Sun House, page 11
Knowing his “three things” might tip her scale, the rancher was clearly debating whether to risk hearing them at all. The nod she finally gave Jamey was very cautious.
“First thing,” he said. “I switched majors this year, pre-med to drama, without my advisor’s permission—as you can see.” The rancher glanced over at Jon, whose head was shaking grimly. “He’s not normally rude,” Jamey said in a stage whisper he made audible to his father. “The trouble he’s having is, he’s cut me off at the purse strings due to my change of major, so now he can make rude faces at me all day and get no results.”
The rancher smiled wryly. Jon made more faces.
“The second thing is this,” Jamey said. “Next April, down in Ashland—please come if you can—I’m in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. I’ll be playing a guy called Mercutio.”
The rancher rocked as if a gust of wind had hit her. “Romeo’s best friend,” she said. Seeing Jamey’s surprise that she knew this, she extended her hand. “Name’s Juliet. Juliet Tall. Which is why the pup’s Romeo. Figured I’d pair up the two tragedy tore apart. But now look.” She sighed at the contentment with which Romeo remained parked on the back of Jamey’s hand. “It could be there’s no settin’ right what the Bard set wrong.”
An engine roared. The tricolored bitch sprang to her feet. Jon had slid across the cab, fired up the Dodge, and was now gunning it. “I’m leaving!” he bellowed. Though he flinched at each roar, Romeo stayed seated on the back of Jamey’s hand.
“I’m going nowhere,” Jamey said to Juliet, “till I tell you the third thing. And my name is Jamey, by the way.”
Again no reaction from the rancher. Just keen attention. But Jon, seeing his bluster had failed, knew Jamey’s indefatigable nature too well to fight it. He shut off the engine.
Jamey looked down at the pup, then turned to Juliet. “The third thing is this. One of us is gonna lose out, is one way of looking at it. But why see it that way? Mercutio and Romeo together? Juliet and Romeo together? This pup’s gonna set right some of what the Bard set wrong, no matter how the next minute or two go.”
Juliet considered this, nodded agreement, but then something changed: crossing her arms, she eyed Jamey with sudden suspicion. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I wish I was a perfect judge of character,” she said. “You might be as good-hearted as you sound. But if you’re not, you’re one of the slickest fast-talkers I ever met. So let’s back offa Thing Three a minute an’ see some proof of Thing Two.” Arms still crossed, one boot tip tapping in the dirt, she eyed Jamey expectantly.
It took the fledgling tragedian a moment to guess what she was after. He then nodded, freed his hand from beneath Romeo, straightened his back, loosened his shoulders and neck, filled his rib cage with an enormous breath, began releasing the breath slowly. With no warning he then clutched his gut, let out an awful Hnnnh! sound, and doubled over.
Sheba crouched in fear. Jon’s jaw dropped. Juliet saw the sword pierce Mercutio.
“’Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door. But ’tis enough, ’twill serve!” Jamey gasped in a voice so desperately damaged that Jon found himself looking for the wound. “Ask for me…tomorrow”—Jamey’s cough made Jon fear a gout of blood—“and you shall find me a grave man. Zounds! Why came you between us, Romeo?”
Jumping out of character, Jamey grabbed Romeo’s forepaws, stood him on his hind legs, and in the heartbreaking puppy voice lamented, “I thought all for the best!”
Juliet’s eyes shone. Jon gaped at his son, stunned. Sheba crouched and began to growl.
Ignoring them, Jamey released the pup, coughed up a spume of unseen yet mortal gore, and wheezed, “A plague! On both your houses. They’ve made worms’ meat of me!”
Collapsing the top half of his body onto the flatbed, Jamey expired briefly, then rose from the dead, stood Romeo on his hind legs again, turned him toward Juliet Tall, and made him cry out in heartbroken puppy-speak: “This gentle man, my very friend, hath got this mortal hurt in my behalf. O sweet Juliet! Thy beauty hath made me effeminate!”
That ended the scene, but not the drama: all in an instant Jon breathed, “Good God!” Juliet broke out in applause, Jamey spun Romeo toward each of them to take a bow, and Sheba shot forward and hit Jamey hard, on both cheekbones, with wide-open jaws and fangs. Not a bite. Just a blow. But it left blood-colored fang indentations, ended the curtain call, and got everyone’s adrenaline flowing.
