Beyond the Dark Water

ONE

1

Seventy-six year old Mike Taylor recognized Rusty’s grin before anything else. That same ear to ear toothy grin that could so annoy or endear. Punctuated by the loose lanky walk, where the feet never came close together. To walk a straight line would be out of the question. It was similar to Mike’s own walk, except less self-conscious. He was dressed in rather nice slacks, sports jacket, slip-on shoes. It was Rusty all right, Mike concluded in shock. 

His brother come walking in out of the bright sunlight.

Those familiar blue eyes stared from the face of Sadie Woerm’s oldest son, now deeper set, now with pouches. His sun-baked skin had long since blanked over thousands of freckles that once covered the entirety of his face. His old man’s nose had come to resemble their grandfather’s huge beak. The lifelong ducktail hair struggled greyly on a pate as balding as mike’s own.

He was an apparition.

As such he presented a quandary for Mike, in whose world ghosts simply could not be. 

Therefore, when his dead brother appeared before him, stalking directly up to him, handshake proffered, Mike was hard put to assign to the seeming ghost figure any meaningful label.

He mentally shrugged.

Mike received the hand, returning the pressure when Rusty squeezed really hard. For a few moments, they struggled, each trying to unbalance the other. They broke away, circling, two fighting cocks. Mike’s smile withered.

He felt disappointment that they could not embrace and exchange words of brotherly love. He paused the go-round. “I missed you,” he said.

Rusty’s reply was a blunt instrument. “I’m not here to be your friend.”

There was condemnation in the utterance. His brother’s sports jacket was open and the highly polished shoes were far apart. Rusty held his hands ready as if anticipating hand to hand combat. 

“You came back to tell me you don’t like me?”

“I came to call you a rat.”

When neither brother made a move, Rusty reached inside of his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes. Mike recognized the camel adorning the label. He watched Rusty place the non-filtered cylinder between his lips and then produce an old-style flint lighter. Spinning the grooved wheel on top against the flint caused sparks that ignited a fluid soaked wick. Rusty puffed the cylinder to life. Then clicked the cap over the lighter, snuffing the flame and closing the apparatus to make it safe to ride inside Rusty’s pocket. 

Words went by the wayside. Mike knew intuitively the nature of his brother’s beef. Futility engulfed him. He wished Rusty had not come. He wished at the same time he could somehow bridge the abyss that had always separated them. And yet the words he dredged up in reply issued from a deep well of resentment. “You know what you know,” he said “Yet you don’t understand. You haven’t a clue why things happened the way they did.”

“You ran off and left Mom and Joe alone. They had no income. Joe was just a kid. I know that happened. Nobody has to give a damn why.” 

“I don’t dispute those facts. Since you don’t want my explanation, though, I will tell you point-blank: “Get screwed.”

“Twenty-seven years I put up with your shit. This is the first time in the past forty I can do anything about it.”

And then Rusty charged him, his calloused hands outreached, ready to slip by Mike’s lackluster defense. Immediately he trapped Mike in a headlock, squeezing as hard as he could.

Outraged, Mike used a fist to hammer the back of Rusty’s head. Two stiff blows caused the attacker to back off.  The fight was over.

Mike watched his dead brother stand away, with an inscrutable expression on his face. He watched further as Rusty lit a fresh cigarette. Only after flipping away the butte did he re-engage with Mike. “Take me to the cemetery. I want to look at my grave.”

“Seriously? It’s a three hour drive to Corpus.”

“Just get your car.”

2

The encounter had taken place near the end of the house where Mike had been ineptly repairing a lawnmower. After easing around the work he trod up the steps, onto the porch. Inside the door, he was met by a sleepy old Labrador Retriever named Percy.

The frail dog pushed his muzzle against Mike, who absently placed a hand on the great head in passing. He looked around. “Katie?”

“I’m getting the laundry. You were out of work clothes,” she said.

“Hey, I have got to talk to you.”

He approached his wife stuffing his relaxed fit blue jeans into the washing machine. Ten years his junior, going strong. “Get me the detergent,” she said.

She accepted the bottle, then paused. “What?” she said.

“Rusty. Rusty. Is out there.”

“Rusty who?”

“It’s my brother. He’s out there.”

Katie continued to pursue the circle.  When at last she understood, she told Mike, “It’s a hoax. It’s not him out there.”

“It is Rusty. I don’t know how. I don’t know why he came. It is him. I don’t know if he is a ghost or what. He wants me to drive him to look at his grave.” 

“It’s a hoax. Why would you do it?”

“I know my brother. I am going to take him.”

Katie sighed  She knew that Rusty had been long dead by the time she met and became involved with Mike. 

The image of his wife pulling out her long white hair assaulted Mike’s mind a bit. 

“Plug in your phone, in the truck,” she urged him. “At the first sign of trouble you call me.”

He drew her close for a kiss goodbye. “I know you think I’m being stupid. See you in the evening. I love you.”

“I love you too. Ass.”

3

Mike’s ride was a purple compact pick up truck, bought for cash at a used car lot in Magnolia. He considered it a bargain. A good highway vehicle and economical to run. With a feeling of pride, he coaxed it onto the driveway, where Rusty waited, dappled by the trees and sunshine. He was not so bedraggled, for seventy-three, Mike noted. At the same time, he pondered, how important could it be to gain this man’s understanding? Or, tolerance, even. Why subject himself to the ordeal? In the old days, Rusty rarely gave Mike a break. He appeared to be, now, as unrelenting as ever.

The apparition settled in the seat, obviously impressed with the truck. There was nothing like it in 1969. He was fascinated to discover its automatic transmission. 

“Buckle the seatbelt,” Mike directed.

Choosing to ignore Mike’s request, Rusty lit a new cigarette and waited.

“The cops watch for seatbelt violations,” Mike insisted. “I won’t move unless you get buckled in.”

Without changing expression or acknowledging he even heard the explanation, Rusty latched the restraint. Mike steered The Purple out into the neighborhood, then. He rolled down the window a few inches. “Want the radio?”

A search of country stations brought in “Amarillo By Morning.”

“Good song,” Rusty observed.

“That’s the oldies station,” Mike said. “Of course, nearly all the songs of their playlist are new to you. Unless they keep up with that sort of song where you have been.”

“It’s a good station.”

“How about it? How is it where you have been the past forty years?”

“I’m not gonna tell you that. The dead alone can know what it’s like. Don’t even ask me about it.”

“You won’t tell; I won’t ask.”

After a bit, Mike realized he had forgotten to charge his phone. Using his right hand, he took out the phone and made the necessary connections. 

Rusty took a close look at the phone. “What is that?” he said.

“A cell phone. Telephone. Everybody uses them these days. My house doesn’t even have the kind of phone you used.”

“Portable phones. You always had to be rich to make calls from your car. Guess there’s been lots of other changes. Damn. I just noticed the price of gasoline.”

“A few years ago it was near four dollars a gallon. Take a guess how much cigarettes cost.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know exactly. I don’t smoke now. The other day I saw a woman buy gas and cigarettes for well over a hundred dollars.”

“Guess I would have had to quit.”

“Remember when Uncle Joel said he would quit if his favorite cigarettes reached a dollar a pack?” Mike said. “Of course they did and he kept smoking them anyway. Then he said he would quit when they put a filter on them. They did and he still didn’t.” 

4

The truck rolled into a service station. It was a combination gas/food mart. A sign at the pump advised that the gas was several cents cheaper when paid inside with cash. As the brothers approached the door, three shorts-wearing young ladies went in before them. Rusty had had an eye for the women. With bittersweet humor, Mike observed the appreciative glances he threw their way. It was plain he had changed little.

Mike took his place in line, not remotely expecting that Rusty would step up beside him with a six-pack of beer in hand. He had failed to consider that Rusty would be unaware of how drastically the law had changed regarding alcohol and driving. He was apologetic but firm. Rusty returned the beer to the cooler and went outside to wait. Nearby, the three young ladies in shorts had crowded near a very dark African American sitting astride an eye-catching gray motorcycle. They giggled at the motorcycle man’s quips as he sat, ultra cool, with sleeveless shirt, tattoos, and rag covered head. Rusty said as Mike came out of the store, “This 21ST Century has some new graphics, for sure.”

As he pumped gas, Mike looked around at Rusty, who rested his arms on the tailgate, an unlighted cigarette in his mouth.  “It doesn’t bother you that they are friendly with a black man does it?”

Rusty shot him the finger.

Feeling vindictive, Mike waited impatiently for the final dribble of gas to go in. The instant the nozzle went back in place, Mike jumped in and started the engine. Rusty was opening his door when he moved the gear lever. 

Pulling himself into the rolling truck, Rusty unleashed his feelings regarding his undisputed racist views, learned in childhood, and held until his stint in the Army. “There, I met some good people and I changed my view. As for the bunch at the station, I didn’t intend to criticize. I just wasn’t used to seeing it is all.”

Rusty was still buckling his seat belt by the time the Purple hit the road again. “Do you drive like this all the time?”

Mike’s grin was devilish. “Don’t be shooting me the finger.”

It became his intent to steer the Purple onto Tomball Parkway and then drive on the toll road. Soon they would approach Highway 59 South, the route to Victoria. From Victoria they would transfer to Highway 77 and continue on southward, nearing Corpus Christi, but would veer onto Highway 44, through Clarkwood. He believed they could make the trip, one way, on about two-thirds of a tank of gas.

