Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories

by Jean Shepherd

  Quick medium shot of a fifth-hand Olds in the family driveway. Close-up of the old man’s face behind the wheel.

  “HOLY CHRIST, I’M GONNA HEAVE! WHAT THE HELL WAS IN THAT RED CABBAGE?”

  Quick pan to my mother, hair in curlers.

  “What do you mean, red cabbage? Them seven beers….”

  Back to the old man, face now turning green. “Forget that crummy trip!”

  Sudden uproar from kids in back seat, including me. Quick cut to the old man. “WHAT DID YOU SAY?”

  Shot of his right hand sweeping the back seat like an avenging boom, knocking heads together indiscriminately. Pan to Mother:

  “Here. Take a Tums.”

  Old man, bellowing:

  “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND!”

  Shot of door opening quickly, as he rushes into bushes. End of commercial.

  That true-life vacation scene is all too reminiscent of the one we played out every year. The family took a vacation trip by car each and every time the earth completed its laborious cycle around the sun. It usually came in late July or the first two weeks in August, but it made no difference. It always went the same way. For 14 straight years, our vacations were spent in southern Michigan on the shores of colorful Clear Lake. Clear Lake—it was many things, but the one thing it wasn’t was clear. In fact, it was never even clear why we went there, but we did. Such are the vacations of the humble.

  From June on, five minutes after school let out, my kid brother and I were in a feverish sweat of anticipation about this annual pilgrimage. The old man, playing it cool, didn’t get really heated up until maybe a month or so before the big day. My mother—who, incidentally, would never have made a TV momma—would begin laying in supplies. As far as I was concerned, the only thing that counted was my meager collection of dime-store fishing tackle and my BB gun. For weeks I gazed at fishhooks, rolled lead sinkers over my tongue, drenched my Sears, Roebuck 79-cent reel in 3-in-1 oil. To be honest, I don’t think I could have made it as a TV kid. For one thing, there were the pimples; and for another thing, I had a tendency to smell in those days—as a result of a lot of time spent in alleys and under porches and crawling through bushes with Schwartz and Flick and Kissel and the motley collection of spotted dogs that always accompanied us wherever we went. Come to think of it, Schwartz and Flick and Kissel smelled, too; which may be why, to one another, none of us smelled. In any event, Right Guard was something we played, not something we squirted on ourselves.

  About two weeks or so before the big day, the old man would take the Olds down to Paswinski’s Garage for a tune-up, which in our case was purely a cabalistic ritual. It was like fingering a string of beads or burning incense. But southern Michigan was a long way from northern Indiana and the Olds was our only hope. She was a large, hulking four-door sedan of a peculiar faded green color that the old man always called “goat-vomit green.” This was his big party joke. He always said it when everybody was eating. The Olds had been in the hands of at least four previous owners, all of whom had left their individuals marks on body and seat, fender and grille.

  The week before vacation, the old man would go into high gear. On Monday of the last week, just after supper, he would make the Big Phone Call. Putting through a long-distance call to Michigan was not something that happened every day in our house.

  “Is this long distance?” he shouted into the receiver. “Operator, I want to put through a long-distance call to Michigan.” The rest of us sat in hushed excitement, trepidation and fear. This was crucial. Would there be a cabin available? The old man played it for all it was worth:

  “Marcellus, Michigan. Ollie Hopnoodle’s Feed and Grain Store. I wanna talk to Mr. Hopnoodle.”

  He listened intently, then put his hand over the phone and whispered:

  “I can hear ’em ringing him! … Hello, Ollie? You old son of a bitch! Guess who this is…. Right! How did you guess? … We want the green one this year…. Yeah, the one on the other side of the outhouse…. You did? That’s great!

  “Ollie had two more holes put in the outhouse,” he reported in an aside to us.

  “OK, Ollie, see you next week.”

  The die was cast. We were on our way—almost. The week dragged by interminably—but finally it was Saturday night. All day, my mother had been cleaning up the house for the two-week hiatus, nailing down the screens, locking the basement windows, packing suitcases, trunks, cardboard boxes, laundry bags and wicker baskets with everything she could lay her hands on. The old man, who worked on Saturday, came roaring up the drive, the Olds already snarling in defiance over what was about to occur. He charged into the kitchen, his eyes rolling wildly, his very being radiating sparks of excitement

  “OK, now. This year we’re all gonna get up early and we’re gonna be on the road by six o’clock. No later! This time we’re gonna beat the traffic!”

