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Catherine Dundon |
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Buying Happiness at the Sleeping Hound "People say money can't buy happiness," Tom Failey used to always say, "But I say, give me a few million dollars, and let me see for myself." It was a persuasive argument, I'd concede, and the men over at the Sleeping Hound always laughed and concurred with Tom that they wouldn't object to such an experiment. To hear Tom talk about his work, you'd think he earned almost a million dollars. But Tom Failey was always broke, and his loved ones, especially his wife and his teenaged daughters, weren't ever too happy with him about that. The way they saw it, it was his fault. Truth was, the whole town saw it that way. Our town is pretty, and very small, in the northwest part of Michigan's Manistee National Forest. On the signs that greet you when you drive in on the state highway in either direction announcing our population of 273, we' re only a village. We have the IGA, which most people only use for emergency shopping and not for real grocery needs. It's best to drive on into Cadillac or Traverse City for that and get the lower prices the big chain stores have. We have the hardware store, and the small arcade for the teenagers, and the thrift store, and various establishments that come and go fairly frequently, leaving the remaining storefronts vacant for months on end. People come and go, too, from downstate or even out of state, and open up a craft store, or a children's clothing shop, or a what-not place, but they don't usually last too long. There's just not enough business for the stores, and their owners, to survive here. But the town is pretty, and my wife and I have called it home since we moved up from Lansing thirty years ago. We bought the Busy Bee from the previous owner's widow, who liked my wife, and the town has liked my wife's cooking, and so we've stayed, and been happy here. We don't sell alcohol and we close up early after lunch at three o'clock. Several days a week, in the late afternoons, I head over to the Sleeping Hound Bar and Grill for a draft beer and to say hello to the guys. I knew Tom Failey's parents, and I knew his wife's parents, too, before they moved back to Indiana after she married Tom. I figure I've been watching and listening to Tom Failey for as long as I've been here, when he was in town, and he was an entertaining fellow, and the truth is, I still miss him. When Tom Failey was in town, he was at the Sleeping Hound. And what he did there was spend money and tell tales. Listening to Tom Failey's tales was high recreation, and there's no other way to put it. When Tom Failey talked, people listened. My mother would say he had the Irish gift of gab. I think he was just a born storyteller. But no matter, he was an entertaining man. Tom Failey made you feel what he was talking about. When he talked about Texas, you could see the brown-skinned girls with big doe eyes slowly turning and ducking their chins so their black hair swung down like satin sheets around their heads. You could see their cheap skirts swinging as their hips swayed to the Tejano music, and in the distance you could see the dust rise up on the roads as the men in the trucks drove away with what was left of their paychecks afterwards. When Tom talked like that about Texas, the blizzard winds of our Michigan winters would calm, and the temperatures outside of the Sleeping Hound might even rise a degree or two. The chill would seep out of our bones as we sat there at the cracked red leather bar. More than one of us would shrug off our hunter orange jackets, and our quilted flannel shirts, wipe a bead of sweat from our brow and ask Bob Winstead how many trees he'd stuck in the wood stove. In the summers, I remember, he'd talk about the East Coast. "Yeah, we finished up that co-gen plant for Duke and headed for the beach, boys," he'd lead us into the story that way, and we'd be waiting, leaning forward even. "You should've seen those girls. Oooh, they were so pretty! They were all in a line at the 7-11, like it was the Miss America Pageant, and each one was finer than the one before . . . " He painted a picture of freckle-faced college-girls, sun-streaked hair pulled back in ponytails on some and framing breasts on others, pink-nosed from the sun. "They were just intoxicated enough to be intoxicating!" Tom described them, and we could see them in their convertibles, laughing and winking while the car stereos played pop music. "'Come to the beach. We're having a bonfire!' they told me, so I went," said Tom. We scoffed, but we were grinning right along with him, and we could taste the wine coolers he told us they shared with him instead of our draft beers growing warm on the bar. "Ready for a game?" one of us would ask him; story time didn't last forever, and when it was over, Tom's troubles began. Tom spent a lot of money drinking at the Sleeping Hound, trying to buy happiness, I suppose, but he lost a lot more gambling. I've known a few men in my time addicted to the rush of the bet, but Tom Failey had the bug worse than any man I've ever known. And that was a shame-for Tom, for his wife, and for his girls. Because when it came to gambling, Tom Failey was not a lucky man. Every other gambler in the county profited off his drunken foolishness, but Tom Failey's family lived where they did as long as they did