When We Get There

by Shauna Seliy

  I put the menu down and walked out, past all the clothes in the department store, and then kept going out the doors and down the street, past the shops and offices.

  After five or six blocks going the direction I was, Brilliant ended at the train station. I'd never been inside before. I walked in and sat on a bench that looked out over the tracks, the rail yard, and out toward the roundhouse. I walked around until I found a better view.

  Not all train stations had roundhouses, I didn't think, at least not as big as the one in Brilliant. It looked like a kind of gigantic record player. Trains would slide on, then they'd twist the part that looked like a record, and attach the trains to other cars outside of it. I stayed there for a long while watching everything swing around and come apart and then come back together.

  When my mother and I didn't have anything else to do and my dad was at work, we used to burn our garbage in the chicken wire can in the backyard, standing close by to take in the good smell of burning paper; we'd go to the drugstore and stand in the aisles eating fireballs and sour belts and reading magazines; we'd walk backward away from our house until it looked small enough to fit in the palms of our hands. She'd ask me about what I'd been learning at school. "Tell me everything, L," she would say to me. Tell me everything.

  Sometimes we'd go have a stare at the Japanese fish in the King mine pond, sit by the edge and wait until they'd show us their orange backs or open their round mouths. Behind us, there'd be coal crashing around in the tipple, but we'd lean down close to the water so we could hear the sounds the fish made swishing around. They were so big and their orange had such a shine that when they were close to the surface, they almost lit up the black water.

  I went downstairs where the regular part of the train station was. Ticket sellers stood behind glass windows. Above them, there was a black board with white letters listing all the places you could buy tickets for: Pittsburgh, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and more and more names, places I never heard of, a lot of them not even in Pennsylvania, a hundred places a person could end up.

  Chapter 11

  Miss Staresina had us laboring over cranes made out of thin colored sheets of paper. She had an idea that she should decorate the tables at her wedding with them. Mine kept turning out wrong, not looking like cranes, or any other kind of bird. Walter’s weren't right either. We both gave up.

  Walter said, "I heard these ladies say Zoli must have quit the Glass. They said they thought he was hunting around for your mother."

  "What ladies? Did they say where he went to look for her?"

  "My dad says they're wrong. He thinks maybe they had to lock Zoli up out at Bedford, pump some medicine into him, make him act like a regular person. He went all the way out of his head when your mom left here, my dad said, grieving. Everyone knows he set that tree on fire. That's crazy, right? What he'd do that for? A normal person would just light up the barn."

  "They don't just take people out there."

  "How do you think people get out there, Lessar? Someone takes them. Mr. D'Angelo told me that his patrol car's nothing but a taxi to drive people to the county jail or out to Bed­ford."

  "You talk to him?"

  "Of course I talk to him. He's my neighbor. I'm not like you are.

  "Like what?"

  "Keeping away from everyone."

  "What? I don't keep away from everyone."

  If you worked at Bedford, you weren't supposed to talk about the things that happened there. And if you went in there, you wouldn't want people to know about it. So most of the stories about Bedford came out around Halloween, usually from some kid at the high school.

  There'd be a story about a guy who'd broken loose from Bedford and was coming toward Banning with a sack of knives he'd stolen from its kitchen. Even knowing full well it was made up, I'd still lock my bedroom window for a few nights and jam a chair under my door.

  The only person I really knew about who was up there was a guy from Mineral who smashed in his wife's head with a Westinghouse mixer until she was dead from it. He should have gone to jail, everyone said, but he pretended he was too crazy to understand what he did.

  I liked the idea of Zoli being locked up, but I couldn't see clear to him being there. "They got phones up there? For people to call out."

  "How am I going to know that?"

  "What else did they say about him, the ladies?"

  "I'm going skating after school. You want to go?"

  "Quit saying you can skate. What ladies? Who are you talking about?"

  "You don't know nothing about skating."

  "I guess I know more than you, since I know you need skates to do it."

