The Flicker of Old Dreams Page 4

  “Try to pick up that end,” he says.

  I lift it to my knees, but I doubt the two of us could haul it anywhere.

  “I saw that guy with the long hair on your porch last night,” he says. “I was worried I’d have to come over and drag him away.”

  “He just needed some paperwork,” I say.

  “You know who he is?”

  “Yes.”

  “He should know better than to pay a visit so late at night.”

  “I’m usually up late,” I say.

  “Well, I don’t trust him,” Fritz says. “Guy’s gone for decades. Comes back just in time to collect his mother’s money.”

  I set the rusted metal back on the ground.

  “What did you think of his outfit?” he asks. “Strange, wasn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  I hear the front door to my house shut, and I’m relieved to see Pop. He’s wearing what we both refer to as his happy suit—the green one he used in the commercial where he famously said, “Don’t be afraid to stop by Cramptons’—this is a happy place.”

  There is only one other funeral home reasonably close to Petroleum, and Pop fights hard for this small pool of customers. He believes that what people see of you during your off-hours, as you go about your business, is how they decide whether, in a time of need, they can rely on you.

  Pop raises a hand. “Fritz,” he says.

  And Fritz answers, “Allen.”

  My father crosses the street as the businessman with an easy smile and firm handshake. The men stare at the sign.

  “I’d like to put it in the Dumpster,” Fritz says.

  “Then that’s what we’ll do.”

  He puts on his gloves and crouches beside it, the green fabric of his suit straining.

  “Quite a wind last night,” Pop says.

  He’s good at using the information I give him.

  “Kept me up most of the night,” Fritz says. “That and seeing the younger brother on your porch.”

  “What’s this?”

  “He wants to start making plans for his mother,” I say, turning to Pop. “He needed the preplanning package.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t mention this to me.”

  “I still need to drop the papers off.”

  “Let me handle it,” Pop says.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Let me handle it,” he says sharply.

  “He’s right,” Fritz says. “Why have a thing to do with him if you don’t need to?”

  He sets his cane on the lawn. Now that there are three of us, we lift. The nearest Dumpster is behind our house, so we cross the street in shuffling steps, Fritz grimacing whenever he puts weight on the weak hip. Pop and I try to hold our ends high to take the burden.

  As we grunt and huff to the middle of the street, I see Robert leave his mother’s side door.

  Pop lifts his chin. “First time I’ve seen him grown up,” he says.

  “Who?” Fritz asks, looking over his shoulder, then he cries out. “Oh, goddamnit! I’ve got to put my end down.”

  We lower the sign and Fritz grabs one of his wrists and squeezes.

  “Are you hurt?” Pop asks.

  Fritz stares at his glove. A metal sliver has cut through it.

  Robert drives slowly past.

  “Hey!” Fritz shouts. “Can’t you see!”

  “He wasn’t going to hit us,” I say.

  Fritz takes off his glove and examines his finger.

  Pop leans over for a look. “Any metal in there?”

  “I don’t know. If there is, I ought to send him the medical bill.”

  “You need a doctor?” Pop asks.

  “No, I don’t have time for that.”

  Our town has never had a hospital, but until three years ago, we had a doctor who could treat a mild snake bite, manage diabetes, and at least stabilize a broken bone before sending you on a two hour drive to get proper help. Most don’t bother about the little stuff anymore.

  “I don’t know how that guy can show his face here again,” Fritz says as if Robert had inserted the metal splinter himself.

  “Well,” says Pop, “he ought to say good-bye to his mother.”

  We help Fritz to our lawn and set him down gently, adjusting our grip each time we see him wince.

  “Comes all the way here,” Fritz says. “And he can’t pick up a piece of trash or wait for people to get out of the road before he practically runs them over.”

  I sit beside him.

  “And look at that,” he says.

