Fup Read online

  Fup

  Jim Dodge

  FUP, like all of Jim Dodge's work, takes place between rain and sunlight, diamonds and love. Read it. Live a little wiser.

  Jim Dodge

  Fup

  For my Father

  in Memoriam

  The temple bell stops.

  But the sound keeps coming

  out of the flowers.

  – BASHO

  Copyright © 1983 by Jim Dodge

  1 Some Family History

  Gabriel Santee was seventeen years old and three months pregnant when she married "Sonic Johnny" Makhurst, a Boeing test pilot and recent heir to a modest Ohio hardware fortune. The ceremony was performed in a crepefestooned hangar at Moffit Field, witnessed by a score of Sonic Johnny's drunken buddies. The bride and groom exchanged vows while standing on the wing of an X-77 jet fighter. Two months before Gabriel came to term, the same wing tore off the plane at 800 miles an hour over the Mojave Desert with Johnny at the controls. After a bitter court battle with one of her late husband's previous wives, Gabriel inherited his estate.

  * * *

  On March 7, 1958, nine days before Johnathan Adler Makhurst II's third birthday, Gabriel took him to Plomona Reservoir to fish for bluegill and have a picnic. A sudden rain shower swept the lake just before noon, sending them scurrying back to the car. Together in the front seat they shared his favorite lunch of hotdog sandwiches, pickles, potato chips, and Nehi orange drink. When they'd finished eating, they snuggled together on the front seat and watched the rain falling steadily on the lake. "Do you think it's going to stop, Johnny, or should we give it up?" Gabriel asked, but Johnny had fallen asleep.

  When Gabriel looked back out at the lake, a duck was circling in through the rain. It landed twenty yards from the end of the rickety northside pier. When the rain stopped a few minutes later, Gabriel settled Johnny, still asleep, across the front seat, gathered some sandwich scraps, and went down to see if she could coax the duck in close enough to feed. At the end of the pier she slipped on the rain-slick wood, cracked her head sharply, rolled into the water, and drowned.

  * * *

  Tiny-as Johnathan Adler Makhurst II came to be known-remembered little about his mother's death, but what remained was vivid. Waking alone on the front seat of the car. Beads of rain on the windshield. Calling for her. How hard it was to open the door. Calling for her as he walked out on the pier. Crying for her. The soggy sandwich scraps, the rotten gaps in the railing. His mother floating face down as if she were looking for something she'd dropped on the bottom of the lake. A large bird swimming around her body. The explosion of water and wings when he screamed.

  In Tiny's wrenched memory, grief-shocked and baffled by time, the bird he came to remember was a swan, immense, stately, white as marshmallow cream, neck elegantly curved, eyes of bottomless grenadine. If he'd known it was a duck, he might have been more careful when he found Fup.

  * * *

  Early April, 1878, in the middle of the worst drought ever recorded in the Kentucky hill country, Jackson Santee was delivered to life. Sixteen hard years later, ignoring his kinfolk's warnings of disastrous folly, he set out forty years behind everybody else for the gold rush in California. While the last luckless diehards scoured the deep Sierra, Jake Santee staked his claim on a little feeder creek within a few hours easy walk of the best whorehouse in Angel's Camp. He didn't hit a lode, but there was enough, if judicious, to comfortably last the rest of his life.

  For the next two years he traveled California on horseback. He was not judicious. Three marriages-the longest lasting seven weeks- seriously dented his bankroll. Gambling covered his drinking, but the drinking gave him crazy visions. Always one to follow the inner light, Jake invested lavish amounts in highly speculative ventures, learning the hard way that sometimes when you put your money where your mouth is, it's only to kiss it goodbye.

  His fourth marriage lasted one day. Polly was a San Francisco librarian. The practicality he admired in her, and which he thought might temper his recklessness, unfortunately carried into the bridal chamber. When she opened a book and began to read, Jake settled with her in cash on the spot. He won some of it back playing poker in the waterfront saloons, but then his luck turned cold. He skidded for weeks. Then, with less than $1000 left in his poke, his luck returned in a highrolling game at the Barbary Hotel. He won $17,000 and the deed to 940 acres north of the Russian River along the coast. He rode out the next day to look it over.

