Not that they had enough cash to pay for gas.
Jesse, the driver, had been on a nonstop verbal methadrine tirade since the middle of the night about his girl friend whose other boy friend, an old Hell's Angel, they were fleeing. Jesse hadn't known that Angela belonged to Gunshot. Gunshot, who was known not to be able to have orgasm unless he fired holes in the ceiling with both of his Colts on his back in his ramshackle hutch in Bolinas on the Marin coast, had taken a full-barrel rifle shot at Jesse in a peaceful bayside park the day before, among picnicking families.
Billy had convinced him they'd best get out of town for a while.
In the second place, Billy's grandmother was dying after a massive cerebral stroke in a rest home north of Salt Lake City. In the middle of the night it had seemed like stoning two birds to suggest to Jesse that they get out of town by paying a last visit to Billy's grandmother.
But this was history now to Billy, who hadn't seen a bird in the sky all day, not even a crow blown down by the winds from the mountains, nothing but dry sage cluttering high desert plains between dead mountains. During a flapjack breakfast in Winnemucca at dawn, after losing twenty bucks at blackjack in the casino, it was he who had suggested they take the old road north, across southeastern Oregon, Idaho and then south into Utah, instead of the Interstate. It had seemed like a good idea to get far remote as soon as possible.
Now the beers, potato chips and cigarettes were gone.
Jesse was going on and on about women and guns. With his moustache that looped down to connect with the black tangle of his beard, his light-brown tasseled suede jacket and silver necklace and wristband encrusted with copper and turquoise, he looked like a utopian desperado from the nineteenth century -- which was what had attracted Billy to him in the first place. He had been a guitarist in the a Bay Area rock group that never made it out of the sixties. Vietnam had cut through him, and left a mark deeper than the bayonet scar visible on the side of his neck. More recently, as a bicycle courier in the financial hills of downtown San Francisco, he had met a car door that had opened just enough to put him in traction for six months. He had been waiting for a two-three hundred thousand dollar settlement when Billy had run into him in the park. The park was next to the dry dock in Sausalito, a Mediterranean look-alike, where Jesse was sandblasting boat hulls for pocket money and living in the hoisted schooner of a friend who had split to Hawaii for the season. Billy, on unemployment, recently back from New York City in an attempt to reunite with his family, had moved in with him. Jesse, a twentieth century cowboy, was still waiting for the settlement.
In the high desert, among a good many other things, Jesse said: "... out there, we're out here, aren't we? I mean, aren't we? This is as far as I can go. I mean, shit, I mean, I don't give a shit about any woman. I don't care about a man who wants to kill me. These big empty valleys. Is there going to be a moon tonight? What will the moon be if we get stuck tonight?"
There was still a half a tank of gas, enough to get them to any town in northern Utah with a bank machine -- if rural Utah accepted CitiBank cards. In the middle of the valley the road curved right and began heading south. To the east, in desert sun, rose the white Santa Rosas; to the west, behind low hills, a snowy plateau sailed off into blue sky. Jesse still couldn't find anything but static on the radio. He was very worried about his van breaking down -- they hadn't passed a vehicle all day on the rough road that was testing the suspension system of his van.
It was only April so it wasn't that hot but if the engine quit they could die out here.
In the third place, Billy was sick of himself and his life and his futile ways of doing anything about it. He really wouldn't mind dying out here.
It was, after all, his idea.
"We can walk it. Aunt Beth lives about thirty miles from here. We can sleep in the van and hoof it in the morning. She'll give us cash against my bank card."
A farmer and his wife in a weathered truck pulled alongside the van. The wife, whose face looked like the front of the truck, peered into the van and stated, "Out of gas."
Jesse slumped in the driver's seat to let Billy do the talking.
Billy said, "Yes. We're trying to get to Coyote Creek. To my Aunt Beth. My grandmother's dying."
"Beth Ambudson? You must be Hilda's grandson."
