todd of tacoma

Could have been any man. Any man in the world. And he kind of was, P was. Then G married him, and he wasn’t just any man anymore. He was a man with a wife. A man with a wife with a good body and a nice face, and now he had a boat, to boot.

Merry Christmas and Congrats 2004
–Your Old Man P

You’re thinking, something’s not right, and you’re not wrong. You don’t just get a boat with every wife, even good-bodied wives, especially when your old man’s a dryland farmer. Winter wheat and peas barely fetch you the combine to harvest them.

A boat?

Wife like that you ought to have a boat to show her off in, he said.

Dad, you shouldn’t have. What’d this cost you?

Don’t you worry about that.

Look, P’s practically worthier than God to get a seat in Heaven–and meeker than Job and as good at praying as King David. He deserved a boat to show his wife off in. But he wouldn’t ever buy a boat to show his wife off in. It ain’t Christian in the sense, among other senses, that you’re putting on full display your wife to covet, so your neighbor can break the Tenth Commandment.

Old Man P never really read that much into the Bible.

Well, rumor had it, and rumor’s as good as Fox News around here, rumor had it Old Man P gifted the boat to his boy, as a wedding present or honeymoon present, the Christmas of the year he and G wedded, and the old man said the boy could work his gift off over the next four, five years.

Don’t even have to put you on a schedule, just extra odds and ends on Saturdays and Sundays time to time, till both of us agrees on it’s paid for.

That was four years ago.

Congrats.

It would have been paid off already but Old Man P determined Saturday work don’t really count as extra in the winter, since you barely put in forty hours a week over six days in the winter, and Sunday work don’t count in the summer because you shouldn’t work on the Sabbath anyway. And shoot, you’re gonna work Saturdays in the summer, too, so those oughtn’t really count, either.

Finding work to pay his gift off was more work than work by now. He didn’t even have time to put it in the water, almost kind of forgot that’s what it was for.

It was getting use, though. Old Man P made sure it didn’t gather dust. Borrowed it for fishing trips and Flathead joyrides, Hyalite some, too, along the dam. Meanwhile P’s burning ditches and poisoning gophers.

Eagles

Real quick.

You remember Old Man P in high school, when he was in high school, he had that peeping streak?

If you don’t remember, it was sort of an unsecret secret he’d crept houses in Manhattan and Amsterdam, peeping windows. Got to be expert at driving without his headlights on and accelerating and shifting real quiet on the getaway. He liked those R rated movies, too, still does! The fornication type. Basic Instinct, Indecent Proposal. You might say, that ain’t peeping, but peeping’s peeping if you ask me, don’t matter if it’s on a screen or through a screen door.

Or through binoculars.

He wore binoculars all summer long, too, remember that? Wore them like a bolo tie. Saying he’s on the lookout for eagles. Scanning trees, scanning beaches, scanning crowds, scanning high school track meets and football games. For eagles.

Really loved to look at eagles.

Still does.

But this story’s about the son, not the father. The child’s the father now. He’d sweared off his old man’s ways early on in life, and he vowed to be a righteous and respectable man and raise good children, and be a diligent husband and always set things right. That’s why he was working so hard to find work to work his boat off.

Ennis Lake, Ennis, Montana

One day in July, I think around the Fourth.

This isn’t a real good Christmas story, I’m seeing that now.

Around the Fourth of July it was and the whole family was going to Ennis Lake by Ennis, Montana. It’s the first lake to get hot in the summer and it’s the closest to Manhattan, too. The water’s cloudy and brown in the main body, but there’s a finger part with clearer water you can find if you beeline to under McAllister Bridge. There’s a campsite you can set up there, too, accessible best by boat, since the stone they packed that 287 turnoff with seems to be made of newly sharpened arrowheads with Shoshone curses on them. Don’t even think about that turnoff if your tires are bald.

Anyway, Old Man P this Saturday drove the family up first, Grandma and Jackson and Angel, that’s the two kids, three-and-a-half and one, and G, too, P’s looker wife, looker up to her wrists. P sent them off, G in the passenger seat while Grandma and the kids were crowded in the back. P sent them off first because he wasn’t quite finished mending that fence along that twelve acres of dry green along Veenstras’. They wanted to turn twenty head or so into that bordering pasture and they paid Old Man P good money to rent it, so why ain’t it ready yet?

