about the canoe?”
She had just lit the joint and she coughed hard, almost fell off the couch. “He’s been here, huh?” she said.
“Who?”
“You know who I mean.”
“How could I possibly know who you mean?”
“Well, he’s full of shit,” she said, “and besides that, he’s crazy. He says I killed Flip, but he’s just trying to blackmail me into
marrying him. I shouldn’t have slept with him. I don’t know what I was thinking. I must have been drunk. Anyway, if he comes around
again, let me know. I’ll get another restraining order.”
“So did you?”
“What?”
“Kill Flip?”
“Hell no! Flip killed himself. He quit taking his medication. He’d tried it before. This time there was nobody around to stop him.”
April took a deep breath and sighed. “I met Flip in Atlanta. I was working as a stripper at Peaches. Don’t look at me like that, where
else can a girl with no diploma make 200 bucks a night? Flip worked there too, but only on ladies’ night. He was a hunk, but lost. He
was like a big, dumb puppy. Except when he danced. Boy could he dance. He could do things… Well, anyway, he was good. And he
was a sweet guy, too, but clueless. He had been abused by his father and his uncle, so he was confused about his sexuality and stuff.
He had issues. We started hanging out. I liked him. He was gentle. He wasn’t all over me like most guys are. He liked to go rafting on
those slow, muddy southern rivers. Did I tell you he was an ex-junkie? That was why he didn’t like taking his medicine. He didn’t
believe in changing the way you feel with chemicals. He wanted to do it himself, naturally.
“Anyway, Flip and I decided to make a clean break from stripping and drugs and all. This was about a year ago, in the spring. In the
meantime, I had met this Okie at Peaches and he had a crush on me. He had an inheritance—some kind of oil money or something—
and he didn’t have to work, so he just drove around the country hanging out. He wanted to marry me, too. I don’t know what it is with
men. You sleep with them once and they think they own you. OK, I shouldn’t have done it—and it would have hurt Flip if he knew—but
we needed the money. Flip was itching to use again, and we were talking about splitting town and starting over, someplace where we
didn’t know anybody.
“Technically, I was still married to Vaarni—just on paper—so we stopped off in Nuevo Laredo to it annulled. But while I was at the
courthouse Flip freaked out and bought tar from some creep he met in the cantina. So he was all fucked up when I got back with the
papers. Well, he told me he didn’t have any more, but he did—he tried to hide it in his backpack—and they nabbed him at the border.
So I got stuck in Laredo with no money and no place to stay—and I don’t have to tell you that was no picnic. The state took Tommy
away and put him in a foster home, for christsakes. I got him back, but it took me six weeks. I had to jump through a whole bunch of
hoops—see a counselor, join a church, get a job, that kinda stuff. When Flip got out of jail we caught the first bus to Albuquerque and
got married. Then we headed out to California to start over.
“But when Flip got busted they took away all his pills, and when he got to jail he didn’t say anything about needing his medication.
He didn’t tell anybody. He just quit taking it. Well at first I didn’t notice, but after a while Flip stopped being himself. He got withdrawn.
He took to talking to himself, and laughing in this little high-pitched tee-hee-hee; which I guess he thought only he could hear. Every
time I asked him ‘What’s so funny?’ he’d say ‘I’m not laughing.’
“It isn’t something you’d think about, you know, because he’d been doing so good—except for the little incident in Nuevo Laredo—
and I had never seen him have a breakdown. But I remembered that one night, after he told me he was clean, I asked him why he took
pills every morning, and he told me they were mood elevators and they didn’t really do anything except moderate his thinking ‘cause
he got crazy without them. And then he told me that he had flipped out in class one day—that was why they called him Flip—and he
started throwing things and yelling and screaming at people that weren’t there. ‘It’s hard to explain,’ he said. ‘But when I had these
thoughts, or heard voices and such, my brain couldn’t tell the difference between what it was thinking and what was real.’
“They sent him to the looney bin and put him on medication. He got better and they let him out. But after he got better he thought he
didn’t need the medication anymore, so he quit taking it. That was the first time he tried to kill himself. He jumped off a bridge, but
somebody fished him out before he drowned.”
April took a drag off the joint, but it had burned out. She felt around in her jeans for the lighter.
“There,” I said, pointing down by her foot.