Billy nodded. The farmer was retrieving a metal can from the truck bed and a hose to siphon gas while Jesse struggled over the back of his seat into the rear of the van to sleep.
"Does Beth know you're coming?"
"Not yet."
"Why don't you follow us to the house and call her?"
Billy slid across to the driver's seat and the ignition started the engine right up. As he followed the truck onto the highway -- two lanes of smooth sophisticated asphalt -- Jesse was roused by the motion.
The full plains moon had risen opposite where the high desert sun had fallen.
"There it is," Billy reassured him before he crashed back down on the bunk.
They'd left Jesse asleep in the van parked to the side of the house. Mort, the farmer, was tending to the hogs and chickens in the sheds next to the barn in back. Billy put the old black phone back on the hook in the foyer beside the sitting room. These folk still kept the phone close to the front door where it would be easy to swift-kick it out.
Smells from the kitchen drew him in. They had a dining room opposite the sitting room but it was obvious that almost all meals were taken at the small square table in the middle of the kitchen. There was a cup of Postum -- a cereal coffee substitute (these were Mormons) -- and a slice of buttered homemade bread waiting for him. Jessica was at the stove stirring the contents of a large aluminum soup pot.
"It's just left-over deer stew. Mort killed it at the end of last season with a bow. He was the only one who didn't use a rifle."
Billy was thrilled at the prospect of eating deer again, left-over or not.
Satisfied with the progress of the stew, Jessica brought her own cup of Postum to the table.
"You didn't make it to Hilda's eightieth birthday party, did you?"
"No. I couldn't manage it. I was in New York."
"They came from all over. The governor was here. Over eight hundred people. They had to put up a circus tent to cover it all. We didn't realize until then how many lives she had affected. Fifty people brought quilts she had made for them and they made a huge square of them on the lawn in the park beside the tent."
"I've always regretted I couldn't show. That's why I have to do it this way now."
"It's all over. You should see her. Well, you will. It's such a shame. It's so good you're here for her now. I hope you're ready for it."
As Billy was preparing a reply Mort walked in and took the third of four seats. Jessica went to the stove to ladle bowls of stew for them and sat out more bread.
Mort said sternly and with frightening conviction, "Your friend was in the last war, wasn't he?"
"Yes."
"Damn! Double damn!"
Jessica reached for her husband's hand. "Honey, don't get riled. Eat your dinner."
Billy took her advice.
She looked wane, drawn thin by time, as she insisted that it wasn't all right that Jesse be left in the back of the van to sleep, that he had to be hauled upstairs to the alcove in the attic where Billy had always slept.
It was actually easy getting Jesse up the porch steps, through the hall, and up the conic spiral of stairs that led off from the kitchen into the attic. Billy dumped his body on one of the two brass single beds that had always been there. The other was for him. It was Kids Zone, Romper Room. In the night light from the seashell plugged into the socket in one corner he could see tacked to both sloping walls the crayon drawings of the current generation of nieces and nephews, signed Barbara, Bobby, Johnny, Alice.... He unbuckled Jesse's thick leather belt, unzipped his fly, unbuttoned his shirt, and then let him continue dreaming.
Aunt Beth was at the kitchen table with a fifth of bourbon and two empty shot glasses in front of her.
"I suppose you want more than this," she proffered, pointing at the bottle. "What do you need, some white powder?"
"No. A shot will do."
She poured for both of them, a steadied, practiced amount. She looked old, but then she always had. After his phone call she had changed into a chartreuse velour dress and was wearing the string of pearls that Uncle Chet had given her on their 25th anniversary. Billy had always been special to her, the golden boy from California. Lately from New York. She'd even smeared on cool pink rouge, lipstick and dabbed her eyes with blue shadow.
"Your Uncle Chet's with Kirk now. He won't be back till the middle of the night. They're arranging fall contracts for Kirk's combines."
