The Home Place: A Novel Page 5

  Pete’s voice drops even further and he glances around before continuing. “He started screaming and coming at us. I had his tools sitting by the door and he grabbed a monkey wrench, started swinging it around, screaming faggot this and faggot that. I never thought he’d do anything until the wrench came down on my head. Next thing I knew I was staring into bright lights in the emergency room. Shep says the sight of blood made Walt reconsider and he ran off. Never did ask for his tools back from us. Cooties, no doubt.” Pete smirks. “Look.”

  He leans forward and lifts his hat to reveal a long, raised scar stretching back from his left temple.

  “Jesus, you’re lucky he didn’t kill you. And you never pressed charges?” Alma is incredulous. The whole family has thought of Walt as a loose cannon ever since he came back from Vietnam, got raging drunk one night, and told his father to go to hell and take the ranch with him. Al could have forgiven the insults, but rejecting the land was a mortal sin in his eyes. Alma had believed—hoped, rather—that time had mellowed Walt’s uncontrollable anger over whatever happened in the southeast Asian jungle, but it hasn’t.

  Pete shakes his head. “Glancing blow. Wasn’t even a concussion, just a lot of blood. We didn’t want to get into it.”

  “Not even aggravated assault? They could’ve tried him for attempted murder! Did you tell Helen?” Alma leaps to the suggestion of criminal charges without reflecting for a moment that this is her own uncle she’s talking about. She is fully able to imagine such an outcome. That reality—this veil drawn from what she really believes about Walt—shivers through her. And then she remembers that Brittany is at his house.

  Pete tosses his rag on the counter in a contemptuous gesture. “Come on, what for? She’d never hear a word against Walt. Plus we didn’t want to get into the faggot part, and besides, Montana’s hate crimes law doesn’t cover that. We told the cops it was an argument over the tools. Then they just thought we were all stupid.”

  “You could’ve called me for a second opinion.” Alma reaches up to pull Pete’s scarred head down to her. She kisses the wounded place and replaces the hat. “I don’t think you’re all stupid. Shep’s pretty clever.”

  “Thanks, sis.”

  “Anytime.” The ease between them is back, like a gas that circulates in and out of the room. Alma unbuttons her coat and Pete resumes his bar tasks.

  “Is Brittany doing okay?” he asks over the noise of the espresso machine. “I haven’t talked to her yet.”

  “I don’t know. She’s not talking.”

  Pete waits for the noise to stop, watching Alma all the time.

  “Not talking? You mean, not at all?” he says.

  Alma shakes her head and cracks the knuckles on her right hand. The sound startles her. She can’t remember ever cracking her knuckles, but somebody else did. Who was it? An ugly memory crouches down there, muddled dirty and deep in the black swamp that holds the days after their parents died. She doesn’t want to remember. She shakes her hands out and stands. “Not at all. Not to the cops, not to the social worker, not to me on the phone this morning. I’m going over to Helen and Walt’s after this. Hopefully it will have passed by now. I’ve got to get her out to the home place.” She doesn’t have to explain this refuge instinct to Pete.

  “You’re picking her up, right? She’s staying with you?” Pete demands.

  Alma nods. “Of course,” she answers, a little surprised at his vehemence.

  “I worry about Brittany.” Pete hesitates and ducks his head, drawing Alma back toward him with a look. “There was a night several years back when Vicky came by here in the middle of a hard night of barhopping. She was a mess, so I took her back to our place after I closed. She got started crying on the couch, so I said maybe I should take her over to Walt and Helen’s. I mean, have mercy, I don’t know the first thing about crying women. Well, I no sooner got it out of my mouth than she just turned off. Curled up on the couch like she was catatonic or something. Refused to talk. Scared us both to death. I wanted to take her to the hospital, but Shep said just to put a blanket over her and let her sleep it off, and so we did. She woke up the next morning and acted like she couldn’t remember what happened.” Pete’s pupils are dilated in the dim light, giving him the disconnected aura of a shock victim. “It sure makes you wonder what’s gone on with her. I tried to talk to Brittany a little, make sure she’s okay, but you know that kid. She can be a sphinx. And Vicky watches over her like the Secret Service, when she’s clean. I would have done something, you know, if I knew anything for sure. But as soon as she’s sober Vicky shuts me out again.”

