Fitting Ends (3 page)

They call it the “dead truck,” his father tells him. His father's job is to drive through the rows of cattle pens and pick up the ones that have died. Wearing thick leather gloves and coveralls, he attaches a chain to their bodies and cranks them up into the back of the truck. Later, Scott's father explains, they'll be taken to be made into dog food and fertilizer.

The cattle shift and mass in their pens, staring uneasily as Scott and his father pass. After a few minutes, Scott's father spots one in the midst of the ebb and flow of brown-and-white bodies. He points it out, and Scott sits, looking at it—the swollen belly, the stiff legs that point in the air at odd angles. “We lose sometimes thirty a day,” his father tells him, and Scott can picture them, lying down in the heat and mud and the maggots that thrive in the fresh manure, lying down and never getting up again.

He watches through the rearview mirror after his father backs the truck up to the narrow edge of the pen. The cattle bellow, scatter away, then circle like bystanders at a respectful distance. His father bends over the dead animal and lifts its head so he can work the chain under its body. He strains, pulling the chain under the torso, hooks it under the front legs, which sway lazily. When he activates the crank, the watching cattle bolt again, and the dead cow's body jerks once, then slowly begins to sidle along the dark, tadpole-colored ground, and finally Scott sees it lift. He stops looking. It's impossible to imagine, he thinks—days, weeks, months of this: the sickly sweet smell of the dead and the manure; the boring maze of dirt roads that trace around and around the circumference of the pens. You would almost have to be drunk or high, Scott thinks, just to make yourself go to work in the morning.

His father climbs back into the cab of the truck and wipes his face with his forearm. Scott lets his gaze drift over his father's gloves, then, involuntarily, to his eye, which is fixed on some distant point—the hills, the faint white line an airplane is making along the sky.

“What's the matter?” His father puts his gloved hand on Scott's knee, and Scott can't help but flinch. “Oh,” his father says, and his expression wavers. He takes off his gloves. “Not a pretty sight, is it? But it don't take much to get used to it.”

“Yeah.” Scott looks away, ashamed of his own squeamishness. “No big deal,” he says. He tries to sound upbeat. He doesn't want to offend his father, to seem prissy or snobbish. Besides, he's almost positive he won't get the job, anyway.

“It's only to September, even if you don't like it,” his father says. They nod at one another, neither sure of what to say, and Scott's father clears his throat. “Well. How about some of that coffee?”

Scott pours him a cup out of the thermos, balancing as the truck jogs forward. He is trying to concentrate on making himself believe that there will be a time when his life is back in order, when he'll be back at the university, walking through the quad with a load of books or looking out his window at night and seeing the bright dominoes of city lights on the horizon. He remembers how, once, when he was little, his father drove him to the top of a hill at night, and how they stood there, watching a red airplane light move among the stars, his father trying to convince him that this tiny light held hundreds of people, all of them on their way to California or Hawaii or Japan, all of them oblivious of anyone down below. College seems at least that distant and unreal.

“Don't look so down in the mouth,” Scott's father says. “You should have seen me when I came back from the cure. You're tougher than I was. All you need is something to keep your hands busy.”

Out the window, the white faces of Hereford cattle are ghostly in the waves of heat—pale, skull-like masks, staring as the truck rattles by. “Yeah?” Scott is playing with the neck of his shirt, crumpling it, and he smooths it out when he realizes what he's doing. He and his father nod.

A few hours later, his father parks the truck for lunch, and they pass a sandwich back and forth, trading bites. “I guess my life is pretty good these days,” Scott's father says, chewing thoughtfully. “Things are calmer now. More peaceful. I fiddle around in the shop. Go fishing. I'm getting older, you know, all I want is the easy life. You're lucky. You didn't let this thing drag on and ruin your life.” His eye searches Scott's face, but Scott remains blank. “Don't worry, son,” he says softly. “Things will turn out fine for you, just you watch.”

Scott doesn't say anything. But what he is thinking is how it would be to go back to school; the way it would feel to move his things out of the fraternity house, looking up to see his friends' stares shift quickly away; the way it would feel to stand in the doorway of an empty dorm room and see the nights ahead buzzing endlessly, like a fly around a lightbulb. He closes his eyes for a moment.

