Dry Winter
By José Rodríguez
Smashwords Edition
Copyright José Rodríguez, 2011
A cold wind slapped me the moment I got out of my SUV. It blew through the high plains to the west of the Tarryall mountains where a mist of blowing snow veiled hard granite lines encased in winter ice. I didn't belong here, standing on the pot-holed parking lot of the only general store in Anaconda, Colorado, defying logic and my best judgment.
Tumble weeds crossed the road and rolled underneath a row of rusted and worn out 4x4’s. I took this disappearing motion to be my cue to join the general store’s patrons inside the painted-many-times-over-yet-still-rotting building. I opened the door and the bell above my head clang and all eyes in the store met me at the threshold. Two steps further on the wooden floor and they had gone back to their original business, lurking among warped wooden racks.
“Good evening” I said to the man with a yellow mop of hair that wrapped around his head and chin down to his neck and over his shirt. “I’m looking for the police station.”
“Go down the main road until you see a green barn on your right. There is a flat fender Jeep parked next to it. Take a right and go up the hill until you see a stop sign. Joe’s office is to your left.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
I went back to my SUV feeling better, having been able to talk to this country folk without being – I wouldn’t say ridiculed – but talked down like a tenderfoot just stepping off the stage coach into a John Wayne movie. On the other hand, the people of Anaconda didn’t know who I was or the reason for me being in this desolated high plain. Things would change when word got around like those tumble weeds running with the wind.
What is a flat fender anyway? I drove down the main road until I saw a dilapidated barn that had been painted green perhaps generations ago. Next to it there was a rusted GI Jeep, one of those with a square hood. That must be a flat fender, I said to myself. Its faded For Sale sign flapped against the cracked windshield, beaten by the persistent wind. Up the road I went, to the stop sign. A brownstone building stood to my left with an “Anaconda Police” sign above a heavy timber door and a police Cherokee parked in front of it. There was neither handicap space nor reserved space signs. Free for all parking.
I parked next to the Cherokee but I didn’t shut my engine off. I could have run back to my suburban life in Denver that fit me like an old pair of pajamas, but I stayed put, ready to stick my finger into the wounds of an old corpse to get – you guess right – a handful of maggots. My fingers in one hand tapped on the steering wheel and my other hand ran through my hair. I could put this thing into reverse, I thought, and tail out of town, back to civilization and comfortable denial. I shut the engine off instead.
The heavy door wouldn’t budge when I pushed on it. It rattled with the sound of ancient hinges.
“Come through the back” a loud voice from the inside said. I went around the building, passed a small dumpster and found a gray metal door. I knocked this time. “Come in” the same voice said. I stepped into a cramped office, storage room and waiting room. A shotgun sat on a faded couch set against a stone wall. Despite the junk everywhere, the desk in front of the man with the loud voice was as bare as the grasslands outside.
“How can I help you?” said the man in his Andy Taylor uniform. A small placard on his desk bore the inscription “Chief of Police.” Was this Deputy Fife? I was going to ask but I didn’t have the presence of mind to joke with the armed stranger. Anyway, this Fife thing came to me after the occasion had passed. My smart mouth works in a time delay fuse, so delayed that there is no point on using it. I have found this slowness in my wit to be more of an advantage than a handicap.
“I’m Jack Norton,” I said. The Chief of Police’s eyes didn’t speak. “I’m Sam – Samuel – Norton’s son.” His eyes still didn’t say anything. He stood and offered his hand across his desk.
“Joe Styron.”
“Nice to meet you.” His handshake was firm and brief. Some people have the knack, or at least they believe so, of reading’s a man’s character by his handshake. Joe Styron’s handshake, like anyone else’s I have ever experienced, held no key to his personality. The coarseness of his palm hinted of a man used to manual labor, but what kind of labor, I had no clue. Joe Styron’s eyes gave no clue either, but again, for me looking into stranger’s eyes is like looking into a dark lake. I cannot ascertain what’s below the surface or how deep or shallow the waters are.
“Sorry about your father, and sorry that I or the Coroner couldn’t find you before we buried him.”
“Thank you; but there is no reason to be sorry.” My double speak was unintentional, but my answer left doubts about not being reason to be sorry because my dad was dead or because Joe styron couldn’t tell me on time about the old man’s burial. If I had been pressed at the time to clarify my answer, I would have said that there was no reason to be sorry on account of either proposition.
Joe pointed to the chair to the side of his desk as he sat back on his old wooden one that creaked under his wire frame as if he weighted a ton.