She picked it up and lit the joint, took a deep drag and held her breath. When she finally exhaled she said, “this is some good shit
but it’s really green. I got it from an old friend of Vaarni’s, in Humbolt. He he’s got acres of the stuff. His family’s Mexican—I mean
really old Mexican. Before the Anglos came west they were settled there. So the cops leave him alone. Either that, or he pays them
off. Where was I?”
“You were telling me about the canoe.”
“Oh, yeah. So me and Flip and Tommy drove out to Yosemite for our honeymoon, and Flip stole this canoe in Merced so we could
go rafting. It seemed like the trip was going to be a good thing. It calmed his nerves. For a few days, he was just like the old Flip again,
quiet and shy, caring and kind. I was thinking maybe he didn’t need the medication after all.
“You can only raft so far down the river because of the falls. They have a cable strung across the water and a sign that says: if you
go in the water, you will die. Well, the last night we landed there. I built a campfire. I was about to cook supper when, out of the blue,
Flip said ‘they’re here,’ and I looked around and said ‘Who,’ thinking maybe he meant the park rangers or something. And he said
‘Oh, it was nothing.’ And the next thing I knew, he hopped into the canoe and headed for the falls.
“I shouted after him, but he didn’t seem to hear. I ran down the bank screaming, but he didn’t say a word. He looked at me, and
smiled, and then he threw the paddle away. There was nothing anybody could do. He ducked under the cable and laid down in the
canoe, and as God is my witness, I could hear him laughing. And then he was gone. They never did find the body. Flip would have liked
that. He would say: ‘of course not—I told you they were here!’ The rangers said they would likely find it in the summer under a snag
when the runoff went down. And that,” April said, standing up and arching her back, “was how I lost my third husband. Sad, isn’t it?”
The joint had burned out and April lit it again, took a big hit, and then got up and crushed it out on the hearth. “So now you know
why I do all this stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“All this dope and drinking and shit.”
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t understand at all.”
April tried standing on one leg in the middle of the room. She spread out her arms like wings, tilted her head back, and then
brought her right index finger to her face and touched her nose. The she threw her arms out and stepped forward and said “Ta Da! I
practice my field sobriety tests all the time so I can pass them when the cops stop me.”
“Do you get stopped often?” I asked.
“All the time,” she replied. “I fucked a state trooper last week outside of Olympia just for the hell of it.”
I didn’t say anything and after a minute April went limp and collapsed onto my shoulder sobbing. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t
know why I do half the stuff I do. I don’t know why I liked Flip, or Vaarni, or any of them. They were all assholes. None of them loved me
half as good as you did. I don’t know why I ever left.”
April’s sobs turned to kisses and soon we were liplocked on the couch. “It’s not a good time for me right now,” she said, “do you
have any condoms?” I said that I did, but when I got back she was out like a light.
I wrapped her up in a blanket and left her on the couch. The next morning, when I got up she was still there, and she didn’t budge,
even when I kissed her goodbye. I left two twenties on the counter with a note to buy herself and Tommy some lunch, but when I got
home from work she was gone. But a few minutes later I heard the VW chugging up the drive. Then I heard Tommy playing in the yard
with Newton and April came in with an armload of groceries. “Can I cook for you tonight?” she asked. “It’s the least I can do.”
And that was how it started. April put Tommy in school and he was pretty good about going. He made April solemnly swear (on the
yellow pages) that she would look after Newton every day while he was gone. In the mornings, if April got him ready in time, he would
walk down to the highway to catch the school bus, and I would see him and wave on my way to work. If not, I would drop him off, even
though it wasn’t on my way and made me late sometimes.
Dean-o didn’t mind. He seemed happy for me, and the guys said something good had come over me. But if you asked me, I would
have said that what was changed was that I had was what I was supposed to have had from the beginning. And one morning when I
got up, and April was sleeping off her wine, and it was just me and Tommy making breakfast and packing our lunch, I stopped in front
of the mirror on my way out the door.
I do have a big head, and my face is round, but it’s big in a friendly way, or so I always thought. And my nose is crooked, and my
ears are little, and they stick out. I have some gray in my whiskers, but my hair is still thick and black—that’s the Indian in me—and I’
ve got crow’s feet around my eyes. I might not be the best-looking guy that ever lived, but I never did anybody any harm on purpose. I
felt like a daddy. And when I stopped in front of the mirror and combed my hair, Tommy stopped with me and combed his hair, tried to
part it the same way as mine, even though his hair is blonde and wavy and wants to stick out all over. And when we went outside
there was a note stuck under my windshield wiper that read: Meet me at Boondock’s on your way home, and I knew who it was from.
