Authors: Craig Lancaster
I
T WAS STILL
dark when Dad shook me awake. “Mitch, let’s get moving.”
I stretched and yawned. “What time is it?”
“Just after five. Come on, sport, get up. Take a shower if you want. I’ll load up.”
I pulled on pants, socks, and tennis shoes, grabbed a pillow, and stumbled out to the pickup. I climbed into the back and found sleep again.
By the time I awoke, almost three hours had passed and we were nearly to Provo. Dad’s cap—emblazoned with “JQ Drilling Co.”—rode high on his forehead, almost the opposite of how I wore mine, pulled low with the fabric on the bill pressed smooth by my constant shaping it. The yellow highway lines shot past, and Dad hummed along to a Ronnie Milsap eight-track.
“I’m coming up.” I slid over the seat, nearly clipping Dad in the face with my feet.
“Watch it.”
“Sorry, Pop.”
It was just after eight, and the sun bathed the surrounding mountains, slowly filling in the darkest corners and sparkling off the road ahead of us.
“You hungry, sport?”
“Yeah.”
He smiled at me from behind his sunglasses.
“All right. Let’s get on the other side of town here and we’ll find a truck stop.”
Dad went back to humming a Milsap tune—“Let’s Take the Long Way around the World”—while I gazed out the window. Provo came into view, tucked into the Utah Valley and lorded over by Mount Timpanogos. Its beauty captivated me in a way that dusty, windy Milford could not. I soaked up the scene, happy to be free of work and worry. I wanted to ride that road, and my father’s good mood, as far as it would carry us.
We steered into a truck stop between Provo and Orem and hopped out of the Supercab. I lifted my arms above my head and reached for the sky, enjoying the tingle as my latent muscles awoke. Dad stepped lively over to the gas pumps and started glad-handing. If a trucker showed an inclination for conversation, Dad would oblige him. He spoke the language of the long-hauler, and he would quiz the drivers about their cargo and their destination, offering any information he had about speed traps and accepting any reciprocal wisdom. Jokes he heard would be rewarded with a gut laugh. Those he told would be accompanied by his grasping his newest buddy’s shoulder as he delivered the punch line.
You would have thought he was running for office.
After an extended tour of the pumps, Dad ambled back my way and we headed inside. The lady at the cash register got a wink and a “darlin’.” The haggard, fifty-something waitress got the same.
Dad asked for eggs over hard, toast, bacon, and hash browns, the breakfast he’d had every morning since I arrived. I went with the tall stack of pancakes.
“Did you have fun last night?” Dad asked.
I should ask him that question, I thought, and then I wisely reconsidered.
“Yeah, it was neat.”
“What did you have to eat?”
I told him about Mrs. Munroe’s feast and how the food kept coming. He asked what Mr. Munroe did for a living, and I told him that too, as well as some of the railroad stories that Jennifer’s dad had relayed.
“They sound like nice people.”
“They are.”
“Sort of makes you wonder how they raised such a bitch of a daughter.”
“Denise doesn’t like you very much, either.”
“What’d I ever do to her?”
The arrival of food ensured that I wouldn’t have to answer his question.
Dad, chipper right up through breakfast, didn’t have the energy to keep it going. The road began to wear on him. The morning rush in Salt Lake had pretty well cleared by the time we hit town, but even the slight crowding of the freeway put him on the defensive. He yanked out the eight-track tape with an “Enough of that shit.” As we pushed through the gut of the Salt Lake, Dad told me to hush up and let him concentrate on driving. The towns that sat beyond—Layton, Clinton, Ogden, Brigham City—came into view and then dropped back, and Dad seemed to sink deeper into his seat, his gaze growing longer as each mile clicked off. We had covered nearly three hundred of them. Five hundred more lay in front of us.
It became an endurance test, with his patience pitted against my happy chatter pitted against the asphalt.
I punctured silences with futile attempts at conversation.