“Going through your father’s personal papers I found a Christmas card your dad had sent you and that the post office had returned as undeliverable. The address on it was no good of course but I gave it to the Coroner as a starting point.”
“I talked to him this morning.”
“He’s a patient and tenacious guy. Sometimes people confuse his patience with slowness.”
We both had a polite laugh. Joe, I will call him Joe because writing Joe Styron every time I refer to him takes space and time, opened a drawer on his desk and pulled a fat manila envelope, legal size. He untied the red ribbon that kept it close and dumped its contents on the desk. Memories poured out, some disguised as official documents. The parched postcard my dad had sent to me years ago. Yellowed photographs of my mother, Augie Norton, and my dad, Samuel Sinclair Norton, in black and white, both proper and stiff in their best clothes. A faded color picture of my mother with a toddler, me. She is leaning against the front end of a 1960 Chevrolet Impala. In the picture our skin color had turned a sickening pink. She looked like the ghost of today and not the mother of yesterday. A letter bundle wrapped with a rubber band made the bulk of the package. Three keys bounced with a metallic thud on the desk.
“After the incident,” said Joe, “I went through your dad’s belongings in his house. Evelyn Hughes, his then girlfriend, let me in with her key. I picked these things because I though they were worth keeping.” He looked at me with those expressionless eyes.
“Why didn’t you leave them were you found them then?” I asked. Joe leaned back on his chair. It creaked.
“’Cause they might have been gone by now,” Joe said.
“I understood he lived alone.”
“Yes he did, and that is the problem.” He lowered his voice as to stop it from leaving the walls that surrounded us. “Scavenging the dead’s belongings is not seen as a crime by many. More so when the dead has no visible relatives.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“The keys?” I asked.
“These are for the house. One set is from your dad; the other Evelyn gave to me.” Joe pushed a set of worn out keys towards me. His nails were rough at the edges and cracked, as if he had been digging with his bared hands.
“This one is for the Jeep.” Joe pushed a single worn out key my way. “I have kept an eye on the place and so far nobody has broken into it yet.” I stared at the keys. Normal people would have thought of the bonanza of inheritance – free stuff. I thought of burdens and unsavory duties. I must have been staring at the keys for a good while because Joe leaned forward. Another creak.
“This ain’t easy. I know. When my old man died all I could think of was torching the whole damned place down too.”
Joe had to be a psychic to be able to read my mind so well, or was I a dupe who carried my thoughts printed on my forehead?
“How did you guess?” I asked.
“You didn’t sound too chipper when I asked you to come by to take care of these things.”
“I’m not good at playing dumb and deceiving people.”
“Call it a virtue.”
“Some may call it a dumb virtue.” We both laughed. Joe stood. This time his chair didn’t creak. “Come on. Let me show you where we put him to rest and then I can show you the house.”
Dry and grainy snowflakes greeted us outside. They landed on the ground and sublimated leaving a small wet trace of their existence. Some people do that too.
“Dry winter this year,” Joe said. “Snow stays up there and won’t come down.” The mountain peaks had disappeared inside a gray whirlwind cloud that spew a wind that cut like a cold steel blade across the open spaces. Joe’s pant legs had fallen outside his boots but he didn’t care or didn’t notice.
The paved road turned into dirt just out of town. We headed for a hill whose only ornament was a ragged fluttering American flag. We stopped at an iron wrought gate that had not fence on either side so instead of opening the gate, we just walked right by it. Headstones and crosses jutted in not obvious pattern across the sparse cemetery.
“The old man is at the end, next to that boulder, “ said Joe. “The marker is pretty crappy, county issued.”
I said nothing. The snow had stopped and a faint trace of it hid among the weeds. Joe stopped short so I could be alone when confronting Sam Norton’s grave but I didn’t step forward. I had no idea what to do if I were to stand on the grave. I didn’t want to even try. Psychic Joe felt my vibes and we went back to the Cherokee. Once seated and belted, Joe said “Dry winter,” not looking at me, and shook his head in disapproval. Without waiting for me to say anything he hit the gas and we drove back into Anaconda.
Having just seen my father’s grave, I would have thought that my head would have been filled with the struggle of life and death, or the meaning of life, or father-son reminiscences; instead, I was thinking of something else.
“Hey Joe, “ I said. “Why do you park at the front when the door is at the back?”
“Folks can see my truck from the main road so they know when I’m in.”
“You ought put a sign at the front door telling people to use the back one.”