  Alma rubs his shoulder as he leans over her, braced on the counter. She feels hysteria rising and breathes in the strong smell of coffee with all her strength, to hold it down. This is what she ran from, what ultimately took Vicky. If she were ever to come back to stay, there would be things she’d have to know—to acknowledge—that are beyond her capacity to survive. Her cultivated control is black, groaning ice underfoot. “Petey, I can’t take any more of this. Can we just . . . sit for a few minutes?”

  He pats her hand, still resting on his shoulder. “Tell me about Seattle,” he says, “or your flight. Something different.” His eyes hold hers, bearing her up, as always, as Alma relaxes back onto the stool and firmly changes the subject.

  CHAPTER 5

  SUNDAY, 7 P.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME

  Back in the car, she turns her wheel toward Helen and Walt’s house, where Brittany will be. The route takes her past the ballpark where her parents used to sit with her and Pete and Vicky in the creaking outfield bleachers on firefly nights, before the fancy new stadium went in, heckling the opposing batters. Helen and Walt have moved to one of the newer subdivisions out by Alkali Creek Road since Alma’s last visit, and Alma has only an address to guide her through the cookie-cutter streets. Her GPS circles aimlessly, confusing similar street names. She drives up and down a few unfamiliar cul-de-sacs before spotting Helen’s old minivan and Walt’s pickup in one of the evenly spaced driveways. She parks across the street, steps out of the car, and examines the house.

  It’s a suburban special, a snout house, all garage, so that you’d hardly know there was a house attached until you wandered around the side and stumbled upon a front door. Maybe the layout makes things easier for Helen somehow, as she gets sicker. It certainly suits Walt. On their annual birthday phone calls, Alma remembers Helen mentioning that Walt has taken over the entire cavernous garage for his woodshop and leaves their cars in the driveway. Staring at the GMC, Alma unconsciously raises her hand to rub her temple.

  In spite of the lack of windows onto the street, Brittany somehow knows that Alma has arrived. She runs around the edge of the garage like an angry Rottweiler that’s just noticed trespassers in the junkyard. When she sees her aunt, Brittany bullets down the driveway and across the street without any pause to look for traffic in the empty street.

  “Brittany! Be careful!” Alma shakes her niece in a quick-passing fury, then clings to her. Brittany looks up and pushes long brown hair out of her face, with an innocent look that says “I’m okay” but offers up no words.

  Brittany’s face is round with a little leftover baby fat, probably from a diet of dollar meals and cereal. She’s in skater clothes, baggy, no labels, that make her look smaller than she is. The little girl who a few years ago would have grabbed Alma’s leg and shut her eyes has given way to a keen-eyed person who steps back and examines her aunt. Alma has changed very little in the year since she sent Brittany a ticket to come down to Los Angeles for a few days to see Disneyland and walk carefree on the beaches while the winter winds howled up north. The firm had transferred her temporarily to the L.A. office to assist with a major deal, and at the end she had a few days free in an executive condo. Short, impromptu visits are the only way she gets to see Brittany. It’s less complicated than coming home to Billings.

  Brittany is nothing like the same person. The child who chased any ball on the beach to retur
n it cheerfully to its owner now looks only straight ahead, long hair blinkering her regard, which focuses on Alma—highly charged, electric. The eyes that reflected infinite Pacific sunlight on surf have turned opaque and swim with dark questions, the sort of questions that Alma was asking herself at seventeen, not eleven. She’s run far and hard to avoid them, and here they are again, glinting up at her from the face that trusts her most in the world and requires of her all the honesty she can dredge up.

  Before her eyes can show Brittany fear and uncertainty, Alma looks away. The fact that she has lived this story does not make it hers to explain. Instead, Alma takes Brittany’s hand firmly before crossing the street. The answering grip is proprietary: Alma is hers now. Brittany wants her to know it. Alma lifts the small hand to her lips for a kiss. As they reach the driveway, Alma notices that the small windows in the garage door are lit. “Walt?” Alma asks, tilting her head toward the garage. Brittany nods. “You go on in. I need to talk to him for a minute. I’ll be right there.”

