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jerrygabriel.net Falling Water Fiction Quarterly (Tampa Tribune), March 30,1997 The big farm house was dirty and white with its paint chipping. Bare lumber showed through in places, dark from the rain, and rusted, dilapidated cars filled the muddy yard, parked anywhere there was space. Grandpa stood on the porch wearing a Cincinnati Reds cap, his eyes drawn deep into his head. He held a box of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer under his arm. When we got close enough, he smiled. "Hola," he said. Mom straightened out her dress with her hands and said "Hello, there," but in a quiet voice, the way she had talked while Dad was in the hospital. Dad and Donnie and I all stood quietly behind her. I noticed how Dad looked toward the hills, like he might be searching for something there, while Grandpa and Mom said a few words about the weather. Donnie ran off through the yard until Dad, still holding the casserole dish, yelled, "Get back over here." And Donnie did, right away. Dad had little patience in those months and we learned to listen to him the first time. Donnie had run away in August, and when he was turned in by a family fifteen miles away two days later, hungry and dirty, I thought Dad might actually kill him. He beat him out in the barn and Donnie's wails carried across our entire farm, Dad's guttural questions two octaves lower. My mother and I braced ourselves in the house, both of us hoping, I think, that he wouldn't kill him, that our family wouldn't fall apart now. A door opened then behind Grandpa and I could hear voices for a second, and then a small woman appeared and the door slammed behind her. She walked over to Grandpa's side and he wrapped his arm around her. She was much younger than him-twenty-six years younger, I learned later-and she was short, coming up just to the crook of his elbow. Grandpa said to Mom-or maybe to of all of us-"Like ye to meet Shirley." He smiled for a minute, and his teeth showed, and I could see a couple that were dark or missing. Mom walked up the steps to the porch and shook the woman's hand and said, "Nice to meet you." After a brief moment during which everyone stood awkwardly still, Grandpa turned around toward us again, taking Shirley by the elbow, and he introduced us, one at a time, without even hesitating, like our names were as common to his tongue as pass the butter; but this was only the second time I'd seen this man in my life: the first was two years prior, when he showed up at our farm and reentered my mother's life after nearly forty years absence. During this introduction, Shirley stayed on the porch and we stayed in the grass and Donnie and I nodded to the young woman just the way Dad did. *** Grandpa and Shirley led us through the peeling front door, and into the first room, which was a huge country kitchen. Inside, a dozen or so women moved about, frantically preparing Thanksgiving supper, and Grandpa stashed the new beer in a rounded refrigerator in a corner. Some of the women smiled at us as Mom pushed me and Donnie through the kitchen into a room where Dallas played Houston on a black and white television set and a roomful of men sat on torn chairs and couches. They were heartily drinking Genesee and Pabst Blue Ribbon and had a coffee table full of empties to prove it. Mom pulled off my coat and hung it in a large closet Grandpa had shown her. I looked at her for a second, wanting to tell her that I didn't like it here, but before I could even form the words, she said, "These are your relations," as if it were the single most important facet of being alive. I knew that she had read my mind like she sometimes could and there was not going to be any argument about it. Mom disappeared into the kitchen and in the living room Grandpa inquired about the score and introduced Dad in nearly the same breath. A man in bib overalls said that it was tied, 0-0, and Grandpa pretended interest, nodding thoughtfully. I watched as Dad leaned into a dark corner, tightly holding the can of beer Grandpa had given him, glancing at the television. The men looked up from the game briefly to see what Dad looked like and then immediately returned their attention to an incomplete pass on the screen. Dad nodded almost imperceptibly to the men and took a swig from his beer. Donnie and I stood near a boy and girl sitting on the floor playing an adult board game. "What's a membrane?" the girl asked us, looking at a small card she held in her hand, as if the question were a perfectly reasonable one and we might be in possession of the answer. I shrugged and Donnie, uninterested, moved toward some other kids; there was no shortage of kids about the house. I stood and watched the game for a minute and listened to the mumble of the men in the adjacent room. When I finally moved, I saw that Donnie had already made friends with two kids playing with Matchbox cars; they were dressed almost exactly like us, which really bothered me. Donnie had chosen a favorite car, I saw, an old-style ambulance, and was running it along the scuffed wooden floor, alternately making the sound of an engine by vibrating his lips and mimicking a siren with loud falsetto screeches. I moved among them and sat for a long time in the empty corridor, carefully running an anonymous car back and forth on the stairs. The noise of strangers filled the place and I was thinking again of the day Donnie had run away. To hell with it, he'd told me that morning. He had had enough. If he hadn't been found camped in a cave along Salt Creek, he might have died or just gone on forever, never returning home, and never, for a minute, missing it. That, I knew, was the difference-or one of them-between me and my brother. *** A loud call came from the kitchen finally and everyone formed a line that stretched back through the hall and into the television room. We had our plates handed to us one at a time, like at school, and these women who wore long dresses and had their hair up, stood on the other side of a table, and scooped things onto them for us. I sat on the floor with my food and listened to the men talk about what Houston should have done on a fourth down and inches. Everyone except Grandpa agreed that they made the right move by going up the middle, even though they didn't get the first down. Grandpa, though, thought they should have passed it. "Can't run head-on into something like that," he said. "You got the element of surprise with the pass. When they're expecting one thing, you just go for it all. You go downtown with it." *** After the game, all the men filed outside. With the rest of the women upstairs looking at a bridal gown one of them would soon be wearing, my Mom and Shirley stood by themselves in the kitchen, leaning up against the countertop. "Go outside," she told us when Donnie and I came into the room, tired, wanting to go home. I could tell that she was tired too. I watched Shirley while Mom talked to us, watched the way she looked at Mom, the way she held her coffee and sipped from it. I thought that it must have been strange for Mom to have a new mother, but