Kirk was Billy's cousin. It was he who had taught Billy how to frighten and tackle a billy goat when they were kids. When their mutual grandfather, Hyrum, Hilda's husband, had died and broken the farm among his offspring, Billy, who was in Mexico at the time, had bequeathed his share to Kirk. Billy remembered how difficult it had been to decipher and sign the legal papers from his pension near the University. He had been busy trying to manage, without success, the career of a Oaxacan rock group at the time. His other male cousins, Fred, Dan and Josh, had not forgiven him for favoring Kirk. But how was he to know from such a distance?
Grandpa's breaking up the farm among his offspring had proved to be a mistake. Two of his sons had died in Normandy in 1944, one on the ground, one in the air. The third, and last, had died when a combine had overturned on him on the slopes of the outer forty during a frantic harvest after the war. It was all his grandkids could do to keep things going by selling themselves out to the agribusiness interests who had moved in and taken over. Kirk, for example, who through Billy's doubling his stake, had proven to be the most successful of his cousins, was merely pruning the gardens of international business, even though his pruning shears, his combines and tractors, were worth more than four million dollars.
Billy reassessed this during the brief downward cast of Aunt Beth's eyes as she sipped her bourbon. It was Kirk who was keeping the house going, the little farm house they'd all known as home. Aunt Beth had been born there and would probably die there. Billy had come and gone with the cycle of the seasons when he was young, but now he was back for the moment. Urban and suburban folk know bull and bear markets, and recession, but the rural know it's always the depression.
"How's Betty?" he asked, letting Beth refill his shot glass after he'd drowned it.
Betty was the wall-eyed cousin who'd deflowered him when he was thirteen one summer after a brass band concert in the park in the very brass bed where Jesse was now so blissfully oblivious.
"Her third kid is off to Utah State. She's still a secretary at Thiokol. I called her just after you called tonight. She wants to see you tomorrow. She's thrilled."
Thiokol gained brief national shame as the company that was responsible, through shoddy workmanship, for the part that failed that led to the blowup of the Challenger space shuttle that had obliterated an American high school teacher. Thiokol was the only major high technology industry in Northern Utah.
Betty's husband had run off when he found out that the third child, Ben, wasn't his. He'd been a local seed salesman. No one local had heard from him since.
Aunt Beth refilled her own glass, carefully. "Do you want to go to bed? I'll take you to see Grandma in the morning."
"No, I want to talk."
"I thought you would. You didn't come this far."
Her controlled demeanor broke. She lay her head on her crossed arms on the table and sobbed. Billy squeaked his chair around to her and put one arm over her shoulder. God, he had forgotten that he had always been the one they could come to in their sorrow and weakness. Beautiful Billy Boy, from California, from New York, from Mexico. Why had he left, gone so far away?
"Okay, okay, I'll say it," she stated with a temporarily controlled voice. "I'll confess it."
Billy waited. He heard the ticking of the old cuckoo clock on the kitchen wall that he could still hear from childhood.
"Your mother. I never meant it against her. I, we, didn't do it right. I'm sorry. Billy, I'm so sorry."
Aunt Beth and Billy's mother, Mary, had bickered for years over what to do with Grandma Hilda after Grandpa's death. Grandma Hilda had wanted to remain at home and had done so as long as she could, puttering around in the memory of Grandpa, until her stroke when she could no longer. Her stroke had happened last fall. Then Beth and Mary had fought over who should take her in. Neither really wanted to, neither had. Hence, she was where she was now.
Mary's husband, Ralph, Billy's father, an accountant for a steel company, had disowned Billy (had thrown him out of the family!) in the same year that Grandpa Hyrum had died and Uncle Seth had turned the combine over on himself. It had been a tragic year for the family. Nineteen Eighty-four. Billy still couldn't speak with either of his parents.
"Okay. You're right, Aunt Beth. I should go to bed. I don't know how Mom feels. I haven't seen her in years. I know you're sorry. I am too. I wasn't there."