  To this day, Alma can’t look at Walt without remembering the words he spoke a few days after her parents’ deaths. “It all belongs to the government now,” he snapped at Pete and Alma, while Vicky still lay recovering at St. Vincent’s. He was so angry—at his little brother Mike, Alma realizes now, although at the time she took every word personally—and he wanted the house cleared out almost overnight. Their father had been cooking the books at his shop for years, doing jobs for cash, paying employees under the table to avoid payroll taxes. If he’d lived, he would have wound up in jail for tax evasion, according to Walt, who had clearly known all along. Mike, the good brother, the one who had it together, not like his crazy screwed-up Vietnam-vet big brother. It couldn’t be true.

  Mike Terrebonne was Walt’s younger brother who missed the draft. Anne Mendenhall Terrebonne came from outside Bozeman, where she had two bachelor older brothers, the old-fashioned kind who wouldn’t know what to say to a woman if she showed up at the door of the ranch house with a giant check from Publishers Clearing House. They met in the seventies at Montana State, where they seemed to have missed anything resembling counterculture. Mike was going through college in ROTC, ready to be a soldier like his big brother. He dropped out halfway through. The university, he said, wasn’t telling him anything he needed to know. He was making more money than the government check doing bodywork on cars and pool sharking. He wanted to marry Anne, go home, and forget he’d ever left. The specter of Walt, utterly undone by his tour of duty, must have been an influence.

  Mike owned a machine shop, did metal work and all variety of odd mechanical jobs for local businesses. Anne had finished her nursing degree, but she cut back her schedule to part-time after the kids arrived. Add to that the fact that Mike had no stomach for collecting on debts—I’m sure they’d pay if they could, Alma remembers him saying more than once—and the arrangement left little money in the house.

  “You’re lying! You always hated him!” Pete shouted at his uncle on the chilly day when Walt laid out their financial reality, sitting in a bare kitchen, cracking his knuckles over and over in the mortuarial silence, at the table where their mother used to lay out sewing and quilting projects. It happened to be the Ides of March. Alma isn’t sure if she knew that at the time or figured it out since, but her mind clings to the fact. She opens the side door to the garage and steps into Walt’s man cave. It’s a little cold, but not freezing. Walt is in his parka but working without gloves on some kind of rail.

  “It’s for the front steps out at the cabin,” he answers without expecting any question or offering any greeting. “I’m getting to be an old man.” Yes, the cabin. Maddie’s great-uncle surveyed the high country up the Stillwater canyon back when the government first claimed it. He got a little chunk in payment. It’s the only private parcel around there, and Walt laid claim to it many years ago.

  “Ah,” says Alma. She moves toward the table saw and lathe in the middle of the garage and studies the elaborate vacuum system suspended above.

  “You talk to the police?” Walt inquires.

  “Yeah. And I went by the morgue.”

  Walt huffs. “They wanted me to identify the body. I told them to go to hell.”

  Walt left the dirty work for her. What else is new? Alma breathes with concentration, focusing on the smooth planes of hickory stacked in front of her, the order and symmetry of woodwork. “How has Brittany been today?” she asks.

  “Seems okay. I haven’t been in there much.” Walt sniffles a little in the cold and wipes his nose with the sleeve of the parka. Alma wonders if he could actually be crying, then dismisses the notion as absurd.

  “Pete said he thought he saw your pickup heading down Twenty-Seventh last night. That’s why he didn’t go.”

  “My GMC?” Walt’s bushy, graying eyebrows sweep toward her almost independently of his face. “I ain’t had it out of the driveway since Friday.”

  “Brittany said she called people last night, when Vicky went outside. Did she call here?”

  Walt moves across the bench and comes up with a small hand sander. “She called all right. Middle of the night, woke us both out of a sound sleep. I probably would’ve gone down, but Helen told her to call the police if she had to call somebody.”

