This Is What I Want (13 page)

SAM

From the trash-riddled center of Main Street, Sam watched the sun peek above the badlands east of town. He looked at his watch: 5:20 a.m. Every year during Jamboree, he went to bed early on Friday night, his ears plugged against the sonic assault, and every year he wondered if he shouldn’t be downtown having fun with everybody else. And then, come Saturday morning, every year, he was here at sunrise and thankful for his good sense in bagging some sleep.

His companions on cleanup duty—Eldrick Sloane, Ren Brian, and Chet Mayberry—didn’t seem to have quite as much starch in them, having been downtown for the duration the previous night. The owners of the Sloane Hotel, the Double Musky, and the Oasis had promised months earlier to kick in some cleanup help. That was part of Sam’s job, getting commitments on jobs like cleaning up and setting up the parade markers. At the time, the business owners no doubt expected that they could saddle an underling with the duty, but in a place where high school dropouts were pulling in thirty dollars an hour for using a scrub brush on oil rigs, the labor pool of peons was turning out to be damn shallow.

“Fellas, if we just divvy the street into quarters, we can get everything swept up pretty quick,” Sam said. “I’ll run everything out to the dump. We’re not aiming for pristine here. Just presentable.”

He handed out push brooms to each man. “Smile, Ren,” he said. “It’s going to be a beautiful day.”

“What are you so damn cheerful about?” Brian said.

“It’s my favorite day of the year.”

“Yeah? Mine is Sunday, when I can count the money and be done with this for another year.”

Sam gave him a chuck on the shoulder and sent him off to meet his duty.

The other guys dispatched to their positions, Sam started his sweep at the south end of the stretch, and as he built piles of detritus, he tried to make sense of the conversation he’d had with Patricia an hour earlier. She woke up while he showered, and she’d made him a cup of coffee, a gesture he appreciated.

“What time did you get home?” he’d asked her.

“Ten thirty or so.”

“That late?”

“I had a drink with Raleigh.”

“Oh.”

“Coffee, Sam.”

He’d winced at having let it get to him. He wasn’t stupid. He knew about her little crush on Raleigh Ridgeley. The way she kept those books close when they came out, like a starving child protecting her food, made it obvious, but Sam had always ascribed that to an innocent fascination with what Raleigh had been able to make of himself beyond the town limits of Grandview. To anyone who stayed, like Sam and Patricia had, Raleigh’s life would naturally seem exotic and alluring. But hey, Raleigh came back year after year—by Sam’s reckoning, that made Grandview pretty special, too.

He might’ve cogitated more in that direction if not for what Patricia had said next.

“Henrik was at your mother’s again. Samuel saw him.”

“Damnit.”

“And listen: Samuel, I hope, is going to tell you about this, but in case he doesn’t, I want you to know.”

“OK.”

“Henrik called him a fag.”

“He did?” Sam folded his hands into fists.

“Yes. Do you know anything about this?”

That had stung him a bit. He’d snapped the buttons on his shirt to buy time to moderate his reply. “You think I told Henrik about Samuel? Really?”

“Samuel asked if you did.”

“Well, that’s just great.”

His voice must have risen, because she held her hands out, palms down, urging quiet. “You don’t get to be hurt by this. Samuel’s the aggrieved party. I’m just asking a question.”

“No,” he’d said. “I did not tell Henrik anything. And I’m getting a little tired of being the bad guy here. Why do you get all the firsthand information and I get all the secondhand questions? Why won’t he talk to me about it?”

“Because you were asleep and I wasn’t.” Here, her voice had gone to a whisper. “And if you’ll stop blustering and listen to me, I’m telling you that he wants to talk to you and I told him he should. So if he makes like he wants to, let him. OK?”

“OK.”

She’d stood and fixed his collar.

“He wants to go by Norby, you know,” Sam had said.

“I know.” She’d sighed. “I don’t have the energy for any more names. Your son Norby is asleep next door. Your daughter Denise and her husband Randy and their children Chase and Randall Junior are in the basement. They would all like to see you, Sam Kelvig, for breakfast, so hurry home, OK?”

