Written by Stephen F. Moloney
Ray navigated the Mustang towards the end of the dirt track he’d been following since turning off the main road five minutes previously and brought it to a stop. He turned the key in the ignition, causing the quietly purring engine to fall silent, and popped open his door. After driving for the bones of nearly five hours – save for the odd pit stop at one or two gas stations in order to fill up his thirsty steed – Ray stepped out of the car and afforded himself the luxury of thoroughly stretching out his stiff, aching joints. Once he’d heard a sufficient amount of crack and pops emanating from his back, and began to feel the blood coursing back down into his legs, he took in a lungful of the cool, fresh air and looked around at the surroundings he’d only been given a glimpse of previously through the rather small windows on the Mustang.
As advertised by the beat-up mailbox Ray had been keeping his eyes peeled for, ‘Hartstone Farm’ was, indeed, what the name suggested, but going on first impressions, at any rate, it had ceased to be a ‘working farm’ a long time ago. There was a large, two-storey wooden barn off to his left that had been patched in places with sheets of corrugated steel where the decades-old wooden boards had, obviously, rotted away. Directly behind the barn, fenced off with a ring of weather-beaten wooden posts, was a spacious corral where any carpet of grass that might have once covered it at some point in time had long-since been replaced by a layer of a concrete-like, dusty hardpan where the only signs of growth now were the patches of hardy-looking weeds that, true to form, had managed to crack through the barren surface in a display of sheer stubbornness to survive. And then on the far side of the corral, the very top of it just peeking out above a thicket of tall, old oak trees, there was a relic of a wooden grain silo that, like the barn, had clearly seen some ‘emergency surgery’ in order to keep it structurally sound, as evidenced by the patches of corrugated steel Ray could see welded onto, not only the cylindrical body of the silo but the coned roof as well.
After registering each of those landmarks into the mental map of the property he’d been compiling since turning off the main road, however – a holdover of a habit from his days in the army – Ray promptly turned his attention onto the house sitting almost directly across from the barn on the opposite side of the yard to where he was standing.
Though not overly large, the house was an attractive – if not slightly in the need of some repairs – ranch-style property with a generously-sized, raised porch wrapping around three of the four sides of the exterior. Again, like every other structure Ray had seen on the farm up until that point, the house was predominantly made up of wood that had been bleached a faint grey colour by years of exposure to the elements, but with the added addition of an impressive stone chimney breast running up the right-hand side of it. And then, tying this whole idyllic slice of ‘Americana’ together – itself, just like the house, slightly faded and frayed around the edges – was ‘Old Glory’, hanging from the very top of the porch; the nylon fabric it was made from not so much “gallantly streaming” as opposed to “ever-so-gently swaying” in what little breeze there was blowing around the yard.
What worried Ray, though, was that the more he looked around the outside of the house, the more it appeared to be that there was no one home – a proposition which, given the limited amount of time he had, would be severely problematic. Knowing there was no point getting too far ahead of himself before he’d, at least, knocked on the door, however, Ray turned around and half-sat back down into the driver’s seat of the Mustang. With his right leg resting in by the brake and his left dangling ever-so-slightly above the ground outside the car, Ray stretched across to the front passenger side – his back grumbling at him for making such a move – and pulled open the small glove box. He reached inside, felt around the pile-lined interior and half-empty packet of hard candies he’d found earlier – candies which had long-since melded together into one large, sticky lump – and eventually grabbed a hold of the sheet of paper he was looking for.
With one final effort before his back decided to just ‘up and drop tools’ in protest, Ray, in one fluid motion, pulled the sheet of paper out of the glovebox, slammed it shut, and returned to a more natural sitting position. As his back, gratefully, set about realigning itself, Ray glanced down at the sheet of paper and, for the umpteenth time, checked that he had, indeed, gotten Jeanie to print out the correct form for him using the semi-broken printer in the small office at the rear of the diner back home.
“GR-191 …” he whispered, reading each part of the blocky title at the top of the form slowly and precisely in order to appease the paranoid part of his brain that, for some reason, refused to believe he hadn’t, in fact, come all this way with the incorrect form.
“SO, HOW’S THE OLD GIRL RUNNIN’?!”