5

The droning engine and the radio were all they heard, by now having passed Sugarland and were bearing down on Rosenberg. Mike was accustomed to the silence. He had gone on similar trips with Rusty in the late years of the 1950s and early 1960s, with scarcely a dozen words exchanged. He had been focused on the road and the music. Then he glanced over at his brother and became suddenly aware that he wore no glasses. Rusty had worn some with clip-on shades all of his adult life. “Why no glasses?”

Rusty shrugged. “Don’t know.”

“I need reading glasses these days.”

Rusty threw up a hand. “I don’t care. Look, I don’t want you to talk to me like a brother anymore. When you walked out on them, you severed the tie.”

Mike slowed his driving and moved onto the shoulder, to barely moving. There was venom in his reply. “If you could make a clean break of it we might cease to be brothers. But you can’t.  You came all the way back from whatever hole you fell into, just to condemn me. That makes you still a brother and it makes you owe me a listen-to. I think it’s possible you just popped in here with no intent to do so and therefore no plan. You came to me and nobody else. Why should you bother if I was in fact just some lost piece of shit, meandering down the sewer stream? In some unnamed way, you still care.”

Rusty offered no immediate comeback. He butted his cigarette. The stone-faced apparition disassociated himself from the conversation. He took a special interest in a ’57 Chevy that cruised by. He watched until it blended into the traffic racing in a flood of color up the road ahead. 

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Mike insisted.

Rusty’s burn was slow and deliberate. “There’s no reason to believe I’m going to forgive you.”

‘Then how are we ever going to resolve anything?? For our whole lives, every time I’ve approached you you’ve brushed me off, with sarcasm and ridicule.”

“You can’t drive and talk. Get us back on the road.”

“We are going to have this conversation.”

Exasperated, Mike punched the gas pedal. They roared into the traffic, once again one among the pack. “After we get to Corpus, it’s going to happen.”

6

Mike viewed as old home territory the land beyond El Campo. Throughout south Texas they had gone as assigned, in their teens and early twenties, constructing what was labeled “shell housing” - Houses constructed to a point of being closed in, ready for the residents to complete the rest however they saw fit. It was grueling labor, beneath scorching suns of summer and in the face of winter blue northers. They often spent the nights sleeping on boards laid across sawhorses in the open air. The pay was poor but a family could survive. The rent got paid and Mike even managed for himself a record player. The highways had changed in succeeding years. The towns they passed were no longer visible to the traffic.

He wondered if Rusty might be thinking similar thoughts.

The Purple slipped into the high-speed lane.

CHAPTER TWO

1

Looking back through time. In December of 1956, Sadie Woerm had brought her eleven children through these same parts. There were twelve, until, less than one year earlier she lost an infant. Little thing strangled on her spit-up in the late hours of night. It was too late when Sadie, exhausted, near breakdown, discovered her, still and bluish.

They made a switch in Houston, from a shiny red and silver train to an older Tex-Mex Railroad train that was by comparison older, shabby, with passengers tending to look poor and mostly Mexican. It was a homecoming for Sadie after being ten years gone. Her father, step-mother, and siblings all resided around Corpus Christi, their destination.

At fourteen, Mike studied the land through the window, miserable over reeling mural of scrubby brush and stunted trees, at prickly pear cactus and brown brush of winter. He felt a desperate need to be in the paradise that was California, with the grapes, nectarines, oranges, and green fields of alfalfa. He felt they were approaching the tip end of civilization and a potential for oblivion. 

2

Fearing he might fall asleep, Mike began singing with the radio. Rusty groaned at the sound of it. He faced away from Mike, hunkered down as if under siege. It was to be expected. Mike and his siblings had always held differing opinions as to his vocal abilities. He grinned slightly over his brother’s discomfiture.

When he left off singing, his mind raced ahead, to Victoria. Most of the relatives moved from Corpus,” he said. “The ones alive, that is. They went to Victoria partly; others to San Antonio and Three Rivers. As for our brothers and sisters, they scattered, like a kicked sack of marbles. I don’t know where they mostly are. Everybody hates everybody.”

Examining the back of Rusty’s head as he looked out his window, Mike recalled the hair at age fifteen. That was when he came up with his trademark ducktail haircut. It was one hell of a production, beginning with a pomaded flat top and long sweeping sides meeting in back. Added to the effect was a leather jacket, given him by his Pima friend, Houston. It was enough to set their stepfather, Elroy, in a perpetual dither. 

“You look like a Pachuco,” he railed, his red drunkard face contorted with scorn. “If anybody is going to be a Pachuco I’m going to be head Pachuco.”

Rusty had the brass to argue back. In fact, he and Elroy had already been feuding since about a year before and he was not going to give Elroy any satisfaction now.

The old man brooded over the arguments. Because he recently transitioned from beer drinking to whiskey guzzling, he was becoming incrementally meaner. 

One evening Elroy came home with a supposed flattop of his own. 

He pushed his drunken self into the living room, where he found Rusty on the couch, reading a novel. “You look like a rat,” he said. He ran his hand over his new haircut. “I have a perfect flattop. You look like a rat.”

Nobody dared laugh at the time, that Elroy’s hair was drenched with a crème oil hair tonic and slicked straight back. To be a true flattop, the hair must stand up. Just Elroy and his barber could have known to say it was cut to be a flattop haircut. 

Today, just the ducktail part remained, partially, due to widespread baldness over Rusty’s head.

3

They were into the home stretch. A prolonged sense of anticipation ruled as their eyes drank in these final miles. Past Mathis and then the Nueces River, the Purple veered rightward, only nicking Robstown. Next, a little sprinkling of homes in Violet, the location of the first home Sadie rented on the arrival from California. It was a turn of the century structure with a water tank attached to the rear. Mike never did find out if the water he drank came from a water company or that tank. It smelled and tasted good. Across the highway had been a service station, where Mike discovered he could buy soda from a machine for just six cents.

Running with the road on the left were fields of grain, which always turned an early brown. On the other side, they touched the subdivision Rusty had been buying in at the time of death.

4

The folks in California had begged Sadie to not move her kids to Texas, where they would likely starve.  “My family wouldn’t let us go hungry,” Sadie insisted.

One uncle hired sixteen-year-old Rusty for one dollar per hour, the full extent of her family’s help. Welfare coughed up ninety-nine dollars per month, for a time. She remarked that a worker escorted her ahead of the people of color when she applied.

Rusty took up one hell of a burden without complaining. His steadfastness never deserted him.

Meanwhile, freed from Elroy’s brutal grip, Mike felt he had the right to spread his wings, for the first time ever in his life. When Rusty sought to control him, he saw it as more bullying. It was his personal vow to never again buckle under to anyone. Wars of words, even physical confrontations ensued. It was a continuation of the pattern from childhood and it only began to ease up in the final two years of his brother’s life.

5

Approaching the Clarkwood bypass, they craned their necks. It looked about the same. Except, a very old beer joint was gone. At seventeen, Mike had sat in it with Rusty and downed a few Texas beers.

Immediately past Clarkwood, he turned the Purple onto the road to the cemetery. His phone rang. It was Katie. “How far are you?”

“Only five minutes away,” he said.

“Tell your ghost I said ‘Hi.’”

“Funny.”

“What is he doing right now?”

“We both are antsy. It’s likely going to be the same emotionally for me as the day we had his funeral.”

“I called to make sure you charged your phone.”

Mike glanced at Rusty. “Did you ever know anybody you want to hug and kick in the ass at the same time?”

“Oh yes. But you know that already.”

“I am nearing the turn. Need to hang up.”

“All right. Kisses. Hurry home.”

“I love you.”

“Love you too.”

The valiant little pick up truck had delivered the quarreling brothers to their destination.

6

The grounds were lush, the graves well maintenanced. Statues of angels kept their vigil. The parking lot was empty. After switching off the ignition, Mike turned to Rusty and saw him stricken. To Mike, it had been forty years. It was likely moments ago, for his brother. 

Rusty stepped out and went to the nearby graves. The wind whipped his hair and he looked older and haggard. Mike followed and pointed the way but stationed himself a considerable distance from the exact stone bearing the name of Rusty Taylor. 

Rusty had always been slender. Now he looked diminutive, a mere wisp in the great field of bones and throttled dreams. He inched up just until he could read the inscription on the headstone and froze. He was transfixed for so long that Mike began to edge closer.

Looking now like a lost child, Rusty asked in wonder, “What happened? How did I get here?”

It always has seemed that the dead, should they venture back into the material world, would know everything. Evidently, Mike concluded, they know very little.

“Do you recall coming out of the bar with Mona?”

“With Mona?”

“Aunt Marie’s sister; Mona.”

“No.”

“What do you remember, last thing?”

“I don’t know about Mona. I went for a beer. I don’t recall anything.”

“I was living in Kansas City,” Mike said. “That caused me to not get all of the details. Mostly I picked up what I know from the investigator and a few odd conversations from the family. No way I could approach Mom to ask questions. But here is what I know -”

7

Mona wore a beige tee shirt and blue jeans that night. She was a big woman yet was not embarrassed to let others see her size. Nursing a beer, she looked around when Rusty came in. Her concern was evident to him even before she could speak. He reassured her that no harm would befall her this evening. 

It was her husband, Arnold, whom she feared. After their break-up he went off and shacked up with another woman. But the war between he and she continued unabated. Her big mouth said maybe too much. Hints and speculation. Rusty slipped into a protective mode. He ushered her to the shiny red sports car and they went down Leopard Street and into oblivion.

He stopped for a red light. When other headlights rapidly approached from the rear, he would have assumed the other driver would go around. So he did nothing in the moments before a three-quarter-ton pick up plowed into the rear of his car. A witness was said to have observed that it backed up and rammed the auto a second time. Had the car not been forced to slam into a post, broadside, causing the metal to wrap around the post and the momentum making it slide the length of the post, it would not have flipped upside down. They likely would have survived the crash, it has been said. 

