After spending the day at nurseries buying plants for the Cramers’ project, I got home at a decent hour with enough time to relax in the yard with the dogs, take my shoes off, and enjoy some ice tea. I stuck my bare, hot feet in the dogs’ blue plastic wading pool that I set up for them each summer. Patsy Cline was first in the water and would immerse herself as if she were swimming, but Pecos would only stand in it to cool off. Even after he started getting summer shaves to free him of his thick, Chow coat, he wouldn’t do more than wade now and then. Patsy, however, was a frequent user. They enjoyed it, and so did I, and we shared it with friends, too. I named it the Patsy Cline Memorial Swimming Pool, and we’d had pool parties celebrating the season.
I had called Bernice Thorton’s number several times during the day, without any luck. An answering machine didn’t even pick up. I was hoping I could reach her before the police contacted her so she’d know the situation and not be freaked out by the authorities showing up at her door unannounced. I also wanted to let her know that I would bring the trunk out to her again; I wanted to be rid of the troublesome thing.
I still had some energy, so I decided to head out to Bernice’s and see if I could catch her at home since I figured maybe she wasn’t answering her phone. The whole trunk thing was burning a hole in my brain, and I needed some answers. With that as an excuse, I herded Patsy Cline and Pecos Bill into the car, and we slowly headed out on back roads east onto the plains, their dog heads out the windows enjoying the breeze.
The northern Colorado plains are dry, gently rolling hills, unlike the humid flatland plains of Texas and Oklahoma where I grew up. The view is as big, though, and on this late afternoon, giant cumulus clouds were drifting like sky schooners over green sugar beet fields, leaving racing blue ground shadows in their wake, soon to gather farther east into rain fleets that were too far away to help us in town. Thunderheads toward the north were looming dark gray, their tops shining white in the sun, and though I could see flashes of lightning far to the northeast, I could hear no thunder.
A wind had picked up, northwest to southeast, scattering tumbleweeds across the road. I knew it was probably not going to rain as hoped, but the breeze was refreshing, and the contrasts in light and shadow made me glad I’d brought my camera. I pulled over toward the barrow ditch and parked to watch the sky and take a few images of the storm clouds. I hurried because I didn’t want to get to Bernice Thorton’s at an inconvenient hour, such as dinnertime.
I needn’t have hurried because no one was home. The house looked shut up. Ladders and paint buckets of the previous visit had been shoved together on the side of the house in an untidy heap. The front porch floor had been painted, although not very well, but it was dry enough to walk on. I rang the bell several times, waited, rang some more. No one home, I mouthed to the dogs, who had their heads sticking out of opposite car windows, looking attentive. As I walked down the front steps, I noticed again an older man out watering his yard a couple of houses down the road. He’d seen me drive up and had scowled at the dogs. Now he scowled at me and bent down to move the sprinkler, now wasting every drop to the wind, to another part of the yard.
By the immaculate look of his yard, the very Teutonic precision of the clipped shrubs, I figured he spent a lot of time outside, maybe knew what went on in the neighborhood, and surely had some opinions about it. I walked down, smiled, and asked him about a shrub in his front yard. I knew what the shrub was, but I’ve found that if you ask people questions about something they are familiar with or responsible for, they loosen up and probably start talking about other stuff as well.
At first he was the crotchety old guy I thought he’d be, eyeing me and saying he’d seen my car before at Bernice’s. He didn’t seem interested in knowing why I was there but wanted instead to complain about the general state of the world, as he twice hitched up baggy khaki pants that his narrow hips could not hold up. A ribbed white undershirt showed under his open brown plaid shirt whipping in the wind, and the brim on his stained fedora snapped back towards the crown as a dusty gust blew through the yard. After talking about his own yard for a bit, he forgot I was a stranger, and forgot his defensive feelings and his thoughts about everyone being out to get him. I commented on how nice his yard looked—the best one in the neighborhood, I said—and how quiet the neighborhood seemed.
He grumped, “Yeah, used to be,” and glared at Bernice Thorton’s house. He told me that the police had been there that afternoon at her house; he’d seen an officer knock on the door and then drive away.
Had he talked to the officer? I asked. “Nope,” he said, “he didna ask.”