Having been so focused on reading the form and internally arguing with himself, to suddenly hear a voice cut through the silence – and knowing it was aimed at him – caught Ray completely by surprise. He quickly glanced at both the barn and the house, but when there was no one to be seen in either of those two places, Ray’s eyes, immediately, darted up to the rearview mirror. And, sure enough, there in the reflection shuffling up along the track he’d driven in on, a well worn-in, cream-coloured cowboy hat perched on his head and a wooden cane in his hand, was, undoubtedly, the man who Ray had come to see: Travis Peyton.
Feeling a lot more nervous than what he thought he would be, Ray quickly pulled himself together, climbed out of the car, and looked back down the track at Travis. He was comfortably in his 70s, if not early 80s, so a lot older than what Ray had thought he was going to be given how young Mustang was. Though his rounded shoulders and slightly hunched back betrayed the fact his condition had already begun to warp how he stood and moved, from the size of his all-round frame it was clear he was the kind of man who’d spent decades working with his hands and doing the kind of hard manual labour that gets you properly strong – a fact his Parkinson’s had yet to fully succeed in robbing him of. And despite the brim of his cowboy hat casting quite a heavy shadow over his face, Ray could still just about make out a pair of piercingly green eyes staring out at him from a heavily tanned face fit with a snowy white mustache and deep cut wrinkles – in other words, the face of a man who looked as though he could tell you a different story from his past every day for a year and never repeat himself once.
“Afternoon, sir! I didn’t pass you on the way in, did I?!” called out Ray, apprehensively, as he quietly hoped he hadn’t, inadvertently, made the worst possible first impression on Mustang’s grandpa, save for accidentally hitting him with his own car.
“Relax, you’re fine – you didn’t pass nobody,” replied Travis, his deep, drawling Texas accent and the dismissive wave of his hand quickly allaying Ray’s worries. “I was just off checkin’ my well – it’s in one of the fields just off the track there – but when I heard old Maisie here rumblin’ past, I knew it had to be you, so I hightailed it back up here … well, my version of ‘hightailin’ it’, at any rate.”
With that, a smiling Travis reached the Mustang and, like he was doing so to an actual wild horse, placed his hand gently up onto the back of it.
“So, wait … you knew I was comin’?” asked Ray, as he watched Travis carefully glide his hand across the paintwork of the car, reacquainting himself with the curves and creases he’d once known inside-out.
“Yessir,” replied Travis, a touch distractedly, as he worked his way across the trunk of the car and over to the passenger side. “Got a call from Ms. Kershaw ’round lunchtime sayin’ the ‘Thackett gentleman’ who looked after young Oscar when Maisie here …” He slapped his hand on the roof of the car. “Decided she needed a new radiator, would be droppin’ by to talk to me about how he wanted my only grandson to go live with him …” Having been peering in through the front passenger window to get a look at the interior of the car, cupping his spare hand up against the glass in order to beat the glare of the late afternoon sunlight, Travis straightened back up as far as he could and looked across the roof of the car at Ray. “And to ask if I’d be willin’ to give my blessin’ to make such a thing happen.”
“And here was me spendin’ the last five hours craftin’ the perfect speech for how to bring that up,” replied a smiling Ray, dryly. “Little did I know, though, Tess had beaten me to the punch probably not all that long after I’d gotten off the phone askin’ her if Must-…” Ray caught himself before he could finish saying ‘Mustang’. Given he was trying to convince Travis that he should, indeed, allow his one and only grandson to come live with him – a, for the most part, complete stranger – he figured it was probably best if he, at least, called said grandson by the actual name on his birth certificate, as opposed to the one he’d hastily made up as part of a lie. “If Oscar could come stay with me in the first place.”
“Well, far be it from me to see a few hours work wasted …” said Travis, himself mirroring Ray’s dry tone. “So, how ‘bout this? You can still make your speech, but instead of doin’ it here, we mosey on over to that there porch and you can show me what you came up with over a couple of cold ones – what d’ya think?”
“Yeah, I could go for a beer,” replied Ray, already dreaming of getting an ice-cold drink into his hand.
“Good, cause I need one after marchin’ all the way down and back from that well; and given I promised my doctor I’d only drink when I’d company, this is kinda a ‘win-win’ situation for me.”
Not needing to hear anymore, and with Travis already beginning to shuffle away from the car, Ray closed his door with a solid thud, tucked the form into the back pocket of his jeans, and set about catching up with his soon-to-be drinking buddy.
“Now, if you need me to slow down at any point?” joked Travis, sarcastically, as Ray quickly fell into step alongside him. “You just holler out, alright? No need to be embarrassed.”
