The Beavers Get Away

Is included in: NotesA_WhileTeen

Summer was half over, and though we had all worked hard to make the development look nice, we hadn’t sold a single lot.

We were convinced that we had—in Dad’s words—the prettiest, most sensible land development in our part of Missouri. But we were gradually losing faith in the business value of natural beauty and sensibleness. People must be looking for something ugly they could be overcharged for.

Still, we continued to work day after day mowing grass, working roads, burning brush, trimming trees. Our signs along the local roads continued to proclaim, with friendly enthusiasm, our “natural beauty” and “sensible prices.”

Finally Mom or Dad or both of them decided we needed a break. We needed to “get away for a few days.” Plans were laid one morning during a rare breakfast in which we were all present. We would go to Silver Dollar city in the southern part of the state. Silver Dollar City! Mom made reservations that afternoon. Two days later we left, and two days after that we were home again, six hours earlier than planned, and I was mowing a field and Bill was replacing the carburetor on one of the tractors. Dad was inside waiting for Mom to get back from town with the medicine…

The night before departure was filled with domestic hostility and rush.

I loaded the trunk and my brother went almost insane because the soda box was on the left side instead of the right.

“What if we want to stop and get a soda along the highway?” he reasoned, his voice echoing up and down the valley. “You think we’re gonna stand right here with cars zooming by a hundred miles an hour to search for a root beer?”

“What are they gonna do?” I asked, caught up in the spirit of rational debate. “Try to hit us?”

“They’re a lot more likely to than if it was on the other side!”

I did not at that moment take time to visualize the disaster he thought so probable—a car full of children and parents parked beside the highway gets rammed on the left rear corner by a 12-ton truck, but the wise individual getting a soda from the right side of the trunk is able to leap to safety.

Instead, I attacked the basic weakness in his argument. “That’s so stupid. God you’re stupid. Over such a little thing you get all upset like it’s going to change the world.”

“Stupid?” he challenged, and offered a different theory. “You’re the one that’s stupid.”

Dad came into the garage to get himself a beer from the refrigerator there. “Now come on boys. What’s wrong?” he asked, including a belch of evening peacefulness somewhere in the question. We explained the disagreement, but failed to take turns. “Come on now, don’t yell,” Dad yelled.

“Dadisitallright,” I asked, substituting speed for volume, “toputthesodabox on the left side? He says cars’ll try to kill you when you’re getting a soda.,”

“Oh, I don’t think it matters,” Dad ruled, and began to walk away.

“Dad—“ Bill began.

“All right!” our father said, in a tone that meant something entirely different than the words. Bill shut up, sighing deeply. I smiled, victorious.

But Dad decided to inspect the rest of my packing. “Well, Tom, you put the pillows on the bottom. They’re gonna get all dirty. Now why did you do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and offered an alibi I didn’t have much confidence in. I had used it several hundred times before. “I just didn’t think about it.”

“Ha!” Bill gloated, knowing as well as me how well that excuse usually worked.

“You didn’t notice it either,” I said, attempting to insult him by categorizing him with myself.

“Okay, now, just stop arguing,” Dad said. He didn’t take the occasion to chide me for thoughtlessness. It was, after all, the night before vacation. Instead he changed the subject, tried to introduce a note of camaraderie, a sense of working together for a common goal, a shared adventure. “We’ll have to check the oil and make sure we have tools,” he said.

“Who?” I asked suspiciously.

“The two of you,” he said, and walked away to drink his beer in peace.

“The royal us,” said my brother

We left at 8 o’clock the next morning.

[Several hours into the vacation…]

We drove out of town on a narrow, hilly road. Very soon we arrived at the motel. Dad and I went into the office to get the room numbers and keys while my sisters twittered about the huge blue swimming pool they’d seen behind the building and Mom tried not to visualize how close she actually was, at long last, to a bathroom. My brother sat looking silently out a rear window.

Dad and I got back in the car, I holding the keys and feeling important, Dad snarling about the cost of the rooms.

“Now don’t think about money,” Mom said. “We’re here to have a good time. Just stop thinking about money for awhile.”

“I can’t stop thinking about money if I don’t want to end up in jail,” he said, which lightened the mood. We knew he was half joking. He drove us downhill and around to the back of the building.

“Look for 233 and 235,” I said, reading with authority from the key plaques.

“Aren’t they together?” one of the girls wailed.

“Yes,” Bill said kindly, although it sounded more like disgust. “That’s just the way they number them.”

“Now, Bill, try to get in a good mood,” Mom implored.

“That is his good mood,” said one of the girls.

“There they are!” a sister squealed, pointing to a pair of doors on a balcony. As Dad parked the car we saw a woman push a cart loaded with towels and bed linens from one of our doors. “Is she cleaning our rooms?” a sister asked.

“No, she just got done making them dirty because the last people left it so clean,” I said.

“Ha ha,” said a sister. Mom smiled. Bill laughed in a way that was the opposite of a laugh.

We sprang from the car—stiffly, like thick wire not really made for coiling—and we took a few moments to stretch out, tiptoeing in small, meaningless patterns like several frankenstein monsters trying ballet.

Then we raced, at different speeds and for different reasons, to our rooms. My sisters and I made a survey of the closets, televisions, drawers and light switches. Bill read the instructions on the TV set and air conditioner. Mom tested one of the bathrooms. Dad tried one of the beds to see if it worked.

In a few minutes, Bill had both air conditioners running and we were basking in the heat, imagining we had already, as masters of those rooms, made life half a degree cooler. We had all converged in the room where Mom and Dad were. Dad was not sleeping, but was simply lying on his back with one knee up and the other leg crossed over it. He had his shoes off and was scratching one foot through the clean white sock, a form of meditation for him. Mom emerged from the bathroom, looking fresher and stirring a newly made glass of instant tea in the tall plastic cup she’d brought from home. She set the cup on a table, removed a single cigarette from her purse, and sank into a motel chair, groaning luxuriously.

“Whew. All that sitting makes me tired,” she said. She lit the cigarette. We were all quiet now, sprawled on the beds and carpet, tired, as Mom had put it, from doing nothing for so many hours.

“You boys’ll have to unload the car right away,” Mom said.”

I groaned, suddenly so sleepy I seemed to be coming down with something, and considered saying so. Bill was standing up, watching television with the sound turned all the way down. He had been chuckling at a cartoon. Now I heard him sigh.

“Oh, you can wait a few minutes,” Mom said, knowing that we would take that long to start doing it in any case. 

“I’m starting to feel that good cool air,” said dad.

That great place, Silver Dollar City, was still in the future for us. The very near future. We kids could feel its closeness. But somehow, we were happy for the moment exactly where we were, in a small, plain motel room, far from all our work and worry, experiencing a break from the usual.

[unfinished]