by Shauna Seliy
I sat as still as I could, but he saw me up there, slowed down, and stuck his head a little out the window. He had to practically shout for me to hear him over the muffler, but he didn't use the voice he used when he wanted to scare the crap out of me. He said, in a kind of serious voice, like it was important business, "You take care of yourself, all right? And your mom."
I knew that in the next minute he could change his mind and be up on the porch with his hand wrapped around my neck. I didn't breathe again until he drove away. I didn't feel any better when the sound of the car got quieter and quieter and then disappeared. And I didn't feel any better the next day or even the next, when we all figured out that he wasn't coming back. I mean, I'm still afraid of Zoli. Even now the hair on my neck stands up every time I see a green Skylark with a black top.
As soon as I was feeling well enough, I went to Luna. I handed Helen the lipstick case when she came outside. She opened it. I thought she'd be happy, but she looked like she might cry. We sat down on the steps of her porch. She was quiet for a while, and then she said, "You spring your mum out of there yet?"
"No."
"You sound gloomy, like you're giving up."
"I don't know what to do."
"Me either. I don't know why I'm telling you not to give up. Just seems like no one ever gives advice saying you should give up. You got to try and think of something. It'll be a big idea, maybe it won't even fit inside your head." She laughed and lit a cigarette. "We're going away, me and mum. Dad's in a real fix. So they're letting us try another place. It's up in Pittsburgh. Mum's got a sister lives there."
"When will you come back?"
"You think I should just smoke that cigarette of Billy's and get it over with? I had five heart attacks trying to think of where it was. I was about to steal some of Dad's medicine to get myself calmed down. If I smoked it, I wouldn't have to worry about it anymore."
"No. You should keep it."
"For how long?"
". . . Maybe keep it until the fire goes out in the mine."
"In other words, forever," she said, and smiled.
We didn't really say much of anything else to each other, but I didn't want to go and she didn't ask me to. We stayed out there for a long time, until the only light was the charged end of her cigarette. Of course I didn't know it then, but it would be years before I would see her again. We would be standing on the street in Brilliant. She would be the same, all that black hair. But I would be different, taller than her, and she'd hardly recognize me. "It's me, Lucas," I'd have to tell her. "Lucas Lessar. It alliterates, my name. You used to like that about me."
When Marko came back to Banning, they had to bring a hospital bed to his house. They cleared out the living room and put the bed in there, right by their front picture window. Slats made them a casserole and asked me to carry it over.
"You should take it. You cooked it," I said.
"His wife's so busy she doesn't have time to turn around. They probably don't have a thing to eat."
"You take it."
"You know those Markovics always come around for you Lessars. You got to do the same."
"Just go. I'm too tired."
"How come when I need you to do something, you're tired, but anytime you want to go someplace, you got plenty of energy?
"I really am tired now, though. You're making me tired."
After she left, I went up through her attic to the roof and looked out toward the Markovics' house. I looked out over the hills to see if I could see the smokestack at Bedford poking out, but I couldn't. I went back down into the house, found a magnifying glass in Slats's desk, and went to work all over the picture again. I liked the way everything looked all stretched out of shape under the glass, even the trees. I was getting a kick out of moving it over the horse's face, looking at his long eyes. Then I saw, down near the horse's hind legs, a pair of boots, the cuffs of work pants. My father. He was standing back there hiding himself from the camera, but he must have been holding me up.
The next morning, I took the picture with me and walked over to Marko's house. The curtains were opened, and he was in the hospital bed, almost like on a display. He was all bruised, his eyes were shut, his face was a kind of pale green. Walter must have been at school already. I saw Mrs. Markovic in the kitchen, cooking. When I looked back at Marko, his eyes were open. He held his hand up and waved for me to come inside.
When I came to the door, Mrs. Markovic wrapped me up in her big arms and kissed my forehead. I felt all choked up, just like I did last time she did that. I shut my eyes tight to keep them from watering.
Marko held out his hand for me to shake. He sat up a little in his bed. I stood next to it. I didn't know what to say to him. I pulled the picture out of my pocket and showed it to him.
"It's you?" he said.
I cleared my throat. I turned the picture over and showed him my mother's handwriting, J and L at county fair. "See, he's back there." I showed him the boots. "I found him."
He held it away from his face, "Jimmy. Huh. That's something."
"That pin in your leg, can you feel that it's there?"
He was still looking at the picture. "It's just like him, kind of hiding, but there, still there. He'll never leave you, you know. It's like now—we can't see him, but he must be around somehow, helping us."
"Marko," I said. I cleared my throat again. "Sorry."
"For what?"
"For what happened to you."
"The pipe comes to me with the crazy at the other end of it, see—that's proof Jimmy's around helping. If it was you against that pipe, we might have no more Lucas Lessar." He looked at the picture again. "Jimmy was with me many times when I made my show, my strongest man show. So, he knows about how I can get banged around, but not broken." He looked back at me. "You will come here again, sometime to see me, okay?"