“Yessir,” laughed Ray. “Though, if worst comes to worst and I fall too far behind, I can always just try to hitch a ride on the back of a turtle – you know … to catch up.”
Out of nowhere, Travis brought their glacier of a convoy to a standstill and looked up at the far taller Ray.
“You really think that’s the best thing to say to me given what you’re here to ask me?” he inquired, attempting to sound stern, but unable to fully suppress an air of mischief from seeping into his voice.
“Probably not, no …” replied Ray, before smiling daringly down at Travis. “But it is kinda funny, though.”
After attempting to fix Ray with a withering glare, Travis’ cheek muscles soon betrayed him and finally pulled his mouth into the smile he’d been attempting to fight off.
“I like you, Thackett …” he said, his eyes narrowing suspiciously like he wasn’t sure whether or not to trust the gut-feeling he was having about Ray as he set off walking once more. “The only question, though …” he called back over his shoulder as he wiggled his index finger in the air like a charismatic detective on the cusp of a breakthrough in a “whodunit” novel. “Is will I like you enough to let you take care of my grandson?!”
*
“So, how long after that was it until he realized that, yes, he did like you enough to want Mustang to go stay with you?” asked Maggie, leaning forward in her chair and propping her elbows up onto the table in the ‘LaFleur Suite’.
“To be honest …” said Ray, after letting out a skeptical-sounding sigh. “In the end, I don’t think his decision really came down to how much he did or didn’t like me. Now, look, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure he had to have liked me in order to do what he did; and, yeah, we did get along really well. I mean, we had a lot of things in common; we were both veterans – I’d been to the Middle East, him to Korea and Vietnam; we had the same sense of humour; we just … you know …”
“Clicked?” said Maggie, suggesting the word she felt Ray was combing through his internal dictionary for.
“That’s the one,” said Ray, gratefully, rapping the fleshy part of his fist against the table and pointing at Maggie like she’d just correctly answered a question on a quiz show. “Clicked – we just clicked.”
With that said, Ray, once again, took a moment to readjust how he was sitting in his chair. From the second he sat down on it, Maggie couldn’t help but notice how uncomfortable he’d looked. It was as if the chairs surrounding the table had never been designed to accommodate someone as just generally large as Ray, and to see him sitting on one now just appeared, somehow, ‘incorrect’ – like an adult trying to sit on one of the chairs you’d find in a kindergarten classroom.
“Looking back now, though, do you perhaps think that was what could have ended up swinging things in your favour?” asked Maggie, spying an opening. “You know, you and Travis having that shared military experience?”
“I’m sure it probably helped to some extent, yeah,” replied Ray, after taking a second to consider his answer. “But as for whether or not it was the definin’ reason why he gave me his blessin’? I think I’d still have to say no.”
“Ok then; so if it wasn’t that, and it wasn’t down to Travis just liking you as a person … what do you think it was that got you over the line?”
Again, Ray paused for a second as he mulled over his answer – and readjusted how he was sitting.
“I guess …” he, eventually, began after a moment or two of quiet deliberation. “Yeah, I guess it was probably just after I’d given him my phone to show him the video of Mustang making that putt – you know, the one against Byron?”
“What did he make of that, actually?” asked Maggie, after briefly nodding her head to show Ray she was following him.
“Aw, man, you should have seen his face,” replied Ray, all thoughts of how the spindles at the back of his chair were digging into his hips completely erased as the memory of that moment flashed before his eyes. “I mean, of all the times I look back on and wish I’d been able to take a picture? That moment right there is way up on the list; ‘cause the way his face lit up when he was watchin’ it? And hearin’ those cheers?”
“Pure pride, huh?” suggested Maggie, taking a guess where Ray was headed next.
“Just burstin’ out of him, yeah,” said Ray, the memory of the beaming smile splashed across Travis’ face as he carefully held his phone in-between his slightly gnarled hands and watched his grandson make the mother of all walk-off putts making he, himself, smile. “But after he’d finished watchin’ it for, like … I dunno … the third time in-a-row, he looked up from my phone and just started starin’ out across the yard and off towards the barn. Now, at this point, I know somethin’ must be up ‘cause up until then? The two of us had been yammerin’ on for the bones of an hour like we went way back.”
“Did you say something?” asked Maggie.
