Mario Muscar

Rank Stranger

by Jacob Strautmann 

 

 

 

She said. She said. She said. She said. She said.

She said. She said. She said. She said. - K.C.

 

 

Mustard Seed Ridge dropped off to the right. I hadn’t encountered another vehicle in the half-hour since I’d left my mother’s house. Maybe everyone was in church. Maybe no one went to church anymore. I had done everything I was supposed to do. Flowers at her graveside. A moment of silence pulled over on the blind turn where they found her car. Gaps of her last twenty years glossed as good as they would ever be over cigarettes and coffee with an elderly woman who had been my second grade teacher and her sister’s second mother-in-law. My band’s jag of festival gigs ended in the usual disorganization that summer (even the same week I learned what had happened to her), but it took me months to show up. And now I was on my last day before heading back to Berkeley. I knew I was crossing a line driving to her old place. This morning, too tired to extricate myself from my mother’s suggestions I play a few pieces for the ladies at Wolf Run Presbyterian, I turned on her coffeepot and shut the door quietly behind me before it finished brewing. On a vaguely worded note I said something about driving without a destination and indulging whatever showed up on the road -- that’s pretty much how I managed to find myself idling at the end of her old man’s long driveway, staring at what used to be her sister’s trailer and an inexplicably shiny Harley off the side-porch in the tall dry grass. 

 

I turned the radio down to a respectful level and continued up the lane. I hadn’t called ahead. Mrs. Bard told me the old man lived primarily in the garage, retired, cut-off from most things except his occasional calf-breeding and his thirty-three year old Dodge Ram, that he only headed into the empty house for showers and the fridge when he needed to thaw out his venison. I wondered if the phone still rang as loudly and as startling as it once had, if he could still hear it. Halfway up the lane, the small poplar trees of two decades ago loomed over me, and their yellow leaves blocked the open view of the ridges and pattern of hayfields and pastures I’d so easily rejected for bigger things. I braked when a dog trotted out in front me. He didn’t bark, kept down the lane, ears flat, nose straight ahead. He wasn’t the same border collie I stupidly expected, a different one, also quick and with a ring of white around his shoulders, but darker in general. 

 

The two girls stepped into view behind him. The road was narrow, and I let the engine idle. Would they be 11 and 13 already? I’d forgotten their names. The older one held a switch in her left hand, a key on a yarn-loop hung from her neck. Both carried their Mama’s sadness like a halo -- mousy chin-length hair, round faces, small upturned noses. They each wore a similar blue potato-sack dress too thin for the season. Until now, I’d only seen pictures. I wondered if they blamed their Mama, if they knew she was a drinker -- how much a part that had played in their loss. After a first wide-eyed look, they put their faces down and walked quietly by the purr of my rental. There was something goat-like in their movements, sure-footed with surprisingly long legs stepping over the poplar roots and the gullies runoff had carved around the gravel. Maybe their Aunt still lived in the trailer. 

 

At the top, I carefully backed around to face down the hill, inching my brake lights as close as I dared to the wood rail fence. Everyone did this. I was satisfied with my car, an Impala I’d nabbed at the airport for the rate of a compact. I stood, slammed the door, breathed in. Manure was sharp and pleasant in the air. This reflex was not one I practiced anywhere else. When the band bus pulled into a new town it usually parked in back by the dumpsters. Here, in the hills, the air always smelled like wet earth and felt like something seeping back towards me, something vaguely alive and, yet, uncaring enough it didn’t ask anything of me. I was calm when I knocked on the half-open lid of the garage door. The dodge was gone. No one answered, and I slipped under it calling out his CB handle. “The Ram” wasn’t home. It looked like he had been cleaning out the house. There were a couple piles of books in crates against the cinder block wall, a few table cloths covered them. One lay on the floor near a spill of oil. In the small alcove to the left he’d set up a cot and mattress, raised about four feet and even with the bottom of the window; a rifle could be placed on a tripod easily there, I guessed -- a tree-stand with all the comforts of home. Binoculars hung on a bolt drilled into the wall above the cot. 

