by Jay Varner
My dad cracked off a list of ways too complicated for me to understand, though it seemed I wasn’t alone when it came to noncomprehension; with each answer he gave, my mother only shook her head and asked more questions. His jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed. When she finally asked where this doublewide would be placed, my dad raised his finger and pointed toward the hole.
“Teena, we already have a foundation practically dug out for it over there,” he said.
“The hole? It’s full of broken-up cement.” My mother shook her head slowly. “You’d have to get somebody to dig it out and then haul all that stuff away. And then on top of that, we’d have to pay for the trailer. We can’t afford any of that.”
My dad, silent, stared at the checkered oilcloth table cover for a moment. He ran his tongue behind his lips and then scratched at his mustache. Finally, he looked up and nodded. “All right, if you don’t want to move, you don’t have to. You can leave.”
My mother stood, gently pushed her chair against the table, and then walked back the hallway to their bedroom. Her car keys jingled and she opened the back door.
“Teena?” my father called. “Just hear me out.”
She closed the door and her footsteps squeaked across the snow. She started her car and drove away.
My dad raised his eyebrows and shook his head as if he had just watched the Steelers lose a game. He continued eating. When he finished his plate, he looked at me.
“You want to live in a new house, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, though it made little difference. I just didn’t want my father to tell me to leave. I imagined that my dad would buy a doublewide and live next door while my mother and I stayed in the old tin can. We would become like one of those divorced families a few of my friends at school talked about. I’d see my dad on the weekends, when he wasn’t busy with the fire company. That was when I usually saw him anyway.
Neither of them spoke when my mother returned home a few hours later. It seemed that for days after that argument, they barely even looked at each other.
But by March, all of the snow had melted and my mother must have warmed to my dad’s badgering. Just like with those jokes he told in front of his friends, I didn’t understand what happened between them, but it seemed that things were back to normal.
We drove around the midstate for the next several weekends and visited mobile-home dealerships. The lots reminded me of pictures of army barracks — several model trailers sat in rows, their interiors bare and clean. The doublewides we toured seemed like mansions compared to our trailer. They had windows that slid open like in a real house, unlike ours which opened with cranks. They had an actual room for the dining table too; we wouldn’t have to eat in a cramped kitchen anymore. Plus, even the smallest bedrooms were double and sometimes triple the size of my current room.
I tugged at my mother’s coat as we walked through one of the trailers. “Aren’t you excited?” I asked. “These are so much bigger.”
She shrugged. “It’s still going to come on wheels. It can’t be that much better.”
It occurred to me that if we did get a doublewide, Lucky would no longer be able to burn his trash in the hole — our new home would sit on top of it. I asked my parents where he would burn his things every Saturday morning, hoping it would be nowhere near us.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I don’t think he’s ever had a problem with that.”
My dad turned and walked through the model trailer, past both of us, and didn’t say a word.
Five
Overhead Door shut down for vacation during the week of the Fourth of July — it was the only time my dad had off all year until Thanksgiving. On Independence Day, my birthday, my dad drove us to Lewistown for the fireworks display, but first we had to visit Lucky and Helen.
The apartment building they lived in was two stories of red brick, and looked dingy and run-down. All along the street were small houses, their paint peeling or siding falling off, situated so close they seemed to tuck into one another. None of the houses had yards, which seemed impossible to imagine since I spent so much time in ours.
I followed my father up the stairs to their apartment. Behind me, my mother accidentally kicked one of the six-packs of soda that were stacked on every step. My mother had told me that Helen bought the soda when it was on sale at the store. Over time, the bottles piled up until it looked like she was preparing for some future soda blight when Shasta, RC Cola, and Tab would not be available.
With each step we climbed, the bottled-in heat of the stairwell seemed to rise ten degrees. By the time my father opened the door at the top, I felt as if I could barely breathe. We entered the kitchen, and like always, it smelled of lemony Lysol. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink.
“Lucky, look who’s here,” Helen said. She stood in the kitchen and was holding a blue flyswatter. She wore a pastel-colored dress, had her hair up in pink curlers, and her mouth hung agape as though in awe. “Come on, Lucky, it’s the birthday boy.”
Lucky climbed out of a recliner in the living room and walked across the brown shag carpet and stood next to Helen. He looked like one of those toothpicks he always had in his mouth — tall and thin. Helen was shaped like a football — thick in the belly, wide at the waist.
“Are you having a good birthday?” Helen asked. She spoke in a nasally whine.
“ ’Course he is,” Lucky said. He nodded toward me. “He’s a kid. Every day’s good for him.”
Helen leaned forward, her eyes bulging behind her thick glasses. “Did you see any of your friends today?” she asked. Her wet lips hung open and her tongue slightly protruded from her mouth. My mother always said that one day a fly would buzz into Helen’s mouth and she wouldn’t even notice.
Before I could answer her first question, she asked another. “Just who are your friends right now?”
“Ben Simpson and Michael Miller are my best friends,” I said.
“And what do their parents do?” She shook her head and said, “Well no, wait, do they live in McVeytown?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And do you play sports with them?”
