I don’t know why no one ever told me that Dick was short for Richard. I found out on the playground like all the other kids did. Either by shouting it at someone or having it shouted at me. But I never considered going by the name Dick, not just because of the obvious nickname but there already was one. He belongs in that category of vague relations that is either a Great Uncle or an Elderly Cousin that everyone around me referred to as Dick Selkirk. I never knew exactly what his relationship to our family was, only that he shared a last name and that was good enough for everyone around.
Dick Selkirk was already an old man and I was barely 16 the day my dad took me to see him. Not that being social was the point of our visit mind you. He (my dad that is) had this idea of towing home a broken down “Deuce and a half” from out of the little patch of garden Dick worked on his property, then repairing it and selling it off for profit. But he didn’t know what condition it’s engine was in or even if there was an engine. I recall hearing that it was a ’56 model and that someone from the local mining concern had gotten it stuck in Dick Selkirk’s field one day and just left it never to return. It was not revealed to me what the mining company wanted with a former military vehicle or why they didn’t take it with them when the mines ran out and everything else of value was hauled away. “More trouble than it was worth!” is the most likely reason.
My dad thought Dick might have the keys to it and well it was just going to waste and rot out there in the field ain’t it? The whole thing sounded like a bad idea to me and I really wanted to ask him seriously what sort of shape could it be in after 3 decades in a cornfield but I knew better than to say anything. It wasn’t my place to ask as I’d been told often enough. I don’t even remember why I was along for the ride or where my brothers were. I guess I was the only one home at the time so I won the lottery. So there I was squeezed into the front of my dad’s flatbed truck between him and his drinkin’ buddy Lloyd Maynard. Lloyd was a thin dark-haired character who had a little black mustache like Gomez Addams. That was about all I could find to like about him. He talked constantly which was a habit that made my dad insane when other people did it but for some reason he put up with it from Lloyd.
We hadn’t gone very far from our house when Lloyd proceeded to share with me the reason why he only drank peppermint schnapps. I hadn’t asked, he was just trying to include me in the constant stream of dialog he generated or possibly continuing some conversation he was having with my dad before I got in the truck. “Cause then boy if the Fuzz pulls you over they can’t prove you were drinkin’! They smell peppermint breath mints instead of schnapps , or that rotgut your daddy makes.” My dad reached across me to whack Lloyd in the chest and his elbow hit me in the mouth at the same time. My head banged back against the rear window and I tried real hard not to say anything but my eyes started and I sort of just growled out “Owwww” and stared straight ahead. Growled as well as a 16 year old might I guess. My dad pulled his arm back like he was going to hit me on purpose this time but Lloyd suddenly pounded the dashboard so hard that dust flew around the cab and he let out a raucous laugh. I didn’t know which of us he was laughing at but my dad apparently did cause he joined in and they spent the next half hour taking turns pushing me into the other one or reaching across my face or behind my head in order to thump or pinch the other one. Lloyd concluded his lesson with: “Just remember to have some peppermint breath mints in your car to show them!” An outside observer might point out Lloyds lack of a car or even a license but there was no way I was gonna say anything. Just being within arms reach of my dad made me leery of anything that might set him off. As it was I didn’t dodge their blows so much as deflect them. I’d never seen this sort of behavior from my dad before and didn’t know if I should encourage it, join in, or express any emotion at all. I already had a sour stomach from the herky-jerky suspension on the truck and from sitting between my dad who smelled of gasoline and Camel cigarettes and Lloyd Maynard who smelled of peppermint schnapps and whatever harder liquor he was drinking before we got on the road. I wasn’t big on praying but I sort of had a litany in my mind that I repeated over and over to myself about how bad it would be to get sick right there in the truck and I promised my stomach if it would just hold on I would empty it at the earliest acceptable opportunity.
We were caught by the one stop light in Ceredo and while we waited a car with three girls in it pulled into the turn lane on the right side of us. Lloyd rolled the down his window and proceeded to grin and wriggle his tongue and eyebrows at them. This set off peals of laughter from the girls and he nudged me hard in the side as he proclaimed “Oh yeah, they know what that means, they’re young but they know!” My dad actually seemed a bit put out that his buddy was hanging half out the window of his truck but he couldn’t resist looking around us to see who was in the car. “Why that’s your girlfriend in the back seat ain’t it boy?” I had been trying to change the light to green with the sheer force of my mind so I could get out of this situation but at that comment I turned my head and looked over Lloyd’s shoulder. I’m not sure why because I didn’t have a girlfriend of any sort to actually be in a back seat. I guess I couldn’t resist seeing what my dad thought was girlfriend material looked like. I didn’t recognize anyone in the car but they however immediately recognized me and and the laughter got even louder. They called out “Sell-Kirk! Selllll Kirk Honey!? Who’s your handsome friends? That’s a nice set of wheels you have there Selkirk, all seven of them!” Then more laughter. I turned and looked out the rear window to hide my embarrassment and to pretend to check the spare tossed among the sawdust and tools on the back of the truck. Someone was behind us and beeped his horn which only made my dad cuss and flip them off. Refusing to move forward “Until I’m good and goddamned ready to.” Then he said “You can get out here if you want boy those ladies look like they need some lovin’!” Next to slowly being eaten alive by ants that was the last thing I wanted to do right then. I just nodded forward at the green light and said “No thank you sir, I want to go with you on your mission.”
There was a brief silence in the truck then even more laughter erupted from both sides as my dad finally put the truck into gear. “A mission? Did you hear that Lloyd Maynard? We’re on a God-damned mission!” He deftly worked thru all the gears as we left the girls in the turn lane behind and looked at me in the mirror. “Well listen up swabbie, you aren’t going on any F–king mission, you’re going to sit right there and not get out of the F–king truck unless I tell you to. Got it?” I quickly nodded and then said “Yessir” barely suppressing the urge to salute. I cursed myself for putting my dad in a military mindset though he might have already been there just thinking about the Deuce and a Half he was about to see. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind and instead tried to recall the names of the three girls in that car. I was certain I’d hear about this incident at school the next day but couldn’t place whether they were in my class or if they were upperclassmen. I stared forward and up, occasionally seeing my dad’s perpetually stubbled face reflected back at me as he changed lanes. I thought a lot of dark things at that reflection before settling on my usual game of calculating the percentage chance of surviving a crash with him at the wheel.
Long before Han Solo said “Never tell me the odds.” and even before I held my first pair of percentile dice in DnD I was working out the odds of a being in an accident with my dad and my potential survival rate. I had a list of things that deducted from the base chance and then tried to add back in the conservative driving skills and quick reflexes of strangers. Strangers who moved quickly to get out of my dad’s way, to let him thru amber or even red lights or to give him more than his half of the narrow country roads just so he could fly past without hitting anyone. It was minus 10 points for each drink he’d had, minus 15 for not wearing seat belts, and the ability of the truck to survive a roll over? Minus another 20. My dad sometimes raced people in cars or drove in the oncoming lane to pass someone traffic or no traffic, then stomp on the brakes to watch their reaction. Once he even passed someone on the access ramp to Highway 64 by going over the berm and gunning it up the hill and into traffic. Later I revised my debit system for alcohol tolerance but still often ended up with less than a 10% chance of surviving. That I didn’t die or even get into an accident while riding with my dad I could only attribute to Fate’s whimsy and overall desire not to complicate other people’s lives.
I explained my system to my mom once and she told me not to worry none, that my dad was too mean to die by accident. There was always an awkward silence after that declaration and I would go on to say I just couldn’t wrap my head around that sort of “devil may care” attitude. I lived my life like I wanted to live. I wanted most of the people around me to continue to live and I even wanted to do minimal damage to property in the event that I did die. It was my belief that most people felt that way but my dad didn’t seem to waste any time thinking about it. It was never about living or dying for him it was always about the moment. He valued things like cars and women and good booze, but the longer I was around him the more I was convinced he didn’t value Life itself, not one whit. So why would he value mine? I don’t know how I was supposed to develop a sense of self worth in such a situation. My dad went about his life untroubled by immaterial concepts like this and more than once professed a real pride in his ability to live his life like he wanted to without the need of a ‘long-haired education.’ Sometimes I envied that and secretly wished that I wasn’t smarter than he was or wasn’t just better educated if it meant I had to go thru life aware of what was I was lacking, of what potential there was in the greater world, and how far down the Great Pecking Order of Life I was starting out.
Dick Selkirk’s place sat in a hollow between two low hills with a train track running across it. The very bottom of the valley was wet and once had a stream running thru it. It looked to me like the most useless bit of land around which probably meant he got it for a bargain. His house was modest in size but looked much bigger because of the wrap around porch that covered three sides. There was a circular gravel driveway that curved up to his door and next to that was a platform built of railway ties that stuck out from the hillside so you could drive your car onto it and work underneath whist still standing up. Both hillsides had crops growing on them; corn on this side and tobacco on the other. Wayne county was not the right climate for tobacco and a lot of people pointed that out to Dick Selkirk but he grew it all the same. There was a barn behind his house so old and unkempt that the wood had faded to a greyish silver color and thru the wildly canting doors you could see dark things way in the back hanging from the rafters. To my eye they looked like man sized bats slowly swinging in the shadows and I did not care to go inside. I knew from my time in Virginia that this was how they dried tobacco on the farm but my mind also suggested that if there were man-sized bats in West Virginia what better place to hide during the day than in an upside down forest of brown tobacco leaves? For once I was glad to be left in the truck though then question of why I was even there still niggled at the back of my mind.
Dad called out to the house without getting out of the truck. Perhaps because anyone in the house could only see Lloyd Maynard’s head still stuck out the window and pivoting around as if he was assessing for the county or something. Neither of us could see the Deuce and a Half from where the truck stopped nor any sign that anyone was home besides the front door being open. The screen door was the only barrier between the bright sun and the dark interior. My dad stood on the door sill of his truck so his head would be visible over the cab and said “Heigh Ho Dick! Its Ray Isaac, you still in there? You alive you stubborn old summabitch!?”