“Don't you think so?” his father says.

“What?” Scott says. And then, “Yeah.” He draws in breath. “I'm sure things will work out fine.”

On days that Scott's father is at work, Scott tries to think of at least one thing he can do so when his father comes home and asks, “What have you been up to today?” he can prove that he hasn't just been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and brooding. He mows the ragged patch of lawn, and puts out sprinklers, or cleans the shop, sweeping the tiny dollops of melted metal into a pile, rebaiting the mousetraps hidden behind a stack of old pipes, picking through the coffee cans full of nuts and bolts and nails and separating them into individual cans. Mostly, he does these things in the afternoon, so that he won't finish too soon and have hours and hours left to kill. If he starts late enough, he's still busy when his father comes home from work. Scott looks up, as if surprised that the day has gone by so quickly, and waves at him.

Mornings are the hardest part. Scott wouldn't like for his father to see him, walking through the trailer from one end to the other, or snooping through things, as he sometimes does. His father keeps old pictures in the bottom drawer of his dresser, and Scott likes to take them out. There are photographs of his father as a young man, wide-eyed and alert in his navy uniform, his smile taut, anticipating the flash of the camera. When he was little, Scott used to dream of having a father like the man in those pictures—the firm, determined jaw, the noble posture. There was a picture of him on the deck of a ship, smiling an eager, innocent smile, an expression Scott had never seen.

He had a fantasy, back then, that if he could somehow trap his father in a room for a week without alcohol, that he'd be cured. He'd be transformed, suddenly, into that calm dream-father. Scott used to imagine caring for him, bringing him food as he lay there in his locked room; he even imagined sitting on the edge of his father's bed and wiping sweat from his face with a damp cloth. How grateful he would be afterward! Scott knew the way his father would hug him, knew the way his father's tears would feel on his neck.

One night, just before he turned thirteen, Scott tried to do it. He locked his father in the bedroom and barricaded the door. For a while, his father cursed him, and threatened, and hollered. Then everything was quiet, and Scott began to get frightened. And when, finally, crying, he opened the door, he discovered that his father had squeezed through the tiny bedroom window and escaped into the night.

Scott had searched for hours. He had hidden his father's car keys, and so his father had gone off on foot. Scott walked the dark dirt roads with a flashlight, calling for him, the dust-filled beam of light tunneling all the way across the fields, to infinity. When he found his father at last, he was curled up like a baby in the high weeds along the side of the road, asleep.

Sunday, after they've washed the dishes and stacked them carefully away, Scott and his father play poker. These are the times that Scott's father seems most like himself, the way he used to be—or so Scott thinks, anyway. They play for cigarettes, and Scott's father deals the cards with a smooth, magician's precision. As he does this, he tells Scott about a woman, a widow, older than him, who comes to AA meetings. He has spoken to her several times, seen her in the grocery store and said hello. He lingers over her physical qualities—the wide, generous mouth; the milky skin.

The father wins one pack of cigarettes, and Scott takes another from the carton. The light glares down on his cards as he fans them out. He arranges them, and his father speaks ramblingly of an idea he's had to move his trailer out near the lake. “They say there's plots in Lewellen that don't cost too much. Couple years down the road, who knows?”

“Who knows?” Scott echoes. And here is another happy memory he's reminded of—he doesn't understand why there should be so many good things when his father was such a wreck, really—but he can remember being seven or eight and going with his father to Lake McConaughy, fishing. They'd rented a boat, and he thinks of being out on the water, his father telling him that the lake had been made by a dam, and that at the deepest point, which at one time had been a valley, there had been a little town. And sometimes, his father told him, when the lake was very calm and clear, boats passing over could see the steeple of an old church down there under the water. He must have been stone drunk then, Scott knows, but it also seems that he was more whole then than he is now, that something great was happening, and Scott had sat there, believing him, staring over the edge of the boat. He could hear the sound of a radio playing somewhere along the shore.

Scott lays down his cards, frowning at the memory, and his father taps the table briskly, because he wins again, and he sweeps the cigarettes in the center to his side.

“Just like the old days,” Scott says, and begins to shuffle. “I used to get such a kick out of you giving me a fifty-dollar bill.” Scott smiles, but his father doesn't. He looks up as if accused, as if revealed. His brow furrows.

