July 1, 2011
That’s What I’m Talkin’ ‘Bout!
Hell, Dean is old; which makes his folks dirt old. Both near ninety, they feel lucky having their oldest boy still give enough of a shit to mow the front yard for them, take their garbage can out to the corner on Friday mornings (back to the garage around noon) and fix the FreeCell game on their computer when it decides to shoot craps. Yeah, he’s old, but they’re ancient.
Hubert is Bonnie’s third husband. They were high school sweethearts seventy years ago in Drexel, Missouri, until he went off to war and she went wild. Bonnie eventually hooked up with Ben – the first man she ever met that could handle her – and bore him three sons and a daughter in their eleven year marriage; Dean the oldest. Pete, her second husband, fell over dead of a heart attack in ’92, and “Hub” found her again on the internet in 2003, thirteen months after his only wife passed of pancreatic cancer. They’ve been together since.
When Pete bit the dust, he and Bonnie had ten acres out south of Stover; a weekend playground for the grandkids when they come down from the city. It has a pond, stocked with big fat catfish and some bass, swing set, teeter-totter, horseshoe pit, fire-pit and tent-pitching area. Now, their boy Dean’s grandkids come down to fish and swim in the pond. Re-generational, recycled joy.
Hub loves “The Ten,” and would rather hang out there than sit in that damn recliner listening to Bonnie snore at the TV set all day long. He’s usually shit, showered and shaved by 8:30am and sitting out on the front porch at 9:00am, waiting on Dean to pick him up for coffee down at Mitchell’s Café, then on out to “The Ten.” No different this morning.
Last spring the great-grandkids brought down some weeping willows and planted them around the pond on Arbor Day. Hub’s only chore in life (as he sees it) is to walk around the pond each and every day with a plastic milk jug that has the top cut off, but handle still intact, and water the four future shade trees. He takes an odd pleasure in watching the pond water splash upon the ground and spatter out onto his Red Wings. Makes them look like they have been worked in…and by him.
When a person passes the autumn of life and moves on into the cold, hard winter, even the slightest sign of still being of some human value (like watering trees) is a daily goal. They fear that if they fail at their one, remaining ability to function, the Good Saint Nursing Home will be their next, and final, stop. Yep, Hub waters those willows religiously.
This particular morn Dean is trenching a new shithole for the outhouse with posthole diggers, rock-bar, and a broken-handle shovel. This is one of those annual, must-do chores, or by August even the second hole of a two-seater is full…and rank. Hub is on his way to the far bank to soak down the trees planted along the dam, and watches Dean flail away, shoulder deep in the rocky Ozark ground. Dean’s shovel and diggers stabbing through the pebbly dirt and Ash roots, occasionally a rock-bar bouncing off a tough chunk of gasconade, the only sounds skipping across the pond to Hub’s ears, which are still amazingly sharp.
He’s named each of them after his favorite Lonesome Dove characters; Gus – who he just watered, Woodrow, he’s doing now, Pea Eye and Newt yet to go. “Can’t be much of a crime, whackin’ a surly bartender, Woodrow.” As Hub grins to himself and watches the toes of his boots catch spittle, he notices an eerie quiet drift across the pond. Maybe Dean struck water, or Montana.
He glances up from Woodrow and over toward Dean’s hole. The digging has, indeed, stopped, and Hub can no longer see Dean’s bald head or shovel occasionally breach the surface. “Hey, boy,” cupping his hands to help his old, scratchy voice reach all the way over there, “Did you get to China, or what?” Nothing.
Hub goes on and empties that gallon of pond water onto the willow and heads back around from whence he came, Pea Eye and Newt will have to wait. “Dean? Hey, boy…Dean?” By the time Hub gets there he’s winded and wishing a bucket or something was nearby to sit on, but that wish is brutally interrupted by the sight before him.
Apparently, the rock-bar slammed into something damn hard, ricocheting off and back-slamming Dean square between the eyes. Both sockets seem to be pushed into the back of his face, along with his nose, blood gushing from the wound like the fountain at Lourdes’s. His body lies twisted into an odd heap, legs buckled under him…and five feet down. For Hub, it may as well be fifty.
Standing at the top of that shithole, Hubert, eighty-nine –year-old Ozark native, makes the decision of his life; try to save Dean now, and no doubt fail, or go for help. He hasn’t driven in nine years – his ears are still good, but he’s damn near blind – and the closest phone is thirteen miles away. He notices Dean’s chest is still moving, sucking for air through a gaping, bleeding mouth and knows he must act now…or.
Hub spins around on those tattered, wet Red Wings and races like the wind (off a turtle’s back) for Dean’s old Chevy truck. He digs around frantically in the bed for whatever he can find that may give him an idea for getting the boy out of that pit. An old rope, looks like it might have once been a tow rope, but snapped about a dozen times. Good enough, by God.
After climbing into the cab, Hub’s hands flail along the dash and steering column looking for the key, or ignition, or whatever turns these damn things on these days. “Ah! There it is! Let’s see now, turn the switch, give her some gas…put it in -D-.” Hub slowly pulls Dean’s pickup up to the freshly dug shithole with a body in it and hopes he doesn’t drive right over the top of it. He’s guess-driving, here.
