Call If You Need Me (11 page)

I went to the window. The horse looked up at me for a minute, then went back to pulling up grass. Another horse walked past the car into the yard and began to graze. I turned on the porch light and stood at the window and watched them. They were big white horses with long manes. They’d gotten through a fence or an unlocked gate from one of the nearby farms. Somehow they’d wound up in our front yard. They were larking it, enjoying their breakaway immensely. But nervous, too; I could see the whites of their eyes from where I stood behind the window. Their ears kept rising and falling as they tore out clumps of grass. A third horse wandered into the yard, and then a fourth. It was a herd of white horses, and they were grazing in our front yard.

I went into the bedroom and woke Nancy. Her eyes were red and the skin around the eyes was swollen. She had her hair up in curlers, and a suitcase lay open on the floor near the foot of the bed.

“Nancy,” I said. “Honey, come and see what’s in the front yard. Come and see this. You must see this. You won’t believe it. Hurry up.”

“What is it?” she said. “Don’t hurt me. What is it?”

“Honey, you must see this. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m
sorry if I scared you. But you must come out here and see something.”

I went back into the other room and stood in front of the window, and in a few minutes Nancy came in tying her robe. She looked out the window and said, “My God, they’re beautiful. Where’d they come from, Dan? They’re just beautiful.”

“They must have gotten loose from around here somewhere,” I said. “One of these farm places. I’ll call the sheriff’s department pretty soon and let them locate the owners. But I wanted you to see this first.”

“Will they bite?” she said. “I’d like to pet that one there, the one that just looked at us. I’d like to pat that one’s shoulder. But I don’t want to get bitten. I’m going outside.”

“I don’t think they’ll bite,” I said. “They don’t look like the kind of horses that’ll bite. But put a coat on if you’re going out there; it’s cold.”

I put my coat on over my pajamas and waited for Nancy. Then I opened the front door and we went outside and walked into the yard with the horses. They all looked up at us. Two of them went back to pulling up grass. One of the other horses snorted and moved back a few steps, and then it, too, went back to pulling up grass and chewing, head down. I rubbed the forehead of one horse and patted its shoulder. It kept chewing. Nancy put out her hand and began stroking the mane of another horse. “Horsey, where’d you come from?” she said. “Where do you live and why are you out tonight, Horsey?” she said, and kept stroking the horse’s mane. The horse looked at her and blew through its lips and dropped its head again. She patted its shoulder.

“I guess I’d better call the sheriff,” I said.

“Not yet,” she said. “Not for a while yet. We’ll never see anything like this again. We’ll never, never have horses in our front yard again. Wait a while yet, Dan.”

A little later, Nancy was still out there moving from one horse to another, patting their shoulders and stroking their manes, when one of the horses moved from the yard into the driveway
and walked around the car and down the driveway toward the road, and I knew I had to call.

In a little while the two sheriff’s cars showed up with their red lights flashing in the fog and a few minutes later a fellow in a sheepskin coat driving a pickup with a horse trailer behind it. Now the horses shied and tried to get away, and the man with the horse trailer swore and tried to get a rope around the neck of one horse.

“Don’t hurt it!” Nancy said.

We went back in the house and stood behind the window and watched the deputies and the rancher work on getting the horses rounded up.

“I’m going to make some coffee,” I said. “Would you like some coffee, Nancy?”

“I’ll tell you what I’d like,” she said. “I feel high, Dan. I feel like I’m loaded. I feel like, I don’t know, but I like the way I’m feeling. You put on some coffee and I’ll find us some music to listen to on the radio and then you can build up the fire again. I’m too excited to sleep.”

So we sat in front of the fire and drank coffee and listened to an all-night radio station from Eureka and talked about the horses and then talked about Richard, and Nancy’s mother. We danced. We didn’t talk about the present situation at all. The fog hung outside the window and we talked and were kind with one another. Toward daylight I turned off the radio and we went to bed and made love.

The next afternoon, after her arrangements were made and her suitcases packed, I drove her to the little airport where she would catch a flight to Portland and then transfer to another airline that would put her in Pasco late that night.

