What We Needed
By Chuck Radke
By the time we happened upon the cow’s carcass, I had been thinking about my father for more than a mile. We were at a sharp bend in the trail and the dead animal was just off the path in a tiny meadow, four or five curving vertebrae in folds of cowhide like an old leather jacket in a heap. The grass around the animal was littered with bones picked clean: femur, hip, rib. Of course, I wondered how it came to be that this cow died alone in the hills: if she were taken down by a predator or if she simply got sick, couldn’t rise, and yielded herself to vermin.
“COW-vid,” Will said.
We were hiking above the San Joaquin River through a landscape of scrub oak and mossy boulders, a scene ripped from a children’s book about fairies and trolls. It was early March. The grasses were green and the ground was soddened from fog and rain. Judging by the completeness of the gray sky and its layers of prowling cloud-mass, we were likely in for a wet afternoon, yet there was my son in just a t-shirt and shorts, sneakers with no socks. He was dressed for a two-mile out-and-back, not the seven-mile loop this had turned into. I wore a long-sleeve shirt and light runner’s jacket, and beneath those, a tight elastic waistband I had hoped would melt away my belly fat in a few short miles. “A girdle,” I’d said, but it was nothing more than a soft back brace flipped around, a futile stab at a miracle in what had become—as far as my girth was concerned—a desperate time. The hike had started out sunny, but the temperature had dropped and wind gusts were bending the tops of blue eyes and golden poppies. At times, the winds rose and howled, rippling the puddles and eliciting a somber chorale from unseen cattle.
“I’m freezing,” Will said. “Who would do this on purpose?” He was talking about hiking, a word that for him has become a euphemism for Hell on Earth. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets; his teeth were chattering. I offered him my sweaty jacket, which he declined.
“My father never took me on a hike,” I said. “Not once.”
“Hmph,” Will said. “Lucky you.”
“I guess my dad wasn’t outdoorsy,” I said.
This is a tired game we play. It starts with Will grousing over something I make him do and ends with me trying to get him to see how fortunate he is. To have a father around, I guess. I hate to admit it, but maybe that day he had a legitimate gripe. I told him “just to the bridge and back,” which turned into four-plus hours on the trail. I promised him one thing, then forced him to pivot to a much different, more difficult thing. “The irony is,” I went on, “When my dad left, he drove straight to Montana. How’s that for outdoorsy?”
“Hmph,” Will said again.
“I might have gone to Montana,” I said. “But he never asked me.”
***
When I was six, my best friend in our Fresno, California apartment complex was a girl named Shannon. She had curly locks of yellow hair, a freckled nose, and sunburnt shoulders. We trapped moths between our fingers, rubbed the dust from their wings, and pretended we could fly. One hot day, we shed all of our clothing and administered shots to one another’s genitals from the candy-filled syringe in a toy doctor’s kit. I listened to her chest through a foam stethoscope, the diaphragm covering her left nipple where I imagined her heartbeat would be. Later, my father found us lying nude on the warm concrete in front of our apartment. We had our arms in wings behind our heads, our eyes looking at the hazy sky. He jerked me to the ground by the elbow, threw me inside, and yelled at Shannon to march her “bare ass” back home to her mother. I watched her through the window run naked across the grass with her dress and panties clutched against her chest, sobbing and ashamed.
This is one of the memories I have of my father, and there are others. Like the time I watched him from the back seat of our Chevy Vega spit out the driver’s side window, and how he shoved me in the face when I tried the same thing, only to spray him in my saliva. Or the time on Christmas Eve when he told me to hurry outside to watch Santa fly over the apartment, only to break the news by the time I got there that I had just missed him. Or the time he pulled off the busy freeway after the 1983 Rose Bowl to vomit repeatedly over the guardrail. There was that time after I’d just turned eighteen and to celebrate me, he drank whiskey in a smoky, windowless Long Beach steakhouse then, at the urging of his cronies, wobbled to a microphone and sang “Sweet Caroline” accompanied by a karaoke machine. Or, in my twenties in a Black Angus parking lot, that time he leaned on his cane and said his biggest regret in life was leaving me and my mother. Or, once all hope was lost, the time I drove to the Thunderbird Mobile Estate Park in Palm Springs to say goodbye to a man I hardly knew and watched my step-monster pour generic-label vodka in his feeding tube while a cigarette burned in her cracked, grainy lips and she muttered at me to mind my own fucking business.