  My mother, who had heard all this before, continued toiling stoically over her enormous pile of effluvia.

  “When that alarm goes off at four-thirty,” the old man said to no one in particular, “I don’t want to hear no griping. OK, now, let’s check the list.”

  Far into the night they went over every can of pork and beans, every slice of bacon, every box of crackers, every undershirt and rubber band—even the jug of citronella, that foul, fetid liquid mystically (and erroneously) believed to be effective in warding off mosquitoes of the Michigan variety. Finally, sometime after midnight, the uproar slowly petered out

  A few minutes later, the alarm went off and my kid brother and I leaped out of the sack like shots. This was it! From the next bedroom came a muffled curse.

  “Fer Chrissake, will ya shut that damn thing off!”

  Mutterings from my mother as she put on her slippers in the dark.

  “Don’t worry,” growled the old man in his familiar litany, “I’ll get right up. I’m just resting.”

  More mutterings. “Look, I’m just resting my eyes! I’m getting right up!”

  The vacation had begun as it always began. Already, not three minutes old and it was imperceptibly inching downhill. Five minutes later my mother, wearing her rump-sprung Chinese-red chenille bathrobe with tiny flecks of petrified egg on the lapels, her eyes puffed sleepily, peered down at a pot of simmering oatmeal in the clammy kitchen. Outside in the blackness, a few sparrows clinging to telephone wires chirped drowsily, pretending that they were real birds and not just sparrows living in a steel-mill town.

  My kid brother and I ran insanely up and down the basement stairs, dragging stuff out of the coalbin that we figured we might need at the lake. For over a month I had been assiduously collecting night crawlers in a Chase & Sanborn coffee can; I brought them up from the basement to be ready to pack when the time came. I toyed with my oatmeal, but it was such a great day that I actually went ahead and ate it.

  My brother, who had been known to go for over two years without eating, was playing Pig in honor of the festive occasion. This was a game invented by my mother to euchre the little runt into eating. It consisted of my mother saying:

  “Randy, how does the little piggy go?”

  His nostrils would flare, his neck would thicken, his face, redden. He would grunt twice and look for approval to my mother.

  “Nice piggy. Here’s your trough.”

  He would give another snort and then shovel his snout deep into the red cabbage, mashed potatoes, oatmeal or whatever it was and slurp it up loudly. He wasn’t a TV kid, either. This morning, in excitement, he polished off two troughs of Quaker Oats, usually his quota for a month. My mother, her hair curlers clinking, called out:

  “Are you up?” Silence.

  “Are you up?” Silence.

  “It’s getting late.”

  “SHUT UP, FER CHRISSAKE!”

  Wearily, she bent back over the sink. She had been this route before.

  Half an hour later, the sun streaming in through the kitchen windows finally flushed the old man out into the open. By now, the mound of impedimen
ta filled the kitchen and overflowed out onto the back porch. His B.V.D.s hanging limply, the old man weaved unsteadily between the piles and collapsed into a chair.

  “Gimme some coffee.”

  He slumped unshaven, staring numbly at the kitchen table, until my mother set the coffee down in front of him. She did not speak. She knew that this was no time for conversation. He lit a Lucky, took a mighty drag and then sipped gingerly at the scalding black coffee, his eyes glaring malevolently ahead. My old man had begun every day of his life since the age of four with a Lucky and a cup of black coffee. He inhaled each one alternately, grimly, deeply. During this routine, it was sheer suicide to goad him.

  The sun rose higher. And higher. It grew hotter and muggier, as only late July in northern Indiana can. The first faint whiff of oil-refinery smoke and blast-furnace dust eddied in through the screen door. Somewhere a cicada screamed into the brightening haze. Clotheslines drooped. My brother and I were busy carrying bags, suitcases and lumpy cardboard cartons tied with string out into the driveway. My mother wordlessly squeezed lemons for the lemonade we always carried along in our big two-gallon Thermos.

