by Tony Abbott
“Okay, cut it out,” their mother said. “We’ll be stopping soon.”
Finally there was the game Ricky and Bobby had invented together. It wasn’t really a game, and it was private so their mother and grandmother never heard them playing it, and it didn’t have a name, but if it did, it might have been called “What If.”
The point of it was to describe a situation in which it was impossible not to do something disgusting to yourself.
“Okay,” Bobby whispered after they left Lexington, and his grandmother had fallen asleep with her head resting on the passenger window, “okay, I have one. What if you’re in a desert. You’re in a desert, and you’re there for a week and you’re starving to death, you’re nearly dead, and it’s incredibly hot, and then you find a bottle of mustard. All you have to eat in the whole desert is mustard. There’s nothing else. It’s just desert. And it’s a hundred and fifty degrees. Would you eat it?”
“Mustard?” said his brother.
“It’ll burn out your throat. You know it will make you throw up, it’s so hot out, and it’ll burn a hole in your stomach, but you’re empty and you’re starving. Would you still eat it?”
Ricky frowned. “Yellow mustard? Regular yellow mustard? Like for hot dogs?”
Bobby couldn’t keep from laughing. “No, spicy brown. Hot. Like fire—”
“Boys?” said their mother. “Bobby?”
He lowered his voice and leaned toward Ricky, who leaned away as if he smelled sour armpits again. “It burns your tongue and that…hing unner yur tonnnnn,” he said, holding his tongue up to show what he meant.
Ricky shook his head. “Gross. I don’t know.”
“It’s been a week. You have no water. Your stomach is empty. It burns. And your water ran out days ago—”
“Then you just die from starvation,” Ricky said.
“But no, because then you find a bottle of brown mustard. It might keep you alive, but will burn big holes from your tongue all the way to your stomach.”
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
“You’d throw your guts up, you know—”
Ricky laughed now with a flicker of bitterness in his voice. “Yeah, I would. All over you!”
“Aww, gust!” Bobby made the sound of throwing up.
Grandma woke up when he said that and looked back, so they stopped playing. Her hair was funny, thought Bobby. His mother was just driving and driving, eyes ahead now.
Perryville was twenty-five miles off the TripTik route, straight west on country roads. It was middle afternoon when they turned off, and the snaking bands of trees along the smaller roads were shady and full of the early, still quiet of summer. Ricky fidgeted with his books for the longest time before he finally let them go and perched forward in his seat, casting looks out every window until he spied the sign—PERRYVILLE BATTLEFIELD—and they turned left and entered the park.
The road to the information center was long and straight and rising, and its shoulders were paved with gravel. They parked and got out. The sunny hills (there were always hills on Civil War battlefields, Bobby knew from the brown photographs) rolled so easily up and down and away from the car, overlapping one another like silent green waves, it was hard to imagine these fields as places of death. Ricky charged immediately up the nearest hill to a paved circle around a stone wall. Inside the wall stood an obelisk memorializing the battle and the dead. Beyond that several old cannons stood poised on a ridge. All around, the standing rocks, the bending flow of trees, the isolated groves moving ever so slightly in the heat, the long wooden fences zigzagging at the edges of fields, all were muffled, peaceful, and somber.
“You can’t believe it,” Ricky said, the first one to speak. “Places like this, a hundred years ago, there used to be thousands of guys fighting, shooting, riding. It was a mass of yelling men. Plus there was a fog of smoke, even if it was a clear day, from all the rifle shots, and who knew where you were.”
“Yeah,” said Bobby.
Following Ricky’s animated charge back down the hill and beyond it to another hill and another, Bobby paused when he glimpsed a white house in the far distance below the crest. It stood angled at the bottom of the downward slope, near a sliver of creek, amid a loose gathering of trees in full leaf. The house was as unmoving and serene, he thought, as if you might gaze at it for hours and see no change at all save the sun’s slow crossing, until a face appeared in its doorway, a woman’s face, her hands wiping a towel, and she called you in, gently and by name, for lunch.