because Tom Failey couldn't turn down a game when he wasn't working, and he couldn't play a game without making a bet. Now Tom Failey was a hard-working man. He had a good job as a foreman for a national industrial construction company out of Texas. He'd have made more money if he'd have moved his family down there, but he wouldn't do it. His heart and soul were in these woods. People around here understand that. Most of the year he was gone, but in between jobs he spent his own money flying into Traverse City and having his wife pick him up for a few days at home. They'd send him anywhere, those people in Houston. He didn't start out that important, of course. He started out working for a construction company out of Traverse City, and after about ten years he met some guys working on a gas plant somewhere up north. He got hired on with a steel erection company as a steel worker, and from there things just got better for Tom. He was good at what he did; he must've been because he was gone all the time-even out of the country sometimes. And he didn't do much work himself anymore. To hear him tell it at the Hound, he just watched other people do it. He'd holler at them to work harder and faster and he made more money the harder and faster they worked. He explained it all to us as we sat at the bar, looking duly impressed or skeptical, depending on the hour or how many drafts we'd had. He told us how he made lots of money because of these fancy contracts with terms like "liquidated damages" and "reverse incentive clauses" and stuff like that. It didn't make a whole lot of sense to us, except that the faster things got done, the more money Tom Failey made. But you couldn't tell Tom Failey made a lot of money by looking at where he lived with his wife and those teenaged daughters of his. Tom Failey and his wife and daughters still lived in the Oakhurst Trailer Park right south of town, and they had lived there ever since they first got married. They had to get married, because Tom got her pregnant when she was just sixteen, and she quit school to marry him and have the baby. He had just started working for that construction company outside of Traverse City. Tom Failey's wife's father had paid the down payment for the single-wide trailer they moved into, and the whole first year's lot rent just to get Tom Failey to marry her, and they never moved out of it. The Oakhurst Trailer Park was still a pretty place then, and her father got his money's worth, the town supposed, because he never did divorce her. He never did cheat on her, either, at least not in this county, or we'd have all known about it, and nobody ever said anything about Tom Failey cheating on his wife. No, infidelity wasn't the nature of Tom Failey's problems. Drinking and gambling were Tom's problems. Nothing besides desperate humanity lives in the Oakhurst Trailer Park now. It's a gray place, not just in the winter, with the snow turning into a toxic slush under the tires of the rusted, broken-down cars, but even in the spring and summer. The trees are all dead in the Oakhurst Trailer Park. Hopelessness-and now the gypsy moths-have killed them all, and nobody there has even got a chainsaw to cut them up for firewood. A lot of the poorer people in the county who live outside the trailer park have stopped to look and think, "Now there's a lot of good firewood gone to waste!" But it's not worth setting a foot inside of there just to get some firewood to last a few weeks or so. It's like you know looking inside the park that the hopelessness there might be contagious. Even the asphalt lane that runs through it, and the short slanted driveways next to each trailer are so faded and cracked as to be more the color of concrete than black. The Oakhurst Trailer Park has been a fixture of the town as long as I can recall, and like I said before, it wasn't always such an eyesore. Even twenty years ago it was a pretty, well-maintained community, with planter boxes in the kitchen windows of the homes facing the lane that runs through the center of it, and children playing jump-rope in the summer. But when cocaine came in massive quantities to the north woods in the late eighties, things started to get bad at the trailer park. The owners moved back to Kalamazoo, and hired property managers in Cadillac to run the place. I don' t believe they did a thing but collect the lot rent, and they probably exercised only a half-hearted effort on that front. The trailer park has deteriorated at a steady rate ever since, even as Tom Failey's income rose, and his drinking and gambling with it. Tom's wife used to come into the Sleeping Hound, and try and drag Tom out before he lost too much money, but she could never make him budge, and after a few years of unsuccessful, unwelcome scenes, she just gave up. After that they fought in the lane of the trailer park, like the rest of the couples in the trailer park do-fights over money, fueled by alcohol and the phone calls of creditors earlier in the day. Sometimes Tom's wife would stop by the Busy Bee, and she and my wife'd talk in low voices over cups of coffee that soon grew cold. I'd take care to avoid their table, and I'd wait on the other customers while she was there, so my wife wouldn't have to get up. The Busy Bee Restaurant is located across from the new gas station next to the post office across from the school, and we keep it neat and clean and put in new vinyl every few years