Joe Cottonwood

Chapter One: The Choice of Life

Pop tells me when I was a baby my mother gave me a test. She called it the Choice of Life. She lay me down on the floor and spread out in front of me a spoon, a deck of cards, a dollar bill, a book, a Bible, a ball. She said whatever I reached for first would be my Choice of Life. If I reached for the dollar, I would grow up to be rich. If I reached for the cards, I’d be a gambler; the book, a teacher; the Bible, a preacher; the ball, an athlete.

She was hoping I’d reach for the Bible.

Pop says he was hoping I’d reach for the dollar, and maybe then for the cards.

If you gave me the test today, I’d reach for the ball. But it’s too late, now. You only get one Choice of Life.

What I reached for first was the spoon. Which means I’ll be hungry — poor — all my life. That is, if you believe in that stuff. Pop’s superstitious. I ain’t. I say reaching for the spoon could just as well mean I’ll have plenty to eat all my life. A spoon for a trainload of ice cream. I’ll be fat. I’ll be rich.

Pop says, “Look at us, Danny. Ain’t we fat? Ain’t we rich?”

And all I can say is: “Dsh.”

I’m thin as a blade of grass. I’ve got duck tape around my shoes. I don’t live in a big new house. Where I live is small, it’s old, and everything leaks — the faucets, the roof, the toilet. Where I live ain’t even a house but actually a trailer that used to be pulled behind a car. Then they took the wheels off and set it on blocks and hooked up a water pipe and an electric wire.

We got no car. Not even a phone.

Dsh.

I was rich once. I won a ten thousand dollar reward for catching a man who’d been setting fires all over town. That is, we split the reward three ways, because three of us caught him together: Boone, Babcock, and me. So we each were going to get three thousand three hundred and thirty-three dollars and some cents. I waited months for that money. I figured to buy a dirt bike, a skateboard, a chainsaw, a radio-control car, and on and on. Then Pop said I was too young to blow all that money and he was going to take care of it for me. He said I don’t need a chainsaw.

Well, of course I don’t. I just liked the noise it made, plus I’d like to take one apart and see how it works.

The next day Pop was looking at a used Mustang, trying to haggle it down from forty-one hundred to thirty-three hundred.

We never got the money. What happened was, Boone’s father arranged for some guy named S. Crow Count to hold the reward in a bank until me and Boone and Babcock are eighteen years old. Then we’re supposed to use it to pay for college.

Maybe Boone and Babcock will really go to college. Not me. When I’m eighteen, I’m buying a chainsaw.

Pop got so mad at Boone’s father and S. Crow Count, the only way he could get over it was to play poker all day and all night. With me. We each started at ten in the morning with the same number of chips. Soon as Pop cleaned me out, he’d give me back my chips and start all over again. And again. And again. Around four in the afternoon I had a lucky streak and built up a nice pile, but Pop stood up and walked around his chair. Then Pop draws two wild deuces on a two-card draw when I’m holding three kings, and he wipes me out with four tens. Then Pop tells me “Never — ever — let somebody walk around his chair. Kick it away. Trip him. Because walking around your chair changes your luck.”

And that ain’t a superstition. That’s a fact. I saw how it worked for Pop.

So I keep on losing. I figure he’ll want to stop for supper, but we don’t. I eat chips and drink root beer. Then I figure we’ll stop after midnight, but we don’t. The longer we play, the better I get — but he still beats me. It just takes him longer.

Four-thirty in the morning, Pop rakes another handful of chips to his side, throws down the cards, tilts back his chair, and says, “There. I did it. You know how much I won off you, Danny?”
I yawn, scratching my scalp. “Dsh,” I say.

He drops his chair forward and slams his fist on the table. The chips jump. “Three thousand three hundred and thirty-three dollars,” he says.

Maybe I should’ve felt bad because I lost three thousand three hundred and thirty-three dollars, but I didn’t. I felt fine except for being sleepy. And I’d learned to play poker.

We went to bed, Pop in his room, me in my closet, and slept until afternoon.

Sleeping late left me groggy. Normal, I like to get up with the sun. I walked sort of shuffling to the sink to splash some water on my eyes and saw something move. A rat. He was standing on the faucet stretching his body up so he could sniff the bottom of the medicine cabinet. I didn’t think. Didn’t choose. I just moved. I grabbed a plastic Elvis that Pop was using for a doorstop and heaved it at the rat — and missed. I hit the mirror and broke it to smithereens, mirror and Elvis both.

Dsh.

Pop slams open his door and comes tearing out of his room, in his underpants, with a rifle. His eyes are big as baseballs.

“It’s okay Pop,” I say quick as I can.

He stares at me, chest heaving.

“I threw the Elvis at a rat. I’m sorry. It broke.”

He drops the butt of the rifle to the floor and holds the barrel in his hand. He says, “You get the rat?”

“Dsh. Missed.”

“You broke the Elvis?”

