The Book of Famous Iowans by Douglas Bauer

Author:Douglas Bauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: coming of age, drama, marriage, midwest, families, baseball, adultery, rural, iowa
Publisher: Foreverland Press

TWELVE

After my grandmother went back in, I gave my full attention to Dale Van Zant across the road. He continued to move in and out of his house. Watching him, I began to realize that I was only punishing myself by hiding. So I crawled out, parting branches, and headed up the lawn.

I hurried through the downstairs rooms. Their dusky darkness seemed a taunt. Climbing the stairs into the day's risen heat, I caught the smell of sizzling fat. When I came into my grandmother's kitchen she was seated at the table and her hand was reaching for the fried chicken on my plate.

"Whoa!" she said. "You're a lucky boy. A second later and I'd've snatched your drumstick. I guess you didn't hear me calling you."

"I was riding my bike," I lied.

"Ah." She got up to get me a glass of milk and brought it and a bowl of potato salad to the table. She said, "I'm as hungry as a stevedore tonight." I glanced at her plate but it looked too clean to have held food. She reached for the potato salad and dished an enormous portion onto her plate. "See?" She had no fork or spoon and made no move to get them.

"Who's Steve Adore?" I asked. I nibbled at the chicken and my knotted stomach felt as though it might refuse the tiny bite.

She raised her chin and gave a throaty shout of laughter. "Stevedores? You never heard of stevedores? It's not a person, it's a job. They're those big hairy brutes who load things onto boats."

She leaned back in her chair. "In fact, when I was a girl, this was before I met your grandfather—didn't I ever tell you this?—I almost ran away with a stevedore." She was fluttering her eyes like a damsel about to swoon; it was the way they moved when she was improvising. "The day I met him, he was unloading a big boat docked on the Mississippi, over at Princeton, that little river town where my father took Mother and me for one of our 'excursions,' he liked to call them, which, Princeton, is also the birth

place of John Wayne, whose real name is Marion Morrison, and, Judas priest, he took my breath away. The stevedore, not John Wayne. Or is it Winterset, where John Wayne's from? Yes, it's Winter—"

"Gram, where are they?" I blurted. "When are they coming home?"

She immediately leaned forward in her chair.

I said, "You promised this morning they'd be home by now." Of course this wasn't true; she'd only offered that my father would be back soon. But to my accusation, she whispered, "I know I did."

I asked, "Did Bobby kidnap Mom or something?" The words she'd refused to clarify that morning had naturally been sounding in my mind all day.

Her voice was soft. "Why would you think such a crazy thing?"

"You said Bobby 'took her up.' Did he take her somewhere?"

Her face puckered. Laboring, she got up from the table, her stiff leg swinging out like a scythe, and stood at the sink with her back to me.

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