When We Get There

by Shauna Seliy

  About a week after Christmas, Benci came into Slats's kitchen and after saying his hellos, fell quiet and stared at his shoes.

  "What's the matter with you?" Slats said.

  He looked up and said, "Daddy's still in bed."

  "From this morning?" Slats said.

  "No," he said, "from Christmas."

  "What's wrong with him?"

  "I don't know. Can't get him to say anything that makes sense."

  "Is he feverish?"

  "I ain't no doctor."

  "No kidding."

  Benci looked at his shoes again.

  "Was he hot?" Slats said.

  "I tried to get at his forehead, but he wouldn't let me."

  "Well, is he not making sense in his usual way or is he not making sense like his brain's boiling over?"

  "He says to me, 'Benci, I got a ghost trapped in my lungs.' I says to him, 'You mean you got a cough or something.' He says, 'No cough. Ghost.' I don't know. Maybe you could go up there and have a look at him."

  "We got our own problems here," she said.

  He looked at me, then back at Slats. He stared at the floor some more, waiting for her to say something, but she didn't say anything. He said, "Come on, you know Daddy won't listen to no one but you. He thinks you're the only one with sense."

  "Well, he's right."

  After he left, Slats called the farm. She waited a long time for an answer and then hung up. "We should take him something to eat, I guess," she said. She took cans of soup out of the cupboard and looked through the refrigerator. "How are we living like this? All we have is Kool-Aid, ketchup, and beer. Like a pair of bachelors. I guess we do have one bachelor in the house now, young though, a starter kit."

  "I'm one of the tallest in my grade."

  "Did I say anything against you and your great tallness?" She picked up the phone and called again, waiting longer this time. "Daddy, you okay?" she said. "Is that right?" She waved her finger in circles by her ear, letting me know she thought he was saying something crazy. "I know. I heard from Benci you aren't feeling too good." She listened for a minute, then said, "Me and Lucas will be by." Worry passed over her face. "No, Dad, not Lukacs. Lucas, Mirjana's boy, Lucas." Then he said something that made her laugh. "No, I don't know how Benci got so heavyset. You're right, it's an actual mystery. See you soon, all right. Do zavtra." She hung up the phone and said to me, "Well, I don't think he sounds all that bad."

  "Then why'd he call me Lukacs ?

  Lukacs was how you said my name in Hungarian, Great-grandmother's language. It sounds like "Loo-katch." Great-grandmother and Great-grandfather's first son was named Lukacs. He died from catching a fever when he was just a baby. After he went, they had a few more sons and daughters and tried to forget about him. But when they were lying in bed listening to the noise of all their babies and growing kids, they would always hear a hole of quiet where Lukacs's yelling should have been. Then they had their biggest baby yet, a fat boy who screamed so loud when he was born that Great-grandfather had to stuff newspapers in his ears. They thought he was too tough and big and loud to get cut down by a fever, and they missed their Lukacs, so they brought out his name and gave it to that baby.

  All of my mother's growing up, this second Lukacs was her favorite uncle. Even though he'd started out big, he turned out skinny. She told me that when he stood up straight, or curled over laughing, you could see his ribs, even through his clothes. When she got married, since my grandfather wasn't living anymore, and since she loved this Lukacs so much, she had him walk her down the aisle to my father. I've seen a picture of this, Lukacs with his skinny neck and bright eyes, next to my mother with her secret-keeping smile and dark eyes.

  Like the first, the second Lukacs was prone to fever. He beat them back one by one. He killed off a few by sitting in a bathtub full of ice, others by sitting in the freezer room at the butcher. One winter he caught hold of a terrible one, and he fought with it by walking around in the snow in just a T-shirt and jeans, picking up snow and melting it on his burning skin. He was near the barn where Benci was working, and he shouted up to him, "I'm going out to the fields to find colder snow."