and new curtains every spring, so in my mind that puts us right up there with the Claytons and the Morrises, who own half the land around here, including the IGA, and the hardware store. They didn't own the Sleeping Hound Bar and Grill, though. Bob Winstead owned the Sleeping Hound Bar and Grill, and had ever since his Daddy died and left it to him and cut Bob's brother right out of the will, which didn't surprise anyone because Bob Winstead's brother never left the Sleeping Hound Bar and Grill, and it never bothered him a bit that he didn't own the place-he got free drinks because his Daddy stipulated it in the will. Bob's brother had cirrhosis, and the whole town felt sorry for both brothers, because the people here are a decent lot, by and large. I first met Tom Failey at our restaurant thirty years ago, right after we bought it and redecorated it. He and his parents had come in for breakfast early on a Saturday morning, stopping on their way downstate to visit relatives. Tom was a teenager, a good-looking boy, dark-haired like his Daddy, and not too tall, broad-shouldered for his height, and slender. He had dark laughing eyes, and was friendly, not sullen like so many teen-aged boys are when with their parents. "Welcome to the big city!" Tom called out to me, "I sure hope your food is better than old Betty's was!" Tom's mother hushed him, but Tom's father roared. "We've been eating here every week for a decade," Tom's father explained to my wife and me, "And regretting it for hours afterward. But Betty and her husband always sent the tourists to rent canoes from us, so we reciprocated. I will say this, though. I had to match in Rolaids, pound for pound, what I ate of Betty's cooking!" My wife and I both laughed. We liked the Faileys. Anyone would be hard pressed not to. The Faileys had raised a good boy. Then, when Tom was a senior in high school, they were killed. It was a bitter January night, and the roads were black with ice. Tom's parents were coming home from their anniversary dinner in Traverse City, and didn't make it down the hill just north of Mesick. These things happen all the time up here, but it doesn't make the grief any easier to bear when the ones lost are your friends. What 's more, it turned out the Faileys' canoe rental business was mired in debt. By the time all the creditors were paid off, the business and the house and the land were gone, and there was only about twenty thousand dollars left for Tom. He bought a new Ford Mustang and finished high school in a drunken fog. Nobody, including me, said a word to him about his behavior. He'd been a good boy once, he'd snap out of it, the townspeople thought. But the truth was, he never really did. A few years later, he got his young girlfriend pregnant, married her, and moved into that trailer in the Oakhurst Trailer Park. These days, children don't grow in the Oakhurst Trailer Park, any more than trees do. The trailer park toddlers are rarely seen, sad flowers in the long-untended beds that remain cordoned off with railroad ties next to each trailer, regularly ornamented only with discarded tires and other unidentifiable debris. But when Tom Failey's girls were that small, the trailer park was still a shiny place to live, and Tom was a hard-working, hard-drinking young man, burdened with unfamiliar responsibilities. He brought his young daughters to the Sleeping Hound once, proud as any Daddy is about his little girls. They were maybe two and three years old, with matching dresses on and their hair in ponytails above their ears. The little one had her thumb in her mouth and Tom spent nearly the whole time he had them there trying to pull that child's thumb out of her mouth, which just made her scream and had everybody drinking faster and leaving, which angered Tom. "Hey, you ain't come and said 'Hi!' to my daughters yet!" he'd holler if he caught sight of someone he knew sneaking out the door to escape the hollering of that little one. "Come back here! This is my little girl!" You couldn't blame Tom, but you couldn't blame the fellow leaving, either. That little one was screaming like a banshee. "Take your thumb outta your mouth, sweetheart," Tom was saying, "These here are my friends." I patted them on theirs heads, and left too. It was getting late. The Busy Bee lives up to its name in the morning. The fishermen are first, in the door at five for my wife's coffee and not much else. Then the factory men come in for breakfast. They're a taciturn lot, sitting together in the same groups day after day, communicating with grunts mostly, raising their cups to let my wife know they need more coffee. Then the women come, the ones whose husbands have good jobs, or own their own businesses. They come and sit for an hour or so, talking about everybody in the county and minding everybody's business but their own. After they leave, my wife and I have about an hour or so to sit before the lunch crowd comes, which is never as big as the breakfast crowd, unless it's hunting season or mushroom time. We sit and have coffee, and except during the summer, we watch the children playing at recess over at the playground at the consolidated school. The trailer park children start coming into their own once they hit school. These past fifteen years or so, my wife and I can easily tell the trailer pa rk children from the other kids, for a while. It's the surprise in their eyes at the sight of the slides that sets