Crow Fair: Stories

The House on Sand Creek

When Monika and I were first married we rented a house on Sand Creek, sight unseen, because Monika wanted to live in the country, and nothing else was available within reach of town. Everything we had been told was true: the house was a furnished ranch house with two bedrooms, two baths, near a quiet grove of aspens. It had been repossessed from a cowboy and his wife, who had gone on to Nevada or Oregon — somewhere in the Great Basin. The man at the bank said that he was an old-time rambling buckaroo, who’d stopped making his mortgage payments because “he was looking for a quit.” Monika turned to me for an explanation, but I just wanted to get the deal done and move in. “It might not be exactly to your taste,” the banker said, “but nothing says you can’t tweak it.”

It was an absolute horror. Skinned coyote carcasses were piled on the front step, and a dead horse hung from its halter where it had been tied to the porch. Inside was a shambles, and there was one detail we couldn’t understand without the help of the neighbors: shotgun blasts through the bathroom door. Apparently Mrs. Old-Time Buckaroo used to chase Mr. Old-Time Buckaroo around the house until he ran into the bathroom, locked the door, and hid in the bath. The sides of the tub were pocked with lead.

Monika, who had seen the dead horse, said that it was a shame the wife had failed and that the two of them were now in the Great Basin, living out their lives. This is a bit of an understatement — at the time Monika broke into sobs and begged to be taken away. “Is this how you treat your wife?” she turned on me. “Stop calling me your princess, you bastard.” I never quite got used to these flare-ups or to Monika’s sometimes-misleading passion for fresh starts.

Monika was not only not a westerner; she was not even an American. She had been stranded in architecture school by the uproar in the former Yugoslavia, and by the time it was safe for her to go home, we had met and planned to marry. Which we did. And now we were in that house. Monika was commuting to architecture school, and I was running an underemployed law office that five years earlier had done thirty real-estate closings a month and now did at most two and often none. Booms in real estate came and went, like weather, except that there always seemed to be plenty of weather.

I am aware that my ability to wittily point out things like this, and to describe the house the way I am describing it, has a lot to do with the fact that Monika left soon after we’d moved in. She abandoned what she contemptuously described as “the western lifestyle” to return to her parents in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There, she found herself a nice house with no dead horses or coyotes, and a nice man and a nice baby — a twofer in the fresh-start business. Ours had been a poor excuse for a marriage, borne on an ill wind from the start.

I was still in the house, which we had painted in such a hurry that we’d rolled right over the outlets and floor moldings in uneven lines, giving one the feeling that the interior had somehow been draped in paint. For a long time, the sight of the walls kept Monika in my mind, even when womenfolk came for a visit, always short. Something — either me or the house — seemed to give them the willies.

I first met Bob when he came to congratulate me on “getting rid of that Croat.” Like many other men in the area, Bob wore cowboy boots and a big hat and described himself as a former cowboy. This phenomenon interested me, and I began to put the stories together a bit. For example, Bob, a retired electrician, had not been a cowboy for at least forty-five of his sixty-two years. Further investigation suggested that his cowboy years had occurred somewhere between the sixth and seventh grades and may have lasted just under a month. I had always imagined cowboys, former and otherwise, to be laconic men, who, if they overcame their reluctance to speak at all, did so without much expression. Not Bob. Bob never shut up and his facial movements had more in common with those of Soupy Sales than John Wayne. A surprising number of his anecdotes culminated in his telling people off, especially members of his own family. “My mother’s in her eighties and she keeps talking about when I was in her belly. Ever hear anything more disgusting? I finally had to tell her to shut her trap.” Or “I got fed up with my son. I told him to go fuck himself. He said he’d give it his best shot. Never at a loss for words, that boy.” Or “They’re all driving me crazy: my wife, my mother, my son, all his noisy friends. All the guys I worked with. Too much time on their hands. They need to get a life and quit cluttering up mine.”

Mail addressed to Bob was once mistakenly delivered to my box, so I took it up to his place. It was clear that he was living alone. In time, I learned that he had been living alone for years and that all his stories of telling people off were just wishful thinking. Bob’s relatives had put plenty of distance between themselves and him long ago. The only car that was ever in his driveway was his, an obsolete six-cylinder Bel Air with plenty of gravel cracks in the windshield. But at least Bob had integrity: he was mad at the world, if not yet at me. If I didn’t wind sprint to my car or work on weekends, I was in for long visits. Still, something about him touched me.