“Sometimes we—”
“I bet they know how to swim already,” she said. “I tried to tell your mother that you should be taking swimming lessons this summer. Don’t you want to know how to swim?”
“I guess I do.”
Helen slowly turned toward my mother and smiled. “Did you hear that? He said that he’d like to know how to swim.”
My mother stood with her back against the door, arms crossed. “I already told you that I called the pool,” she said, her voice low yet strong. “They said they don’t teach swimming lessons to his age group. It wouldn’t even do him any good right now. Maybe next summer he’ll go.”
Helen looked at Lucky. “Why don’t you show them to the living room and I’ll get some cake ready.”
“Show them?” Lucky said. “They’ve been here before. Unless they went blind and dumb, I’m sure they can find the couch.”
Week-old newspapers, opened envelopes, and magazines lay about as if they had simply been left wherever they had first been read, many partially covering dirty plates.
Lucky sank into his orange recliner, its arms spotted with stains. When my dad sat down on the couch, the springs squeaked and clanked; surely if someone of Helen’s weight sat on that couch, the entire thing would fall apart.
“Jay, you can sit in the bean bag chair,” she said. “I know how much you love that chair.”
Helen took special pride in the bean bag chair. Not only was the smiley-face yellow color enough to induce headaches, the chair looked as if it had been sat in by thousands of people. It had the thickness of two pillows, and much of it was held together by swaths of duct tape.
My mother sat on a metal folding chair in the corner. She stared out the small window overlooking a gas station.
“Find a house yet?” Lucky asked. He picked up the latest issue of Purebred P
igeon and fingered through the pages.
“Not yet,” my dad said. “But we have a few places we’d like to look at this week.”
Lucky still stared at the magazine. “Going to be a lot of work. You sure you want to do it?”
“In the end, it’ll be good for us.”
Lucky nodded and then slapped the magazine onto the floor. He craned his head toward the kitchen. “Where’s the cake at, woman? Thought you were bringing it?”
“Give Jay his present,” Helen said.
Lucky sighed. He reached next to his chair and tossed a brown paper bag toward me as if throwing a toy to a dog.
“Here you go, boy. You’re spoiled, you know that? I never had toys when I was your age. I would have been working.”
I opened the bag and pulled out a plastic squirt gun. I recognized it from Jamesway, the local discount chain. When my mother shopped there each Friday night, I spent most of my time in the toy section, examining things like squirt guns. The red pistol Lucky and Helen bought had been the least expensive on the rack.
“What do you say?” my father said.
“Thanks, Grandma and Pappy,” I said.
I had learned to show my grandfather respect, as my father had demanded — he had slapped my mouth when I was very young after I called him Lucky. Though I didn’t recall what exactly my father had said, I remembered the sting of his palm against my cheek.
An hour later, my dad parked in a lot in front of Dank’s Department Store in downtown Lewistown and we sat in lawn chairs on the bed of his truck.
The Ax Factory, a long, narrow, and dingy building that usually echoed with clanging hammers and hissing machinery, sat oddly quiet next to the parking lot while we waited for the fireworks. The peached haze of dusk slowly faded to black. The parking lot was clustered with families who sat in their cars and pickups and waited for the show.
“You like your new squirt gun?” my dad asked.
“I guess so,” I said. “You should get one too. Then we could have a water-gun battle.”
“That’d be fun,” he said. “But you know, I’m pretty busy right now with the new house.”
“Trailer,” my mother said.
My dad waved his hand at her. “But it’s like a house. This coming week, we’re going to Harrisburg and Selinsgrove to look at some. And I heard that the lot in Huntingdon is getting new models at the end of the month. See, if we settle on a trailer by fall, we can excavate the foundation and maybe lay some of the bricks by winter.”
He was still talking when the first bang thundered in the sky and echoed against the ridges. Glittering pops of red, white, and blue trailed against the blackened sky. I giggled as the rockets burned high into the sky and then burst. Each blast reverberated into my ears, through my insides. The warm, acrid smell of spent gunpowder drifted into the parking lot like a fog, and for a while it was me and my mom and dad, together in a place and time that felt warm and secure.
On the drive home, my parents reminisced about the day I was born, as they always did after the fireworks. They had worked out the rhythms of the story over the years — switching off for different parts, correcting one another, adding alternative versions of what really happened. Like so much that I later came to know about my family, I guessed that the truth lay somewhere in the middle.
“You weren’t due for another week,” my mother said. “I had no idea you’d be coming that day. And neither did your father because he wasn’t even home.”
“Because of what those doctors said,” he added.
That afternoon in 1981, my dad hammered the finishing touches on a raft for the annual Juniata River Sojourn — a twenty-five-mile float downriver from nearby Mount Union to Lewistown. A group of men surrounded him in the back parking lot of the firehouse, double-checking that the wooden logs were tied together, that the tarp meant to keep the rafters dry in the water was laced tightly with nylon cord. The men had been out there since morning, drinking water, cracking jokes, and turning pink under the summer sun.
