The Trouble Way (41 page)

I remember all the things Bella said to me in that dream. All were true; I was just having flashes of her conversations in my
mind while I was dead.

Here
’s a conversation I had with Karen on another spooky visit while I was waiting to find out what queue I should be standing in, the one for Heaven or Hell. I think it was maybe after I’d been dead for four days. She phoned me.

“
Hello,” I said.

“
Would you do a favor for me?” Karen’s voice came from the receiver.

“
Sure, what is it?” I said.

“
Don’t start firing shit at me,” she said.

“
Well, then, when do you want the favor?”

“
I can’t stand it when you keep flipping me shit. I need you to do something right now. Do you want to do the favor or not?” she said.

“
I don’t know what it is.”

“
Christ, can’t you ever make up your mind? Stop being wishy-washy, you’re always so wishy-washy. You’re starting to sound like Annie,” she said.

“
Well, it would be nice to know what the favor is. (I have no clue who Annie is.)

“
You couldn’t even put the windows away right. I had to carry the little one for you,” she said.

“
But, I already put away ten big ones,” I said. (It was another favor I did for her, putting windows she bought at a garage sale into her shed.)

“
It doesn’t make any difference; it was the last little one that counts. You ruined everything. I don’t know if I will ever be asking you to do any favors for me. I have plans and you always try to change them,” she said.

“
What plans do you have?” I never could read her mind.

“
None of your business. They were plans and now you’ve screwed everything up,” she said.

“
But I don’t know what you want me to do for you.”

“
Are you going to build that fence before you leave?” she said.

“
Where do you want it?” I was about to move to the Midwest, or maybe it was to Libya, to be with Priscilla.

“
Around,” she said.

“
Around what?” It was like sweeping fleas (I think Lincoln said that), talking to her. You never knew if you were making any progress.

“
Do I have to spell everything out for you? I’m getting sick of this.”

“
Do you have a general idea of where you want the fence?”

“
Yes!”

“
And …?” I said.

“
I want it built so the horse doesn’t get out,” she said.

“
Anywhere specifically?”

“
Of course, I’m not an idiot.”

“
Do you have fence posts?” I thought a different tact might help.

“
You are flipping shit again and I am getting pissed. Forget it, I’ll ask Annie to ask her husband to do it for me. He only wants me to feed three dogs, forty chickens, one goat, sixteen horses, and two cats for three weeks and put walls on one barn in return.”

“
What is it that you want in return?” she said.

“
Nothing,” I said.

“
I don’t believe you. You’re always lying. I can tell when you are lying. Your face gets red.”

“
I think that is high blood pressure caused by these conversations. Besides, we’re on the phone … you can’t see my face,” I said.

“
You’re making me sick. Do you want me to throw a brick at your head?” she said.

“
I could do the favor on Saturday, how’s that?” Sometimes it was good to ignore some of the things she says.

“
I just have a lot to do and I appreciate favors but not after being treated like a dunce.”

“
No, I really want to do the favor for you,” I said.

“
Forget it … no hard feelings.”

“
Okay,” I said.

“
Aren’t you even going to say goodbye?” she said.

“
Bye.”

Tell me … I
’m already in the right cue, aren’t I?

My Dad, who died years ago, stopped by for a few minutes in the room when I was dead but he didn
’t have much to say. It’s been fifty years or so since I last talked to him.

One vivid conversation I remember is when I was nine or ten and I asked him if he had ever killed anybody. It seemed like a logical question to ask a guy who had been in WWII and the Korean War. World War II and the rationing that went along with those hard times were topics often brought up when I was little. The big war in Europe ended three days before I was born but the Korean
War was started when I was five and ended three years later. Those two huge events were still fresh in the minds of the grownups. I was just trying to keep up my end of the conversation. What the hell did I know? I think he thought I meant did he ever just go around town killing people. That conversation did not end well.

I
’d dreamt about him on quite a few occasions over the years. Mostly nightmares. He was always leaving me. I guess dying and leaving are pretty-much synonymous in a young kid’s mind; both forms of abandonment. Those traumatic things stick with a person for years and sometimes haunt your dreams forever.

On his visit he had a bit of advice for me. He said,
“You’d better shave the hair on your calves or people are going to think you’re gay.”

Caught me completely unprepared with that little quip, dead or not. He was serious as hell. When your old man tells you something after fifty years, you tend to pay attention. I was scared as hell and seriously considered getting the lather out but stopped when I thought about what he said. It didn
’t seem quite right. I don’t think “gay” was the word bandied about a half century ago, at least not in my little Lutheran community. I don’t know what they talk about in the Lutheran Church; I wasn’t invited to be confirmed. I doubt I’d have gone anyway, so it’s just as well I wasn’t invited.