“And the mirror. I’m sorry, Pop. I’ll clean it up.”

“You broke the mirror?”

I told you Pop’s superstitious. Now he tells me I’ll have seven years bad luck unless I don’t touch it for seven hours and then save the pieces for a night when there’s no moon and no stars, and then I have to bury it in a graveyard at midnight.

I tell Pop, “I’d rather have the bad luck.”

Pop says, “If you have bad luck, living with me, I’ll have bad luck, too.”

“I don’t believe that stuff.”

“You sure, Danny? What’s the best that could happen?”

“If I bury it, the best that could happen is I lose half a night’s sleep and make a trip to a graveyard.”

“And?”

“And I have good luck.”

“Now, Danny. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Seven years bad luck.”

“Seven years — or one trip to a graveyard. Ain’t the best worth the worst?”

“You come with me, Pop?”

“You scared?”

“No.”

Pop’s eyes flicker. He doesn’t believe me. “Probably be foggy,” he says. “We could do it tonight.”

Just as Pop predicted, the night was foggy. No moon. No stars. After waiting the seven hours, I picked up the pieces of mirror and only cut my fingers once. I put the pieces in a grocery bag, and the Elvis, too. Might as well bury them both, in case it’s bad luck to break a plastic Elvis and nobody’s figured it out yet.

Pop brought a flashlight. It was plenty dark outside. No streetlights. Not even a light from a house. Pop and me, we live in the mountains just outside a little town called San Puerco. Our trailer is downhill from a farmhouse and a chicken coop. Workers used to live here when they helped with the crops. Now the old farmer won’t plant the fields, he just lets another man run cattle on his land, so he lets us use the trailer. We pay rent.

Pop walked behind me. I asked him to turn on the flashlight.

“No,” he said. “You can’t see with a flashlight.”

“Are the batteries dead?”

“No.” He turned it on. “See? Now you’re blind.”

“I can see.”

“All you can see is where the flashlight’s pointing. You’re blind everywhere else. And anybody else around here, he can see you.”

It was true.

He turned it off. Now I was really blind. Then my eyes readjusted to the dark, and Pop was right. I could see more — a bigger area, anyway — with it off. Pop knows things like how to walk in the dark. His mother was Cherokee Indian. What he didn’t learn from being half Indian, he learned from fighting in Vietnam. In ’Nam, he said, you either learned or you died. And he said a lot of people learned and still died anyway. Pop talks about dead people a lot. Like they’re still alive, sometimes.

At the end of the driveway we turned up the dirt road. A little ways up the road we climbed a barbed wire fence and walked through the grass up a hill. At the top of the hill there’s an old graveyard with just one family buried there, three tombstones, one fallen over. Somebody brought an old metal bed frame up there and set it over one of the graves — to keep the cattle from stomping it, I guess.

I set down the grocery bag and the shovel.

“You can dig the hole now,” Pop said. “Just don’t dump the mirror in until midnight.”

“I brought the Elvis, too.”

“Good idea,” Pop said, and he sat down leaning against the trunk of an oak tree.

“How will we know when it’s midnight?” I asked. Neither of us had wristwatches.

“I’ll tell you.” Pop doesn’t believe in wristwatches. It comes with being part Cherokee Indian. He uses a different kind of time. I can’t explain it, but it’s a time that doesn’t use numbers. The right time, he calls it. Not the real time but the right time.

I dug a hole, not too deep. The ground was soft. I hoped I didn’t dig up any bones. That would be bad luck, for sure.

It was dark, of course, but I could see. If there’s light anywhere the fog sucks it up and spreads it out, sort of glowing. The lights from town plus the moon up above the fog, even though we couldn’t see them, were making light, just enough.

“Who’s buried here, Pop?”

“Some farmer and his family.”

“Shine your light on a gravestone. I want to read it.”

“No.”

“Pop, if you don’t believe in flashlights, why’d you bring one?”

“Because it’s a graveyard.”

“You mean, you want the flashlight in case you see a ghost?”

Pop grunted.

“You believe in ghosts, Pop?”

“No. I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said. “I know ghosts. If you believe in ghosts, that means you decided to. If you know ghosts, that’s something else.”

“You know a ghost, Pop?”

He grunted again.

“You know Mama’s ghost?”

“Danny.”

“What?”

“Shut up.”

My mother died when I was still a baby. Sometimes Pop will talk about her; sometimes he won’t. In a graveyard, I guess he won’t. He’s got a picture of her on a dresser in the trailer.

The hole was ready. I sat down under the tree with Pop, leaning against the trunk on the opposite side.

“Wake me when it’s midnight,” I said.

I shut my eyes. I could hear the breeze blowing the fog through the branches of the tree with a soft moaning sound. The dry grass shifted in the wind, crackling — almost, it seemed, tinkling like little bells. Downhill somewhere I could hear the hooting of an owl.