  The curtains open to the Goldens’ living room, and there is Doris, setting up her easel, tubes in her nose to help her breathe. Most neighbors cover their windows in tinfoil and towels to insulate during the cold weather, but Doris needs the light to paint.

  “You say he’s here to look after his mother,” Fritz says. “But he’s left her all alone.”

  “I’m sure she’s all right painting by herself,” Pop says.

  “All I know is Doris has been through enough.”

  “She has indeed.”

  Fritz studies his palm.

  “Can I get you some tweezers?” Pop asks.

  “I’ve almost got it.”

  Pop stands up, dusts off the seat of his pants, and walks toward the sign in the road.

  “I’ll help,” I say.

  “Nope. I’ll just drag it.”

  This is the image my father loves. The man from the commercial right there in the road helping an elderly neighbor. The kind of man you’d like to do business with. He needs but won’t accept my help, so I simply watch Doris in her window.

  Pop has told me about her hobby, how she’s very taken with the former president, the cute one, as she calls him, who paints self-portraits. Inspired by him, Mrs. Golden bought art supplies.

  “I’ve never understood that hobby,” Fritz says. “She showed me some of her paintings and they didn’t look anything like her. If you want a picture of yourself, it’ll come out better with a camera.”

  “Maybe she likes the feel of a paintbrush in her hands.”

  “I just don’t see the point of it,” he says. “We all have mirrors.”

  I watch my father, face reddening, as he hauls the sign closer.

  “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter anymore,” I say. “Now she paints by numbers.”

  Fritz nods his head slowly as if this idea makes better sense. There’s no staring at a blank canvas, no wondering what color to choose or where to put it. It’s all there for you: one, two, three.

  I’m sorry Doris gave up on her self-portraits. She would make a great subject for a painting with her long nose that tilts hard to the right and her pale green housedress covered with daisies. I notice the resemblance now, how Robert has the same delicate features, the long, narrow nose, though his mother’s looks Old World with a bulge you only see from the side and a crook you only see from the front. They share long slender fingers, a slim frame. I know from the game Eddie that the younger brother was derided for being small boned. Boys here are praised for being tall, broad shouldered, with a toughness about them.

  The sign gouges the road as Pop walks backward, heaving it over the curb so forcefully he nearly slips. Once he lets it go, he straightens again, face moist. There’s a rust stain on one of the pant legs.

  “Well,” he says, as if he isn’t struggling to catch his breath, “let’s get you up on your feet.”

  My father links arms with Fritz at the elbow, and I do the same. I’m glad he stopped talking. Sometimes, the more people talk, the more removed I feel. It’s early morning and I’m already tired of the day.

  We walk Fritz to his side of the street. Pop hands him his cane and then pulls a large plastic bag from each pocket. I take one and we set off through town, Pop a little winded but walking with his only-in-public posture. I turn to look at the rusted sign lying across the lawn, our problem now.

  4

  We live below a flat-topped wall of sandstone,
known as the rimrocks. Its beige hillside is painted with a giant letter P, fifteen feet tall. Pop and I set out toward Main Street, the one paved road in town. None of the streets have signs or official names; there are just a shared set of reference points: Main Street, Church Street, Railroad Street, Crick Road, Rimrock Lane, and our street, Crooked Hill Road, which most would recognize as crooked but not a hill.

  Just about everyone who hasn’t already left for work is out picking up after the storm, not concerned with whose trash or whose property it is. They simply pick up each piece as they come to it. We wave or nod as we pass. Sometimes my hair blows so completely over my face that the person I’m acknowledging is a mystery to me.

  In ten minutes you can pass every building in town—small, abandoned homes beside lived-in homes, trailers up on cinder blocks, everything leaning away from the wind. From one street to the next are yellowed signs that say for sale by owner, but there are no buyers.

  The storefronts are clustered in one block. You can count the surviving businesses on your fingers, even if, like many here, you have fewer than five on each hand. Several stores are padlocked, their windows murky, and paint so faded only an idea of the original color remains. What you can read of the old signs reminds you that our town once had a First Security Bank, Jim’s Feed and Farm Supply, and Northwest Hardware & Ranch. Both pumps have been removed from the old gas station, the holes filled with cement.