Maybe it was this adrenaline, Jamey felt, that gave Juliet the strength to do what she did next. “He’s yours,” she said without a word of apology for Sheba’s blow to his face—which made sense to Jamey since, with those two words, Juliet had become by far the worst hurt.
“You’re unbelievable!” he gushed as he fished out his wallet. Then he laughed and put it back. “I’m broke! But let’s barter. I’ve got a Remington twelve-gauge worth a couple hundred. A warm red hunting jacket worth forty bucks or so.”
“Mercutio,” Juliet said fiercely, “I want way more from you than that.”
Frozen by her seriousness, Jamey waited for her words.
“I’ve owned border collies all my life,” she began. “Sheba’s the best bitch I ever had. An’ Romeo’s the best pup she’s ever given me. What you need to know is, he’s gonna worship you. It’s his heart. From now till you or he are done he’s gonna watch every twitch of your hands an’ legs an’ body, movement of your lips, dart of your eyes, till he knows your next move the instant you do. He’s gonna adore you, is what he’s gonna do. Unless you put him on a chain. Or in a pen. Or stuff him in a dorm room and leave him alone all day. Do that to this animal and his great heart’ll be ruined. What I want from you, Jamey, is to know there is no chance o’ that. Ever.”
“I hear you,” Jamey said, “and I promise. Zero chance. Ever.”
“So you say,” Juliet told him. “But I’ve raised ’em so long I’m a bit of a border collie myself. I wanna read your eyes and hands and body language while you swear to me to give Romeo his lifelong place at your side.”
Moved by her demand, Jamey laid his hand on his heart. “I swear to you, Juliet Tall. I will honor Romeo’s heart by making him my constant companion. He will live at my side. I don’t know how yet, but he will. I swear it on Shakespeare’s pen, Sheba’s teeth, Romeo’s wise elder smile, and your courage in entrusting him to me.”
Juliet scrutinized him for a moment, nodded just once, turned to the truck, grabbed Sheba by the collar, and to Jamey snapped, “Be quick!”
Jamey took Romeo in his right hand, stood the perfect Japanese plum on the truck bed with his left, and said, “Ashland. April. Come see a vow being kept, Juliet.”
She managed a strained smile as Sheba lunged and twisted against her grip. “Go!”
Jon started the Dodge, this time careful not to gun it. Jon, in fact, seemed a changed man. He had seen his son act and found him brilliant. He’d heard him make an impossible vow. And Jon believed Jamey would keep the vow, and was pondering ways to help him do it.
Jamey climbed up into the cab and set Romeo in the DMZ between himself and his father. The pup’s diplomatic hot streak continued: he trundled up to Jon, placed his front paws on his thigh, looked up in his eyes, and turned on the wise elder smile.
“Romeo,” Jon said gruffly. “It’s a relief to know at least one of you two has good sense.”
Jamey grinned straight ahead at the windshield.
“What d’ya think, Roams?” his father growled, shoving the Dodge into reverse. “They got any Milk-Bones or puppy chow in this one-horse, one-plum town?”
X. The Unbearable Lightness of Dave
(Seattle, 1988)
You’ve got three minutes
to say what you want to say. Beyond that
no one hears a thing. So…
just say: There’s a moon,
a boy walking, somebody crying. The rest of us
trying to mainline darkness
from the Little Dipper’s spoon...
—Chris Dombrowski, “Statesboro Blues”
THROUGHOUT THE ELEVEN years between her parents’ divorce and her falling in love with Sanskrit, Risa had attended four different Portland schools, two parochial, two public, nonstop. Over the same span of time she had paid her father an average of two visits a year in Seattle, twenty-two total, while Dave paid Risa just six one-day visits in Portland. Out of an increasingly scorched affection for him Risa had tried hard not to count. But single digits are dismayingly easy to remember.
He was better at phone calls. He telephoned to chat once a month or so and was an engaging talker. But even the most cordial calls didn’t make up for the fact that he once let two years pass during which he never set eyes on his only child at all. When Risa was eight, ten, even twelve, she told herself that this abandonment wasn’t abandonment, because that’s what Dave told her. But when she turned thirteen and realized she’d ached ever since he left her with Moira, she decided to make him ache in return: she began referring to him, to his face, as “Dave.” Never “Dad,” “Father,” “Daddy.” The first time she reduced him to his name, her voice trembled as she spoke. But when Dave accepted his demotion without complaint, comment, or perhaps even notice, the hurt Risa had intended boomeranged back upon her, creating an even deeper sense of abandonment.