But at home, my mother felt the first of her contractions.
“I thought back to my Lamaze class,” she said. “Which your father only ever attended once.”
“I was working night shift,” he said. “And your classes were in the evening.”
She concentrated on breathing, and then, with measured steps, she walked to the telephone in the kitchen, called the firehouse, and left a message for my dad with the station dispatcher. He finally returned home nearly an hour later. Her overnight bag sat on the linoleum in the hallway.
“What took so long?” she asked. They enjoyed acting out the parts and their dialogue.
“Still had some finishing touches to add to the raft,” he said. “Figured since I’m not going on the trip now, least I could do was help them finish it.”
On the way to the hospital, he stopped at the firehouse once more to tell the dispatcher that he was driving his wife to the Lewistown. My mother sat inside the pickup with the windows rolled down, the thick humidity blanketing the cab.
“Want to make sure they know where I am in case something happens,” my father said as he climbed back into the truck.
In the hospital waiting room my father ate Snickers bars and read the latest Firehouse magazine. By that night, he held his first, and only, child. In the photos that I’ve seen from that time, both my parents looked like children themselves. My father, only twenty-three, wore aviator sunglasses in one photo. His hair was thick, combed neatly over his forehead in that mop-top, and a mustache spread over his upper lip. He was thin and in peak physical health. And in the only picture that exists of my mother in the hospital, her face looks flushed and her eyes tired. She was thin too, with straight brown hair and a weary smile. My mother and I stayed at the hospital overnight and the next morning, my dad drove us home.
In the summertime, that trailer sealed the humidity inside like a Ziploc bag. My mother placed box fans in the windows, but they only circulated hot air. On some nights, we slept on the living room floor — it was the only room with enough windows to deflate the heat. The sultry days of summer vacation felt as if they barely passed. Under the lacey ceiling of oak leaves in the backyard, I played in my sandbox, hand-smoothing roads in the sand for my Matchbox cars. Or else I rode the swing on the aluminum jungle gym my father had put together and listened to my Walkman, both birthday presents. I loved oldies music, especially surf and car songs. My dad said that those were the songs he had listened to when he was my age. That week of my birthday, I decided Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve” was the best song I had ever heard. After it ended, I rewound the tape and then listened to it again.
My dad told me that Jan had been in a car crash almost like the one he sang about in the last, eerie verse of the song.
“It was in California,” he said. “I remember hearing about it on the radio. He went around a turn one night and bam, ran right into another car parked along the road. Gave him severe brain damage. He could barely talk after that. And, a few years later, Neil Young wrote a song about Jan’s brother who died in the crash.”
“Does Neil Young sing surf music?”
“No,” my dad said. “It’s rock and roll. But he’s good.”
Sometimes when I rode the swing and listened to that Jan and Dean song, I imagined that after the crash at Dead Man’s Curve, my father had responded to the accident and had saved Jan’s life as surely he had done for dozens of other people.
Exactly what my dad did with the fire company still remained a mystery to me. It seemed a distant world, another life that called him away from my mother and me. There were many times when he had wanted to take me to the firehouse — for chicken and waffle breakfasts, for Santa Claus’s annual Sunday afternoon visit, for work-detail nights — but my mother forbade me to go.
“The other guys take their kids,” my father pleaded.
“Well, you don’t need to take ours,” she said. “It’s not a place for kids.”
And so I s
earched for clues about my father’s secret life. At noon each day, I watched reruns of CHiPs on television. My father told me he had loved the cop series when it first aired in the late seventies. When Ponch and Jon raced California freeways on their motorcycles, sirens screaming, lights flashing, I imagined that this was similar to what my father did in his pickup. I asked him about it once and he laughed.
“Not everything is like a television show,” he said. “In all the accidents I’ve been to, I’ve never seen a car blow up like they do on CHiPs. Plus, they always blow up right after Ponch or Jon pulls the victim out.”
Still, I built my dad into a hero, based not just on the television shows and movies I watched, but also on how people in McVeytown respected him and his job. It seemed that every time I went somewhere with my dad, someone squatted next to me and said: “Think you want to be a fireman like your dad when you grow up?” It seemed that becoming like him was expected, and a noble goal, as if anything else would be a disappointment. I answered yes even though I didn’t understand what it meant — I only hoped that my father would want to see me more.
Six
We had one family outing a year — a day trip to Hershey Park. I anticipated the visits to the park when the first blossoms of spring bubbled to life on the trees. It was the only day of the year when the three of us were together without interruption — no fire company, no Overhead Door, no telephone calls. My father grabbed the radio microphone under the dash of his truck as we drove out of McVeytown that morning.
“Chief Eighty signing off for the day,” he said. “I will be out of the area until late tonight.”
His pickup lacked a tape deck and the radio had never worked. Instead, I brought my Care Bears portable cassette player and listened to Beach Boys tapes. The single speaker muffled Brian Wilson’s vocals and sometimes cracked when the rest of the band sang harmony. But I didn’t care. As my father and I sang along with “409” and “Fun Fun Fun,” I thought we sounded great.