When Dad whistled admiringly at a passing Peterbilt hauling cattle, I asked him, “Is that a good truck?”
“Peterbilt does good work, yeah.”
“How come you bought an International?”
“Deal was right.”
“Do you wish you had a Peterbilt?”
“No.”
“What about Kenworth, is that a good truck?”
“Mitch, shut up, huh?”
And then later:
“Dad?”
“Huh?”
“Did you play baseball when you were a little kid?”
“A little.”
“My team was good. I wonder if they won their last game.”
“Don’t know.”
“What was the name of your team?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What position did you play?”
“Is there a point to this, Mitch?”
And then, finally:
“I’m going to ride my motorcycle when we get there.”
“It’ll be late. You can ride it tomorrow.”
“That’s what I meant.”
I waited a few beats and then said, “Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I get a new motorcycle this summer?”
He looked at me. “What’s wrong with the one you have?”
“I’m a lot bigger than I was two years ago.”
“I don’t know.”
“Please?”
“Don’t beg.”
“OK, but will you think about it?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ll—”
“Shut up about it. Jesus. Do you ever stop talking?”
In Pocatello, we gassed up again. Dad slipped me a fiver and precise instructions.
“Buy a magazine or a book, something that will help you fill the time. You need to stop jabbering at me.”
“Yeah, OK.”
I slunk into the store as Dad handled things at the pump. I should have been happy to have the money—five dollars was a lot of money to a kid my age—but I wasn’t. I didn’t understand why it made him feel better to make me feel worse.
I returned with my arms full of comic books—Archie and Jughead, Richie Rich, Donald Duck, and whatever else I could lay my hands on. The comics, particularly the back pages, proposed a hundred ways a boy like me could burn his cash. Sea monkeys, selling
Grit
magazine, X-ray goggles, you name it. I had no cash to blow, having spent the money Dad gave me on the magazines (and remembering Jerry’s words that the other sixty dollars I had was off-limits to capricious spending). I disappeared into the magazines as we continued our long slog north, and back on the open road, Dad finally loosened up again, popping some Willie Nelson into the eight-track. Blackfoot and Idaho Falls and Rexburg beckoned, and then we would see West Yellowstone, by far the prettiest part of our drive. Soon enough, we would be on the last stretch to the ranch.
In West Yellowstone, we stopped for a late lunch at a drive-in hamburger joint. Dad shoved fries into his mouth. I slurped soda and thumbed through a comic book with greasy fingers.
“What do you have there?” Dad said.
I held up a Richie Rich.
“Richie Rich and his girlfriends,” Dad read from the cover. Four girls were popping out of a big birthday cake.
“Those are all his girlfriends?” Dad said.
“Yep.”
“Lucky guy. Do you have any girlfriends?”
“No.”
“What about that girl from last night?”
My face flushed red.
“Yeah,” Dad teased. “You like that girl.”
“Dad, I have to go pee.”
He looked at his watch. “Hurry.”
I didn’t really have to go. I jogged into the restaurant anyway and went into the men’s room, locking the door behind me. Instead of doing business, I read the walls, which had been well marked by the lavatory’s many bored visitors. I could see that the management of the restaurant had made a few losing attempts at stemming the flow of bathroom innuendo. The graffiti apparently reached a critical mass, and there was no more sense in resisting. It wasn’t literature, of course, but I could see some merit in the knife-scratched words of someone who proudly called himself the Shithouse Poet:
West to East
East to West
Across This Great Land
Of Fruit and Grain
High and Low
From Door to Door
The Shithouse Poet Rides Again
I
WALKED OUT
of the drive-in doors and saw Dad talking to a long-haired man in tight jeans that frayed at the bell bottoms. Dad spotted me and pointed, and the man turned and waved. Dad jerked his thumb toward the back of the pickup, and the young guy threw his duffel bag into the box.