“Tell your mother I said hello. Give Richard a hug for me and tell him I miss him,” I said. “Tell him I send love.”

“He loves you too,” she said. “You know that. In any case, you’ll see him in the fall, I’m sure.”

I nodded.

“Good-bye,” she said and reached for me. We held each other. “I’m glad for last night,” she said. “Those horses. Our talk. Everything. It helps. We won’t forget that,” she said. She began to cry.

“Write me, will you?” I said. “I didn’t think it would happen to us,” I said. “All those years. I never thought so for a minute. Not us.”

“I’ll write,” she said. “Some big letters. The biggest you’ve ever seen since I used to send you letters in high school.”

“I’ll be looking for them,” I said.

Then she looked at me again and touched my face. She turned and moved across the tarmac toward the plane.

Go, dearest one, and God be with you
.

She boarded the plane and I stayed around until its jet engines started, and in a minute the plane began to taxi down the runway. It lifted off over Humboldt Bay and soon became a speck on the horizon.

I drove back to the house and parked in the driveway and looked at the hoofprints of the horses from last night. There were deep impressions in the grass, and gashes, and there were piles of dung. Then I went into the house and, without even taking off my coat, went to the telephone and dialed Susan’s number.

My dad’s name was Clevie Raymond Carver. His family called him Raymond and friends called him C. R. I was named Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. I hated the “Junior” part. When I was little my dad called me Frog, which was okay. But later, like everybody else in the family, he began calling me Junior. He went on calling me this until I was thirteen or fourteen and announced that I wouldn’t answer to that name any longer. So he began calling me Doc. From then until his death, on June 17, 1967, he called me Doc, or else Son.

When he died, my mother telephoned my wife with the news. I was away from my family at the time, between lives, trying to enroll in the School of Library Science at the University of Iowa. When my wife answered the phone, my mother blurted out, “Raymond’s dead!” For a moment, my wife thought my mother was telling her that I was dead. Then my mother made it clear
which
Raymond she was talking about and my wife said, “Thank God. I thought you meant
my
Raymond.”

My dad walked, hitched rides, and rode in empty boxcars when he went from Arkansas to Washington State in 1934, looking for work. I don’t know whether he was pursuing a dream when he went out to Washington. I doubt it. I don’t think he dreamed much. I believe he was simply looking for steady work at decent pay. Steady work was meaningful work. He picked apples for a time and then landed a construction laborer’s job on the Grand Coulee Dam. After he’d put aside a little money, he bought a car and drove back to Arkansas to help his folks, my grandparents, pack up for the move west. He said later that they
were about to starve down there, and this wasn’t meant as a figure of speech. It was during that short while in Arkansas, in a town called Leola, that my mother met my dad on the sidewalk as he came out of a tavern.

“He was drunk,” she said. “I don’t know why I let him talk to me. His eyes were glittery. I wish I’d had a crystal ball.” They’d met once, a year or so before, at a dance. He’d had girlfriends before her, my mother told me. “Your dad always had a girlfriend, even after we married. He was my first and last. I never had another man. But I didn’t miss anything.”

They were married by a justice of the peace on the day they left for Washington, this big, tall country girl and a farmhand turned construction worker. My mother spent her wedding night with my dad and his folks, all of them camped beside the road in Arkansas.

In Omak, Washington, my dad and mother lived in a little place not much bigger than a cabin. My grandparents lived next door. My dad was still working on the dam, and later, with the huge turbines producing electricity and the water backed up for a hundred miles into Canada, he stood in the crowd and heard Franklin D. Roosevelt when he spoke at the construction site. “He never mentioned those guys who died building that dam,” my dad said. Some of his friends had died there, men from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

He then took a job in a sawmill in Clatskanie, Oregon, a little town alongside the Columbia River. I was born there, and my mother has a picture of my dad standing in front of the gate to the mill, proudly holding me up to face the camera. My bonnet is on crooked and about to come untied. His hat is pushed back on his forehead, and he’s wearing a big grin. Was he going in to work or just finishing his shift? It doesn’t matter. In either case, he had a job and a family. These were his salad days.