Not long after, Mike, asleep in Kansas City, was awakened by a Western Union, who handed off the message and literally vanished, it seemed. The message: “Rusty Taylor killed in car wreck. Come home.”

8

“The authorities declined to charge Arnold. They ordered him to leave the county for a year.” Mike, his recitation ended, fell silent.

Rusty had listened in horror. “I was murdered. There’s my grave.”

Mike felt tired. He waited patiently for Rusty to process all the information. “Is there anything else you are going to want from me,” he said, being gently sympathetic. “it’s time for me to be going home. I no longer need to coax your understanding. Your love. Your brother-ness. I want to be home with my wife, where I have a life that’s worth living.”

“I’ve been crushed. I need some more minutes to recompress.”

“Before I leave I can show you where we buried Mom.”

“Take me now,” Rusty said. “I’ve seen enough here. I can’t stand it any longer, being near my own grave, knowing I am lying in it.”

Minutes later, Rusty was squatted before Sadie’s gravestone, plucking some tufts of grass. He looked up at Mike. “Tell me your reasons. I might be ready to listen.”

“Let’s find a place to eat and talk, then,” Mike said. “I haven’t had a bite since breakfast.

9

They went to a restaurant both knew from their teens. It had seemed pretty old even then. In all its decades the dowdy eatery had not changed a bit, not even having a standoffish staff. This place was chosen because with booths stuffed all the way into deep recesses it guaranteed privacy. Mike’s chicken fried steak was countered by Rusty’s burger with fries. Both wanted cola. The waitress, a young woman who was thoroughly unobtrusive, barely made a mark on Mike’s consciousness.

10

The hour had come for Mike to explain himself. Close to forty years later he was still being held accountable for the past. He reflected for the millionth time that never in his life had he gotten away with a thing, great or small, and was perpetually held accountable. How and where to begin? How to reach the mind of one who had held Mike in varying degrees of contempt his entire lifetime. He looked on the specter he in some way believed was his brother and marveled that such a creature could tear into a burger like a ravenous dog. And yet Mike’s tender side ventured forth and he looked affectionately on the devourer of hamburgers this the final time. Ever. He wondered if Rusty might just drift away into eternity at some point near in time. The thought made his eyes smart. He tried to control his tears, hiding his face, wiping at his eyes.

CHAPTER THREE

1

His whole adult life he had constantly reviewed the past. But how to distill it into an explanation that could not just satisfy Rusty, but himself as well? His imagination saw it playing, just like a movie.

The Great Depression made of their parents migrant workers. Sadie was Okie. Rafe was Texan. In the dustbowl days before they were married, Sadie’s family became refugees who rode a battered Ford along the narrow highway to the fabled land that is called California. They were unwelcome there.  A roadblock at the border separated that state from the rest of working America. One could not blame the Californians much. Penniless families had been pouring in by the thousands per day. John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, details without exaggeration the plight of the migrants that actually got in. Sadie’s family was lucky to have gotten turned around, although it was tough life to which they were returning.

The one true home was the highway, where endless cotton fields provided temporary havens for workers, who often were hard put to keep the children properly fed. 

At night one would have found whole families asleep in tents in the middle of the cotton patches. By day the camps were deserted. In the minutes before dawn every able-bodied man, woman, and child straggled out, ready to drag long sacks between the rows and stuff as much of the white stuff as possible. The fittest workers could pick nine hundred, even one thousand, pounds per day.

Near twilight weary bones came back to rest and set up the evening meal. By the time the food was ready many a child had already gone off to sleep, after crying from hunger and exhaustion.

2

At age sixteen, Sadie fell in love. She felt compelled to elope to be with Rafe Taylor. After they wed, she quickly became pregnant. It is not certain how long they were married before she tasted regret. 

3

A few years later, on a cool December night, a silver-haired doctor came out of retirement to deliver eight-pound Mike. Rafe led the doc to a cotton patch not far from the medicine man’s home. They entered a tent, inside of which Sadie labored. Once he had escorted the doc in Rafe stood outside by the open flap, ready to help, hoping he would not be called upon. 

Rafe wore his cowboy hat and western shirt, his blue jeans, and pointed boots, at every opportunity. His breath filled the space before him with the odiferous fumes of what he had been drinking - which in these money-tight times would be anything cheap, including beer and Old Crow whiskey. He reeked, I say, on this calendar day of September 17, 1942, as he did on all three hundred and sixty-five days of every year, which is how I know.

In this highly concocted vision I doubt not that Rafe spat tobacco juice onto the cotton patch dirt while he stood there. Tobacco was almost universally enjoyed in the time period and he was likely no exception.

Already out of the chute and sleeping tranquilly was two years old Rusty. He lay bundled in a corner, indistinguishable from the rumpled blankets in the shadow cast by a coal oil lamp. He could have been named after Jimmy Rodgers, the first country music superstar. But Rafe’s sister beat him to it. In my opinion, Rusty was the perfect name for a boy with such true brown hair, blue eyes, and a face totally blotched by freckles. Jimmy Rodgers could not be his name. Never. No way.

4

Mike came out and was made to cry, same as Adam, who followed in Abernathy, in 1944. Adam was to be the youngest Taylor, although Sadie gave birth to nine more children, by the middle of 1956.

As the sun eased its fire into the morning sky, Mike lay resting, blissfully unaware of the great adventure that lay ahead: The uniquely individual human version of the life cycle shared by every creature. Little did he know that beyond the dark water of the womb there is an entire universe to be dealt with.

5

Sadie gawked at the handsome suit Rafe held up before her.  It was not a bit western, which was very out of character for him. “Where did you get it?” she asked.

Rafe shrugged. 

“I know where you got it.” Rafe’s father, George Taylor, said. “I have seen your friend, Clint, wearing that suit. You took it when you took him to his house, drunk, the other night.”

Rafe paraded the outfit. He draped it on the back of a kitchen chair, “I wonder how my boots go with it.”

“You won’t wear those clothes,” said Sadie. “Clint will know you took ’em.”

Rafe pushed his hat back and scratched his head. After another moment he grabbed Clint’s stuff and walked outside with it.

“My boy don’t cognate too good, sometimes,” George commented. 

He reached for the whiskey bottle. It was empty. “Dang. And I got no money.”

He twisted off the cap and ran his finger around in it. Then licked the finger. 

Rafe bowed back in, minus the suit. “I put it under that rock by the back fence,” he said, eying the whiskey bottle. 

‘Ain’t nothing in it,” George complained.

For a bleak moment, their gazes locked. No whiskey.

Sadie, 21 and pregnant with Adam, watched her men pace the three room shack. Their drinking and thievery had become intolerable. It was a way of life that kept them scratching for pennies.

Rafe suddenly rushed the bathroom. He came out holding a full bottle of isopropyl alcohol. As he opened it up George gave an encouraging smile. “Try it,” he said persuasively. 

Sadie could smell the vile stuff from across the room. She watched in disbelief as her husband decided that “a drink’s a drink.”

He balanced the turned up bottle against his mouth and allowed some to gush inside, swallowing it in the same action. George howled with laughter as Rafe desperately fought to breathe. 

The elder Taylor stood to the side, wiping tears from his eyes. “You dang fool,” he said more than once. 

“You mfsb. What’d you tell me to drink it for?”

“Don’t be calling me that.”

6

Sadie huddled on the couch, looking fatalistically on as George pulled his son down in a fierce headlock. Rafe kicked his feet. He grunted. Even growled. But he could not free himself. His boots pounded the wall. They knocked over a chair. The redness of his face deepened to a frightening hue. 

Awakened from his nap, Rusty came in, wearing the same shirt and shorts he had played in all morning. He paused to stare at the knotted bodies, then ran to the couch. Mike toddled in and sat in his damp diaper on his mother’s lap. She hugged the boys to her. She was so tired of these men and the lifetime of struggle that staying on implied. She tried to shut them out by focusing on the children, but it would not do.

“Damn it, Daddy. Let me up,” Rafe managed to say.

“You want up? You want up?”

George pushed away and lurched to his feet. In three long strides, he reached the door. It slammed behind him.

Rafe crawled to where his hat had ended up and sat up to put it on. He looked slowly around at Sadie. “You got any money?”

She shook her head “no.” but her eyes betrayed the lie. He came to his feet and grabbed her arm, causing Mike to tumble against Rusty. “Give it to me,” he said.

Sadie wanted him to understand. “Food. The kids.”

His teeth sank into her shoulder.

“Oh. Ow. It’s under the mattress.”

He rolled back the cotton mattress and greedily snatched it all, even the pennies. Poking his head out the door, he called, “Hey, old man. Let’s go to the liquor store.”

He stood apologetically before Sadie and the howling boys. “Sorry,” he said. “But I needed the money. You okay?”

“Go get your whiskey.”

She watched through the saggy screen door as the two climbed into the car and coaxed it out on the road. A cloud of Abernathy dust trailed behind, once the car accelerated. “I wish I could go back to like I was,” she told her sons.

7

A dilapidated gray sedan followed the ruts into a yard overgrown with weeds. It came to a stop near an unpainted porch. The front tires rested in a hole the size of half a bathtub. The occupants of the auto were seen by four-year-old Rusty, banging on the screen door and two-year-old Mike pushing from the side in an effort to displace him. “Grandma. Grandpa,” Rusty shouted.

Sadie could be viewed peering from a window until she moved to unlatch the screen door.

Seeing the baby in the crook of Sadie’s arm made Grandma as excited as the boys. “There’s Adam,” she exulted.

