A Thousand Acres: A Novel (11 page)

Jess said, “Yeah, adrenaline.”

Ty leaned back against the railing. “I just couldn’t shake the images all day yesterday. Today, too. What they must have seen when they opened the bedroom door.”

We mulled this over. I looked at Jess once, wondering if we seemed naive to be so interested in something like a murder. In cities they had murders all the time. I said, “I wonder what she thought she was doing, going out to meet him.”

Jess stood up and stretched out his arms. I could hear his shoulders crack. He said, “I’m sure she thought he couldn’t really want to hurt her.”

I stood up. “What a way to end a pleasant evening.” Ty looked a little sheepish, and Jess smiled. He said, “Things come up.”

After brief good nights, I went into the house, and it was true, there was a privilege to perfunctory farewells—we would resume our conversation tomorrow or the next day. When Ty came in from his bedtime check, he said what I was thinking—“Actually, it would be more fun to have Jess closer than my old place.”

“If he were actually farming, there probably wouldn’t be all that much time or energy for socializing.”

“We’ll see.”

T
HE NEXT NIGHT
, Jess showed up again, this time on his own, after supper, then Rose called to tell me she would make breakfast for Daddy, since she was leaving early anyway to go pick up Linda and Pammy down in West Branch, which was about a four-hour drive. I did not ask her if she felt well enough to drive all that way, because she wouldn’t have told me the truth, and would have been annoyed. I did suggest that she and Pete come over. We talked about playing cards, poker maybe, or bridge, with one person sitting out, but then Rose had an idea, and showed up with an old Monopoly game, and that’s how the tournament started, the Million Dollar World Series of Monopoly, that lasted two weeks or so and that none of us could keep away from, in spite of all the work to be done. We gathered every night and played at least a little. One night, Ty even dozed off at the table, but when he woke up, he made two or three more moves and bought Pacific Avenue before going up to bed.

I wonder if there is anyone who isn’t perked up by the sight of a Monopoly board, all the colors, all the bits and pieces, all the possibilities. Jess was the race car, Rose was the shoe, Ty was the dog, and I was the thimble. Pete was torn between the wheelbarrow, which he had won with twice, and the mounted horseman, which had more zip, though with that one he had lost twice. Pete was determined to win. It was Pete, actually, who proposed adding the scores of the games, throwing in bonuses for certain strategies and
pieces of luck, and shooting for a million dollars of Monopoly money. There would be a prize, too, a hundred dollars, if we all put twenty into the pool, or a weekend in Minneapolis (how about L.A.?), or two days of farm chores in mid-January. In this Jess and Pete thought alike—like city boys, my father would have said, looking for the payoff in a situation rather than the pitfall. Rose and Ty and I played like farmers, looking for pitfalls, holes, drop-offs, something small that will tip the tractor, break it, eat into your time, your crop, the profits that already exist in your mind, and not only as a result of crop projections and long-range forecasts, but also as an ideal that has never been attained, but could be this year.

Discussions around the Monopoly board were lively. Jess had plenty of adventures to relate, but Pete did, too. He told about hitchhiking across the country in 1967, just graduated from high school in Davenport and hoping to get to San Francisco, where he planned to join the Jefferson Airplane, or at least, the Grateful Dead. Things were uneventful until he got to Rawlins, Wyoming. He was rich (thirty-seven dollars in his pocket) and had a new guitar (Gibson J-200, dark sunburst, $195, a graduation present). A rancher picked him up late one afternoon and offered him a place to stay, then a ride to Salt Lake in the morning. The rancher had two brothers and a wife. They gave him a steak for dinner, then waked him up in the middle of the night and shaved his head and beard. The two brothers held him down, the wife held the flashlight. “You know,” he said, “I’ve never figured out why they didn’t turn on the lights. There wasn’t anybody for miles around.” In the morning they gave him more steak and a couple of fried eggs, and drove him to the nearest blacktop. When he realized that he had forgotten his guitar, he tried to walk back to the ranch and got lost. That afternoon, one of the brothers found him trudging along, handed him the guitar, and drove him back to the blacktop. It was nearly dusk, and the only car to pass him was heading east, so he waved it down, and that guy drove him all the way to Des Moines. “When I got out of that car,” Pete said, “the guy touched me on the arm and said in a whisper that he hoped my chemotherapy was a success.”