When he figures he must be close enough, he puts the lever in –P- and crawls out, grabs the rotten old tow rope and makes his way to Dean. Hub can still knot and quickly creates a dandy lasso in one end and lowers it into the pit. One arm is folded under the torso with his legs, but one lies across his heaving chest. Blood still streams from his face, his breathing more labored and Hub knows he’s got to get his ass in gear. On the second try he catches his loop around Dean’s hand and slides the rope up around his wrist as best he can. Pulling it tight, he grabs the rope and feeds it back through his hands till he finds the other end and feverishly ties it to the truck’s bumper.
-R-.
Real slow, like…
About twenty-five seconds later, Hub sees Dean’s hand clear the top of the shithole and it kind of spooks him, somehow, causing him to gun the accelerator a little bit. Shit! By the time he gets his foot over to the brake, he sees Deans body pop out of that hole and bang over the edge. Shit!
-P-.
Hub heads back for Dean, Old Timer at the ready. Just as he prepares to cut the rope, it dawns on him he still has to get Dean into the truck. Damn, shithole, anyway. Shit!
He scans the Ash tree Dean’s been digging under and spots a sturdy limb not ten feet off the ground. Back to the truck, to the bumper end of the rope, and whack!…just one swipe with Hubert’s Old Timer, by God. He quickly ties two more lengths of the rotten, old rope together giving him another twenty feet or so and loops it up all the way back to Dean.
As the old man looks at the limb just a few yards up, he knows this is the moment that determines the rest of his life, as well as Dean’s. If he can’t get the rope over the limb before he wears out trying, he will fail at saving a life, and no doubt begin the end of his own. That limb looks a mile away if a foot to Hub, but The Good Saint Nursing Home looks closer.
He recollects the Roy Rogers and John Wayne Saturday Afternoon Matinees he took his own kids to sixty years ago when they were tykes, and begins to twirl his one good arm. It takes him three tries, but he finally tosses that rope across the Ash limb. That’s what I’m talking about.
-R-. Soon as he’s tied off to the bumper again and back behind the wheel, Hub gingerly edges the pickup back away from the hole, slowly lifting Dean’s limp body off the ground. A few inches… a foot, two feet…finally his hand nears the limb and his feet dangle a foot or so of the ground.
-P-. Hub is so spent he can hardly get out of the cab of the truck and set his feet on the earth again. His legs feel wobbly as licorice sticks and his hands shake something fierce, but he somehow gets them to work and reties the rope to the trunk of the Ash. Back to the cab…-R-., -D-., Hub’s arms are so weak he can only turn the wheel a few inches at a time, using them both and all his upper body. Finally he gets it turned around and asses up to Dean’s still unconscious, dangling body. Guess driving again, he slams on the breaks when he hears a knee-cap clank the tailgate.
Oh, God. He’s got to climb out of the truck again…oh, God. When he finally gets out, he can’t walk. Hub can’t feel anything in his legs from the stomach down but a tickle-tingle kind of sensation dancing around inside his skin. Clasping tightly to the rail of the truck bed he slowly slides one foot at a time along the dirt, finally reaching Dean. With that one good arm, Hub picks his legs up at the back of his knees and sets his feet, legs and butt into the bed. A long, four-full-second breath in through the nose and out through the mouth, and back to the cab. Oh, God.
“Good Saint, Good Saint, Good…” Hubert keeps repeating this mantra to himself until he finally pulls the lever again, -R-. When he guesstimates he’s backed up two feet, -P-. Another breath, another mantra and he soon has Dean’s body completely in the truck bed. He can finally cut the rope. THAT’S what I’m talkin’ ’bout.
One more –D-. and one more –P-. and forty-five minutes later, Hubert shuts down the Chevy pickup truck with a cargo of his step-son at the Bothwell Regional parking lot. He can’t unfurl his fingers from the steering wheel, so he drops his forehead onto the horn and prays.
Hubert woke up what seemed to him eons later. From that last memory of the horn blasting his eardrums to this one he has dreamed a thousand dreams, relived lifetimes; set wrongs right; raised children; and saved worlds. His first blurred vision upon opening his ancient eyes is a pastel blue sign on a bright white wall that reads: Good Saint.
Guess Dean didn’t make it. Hell, he tried, by God…he tried, damn it! Oh, for the love of God, Good Saint? So it’s all over now. He’ll never water the Hat Creek gang again, or complain to Lucy Mitchell about the coffee being too cold, or hear Bonnie sawing logs in her recliner…ever again. Yep, it’s all over now. Good Saint…oh, my God. And, Lord…Dean. Oh, Christ…his grandkids! Shit! Why didn’t he just try going for help in the first place? Why try to act like a damned old, fool hero and blow everything. Shit!
Tears start to well up in Hub’s eyes as he inspects the IV’s and tubes intruding his sore and aching body. Before he can reach over to the little beige counter next to his bed for a tissue, another hand hands him the box; a bandaged hand; Dean’s hand.
He’s in a wheelchair, that hand bandaged the other in a sling, gauze covers his entire head save a dark plastic shield across the brow and an air hole at the mouth way. He sets the tissue box on Hub’s stomach and takes his wrinkled, bruised hand into his own bandaged one, “Thanks, Pop. You saved my life.”
Gus, Woodrow, Newt and Pea Eye never spend another day alone. Dean builds a little cabin on the pond’s edge for Hub and he waters those willows, tends them and sings Roy Rogers songs to them every day of his remaining life. When he passes on, Dean scatters him beneath the willows that had grown into forty foot shade masterpieces, and places a brand new, fancy-schmancy outhouse over that hole, with a little hand-painted sign hanging above the door: The Good Saint Hub.
That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.