I had a bad feeling about things I couldn’t keep my mind on the job. I left work an hour early telling Dean-o I didn’t feel well. I didn’t
wait long at the tavern, either. I high-tailed it out of there thinking I shouldn’t have gone to work at all. I got home and the VW was
gone. It looked like they’d left in a hurry, too. There were dishes in the sink and clothes in the washer. Newton was tied up on the back
porch. When I let him loose he went straight to Tommy’s room, and then room to room through the house, until finally he came back
and sat down beside me and laid his head on his paws.
After a while I heard a car in the drive and I crept around the side of the garage and hung back until Jake got out and headed for
the front door. A rage boiled up inside me. I don’t lose my temper much, but I was on Jake before he was halfway to the porch. He
didn’t try to fight me. I clipped him in the jaw once, maybe twice, and then he was on his back and I was on top of him with my hands
knotted around his neck. He didn’t flinch. Newton brought me to my senses running around all excited and barking and biting me on
the hand, his baby teeth like needles.
I got off Jake and he laid on the ground holding his throat, gasping for air. I stood over him and sucked the blood off my knuckles. “I
don’t blame you at all,” he said. “Not one bit. I’d have done the same thing myself, if I was you.”
Newton barked and ran back and forth nipping first at Jake’s ear and then at my foot. Jake finally corralled him and sat up,
scratching Newton behind the ears and rubbed his belly until he quieted down. “Cute little guy, ain’t he?”
“Are you alright?” I asked.
Jake rubbed his jaw. “You got some powder in the keg,” he said. “I got a tooth loose.”
“Can I get you some ice?”
“I’ll be alright. How ‘bout a beer?”
“Sure,” I said. “What the hell.”
We sat on the porch. The sun was setting. Jake lit a cigarette. After a while he said, “I came by to tell you face-to-face what
happened, and to thank you.”
“For what?”
“For keeping April around until I could get a court order. You’re a man of your word and I appreciate that.”
“To tell you the truth, I’d forgot about it. I was hoping you’d gone back to Oklahoma.”
“Oh, no,” Jake said, shaking his head. “I can’t give up. That boy’s my flesh and blood, and I’d give everything I got to give him a
good home.”
“He had a good home.”
“Yes sir, and I appreciate that. I sure do. But I’m sure you can appreciate my predicament.”
“He’s not your son, Jake.”
“Well, I say he is, and I aim to find out. You can’t fault a fella for trying, now can you?”
I took a long pull off my beer. It was almost dark, the moon was just peeking out over the eastern horizon. There was still a line of
pink to the west, and it tinted the moon red. A crow cawed and I could see its silhouette pass by in the distance. Just behind it flew a
larger bird, a hawk, maybe, or an owl, and it landed high in a tall pine. I could see the branch sway where it perched.
“Anyhow,” Jake said, “I got a lawyer down in Bozeman, and he got a court order for the test. The sheriff come out this morning
and served papers. She was supposed to take Tommy over to Sulphur Springs to draw blood. But April sweet-talked the cop into
letting her shower and clean up—on her solemn promise to drive straight over—no doubt. But of course, she never showed. I reckon
she’s half-way to Canada by now.” He sighed. “Anyhow, I wanted to tell you myself. No hard feelings?” Jake said, extending his hand.
I shook it without much enthusiasm and Jake gave Newton one final scratch and then stood up to go. “By the way, did she ever tell
you about the canoe?”
“Yeah.”
“Which version?”
“What do you mean…which version?”
“I mean which version. Was it the poor old Vietnam Vet who got shot down over Hanoi and spent seven years in a tiger cage? Or
was it the tank commander from Desert Storm who breathed too much toxic dirt in Iraq? Or maybe it was the one about the poor kid
who was abused by his daddy and never got straightened out?”
“That sounds more like it,” I said. “It was more along those lines.”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings or nothing, but that story was a lie. She made the whole thing up.”
“Then what is the truth?” I asked—as if Jake would really know, or tell me if he did.