“OK, wife Patricia.” She’d smiled at that, and he’d thought that maybe it was a way forward after these weeks of clinging to their own sides of everything—the house, the bed, their interests. He’d puckered up for a kiss, and she’d instead patted him on the chest.

“I’m going back to bed,” she said.

Twelve bags full of trash rode in the back of Sam’s pickup as he drove home. Breakfast first, dump afterward. He’d see if Samuel wanted to go with him. That would offer an opening for more to say, if his son wanted to say it.

The problem, as Sam had come to view it, was one of perspective. He just didn’t see how this was who Samuel claimed to be. When had that happened? In Missoula? God knows, Sam had chafed often during his own time out there, at how little dignity and self-control some of his classmates had shown. California, maybe? Sam couldn’t make sense of that place. Norby said he was gay and that was that. “I was born gay,” he’d said to his parents, on that excruciating phone call after he and Derek didn’t even make it to their flight in Minneapolis. Sam had felt kicked in the teeth on that one, because there he was, trying to understand something that was beyond comprehension, and his own son wouldn’t even come look him in the eye.

Sam had his doubts about this “born this way” stuff. The Reverend Franklin had backed him up on that one, talking about the people he personally knew who had been able to conquer their “SSDs.” “What’s that?” Sam had asked, and the pastor had said, “Same-sex desires.” The Reverend Franklin said there was help, that people could beat back the impulses with intensive therapy. “He’ll need you to stand by him as he fights this,” the pastor had said.

On the ride home, Patricia had told Sam, “That was a mistake. I’m not talking to him anymore.” No discussion, no mediation, no attempt to come to a unified idea of what they should do about their son. She’d been unfair, Sam thought. She’d left him out here alone to wrestle with this.

If Samuel was born that way,
Sam wondered,
how come he had girlfriends all through high school?
Lidia Faulkner, Janine Cisco, Megan Riley. Those were just the three he remembered. There were more. Sam and Patricia had particularly encouraged him where Megan was concerned. They liked her, liked her family, liked the stock she came from. “The cut of her jib,” as Big Herschel was wont to say. It had looked so promising, and then, just like everything else, it fell away and this new person—this Norby person—showed up.

Sam idled in the turn lane off Main Street, waiting for three trucks carrying scoria to pass so he could make the turn for home. He punched the steering wheel. Then he punched it again and again and again.

NORBY

His father’s truck rattled up Telegraph Hill, weighted down by the cargo and by the burden of all that had gone unsaid. Every now and again, one of them would look at the other and smile, but nobody dared pop open the conversational seal.

That’s OK,
Norby thought.
For the first time here, I’m feeling all right
.

The scene at breakfast had been familiar, familial, a grab-it-if-you-want-it free-for-all of pancakes and waffles and fresh fruit his mother had been cutting when he slipped up behind her and kissed her cheek. Randall Junior had sat on Norby’s lap, happily popping grapes in his mouth while Denise snapped pictures of them on her phone, and Randy talked of the impending night’s adventures, now that Denise was granting him dispensation for one night of fun. Norby had watched his parents—mostly his father, who seemed delighted to have everybody under the roof again. That’s when Norby realized he was glad he’d come, and more than that, he was glad to be glad.

The talk with his mom the previous night had gone a long way, he thought, as had what he’d overheard earlier this morning, while still in bed. He’d been relieved that his dad hadn’t used the auspices of a private conversation to run him down. He’d been thankful, too, that Sam forswore any knowledge of what Henrik had said. And he smiled now to think that his parents assumed he couldn’t hear them. He’d spent his growing-up years in that room adjacent to theirs, the ductwork like an amplifier. They had no idea the things he knew.

The truck had climbed atop Telegraph Hill now, and the turn-in for the dump lay just a few hundred feet ahead.

“You remember the last time I was up here with you?” Norby asked.

“Can’t say as I do.”

“It’s been a long time.”

Sam snapped his fingers. “The bike!”