them apart, and the newness of the crayon pictures they carry home as they walk past the Busy Bee in afternoons after school's out. They get that hungering for color, my wife says, like they've never had crayons before. I guess it's because my wife and I never had children that we watch them so closely. We don't talk about it much, the lack of our own children, but we talk about the children, especially the trailer park children, and we talked about Tom Failey's girls. Tom Failey's girls were pretty at that age, in elementary school. They wore their hair in ponytails and their mother dressed them alike some days, but that came to an end soon enough. They walked to and from school together, hand in hand and we watched them make friends, my wife and I, from the windows of the Busy Bee, over cups of coffee as the seasons changed and the years went by. Adolescence purifies the children with fire, or burns them and sears their souls into charred lumps of the promise that could have been. Dave Burgess was a trailer park kid. His parents started smoking crack in 1987, and they didn't stop until his father died of a heart attack three years ago. His parents never worked a day in their lives, living instead on welfare and two-bit drug deals. But Dave Burgess didn't care what cards life dealt him. He started working at the hardware store for Richard Morris when he was fifteen years old, and saved every penny he made in a bank account his parents never knew existed. Most of us believed his parents never even noticed he had a job. He was the valedictorian of his graduating class, and his touchdowns gave our town's high school football team the Class D state championship the year his father died. Now that young man is off to college in Marquette, on a National Merit Scholarship, and you can't speak his name in this town without everyone within earshot beaming. Tom Failey's girls didn't go that route. By the time they were in high school, they wore too much make-up, and their eyes were already hardened and cold. They stood around in the alley behind the arcade, smoking marijuana and trying to look older than their years. They were "easy with their virtue," my wife would say sadly, thinking of Tom's parents, and all of the children we'd watched bear more children of their own over the years. If Tom noticed what had happened to those toddlers he brought into the Sleeping Hound years ago, he didn't talk about it. Men don't usually talk about their daughters during those years, I've noticed. It must be too painful, is the conclusion my wife and I have drawn. It was when Tom Failey's girls were in high school that his world came to an end. Tom was in town that day. He wasn't in town that often, but when he was, he spent most of his time at the Sleeping Hound Bar and Grill. Of course, a lot of us spent a lot of time there. He'd tell us stories about work, like all men do. I didn't much. There isn't much to say about the Busy Bee. But Tom, he'd tell stories about working on Indian reservations, and having to train drunk Indians to use power tools to attach steel sheeting to girders, and about how all the time he'd have to be sure his men were "in compliance" with safety regulations. Safety was the name of the game, he'd say, slamming down his glass and ordering another shot of tequila. He had horror stories, Tom did, of men down in Texas working in huge plants, in towns with names that sounded like flowers or pretty girls, getting killed just for not being careful. "Fell twenty-five feet," Tom would say, throwing back his shot, "Aaaaah, yeah, buddy. Right onto the concrete. Didn't use his freaking lanyard, the damn fool. Deader'n a door nail. There's another OSHA violation for the sub that hired that idiot and let him up there." Most of us didn't have any idea what Tom was talking about, including me, but usually one of us would try to one-up his stories with the latest one about the flatlander who beheaded himself snowmobiling through Mack Clayton' s barbed-wire fencing out past the dam road, or the guy from Harrietta who rolled his car coming around the dead-man's curve on old 37 in a drunken stupor on the way home from the Am-Vet's lodge. But Tom's stories always did kind of stick in my brain. The man had a storytelling gift, and when Tom told of that man's demise, you could practically feel your own body falling through the air and striking that hot Texas concrete fifteen hundred miles away. Six years ago is when Tom Failey's story came to its own sort of ending. It was November, and Tom had been in town for a week or so, getting ready to leave that very night. Tom was always getting ready to leave when he arrived. This time he was headed for some place just as cold as our own rolling hills were fast becoming, Idaho or South Dakota, somewhere like that. He was laughing as he told us about the "commercial terms" on this job. When I remember Tom, I always remember him laughing. "'Winter conditions,'" Tom was telling us, "We get fifty percent extra labor pay for 'winter conditions.' Can you beat that? Are you men making extra next week if the snow flies?" And he laughed. Of course they weren't, but they'd be getting his money all the same before the night was out after that kind of remark. He started in on a game of guts poker with Mack Clayton's second cousin after that, with his usual call, "Come on, boys, I need to get your money, and get my start trying to buy happiness!" Tom