The Summer Son (4 page)

I
GOT THE NEWS
that Dad had married a third time in much the same way that I had received the news about his second wife. He called me and said, “You have a new mother.” That’s where the similarities ended. The first call, in ’76, had been to an eight-year-old boy who thrilled at the idea of a whole new member of the family. The second, twenty years later, had been to a twenty-eight-year-old man who barked back, “I have a mother,” and reluctantly stayed on the phone to give a perfunctory greeting to Mrs. Quillen number three. Helen had said something like “I’m just so thrilled to have such a talented son.” I had shot back, “You’re my father’s wife. Let’s just leave it at that.”

In the years that followed, Helen surprised me. If she had been hurt by my coldness, she didn’t reveal it. She simply treated me with consistent kindness when I called Dad or he called me. She would hop on the extension and fill the considerable gaps in the conversation. Once, she called me out of the blue and asked why I never came to see Dad. I suggested that she ask him. If she ever did, I didn’t hear about it.

When Mom died, one of the most thoughtful and unexpected notes came from Helen.

There is nothing I can or would attempt to say that could make the pain of losing your mother go away. My own parents have been gone for more than thirty years, and not a day goes by that they don’t cross my mind.

But please remember this: you’re her legacy, her greatest work. And she did a wonderful job with you. You are a good, honest, forthright man, and you’re living the life that she gave you a foundation to live. Every day that you wake up is another day that Leila’s legacy lives on.

I’m proud to know you, proud to be related to you. And I thank God every day that you’re who you are. So, you could say, I also thank God that she was who she was.

A few years later, when Helen began her fight with cancer—an arduous battle that she and Dad bore stoically—I would bring that note out from time to time and reread it as I prayed for her to get better, and then, toward the end, for her to go quietly and without pain. Looking at what had become of their home in her absence, I missed her all over again.

In the kitchen, I was momentarily flummoxed about where to start in taming the filth, and then I figured that a big garbage bag would do for openers. I shoved in paper plates and plastic forks and plastic cups (after I had drained the half-filled ones into the kitchen sink) and anything that carried a hint of garbage. The unopened mail, and there was a lot of it, got stacked on the table until I could go through it with Dad.

“What happened?” I asked. “This place was spotless a few months ago.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Busy doing what?”

“Busy.”

I tamed the dining room and kitchen. Next, I ventured to the bathroom. I had already seen the bedroom I would be staying in, and it was mercifully clear of mess. The only bathroom in the place was not. The stench of dried urine knocked me back when I cracked open the door. I peeked in, and my eyes confirmed what my nose suspected. Bath towels that hadn’t been washed in who knows how long hung from the shower curtain rod, soap scum ringed the tub, and Dad’s errant whizzing had left little yellow puddles between the sink and the tub.

“Do you have rubber gloves?” I yelled to him.

“Just leave it.”

“It’s no problem.”

“Under the kitchen sink.”

As I walked back through, I saw that Dad had made a halfhearted attempt at helping, but from what I could see, he had just rearranged the newspapers and other detritus in the living room into more orderly stacks. I found him in his recliner, fiddling with the TV remote.

“What do you want to do with all of this newspaper, Dad? Do you recycle it?”

“Maybe I want to keep it.”

I held up a front page of the
Billings Gazette
, dated July 14, 2007.

“You save those sewer-bond stories, eh?” I said.

His anger struck like lightning.

“Don’t fucking baby me. Do you hear me? Don’t do it.”

“Whoa. I’m not babying you. I’m just cracking a little joke.”

“It’s not funny.”

“No, apparently not.”

Dad fumed but said nothing else.

I went to the kitchen, dug out the rubber gloves and cleaning solution, and then I trudged down the hallway to finish in the bathroom.

A few minutes later, I heard him coming down the hallway. I sat on my knees with my head pinned between the toilet and the bathroom cabinet as I scrubbed the floor.

“I’m going to lay down for a little while,” he said.

“All right, Dad. I’m nearly finished in here.”

He stepped down the hall and shut the door. For the next four-plus hours, the house was mine.

By the time Dad emerged, at just past seven, I had made the house habitable again. I had dragged five big, brimming garbage bags to the bin, mopped the floors, washed dishes, collated the mail, and dusted the furniture. The only chore left was to run a vacuum cleaner, something I had left undone while Dad slept.

I sat in his recliner, watched Monday Night Football, and ate a pizza I had found in the freezer. I offered Dad his chair, but he motioned for me to stay put and sat on the couch opposite me.