We talked some more about his yard, about which he was evidently very proud. I learned that Bernice was gone on a vacation. He’d been out working in his yard when he’d seen her come out of her house.
“I was trying to kill those dang grasshoppers; can’t keep up with ’em,” he said, “and I come ’round the corner and saw Miz Thorton come out of her house with a valise. At the curb was one of them big dark limos and its own driver. Miz Thorton seemed jist thrilled. She was a-wavin’ at me! She was callin’ out ‘good-bye! good-bye!’ and something about a cruise.” He stopped and glared at me, “Now why would a woman of her age wanta go on a cruise? She’s too old!” This from a guy at least ten years her senior.
“A cruise?” I asked. “Did she say where she was going?”
“Uh, somethin’ about Hawahya or Chinee, or some sort of nonsense. I couldna hear her; she mumbles!” He pulled down his hat farther onto his head to keep the wind from catching it, and gave me a look as if he enjoyed being a crotchety old man. “Anyhoo, what she need a limo for?”
So I laughed and said, “Wow, a limo. Uptown, huh?”
“Well, whoever it belongs to, he’s one smart man.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“’Cause he supports Erik Nambertin for Congress, that’s why!” He looked at me as if everyone knew this but me.
“How—”
“He had a ‘Support Your Rights!’ sticker right there on the back bumper. Standing up for his rights! I got me one of them, too, at the Nambertin rally here last month. His campaign makes ’em, and it shows that I’m proud to be an American!”
Well, I was, too, but Erik Nambertin was a little too right wing for my beliefs. One way he sought political power was by demonizing immigrants and stirring up xenophobic fear. His idea of supporting his rights usually meant stepping on others’ rights. But I kept my mouth shut and just smiled as Mr. Crotchety proudly showed me his bumper sticker on his fading but spotless 1988 Buick tank.
I asked him about Nephew. He scowled. “Good for nothin’. He shows up here wantin’ a handout—good for nothin’. Poor woman ain’t got anything! She’d been needin’ paintin’ done and had to beg him to do it. Now look at it,” he said, scowling over at Bernice’s unfinished house. “I’ll have to look at that mess! Me! Nobody else! Me!”
It was getting to be time to go. Did he know Nephew’s name? Did Bernice mention it?
“Aw, something like, uh, Darren, Daryl, Daniel or … or something. I don’t know! She mumbles!”
Then he showed me some potentillas he was having problems with in his front yard, and after suggesting a few pruning techniques as a solution, I left him to his yard work, mumbling to himself in the breeze.
Back in the car, my head was buzzing with unanswered questions, and the dogs were of no help. I put Mark Sloniker’s Paths of Heart in the CD player to enjoy the peaceful piano jazz, and the gray-blue haze of the Front Range view as I pulled back onto the county dirt road. There were no indications of possible rain now; in fact, it rained so seldom each event was celebrated as manna from heaven. From out there, the clear blue sky showed an unobstructed view north to Wyoming, all the way south to Pike’s Peak.
It seemed unlikely that Bernice Thorton could afford or would decide to go on a cruise, so someone must have set it up for her. And it seemed sudden, since Bernice hadn’t mentioned it to me when I had talked w
ith her two days before. An upcoming cruise was something any of us would want to talk about to anybody who would listen, I thought, and she hadn’t said a word about it. Yet more questions I’d just as soon let go.
When we got home, and the dogs were chowing down their dinner, I knew it was time to get out of my head, and take a walk by myself along the river in the early evening light.
The wind that had been so hot all day became a cool breeze by the water that looked like liquid marble, mottled in greens and browns. Two mallards, their iridescent emerald necks flashing in the sun, bobbed with a dark merganser on the edge of an eddy under a low hanging, ragged limbed willow. Engelmann ivy tangled in the undergrowth of hawthorn, skunkbrush, and washed-up tree limbs from the last flood, obscuring the small sand islands in the middle of the stream. The line of cottonwoods by the river thinned out into open fields, and the view expanded to include the brown line of foothills, backlit by the setting sun. Soon I wasn’t thinking of anything at all, just following my feet down the path, following the sound of the river.