  * * *

  He was taken by the color of the river. It had the same dense clarity as the emerald Crazy Joe Kelso wore. It was late September, and where shafts of sunlight penetrated the redwood canopy and touched the water, he caught the gleaming flash of salmon moving upriver to their spawning grounds. His horse belly-deep in goldenback ferns, he rode by the river as far as he could then headed up toward the Gualala. His property was at the end of a long ridge, both slopes thick with redwood and Douglas-fir. There was a large two-bedroom cabin in the sturdy shade of a huge walnut tree. In the quiet evening, he could hear the ocean eight miles away. He made himself at home.

  He invested in sheep and for three years made a decent profit until an epidemic of pulpy kidney wiped out the flock. He considered the loss an Act of God that just happened to coincide with his growing boredom. He sold 120 acres for bankroll and spent the best part of the next three decades traveling the western states playing cards. He didn't get rich, but he got by.

  When he was 61, he married for the last time. She was the wholesome daughter of a Sacramento grain broker, and it was as close to love as he'd been. They returned to his ranch on the coast and raised horses. The marriage lasted 15 months and produced the only child he would sire. Three months after Gabriel's birth, his wife, babe in arms, ran off with a shoe clerk from Fort Bragg.

  Jake sold the stock and drifted again, discouraged but not deeply disheartened. One night playing cards in Nevada City he stepped out in the alley to piss and saw an old Indian man lying crumpled against the wall. When Jake went over and stopped to help him up, he saw the man had been stabbed several times and was near death. Jake turned to go for help, but an iron hand seized him by the ankle. "Whoa, pardner," Jake said, "it wasn't me that done it. I'm on my way to fetch a doc."

  The Indian shook his head, but let go his grip on Jake's ankle, motioning him to bend down. When Jake knelt by his side, the Indian thrust a piece of paper into his hand and said in a wheezing, gurgling whisper as he died, "Drink this. Be still. You'll live forever."

  Jake opened the folded paper. It was a recipe for whiskey. "Don't look like it did you a whole hell of a lot of good," he said to the Indian's corpse. But something in the Indian's glazing eyes held him, and without looking at another card that night, Jake returned to his hotel room, packed, and headed home to the ranch.

  The whiskey helped him keep still. One hit of Ol' Death Whisper would drive most humans to their knees; two produced a mildly hallucinatory catatonia. The recipe produced a distillate that Jake figured was close to 97 percent pure, the condensed essence of divine vapors. He devoted himself to further refinement. Having been born during drought times in the Kentucky hill country, he was graced by heritage and sensibility to master the craft, and with that mastery came the beginning of art. In the processes of fermentation and distillation he found not only metaphors that answered his spirit, but a product that extended it.

  For the next decade and a half he lived on the ranch. Between fifty gallon batches run off in the barn and the daily chores of sufficiency, his spare time was spent sitting on the front porch sipping the fruits of his labor while letting his mind wander. He did some actual traveling, always on foot, to visit his neighbors in the surrounding hills. Originally, he'd hoped to trade his whiskey for other amenities, but his neighbors-mostly hardwor
king sheep ranchers-lacked both his taste and tolerance for highly-refined spirits, though most eventually found other uses for his elixir. They used it for tractor fuel, blowing stumps, and, diluted by a drop to a pint of water, as a treatment for almost anything that ailed their stock, from scours to lungworm. With a weedy garden, a few chickens, some hunting and fishing, and a fairly steady income from the Saturday night poker game he hosted each week, Jake got by. He developed a highly flexible sense of sufficiency. When he ran low on whiskey, he could always scrape up the makings for more, and whatever struck him as beyond the immediate necessity of his contentment he benignly ignored. It helped that he kept his necessities simple.

  He received one letter from his daughter. She wrote to say she was pregnant and needed money. He sent a postcard in reply:

  "Dear Gabe-

  Get married. My wives made out real good, and unless you've growed up homelier than a sackful of beets I expect you could too. Glad to hear I'm gonna be a granddaddy. Let me know how it all turns out and if it turns out bad you're welcome here though I suspect you wouldn't like it. Can't help you out with money for I don't have much. Your Father."