 

I knew he wasn’t there, but I crossed the driveway to see the house I’d left in a huff twenty years ago. The door was locked. I held up my hand to block the reflection of the morning’s bright blue sky from each of its six panes. The kitchen was empty, the table and chairs were present in their absence. Gouge-tracks marked up the floor on four sides. An industrial-sized freezer took up space where the fridge used to stand, but the rest was the peeling brown and orange linoleum I expected to see. The living room’s one bookshelf was empty. It was hard to see from this angle, but the same oil-drum stove, the same couch and recliner remained museum-like. I stood on one of the flowerbeds to get a view in the big bay window. The flowerbeds were everywhere in the yard, bald tractor tires painted white, filled in with planting soil. I caught my breath. 

 

From here, the entrance to her old room was clear. The Ram hadn’t started in on it. He must have been clearing one room at a time. A strip of sunlight fell through the far window across her bed. What I hadn’t expected to see hung on the wall above her nightstand, the 11x17 version of my first band poster. It was hard to make out in shadow, and the colors were faded, but I knew it. I remembered asking my sister to add a light-flair in the top right corner. There it was, something she kept of mine. 

 

How many times had she come back to that room since her first marriage ended? How many times had she gathered her girls and a half-packed suitcase when the husband went on a night shift, the panic of an irreversible decision standing up in the hairs on the back of her neck? She kept my poster. Her daughters would have asked who “Rank Stranger” was, and she would have had to explain my band to them, she’d have had to explain me. 

 

I sat on the porch and lit one. Rose was my first; I was her fourth or fifth. We may have been horribly mismatched from the beginning, something common in closed-off West Virginia communities, but I saw it before she did. No -- she never saw it, until I laid it out plain. Her father, The Ram, was already a grey, fox-eyed, hippie-hating deer hunter, imposing in his height and girth. He clicked off the six o’clock news and made a disparaging remark I probably didn’t fully register except to afford myself the opportunity for yet another display of my righteous otherness, in the place I knew I didn’t belong.

 

Kurt Cobain’s body had been discovered by an electrician earlier that day. When Diane Sawyer read the first verse of his “Dumb” proving the awful school day rumor true, the lyrics rang flatter than I’d ever heard them, sang them, or read them before. Kurt was my antidote to the big-haired, tight-jeaned country and classic rock cultural hegemony the rest of Marshall County embraced, Rose’s culture. The music I blared from my white 1986 Volkswagen Golf as I drove past our high school or Rose’s church was my middle finger waving out the window. My perspective was wall-eyed, but I wanted to tear my hair in her small wood-paneled living room, the old stove sweating us out late in the season. I wanted to show her this meant something to me, that it was bigger than I could articulate, that some invisible ratio of me to the idea of what I could expect from life had just been cut adrift -- how I knew Rose’s silences could dig into me. 

 

The Ram’s carelessness was the trigger. All I could get out was a compromised, “It’s hard for you to appreciate how big it is, and it’s all I know.” He didn’t register my comment, dropped the footrest of the recliner and looked out the window. He was always checking his herd. In order to regain my petulancy, I pushed The Ram for a comparison. “Surely, you’ve lost someone you idolized. You must know how it feels.” Rose dug her fingers into my forearm. I hadn’t noticed she was on the couch with me. But I had reached a decision about Rose and me. Even she couldn’t slow my gesture towards a more inclusive American cultural landscape: “He was an artist and should be honored.” 

 

“He was a hopeless hippie,” her dad spat back and shuffled out of the room to bed. 

 

I turned to Rose. “He’d understand if he were younger.” 

 

“He’s only ten years older than yours.”  

 

“My dad was a hippie.” 

 

“Think before you speak.” She was playing with the fringe of a throw pillow.

 

“I don’t understand what that means.”

 

“Everyone’s lost someone.”

