One last joyride, p.1
One Last Joyride, page 1
© 2022 Dean Hughes
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Deseret Book Company, at permissions@deseretbook.com. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church or of Deseret Book Company.
This is a work of fiction. Characters and events in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are represented fictitiously.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CIP on file
ISBN: 978-1-63993-019-7 | eISBN 978-1-64933-132-8 (eBook)
Printed in the United States of America
PubLitho, Draper, UT
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Book design Deseret Book
Art direction: Richard Erickson
Design: Garth Bruner
Cover photo: Chad Hurst
Cover images: Adobe Stock/Delphotostock,
Andrey Kuzmin, jkraft5, TTstudio, Philip Steury
Getty Images/ DenGuy
For Emily Watts
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
About the Author
Chapter
Earl scrutinized his food, wondered at it. His table partners were staring at their plates, not eating. “What is it?” Earl asked. “Fish or chicken?”
Mac McDowell looked thoughtful, maybe concerned. “The waitress said it was ‘meat.’”
Earl sliced through the gray slab and pried one side off the plate so he could look at the interior of the stuff, but he saw nothing he recognized. “It’s like soggy pie crust,” he said.
Mac’s wife, Georgia, said, “It smells like wet cardboard.”
Earl decided to eat his red Jell-O and maybe the yellowish green beans and let the fish/chicken/cardboard rest in peace.
“I wouldn’t eat that stuff if I was you,” someone said.
Earl turned to see a short, stout man standing next to him. He had thinning white hair and weathered skin, but his eyes, though flapped from the pull of age, were blue and clear, and he was smiling, revealing bright synthetic teeth. “I knew a guy in Malaysia who ate some stuff that looked exactly like that,” the man said. “He died within five minutes. Went into convulsions and croaked, right before my eyes.”
Mac looked astounded. “What?” he managed to say.
“It probably wasn’t the same stuff, but I’m just sayin’. I wouldn’t eat it.”
Earl had seen this portly man in the hallway a few times, but he didn’t know his name. He was surely joking about the dead man, though he had sounded entirely serious.
“My name’s Teller,” the man said. “I got reassigned to your table. A couple of the ladies I’ve been eating with complained to the management about me, so I got moved over here. Maybe I do talk too much. Just tell me if I do. But I’ve been almost everywhere in this world, and I can tell you stories that you’ll never forget.” He made a loose, shredded noise that seemed to be his way of laughing. “And a few stories you’ll wish you could forget.”
Teller pulled back a chair and sat down at the table. He looked at Georgia, then Mac, and said, “You’re married to each other. I can see that already. What’re your names?”
Earl didn’t know how this Teller fellow knew the McDowells were married—except that they sort of looked alike: both pretty much the same color as the fish or chicken. But the new guy didn’t know what he was in for if he tried to get much in the way of chatter from them. Earl had conversed with them some at first, back almost a year earlier when George Finlayson had died and the director of the Valleyview Assisted Living Center had rearranged the table assignments. They were nice people, but laconic to a fault, and Earl had decided that he wouldn’t force them to talk any more than they preferred. So shared meals had become cordial but mostly quiet.
Mac stared at Teller for several seconds, seemingly baffled by this sudden outbreak of energy. Finally, he said, “Mac and Georgia McDowell.”
“So, Mac, what did you do for a living before you got stuck in this place?”
“I was an attorney.”
“Mac doesn’t like to brag,” Earl said, “but he was chief counsel for a corporation—a big trucking company. And Georgia was chair of an English department at a college in Colorado.”
“Holy cow!” Teller said. “I’ll have to read a book one of these days—and then you can tell me what it means.”
Georgia smiled just a little.
“So how did you end up in Utah?” Teller asked.
Mac said, “We grew up here. We decided to come back when we retired.”
Teller, by then, had turned to Earl. “So you must be Earl Evans. Mrs. Schmidt, the director lady, said I’d like you. In fact, she said everybody does. But I guess I’ll withhold judgment for now.” He laughed again. “No, not really. You look fine to me.”
Earl was not sure what that meant. He was eighty-nine years old, and he didn’t think of himself as looking “fine” anymore, but this Teller fellow had to be almost as old. True, he was not as wrinkled, and he certainly had plenty of vigor in him, but he moved the way lots of people did in this place: in stiff motions, as though their joints needed grease.
“Where are you from, Earl? Here in Salt Lake?”
“Well, no. I lived in Roy most of my life, and Huntsville before that.”
“Roy’s up by Ogden if I remember right. I’ve lived here for awhile, but I still don’t know Utah all that well.”
“That’s right. Not too far from Ogden. And Huntsville is up Ogden Canyon, by Pineview Reservoir. It’s where President David O. McKay grew up.”
