Sentimental Journey

by Jill Barnett

  But they didn’t have dollars to waste on plane rides, so Red had just walked around it over and over again, spinning the propeller, sliding his hand along the bi-wings and the tail, trying to imagine what it would be like to get into that bucket of a seat, to put goggles over his eyes and fly right out of Acme, Texas, away from the bootlegged beer bottles that filled the kitchen trash can every day, away from the chipped supper plates that weren’t good enough to give away with a gasoline fill-up and the jelly-jar glasses they used for meals, away from the hollering that echoed in their lopsided old house out back of the gas station, hollering that came from his mama’s restlessness and his daddy’s confusion.

  Red stood up, shaded a hand over his eyes, and watched.

  The biplane flew overhead; it rocked its wings at him and circled once. He waved back at the pilot, then ran through the field after that plane, still waving, ran and ran and ran, until his arms were spread out like wings and his face was turned up toward the sun and the sky and tomorrow.

  “Billy Joe!”

  Red stumbled and fell on his knees, his palms skidding into a warm furrow of dirt. He knelt there in that rust-colored Texas farm field while the plane kept on flying away, until it was only an arrow in the distant sky that was as unreachable as a dream.

  He stood, dusted himself off, then shoved his hands in the deep pockets of his overalls, where a hunk of smooth turquoise slipped right into his fingers as if it were meant to be there. He looked toward the house and the female voice that called him.

  The sun caught his mama’s bright red hair, a burst of shining color against the weathered wood of their scrappy gray house, which was really little more than a three-room shack that leaned like a Saturday night drunk and sat under an old wooden water tower with a narrow platform that was a favorite spot of his. That water tower was branded with cigarette burns along the back rail, and he could sit there on that puffy platform for hours, wishing, dreaming, and looking out to the west where there was nothing but the flat Texas horizon for as far as his eyes could see.

  “Billy Joe!”

  It must be after four o’clock. She never got up before four o’clock, and that was just because she had to get ready for work. Six nights a week she played honky-tonk piano at a club just across the Oklahoma border called The Afterthought, where the Harmon County law enforcement turned a blind eye to the drinking and gambling because the governor’s brother owned half the place.

  Red’s older sister, Onetta, said she heard the church ladies laughing about Mama’s job. They said it was pretty far-sighted of Dina Rae to be working in a club called The Afterthought.

  He didn’t exactly understand what that meant, until Nettie explained.

  Dina Rae Ross Walker had been known to drink enough beer between dusk and dawn to try to forget she had a husband whose hands and fingernails were never clean and who reeked of oil and grease and the small town she’d always wanted to leave far behind her.

  “Billll-eeee Jooooooooe!”

  His mama called him Billy Joe, or if she was real mad, William Joseph. His daddy just called him Red. Just Red, after his full head of wavy red hair—a gift from some Ross relative, a Scot who settled here after The Clearances.

  Billy Joe or Red. What they each called him pretty much typified his folks’ marriage. That, and what they called each other when they were yelling late at night. He wondered sometimes how those two ever got together in the first place.

  “William Joseph Walker!”

  He cupped his hands over his mouth. “Coming!”

  She raised the long-necked brown beer bottle in her right hand. A gesture that looked like a toast.

  He ran toward her.

  She stood in the open doorway, her long slim arm propped casually on the splintered, crooked frame of the screen door. She was taking a good draw off that beer.

  She’d started early today.

  “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

  “Sorry, Mama.” He was out of breath and the words came out in a stutter.

  “Your daddy had to run out to the Miller place. Old Cora Miller’s DeSoto won’t start. Probably because she took a good, long gander under the hood and the engine just upped and died. Lord knows she’s got a face that’d kill a weed.” She tossed her head, then swiped a wave of hair out of her right eye. “He wants you to watch the pumps, hon, till he gets back.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He wedged his way into the doorway.

  She stopped him with a soft hand on his shoulder. She smelled clean, like soap and the cherry-almond hand cream she always used.