Grandma and Grandpa were Ada and Herbert Thomas. They emerged from the sedan. Despite Afa’s always dawdling, despite his impatient nature, Herbert moved slowly, presumably because unwilling to leave her behind. 

Sadie’s father was raw-boned, angular, all European extraction. He began his half of the ensuing conversation long before Sadie could differentiate the words he spoke. He planted himself inside the door, positioned to leave just as soon as he’d had his say. 

Grandma scooped up her favorite grandchild and navigated beyond the maelstrom of the hollering boys, pausing then to coo and cuddle.

Sadie had to override Grandpa’s voice, get in his face, and practically shout at him. “Daddy, what are you talking about?”

Grandpa fell silent for a moment. After looking about, “Where’s Rafe?” he said. 

“He’s in jail, caught stealing from a store. The cops chased him almost to Flower Bluff before capturing him. It could have been worse if they found his gun. He hid it out there and now he can’t remember where he put it.”

“I knew before you married him he wasn’t worth a doggone. I hope he stays in there.”

“I know I made a mistake, Daddy.”

“Now. What I’m talking about. Ever since your brother been in the Navy he’s been writing: Come to California. That there’s jobs galore out there.”

Grandpa took out his snuff. “He thinks we ought to give it a try. Ada and me’s anxious to see what’s out there.”

He dumped tobacco in his lower lip. “We want you to come with us.”

Sadie beamed. “A chance to start over. But -” and she darkened - “We won’t go. Rafe hates the mention of California.”

“He’s not going. Just you and the boys, if you want to.”

Sadie looked closely from one parent to the other and back a few times. What if Rafe caught on? What might he do? If I go out there I will be raising three boys by myself. California - I want to see it - but it’s a foreign soil. I might not make it out there.  Her eye’s sought Ada’s attention. She needed help deciding.  But Grandma wrapped up in Adam, dumb to the flow of the conversation, offered nothing at all. At last, the sweet smell of freedom proved overpowering. “He gets out of jail Monday. Can we leave before that?”

Herbert exhaled, suddenly relaxed. “First thing Saturday morning,” he said. “Get yourself two or three boxes to pack  -” 

He watched his grandsons at play for a moment. “Let’s go, Ada.”

Ada returned the baby to her stepdaughter, who laid him on a pallet beneath the window. “No,” Ada protested. “He’s going to catch pneumonia there. Put him on the bed.”

“Then he would roll off,” Sadie said. “It’s warm enough there.”

“Pick him up from there.”

Herbert had grown impatient. “Ada. Let’s go.”

Ada adjusted her scarf before following Herbert out the door. “Don’t leave him on the floor,” she pleaded.

After they had gone, Sadie lit a cigarette and walked the rooms of the house. Packing presented no problem since everything was mostly already in boxes. She turned up the radio because she heard the music of Jimmy Rodgers, the song “Pistol Packing Papa” - Rafe’s favorite. She paused to think about him. Likely they would never meet again. She wondered how she would come to feel about that. Long ago her love had been secure. Now Rafe was set to become just another person. She would have no tears for him. Outside, the sun was low, making a red glow in the rows of clouds.

8

San Diego in wartime. A stirred up anthill, of gobs training, gobs partying, spilling over the main drag, with the music of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey flooding the streets. Society had been flipped upside down by the spade of fortune, first for the Great Depression, and now the war. They would scurry frantically to restore equilibrium. Sadie would come out after her witnessing job to join with brother Don and his two friends, Bob and Eric. They reveled in the gaiety of the moment, failing to recognize the fear-tinged madness that drove them. Every act became a cause for celebration. They defiantly roamed the city, introverts made to behave like extroverts.

The times Don and Eric pulled duty and Bobby didn’t he and Sadie pushed on. Mainly they walked the sidewalks, not having money to spend. He was plaintive, speaking of his home in Brooklyn. He’d turn impish, saying, “I would like to have you there with me,” and he would push back his hat, “I would take you to the Brooklyn Bridge and I would sell it to you.”

Never one with much to say, Sadie relied on her eyes to do most of her talking. Bobby did not seem to mind. He went on, about himself, his aspirations, the family and friends he hoped to return to. He asked about Ada, who babysat the boys when Sadie had her nights out. Speaking of the war, he waxed philosophical. “You see, I may not come back home, but if I help shorten this thing lots of fellows will. 

They frequented a place where Sadie watched him play pinballs. Beneath an overly bright moon, they held hands. Then one day he was gone. Don told her Bobby shipped out on a destroyer, bound for patrol off the Philippines. She wondered why he had not told her “Goodbye.”

9

They left San Diego and soon came to Lindsay to pick oranges. The woman owning those oranges, eight groves of them, Ethyl Mae Johnson, had inherited it all from her husband, a kindly lush who abused his liver until it quit on him. Ethyl was industrious, smart, and she made the trees flourish. Her brother, Elroy Woerm, was visiting from Campbell. Elroy looked among the trees and beheld Sadie, high on a ladder, filling her basket. Sadie saw him looking and smiled: She thought him quite handsome. In the course of the day she was to see the strapping somewhat older man with his sister and wonder who he might be. In the late afternoon, he awaited her on the trail.

As the humble pickers traipsed back to camp she could sense the anticipation in the air, long before Elroy showed himself. Rusty, Mike, and Adam notwithstanding, they were about to form a union. Of this she was certain. It was no surprise at all when Elroy joined them to introduce himself. He extended an invitation to join Ethyl for dinner - “supper,” he called it. Sadie saw his snare and willingly stepped into it. Ethyl graciously presided as they dug into ham hocks and beans, hot buttered cornbread, and tall glasses of iced tea. Ethyls’s teenaged sons, being morbidly shy, skipped the meal altogether. Ada fed Adam bits of food and Rusty and Mike knelt before a crate that had been brought in for a table.

Ethyl said, “We came from Abilene in 1932. Did you ever work around there?”

“We have worked everywhere,” Herbert said. “Everywhere from Oklahoma into south Texas. This California is a different thing entirely.”

“We don’t much like it here,” Ada put in from the side.

“I like it,” Sadie said quickly. 

Her eyes had been and continued swimming in Elroy’s gaze. 

“What’s your line of work?” Herbert wanted to know.

Elroy spoke with a half grin. “I have picked cotton, worked in a mine, carpenter - Today I am a short-order cook, in Campbell. Was a short-order cook. I can get another job as quick as I get back.”

Ada, Herbert, and the boys had finished up. Grandma wiped the kids’ mouths with a cloth napkin. As they all pushed away their empty plates their eyes turned to Sadie picking at her food. She moved to shove back the plate. Ethyl intervened. “Finish eating,” she said.

“They’re all ready to go.”

“Eat,” Elroy insisted. “I will walk you back.”

“Go on and eat,” Herbert said. “We’ll take the kids with us.”

All of the attention had Sadie smiling, embarrassedly. She could not lift her face to look at anybody.

“Where is the boys’ daddy,” Ethyl asked. 

“Texas. I am filing for divorce when I get enough money.”

“Elroy was married, in Abilene. He has a daughter.”

On the walk back, Elroy asked if Sadie thought her parents might stay in California.

“They are saving to leave,” she admitted.

“You going too?”

“I don’t know.”

Sadie’s eyes were blue and vulnerable. 

“I’m going to work on making you stay.”

10

Now the oranges were picked and most of the workers moved on. Herbert stewed over the next move. “I just don’t know,” he confided in Elroy. “Maybe there’s jobs out there. I’ve looked and can’t get a line on anything.”

He gazes wistfully on the de-oranged trees. Elroy had the answer. “My mother’s place n Campbell has a tent stretched on a wooden framework. Which I built. It’s as big as a small house. It has a stove and you could stay in there, free.”

“Work?”

“There ought to be something.”

In the end, they loaded up Herbert’s grey sedan and followed Elroy’s ’28 Dodge. He led them to Gladdie Woerm’s home. They drove up to find Gladdie chopping in the yard with a garden hoe near a line of lush boysenberry bushes. She invited them to stay as long as they like. 

Shelter. A great tent of army green canvass, erected behind both the house and a dilapidated trailer house. Mike would always recall an oppressive pall and tent odor in there. There would always be an image of Sadie cooking over an iron wood stove.

Right away Herbert began a quest to find a good paying job. But by week’s end he made a decision. 

Ada agreed it was time to leave. “But Sadie is determined to get married. I’m taking Adam home with me.”

“Elroy is turning out to be no different than Rafe,” Herbert said.

“I hate the way he eats his fill before Sadie and the boys have any.”

“The way he talks,” Herbert added. “There’s a negative turn put on every story.”

“Let’s make her go,” Ada said. “She will have to go to see Adam.”

They went to adamant Sadie. “I’ve sent the papers. Soon I will be able to marry Elroyy,” she said. “The boys need someone like him for their father.”

“I am taking Adam to Texas,” Ada insisted.

“He’s mine. You leave him alone.”

“I’ve had him this whole time.”

They struggled, briefly. But Adam, as Sadie fiercely pointed out, was hers. The bitterness shared by these women was to poison the mother/daughter relationship for fully ten years.

Herbert and Ada rattled off in a huff. Sadie clung to Elroy as they saw them go.

CHAPTER FOUR

1

The beleaguered newlyweds hitched a travel trailer to the old Dodge as they and the children set out in pursuit of work and a better life. The search became a protracted ordeal as they clawed and scratched across the underbelly of California. 