“Naught, “ said Joe. “You’re the first person in years who tried to come through the wrong door.” There was not sarcasm in Joe’s voice. We crossed the main highway and ended up on the east side of town and parked in front of an old house. Of course, in Anaconda we can dispense with the “old” adjective because every structure qualifies for it. The same does for in-need-of-paint, or patched-shingle-roof, or junk-in-the-yard descriptions. If Joe Styron is now just Joe, all old houses in Anaconda will now be houses.
“They have cleaned the yard,” said Joe.
I looked around and saw assorted junk piled all around the house and stacked on the rickety porch.
“They didn’t do a good job,” I said, not knowing who Joe was referring to.
“Somebody carted your dad’s tires away.” Joe pointed to a round and grassless patch that showed the scars of tires left for too long. “They still had thread on them.”
“I wish they had cart it all away,” I said. “The house included.”
I stood at the front door with key in hand and ready to open a Pandora’s box. A curious face came to the window of the house next door, half hidden behind curtains. It wouldn’t be long before Anaconda knew my business, if my being here could have been called that.
After wiggling the loose lock I swung the door open. A trapped staleness went past me on its way to the outside but a lingering waif of nicotine and dirty clothes remained inside as I stepped into the kitchen. A clean and bare kitchen counter held an ashtray full of cold butts, a few of them with a light smear of lipstick. I stood unable to continue into the living room, overwhelmed by my father’s essence still enduring in the acrid smell of the indoor air.
Joe had stopped at the threshold. “What do you plan to do with the place?” he asked.
“Burn it,” I said.
“It ain’t much. It would be nothing in Denver, but around here you could get some money for it.”
“Hard to believe,” I said.
“What?”
“That he worked all his life at Montgomery Ward selling tires so he could buy a dump like this.” After my words had left my mouth I realized my mistake. I had no idea of where Joe lived, and his place could be no better than my dad’s.
“Well,” I said, trying to patch things up. “This is not a dump. It just needs a good scrubbing.”
“Nope,” said Joe. “It is a dump.” There was no detectable innuendo in his voice; like all his words, it ringed like a flat opinion. Then he added, “People don’t come to Anaconda to live fancy.”
“What do they move here for then?” I asked, turning my attention to the dark living room.
“To live in peace.”
“The old man failed at that; a loser to the end.”
Joe didn’t reply. I stepped into the living room and Joe followed me a few steps behind. A couple of Hustler magazines lay atop the coffee table where another overflowing ashtray, this one shaped as a tire, acted as centerpiece. More pinkish butts. I’m not Sherlock Holmes, but I couldn’t stop noticing the damned things.
“Who is – who was – my dad’s girlfriend?” I asked.
“Evelyn. Evelyn Hughes.” There was no hesitation on Joe’s response.
There were no family pictures anywhere. What Joe had found must have been well hidden in a drawer somewhere. No feminine knick-knacks or cute figurines on any shelf; just piles of magazines and yellowed newspapers that held no connection to kin or friends or a former life in the flat lands.
“I have had enough,” I said to myself in a loud voice.
“Let’s go back to the station,” said Joe as he walked back into the kitchen on his way out.
On purpose I didn’t lock the front door. I had hoped the jackals would descend upon the dump at night and rob the timbers of what had been Sam Norton’s last known residence. After that, I could have burnt whatever was left. The ashes I would have dispersed on the wind swept prairie after spreading salt on the empty lot while coursing the old man’s memories.
On the way back to the station I asked Joe about the Jeep.
“Evelyn is keeping it parked at her place. It’s in better hands up there than here.”
“Is it a flat fender?” I tried my new found knowledge on Joe.
“Nope. It’s a CJ-5.”
Now I had to figure what a see-jay five was. New knowledge breeds new ignorance.
“Wanna take a look at it?” asked Joe.
“Nope,” I said. In the short time spent with Joe I already had forsaken no for nope. “Some other time.”
“You need to. Evelyn has some stuff that she wants to give you that belonged to your dad.”
My state of mind was unprepared to meet Evelyn, Evelyn something; I already had forgotten her surname. What do you say to the lover of your lost-in-life-found-after-dead father? I needed time to prepare for such meeting, that is, if I ever could gather the guts to see the woman.
Joe parked where he had been parked before, and where he had been parking for the last fifteen years as Chief of Police of the one man Anaconda police force. I understood why he had no use for reserved parking.
With my SUV keys in my left hand I extended my right hand towards Joe.
“Thank you for your troubles,” I said.