  After a while, they all went out looking for him around the barn and the house. I guess they hadn't known how far he was willing to go looking for cold snow. When they finally did get to him, he was miles and miles away from the farm, deep in the woods. If he was living under a curse, maybe he outsmarted it, because it wasn't fever that killed him, it was cold.

  The first Lukacs had been dead for a long time when I was born, and the second for just a year. He was still heavy on my mother's mind. As soon as I was born, she said I would be named after him, but with regular American spelling, like a regular American. Changing the spelling, she was sure, would change the luck. I don't know what it means in Hungarian, but in English it means light. Not light like a feather, light like what comes off stars.

  There were a few pictures in Great-grandfather's house of that second Lukacs. Tucked in the corner of one of the bigger photographs of him was a baby picture of the first Lukacs. Sometimes when there was no one around, I'd have a look at them. I'd think about how the second Lukacs and I had to haul around that dead baby's name. I'd wonder what it was like to be so hot with fever that you had to walk in the snow until you froze to death.

  At school, our teacher, Miss Staresina, changed our seats around depending on how we did on our tests; high scores sat you up in the front rows, low numbers landed you in the back. In her note, my mother had told me to look after my schoolwork, but after our Christmas, I made steady progress away from the front, where I'd been sitting for most of my life. I'd usually worked hard because I had my father's reputation to look after. There was a picture of him in a glass case in the entranceway at school. The first time I noticed it, I thought it was me. There was my black hair swooping down in front of my eyes. I looked at it for a while trying to figure out when it was taken, wherever was I that someone was handing me a trophy? Turned out it was my dad winning at a quiz show. The smartest kids from all the schools—Banning, Mineral, Brilliant—used to go to this quiz game. My father was the only person from Banning to ever be smart enough to make it the whole way to getting the trophy. From my first days in school, even in the first grade, people expected things from me because of him. If I didn't turn in my work, or if I did a poor job, teachers would say, "Your daddy would have been able to do that in no time."

  After what happened in the mine, they stopped mentioning him. Instead, they gave me long worried looks like they thought I might come apart if they said one wrong word anywhere near me. If I showed up without my homework, they said it was no rush, I should take my time. They hardly said anything when, after Christmas, I started my slide to the back of the room.

  A kind of wide berth started to spread itself around me. I'd seen other people get set apart because of a sharp turn in their luck. Mostly people were all right, but they had their own husbands and brothers and fathers in the mine and they had to be careful about what their luck knocked up against.

  I found that from the very last seat in the room, I had a good view of the Plate Glass. On a day when I was nearly pressed against the window, Walter Markovic leaned back from his desk and said to me, "Lessar, what are you staring at?" Walter was permanently in the back of the room. I don't think he had much time to study. Most days he went straight to the Croatian Club after school to help his parents. There was a cot under the bar that I think he slept on some nights. My father and his father, Marko, had always tried to make a friendship between me and Walter, but it never took. As far as I knew, Walter wasn't a real friend of anyone's; he was always off on his own. There were things about him that made you want to stay away—he smelled like old sauerkraut and cigarettes and stale beer. With his dirty yellow hair and skin pale as chalk, he looked like maybe he had something you didn't want to catch.

  "I'm looking for Zoli," I said. "You seen him?"

  "I saw him in the Monkey Dumps sitting
on an old couch."

  "Today?"

  "No. In the summer."

  "Jesus, Woj."

  "What?"

  "I'm not looking for where he was in the summer."

  He shrugged. "You asked me if I seen him, and I'm just saying, I seen him."

  At lunchtime, I slipped out of the school and headed toward the Monkey Dumps. It wasn't really a dump, not the regular kind with a scrap heap and piles of trash. When the coal companies mined their pit on the surface, instead of tunneling underground, they scraped away the topsoil and rocks with a dragline and dug right into the seam from the top. The dragline made a kind of mountain range of dug-up earth. When they were through with the land where the Monkey Dumps were, the company moved away and left the piles behind. Trees grew on the heaps, and eventually a whole woods. Some of the trees had those long thick vines a monkey might swing on. There were no real monkeys there, of course, just those vines putting you in mind of them.