Bob and I had really started to settle in — with Bob tracking my movements to make sure that I was home from work for at least ten minutes before he showed up — when Monika called me from Belgrade. She had written occasionally since leaving, but this was the first time I had spoken to her in a couple of years. I found it painful in the extreme and didn’t quite keep track of the conversation, uncertain why I should care that she had money from the sale of her house or that little Karel already slept through the night and was such a happy boy. Monika must have detected my confusion because she suddenly asked, “Are you following this?” and I had to admit that I was a bit lost. She filled me in: she wanted to come back. What had happened to her new man? I asked her. “Out the window!” she said.

Monika spoke nearly perfect English, but she always managed to alter our colloquialisms slightly. My favorite was her description of a problem as “a real kink in the ointment.” I tried to correct this to “fly in the ointment,” but with a blank look on her beautiful face she asked me what a fly would be doing in ointment. I let it go. I had been raised to think that loving your spouse was a requirement. “Love is a job,” my mother had snarled at our wedding as she gazed at Monika, who was wearing some sort of shocking Eastern European headdress. Thus, I loved Monika even after she left me and until the day she announced her return, a baby under her arm by someone I had never met.

On the first day of the Bozeman Sweet Pea Festival, Monika got off the plane and handed me little Karel. “For you. Have I aged? I don’t seem to turn heads the way I used to.” She wore some sort of gown that fit her like a giant lampshade, a grand cone that went from her neck to the ground. “Is that a dirndl?” I asked.

“No, it’s a dashiki. Oh, God, you haven’t changed.”

I was in shock. As for little Karel, now in my arms, he was clearly black. I had an unworthy thought: Wait until Bob gets a load of this. Turned out I was wrong to worry about it because when Bob met Karel he thought he had a skin condition of some kind and expressed his sympathy.

In the parking lot, Monika said, “What are you doing with this tiny car?”

“I’ve been single, Monika. It was all I needed.”

“Well, I’m back.” She worked her way into the passenger seat while I held little Karel, who was gazing into my eyes confidently. “And this put-put will prove inadequate.”

The feeling came back to me, from the days of our marriage, that I was doomed in life to take a lot of shit and make weak jokes in response.

We made love as soon as we got to the house. Monika bounced me around and remarked that I seemed out of it. Across her lower back was a mysterious architectural tattoo, which turned out to be Le Corbusier’s plan for the High Court of Chandigarh, India. As I drifted off into postcoital tristesse, Monika raided the icebox. She was perfectly candid about her enthusiasm for food, explaining that her ex was a glutton. “Often when people come from lands of scarce resources their response to abundance is gluttony.”

“A big fellow, is he?” I asked weakly.

“In every way,” she said with a laugh. “You know what a Mandingo is?”

“Is it something to eat?”

“No, idiot! A Mandingo is an African warrior. You’re thinking of a mango!”

“Oh. Is he an African warrior?”

“Hardly. He’s a Nigerian neurosurgeon. But Olatunde has the sort of Mandingo traits that I hope Karel inherits. He’s actually Yoruba.”

I looked over at Karel. He didn’t seem to possess any Mandingo traits. He was just a little baby waving his arms around. When Monika collapsed with jet lag, I took him out to the sofa and let him play on my chest until he fell asleep. And then I fell asleep. The last thing I saw was a bird trying to get in the window. Monika’s luggage was still sitting in the living room, unopened.

Bob must have figured out that Karel did not have a skin condition because there was certainly a theme to the gifts he brought over. “He already had a baby shower in Belgrade,” Monika said, but that didn’t stop Bob. A children’s biography of Martin Luther King Jr., James Brown’s Greatest Hits, and a pretend leg of fried chicken made out of some rubberlike material. “He can actually teethe on it!” Bob said.

When he was gone, Monika said, “My dream was of a new life here, but this may be impossible.”

“I think Bob meant well,” I said.

“Ah, make no mistake: that was not Bob speaking and bringing his symbolic gifts. That was America speaking through Bob.”