I heard Pop shifting his position. I didn’t open my eyes, but I knew Pop didn’t like the hooting. He thinks owls are bad luck. Owls can see more than we can, and not just in the dark. They can see the future. If one hoots at you, that’s a warning.

Of course I ain’t superstitious like Pop. I don’t believe in owls being bad luck. I don’t believe in ghosts.

The hooting stopped. For a minute all I heard was the crinkling of the grass and the moaning of the tree. The sound a ghost would make. If you believed in ghosts. I was holding my eyes shut. I made up my mind I wasn’t going to look. If I looked, that would mean I was worried about ghosts. And I wasn’t worried.

Then the sound of the grass changed. Maybe the wind shifted. It sounded sort of slithery. Like a snake. I wanted to open my eyes now to see if it was a snake. But I held them shut. I was afraid I’d be cheating, that I wasn’t really worried about a snake, I just wanted an excuse to open my eyes and see if there was a ghost. And I don’t believe in ghosts. And because I don’t believe in ghosts, I don’t need to open my eyes. If I open them, that means I believe in ghosts.

Then there was a hoot right over my head. I must’ve jumped a foot off the ground. I bet Pop did, too. That owl had landed in the tree we were leaning against. But I never opened my eyes. I could hear Pop shifting. Bet he was nervous. Too nervous to shut his eyes.

The wind shifted, and the grass went back to its old way of tinkling. The branches kept moaning. The owl kept hooting. I hoped midnight came soon. It was too noisy to sleep. The same way turning off your flashlight makes you see better at night, closing your eyes makes you hear better. I might as well be trying to sleep next to a runway at the airport.

Hoot, went the owl. Swoosh, went the grass. Mo-oa-oan, went the tree.

And with my eyes jammed shut I’m thinking, Hurry up, midnight.

Suddenly there’s a sound like a fire siren. And another like a pack of wild dogs. And a groan like a creaky old door.

I open my eyes. I jump to my feet.

Pop turns on the flashlight. He jumps to his feet.

We both try to hide behind the tree but we don’t know what we’re hiding from or where it’s at, so Pop sweeps the light all over up and down around the gravestones, and we edge around the tree with our eyes following the light — and there in the grass a little ways down the hill are two dogs. Just two of them, making noise like they were twenty.

As soon as the light hits them, they turn and run.

“Coyotes,” Pop says. He switches off the light.

Now I’m blind. “I didn’t know coyotes lived around here,” I say.

“Didn’t,” Pop says.

My eyes start to see things again. It looks like Pop is smiling.

“What are you grinning about?” I ask.

“Coyotes,” Pop says. “Coyotes are back.”

I’m still standing with my hands against the bark of the tree like I’m hiding from the coyotes.

“You can bury the mirror,” Pop says. “It’s the right time.”

I empty the grocery bag into the hole, then shovel dirt over Elvis and the mirror and tamp it down with my feet. Just as I finish, the last of the fog clears away, and the moon shines down.

Pop was right. It was the right time.

Pop’s looking at the moon. I hear him whisper to himself: “I see the moon, and the moon sees me. The moon sees the somebody I want to see.” Then he shuts his eyes for a few seconds.

I wait until he opens them, then I ask, “Who you want to see, Pop?”

He doesn’t answer.

But I know. It’s either my mother, or it’s Tater. Pop and Tater were buddies in Vietnam. Tater died there. Him and Pop were side by side, and Tater took a hit, and Pop wasn’t even scratched — except inside his head.

I think Pop knows Tater’s ghost, too.

We walk down the hill. I carry the shovel, Pop carries the flashlight. He’s still grinning.

“You like coyotes, Pop?”

He nods. He says, “You know the Indians never killed the coyote?”

“Never?”

“Well. Hardly ever. Coyote was the Indians’ friend. They say back in the beginning of time, the Indian was starving because he couldn’t hunt the buffalo. Buffalo’s eyes were too good. The Indians tried to sneak up on him, but he always spotted them and ran away. Then Coyote took pity on the Indian. He kicked sand in the buffalo’s eyes, and ever since then his vision is poor. So the Indian could hunt the buffalo.”

I couldn’t believe that story any more than I could believe in ghosts. But I asked Pop to tell me more about the coyote, and to my surprise he did. He talked and we walked down the hill, over the fence, along the dirt road, down the driveway. We sat in the kitchen, and he told me story after story. He loves coyotes. And I loved hearing him talk, not because I had any special feeling for coyotes but because it was so rare for him to talk to me for so long. Here for the second night in a row I was staying up with Pop getting to know him like never before. He can go for a month of practically ignoring me. A wall goes up. I fix my own meals, wake up when I want, go to bed when I want, hardly even see him. Then something happens — the wall cracks — and for a few minutes or a few hours he sees nothing but me.

I didn’t know it, but this night would be my last good crack with Pop for a long, hungry time.

© Copyright 1992 by Joe Cottonwood