A View of the Moon

We packed the bikes on top. They were the most important things — my three-speed, her whatever-speed. We didn’t have a proper bike rack. I just lashed them to the roof with belts. I liked reading to her better than her reading to me, but she didn’t have a driver’s license, so I drove, and she read. I picked In Cold Blood. Bastard creeps. And Capote slept with one of the killers? And all this in Kansas, right where we were headed.

Her brother lived in California. Weird dude. Face all pock-marked, and he was haughty as if he never had zits. I was born in Des Moines. Maybe that’s why he acted that way toward me. He was from New Jersey. How many points do you get for that?

Des Moines is just a few degrees west of perfect south from Minneapolis – two-hundred thirty-four flat miles of corn, milo, wheat, beans, cabbage, spinach, and the occasional tall hemp plant which, if you smoked it you got a headache. I hadn’t seen Des Moines since I was five. I hadn’t even seen the name Des Moines except on my mom’s letters I’d saved. Took us three hours and forty-three minutes. We took the 235 across the Des Moines River and exited downtown at Third Street, as if I still lived there, pretending that it was the past, and that my people were all alive and dressed in bright colors, and we slept on flannel sheets. We parked and I looked for Younkers Department Store where my mom used to take me for ice cream in the Tea Room. A man pointed to a huge, high pile of rubble. “Younkers? There it used to be,” he said.

I remembered my dad tossing me in the air in the Des Moines municipal pool, his hairy arms and big chest. My brother Pete bucking me on his bike, proud as hell—both of us. I stopped at a Walgreens to use the pay phone.

“Directory assistance, may I help you?” She spoke with an accent like a soft cowgirl.

“Yes, do you by any chance have access to street addresses from 1952?” I gave her my old address.

“Well, there’s a phone book on the shelf. Please hold…Oh, our addresses changed at the end of the 1950s, sir, but I think I can help you find your home.”

I had been wanting to hear that all my life.

Filled with malted milk and coffee I drove west to find my old house. My heart was going faster than we were. I was too young for a heart attack. I was having memories that were so old they felt like fiction. As I drove I watched pigeons and light poles, crosswalks, dust, and summer leaves. Grand Avenue felt more familiar to me than Cheerios or Christmas. As Directory Assistance warned me, Grand Avenue and West 51st Street was no longer West 51st Street, just 51st Street. I pulled up to what I believed had been my house, parked, got out of the car, and stood at the curb. I stared at the two-story white clapboard house that was once the scene of me, and my mom, and her diagnoses, and my dad, and his home-economist ladies from work, and my brother Pete in his striped shirts and Converse and blue jean cuffs rolled up. I remembered Iowa Cubs baseball games on the radio and hurricanes, skittering along this flat Polk County Iowa bowl of loam and plant riches. I remembered playing naked with Janet across the street. Her dad caught us in the garden shed and banned five year-old me from her life. Forever.

But now, here comes this old guy down the sidewalk. It’s been twenty-one years since I’ve been here–a lifetime later–memories are gone from most of it all, and as the man approaches he doesn’t even eyeball me. He saunters by and says, “Hello, Billy.”

I go silent like a rowboat without oars. He walks up Janet’s driveway. Does he remember me? Does he remember seeing me yank my little summer pants on and his daughter’s tiny delinquent bottom? If so, he’s being awfully casual.

I don’t know if life is an accident or a view of the moon. That’s Des Moines, I guess. So Des Moines.

Go For the Green

She pressed the packet of my father’s letters to her brow, closed her eyes, and waited. “Go for the green. Go for the green. There’s not a lot left here. Very old stuff. But I’m hearing, go for the green, go for the green. Would your father have said something like that?”

“Yeah, he would have.”

She stared at the envelopes for a moment and slowly brought them back to her forehead.

“There’s not a lot left here, I’m sorry.” She shifted in her chair. “Not a lot left. Just fragments. So long ago. Gosh, I…Go for the Green. Would he really have said that?”

“Yeah, he would have.”

“Okay, well that’s all I get. Look, I don’t want to cheat you out of your money. I don’t know what you wanted or what you expected, but that’s all I get.” She handed me the letters. I tightened the black shoestring that held them together. Seven decades had passed since my father wrote to my mother about high seas and deafening cannon fire and secrecy for fear that Japanese spies might intercept his letters home. Paper as pale as old skin, writing as alive as he was back then. Go for the Green. He could have said that. Or she could be making it up. I didn’t care. That’s what she did for a living, but what she looked like on a stage in a club was a necromancer.

When I first saw her on stage she walked away from the microphone and advanced on a table up front with an innocent-looking couple nursing their twelve-dollar club drinks. “Hi. Did you guys…Did you guys face a death recently.” And the woman burst out in tears, her boyfriend jerked in his chair and put his arm around his sobbing date and comforted her. Then she wandered stage left and pinned another couple to their seats. “So are you guys exclusive yet, or are you still dealing with the violence?” “Jesus Christ,” the guy called out. “How do you know this shit?” His date stared into her drink. No one laughed. It was a comedy club, but she got way more than laughs. She scared the hell out of us. So I hired her to see what she could glean from my father’s old letters.

“Want more tea?” she asked me. “Go for the green,” she said again and chuckled. “Not bad advice, really.” She handed the letters back to me. “These are really old. Not much left there.”