Dragging Wyatt Earp. Robert Rebein
and ideas multiplied like flies, the family lived in a strange, almost surreal state in which everything that had once seemed “normal” was turned on its head, and even the strangest of circumstances provoked little more than a tired yawn. Was it “normal” to take your bath in a plastic baby pool, to think of a Styrofoam cooler as “the fridge,” to eat Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup over rice for fifteen days in a row? Well, who was to say it wasn’t normal when clearly it was the only reality going?
And so the zombies continued with their dubious enterprise, fitting the work in on evenings and weekends and holidays such as Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Watching the work take place, all I could do was shake my head and whisper my mother’s old mantra under my breath, so no one else could hear, “And this, too, shall pass. And this, too, shall pass.”
It did pass. And in time life went back to “normal” again. However, having experienced life as a refugee, I no longer trusted the whole idea of normalcy. Deep down, I knew that the zombies could reappear at any moment, and when that happened, the world as I knew it would be laid to waste as if a flood or a tornado had raged through the neighborhood.
The older I got, the more adept I became at forecasting the squall on the horizon that in time would grow into a full-blown storm of remodeling. Usually it began in this way. My mother, whom I was beginning to recognize as a co-instigator of the madness, rather than a co-victim, would express in passing some dissatisfaction with the house as currently configured. The bathroom was too small or in the wrong part of the house; whenever it rained, water ran down the basement steps, flooding the laundry room; the front room lacked a fireplace, and wouldn’t it be grand to sit before a crackling fire, glass of wine in hand, kids exiled to the basement where they belonged? Hearing this, my father would remain quiet for a long time, his Rebein jaw thrust out before him. At first I thought this look was because he was mad at her; only later did I learn that the silence was a sign that the wheels in his mind had begun to turn, seeking answers to these riddles his mate had posed. Not long after the comments were made, the two of them would move on to the next inevitable stage in their process—driving around town to “look at houses.” How I hated this ritual! Invariably the houses they looked at were in upscale neighborhoods like the one surrounding the country club golf course, a part of town universally derided as Snob Hill.
“There’s no harm in looking,” my mother would say at the beginning of one of these interminable expeditions.
“No, looking is free,” my father would agree. “It’s buying that’s expensive.”
Sitting in the backseat of the family Buick, a car I considered not nearly nice enough to be driving down these particular streets, I would try to predict the future by paying attention to which houses my parents looked at and what they said about them. It wasn’t particularly hard.
mom [pointing to a two-story Tudor with a massive front lawn]: Oh, I like that one, Bill.
dad: The roof doesn’t have enough overhang. [Nodding at a single-story brick ranch with an open ceiling and massive windows across the front]: What do you think of that one over there? Now that’s a house.
mom: Nice. But what do you suppose a house like that costs?
dad [shrugging]: A lot. What do you think of that color of brick?
mom: I like it. A lot.
dad: So do I. See the way the chimney rises up on that side of the house . . .
Having heard this much, I knew it was just a matter of time before my father grabbed some piece of unopened mail and used the back of it to draw a rough sketch of his latest home improvement idea. But was that really so bad? I found myself wondering, as time went on. While part of me blamed both my parents for continually pulling the carpet out from under my childhood, another part of me was beginning to look at them with something like awe, maybe even admiration. They’re crazy as loons, I’d think to myself. But they certainly do know what they want, and they aren’t shy about going after it.
* * *
The biggest of my parents’ “remodeling projects” stretched across several years in the late 1970s, when I was twelve or thirteen years old, and my oldest brother David was in law school at the University of Kansas. After years of talking about it, my parents were going to remodel the house’s exterior, adding a shake shingle roof, a fireplace, and an exterior of new red brick. In essence, they were going to remake the house in the image of one of those sprawling ranches on Snob Hill they were always driving past and admiring. Of course, being Rebeins, they had their own way of going about this, one that only someone who knew their history and tendencies could have predicted.
During World War II, which coincided roughly with the later years of my father’s childhood, Dodge City was a veritable hive of military activity, particularly as regarded the testing of aircraft and the training of pilots. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, an army air base home to some forty thousand people was thrown up in wheat fields west of town. There were massive airplane hangars, hundreds of smaller Quonset huts, and row upon row of temporary barracks heated by tall chimneys of red brick. In the years after the war, however, the old air base quickly fell into disrepair. Finally it was closed altogether, the barracks torn down, the Quonset huts and other usable buildings dragged off to nearby farms and ranches to serve as machine shops or cowsheds. Grass grew up in the cracks in the old runways, the old brick chimneys fell to the ground, and what remained of the place was turned into a feedlot for finishing cattle. My father had grown up less than a mile from the old air base and was intimately familiar with every part of it. However, the massive old hangars and the majestic runways and even the utilitarian Quonset huts were not what drew his attention. No, what stoked his desire and got his imagination going was the thought of all those fallen-down barracks chimneys. All that brick just sitting there on the prairie waiting for someone with the desire and initiative to imagine a use for it! All that brick for free!
I remember the Saturday this desire of my father’s was translated into action. Two or three of my brothers and I were loaded into the back of my father’s snub-nosed 1969 Dodge pickup and driven out to the old air base. There we were issued tools and instructed to stand by and watch carefully as my father demonstrated the process we were to use in recycling the bricks for use on our house.
“First you find a cluster of three or four bricks that have already fallen from the chimney,” the old man told us, digging in the weeds until he came up with a representative chunk. “Then you carefully tap at the mortar between the bricks with your hammer and chisel until you get them separated from each other. Finally you chip away at the remaining mortar until . . .” But here, in the final part of his demonstration, the brick he was cleaning broke in half in his hands. “Well, you get the idea,” he said, tossing the broken brick back into the weeds and wiping the mortar dust from his hands. “As you get the bricks cleaned, just stack them in groups of a hundred or so, and we’ll load them in the pickup when I come back to get you.”
And with that, he drove off, leaving us to our work. I can’t recall how much we were to be paid for this job—a couple of cents a brick, I think. I know it was enough that I was vaguely excited by the prospect of making the money to buy whatever toy I had on my wish list in those days. However, this initial enthusiasm soon wore off, as brick after brick broke in half or disintegrated altogether in my chapped, red fingers. That old army cement was just too tough and clingy, the bricks too porous and fragile. In the four or five hours before my father returned to take us home for lunch that Saturday, I think my brother Steve and I managed to clean all of three or four bricks. The rest we had to toss back into the weeds from which we had gathered them, and soon enough the hurling of these bricks because the day’s chief activity, complete with side bets on accuracy, and so on. My brother Joe concentrated much harder on the work but did no better. In any case, the sight of our tiny stack of cleaned bricks must have been all the old man needed to abandon all thought of cleaning enough bricks to cover our house, because we never returned to the air base to clean another brick after that day—indeed, we didn’t even bother to take the bricks we had already cleaned home with us. For all I know, they’re still sitting out there today on the broken tarmac, waiting for sun and rain to pound them back into the ground from which they came.
Despite