Chapter 11
MARLA
He took the truck out on the Wednesday to run the recycling over, and he was gone forty-five minutes for a thing that takes twelve.
I was on the porch when he pulled in. He sat in the cab a second before he got out, which he'd been doing a lot lately.
"Get your coat," he said.
"It's nine o'clock."
"I know what time it is."
I got my coat.
He drove west on 36. Eleven minutes — past our station, past the Casey's at the Bellwood exit, out to the Brakeman's Shell at Ridgeline. He pulled up to the pump on the outside island, the far one under the burned-out light, and put it in park.
He didn't get out.
"I've filled up here about nine hundred times," he said.
"I know. I've got the receipts."
"You've got the receipts." He laughed, one breath of it, no shape to it at all. "Marla, I'm going to tell you the thing. I can't do it looking at you, so I'm going to sit here and look at that pump."
"Okay."
"And I'd ask you not to be kind to me for a while. If you're kind to me I'll take it and quit."
"All right," I said. "I won't."
He put both hands on the bottom of the wheel.
"My father was Darrell Bunch. He was the drunk in Harlan Falls for thirty years. Not a drunk. The drunk. There's one, in a town that size, and it was him, and everybody from the county line to the river knew it by 1975."
"I knew he drank."
"You knew he drank because I told you he drank, one time, in a car, in 1994, and then I never said another word about it and you never made me." He nodded at the windshield. "That's not on you. That was a system I ran."
"Keep going."
"He wasn't mean. I want that said, because it'd be easier on me if he was.
He never hit my mother. He never hit us.
Big soft man who could fix anything with an engine in it and could not stay out of Rooney's.
He'd cry at the kitchen table on a Sunday and mean every word of it, and by Wednesday he'd be in the ditch again. "
"In the ditch."
"Sawyer Road, mostly. It's got no shoulder.
" He shifted his hands on the wheel. "First time I remember I was eight.
He put the car in the ditch on a Wednesday afternoon and the sheriff brought him home and left the car sitting out there.
And my mother handed me a red gas can and sent me down to the Sinclair on my bicycle, because she couldn't stand to be the one who went. "
"Eight."
"Eight. And Ted Bickell filled that can up and set it on the counter and leaned on his elbows and said, 'How's your daddy, son?'"
He stopped there a second.
"And I said, 'He's fine.'"
"Keith."
"He wasn't being cruel." He shook his head.
"That's the part I've never been able to explain to anybody, and I've never tried, so it's not much of a claim.
Ted Bickell was a good man. Every one of them was decent to me.
Nobody laughed at me, nobody said a hard word to my face in eighteen years.
They were kind. And every kindness was a receipt.
Every one of them said the same thing, which was, we know what you are. "
"What were you."
"Darrell's boy."
He said it and then sat with it. The pump light buzzed over us. Somebody pulled in on the far side, got out, started washing a windshield.
"So by the time I was ten or eleven," he said, "I'd worked out a system, and I have never told a living soul about it.
Not you. Not my brother. I'd ride my bike two exits out.
There was a Marathon out at the Kelso road, four miles, and a station at Prentiss on the other side.
I'd fill that can up out there, where the man behind the counter didn't know whose kid I was, and ride it home.
Four miles out and four miles back with a full gas can on a Schwinn, so nobody would ask me how my daddy was. "
I put my hand over my mouth.
"Don't," he said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing something. I can hear it." He kept his eyes on the pump.
"I did that till I could drive. Then I did it in a car, then in a truck.
I did it in Bellwood. I did it in Grantsburg.
I've done it in every town I've set foot in for forty-five years, and until five weeks ago, standing right out there, I did not know I was doing it. "
"That's what the gas is."
"That's what the gas is."
"Say the rest."
"I left at eighteen." He rubbed his thumb along the wheel.
"Nineteen eighty-nine. Verl was already gone, he'd married Ruthann.
I had two hundred and eleven dollars and a job lead at a Case dealer in Grantsburg.
Got in a car in June. And I made myself a promise on the way out of town that I've kept better than any promise I ever made anybody, including you. "
"What was it?"
"That I would never again in my life stand in that county as Darrell's boy."
The man on the far side finished his windshield and got in and left. Somebody's radio came on two islands over and went off again. It got very quiet out there.
"Chilton's in that county," I said. "Twenty minutes from Rooney's door."
"Chilton's in that county."
"Twenty minutes."
"Twenty minutes." His voice dropped down to almost nothing.
"Your gym is nineteen miles from Rooney's.
Half the people in it have a cousin in Harlan.
Your class of '91 and my class of '89 played each other twice a year.
That old man at the trophy case — Marla, I had one conversation at that homecoming, with one eighty-year-old, and he knew my father, and he knew what year my father pulled his truck out of a creek. "
"So you never came."
"So I never came." He let out a long breath.
"And there wasn't a day I decided it. That's the part I can't get around.
If there'd been a day I could hand you the day.