“I know that name. He was one of the top Mormon guys, right? I’m not too well versed in stuff like that. I grew up in Tacoma, Washington, mostly. And a few other places. Hawaii, for one. But I was a sailor. Commercial sailor. Captain of ships. I’ve rounded the world several times, and I’ve stopped in ports everywhere.”
By then a server—a young woman who always looked half asleep to Earl—had stepped to Teller’s side. She set a plate down in front of him and mumbled, “Enjoy.”
Teller looked around at everyone, his head making a slow arc. “I’ll tell you what this stuff could be,” he said. “Tripe. That’s a cow’s stomach. Or a pig’s. I’ve eaten it in the Philippines and Mexico and once in Uruguay—although that was in a soup. But tripe doesn’t have much flavor; it’s the spices a cook uses that make the difference. But this stuff here . . .” He jabbed his fork into the unburnt offering. “Personally, I wouldn’t trust it. I’m not eating it.”
Mac had stopped eating, and Georgia had stopped sampling, which was the way she dealt with lunch each day. The two were looking at Teller as though he were an unexpected storm that had burst open the doors to the dining room. Earl also noticed that other people were looking over, probably because Teller’s voice was so loud.
Earl had no idea what to say. There was something good natured about this Teller, but Earl was not one to be so flamboyant. Teller made him a little uncomfortable.
“I’ll tell you one place I met some LDS guys,” Teller said. “Two missionaries. I was in Taiwan, and I saw these two fellows out on the street. They had set up a display, and they were trying to talk to people who walked by. One of them must have been six foot eight—Elder Turner—and the other one . . . Dinkelberger, or something like that . . . he was only an inch or two shorter. The two of them both spoke Mandarin Chinese, and quite good. I’d picked up a little while I was there, so I could say a few things, but these two guys were talking a blue streak.” Teller suddenly looked at Earl and then Mac. “Did you guys serve missions?”
Mac only nodded. Earl said, “Yes, I did. In Germany and Switzerland.”
“Do you still speak German? Sprahken Zee Dutch?”
There was no good way to answer the question—for a number of reasons—so Earl merely nodded.
“So these two missionaries were trying hard, but I felt sorry for them. I walked over and said, ‘You guys don’t seem to be having much luck. But Turner started telling me that they were actually doing well. The other guy, Dingbat or whatever it was—he went back to work, but Turner took the time to tell me how they had made Mormons out of a lot of people over there.” Teller looked at Earl. “I’ll bet you didn’t convert thousands of people, did you?”
“No,” Earl said. But he was becoming skeptical of this story. Thousands of people?
“Well, anyway, what Turner told me was that he and the other guy both played basketball in college, Turner at BYU and the other one somewhere else. Now they pla yed together on a missionary team. The other guys on the team weren’t great players, but all they had to do was feed Turner and Dinkieberger the ball, and no one could stop them. They got to be famous. People would come out just to see these giants throw down dunks, back when no one in Taiwan could do that. So when the games were over, these basketball players would line up at the door and ask everyone if they wanted to know more about the Mormons, and quite a few did. So they got names after every game, and they sent the names out around the whole island. At that point, hundreds had been baptized, and they were expecting those people to talk to others and the grand total, just from playing basketball, to climb into the thousands. Can you believe that?”
Earl didn’t. But he decided not to say so. Instead, he said, “That’s quite a story.”
Teller laughed, making that sound again, like a wet cough. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“I didn’t say that. I’m just surprised it wasn’t in the Church News—thousands, or even hundreds, being baptized because of a basketball team.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what. Turner was humble. He told me he didn’t like to make too much of it, and he even said not to spread the story around. Fact is, I’ve never told anyone until right now. So, Earl, aren’t you going to eat?”
Earl had forgotten about the food on his plate. He really didn’t get hungry enough to eat three full meals, and he actually wouldn’t bother with lunch if it weren’t something to break up his long days. He liked the McDowells, and he liked to see others he knew. He would usually chat with a few people as he entered the dining room or when he was leaving.
“Stand up for a second.”
“What?”
“Just stand up. I want to see how tall you are. You’re a big man.”
“I’m six two, or at least I used to be, and I weigh a little more than I should, but I’m not all that big.” He was not going to stand up and draw attention to himself.
“Did you play sports in high school or college or anything like that?”
“Not really. I played basketball for my church team, but I wasn’t very good. I grew up on a farm back during the Depression and World War II, and I lived a long way from my high school. So with chores, I never found time to play on school teams.”
“I played high school basketball,” Teller said, “short as I am. But mostly I got splinters sitting on the bench. But I did have one great moment. Our point guard fouled out, so the coach put me in, but he said, ‘Don’t shoot the ball. Just pass it to the other guys.’ So that’s what I did, but we were down by one point, and the other team knew to guard everyone but me, so I ended up with the ball. My coach yelled, ‘Shoot!’ and I just winged the ball like I was throwing a baseball. Somehow the ball hit the back of the rim, bounced up high . . . and dropped through the hoop. And that won the game. People ran out and carried me off the court, and that was my great moment of glory. Then I went back to the bench. But it’s a memory. The best things in life are the memories we collect. Don’t you agree with that?”
