Finding Don
Fresh out of college, with just a few hundred bucks to my name, my friend Dave and I toured the southwest for a month in an old Dodge Omni that burned more oil than gas.
We got drunk on the blues in Memphis, were mistaken for drug mules outside of Las Cruces and played spades with strangers at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. We leapt off dunes at White Sands and hiked Canyon de Chelly to see the cliff dwellings Ansel Adams made famous.
On a frigid night high in the hills outside Rehobeth, New Mexico, we sat ice-fishing on a frozen lake with friends from back east, the Milky Way splashed across the clear cold sky above us.
We were still well over a thousand miles from Michigan, but after three weeks in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah we had turned east, crossed the western Colorado border and felt like we were heading home.
Eagle is a small town of a few thousand people spread out along I-70 as it cuts through the Rocky Mountains about midway between Grand Junction and Denver. Yet as we drove along the icy highway east of Grand Junction I didn’t know it was anywhere nearby. When I saw the first sign for Eagle I turned to Dave and said, “I think my grandfather lives here.”
I didn’t know a lot about Don Lilly. My family was what you would call estranged I guess. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him. It may have been when I was about two. I have a picture of my sister and I at his house. I’m wearing a gigantic cowboy hat and no shirt. I don’t remember the visit at all.
There’s another one of him that ran as an ad in some western magazines. He’s holding an enormous horse tranquilizer and looks like he was carved out of the mountains behind him. It was one of a long line of jobs he’d had throughout the years. The last I’d heard he was driving to Denver to buy used cars which he would drive back to Eagle and sell at a significant markup. Part huckster, part enterprising opportunist.
Dave and I had nowhere to be. This trip, and whatever happened along the way, was the destination. We were done with school, had no jobs to speak of and were spurred only by the dwindling cash in our back pockets. So when we reached the exit for Eagle, Colorado — we took it.
The late January air was cold and the sun had long set when we turned off the highway. It was only mid-evening but the road plays tricks with your mind after dark. It felt like the dead of night. Naturally we started at a bar.
The first place we went was, in retrospect, probably a little too nice considering the stories I’d heard about my grandfather. Dave and I sat at the horseshoe-shaped bar and drank our beers while I tried to figure out what to do next. Thankfully the bartender took care of that for us. Unfamiliar faces don’t turn up often in Eagle. Whatever caused her face to darken with recognition when I mentioned Don’s name went unsaid, but she did know who he was and pointed us to a place on the other side of the highway.
It was much smaller and run down with an empty restaurant out front. I introduced myself to the lady at the door who responded excitedly, pointing to an old Cadillac with a for sale sign in the lot. “That’s one of Don’s cars there,” she said before leading us past the unoccupied tables to an opening in the back.
It was a tight room with a few more empty tables and a short bar along one side. There were only two people in the room. One guy sat at the end of the bar and laughed occasionally. Maybe at the television, maybe at nothing at all.
The other was the bartender. He was old. His skin was weathered and deeply crevassed, and part of me wondered if this was Don. It had after all been a long time since I’d looked at his picture. Dave and I sat down at the bar and ordered a couple of beers.
“I’m looking for somebody,” I said while taking a drink. “Do you know Don Lilly?”
The bartender stood behind the bar cleaning a glass and examined me for a moment. “Maybe,” was all he said.
“I’m his grandson,” I said, taking another drink of my beer.
He stopped cleaning the glass and looked at me a moment longer. “Well fuck.”
There wasn’t any gray area in my family when it came to Don. I’m not even sure I ever heard my grandmother mention his name. She married Bill, her second husband, before I was born. And it was Bill who was called Grandpa. There was never a “Grandpa Don.”
Everything I’d heard about him from my mother was very black and white. He was not a part of our lives, and did not want to be.
The bartender was not my grandfather. But he knew enough about Don to know who I was. He knew that it was a big deal I was standing in his bar. And to me that meant that Don at least acknowledged my existence which, in an odd way, made me feel better about him. The bar had been set very low.
The bartender gave me a phone number and I spent a minute on the phone. A few moments later a very bewildered old man walked through the door. Don bought Dave and I another round, and then assured me there weren’t any more drinks coming from him. “That’s all you’re getting from me,” he said.
The guy in the corner laughed. At us this time, I think.
Don asked about my mother. He asked about my sister and her kids. I showed him the pictures I had of them in my wallet and he asked if he could keep them. An hour later Dave and I were back on the highway and on our way.
I never saw Don again. He died a few years ago. My mother, who had reconciled enough with him by then to attend his funeral, called me from Eagle to tell me she’d heard about my visit from a couple of his friends at the memorial service.
She also told me Don had left me something. A Cadillac — parked out in front of a bar.