Aunt Beth lifted her head from the table. Her dread visage, as Billy caught it momentarily, looked like a gift from the dead.
"Visiting hours are from nine to eleven and one to three. It's only five miles from here."
"Okay. Can you get me there by one?"
She nodded. "Jesse will drive you there. After lunch with Betty. Then Jesse will drive you home."
"My home is a beached boat," Billy moaned, patting her on the back of the head before she lowered it to the nest of her arms on the table. The little black comb she'd used to hold her bun together sent pain through his wrist. Billy took a moderated swig of his Uncle Chet's bourbon before crawling (not that he had to but he remembered that was the best way) the spiral steps up to the alcove.
Jesse was snoring. Billy had never heard him do that. As he crawled into the other brass bed naked (Mormons never slept in the same clothes they lived in) he remembered the night in the drydocked boat in Sausalito when Jesse had told him about his divorced mother and father in -- where was it? - Louisiana, Mississippi, somewhere on the Gulf Coast -- that he had lost touch with. How he, as a lost son, was no one without them.
Billy drifted off to sleep with an erotic fantasy about Betty.
Betty was sitting opposite Beth in a serious blue and white business suit. She was instantly all over him, kissing him on the cheek and rubbing his arms. He was startled to realize how familiar her body felt. None in his mother's side of the family had ever been physically reticent. As he took a seat between them Betty held onto his hand.
In the middle of the table was a plate of quartered chicken sandwiches and a tureen of homemade tomato soup. In faraway parts of the country Billy had often salivated over the thought of Utah tomato soup and juice. As he let Beth ladle him a bowl he told himself that the long hard trip was going to be worth it just for this.
"Jesse went off with Chet and Kirk. They're sorry not to be here but they committed themselves today to joining a work crew that's setting up a chain-link backstop at the little league park. We had a storm that blew the old one down over the winter.
If you don't mind you can drive lunch to them after you visit Grandma."
"Did they get their contracts?"
"Apparently so. They didn't say otherwise."
If this side of family wasn't physically shy it tended to be so orally, at least among the males. Billy could remember sitting in the living room with Uncle Chet and Kirk during evenings when nothing was spoken except for an occasional chuckle when one of them had fully digested something the other had said during the course of the day.
But that didn't apply to Betty. She couldn't wait to dive in and find what he had been doing with himself in her absence. During the summers of their adolescence they had promised undying love for each other. He was the smart bright boy from the magic of California with a future away from this hick town. She was the energetic tomboy who couldn't seem to give enough of herself to him. She had been the present. She had taught him how to ride bareback. He had ridden her bareback. The summer after his sixteenth birthday he had stayed home in Southern California for first time since he was eight. That fall he had received a wedding invitation from her. She was marrying a local beau from high school who she'd kept on a string while waiting for Billy's seasonal returns. Of course, everyone knew she was pregnant. That was the only reason any of them got married. If Mormons were stiff about alcohol, tobacco and other body poisons, they certainly could not be accused of that in matters of love. Back when his mother was in high school the principal had issued an edict that no one could perform in intermural sports if he'd gotten a girl pregnant. They hadn't been able to field a varsity football team that year.
There had been a question looming between Billy and Betty over the years about what might have happened if he'd not stayed home that sixteenth summer. It was a question that hovered now over the table blending with the aroma of tomato soup. But of course it was not directly discussed. With her hand interlaced with his he could feel the hardness of her wedding band.
"Billy! I'm so glad you're back. Why have you been away so long? What are you doing in San Francisco?"
"Living in a houseboat in Sausalito."
"Sausalito!. I was there a few years ago. What a beautiful little town. What are you doing there?"
For a living, of course.
"Actually, I'm on the dole. I haven't been too long back from New York. I'm drawing unemployment in between jobs. It's okay for now. The houseboat is free. I'm watching it for a friend who's in Hawaii."
