Caspar looked like a short Mark Twain, which is maybe why I don’t care for Huckleberry Finn. He did a lot of things I hated to Lydia on purpose and a lot of things I hated to me accidentally, but his one unforgivable sin was being short. That stuff is hereditary as hell.
Caspar had a gray hearing aid that he kept turned down except for when he was talking, and he wore a white suit year round, Southern as all get out. Every day, he stuck a fresh yellow mum in his lapel. I used to think the mum had something to do with Me Maw and he’d once had a heart, but Lydia said it was part of some spiffy self-image thing, and if Caspar ever had a heart, he sure wouldn’t advertise the fact.
The day we left Greensboro, after these ape-men-redneck movers piled all our stuff in a truck and went away, Caspar came out on the porch to deliver some sort of farewell to the family. Lydia was sitting sideways in the porch swing, reading Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers, and painting her fingernails black. I read the book on the drive west and decided not to ride any horses. The black fingernail polish was a Lydia statement to Caspar, but he missed it.
I was on the plank floor sorting baseball cards. It was late in the summer and there’d been a rash of trades before the final pennant drive, which meant I had all kinds of guys in the wrong place. Willie Mays had collapsed in the batter’s box the day before we left so his card was out on top.
Caspar drew himself up into what passed for posture. He fingered his hearing aid and gave out a little snort. “The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation.”
I looked at Lydia who shrugged. “You been in the library again, Daddy?”
He hovered over me, looking like an old man pretending to be an even older man. “Do you know why I’m sending you to northwest Wyoming?”
I stared up into his permanently black fingernails. No matter how much Caspar played at Southern gentility, carbon in the cuticles would forever show his roots. “Because Lydia messed up again.”
Lydia coughed real ladylike into her hand. Casper wasted a glare on her before going on. “Because I measured in the Rand Atlas and Jackson Hole is farther from a major baseball team than any other spot in the country.”
“Oh.”
“And you are leaving those cards here.”
“Caspar.”
“There will be no discussion. In Wyoming you are to mature into a gentleman. You will think carbon paper, not baseball.”
Lydia almost stood up to him. “Daddy, don’t take it out on Sam. He’s innocent.”
The old goat actually hooked his thumbs under his suspenders. “Nothing you touch is innocent. One mistake out there and he goes to Culver Military Academy. Are the implications clear?”
“Yes, your daddyship.”
Caspar stared down at me. “Carbon paper, Sam. The country turns on carbon paper. Nothing else matters to you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bring your cards to the basement.”
When Caspar opened the screen door, I snuck Willie Mays and Gil Hodges into my socks. They’re the only two I saved. Caspar incinerated every other player from 1958 through 1963 in the basement coal stove. And he made me watch.
“Gentlemen, on punts we have two men we pop free for the block. First one’s the outside rusher, that’s you, Callahan. Line up on the side of the line that the kicker’s kicking foot is on. Got that?”
I nodded. No reason to go into the Yes Sir mentality until I had to.
“You have a second and a half to move from here to a spot two feet in front of the kicker, and you’re being blocked one-on-one so there’s no time for anything fancy. Just get around the guy and fly.”
Practice hadn’t been the irritating grunt I’d expected, mainly due to the pleasant temp. My one shot at September football in Carolina came to drippy sweat and stomach cramps followed by heat prostration and first aid from the student trainer. Here, I did the jumping jacks, touch the toes, ran through a few old tires, and did okay.
Thank God nobody had loads of gung-hohood. I figure Stebbins recruited the whole team the way he got me. We were hundreds of miles from a decent college team and, what with limited TV exposure, there was little instilled pigskin fanaticism. A couple guys tried rolling blocks, but I stepped aside and they ate dirt. Neither one seemed to take it personally.
“Our other punt blocker will be Schmidt here. You line up at middle linebacker. Talbot, you cross-block their guard, blow his ass down the line. Then Schmidt comes through the hole.”
Why is it coaches use first names in class like normal teachers and last names on the field? And who started this gentlemen jive? Coaches and cops love to call people they don’t like gentlemen.