***
At Pinecrest Preschool in 1973, Miss Jacquie knelt with me on the floor and helped me cut the shape of a cow from a sheet of butcher paper. It was an enormous cow and I was a clever boy who could use scissors. With a sponge brush, I painted black, rounded patches on the cow’s body. It was a Holstein milk cow. I painted the teats and udder pink, both of which Miss Jacquie labeled “teats” and “udder.” Miss Jacquie labeled other parts of the cow: head, tail, thigh, heel, hoof, elbow. The highest part of the cow’s back, below the neck and above the shoulders, is called the withers. The nubbin that sticks out from the back of its heel is a dewclaw. The skin sagging like a pendant from its chest is the dewlap.
These are just a few parts of a cow.
My mother tacked the cow to the wall in my bedroom of our apartment in Van Nuys, California, a place called Wishing Well Ranch. It hung just above the headboard of my bed, covering nearly the entire wall. I think it must have been bigger than an actual cow. My father stood in my doorway with his arms folded across his chest as my mother fastened the cow in place. He didn’t like the size of the cow and how much space on the wall it occupied.
He said to me, “Why couldn’t you just get a chicken? Or a pig?”
My mother snapped. “Because he wanted a cow!” she said. “Your son wanted a cow!”
Sometime later I was jumping on my bed and there was an accident. I cracked my forehead against the headboard, right below the cow’s teats, and my father took me to the hospital to see a doctor who flicked a needle with his fingertip then pinched my skin together in a fold. This is where the doctor inserted the needle.
“You’re going to feel a little stick,” he said, and my forehead went numb. He then used a second needle in the shape of a C to hook sutures into my head to close the wound and bring my skin together in a seam. I had four small black stitches. The doctor said I was a brave boy. On our way out, he showed me a framed display of all the things children had swallowed and he removed: marbles, teeth, dice, thumbtacks, nails, needles, staples, a fishhook. This happened in June of 1973, just before my mother had to quit her job at Al-n-Ed’s Big Sound Corner in Watts so my father could move us to Tigard, Oregon, where one afternoon in the winter, with my parents working, I wound up after school in a funeral home with Lance Petitt and his mother, got lost, and walked into a stainless steel room, in the center of which lay the old, gray body of a man covered from the waist down in a white sheet; above the sheet, ribs wrapped in crepey skin, hair like the fringe on a Christmas stocking, a cavity in his chest big enough to hide an apple.
My Holstein milk cow did not make the trip to Oregon, but the scar on my forehead did; it is still there, settled now between worry lines, hanging about like a tiny crescent moon.
***
At first glance, the picture on the postcard looked like a cow, albeit one with a good deal more facial hair, a much bigger head, and horns like hat hooks just in front of its fuzzy ears. In their roundness, they were ears of the kind you might see on a Teddy bear. The eyes, though, were very much like a cow’s eyes, containing in their darkness the dull torpor singular to grazing animals.
“It’s from Montana!” I said.
My mother took the postcard from me, which had come in the mail on the occasion of my eighth birthday along with a promise from my father that he would see me soon, once he got back to California.
“Montana,” my mother said. She spat the word like a curse. She had gotten into the habit of using the dying ember of one cigarette to light the fresh paper on another. That’s the first thing she did after handing the postcard back to me, crossing her legs beneath her housecoat at the kitchen table and side-streaming smoke from the corner of her mouth.