 

I stepped back, flicked the ash and pressed my face against the glass of the door again to see if the throw pillows with the oversized gold fringe could be where I remembered them. They were one of the last things her mom ever made. They were gone. Or, maybe they were on Rose’s bed. I straddled the railing and stepped back onto a whitewashed tire. Her room was all in shadow now, and I dropped my smoke somewhere in the yucca plants. After kicking up the mulch with my new Chucks, I gave up and walked out to the fence. 

 

The pinnacle of our relationship, January to April 1994, had quickly found an enduring cycle of mental anguish (usually composed of Rose’s silences), worrisome sex (pregnancy scares arrived with the moon), and the boredom of two people who have nothing in common trying to plan an entire life together. Three months after we were in deep I begged her to hear my band’s first show at the VFW. She brought her sister, Kimmy, who still hair-sprayed her hair into a salute and who, for some reason that night, wore purple overalls. Only my desire to touch Rose in her pegged jean jacket overcame my embarrassment at the Randy Travis style they brought to my punk show. Good lord. 

 

“Of course everyone has lost someone. That’s my point.” 

 

“He lost someone, David.”

 

“Yeah.” 

 

“Recently. You should know better.” 

 

Her late mother had already registered for me, but I was willing at that moment to play dumb. I hated her complacency and self-assurance. Her way of seeing the world in “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” was, as far as I could gather, the Upper Ohio Valley’s modus operandi. They couldn’t be wrong about anything, because “everything is as it should be.” The fatalism behind the phrase I’d heard a million times growing up was the reason (I was sure) all but two of my classmates stayed in the same county they’d been raised in. It continued to make me angry. I tried to put Rose on the defensive: “Yes, and he should understand exactly what I’m feeling.” It was too far. I was trying to figure out how to apologize when she surprised me.

 

“I’ve listened to none of your tape.” It was meant to sting. She spat “tape” the same way The Ram spat “hippie.” The reason my guitar was sitting in the kitchen (far enough away from the stove that it wouldn’t warp) was part of the deal I made with myself about Rose and me. Our recycling of anguish, sex, and boredom had begun to wear me down. The thought of another spin through it all nearly brought me to tears. Like most musicians stuck in the Valley’s version of the Grunge scene, I had neither the credentials nor the calluses. It, too, was compromised. After the punk show, I immediately came down with pneumonia. It gave me time to think, and I woke early one Sunday to write one after another eleven songs about our great romance. Stopping only to eat and take my inhaler, I generated verses and choruses, perfected them by my idiosyncratic standards, and recorded in a couple takes, the final versions done on a crappy hand-held cassette recorder. For what I knew as an 18-year-old, I’d hit my stride as an artist. I needed to know Rose could appreciate something of my achievement -- that is, what I thought at the time, the most important part of me. When I brought the guitar to her house that night, I thought playing her the songs would be a bridge out of our funk. If she could meet me halfway, acknowledge something positive about my music or at least give a nod towards my future with the band, then we’d be fine. It was a quiet ultimatum and free of confrontation. I needed to know I had muscle and wanted to speak the truth, whatever the truth was. But news of Kurt’s death started us off on the wrong foot. I didn’t know what to do. She lied. She hadn’t even removed the ribbon from the cassette case. I was appalled, my rhythm thrown off.

 

The high whine of a chainsaw drew my focus past the rut that ran alongside the fence. It struck me that I hadn’t spotted a single cow in the pasture all morning. Over on the next hill parked on a utility road I could make out a red pick-up truck, a couple figures hunching over their work. I walked back to the garage, slipped under, called his name once more for good measure, and quickly passed into the alcove for the binoculars. The window just missed the view I wanted. A second saw started up, discordant with the first, and I stepped outside, squinted to locate them again, and drew them into focus. A big, stooped man I knew at once to be The Ram and a younger man with nearly the same build were busy dismantling wooden fencing. The tailgate of the Dodge was down. Firewood probably. I thought again of the heat the oil-drum stove put off, how many head of cattle he had back then. 

