BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 54

MARCH 2012

DAVID

There are two roads into town—Highway 39 and Ferry Butte Road, each with a bridge over the Snake. The first, a State highway once named the Roosevelt (after Teddy, not Franklin). The second crossing the Tilden Bridge some miles downstream east of Pingree, before invading the Fort Hall Indian Reservation. That road appeared in 1926 when the bridge was rescued from the flats—its old pilings are still evident just a mile from the museum—, where the soon to be filled American Falls Reservoir would exist.

Every trip to town reminds David of the past, how can it not, 39 his school bus route for twelve years, then his path for three years driving to the sucking teenage whirlpool called Humpty's Dump. Ferry Butte Road he drove less frequently to go to Pocatello. It has a different set of primary memories, most associated with commuting to the university or furtive trips to the record or book store—dart in to civilization, steal a bit of culture, take it home to devour it in private.

He never stopped buying books but he stopped buying records when CDs came out. 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs. Every new technology sapped his interest a little more, changing the rules and disguising the game—music. Or maybe he just grew up, maybe he just got bored after two thousand albums. A Bruce Cockburn title sticks in his head now: Dancing in the Dragon's Jaw. That's what he's doing, the dragon a past that's bigger than him, as all pasts are to their holders. For a second, David imagines he can still escape before he's settled into the current scenario. But he won't. He's too dutiful.

He doesn't think he's actively trying to remember—but remembering is exactly what he's doing. It's a video game, a tennis ball machine gone berserk, bugs hitting the windshield at dusk—ping, ping, ping, out of nowhere the vignettes come. There, where he ran his Comet off the road and luckily wasn't killed. There, where he plugged in a Neil Young cassette and "Southern Man" played. On the corner, where he rear-ended a friend who was too young to legally drive. At the rock cut where he passed a schoolmate on a bike, just up the road where he waved at friend, one going to town and one coming out, both with their fists raised out the window, for some reason joyous. The cemetery, where he parked most nights for an hour or two on his way home one summer, laid on the hood of his car not wanting to live on.

That's just today's drive. Other days it's a different set of recollections, snippets sometimes that require further digging, overwhelming floods at other times that make him recoil. The present is like a cattle guard, he thinks, overlaying the pit of the past—move across its bars wrongly and fall through into random memory.

At the bank in Blackfoot, he consults the manager though everything is in stasis until the County money comes in. His name was on his mother's checking account so he can pay any bills she accrued. Few have, his mother being a good German and sewing up almost all loose ends. His name had also been on the safe deposit box, and he cleaned that out last summer. There was a small box with a ring and other jewelry, the worth of which he couldn't evaluate so he'd left that task for his sister. There was a manila envelope that had to be folded in half to force into the box. Inside were thirty typewritten pages—the memoir she talked about but never showed anyone. Lastly, there was an envelope of cash—he had put in the checking account immediately. Four thousand dollars.

He banked here decades ago, thinks he recognizes a teller who worked back then. But when his eyes bounce over hers she shows no response. The habit he thought city life had erased, of meeting all oncomers' eyes, is back, as if he's suddenly been possessed by a demon. He doesn't quite know how to react to the reappearance of the practice. Can you be possessed by a self from the past?

Looking a stranger in the eye is a rural thing. In small populations with few events you give respect through acknowledgment, an awkward action in urban settings. The effort is just too taxing given the number of people in a city. Accustomed to disrespect—or non-respect—city people are disturbed when paid attention to.

He is invisible now, at best. An intruder, a stalker, at worst. Who would know him after three decades? Classmates, old neighbors? Drinking pals from his wild years? All would be as changed as he is—though the girls wouldn't have grown beards, as he has, gone bald, as he has, gotten fatter, as he has. He wouldn't recognize them, unless he heard a specific voice that triggered memory.

He remembers the omnipresent youthful sense of the imminence of something soon to be happening, that someone he knew would suddenly appear. It was a wasted, false prescience he now knows, just his wishes masked by his imagination. The likelihood of meeting an old acquaintance was minimal then, moreso now. Far less a chance, even, than to see someone on an early Sunday morning at Humpty's Dump—which he noticed has been razed, he doesn't know when.

The lawyer's office is there now, a fancy brick building. It's his next stop, one he won't have to make many more times.

The French had their promenade, the Italians had their passeggio, and though David doesn't know it, he gets drawn in to Blackfoot's own tawdry version of those displays: cruising Humpty's Dump, the drive-in where teenagers hang out—to see and to be seen.

The Dump is a cement block building, the narrowest possible to still have storage and a kitchen. It has a portico on each side that three cars can fit under while they wait to order. A west end window serves walk-in orders, the distance to the parking lot's edge just enough to allow one set of cars to park while a lane is free for others to comfortably circle.