something made me realize that she probably didn't see it that way. When the two of them were standing beside each other then, I thought that Mom might even have been a little older. As it turned out, they were exactly the same age. *** Outside, the men were drunk. Their language loosened and a man in a beard and flannel shirt swore at his kids to get away from the creek. A few of the men laughed and sang a silly country song while they set empty beer cans on top of the fence posts separating the yard from a pasture. There was a light drizzle and the sky was turning the dark color of the hillsides. In the yard everything was wet, and a creek ran high just beyond the fence. My brother and I stood near a corner of the house by ourselves, our hands in our pockets. Next to us, water dripped from a rusted rainspout into an overflowing metal bucket. Several more of the men came through the back door and stood on the small porch, surveying things for a moment. The porch was crowded with boxes of pop bottles and tin trash cans, and it seemed like their weight might push the floor through. Four of them carried rifles. Dad was in the back of the group, but had no gun. He held a beer in one hand and the other was stuffed into the pocket of his jacket. When the rest of them moved from the porch, he took a seat on the wet boards of the top step. Grandpa and another man pulled lawn chairs into the yard and sat down, placing their beers in the damp grass beside them. Everybody seemed unaware of the rain, or just unbothered, and the men with guns lined up twenty yards from the target and started shooting at the cans. Every third or fourth shot, a can would fall from a post into the creek and would bob in the water until it disappeared behind an old shed and high grass. The men cheered each shot at first, milling about while they waited their turn, ribbing each other, chatting loudly. I moved next to Dad on the steps and Donnie stepped closer to the men with the guns. Dad and I sat quietly for what seemed a long time and the shooting continued rapidly, like a small battle was going on nearby. Even if the quiet was too much, I resigned myself to staying there as long as he did and face whatever it was between us. He took slow drinks from the tin can in his hand while a man ran out to the fence, holding his hands up and yelling, "Cease fire, cease fire." He put up new cans in place of the ones that had fallen and then retreated again behind the firing lines. Grandpa had a gun now, aiming the thing haphazardly, shooting from his lawn chair-from his hip-like some arrogant mercenary. I listened to the muffled echo of his shots as they flew past the cans and into the pasture and I thought about my mother when she was my age, how her father had disappeared, leaving them to make their own way in those difficult years toward the end of the Depression. After a string of poor shooting, Grandpa gave out a final laugh at his bad aim and pointed the gun toward the wet grass at his feet, wedging it under his right arm. Over near the corncribs and parked cars, a group of women appeared, and I could see Shirley pointing things out to them-flower gardens and a dead tree struck by lightning. When another man knocked down three cans in three shots, he turned to the women and bowed foolishly, awarding himself contest champion with the gesture. The women giggled and one of them-maybe it was his wife-ridiculed him. Grandpa turned then, after he had the gun loaded again, to give someone else a try, and my brother held out his hands for it. But Grandpa looked over his head and directly toward me and my dad. "Come here and try yer hand at this, Clarence," he said above the noise, and a lot of the men looked our way. Dad waved him off, though, and stared at his beer. But everyone looked then, including some of the women. The men started in on him. "Come on, Clare," they said. He swore under his breath and, setting the bottle between us, stood up. He looked down at me, just before he walked away. He wore an expression I'd never seen from him before, one I interpreted as the communication of a promise; he would hit this can and then everything would be back to normal. He limped toward Grandpa, holding his arms at his sides, placing each step slowly on the wet ground before taking another. When he finally got there, he took the gun and, holding it down, looked across the yard to the can that rested on top of the old, worn post. He raised the gun to his shoulder. I could see only half of his face and couldn't tell if he squinted to see the can or to fight the pain in his chest, but he squinted hard and there seemed to be a silence carrying over the place. He lowered the gun twice to look at the target. The light rain turned into something a little more then, and some of the men began to pick up their beers and walk toward cover, all the while watching the man with the gun, some of them backpeddling so they could. They moved under the porch and window awnings. A few of them went inside the screen door, but stayed in the foyer to watch. Dad did not move. The water spotted his jacket, leaving wet patches here and there, and ran down his face, but his eye remained trained, squinting down the long barrel. And in the next instant, the rain picked up another notch, not yet downpour, but driving, and most of the crowd seemed to give up on him and began running for the doors. I stayed where I was on the top step, though, even when a man told me to get out of the way. I pretended like I didn't hear him and I stared out into the backyard. When Grandpa went past, he said, "Let's get inside, son," and I didn't say anything to him either. I didn't acknowledge his words and scarcely even looked at him with recognition. In fact, it was true that-as wet as he was and as little as I knew him-I hardly did recognize him. The rain moved in from the hills beyond the house then like a terrible swarm of bees. Near the parked cars where the women last were, I saw a figure step forward from underneath the tin roof of an open-air shed, and I knew from the walk and the way her arms crossed her chest, that it was my mother. She moved into the rain, and even though nearly everyone else was gone, my father still stood, patient, taking in and holding that last breath before pulling the trigger. And when the rain finally let loose and a thunder clap exploded over the farm, I thought I heard the echo of a rifle shot and I saw what I thought was the empty beer can falling into the water on the other side of the fence and disappearing into the noise of thunder and rain and rushing water. The rain came down torrentially then, in sheets of solid water. I sat under the metal roof but the rain slanted in and caught most of me anyway, and I looked out into the darkness the storm had brought, trying to make out what seemed like two people in the middle of the downpour. If it was them that I saw out there, the mysterious people who represented everything I didn't understand about the world and the few things I did, then they were very close then, maybe touching. And I told myself that it was them, and that they were touching.