“Yep,” Norby said. He laughed. “Never did find it. We tried, though, didn’t we?”

“We had to.”

God, how Norby had loved that bicycle, a present from his mom and dad for his thirteenth birthday. Chrome plated, with mag wheels. He’d been the instant envy of every other kid in Grandview. For three days, that status lingered, until the bike was stolen from the Kelvigs’ garage during the night.

“I’ve never seen you so mad,” Norby said. “I thought you were going to interrogate every kid in town.”

“I would’ve, if I’d had the chance.” Sam grinned.

The Kelvigs had gone house to house, asking questions, meeting insolence with guilt-inducing invective. (“See this boy?” his dad had said to one neighbor who’d suggested that all boys’ bicycles should be confiscated for the peace of the neighborhood. “His favorite thing in the world was stolen, you moron.”) They put up flyers on creosote-soaked telephone poles. They filled out a police report that they knew would do no good, until Sam said, “Maybe somebody dumped it.”

That, too, had been a futile effort, unless you counted the three milk pails and the Red Wing crock they found and dragged home to Patricia, who rehabilitated them and turned them into planters that still graced the house.

“That was a good time,” Norby said. “Didn’t seem like it then, but it was.”

They made the turn, and Sam reached over and tousled Norby’s hair, just like he would have done in a time when he didn’t have to engineer tenderness.

Activity had picked up in town. Folks jammed into Pete’s for breakfast, Sam had volunteers marking off the parade route, and Norby was helping his dad put together the viewing stand where Mayor Swarthbeck, Sam, and a few other dignitaries would sit.

“So you saw Henrik again?” Sam said.

Norby grunted as he ratcheted a line of bolts. “Yeah, at Grandma’s.”

“What’d he say?”

There goes Dad, fishing
. Norby smiled. His father knew damn well what his uncle had said.

“He mostly talked about you.”

“And?”

Norby finished the last bolt and handed the ratchet up to his father.

“That was it, pretty much. Said you’re keeping him from what’s his.”

“Same old story.” Sam went to work on his part.

“What
is
the story?” Norby stood up, and Sam set the tool on the half-finished platform.

“Well, you know about the land, right?”

Norby nodded.

“So there’s that. He still hasn’t paid me back what he owes. He says he has, but he’s lying or confused, same as ever. Add to that the mineral rights, which nobody ever thought of until this damn horizontal drilling started happening, and now he’s got dollar signs in his eyes.”

Norby set his arms on a crossbar, then his chin on his hands. “How much money are we talking about?”

Sam stretched his arms wide.

“Maybe that’s the thing to do, then.”

Sam looked stung by that, and Norby noticed and scrambled to make it right. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be contradictory. I’m just wondering, you know, from a pragmatic standpoint.”

“That would put the wells almost in town,” Sam said. “After that, it’s all over but the crying. I thank God every day we have those mineral rights so we don’t have to exploit them. Other people aren’t so lucky, you know?”

Norby nodded.

“We’re a haying family. That’s what we’ve been, and that’s what we’ll stay.”

“OK.”

Norby knew he’d wandered into a conversational thicket. He just wanted a way out, and his father, perhaps thinking the same thing, provided it.

“Here, son, help me with this front piece.”

Norby slid the painted plywood section, complete with the Jamboree logo, into place, and Sam bolted it down to the frame. He knew what his father wanted from him. He’d always hoped that Norby would come home and pick up the mantle from him, same as he’d picked it up from Uncle Rick and Big Herschel before him. And Norby had resisted, first out of youthful contrariness and later because he sensed a bigger threat to his freedom to chart his own life as he saw fit. Now, though, he wondered. Maybe pitching in was nothing more than that. He was happy to help.

“Thanks for that,” Sam said. “I’d have been wrestling with that for another half hour if I’d done it alone.” They shook hands at the satisfaction of a job done well.

By eleven, downtown looked like a different place. Norby and his dad had strung up the bunting on both sides of Main Street, had plugged in and tested the sound system, and had made sure the improvised business loop around town was operating properly, keeping the big trucks moving along without sending them crashing into the works.