It was true, thought Bobby, you couldn’t believe it. You couldn’t understand how such peace could turn so deadly.
“It was the bloodiest battle in Kentucky,” he said, recalling from a bronze plaque near the obelisk what he thought Ricky might like to hear, “1862.”
“Sure it was. Thousands died here. Four hundred and ten on a small patch of ground, somebody wrote.” Was Ricky making that up? “Their bodies all stacked up and ready to be buried,” he added.
Turning, Ricky looked at the trees soberly, the sun on his glasses. Bobby wondered if so much blood soaking into the dirt burned the grass or made it grow better, greener. He couldn’t believe it had no effect either way. It was blood. He asked his brother.
Ricky shrugged, not taking his eyes from the trees. “I don’t know, but guess what? After some battles, maybe not this one, there were thousands of dead horses everywhere. Big, huge carcasses that had been shot out from under their riders. They were no good, so they just left them rotting where they died.”
As they made their way back, the two boys saw their mother and grandmother walking out of the information center toward the obelisk, followed by a brown woman with a handled bag.
“What did they do with all of them?” Bobby asked. “The horses?”
“And the soldiers,” Ricky continued, “the dead soldiers? They’d pile the bodies in pigpens, inside the pens, with the hogs outside. If they didn’t, the hogs would eat the bodies. The Union cleaned up their dead but left the Confederates for days. People had to wear masks over their noses. Also birds, too, would peck at them, but they shot those out of the sky.”
“Gust,” said Bobby.
They walked one last field down to a line of fences, stunned by a quiet that was quieter the farther away you went from the road. There were only two other cars. In the middle of June, only three cars. No one went to Perryville, the bloodiest battle in Kentucky history. Bobby looked once more toward the white house, but couldn’t see it now. Grandma was sitting in the front seat, her door open, her feet on the road. She looked tired. Was she thinking of Grandpa? Did she know what a battlefield was? Did she care?
“How we doing?” their mother asked when they got back to the car. “We should be leaving. Moving on. What do you think?”
Ricky said nothing at first. Then, “Yeah. This is good. A good one to start with. It’s great. Thanks, Mom.”
“More to come,” she said.
As they drove down to the main road, Bobby’s mind drifted back to how his father often took Ricky downtown to Indians games, how there was a giveaway at the grocery store once and his mother brought back a book about old pistols for Ricky while he got a book about watches, how Ricky did this and Ricky did that, and sooner or later any good thing Bobby did was remembered to have been done by Ricky, the first, best son.
He cursed to himself and turned away to the window but had trouble not thinking more of the same. He tried to wash his mind clean and stare blankly at the miles and miles of no change. Trees and white highways. Highways and gas stations. Barns, always barns, and rusting silos, and more highways.
Sometimes, tired of the ceaseless monotony of staring out, Bobby lay sideways with his back on the seat and his knees folded above him. He gazed quietly at the ceiling of the car while Ricky looked out the window from his pillow.
What did his brother see out there when he sat with his head against the pillow and his elbow on the padded door rest, cupping his chin in his hand? It wa
sn’t the barns and horses and truck stops, he knew that. It was something farther away. Tomorrow, maybe, as silly as that sounded. Bobby didn’t know, but it was far away. Ricky’s face looked so small and pale and thin. He wrinkled his eyebrows when he thought people were looking at him, as if he thought that made him look better. He wasn’t frowning now, so Bobby knew he was just himself, looking out the window at whatever it was. And whatever it was Ricky was seeing, it wasn’t happy. Bobby knew it made him sad and took him far away from himself, but what was it?
Since the time he was five, Ricky had worn glasses and hated them. They were thick and heavy. Bobby remembered the first time his brother came home from the eye doctor with the glasses. Was their father there? He might have been, but he didn’t drive, like Grandma didn’t drive, so it must have been his mother who had taken him.