He realized he was place dropping, but only as compensation for his disheveled clothes, the two-day beard on his face, and the fact that he was developing a middle-aged paunch. His face had become slightly pasty and his fingers were growing stubby. Betty, too, although still vivacious, was showing signs of a losing battle with weight loss.
Nevertheless she didn't let the question evaporate. "If you don't have a job why don't you move back here? Aunt Beth would let you have the room upstairs, our old room, as long as you needed. You do office work, right? I could get you on at Thiokol. I have seniority there now. You could spend all the time you wanted with Grandma."
At this she withdrew her hand.
"That, for now depends on Jesse," he replied. "This is a lark. It's his van. We were sitting around in the middle of night before last talking about how cut off from our roots we were. Jesse's from the south. He doesn't even know where his parents are. So we said to each other, we're in a position to; why don't we just jump in the van and do it?" He turned to Beth.
"Sorry, about the short notice but, as I told you last night, I've always regretted not coming to Grandma's birthday party. All I can say is, well, here I am."
"Sorry seems to be the word of the moment," was Beth's wrenched reply. Billy found that his hand had reached for hers. Both he and Betty retracted from the pain.
He turned to her, "So what have you been with yourself with your kids grown up?"
"I've been working on the house, renovating it. I might sell. Why don't you and friend come by for dinner tonight to see it?"
"I'll ... talk to Jesse this afternoon. Can I call you at work?"
She handed him a business card she'd extracted from the purse at her feet that she'd moved to her lap. She was preparing to leave.
"I have to get back," she explained, standing. "I don't have the seniority for too long a lunch, even for so special an occasion." She offered a limp hand for him to kiss. "Billy I hope you can stay. I hope this isn't it. The afternoon at work is going to be so boring."
"We'll see."
On departure she gave a slight coquettish curtsy. "Who knows? If I sell the house I wouldn't mind living on a houseboat either."
As she left he wanted to kiss one of her wall eyes, but she was gone.
Aunt Beth was looking down at her hands crossed on the table. He was glad she couldn't look at him. On the table beside her hands was a package wrapped in aluminum foil and a smaller, square one wrapped in what looked like satin, red.
"We always bring her something when we come. I manage to get there two or three times a week. In the foil are the Ritz crackers and the Wisconsin cheese she likes. The dietitians let her eat it. In the other package, well, I knew you didn't have time to bring something for her so I took the liberty. There's a little box of your things we've kept in the chest of drawers upstairs. I rummaged through it after you'd called last night. It's just a cheap old pair of cufflinks Grandpa gave you in his last year. You might want to give them to her. It wouldn't hurt if you lied, if you told her you'd kept them with you these years, for memory's sake."
"I understand."
"It won't be easy, especially the first time. Remember only half of her is there, the other half is panic and crazy ... ah ..."
"That's all right."
"The hard part is that the one half is still really Grandma. She knows what's happening to her. That's the hard part. I called her first to let her know you're coming. It's not good to surprise her. It can trigger her explosions. Just talk quiet with her, hold her hand, and listen to her. She'll probably off in the past, pulled by your memory. Just let her go."
"I see. I'm glad you called her that I was here. I worried about that."
"Well, that's it. It's time." She handed him the packages, along with Jesse's key chain. "Do you remember where the rest home is?"
"Just across from the church." He paused after standing.
"There is one thing more, though. Jesse and I don't have cash with us. I have money in the bank but I don't think my card is going to be any good here. Can you loan me ... a hundred?"
She smiled for the first time that morning as she withdrew a check from beneath her soup bowl. "Will seventy-five do? Uncle Chet wrote it this morning, figuring."
"That will be fine."
"I was going to hold it over your head for a while, to keep you here. But I don't suppose that's fair, under the circumstances.
He didn't know what to say so he turned to leave but she stopped him.
"Billy, I'm so glad you came. There's just one thing, though. What are you doing with a mess like Jesse?"
