“WHAT?!” He straighted up in his sweat-soaked pongee shirt. “YOU DID WHAT?!”
“I … I….”
“Oh, fer CHRISSAKE! What next!” He spit through the open window into the onrushing hot air. It arced back into the rear window and missed my brothers head by an inch. My mother had been asleep now for some time. She never stirred through this disaster. Deep in my hole, I wept.
The steady, rumbling oscillation of the ancient Olds rolled back over me. Way down deep inside, the first faint gnawings of car sickness, like some tiny, gray, beady-eyed rat scurrying among my vitals, merged appropriately with the disappointment and the heat. A faint whiff of the sweetish-sour aroma of my kid brother filtered through the camp gear, drifted past my nose and out the window to my right. I stared with glazed eyes at the blur of telephone poles; at a barn with a huge Bull Durham sign on its side, with its slogan, HER HERO; at farmhouse after farmhouse; at a rusty tin sign with its faded message: HOOKED RUGS FOR SALE—ALSO EGGS.
The low hills, green, yellow and brown, wound on and on. I had wrecked the vacation. You might just as well tell Santa Claus to go to hell as leave your split-bamboo casting rod that you saved all year to buy and that had a cork handle and a level-wind Sears, Roebuck reel with a red jewel in the handle, and your Daredevil wiggler, so red and white and chromy, back in the garage amid the bald Goodyears and empty Simoniz cans. Oh, well, nothing ever works out, anyway. My little gray, furry rat reared on its hind legs, his fangs flashing in the darkness.
Over the steady hum of the mighty Olds engine I could hear the pitiful keening of my kid brother, who had now burrowed down to the floor boards in his travail. I stared sullenly out the window over a huge, rolled-up, dark-green comforter and an orange crate full of coffeepots and frying pans.
Suddenly: BA-LOOOMMMMPPP! K-tunk k-tunk kk-tunk k-tunk.
The car reeled drunkenly under the wrenching blows of a disintegrating Allstate tire. In the front seat, the driver wrestled with the heaving steering wheel. Overloaded by a quarter ton at least, the car continued to lurch forward.
Ding ding ding ding. It was down to the rim now. My father hauled back on the emergency brake. We slued up onto the gravel shoulder of the highway and rolled to a limping stop. He cut the ignition; but for a full 20 seconds or so, the motor continued to turn over, firing on sheer heat. Finally, she coughed twice and stopped. Dead silence enveloped us all. My father sat unmoving behind the wheel, his hands clenched on the controls in silent rage.
“Do you think it’s a flat?” my mother chirped helpfully, her quick, mechanical mind analyzing the situation with deadly accuracy.
“No, I don’t think it could be that. Probably we ran over a pebble.” His voice was low, almost inaudible, drenched in sarcasm.
“I’m glad to hear that,” she sighed with relief. “I thought for a minute we might have had a flat.”
He stared out his window at the seared corn stalks across the road, watching the corn borers destroy what was left of the crops after the locusts had finished their work. We sat for possibly two minutes, frozen in time and space like flies in amber.
Then, in the lowest of all possible voices, he breathed toward the cornfield: “Balls.”
Very quietly he opened the door, climbed out and stalked back to the trunk.
“ALL A’ YA GET OUT!” he shouted.
My mother, realizing by this time that it hadn’t been a pebble after all, whispered: “Now, don’t get on his nerves. And don’t whine.”
The four of us gathered on the dusty gravel. Along the road behind us for a quarter mile at least, chunks of black, twisted rubber smoked in the sun and marked our trail of pain.
The old man silently opened the trunk, peered into the tangled mess of odds and ends that always filled it and began to rummage glumly among the shards. He removed the clamp that released the spare tire. In his world, spare tires were tires that had long since been given extreme unction but had somehow clung to a thread of life and perhaps a shred or two of rubber. Next, the jack.
We sat at a safe distance next to the cornfield, in the shade of an elm tree suffering from oak blight
“Let’s have a picnic while Daddy fixes the tire,” suggested Mother cheerfully.
Daddy, his shirt drenched in sweat, tore his thumbnail off while trying to straighten out the jack handle, which was insanely jointed in four different spots, making it as pliable as a wet noodle and about as useful. While he cursed and bled, we opened the lunch basket and fished out the warm cream-cheese sandwiches and the lunch-meat-and-relish sandwiches.
“Gimme a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich,” said my kid brother.
“We don’t have peanut-butter-and-jelly.”
“I want a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.”
“We have nice tuna and egg-salad sandwiches. On rye bread. You can pick the seeds out and have fun making believe they’re little bugs.”
“I WANT PEANUT-BUTTER-AND-JELLY!” Randy’s voice was rising to a shrill pitch. Off in the middle distance, the jack clanked and rattled as the Olds teetered precariously on the flimsy metal support.
