Chapter 1 #13
Good smell, mostly. To him. Familiar, anyway: prairie grass at dawn, a little cow shit, strangely sweet, a bonfire burning somewhere, but not for fun.
It was a work fire and someone’d dropped in a hunk of molded plastic, maybe.
Like that. A tumbleweed blew through and a black calf was nibbling at a cabbage garden near the closet door.
What’s this, my charge said.
Not sure, I said.
—
The bonfire smoke cleared and the calf was startled away by a thrown stone. A human figure suddenly stood at the foot of the bed.
Father, said my charge, amazed.
What are you, his father said, looking around at the spacious, high-ceilinged room. Big dang deal?
My charge nodded shyly.
Best get over it, his father said. Because look where you’re at.
True, thought my charge.
He had not seen this coming, this difficult end.
I had a few of ’em, Father said.
What? said my charge.
Sorrowful regrets, said Father. One was, I was too harsh. With you. Was I?
Maybe, he said.
All right, then, Father said. So I was. What to do? You see where I’m headed with this.
No, sir, said my charge.
It was good to see the old man again. In that familiar country slouch.
He was missing the index finger of his left hand from the famous threshing accident and always kept that hand in his front jeans pocket.
Sometimes he’d take something out of that pocket (a penny, a lint wad, the last bit of a pencil) and squint at it as if it were more deserving of his attention than whatever it was you were saying.
If he ever caught you staring at the stub he’d be brusque with you rest of the day.
But he seemed different now: kinder, lighter.
Wouldn’t you think this little guy’d be cured by now? he said almost merrily, raising the maimed hand.
Are you real? my charge said. Sir? Or am I making you with my mind?
His father inclined his bony, sunburned head at me.
Ast her, he said.
He’d always done this, said “ast” for “ask.”
A fellow could ast around, find out about a thing if he had some get-up-and-go.
My charge had been a bright child and around the age of six this mispronunciation had begun to embarrass him. Once he’d corrected his father in public.
Once.
His father was of our ilk, as was the black calf, who had now drifted back into the room and stood near the love seat, gnawing contentedly on one of its cushions.
Real, I said.
A sweet, pre-crying feeling came over my charge.
All these years, he’d imagined that his father had thought him too short, slow, studious, undisciplined, soft, not man enough.
Now here the old fellow was.
To patch things up.
In his fashion.
Oh, Pa, Dad, Daddy, he thought.
His father dropped to the floor with that beautiful natural grace he’d always had and began running his hand through the long grass there as if combing it.
You afraid? his father said.
Yes, said my charge.
Of? his father said.
There within the orb of my charge’s thoughts, I felt the presence of a powerful wall that he felt must be continually maintained between himself and certain complicating admissions.
Admissions easily misunderstood by someone not in the know.
A hick, a yokel, a fellow confined all his miserable life to the merely local.
I did a lot of things, my charge said defensively. Important things. That needed doing.
I know it, said his father.
My charge cast a furtive glance at his father to see what all he knew. Some of it, Father wouldn’t like.
Father’s polestar being honesty.
An absolute, cornpone honesty. That brooked none of the complexity real accomplishment required.
Hence the failures.
The repeated failures.
Who’s this gal? his father said.
Nobody, said my charge. I don’t know.
What do you think, lady? his father said to me. Of this here fella?
(I was hesitant to say.
For my loyalty must reside with my charge, always.)
He has done well, I said. Traveled widely. Accomplished much.
What happened at Aarhus? his father said.
I don’t know that, said my charge.
But he did. He did know.
I could feel it.
Aarhus, his father said. Explain.
Doesn’t ring a bell, my charge said.
His father stopped combing the grass and stood.
When he had risen to his full height, he seemed perhaps five or six feet taller than before, his head being slightly bent down by the ceiling, and was wearing finer clothes, and his hair was slicked back and he looked somehow cleaner, as if he had just gotten ready for church.
His country affect fell away, and he glared at his son with the focused intensity of a wronged, wrathful deity.
It frightened even me.
I won’t have it, he said. Won’t have a liar in my house. You tell it. Tell what you did. Or else.
But my charge was no longer the child who, hearing his father in the living room, would veer away in something like fear and take instead the dining room route into the kitchen.