“Naw,” replied Ray, shaking his head. “I wanted to, mind … but I just kinda got the impression that whatever it was he was thinkin’ about? I just needed to let him do his thing without me interruptin’. When he, finally, did speak, though …”.
*
“You know …” said Travis, his gaze still cast out across the yard in front of the house, itself strewn with old, discarded pieces of well-rusted farm machinery that were now closer to resembling works of modern art as opposed to apparatus with which you’d get a day’s work out of. “Over the last few years … I’ve lost some very important people to me, Mr. Thackett. My gorgeous wife, Dana …” He glanced over at Ray, a warm, but watery, smile on his face. “Who, by the way, was the biggest firecracker you could’ve ever hoped to have met! I mean, the woman looked like an angel, but had a wit sharper than a cut-throat!”
Ray smiled and nodded, but remained silent.
“And then, as you know …” he continued, the smile fading from his face as he, once again, turned to look back out over the yard. “A few months ago our beautiful daughter, Lori – Oscar’s mom … well, she had her ticket called as well.” Travis fell silent for a moment. He cleared his throat and sniffed sharply a number of times in an effort to shake the slight tremor which had infiltrated his voice towards the end of mentioning Mustang’s mother; it was, obviously, all still quite raw for him – even now.
“So when Ms. Kershaw then called me a few weeks ago and said Oscar had gone missin’?” he continued, his voice, undoubtedly, steelier, yet still with the slightest hint of a tremor still present. “Well, I’m sure it won’t come as a surprise to hear that it near-on broke me. And, no word of a lie, for the month or so that he was gone? All I did – all day, every day – was sit by the phone and just will it to start ringing. I barely ate. I barely slept. I was a wreck.”
To hear Travis say this made a lot of sense for Ray. Having been sitting down with him for the past hour or so, though the first impression he’d gathered of him when they were out talking by the car was still valid, after getting a chance to really look at him up close and personal, he’d become a touch concerned by what he’d seen. His somewhat grubby clothes looked ever-so-slightly too big for him, as if he’d lost weight. His cheeks were sunken and drawn looking – again, something that hinted at recent weight-loss. There were large, dark circles under both of his eyes, slightly dulling the brightness of their emerald green colour. And though he was, clearly, someone who usually just sported a mustache, quite a distinguishable coat of heavy, silvery-white stubble had filled in along his jawline where he, obviously, hadn’t shaved for a number of weeks.
And whilst all that could be explained away, as he’d mentioned, by the stress of Mustang going missing, Ray couldn’t help but wonder if all those little signs belied a fact he dare not bring up with Travis at this particular moment in time – that being, perhaps he wasn’t coping with his Parkinson’s as well as he’d like people to believe.
“But then …” said Travis, his voice pulling Ray out of his thoughts and back onto the porch. “Just as I’d gone beyond fearin’ the worst … last Sunday night … the phone did ring. And on the other end of the line was Ms. Kershaw tellin’ me the three words I’d been prayin’ to hear for four weeks straight: ‘I got ‘im’. And the sense of relief I had?”
Travis let out a sigh like he was right back in that moment on Sunday night. The receiver gripped in his sweaty, quivering hand. The feeling of pressure that had been sitting on his chest for weeks finally lifting. The sound of Tess’ voice asking him if he was still there when he didn’t immediately respond, mainly because he was so overwhelmed.
“It was just somethin’ else,” he sighed, with an almost disbelieving shake of his head. “Because that boy is everythin’ to me …”. He turned and looked across the table placed in-between him and Ray, his earnest expression making the wrinkles on his face appear even deeper. “He’s all I have left.”
“And I would never do anythin’ to jeopardize that fact, Mr. Peyton,” replied Ray, solemnly, and looking Travis dead in the eye. “You have my word on that.”
“And I don’t doubt that for a second, Mr. Thackett,” said Travis, his tone lightening somewhat. “I really don’t. Between what I’ve seen from sittin’ down here talkin’ with you, and goin’ on how highly Oscar, himself, spoke about you and where you’re from when I talked to him on the phone, then from a ‘technical standpoint’? I can’t see any reason why I wouldn’t want him to go stay with you.”
“But …?” said Ray, preempting what he thought was coming next.
“No, there’s no ‘but’,” replied Travis, waving away the idea there was some secret addendum lurking in the offing. “Though … well, there is a ‘however’.”
“Technically just a fancy way of sayin’ ‘but’ …” smiled Ray, dryly. “However, hit me with it.”