“You know,” he says, “I'd give anything to have those days back to live over again. I'd give anything to make that up to you.”

“I didn't mind. Things were fun for me.”

Scott's father shakes his head grimly. “No, they weren't.”

It has been an unspoken rule between them that they don't mention the past. The only things Scott's father will say are abstractions of some sort, phrases he has obviously picked up in a clinic: “I just had to learn to turn my actions into reactions,” he will say, or “I was looking for approval, and I lost my identity in the process.” His words hang in the air like smoke, and it's hard for Scott to believe he has said them.

Scott doesn't feel he can forget or ignore things the way his father does. He'll think of the time this girl, Traci, and two of his fraternity brothers and he sat up late playing quarters—the easy jokes; the talk of stupid things that connected their childhoods, like pop songs and brands of candy; the way Traci's hand kept bumping against his. She was rich and beautiful, and Scott knows for a fact that if it hadn't been for the alcohol there never would have been that great moment, much later, when they slid loosely into a kiss. He remembers the parties, the night he stood on a chair in front of a crowd of dancing people and raised a cup of beer above his head, shouting a toast: “To Life! To all of us! To me!” And everyone cheered. He was happy then. There aren't so many nights he regrets. He never did those types of things people spoke of at the clinic: wrecking cars, beating their wives, tearing through their life's work as if there would never be an end to it. Listening to their stories, Scott had felt ashamed to have such fond memories, and so little desire to start over.

In the middle of the week the feedlot calls. They would like Scott to start on Friday, and they will train him to drive one of the feed trucks. He wants to say no right away, but then he thinks that maybe his father pleaded with them to offer him the job. He imagines them snorting as his father comes into the office to punch out: “Larry, your kid turned the job down. Does he think he's too good for us?” Scott doesn't know how he would explain himself. So he tells them he will be there, seven o'clock sharp. When he hangs up, his whole body feels hollow.

When his father comes home from work, Scott is sitting in front of the TV, drinking quinine water and eating dry saltines from the box. His father walks in and tosses his work clothes lightly into the closet. “I hear you got some good news today,” he says.

They go out for a walk, Scott and his father, after supper, down the long dirt road that leads away from the trailer. Scott can tell how pleased his father is from the way he walks, his springing step, as if he's trying on a new pair of shoes. His father picks up the larger pebbles he finds in his path and throws them over the sunflowers in the ditch, out into the pasture. “I got a pair of coveralls you can use,” he tells Scott. “They're too big for me. And you can take the car. I won't need it. I got Fridays off, you know, and I'm just going to work in the shop.”

“Great,” Scott says. The air is electric with things he considers saying and then doesn't. He thinks of friends who have parted on bad terms, meeting under falling leaves, under a drizzle of rain. He could say, “I really don't think this job is right for me,” or even, “Dad, will you help me, please?” But then, when Scott looks at his face, all he can see is the glass eye, which is blank as the dark bead of a bird's. Scott faces him, turning words over in his mind and then discarding them.

His father smiles at him quizzically. “What's wrong?”

“I don't know.” Scott shrugs, bending down to pick up a rock. He throws it across the ditch. “Nothing.”

When Scott wakes up on Friday, his father is still in bed. Scott dresses in the dark, and when he goes to the car, the sun is barely staining the rim of the sky. Once he's driving, his head starts to throb, and he can't stop himself from feeling that this day will mark an ending place. He stares ahead and can almost see his future in the distance, bearing down on him like dark weather. He lets his foot off the accelerator, watching the speedometer drift down, slower, as he heads into the gray foot-hills. Lots of people are worse off than he is, he tells himself. He thinks of someone his own age, with the same problems, back in the real world, going to work, content. He imagines men his age, not boys, going to war; the pioneers, with wives and kids and complete responsibility at his age enduring all sorts of tragedies and hardships. And yet, as he curves up to the top of the hill and looks down to where the feedlot is, where thousands of cattle cluster like a brand against the pale fields, he stops the car. He sits there until the time when he is supposed to start work has blinked by on the digital clock on the dashboard. Then he turns the key. He drifts past the feedlot, puttering as heavy trucks roar past, his hands clutching the steering wheel like an old man's, drifting toward the highway, toward town.