Free At the Jim Bridger: Stories by Ron Carlson

ORDINARY SON
     
    THE STORY OF MY FAMOUS family is a story of genius and its consequences, I suppose, and I am uniquely and particularly suited to tell the story since genius avoided me—and I it—and I remain an ordinary man, if there is such a thing, calm in all weathers, aware of event, but uninterested and generally incapable of deciphering implication. As my genius brother Garrett used to say, “Reed, you’re not screwed too tight like the rest of us, but you’re still screwed.” Now, there’s a definition of the common man you can trust, and further, you can trust me. There’s no irony in that or deep inner meaning or Freudian slips, any kind of slips really, simply what it says. My mother told me many times I have a good heart, and of course, she was a genius, and that heart should help with this story, but a heart, as she said so often, good as it may be, is always trouble.
    Part of the reason this story hasn’t come together before, the story of my famous family, is that no one remembers they were related. They all had their own names. My father was Duncan Landers, the noted NASA physicist, the man responsible for every facet of the photography of the first moon landing. There is still camera gear on the moon inscribed with this name. That is, Landers. He was born Duncan Lrsdyksz, which was changed when NASA began their publicrelationscampaigns in the mid-sixties; the space agency suggested that physicists who worked for NASA should have more vowels in their names. They didn’t want their press releases to seem full of typographical errors or foreigners. Congress was reading this stuff. So Lrsdyksz became Landers. (My father’s close associate Igor Oeuroi didn’t get just vowels; his name became LeRoy Rodgers. After le Cowboy Star, my mother quipped.)
    My mother was Gloria Rainstrap, the poet who spent twenty years fighting for workers’ rights from Texas to Alaska; in one string she gave four thousand consecutive lectures in her travels, not missing a night as she drove from village to village throughout the country. It still stands as some kind of record.
    Wherever she went, she stirred up the best kind of trouble, reading her work and then spending hours in whatever guest house or spare bedroom she was given, reading the poems and essays of the people who had come to see her. She was tireless, driven by her overwhelming sense of fairness, and she was certainly the primary idealist to come out of twentieth-century Texas. When she started leaving home for months, years at a time, I was just a lad, but I remember her telling my father, Duncan, one night, “Texas is too small for what I have to do.”
    This was not around the dinner table. We were a family of geniuses and did not have a dinner table. In fact, the only table we did have was my father’s drafting table, which was in the entry so that you had to squeeze sideways to even get into our house. “It sets the tone,” Duncan used to say. “I want anyone coming into our home to see my work. That work is the reason we have a roof, anyway.” He said that one day after my friend Jeff Shreckenbah and I inched past him on the way to my room. “And who are these people coming in the door?”
    “It is your son and his friend,” I told him.
    “Good,” he said, his benediction, but he said it deeply into his drawing, which is where he spent his time at home. He wouldn’t have known if the Houston Oilers had arrived, because he was about to invent the modern gravity-free vacuum hinge that is still used today.
    Most of my father, Duncan Landers’s, work was classified, top-secret, eyes-only, but it didn’t matter. No one except Jeff Shreckenbah came to our house. People didn’t come over.
    We were geniuses. We had no television, and we had no telephone. “What should I do,” my father would say from where he sat in the entry, drawing, “answer some little buzzing device? Say hello to it?” NASA tried to install phones for us. Duncan took them