Book Six and One-Half: Marion Saunders
49. “This fellow you’ll be riding with. . . .”
“This fellow you’ll be riding with,” Pop told me, “says he went to school with you. Name of Marion Saunders.” We were in the Milestone, up in Palemon, eating breakfast. Christmas vacation for some of us. If my dad ever took a vacation, I didn’t know about it.
“Must not have been in my graduating class. I suppose I’ll recognize him when I see him.” I waved my hand to the waitress for more coffee. Of course I would know him. My high school was tiny. Even the Baby Boom classes that were coming along had fewer than 65 kids graduating.
But when I hauled myself up into the cab, the man sitting in the passenger seat was no one I remembered. He looked instead like someone I might become: the bushy beard, a shade lighter than my own, starting at his cheekbones; the black felt hat with its band of conchos; the turquoise beads worn outside his snap-button shirt. He wore amber-tinted glasses and smoked a cigarette, and his right foot, in a knee-length cast, was propped on the dash. He was a little shorter than I was and owned the beginning of a paunch, and beneath those glasses there was a look I knew around his eyes. Men have it who’ve been shot at.
“Jonas Smith,” I said, introducing myself. “The old man says you and I went to school together.”
“Marion Saunders,” he said. “You might not remember me. I was only there two years. I graduated in ‘63; I was a grade behind you.”
“I remember you now,” I said. “You couldn’t play basketball for shit.”
“Neither could you,” he said. “We rode the bench together. Two of the tallest benchwarmers in the conference.”
Once I recalled the boy who couldn’t play basketball, his features snapped into their template in my brain. Marion Saunders had moved to Palemon from Honolulu; skinny and tanned, outspoken and cowardly by turns, he’d been a disappointing athlete but a big hit with the girls. He’d have been the last person I’d have guessed would stay around after he graduated. “What’re you doing in this no-life town?” I asked him. “A city boy like you. I’d have thought you’d be long gone by now.”
“Fact is, I kind of like it here,” he said. “Anyhow my wife won’t leave. You remember Debbie Beeman? Sandy Beeman’s sister?”
“I remember Debbie,” I said. “She was one cute little freshman.”
“Still cute,” he said. “She gets pregnant at the drop of a hat.”
“Better keep your hat on,” I said. “How many kids you got?”
“Three now,” he said. “We’re trying to hold it there for the time being.” He grinned as he said this, but his eyes darted nervously around the cab.
Marion had the truck hitched to the trailer, warmed up and ready to go. All I had to do was pull out onto the highway and try to remember how to get to Eldon Simms’s place, south of Palemon on the old Stagger Lakes turnoff. I guessed that once I got that far the rest would come to me. Sandhill roads are easy to drive in winter, when the ground is frozen, because if you make a mistake you can pull off into a meadow and turn around. If you try the same thing in April, you’d better have a Cat D-8 handy.
I found the ranch with no trouble. Eldon Simms worked his cattle alone, and Marion was no help, hopping on his bum leg, so it was past ten-thirty by the time we got loaded, meaning it’d be nine p.m. when we got back, provided it indeed turned out to be an eleven-hour trip. My father figured time differently than anyone else, so I doubted we’d be getting in before the Milestone closed at ten. Marion drove the first shift, saying he’d take it as far as the weigh station at Greeley.
As we were going north toward town, a couple in a beat-up ‘60 Chevy pulled out in front of us from a country road. Marion hit the brakes with his casted foot, and the cattle shifted in the back of the trailer. After he revved the engine and caught a gear, he expressed his sentiments by blatting the air horn a couple of times. The old character driving the Chevy paid no attention, but the woman turned around, smiled and waved. I waved back at her.
“Run over that old son of a bitch,” I said.
“That’s Baldwin McDonough,” Marion said. “Don’t you like him?”
“Not especially,” I said. “They’re related to me, sort of. Mom’s sister married Badwin’s brother Rudy.”
“Didn’t know you had a mother,” Marion said. We were pulling around the Chevy by now; Baldwin was holding it at a steady forty-five. “George lives by himself, doesn’t he?”
“Mom left a few years back,” I said. “She moved to Seattle.”
“Sorry.”
“Baldy beat me out with a woman when I was eleven years old,” I said. “Makes a pretty good road story.”
Marion Saunders looked at me. “You weren’t interested in Irene, were you?”
“It wasn’t Irene,” I said. “Baldwin was screwing the music teacher. There’s a dog in this story. Do you like dogs?”
“You bet,” Marion Saunders said. “You’ve got to love a dog. What kind of dog was it?”
“A hot dog,” I said.
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