“Place looks good,” he said.

“It’ll do. You want something to eat?”

“Not hungry.” He turned to the TV. “Who’s playing?”

“Washington and Philly.”

“Who’s up?”

“Washington, 3–0.”

The game mattered little. A lifelong Montanan, Dad threw in with the Denver Broncos. Having grown up in Washington, I hitched my allegiance to the Seattle Seahawks. That had made for some good-natured banter between us when I was a kid and they were in the same division, but silence had long since ensured that we had no room in our relationship for a triviality like football.

“So, Dad, what happened with the house?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on. I just spent four hours cleaning it.”

“Nobody asked you to do that.”

“It was either me or the HAZMAT crew, Pop.”

“I told you. Don’t mouth off.”

There was much I could say to that—starting with the absurdity of Dad’s scolding a grown man as if he were a little boy—but I flushed with shame about my crack. I was doing exactly what Cindy had counseled me not to do. If I teased him, I would go back to California with no more answers than I had when I got here.

“Come on, Dad. Talk to me.”

“About what?”

“About the house. About the past week of telephone calls. About anything.”

He sighed, then dropped his head and stared at his hands, his fingers interlocking and twisting.

“There just doesn’t seem much point to it.”

“It…”

“The house. She’s gone. What’s the point?”

“You’re not gone. You live here.”

“Yeah.”

I waited. I hoped he would say more, that he could give me something more to work with.

“I don’t really know what to do with myself. I just sit around here, waiting. For what?”

“Are you feeling depressed?”

“I don’t want to talk about all that psycho bullshit. I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“It’s not psycho bullshit. It’s real. And somebody can help, if that’s your problem.”

“I said I’m just tired.”

“OK.”

We sat in silence. The Eagles kicked a couple of field goals to go ahead, and then, with just a few seconds left in the first half, the Redskins scored on a touchdown pass, and you would have thought we were both fans the way we jumped out of our seats.

When I got up to go into the kitchen for another slice of pizza, Dad followed me.

“I didn’t know how much I would miss her,” he said. “She was dying for a year, but I can’t believe she’s gone. I miss her.”

I thought he was a real son of a bitch for saying that. I hadn’t made the trip so I could feel my heart break for him, yet that’s what happened. I wondered if I should feel guilt that his pain had brought us together. And then I discarded the thought. It was his pain or mine.

I wrapped Dad in an awkward hug. He endured it stiffly, his open right hand patting me impatiently on the back until, finally, I let him go.

I
DIDN’T NEED
much time to figure out what Jerry had warned me about that first evening. Dad and Marie were fighting, a lot. They would try to hide it, but how much hiding can one do in a twenty-six-foot-long fifth wheel? I did what I could to stay away from it, pumping quarters into the pinball machines in the trailer park office, tearing around in the city park across the street, and when Jerry would let me, hanging out at his place.

The problem was that Jerry protected his scant hours away from us. That summer reinforced the truth of just how separated my brother and I were, by years and by interests. We had nothing in common, save for a father we tried to please, to varying degrees of success, and a desire to not take on collateral damage when Dad and Marie clashed.

Just as I easily deduced that Dad and Marie were fighting, it was similarly easy to figure out that the source of the quarrels was money, specifically Marie’s ability to make it disappear. While she sometimes accompanied us to the field—reading in a lawn chair, under an umbrella, and out of earshot of the loudest grind of the big machinery—Marie often took two-and three-day sojourns to Salt Lake City to visit friends and favored stores. When she came back, she carried bags of blouses and pantsuits and shoes and jewelry. Each unhappy return ratcheted Dad’s stress level up a notch or two. Jerry said he had begun to wonder how many notches Dad had left. Black dread filled my stomach when he said that. I knew that when Dad reached the end of his patience, pain would follow.

The hours in the sagebrush and dust, while arduous, provided a respite for all of us. The days began early, at five a.m., when Dad convened a breakfast at the diner. If Jerry and Dad’s other hand, Toby Swint, were more than a few minutes late, Dad paced around outside the door, muttering under his breath that one more fuck-up—just one more—and he would by God find somebody who wanted to do work. When they finally arrived, he greeted their sheepish apologies with a stare and then rushed us through breakfast. Dad ran a tight ship, the tightest of any of the fifteen or so drillers on the job.