The main cause of Dave’s ongoing fatherly abdications were what he called “serial romantic conflagrations.” Since it won’t be possible to understand Risa’s romantic hesitancies otherwise, here’s a brief summary of her father’s misadventures.
DAVE MCKEIG WAS born on a family ranch in Montana. But to really tap into the emotional essence of his boyhood we need to imagine a moonless spring night, starshot and church quiet, the boy wide-awake in the wee hours, his love and awareness spilling out the open window, running uncontainable down the “sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack” Elkmoon River (Dylan Thomas a boyhood favorite of Dave’s). The early May sky is ashimmer with starwinks through leaf buds, the cold air pungent with the fragrance of the century-old cottonwoods encircling the house. Weak-wooded trees, cottonwoods, potentially lethal in windstorms, but the McKeig family’s allotment of thirty are all four feet in diameter and all magic to the boy for the grosbeaks, chickadees, and calliope hummingbirds asleep in their boles and bark caves by night, and the great horned owls hidden in their high branches by day. The owls (how the boy loves this!) so perfectly match the trees’ rough gray bark and shadowing that visitors refuse to believe they’re up there till Dave runs to his room, returns with a cigar box, and flips it open to show them the hundred or so owl-ejected vole and mouse skulls he’s collected mowing the grass below. Magic too, his cottonwoods, for the way they share a single underground root network, so that one giant faery-ring organism encloses Dave and his family. “Dioecious” is the word Grandma Stella used to describe how male cottonwoods produce bullet blossoms that stain everything beneath them a sticky blood red, and females produce seed-bearing “cotton” capable of riding the breeze to start new faery rings hundreds of miles away. What a flight for the boy to ride this notion out into spring starlight, wander the world as far as his imagination can carry him, then wake to find himself as rooted as his family, sharing their ring of trees with hummingbirds safe in their silent night branches, and invisible owls raining vole skulls down by day.
Dave was a very good student despite his susceptibility to enchantment. He excelled at science and math and scored off the charts on standardized tests. Because prestigious East Coast colleges are often accused of being the bastions of elitism they in fact are, most make room for a few Western whiz kids. Dave’s whizzery won him a full ride to Princeton.
A few months after he left the ranch and so emptied the family nest, his cattle-ranching parents, to his astonishment, wrote two separate letters to inform him that they had divorced and were moving to separate cities in the desert Southwest. Dave was beyond shocked. They’d been so hardworking and taciturn he hadn’t even known they were struggling. To finance the split, they’d sold the ranch that Dave and his brother, Charlie, had assumed was their legacy. A worshipper of cottonwood faery rings was suddenly the rootless owner of nothing. The loss of the place she’d homesteaded sixty years before sent Grandma Stella into a tailspin, and a case of winter pneumonia became double pneumonia, then a headstone in the St. Luke’s Parish graveyard before Dave could make it back to say goodbye.
The next time he set eyes on his Elkmoon Valley home, the following summer, the cottonwoods had become a polka-dot pattern of four-foot circles sawn level to the ground. As he knelt stunned on a circle, trying to find a last vole skull to take back to Princeton, a man stepped out of the house and told him he was trespassing. “Why’d you cut the cottonwoods?” Dave asked. “Damn things are dangerous,” replied the new guardian of Dave’s “sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack” boyhood nights and dreams.
Neither brother forgave his parents, but both greeted their loss with the laconic veneer popular among aspiring cowboys. A fraction of an inch beneath Charlie’s veneer, impotent rage would simmer for the rest of his life. Dave, being more self-aware, made two attempts to heal his hurt. The first: hoping to resurrect some kind of idealism, he freedom-rode for civil rights in Mississippi for two successive early ’60s summers. And he did feel briefly recharged. But over the long haul—especially after a brief blossoming of American idealism died with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy—the legacy of those summers became Dave’s full-bodied surrender to the music and moods celebrated by Delta blues.