There was just always a reason, every single time, and every reason was good enough to say out loud, and I never once turned one of them over to see what was underneath.
Thirty-one years of reasons, and every one of them was a fence around a town I never told you I was afraid of. "
"You knew."
"Some part of me knew."
"How much of you."
He was quiet a second. "Enough that when that packet came in August I already had the sentence ready. And I'd known for a week the inventory was canceled."
I looked out my window at the dark. A truck went by on 36 with its brights up, and the light came through the cab and went out again.
"Say the last part," I said. "Don't make me pull it out of you."
"Your hometown was collateral."
"Say it plain."
"It was never about your people. Your people would have been fine with me.
They were fine with me — they fed me pretzels and asked me about hay rakes.
" He turned his head then, finally, and looked at me, and he was wrecked.
"Your town was in the way of the thing I was hiding from.
That's all it ever was. I let your whole map close so mine could stay shut.
Thirty-one years of your life, your friends, your mother's town, every Christmas, every funeral you drove to alone in the dark — I spent all of it so I wouldn't have to stand at a gas pump and hear one old man say a sentence to me. "
I sat in that truck and felt four things at once.
The first was the boy. Eight years old on a bicycle in the summer with a red gas can, riding four miles out of his way so a stranger would sell him gasoline and not ask him anything. I could have gone through the windshield to get to that child.
The second was the man. Fifty-five, sitting right there next to me.
A man who'd had his hand on that doorknob a thousand times and never turned it, and who'd made me pay for that in a currency he never once told me I was spending.
Who watched me get in the car by myself.
Who lay in bed listening for my tires, and let me drive it alone anyway, and never said one word.
The third was that I loved him straight through, no interruption, which was very inconvenient.
And the fourth was that I'm fifty-three years old with twenty-two people lost out of a green accordion file, and being sorry doesn't resurrect anybody.
"I need to say some things," I said.
"Go ahead."
"That was a terrible thing to have happen to a child."
"Marla—"
"I'm not finished, and don't you dare tell me I'm being kind.
I'm not being kind. I'm being accurate." I turned in the seat to face him.
"That was a terrible thing, and it wasn't your fault, and you carried it by yourself from eight years old with nobody at that kitchen table to take it off you.
I'm sorrier about that than I know how to sit here and say. "
He put his hand over his eyes.
"And," I said.
"Yeah."
"And you were twenty-four when we got married.
And forty. And fifty. And last Christmas.
Every one of those years you were a grown man with a wife who tells you everything.
" I kept my voice level, which took some doing.
"I told you about my mother's last week.
I told you what I said to her and what I didn't. There has never been one thing in me you couldn't have had for the asking — and you had a whole county in you, and you gave me traffic's better. "
"I know."
"You let me think it was me. Thirty-one years of carrying around this small quiet idea that my hometown was too little for you.
That my people were too much church basement for a man who—" I had to stop and start over.
"I never said that out loud to anybody. Not to Wanda.
Not to my mother. I just kept it, and it got heavier, and you could have set it down for me in about four sentences any night of our lives. "
"Yeah."
"So I'm not forgiving you tonight."
He took his hand off his eyes.
"Okay," he said.
"I don't mean I'm punishing you. I mean it isn't a thing a person does in a truck in nine minutes.
If I did it tonight it wouldn't be worth anything to either one of us, and you'd take it and quit, like you said.
" I found his hand on the seat and put mine over it.
"You told me the whole map. That's what I asked for and that's what you gave me, and I want you to know I know what it cost you to say Ted Bickell's name out loud. "
He was crying by then, without any noise at all.
"There's one more thing," I said.
"Go ahead."
"The first Sunday is in four days."
He wiped his face with the back of his wrist.
"Wanda's," he said.
"Wanda's. I'm going. I was going whether you ever said a word about any of this. That part's mine — I set it up on a tailgate before you ever drove to Harlan Falls, and I'd have kept it up if you'd never told me a thing." I squeezed his hand. "And you're invited."
He looked at me.
"That's the word," I said. "Invited. You're not being driven and you're not being tested and you're not being graded. It's a good thing to be, Keith. Nobody's ever once had to invite you anywhere. You made real sure of that."
He sat there a minute. Then he said, "What time?"
"Four. Supper. I'll already be out there."
"I'll do the dishes."
"You will absolutely do the dishes," I said. "She'll make you."
"And I'm going back on one thing."
"Go ahead."
"You said don't be kind to you." I put my hand on the back of his neck. "I'm going to be, some. Not tonight, not about the thirty-one years. But about the boy with the gas can, I'm going to be kind to you for the rest of my life, and you don't get a vote in it."
He put both hands back on the wheel. Then he laughed a little and shook his head and said, "I don't even need gas."
"I know."
"Half a tank. Little better than half."
"You want to go home?"
"In a minute," he said, and we sat there a while longer under the burned-out light, in a truck, at a gas station eleven minutes west of our own house.