Mother called on Wednesday to tell me her father had died. The funeral was scheduled for Saturday but she was too busy to attend. She had a million dollar house sale on the line and she hoped to close the deal over the weekend. There was too much money at stake and, after all, Oklahoma was a long trip from Northern Virginia. Instead, she would send flowers in the family's name. I asked her why she called me. What exactly did she expect me to do? Nothing, she said, a little miffed, she just thought I might like to know my grandfather had died. I told her that now I knew and had to get back to work. I was a little put out that she had signaled me on my beeper, causing me to pull my truck over to use the phone at a 7-11. I had expected some family emergency.

    I had a drywall job over in Rockville, Maryland, and, as I crossed the bridge over the Potomac, I thought back to the one and only time I had seen my maternal grandfather. It was during spring break of my freshman year in high school and, for some reason, my mother thought it was time my brother and I met her dad. I didn't really understand why; she never communicated with him and rarely spoke his name, save to tell us that her father had been mean. "What do you mean, mean?" I asked. "Just mean, just plain mean," was her reply. And we left it at that. Until the day that she announced the trip, of course.

    My brother, Rik, and I were none too happy about this intrusion into our spring break, which we had traditionally thought of as a kind of sacrosanct time to just hang out. And just what was the purpose in going to see our "mean" grandfather in Oklahoma, anyway? It certainly wasn't to teach us to love him as our mother did.

    Most of the details of the trip have blurred in my memory, but, as I swung my truck on to Rte. 270, some images sharpened in my mind. For instance, though I've completely forgotten the flight, I do remember landing in Tulsa where my mother, adventurous as ever, rented a Dodge Colt rather than the convertible Mustang my brother and I had selected. My mother was especially frugal in those days so the car had no air-conditioning (to save on gas, she explained).

    And I remember heading out over the dusty terrain toward Gore, the little former cattle town where my mother's parents had raised her and her seven siblings. Though the sun was setting, it felt like a hundred degrees outside even at sixty miles an hour with the windows down. I propped my chin atop the back seat open window and watched the dead landscape whiz by. Everything seemed so hot and dry and beige. Then the gray shadows of sunset moved across the land like an approaching storm until, suddenly, the horizon fanned out into flickering rose and the dusty soil began to shimmer like a dying campfire surging in a cooling breeze. And a post-dusk breeze did come to cool my parched face, and at the moment with the windows down, I was glad we did not have a.c. I was not glad we did not have a convertible, however. Rolling from the radio across the front seat was a song by Merle Haggard: I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee... I sat back and closed my eyes.

    By the time we got to my grandfather's I was hungry and tired. I don't remember much about our arrival except that the little farm on which my mother was raised seemed barren and the one story frame house in which my grandfather still lived seemed as spare and dry as the terrain. Had it not been for the fact that the place had running water, it might have been better termed as a shack. It had no central heat except a potbelly stove in the main hallway which dissected the flanking rooms, six in all including a scorched kitchen with a yellowing linoleum floor, a long pine table with a bench on either side, and a wood burning stove; a bathroom with a huge porcelain tub with clawed feet; and a family room with a stone fireplace. There was one bedroom for my grandparents and two for the eight children they had raised.

    All the children were gone, of course, except Stanley and Jimi who had left but now had returned home. Their full names were Stanley Harold and James (Jimi) Earl, which is what my grandfather called them. "Hey little Tessie," he called as we stepped out of the car into the blackening dust of the farmyard. My mother's name was Teresa and this was the first time I had heard anyone call her "little Tessie." She was little but always seemed to me too austere to be dubbed with any endearing nickname. I shook my head. The temperature was dropping rapidly and the air was fluttering about my cheeks. "And you brought your younguns. Let me get a look at them. You got a hug for your ole granddad," and before I could protest he grabbed me, gave me a bear hug, and grazed his stubbly chin across my face. I felt intuitively he did not do it to convey affection, but to hurt me, to confirm his reputation for meanness. He smelled of whiskey, cherry tobacco, gasoline, livestock, and the greasy, acidic rankness of hair that had not been washed for many weeks. My brother avoided his embrace by u-turning to the car, supposedly to retrieve our bags.

    I don't remember much else about our first night on the farm except meeting my grandmother, who somehow recalled to me the dried corn husks my mother hung on our front door for Thanksgiving; and, of course, my two uncles who seemed like two seedy, unemployed cowboys. At least all they did was shake my hand, my grandmother expecting a kiss on her dry and sunken cheek. After we unpacked, we sat around the pine picnic table in the kitchen eating chicken and corn soup. My uncle asked my brother and me if we wanted some home brew, but we didn't know if he were kidding or not so we sat in silence slurping our soup.