Present

It wasn’t long before I realized that Priscilla was just an older version of my little honey, Bella. They both knew those “women tricks” that allow them to get their way. Before I knew Bella, I wasn’t aware of how early on they perfected their packet of tricks. They are able to refine simple manipulation into an art form at a tender age.

Bella couldn
’t do much wrong as far as I could see. Of course, I wasn’t looking all that hard. In any event, she was a smooth motor scooter when it came to getting her way. If I thought she was doing something wrong, she had a way of convincing me why what she was doing wasn’t, in fact, wrong at all.

When her Mom told her that she couldn
’t have another muffin because she already ate the “last” one, she said, pointing to the next muffin on the plate, and said, “How about we say this one is the last one.” Made perfect sense to her that all she had to do to make everything right was to re-label which was the last muffin. Of course she is not much more than a baby. She’s been hanging around, as she puts it, since she was zero and I have been her near constant companion and caretaker not long after zero.

I
’ve known Priscilla since I was nine but for the vast majority of her years we were not together. Each of us had our diversions; mine were with two wives and her with the marriage to David. Two of those marriages, the second of mine and the one of hers, ended unglamorously because of infidelities of one of the spouses. One of mine, the first, ended quite spectacularly as the result of a serrated steak knife to the goolies.

After I had reconnected with Priscilla, we had a relatively short romance and shortly after that, we decided to move in together. My sister Karen was not all that pleased at my decision to move to the Midwest to be with Priscilla. There was always an undercurrent of minor hostility between the Western Forests and the Eastern relatives.

My Dad hopped on a motorcycle in the late 1930’s and rode west till the Pacific Ocean forced him to stop. I have never heard a satisfactory explanation as to why he felt the compunction to escape his family. From that point onward, it must have been ingrained in the Western family to stay clear of the Eastern relatives. So my decision to move east was not taken gracefully, especially by my sister, who considered my move akin treason. It was directly against my dad’s supposed reasons for escaping those many years ago, whatever those reasons were.

My family referred to anything east of Wyoming as Back East. There was no breaking that misconception, no matter how many times I had reminded them that they were ignoring a major portion of the United States, the Midwest.

During the Civil War, Ohio was considered the West. But my family has never been big on history. That meant Iowa was Back East, period. It was either West or East. There was no Midwest, never heard of it. It wasn’t in any Roy Roger or John Wayne movies. They were nearly traumatized to find out John Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa. I was pretty smug when I filled them in on that bit of trivia. About as Midwest as any town is in the country. There is a street named after him in Winterset, John Wayne Drive. I would have thought he’d rather it was a trail or something dustier, rather than a Drive. It’s just like that thoroughfare in Kingman, Arizona named after Andy Devine, the Jingles P. Jones character as the sidekick of Wild Bill Hickok in the 1950s TV series. No trail there either, just a monster truck plaza for those modern day cowboys, the semi drivers.

Priscilla and I finally got legal after about seven years of living together. No particular reason it took so long other than we are cousins and there were some geographic difficulties. That had an influence on the decision since it
’s illegal in a lot of states for first cousins to get married, including the state where we live. We’d committed to each other before I ever left the West Coast and migrated to the land of corn and soybean fields.

There were times I wasn
’t sure if Priscilla thought I was committed. Nothing specific, just a feeling. Well, she does ask me quite a bit whether I love her. “Do you love me,” she asks after I’ve nearly fallen asleep after watching Letterman and the monologue of Craig Ferguson and then she asks again because my drowsy mumble in response is incomprehensible except in my mind. The repeat accomplishes two things, her reassurance of my love and my return to full wakefulness. I’ve never been all that proficient at communication, especially about matters of love.

I
’d always thought I was not good at change. It was inevitable, an old girlfriend who lived in New Orleans had said once and it was how you deal with change that matters. As a matter of record, all things considered, I was not really all that bad at change either. That didn’t mean I had to like it. I’d moved nearly twenty times, if you include my transfers with the military and the time with Big Richards, over my career. So, change was a common occurrence in my life, just not all were pleasant ones. I like being in Iowa with Priscilla. If it weren’t for her, I might like to be closer to an ocean than to cornfields. If not for Priscilla, I’d stay to be close to Bella.

Bella could get her way by saying certain things. Like when she say
’s “It isn’t nighttime,” to put off having to go to bed.

One time I suggested something and she had an alternate suggestion and had a valid reason why her idea was superior and she said,
“No, no, no … you love me so you let me do what I say.” It was never something entirely out of the question so I let her have her way. What the hell.

Like Bella, Priscilla has her own little way of getting what she wants. She thought she was being clever, manipulating me, but I
’m onto her.

“
I saw someone getting a ticket here yesterday,” Priscilla said, pointing to the exact spot where a vehicle had been pulled over by the cop. I was driving about ten miles over the speed limit on the way home from our weekly Saturday evening drives.