  The old man stonily began his second cup. Halfway through it, he suddenly looked up, the sun now well over the high-tension wires and striking him full on his stubbled face.

  “WELL!” he shouted. “ARE WE ALL SET TO GO?”

  This was the signal that the real action could begin. The old man was still alive for another day. It was vacationtime. He had been let out of the pen. My mother, picking up her cue, said:

  “Well, everything’s about set.”

  “OK, gimme that list.”

  He roared around the kitchen, his B.V.D.s flapping obscenely as he rechecked the pile of rubber ducks, beach balls, old inner tubes, spyglasses, straw hats, fielders’ mitts—all of it. He rushed into the bathroom to shave and emerged a few minutes later with a wad of toilet paper plastered to a nasty gash on his chin. As I said, he was no TV daddy.

  By now, we had moved perhaps a ton and a quarter of stuff out into the weeds of the back yard, which at this time of the year were usually knee high, filled with green caterpillars and millions of stickers. As always, Mrs. Kissel peered wistfully from her kitchen window next door. Since Mr. Kissel never worked, the Kissel family never took vacations.

  The neighborhood dogs, sensing that something was afoot, scurried round and round the cardboard cartons, yipping. A couple of them did more than that. Piece by piece, carton by carton, every available inch of the back seat was packed solid. The old man had a Sears luggage rack clamped onto the roof of the Olds. The heavy stuff was loaded on top: comforters, folding camp chairs, beach umbrellas, his set of matched Montgomery Ward golf clubs—all piled high and held down with lengths of clothesline. Those wooden-handled, chrome-headed clubs represented his only foray into the magic world of the “Big People,” as he called them, the ones who ran Chevy agencies and sauntered around the course on Sundays in checkered knickers.

  At last he crawled in behind the wheel, rolled down his window and peered over a pile of junk next to him to see if my mother was in place. Back in the rear, my brother and I were wedged into two tiny cockpits burrowed into the wall of tightly packed essentials for living. My mother, for some reason, always pretended that going to Clear Lake was something like traveling to the North Pole. You had to be ready for anything. The doors were slammed, windows adjusted, and finally the old man gave his yearly cry:

  “OK. Here we go!”

  Outside in the yard, a motley collection of well-wishers had gathered, including Flick, Schwartz, Kissel and other smaller fry who moved in the substrata of kid life-nameless, noses running, never invited to play ball.

  The old man turned the key in the dash and stepped on the starter. From deep within the bowels of the Oldsmobile came a faint click. He jabbed again at the starter. Another click. His neck reddened.

  “Oh, fer Chrissake! That damn starter spring’s stuck again!” The sun beat down mercilessly on our wheeled pyramid, the interior growing hotter by the second. Enraged, the old man threw the door open and rushed around to the front of the Olds, shouting:

  “TURN THE KEY ON WHEN I JUMP UP AND DOWN ON THE BUMPER!”

  He grabbed the radiator ornament, a shoddy copy of the Winged Victory, climbed up on the bumper and began to bounce maniacally up and down. It was a routine we all knew well. The old man, his face beet red, the blood once again dripping from his gashed chin, hopped up and down in a frenzy. Once again, from deep within the Olds, came another faint click. Instantly, the old man shouted:

  “DON’T NOBODY MOVE! SIT REAL STILL!”

  He tore around the side of the car and eased himself into the drivers seat. It was a touchy moment. Carefully, so as not to create the slightest vibration, he pushed the starter button on the floor.

  Gug gug gug gug…. It failed to catch.

  The old man whispered hoarsely: “Don’t nobody breathe.”

  He tried it again. G-gug gug …BBRRROOOOOO-MMMMI

  The mighty six-cylinder, low-compression Oldsmobile engine rattled into life, rocker arms clattering, valve springs clanging, pistons slapping. After all, 142,000 miles isn’t exactly around the block. He threw her into reverse and slowly she lumbered backward down the driveway, swaying under the immense load of half the available stock of the A. & P.