With the parade lineup still an hour away, Sam said, “I’m going to do something I never do on Jamboree Saturday. I’m going to take a half hour and buy you lunch.”

They settled on Pete’s. Norby found himself amazed at how much he’d been craving finger steaks from home. He got a couple of “Good to see ya, Samuel” greetings, including one from Becky Reedle at the front counter. Sam had started to say, “It’s Norby now,” but Norby reached out and touched his arm and shook his head.

They found a booth in a quiet corner and sank in with a couple of cherry Cokes.

“So it’s not Norby anymore?”

Norby fingered his straw. “I don’t really know how to explain that.”

“I’m not asking you to.” Sam took a draw on his drink, still yielding the floor despite the attempt at alleviating pressure.

Norby looked at the top of his hands, resting on the table. He could see the freckle pattern coming in, a little more pronounced each year as his skin soaked in more sun. He’d probably never have the thick, work-calloused fingers his father had, but he was every bit Sam Kelvig’s match for Scandinavian skin. He could see a fortune lost to sunblock in the years ahead.

He now looked at his father.

“It’s taken me a long time to be—I don’t know if ‘comfortable’ is the right word, because I still struggle with that, so maybe the word is ‘accepting,
’ ”
he said. “It’s taken me a long time to be accepting of who I am.”

His father leaned forward in the booth. “But you are, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes. There’s still work to do, but yes.”

“Work?”

“Explaining myself. Talking to you. Making you understand. Being OK with all that.”

Becky showed up with their order, and Sam gave her a grim smile. She took the hint and left.

“I might not. I’m just being honest. What if I never do?” Sam said.

“I—”

“I want to. I want to try, anyway. I’m just a simple guy, though.”

Norby scoffed. He didn’t come all this way for an aw-shucks-I’m-just-a-country-boy shamble. “Dad, you’re not that simple.”

“But—” His father stopped, lifting his eyes in anticipation. Norby swung himself a quarter turn in the booth and followed Sam’s line of sight. There stood Burt Partain, waving spastically.

“Sam, I need to talk to you,” Partain said.

“Well, come on then.”

Norby turned himself back around, deflated, as the beet farmer approached on heavy feet.

“Hey, Samuel, good to see you.” Partain dropped a hand on his shoulder, and Norby squirmed out from under it. “Listen, Sam, the egg roll truck is venting into Lois Staley’s yard and she’s raising all kinds of hell. She says she was promised it wouldn’t. I checked, and Thuy is where she’s supposed to be. Lois says she wants to see you.”

“Now?”

Partain looked at his watch. “Quarter after. Problem’s only going to get worse once the parade starts. I can’t shut her up. She said you promised her.”

Sam shot a look to his son. Norby dismissed him with a wave.

“We’ll finish this later,” Sam said.

Norby nodded. “OK.”

As Sam and Partain hustled out, Becky came by with the check.

“You want a box for that?” she asked, waving a finger between Sam’s mostly uneaten burger and Norby’s untouched finger steaks.

“No.”

“Something wrong with the food?”

He smiled at that. So many possible directions to go. “I don’t think we had a chance to find out, Becky.” He remembered her, sort of. She’d been a sophomore when he was a senior, and a social climber she was. He remembered how much Megan and some of the other senior girls had hated her, as Becky mowed through the guys who should have been theirs alone. He drew a hazy memory of Megan laying out the consequences if he should dabble in those well-known waters, as if that were something he was contemplating (he wasn’t, clearly) and as if such preemptive threats were a healthy way to go about a relationship (not that he and Megan would have known much about that).

Now, he caught Becky looking at his bare ring finger.

“You still single?” she asked.

Yes, but you’re not,
he thought. He wasn’t entirely sure of that, actually, but he knew enough. His mother had kept him apprised of the happenings around town, particularly the juicier ones. It didn’t come much more luridly interesting than four kids and three marriages by age twenty-six.

“I am,” he said.

“You going to the party tonight?”

“Probably.”

“Well,” she said, “if you see me, buy a girl a drink, OK?”