    My mother was given one of the bedrooms while my brother and I shared the remaining one. I learned the next morning that Jimi and Stanley slept on cots in the family room. For a long time after I was in bed that night, I could hear the drunken men's voices rising and the wind from the plains working its way through the clapboards of my room. I fell asleep to the sound of my grandfather yelling and my mother exhorting him, please, did every visit have to be like this? If so, it was the last time she was coming home. I remember my last conscious thought drifting: why is she saying this? She never comes home anyway. And then sleep.

    To be awakened at dawn to roosters, wind and a burning need to pee. I groped in my underpants down the gritty, wood-planked hallway to the cold bathroom. I shivered as little mists of steam rose up from my urine. When I came back into the hallway, Jimi stepped out from the kitchen and, after a remark about how he didn't know city folk rose so early, asked me if I'd like to join him for some coffee. I didn't drink coffee then, but the thought of any hot beverage and Jimi's garrulous warmth seemed more appealing than returning to the wind-leaking bedroom, so I accepted. As I started down the hall to dress, Jimi called out, hey, why don't you just slip on these. And he tossed me a pair of overalls.

    As I sat sipping on my hot, over-sugared and too-white coffee, and nuzzling to the warmth of the stove, Jimi started showing off his trophies. Apparently, as a young man he had been a rodeo champion. "This one I got for steer roping," he drawled, holding up a trophy with a lasso rope twirling from a hand suspended in the silent air. "And thisun here I got for bronco bustin," he explained, lifting one with a horse hunched in a frozen, about-to-buck pose. And then, finally, the greatest prize of them all, the one he got for bull riding, fixed with a bull about to snort clouds into the cool kitchen air, and a cowpoke atop him waving a ten gallon hat above his head. It was impressive. "I used to have dozens more," he lamented, pouring a drought of whiskey in his coffee mug, "but I pawned most of them up in Tulsa."

    After a dry breakfast of cornmeal pancakes, my brother and I went out for a tour of the farm with Uncle Stanley. He brought along a twenty-two rifle and a Colt .45, his daddy's prize, he claimed. But not to worry, the ole man'd never notice. There wasn't much to see, the farm diminished now to just an old weathered barn, a chicken coup, and an old abandoned pigsty and a tilting, out-of-service outhouse. As far as the eye could see there was fencing, either broken wood slats or coiled and torn bobbed-wire. "We used to have a hundred head a cattle, but alls we got now is two cows so papa don't see no reason to keep up the fence," he explained. Other than the two cows, who Stanley called Tillie and Hazel, there were a couple of dozen chickens and a rooster or two. Otherwise, the farm seemed pretty deserted and bleak. "Papa gets social security now so he and momma don't have much energy or need to work the farm. They just keep the chickens and Tillie and Hazel round for company. Course now they got Jimi and me, though papa seems to have mixed feelings bout our coming to stay."

    Stanley took us atop a rise overlooking a little valley into which the Melton family had been dumping their refuse for decades. "Family been throwing their shit in here ever since papa built this place. It's great for target practice," he mused, lifting the twenty-two and firing off a round at a discarded commode sitting half-buried and askew in the middle of this garbage-grave. Ping! A chip of white porcelain went flying off in the dirt. Stanley said he wished his papa had been sittin' on the damned thing when he took the shot, and he laughed a little longer than the joke merited. Then Rik took the rifle and shot another white chip off the disreputable stool. Stanley handed me the .45. "Go ahead, boy, shoot any damn thing you please, 'cept your uncle of course," and again he chortled. I looked out over the range. Most of the targets were rusting cans, newspapers and cardboard cartons. But strewn among these also were: a bicycle with amputated wheels, an old roller-wheel wash tub, a stripped panel truck that looked like it was manufactured in the 1940's, innumerable objects too rusted and decayed to identify, and the blanched skull of a steer. I imagined Stanley picking it up and calling it by name: "Alas, poor Elsie, I knew her, boys. A cow of infinite milk, and most excellent cream. I tugged upon her udder a thousand times..." I took aim. Ping! The bullet ricocheted off the old wash tub.

    Later that day, after a lunch of cornbread, corned-beef and cabbage, Stanley, Rik and I went out with the pistol again. I basically detest firearms, but I was determined to stay busy over our three-day visit so that I could avoid my grandparents and my mother as much as possible. We went out into the front yard where Stanley told us to wait quietly behind the broken seat swing. I crouched there, gripping the .45 waiting for god knows what when suddenly something came bounding across the barnyard. "Quick, boy, get out there and blast that little bastard!" I lurched forward only recognizing my prey when I was squared off with the cornered jack-rabbit. "Blast it, boy, blast it," Stanley exhorted. Well, I wasn't all that keen about blasting the wash tub, so I charged the rabbit, feigning I was chasing it down, when in fact I was giving it a chance to escape. It shot slap-footed, skirting around my ankle and took off down the dirty lane, back-kicking dust clouds, as I took purposeful wild shots at its backside. "Damn, boy," Stanley admonished, "you shoulda blasted it when you had the chance!"