“No trouble at all,” he said. “Before you go, take the envelope with you.” Joe opened the rear door of his truck and pulled the manila envelope out. I had not noticed that he had brought it with him when we left the station. Where was I looking? Perhaps I had looked but I had refused to see what I didn’t want to deal with.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Whatever happens next is up to you,” Joe said.
“I understand,” was my answer and it sounded like a good one but it was only a half-truth because what I understood was that things were never up to me but to capricious circumstances; otherwise how can you explain my presence in Anaconda looking for ghosts?
After ghosts I went indeed. Instead of heading back to Denver, to my family and the security of trite routines, to my Internet-satellite-cable wired home, I headed up the road towards Anaconda’s cemetery, to visit the lonely dead who had not even a fence to keep the wildlife from trampling their graves.
The sun had already fallen behind the Continental Divide where a cold front’s gray cloud mass had tangled with the peaks. Other than VA cemeteries and posh private ones where strangers pay strangers to upkeep stranger’s graves, places like Anaconda’s boot hill are a garden of the dead. They get planted under the grass and dirt, many with their boots on – hence the name – to be watered by melting snow and the occasional spring rain, growing more forgotten every day until they bear the fruit of absolute loneliness. When the wind takes with it the makeshift grave markers of the lesser dead, they become a patch of wildflowers. The prairie owns their bones and dust forever.
I made my way through a helter-skelter of graves. A morbid curiosity, perhaps it was just a curiosity without adjectives, made me read tombstones in my way to the boulder that Joe had pointed to me.
I walked among children. Almost every other grave belonged to a child. Fancy or humble marker, it didn’t matter, a child rested below. Though times back them. Disease? Malnourishment? Harsh winters? The survival of the fittest? A simple ear infection that could not be treated, a cold gone bad, worried parents trying homemade remedies that didn’t work or a country doctor who didn’t have the wonder drugs of today; all I can do is guess. I think of my two daughters, Monica, five, and Karina, seven. At the slightest sign of discomfort or disease, they are at the doctor’s. These children had to make it on their own or else.
One marker was a piece of wood half-buried on the ground, weathered to a light tan and creased finish. Somebody had carved with a knife John Dreisser, 1885, Died two months old. The carving had almost disappeared into the creases but the pain of the carver was still fresh on the scrabbled words.
The dead of Anaconda were hardy souls. Among them was my father. He doesn’t belong here, he the weak, the coward, the weasel. His only claim to a grave on this hill was that he was dead and the living had to plant him somewhere. I came upon the boulder. A plastic marker had the inscription Samuel S. Norton, 1933-2000, 57898. How apropos, a fake marker above a fake man, branded by the county bureaucracy as a case number whose folder would gather a thick coat of dust undisturbed for the next one hundred years.
My father’s ghost didn’t rise from his fresh diggings to ask for my forgiveness or to chastise me for my meekness. The earth didn’t crack open to give a vision of hell with my father begging for a drop of vinegar to quench his eternal thirst. Heavenly lights didn’t show my father among angels looking like a messiah. A coyote ran off in the distance.
“Mister Coyote!” I yelled. “Come back and dig these bones! They don’t belong here!”
My anger at the man under the plastic marker whirled like the wind among the emaciated grass blades. His death had not soothed my animosity; instead, it had fueled its intensity, knowing he had gotten away with it. Got away with what? He was dead and I was alive, and I had a family that cared about me. Nevertheless, I was pissed. I should had stayed in Denver and let the locals dispose of Sam Norton’s property and memory as they saw fit.
I turned my backside to the west, unzipped my pants and pulled my weenie out. Even urinating on Sam Norton’s grave was not enough to show my contempt for the man. I had never driven this far to take a leak.
Back in my truck, the expected mind debacle about what to do next took place. Lines from a Clash song came to my mind, Should I stay or should I go? I picked my cell phone to call my wife in Denver but it couldn’t get a signal. I couldn’t talk to the dead; I couldn’t talk to the living. All I had were gibberish thoughts inside my head. Wrong headed compulsion is better than dumbfounded inaction. I put the truck in gear and peeled off Anaconda, drove through darkened and frozen mountain passes to end up in Breckenridge where thick snow and debonair skiers and snowboarders mingled on the well-lit streets. I had come back to the living; this was my tribe. I drove straight to Frisco and stayed in a hotel next to the highway where the noise of passing traffic would sooth my aversion to the cold loneliness of Anaconda’s air. I didn’t feel up to driving back to Denver in my state of mind while fighting fatigue, traffic and icy roads. From the hotel parking lot, engine still running, I called my wife Martha.