“Ha!” Rose exclaimed. We laughed the way we never did by ourselves, without Jess.

“Listen to this,” said Jess, and he told about confiding to an American woman in a Vancouver saloon that he was evading the draft. She asked him to order her another drink, and when he lifted his arm to hail the waitress, he felt her poke him in the side. She muttered that she had a loaded gun, that her boyfriend had died in Vietnam, and that “if I didn’t say the magic word, she was going to kill me, so I waved off the waitress and I thought for a while, and I said, ‘Bullshit.’ She said, ‘That’s the magic word.’ She took whatever was poking me out of my ribs and then looked at me with a smile and said, ‘Why don’t I have a margarita?’ I ordered her a margarita, and I paid for it, too.”

When he was sixteen, said Pete, and hitchhiking regularly between Davenport and Muscatine to rehearse with his group, he got picked up by a New York couple in a VW bus, with an Afghan hound and two cats. They had been on the road for eighteen months, living in the van. They asked him if he had ever seen any Jews before, “because we’ve been the first for about seventy-five percent of the people we’ve met.” The husband was writing plays about their travels for the street theater group they were going to found when they got back to New York, and one of the plays was called
The First Jews
. He asked Pete if he wanted to drop out of high school and go back to New York with them as a member of their company. They pulled over to the side of the road and smoked a joint with him, then the husband took over the driving, and the wife took him in the back, where the dog and cats were sleeping, and seduced him. Rose smiled all the way through this story, as if the carefree glow it cast originated partly in her as well as Pete.

Pete was an aggressive Monopoly strategist, building houses and hotels every time he could, and letting his liquid assets drop dangerously low. He also managed to predict three times that he was going to land on Boardwalk in time to purchase it, and twice it was Boardwalk with a hotel on it that broke the back of his most threatening rival, once Jess and once myself. Pete definitely counted on winning. But Rose, by slowly and steadily accumulating money, buying properties only with a certain percentage of it and hoarding the rest, managed to move toward a million dollars without ever actually winning a game.

One thing I noticed about these Monopoly nights was a shift in my feelings about Pete. It had been a long time since I’d realized what fun he was (when I mentioned this to Rose, she said it had been a long time since he’d had fun or been fun, actually), but it was more than that, more a realization that he had certain powers. Those nights he flexed them: he teased me; he charmed his daughters and included them in the game, even allowing them to decide strategy when his play was at a crisis; he topped Jess’s stories, and, in some ways, his style of telling them; he sang verses of songs, both familiar and obscure, that were entertaining, but best of all, appropriate, so that you had private realizations, sharp but silly to express, of how everything that was happening at that moment seemed marvelously to fit—that was Pete’s gift, and it demonstrated to me an intelligence that I wasn’t used to allowing him. In our family life, the inappropriate had always been Pete’s special domain.

One night, Jess told us that Harold had a remodeling project in mind for the July lull in farm work. We were grinning already when Pete said, “I’ve got to hear this.”

“Well, he’s going to rip out the linoleum and the subfloor of the kitchen. You know, the kitchen isn’t over the cellar, it’s over a crawl space. So he’s going to put a new concrete floor in the kitchen, green-tinted concrete that slopes to a drain so he can just hose it down when it gets dirty.”

“You’re kidding,” said Rose.

“Nope. He said if that works out the way he thinks it will, he’s going to try it in the downstairs bathroom, too.”

We laughed.

Ty said, “Is he going to run the hose in from outside?”

Pete said, “He could put in a hose spigot easy enough.”

We laughed again.

I said, “What does Loren think?”

“He doesn’t care. He said, ‘It’s his place, he can do what he wants to it.’ ”

I rolled the dice, landed on St. Charles Place, and paid Rose her rent. She divvied it up between her spend pile and her save pile, and I said, “He’s never going to get married at this rate. Nobody wants to cook in a concrete kitchen that slopes toward a drain.”

“Harold thinks this is an idea he can patent. He can’t figure out why no one’s ever done it before.”

Pete said, “I can’t wait till he tells Larry this one. Larry will go bananas.”