Meanwhile, Karel teethed contentedly on his rubber drumstick, his little chin glistening as he hummed.

As part of Monika’s first assignment on her return to architecture school she began to design some alterations for our house, a wing here, a wing there: I was terrified that she would actually want me to have these things built.

“Why do we need a loggia?”

“Why do I even talk to you?”

Bob continued to visit some mornings for coffee. If he arrived before Monika left for school, she fled to her car. “Always in a hurry, that gal,” Bob said. “Someday she’ll be designing skyscrapers, and we’ll brag we knew her back when.” Whenever Bob drove Monika from the house, it fell to me to care for Karel until the babysitter arrived in her white tennis shoes and loose shorts that made the vanishing of her thighs into them a matter of urgent mystery. I loved to start the day by playing with Karel in bed. He’d sit on my stomach, and we’d play hand games that always ended with this merry little boy tipping over onto the pillows only to arise and crawl on top of me again to resume the battle with a shout. If Bob was still there, we did this on the living-room rug, scurrying around until I had rug burns on my knees. When Bob wasn’t launching into some complaint about his overindulgent mother, he was wonderful with Karel. I could leave the two of them together while I dressed for work, and whatever Bob did always had Karel squealing with delight. The arrival of the babysitter, nubile Lydia, would put an end to all this: I went to work; Bob went home.

I have lived in this town for a long time, but I was raised in Bakersfield, California, a town I was longing to flee by the age of ten. I coughed up out-of-state tuition, went to law school, then settled here, at first alone and then with Monika. I mention all this because my colleague, Jay Matthews, who has lived here all his life, told me that Bob’s mother could hardly be driving him crazy: she died when he was a boy. “Got to be fifty years ago.”

“I must have misheard him.”

“Yeah, Bob was an only child, and his mom was single. Ole Bob was a bubble and a half off plumb, even back then. That’s why he’s always fit right into this godforsaken town.”

Life went on. Karel’s father, Olatunde, called every week, sometimes talking to me and sometimes to Monika. His attempts to talk to Karel came to nothing, as Karel drooled and stared at the receiver. Olatunde spoke in measured tones in a deep voice, which, combined with his cultivated, slightly fusty British accent, seemed to come from a tomb. Nonetheless, his melancholy over the absence of his little boy could be discerned. He wished me luck with Monika and said that I was going to need it. His, he said, had run out.

Bob and Karel became so close — Karel singing in his presence and crying out in delight when he arrived — that Monika and I consulted about dispensing with the babysitter and using Bob instead. I wasn’t sure about this. The babysitter was getting ready to start college and needed the money, and, besides, I was sweet on her and thought she was starting to come around, recklessly bending over to pick up Karel’s toys in my presence. Monika noticed this once and started braying with sardonic and distinctly Slavic laughter. The time had come for me to take the bull by the horns. I followed Lydia to her car and told her that any fool could see how beautiful she was and I was no fool. She started but failed to reply. “You — you — you—” She got into her car and roared off. I thought it best to maintain a sphinxlike expression on my way back into the house. Monika smiled at me as I entered. “Turn you down?”

“Seems to be running okay. I can’t think why she thought the ignition was going out.”

Gales of laughter. “Oh, good one. Stick to your weapons.”

The moment blew over, with the usual residue, but in the end I was furious with Lydia for having wiggled around the house on the assumption that I wouldn’t notice. Entrapment, pure and simple. Another few steps down that trail, and Lydia could have owned my law firm. These youngsters look right through you, unless their gaze falls on something they might need. I should have held my wallet aloft with one hand while pointing at my crotch with the other, but I simply lacked the nerve. So (a) babysitter leaves, and (b) here comes Bob. The convenience and economy of this arrangement appealed even to Monika, who allowed that he was “not a bad chicken egg after all.”

Obviously, we made several forays into marriage counseling, during which we turned each of our counselors into helpless referees. I always felt that these sessions were nothing more than attempts by each side to win over the counselor, with charm, cajoling, whatever it took. In the end, Monika decided that everything that had led to the idea of counseling — Freud, Jung, Judeo-Christianity — was spiritually bankrupt. Therefore, she was going to look back thousands of years and seek the help of a shaman, now resident in Missoula. This shaman, she explained, had the benefit of ten thousand years of human spiritual experience, as opposed to the Johnny-come-latelies of psychoanalysis, and she intended to partake of that knowledge. I listened thoughtfully and replied that it sounded promising so long as she didn’t fuck the shaman.