"I think Walter pretty much hates me."
"Don't worry about Walter. I'll take care of Walter. You come back."
Slats thought I was recuperating, but in the mornings after she left, I started to go out to Bedford to see if my mother had gotten better enough to work on the farm. Red explained the whole system to me, how the people that were doing well came out in the mornings and went down to the barns. He showed me which doors they came out of and where they went to. She was never there.
I remembered when Mr. D'Angelo was sitting out in the lawn chair growing his beard, that my mother had said he was doing a penance, one he made up himself. So even though I didn't want to go over to Marko's, when I came back to Banning from Bedford, I'd make myself visit him. I got an idea to go back in the shed and get his box of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines. We started working our way through those, reading the articles, looking at all the crazy things for sale in the back pages. Some days he had a nurse that came to crank up his hospital bed, and she brought him a cane so he could practice walking on his knee with the pins in it. Those days we'd walk from the front door to the Nash, with all its broken windows, and then back. I would leave before school let out, so I wouldn't run into Walter. Then I'd go back to Slats's house, where she would watch the news and read magazines and drink her beer with salt and pepper poured into it.
It seemed that pretty much the whole spring would spend itself like that, but then Slats got a phone call from a man who'd heard about how our animals had gone missing. He called to say that a cow had shown up at his place, trying to stick her head through his fence, and that maybe it was one of ours.
We drove out there to have a look. Neither of us could say for sure if she was Great-grandfather's cow or not, but no one else around had any missing, so we took her. We had no way of hauling her back. We had to call Benci. He didn't have a truck big enough for her either. He put a rope around her neck and walked her back to the farm. Slats and I waited for him there, sitting in her car with the lights on. She didn't want to go in the house. I kept looking at it though; it was so strange to see all its windows dark.
"What are
we going to do with her?" I said.
"Leave her here, send Benci out to feed her."
When Benci showed up, Slats got out of the car and had a long look at the cow and patted the side of her face.
When we got home, she went back to reading magazines, and I went back to sleeping. A few days later, though, we got a call about a pair of sheep. Benci hauled them in the back of his truck. I had to sit back there with them to make sure they didn't jump out on the road and break their necks. We took them to the farm and Slats had a long look at them in the light from the headlamps, then we drove to her house.
One afternoon after I'd been to Bedford and it seemed like my mother would never come out of there, I went to see Marko. We tried walking out of his yard, onto the street. I told him, "You were right. About my mother. She's where you thought."
He stopped walking. He winced at the pain in his knee. "You saw her?"
I nodded.
He looked worried. "How is she? She's okay? How's she doing?"
"I don't know. I can't visit her anymore. She says for me not to."
"Huh. Well, maybe she just wants to be alone until she feels better. Some people like to be alone when they don't feel good.
"I got this friend and sometimes she would do things for this guy she knows up there, and it'd cheer him up. She'd take him old things he used to like from his house. You know. They played him a record one time. Can you think of anything that used to make her happy?"
"How about. . . you know what she always liked were those couple of songs in the jukebox by Stevo, the flugelhorn player from Mineral, and his brass band. How about we go to the club. We'll unplug the jukebox and take those songs from there. You can take them up there for her."
But looking down the street at how far it would be to walk to the club, and at Marko's face, all twisted up with pain, I knew it'd take us a week to walk that far. It seemed too small a thing anyway, a couple of old records. Another idea came to me, "Do you know him? Stevo?"
"Sure."
"Let's take his band out there and make them play a song for her."
"In her hospital room?"
"They got this song they always play at the end of their shows. We'll make them play that one."
"Ha. Lucas, don't you know there's like fifteen, maybe twenty people in that band? Also, those guys, they are too much. How they play that music. If the doctors see them, they'll lock the whole band up in there and never let them out . . . The record will be good. She'll like the record."
"It's not enough, that idea. It isn't big enough."
Walter showed up on the porch one day when I was sleeping. He woke me up by stepping on my shoulder.
"Jesus, Woj," I said.
"My dad says I'm supposed to come over here and smoke the peace pipe with you. I'd rather break your knees and crack your ribs."
I didn't say anything.
He looked around the porch. "Let's do something."
"All right." I sat up and rubbed my shoulder. "What?"
"Let's go out and see that girl with all those cigarettes."
"She had to go visit her aunt in Pittsburgh or something. She's not there."
It was a warm day. It was still spring, but it was one of those days when you can feel everything leaning into summer. People were running lawnmowers, driving past on motorcycles. I could hear, someplace far off, a set of dogs barking at each other. "Let's go to the farm," I said. "My Great-grandfather's farm."
"How are we going to get there? Walk? It's sort of far."
"I walked there all the time in the winter. It's not that far."
"All right, Lessar."
I stayed still for a while, closing and opening my eyes, listening to the lawnmowers. The air felt different than it had in the winter. It wasn't just that the cold was gone, there was a sweet smell lingering around, cut grass, new flowers. I remembered the night Great-grandfather reached out from under his covers and rubbed the air between his fingers, feeling the cold of it. I reached out and did the same thing.