  It took him most of the afternoon to write the postcard. Except for signing his name on chip tabs, it was the first thing he'd written in almost 20 years. Gabriel's letter was also the first he'd received in the same period of time, or at least the first personal letter-there were occasionally envelopes from the government, but he didn't want anything from them and couldn't think of anything they might want from him, so those he chucked in the fireplace.

  * * *

  In the winter of '57, about the time Alice Parkins saw him running stark naked down McKensie Creek trying to spear a salmon with his fishing pole, most of the people in the community came to think that Jake was a little crazy. Fortunately for Jake, it was the kind of community that has almost been lost in American life, one where the neighbors are respectful and friendly, and where-as long as you are just difficult and not dangerous-people mind their own business. Jake, of course, didn't think of himself as crazy, or even vaguely abnormal; like anyone who lets the mind wander long and far enough, it occasionally got lost. Jake, increasingly convinced of his blooming immortality, was in no hurry to find it. He figured he had plenty of time. He thought of himself as the beaver he'd seen a few years past on the Gualala, floating downstream on its back, paws folded on its chest, looking up on the deep blue sky, steering with its tail, indolent and happy. Then, early the following spring, the Sheriff disturbed the easy drift of his life.

  Cliff Hobson was a local boy who'd gone into law enforcement when he returned from Korea. He considered his job a public service, helping people out and stopping trouble. He'd known that Jake brewed a little whiskey long before he'd left for Korea; he'd even tried it once after he'd delivered a rick of wood to the old man. It had tasted like diesel going down, and the image he'd always remembered as it hit his stomach was the compression stroke in the cylinder of a D8 Cat. Figuring nobody could possibly want to buy the brew for human consumption, he didn't consider it a law enforcement problem, and saw no reason to turn it into one. Cliff liked his job; he got to ride around in a new four-wheel-drive Jeep and talk on the radio. The only part of his job that he didn't like was delivering bad news. He knew Jake wasn't going to like it.

  Jake didn't: "What the fucking shit does this mean!" he shrieked, crumpling the papers in his bony hand.

  Cliff took half a step back. "It means proceedings have been started to sell your land for back taxes-you've never paid 'em once is what it says."

  "I bought the goddamn place before there was any taxes."

  "There's been taxes a long time," Cliff mumbled, "and it looks to me like you either gotta pay 'em up or they're gonna sell this place to someone who will."

  "Well I ain't got no $70,000 but I do got a.12 gauge scattergun and a.30/.40 Krag, and you can take word back that anybody who tries to buy my land or take it over is gonna have to kill me first, and even if they manage that, my ghost will haunt their ass hard. Hard, you hear me."

  "There won't be no shooting," Cliff said firmly.

  "Good," Jake barked, "then none of 'em will get killed."

  They left it at that.

  At the end of the Sheriff's visit four days later, he left Jake in tears. Gabriel, his only child, had drowned.

  It was to be the first of two times Jake quit drinking. He quit for three days, till the funeral was over and she was buried. Most folks held that his unexpected temperance was an act of respect, and were mildly surprised at his behavior; those that knew him well understood it was a symptom of grief, and were relieved when he started drinking again. The kinder souls felt that he wanted to adopt his grandson because it was the decent thing to do, although they privately doubted that a man pushing 80 could properly raise a child-at any rate, they didn't think it was the money. Those closer to Jake were sure it was the money: a $500,000 inheritance would pay a lot of back taxes, with plenty left over to cover his taste for highrolling action. In fact, those that played regularly in the Saturday night poker games were offering 8 to 5 that the boy would be gone within two years.

  But to Jake it was more complicated than all their opinions together, so complicated that he didn't even try to understand it. He went with his guts instead. When he'd heard about the inheritance from Gabriel's lawyers, it had put a sparkle in his eye; but when he saw his grandson for the first time, he felt a sparkle in his blood. He saw them fishing in the late afternoon, casting the deep pool at Tottleman's Falls, the kid yelping as a foot-long rainbow ripped the drifting worm. He saw birthdays and baseball mitts and a trip once in a while to the city to see the worthless Giants play; someone he could teach to play cards, and drink with, and tell the thousand stories of his life and the secrets of immortality. And if he saw the $430,000 in a mutual account, the other $70,000 coming off the top to cover room and board, he didn't let it influence him unduly.