And circle they do, counterclockwise, the social pull of the Coriolis Effect apparently equivalent to its impact on wind and water. It's a carnival game, a shooting gallery, the parked teens picking off passing gawkers and those who drive ambushing those sitting in their cars. The smarter, more Machiavellian, cruisers know the most advantageous times to come, others use whatever moments of freedom their parents afford them. And then there are the few, like David, who haunt the place, whose omnipresence sometimes reflects their optimism and sometimes is a measure of their desperation.

Cruising absolves him from responsibility, puts his life in fate's hands—rather than using the telephone to call a friend or make a date, he relies on the goodness of the universe. Running into someone at the Dump is serendipitous, something magical, unlike the transaction of asking and receiving, offering and having one's offer accepted—this strikes him as authoritarian, something he shrinks from; he can smell it, it sometimes seems, from a great distance.

To earn, to deserve—they cluster where thievery and cheating reside, are difficult to unknot. Selling something, asking for a job, these are distasteful. Stopping to talk to someone in a parking lot or being stopped, on the other hand, fits a template of rightness, as examples of chance they remove purpose, eliminate greed and hunger. Those interactions open into an unfettered place to be filled, fashioned, fondled by only those agreeing to the encounters. It's a team effort, not a solo one, and David gets enough solitude.By chance, and chance alone, the cruisers meet.

Chevelles, GTOs, restored 50's Chevys, short box pickups with fancy wheels and roll bars, family sedans obviously on loan for the night, and the rarity, like David's Comet, a nondescript car, generic and lifeless. Clueless on one hand, having never paid attention to fashion (he's always been invisible enough to bypass those prone to commenting on and correcting it), and uncaring on the other, having absorbed the false notion of equality, the idea that essence trumps appearance (it will be decades before he discovers he's wrong), he exhibits, again without knowing, a French notion—egalite—that emerged with the promenade, where the classes first started anonymously mixing. It was a radical thought centuries ago, might still be.

For the rich boys and the impoverished, the cowboys (goat ropers, they're derisively called) and the hippies (dopers), and all those in between, those perfectly fitting a stereotype and those defying categorization in small part or whole, rotate through the nights, through lunchtimes, Saturdays, and randomly when boredom strikes. It strikes him as egalitarian, the spinning perhaps a magician's trick to take his attention from the actual goings-on.

The spinning, as might be expected, creates a centrifuge-like effect, those with the densest dreams and attachments (college, job, a surprise pregnancy) thrown out to the edges where they're collected by the larger society for fodder, while those lighter in possibilities continue to spin, sometimes for years.

Like David. Three years of his life, twenty thousand miles a year, an acquired taste for alcohol, dabbling in drugs, disappointment seeping in behind every hope as efficiently as water flowing into a boat's wake. His Comet battered with barbed wire scratches where he's run off the road and through fences, its hood marked with the impressions of highway reflector posts, some of its hubcaps missing, rims dented from smacking curbs, dust generally thick on its every surface courtesy of country roads, which the townies, who wash their cars every day have no understanding of. Strangers write "wash me" in the rear window's dust, the joke apparently never growing old.

As usual, there's something missing for David, a comprehension of when to come and when to go. The Dump is the endpoint of his every impulse, there are no other alternatives. If on Sunday morning he feels uneasy, he showers and drives to town, may sit for hours in the parking lot without seeing someone he knows. He might break that monotony with a drive to the "beach", to the gravel pits, down main street, all of them auxiliary cruises, but inevitably he ends up sitting and watching cars on the highway adjoining the Dump. Were it not for music from his eight-track tape player, he might not be able to stand the stasis of watching, but with Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac he achieves the impression of doing something when he is doing nothing. He is feeling, that is all. It's quite a sleight of hand, and he, being a country bumpkin, is just gullible enough to embrace it fully.

One morning, after a blackout drunk night, David goes out to his car, parked on the lawn to the side of the house, and sees blood covering the inside of the front wheel well. He looks around to see who is watching. No one. There is no one to see, save his mother and father, both out in the barn working. He bends to investigate, sees no hair, no gristle, no new dent. He remembers little of the night: smoking a joint, looking out the window afterward and being shocked by how dense the fog was, Richard laughing. "That's a propane tank." Sure enough, a white thousand gallon tank where they'd pulled off and which they parked by for a private place to smoke. They'd then headed out to the desert, the skies clear and full of stars, the snow reflective from being windblown and sealed, polished, the Big Southern Butte their beacon, getting larger as they neared.

They had stopped at the boxcars in Taber, just to see the decrepitude as art, representative of their own shabbiness—that was David's intention, anyway, unvoiced. Richard had found a loose piece of wood, used it to knock glass out of already broken windows. David didn't see ghosts, but he imagined lives that once filled the empty containers.

Craving movement, the old highway theirs alone in the below zero night, they had gone on, all the way to Atomic City, just a few miles from the Butte, which was out of the reach of his Comet, even four-wheel drives probably iffy to traverse the desert roads in winter.