“Truth is she substituted some other pills for the ones he was supposed to take. He didn’t know the difference. She just kept
throwing out his prescription and giving him something else until nature ran its course.”
“And you believe that?”
“It’s a fact.”
“Why would she do that? April might be a lot of things, but she’s not a killer.”
Jake scratched his face and looked back over his shoulder at the moon. “She did it for the money,”
“What money? She doesn’t have any money.”
“He had an inheritance. Oil money, or something like that.”
“I thought you had all the money.”
Jake laughed. “Me? Did she tell you that?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“All that money and I’m staying at the Motel Six, except when I’m sleeping in my truck. And look at it. Why it must have cost me
five hundred dollars. I’m just floured in thousand dollar bills.”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” I said. “I think you’re both crazy.”
“Some things you know,” Jake said, “and others you take on faith. Do you know what the Bible says about faith, Frank?”
“What does the Bible say about faith, Jake?”
“The Bible says that faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of reality, though not beheld. I
walk by faith, Frank, not by sight.”
“Like believing that Tommy’s your son, even though he don’t look anything like you?”
“He takes after my mother’s side of the family.”
“You’re fucking crazy, you know. I should have blown you to hell the first night you set foot on my property.”
“Now why would want you do that?”
“Because you’re nuts, Jake, following April all over the country. There’s laws against that kind of stuff. It’s called stalking. You got
her scared half to death.”
“Would you say a man was crazy to follow a woman he thought stole his son, a woman who drank and did drugs and God-knows-
what-all? A woman who might—just might, mind you—have murdered an innocent man? Would that make me crazy, Frank? To try to
get my son away from such a woman?
“How ‘bout this, Frank, what would you say if I told you I knew a man who pined away ten years for a woman who ran off with a guy
who read meters for the electric company? What would you say if I told you he threw away the best part of his life waiting for a
faithless woman who couldn’t say no to a man? A woman who didn’t have the decency to leave a note and say good bye. And after he
waited ten years she came back with somebody else’s kid and he took her in like she had never left. What would you say about that
man, Frank? Would you say that he was crazy? Look at me, Frank. What would you say?”
“It was the gas company,” I said.
“Come again?”
“It was the gas company. He read the meter for the gas company.”
Jake walked back to his truck. “Think about it, Frank,” he said. Then he drove away, to Canada, I suppose.
* * * * *
The snow held off for the longest time, but the weekend before Thanksgiving it hit hard and made up for the delay. It blew
sideways for forty-eight hours and piled up on the back porch so deep I couldn’t open the door. I let Newton out to pee Friday and he
never came back. I stood out front and called his name for hours, like to froze to death looking, but I never found him. Saturday
morning I couldn’t see to the end of the drive, and I could barely hear myself shout over the wind.
I stood on the porch Monday morning with a bottle of beer and understood what April meant when she said she drank so she didn’t
have to feel. The snow drifted half as high as the roof, but there were streaks of blue opening up through the clouds, and only a few
flakes floated down. It was no use thinking about work—the highway wouldn’t get plowed until Tuesday or Wednesday, and even if I
went in, nobody else would show up.
I thought about Flip, and wondered if there was such a man, and what he was really like, and if they would find his body in the
summer when the water was low, the same way as I would find Newton when it thawed this spring. April said Flip couldn’t tell the
difference between what he was thinking and what was real, and I wondered if that was what people said about me. But what would
happen if I lost faith? A vision crossed my mind of me laying down in a canoe, looking up at the sky, laughing as I float over the falls.
I’d bought a fifteen-pound turkey and two bags of stuffing, sweet potatoes, a frozen cherry pie, dinner rolls, and a carton of ice
cream. I don’t even know if they celebrate Thanksgiving in Canada, but I’d hate to think of April drinking wine under a bridge, alone, or
Tommy sleeping in the van. I suppose that’s why I waited all these years, and why I'll probably be waiting next year, too. Somebody’s
got to do it, and sometimes I’m all we got.
| Melvin Sterne: Writer, Teacher, Editor, Photographer |
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Most of my stories were published in hard-copy literary magazines and are difficult (if not
impossible) to find (one of the problems with print publication!). Until I publish a collection, I
put some of my favorites online.
impossible) to find (one of the problems with print publication!). Until I publish a collection, I
put some of my favorites online.