Thus began our decidedly parallel lives: Monika and her shaman and her architecture, me and my law practice, Bob and Karel. Monika came home in the evening with long rolls of paper under her arm, and I with my briefcase, containing few briefs in these straitened times, to the happy home of Bob and Karel. When Bob left for the night, I held Karel’s rigid little body as he wailed and reached frantically in the direction of Bob’s departure. “Give him something to eat,” Monika remarked on her way into the bedroom.

One afternoon, Monika and I had a rather sharp exchange in the presence of Bob and Karel. I asked innocently if it was absolutely necessary for her to keep using her boarding pass as a bookmark.

Monika said, “None of your business.”

“I suppose it helps to remind you of that shithole where you grew up.”

“It reminds me that they still have airplanes that go back there.”

“Everyone wants to go to Yugoslavia,” I said, “where shooting your neighbor is the national sport.”

“Oh, you’re awful. You’re just so awful. My God, how truly awful you are.”

Karel started to cry, and Bob took him outside. Soon I could see the chains of the swing flashing back and forth and hear Karel’s delighted cries.

Monika had recently undergone an abrupt sartorial change from dark Euro-style clothing to Rocky Mountain chic: hiking boots, painter pants, bright yellow down jacket, and a wool cap with strings hanging down the sides. Now screwing a mountaineer, I thought ungenerously. Her exhaustion, I assumed, owed more to her shagging the mountain man than to anything she was doing in the world of architecture.

It should come as no surprise to anybody that the day came when Monika and I returned from work to find Bob and Karel missing. Having read Huckleberry Finn, she remarked that Bob had “lit out for the territory” with Karel. I don’t want to overstate the ghastly nature of our response, as we were both crying — though whether at the loss of Karel or at the feeling that we deserved to lose him and Bob deserved to have him, I couldn’t say. When I attempted to cheer Monika up by saying that when life gives you lemons you must make lemonade, she slapped my face. I almost fought back, and you can only imagine how that would have seemed under the circumstances.

Instead, I called the police in town. Monika called Olatunde in Yugoslavia and put me on the phone. “You tell him.”

“Good morning, Doctor. It’s afternoon there already? Well, I have news, well, not news exactly. One of our neighbors here has … kidnapped Karel.” Dr. Olatunde was understandably slow in absorbing this announcement but not in any other way, and it fell to me to pick him up at the airport a day and a half later.

These were terrible hours. Monika stayed home as we awaited word from the police, her drawings laid out on the kitchen table. She showered me with reproaches, the recurrent one being that Karel would never have “slipped through her hand” if I hadn’t chased the babysitter away with my ogling. Pointing at the drawings, I said, “I see the loggia stays.”

“Yes, and a pergola.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

I met Dr. Olatunde at the baggage claim though he had only a carry-on. He was the sole African among all the skiers, and he drew a bit of attention to himself for that and for the suit he wore, a nice English cut, rumpled from the long trip. He was not at all the big Mandingo glutton I had pictured but a small, precise man with a slightly receding hairline and a friendly but crisp manner. He said, “You were kind to come for me.”

“You must be tired.”

“Not so bad, really.”

“Well, I have marvelous news for you. Karel has been found.”

“Is that so?”

“I hope you don’t feel the trip was wasted.”

“Nothing could compare to this. Is he well?”

Bob and Karel had not gone far, at least not far enough to give plausibility to a charge of kidnapping. They were in the first motel on the way into town. Their loud music had given them away. Bob was belligerent about what he described as the hostile atmosphere of our home, and we felt that by pressing charges we would only bring his version into the public eye. Karel responded to his father, whom he could hardly have been expected to remember, much as he responded to Bob: he was always drawn to someone who looked straight at him as though making a delightful discovery. I spell this out because it was against all odds that we allowed Bob to come back again and let ourselves be compensated by Karel’s squeals of delight. More and more, he stays over at Bob’s anyway, which Monika and I hope will give us some room to work things out.