Free North of Montana by April Smith Page A
Authors: April Smith
will be dead and I can sell his condo for a nice piece of change.
I know I am fooling myself with that kind of thinking. We buried my mother when I was fourteen, my grandmother was gone before I was one year old. One more trip to Eternal Valley Memorial Park would finally cut me loose from the already thin thread of kinship like rusty shears operating in the hands of one of those gnarly sisters of fate. It wouldn’t be a clean easy cut, not at all, but a slow severing with lots of fray and lots of pain. I can see my fingers stretching up last minute to catch the end of the line so I won’t fall into space, because without my Poppy I don’t know who I would be.
In fact, when I really look at our family, it becomes as clear as the lucidity of cactus spikes revealed by the blood-red sun that three generations of females have lived our lives not as free individuals but in relation to this one man.
Grandma Elizabeth was a policeman’s wife in a small seaside town in the 1950s—what choice did she have? When she died, my mother, aside from working as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, took over the solemn duty of caring for Poppy, preparing Koenigsberger Klops, his favorite veal and pork meatballs (when he worked the night shift, she woke up at five in the morning to warm them up for him in the oven). These past ten years it has been my turn (drawing the line at Koenigsberger Klops). We talk on the phone several times a week, I drive out to see him at least once a month. First thing in the morning Poppy is in my thoughts, sometimes with a fearsome rush of anxiety that he has died during the night, although I know he is independent and strong as a horse. When I have a question, his voice tells me what to do. When I screw up, his voice punishes me. I may be a hotshot federal agent who carries a gun and a pair of handcuffs (they’re light, you can throw them in the bottom of your purse trash) but my self-worth is still measured by my grandfather’s rules. From childhood he was my standard and my mother’s standard and I have always believed as innocently and completely in the rightness of Poppy as I do the American flag.
I am here for an overnight visit to wish him a belated seventieth birthday, but questions about my supposed cousin Violeta Alvarado and my father and the lost Latino side of the family are definitely percolating in the back of my mind, so that when I approach the tan steel door loaded with groceries, a birthday cake, and a duffel bag and hear barking from within, I am not pleased.
Sure enough it’s Moby Dick, one of Poppy’s whacked-out desert pals, and his friendly pack of killer Akita dogs, which he raises in a shack out there in the wilderness, illegally crossing purebreds with German shepherds to create these hulking muscular monsters with mottled gray fur and curling tails and schizophrenic personalities, just like his. Bikers and police officers with families buy them for five hundred dollars apiece.
“Freeze! It’s the FBI!” laughs Moby Dick, opening the door. I give him a wincing smile. His enormous bouncing belly is almost covered by a black T-shirt that says Fuck Dieting.
The television is on, beer cans on the coffee table.
“It’s about the dogs.”
“No problem.” He drags them out to the balcony by their collars and slides the heavy glass doors shut, shouting, “Commissioner! Your little girl’s here!”
I put the stuff in the kitchen. Poppy keeps a neat place. The dish drainer is empty. One box of Keebler’s crackers on the counter. Inside the refrigerator everything is low salt, low cholesterol—except for Bloody Mary mix and two New York steaks. At least Moby Dick isn’t staying for dinner.
“Annie!” He is there in the doorway wearing nothing but a white towel at the waist, vain as ever, showing off his extraordinary tanned barrel chest and weight-lifters ropy arms.
Even though he is seventy, hugging him bare-chested is an experience in maleness that brings
I know I am fooling myself with that kind of thinking. We buried my mother when I was fourteen, my grandmother was gone before I was one year old. One more trip to Eternal Valley Memorial Park would finally cut me loose from the already thin thread of kinship like rusty shears operating in the hands of one of those gnarly sisters of fate. It wouldn’t be a clean easy cut, not at all, but a slow severing with lots of fray and lots of pain. I can see my fingers stretching up last minute to catch the end of the line so I won’t fall into space, because without my Poppy I don’t know who I would be.
In fact, when I really look at our family, it becomes as clear as the lucidity of cactus spikes revealed by the blood-red sun that three generations of females have lived our lives not as free individuals but in relation to this one man.
Grandma Elizabeth was a policeman’s wife in a small seaside town in the 1950s—what choice did she have? When she died, my mother, aside from working as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, took over the solemn duty of caring for Poppy, preparing Koenigsberger Klops, his favorite veal and pork meatballs (when he worked the night shift, she woke up at five in the morning to warm them up for him in the oven). These past ten years it has been my turn (drawing the line at Koenigsberger Klops). We talk on the phone several times a week, I drive out to see him at least once a month. First thing in the morning Poppy is in my thoughts, sometimes with a fearsome rush of anxiety that he has died during the night, although I know he is independent and strong as a horse. When I have a question, his voice tells me what to do. When I screw up, his voice punishes me. I may be a hotshot federal agent who carries a gun and a pair of handcuffs (they’re light, you can throw them in the bottom of your purse trash) but my self-worth is still measured by my grandfather’s rules. From childhood he was my standard and my mother’s standard and I have always believed as innocently and completely in the rightness of Poppy as I do the American flag.
I am here for an overnight visit to wish him a belated seventieth birthday, but questions about my supposed cousin Violeta Alvarado and my father and the lost Latino side of the family are definitely percolating in the back of my mind, so that when I approach the tan steel door loaded with groceries, a birthday cake, and a duffel bag and hear barking from within, I am not pleased.
Sure enough it’s Moby Dick, one of Poppy’s whacked-out desert pals, and his friendly pack of killer Akita dogs, which he raises in a shack out there in the wilderness, illegally crossing purebreds with German shepherds to create these hulking muscular monsters with mottled gray fur and curling tails and schizophrenic personalities, just like his. Bikers and police officers with families buy them for five hundred dollars apiece.
“Freeze! It’s the FBI!” laughs Moby Dick, opening the door. I give him a wincing smile. His enormous bouncing belly is almost covered by a black T-shirt that says Fuck Dieting.
The television is on, beer cans on the coffee table.
“It’s about the dogs.”
“No problem.” He drags them out to the balcony by their collars and slides the heavy glass doors shut, shouting, “Commissioner! Your little girl’s here!”
I put the stuff in the kitchen. Poppy keeps a neat place. The dish drainer is empty. One box of Keebler’s crackers on the counter. Inside the refrigerator everything is low salt, low cholesterol—except for Bloody Mary mix and two New York steaks. At least Moby Dick isn’t staying for dinner.
“Annie!” He is there in the doorway wearing nothing but a white towel at the waist, vain as ever, showing off his extraordinary tanned barrel chest and weight-lifters ropy arms.
Even though he is seventy, hugging him bare-chested is an experience in maleness that brings