Lunch-Box Dream

by Tony Abbott

  “The police won’t look for him,” Ellis said, his mouth hanging open, unbelieving of what he was saying even though he had just heard it. “Someone get on the phone. Jacob’s missing in Dalton.”

  “Who told you?” asked Hershel, taking Ellis by his shoulders.

  “Who? It was Cora, the girl. But she doesn’t know anything. She can barely talk she’s so scared. It was last night—”

  “Last night!” I said, my heart thumping. “When last night?”

  Everyone was screaming and rushing around then.

  “Why so long?” Hershel said. “Oh, my God, why so long to tell us? There are other damn telephones. If they let Jacob get taken, I’ll go over there—”

  “He has not been taken!” I screamed. “And no you won’t do anything! Frank has been ripping himself up trying to find Jacob, who is just lost. I’m sure he has. He’s my son and he loves Jacob. You know your brother—”

  “My brother!”

  “He must be crazy with worry,” I said, “and doing everything he can to find him. And the police, too—”

  “The police!” Hershel screamed. “I’ll kill them, too, they don’t look for my boy. They’ve probably done it. They killed my Jacob—”

  “Stop, stop, stop!” I said, wanting to smack his face. “Stop all that before Weeza comes.”

  “The police!” he said again, mad as a wasp.

  I held his arm strong. “The police,” I repeated, trying to be calm. “Yes, they will be involved and will be looking for him. You think they want any trouble if they can avoid it? Everywhere a tinderbox? Everything in the papers? He is a boy lost and nothing more. You get yourself together, and you do it now, because it doesn’t help anyone to hear you shouting like a crazy man. We need to get to Dalton right away.”

  Hershel stomped around the yard, whipping his head back and forth and cursing, and I told him again to be quiet. Then he rushed over to start the car but I knew there wasn’t enough of it to start.

  I went into the house to the telephone, when I saw Weeza come up the walk with two shopping bags. My heart went to ice. I ran down the steps and met her before she got to the house and told her, poor girl, I tried to tell her, but she got unsteady on her feet right away. Then her knees went weak and she fell in the yard. Apples rolled into the dust.

  “Weeza!” said Ellis, dropping his cane and helping her up to the porch.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  “I can’t sit,” she said right away. “We have to go there!” Her hands shaking, her voice high, she trembling and trying to be calm. “We have to take the bus. It’s the only way to get there. Hershel, get away from that damn car!” she yelled to the side yard. “Will someone call and find out the times?”

  “What?” said Ellis, who was holding her hand and who loves Weeza and Jacob like his own. “What times, honey? What is it you mean?”

  “Never mind, I’ll call,” Weeza said.

  “I will,” I said, trying to be firm. “I’ll find out the bus times and ask Mrs. to drive us to the station. Somehow get word that we’re coming. She’ll do that for me.”

  At first Hershel didn’t go to her, then he went to her, but it didn’t do her any good to hear him say kill this and kill that. She closed his mouth with her hand and he tore himself away crazy. I didn’t like that. Why do we have to coddle our men when we are torn up just as deep?

  The car never did start. Hershel whipped the fenders with his hat and cut his fingers and cried and kicked the doors and lights and everything until he fell to the dust and had to be pulled away. Ellis tried to bring him into the house. The neighbors were all out by then. But Hershel wouldn’t go in. He just stopped before the door, leaning hard against the post with his face sobbing in his arms until he slipped all the way to the porch floor. And Weeza trying not to, but she couldn’t stop crying on the phone to the Atlanta police. They said they couldn’t do anything about a child missing so far out of town, but all she said was “Jacob, Jacob, Jacob, my Jacob!”

  Twenty-Six

  Hershel

  Weeza was on the phone back and forth for nearly an hour. I hated that car. There was nothing I would not do for my boy.