"I guess we have something in common."
He turned back to the table and did something she never would have let him get away with as a child. He filled his bowl with cool tomato soup and slurped it.
The April air was dry and cool under cotton white cloud tufts but smelled rich, dark and moist from the miles of tilled and recently seeded soil. There were more farm vehicles on the road than automobiles. Billy had only experienced this once, a decade earlier during Grandpa's funeral which had coincided with Easter.
In Snow City he pulled Jesse's van over beside the old home, which Grandpa had bought during the Depression right on the main highway on the edge of town, and noted that the new owners were doing a good job of keeping up Grandma's truck and flower garden.
There were children's toys on the front lawn before the yellow brick facade. New life was going on. Billions of seeds in the soil were stirring.
The fact that Grandma was not now in there being tended by a nurse's aide was the dark cloud now shadowing the entire family. His mother and Aunt Beth had feuded, as they often had in the past, unable to coordinate a less than dismal solution.
He turned on the ignition. He was dawdling. The gas gauge registered empty but he decided to risk it, to wait until after the Visit to cash the check and fill the tank.
The "Home" had once been a grade school and was constructed of the pale yellow brick that pervaded the town. Billy was immediately reassured by that as he parked at the curb, as well as by the fact that her old white shingle church was clearly visible across the street.
The receptionist was ready for him, knew who he was and why he was there. Apparently Aunt Beth had covered everything. He felt like his reservation at a small motel was being processed efficiently. She led him down a long narrow hallway past open doors into what had been classrooms but now were partitioned by white muslin dividers into sleeping cells. Billy realized with shame that he didn't even know if she had a private room or not. Well, such living details he was about to find out. He decided to concentrate any questions he had for her on the quality of her daily life, and not on the larger issues.
The receptionist, 'Madge' he could see from nameplate pinned to her white lapel, led him into a large room containing about forty old people mostly in wheelchairs. Some of them were engaged with friends and relatives seated on folding metal chairs but most were alone, idle in thought or gesturing and speaking to themselves. There was a disturbing, to Billy, murmur in the air like a groundswell of pandemonium. He noticed through a sliding plate class door more patients on a cement deck outside. He couldn't see Grandma.
"Do you want to see her here, or outside?" Madge asked, as though she was determining his preference for smoking or nonsmoking at a restaurant.
"Madge, whatever is most comfortable for her."
He had presumed he would be talking to her in private.
"She's in the sun out back now. I think she'd rather come to you than for you to come to her." She looked quickly around and said, "Oh, here's cushy seat for you. I'll bring her right back."
He sat down in an old ugly green armchair with the stuffing visible and tried to let his tension relax into it.
Near him a man with his head resting on one down-dropped shoulder like a pillow falling off a bed while the other shoulder jutted high in the air was being spoon-fed by a young woman dressed in her Sunday best from a tray clamped across his wheelchair like a crib. Billy realized he didn't even know if Grandma could feed herself any longer. He was suddenly overwhelmed with concern about the quality of personal attention being given to her. He lifted his gaze to a TV set suspended from one corner of the room where a semi-circle of wheelchairs was facing an afternoon soap opera. Grandma had been addicted to one of them -- which was it? - 'Days of our Lives" - since its radio appearance in the Depression. Did she get to watch it now, or was she subject to the democratic rule of the majority of patients?
It occurred to him now that he could have been here for these decisions, especially for the terminal one that put her here. Uncle Chet was old now and had never liked or been good at the details of family matters. It had been left to two bickering female siblings. He did remember that his mother had flown here to inspect the home before she'd agreed to Beth's decision that was "best under the circumstances."
He could have been here, at the center, put the weight of his male prime into what was being done. Instead, where had he been? In away in New York.
So he had no right now to judge.