Soon enough they ditched the travel trailer and rented a house, for Rusty to enter his first school. It was a house Mike learned to hate. He found himself ushered into the living room every morning, where there was nothing to do, instructed to play and the door shut. He dreaded these dreary times and came to wonder in later life why he spent so many hours alone.

2

They came to Calwa in 1946. Elroy drove them to a lot on the unpaved Mason Street, where he had constructed a small cabin. They poured out of the car, like a bag of spilled rocks, and gazed with wonder at the cabin and near virgin sand. Adam went immediately to his knees, uttering a small cry. Mike looked on with some consternation as Adam gingerly pulled two goat’s head stickers from his bare heel.  His eyes traveled over the flat ground, pinpointing doilies of stickers and red ant mounds. A few clumps of thirsty trees and underbrush broke up the monotonous sameness on the way to a railroad switchyard in the far background. Across the main road on the corner was a cottonseed processing plant. Elroy ushered his family into the single room, with Sadie having some difficulty, carrying as she did a toddler in her arms named Jasper and being again already pregnant.

There was an enclosed bathroom with a commode and space for a corrugated tub. After the full-size bed a stove, sink, and icebox were jammed into the area by the sole window. 

After a few minutes, the Turner boys were instructed to “Go out and play.”

Mike could not fathom the reason these adults showed no concern for the kids’ unshod feet. He paused to comment on the situation, but it never helped to to ask about anything. Instead, he just went outside. 

“I’m going exploring,” Rusty announced.

“Me too,” said Mike.

But he could not keep up and turned back. Rusty quickly vanished into one of the brushy areas, goats heads notwithstanding. Mike’s attention went elsewhere. Choosing each step with the utmost caution, he approached an anthill. Here were oversized, slow-moving, dignified red creatures, comparable to nothing in his experience. He was to learn that these ants did not attack, but were inclined to bite if picked up. He traced their food line until Rusty showed up with an improvised spear in his hand. “I’m going to make a bow. I found a tree with perfect limbs.”

Mike greeted the news with ambivalence. On the one hand, such activities seemed as interesting as dirt; on the other, he had rather fresh memories of being shot in the corner of an eye with one of those homemade arrows. (“Move.” “I was here first.” “Get out of the way.” “No.” Blip. Right in the eye.)

“We can make swords too.” Rusty almost looked the part of the savage, being shirtless, his homemade haircut being a sort of burr on the sides and back but standing up on top. His freckled face absorbed much sun in his short lifetime. He struck a pose before hurtling away the spear. Before he had opportunity to retrieve it they were summoned to the car. “We are coming back tonight,” Sadie told them.

3

Elroy built fires under galvanized tubs on Saturday. Using these, in conjunction with a wringer washer, he and Sadie did the laundry. He moved the back straining loads. She pinned the wet garments to the lines.  They rode the Dodge to the rail yards where blocks of ice were fed via conveyer belt into boxcars. The errant chunks that went to the rocks below were left to melt. From these Elroy selected large blocks for the icebox. He built a cage with a light bulb in it to keep baby chicks he bought safe and warm. All in all, Elroy appeared to make the right moves. But Mike feared and mistrusted him from the first time he saw him. He dreaded when he became the object of his attention.

Solicitous to a fault in these early days, Elroy seemed genuinely proud of his family and it showed in the efforts he made. Little time was lost in the construction of a chicken coop and storage building. He finally set the batter boards for the foundation of the house he meant to build. Sadie constantly beamed, in love with her new life. She believed in this man, certain that together they could fulfill their fondest dreams. 

Elroy made a pile of scrap wood, many pieces of which bristled with nails. Piles such as that eventually spread. It’s the nature of any loose pile in a yard to move. Mike often sprawled on the ground, pulling the little spikes from his feet. Soaking for an hour in kerosene helped them get better. 

He rented a cement mixer, fed it sand, stone, and cement, and poured the foundation beams single-handedly. Soon after, he laid down joists and a wooden sub-floor. One day he stood in triumph atop the deck, joined by Rusty, who summoned Mike and Adam to enter the celebration. Mike came, bouncy ball in hand. Smiling, feeling good for all, he bounced the ball and caught it. Elroy angrily scooped the ball away and threw it all in one motion. “You always find a way to get on somebody’s nerves,” he said.

Magic moment over, Mike wandered dejectedly onto the neighboring property. 

This piece of ground had yet to be settled upon. It was an uninteresting patch of weeds. Except, for no particular reason he could name, a pit had been eaten in the dirt near the property line, large and bowl-like, with a meandering entry cut in a wall. He and Adam kept a few toys on-site, with a collection of sticks and twigs for constructing little buildings. They lived in the out of doors, from waking until dusk, paused for dinner, then returned to play until bedtime. There were no interactions with the adults, no bedtime stories - No nothing. When the boys would scratch out dirt roads to connect the little buildings they built, then push the autos to their homes, the games would end, thwarted by stunted imaginations.

Mike and Adam came to the pit daily and they looked out at new homes going up all about the neighborhood. At the corner by the main road, a stucco job went up in a hurry. Mike was startled at how quickly a family moved into it. Thet they had a son his age went undetected. Until one day when the boys looked over the rim to see him coming in to play.

Mike stared at the boy with a feeling akin to fear and wished he did not have to make contact with him. He turned away. His brother had no such reservations. 

“Hi. My name is Adam.”

“My name is Calvin.”

Mike swallowed down his fear enough to say “I’m Mike.”

Calvin’s Mom made acquaintance with Sadie. She was Gita Gerber, tall, skinny, somewhat bucktoothed. Between Gita and a few other new move-ins Sadie had at last a circle of friends.  She was granted by providence her other greatest wish with the birth of a daughter, Sadie, whom they nicknamed Angel, the name that stuck with her throughout life. 

As the golden summer progressed Mike took for granted that life would always be about these long days spent in a yard now smoothed of stickers and absent extinct red ants. It would star himself, Calvin, and Adam. He didn’t note anything strange about Sadie instructing Rusty to teach him the art of tying shoestrings. Then his Mom taught him how to print his name. Then he went outside to reclaim the yard. A few mornings later Sadie woke him out of a sound sleep and presented him with brand new clothing. After a breakfast of warm oatmeal, it suddenly dawned on him. He had been drafted.

Elroy and Rusty escorted him out of the house and all too quickly led him to his classroom. Miss Jeffries shut the door and class began. They went off and left me, Mike told himself. It was the final straw that set him bawling all the way until school for the day ended and Rusty walked him home.

Calvin had played all day. Being two weeks Mike’s junior made him ineligible to start for another year. The afternoons they spent together were quiet, with Calvin spewing non stop monologs and Mike with nothing to contribute. He realized with growing frustration that he knew next to nothing. And anyway the topics Calvin covered might as well have been spoken in Swahili, for Mike heard it all as a drone. Worse, he realized that he lacked a facility to converse, even had he actually had something to say. One fateful day, when Calvin paused to draw a breath, Mike rebelled at the situation. “No it’s not,” he said, without a clue what he supposedly objected to.

Calvin frowned, obviously deeply offended. Their normal time together was cut short.

Mike was to attend eleven schools in the course of ten years, with just a few conversations and only occasional friends who attached themselves and tolerated his silence. He became fond of Miss Jeffries. She always spoke kindly and smiled frequently. It was pleasant and fun to color pictures and to watch the still-frame movies ahe sowed, such as Disney’s tales of Brer Rabbit (At the beep change the picture).

Summer came and for a time Mike and Calvin resumed where they left off. Mike’s irritation that Calvin spoke authoritatively on a raft of subjects again came to the fore. As his friend explained the wherefores of something of which Mike followed not a word, he spoke out forcefully. “No it isn’t,” he stated flatly.

Calvin frowned but launched back into and finished his dissertation. The third time it happened, Calvin lost his cool. He bellowed his rage and charged at Mike.

It was obvious neither boy had been in any fights, for Calvin foolishly began windmilling his arms, as Mike started a windmill of his own. He slapped hapless Calvin across the forehead repeatedly until he gave up and ran crying to his Mama. 

After two more such fights Calvin sort of vanished. They remained pals, or so Mike believed. He had no clue how vengeful a parent could become. It was that his summer pal had been taken to school in the art of fist fighting. Coming home one day, as he was passing the Gerber house, Calvin came around a corner and approached Mike, wordlessly, determinedly. Mike broke into a friendly smile. Without preamble, Calvin pummeled Mike’s belly with both fists. Too surprised by the sour turn of events to react, mike started to cry, though just for a second. Calvin wisely transported himself back to the house corner, where his Mama hugged him and led him away. There would be no return bout, no mending the friendship, for his family kept him hid out permanently. Mike was not hurt by the pounding, just the betrayal, and the treachery. 

Sadie disappeared for three days, returning with Laura - named for a song. She was to have a child each year until she reached the magic dozen. Not that she wanted to have that many children. She requested a surgery to prevent having that many pregnancies but the charity hospital balked. With the final birth they changed their tune and it could be done after all. Now it was Sadie’s turn to decline. “You are too late,” she said.

Seemingly overnight Elroy developed the greatest gut one could imagine. Visiting neighbors asked how he could function around it. “You get used to it,” he replied.

He had been well-liked in the neighborhood up to the point where his drinking took over. As he consumed more alcohol progress on the new house became sporadic and finally ceased, as he hovered on the brink of failure. He broke Mike’s heart by trading off his Dodge for a shiny blue Chrysler. Symptomatic of the times, Sadie got her arm caught in the washer wringer. It pulled the arm nearly to the elbow before she hit the emergency release.