  "I only asked you because my dad said to, said to look out for you since your dead dad was his good friend and your greatgrandfather's up in that old house dying."

  Before I knew what I was doing, I stood up and tore him out of his chair and pushed him down to the floor. I pounded hard enough to hear his forehead knocking against the wood. Miss Staresina told me to stop. The other kids yelled at us to keep at it, cheering for me or cheering for Walter. He shook me off and stood up. We faced each other. He made a tssk noise with his teeth, and hit me so hard in the stomach that I almost threw up.

  Miss Staresina made us clean up all the cranes we'd smashed, then she sent us to the principal's office. The principal told me he knew how things were for me because he was an orphan himself.

  "Orphan?" I said.

  "I grew up in the orphanage, with the nuns, at the mission."

  "The orphanage?" I said.

  He let me go and asked Walter in. Even though it was still early in the day and school would be going on for a while, I didn't go back to the classroom. I walked out to the Croatian Club to find Marko.

  When I opened the door, Mrs. Markovic was right inside. I hadn't been to the club since my mother left and I hadn't seen Mrs. Markovic since then. Before I could say one word, she wrapped her big arms around me and pressed my face against her neck. She smelled like sauerkraut and cigarettes even stronger than Walter did, but somehow on her it wasn't terrible like it was on him. His smell was secondhand, rotting; her smell was like standing over a pot of fresh sauerkraut smoking your own cigarette.

  "I miss you," she said. I don't think anyone had ever said that to me in my whole life. I'd never gone anywhere to be missed. I couldn't help it, my eyes burned and watered.

  She covered me with her apron and took me behind the bar. I didn't see Walter come into the club, but I heard him shouting "Hi" to his mother. He said, "What are you doing here, Lessar? You shithead." Mrs. Markovic pulled me into the room-sized refrigerator behind the bar and closed the door on him. She took a towel from one of her pockets and wiped my face. "You can always come to our house and be our own son, Lucas. We will love you equal as we love our own."

  Walter shouted at the door, "Lessar, when you come out of there, I'll probably kill you."

  His mother smiled and said, "Maybe we'll love you more." She started opening a case of cola. She hummed some song, whispering a few lines here and there under her breath, something about the strongest man in the universe. He ate buckets of iron filings to keep up his strength.

  She finished opening the case, put a towel over my shoulder, touched my cheek, and gave me a bottle. "You stay in here as long as you need to." She went out and closed the door behind her.

  I heard her cursing at Walter and telling him to leave me alone. He shouted, "All right, Lessar, when you come out of there, I won't kill you, but I'll probably break your bones." She sent him to clean the grease traps.

  When my mother and I were driving my father to the hospital the time he nearly cut his thumb off fixing the cabbage, the car kept stalling out. My mother was losing her mind, but he was calm as could be. He kept telling her not to worry. He was stretched out on the back seat holding a towel around his hand. He recited the names of the Croatian saints: St. Nikola Tavelic, St. Ozona Kotorska, St. Augustus Kazotic. Then he went and named the diffe
rent kinds of tomatoes there were, and corn, and rocks. Whenever he was nervous, he would make lists like that, say them out loud or whisper them to himself.

  I sat down on a beer case and started working my way through some of the things I knew. The names of the mines—Banning, Bluebird, Luna, King. The names of the trees we had—shag bark maple, silver maple, mountain laurel. Since I'd stolen Eli's map of California on Christmas Eve, I'd been studying it every so often, just in case Slats had been telling the truth to Zoli about my mother being out there. And I thought of a few things I'd learned from the map—Eureka, Barstow, Redding, Sacramento Valley, San Joaquin River.

  The walls of the refrigerator were like slabs of ice, but I didn't want to leave. Something about the lone bulb burning and all the quiet had me feeling better. There was a pile of blankets on the floor. I got off the beer case and went to take up a blanket. When I pulled up the one on top, I saw a flash of skin, a head of hair. I leaned back and tripped on a box. My soda bottle fell and spilled everywhere. The man in the blankets sat up and blinked his eyes hard. It was Marko. "Christ!" I said. "What are you doing in here?"