  It wasn't hard to find the couch Walter was talking about. It was big and brown. It sat at the edge of the dumps, looking down over the gully where Zoli's house was. Most people wouldn't think of sitting on it; it was damp and dirty. But I could picture Zoli there, surveying the mountains of junk around his place, landing his empty stare on whatever unlucky thing happened to pass him by.

  After my mother started with Zoli, she kept working her way out of her long sleep. He seemed to help her do that, but then something else happened—she started having trouble sleeping at all. She said she'd stored up so much sleep that she didn't need much rest anymore. After a few weeks of it, you could see her reserves were spent. "Go back to sleep," I yelled out to her one night from my room. She came in and said, "He's mad at me."

  "Who?" I said.

  "Your dad. I had a dream and in it I could hear his footsteps. All these years of not dreaming about him. He must be mad at me.

  "Why?"

  "There was a blind corner in this old house I was standing in, and I thought I heard him coming, walking around that blind corner. I know what his boots sound like. Jimmy?' I said. 'Is that you?' Then I woke up. I'm afraid if I go back to sleep, he'll come the whole way around the corner."

  "How do you know that means he's mad?"

  "It's because of Zoli."

  "He's not mad," I told her. "He's dead."

  I looked down into the gully. I didn't see the Skylark. Zoli didn't go anywhere without that car. He'd get in it just to drive from the Plate Glass twenty feet across the street to Slats's house. I walked down the hill.

  There weren't any lived-in houses down there besides his, just a couple of empty places with their porches so tilted that they looked like ships on a rough sea. He had an old company-owned one-story house, only there wasn't a company anymore. Their open pit had made the Monkey Dumps. Maybe someone in his family had worked for them. If you lived in a company house and the company was running, they'd usually send someone out to paint it every so often and make sure it wasn't falling down. But since they'd called it quits, Zoli was on his own. The paint was coming away in fat peels. There was a big cushion of dead grass in the front yard. Zoli was always saying that if my mother married him, we could all live in there together. He'd fixed it up himself, and he thought he'd done a good job of it. The way he talked about it you'd think it was the nicest house in the county.

  I'd been inside two or three times and I knew that he always went in through the back. I walked back there and tried to look in the windows, but they were all curtained up. I'd never seen them like that before. I twisted the doorknob. It was locked. I tried it again. I studied it for a minute, to see if there was some trick to how you turned it. There had been a couple of times when I'd watched Zoli from the car while he'd gone inside to get something. I didn't think that door was ever locked. He always walked right in.

  I remembered a night in the back seat waiting, his headlights against the house, my mother's shoulder, her looking out the window, him walking into the house. "I hate him," I'd said to her all of a sudden, for no reason really that I could point to just then. "I hate him more than anyone."

  "Oh," she'd said, "I'm sure there's other people hate him more. Girls, most likely. He was always a heartbreaker."

  "Are you kidding me? He's awful-looking."

  "Not really, honey. Not to girls." She turned around and looked at me. "Don't waste your bitter on him. He's harmless."

  I pushed against the door with my shoulder, but it didn't give. I tried the front door and all the windows along both sides of the house. Everything was locked. Slats was wrong about him; he wasn't hiding out in there, laying low. He was in the Skylark. He was looking for my mother.

  Chapter 5

  In the slate fall that made the Bluebird people shut down their pit, back behind the Markovics' and the D'Angelos' houses, two miners who hadn't heard the top talking soon enough got buried so deep that the company couldn't dig them out. They're still under there. People used to say that if you lay down next to one of the toadholes and put your ear over it, you could hear them. They were two gypsies, people said, tricked into working, and their sad gypsy songs came out of the ground. Other people said they were two men who'd been in love with the same woman, and they did nothing but shout at each other.