One day life on Mason Street ended. Not one word of discussion had reached Mike’s ears, yet it had been decided. They gave up their home to live with Elroy’s mother in Campbell. Mike watched in sadness the loading of the trailer, not wanting to leave the only real home he had ever known. The family had returned to the nomadic ways. Over fifty years later, he still would pine for the little home and these formative days of his youth. 

CHAPTER FIVE

1

Rusty looked surprised, turning his head around, looking along the walls and counters. “They took out the jukebox,” he exclaimed.

“Didn’t make sense to keep it,” Mike quipped. “Records were replaced by CDs and CDs are being steadily phased out by digital.” 

He thought ruefully of his own record collection. These days a good turntable was a luxury he could ill afford. Those vinyl discs languished in storage.

But enough. “Time to get on with my story.”

Mike made certain he had Rusty’s attention before he began. “Here it is. To understand my actions you have to be able to see me as I saw myself.”

“I don’t want a big production. Tell me and be done with it.” 

“I will keep it as short as possible.”

2

Then began Elroy’s trip over a slippery slope straight to hell, dragging his family with him. 

Elroy took exception to Mike’s constant reading and good grades. It was time to take the boy down. He began trying bully’s nicknames on him. He called him “Noun/pronoun.” “Well, Noun/Pronoun.” Then he challenged him, a three hundred pound gorilla with bloodshot eyes. “Do you know what’s a pronoun?”

His mind was blank. He stared fearfully at his stepfather.

“What is a pronoun?”

“I don’t know,” he whimpered.

None of the nicknames stuck, until after Mike developed a defensive grin, which often made him look stupid. That was the triggering element that had been missing. Elroy grabbed it. “You act just like Mortimer Snurd,” he announced triumphantly. This was a puppet’s name, from the Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy radio show; a dimwitted farmer. Mike became “Snurd,” from that time on.

Adam only escaped the daily harangues on occasion. Rusty was the sole child in the house allowed any dignity. He was given responsibility and often spoken to as though his thoughts had true value. He took his cues from Elroy to join in the badgering Mike endured. The Woerm youngsters ran loose like a collection of pets.

There were other indignities, such as Elroy stuffing Mike in a box, sitting on it, and putting a water hose in the boy’s face, as well as causing Mike and Adam to “Drop your pants. I want to look at you.”

3

Meanwhile, Rafe had left Texas to pick the crops in Oregon. He soon dropped down to California, where he was done in with a tire iron and dumped in a stream. He received a John Doe funeral. His family eventually discovered in which cemetery he was laid to rest, although the exact plot was never determined. When arrested, the killer told the court he just wanted his car. Mike learned of this over fifty years later, by searching for his father on a computer.

4

Mike shit his pants in school, three days running. On the fourth, as he sat at his desk, trying with all his might to not pee himself, just when drops of urine were in his pants already, the vice principal came into the room. She moved behind Mike and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Take a bath when you get home,” she said. “You stink.”

Baths were doled out once a week, using one galvanized tub of water. Mike’s turn came somewhere down the line when the water was murky and cool. 

The day after the vice principal ordered him to bathe, Mike came to school determined to never again soil himself. At recess, he felt an urge and he made the difficult decision to approach the restroom. He studied the door for a long time, riveted to the spot with fear until desperation to urinate forced him to go inside. Dazzling white porcelain greeted him, awaiting his pleasure. It was friendly, welcoming actually. In an instant, the fear was vanquished and he never again shat himself.

5

They moved from Campbell to Fresno and back, repeatedly. And then they took up housekeeping among Ethyl’s oranges. In one grove there stood a massive fig tree, the only one Mike ever beheld in that size. It was beneath its limbs they placed the furniture, much the way it could have been arranged inside a house. Later, a few weeks into the new school year, they moved to a house on a farm in the foothills near Milpitas.

By now Elroy was in the habit of disappearing with his paycheck until his pockets were empty. He came home of a late afternoon, almost too drunk to walk. “Where’s Rusty?” he demanded.

Rusty approached Elroy’s window, suspecting nothing by the demeanor of his face.

“I’ve got something for you.”

He slapped a parcel of ground beef in the boy’s face. He put the car into gear and drove up the slope, ramming a fence post, then backing off to come up and butte it down. He drove a half circle in the pasture, then exited at a different location. Then he climbed out and went inside. Mike had been noticing that the water valve for the cows’ trough kept dribbling. They had been instructed to leave the trough alone. He reasoned that if the old man came out there he would seethe dribble and conclude that the children were playing with it. He pushed down on the ball to make the trough fill all the way up. The old man must have been watching out the window, for he instantly called his name.

Elroy came outside and promptly slapped Mike’s face, causing him to be lifted off the ground and deposited flat on his back.

The next move was to gather the four older children and put them to bed, after belittling them for being lazy.

6

The landlord did not buy Roy’s explanation that motorcyclists did the damage to the fence. He demanded that they all get out immediately. Which explains why Elroy had to prevail on his Aunt Agatha in Fresno to provide the family with a place to stay.

Agatha lived in a nice house on the street front of a long strip of property. Closely behind it was a two-room rent house. Both buildings had the luxury of all indoor plumbing. A larger structure, way in the back, employed an outhouse. The two rental homes had been empty for a few months. Rusty was given the little house, while the rest of the family moved to the back.

In school, Mike’s isolation intensified. For thirteen is a time of awakening. Awakening on the outside of society, able only to stare in with hungry eyes, is to be in hell. With no place to hide, he stood around between classes, looking at no one, feeling the stares of the other students, his humiliation complete.

On Christmas, Sadie had perhaps ten dollars for presents. Mike’s shoes had to be wired together to keep the soles from flapping. He no longer owned underwear. His two pairs of pants had become threadbare, with the zipper of one perpetually sliding down. He stood before the class one day, unaware until he had finished speaking the fly was open. 

7

And then Elroy fully lost it. He sent the children to bed, all but Rusty. He laid out his butcher knives and told Rusty they were going to fight it out.  With seven months pregnant Sadie in between Elroy railed. Then he put the knives away, just before the police arrived. As they took him past Agatha’s house he shouted, “Hope you die.”

His two weeks in jail were enough for some sober thought. “These kids don’t want me here,” he told Sadie. “I will be GD if I will stay.”

Of course, he almost immediately requested to be allowed to move back in. For the first time in their relationship, Sadie stood up to him. The answer was a resounding “no.” When gentle persuasion failed Rusty resorted to anger. His abusive phone calls landed him another stint in jail, for in those times operators heard the conversations. It was the foul language rather than the abuse that got him reported. 

8

It likely had been percolating in Sadie’s brain for a while when she finalized a plan to flee to Texas.

9

First came a tragic diversion. Angelica, the toddler, died suddenly. She strangled on her spit up in the deepest night. Elroy and Ethyl had no sympathy. They accused Sadie of murdering the little one.

10

Sadie squirreled away her dollars until she could purchase train fare to Texas. She managed to have several hundred for getting settled. 

11

“Look,” said Rusty, interrupting, I am willing to get along. Push it into the background.”

“No way,” Mike said. “You will just hoard it and bring it up later when you need it to clobber me. Let me get this out.”

12

They settled in Texas.

New situation, new start. Right? The students cold-shouldered Mike from the beginning. He entered this school with a notion of acceptance at last. That he would be open and friendly and his life would be changed. It took less than a week to realize he still was on the outside of the societal bubble looking in. After enduring two more years of being a nonentity he dropped out. The final report card displayed straight Fs.

His entry into the adult world altered nothing. The grandfather and uncles tagged him “stupid.” They used his labor. Grudgingly. Almost five years he tried to please them. Desperation ate at him night and day. He was like an insect looking into the world of humans, not knowing when he might get squashed. With no life and no hope of establishing one, nature took over. At twenty, he spontaneously told Sadie he was going to hitchhike into San Antonio to find a job. There was no plan and no hope for success. He set out blindly, with no baggage, no money, no change of clothes. Halfway to town, it dawned on him that he was not going to San Antonio at all. His destination was California. Some deep down below the surface force had taken him over to push Mike to either succeed or else go down trying. He bought a paperback novel with one of his three dollars and was halfway to his destination when a moving van picked him up and deposited him in Long Beach. 

The trucker gave him temporary shelter until he found a job. It seems a car wash had been looking to hire a warm body and Mike fit the bill. A motel gave him a special rate because he looked so young. As he vacuumed the cars and went home to vegetate, it came over him to enlist. The Navy could provide a haven from which to launch his future. In the end, he learned how to argue with people in the service, an important step, but self-destructive without some added qualities, such as ability to converse and instill confidence in his dealing with people.

Yes, arguing was an important step. For the first time ever he stood up on his hind legs, looked people in the eye, and stated his case. But it did nothing to save him in the short run. He became a nomad in the time of hippies. And he felt so strongly about civil rights and the war in Nam he joined in some of the demonstrations. He established a routine of hitchhiking, riding freight trains, and earning money through temporary agencies, such as Manpower. He joined up with Adam in Kansas City.

13

In a rooming house, they passed what Mike recalled as The Great White Winter, trudging in ice and snow to work, coming home to hear music and to write and draw. An insular life. Awakened one morning by an insistent knock, Mike opened the door to have a paper pushed into his hand. The messenger fled. He read the following: “Rusty Taylor killed in car wreck. Come home.”

14

“After the funeral, I was expected to step into your shoes. I tried. I didn’t run away.”

“But you did run away.”

“Eventually. I underwent a major regression. A tailspin that if unaltered would end up killing me. I was hardwired to fail at it. What held you steadfast eluded me. I went for long aimless drives daily. Went so far into one night I slept at the wheel, until I woke up on the shoulder of the oncoming lane, doing about fifty or sixty. Tried to connect with other souls, unsuccessfully. The pressure building within me by the minute. People who have not experienced it cannot know.”