Something arose in him, instilled by the many tense situations from which he’d emerged victorious, the many lawsuits, hallway confrontations, public fights, occasions on which powerful individuals had cowered before him seeking his favor.
Or else?
Some joker was threatening him, K. J. Boone, with or else?
Or else what? he said coldly.
And turned his mind deliberately, even cruelly, to that sad Wyoming shack, that failing farm, his parents’ poverty in their middle years, the way he’d swooped in, knocked that little dump down, put them up a new house, hired help, got them a driver, had flowers delivered out there every damn week for the rest of their lives, sent them to the Holy Land by way of Paris.
(Only the best hotels. Cars, tour guides, the whole enchilada.)
His father, drawn into the orb of my charge’s thoughts by a desire to be near his son after these many years of separation, found himself also recalling these things.
And was shamed by them, and subdued.
Shrinking down to his previous size, suddenly self-conscious, wearing again the dusty work clothes in which he’d arrived, holding a cheap straw hat he had not been wearing before, behind the brim of which he was endeavoring to hide his four-fingered hand, he backed out of the room, begging our pardon.
Aarhus, he mumbled timidly as he left.
I felt a jolt of joy run through my charge in response to this perceived victory.
This petty, mean-spirited victory.
—
It was quite something.
Quite something to have watched a man savage his own father like that.
He was positively on fire now with fresh self-regard.
You know that speech? he said.
No, I said.
Ever read it? he said.
No, I said.
Ever hear about it? he said.
It—it may have been before my time, I said. That is, it may have been after I—
Aarhus, Denmark, he said. Nineteen ninety-seven.
I’d already come here, I said. So.
Come where? he said.
Nowhere, I said.
Where are you? he said. What are you? Who were you? What sort of person?
Nice, I said. Kind of quiet.
But what were you like, he said.
Well, that was the sad part.
I didn’t really know.
Having only just gotten started.
I don’t know about any speech, I said.
But his thoughts were already elsewhere.
Certain memories were moving happily in him: long working evenings in the cold months of a distant year; a delivery boy who, lingering too long in the doorway, had needed to be rebuked; a growing sense between him and some fellow (Dell?
Right: Ed Dell) that the thing they were working on together was finally falling into place.
Dell was good. Dell was shy, obsequious, a bit in awe of him, sort of a kiss-up, really, but every now and then Dell would rise to the occasion and pop out a line that nicely sidestepped a too-blunt statement of a thing and reworded it in a way that both managed to assuage the concern and slyly debunk it, leaving the audience feeling they were in the hands of someone who, having examined all sides of the thing, had come genially down on the side of keeping the extant system chugging along in the interest of the common good.
Out in the far distance, on those long-ago winter work evenings (across the mesquite grove, past the Western-style split-rail fencing quaintly enclosing the corporate compound), would be downtown Dallas, looking like a miniature toy town over which strings of Christmas lights had been draped.
The snowflakes on the Bank of America building were big as cars but you could cover one up with your thumb from out here.
Ditto the fifty-foot candy cane hanging down from the sky deck of the Praetorian.
Over the course of the evening, he and Dell would slip into what they chummily called “mind meld,” passing marked-up pages back and forth, adding this phrase, taking that one out, and then, at one point, Dell would say, “Try,” and my charge would stand up and read the thing aloud.
One night Dell nodded, my charge nodded back, and they were done, and that was it: the speech he’d give a week later, at Aarhus, to the ISPP, the International damn Society of Petroleum frigging Professionals.
What an honor. Keynoting that big bear? They didn’t ask just anybody to do that. And not just anybody could have knocked it out of the park like he had.
Like they had.
Like he and Dell had.
Good little speech, that.
What a triumph. Jesus Christ. Calls rolled in from all over.
Marie had a whiteboard on which she’d tape up the latest clippings, the most special letters of congrats.
Imagine that: small-town guy from Bumfuck gives a little seven/eight-page talk, offers a few modest insights, and pretty soon his logic, his examples, are showing up all over the world, altering the path down which the whole shebang—
Could one speech really be that major, have that big an influence?
Well, he only knew what people told him.
Ha.
But yes.
It could.
It had.
To wit: