Father's Mechanical Universe

I. A Short Season

Frank Kellerman was a man who had no words. It wasn’t that my father couldn’t talk; he could say things all right. Things like Take your time, Hurry up, Hand me that wrench, No, the little one. Father had plenty of words to name objects or describe motion, to give and refine orders. The words he lacked were the words that referred to things one couldn’t see nor hear nor touch, at least not directly. Things whose existence had to be inferred or simply felt. Things like love.

When I was a very young boy I barraged him with questions about the world: What holds up the sky? Why do girls smell funny? How come Donald Duck’s voice is harder to understand than Mickey Mouse? To these and all other difficult questions, Father had the same answer: Ask your mother.

Father was a sullen, inward man, with Mother as well as with me. In the eighteen years I lived with the two of them, I never once heard Father say anything to Mother that expressed any sort of affection for her. Nor did he ever demonstrate any visible sign of this. Not until I was a teenager, and had felt some of the feelings the opposite sex stirs in the human body, did I find this absence in my father strange. It was strange mostly because despite the fact that the only emotions he demonstrated toward Mother ranged from resentment to rage, I never doubted that he loved her intensely. Something in the distance he always kept from her expressed that. Something in the blank, carefully measured way he always looked at her, the way his gray eyes bulged like the eyes of a toad behind the top half of his bifocals as he stared at Mother across the breakfast table or the back porch. Those toad eyes of Father’s always seemed to be looking not merely at the woman before him but also at the woman she used to be--as if by fixing his eyes on her, he was able to stare through layers of time and view the whole of their past. By my mid-teens I sometimes wondered: Maybe Father’s connection to Mother was beyond love, something deeper than love. Something not even pleasant, perhaps, but stronger.

For her part, Mother never made him look ridiculous by putting on a display. She never hugged him around the neck nor whispered embarrassing things in his ear. At least not in my presence. But every now and then I would catch a glimpse of something--a slight squeeze of his elbow, a lingering touch on the wrist--that betrayed the difference in their natures. Father never acknowledged these gestures in my presence.

Hugs, kisses, loving words spoken aloud, these things were reserved for me. Mother gave them freely and in abundance. And I returned them to her. And sometimes, despite his own gruff reserve, I gave them to my father. That was the pattern. Sometime in my childhood--I couldn’t say exactly when--I began to feel what I could not yet comprehend: My parents expressed their affection for each other only through me.

When eventually I grasped this phenomenon, I understood something else as well: Because in the Kellerman family love flowed through me--and only through me--I held power over my parents. I could control them.

I began to control my relationship with Father in the fall of 1961, when I was almost eleven, after Father made a mistake that almost destroyed us as a family. Because of Father’s mistake, and my own childish reluctance to forgive, I learned to control Father out of hate. And that might have been the end of us forever, were it not for Father’s ability to communicate without words.

To appreciate my father, one had to appreciate automobiles. Automobiles were his passion--his first and only true love, Mother would sometimes claim in anger. Unlike his feelings for Mother and me, evidence of Father’s passion for automobiles was easy to find; his past was documented by the various autos he’d owned during his lifetime. No, he wasn’t a collector of classic cars. He was a master mechanic: owner of his own garage and autobody shop and the curator of the museum of his own personal history. Father’s garage was located just off Route 66 in the small farm community of Yukon, Oklahoma, where I grew up. His "museum" was a wide, free-standing carport on our five-acre plot of land a few miles north of town. Under the tin roof of the carport he parked five automobiles: A purple 1929 Moon Prince of Windsor roadster, resting on blocks; a green 1951 Hudson Hornet ragtop; a faded blue 1954 GMC pickup we called "the Jimmie Truck"; a gleaming 1956 Studebaker Silver Hawk coupe; and, finally, at the very end of the row, a homely gray 1961 Corvair sedan.

Through these five automobiles one can trace the history of my father’s adult life, the story of which he never told me in words. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The connections I’m thinking about now deeply involve my father, but the story is my own.

The carport Father built lay between the two-story woodframe house I was raised in and an old one-room limestone schoolhouse that was, at the time of my father’s death in 1981, nearly a century old. The sign (even in my youth faded almost out of recognition) on the wood panel above the door of the entrance read "Spring Creek School." Father used the old schoolhouse as his private workshop. He spent evenings and weekends inside its walls, repairing lawnmowers, air conditioners, water pumps, anything mechanical.

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When I was ten, Father broke his hip. It was in the spring of 1961, just after the start of the baseball season. The injury kept Father in bed for the entire summer--and away from the garage and autobody shop that supported us. Father became totally dependent on Mother, and hated it. She fed him, sponge-bathed him, changed his bedpan.

For me, having Father home all day was a novelty. Over the course of that summer we grew close for the first and only time in our lives. In the morning we read the sports pages of the The Daily Oklahoman together (this was the summer of the great home run race between Roger Maris and my childhood hero Mickey Mantle); in the afternoon Father looked through the bedroom window and watched me stand at home plate of our imaginary ball park at the edge of Orville Zucha’s wheat field and pretend I was Maris or the Mighty Mick--or Mathews or Colavito or Killebrew or Jim Gentile--and rehit the home runs the major leaguers had pounded out the day before. Home plate stood at the southeast corner of our property, and the foul lines paralleled the south and east barbed wire fences that separated our land from Orville Zucha’s wheat fields. The infield was marked off in regulation Little League size, with old tomato crates serving as bases. We had no pitcher (Mother never participated in this game), so I hit the home runs fungo-style, swatting old golf balls (I was too skinny to hit baseballs very far) with my prized Mickey Mantle Little League signature bat. Depending on what had happened in the big leagues the day before, I’d smack golf balls over the left and right field fences I’d erected with stakes and kite string--or over the roof of the schoolhouse in dead center two hundred feet away. Atta boy, Slugger, Father would say when I’d finished my imaginary newsreel re-enactment of the previous day’s home run highlights. You’re a natural.

Father’s carport formed an imposing impediment, to both the game and my imagination, in left field. If there’d been any possibility of striking one of Father’s prized autos with a golf ball, the home run game would never have progressed beyond the first at bat. But the tin roof and redwood walls on the south and east sides of the port shielded Father’s cars from the line drives of my right-handed sluggers. The moment I took Mickey’s right-handed stance against a southpaw, the carport magically disappeared.

The home run game was the best game I’d ever dreamed up. It had definite rules; nothing was arbitrary. The sports pages determined who, what, when, and how. The only thing the game allowed me to invent was the way it felt to be Mickey Mantle when he blasted homers number twenty-one and twenty-two, left-handed, off Bob Shaw in Kansas City in early June. But that was enough. Stepping into the Mighty Mick’s shoes as he dug in his cleats to face the A’s tough righthander, well, that was the best thing there was.

Father understood this instinctively, though of course we never talked about it. Nice going, Slugger was the most he could bring himself to say about my performance. But he knew. I could see it in the way he watched me from the window by his bed, which looked onto the playing field from the imaginary stands on the foul side of the left field line. Father watched me not like a captive spectator, but like an informed fan who recognized the distinctive looping plane of Mantle’s vicious left-handed uppercut, and clapped or raised his palm in salute only when I got it just right.

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Then at the end of the summer--when the Mighty Mick, slowed by nagging injuries, fell behind Maris in their race for Ruth’s record--Father made the mistake that changed our relationship forever. If I’d been a couple of years older and been paying more attention to how things were going outside the sports pages, I might not have been so completely stunned by Father’s impulsive act. I might have expected something. For just when Father’s hip had healed to the point where he could get around with the aid of a crutch, the Yukon National Bank foreclosed on his garage and autobody shop, taking away our livelihood.

On September 1st, with the start of school only two weeks away (I’d be in sixth grade), the home run race stood Maris 51, Mantle 48. Just as the afternoon tempertaure hit 102, somebody at the bank informed Father his garage had been picked up for a song by Carl Vukovich the junk dealer, Father’s only real competitor in the auto repair business. I had no idea how this news would affect him.

On the day everything changed, I was playing the home run game as usual. Batting right-handed with two men on against the Tigers, the Mighty Mick had just powered one over the 461 foot sign in dead center in Yankee Stadium, right over the head of the statue of Miller Huggins, when Father’s voice rang out from foul territory:

"Curly!"

As I turned toward the voice, The House That Ruth Built disappeared, and the schoolhouse, Father’s carport, and the white woodframe two-story we lived in shimmered into view like heat mirages. Framed by the window, Father’s poptoad eyes glimmered like twin stars behind the rectangular frames of his bifocals.

"Come here . . . I need you."

I rested the bat on my shoulder and strode over to the open window, and looked in at Father. He was sitting in the same position as usual, propped up by pillows, his right leg pulled taught by the traction weight at the end of the bed. But the look on his face was different. Determined. I knew from his voice that the game was over for the day. Nevertheless, I said: "Did you see that one? That was Mickey in--"

"Listen, son, come in here. I want you to do something for me."

When I started to go around to the back door, his voice stopped me.

"No, don’t go around. Crawl right through the window here so you don’t disturb your mother."

This surprised me; I was never allowed to crawl through windows. The thought didn’t deter me as I tossed my bat inside and scrambled over the sill.

"Good. OK, the first thing I want you to do is unhook that weight for me."

I’d seen Mother do this when she helped Father get out of bed and limp down the hall for his bath. I grabbed the iron hook.

"Careful! Slowly . . . just ease it off . . . That’s it."

I could see the muscles in Father’s leg recoil toward his hip cast as I laid the weights on the lamp table. Father grimaced. He was in his mid-forties, but on that day he looked much older to me as he eased his legs over the side of the bed and set one foot, then the other, on the floor.

"Now hand me those overalls."

I helped him slip the overalls up his legs and over the plaster cast. "Where you going?" I asked.

Father winced as he moved his shoulders beneath the straps of the overalls. "To hell and back."

I stepped back and stared at him. He didn’t seem to notice. When he had hooked both shoulder straps, he said, "Now give me your bat."

I handed it to him. He planted the fat end on the floor, then pushed himself to his feet, using my bat as a short cane. This was the first time since the accident I’d seen himself stand up without Mother’s help. Then he took a step away from the bed. The muscles in his neck and jaw tensed. Then he forced a smile and looked at me. "OK. I’m going to borrow your bat for a while, OK?"

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I nodded. "Where you going?"

"See a man at the bank," he replied as he crutched his way toward the door. "You stay right here while I talk to your mother."

That meant they were going to fight. Again. "OK," I said, and watched him limp/stagger down the hall toward the kitchen. As soon as he turned the corner I heard Mother’s voice. What was he doing out of bed? she wanted to know. And where was he going? Then two words I didn’t understand: No remortgage.

I crept down the hallway in time to see Father push open the screen door. "If there’s one thing I’ve heard often enough to remember," he said with a snarl, "it’s ‘no remortgage.’ So what am I supposed to do: Lay in bed while Vukovich steals my business?"

"This is our home, Frank. When are you coming back?"

Father released one of his heavy sighs that meant he’d had enough. "Coming back? If I don’t get this note fixed, what’s the point in coming back?"

Then he saw me.

"Don’t worry," he said. Then, with a final glare at Mother, he turned and clumped out of the house.

I joined Mother by the sink. We watched Father make his awkward three-legged way toward the carport in the blazing sun. He picked out his most recent acquisition: the Studebaker Silver Hawk. I watched him use my bat to wedge himself into the front seat. A moment later he backed out into the gravel drive--then, without a backward glance, drove off toward Yukon.

"Is he all right?" I asked.

Mother sighed. "I don’t know."

We sat down at the kitchen table and waited. Mother gave me a glass of milk. She drank iced coffee. On the black and silver formica beside her cup lay a pack of Winstons, but I knew she wouldn’t touch them. I was old enough to have observed that most people smoked when they were under stress, to help themselves relax. But Mother was different. She smoked only when she was already relaxed. She liked to sit out on the back porch after the sun had gone down, when the heat of the day began to melt away before the breeze rippling through the wheat fields, and smoke one cigarette, savoring it, the tip glowing red at the end of her fingers as she propped her elbow on her knee. When she exhaled she would lift her chin an inch or so and blow the smoke in a thin stream that dissipated into the air about two feet in front of her face. As she did this, something remarkable would happen. Her heavy brow, her entire face would lighten, begin to glow like the tip of her cigarette, as if whatever worries she had carried around inside her during the day, whatever had been weighing her down, had been incinerated then expelled in the smoke. When she was relaxed like that, often she would talk to me, tell me stories--especially if Father was inside, watching Rawhide or Have Gun, Will Travel or one of his other cowboy shows.

But not this time. The pack of Winstons lay untouched. Mother stared out through the screen door in silence. When I’d finished my milk, I rinsed out my glass, then went to my room and played with my army men. When I returned to the kitchen an hour or so later, Mother was sitting in the same position at the table, staring through the same screen.

At five thirty Mother called the Yukon National Bank. When no one answered, she called the bank president at home. He gave her another number, a vice president. "Yes, yes," she said to the vice president. "But when?"

After she hung up she said to me: "I think your father’s going to be late."

"Where is he?"

Mother was wearing her blue cotton house dress. She turned her eyes away from me and began to brush vigorously at the lapels below her collar, as if a cobweb or something even filthier had drifted through the air and stuck to her neck. "I don’t know," she said.

At nine o’clock I went to bed. Mother sat on the edge of the bed and sang me a song, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." I was several years too old for this song, and we both knew it. But she sang it to me just as she had when I was six. When she’d finished, I asked the question on both our minds. "When will Father be back?"

She managed a smile. "He’ll be here when you get up."

But he wasn’t. When I entered the kitchen the next morning Mother was sitting with her elbows propped on the table, her chin in her palms. Almost the same position as the evening before. I wondered if she’d been to bed at all.

"Ready for some breakfast?" she asked.

I nodded and sat down as she poured us each a bowl of Rice Crispies. She made a point of smiling at me several times while we ate, but her plump body slumped over the bowl before her. She hadn’t bothered to comb her hair. She always combed her hair. This morning her hair was pushed over to one side of her head in a big brown knot. The knot just stayed there, like it was pinned on. But her eyes were what shocked me. They seemed to focus on two different points at once: on me, with a strange kind of sadness I later came to recognize as pity--and at the same time way beyond me, on some awful distant place she seemed to hope I’d never have to go.

"I think your father may have gone out of town on business."

I nodded. But I knew better. I couldn’t look at her eyes and not know.

After breakfast I biked over to Cletus Bluefire’s house, about a mile away down a dirt road. Cletus and I played army all morning. I stayed over for lunch, then went skinny-dipping with Cletus down at the creek. When I get home, I kept thinking, he’ll be there.

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But he wasn’t. When I pumped my bike up the gravel drive to the garage late that afternoon, Mother was sitting on the steps of the back porch. The faraway look had vanished from her eyes; she was concentrating on me. "What do you want for dinner?" she said.

After dinner, while the sun still hung above the horizon, I read the sports page of The Daily Oklahoman, then went out back to play the home run game. I tried to envision the Mighty Mick batting lefty against Yankee Killer Frank Lary at the Stadium, tried to imagine Mickey fouling off hard slider after hard slider--then with his trademark uppercut smacking one off the facade high above the right field stands. But I couldn’t visualize it. I couldn’t get inside Mickey’s body; The House That Ruth Built wouldn’t materialize. The season had ended prematurely.

The next morning Mother said, "I think Father may have left us."

And so we began to adjust. Over the next few days Mother and I talked a lot about why Father had left. The garage was his life’s dream, she explained. Losing it was just too much for him to bear.

But what about US? I wanted to know. How come he LEFT us?

For that, Mother had no answer. It’s not about you, she kept saying. Your father still loves you.

I believed her. But after a while, knowing that simply made it worse. It was a greater crime, it seemed to me, to abandon someone you still loved. Where had he gone? What place was better than this? On Monday, one week after he’d left, I took a hammer and smashed the headlights in Father’s four remaining automobiles. I imagined the cars were huge metal animals, mechanical dinosaurs, their headlights eyes. I blinded them, one by one. They suffered their pain in silence. The white Moon Prince of Windsor, Father’s very first car, hurt the most as my hammer drove a stake through each lidless eye into its tiny stupid brain.

When Mother saw what I’d done, she demanded the hammer. I placed it in her palm. "I understand why you did it," she said. "But we’ve got to have something to drive."

On Wednesday morning, three days after Father had left, I crossed Orville Zucha’s pasture and hiked along the banks of Spring Creek until I came to an enormous willow tree that grew next to a stagnant pool. The willow was ancient, so old and decayed its gnarled trunk had split open all the way from its exposed roots to its lower branches, which drooped low over the sour-smelling pool, some of the elongated leaves dipping into the scummy water. The pool was about two feet deep in its middle, even though the creek had temporarily dried up. I wondered if there was a tiny spring somewhere beneath it. The drooping limbs of the willow surrounded the entire pool like a living green dome-shaped fortress, a safe haven.

The green dome of the willow’s branches was my one secret spot in the world, the place where I came to dream my most secret dreams. Sometimes I would take off my shoes and socks and dangle my feet over the side of the thick root into the still water of the pool, and just let my mind wander. It was right here that I’d dreamed up the imaginary home run game Father and I had played most of the summer. It was this very spot where I’d imagined I’d someday bring Lila Ruzicka, the cutest girl in my class, and give her a long disturbing kiss. Inside the warm green dome of the ancient willow, anything was possible.

In the shade of the willow, I sat down on an exposed root, closed my eyes, and whispered to the drooping branches: "Come back."

When I returned to the house there was no sign of the Silver Hawk. Mother was heating a can of Cambell’s tomato soup. We ate in silence.

On Thursday, because we had no other course, Mother and I turned our eyes toward the future, toward the start of school in less than a week. And toward a surprise: Mother was going back to work. "Old man Turch needs a receptionist at the funeral home," Mother said the evening after I’d smashed the headlights. "I told him I could start as soon as you’re back in school."

School. I could imagine what some of the other boys, the bullies like Eddie Hacker, would say: Hey, Curly: Heard your old man run off. He find himself another woman--or just get bored? In the week that remained, I began to prepare myself for the taunts and the inevitable fights that would follow. I forgot Mickey Mantle and imagined myself inside my own body, a stronger body than my real body. I imagined myself freezing at the sound of Eddie Hacker’s taunting voice, then suddenly spinning to face him, eye to eye--and in the same motion driving my fist through his jawbone.

School started on Tuesday. By Monday morning I believed I was ready. I was prepared to fight, prepared to take a beating if I had to. If I had to spend the first day in the principal’s office, it didn’t matter. I sprang out of bed, looking forward to the last day of vacation. Maybe I’d bust a few a taillights, just to keep up my spirits. I practically hopped my way into the kitchen--then froze.

"Daddy’s home, Slugger!"

He was grinning, holding out his arms for a hug. Like he’d never left, like nothing had changed. Like it was time for us to step out into the backyard and toss a ball around . . .

Mother was standing next to him by the sink. When I looked at her she turned and hid her face.

I ran back to my bedroom and slammed the door. There was no lock, so I pushed my dresser in front of it, then crawled under the bed. Half a minute later I heard a knock.

"It’s me, son."

Outside my window, the wind rose; the loose screen began to rattle.

"Everything’s all right. I want to talk to you."

The wind died down again, and I heard the knob turn. From my spot under the bed I could see the legs of the dresser blocking the door.

"Open the door, Curly."

A moment later the dresser began to skid slowly across the floor. A pair of brown loafers appeared. They turned left, then right, then pointed directly at me and approached the bed. They stopped about five feet from the edge. Then, from high above, Father’s voice spoke. "I want . . . I want to explain something to you, son."

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From the kitchen came the sound of running water, then silence.

"I went away--I ran away--for a while, and that was wrong."

The voice and the shoes became still then. What did he expect me to say?

"Can you hear me, son? I still love you. Will you forgive me?"

I stared at the loafers. They were speckled with dust. I wondered where the dust had come from, how many miles from here?

"I understand," the voice said finally. "Well, you think about it and talk to me when you’re ready."

The loafers twisted around then and stepped back behind the dresser. I heard the door close with a click.

Well, you think about it. What was it I was supposed to think about? Why had he come back? I wondered what he would think when he saw the blind, cowering faces of his pet automobiles. I wondered if he would bellow with rage--or cry. I hadn’t cried once since he left. I was proud of myself for that. I wondered if Mother had cried, secretly in her bed at night after I had drifted off to sleep. I wondered about these and other things as I lay motionless on my belly in the shadow beneath the bed.

After a while I might have fallen asleep; I can’t be sure. When the loafers reappeared, my face and arms and chest had the foggy burning ache of sleep interrupted.

"Want to talk now?" Father’s voice said.

I slid back toward the wall.

"Say, I’ve lost track. How’s Mickey doing now?"

How the hell do I know? I wanted to scream at him. You stopped the game. YOU stopped it.

Suddenly a fist appeared next to the shoes. The knuckles almost touched the bare hardwood floor. Then, very slowly, like the motion of a wrecking ball, the fist drew back, then swung forward. At the bottom of its arc, its fingers opened and a white ball appeared. It rolled noisily across the floor from the light into the shadow, toward me, toward my swelling eyes. I moved my arm and blocked the ball, then squeezed it in my own fist.

The shoes stood still. Then suddenly another ball appeared, rolling slowly toward me. I caught it. Then another ball, then another. Then nothing.

The shoes waited. I lined up the four golf balls along the edge of my right arm. I matched the dimples, lined up the words on each ball: Titlest, Titlest, MaxFli, Titlest. For a long time, I just stared at the balls. Then I took the first Titlest, squeezed it between the floor and my flattened palm, and rolled it back out.

"Atta boy, Slugger."

A few minutes later, I crawled out from under the bed.