It’s nice to have two cars up there, G said to her pretty irritated husband, in case Grandma wants to get home early. She squeezed P’s strong forearm in that way he liked. She touched him with her hands and eyes and made innocent like she never touched an arm before.

It’s nice to have two cars there, he agreed.

Gimme a kiss.

So, it was decided.

He watched his whole family pull out of the yard slowly, P did, slowly so as not to kick up dust. He brought his forearm to his nose and breathed deeply. Banana Boat 55. You get to kind of liking the smell of most sunscreens in the summer, partly because you watch women rub it on themselves about once an hour and so you associate it with them and their skin, and the lake, too, because at the lake’s the only time you see it, all that skin.

P don’t wear it much, but he took some of that Banana Boat 55 with him to save his neck mending.

Something in the Way

When you live under a big sky you see storms you ain’t going to see. You can toss a look up at the Spanish Peaks and there’ll be mounds of purple and blue banished off at such an elevation all the rain’ll be spent by the time it gets down to a reasonable height to soak you, and the clouds will just float your way like some sad cirrus once they get all sorted. Most folks look out at the Bridgers to see what’s brewing, but that’s just a queue for storms going to Livingston. No use speculating that direction. If you look at the foothills out by Manhattan, you’re a fool. Them clouds stretch out like so much taffy and don’t a darn thing come out that hits the ground.

That rain’s called virga.

P’s barometer was the Devil’s Slide, opposite the foothills and situated between the Bridger’s Saddle and the Spanish Peaks such that it looked to P like a needle. A needle that never moved, sure, he knew that, but what’s around it’s built up different enough every time you look, so that it seems like the needle moves, that it’s telling you the weather. Saddle to the needle three-quarters says you got a heavy thundershower, maybe hail. Peaks to three-quarter needle, an afternoon of rain.

Today, it said no storm or anything, but it felt like something.

Might have been that he was alone, that the farm was empty of his family and everyone. Could also have been the horseflies. They liked the smell of Banana Boat, too, he knew that, and he had served them up a neckfull. But more likely it was his secret.

A secret?

He would never do this on a weekday, but he was treating himself, today. He’d drove a path, a little road, along the side of that field by Veenstras’, just so he could listen to music from his truck while he worked.

The secret, he really liked the grunge music that came out of Seattle. Seattle, Washington. He kept in his Silverado two CDs only, a Garth Brooks album he could tolerate when other people rode with him and a mixed CD with Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden songs, those were the ones he knew of, and he put Bush and Everclear and Stone Temple Pilots on it, too. Twenty-some tracks. He prayed for forgiveness every time he shut his truck off.

God, I’m sorry I listened to those last couple songs about drug addiction, I know what they say isn’t always holy, amen.

When P’d got the fence strung and taut and he’d showered and found his dusty swim trucks and got two gas cans for the boat and filled them and got to Ennis and the lake, and then he reached the McAllister turnoff leading to the campsite, he switched his burned CD–which he had listened through some eight times today–switched it out for Garth Brooks and crawled up the switches and over so he’d make it to his family with barely any dust on his truck.

The Devil’s Slide

Grandma was the only one in the shade. The rest of the family was strewn about the campsite, like a little microwave explosion. Angel was playing with grass, in the sun, about ten feet from Grandma, who seemed to have tasked herself with watching her. Jackson was sitting in an inner tube playing with a cordless air inflator, letting air out, then letting air in. G was on a towel with her ass covered by a peach-orange-checkered swimsuit bottom shaped like a fancy banquet dinner napkin. She had a small wedgie and as long as she had that wedgie you couldn’t look away.

Her backside looked naked except for that napkin and a couple strings you couldn’t even tell were tied. You had to squint, look real close–and that’s exactly what Old Man P was doing. He was at a picnic table twelve o’clock from G, staring right at her, fixedly at her behind, didn’t even need binoculars, and yet there they were, dangling there, useless and tired, like a crest or a medallion.

P rolled the driver side window down a couple inches, and the passenger, too, and unfolded his dash protector. Then he slammed his truck door.

No one moved. No one had moved since he’d parked, and still they weren’t budging.

