Lunch-Box Dream

by Tony Abbott

  “Stupid jerk,” Bobby said.

  Ricky shrugged. “Yeah, sorry.”

  “Yeah, sorry. I hate you—”

  “Me?” Ricky said. “You hate me?”

  This came back to Bobby in the minutes his brother stood by the guardrail, both of his hands empty now.

  “We’ll get to Chattanooga tomorrow,” his mother said finally, rising and wiping her face with the tissue. Without her glasses, the brown circles under her eyes were nearly black. She spoke to no one in particular, didn’t look at Ricky, raised her head as if trying to sniff away the last five minutes. “We’ll find the battleground. I don’t want to go now. I know it’s close, but I’m tired. I don’t feel good. I don’t.”

  “Marion,” their grandmother said.

  “Shhhut…” his mother started, then her head suddenly flew around to his brother. “Ricky!”

  “Yeah, Mom?” he said, startled by the sharpness of it.

  “We’ll spend most of the day at the battlefield, okay? I promise. At Lookout Mountain. Will that be enough for you?” She said this with a cold, crying look. “I said will that be enough for you?”

  “Sure, yes,” Ricky said, working his glasses back up his nose. “That’s fine. Thanks, Mom. I’m sorry.”

  She waved Ricky back to the car and after a few minutes of breathing to calm herself got behind the wheel, saying nothing, and drove to the first motel with a vacancy sign and walked quickly into the office, leaving them in their seats.

  Fifteen

  Jacob

  I know Weeza loves me. And Aunt Ruth and Uncle Ellis. And Poppa. And Olivia. Well, I’m lovable. I know lots of other things, too. I know I am a good speller in school. I know a girl in my classroom likes me, maybe two girls do. And probably Cora likes me, too. I know when Mrs. brings her car around to pick up Aunt Ruth—I am talking of Atlanta where I live, and Mrs. is the white lady Aunt Ruth cleans house for—I watch from the front window as she pulls the car up the street right to our house. It’s brand-new and long, with fins the color of butter. Mrs. has to know I want to sit in it. She saw me staring at it from the window. Once I even came down the steps like she was driving up for me. I wonder if she would ever let me sit on those white seats.

  The minute she saw me standing out there, Aunt Ruth growled and shooed me back in the house to help Weeza wash up the breakfast plates. I ran!

  But I didn’t stop looking.

  That car must ride pretty nice. I know I would drive it right out of here. Kansas City here I come!

  Cora laughs behind her hand when I say funny things. She hides her teeth when she laughs. She says funny things, too, and almost made my nose explode in church with what she told me.

  I get an idea sometimes. You know what I mean. I’ve lived in Atlanta my whole life, and that’s a big city not a little town. I’m practically ten, or will be in a few months. And I’m tall for my age. Sometimes I think a thing and I’ll say it. I’ve always been that way. I remember something about Poppa and my old momma. One day, he comes in and I say, “Poppa, why did Old Momma leave me here with Weeza and you and never come back?” And he blinks his eyes at me and says, “Never mind about that. You’re with people who love you now.”

  Now.

  He said “now.” Like Momma didn’t love me. Well, lots of people love me now.

  Sure I know Poppa is not really my poppa. Once when I was supposed to be sleeping I saw him cry. Some white people did something to him. I’ve never cried but maybe once.

  Being nearly ten I have seen a few things. I have friends down in Atlanta and they’ve seen things, too.

  At three o’clock I’ll go into town to an office in a store. Cora will walk down the sidewalk with me, but I know what to do. I just go left and left and right and left and into the store. Then I walk between the racks of clothes to the office behind the wall in the back and sit on the chair next to the desk. I know the number by heart, and I dial the telephone myself. There’s a man there who’s white. He probably has a car like Mrs. They all do.

  Sixteen

  Bobby

  They stopped at a place called the Cumberland Motor Inn in a city called Wartburg. Funny name, he thought. Wartburg. Only it wasn’t a city, but a small town that lay just off the highway in a valley surrounded by overlapping hills. The hills were covered with brown trees, but looked more like giant mounds of mud that rain had washed into peaks and creases that dried dusty brown.