In 1941 we moved to Yakima, Washington, where my dad went to work as a saw filer, a skilled trade he’d learned in Clatskanie. When war broke out, he was given a deferment
because his work was considered necessary to the war effort. Finished lumber was in demand by the armed services, and he kept his saws so sharp they could shave the hair off your arm.

After my dad had moved us to Yakima, he moved his folks into the same neighborhood. By the mid-1940s the rest of my dad’s family—his brother, his sister and her husband, as well as uncles, cousins, nephews, and most of their extended family and friends—had come out from Arkansas. All because my dad came out first. The men went to work at Boise Cascade, where my dad worked, and the women packed apples in the canneries. And in just a little while, it seemed—according to my mother—everybody was better off than my dad. “Your dad couldn’t keep money,” my mother said. “Money burned a hole in his pocket. He was always doing for others.”

The first house I clearly remember living in, at 1515 South Fifteenth Street, in Yakima, had an outdoor toilet. On Halloween night, or just any night, for the hell of it, neighbor kids, kids in their early teens, would carry our toilet away and leave it next to the road. My dad would have to get somebody to help him bring it home. Or these kids would take the toilet and stand it in somebody else’s backyard. Once they actually set it on fire. But ours wasn’t the only house that had an outdoor toilet. When I was old enough to know what I was doing, I threw rocks at the other toilets when I’d see someone go inside. This was called bombing the toilets. After a while, though, everyone went to indoor plumbing until, suddenly, our toilet was the last outdoor one in the neighborhood. I remember the shame I felt when my third-grade teacher, Mr. Wise, drove me home from school one day. I asked him to stop at the house just before ours, claiming I lived there.

I can recall what happened one night when my dad came home late to find that my mother had locked all the doors on him from the inside. He was drunk, and we could feel the house shudder as he rattled the door. When he’d managed to force open a window, she hit him between the eyes with a
colander and knocked him out. We could see him down there on the grass. For years afterward, I used to pick up this colander—it was as heavy as a rolling pin—and imagine what it would feel like to be hit in the head with something like that.

It was during this period that I remember my dad taking me into the bedroom, sitting me down on the bed, and telling me that I might have to go live my with Aunt LaVon for a while. I couldn’t understand what I’d done that meant I’d have to go away from home to live. But this, too—whatever prompted it—must have blown over, more or less, anyway, because we stayed together, and I didn’t have to go live with her or anyone else.

I remember my mother pouring his whiskey down the sink. Sometimes she’d pour it all out and sometimes, if she was afraid of getting caught, she’d only pour half of it out and then add water to the rest. I tasted some of his whiskey once myself. It was terrible stuff, and I don’t see how anybody could drink it.

After a long time without one, we finally got a car, in 1949 or 1950, a 1938 Ford. But it threw a rod the first week we had it, and my dad had to have the motor rebuilt.

“We drove the oldest car in town,” my mother said. “We could have had a Cadillac for all he spent on car repairs.” One time she found someone else’s tube of lipstick on the floorboard, along with a lacy handkerchief. “See this?” she said to me. “Some floozy left this in the car.”

Once I saw her take a pan of warm water into the bedroom where my dad was sleeping. She took his hand from under the covers and held it in the water. I stood in the doorway and watched. I wanted to know what was going on. This would make him talk in his sleep, she told me. There were things she needed to know, things she was sure he was keeping from her.

Every year or so, when I was little, we would take the North Coast Limited across the Cascade Range from Yakima to Seattle and stay in the Vance Hotel and eat, I remember, at a place called the Dinner Bell Café. Once we went to Ivar’s Acres of Clams and drank glasses of warm clam broth.

In 1956, the year I was to graduate from high school, my dad quit his job at the mill in Yakima and took a job in Chester, a little sawmill town in northern California. The reasons given at the time for his taking the job had to do with a higher hourly wage and the vague promise that he might, in a few years’ time, succeed to the job of head filer in this new mill. But I think, in the main, that my dad had grown restless and simply wanted to try his luck elsewhere. Things had gotten a little too predictable for him in Yakima. Also, the year before, there had been the deaths, within six months of each other, of both his parents.