  "Why are you stealing my warmth? How'd I get in here? You put me in here?"

  "No."

  "You know who put me in here? My wife, who wants to make for me a slow death from being cold."

  "My Great-grandfather's not dying," I said, sort of shouting.

  "Take it easy, Uncle." He ran his fingers through his hair and looked around. "I came in here to get something and then it was so nice and cool, you know. I had a little vodka. Then I was closing my eyes. What was I coming in here for though?" He ran his tongue over his teeth. "Bone dry," he said.

  I picked up my bottle of soda. There was still a little left, and I handed it to him.

  "Hvala," he said. He finished it off and ran his fingers through his hair again.

  "He's not dying, you know. He's just got some kind of cold or cough or something." I headed for the door.

  He grabbed my coat sleeve. "It's too lonely in here," he said. "Don't go yet, Uncle. Sit some more. It's cold here."

  I picked up the blanket I'd taken from him and handed it back. He wrapped himself up and said, "You don't look so good, Lucas. You okay?"

  "I don't look so good? What about you? You're sleeping in a refrigerator."

  "Okay, so we both don't look so good. We are missing our two friends . . . Last time I saw Mirjana she was at the bar with Slats and had a shot of something. Whiskey? Slivovitz? Can't remember. Middle of the day. Place is empty. Just us three."

  "When was that?"

  "She plays a few times in a row on jukebox that crazy horn music she made me put in there. Songs by that guy from Mineral, Stevo, his brass band. No one plays those songs but her, you know?"

  "When was she here?"

  He squinted. "Don't remember. I was smoking and Mirjana took my cigarette out of my mouth." He held two fingers out in front of him like there was a cigarette burning between them. "She polished it off herself, didn't give it back to me. But that's okay, Uncle. I don't care. We've known each other since always, me and Mirjana. She can have all of my cigarettes forever."

  It seemed like the refrigerator was closing in on us. I opened the door. Mrs. Markovic was lining up a team of whiskey shots for some people from the Plate Glass. I didn't see Walter. I closed the door behind me as quiet as I could manage. I slipped out of the club into the evening air, where the dark was coming with fresh snow. My skin was so cold from being in the refrigerator that the flakes landed on my hands and stayed whole, and couldn't melt away.

  Chapter 12

  Next time I went out to the farm I didn't go inside the house right away. I still had raisins for Valentina in my pocket. I'd been carrying them for days. I walked the whole property to see if she was hanging around in the woods or fields. When I was almost through, I ran into Eli.

  "You seen that gray goat?" I said.

  "Our old person friend always says she is genius animal. Maybe she is away on some intelligent purpose, the wondrous goat Valentina." He walked with me for a while. When we got close to his house, he wished me luck, gave me one of his quick bows, and walked away.

  I was close to the place where Zoli had snagged me on Christmas Eve. I walked fast as I could back to the house. It was full dark. Stars and clouds rested on top of the trees. I looked up at the windows of the farmhouse and saw Greatgrandfather was pacing back and forth in his room. He passed one window then the next and then he turned and went back again. He was skinny as a rake.

  I must have been walking around for a while, because by the time I got to the house, Slats's car was there. I put the raisins in a pile on the stoop for Valentina, in case she came around. Inside, Great-grandfather came down the stairs and threw his arms around me. It was like getting skeleton bones tossed at me. "I thought you were gone away from us!" he said.

  "I'm not." I worked my way out of the circle of his arms.

  "Maybe better from now on when you get here, you come straight to house, stay in house."

  "That's exactly right," Slats said. "He should be staying in here looking after you."

  "No," Great-grandfather said, "me looking after him."

  "However you want to name it," Slats said.