We lined up and shuffled through four or five punts without using the ball. A kid named Skipper O’Brien stood across the line with his elbows up. I let him bump me a time or two, figuring the poor schlock’s ego needed a buildup. He had red hair and an overbite you could open a can with. Red-headed children tend to feel inferior.
When it came to the real drill, our punter was so awful that Stebbins did the kicking himself. He said, “Yup, yup, yup,” and everybody took off. I faked O’Brien’s jock to the outside and zipped right up the middle. The punt boomed off Stebbins’s left foot, traveled maybe nine inches and caught me dead in the lungs.
I rolled over and over, wound up armadilloed on my back. Try breathing when you can’t. It’s a panic deal. I couldn’t see squat, but I could hear, and I felt someone pull me off the ground an inch by a belt loop, then lower me again. God knows why.
Stebbins’s voice floated in. “Nice block, Callahan. Get up, we’ll try it again.”
My mouth and nose felt sealed in Saran Wrap. The thing lasted forever.
More voices. “Think he’ll die?”
“Doubt it.”
“He don’t look like a nigger.”
“His mom tried to pick up Ft. Worth at the White Deck last night.”
“I heard it other way around.”
A toe poked me in the ribs. “He’s turning blue.”
“Maybe the nigger comes out when he’s hurt.”
Stebbins’s voice again: “He’s no nigger, he’s not fast enough.”
I pretended to pass out.
I got the wind knocked out of me one other time. In North Carolina, I was little, six or seven, and Lydia and I were playing seesaw. She had to scoot way up near the middle so our weights sort of balanced out. It was fun because the air was nice that day and Lydia didn’t play outdoors stuff with me too often. About all I could ever get out of her was an occasional game of crazy 8s.
So I’m going up and down, up and down, admiring to myself how pretty Lydia is down the board from me. She had on a gray sleeveless shirt and white shorts. She’d spread a magazine out on the board in front of her so she could amuse herself and me at the same time. Every now and then she’d raise her face to swipe the bangs off her forehead, and she smiled at me kind of absentmindedly, as if she’d forgotten I was there.
Then, while I’m way up a mile high on top of the world, the damn coach of some swim team walks up in his stretchy trunks and rubber thongs. Had a blue whistle on a cord around his neck. I hate coaches.
He cocked his head to one side and banged on the skull bone over his right ear. “Does your little brother know how to swim?”
Lydia marked her spot in the magazine with her finger and turned to stare at the bare-chested coach.
He switched sides of the head and banged some more. “Every young man should know how to swim. It is vital to his safety and the safety of his loved ones.”
Lydia looked up the board at me. “Sam, do you know how to swim?”
“No.” I wasn’t happy about being passed off as a little brother.
She turned to the coach. “No.”
“I could teach the little snapper. Maybe you and me should walk over to the ice cream stand and discuss it. My treat, I’ll even stand the boy a single cone.”
Lydia stared at him a few seconds more, just enough to cause him to stop banging on the sides of his head, then she said, “I do not receive gentlemen without the decency to cover their repellent chest mange,” and dignified as all get out, she swung her right leg across the board and got off the seesaw. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t breathe for five minutes or stop crying for an hour, not until the stupid swimmer went away.
I was depressed that fall. I’d never been depressed to the point where I knew it before. Depression is like a headache or true love or any of those indefinable concepts. If you’ve never been there, you don’t know what it’s like until you’re too far in to stop the process.
But I remember coming home from football practice to entire evenings on the couch next to Lydia, neither of us talking or reading or anything. We’d just sit with our eyes glazed, waiting for 10:30.
I figured out the stove deal so we ate frozen pizzas three nights a week and at the White Deck the other four. That’s something of an exaggeration. Lydia bought rib eyes every now and then, and I got good with Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in a box. Some Sundays we drove to Jackson for late breakfast at the Wort Hotel.
So far as I can tell, Lydia made good on the emotional catatonia threat. She went a good month without speaking to a human other than me and Dot. Even with Dot, Lydia took to pointing at things on the menu or going through me.