As I walked to the front of the truck, I got a close look at the guy, who was holding the door open for me. He was in his early twenties, I figured. His freckled face had been darkened by the sun and was ringed by a thin, scraggly, dirty-blond beard. He gave a cheerful smile and ushered me into the pickup.
“Hey, man,” he said. “I’m Brad.”
I acknowledged his handshake and said, “Hi.”
“This fella’s going to ride with us for a bit,” Dad said.
“OK.”
Brad piled in next to me, and I returned to a familiar position—wedged between two men on the pickup’s bench seat. The new guy smelled ripe.
We rolled out of town, skirting the stands of conifers on the western edge of Yellowstone National Park.
“Appreciate the lift, Mr.…”
“Quillen,” I said.
“Jim,” Dad said.
“Appreciate the lift, Jim.”
Dad nodded. I thumbed at my magazines idly, but I had lost interest in them. I looked up at our guest.
“Why are you hitchhiking?” I asked.
“I was working.”
“At what?” Dad said.
“I was with a road crew for a while, a flagger. Now I’m just trying to get back to Bozeman and figure out what’s next.”
“You looking for work?” Dad said.
“Yeah. Do you know of some?”
“Maybe.”
I didn’t like Brad at first. He had intruded on us and was trying too hard to be liked, plus he stank to high heaven. Soon, though, I was happy to have someone who would talk to me. He said he had dropped out of college in California the previous fall—“I missed Montana really bad,” he said—and had moved home and hooked a job with a road crew. It ended in West Yellowstone.
“What happened?” Dad asked.
“Didn’t get along with the boss. Personality conflict.”
Dad grunted. I knew he wouldn’t see such a thing in Brad’s favor. Dad had fired a whole lot of guys, and it had never been his fault. And personality conflicts? The only personality that counted was Dad’s.
Once I figured out that Brad would lend an ear, I spilled loads of chatter on him. I told him how my parents had met, that we had lived in Billings, that she had left. I told him about Jerry. I told him about Marie. I told him about my driving the pickup. On and on I talked, with no revelation too personal or trivial. My loneliness was such that any listener, even one desperate for a ride, represented a chance to unload.
“I don’t think your dad wants you giving out family secrets,” Brad said, sending a nervous glance in my father’s direction.
I turned and looked at Dad. His jaw clenched hard, but he said nothing. I’d put him in a hell of a spot. I knew he wanted me to pipe down, but I also knew he wouldn’t berate me in front of a stranger.
I turned away and started chattering at Brad again.
We reached Bozeman at dusk, and Dad pulled over at a gas station. Brad would have to cover the last stretch on his own.
Before Brad left, Dad said, “If you’re serious about work, we’ll be here a week from today, around ten in the morning. You can come with us back to Utah and work on my drilling crew.”
“Seriously?” Brad said.
“Serious as a heart attack.”
“Ten a.m. next Saturday. I’ll be here.”
“Make sure of it. If I get here and don’t see you, I’m gone. On this crew, you’re on time.”
“You can count on it.”
Brad gave a wave and started walking. Dad put the pickup in gear.
“About next week,” he said to me. “Your endless talking is over with. You got that?”
I averted my eyes.
Dad eased the Ford onto the road in front of the gas station, then barreled down the ramp onto I-90 eastbound. I rode in silence for ten minutes or so and then drifted off to sleep.
It was dark when I woke up. Dad had stopped the pickup, and I watched the headlights illuminate him as he fought with the lock on the steel gate to the ranch access road.
“You were dozing pretty good,” he said when he climbed back into the cab.
“We’re here?”
“We’re here.”
We bumped along on the pockmarked route, until I saw the ranch house. Every light in the place was on, and the beams cut gouges into the dark.
Dad eased the pickup into the driveway, and when he saw that Marie’s car wasn’t in its place, he punched the dashboard. I flinched.
“What the hell?” he said.
I sat still, waiting.
Dad sighed.
“Well, grab your things,” he said. “Let’s go in.”