  He looked up at her.

  At that moment he thought he might have just understood why his daddy put up with her. It was the same reason Red did whatever she asked him to do, the same reason he wanted to make her happy. He’d remembered his granddaddy saying there wasn’t a man alive who after taking one good look at his Dina Rae wouldn’t give her the moon.

  She brushed the hair off of his forehead with a tender touch of her hand. “You need a haircut.”

  “Aw, Mama.”

  She laughed. “Don’t you ‘aw, Mama’ me. I’ll cut it on Saturday.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he muttered. He liked his hair over his ears because they looked too big for his head. Although lately he thought he might be growing into them like his daddy said he would. But he still liked his hair longer. She always cut it too short.

  “I think we have time for one song. You want to sing with me?” She gave him a wink.

  “Sure.”

  “Go look outside that window, hon, and see if there’s anyone out front.”

  The filling station was empty, the gas pumps standing there tall as Injuns. “Ain’t no one out there.”

  She gave him a narrow-eyed look. “There’s no such word as ‘ain’t.’ “

  “But, Mama, everyone says ‘ain’t.’ “

  “No, everyone doesn’t. And if everyone shot their dog and their daddy, too, would you do it?”

  He stuck his hands in his pockets and mumbled, “I don’t have a dog.”

  “You want people to treat you with respect, Billy Joe, then you can’t talk like some old farm boy.”

  His granddaddy had been a farmer, and he was the best and the smartest man Red had ever known.

  “You remember what I tell you, now.” She walked into the house. “You use the sense God gave you and good English. You hear me?” Yes, ma’am.

  “Good.” She patted the spot next to her on a feeble, short-legged bench. “You come here and sit by your mama.”

  He crossed the room and sat down next to her in front of an old cabinet piano made of some kind of dark wood the deep color of Texas farmland. It had belonged to her grandmother Chisholm, who was nothing more to Red than an old image in a photo—a small woman with a silly-looking calico bonnet and a sagging chest.

  His mama flexed her hands.

  He looked down at the piano. Over the past thirty-odd years, the keys had turned as yellow as an old man’s teeth, and there were white rings melted into the wood from the beer bottles she had set on top of it.

  She didn’t need any sheet music. She carried all the notes in her head. She could play anything. You just named a song, and she could sit right there and pound out the sweetest melodies.

  A second later her hands flew over the keys in a rousing rendition of “Ain’t She Sweet.”

  He knew she played that song on purpose. He’d asked her once if “ain’t” wasn’t a word, then why was it in a song title? Didn’t make sense to him and he said as much.

  She told him that if he was looking for things to make sense in life, he might as well give up right now. That was his mama. Like her daddy, she said things he remembered.

  Her foot tapped and pumped the brass piano pedals, drawing out those sugar notes. It was always the same for Red, sitting there beside her on that wobbling bench, tapping his fingers on his patched knees in time to the music. Suddenly the cracked paint, the beat-up old wood floor that slanted so
uth, and that worn-out blue divan in the corner didn’t matter.

  Oh, Lord, the sound she could lure from that piano was enough to make an angel cry and the devil dance.

  A car horn blared from out front.

  She stopped playing suddenly and swore one of those raunchy, mouth-washing words. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Better see who it is.” She was reaching for her beer bottle.

  Red got up and ran out the front door. He shoved the screen open so hard it banged on the outside wall, then rattled against the frame when it snapped closed.

  He stopped running halfway down the front steps and stood there frozen.

  Sitting right in front of the tall, glass-topped ethyl pump was what looked to be a brand-new Ford-blue cabriolet with its canvas top crushed down. It had sparkling whitewall tires. The hubcaps were polished steel, and the background of the V-8 emblem was painted in the same glossy Ford-blue as the chassis.

  Red let out a soft whistle. It was some automobile. He ran toward the driver, a tall man in an expensive suit and a Panama hat who was leaning against the spare tire in the rear and puffing on a cigar that smelled like black walnuts.

  “Is this a real V-8?”