didn't have a chance winning at guts poker with Mack's cousin, much less getting a start on making his millions and trying to buy happiness. Guts poker just wasn't Tom's game, and he'd already had way too much to drink. He was down about two hundred dollars when Bob Winstead's drunk brother lifted his head from the bar and slurred, "Hey, Failey, you ugly son-of-a-bitch, I heard your youngest daughter went and got herself knocked up." Never to this day has such a still silence fallen over the Sleeping Hound. Tom's cards were still in his hands, but the other men laid theirs down, and, after maybe ten seconds, Tom put his down, too, and stood up. "Winstead, what the hell are you talking about?" But Bob Winstead's brother didn't have any more to say. His head fell forward on the bar. Tom was shaking when he whispered, more to himself than to anyone else, "God damn bastard! When I find out who he is, I'll kill him!" I was thinking to myself that Tom's youngest wasn't too much younger than Tom's wife had been when he got her pregnant, and musing to myself on the mysteries of men. How protective they are of their daughters, how forgetful of how they acquired them. But Tom was already gone. At the Busy Bee the next morning we heard it all, of course. Tom's youngest had a little scare, that was all, and had told some of her friends she thought she might be pregnant. One of her friends had told her parents. Bob Winstead's brother, as a permanent fixture in the Sleeping Hound, had overheard one of her classmate's parents discussing it at a nearby table. Tom's wife had already bought an at-home pregnancy test, and they'd waited until the next morning, after Tom left for wherever, to use it. The test was negative, and Tom's wife was waiting for his call when he got off work that night to tell him. But Tom never called. The way I heard the story, somebody on the job site was driving a truck with a crane attached to it, and the crane was carrying an iron beam. Whoever was driving the truck wasn't supposed to be driving it, they were driving too fast, and they didn't see Tom, and he didn't see them and the iron beam hit him on the left side of the head. I figure Tom wasn't at his best, worried about his daughter, perhaps. He just wasn't being as careful as he always claimed a person had to be, doing the kind of work he did. They say Tom Failey's head is dented in like a rotten cantaloupe. I can't imagine a man getting hurt like that and living. Something to do with brain stem function, Chuck Parker told me. His wife's a nurse up in Traverse City and she explained it to him, and he explained it to us as best as he could over a round of draft beers at the Sleeping Hound. Tom Failey stays in some fancy place down near Detroit now, where they can take care of him, but he doesn't know he's living all high on the hog like he always wanted. He doesn't know he's finally got his millions. He doesn't know anything at all. Things have changed a lot in our neck of the north woods in the last six years. A month after Tom Failey died but didn't, Bob Winstead's brother really did. And to the astonishment of the entire county, once Bob could finally make a real profit on the Sleeping Hound, he sold the bar to Mack Clayton's oldest son. Mack's boy ripped out the old fuel oil heater, and the wall air conditioners in the brick storefront facing Main Street, and actually pulled out the old pot-bellied wood stove in the middle of the huge room, not too far from the end of the bar where Bob's brother sat and warmed himself and drank himself to death. Mack's boy remodeled the whole place, bit by bit, and we sat and watched, moving when we had to, mumbling stunned protests. He left the sign outside unchanged. Mack's boy doesn't allow gambling at the Sleeping Hound. Nobody really minds. Without Tom, there isn't much money to be made gambling at the Hound anymore. There are housing developments springing up everywhere, and they're clear-cutting parts of the forest now, leaving the thin trees the locals call popple in the wake where once hardwoods sheltered the forest floor and bathed the ferns and the rich dark loam in a shimmering emerald glow. The morel mushrooms are harder to find every spring, and this year the enterprising locals that don't jealously hoard every one they find to sauté with their venison steaks come fall were selling black morels on the roadside for fifty-five dollars a pound. Fifty-five dollars a pound. My wife and I have one hundred and sixty-five dollars worth of mushrooms in our freezer. We slice them into omelets sparingly, late at night. Some days the traffic is so bad we wait on our dirt road for up to ten minutes before we can pull into the oncoming cars on M-115 and head into town to open the Busy Bee. It's been a long time since we moved up from Lansing. We talk about going back downstate in a few years, but that's just talk. I still think of Tom often. His wife and daughters moved out of that old trailer as soon as the lawsuit settled. His wife bought a fancy chalet on the Pere Marquette River, they say, and his daughters bought places on a lake not far from town. It's said they entertain good-looking lucky young men from downstate on a regular basis. Some times, though, the three of them still come through town. And when they do, they stop and buy their happiness at the Sleeping Hound Bar and Grill the same as the rest of us, and nobody in our town faults them for that. |