  The man at the front desk called a name and whistled sharply as his mother came out of the office, and a Negro girl with towels in her arms ran from somewhere to what Bobby suspected was going to be their room, but it wouldn’t be ready for an hour, his mother said, so they ate lunch.

  The cheery waitress at the restaurant up the street from the motel hovered over the table, first with water, then with her order pad, then with sodas, then with food, then just to see how things were going. They weren’t going well. Bobby wasn’t at all hungry, but his mother told him to eat, so he ordered the Sputnik Special from the children’s menu. “Yes, little sir,” the waitress said, which annoyed him. The Special was described as a “a meal to send any kid into orbit!” but was only a grilled cheese and coleslaw. Ricky ordered a sandwich and potato salad said to be “just like Mama used to make before television.”

  “Yes, sir!” said the waitress, smiling as she wrote on her pad, then leaving the table. Ricky chuckled. “They probably don’t even have television in these mountains—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” his mother said, sounding as if she was talking to herself. A blanket of quiet settled over them then, as if they were all too tired to speak. After the waitress slid the plates on the table and left once more, no one breathed a word. People at the other tables glanced at them when their own conversations faded. Bobby did not meet their eyes, but leaned over his plate.

  In the motel room, his mother slept. So did he. The grilled cheese settled in his stomach like lead, and he felt it would sooner send him into the bathroom than into orbit. Gazing around before he set his head down, he realized he hated the room. It was too much like their room the night before in which he woke to hear his mother whispering on the phone. The cot’s soft mattress smelled dully of someone else, a man, he thought, who smoked; but why would a grown man sleep on a cot? But this was the South. So who knew?

  Finally, the room’s heat fell over him, and he closed his eyes, trying to imagine the coming airplane ride but not getting far because he didn’t know at all what it would be like.

  When he woke, hours had passed, and he found he had a headache and no dreams to remember. His grandmother was sitting up in bed, praying with her eyes closed, while Ricky studied a large book of photographs by a crack of window light. Bobby looked out at the pool beyond. There were one or two people, a girl, a family, maybe, moving in the sunshine. It was afternoon and hotter than before. He turned over, rested his head on the mattress, breathed in shallowly, and slept again.

  Later, he stepped out onto the little sidewalk between the room and the parking lot. It was nearly nine o’clock. The nighttime air was warm and scented with flowers and chlorine. His mother was still sleeping like she had the day she learned Grandpa had died. After the strange afternoon everything had slowed to a near stop, gone quiet, almost to sleep itself. They were far enough off the highway so that the air was hushed. Bobby felt that no one would ever find them there, if anyone was even looking for them. The mud hills twinkled with house lights far above the roof of the motel office.

  He heard the sound of a faraway train whistle.

  It came to him then what his mother had told him, that when there was a change of trains in Washington, Grandma had asked her to find out if Grandpa’s coffin was being moved to the right train to continue its journey to Ohio. Had his father been there, too? It was Washington, where he was studying. But he wasn’t part of this story, so perhaps not. His mother told Bobby she had been nervous, afraid, and dizzy. But after several wrong ones, she found the right counter and, clutch
ing the stamped yellow tickets, asked a man at a window.

  Bobby imagined a ruffle of papers behind the window, and a slow nodding: “Yes, ma’am. Your father’s been transferred to track seven, leaving for Youngstown in twenty-eight minutes. I just made the call. He’s safe.”

  Those strange words. “He’s safe.”

  And his mother wobbling back to where Grandma stood alone in the waiting room, no more now than a stick of herself.

  “He’s safe,” she repeated.

  And Grandma’s face, worn down to nothing. “Good.”