  “Sure is.”

  His daddy was going to be mad as cats in a sack. A real V-8 engine and he wasn’t there to see it.

  “Fill her up for me, son.”

  “Sure.” Red went over to the pump and began to fill the car. As far as he knew no one had filled up their gas tank in a good six months. It was always a dollar’s worth here or fifty cents’ worth there. “Is that carpet on the floor?”

  “Yep.”

  Red craned his neck a bit. “In the back, too?”

  “Yep.”

  He shook his head and just stared at that beauty of a car, holding the gas nozzle in the tank on the right rear fender.

  The man grinned at him from around his cigar.

  With the rag top and windows down, the car was the sportiest thing Red had ever seen. The bench seat was russet brown leather, and it smelled just like new shoes, although it had been so long since he’d had a pair you’d think he would have forgotten the smell by now.

  Even the rumble seat was covered in leather.

  “Well, my, oh, my, will you look at that.”

  Red pulled his gaze away from the dream car and watched his mama saunter toward them, over the warm blacktop driveway in a pair of fancy red high heels he’d never seen.

  The man straightened up like he’d just been starched. He whipped off his hat. “Ma’am.”

  She was wearing lipstick the color of a vine tomato. It made her lips look fuller and her skin look as perfect as fresh cream. She had a flowered comb pulling up one side of her shoulder-length, wavy hair. The comb matched her best blue-and-red dress, which was not the one she’d been wearing a few minutes ago, but now skimmed her long, bare legs.

  She ran her hand along the car in the same tender way she’d brushed the hair off of Red’s forehead.

  He got a sick kind of feeling in his stomach—the kind you got when someone played a joke on you and you hadn’t seen it coming.

  “Why, I think this is the prettiest car I have ever seen.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “My name’s Dina Rae.” She held out her hand and looked straight at the man in the same way Red looked at his teacher when he wanted her to believe that he hadn’t let those big old spiders loose in the girls’ washroom.

  “It makes me feel like an old woman when people call me ‘ma’am’,” she said.

  That was news to Red. He was brought up to say “ma’am” out of respect. If he hadn’t, he would have gotten one hell of a licking with his daddy’s belt or his granddaddy’s razor strop. He knew that for sure because he’d made the mistake of testing it once.

  “Roland Stiles.” The man took her hand in his.

  Red’s knuckles tightened on the gasoline nozzle.

  She smiled, then pulled her hand away and walked slowly along the car, dragging a finger along the shiny paint until she was standing in front of it. She stepped back a foot or so and put her hands on her hips.

  Roland Stiles was looking at his mama the way a hungry dog looked at a ham bone.

  Red was watching them so closely that he lost track of things and pumped gasoline all over the fender.

  Shitfire!

  He snatched an old rag from his back pocket and hunkered down, trying to wipe the gas off as fast as he could. When he looked up again, embarrassed, and ready to hear about what he’d done, he saw that they hadn’t even noticed.

  “ . . . No,” Mr. Roland Stiles was saying. “I’m from Jackson. Not Jackson County, but Jackson, Mississippi.”

  “I figured as much. I don’t think you can buy a brand-new Ford in Acme.” She grinned up at him, then shaded her eyes with a hand as she cast a quick glance up at the late afternoon sun. She turned back and began to fan herself. “It’s hot enough out here to wither a fence post. Why don’t you come along inside. I’ll get you a nice cold Dr. Pepper and you can tell me all about Jackson, Mississippi.” She threaded her arm though his and then turned back to Red. “You take good care of Mr. Stiles’s car, now, Billy Joe. Wash that windshield real good.”

  He just stared at her.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He looked away. He couldn’t watch as they walked toward the small station building where bottles of Dr. Pepper, Bireley’s, and Crème Soda were kept inside a white-and-red porcelain cooler that looked like a washing machine.

  Once, a long, long time ago, he remembered his mama taking his daddy’s arm like that and walking and talking with him. At least he thought he remembered it. It was back in the days when they all went to church on Sundays, those days when she made shirts for his daddy and him, and dresses for his sister.