I
CLUTCHED THE STEERING
wheel hard, relenting only after the pain hit my shoulders, and Dad sat indignant in the passenger seat of my rented Ford. We rode in silence those final few miles after the turn toward Split Rail. The well-worn state highway dropped behind us, and we climbed a sandstone butte, stacked layer upon layer like a wafer cookie. The deeper we pushed into the country, the angrier the road to Split Rail became.
“How long since you were out here?” I asked. As the curtain of silence fell, I exhaled.
“Long time.”
“I don’t remember the road being this bumpy.”
“People here don’t pay their taxes,” he said. I smiled. All my life, that had been his stock answer for anything that wasn’t right with the world. Roads in bad shape? People don’t pay their taxes. No emergency clinic in the neighborhood? People don’t pay their taxes. Dropouts plaguing the high school? People don’t pay their taxes. For everything I wished were different about the old man, I found comfort in just as many things that never changed.
We fell silent as I chewed on whether to push the question. I decided to risk it.
“No, seriously, how long since you’ve been here?”
I held my breath.
“It’s got to be three years, at least. Helen and I came out and saw Charley once in a while, but that didn’t last after she got sick.”
“Charley looks good.”
“Yeah.”
“He told me Jeff’s in prison. What happened there?”
“I don’t really know, Mitch. He doesn’t say, and I don’t pry. Maybe you shouldn’t, either.”
My ears singed. I doubled back to the topic of Split Rail.
“Three years? Who knows, maybe the place has changed.”
“Split Rail never changes,” Dad said.
I hadn’t been to Split Rail in twenty-eight years, not since that last summer with Dad. I soon found, though, that Dad was right. We rounded a bend and started down the back side of the butte, and Split Rail lay out before us, the same as I remembered her. The tripod water tower with the red top, the block letters spelling out “Split Rail.” The main drag that took in a gas station, the Livery bar, a small grocery, the farmers’ credit union, the Tin Cup diner, a grange hall, Split Rail School, and the weekly paper, the
Standard
. Of the four hundred or so residents, just a handful lived in a smattering of clapboard houses in town. The rest spread out across the country like cattle. Literally and figuratively, Split Rail sat at the end of the road. The dusty lanes that shot off the main strip led to farms and ranches of various shapes and sizes. Those who wanted to get goods to market would have to look south to Broadview and the railroad. For a night on the town or to load up on supplies, Billings was the ticket.
Living in Split Rail wasn’t easy, and from what I recalled of the people who called the place home, they liked it that way.
There were rewards for the hardy few, though. On a clear day, like the one gracing us, you could scan the horizon and see many mountain ranges—the Snowys, the Little Belts, the Castles, the Crazys, the Bulls. I took in the scene as I nudged the car into town.
“Beautiful,” I said.
“Yeah.” Dad sounded as awestruck as I did.
I cruised up the main drag until it petered out, then turned the car around and made another pass. The diner was still an hour from opening for dinner. We saw a couple of cars at the grocery. Other than that, Main Street kept quiet vigil.
“I’ve forgotten the way,” I said. “You’re going to have to give me some directions here.”
“The way to where?”
“To the ranch.”
“We’re not going to be able to get in there.”
“Let’s go take a look anyway.”
Dad didn’t fight me. As we passed the Standard, he pointed to his right, and I turned onto the gravel road. Soon enough, Split Rail proper was behind us, and we headed into the maze of ranch roads that ringed town. For the first time since we had started our little day trip, my stomach began churning.
I thought about Dad and his ranch, and how bittersweet it must have been for him to think of it, much less see it. Dad lost it in 1983, six years after he had bought it in a fit of joy and a cascade of cash.
Mom had predicted that ending a year or two earlier, though I don’t think she was particularly proud of her perspicacity. Her signal that things had turned badly for Dad came when my child support checks stopped in 1981. He ran late for a few months, rallied, and then stopped altogether. Mom and I badly needed the money, but she wasn’t the sort who would have withheld his right to see me over it. That mattered little; the plug had already been pulled on my visits. I had never come back this way.