“Tell her this hamburger is overcooked. Your sneakers have more flavor.”
I turned to Dot and shrugged.
Dot laughed like we were perfectly pleasant folks making a joke. She had nifty dimples. I had a crush on her that wouldn’t let go, and Lydia’s attitude caused me some embarrassment.
Once when Lydia left me the money to pay and fluffed out the door, I explained things to Dot at the cash register.
“My mom’s kind of high-strung. She doesn’t mean anything personal.”
Dot looked sad for the first time. “No one should apologize for their mother,” she said. “All moms are doing the best they can.”
“Are you sure?”
A guy did try to talk to us once. Big, wide fella with a grin, he came slamming through the door and walked straight toward our table, pulled a chair over and straddled it backward with his hands across the top slat. The middle finger on his right hand was missing two joints.
He held the stub out to me. “Look.”
I looked but didn’t see anything other than a short finger. Lydia didn’t look. “It’s short,” I said.
“Look at the tip.”
I shrugged. Seemed like a fingertip to me.
“I lost it in a chain saw and at the hospital they took a skin graft off this arm,” he showed me a scar on his left arm, “and stuck it over the tip.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Look close and see.”
I finally figured out that he meant he didn’t have a fingerprint so he could commit crimes. I looked so I could say, “Gee, no fingerprint,” but then I saw all this wiry hair.
“Your fingertip’s hairy.”
The big lug’s grin showed a flashy gold tooth. “Never seen anything like it, huh? Look, ma’am.” He stuck the finger between Lydia’s face and her food. I couldn’t believe it, the guy had his hand in a pornographic position three inches from her nose, and she was speechless. Normally, Lydia practically spit at anyone who called her “ma’am.”
“They shaved the skin off my arm before grafting it, but the hair all grew back. Ever see anything like that?”
He turned his hand sideways into the handshake position. “Ft. Worth Jones, ma’am. I’m more than pleased to meet you.”
Lydia stared at the hand a moment, then up at the guy’s expansive face.
I said, “I heard your name at football practice.”
The gold tooth flashed in the fluorescent light. “Hope they said something good.”
“How do you spell Fort?”
He looked perplexed by the question. “F-T period. Like the town.”
“Oh.”
He still had his hand out. “Saturday night’s movie night at the VFW, little lady. The Inspector General. I’d be pleased if you’d accompany me.”
I was sure “little lady” would spark a Lydia volcano, but nothing happened. She just sat there. My theory is Ft. Worth was so far from her frame of reference that Lydia couldn’t see him.
Ft. Worth looked at me. “Is she okay?”
“Medication.”
He stared intently at Lydia’s eyes. “Yeah. Would you tell her I dropped by.”
I nodded.
The tall stranger stepped through the White Deck screen door and strode to the counter. “Black coffee and rare beefsteak.”
When Dot brought out the stranger’s supper, she refilled his coffee cup. “What brings you to town, stranger?”
“Passing through.”
Dot was amazed at his calmness. “Honey, nobody passes through GroVont. Where you headed?”
“Paris-France.” The stranger paused to light a Cuban cigar. “Want to come along?”
Dot looked around to see to whom the stranger was speaking. “You want me to run away to Paris-France?”
“Your considerable beauty and charm are wasted in this king-hell hole. I want to uncover your light and let it shine on the world.”
“But I’m overweight.”
The stranger studied Dot from her white sneakers to her teased hair. “I like ’em with meat.”
As Dot took off her apron and threw her order book in the trashy she asked, “What’s your line, mister?”
“I’m God’s gift to waitresses.”
“And what’s your name?”
“Callahan, ma’am. Sam Callahan.”
I actually dragged Lydia to a football game. We were playing Victor, Idaho, and I started at split end—even caught a pass, a first for me and the team.
The rodeo grounds east of town had bleachers, but the football field didn’t—says something about local priorities. The football field was a flat spot on the valley floor cleared of sagebrush and marked off with lime. Probably the only playing field in America completely surrounded by national park. Spectators backed their trucks up to the sidelines and sat on tailgates, a few even had strap-back lawn chairs. Almost everyone had access to a cooler.