Walter kicked me in the leg. "We're going anywhere you'll have to stand up, you lazy shit."
Walter was right—it was far to the farm. I couldn't keep up with him. He said, "This is worse than going for a walk with a hundred-year-old lady."
"Shut up."
We crossed through a bank of silver maples. In the winter, the trees were always dark and gray. You could only really tell in the spring and summer why they were called silver maples; the undersides of their leaves held a shimmer. It was like walking through a box of tinsel. I grabbed a handful of leaves.
"Walter," I said. "Do you know Stevo, the guy from Mineral with the brass band?"
"The flugelhorn player?"
"You know where he lives in Mineral?"
"No."
"Does that Nash still run?"
"Don't need windows to run."
"Think your dad's all right to drive it yet?"
"So, let's see, Lessar, are you trying to tell me that you want to drive around in a trashed car with no windows looking for a flugelhorn player? You still got that fever or what?"
At the farm, I showed Walter around the fields and the pond.
He kept looking at the house. "He still up there?" he said.
"Who"
"Your crazy Great-grandfather."
"What's wrong with you? He died."
"Someone's in there. Look." He pointed at the kitchen window.
It was Eli. He opened the window. "Are you the new farmers? Is empty here. All empty." He came out and the three of us walked the property. Eli showed me all the places where things were growing too wild, or weren't growing at all yet.
"You seen Benci around here?" I asked him.
"No. He's not so good at his job of oldest son. So now no one is doing that job and house is empty and animals are here alone. Maybe together, me and you can do for him his job? What do you think?"
"I don't know what that means." I looked inside the barn. There was another cow there. "Hey, where'd that come from?" I said.
We all went into the barn.
Eli said, "She shows up the other day. From where? I don't know."
"It's one of the ones from here?"
"Maybe. Could be she was one of the ones that leaves here and then she finds a way back."
"Like a homing pigeon," Walter said.
"Except she is cow," Eli said. We all stared at her.
Later, Eli had me fill some of the holes, the craters, that Great-grandfather had dug looking for oil and water. He had Walter start to tear down the chicken pen, which was listing and needed to be taken down and then built up again.
At the end of the day, it wasn't warm enough to swim, but Walter jumped in the pond anyway.
I found out from the phone book where Stevo the flugelhorn player lived in Mineral. One night when they had a big order to fill at the Glass and Slats had to work through the night, I called his house.
"You at your house?" I said.
"Molim? "
"Hi. You busy?"
"Who is this? What are you want from me?"
I didn't know what to say. I hung up. I went over to the Markovics' house and talked Walter and Marko into driving out to Mineral in the Nash. Once we were in the car though, I knew I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have any money to give Stevo or a way to tell him what I wanted from him. "Forget about it," I said. "This is so stupid."
Marko had already gotten the car started up. He was in the front seat, pressing on the gas, warming the engine. I was in the back seat. He turned around and looked at me, then he looked behind me, at my house. "No. It's not so stupid, Uncle," he said. He explained to Walter where we were going and why. When we got to Stevo's house, he got out of the car with his cane, and a while later he came out with Stevo. Then we went a few blocks down the road and got a trumpet player. We were missing the drummers and tuba players and the rest of the trumpet players, and the other flugelhorn players. "What about the rest of them?" I asked Marko.
"We can't go up there with just the two of them."
"But this is something. It's what we have. This is what we can do. Okay?"
At Bedford, we had to park out on the road, climb over the fence, then walk through the woods and the fields.
Stevo stopped and said, "Markovic, you haven't given us even close to enough money for this kind of trouble. I think maybe we turn around."
"You're already out here," Walter said. "Just come on. We'll pay you extra at the club in beers or Slim Jims or whatever."
"Slim Jims?"
"Yeah."
Stevo shrugged. "Okay, Woj. Many many Slim Jims though. A feast of Slim Jims." Then he saw the building and figured out where we were. "This is some serenade place, huh." He whistled.
I led them over to the window where, best as I could remember, I'd seen my mother on visiting day. "Play that song you play at the end of your show."
He started playing a song, but not the right one. "No. Stop," I said. "It starts out different, starts out sounding like someone climbing up some stairs. Then it speeds up." I hummed it. It didn't sound like it should have at all. He tried again and it was the right song, but outside, and just him alone, it was a small sound and it got picked apart by the breeze. It was nothing like listening to it in a small room getting your ears blown out. I walked away.
He stopped playing. "What?" he said. "What's problem now?
"She'll never hear you."
He looked at his horn. He took a deep breath and went at it again.
How'd he make that noise come out of that horn? I couldn't figure it out. It was like there was nothing inside him but lungs. He played for a while and stopped and the trumpet started up, and then the best part came, when they played together. Stevo started to pound his foot on the ground, and the horn got even louder, and it seemed like there were twelve of them instead of two.