THE GUTS TO GET GONE

I was born in 1946, in the cabin I would grow up in, just my mother and father there to see me arrive. That cabin is long gone by now, I’m sure, and good riddance. The town we lived in, Sunshine—if you could call it a town—is also long-gone, and good riddance to that too.

Sunshine—named that way for obvious reasons—was forever dusty and parched, not much more than a dirt road with the huge hoarding for The Sunshine Bar looming large over everything else, dwarfing the General Store and the barber shop and the two or three other businesses that somehow scraped a living.

There were the old men sitting out in the same place every day, watching everyone else go by as if that was what they were paid to do, and the kids who didn’t go to school, like me, waiting around to tease the ones who were made to go.

The sun seemed to bake the dirt so you could taste it, and no matter what was happening there was always a stillness in the place, like it was just waiting for time to pass. Even as a boy it seemed like that, like the kind of place people didn’t ever get to leave, like there wasn’t anywhere else to leave for.

I spent most of my days doing nothing much, out back of The Sunshine with the rest of the boys smoking cigarettes, or trying to get beers bought for us in the liquour store or looking for some other kind of mischief, but mostly just loitering and eyeing the girls on their way home from school.

I never had much patience for school myself—and school for me neither—so most days I spent dallying in town or making the short trek out past our little cabin through scrubland to the creek. With all the heat and dust choking us up year-round, the creek was a blessing until it all but disappeared.

My Poppa was right about some things. He was right about my mother never coming back, for one. And he was right about them coming to dam up that river, too.

Not that anyone needed our creek for much, other than cooling off in, maybe catching a stunted little brookie or two. The water there was no good for drinking and the land around no good for farming, so I guessed it didn’t matter too much, but that didn’t stop my old man getting riled up about it.

I couldn’t figure why that creek meant so much to him, but once Momma left there wasn’t a whole lot for him to get riled up about anymore, and I knew well enough to stay out of his way. He was a drinker—me and Momma had always known when best to avoid him—but he wasn’t the worst of the drinkers in town, and there was more than just a few. But the river getting dammed was just one more thing for him to be angry about.

*

Momma left quietly one night, without telling a soul.

I heard them hollering that particular evening, but there wasn’t too many nights I didn’t hear them at it. It was louder than usual though, and fiercer. It seemed to go on for hours, until eventually I must’ve fell asleep and when I woke up everything was very quiet.

Poppa said she was gone for good and not coming back, but I didn’t believe him. He wasn’t an easy man to be around, and Momma was something of a free spirit—I’d heard this said of her, though I didn’t understand exactly what it meant at the time—and it wasn’t the first time she’d left in that way. She’d always come back, after a few days or maybe a week or two, and I didn’t think much of it at first.

I never knew where she’d go those times she’d up and leave. She never talked about having any family—I asked her enough times when I was small, hoping for some long lost cousins or an uncle or something, but she was from way across country and said there wasn’t any, or none worth knowing at least.

When she didn't come back I thought he might try to go find her, even said as much to him. I got silence for an answer, and then a taste of his belt when I asked one time too many. He didn't seem sad she was gone, mostly just angry, but for him the two were maybe the same thing. Didn’t go looking for her after the night she left. Didn’t ask none of the people in town about her. Said his pride wouldn’t allow it.

I learned not to stay around the cabin too much, and I learned not to ask about Momma. I guess I was angry too, with her disappearing that way without me.

Time passed on like it does, and after a while, after a few months or maybe almost a year, I stopped thinking about her coming back to get me, and knew she was gone for good.

My old man knew it too. He wasn’t ever a talker—not like Momma was—but after she left he hardly spoke at all.

*

It’s a funny thing about a little town like that—everyone seemed to know everybody’s business, but nobody seemed to really care. My father was never a friendly kind of person, and once Momma left no one ever stopped by the cabin no more.

People started to whisper about him when he went into town—at least that’s what he said, the few times he said anything—and he stopped going in altogether, sent me in his stead to pick up supplies and whatnot. Folk had liked my Momma, said what a shame it was, her leaving me like that.

I didn’t know whose fault it was, her leaving. All I knew was she left.

Not a whole lot changed. I kept my distance from school. I guess I should’ve been in there learning, but I never really saw the point of it all. Some kids said it was a ticket out of town, but I came to figure the only ticket you needed was the guts to get going.