  Alma can believe that. Helen once told her that if she wanted to come home for Christmas, she should get off her butt, earn some money, take Amtrak from Philadelphia to Denver, and get a bus to Billings—more than a two-day trip. Nobody ever gave me anything. Helen’s tight voice sounded economical even over the phone, like she was using the fiber optics at maximum efficiency, not expanding into unnecessary bandwidth. “Brittany must have been very worried to call,” she says at last, trying to draw Walt out a little, feel for some of the human emotion he shows so rarely. The last time she remembers seeing any warmth from him, it was directed at her father, on a riverbank on a kindling-dry summer day, as they remembered some childhood fishing trip while baiting hooks for the kids. Mike had never accepted the darkness that came back from Vietnam with his big brother. To him, it was only a passing struggle from which Walt would one day emerge, whole and reborn.

  “I know,” Walt admits. “Alma, I just—I’ve loved them both the best I know how. I think we all knew what would happen to Vicky in the end. I get no joy out of it.” He glances at Alma, a look she knows well. As long as she’s known him, Walt has had trouble holding eye contact, as if connecting that much with another person causes him pain. He turns on the bench sander briefly to smooth the top edge of the handrail.

  Alma is so empty inside, so hollowed out with the searing immediacy of new grief—barren, blackened prairie after brush fire—that she has to scrape around for any emotion to respond to Walt. She has tried to hate him, God knows she has, but he’s still her daddy’s brother, the closest thing left of him, and he took Vicky in when there was nobody else. Her evergreen love for her father is enough to let her reach out to Walt one more time.

  “She was my sister,” Alma says when the machine turns off. She is careful not to speak loudly, but with all the intensity she can muster. “Whatever she was, you had a big part in making her that way. When I left, I asked you to keep a close eye on her. Do you remember? She and Dad were so close, and she was so young. It was harder on her than anybody not to have him. To help with homework and take us fishing and stuff. He really loved us.” Alma chokes on a few of the words, feeling like a tongue-tied girl again, but she gets them out.

  “Loved you? Tried to kill you, that’s what he did,” Walt grunts, hunched over the massive saw that looks small next to him. “Probably would’ve been better off if he’d succeeded. Pretty rotten life he left for you kids.”

  “Tried to kill us?” Alma is dry-mouthed at Walt’s words. How dare he say something like that to her? How dare he think it? Her father’s love has always been an absolute to her, an element to chart on the periodic table.

  “There were no skid marks. I saw the police report. He never put his foot on
the brake. He ran you straight into that truck. That’s a man who loves his family all right.” Walt lowers the saw to finish an edge, as if he isn’t even distracted by what he’s saying. Alma wants to throw herself at him and pull out his hair.

  “You’re lying! Even if there were no skid marks—it happened so fast, and it was icy. You weren’t there! You don’t know anything!”

  “Don’t be stupid, kid. His business was going under and he was going to jail. He figured he’d rather be in Mountain View than Deer Lodge, that’s all, and he thought he’d take the family with him. You’re better off without the selfish son of a bitch.” The cemetery rather than state prison. The phrase echoes in Alma’s mind. Rather be in Mountain View than Deer Lodge. Is that really what her father chose? This is the root of her hatred of Walt—that he made her doubt her father, on that long-ago day in the kitchen. The hatred and doubt remain real, just paler now, like upholstery left in the sun. This new accusation pumps up the colors to vivid, real-life shades.

  “Stop it!” Alma clamps her hands over her ears. “Stop it! I won’t listen!”

  “Suit yourself.” Walt pulls a half-smoked cigarette out of the ashtray and relights it, sawdust hovering around him, recklessly inviting combustion. His actions are slow and purposeful, daring her to challenge him. Her parents had never let him smoke around the kids, and now he makes a point of lighting up whenever he sees Alma. This is deliberate provocation.

  “If you ever say anything like this to Brittany, I’ll—” Alma has to let her threat hang embarrassingly unfinished in the air. She’ll do what?

  “You’re just like your mother. She always thought she could boss everyone around.” Walt’s voice is so moist with contempt that spittle forms around the edges of his mouth. “All the women in that family. At least I found a woman knows her place.”