To calm himself, he crouched with his ears and hands attentive next to each of his truck tires to check for punctures. The left rear looked a little low, but he couldn’t feel nor hear no whistling. It left him annoyed being unable to suss out the root of that low tire. Things were getting to him easy, today. If he wasn’t on the water too long, anyway, he’d get home fine with a slow leak. He tried to tell himself this in that stoic way he’d tell himself things like this, and then he made his way down the path to the campsite and shore and, feeling that boldness you feel when you’re annoyed, decided to castigate his old man.

For coveting?

Yes. You can bet he had every right to, but families out here don’t air grievances. When they get aggrieved they pick something else minor to make too big a stink about. As he huffed down the trail, eyes darting between his wife’s small shoulderblades and his dad’s sad jeans, size and a half too baggy; between his wife’s venusian dimples and his dad’s thin shirt and his hat like a diving board; his wife’s bottom with that perfect curvature, that wedgie that ended somewhere in her perineum, that Devil’s Slide, contrasted with his old man’s posture, resembling best a stubbed out cigarette, to go with his rawhide skin. Back and forth he looked, until his eyes were tired. He couldn’t think of anything minor.

When he was about ten steps from the site, his wife rolled over to acknowledge him. In so doing, she felt her wedgie and with two fingers deftly removed it. A maneuver that, if not executed quick enough, is going to make you look like you’re rolling up a dingleberry.

But if you do it quick.

What’s the use pulling a boat up here if you’re just gonna ground it against these frickin boulders? P said as soon as he thought it.

Did you get the gas? is all the old man said. He was munching on a bag of chips.

Shit!

P! his wife said. So did Grandma.

The cans are in my truck.

Jackson came running up to hug his leg.

Oh, you gonna help me, little buddy?

The boy nodded.

You get any bigger I’m gonna have to hire you on. You wanna be my hired man?

You can’t afford him, G said. Her sunglasses sparkled louder than the lake. She tipped them down like she was sexy, and she was.

He owes me half his wages for the mess he left at breakfast, she said.

I saw that. Son, you eat your breakfast like an honest man and I’ll hire you on. Deal?

Deal!

This family’s just owing everyone all over the place, ain’t they? P said.

He and Jackson walked up to his truck and walked back with the cans and set them on the shore.

Banana Boat

Can you pass me them cans, Dad?

I just filled it.

Then why’d you make me get gas?

Thought it was empty.

It wasn’t?

It was.

It was. So, you filled it?

Yep.

Then why’d you ask if I got the cans!

I just asked if you got ’em, not if you’d go get ’em.

P was getting redder and redder and with hardly even a sunburn. He was speaking like he was looking the old man in the eyes, but he wasn’t. He was staring down the binoculars hanging at his chest, the ones that surely ogled his wife all morning while he was sweating over barbed wire and deer flies and setting probably twelve new posts.

Lord, forgive me for my hateful thoughts, amen.

Thought we might need them, said Old Man P. Good to be prepared.

Behind the old man, G was rubbing Angel ghost-white with Banana Boat. She outfitted the little girl’s arms with pink floaties.

That feel okay, hun?

The attention she gave those kids.

Can I pass her to you, babe?

The attention she gave P. There was at least five, six moments a week where P felt he was the luckiest man in Southwest Montana.

You can pass her to me.

Hang tight, I’ll wade out, she said.

Once she had Angel situated and talked up to go on the boat with Daddy, G waded out. She pushed the water with her shins and thighs like she was kicking a soccer ball, like the water was more substantial than it was. And maybe it was. That little girl was weighing on her hip, kind of, and was grasping at Mommy’s neck and at her top’s clasp, and let me tell you P’s heart could hardly take it, how lucky he was. It was like a sequel to G walking down the aisle. Like it was the second act in their marriage. They were parents now, and they were doing it right, with kids who loved and trusted them and loved the Lord God, too. P had never had more confidence in this fact than now, his wife kicking at water to bring him his daughter.

Whatcha doing, you goofball! G said.

Angel had let go with both hands and was reaching out to the water arms spread to hug it. G just clutched her tighter around the belly.

Careful with this little girl, she said to P. She’ll convince you she can do anything.

Just like her mom, P said, kind of surprising himself.

They locked eyes, P and G did, P squinting and G looking over her sunglasses. G was barely able to hold her head straight, too, thanks to that kid going uh-wowowow-uh-wah-uh-wah-uh and swimming at the air.