His second attempt to heal: when his cattle-ranching career vaporized, Dave set out to explore alternative careers. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, spent two years as a Rhodes scholar studying diplomacy and economics at Oxford, got accepted into the Kennedy School at Harvard, and seemed briefly destined for a career as a diplomat, financier, politician, or some such shaker and mover. But, the summer before his graduate program started, Dave landed a decent-paying job at a Portland, Oregon, branch of the Pioneer Trail Bank chain. And there, at a college pal’s wedding, he met the sexy, hard-partying Irish American Moira O’Reilly.
A loyal product of parochial schools, Moira was thrilled by the long-haired liberal priests of the era who held that while birth control is a mortal sin, the “rhythm method” was not a sin if confession absolved the rhythmic sinners. Once Moira and Dave got their rhythm thang goin’, Moira grew more devout than ever. “I checked the calendar, checked my temp! Go!” she moaned all summer, instigating the zillionth shotgun wedding in Church history and, seven months later, the birth of Risa. (But let’s not single out Catholics: Methodist Debbie and atheist Jon Van Zandt’s daughter, Judith, was born of the same “method.”)
When family life converted Dave’s summer job at a dull suburban bank into his career, two traits he’d felt sure he possessed fell out of his possession. The first: ambition. The second: fidelity. Delta blues became the soundtrack for this exciting shift in perspective. Damn right, Portland ladies, I’m down, his night life began to croon. I’m so far down I might never get back up. But by bein’ down, if you’ll get on down here with me, baby, we just might find us a way through. Moira, meanwhile, fully believed the priests who said divorce is a mortal sin whether confessed or not, and so refused, out of genuine mortal terror, to accept Dave’s demand for a divorce in spite of several years of infidelities.
When a split was granted, Dave headed north to a job as chief loan officer at the First State Bank of Puget Sound, the largest in Seattle at the time, and a promotion that could have taken him places, as the saying goes. But having lost his ambition, there was no place Dave much wanted to go except back through time to the Elkmoon Valley of his boyhood. His two-week Montana summer vacations became an annual fix, his laconic drawl and Western style became daily habits, and at certain cost to his career Dave took to wearing custom-tailored gray or indigo pin-striped suits, with the coats cut long to match his long brown hair. Black or brown Lucchese cowboy boots, immaculate white broadcloth shirts, mother-of-pearl cuff links, bolo ties with embossed silver tips and cattle-skull clasps, and natural good looks added to the ensembles, and a predictable result ensued.
Comely women walked into Dave’s big downtown bank almost daily. After all, there was money in there! Not every day, but once or twice a month, a certain type of “looker” (Dave’s term) would high-heel it across the marble floor, halt like an enemy officer in front of Chief Loan Officer McKeig’s massive mahogany desk, seat herself in the lasciviously soft rawhide armchair, and level her gaze on the man in charge of the funds she hoped to extract. Having revved herself up to debate loan or mortgage rates with some soft-gutted steel-minded financial geek, the woman would feel confused, then disarmed, by the elegant gent eyeing her across a Great Plain of mahogany. Often it was not prime rates but Dave’s garb that broke the ice. “Is that cattle skull on your bolo genuine ivory?” the woman might ask. “Oh, be sure,” Dave would say of the Chinese plastic imitation, the lie making his eyes dance. As a discussion of loan contract details commenced he’d then hum snatches of such tried-and-true Western cowpies as “The Streets of Laredo,” “El Paso,” and “Tennessee Stud.”
Was it fortunate that these performances worked? Not so much. As Jimmy Driftwood didn’t quite sing it, “He had the nerve and he had the blood, but there never was a Dave like the Tennessee Stud,” and on some level the women who succumbed to his cowboy banker act knew it. His phone chats with Risa throughout these years revealed a spate of conquests rote as a pulp Western plot. If a coffee date led to a dinner date and the dinner evoked what Dave called “chemistry,” the “looker” would make every cell of her corporeal form and absolutely none of her net worth available. Dave’s phraseology regarding the new “lady friend” would then morph, over the course of a few weeks, from an enthused “Astoundingly attractive!” or “This time it’s different!” to a confused “A little high maintenance,” or “Complicated, it turns out,” then on to Risa’s favorite deal breaker: “To quote Flannery O’Connor’s misfit, ‘She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’”