Years after Dad lost the ranch, when Mom was gone and a bit of long-distance détente set in between him and me, we talked about it during one of our semiannual phone conversations, and Dad had sloughed it off as his decision. The ranch, at two sections and more than twelve hundred acres, was too big, he said. He wanted a life closer to town, he said, and so he sold out and moved to Billings. The public records I sought later suggested something different: bankruptcy. When the energy crash came, he had stayed on top of the ranch mortgage for as long as he could, trying to patch together a living with water-well work. Eventually, though, he succumbed to the wave of creditors who took his rig, his ranch, his boat, his life’s work. He limped out of Split Rail with a failing Ford and that old Holiday Rambler.
When we got the news about Jerry, Dad lived in a trailer park in Billings, subsisting on unemployment and odd jobs. Mom offered to buy him a plane ticket to come out for the funeral—a gesture she didn’t need to make and one she couldn’t afford. I told her as much, but she said she and Dad made Jerry together and that they ought to see him off together. In any case, her offer was moot. Dad declined. He might have sat there in squalor until the end of his days had he not met Helen, who lifted him up and gave him another shot at prosperity—or at least comfort.
I thought of all this as we bounced along the gravel road. It always seemed to me that Dad had gotten a fairer shake than any he had offered to the rest of us, but now I wasn’t so sure. We were coming up on the access road that led to the old ranch house, and I felt sorrow for this man who had once had so much and now had so little. Feeling sorry for him pissed me off. It wasn’t why I’d come.
The steel gate, put in by Dad to dissuade trespassers during his long absences, was locked up tight. We climbed out of the car and rested our arms on the gate as we started across a newly tilled field abutting it.
“Looks like they’re getting it ready for wheat planting,” Dad said.
“Yep.”
We looked a while longer.
“Do you miss it, Dad?”
“This?”
“Yeah.”
He chewed on the question for a few seconds. I wondered if I would be sorry that I asked.
“I do. Sometimes.”
“I think about this place a lot.”
“Why?”
“A lot of things happened here. This is the last place I ever saw Marie.”
“That’s no big loss.”
“True. But it happened just the same. Don’t you ever think about that stuff? Think back to what happened and wonder what might have been?”
Dad scoffed.
“Things work out the way they work out. I’ve told you that before, Mitch. You live with your head in the clouds. There isn’t anything that fixing the past can do for you now.”
I kicked at the ground and turned toward him.
“It’s not fixing I’m talking about. That’s not what I said. I’m talking about trying to figure it out, to see what can be learned. I guess it’s easier to be dismissive about the past if you don’t care. Well, I care.”
He wheeled around and faced me.
“It sounds like you’ve got something to say. Why don’t you unburden yourself and say it.”
Maybe it was that word,
unburden
. It was so similar to what Cindy had said before I left: “The man has some sort of burden.” Maybe it was the years of carrying my memories around, alternately trying to sort them out in my own head and fighting with myself over whether to drop them all on Dad and make him account for the things he had done. Whatever the case, I decided right there, on that dirt road, that if he wasn’t going to own up to whatever was bothering him, to this great mystery that had brought me out here away from my home and my family, I’d damn well spill my grief. Split Rail, to my mind, was a poetic scene for the confrontation.
“OK. I hate you for what you did to us, to Mom, to me, to Jerry. I hate you for a few weeks from twenty-eight years ago that no matter what I do, I can’t get out of my head. I hate that she’s gone and he’s gone, and you’re the one who’s left. I hate that for all the time I’ve carried this around, you won’t even see me, won’t let me in, won’t help me deal with this. Even now, you’re doing the same old thing. You’re jerking me around, because that’s what you fucking do.”
Dad quaked. He balled his fists. His eyes bore in on me.
“Are you fucking done?” he hissed.