“Well . . . yes. To some degree,” Earl said.
“So tell me this. What else is there?” Earl was still thinking how to answer when Teller posed a second question: “What do you want to do with your life now? What do you live for?”
“I don’t have much choice about living. That’s just what keeps happening. So I guess I try to make the best of each day.”
“What does that mean, Earl? What do you do with yourself?”
Earl didn’t like this. He didn’t want to be interrogated, so he asked a question of his own. “So what are you telling me—that you accidentally made a basket that won a game seventy years ago and that’s what matters to you now?”
Teller’s head jerked toward Earl, and when he raised his arm, Earl thought the guy was going to throw a punch at him. But instead he burst into laughter and slapped Earl on the shoulder. “I like you, Earl,” he said. “I like a man who doesn’t mind looking me in the eye and saying, ‘I’m pretty sure you’re full of horse pucky’—to use the word you’d probably use.”
Earl found himself laughing. He was actually thinking that having Teller around might be a nice change. The guy’s face was craggy, like all the faces around the Valleyview facility, but a boy of forty or fifty seemed to be hiding inside the old man.
“But really,” Teller said, “what do you get up for each morning? What do you still want to do with your life?”
Teller had no idea how much Earl had thought about that question the last couple of years, but he didn’t have an answer, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to discuss his doubts at the dinner table. Still, he did offer something. “I have a big family, but most everyone is scattered around the country. I feel kind of left on my own.” And then he said more than he had intended. “A guy starts to feel useless at my age. It seems as though my family is just waiting for me to die.”
There was silence at the table for a time, as though the McDowells understood what he meant, even though they were somewhat younger. But Teller said, “I’ll tell you what I want to do: get out of this place and do something. I need to make new memories, not just think about the old ones.”
Georgia clearly wanted to change the subject. “Earl,” she said, “may I ask you to do a favor for us?”
“Sure. What can I do?”
“I’ve decided to reread the novels of Anthony Trollope—one of my favorite writers. But those books are on my highest shelf. Mac and I can’t reach that high, and we don’t like to climb up on chairs. Could you walk down sometime soon and just get those books down for me?”
“I guess I could. But I might need to charge you for my services.”
She smiled. “That’s fair enough. How much per book?”
“Well, let’s see. We can negotiate. But I’m thinking thirty-five cents for a paperback and a half-dollar for a hardback.”
Mac laughed, and then he said, “I think I’d prefer to put you on a retainer. I’ll give you twenty dollars, and that will cover every reach we call on you to make for . . . let’s say, the rest of your life.”
“You might lose on that deal. At my age, my services may not be available much longer.” But then he smiled and said, “I’ll stop down in just a few minutes.”
Georgia and Mac, as though sharing an unspoken signal, both stood, but before they walked away, Georgia said, “Earl, you’re such a lovely man. Thank you.”
Earl thought she might have been trying to say, “Let’s not let this new person ruin our quiet, peaceful times together.” Earl wondered whether he didn’t agree.
As soon as the couple stepped away—and while Earl feared they were still within hearing distance—Teller said, “I think I scared them off. I sometimes have that effect on people.”
“They’re just kind of reserved,” Earl said. “We can all get used to each other.”
“Well, sure. I sort of like everybody. That’s something I learned by traveling around so much. He looked down at his plate. “I guess I’ll eat my Jell-O. And then I’ll drive over to the Burger King and get myself a big ol’ bacon cheeseburger. Do you wanna go with me?”
“No. I’m not really very hungry.”
Teller lifted his little bowl of Jell-O toward his chin and began spooning the goopy stuff into his mouth. But then he stopped and asked, “Do you like to watch sports?”
“Sure. When my boys were in school, I used to go to their games and—”
“No. I mean, on TV. I’ve got a big ol’ flat screen with the best picture you’ve ever seen. If you want to come over, we could watch football games. The season is getting going now, and there’s college or pro games on all the time. I signed on for this cable channel that gets me pretty much any game I want to watch. Any sport. What do you say? I could use a partner. We could eat some junk food and yell at the referees and all that kind of stuff.”
Earl was uncertain. He wasn’t one to eat junk food—not since his doctor had been talking to him about his weight and blood pressure—and he was not one to yell at referees. Still, it would be a change. “Sure. I could come over and watch a game with you.”
“Who do you cheer for? BYU?”
“Actually, not so much. I like to see them do well, but I graduated from the University of Utah. The only thing is, I haven’t followed sports that much in recent years.”