  Jacob lying in a ditch somewhere by the side of the Dixie Road, his eyes staring at the sky? Oh, God in heaven. I cannot tell you. A boy was found last year, but you won’t read it in any paper. And that man they just killed with his own shotgun and called it suicide. I read that lie. Or that poor boy in Money whose mother laid him out all open for everybody to see what they did to him. And thinking of our Jacob, his face like that, is a thing I cannot put out of my mind. There is no law for Negroes, marches or no marches, boycotts or no boycotts.

  And maybe I know something about it.

  Jacob didn’t know what it meant when he said it. I’m sure he didn’t. But if he ever said to someone else what he said to me, I don’t know what would happen. He was with me when he said it, but if he wasn’t? It makes me shake when I think of it.

  “She’s white top to bottom, isn’t she, Poppa?”

  When I heard him say it and saw his grin, I rose up inside like a devil because I knew he heard it from one of the older boys who think he is older, too, or don’t care he isn’t.

  “Jacob!” I said, raising my hand so fast his grin went away.

  When I took his face in my hand and pulled the other one back he was surprised and began to cry. I got ready to, but I didn’t slap him. He said, “Poppa, Poppa, I’m sorry!” I told him to wipe that look from his face and those words from his mind and never say them again, ever, to anybody. How would he like it if a white man said that about his sister? If somebody said that kind of thing about Weeza? It’s a dirty thing. It’s just words but it’s dirty. He wouldn’t like it, I told him. It would be as nasty a thing as he ever heard. I wrapped his face in my hands and hoped he would learn something. Putting my mouth close to his ear I said, “Don’t ever say that, Jacob, don’t say that, please don’t say that.” He just looked at me, into my eyes, his little face, and then we were both crying. Weeza came in and asked what it was about. I was going to say something, but not the real reason, when Jacob got right up and went to Weeza and cried on her. At that second I saw how young Jacob is no matter how tall he is, and also how they love each other, and how good a boy he is.

  I’m sure Weeza wanted to know what it was about, why we were sobbing. But she didn’t ask again, just left us two by ourselves together.

  I didn’t hit Jacob that time, but there was another time and another hit. That first time, the boy was me. Frank was out and I tried to laugh and even though my daddy saw my scared eyes, his hand was already moving at my face and his mouth yelling, “Okay, Buster, it’s you this time!”

  The crying I did, and then my mother coming in. I saw how Daddy had to keep being mad, madder than he really was, to win her over to his side. He had to act as if his anger was bigger than my crying and my stung cheek. His anger had to be bigger than hers about him slapping me. He knocked things around, roared out of the house as if it was all him. That he was the only one who struggled to make our family work right, that our family was too big a thing to let go to the dogs, and it was only him stopping us from it. He didn’t come back until Momma was sleeping but I was still awake, hating him. But I never thought about this, that Jacob would go and not come back. When I heard about Cora’s telephone call, all the old thoughts came back to me and I hated my father again, but I cried for him, too.

  Let me also tell you that Weeza screamed and said, “The ticket! The ticket!” and I said, “What?” and she said, “The ticket!” her eyes burning as if I didn’t hear the word. So I said, “What ticket?” and she said, “He only gave us there, just there, and not back, as if the Lord knew Jacob didn’t need a ticket home!” I didn’t understand what she was saying. I don’t think anybody understood what she was saying. But when she said she had to call her mother, then I came out with it.

  “I told your mother to go away,” I said.

  Her fa
ce was all screwed up, tears rolling down her cheeks. “What—”

  It all rushed out. “That day I took the train to Mobile to say we were getting married and ask her and Jacob to live with us,” I said. “But she said no, she was moving to Ohio to be with her mother. So I said Jacob should stay with us, that you love him. And I do, too. She said no, he was her son. I said but I have a good job, and she laughed and said for how long, that I was my father’s son. Then I got heated, and my words got loud, and I said she wouldn’t take care of Jacob like we would. She swore at me and I did at her and she told me to get out and take Jacob with me, she wasn’t coming back ever. Weeza, it was so easy for her to say Jacob should go with me that I knew I was right. She didn’t want him as much as we do. That’s why she’s gone and why he’s been our son these six years.”