Maurey Pierce was one of the cheerleaders. They wore these really short, considering the temperature, pleated white skirts and red turtleneck sweaters with gv over what would have been the right breast if any of them had had breasts. I took the color scheme as a joke because our football uniforms were tan and brown, like the hills behind the school. We were in camouflage.
As the team ran onto the field, the cheerleaders jumped up and bent their knees and yelled “Go, Badgers,” our nickname, and threw their pom-poms in the air. Maurey’s pom-pom landed right in front of me and I stepped on it on purpose,
At the bench, as the guys milled around, hitting each other in the shoulder pads and growling, I checked back to see Maurey standing there with a muddy pom-pom in her right hand and a godawful look on her face. Ugly, mean. I guess nobody’d ever stepped on anything of hers before. Her legs were pretty, but the knees stuck in a little.
Lydia parked Caspar’s ’62 Olds on the south 10-yard marker, way off from everyone else, and kept the engine running and the heater on. I knew that was a mistake, but I was so psyched about my mom being out in front of the whole town, I forgot. You see, this big cottonwood tree stood off that end zone, the only decent-sized tree anywhere near school.
Toward the end of the first quarter, a steady stream of men and boys started drifting up to the cottonwood, then back past the Olds and onto their trucks, lawn chairs, and coolers. Practically every guy waved to Lydia, coming and going.
I caught my pass on the last play of the first half. We were behind, 24-zip with nothing to lose, so Stebbins called for the Hail Mary bomb. Jimmy Crandall, the quarterback, figured out what he meant and showed the rest of us with a stick in the dirt.
The play involves both receivers and all three running backs splitting off to the right side of the line and when Jimmy goes “Yup, yup,” we take off hell-bent for downfield, he throws the ball as far as he can, and we see what happens from there.
Jimmy “yupped” and everybody took off but me. I’d watched the Crandall kid throw in practice. Had an arm like a broomstick. So our receivers and all their defenders charge off forty yards downfield and Jimmy launches this wounded duck that wobbles about twelve yards to where I’m waiting—hits me in both hands and the chest, I hang on, the crowd goes wild. About ten potato heads jumped on me, but I didn’t fumble and we got our first first down of the half, what would prove to be the only first down of the game.
Ft. Worth and a bunch of those White Deck hoodlums leapt in their trucks and honked horns. Maybe it was sarcasm, hell, I don’t know. But I was proud. None of those kids who ate at home every night had caught a pass.
I played it superior when I left the field and passed the cheerleaders, but I snuck a quick glance and a couple of them were watching me. Women always love a football star. Maurey wasn’t one of the couple, she was deep in her own superior routine.
I jogged over to the Olds and knocked on the window until Lydia rolled it down. She had the rearview mirror cocked off sideways.
“You see me catch that pass?” I asked.
“What?” Her eyes were stuck on the mirror. A bunch of high school boys waved at her as they walked behind the car toward the cottonwood. “You know what that tree is?” Lydia asked me.
I glanced over and got embarrassed. “It’s the pee tree.”
“Have you ever used it?”
“A few times during practice.”
Lydia’s eyes finally came back to look at me. They held that reckless Carolina glitter that I’d both loved and feared before our drive west, before the post-10:30 doldrums set in all day. “Sam, honey bunny, I believe I’ve seen every penis in GroVont.”
I stood up straight and looked across the top of the Olds to the pee tree. It was disgusting. Nobody tried to cup with their hands or anything. And they knew too. The high school boys were nudging each other and giggling and sneaking leers our way.
I said, “I call that sick.”
Lydia smiled as she gazed back into the crooked mirror. “I call that hospitality.”
The next day, Saturday, it started snowing. I wasn’t total hick enough to run into the street hollering, “Jeeze Louise, what’s this white stuff?” I’d seen snow in Carolina, just not a whole lot. It was still a cold novelty. We both kept it casual—“Look outside, honey bunny, Jack Frost came last night”—but, underneath, Lydia and I were pretty excited.