That's where David's memory ends, though he must have taken Richard back to Humpty's Dump and then come home. No new dents mar his car, but he fears the worst, what if he hit someone, even killed them, though why they would be on the highway he doesn't know. But it could have been in town. He needs to wash the blood off, but can't do it at home, his mother will see and the hose is frozen anyway. He jumps into his car without showering and heads to town, hungover.

For days he scans the paper for news of a hit and run. He avoids town, stays home, suffers the odd hours alone with his parents, two generations removed from him, Depression-tainted and war-damaged, huddling partly in gratitude they no longer suffer those eras, partly in wistfulness remembering excitement long perished. His close calls add up, he's been lucky, no DUIs, no serious wrecks. The adrenaline rush of fear that struck every night leaving town turns to distasteful memory as the days progress, removing any titillation derived from that excitement.

Having left a thing, having been expelled from a thing, watching a thing move away—motion determines the inner sensations, and he thinks he has left the Humpty's Dump vortex—'what's that', Tracy used to joke, hand cupped to ear. 'Why, it's the sound of the Dump, sucking us in! Let's go!" He thinks he has spurned it, been spared by it, too. It seems like he is done with something. Like he has survived.

"Are you okay?"

His pickup window muffles the voice but the knuckles knocking startle him. He turns from his reverie, cracks open the door—he still reaches for a handle to open the window, being unaccustomed to electronics, though when not pressed for time he can find the opener switch. "Spacing out. Sorry," he says.

It's the lawyer, Bill Furchner, graciously laughing as little as possible, masking what his thoughts might be.

"Am I late?" David asks, getting out. "I was just remembering, this used to be my hangout 'back in the old days'." He would make air quotes but instead assumes his vocal inflection conveys the mockery.

"The secretary saw you out the window and she got a little antsy," Furchner says. "Her father died young and now she thinks anyone over forty is having a heart attack."

"Just a little high strung, then," David says.

"You know it."

When they get inside, David considers making a satirical joke about death but figures it will fall flat, given Furchner's advanced age, so just nods. Once seated, he lays out the estate's progress. "I have these preliminary papers from the County," David says, "But I assume you already have copies. Or originals." He slides them across the desk.

Furchner goes through them. "Already in my possession," he says, sliding them back. "The Title Company is working on them at this very moment."

"So, any advice?"

"This should go smoothly. I assume there are no outstanding debts? No liens?"

"Not so far as I know."

"It's just time, then. And one bit of advice, if I may."
 "Proceed."

"It's always the little things in estates that cause trouble. Belongings."

Furchner had related a case he took about a divorcing couple who fought over the ownership of table scraps kept in the freezer for their dog. "Already taken care of," he says. "Everything was cleaned out. Irma got her ironing board and used washer, Jana had a garage sale with the rest. No one squawked. But they do want it done. It's been almost a year."

Furchner crosses his fingers. "You're good to go, then." He grabs a stapled set of papers to his left, looks momentarily at them. "I need you to sign this. And date it." He hands it to David, points to the yellow sticker with an arrow pointing to the signature line.

"She was a fine lady," Furchner says, as David signs. "Really classy."

There is a constant creative process that goes on in those acquainted with the recently dead, David thinks, which he suspects only comes to the fore at moments like this—a statement of character or a poignant anecdote, an equivalent of a handful of clay, a brushstroke, maybe a sentence in a novel. They feel a need to contribute. He doesn't know whether to add to the comment or to just erase it. "So people say," he replies, hopefully with grace.

David would like to be one of those people who can keep a conversation going, exchange anecdotes as if playing catch, but he abandoned that self-delusion long ago. When he sees his professor evaluations he still winces, every time. He laughs efficiently for Furchner, then is silent, spurring an awkward set of gestures and Furchner asking if he has any other questions. He does not.

In the parking lot he sets the papers on the passenger seat. He remembers taking the memoir out nearly a year ago, thumbing through it like he thumbed the little prize books in boxes of Cracker Jacks. They never worked for him, they were supposed to be a version of a moving picture, and he got about the same sensation from the memoir. The scraps of paper between the pages were a different matter, more interesting. A clipping from Newsweek about apprehending a Nazi SS member. Given the attire and haircuts of the officials holding the man, it appeared to be from the sixties. Attached to it was an obituary from much later. The date of death coincided with a trip his mother took to Germany after his dad died in 1992. Behind that obit was another piece of paper with Wulf's father's name on it, along with phone numbers. It was in David's hand writing, he had given it to her five or ten years before. She had provided him the name and asked him to go fishing through the internet, having heard you can do your own private investigations.

"We both had pasts," she had said often enough about her relationship to his father. "And we agreed not to bring them up."

True enough, he thinks. The question arose and still arises, since David has not yet passed on the information: does Wulf know who his father is? A second question: should David ask, should he tell? He's been asking himself that for quite some time.

"What is family for?" he overheard Greenberg ask his class, the students responding with predictable, mythic replies. "Burying you," he answered, after exhausting their thoughts. "Just burying you."

©2025 Ralph Thurston