I wonder where he is now. I wonder what he’s doing.
Three hours ago, he left, saying he’d be back for dinner but he wasn’t.
And then when I went in to wash up and heat up some spaghetti, I passed by the spare room and noticed that his .45 was gone from its holster.
When I’m finished with the sawdust, I go outside and stand in the Indian summer dusk, all rolling Iowa hills and bright early stars and the clean fast smell of the nearby creek, and the distant smoky smells of autumn in the piney hills to the east.
All the outbuildings stand in silhouette now against the dusk, the corn wagon parked by the silo reminding me of tomorrow’s chores.
There’s only one reason he’d take that goddamned gun of his to town. I’m sure glad Mom isn’t here. She tended to get real emotional about things. She would’ve had a real hard time with the past year, Dad’s loan going bad at the bank when the flood wiped us out, and the bank being forced to give Dad until three weeks ago to settle up his account or lose the farm. They gave him a little extra time but this morning he got a phone call telling him that the bank’d have to file papers to get the farm back and auction it off. (“It isn’t the same anymore, Verne,” I heard the banker Ken Ohlers tell him on the porch one afternoon, “we don’t own the friggin’ bank now — the boys in Minneapolis do, big goddamned banking conglomerate, and frankly they could give a shit about a bunch of Iowa farmers, you know, whether the farmers go out of business or not. They just don’t make enough on this kind of farm loan to hassle with it.”)
Then he went into town with his gun.
To the north now I see plumes of road dust, inside of which is a gray car that I recognize immediately.
As I expect, he turns right into our long gravel drive and shoots right up to the edge of the outbuildings. He has one of those long whip antennas on the back of his car, Sheriff Mike Rhodes does, giving his car a very official and menacing look.
He jumps out of the car almost before the motor stops running. In his left hand is a shotgun. He’s a beefy man of Dad’s age, fifty or so. In fact, they served in Nam together, and were the first two Nam vets to be allowed in the local VFW, some of the other vets from WWII and Korea feeling that Vietnam wasn’t an actual war. Fifty-nine thousand fucking Americans die there and it isn’t actually a war, as my dad used to say all the time.
One more thing about Sheriff Mike. He’s my godfather.
“Bobby, is your dad around here?” he says, coming at me like he’s going to hit me or something.
“He went into town. How come you got the shotgun, Mike?”
But he doesn’t answer my question. He just gets closer. He smells of sweat and aftershave. And he scares me. The same way my dad scares me sometimes when I sense how mad he is and how terrible it’s going to be when he lets go of it.
“Bobby, I need to know where your dad is.”
“He ain’t here. Honest, Mike.”
He takes my arm. His fingers hurt me. “Bobby, you listen to me.” He is still catching his breath, big man in khaki uniform, wide sweat rings under his arms. “Bobby, you got to think. Think like a normal person. You understand me?”
Sometimes people talk to me like that. They remember when I fell off the tractor when I was seven and how I was never the same. That’s what my mom always said. That poor Bobby, he was never the same. In school I didn’t read so good and sometimes people would tell me stuff but I couldn’t understand them no matter how hard I tried. And that’s when I’d always start crying. I guess I must have cried a lot before I quit school in the tenth grade because the kids, they called me “Buckets” and they always made fun of the way I cried.
“I’ll listen good, Mike. I promise.”
“You know Ken Ohlers down to the bank?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Your dad killed him about an hour ago. Shot him with that forty-five of his he used in Song Be that time.”
“Oh shit, Mike, I wish you wouldn’t’ve said that.”
“I’m sorry, Bobby, I had to tell you.”
“It makes me scared. You’re gonna hurt my dad now, aren’t you?”
“I don’t want to, Bobby. That’s why I need your help. You see him, you got to convince him to give himself up. There’s just you now, Bobby, your ma bein’ dead and all. You’re the only one he’ll listen to.”
“I’m scared, Mike. I’m real scared.”
And I start crying. Don’t want to. But can’t stop.
And Mike, he just looks kind of embarrassed for me, the way folks do when I start crying like this.
And then he comes up and slides his arm around me and gives me a little hug. Dad, he’ll never do that, not even when I cry. Says it doesn’t look right, two grown men hugging each other that way.
He digs in his pocket and takes out his handkerchief. Smells of mint. Mike always carries mints in his right khaki pocket.
“I have a mint, Mike?”
“You bet.”
I blow my nose in his handkerchief and try to hand it back to him but he nods for me to keep it and then he digs a mint out and drops it into the palm of my hand.
“You remember what I told you, Bobby?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You tell your dad to give himself up.”
“Uh-huh.”
“ ’Cause the mayor, he won’t mess around. He never liked your dad, anyway.”
“They gonna get the dogs out after him the way they did that time with that black guy?”
“Dogs’re already out.”
“And the helicopter?”
“Already out, too.”
“Scares me, that helicopter.”
“Don’t like it much myself. Hate ridin’ in the friggin’ thing.” He wipes sweat from his face. “He shows up around here, you give him that message, all right?”
“I will, Mike. I promise.”
I’m scared I’m going to start crying again.
He looks at me a long time and then gives me another quick hug. “I’m sorry this happened, Bobby.”
“I’ll bet he’s scared, too. I’m gonna say a prayer for him. Hail Mary. Just like Mom taught me.”
“I’ll check back later, Bobby.”
Then he’s trotting back to the big gray car that smells of road dust and oil and gasoline and heat. Inside, he kind of gives me a little wave and then he whips the car around so he can go back out headfirst, and then he’s lost again inside heavy rolling dust that’s silver now in the moonlight.
I go in the house. Upstairs, I go into their bedroom. Mom always kept a framed picture of Blessed Mother on her nightstand. She always said that Blessed Mother listens to boys like me, you know, boys that don’t seem just like other boys. I try not to cry as I pray. Hail Mary full of. Sometimes I get confused. Mom wrote it down for me a lot of times but I have a habit of losing things. Hail Mary full of grace. This time it goes all right. Or mostly all right. And when I’m done praying I light this little votive candle the priest gave her one time he came out here. The match smells of sulphur. The candle smells of wax. Red glow plays across the picture of the Blessed Mother. Hail Mary full of grace. I say a whole nother one. In case she didn’t hear it or something.
Then I’m outside, pretty sure where I’ll find Dad. There’s a line shack up in the hills. Dad and his brother used to play up there. His brother died in Nam. Poor goddamned bastard Dad always says whenever he gets drunk. Poor goddamned bastard. Uncle Win and Mom are buried up to Harrison Cemetery and a couple times a month in the warm season, Dad goes up there and puts flowers on their graves. In the winter months he just stands graveside and stares down at their grave markers, leaning over and brushing away the snow so that their names can be read real clear. He even went up there one night when it was ten below and nobody found him till dawn and Doc Hardy said it was a miracle him being exposed like that — should’ve died for Christ’s sake (how old Doc Hardy always talks) — and probably would have if he hadn’t been so drunk.