No later than a quarter to six, we hit the road, out the other side of town. We rode four-wide across the bench seat of the Supercab; the rear of the cab was generally full of tools or maps or work clothes. I sat wedged between Jerry and Dad, who drove, and Toby perched on the outside. When I fell asleep, and that was nearly every morning, my heavy head ping-ponged between Dad’s right shoulder and Jerry’s left.

The Ely Highway ran between sandy desert buttes and sage, and although we ventured only twenty-five or thirty miles from town, the drive seemed endless, coming and going. It was as if the same scene unfolded in front of us, mile after mile, and just when I started to think, again, that we would never reach the end, Dad turned off on some dirt road and headed into the backcountry.

Rather than haul equipment back and forth from Milford, Dad ended each day by parking at the site of next day’s first dig. I loved that first sight of the rig each morning. Something about it represented renewal, at least to me. Another day, another chance to lay down eight, ten, a dozen exploratory wells. Another chance to please Dad. Another day to be caught in the crosshairs of his wrath.

Neither Jerry nor Toby found our daily arrivals so invigorating. That’s when their work began in earnest. Jerry’s first job was to shimmy underneath the truck—an International Harvester Paystar 5000 mounted with a Mayhew rig—and grease it up. First, he would walk the perimeter, giving each wheel well a hard kick. In the late afternoons, after we shut down, rattlesnakes were known to climb into the insides of the wheel wells and stretch out. The last place Jerry wanted to be when he came face-to-face with a surprised rattler was on his back. Better to give the snake plenty of notice and let him crawl away on his own.

Toby did the same under the water truck, a brown Ford with a three-thousand-gallon tank. He also had the task of fetching the explosives Dad would need on the first hole and making sure the shovels and other tools were ready. Once the mast came up, Dad didn’t tarry.

The actual digging never failed to enchant me. It was like a crude ballet, with my father playing the role of the maestro. He would drive pipe into the ground segment by segment, controlling the speed and the addition of new pipe with a series of levers, while Jerry did the heavy lifting opposite him. Once a segment was down as far as it could go, Jerry would slap something that looked like a big steel hand around the pipe; then Dad would gun the rig’s engine, unhinging the driver from the pipe. Jerry would then take a spring-loaded contraption connected to a cable and jam it into the open end of a new pipe. With levers above his head, Dad manipulated the cable, lifting the pipe and pulling it toward Jerry, who hung off the edge of the rig, ready to catch it. The new pipe was connected to the previous segment, then was pushed down again. Each segment of pipe measured twenty feet, and it took anywhere from eight to twelve of them to finish each well. Pulling them out was the same process in reverse, with Jerry attaching the clutcher to the pipe, which was pulled up and detached, then thrown down a chute—all the while, Dad guiding it with his levers—where it would topple into a transport bay. Toby, the designated number-two hand, handled the shoveling and the other grunt work.

The brittle earth proved a complication in the country we were in. It was the worst kind of drilling, as far as Dad was concerned. He had to tote around a huge steel box with a hole in one end, called a pit. He positioned the open end over the drill site, and into the pit the crew poured water and powdered mud. The mud went down the hole and, propelled by the spinning pipe, clung fast to the earthen walls, fortifying them. Traditional air drilling wouldn’t do in such a place; the holes would just collapse onto themselves. The churned-up dirt had to be shoveled out of the pit, a job that fell to Toby and, when Dad allowed it, to me. Dad also would let me shake in the powdered mud, but like everything else, he micromanaged it, often in contradictory ways.

“Not so much, Mitch, not so much.”

“More, goddammit, more.”

“OK, put that shit away.”

“Where’s the fucking mud, Mitch?”

I occasionally caught a glimpse of Jerry, who would roll his eyes or scrunch up his nose and silently pretend to be Dad yelling out orders. Dad’s bark pushed me to the verge of tears, but Jerry’s clowning brought me back around.

Once the hole went to the specified depth, Dad ran a charge down it. The explosives came in big plastic sticks—sometimes white, sometimes red—with threading on each end. The sticks were as thick and half again as long as a rolling pin. The wooden stake that marked each dig included information about how much explosive to run. This involved joining the sticks, wiring them with a blasting cap, and then carefully lowering it all down the hole.

With all the powdered mud he was using, though, getting the explosive down the hole was difficult. He, Jerry, and Toby often took twenty or thirty wooden rods, each ten feet long with metal hooks on the ends, and connected them, using the chain to shove the explosive through the muck and down the hole. It was an imprecise science; one wrong move could separate one rod from another deep in the hole, and Dad could spend an hour or more trying to blindly hook them up again. No bald-faced display of profanity I’ve seen before or since can compare with the sight of my father kicking empty explosives boxes and blasting out obscenities as the clock wound down on his workday while he tried to figure out how to get his cocksucking rods back.