“GODDAMN IT! IN TWO SECONDS, I’M GONNA COME OVER AND BAT YOU ONE GOOD!” yelled the tire repairman.
Randy threw his tuna-salad sandwich out into the road, where it was instantly smashed flat by a Mack truck. Our little picnic went on. We drank lemonade, ate cookies.
Finally came the call: “OK. Pile in.”
“How ‘bout some music,” my mother asked rhetorically as we rolled out onto the highway.
My father stonily drove on. Sometimes, after a particularly bad flat, he didn’t speak to the family for upward of two weeks. I suspect that he always pictured heaven as a place where everybody was issued a full set of brand-new, four-ply U. S. Royal roadmasters, something he never in his life attained, at least on this earth.
My mother fiddled with the car radio, which hummed and crackled.
“Roll out the barrel
We’ll have a barrel of fun
Roll out the barrel
We’ve got the blues on the run….”
The Andrews Sisters were always rolling out barrels and having fun.
“Isn’t that nice? Now, how ‘bout playing a game, kids? What am I thinking of—animal, vegetable or mineral?”
We always played games in the car, like who could tell quicker what kind of car was coming toward us; or Count the Number of Cows; or Beaver, where the first guy who saw a red truck or a blue Chevy or a Coca-Cola sign could hit the other guy if he hollered “Beaver” first. Then there was Padiddle, which was generally played when there were girls in the car and had a complicated scoring system involving burned-out headlights, the highest point getter being a police car running one-eyed. But Padiddle was never played in cars carrying mothers and kid brothers.
“NOW what the hell!” My father had broken his vow of silence.
Ahead, across the highway, stretched a procession of sawhorses with flashing lights and arrows and a sign, reading: ROAD UNDER CONSTRUCTION—DETOUR AHEAD 27.8 MILES.
Muttering obscenities, the old man veered to the right, onto a slanting gravel cow path. Giant bulldozers and road graders roared all around us.
“Holy God! This’ll kill that spare!”
The Olds crashed into a hole. The springs bottomed. She bellowed forward, throwing gravel high into the air. The trail wound through a tiny hamlet—and then, a fork, where a red arrow pointed to the right: CONTINUE DETOUR. The road to the left was even narrower than the other, marked with a battered black-and-white tin sign perforated with rusting .22-caliber bullet holes: COUNTYROAD 872(ALTERNATE).
We fishtailed to a stop, yellow dust pouring in the windows.
“Gimme that map!”
The old man reached across the dashboard and snapped open the glove compartment just as a truck rumbled past, raining gravel onto the windshield and along the side of the car.
“What the hell is THIS?” He yanked his hand convulsively out of the glove compartment.
It dripped a dark, viscous liquid.
“OK,” he said with his best Edgar Kennedy slow burn. “Who stuck a Hershey bar in the glove compartment?” No one spoke.
“All right, who did it?” He licked his fingers disgustedly.
“What a goddamn mess!”
The mystery of the Hershey bar was the subject of bitter wrangling off and on for years afterward. I know that I didn’t stick it in there. If my brother had gotten hold of a Hershey bar, he would have eaten it instantly. It never did come out—but then, neither did the chocolate; forevermore, the Oldsmobile had a chocolate-lined glove compartment.
My father pored over the creased and greasy map.
“Aha! Eight-seven-two. Here it is. It goes through East Jerusalem and hits four-three-eight. I’ll tell you what. I’ll bet we can beat this detour by crossing through four-three-eight to this one with the dotted red line, nine-seven-four. Then we’ll cut back and hit the highway the other side of Niles.”
Two and a half hours later, we were up to our hubs in a swamp. Overhead, four large crows circled angrily at the first disturbance their wilderness had seen in years. After backing and filling for half an hour, we finally managed to regain semisolid ground on the corduroy road that we had been thumping over for the past hour or so. None of us spoke. We long ago had learned not to say a word in times like these.
Our spattered, battered hulk hauled itself, at long last, back onto the main highway, after traveling over patches of country that had not been seen by the eye of man since Indian times.
“I knew I’d beat the damn detour.” When my father really loused up, he always tried to pretend it was not only deliberate but a lot of fun.
“Did you kids see those big crows? Weren’t they big? And I bet you never saw quicksand before. That was really something, wasn’t it?”
Leaving a trail of mud, we rumbled along smoothly for a few minutes on the blessed concrete.
“How ‘bout some of those Mary Janes? Would you kids like some Mary Janes?” He was now in a great mood.
My mother scratched around in the luggage a few moments until she found a cellophane bag full of the dentist’s delight. “Be careful how you chew ‘em,” she cautioned us futilely, “because if you’re not, they’ll pull your fillings out.”