She stared out the window the same old way, right foot on the sill, Dr Pepper in one hand, cigarette in the other, but something had changed. She wasn’t staring into the void or herself or wherever Lydia went when she did her lost-in-space number. She was looking out the window.
“What’re those bushes over there?” She pointed with her cigarette across the street behind old Soapley’s trailer.
“That’s sagebrush.”
“Kind of pretty with the snow on it.”
We’d been living in a sagebrush ocean for two months. Something, either the snow or the penis parade, had opened the connection between Lydia’s eyes and her brain.
“You ever notice those mountains the other side of town?”
“It’s the Tetons, Lydia. We live smack in the middle of Grand Teton Park.”
“I knew that.” Her lips had a near smile, as if she remembered something. Which made me nervous. I wanted Mom to wake up, sure; it’s no fun coming home to an emotional slug, but Lydia awake could be a powerful force. The difference between a passive and an aggressive Lydia was like the difference between mononucleosis and a hurricane.
I ripped off Lydia’s new book, Catch-22, and rode my bike down to the White Deck. The snow was only an inch or so deep, but I still hit a slush spot and crashed the bike. Right out in front of Dupree’s Art Gallery, I slid sideways under a parked GMC. Afforded Dougie Dupree no end of entertainment. I got an earful of cold mud and the right half of my clothes wet. Bent my handlebars.
Added to all that indignity, Dot wasn’t even working. Some prissy little bopper hardly older than me bounced over and took my order for peach cobbler and coffee. Only other customers in the joint were two slack-cheeked retirees, named Bill and Oly, arguing over a fish they didn’t catch in 1943.
“It was a brown, didn’t you see the jump it made.”
“Brookie. Biggest damn brookie anyone around here ever saw. Fought like hell when she hit my gray ghost, but she didn’t jump. Brookies don’t jump.”
“Weren’t a ghost. Was renegade you rubbed worm all over.” I’d hoped Dot would see me reading this fabulously sophisticated novel full of sex and rebellion and think I was interesting. Instead, I dumped four spoons of sugar and a load of cream in the coffee and sat there with Catch-22 propped open by the napkin box, staring out the window.
Not that the book wasn’t a kick. It was the first time I realized death and despair can be funny, depending on how you look at it. All comedy, from I Love Lucy to The Taming of the Shrew, would be sad if it were true. This idea would eventually grow into my philosophical outlook on life.
But snow was more important than outlooks that day. Since then, an incredible amount of my time has been spent looking at snow, playing in snow, fighting with snow. Like true love, it has caused me hordes of pleasure, pain, and anxiety. From the White Deck window, it appeared soft and harmless. Lydia might seem soft and harmless, seen through a window. Goes to show you.
Two yards either way and Sam Callahan would have missed the dying trapper. As it was, Sam heard the low moan, “Diphtheria,” just before he stumbled over a frozen lump in the blizzard.
“Diphtheria,” it said again.
Sam brushed snow crystals off the old man’s face and held the frozen body in his arms without doing anything that might be misconstrued as latent homosexuality. “What’s that, old-timer?”
The man coughed for several minutes, then spoke. “There’s diphtheria in Yellowknife.”
“I’m not afraid of sickness.”
The dying man’s eyes were frozen open so he couldn’t blink. “The serum. I have the serum in my pack. Those settlers won’t die if they get the serum.”
Sam made his decision. “I will take the serum to Yellowknife.”
“But the blizzard. No one could make it through this blizzard.”
“I’ll make it, or I’ll die trying.”
The old man’s lower lip quivered. “I did,” he whispered, then he was dead.
Maurey Pierce banged through the door followed by LaNell and LaDell Smith, the twins all giggles and flouncing curly hair. Maurey stopped when she saw me and did a narrowing-of-the-eyes number. I narrowed mine right back. Overt hostility hadn’t erupted in the first two and a half months of our relationship. I’d call it extreme wariness, at least on my part. Maurey seemed to regard me as a very large, but non-threatening bug.