  We’re used to the rumor that Petroleum will be a ghost town before long. This doubt in our future comes most regularly from the town of Agate (or Maggot, as the kids from Petroleum High School call it when the teams compete). Two hours to the west, Agate boasts a forest of ponderosa pines, an Albertson’s grocery, a Wagon Wheel drive-through, and a movie theater that shows two films at a time.

  Their students love to tease ours because so few go on to college. But how many kids from Agate know how to work tractors, buck rakes, graders, and D-8 Cats? How many can whitewash barns, set up irrigation systems, run traplines, lift hay bales, pull calves, split wood, and budget the feeding and grazing of livestock even with all the surprises in the weather? When you work on a ranch, one day you’re a veterinarian, the next a construction worker, the next a mechanic, fixing tractors and plows and loaders because you don’t have time to wait for someone to come out and do it for you.

  Sometimes, you’ll overhear a kid from Agate, here for a basketball game, suggest, “Let’s find a good place to smoke.” It can be hard to tell which houses are empty and which are still lived in, and I have to admit there is some delight in watching one of those kids walk up to a building half swallowed by the earth, press his face to the window, only to find the family who lives there staring back. We are still here, their stares tell him. The message is the same when, each spring, the high school students climb to the giant letter P and give it a fresh coat of white paint. We are still here.

  I grab a handful of newspaper pages that have collected along the fence outside the municipal pool. Pop stretches for a plastic bag caught in a tree when he spots Mr. Vinter unlocking his grocery store.

  “Make sure you wave,” my father whispers to me. “These are all future customers.”

  My father gives a hearty good morning. He moves through town with the pride of a businessman providing a crucial service. He gained a lot of respect for taking over the town’s funeral home after the previous owner died. Until then, he had worked at the hardware store. But he and the older residents remembered the days when Petroleum didn’t have a funeral home, when families from this and surrounding rural communities struggled to get their dead to the nearest mortician while the body was still in good shape.

  Many tried carting bodies curled into backseats or covered with tarps in the open beds of pickups. They packed them in ice, sometimes frozen vegetables. In good weather, the trip to the nearest funeral home took a couple of hours. The body, once embalmed, then had to make that same trip back. Many, unwilling to make this journey, opted to host viewings of dead loved ones in their homes, but found that the logistics of keeping a body fresh and presentable interfered with their first order of business, mourning.

  My father stepped in, to the relief and surprise of many. He’d never imagined himself as a funeral director, but why not? From the stories I’ve gathered, he and my mother had almost a sense of humor about what they were taking on, howling as they cleaned the equipment that had been left in the basement and sold to them for cheap. He kept his day job, and for two years studied in the evening and apprenticed at the Agate funeral home on weekends. By the end, he was licensed with a skill no one else had or wanted.

  As we turn onto Church Street, I hear the crackle and nattering of a radio show. Only two stations have signals that reach all the way to town—talk radio, which airs the livestock auctions, and all-request country music. Pastor Lundy, who lives and preaches in the A-frame church, turns up the volume at the first strums of an acoustic guitar.

  “Morning, Cramptons,” he calls.

  He lifts a bucket of ash and carries it to the far side of the lawn, where he tips it over. A wagon on his porch is filled with white patties of dried manure, a cheap alternative to firewood. The cow chips are quick-burning and the fine ash gets all over the drapes, but it’s a source of fuel that won’t likely run out. We all have to make an extra effort during these tough times—adding a little water to the milk, a little vegetable oil to the gasoline. Everyone gets by as they can.

  My father talks with him awhile about last night’s wind and how much they both like the George Strait song playing on the radio.

  “How is work with your patients, Mary?” the pastor asks.

