Faraway Places by Tom Spanbauer Read Free Book Online Page B

at the Blackfoot State Fair.
    When they were mad at each other, my mother and my father didn’t act or talk any way different from the usual, although my father’s voice got higher and my mother’s got lower and my mother smoked my father’s Viceroys in front of him. They still talked to each other, but they didn’t say much. My mother said her usual things— you want another ice cube, Dad , stuff like that—and my father gave his usual answers: Yeah, Mom, I’ll have one , or nope , and just drive and smoke Viceroys.
    What got different when my mother and my father were mad at each other was the world; everything and everybody else was a little off—a touch cantankerous, and full of bother. My mother called it the devil’s work , and crossed herself when she said devil , but crossing herself didn’t stop the mischief. Everybody drove like they were from Utah, the Cokes weren’t cold enough, and somebody always got to the perfect parking space before us, or just as we pulled up, the traffic cop put his hand out so we had to stop and let everybody else and their dog go ahead.
    My mother’s eye got cockeyed when she was mad at my father at the Blackfoot State Fair, but not like that way it had the night of the chinook. Both eyes went slightly off, slightly askew—her right eye, not just the left eye.
    My mother kept saying forevermore , and my father madethat clucking sound with his tongue, said those words under his breath, and turned his knuckles white gripping the steering wheel.
    Other years, when we went to the Blackfoot State Fair, I used to try to do things to keep them from being mad at each other, tried to keep the conversation going, making comments about things I noticed: how straight the barbed wire next to the road was, what a neat car just passed us, how nice my mother’s singing voice was, though it wasn’t all that great.
    But that year I didn’t bother with any of that kind of stuff. I just let it go the way it always got anyway.
    My mother said it was a crying shame the way the crops looked on display on the counters in the vegetable barns that year. A crying shame , she said, forevermore . The sugar beets and the potatoes were half the size of the year before, and the garden vegetables—the carrots and string beans and acorn squash—were a disgrace. The sheaves of wheat should be as tall as you are , my father said, meaning as tall as me. But that year they were knee-high, maybe even shorter.
    In the cow barns, things were a little better. The cattle and the pigs and the sheep all seemed fat and sassy like other years, and their troughs were full of water, but all everybody could talk about was the drought and how hard it was to get feed, and for a decent price. Everywhere it was the same sorry story.
    When we got through with looking at the crops and the animals, usually we would go to the canned-goods part, then the arts-and-crafts section, where there was quilting and embroidery and fruit drying out; then we would go to where the machinery was and wait while my father talked combines and beet toppers and grain drills with the John Deere man. That’s usually how it went. We usually did the machinery right after the crops and animals and canned goods and arts and crafts, and that year was no different. My father’s eyes lit up soon as he saw those shiny new green John Deere machines. He headed straight for them, and everything seemed the way it had alwaysbeen at the Blackfoot State Fair. But then my mother gave me two dollars and told me not to tell my father she’d given me the money. Then she told me to take off out of there and have a good time before it was too late to have any more good times. I looked at those two dollar bills in my hand and asked her what time I should be back by. It’s a small world , my mother said, and you’re not getting away from me that easy. There’s plenty of time to worry about