  She made us soup with beans and ham and celery. Greatgrandfather was so unsteady that by the time he got his spoon to his mouth, he'd spilled nearly all his soup. He gave up after a couple of spoonfuls.

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

  "I was thinking," Great-grandfather said. "We must make sure no one drinks pear brandy anymore. Keep it away from my giant sons. Tree can't make pears anymore. So, we must save all there is."

  "All right," Slats said. "We'll do that, but you got to eat your soup."

  "I look out window today many times. I don't see Valentina. On the other day, did she like the raisins you bring her?"

  "She ate them up," I said. I didn't want him asking any more questions about her. I said, "So where was that Banning Two you were telling me about before?"

  "Banning Two?" Slats said. "What?"

  "I don't know what he's saying about. Maybe your soup is make him feverish."

  "You said there was a Two," I said.

  "I never said. Maybe you don't hear me right. Maybe I say Brilliant Two, or something other Two."

  "No, you said Banning Two."

  He started eating and pretended he was too busy to answer me.

  Slats said, "You must have misunderstood him. There can't be two of these. There just can't be. I couldn't take it."

  Great-grandfather said, "Those raisins she loves too much, Valentina."

  "I just saw that Eli out there," I said. "Did he always live out in that shack? How come I'd never seen him before Christmas?"

  "You've seen him," Slats said. "He's always been around."

  Great-grandfather said, "But sometimes he's not right in the head and goes away for some time. I think he maybe checks himself inside to special place for crazy old mens drunks."

  "You mean this house?" Slats said.

  Great-grandfather threw her a mean look. "You know, Lucas, I have a few times at parties had maybe one or two drinks extra—"

  "Ha!" Slats said.

  "Compare with Eli though, I drink dew from blades of grass. He drinks lakes. He has to drink so much more than me because his troubles are many more than mine. This is starting from long time ago. From when he is a boy and lives with his father in Russia and his father is one famous sorcerer. But Eli himself has no abilities, and when he is young man, there is much shame for him and—"

  "Stop!" Slats said. "Stop right now feeding him stories." She pointed her spoon toward the window. "You're giving him wrong ideas about what's out there."

  "What are you saying? I only tell him truths. It's truth about Eli's father. He was sorcerer."

  "Now, Dad—"

  I said, "She's kind of right, you know. Every time I look up, you're telling me some crazy story, or walking
around in the woods with no shirt on, or telling me something and then saying you didn't tell me, or eating dirt, or—"

  "Lucas," Slats said. "Take it easy."

  I ate some of my soup. "Why were you doing that?" I said. "Pulling up all that dirt that night. Remember? You were putting it in your pockets and then you were stuffing it in your mouth—"

  Great-grandfather looked up at me with his cloudy eyes, and seeing him, looking old and like he might break, stopped me cold. I looked down at the table.

  Slats said, "Okay now, let's eat this soup before it turns into ice.

  Great-grandfather said, "I was thinking, I want to eat it, whole farm." His voice sounded deadly serious, but he was smiling. "This place, I love so much. And it looks in dangers from fire." He laughed. "Next thing I knows, I'm chewing grasses." He pushed his bowl away from him.

  Slats said, "You finish that soup or I'm going to put a needle in your skin and pump it into you."

  He pulled the bowl back, grabbed his spoon, and concentrated on eating. He ate almost all of it, then said, "I can be excused?"

  Slats inspected his bowl. "Well, I guess. All right."

  He started to walk up the stairs to his room. I noticed he was having a hard time standing up. He was leaning against the wall, holding the railing tight. After every step, he stopped and let out a few coughs. He sat down halfway to the top. "This ghost has now moved into my legs. From lungs into legs, that means either next place is out my feet and away, or insides my heart. If it's insides my heart, that will be end of it. End of everythings."

  Slats was clearing the table, running water in the sink, but she heard him. "Jesus, Dad. Don't say things like that. You got a bad cold is all."