  “We don’t actually call them patients when they’re dead,” I say, squeezing the trash bag closed.

  “Mary,” my father says quietly.

  “I’ve got to finish up Mr. Mosley when I get home,” I say, trying, for my father’s sake, to chat a bit longer. “I think I’ll have to pad his chest with something so he doesn’t look so flat in his shirt.”

  “His burial’s today?” the pastor asks, his fingers drumming against the bucket.

  “This evening,” I say. “On his ranch.”

  Pop whispers, “Come closer, Mary. Don’t stay way back there.”

  But I’ve never enjoyed socializing. I don’t know why Pop insists I have more of these throwaway conversations when they only make the day feel slow and interrupted. I step on a cardboard box, pretending not to hear, then move on to the deserted lot next door.

  This yard alone will fill my trash bag. Not only is there garbage everywhere, but there’s a mattress that’s been sitting right in the middle of the lawn for years, like the family couldn’t leave fast enough. No one bothered to move it.

  Sometimes I think of the town the way I think of Mr. Mosley pumped full of pink fluid. We want to fool ourselves. Pretend that our community is thriving. For all the effort neighbors put into keeping up the town, it seems that one roof tile and windowpane at a time is not worth replacing. Piece by piece, Petroleum is crumbling away. Even the asphalt on our town’s one paved road is cracked, full of shallow craters, and will soon return to dirt.

  I spot a couple of plastic grocery bags and head toward them, but lose my footing when one boot sinks into the ground. Damn gophers.

  Through my pant leg, I feel the cold, damp walls of the hole. I put my hands out to push myself up and notice a funny smell and the bones of a mouse. Just as my heart starts to race, I feel my father and the pastor hauling me away from the hole, their gloved hands squeezing hard under my armpits.

  “Back up a little more before you put her down,” says Pop.

  “I should have known those rattlers would come back,” the pastor says.

  Staring back at where I’d fallen, I realize how close I’ve come to waking a den of drowsy snakes.

  “I tried flushing that hole out with ammonia last year,” the pastor says. “I’ll get someone on it this time.”

  “Are you all right, Mary?”
Pop asks.

  I’m thinking of the rattlers, how they wrap themselves into one big ball to keep warm.

  “My armpits are gonna hurt awhile,” I say.

  “Then you’re all right.”

  He helps me up as the school bus chugs past. Some say the obese driver everyone knows as Slim looks like another species, with his thick neck and lashless eyes. His hair is in patches as if he’s cut it himself, simply grabbing handfuls and scissoring where he can reach. It’s his job to drive students from outlying towns, who leave home while it’s dark and return when it’s dark again. Ours is the closest school for them, despite the long trek.

  These towns in our county depend on the services each offers—Breadroot for its ranchers’ co-op; Kestrel for its two-room medical clinic, though it’s been closed since Doctor Fischer died; Lewis Gap, a town of only nineteen people, for its sheepherders; and Petroleum, the largest, for our hotel, post office, K–12 school, and funeral home.

  This is how our cluster of communities is able to function so far from the bigger towns—we share basic services. And borrowing students from these surrounding towns allows Petroleum to have enough bodies for a basketball team and a senior class.

  At the sound of the school bell, children walk from houses and trailers and alleys, wearing jeans, scuffed cowboy boots, and hand-me-down coats. They take their time, kicking at the dirt road. As my father tells them good morning, I wonder which of the boys rode their bikes so close last night.

  “My bag’s full,” I tell Pop once they’ve passed.

  He raises his to show me he’s run out of room, too. We lumber back, fat trash bags knocking against our legs.

  “I wish you’d talk more with the neighbors,” he says. “Maybe not so much about work, but other things, the weather.”

  “Pop, sometimes . . .”

  “I know what you’re going to say.”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m overprotective,” he says. “I can’t help it. I’ve always had to do the work of two.”

  He’s speaking of my mother, who died giving birth to me.

  “I’m thirty,” I remind him.