  Safely out on the street, he threw her into first. Painfully she began to roll forward. I peered out of the tiny crack of window available to me, a square of glass no more than three inches across, and saw my assembled friends standing dumbly along the sidewalk. For a brief instant, I felt a deep pang of regret about all the great things that were going to happen in the neighborhood while I was gone. From somewhere off to my left, amid the rumblings of the Olds, I heard the first muffled squeakings of my kid brother.

  Two minutes later, we turned down a side road toward the main highway that wended its way listlessly past junk yards and onion patches toward the distant, rolling, sandy hills of Michigan. It was Sunday and already a solid line of automobiles, bumper to bumper, stretched from one horizon to the other, barely moving. The old man, his eyes narrowed with hatred, glared through the windshield at his most ancient and implacable foe—the traffic.

  “Damn Sunday drivers! Stupid sons of bitches!”

  He was warming up for the big scenes yet to come. As traffic fighters go, he was probably no more talented nor dedicated than most other men of his time. But what he lacked in finesse he more than made up for in sheer ferocity. His vast catalog of invective—learned in the field, so to speak, back of the stockyards on the South Side of Chicago-had enriched every Sunday-afternoon drive we ever took. Some men gain their education about life at their mothers knee, others by reading yellowed volumes of fiction. I nurtured and flowered in the back seat of the Olds, listening to my father.

  At least we were on our way. No one could deny that. We crept along in the great line of Sunday traffic, the Olds muttering gloomily as its radiator temperature slowly mounted. My mother occasionally shouted back through the din in our direction:

  “Are you kids all right?”

  All right? I was out of my head with excitement. I looked forward to this moment all year long; it made Christmas and everything else pale to nothing. I had pored over every issue of Field & Stream in the barbershop, dreaming about tracking beavers and fording streams and making hunters stew. Of course, nobody ever did any of those things in Michigan, but they were great to read about. One time, our scoutmaster took us out on a hike through Hohman and painted moss on the north side of all the fireplugs, so that we could blaze a trail to the vacant lot behind the Sherwin-Williams sign. But that was about the extent of my expertise in nature lore.

  Hour after hour we inched northward, and finally burst out of the heavy traffic and turned onto the rolling, open highway that led through the sandy hills to Marcellus, Michigan. By now it was well along in the afternoon and the temperature inside the car hovered at maybe 15 or 20 degrees below th
e boiling point. The Olds had a habit of hitting a thrumming, resonant vibration at about 50 that jiggled the bones, loosened the molars, rattled the eyeballs and made all talk totally impossible. But over the roar, a faint squeak filtered through the cartons to my left. My mother turned in her seat, took one look and shouted at the old man to stop the car.

  “WHAT THE HELL NOW?” he bellowed, as he pulled over to the side of the road under a pair of great, overhanging Michigan poplars. Everywhere around us the yellow-and-dun fields, mottled with patches of grapevines, stretched out to the horizon.

  My mother dashed around the side of the car to my brother’s door. I heard him being hauled out of his tiny capsule. Oatmeal, Ovaltine, caterpillars—everything he had downed in the past couple of days gushed out into the lilies.

  I sat in my slot, peering out of the window at the alien landscape, my excitement now at fever pitch. Randy always got sick at about this point. That meant we were halfway there. Ashen-faced, he was stuffed back into his hole. Once again, the starter spring stuck. Once again, the old man raged up and down on the bumper. We were off.

  It was then that the bombshell struck. Oh, no! OH, NO! I slumped deep down into the seat, a two-pound box of rice sliding from the shelf behind me and pouring its contents down the back of my neck. The Oldsmobile boomed on toward Clear Lake and its fighting three-ounce sunfish, its seven-inch bluegills and its five-inch perch, all waiting for me under lily pads, beside submerged logs and in the weed beds. Oh, no! I had left all my fishing tackle in the garage, all piled up next to the door, where I had taken it the night before to make sure I wouldn’t forget it! Every sinker, every bobber, every hook I had saved for, polished, loved and cherished stood all neatly piled up back home in the garage.

  “DAD!” I cried out in anguish. The great thrum of the Olds drowned me out.

  “HEY, DAD!”

  He glanced into the rearview mirror. “Yeah?”

  “I LEFT ALL MY FISHING TACKLE IN THE GARAGE!” That meant his, too.