Aunt Beth had tried to prepare him, but he wasn't ready for the first sight of her being wheeled to him. Madge was carefully maneuvering her chair down a cluttered aisle. What he wasn't at first sight prepared for was the witheredness of her body. She had always been short but robust, strong as an ox, fit as a fiddle. A true pioneer woman. Her crossed legs now were sticks.
Her hips were twisted to one side, unable to bear her upper body.
Both arms were extended twisted inward and down from the elbows with the hands hanging limply, unable to lift. This was the best she could manage attempting to reach him with outstretched arms.
They weren't giving her exercise! But then, maybe she refused it.
She was wearing a dark brown wool dress that fitted her, although loosely. She had black sequined Chinese slippers on her feet, one daintily resting on top of the other. Billy remembered a couple of details from letters from his mother to him in New York about how she and Beth and Betty were re-tailoring all of her clothes. It hadn't meant much to him at the time.
But it was her head that he really wasn't ready for. Aunt Beth had said that half of her was still here, the other half destroyed. He had taken this to be talking about her mind, not that the dichotomy would be so graphically presented to him in her face. Yes, she was still there on the right side, the old twinkle in her blue eye as she drew near now, the delight to see him again, the cagey upturned curve to the smile at the corner of her mouth that used to make him laugh so hysterically when he was on her lap as a boy. But the left side was grotesque, twisted and hideous, taking over, growing over the top of her head. He couldn't look into that other eye, the one that seemed to glow like a red neon bead. He knew that it wasn't red, that it was really still blue, but it struck him as red, as the eye of evil, or just awfulness, but he couldn't look to find out. He was terrified of her. Half of her face looked like a marionette that had semi-burned and swelled in a fire.
He stretched the palms of his hands out to hers so she could relieve her arms of their weight. Her right hand softened into his while the left gripped it like a vise.
"Billy, are you finally back for good?"
"Can we talk about that later? I'm just glad to see you."
She wouldn't let go. She was crushing his wrist. He couldn't help but recoil. He found himself arm wrestling with her and her strength was more than his. She had him and was pulling him down. Madge, who had been hovering nearby watching, stepped in and shoved Grandma back deep into her wheelchair with an elbow and shoulder. Grandma's left hand released its clutch. Billy noticed that several people were watching this drama.
"Try holding her right hand, try that," Madge insisted. Billy did. Grandma's right hand softened into his and she relaxed back and closed her eyes.
Madge took the opportunity to lean to his ear and whisper, "I think you better keep this short."
Billy nodded, while telling himself that it couldn't be this simple, the left side against the right. The people watching, stopped.
Then for five minutes he and his grandmother simply enjoyed being together for the first time in ever so long. She would open her good eye to make sure he was there, wink at him, and then close it again. They played with each other's fingers. The TV had lost its cable connection and there were protests.
Then she stirred. Madge, approached again and it was she Grandma wanted to talk to.
"Get it from around my neck."
Madge seemed to know what she was talking about. She groped in Grandma's bodice, struggled with a clasp, and was about to hand Billy a key on a silver chain when Grandma's left hand stripped it from her, switched it to her right, and handed it to him. It was obvious she had been plotting this moment for some time.
"You know my secret chest," she confided, knowing that he knew the answer.
He nodded. "Of course. Where is it now?"
She looked surprised. "In your Aunt Beth's closet, where else? In the attic. Of course it's there. Just don't let her know. She'll be all over you. She's turned into a witch. Your mother belongs to the devil. Look what they've done to me. Be careful."
There was another little tug while Billy tried to put the chain in his pocket, but she wouldn't let him. He had to put it around his neck.
But before she let Madge wheel her away she had one more thing to say. Her left hand gripped his arm, pulled her to him, and she said, "You figure it out, Billy. You'll get me out of here. I don't care how you do it. Get me out of here. We've always managed before."
That seemed to do it for her. She slumped, satisfied. Madge wheeled her in the direction of the rear deck.
On the way out Billy remembered that he'd left her crackers and cheese in the van. Along with the cufflinks.