  But that was before his granddaddy died and before Mama got her night job. It was when his mama still talked to the church ladies, like Cora Miller and Ida Mae Dodd, talked to them instead of about them. He couldn’t remember a time in the last five years when she’d been close enough to his daddy to even touch his arm.

  Red rubbed hard on the windshield, scouring off the crusted, yellow bugs. He finished and began to polish the single side mirror, then stepped back. It was shining like a new nickel. He swiped at his dripping forehead with his bare arm. He was hot. He wanted a Dr. Pepper. He stuffed the rag in his back pocket and marched toward the station.

  Inside, they were standing side by side, both leaning against the wooden counter and talking about the seventeen thousand World War I veterans camped out in Washington, D.C., trying to get their service bonuses just so they could survive.

  Red leaned over and grabbed a warm Dr. Pepper from a crate in the corner. He slid it into the slot in the top of the cooler and a cold bottle came out the opposite side. He stuck the bottle top into the opener, popped off the metal cap, then pulled off the cork liner to see if he’d won a prize.

  “Did you win?” Stiles was watching him.

  Red shook his head. “I never win anything. I’m the only person I know who once got a Cracker Jack box with no prize inside.”

  Stiles laughed.

  “I’m not lucky,” Red said.

  “You have to make your own luck, Billy Joe.”

  He just looked at his mama.

  She smiled and tossed him a slim pack of Planters peanuts she’d torn from the blue-and-white cardboard display next to her. He didn’t smile back—to punish her—but he took a long few gulps of his cold drink, then tore open the peanuts with his teeth and poured them into the Dr. Pepper bottle.

  He looked up to find them both looking into each other’s eyes in a dumb way that made him angry. He tapped Stiles on the shoulder with a stiff finger. “Your car’s ready.”

  Stiles pulled his attention away from his mama and looked at him. “How much do I owe you?”

  “Five dollars and thirty cents.”

  Stiles stuck his hand in his pants
pocket and pulled out a monogrammed silver money clip that was a good two inches thick.

  Red had never seen that much money in his whole life.

  Stiles peeled off a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to him.

  They didn’t have that much in the whole cash drawer. He just stood there staring at the twenty-dollar bill. “I don’t think we have change.”

  “I don’t need any change, son. Keep it.”

  Red glanced up at his mama. She had a funny expression on her face, one he’d never seen before.

  The money began to burn his fingers.

  She shoved away from the counter and said, “Oh, my Lord! What time is it?”

  Stiles flexed out his left arm. His pearl-linked cuff drew back to reveal a large gold wristwatch. “Five-fifteen.”

  “I’m going to be late for work.” She crossed over to the window, placed her hands on the sill and looked outside. “Where is your daddy?”

  His daddy? She made it sound like it was all Red’s fault that she would be late.

  “I’ll take you, Miz Walker.”

  She cast a soft glance over her shoulder, at Stiles. She gave him the kind of smile that made you think you were the only person in the world. “That’s right kind of you, but I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  “How could it be trouble when I would be driving the prettiest woman this side of the Mississippi?”

  “Lord, how sweet you are . . . Let me get my things. I’ll be just a few minutes.” She left the station and walked toward the house.

  They both stood there, staring at the empty doorway. After a minute the screen door on the house rattled closed.

  “My daddy will back any minute.”

  “It’s no trouble, son. I’m going that way.” Stiles finished the last of his soda and tossed the empty bottle in a trash bin next to the counter.

  After a long moment of tense silence Red reached out and dug into the trash and picked up the bottle. He turned and put it into the wooden bottle crate in the corner, along with the other empties. They were worth a penny apiece.

  “I’m ready!” His mama was waving at them from outside. She stood by that shiny new Ford in her blue-and-red dress.

  Red followed Stiles outside, but stopped in the doorway underneath a double-sided flange sign that advertised the Firestone Tire slogan: They’ll Get You Where You Want to Go.