G was kind of blushing.

Jacks and I will get the grill ready.

That sounds great, thank you.

And hey–you okay?

I’m fine. Just got my head in the clouds.

It occurred to him he wasn’t using the phrase right, the clouds phrase, but it didn’t seem to matter to his wife. She seemed most concerned with catching his eyes again to get her answer.

I love you, she said.

The boat seemed to disappear from under P’s feet and he was walking on water.

I love you, too. Hey, he said, I’m sorry about all, and he couldn’t finish his sentence, just pointed vaguely toward his parents.

All what? The clouds?

I don’t know, he laughed.

It’s a perfect day, P! Bring sunglasses next time. You’re gonna get crow’s feet from squinting!

He laughed and she laughed and, as they laughed, P let his eyes start up to the sky like, ha ha ha, but he stopped before he hit the sky, stopped on Old Man P, on the shore with those binoculars resting on his nose.

P couldn’t tell perfect, but he knew, wouldn’t hold up in court, but he knew. It was in the way he looked away. P knew. And there’s women out there who know what I’m trying to say here. The way the old man looked away. Like he was chasing through the air some eagle dipping to clench a rabbit or a snake.

He was lusting. He was coveting.

P turned the key in the boat’s ignition and held it while the engine tried to turn over. When it did, finally, G had finally kicked her way ashore and P’s old man was helping her with all the picnic stuff they packed.

Bub-bub-bubbah-wub-wub-wub, Angel said.

Ha ha, what are you doing?

Bubbah-wub-kwub-bububub.

Let’s fit you in this now, P said as he put his girl in a tube complete with leg holes in the middle so she wouldn’t need to worry about staying afloat on her own arm strength or kicking her legs.

We’ll get out a little farther and Daddy’ll put you in the water, he said.

When they were out just far enough to still be out of the way of most skiers and boarders and tubers, P powered the boat down and tied a rope to Angel’s tube and put her in the water and tied the other end of the rope to a fishing rod outrig thing they never used except for this.

Looks like I caught a big one!

Angel laughed. She giggled and the giggle grew some other sounds on it. Some of them laughs but uglier, some of them yelling down and some yelling up and the sounds were bouncing all over the lake because the area they were drifting in was popular for cliff jumping. He heard a splash and then, fuck! Holy shit, that hurt! And more ugly laughter to follow.

Shit, P muttered.

He reached down beside him to pick up the wood grate covering the hollow of the hull where his old man kept, among other reckless things to keep, a 9 mm plastic hunting rifle. It’s light and it floats, Old Man P had said. What do you need a darn floating gun for? P had said.

Well, they were the easiest binoculars to grab sometimes, lightweight as they were, and P was grabbing them now to see what was disturbing his peaceful float.

Another splash. Ah, fuck! Greg!

And more ugly laughter.

P squeezed the stock of the plastic rifle against his chin and half closed one eye and relaxed his other eye’s gaze so the scope could aid him best. He hinged at the neck and he couldn’t see no one up the cliff or on the water at the good jumping spot. Then he seen a boat with six or seven kids all sitting on the edge of it. One was toweling off on the stern and the other was just then climbing in. Someone crushed a beer can and stood up and made to skip it across the water, then tossed it over his shoulder. He followed the can’s arc as if he were going to shoot it.

Get in, Greg, you comfortable, Greg, you want a towel, buddy?

P reminded himself to double-check the safety.

It’s fucking cold!

Safety was on.

One boy tossed one boy a towel and another boy pushed the boy P presumed to be Greg into the water with his towel.

More laughter. Until, of course, one of them spotted P scoping them.

Greg!

Not so hilarious, are you? P chuckled, resting his crosshairs on a head here, a head there.

He wasn’t intending to do anything but look. Heck, he didn’t even intend to scare them.

Most of them ducked except one of the braver girls. She put her arms out for Greg and the one called Greg clutched her arms at the elbow and the two kind of rolled somersault past the back seats and disappeared near the driver’s seat.

Get the ladder!

Fuck that!

Ah, shit!

Go, go, go!

And the brave girl took the wheel and they sped off and in their wake bobbed P and Angel and Angel giggled going up and down like that.

That’s right, baby girl. That was silly. Don’t go telling Mommy on me.

He made a funny face.

Angel kept giggling.