While the tank was being filled in the cheapest gas station in town he did a little figuring. It was about seven hundred miles to San Francisco, but he would be able to hit a CitiBank machine on the California side of Tahoe which was about four hundred miles so they needed at most forty for gas, leaving thirty-five for spending money. He would have felt better with a hundred, but seventy-five was okay. There wasn't all that much left in his account.
He was tempted to drive out to the farm to the old silver cloud trailer house in the middle of it where he and his grandparents had spent many evenings playing canasta or listening to the radio or reading stories. But he decided not to punish himself. Instead he drove straight back to Aunt Beth's.
She was sitting on the front porch with her crocheting. He climbed the steps and surveyed the front yard. The ancient elm in the corner (which they'd called 'Elmo') still had the truck tire swing suspended from it. The irrigation canal separating the grass from the highway was almost overflowing. No one had known whether to be more afraid of one of the kids drowning in the canal or getting smashed on the highway. The fear had proved unfounded.
"How did it go?"
"Both worse and easier than I thought."
"I know what you mean."
"Do you mind if I take a shower? I felt bad about the way I presented myself to her."
"I'm sure she didn't notice. Go ahead. You'll remember where the towels and such are."
"Then I want to drive out to see Uncle Chet and Kirk."
"There's a sack of sandwiches and a Thermos of soup in the fridge. Do you think Jesse wants to stay a bit?"
"I don't know. It's his van."
Before his shower he washed and rinsed the armpits of his shirt. He was tempted to splurge for a shirt and pants in town. He imagined the sick smell permeating the rest home clinging to him forever.
The black walnut chest was in back of the closet in his room in the attic (everyone had always called it 'Billy's room' - even though many had slept there) under an army blanket. The famous black chest. Even Grandpa hadn't known what was in it.
The key worked easily, as did the lid. On top of a black satin cloth that covered most of the contents was a letter-sized envelope which read, "To Billy. Only. Don't look down below until I am gone."
Under the letter was his name 'BILL' about four inches wide and three inches high woven out of dark black human hair. The strands of hair were long and he realized that the slight odor emanating from the chest was rancid lanolin. His name had been in the chest for a very long time.
He took the letter, replaced 'BILL,' relocked the chest and buried it again under the army blanket.
He looked for a place to read. On one bed -- she'd made both of them -- was the wooden box she'd said contained a few of his mementos, along with a copy of the Book of Mormon, and one of Betty's high school yearbooks.
Grandma's handwriting had always been poor, here it was barely legible. It covered both sides of a sheet of typing paper but the contents could have fit on the postcard of a meticulous writer.
"I wove your name when your father was off to the war and you and your mother were with us. You were three months old. It was before you went to live with Aunt Alma in Logan. The darkest war. But you know all about that story. What you won't know, that nobody knows, is that the hair I used to weave was that of my mother. It was cut from her and preserved for me on the occasion of her marriage. She was a Newe Indian. A Ute. Your grandfather never knew this. No one is to know this but you! Especially your mother. You must swear. If anyone had known I was born of a savage, an animal ...
"Also the story of my marriage to your grandfather is wrong.
Yes he was a marshall working the Idaho territory for the U.S. government. But he didn't 'bury his guns in the ground' when he met me to start the farm, as the family legend grew. How it did grow! He tracked down and killed an innocent man. He quit and was fired in shame. I was a 'lady of the night' from San Francisco when we ran into each other in Seattle. We were desperate. Oh, that train ride we took back to Boise to start over!!
"It's in the chest, all the records. I kept them. Your great-grandmother's name was Mamona. But don't look into it now. The past must be long buried before it can be brought back to life.
"I'm so tired, Billy. I must have tried to write this letter twenty times. I've had three attacks already, been on the floor for nights. But they don't know. I've always been able to get back up finally without them knowing. They mustn't.
"I'm so tired, Billy."