  The morning of the slate fall, a miner, early for his shift, saw a woman with dark hair walk out of the pit. In those days, a woman in the mine was the worst luck there was. He thought he'd imagined it, but going down in the lift, he couldn't shake the picture of her. He made up a story about not feeling too good, and instead of working, he went home. Later, when the ground shuddered, he was the only one in town who didn't run out into the street to see what had happened. He already knew.

  Some people had the gift like him; the rest of us had to pay close attention—search our dreams for clues, keep our eyes ready for signs. My father said his only gift was for remembering the lines of songs without trying to. My mother never claimed to have the gift either, but from time to time, she knew things. One night she and I were driving back to our house from Slats's when a piece of silver on the road caught the light from our headlamps. We slowed down, then stopped. It was a hunting knife lying flat on the road. "I'm taking that," I said. I got out of the car. She came after me. I was reaching down for it when she grabbed my hands, kicked the knife off the road, and told me to get back in the car. I said I would just come back and find it later. She didn't say much when we were driving, only that something was wrong about that knife, and we needed to get home as fast as we could.

  "What's wrong with it?" I said.

  "I don't know. Something about it just being there. I feel spooked."

  When we got home, we found my dad sitting on the porch with a bloodied T-shirt wrapped around his hand. He'd been cutting up cabbage and had almost sliced off his thumb. He was waiting for us to take him to the hospital.

  When the fireshot blew out next to him, I was at school. I heard a rumble and watched a window rattle in its sill.

  There were noises like that all the time in Banning though, and I might have just taken a memory from another day and moved it over to that one.

  My mother was at the grocery. She only had a few things to buy, so she was holding them in her arms instead of using a cart. When she was in line at the register, she saw a flicker of light in the corner of her eye, like a firefly, and then everything in front of her went black. She fainted, dropped her packages all over the floor. In her whole life, she'd never fainted. When she came to, everyone in the store was standing around saying her name, trying to help. She got up, left everything on the floor, walked out the door and up toward the King mine. Then she heard the boom. She ran the rest of the way, even though she knew there was no sense in running.

  My father told me that years after the company had shut the Bluebird mine, he and Marko decided they were going to settle things about those two trapped miners. They wanted to know for certain—was there gypsy singing? Was there shouting? They were still in high school, and o
ne day after classes were over, Marko tied a rope around my dad's leg and lowered him, headfirst, into a toadhole. He took a flashlight with him and wore his father's old mining helmet strapped around his chin. He hung down there for a long time. Word spread through town about what they were up to, and a crowd gathered.

  When Marko pulled him up, my father didn't want to tell them what he'd found out—he kept his mouth shut. He'd thought the scare was going to come from the ghosts yelling, or whatever they were doing, but what he found scared him much more—there wasn't anything down there at all. No one fighting. No one singing. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear.

  Slats came home from the Plate Glass, stopped up the sink in the bathroom, and soaked her hands. She cursed the whole time. She cleaned her cuts every day so they wouldn't get infected. Most of them were small, invisible from a few feet away, and she painted them over with iodine. The white basin had a pink glow from all the years of her rinsing her hands and spilling the iodine.

  "Hey," she said. "How about sitting in here and making conversation with me. Distract me from my tortures."

  I didn't answer her.

  When she was through, she piled food in the trunk to take to Great-grandfather at the farm. She came back inside and told me to get in the car.

  "I'm not going up there," I said.

  "Why?"

  "I have to go over to my house to get something."

  "Get what?"

  "Something."

  She kept staring at me. "What kind of something?"

  "I don't know."

  "I don't want you going over there without me. Just come up the farm."

  "I don't like it up there."

  "No sense in liking or not liking—it's the farm, our farm."

  "It's not mine. I hate going up there."

  "I didn't mean it's ours, like it's yours and mine. I mean, the family, all of us." She drew one of her long sighs and went outside. I heard the car start up, the tires rolling over the gravel. Right away, though, she cut the engine and came back in the house. "You don't have to get out of the car. Okay?" she said. "You can listen to the radio or do your schoolwork, or stare at your face in the mirror. I just want you to come with me."