P checked the rope again, that it was secure enough that he could sit back, and it was. He sat back, arms kind of up, sat like that in the seat behind the driver’s seat and he just sat there in the peace of water lapping at his boat’s hollow plastic shell and his child giggling still and he realized how tired he was. Not just of working or of never sleeping because he was working, but because he never had dreams anymore. All he ever wanted once ago was his own stretch of land just his, small, maybe somewhere in the Valley proper, with a ditch on it, and he could buy water rights and could irrigate and grow something other than winter wheat and peas. He was thinking alfalfa and was even saving for a baler and a wagon.

Since the boat, though, no dreams at all. No daydreams or night dreams.

Nothing to save for.

Just a man with crow’s feet afloat on sinker.

Out there on the water, engine off, drifting only kind of in the wake of dumb kids, Angel on a string, he felt almost headless, like all he had on top was a sunburned face and ears he wished sometimes didn’t hear so well. He tried to feel it, the head he got. Closed his eyes to look for it.

Try it yourself. It’s near impossible. Just kind of let it all relax. Still no, right?

P prayed aloud since no one was around to understand him and make him feel foolish. He prayed, God, please grant me a dream. Your faithful servant, P. Like he was writing a letter. And he was just about feeling downright upset with his maker when he just right then fell heavily asleep.

Robin Hood

I haven’t seen any sort of comprehensive sleep study results particular to Southwest Montana or, even more interesting, sleep studies done on farmers in and around the Gallatin Valley. But I imagine we’d find their dreamlives interesting, as most farmers around here are so overworked and overtired that when they sleep they dream of sleep. Like they’re catching up.

P was sleeping in his dream. In a bed of water not to be confused with a waterbed. He was rocking like in a carriage or on a buoy and covered in cool sheets of water that wasn’t wet, they was hovering over him like a breeze would. And tucked next to him, tucked inside him almost, was his wife with her good body and it was rocking against him, too. He couldn’t make out exactly if this wife of his was in this dream or the dream within that dream. But it didn’t matter because the effect was that of continuously floating through her.

He was watching her and touching her at once. You can just do that! he asked, because he felt so good it felt wrong. Her hair was in his nostrils but it didn’t make him itch. It smelled of shea butter. He could see the dimples in her lower back even as he covered them. Her legs were kicking lake water and kicking the air around him. He closed his eyes in the one dream and saw her still in another. She was looking right at him and looking away, too. They were–her eyes–they were no one even knows what color, something like cobalt or silver or green and purple, too. She kissed him and when she kissed him the seven or eight or whatever muscles in her neck elongated taut and released like a hopping frog and her voice came to him in like a frequency on an AM radio you can only get when you park your truck at the top of a hill in Norris.

You work too hard, she said.

I just want the best of everything for you and Jacks and Angel.

We just want the best of you.

And here he went rock hard, dream in a dream rock hard. The kind of erection that consumes you, the kind where you begin to understand the Story of Creation, let there be firmament in the midst of the waters.

All P ever wanted was to be seen. For more than working for things and fixing things and paying off things. Just to be seen! Seen enough to where he could see himself.

G’s tongue was now a vine growing around him and a vein growing in him while continuing to talk to him. He was swelling with what he would later describe as life.

I want what’s best, too. For me and Jacks and Angel and the other one, G said.

The other one? P said.

The other one?

He said something in a language he didn’t know, probably Aramaic, and he didn’t know what it meant but he liked the way it sounded. For her part, G repeated it. Then she repeated his name like it was the first time she’d uttered it, like it was a word she’d never heard, and she was telling him with her eyes, no, let me try to say it again.

I got it. P. P, is this right?

And then she started saying it sexually and kind of honking like a goose, and then angry, which is sexual, too, because anger and sex are both mostly sinful and mystifying, and then P woke up out of one dream and then another, only to find he was in one more, and then one more, and one more after that.

P!

Other voices joined, they were ugly, and he couldn’t sense from which direction.

P! P! P!

P!

He was on a boat, then on a buoy, then on a bed, then on a cliff, then in a field, then immersed in water, then in the expanse of the sky, following clouds around the Gallatin Valley. No dream had the right way out, and still he wanted the answer to one question.

Are we having another child?

P!

Angel! someone said.