Well, I got gone eventually, and once I did I didn’t stop until I was just about as far away as I could get, in the end putting an entire ocean between me and Sunshine.

*

Before Momma left, Poppa used to go down to the creek some evenings. Said it gave him the peace he needed from being holed up in the cabin with the two of us. Sometimes, when I was smaller, I’d follow him down there, sneaky-sneaky, watching from behind the cottonwoods. I think the only time I ever saw him content, or close to it, was when he was down there fishing on his own.

We had a busted old gramaphone, and we’d know he was in the mood for some fishing whenever he set it playing. He’d put on the only record we owned, and I’d know straight off that once it was finished he’d get up, struggle into his fishing boots and head on out with his fishing pole over his shoulder, whistling to himself.

My baby’s coming back to me

She went away

To make me pay

But now she’s coming back...

It wasn’t like Poppa to enjoy something sentimental like that. He wasn’t a religious type—I heard Momma say once that the war had driven it out of him—but it always seemed to me that the old tune was like a prayer to him, and once Momma was gone he didn’t feel like praying no more, and didn’t feel like fishing neither, now there was no one left to cook the fish.

He even took to telling me not to go down to the creek anymore, but I still went when I knew he wouldn’t find out, fishing or swimming or just fooling with the other boys whose parents didn’t ever pay much mind to.

People had started talking about the big dam project up-state, how the creek would just as good as disappear once they built it, but how the town might finally get electrified. Mostly there wasn’t much else to talk about.

For a long time there was no sign of anything changing, until I showed up one day and found a murky kind of colour to the water.

People didn’t seem too bothered by it all—the idea of finally having electrified homes saw to that—but the old man said the dam would dry the creek to the bone, and got so riled that he borrowed a car and drove up-state to have a look for himself. I don’t know why, but he made me go with him.

He had some deep sort of feeling about that creek and what was happening to it, because once we got up there and saw all those machines and those men working away, he just stood staring out at that big river being dug up and pushed around, just stood for a long while and stared with a sorrowful look, like he was seeing something in all that muddy water that I couldn’t.

‘That’s it, boy,’ he said. ‘There ain’t no stopping it now.’

By then he barely spoke, like I said. Apart from hollering orders at me, or just plain hollering, we lived mostly in silence. I didn’t know what to say, or if I should say anything at all, so I left those words hanging there, and we drove back home in the quiet, him thinking and me wondering.

*

Me and the boys still swum in the creek when it wasn’t all grey and filthy-looking, but there came a point when you couldn’t even swim, it was just too dirty, and any fish had long since disappeared. I suppose all that cement getting into the water upstream had killed them. The water got lower and lower each time we went to look, and after a while we stopped going to look altogether.

But I started to see my Poppa go down there again. There was a change in him after that day up by the dam. He put on age and turned more and more to the liquor, took to mumbling all sorts of things that made no sense, and soon enough the only time he left the cabin was to go down to the creek.

He started to listen to that old song again, too, usually late in the evening with the drink in him, and after that he’d put on his boots and stumble out. He’d stay out there for hours sometimes.

I tried to steer clear as best I could, staying out myself until I thought he’d be in bed asleep. He took to blaming the people in town for letting the creek go dry, even cursed me for it. He would have taken his belt to me more often if he was able, but by then he wasn’t, and I was getting big myself.

It took a couple years, but they finished with the dam soon enough. Us kids found other things to do, and the folks in town found other things to talk about, and after a time it was like there wasn’t ever a creek down there to begin with. Poppa just kept on drinking, listening to that same old record over and over, mumbling sometimes about the creek drying up, sometimes about the Japanese, someimes about Momma—but by then I didn’t have much of an urge to know about her neither.

‘My baby’s coming back to me

She went away

To make me pay

But now she’s coming back...’

It was playing that evening when I finally left. Just like the old days he sat there listening to it, and when the song finished he stood up in the silence and walked on out without even looking at me.

I followed him one last time, creeping at a distance the way I used to.

The creek was nothing but a drain by then, and it was the last place I saw him, wandering up and down the banks. I knew I’d gotten too big for that dried up place, too big for him.

I guess I knew too, by then, how that creek had taken my Momma, knew why she wasn't ever coming back.

I left him standing there alone on the bank.

I left quickly, barely packing, disappearing without telling a soul, just like Momma.