  Weeza looked at me like I was talking nonsense, but I was crying and saying I was sorry I spoke to her mother like that, not because I wasn’t right, but because I hurt Weeza. She shook her head over and over as if trying to rid herself of my words.

  “Doesn’t matter now,” she said. “Doesn’t matter now.”

  Even now, while Momma Ruth is getting us all together, Weeza just cries and won’t let me near her. “Please,” she says, “please just make something bad not happen this time,” and I understand that well enough. She is talking about what happened to that boy four years ago. And all I can think of is his crushed face in that open box. I wanted to tell her how different that was, that Jacob would not end up in a box like that, but all I said was “I’m trying, I’m trying.”

  She says we must find Jacob or nothing will ever be right.

  Twenty-Seven

  Bobby

  “Not the bus,” he said when they woke Friday morning in the motel room in Atlanta. “Not the bus, please.”

  “It’s the cheapest way,” said his mother coldly. “We can’t afford to rent a car. The trains are on strike. I want this damn trip over. I’m sorry. I have to get home. I need to be home.”

  “Not the bus,” said Bobby. “She can take one, but not us.”

  “Grandma is taking one, and so are we,” she said, and slipped into the bathroom to dress. “Get your clothes on and pack.”

  This was wrong. This was bad. They were five hundred miles from their airplane, and the trains were on strike. They really ought to have the car to get back home, but now the car was wrecked. With three of them in there, there would have been plenty of room, and they could have driven straight through the night and been home by tomorrow night. In the car, if his brother was up front with the TripTik, he could have the whole backseat to lie down on. Not now. It was all wrong.

  They’d stayed in a cheap motel near the railroad tracks, which was the only one they found after the Triple-A truck towed the wrecked car away. The motel had no pool. The car park was filled with junky cars. They’d had to use a taxi for everything since yesterday. Their mother was barely talking now, full of sharp looks, as Grandma walked onto the platform to take a bus south to St. Petersburg.

  “I’m sorry,” said their mother. “This has been a bust. I’m sorry about the car. About everything.”

  Grandma nodded. “Come visit me?”

  “Of course,” their mother said, looking away.

  “Yes. You, too?” she said to the boys.

  “Of course,” repeated their mother, although Grandma was looking alternately at Bobby then Ricky then Bobby again.

  Ricky said, “Sure,” and hugged her.

  “Sure,” Bobby said, trying to smile, but Grandma looked down at him with her face pouching, not moving to hug him until a bus horn shattered the quiet. “My poor Bobchicka,” she said finally, pressing her hand heavily on his shoulder. He watched her eyes, but they were deeper and farther away than before.

  He felt his chest go empty when she walked up the steps into the silver bus and the driver pulled the door closed. That was it. A few minutes later, the bus left the terminal, coughing and squealing away into the white air.

  “She’ll be home by tonight,” their mother said, pulling her eyes away from the blurry street. “I have to deal with insurance now, then we’ll be out of this terrible place by lunchtime.”

  Poor Bobchicka. His grandmother couldn’t bring herself to hug him.

  She was letting him go.

  Two hours later they were back at the bus terminal, heaving their suitcases out of a hot taxicab onto the hotter sidewalk. Bobby was headed toward the door behind his mother when she dropped her luggage on the sidewalk and swung around. “Give it to me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You know what. That damn stick!”

  “I…” he started, moving his hand toward his pants pocket, but not putting it in. “I lost it.”

  Faster than he imagined she could, she drove her hand into the same front pocket. Finding it empty, she searched the others, front and back, roughly.

  “I lost it,” he repeated.

  “Don’t ever let me see one of those things again. You hear me? Ever. And if you ever steal anything again, so help me, I will make you regret it for the rest of your life.” She looked as if she would hit him, she looked as cold as his father had, but also hurt. Staring at him with dark eyes, then taking her eyes off him as if something between them had broken, she turned on her heels, grabbed her bags, and walked up the sidewalk to the station.