“Not even close. I can’t forgive Marie. She drained you. But you deserved it. You deserved to lose what you lost.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you right back, Dad,” I said. “I can’t blame you for Mom, but I’m glad for every day she never had to see you, never had to be with you. I’m happy that when she died, she died free of you.”
“You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about,” Dad said. His body twitched.
I kept going.
“But Jerry,” I said, and I saw my father’s jaw drop, “you didn’t plant the bomb. But you killed him, just as sure as if you’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”
Dad swung a right hand that grazed my neck as I bobbed out of the way. I dropped my shoulders and rammed his midsection, and the breath blew out of him as his back hit the steel gate. He wrapped his right arm around my head and pounded my back with his left hand, but I ended that by wrestling him down. He moaned as his back hit the ground. I scrambled on top of him and pinned his shoulders under my knees. He kicked wildly but couldn’t dislodge me.
“You’re going to listen to me,” I said, spittle hitting Dad in the face. “Mom and I watched Jerry’s coffin come off that plane. We took him back home. We watched him get buried. Why couldn’t you have been there, you piece of shit? Why couldn’t you have owned up to what you did, to making him leave us? You’re such a coward. You have no idea how many times I’ve wished you were dead.”
“Fuck you,” Dad said.
“Fuck you back.”
He strained beneath me, his face burning crimson. I dropped my ass into his chest to further restrict him.
That’s when I heard the pump of the shotgun.
“What the hell is going on?”
I whipped my head around. A man stood on the other side of the gate, looking down the barrel at me.
“This is my dad,” I said.
“You ought to treat him better than that.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Nope, I don’t. Don’t want to. Also don’t want any trouble. So how about you climb off the old man, get into your car, and get out of here?”
I clambered to my feet. I offered Dad a hand, but he slapped it away. While he slowly rose, I dusted off.
The rancher kept the gun on us and watched as we made our way to the car and climbed in. I thought about telling the guy that Dad used to own his place, but that would have been even more absurd.
I fired up the car and we left.
Silence again carried us along, back to Split Rail and over the butte to the highway. The bumpiest part of the ride—and our day, I hoped—behind us, I said softly, “I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
“All of it. But mostly about the fight. Are you OK?”
“You can’t hurt me.”
I had no stomach for another go-round. Not now. What had Cindy told me? Don’t take the bait. What had I done? I took it.
Besides, he could hurt me. I could match him “fuck you” for “fuck you,” but that didn’t matter much when they were the only words we knew. I’d said it behind his back for years, and now I’d proved that I could say it to his face. A useless skill. Our words expended, we remained poles apart.
We slid past Broadview and the diner where we had planned to stop on the way home. Hunger wasn’t part of our reality now. Shared solitude was.
I stole glances to the side. Dad sat stoic and stared ahead, his face contorted in a fist.
“I’m trying to find a place where I fit in with you,” I said.
He kept his eyes and his voice low.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I lowered my own voice to a soothing tone. “I’m not talking about Mom here. I’m not talking about Jerry. I’m talking about you and me.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Your time. Your thoughts. Your ears. I think if, just once, I could talk to you about these things, I might be able to put them away for good.”
Dad at last looked up, and I swear to God, he was crying.
“Why does it matter now? What good will it do?”
“Because twenty-eight years of being quiet hasn’t worked. Do you ever think about Marie and what she took from you? Do you ever get mad about that?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, something was taken from me, a long time ago, and I’ve never been able to get it back. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“If I promise not to yell at you or to accuse, will you listen? Will you let me explain it?”
Dad rubbed his eyes.
“I’ll think about it.”
“When you’re ready, you let me know.”
“I wish you didn’t hate me so much, Mitch.”
The last of my energy spilled out, as if I’d been gut-punched.
“It’s not hate. I wish you could see that.”
He said nothing else. I stared at the coming bend in the road and waited for Billings to return to our sights.
“Jesus, Mitch. You actually hit him?”
“No, he hit me. I knocked him to the ground.”
“Oh, well, that’s something entirely different,” Cindy said.