He jerked awake into this life, the one with the boat. He emerged rigid and dumb. The voices were quite clear now and, worse, unrelenting and ugly.

Boy, you check the water! Old Man P shouted.

P! sang his mother.

A creature was splashing toward him, a figure like an albino seal. It was his wife, probably. He recognized, just now he did, that he was standing up with his dream erection.

Angel! the shore was still yelling.

P picked up the gun and put the scope to his eye and closed the other and saw his mom with Jackson on her hip and she was shouting.

He made an effort not turn side profile.

Stepping forward, as if to make his voice extra heard was Old Man P, binoculars swinging and dangling. While there was urgency in Mom’s voice, there was anger unadulterated in Dad’s.

Boy, you quit playing with yourself and tend to your family!

The seal grew closer. He put his crosshairs on it–it was his wife. And where was Angel?

There was a pair of legs on a rope behind the boat. Blue legs with baby water shoes.

A blue-white hand slapped! the stern as P’s boat reality was starting to come together.

G emerged. Half-emerged, then turned around.

Angel!

Boy or girl! P shouted.

G flipped the blue legs over and pulled their daughter out of the tube and onto the stern.

P was still stiff and G seemed unduly horrified when she looked back and saw it.

You didn’t see your own daughter drowning!

G was sitting down now, shivering, with a puddle of Angel in her lap. She was holding her and kind of shaking her and sloshing her insides around and saying her name in an alien tongue.

Angel!

She shook her and shook her.

P looked down at his plastic gun. The safety was off somehow. He switched it back to on.

What are you doing?

It’s on! he said. He showed it to her. He pushed it back off and then on again. See?

She was drowning! What’s wrong with you?

The child coughed, spat from deep in her throat and wailed like she had just been born. What sort of dreams had she had? thought P.

Oh, Angel, Angel, baby! Baby.

Are we having another child, G?

Are you on something?

Is it true? Are you, he whispered, with child?

She did not answer. She just held Angel close to her and uttered things like, shhhh, and it’s okay.

Shhhh, it’s okay.

Maybe it’s the sun, I wonder.

P heard Old Man P just then. He couldn’t make out what he was saying, so he brought the rifle to his eye and looked to the shore to read his lips a little. 

What the heck are you doing!

The old man was looking at him through his eagle-spying binoculars and something switched in P, like he couldn’t make choices anymore, like he had to pop the safety and exhale coolly and squeeze the trigger of the plastic gun that floats.

And he did.

He popped off what most would call a lucky shot. He didn’t just hit his old man, he hit him square between the binocular hinge, splintered eagle eyes in an equal two, like he was Annie Oakley or Robin Hood.

And from a bobbing boat, no less.

Some men are just born lucky.

Deer Lodge

Ennis Police had a surprise when they showed up for that call of a belligerent man waving a gun on the lake only to witness the tail end of a patricide. The O family being a family of God-fearing stoics they weren’t none of them crying except Jackson when the Madison County Sheriff finally got out there to organize everything.

G was still too upset by the image of Angel’s legs upright in the water and blue to be all that worked up over her dead father-in-law or her husband in cuffs in the back of a police car.

You can get pretty lonely back there, you probably already know that. I imagine P wasn’t no exception, watching his stoical family, like no one’s going to miss him when he’s gone, that suspicion you have all your life. No one’s going to miss you.

It’s true and you’re watching it.

It’s boring back there, too. The statements and the testimonies and whatever that you watch on mute through the glass you’re breathing on, just in there with your head against the window like you’re dreaming. Honestly, it’s the worst part about killing a man.

We’ll skip to the end of the trial since it’s Christmas and I just realized I got to be somewhere.

Here’s the twist.

If it weren’t for Old Man P’s historical bad standing in the community, and the fact it was common knowledge he ogled P’s wife too much and too much publicly, if it weren’t for all that, and that P’s dad wasn’t any good at all to anyone, P’s jury might have believed there was no motive, and that P was just an unlucky shot.

Ain’t a twist, now that I think of it, just a twistedness.

P’s been locked away in Deer Lodge fifteen years now and he’s got ten or so before he’s up for parole. He dreams several dreams a night of his wife in his lap in the cab of a big blue New Holland making hay quick before the sun sets on whatever day he’s dreaming about. She never did tell him boy or girl or nothing, and he kind of never wants to know.