From the driveway of our yellow stucco house in Fresno, California, it would have been about 1,300 miles to the spot where US 191 crosses from Wyoming into Montana. If that’s the route my father took, it was an odyssey he made with a woman named Patty, who rode shotgun in our Buick Skyhawk perhaps with her bare feet on the dash. If I am imagining this correctly, my father would have plucked that American bison postcard from a carousel near the cash register and included it with a package of condoms, a carton of Marlboros, and a six-pack of Schlitz in a liquor store near Bozeman. He would have opened the Skyhawk’s louvered hatch and wedged the bag with his provisions between Patty’s suitcase and his stenciled army duffel. They would have driven with the windows down in August, my father’s hand on Patty’s tan thigh, the two of them smoking cigarettes and marveling at their freedom while scanning the dial for a radio station playing Don McLean or Carly Simon. In this imagining, there are red taillights on a white Buick fading into a purpling sky.
This is one of the fictions I have created of my father, and there are others. Like the one where he doesn’t leave our yellow stucco house in his Buick Skyhawk right after reciting a Robert Service poem to me. Instead, he helps me plant trees in our backyard and shows me where he will one day have the hole dug for a swimming pool. Or the one where he takes me to Whitie’s Pet Shop on Blackstone Avenue in Fresno because he says “Every boy should have a dog.” Or the one where he coaches my peewee league baseball team, Christensen’s Food World, and teaches the boys how to run out a grounder or settle under a pop fly. There was the time just after I turned sixteen when we went to look at a used Mustang advertised in The Fresno Bee classifieds and he matched every one of my dollars with one of his own. And the day in September of 1986 when he helped me load the trunk of that Mustang with everything I would need for my first year in college: all of my clothes in his stenciled army duffel, a typewriter I’d use to write my term papers, a laundry basket, a bar of soap, a bottle opener, a toothbrush, a boombox, a backpack, a carton of cassette tapes, a sheet set, a comforter, a pillow, two rolls of quarters, a long distance calling card, a hand-written letter with the words “If you ever need anything…” Or, once all hope was lost, the time I sat next to his hospital bed and watched my mother lift cool water to his quivering lips and say, “Good, good, that’s a big drink.” Or, the time I went to his funeral at the Riverside National Cemetery to witness an army chaplain commit my father’s remains to the welcoming earth.
There are years of blank space filled with such fictions, written so that I might have something, even a counterfeit something, to remember.
***
On the river gorge trail, Will and I tracked a cow lowing from the trees. We crept through the green grass in the grey light and pulled back a tangle of tall weeds to watch her worry the mud under her hooves.
“She’s loud,” Will said.
“She’s calling for someone,” I said.
The wind lifted and the black cow walked toward us; at the same time, just yards away, a red calf clamored from within the brush, snapping branches. I saw her from the corner of my eye. She leapt forward, in the direction of safety, to the place from where her mother was calling. Startled, Will jumped into me and cried out like a small child. I put my arm over his shoulder and he let me notch him against my collarbone. I set my chin on the top of his head and closed my eyes and inhaled his damp redolence.
“I thought it was a bear,” he said. He clutched his hand over his heart.
“It was just a cow,” I said.
As I held him there, I was flushed with recognition: the mussed hair, the pimply forehead, the whiskers, soft and blond on his upper lip. The resonance of his new voice. Then, too, his seething chemistry, his indifference, his curiosity. I have lived that same boy’s life. I know what he is going through, and despite his cool self-possession, an outward veneer that would have you believe otherwise, there is a tempest inside him. There must be. You cannot be a teenager without it. And what gets to me, what makes the recognition so painful, is that I know the small child is long gone. He doesn’t quite know it yet, but I do. I saw a glimmer of him there, for a split second, when he instinctively sought the safety of me, and there I was: bigger than he could be; startled, too, but not afraid; a familiar body to receive and warm him, which at that moment, as a curtain of rain flew toward us, was the very thing he needed most.
Chuck Radke's memoir, Stuccoville: Life Without a Net (WiDo), launched in January. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Sierra Nevada Review, Palante, Showbear Family Circus, HASH, and Montana Mouthful. His short fiction has appeared in Mud Season Review, San Joaquin Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Stream, and South Dakota Review. Read more about Chuck at https://charleslewisradke.com.