 

I put the binoculars back on the bolt and made up my mind to wait. The Dodge didn’t have that big of a payload, and staying here as long as I had without offering my condolences was another example of my not following through, a phrase that seemed to follow me all my life, from women like Rose, to my family, to the mess of a summer tour I still owed the guys an apology for. He would be back before lunch I was convinced. I would do this for myself if for no one else. I lit another and walked the fence-line listening to the chord-sound of the chainsaws flapping in the air. The smell of manure had become a background smell, barely noticeable, and I wondered how long it would be before I could no longer hear the dissonant saws, wondered how long my hearing would last at all. With rock guitarists it always starts with the upper frequencies, but my hearing loss was broader than most. I’d been a dumb kid too long. 

 

Having caught sight of him, I felt I was trespassing. A bird’s nest lay on the ground where the hayfield and the pasture fence-line met. I walked back to the Impala and leaned against it trying to regain my cool. I remembered there was a path out the back of the house, how it was my escape route from her basement apartment back then -- the basement she once described as carved out of hollow rock by dynamite her father had secreted from the mine. That’s where we usually spent our evenings after school “doing homework.” There was no heat down there except for a kerosene heater she refused to turn on for more than ten minutes. Being pinned under her heavy musty comforter was as much survival as it was sex. 

 

The sun’s warmth was noticeable for the first time all morning, as I tried to imagine what I must have been to Rose. At the time, I had only thought of what she was to me. On those nights, things inevitably turned to her small bath downstairs. She would fill the tub, ask me to leave while she undressed and stepped in. Then she gave me the okay. I was responsible for soaping her back. That was all. She never let me touch her in any other way in the bath, and eventually I got used to it. It was ritual. We often said nothing, and it was the only time in our relationship when I played a mothering role.  After she toweled down and whatever else she was feeling like, I’d leave by the back door in the moonlight for the long ride home, the smell of her body-wash on my hands. 

 

My beat-up Washburn was in the back seat of the Impala. I had no memory of the eleven songs I’d written Rose, only to say I had. I held the body of the guitar close to my best ear and tuned all the strings down a half step to play my song “Sally’s Backbone.” Rank Stranger played “Sally” when I was nominally the lead guitarist. It was the only song of mine to survive the transition and change in band name, but I couldn’t recall the last time I saw it on the set list. The next incarnation of the band retained our drummer and me pushed over into rhythm guitar. We had a charming show-boater take over lead vocals and guitar. He could be a lot to handle, but he had connections in Austin and Berkeley, a new P.A. system, and I was fine hanging in the back with my old friend Marty. 

 

I sat on the cold bumper and started to play the power chords, the only chords I’d known when I wrote it. The first verse came quickly enough: When I find her I’m confounded as a bird without a wish... I winced at the line, its thinness trailing off in the early October air. The chorus stumped me for a moment. The last few times the band had done it (three years ago?), my second guitar was in the shop, and I was forced to use standard tuning. I was confusing one for another. The half-step adjustment was easy enough, but my syncopation was lost, and I had to start over. The saws droned on. I wondered how far my music carried. I finally belted out the second line of the verse: In the hallowed hallway of the daughter, shoved my feelings in the shower. It was all derivative, but for a moment I didn’t care. I liked my voice. The chorus arrived naturally now, and the C-E-A-E progression tuned-down morphed into something I’d forgotten until that moment -- the bridge I’d stolen whole cloth from Kurt’s “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter.” I no longer wanted to hear my own obfuscations. I wanted his: Find. Find your place...Spin. Spin the truth. And the chorus: What is what I need? What is wrong with me? I finished his song. Whatever he was singing it sounded solid, like a man standing up inside the words, truer than the trash I played for decades. I was sure the band kept “Sally” on the set list as long as they had out of pity or laziness. I blamed Marty. I was looking down at the gravel, sad for Kurt, for Rose, sad for The Ram, but, most of all, sad for myself, when I heard her voice. 

 

The two girls were standing across the driveway from me in the leaves of one of the poplars. The older one repeated what I’d just missed: “Henry says hunters aren’t welcome on this property.” 

 

“I’m not a hunter.”

 

“Henry says you aren’t welcome.”