“You were always an undependable, self-centered dope. You never wanted to do anything for anyone.”

“You see? I lay out the truth. It gets rejected. You people made me undependable. I became self-centered in self-defense. No matter how down I got squashed  I always knew I was better than that. I felt like a cockroach getting stomped at by a heel every single day. Yet I treasured this life because I believed there would be eventual relief. My dodging that heel made abandoning Mom and my littlest brother happen. The collateral damage, except they survived and went on without me.”

Rusty shook his head like a shaggy buffalo, shrugging it all away. “Let’s go someplace and drink beer. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

Mike felt a hollowness inside, to finally get it all out and only a ghost audience choosing not to listen.

CHAPTER SIX

1

Mike stood still in silence, regarding a mound of freshly shoveled earth, for he had just buried Percy in the back yard. The old fellow failed this morning to wake up. He hoped there had been no suffering. Katie had suggested euthanizing him, earlier. This way was better. After getting rid of the shovel he found Katie. “He’s buried,” she said. “Did Rusty help you?”

“No,” Mike said. “I did it by myself. But it’s only right. A man should bury his own dog.”

“What’s he doing? Still sitting?”

Mike nodded. “Hasn’t moved all day.”

“It’s getting creepy,” she fretted. 

As it turned out, Rusty had no plan and no place to go. By the time they pulled in the driveway, Rusty had already retreated, leaving a shell to go through the motions. Mike led him to a seat on the porch, where he remained, day and night. 

I’m going to work,” Mike said. “First I’m going to sit with him. Maybe I can get him talking.’

He felt like his brother had already left him but carelessly left his body behind. It was an oppressive situation. Mike loved his brother but wished this remnant out of his life. The dead should rest, he insisted.

Taking a bottle of water out of the fridge, he went outside.

2

The porch chairs were the molded plastic kind that everybody these days have and the feet needed to be positioned so or they could slip between the cracks in the decking. Mike perched on one seat, leaning until his face came within inches of Rusty’s face. His gaze dug deeply into the specter’s eyes, seeking a sign of intelligence. For the briefest flicker, one eye gave movement. Making him believe Rusty was still in there somewhere. He took a breath and began speaking. “I’ve loved you,” he said, “even when we were fighting. I would have traded my life for yours. I still see the boy getting choked by a bigger kid and me on the big kid’s back, trying to get him off of you. Even though I cannot come up with a single case of you trying to protect me I still would do the same thing all over again.

“I got married about a year after you were buried. I let it happen because it seemed a gateway into normalcy. It just partly succeeded. The bulk of my life from then until now is like raw wounds all over my mind, sometimes with partial healing but never becoming whole.

“You were not close to being a primary cause of my misfortune. I think that’s why I continue to love you. Only late in life have I questioned how much you deserved that love. And yes I continue to love you, regardless.”

Mike put a hand on the keys in his pocket and shook them. “I am off to work,” he said.

The apparition sat still as a mannequin. Mike sighed before turning away to descend the steps and approach the Purple.

3

He pulled into his place of employment and found a shady parking space. He loved being here. It was just an apartment complex but it was very special to Mike. He had been desperate for work when they hired him, over twenty years ago. The first day he walked the property he felt an affinity that made him very much want to stay. He was turning fifty and had never held a job for an entire year. He bonded with the lead man in a lopsided way, but Mike was too grateful for a job to mind the inequities. The Spring Lane Apartments provided vital therapy. For the first time in his life he was desperate enough to face people and deal with them. With time he learned to hold conversations with strangers. With still more time he became capable of initiating some of those conversations. 

His life had been hard over the years. His first marriage lasted six years. In his second marriage, he fought with Katie much of the time, but together they brought up four excellent children. They had gone from job to job and home to home until the young ones spread wings and went on their own. With a steady job at the apartments and the purchase of their home, his and Katie’s life stabilized. 

Work time for Mike had been pared down to four hour days because he was old. The company only kept him for the sentiment, for his career had been dedicated and productive. He achieved several important tasks and signed out to go home.

4

Rusty had not moved. In one blue eye, there seemed a flicker, making it as though there was a prisoner in there anxious to get out. But Mike was hungry. He went in, to the refrigerator and removed a portion of pot roast, and prepared it for the microwave.  Then stuck two frozen bread slices in the toaster. While bread and meat were heating he put some pats of butter to lay on the bread. As he prepared his sandwich he wondered where Katie had gotten off to. Likely gone to pay the water bill.

With the TV news on, eating, missing Percy, who had once been a shadow to him, he considered Rusty, decided to not fix him any food unless requested to do so. 

A short time later he leaned out the door, masking exasperation with joviality. “Are you hungry? Thirsty? Last call until the kitchen closes.”

5

Perhaps Rusty would like to know how Elroy met his demise?   

Elroy had searched south Texas for Sadie with no success. Back in California, he prevailed on his sister to set him up with his own restaurant. His joint with oversalted, over peppered, food became a mediocre hit. But shortly after opening, Elroy was alone in there after closing time. He became light-headed and then darkness started closing in around him. He strove to reach the wall-mounted telephone but went down on the linoleum floor.

Three days later he was found, still breathing. After being revived, he spent his remaining days paralyzed on the right side, unable to speak beyond a forced mumble. He never left the hospital.

Nobody was there when Elroy died. His sister buried him in the cemetery where his father lay. Mike felt cheated because it had long been in his mind to look him up and give him a proper ass-kicking.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1

Bainter, the closest neighbor, was the first to remark on the odd presence on Mike’s front porch. He had walked over to the wire fence to have a better look but had waited until Mike was present to make something out of it. “Doesn’t he need a doctor?”

“No doctor could help him, Bainter. And I can’t tell how long he will have to sit there,” Mike said. 

“I don’t like to see him every time I go outside.”

“None of us is happy about it. Sorry.”

“That sort of thing gets to be a nuisance.”

Bainter was an unhappy camper going back to his own house. 

Most people gave Rusty the eye but kept their reactions private. Not Lucy Entwhistle.

She knocked on Mike’s door, a sharp rapping that belied her use of just her knuckles. “This has got to go. I have children who are afraid of that over there. I want to know what you are going to do about it?”

He hated talking to this woman. Her face to him was an angry ugly blob in every setting. “That is my brother,” he said. “Rusty is no danger to anybody.”

“I’m making sure of that. I’ve already called the law. They are going to take him out of there.”

“Take him out where? He’s got no place to go.”

Lucy stalked off while Mike was talking. He watched helplessly for a moment then retreated to his quiet living room.

2

And the police quickly ordered an ambulance. Soon Mike was sitting in the hospital, waiting all day to see him. Doctor George Carson sought him out. 

Doctor Carson gave Mike a crusty once over before beginning to speak. “He’s your brother? You know he is completely unresponsive? No pulse or brain activity. I would write him up as deceased - But, the eyes. The eyes sometimes look at you.”

“Doctor, I tried to tell them. My brother died in 1969. They took his body without permission.” 

The doctor gave him another once over, his expression grave and then graver. “I don’t understand your humor. Why joke about this?”

“I’m sorry, doctor. May I see him now? Thanks, Doc.”

3

He drew up his chair to the bedside, where he could lean forward into Rusty’s face. “It may not be that important that you hear things I tell you. It is important that I say them.

“I want you to know I never lost my love for you, my brother. But, it’s time for you to leave now. I will carry the love, anger, hurt, and joy, of having known you to my grave. But if you won’t or can’t go right now, I will be with you for as long as it takes.”

A short time later, Doctor Carson slipped into the room. “Mr. Taylor, we want for you to take this man out of here. There is nothing we can do for him. By the time you settle his bill, he should be at the entrance, waiting for you.”

Mike grinned rather broadly. “I know it’s a matter out of your hands, Doctor. So I will explain myself to Billing. Thank you for what you tried to do.”

“Good luck, Mr. Taylor.”

He wrangled with Billing until they finally conceded that Rusty was liable for and could not pay his bill. 

This time Rusty was stationed on the rear porch, to be largely ignored, for Mike’s life simply must revert to being normal.

4

With Percy’s passing, Katie felt Mike was deprived of needed companionship. They simply must visit the SPCA. It was true he had no friends of the type that come and visit. In fact, his sole contact with people was usually derived from the job, his near family, and a few inlaws, plus several online contacts.

So they walked the cages, until a tall brindle and black dog leaped about, friendly and playful. He might have passed for mostly Shepherd, but for the ears. Floppy Lab ears. And the eyes. Only a Chocolate Lab could have such eyes. He approached to make acquaintance as the dog sat eyeing him back, his huge tongue lolling down the outside of his mouth. 

It took about an hour to get Rocky out of that place.

Rocky seemed reluctant to climb into the car. Mike helped him in. Frightened of the ride, Rocky flattened himself on the floor. 

The dog was given the run of both house and yard, via Percy’s doggy door. Soon enough he discovered Rusty bundled and propped in his chair. He sniffed and puzzled and walked away, to return several times. Rocky eventually took up a place near Rusty, holding vigil most of the days. He was there for Rusty for the duration.

5

And then Rusty was gone. Mike had went on the porch to sit with him a bit. Apparently Rocky had not yet become aware of the loss, for he slept soundly on his mat nearby. Mike looked around to make certain if the apparition had relocated, but it was already apparent he was not there. He found small particles on the chair seat. When he moved to hold them for examination they disintegrated into something so fine as to possibly not exist any longer.

He found Katie. “He left us,” he said.