“
I saw someone get a ticket in the same place,” I said. I could play that game. I pretended not to comprehend what she was really saying and kept my speed constant but watched for police cruisers in the distance. The subtext of that little comment, “slow down.” It didn’t take long to realize that much of Priscilla’s communication was spoken in the language of white space. White space is not an exact language and there is some leeway in its interpretation. White space in conversation is the silence between spoken sentences. Sometimes white space can be complete silence with no bracketing audible sentences. I became adept at deciphering just exactly what she was saying and what she wasn’t. What she wasn’t saying often times was what the noise coming from her lips indicated. It has been my observation that females are much better at speaking in white space than men.

My stop at the sign about two blocks from home elicited,
“Oooof.” Priscilla fell forward against the seatbelt. White-space: “Easy on the brake.”

After the stop, there was an exaggerated whiplash against the head-rest she had perfected. A nearly inaudible
“Uhh.” White space: “Easy on the accelerator.”

Near home, there was one more right turn and a block down the hill and we
’d be there. Just before the turn, I could see in my peripheral vision Priscilla gripped the door handle. White-space: “You’re taking that corner too fast.” On some occasions she’d grab the handhold over the door. White-space: “We’re liable to roll.”

I
’m probably being passive aggressive, but what I’d do when I notice her hand-hold grab would be to slow down to a black ant’s crawl before we actually got to the corner. What it did was, it negated her handhold white space communication.

The thing is, I
’ve been behind the wheel for nearly fifty years without an accident. Someone who was daydreaming rear-ended me at a stop light in Renton, Washington about forty years ago but I don’t count that. I hit my emergency flasher when I saw she wasn’t going to stop and that caused a panic look on her face as she hit the binders but she still bumped me. Not much damage to my VW, but I did have to have some bodywork done.

Most all of Priscilla
’s subtext communication dealt with things other than driving. There could be any number of topics she could talk about without even bringing up the subject. The yard is her specialty.

One morning after a stretch of good weather, Priscilla came to my office door.
“The forecast says it’s going to rain for the next few days.” Priscilla stood looking in at me in front of my computer screen.

“
I think it’s supposed to be sunny,” I said, knowing full well rain is in the forecast.

“
No, I’ve read it and saw it online. No, it’s definitely going to be raining.” Her eyes narrowed, burrowing her telepathic instruction into my mind.

No rocket salad there. I know what she
’s saying. “Are you going to mow the lawn?”

“
Maybe I better mow the lawn before it rains,” I play her like a fiddle. She knows I hate mowing. I’d done it for years and for some reason, it was not a favorite activity. I do like the looks of the lawn afterward.

Priscilla smiled and continued on dressing for work, her mission accomplished. I volunteered. I really do love her.

Maybe it was that damn hard-to-start Briggs and Stratton engine on the mower we had when I was a teenager. Mom’s mower took at least twenty pulls and sometime more to get the damn thing to fire. That’s a guess, but I bet I’m not far off. Of course, back then, nearly fifty years ago; there was a rope with a knot on one end and a handle on the other that had to be wound around the starter spool each time the rope was pulled and the engine didn’t start. There was no recoil spring to rewind the rope so you had to manually hook the knot in a notch in the winding spool, wind the rope around and around the spool up to the handle. Often, the knot at the end of the starter rope would fray and break off, adding another little irritation to the whole lawn mowing adventure by having to tie another knot in the rope. Once the rope got too short, it had to be replaced. You can only tie so many knots in an ever-shortening starter rope before it is too short to work effectively. Rope was about as plentiful as the non-existent tools in my tool chest.

In my early years, I always wanted to be a mechanic. Always until I was about twelve. There was never any money for tools so I had to make due with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver and maybe a hammer for all mechanical work. The lack of tools and rope finally killed any desire I had to be a mechanic or mow lawns. Irritants like that just stick with you, I shit you not.

When I finally could afford the tools, I was managing a Big Richards store. I’d probably have been happier being a mechanic. But then, The Man was always giving mechanics the business too. Big Richards had an automotive department with low paid mechanics struggling right along with those minimum wage check-out cashiers.

Getting ready for some social event, Priscilla said,
“Are you going to wear your cargo pants?” Sergeant Sub-text: “Don’t wear those pants; they aren’t fit for the occasion.”

Sometime, I leave time for Priscilla to get ready for work and stay out of her way in the early mornings. Sometimes, just before she leaves for her job at the bank and just after the goodbye kiss she
’ll say, “The dishes in the washer are clean.”

On first thought, one might think it is a clue not to put dirty dishes in the machine. That
’s not even close to what she meant. White-space: “Empty the dish washer before I come home for lunch.”

My point is, it is not what women or little girls say that count, it is in the white space where the real communication takes place. I wonder if Priscilla was three, like Bella, when she mastered the art of talking in that blank space.