“Mitch, do you want to learn how to drive?”

Jerry and I stood watching Dad make mercifully easy work of a well.

“Drive what?”

“The Love Boat. I’m thinking the pickup, you goofball.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure. I know you’re not having too much fun without your mini-bike here. You can start driving the pickup between holes.”

We were talking a distance of only a hundred yards or so, but to my eleven-year-old sensibility, it might as well have been a cross-country interstate journey.

“What about him?” I said, nodding toward Dad.

“It’ll be our secret. By the time he figures out you’re doing it, he’ll just be glad you know how. It will make it easier for him to fire Toby.”

We both laughed at that.

Sure enough, by the time the hole had been dug, the explosive had been dropped, and Dad had put his report onto the stake, he wasted no time climbing back into the rig and pressing on to the next site. He paid me no mind.

In the pickup, Jerry said, “Now, step on the clutch.”

“I know how.”

“Oh really?”

“Well, I mean, I’ve seen you guys do it.”

“OK, genius, just take it away.” Jerry crossed his arms and waited for me to fail. I did, but only just.

I succeeded in starting the pickup, but I had no appreciation for just how hard the clutch was going to spring back on me as I tried to release it and give the truck some gas. We lurched and sputtered and came to a stop. Ahead, the rig and the water truck grew smaller.

“You’ll get it,” Jerry said. “Give it a little more gas.”

That worked. The Ford lurched forward in first gear.

“Now, you’ve got to use your ears. When the engine whines, shift.”

I did so, double clutching as I had seen Dad do in the rig.

“No need for that,” Jerry said. “Step through the floorboard and hold it until you’re in the next gear. You don’t want to burn out the clutch.”

My other misstep occurred on the stop. I forgot about the clutch and just depressed the brake. The pickup heaved, cutting out and throwing us violently forward. My mouth crashed against the steering wheel.

“Shit, Mitch.”

“Sorry.”

I drove the rest of the afternoon, with Jerry riding shotgun. By the third attempt, he didn’t need to tell me what to do. I had figured out the clutch-release-and-give-it-gas rhythm, and I could arrive at a smooth stop. There was no indication that Dad had a clue what was going on—or he just didn’t care, as Jerry predicted.

Jerry and I were laughing and talking as I guided the Ford up to the drill site of the last hole of the day, and I’d grown cocky at my blossoming expertise.

When Jerry said, “Shit,” I looked up and saw Dad running at us, waving his arms. I slammed on the brakes—again forgetting the clutch—as Dad reached the driver’s-side door.

His face crimson, Dad grabbed the handle and yanked the door open, then pulled me out by the front of my shirt and threw me into the dirt.

“Do you see that motherfucking thing?” he yelled. “Do you see it?”

In front of my face sat a full box of explosives that Toby had set on the ground. I was maybe five feet from running over it.

“Oh fuck,” Jerry said. He had come around to where I lay and knew just how lucky we were. Relief was short-lived, though, as Dad’s tongue began carving us up.

“What was he doing?” Dad thundered, his face inches from Jerry’s, his fists balled up.

“I was teaching him how to drive. It was an accident.”

“No, asshole,” Dad said. “It wasn’t an accident. No thanks to you, though.”

I started crying. Dad wheeled back on me.

“Shut up. Don’t fucking cry here, Mitch. Don’t do it. You’re going to be a man, you’re going to drive a truck, then you don’t get to fucking cry here.”

I couldn’t stop. The tears came harder, faster, cutting tracks into the dust that had painted my face when he had pushed me down.

Dad loomed over me, grabbing me by the shirt and pulling me to my feet, then spinning me and kicking me square in the ass, which knocked me down again.

“We don’t cry here. If you’re going to cry, you big fucking baby, you go do it somewhere else.”

I loped around to the side of the water truck, out of earshot and out of sight. After a few minutes, while I fretted that Dad might follow me and yell at me some more, I heard the mast go up and the first segment of pipe go down. The mechanical roar drowned out everything else, and I returned to my whimpering in solitude.

The job went quickly. Dad, Jerry, and Toby finished fourteen holes that day, the best day we had that summer. We marked the occasion by riding to town in silence.