  He thought of uniformed men rolling the casket down the platform. Maybe they laughed. Certainly there was no way to disguise what they were doing among the holiday travelers. Was there a holiday? Maybe not. In any case, what they were pushing down the platform was undoubtedly a casket and it was going on a train and everyone saw it. Did Grandpa need a ticket like seat passengers? Maybe they didn’t call it that, but it was still a ticket. He needed to reserve a place on the train. No. Two trains.

  Across the parking lot, the chrome frames of vending machines sparkled under the bulb in the ceiling of the walkway. One was a bright red and white box the size of a refrigerator. There was movement at that machine. The girl he had seen earlier by the pool was bending over at the machine. Then she was up and turning around and facing him, holding something in her hand.

  Candy? A soda?

  Her hair hung to her shoulders. It was light brown.

  “Huh…”

  Bobby turned. Ricky had said that. He was standing on the sidewalk just behind him, the room door closed. How did he get there so quietly? He notched his glasses up his nose as he looked past Bobby at the girl, his brow crinkling to make him look older. His sudden appearance reminded Bobby of the time he had spotted a quarter frozen in the sidewalk on his way home from school. He had exclaimed at it, then was amazed when an older boy pushed him out of the way, kicked the quarter free of the ice with the heel of his boot, and went off with it. He remembered how he told Ricky, who said he deserved to lose the quarter because he had said anything about it in the first place. Or maybe he only imagined Ricky would say that, but he had never actually mentioned the quarter to him.

  “I remember her from the restaurant.”

  “The pool,” Bobby said.

  Ricky hooked one thumb in his pants pocket and shifted his feet.

  Could a year make such a difference? What was Ricky thinking about the girl? Bobby thought about the girl. Of course he did. He had thought about her from the moment he had seen her at the pool, only he didn’t know her hair was that long because she had worn a bathing cap to match her suit. Still, Ricky was taller, a year older, knew things about girls, and his thoughts were different and meant more.

  “Let’s get some ice,” Ricky said, stepping in front of him.

  “What for?”

  “To get some ice.”

  They walked across the parking lot to the machines. The girl stayed there, holding a soda bottle in one hand while unwrapping a candy bar with her teeth. She took a bite, looking at Ricky.

  “My parents drove me here because we’re going to a horse farm to buy me a horse,” she said, chewing.

  “That must be fun,” Ricky said. “What kind of horse?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I have two horses already,” she said. “But one’s getting old. I ride all the time.”

  “I’ve ridden a few times,” said Ricky.

  “You have not!” Bobby said.

  “Shut up,” said Ricky. “We’re here to see the battlefields.”

  “You talk funny,” the girl said. “You from up north?”

  “Ohio,” said Ricky.

  “That’s far away from here,” she said. “I’m from Atlanta. My daddy works for Coca-Cola.” She tapped one of the vending machines and laughed.

  “What?” said Ricky.

  “Coke bottles,” she said. “You know. Glasses?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I always drink from the bottle.”

  “We’ll see Chattanooga,” said Bobby. “Lookout Mountain. That’s where we’re going tomorrow morning. Lots of guys died up there. Union and Confederate. Both sides.”

  “Oh,” she said, tearing a strip of wrapper idly from her candy bar. She didn’t say any more, except another “Oh.” Then she walked back along the sidewalk to her room, trailing the scent of chocolate behind her.

  Seventeen

  “You like her?” Bobby asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Maybe. What difference does it make to you?”

  They were back in the room, whispering in the semidarkness. Grandma was asleep on the cot. Their mother was in the bathroom, its door cracked open, and a sliver of light shone vertically across the beds.

  “Quiet now, boys,” she said through the door. The edge was no longer in her voice. “Go to sleep. I want to get on the road early tomorrow. We can visit Chickamauga, then be up at Lookout Mountain before lunch.”

  Bobby turned on the couch to face his brother’s bed.

  “So what if you were rolled up in a rug?” he whispered.

  “What?” Ricky said. Bobby couldn’t see his face in the dark. “A rug? Rolled up in a rug? What are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” Bobby said. “With her.”

  “Boys,” from the bathroom.

