Land Run. Mark Graham
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“That reminds me of something Mr. Elijah said.” Ted laughed ingenuously. “He goes on a bit. You know, he is eighty-eight years old. Elijah likes to quote that Kenny Rogers song and says, ‘You got to know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em.’”
“Those old farts are something, huh, Cort?” Frank said, throwing a broad smile.
“I hear that Elijah is still pretty sharp,” Cort replied.
“Of course he is. Let me get this, guys. It’s been great.”
It was dark when Cort stepped back outside the restaurant. The evening blackness gave Cort that uneasy feeling of leaving a movie theater after dark, when the world he saw was not what he expected because it was not the world he left. What to do about old Elijah Montgomery? Rusty sent this guy photos? he wondered to himself.
He hoped she would call but never expected it. The cell phone didn’t reveal who called, but somehow he just knew it was her. Rusty didn’t want to answer it but couldn’t take a chance on her not calling again. It had to be important. His wife never said anything overtly about divorce, but he could see it coming. This is it, he thought. This is where God is going to rub my face into the mud he made of my life. That was the thought that made him ready to answer. He wasn’t going down without a fight.
“Yes.”
“Hi, Russell,” she said.
“Yeah. Hi. Your number says unlisted. Afraid I would call you? I didn’t.”
“I know. No. Not you. Just anyone. I just wanted to see how you are doing.”
“Fine,” Rusty relented.
There was a longer silence than Rusty wanted there to be. He didn’t want time to think. He didn’t like time to think before he acted on anything. That wasn’t his training. He was trained to act while knowing. And thinking only brought questions and doubt that he normally could not afford.
“Okay. I heard you went to Mexico,” she said.
“A couple times. Look. In a few months you’re gonna see a lot of money run through our account. After that, you should see a few million get stuck there.”
“Okay.”
“This is the biggest one ever. It’s a major golf course community. More units than you can shake a stick at,” he said.
“Okay.”
“What do you want from me? This is it, the grand slam,” Rusty said, finally stopping his mad pacing back and forth.
“It’s not going to make it better, Russell. It just won’t. You’re not ready to talk, are you?”
Rusty could only repeat his question again in his head. What does she want from me? I left the boy by the pool, and it can’t be undone. And killing myself will only signal defeat. All that’s left to me is to sap all the money I can from this hated town and move on. Get her back and move on.
“I need to go to bed. Just call me when you can I guess.” She hung up.
He went into a kind of coma for a moment after she hung up the phone. But it was more personal than her hanging up. Somewhere deep in his being, he was grateful to her. But he wanted rather, on some level, to be abused. If she had only cursed him, yelled maybe, then he could feel it, the retribution he deserved. If he could just be made to feel worse than he already did, something total and final, then he would know what he should do. But she didn’t do that, and Rusty knew that just wasn’t her. She probably forgave me, he thought, and that only cheapened his self-loathing. He wondered if that was why she didn’t tell him; no one knew him like she did. He would still get to wallow in his mess but was forced to go on living. Well, he thought, I sure as hell am not going to do it sober. Then it hit him. Call her back? How?
It rained most of the night, and the pounding of golf-ball-size hail woke up Elijah in the last part of the downpour. He rather liked the storms. This morning he thought back to his childhood, as he did most of the time. He would say that is where he learned most of what he knows but only recently understood what he had learned. He reached for his walker and made his way around the two-hundred-year-old bed that was passed down through his family. Elijah pressed his body along the walls on his morning journey to the bathroom. The poorly painted, dirty walls of his nursing home dorm room were plastered with memories, the very best ones—mostly of his wife of fifty years and in particular the battalion he served in WWII, also some ships that took him island-hopping in the pacific. Elijah was finding that at his age, you get honest. Everything around him came closer to who he really was and to what his heart had always prized. For him, it was his war and his girl and Montgomery Farm, his land.
At breakfast, Elijah was freshly appalled. He was a cook for the Marines for twenty of his years—the best years, to his mind.
“You’re trying to kill me.”
“No we ain’t, Mr. Elijah.”
“You know I was a cook for twenty years in the Marines.”
“Yes, Mr. Elijah. We know,” one woman answered, picking up trays.
“My granddaddy was a slave, lived to a hundred and four. Died in forty-five.”
“Sorry to hear that, Mr. Elijah. I lost my grandpa too.”
“Well, that’s a debt ever’ one has t’ pay. We goin’ anywheres today?” Elijah asked.
Elijah eventually found his way to the front porch of the home. He rocked there most mornings after breakfast. He liked to watch the people go like crazy to get to work or wherever—in such a hurry to get to the cemetery, he would say. He rocked. He also didn’t want to miss one inmate’s daily last-ditch effort at self-reliance. The man was in his late nineties, short and stocky, and loved to walk. He came to this country when a boy from Italy, from some town Elijah never bothered to pronounce correctly. He had said that he worked at a tool and die factory in Ponca City his whole life. He would talk to Elijah about all the other types of work he did over the years to support his wife and the kids and how he made it through this world by himself. Elijah thought about what his pastor said, how impressed he was with the people Elijah’s age. There was something about the WWII and Korea generations. They really lived for their kids. So they were happy to be in a home so as not to be a burden to their children. But some worried so for their grandchildren because they saw that they taught their own kids, by their own experience, that they should live for themselves. The day care and nursing home businesses were now booming.
The man made a break for it.
“Good luck!, I think this could right be your day.” Elijah attempted to yell.
The old man was headed for the plaza, for the IGA. He was intent on, as he would say, “Getting my own Dad-blamed food.”
Elijah always kept his old, wooden canes across his lap as he rocked. He prayed for his friend to make it to the store next time while humming something from his childhood. There was a lot he knew and could tell СКАЧАТЬ