  Ricky had watched every moment of this from a few feet off, his eyes narrowing to little slits behind his glasses. He didn’t move.

  “What?” said Bobby.

  “It’s so easy, isn’t it?” said Ricky.

  “What’s easy?”

  “To be lucky,” said Ricky. “It’s so easy to be lucky.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve always been lucky. You could have just said nothing. About the bullet. You could have just said nothing.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Bobby.

  “So stupid easy,” he said, and right there he dropped the souvenir slug he had found in the dirt at Lookout Mountain. It rolled to the edge of the sidewalk and off into the gutter. Without looking, he walked toward the station, his book-laden suitcase knocking his knee with every step.

  Was that it? Was Bobby lucky? Was that all it was? Could he so easily have been in his brother’s shoes? Was there only a thread of a difference between them, after all? Brothers. Nearly the same age. Interchangeable? Could Ricky’s bad eyes have been his bad eyes? Was that why Ricky was taken to Indians games? Because of what might happen? And yet Bobby had been vicious to him, saying things that couldn’t be taken back. So now, one by one, his grandmother, his mother, and now Ricky had stepped away from him.

  “Get in. Get in here!” his mother said, kicking open the door to the station, pushing herself through, then letting it fall closed on Ricky as Bobby watched from the gutter.

  So that was it, after all. That he didn’t know, that he was mixed up, that he made nothing but mistakes, that he could steal and be mean and be angry, that he could look around at everything and know things were broken and wrong and unfair and not know what to do or say to fix them, except to grunt and run like an animal.

  That was it, that was all he could do, that was who he was.

  Bobby dragged his red suitcase across the sidewalk after his brother, through the door, and across the floor of the big foul-smelling room, trembling, sick to his stomach, his legs tingling from his ankles to his bottom as if someone were spying at him from a high hidden place.

  Twenty-Eight

  The terminal smelled of coffee and sweat and exhaust and it echoed with the sound of voices from every direction. The long room was half waiting room, half lunchroom, with a low wall separating the benches and booths and a bank of windows overlooking the bus platform, which was no more than a raised sidewalk under a low roof.

  Several buses were outside, parked at an angle to the building. On the flank of each was the famous image of the lean racing dog, promising fast bus travel. The b
uildings beyond the roof were white in the sun. The street shimmered with heat.

  The two boys sat silently at a booth while their mother bought tickets at a counter window under a clock that read five after eleven. When she returned with papers in her hand, she said she had purchased the last tickets and they were allowed to load their things onto the bus before they ate, though it wouldn’t leave for almost an hour. Without a word about it, Ricky and his mother found a seat together on the bus. Bobby put his suitcase on the bench in front of them, but after they descended the steps, he decided to move it to the one behind.

  Bobby hated the big hot dirty city and wanted only to be home, though thinking now of their small house and his smaller room, with his brother and mother everywhere, and maybe his father home from Washington, he wasn’t sure it would be better than here or anywhere else.

  He settled his hands on the lunch table. The sandwich his mother put before him was dry. When had it been made? By whom? By black hands? The black hands at the car window. His own hand on the crank, keeping his window sealed. The car’s insane twisting away from the shack. And now the sudden smell of cigarettes and dirty underwear as a couple of men slumped into the booth next to them. The more he thought about it, the more he felt he was going to throw up.

  The wall clock’s wide face stared ahead, unconcerned.

  There was still close to an hour before the bus left and even then it made stops every half hour. Racing dog? That was wrong. The bus was just standing there! Their suitcases were already on it. Why couldn’t they get on it and just leave? His mother said they were lucky to get tickets at all, she had to pay extra to get them and now the bus was full because of the train strike. When he remembered the airplane, it made him sick all over again how the trip was ending this way. He wanted only to be home. Or anywhere but here.

  The man behind the ticket counter glanced slowly around the room at the people eating, then slid a sign over the window and walked slowly into another room.