“Or he’ll want a concrete kitchen of his own,” said Rose. “Or he’ll want to go Harold one better and do the whole downstairs, with sheet vinyl on the walls so he could wash those down, too.”

We laughed, but the next day, I saw the delivery truck from the lumberyard in Pike pass our house and turn in at my father’s. I watched while the driver shouted for Daddy, and when he couldn’t roust him, I ran down there to find out what was going on. It was a pantry cabinet, a sink, four base cabinets, and two wall cabinets, as well as eight feet of baby blue laminated countertop, the floor display in the kitchen department of the lumberyard, which my father had bought for a thousand dollars, said the driver ($2500 value, according to the display card taped to the sink). Neither the wood nor the door pattern matched what my father already had—yellow painted cabinets original to the house and linoleum countertops edged in metal—but the display wasn’t large enough to replace what was there. I called for Daddy all over the house and out to the barn, but though his truck was there, he wasn’t. The driver and his helper unloaded the display onto the driveway, and when I said I didn’t have my checkbook, he said the cabinets were already paid for and drove off. I had to laugh, remembering how we’d predicted something the night before, then went home and forgot about it until Ty came in for dinner and told me that he had offered to help Daddy carry the new cabinets into the house and Daddy had said he hadn’t decided where he was going to put them yet, so he was going to leave them sit. Pete got the same response at suppertime.

We were a little perplexed, but the affair of the kitchen cabinets seemed mostly funny until two days later, when we got up and saw that it was going to rain soon, certainly before noon. Ty ate quickly, then walked down the road with me to help Daddy put the cabinets under cover, maybe in the barn at least, while I was making breakfast. Daddy was sitting at the table drinking coffee. I said, “Looks like a good rain today. The radio said it could last till late tomorrow.”

“Would have been better for the corn last week. Corn’s behind.”

I said, “Is it?”

Ty said, “It’s not that far behind. Anyway, if we get those cabinets in the house, Ginny will probably be just putting breakfast on the table.”

Daddy said, “You eating?”

“No, I ate.”

“Then you better cultivate those beans down on Mel’s corner, because it’s kind of low down there, and you won’t get the Deere into that field this week if you let it go till after this rain.”

“I was going to do that. The tractor’s down there already.”

“You left the tractor down there?”

I glanced at Ty. There was nothing unusual about leaving the tractor out when work in Mel’s corner was planned, since it was the farthest field from the barn and took longer to get there by tractor over the road than on foot across the fields. He caught my look and gave a little shrug, then said, “How about these cabinets? I won’t have time to help you with them later, and Pete’s got to go into Zebulon Center and file some papers this morning.”

Daddy said, “I’m tired of hearing about that damn kitchen junk. I’ll move them when I’m good and ready.”

“Daddy, you don’t want them to warp in the rain, do you? They’re solid oak. They’re nice wood.”

He drank down his coffee and said, “Quit telling me what to do.” He glared at us, until finally Ty turned and went out. I wished Rose was there, since she knew how to talk back to him, but at last I said, “What are you doing, leaving them out in the rain? Showing Harold a thing or two?” I tried to make my voice cajoling, as inoffensive as possible.

He said, “I’m minding my own business.”

I made him breakfast, pointedly not speaking, but he didn’t seem to notice. Afterward, he got in his truck and drove off, and I went home. I watched the sky, though, and when it started to rain, a steady soaker, I put on my slicker and walked down to his place. The cabinets stood mournfully in the gravel drive, shedding water in rivulets. I didn’t know what to think.

I found out that night. Rose was throwing off jokes like a Fourth of July sparkler. Her favorite notion was that Daddy intended to
start breeding rabbits on the revolving shelves of the pantry and chickens in the wall cabinets. I could tell she was furious, because she wouldn’t drop the subject. Pete was angry, too, and he encouraged her to dwell on it. Finally Ty said, in his mild way, “Larry’s done silly things before.”

Rose said, “A thousand dollars! Right out the window. He bought them just to top Harold, and then he’s too lazy to put them in the house.”

Jess said, “Maybe he never intended to put them in the house.”

“Why would you have such nice cabinets in the workshop? Most people put the old ones in the workshop and the new ones in the house.”