She dropped into the next booth with her back to me. LaNell and LaDell made a minor scene on who had to sit on the inside. LaNell and LaDell are the kind of twins whose clothes will match their entire lives. From the back, they’re kind of cute in a narrow-shoulders, big-hips fashion, but they both squint up their eyes like they just put in new contact lenses and haven’t gotten used to them yet.
I’m afraid God only passed out one brain between them.
At first, they made a major point of ignoring me. They all ordered hamburgers with Pepsi and went into this drawn-out debate on Liz Taylor’s treatment of Eddie Fisher. Maurey defended Liz. “Maybe she and Richard are in love,” which outraged the twins no end.
They cited Debbie Reynolds and Eddie’s mother and Burton’s wife Sybil or Sydney or something. I didn’t give a hoot and I don’t think Maurey did either. Nothing that happened to anyone more than fifty miles away could possibly affect GroVont, Wyoming, so it seemed stupid to worry about Liz and Eddie.
Then the bopper waitress, whose name was Laurie, brought me a coffee heater. “Anything else?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
I should never have spoken. Or maybe they’d exhausted Liz talk and they’d have turned on me anyway. LaNell’s voice was comparable to cutting a cardboard box with a butter knife. “Hey, Sam, don’t you know you’re too young to drink coffee.”
I gave her the mystery smile I’d been working on just in case I ever found myself in a Western poker parlor.
LaDell came in next. “Your mother should tell you not to button the top button on that kind of shirt. You look like a squirrel.” The pair stared at me with their upper lips warped so I could see watermelon-colored gums over their incisors.
I defended my button. “It’s cold outside.”
“It’s cold outside,” LaDell mimicked. “Wait’ll January.”
I wished I could see Maurey’s face. Her back hadn’t moved so at least she wasn’t laughing at me like the retard twins. Maybe she felt an empathetic connection.
LaDell continued. “Hey, Maurey, he’s reading a book on a Saturday. Trying to show off and study in public.”
“It’s not a school book. It’s literature.”
“Litter tour. Litter tour.” What makes people between the ages of eleven and fifteen such mean jerks? I’d rather be ninety-five than thirteen again.
Maurey swung her arm onto the back of the booth and turned her head to look at me. “What literature?”
I showed her the cover of Catch-22. “It’s new. This book will change the way we look at both the novel and war forever.” I stole that from a blurb off the back cover. Then, I added my own, “And sex.”
The twins oohed harmoniously. Maurey’s eyes never left the book. “What do you know about sex?”
Actually, Catch-22 had a ridiculously small amount of sex in it. “After I finish this book I’ll know a lot more about it than you.”
Bill picked up the napkin dispenser and slammed it into Oly’s temple. Oly fell sideways out of the booth, his upper plate skittered across the cafe floor and stopped under a stool. After a few moments’ disorientation, Oly made it to his knees and began to crawl after his teeth.
Us kids, even Laurie, all pretended we hadn’t seen a thing. Young people aren’t allowed to notice grown-ups conking each other.
Bill sat there with the napkin dispenser in his hand, watching his friend crawl away. He had the blankest look on his face. He blinked twice and swallowed, then he called to Oly, “Was a brookie.”
Joseph Heller knocked on the cabin door. It was opened by a weathered-looking boy of thirteen. “May I see your father?” Joseph Heller asked.
“I have no father.”
“Is this not the home of Sam Callahan?”
“I’m Sam Callahan.”
Joseph Heller stared at the boy in amazement. “Surely you can’t be the Sam Callahan who wrote White Deck Madness, the greatest American novel since Moby Dick.”
The boy smiled mysteriously. “The New York Times Book Review rated it higher.”
Joseph Heller could not believe this young man was the same writer who had wrenched his heart out and made it bleed. Yet, as he looked closer, Joseph Heller saw the sadness and depth behind the boy’s deep blue eyes.
“Yes,” Joseph Heller said. “I believe you are a novelist.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“May I have your autograph?”