 

“I’m here to see your dad--” I corrected myself. “I’m here to see your grandpa.”

 

“Pawpaw is cutting wood.” 

 

“I was just waiting.” 

 

Her little sister followed like she was pulled by an unseen rope. They walked up to me. The older girl’s resemblance to Rose was uncanny -- her gait, her gaze, all but her shorter hair. She pointed to the Washburn. “Do you know Creedance?”

 

I was nervous in front of the girls and didn’t tune it back in case it took too long. Instead, I started noodling in 1-4-5 in different keys, assuming I’d find “Lodi,” or something. My ears reddened. She stopped me and motioned for the guitar. She strummed with her fingers “Bad Moon Rising.” Her voice was young, slightly off-key (my tuning no doubt), and she had trouble making the return to the D chord. It slowed her down some, a tempo that always made the song eerie and almost beautiful. She got to “one eye is taken for an eye.” I asked her who taught her to play. “Henry.” I’d missed the Harley’s ignition down at the trailer, but it was growling up the lane. Her younger sister heard it, too, and tugged on her dress. She handed me the guitar. They backed away from me as a man rolled up on his well-cared-for hog. 

 

Everything about him was quintessential biker -- from the faded black cow-leather vest, skull and crossbones kerchief, to the open-carry policy his empty holster suggested. He biked close to the Impala, not threateningly, but not comfortable either, made a wide loop to the edge of the drive and stopped, facing back down the lane. He was familiar to this patch of earth. He shut off the bike, but didn’t kick out the stand, only there long enough to have his say. “If you come for the old man, some other time. He’s working.” Then, turning his beefy head, and in a tenderer voice than I would have expected: “Girls, Auntie Kim says I messed up asking you to come up here. Get on back down the house. She needs help with washing.” The girls trekked down the lane without another word, keeping to the right where the trees forced them to duck and step over roots again. How many times a day did they pass that way? I watched them go. It was unlikely I’d ever speak with them again. He looked me up and down, and I was aware my rental had out-of-state plates. “Did they send you from the insurance place again?” I shook my head. I looked at his handlebar mustache, his short wide stance, his thick neck and tattoos. It seemed he had been born a biker. I hadn’t looked like a musician for some time now. Maybe it was as it should be. He repeated himself, “He’s working all day” and kicked on the bike with a pop. I shouted over it, “Tell Kimmy Dave stopped by,” but it was clear my voice didn’t make it through the rumble. A small cloud of dust lifted up like a tail from the back of his bike as he drove off. 

 

I fell against the car like I’d been punched in the gut. The Washburn slipped off the bumper. I asked Rose why she told me she listened to my songs, had said she liked them fine, when she hadn’t opened the case. And, if I had been teetering that night on the edge of throwing the whole relationship over, just waiting for her to show her disapproval, drag me down into her sadness one more time, this was the plunge I’d been waiting for. 

 

She went for her favorite subject, one that shocked me the first dozen times I heard her bring it up. It was a cultural divide I couldn’t cross, still couldn’t: “Making me a song is not the same thing as giving me a ring.”

 

She wanted the high road, and I bared my teeth in the kitchen. “What the hell are two people in love supposed to do?”

 

“Make plans.” 

 

“Unhappiness is foolish to plan for.” It sounded sharper than I meant it, but I let it ride. I watched her walk into her bedroom and shut the door. I let myself walk out in the cold April night air by the front door, drop my guitar on the back seat, fire up the Volkswagen, and blast Kurt’s Breed already cued up just in case. (He was the soundtrack that could make the whole thing matter.) I punched the gas and spun gravel out into the pasture, startling their dozen cows into tripping over themselves down the dark hill. I knew I stung them good. It felt okay for a moment. Without Rose to distract me I threw myself into the band, and things started to take off. 

 

But most things run out of steam. The band had. I had. Rose most of all. What was wrong with me? The saws were suddenly silent. Maybe they were coming back early. I flung the Washburn in the car, nervously buckled up, turned the key and slipped it into drive. My foot waited over the gas as I reached for the radio.