Katie held Mike and sympathized. “I think you should visit his grave this weekend. I would like to go, but I have plans with Mother.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

1

Mike knew to not anticipate anything and yet he approached the grave expectantly, for he had spent much of his life viewing cartoons and fantasy films - movies that tugged at his mind, coaxing him to believe the fantastic could occur. Last night his sleep had been deep and unbroken until at the end he believed he could see Rusty’s blue eyes staring at him.  His own eyes popped open and they seemed to catch the fading blue for an instant. He would never be able to decide if the eyes were real. So now, against science and logic, he expected a sign.

Sure, he knew Rusty lay inside that grave and so would remain, so long as man and nature chose to not disturb it. His senses were receptive. Nothing happened. “Sorry, Rusty,” he said as he surrendered expectation and turned to go.

His path was blocked by the stepping out of a man from nowhere, one with a balding head and bulging waistline.

Mike and he nearly collided. The man regarded Mike in a manner that suggested their meeting had been planned ahead of time. Through his mustache, he spoke. “Taylor?”

Mike was nonplussed. “Do I know you?”

“Not now. But you did. 1956.”

“I don’t -”

“Think. Distant cousin to Sam Houston.”

His memory saw this man standing before his 8TH-grade history class. “Mr. Harrison?”

Harrison came as near to smiling as Mike had ever seen him.  “You were a mediocre student in my honors class. Ragged dirty kid with nothing to say to anyone.”

“You gave me 98 on the final test.”

Harrison became authoritative. “In history, yes. The entire class didn’t absorb much, concerning the Constitution. Letting you all pass was a gift, pure and simple.”

“I respected you, Mr. Harrison but I resented it when you told us that only an uncivilized person doesn’t wear an undershirt, and me sitting in my misery, wearing ragged jeans, wearing no underwear at all because I had none to put on.”

Harrison seemed unmoved by the revelation. “As I said, Taylor, I didn’t understand you. But, as I stand before you today, I have a few things to tell you. Don’t try to figure out how I know these things. Just listen to me and try to learn.

“You’ve spent your entire life blaming your stepfather and a supporting cast of characters for your own failure as a man. I am ready to contradict that, to a great extent. Would you describe Mike Taylor in childhood thusly: total lack of social skills; unable to hold conversations and unable to talk when it’s your turn; unable to make eye contact; dislike changes of routine; when growing through teens into adulthood fear to approach others, whether to seek a job or merely to transact business at a convenience store? Still unable to hold a conversation beyond your fiftieth birthday?”

“You know it’s so or you would not have asked.”

“It’s autism.”

“Is that autism?”

“Autism can be much more severe. With both, you don’t always have the full range of symptoms. Chances are, nobody you came in contact with ever heard of either one. The ones closest to you might be forgiven for having no clue because you would relax and act fairly normal with them.”

“They kept me in poverty and ignorance. They did everything in their power to make me fail in life.”

“But they were unsuccessful. It was you, with that untreated flaw in your makeup.”

“So this is a seismic shift? Mr. Harriso, how can I overlook the cruelty and the glee in their faces? The severe deprivation on every level?”

“Had you asked the right people for help you might have avoided fifty years of failure.”

“Maybe knowing the cause may not have been enough to effect a cure.”

Harrison put out his hand. “Taylor, it’s been a pleasure.”

Mike shook the hand. “Goodbye, sir. Thank you.”

“See that you get some undershirts.”

Only once did Mike look back, knowing before he turned the man would be gone.

2

During ensuing days Mike was consumed with thoughts of Elroy. He saw him blocking a doorway, rubbing the area between his shoulders against the jamb to still the itching. Heard him singing, coming out of the kitchen, “Oh the buckskin belly and the rubber asshole.” Saw him striding up and down before the bar in a beer joint, repeating several times, “Fire barrel one,” to punctuate the bawdy talk going down all along the bar. Saw the look on his face when he looked into Mike’s drawer a few days after he moved out and discovered that Mike had put his comic books back in, in defiance of Elroy’s order to remove them. He heard him tell his friend, Buck, “By god we eat beans because we like beans.” 

Him belching the words “Whale oil.” 

Calling his own mother Sook and pulling her around by the nose. 

Deliberately trashing his mother’s house. 

Hoeing down a beautiful garden because he was moving away and did not wish anyone else to enjoy it. 

Coming in late at night and preparing himself a maddeningly wonderful smelling steak.

Wolfing down eggs and toast with a little one begging for some at his side, giving the final sop.

Mexican in a bar incessantly repeating, “Texas belongs to Mexico.” Elroy over and over, “You’re a hundred percent correct.” Driving away (to Sadie) “I should have kicked his ass.”

Pitching Mike and Adam in the canal, dragging them back with a rope, to avoid paying for bathwater.

Telling Sadie, “I don’t see why they should get Christmas presents. I never got any.”

Taking Mike outside to call him a GD bastard without explaining why.

Turning his melon slice white with salt, then blackening same with pepper.

Making mike shake the crib for an hour at a time to avoid tending to the baby.

Washing his hands in the freshly made Kool Aide.

Bringing Mike and Rusty fried chicken at school dinner time.

Bumping his friend’s car at a red light - a friendly little tap.

Wringing George the rooster’s neck because George ran at him a few times.

Holding the baby at arm’s length, telling Sadie to change the diaper. It was making him sick.

Telling the children, “Ye don’t never want to be steengy,” after giving away the only fruit in the house to a neighbor.

Seeing his repulsive nut sack inside his loose-fitting underwear as he passed on his way at night to pee.

Hearing him tell Sadie, “One of these Sundays we will all get dressed and go to church.”

Lowering Mike by rope down the outhouse hole to stand in feces and fetch up a bucket lid accidentally dropped in.

3

Mike had to go to California. Katie did not fully comprehend the obsession with Elroy, but she expressed the opinion she was ready, willing, and able, to travel. She had not been to that many places and she would appreciate seeing more. They cracked the 401K money and leased a car. Soon, they boarded Rocky and motored west. Mike had no idea how to locate the orange groves he once knew, but it was simple enough to look up the cemetery where Elroy and others of his kin were buried. 

Soon enough they looked across the huge landscape, where most headstones lay flat but occasional statues and standing markers stood tall.

As they approached the stone with Elroy’s name in the inscription Katy went browsing among the markers, leaving Mike his privacy. 

And, so, he confronted the final chapter in his lifelong nightmare. His rage somehow washed away. He had dreamt for years of launching into a verbal assault when standing over Elroy’s little plot of ground. Instead, he found himself sinking to his knees and then shifting around to sit beside the gravestone. 

He spoke to the man who had been a parent of sorts to him in a conversational tone. “You, the monster of my life, have become a deflated balloon in the scheme of things. I don’t even get to blame you for my failures. If I could I would haul you up out of there and prop you up the way a living Pope did a deceased Pope and rant and rave at you before excommunicating you and pitching you back in your hole. You bullied all of us, you bastard. I am here to declare an end to the hold you have had on our life.”

He signaled Katie to rejoin him. He guided her to block out the vision of other grave visitors. He unzipped his fly, holding himself above the gravestone. The sound of his urine flowing was full, the plashing on the granite distinct. The act of urination lasted almost two minutes, for he had been saving up all morning. He thanked Katie for shielding him while he fixed his pants. He placed a hand on her shoulder as they walked away.

4

Mike wrote in his journal:

“I am home from the hunt. The ferocious beast I bagged is myself.’

5

Mike was on the porch, presumably snoozing. His grandchildren were playing. Drifting in and out of conscious thought, his mind turning to Rusty and Sadie. And, now, Adam had passed on, from cancer. He had done some hard traveling. It had been a long and lonely road. It had taken half of his marriage to Katie and beyond the time the children had grown before he could rise out of those depths. He was content. He mulled in his mind a poem he had written some years earlier.

I can hear the children playing

See them dancing in the yard

Preserve the words they are saying

Like a fancy Christmas card

The moments that betray them

Are the moments caught off guard

Yet the dragons cannot slay them

Not these children of the ward

I hear their mothers calling

As they empty out the yard

Echoing their footsteps

Like bells tolling in my heart

I gaze upon the portrait

Of my brother who’s been gone

Time itself cannot prorate 

The memory and the song

To see you I would kiss you

And give hugs until you groan

Mama’s off to find you

I must go it all alone

I’ve been across some borders

To describe my private hell

In deep and shallow waters

Like a bucket in a well

Each story has an anchor

Yes I dragged mine through the bay

I was lucky just to find her

Fortunate she went my way

The sun is like a prism

See it straining through the glass

My mind’s not like a prison

I’m no victim of the past

There’s a beauty in the foment

And a rage to top the crest

Got to have myself a moment

So I’m ready for the rest

He smiled up at Katie, who had brought out the steaming coffee. As she sat down beside him, his hand covered hers. 

 

  

    

                                            

           

Missing You (California Nights)

Missing You (California Nights)

When the trees are bare

`Cause the leaves aren't there;

With the season's change

Snow's across the range;

I think of you on that western shore

v2

I dream of blazing nights,

The California lights -

You out there with Jim.

I missed you back when;

Tonight, Love, I miss you even more.

chorus

(Miss you baby)

The cows are waiting by the gate

The horses milling cause you're late

(They miss you baby)

Cutting your roses by the gate

Just to view them o'er my dinner plate

(I miss you baby)

Tonight I'll see you in my dreams

v3

I miss your dancing eyes

Before Montana skies;

Since you went with him

Give my best to Jim.

Who would think you'd even the score?

v4

I see the shadows grow;

I hear the cattle low;

Yes I chose the range

Because the heart can change -

But I'll remember you on that western shore.