I gave Lloyd a questioning look and he just shrugged and grinned, finishing his hip flask of peppermint schnapps and letting it slide down to the floor between his legs. I had never heard my dad call out “Heigh Ho” to anyone before. I suppose he was trying to sound friendly. Maybe he didn’t know to approach an elder any better than I did. He stepped down from the truck and slammed the door loudly. He called out again, “Hey Dick its Ray Isaac, Jack Selkirk’s boy. Don’t meet me at the door with a shotgun like you did last time. I’d hate to have to kick an old man’s ass you know.”
There was some noise deep in the house and then a shadow darkened the already dim area behind the screen door. Whoever it was started making a dry rasping noise I took to be laughter. A pale gnarled hand pushed the door open a bit to show it was unlocked and I heard the figure say “That’d be the day. Long as I still got you fooled I got nuthin’ to worry about.” Then the figure went away and dad walked around the back of the truck and spoke to us in a low voice: “Lloyd stay here and keep the boy quiet till I’ve been in there a while then come up to the porch and stand there with your hands in your pockets. Don’t come up the steps till you’re asked to unless you want a gut full of buckshot.” He looked at me and gripped my shoulder thru the window “I may not even need you but you listen for me callin’ you and you come in and be respectful.” He let go and turned back to the door and said under his breath “Don’t let that old fart get ahold of you boy, don’t let him touch you or there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Is this guy supposed to be crazy or something?” I muttered to Lloyd Maynard as we watched my dad’s back as he talked thru the screen to someone. “Hell no, I guess not!” Lloyd replied. “Just old which is crazy enough.” I mulled this over and it did not escape me that my dad had pulled the truck in with his friend Lloyd between him and the front door. Or maybe that’s just the way it happened. I jumped at a loud slam when the screen door closed with my on the dad inside and even Lloyd Maynard looked nervous. He kept reaching down and fingering the empty bottles at his feet, running his fingers over each as if to coax more liquor from them. I took advantage of the extra space to my left and scooted over towards the driver’s seat. I was careful not to brush against the stick shift knowing my dad never used the emergency brake and I doubted it was hooked up anyway. The horrors that would befall me if I knocked the shifter out of gear and the truck rolled down the hill into the corn patch or even thru that and into the stream bottom were too terrible to contemplate. There was no sound coming from the house and none around us except the ever present drone of insects. I looked at the tracks and could just barely make out a railroad bridge at the far end, the closer end obscured by trees and the hillside. I had no idea where I was or which direction home lay in. With no other homes nearby and only a dirt road leading in and out it was as isolated as anywhere in the world. I decided this was must have been how “Man” West Virginia got its name. Was there also be a town called Woman or Wife? Ex-wife, West Virginia? I decided to look closer at the state map the next time I ran across one.
The tedious heat of the truck was interrupted by a visit from two dogs, large and looking as old as anything around them. They had loose, rust colored hides and regarded us thru red rimmed eyes. We watched as they crawled out from under the porch shook the dust from their coats and slowly loped over to the truck. I got the impression that barking would have been too much effort for them. They stood at the end of the drive and looked up at us, ignoring Lloyd Maynard’s attempts to get one to come over. He called and patted the side of the truck but failed having nothing to really offer a couple of coon hounds. Together they turned, walked around the truck and down the hill towards the stream.
“What kind of dog was that?”
“Hell if I know, looked kinda like a bloodhound but their legs were too short like they were part wiener dog or something.” I looked back but it was too late to confirm what Lloyd had said, the dogs were long out of sight. “I didn’t notice that but I did notice that one of them looked like she was nursing pups but I don’t see them around anyplace.”
“Nursing pups from her bitch’s teats!” Lloyd chuckled to himself and added “Bitch’s teats, Witch’s Tits!” He found that word combination funny on some level and laughed loudly, then abruptly cutting himself off as he remembered my dad’s orders. For a bit he just sat there shifting his feet and watching the empties clink and tinkle against his shoes. “I reckon its been long enough. I didn’t hear any gunshots so they’re probably into the good stuff by now.” Lloyd opened the door and slid out, taking a moment to tug on his shirt and jeans as if that would hide the fact that he was still in yesterday’s clothes and had spent most of the morning sleeping it off on our living room carpet. His lanky stride took him to the porch step quickly but there he paused, leaning his head to the side and trying to see into the darkened house. A shadow moved inside and my dad’s unmistakable bellow called him in. “Where the F–k have you been? Get in here and try some of this hooch! Dick Selkirk this is my no good, rotten assed, good for nuthin’ summabitch of a friend Lloyd Maynard…” I heard a harsh laugh in reply as Lloyd ducked his head and went inside, closing the screen door quietly behind him.
I scooted over to the passenger window and tried to find room for my feet in the pile of empties on that side of the floor well. I didn’t want to make too much noise and miss my dad’s call. I unbuttoned my too warm shirt a bit and closed my eyes, still hoping my stomach would stop complaining and hoping even more I’d get a drink of water or a sodapop out of the trip.
Something the size of a buzzard was riding the air over the cornfields and I squinted and watched it loop and turn as it tried to gain altitude. I didn’t think buzzards were common to West Virginia but had no way to actually tell what it was.