Zoo Nebraska: The Dismantling of an American Dream by Carson Vaughan

Author:Carson Vaughan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: art, pay_royalty_done
ISBN: 9781503901490
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2019-04-02T07:00:00+00:00

Three months after they first met in 1962, Marlowe and Earleen tied the knot. Nobody thought it would last. They knew Marlowe, his boozy predilections, his sharp tongue, his back-alley brawls. They took bets on how long it would take him to self-destruct, for the marriage to crumble; they put money on it too. Their best friends gave it six months—at best. They hit six months, then a year. Then two, three, four. Decades later, little had changed. If anything, they grew stronger, synergized, Earleen always on standby with the name or number Marlowe couldn’t remember, both of them defensive and easily distracted.

Not that it was all traditional. Only after they married did Earleen discover the extent of Marlowe’s coonhound business. She knew he had several dogs, of course. The first time she visited the poor farm, five wagging tails met her in the driveway. What she didn’t know at the time was that he kept most of them hidden away behind the shelterbelt, 123 coonhounds in total. Earleen saw little choice but to roll with it, not that Marlowe needed her encouragement. He found a kindred spirit in regional celebrity Vern Hoscheit, a coach for the Oakland As, three World Series rings to boot, who came back each fall to have Marlowe outfit him with a few coonhounds for his coyote hunt. They used to spend afternoons together in Vern’s basement, he says, talking shop and watching baseball.

“I tell you, people don’t really understand what a dog can tell you,” Marlowe says. “I had that one old coon dog, and he’d go out and he’d tell me every scent that he’d come across. And every once in a while I’d say, Jeff, you old bastard, I said get your head out of your butt and get to huntin’ coon. He’d let out sort of a chuckle. He’d tell me if he smelled a possum. He’d tell me if he smelled a skunk. I mean, I could tell every damn word he was telling me.”

Marlowe and Earleen had two kids. Their first child, Nurita Belin, was born premature. Five pounds, two ounces at birth, a half pound less after six days in the hospital. No eyebrows. No fingernails. They fit her in a shoebox, took a photo with Marlowe’s wedding ring around her wrist. That she survived her infancy at all seemed a minor miracle. One night, snowed in at home, Nurita developed croup. Marlowe boiled water and rigged a makeshift tent over the stove, flipping her like an omelet every half hour until the snow cleared and he could rush to Orchard for medicine. Justin came later, and nothing about the two of them fit together.

When Earleen went into labor with Justin in late February 1965, snow covered the back roads of Antelope County, and the family car was, frankly, a piece of shit. The Jensens didn’t trust it would start, let alone deliver them safely to the Plainview hospital twenty miles away. So they wrapped themselves in coats

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