“Well … it’s just I need to know one more thing before I can fully make up my mind.”
“Whatever it is? Fire away,” replied Ray, holding his two hands up like he was gesturing for Travis to take a free shot at him in a sparring session. “I’m an open book.”
“Alright, then …”
At that, Travis paused as he considered his question. He already knew what it was, of course – it had come to mind the second he’d gotten off the phone to Tess earlier that day. All he was doing now was trying to see if there was another way to phrase it that didn’t sound as blunt as it did in its current form – after all, Dana had always said he was about as subtle as a punch into the mouth.
“Well, it’s just …” he began, after making some only very minor changes to round off the edges of his question. “I mean, you’re a single guy, right?”
“Right,” confirmed Ray with a curt nod of his head.
“Ok, so you’re single …” repeated Travis, using the momentary reprieve to load up exactly what he wanted to say next. “You’ve no kids of your own; you’re responsible for no one outside of yourself; you’re completely free to do whatever you want, whenever you want … and, yet, here you are offerin’ to give all that up, and have a teenager – who’s of no relation to you whatsoever – come live with you. So, I guess what I want to know is …”
“Is why?” interjected Ray, smiling confidently across the table at Travis.
“Was it that obvious that’s where I was headin’?” he replied, himself smiling back at Ray.
“Just a little, yeah.”
“Fair enough. The question still stands, though – why do you want to do it? I mean, take it from someone who helped raise a teenager … it ain’t no picnic!”
“I’m sure it’s not,” said Ray, agreeably. “And, to be honest, that very thought crossed my mind on the drive here – as well as, why was I doin’ this at all? I mean, it kinda hit me as I was crossin’ the state line, you know? Seein’ one of those ‘Welcome to Texas’ signs? It was like, ‘I’m comin’ here to try and see if I can take care of a kid’, who, like you rightly said, I ain’t got no ties to – like, what the hell am I doin’, right?!”
“So what was the answer you came up with that, obviously, made you keep on drivin’?” asked Travis, eyes narrowing, once again, as he swatted away a gnat – the first of many to come given it was coming onto seven in the evening.
“Strangely enough?” said Ray, casting his gaze off towards where the Mustang was parked out in the yard and noticing the cloud of gnats loitering just above the roof. “It’s kinda related to one of the things you mentioned I’d be givin’ up. Cause, look, you’re right – right now? I’m the only person I have to worry about. And as fine and all as that seemed, it wasn’t until I met your grandson and had him stay with me that I realized …”. Ray paused and let out a sigh; it was still difficult to confront the fact that what he was about to say about himself was, indeed, true. “I realized just how empty my life had become. I mean, I left the military eight – comin’ on nine – years ago and … to be honest … I’ve really just been kinda driftin’ since then, you know? Like, I’ve got my job and I like it just fine … but aside from that? I don’t really feel like my life, as it currently is, has all that much purpose to it. But when I see your grandson? And I see everythin’ he’s been through? Well, as selfish as it might be, the thought of bein’ able to play a part in givin’ him a fair shot at a normal and, hopefully, happy life?” Ray looked across the table at Travis. “Well, that gives me a feelin’ of purpose, sir.”
After listening to what he’d had to say, Travis turned his gaze, once again, back out across the yard. He gently nodded his head as if he were having an internal conversation with himself wherein he weighed up all of his options.
“Well …” he said, finally, as he carefully placed Ray’s phone back up onto the table, the wood it was made from looking thirsty for a fresh coat of varnish. “I guess when you put it like that … it don’t really leave me with any other option …”
Suddenly, Travis reached his hand across the table towards Ray, holding it out for a handshake. “Welcome to the family, Ray,” he smiled.
“Are you serious?!” asked Ray, eyes wide in disbelief as he looked down at Travis’ hand and then quickly back up to his face.
“Would I be lookin’ to shake your hand if I wasn’t?” he replied, dryly.
Though slightly lost as to what exactly he should do with himself, such was his level of shock, Ray managed to string enough lucid thoughts together to reach out and grasp Travis’ still outstretched hand.
“Thank you, Mr. Peyton!” said Ray, attempting to compose himself as he gave Travis a possibly ‘somewhat over-zealous’ handshake. “You won’t regret this – I promise you!”
“I’m sure I won’t,” he smiled, finally freeing his hand from Ray’s vice-like grip. “And please … call me Travis.”