  Miss Emma Gadderly, the county social worker, informed Jake she could not in good conscience recommend that he receive custody of little Johnny and, in the wake of his stunned bellow, calmly ticked off the reasons why: he was almost 80 years old, and certainly couldn't expect to live much longer; he was a notorious drinker and gambler; there was no woman in the household; his land was being sold for tax delinquency; and, frankly, that in light of the substantial inheritance, his motives were suspect. Jake, spit flying, punctuating his rebuttal with jabs of a meat saw he flourished in his left hand, informed her in turn that 79 wasn't shit to an immortal; that drinking and gambling made men out of boys; that there was, in fact, a female in the household, a new bluetick bitch pup named Nookie; that he fully intended to deed the ranch to his grandson as collateral on the anticipated loan; that his motives were none of her fucking business; and that he was fully prepared to go to the wall if she tried to interfere, promising that his second to last act would be the Supreme Court, the last to strangle her with his bare hands. He backed her out the door with the meat saw, but he didn't back her down.

  The next morning, still showering curses on the memory of her presence, he took the $632 he had to his name, packed a suitcase with a change of clothes and nine jars of Ol' Death Whisper, and hit the road playing cards. Players in the northcoast cardrooms still talk about it in the same tone they talk about the fire of '41: his age and ferocity were intimidating, but it was his plain, bald, Godgraced, unadulterated, shithouse luck that wiped the tables clean. In three months he won nearly $90,000, and everytime he left town he mailed a cashier's check to the San Francisco law firm of Gutt, Cutt and Freese, a group of ruthlessly brilliant attorneys who specialized in custody cases, and who responded to each check like piranhas to blood, unleashing another frenzy of writs, motions, and suits. Finally, through sinuous maneuvering lubricated with tidy envelopes of well-placed cash, the case was assigned to Judge Wilber Tatum, an octogenarian with 17 grandkids, a honky-tonk road map of broken veins on his face, and a $100,00 credit line in Las Vegas despit
e the alimony he paid his eight ex-wives.

  * * *

  Granddaddy Jake, as everyone began to call him at his request, drove his young grandson out to the ranch in a new Jeep pick-up. He talked to the boy continually, pointing out places they would go fishing and hunting, the swimming holes and shortcuts, the name of every waving neighbor they passed. Tiny stared straight ahead, nodding slightly.

  When they arrived at the ranch house (which he'd had Lottie Anderson spruce up), he sat Tiny down at the table with a gallon of milk and a pound of Oreos, then unloaded the truck and fixed up the boy's room. When he returned to the kitchen, Tiny was sitting on the floor by the woodbox, building a miniature split-rail fence out of the redwood kindling. Jake went out and chopped some more. Above him he saw a ragged V of ducks flying high against the sunset, following the light south, but they didn't stir him like they usually did. He had a grandchild to look after now, the responsibility of care. He felt himself settle into himself. The ducks could take care of themselves.

  2 The Great Checker Showdown of '78

  In the early spring of '77, Johnathan "Tiny" Makhurst, just turned 22, was going crazy. After a five day drenching in early February-seven inches of cold rain, limb-snapping winds-the weather cleared to a false and balmy spring, and held till the second week in March. Tiny didn't believe it at first, but after 20 days he went out and checked the ground. It was perfect. He'd planned the fence all winter, scaling it on graph paper, cleaning and oiling his tools every Sunday afternoon till Granddaddy Jake swore they'd squirt out of his hand, and now, finally, preparation met perfect conditions: the ground was just right for posthole digging- not so mushy that the blades wouldn't scour, yet not so dry they couldn't get a bite. He dug 120 postholes the first day in the field, each exactly three feet deep, precisely seven feet apart, and in a line as straight as the shortest distance between two points. He walked home that evening whistling, ate half a venison roast and a pile of hash browns for dinner, did up the dishes, whipped Granddaddy five straight in checkers, downed his nightly shot of Ol' Death Whisper, and started for bed just as Granddaddy Jake started for the door.