Embarrassed that the lenses were thick, but trying not to show it, Ricky boasted about them. He wrinkled his forehead and said that the glasses proved he was a genius. That girls liked glasses. That Clark Kent wore them. That he could see better with them than Bobby could without them. But the sight of his brother with those glasses broke Bobby’s heart in a way he didn’t understand. They made Ricky look thin, afraid, weaker than before, with only the frown on his forehead to defend him. How often, after putting the glasses on, Ricky would stare straight ahead and turn his face from side to side, watching the world ripple and distort across the lenses.
That was only the beginning. He had gotten thicker ones after that first pair. What was happening with his eyes?
Bobby tried looking through his brother’s glasses once when Ricky was in the bathroom and had left them on the dresser. He was shocked at how blurry everything was. Their bedroom, the hallway outside their door, the whole world smeared with goo. What was it like looking through Ricky’s eyes from the car window now? Had he really seen the railroad tracks as he’d told their mother? Had he not seen the white house at Perryville? Might he ever not see anything at all?
Thirteen
Grandma
The boys are two good boys.
They have whatever they want, they have not been ever without anything, and their grandfather they didn’t know well enough, but they are two good boys. Their father? Nuh.
The older boy has eye problems, but so have we all eye problems, except my Bobchicka, my Bobby.
Puppa had spectacles. They are on his face right now in heaven. I put them on him before they took him away.
I hope he will not go blind, my Richie. I hope none of us will go blind. We have to eat well.
Their grandfather wore spectacles, but he was sixty-six only. It was because he was an engineer, always drawing, always bending close over paper.
August was a civil engineer and he designed bridges, first in Hungary, then in Youngstown. He liked to visit new bridges and causeways and there were new ones built every few years over the water near Tampa and Clearwater.
I made chocolate chip cookies that day. I pulled them from the oven and slid the pan onto a cooling rack on the counter. I lifted one to look underneath, they were fine. I saw the clock, rinsed the warm chocolate from my hands.
August was as a young man a baker, with floury white hands the first time I saw him, but he loved my cookies.
The doorbell rang, and I knew it was Puppa. I answered the door, wiping my hands on my apron. “I’ve made your favorite—”
It was not him. A colored man stood on the doorstep. I locked the screen. There was a truck sitting at the end of the driveway. He wore big overalls. His face was still. He was colored and wore blue overalls and a cap that he took off and held in his large black hands.
“Mrs. Banyon…”
“Banyar,” I told him. “What do you want?”
His lips moved. Sounds came from them. I cannot remember what he said but a few words.
“…bridge…sand…hospital…tried calling…passed.”
I threw the cookies away.
It was Puppa’s house, too. He bought it for us. Like that, he was gone and never came home. It is empty now and will be also when I am there.
Wednesday, June 17
Fourteen
Bobby
The third day they crossed into Tennessee. It was happening so slowly. Bobby felt his stomach roll with every mile the car rolled. This many hours of driving was too many, and there were more than these to come—how many more, he didn’t know—but the airplane ride stood fixed at the end of it like a beacon, scouring clean the time before it, so he said nothing. Maybe it was normal after so many hours of driving to feel sick from your stomach to your head, from just below your stomach to the hairs on the top of your head. He looked over. Ricky was staring out the window again.
Sometime late the night before, Bobby woke in the motel room to the sound of his mother talking softly on the phone. It was a quiet call, her voice no more than a murmur, but continuous, as if she were reading aloud. He almost didn’t know when it ended because he hadn’t heard her say any of the usual words, like “Good night” or “I’ll talk to you tomorrow” or “I love you,” just the gentle click of the receiver in the cradle. He cracked one eye open and saw her rise from the desk where the phone was, enter the bathroom, and close the door to brush her teeth. What had they spoken about? He heard the sound of the faucet and the swooshing of the brush soon after she closed the door behind her, which he took as a good sign. She was doing something regular right away after the call. Maybe it was an okay telephone call. Because wouldn’t she be slow to brush her teeth if the phone call had upset her? She would linger, wouldn’t she? She would look in the mirror at herself. Or just stand there. Or worse, she would cry. But not this time. His mother went right to brushing her teeth.