  Bobby leaned closer to the shadow of his brother. “And it was a hundred and fifty degrees inside the rug and you and that girl were really jammed together but you couldn’t breathe and she had bad breath and you had to go to the bathroom, what if you had to let it all go, both ways, and it would go all over you?”

  “What?”

  Bobby was laughing now. “It was all over both of you and it smelled and she had to go, too—”

  “Shut up,” Ricky said. Bobby knew he was stone-faced in the dark, while he himself kept laughing, breathless and unable to stop.

  “And you threw up, too, blahhh, all over her face—” His heart pounded in his chest. “All over her—”

  “Boys, hush up. Go to sleep!”

  The crack of light grew bigger, and he could see Ricky’s face now, glassless, his eyes staring at him.

  “That’s what you’d do to her, no matter what she was wearing, even if she took off her bathing suit—”

  “You’re a jerk. That’s all you ever think about. Shut up.”

  “Even if she had on nothing at all—”

  “Bobby!”

  Ricky sat up in the dim light, pushed his glasses onto his nose, tilted his head both ways. After their mother left the bathroom, he got up and closed himself in it. Bobby felt a pain in the pit of his stomach and thought about the girl under the metal awning over the driveway, and his heart pounded and pounded. He knew the girl had meant that Ricky’s glasses were as thick as Coke bottles.

  Eighteen

  Frank

  So, this is the time when I’m supposed to tell you things about me? I don’t like talking about myself.

  But I will say this. My brother Hershel never knew the worst of it.

  It’s bad having a father who knocks you around, which is why I say I may lose a job but I’m no drunk and that’s not the reason. He was a mean man, angry at everything. I would never hit my kids like he did. Never raise a hand to them. Never could. Besides, Jacob is a fine boy. He can fish, even in the dinky creeks we walk to!

  Truthfully, I think he is more like me in some ways than he is like Hershel. Sometimes I have to talk to him, to tell him what’s what. But I never hit him. But he would get a pounding from Daddy like I got. Hershel might learn it all someday, but I won’t tell him. That’s the past. There is such a thing as pride.

  Nope. That’s it. I have to go find a job.

  Thursday, June 18

  Nineteen

  Bobby

  “Welcome to the Dynamo of Dixie.”

  It was late morning the next day, a hundred and thirty miles south of the mountains.
After driving around the wooded fields of Chickamauga, past stone markers and cannons and pyramids of cannonballs, and families at picnic tables, they were back up in Chattanooga, idling outside the entrance of Point Park and Lookout Mountain.

  They hadn’t been so far away, after all: only three hours from Wartburg.

  Wearing a gray uniform and hat, a park guard sidled from inside the booth to their car. “You folks from up north?”

  “Excuse me?” his mother said, pulling her arm into the car.

  “From where in Ohio you from?” he said, nodding forward at their hood, to mean he’d seen their license plate.

  “No. Well, Cleveland. One of us from Florida,” said their mother. “Cleveland, mostly.”

  “You far away from there now,” he said, his eyes straying into the backseat at the boys before returning to their mother. Bobby remembered the girl at the motel saying the same thing. Then he noticed Grandma staring unblinking at the park attendant, staring him down, if he cared to see it, though he didn’t look at her. Or was she simply trying to understand his accent?

  “Different here for you,” he said, oddly.

  Their mother moved her head back. “Yes…what?”

  “Just saying,” he said, handing her a brochure, which Ricky snatched right away. “Parking’s on the left at the top of the hill near the stone gateway. There’ll be a place or two, if y’all look for them. Busy morning. Lookout Point closes at six for the evening.”

  “Thanks,” said Ricky.

  They drove around the upward-winding roads to the top of the hill, where they found an empty spot and parked. The morning was already heavy with the heat of the day to come. Grandma didn’t want to walk much, she would stay near the car. She said something about not wanting to see “fields of death,” because she had seen “Cossacks do tings” when she was young, whatever that meant. Her eyes had sunk deep into her face.