the writings of john scott ridgway
We moved around a lot when I was a kid, passing silently, almost un-noticed through a series of small towns in Northern Indiana, mostly up around the Illinois line. Nice towns with town squares filled with a gleaming white courthouse and maple shaded streets lined with houses sporting long front porches -- filled with kids and old ladies, all rocking and waving as we passed. There were smaller towns yet, with just a gas station/grocery store, a long rectangular, dim bar named after the owner, and a sunny white church with a bloody jesus hanging behind some smiling preachers.
Mom had some religion, but pop laughed at all that. He used to joke that he talked to the devil. I thought about this a couple years later, when I was ten and he was laying on the lawn dying from a heart that he had been refusing to take into the doctor for years. His brother had died two years before, at the same age as their father, and since then pop had started making what I took then a jokes, little cracks about how he was going to be dead soon.
No matter how much we moved around, sooner or later, my Pop's shady friends would start showing up at our door looking all hang-dog, coming in with a bottle or begging one off Pop.
My Pop was kind of a sucker for people in need, like a lot of folks were back in the seventies, in the rural areas, where there didn't seem to be but a few people miserably failing at life. He had run his own business since inheriting it from his father, when he was seventeen.
He also liked hiring them for one big fat reason -- they were all wild enough to take off with him on some wild whisky whim and fly down the twisty, wooded backroads in his big black Lincoln. I picture him and them with their arms around chubby, small town divorcees going through periods of drunken whoring (but that might just be my years of city living creating a small town myth, I suppose; he looked a lot like Robert Mitchum, and sometimes in my mind, their stories intertwine... he was a big fan of the Mitch, too -- liked the wild boy, drunken and whoring side of the reluctant thespian).
Mom was a tiny thing who didn't drink or carry on, shy and timid, she seemed to only hesitantly make her way through the world... as soon as she could quit working, she retired to a lonesome retirement. She was delighted by abundance of life bursting out of pop, took some part of it for her own when he was around, then went back to being too timid to cope when he was really gone... she laughed easily, and that and her gentle, hestiant way seemed to make some men lwant to take care of her; a sheltered bird raised by a distant grandmother and a germanic perfectionist of a grandad.
Pop had a gregarious father who ran moonshine and performed Shakespeare in the church plays. He died before any of us knew him. I remember once Pop got a mischevious sort of smile on his face when he was brought up and said, "That man knew how to have a good time." I can't remember anything more about him.
Me and my sister hated the criminals that would follow our pop home. He would have them out working for him on some job, then bring them home for a good meal -- something their hotel living lives relished to the point of gluttony. One of them, Coy something, was always hitting on my mother when pop wasn't around. She was too afraid to tell him -- she was sure Pop would kill him.
Stippy the criminal finally destroyed him. A thin, weasly chinned, half bald blonde haired guy. Why they all called him Stippy was lost from the family lore when pop's brain went out. Stippy got drunk while installing a furnace in a farm outside of Elkhart, Indiana. The gas pipes leaked all that first night and half way into the next day before the house violently exploded. Coming mid-day, when the family was either at work or school, the only casualty was a family cat. Stippy skipped town a step ahead of the law. I am sure that myPop would have been with him, if not for us. Since he owned the company, they hauled his ass into court and charged him with criminal neglegience.
He was forty one years old and facing twenty years in prison. The court case was going bad. . and he chose to let his heart blow out rather than let the vagaries of this life throw him in a cage. I used to wish he would have been around even just enough for letters and visits... now I know that was just me being selfish. The party was obviously over.