But the next day he doubted how sure he was that the phone call had ended all right. Not long after a short stop for snacks at noon his mother slammed her palms on the horn over and over, veered off the road, and skidded to a stop in the dusty shoulder.
“Marion!”
“Damn it, that’s it!” she said.
The boys looked at each other as she turned off the engine with an angry flick of her wrist and stormed out of her seat, leaving the door open. She crossed in front of the car, stopped at the guardrail, and stared trembling into the trees. A truck roared by, then cars, one after another, then a space of no cars, then a long grinding ribbon of coming and passing and going.
“Holy cow,” Bobby finally breathed.
“Marion,” their grandmother called from her seat, and then said something in Hungarian. whatever it was, she said it twice.
Their mother swung her head around. “So what?” she snapped, her whole body shaking. “I don’t even care. He’s mad. He’s always mad. It wouldn’t work, anyway, so what’s the point?”
“But, Mar—”
“No!”
Bobby watched his mother step over the guardrail and off the side of the road, stumble a few steps, then collapse to her knees in the grass, and put her hands to her face and cry into them.
“What the heck happened?” asked Bobby softly.
“Dad, what else?” said Ricky. “On the phone last night.”
“You heard that?”
“Vhat?” said Grandma.
What had his parents said, after all? Bobby tried to remember a word, any word, but couldn’t, when Ricky opened his door and got out, passed behind the car, hopped over the rail, and went to his mother, standing next to her for a long time without saying anything. There was a tissue in his hand.
What had his mother asked, and what had his father answered? What “wouldn’t work, anyway”? That word “work” sounded so ominous. What could it mean for something to not “work” between adults?
His mind flashed backward to the previous Christmas when his father hit him for making noise.
“You want to fight each other?” his father had said to the boys when their mother was working at her job downtown. They had been going at it with the fencing set Bobby had gotten for Christma
s. The tree stood unlit in the front of the room, near the picture window. The fencing set’s sword blades were plastic and rubber-tipped. Bobby had asked for them, but you can’t fence alone, so Ricky had taken an épée and a plastic mask as “his own.” Dancing in front of the tree, Ricky had struck Bobby’s blade down, then lunged forward, snapping his own blade in half. Suddenly angry, Bobby punched Ricky in the shoulder and yelled, “That’s mine, you stupid jerk!”
“Don’t hit me, you jerk—”
His father came right out of the den, where he’d been working.
“You want to fight?” he said, his face red. “Yeah? You want to fight? I’m working in there. I have two weeks. You want to fight? Okay, fight. But I’m going to take care of the first one who cries. So go on. Go on!”
Take care of the first one who cries. That was an odd thing to say, Bobby thought. But he and Ricky watched their father turn and leave and, seeing his broken sword on the floor, Bobby punched his brother again, and soon they were tussling, until Ricky kneed him under the ribs, Bobby sucked in a sudden breath, and exhaled with a cry. Ricky’s eyes widened behind his glasses as he moved away.
Quick footsteps from their father’s room.
Still on the floor, Bobby pretended his side hurt more than it did, holding his hand on it and wincing, but also setting his face firm and trying to look man enough to shrug it off.
It didn’t help.
Through his grimace, he saw his father coming at him. (“Oh, crying, are you? Crying? Crying!”) Bobby barely had time to scramble to his feet before his cheek was cupped in his father’s left hand and his father came down fast with his right. The smack was loud and sudden, and he fell again. His cheek felt raw and red and shocked. Ricky watched from the couch as their father strode back into the den and slammed the door shut, opened it, and slammed it louder. Pulling himself to his feet, Bobby ran to his room and cried for an hour, muffled, into his pillow. When he heard his mother open the front door, returning to start dinner, he stopped. Telling her would only make his father madder than before. By that time Ricky was outside. Bobby joined him in throwing snowballs against the trunk of the oak tree until supper was ready.