    That night I again went to sleep to the wall-quaking sound of drunken men; only this time punctuated by mother's shrill admonishments contending with, then piercing the rising wind. It occurred to me that my ancestor's chorus had been shaped by the plains, their voices gritty as a duststorm, bearing down on each other like the Oklahoma sun on the head of a steer. I went to sleep with images of the Melton landfill floating through my dreams.

    The next day I slept through roosters and any strong need to pee. When Rik and I finally rolled out of bed, Stanley and Jimi were gone, and we were greeted by my grandfather's curmudgeonly complaints."Worthless, both of them. One of em a washed up, cowboy drunk, the other married to a red-assed, squaw-bitch whore. I raised that goddamned Jimi Earl to be a champion and now all that weak-assed bum can do is curl up and make love to a bottle. And I don't know what that slut-bucking Stanley Harold is doing back here. That squaw bitch probably left him to whore for the cowboys on a cattle drive. Flat on her back beneath the stars, that's a goddamned Indian bitch for you. And if that bastard Jimi Earl has gone off to pawn the rest of our trophies, I'm going to kick his ass all the way back to Tulsa."

    I looked up to see that the remaining trophies were gone. Then my mother started in about how we hadn't come a thousand miles for us to sleep the day away, so Rik and I decided to skip breakfast and slip outside awhile. We ambled over to the family landfill and, too timid to have appropriated the guns, threw stones at the refuse. The day seemed hot and interminable. We were too hungry to miss lunch, so we went back for a meal of cornbread, salted ham and more excoriations from my mother and her father.

    Rik and I were hanging out by the barn about sunset when Jimi and Stanley got home. The pick-up came bumping up the road, swirling and spraying dust from its wheels. It skidded in front of the house and my two uncles dismounted and stumbled about in the dirt. It was obvious Jimi was by far the drunker of the two. He leaned, steadying himself on the door of the shotgun seat. I heard the screen door slam and turned to see my grandfather striding toward Jimi and rolling up his sleeves.

    "You did it, didn't you, you worthless son-of-a-bitch. You went up to Tulsa and sold the rest of the family trophies. Didn't you, didn't you? Answer me, you no count, whiskey-swilling, lily-livered coward. Answer me," and he punched my crouching uncle in the stomach.

    Stanley had gone over to watch and stand with his arm around his mother's shoulder. Our mother ordered us to get in the house. We crossed the yard and paused, standing behind her. "Get in the house," she said, but we lingered with the other spectators. Jimi slumped over as if he were going to vomit, but my grandfather didn't give him a chance. He lifted his head by the hair and hit him in the face. Jimi fell in the dirt and tried to get up. My grandfather twisted his boot sideways and kicked Jimi in the nose. Blood spurted from his nostrils into the darkening dust. He lay there, groaning, making no attempt to resist. I couldn't understand it. My grandfather, a once sinuous farmer, was now reduced to thin, rasp-bellowing husk. And my uncle, despite his alcoholism, still bulged rodeo-tense muscles beneath his workshirt. He could have killed the old bastard with one swipe of his backhand. But he didn't. He just lay there, groaning and frothing blood into the dust.

    Then my grandfather began to kick him. He kicked him in the stomach, in the back, in the buttocks, all the while cursing him for pawning the family treasures, besmirching the family name. A craven, yellow-bellied, drunken, two-bit bum. He disowned the bastard. The no-good shit would never see a goddamned dime from him. If he did the son-of-a-bitch would just poor it out a whiskey bottle. But it was when he started kicking Jimi in the face that I tried to intervene. I had had enough. Enough of everything. My mother. This trip. Using steer-skulls and jack-rabbits for a target range. Everything. But mostly I had enough of my grandfather. I thought it would be good to kill him. I lunged forward but my mother grabbed me by the arms.

    "It won't do any good. You'll just make him madder. Besides, it's none of our business. We'll be going home tomorrow and in a few days Jimi will be getting more of the same." But it was none of this that kept me restrained. It was Jimi's voice repeating in a slur: "go ahead ole man, kick me again. I deserve it." And grandfather did and Jimi began to vomit liquor and blood into the dirt.

    Then the sun started doing just what it did the night we arrived: infusing the country with a scarlet aura before it died...

    I went inside and got the .45. The thought crossed my mind to kill them all, but instead I went down to the family landfill and blasted point-blank the steer skull into shards. Then I went to work on the commode...