The sound of our munching was drowned out by the RRRAAAAWWWRRRR of a giant, block-long truck as it barreled past our struggling flivver, eclipsing us in a deep shadow. As the truck roared past, inches away, sucking the car into its slip stream, an overwhelming cacophony of sound engulfed us—a sea of insane squawks and duckings.
“Chickens!” Randy hollered ecstatically.
Thousands of chickens peered at us through the windows on our left side. Stretching for a mile back of us, a wall of Leghorns was going by. Then they were past us and the mammoth truck pulled into the lane directly ahead of us, shedding a stream of white feathers that struck the windshield and billowed around us and in the windows like a summer snowstorm. Almost immediately we were enveloped in a wrenching, fetid, kick-in-the-stomach stench; it swept over us in a tidal wave of nausea.
“When the swallows come back to Capistrano …” the Inkspots chimed in on the radio.
“Gaak! What a stink!!”
“Maybe you’d better pass him,” suggested my mother through her handkerchief.
“Yeah. Here goes.”
He floored the Olds, but nothing happened. She was already going her limit. Ahead, the driver of the chicken truck settled into the groove, a lumbering juggernaut rolling along at 55, spraying feathers and a dark-brown aroma over the countryside. Again and again, the old man edged out into the left lane, gamely trying to pass, but it was no use. The truck stayed tantalizingly just out of reach, the chickens squawking delightedly, their necks sticking out of the iron cages, their beady red eyes wild with excitement, as the driver happily headed to market. Occasionally, a stray egg whistled past or splashed into the radiator grille to join the dead butterflies, grasshoppers and dragonflies.
“I have to go to the toilet,” Already we had stopped at 74 gas stations so that Randy could go to the toilet. His output was incredible.
“You’ll just have to hold it.”
It had begun to rain—big ripe summer drops. The windshield wipers were stuck and now my father drove with his head craned out the window in order to see. Rain ricocheted off his face and splattered everything within a two-foot radius. It carried with it chicken feathers and other by-products that streamed back from the truck ahead. But this was not the first time we had been caught behind moving livestock. A load of ducks make chickens a pure joy. And one time we had been trapped for over four hours behind 37 sheep and at least 200 exuberantly ripe porkers on U.S. 41.
The rain suddenly stopped, just when the menagerie boomed into a turnoff, and peace reigned once again. A few feathers clung to the headlights here and there, but the last lingering aroma of the barnyard finally departed through the rear windows. Then:
“WAAAH! I GOTTA WEEWEE!”
“All right! But this is the last time, ya hear?”
No answer. Randy was promising nothing. Ahead, a one-pump gas station crouched amid the cornfields next to a white shack that had once been a diner but was now sinking into the clay, carrying with it its faded red sign with the single word EAT. Under a rusted soft-drink cooler sprawled a mangy hound, who greeted our arrival by opening one rheumy eye and lifting a leg to scratch wearily and indiscriminately at his undernourished room-and-boarders.
We pulled up next to the pump. A thin, creased, dusty old man wearing a blue work shirt and faded jeans sat chewing a toothpick beside the screen door on an old wooden chair, with his feet on a “Phillips 66” oil drum. He didn’t stir.
“Fillerup, bub?”
“The kid’s gotta go to the toilet.” He shifted the toothpick. “Round the side, past them tires.”
“You can check the oil while we’re waiting.”
Taking one foot off the oil drum, then the other, the man struggled to his feet with painful deliberation, shuffled over to the car and fiddled with the hood latch for a minute or so. Finally getting the knack of it, he yanked it open, leaned over the engine, pulled out the dipstick and held it up. It dripped rich, viscous sludge onto the gravel.
“Needs about two and a half quarts.” It always needed two and a half quarts. “You want the good stuff or the cheap stuff?”
“The cheap stuff. Put in the heaviest ya got.” The old crate burned oil like a diesel.
My mother and Randy were back in the car now. It was a typical pit stop on our long caravan route to Clear Lake and paradise.
Doggedly, we swung back out onto the highway. Randy relieved, the Olds refreshed. A mile up the road, my mother, making conversation, said:
“Why didn’t you get gas?”
“I didn’t want any of that cheap bootleg gas that guy had. I’m waiting for a Texas Blue Station.”
“The gauge says empty. Maybe you shoulda got some.”
“That gauge is cockeyed. When it says empty, there’s over an eighth of a tank left. There oughta be a Texas Blue station ahead.”
Texas Blue was an obscure gasoline that had at one time sponsored the Chicago White Sox ball games on radio, thereby winning my fathers undying patronage. If Texas Blue backed the White Sox, it was his gas. He would have used it if they had distilled it from old cabbages.
Thirty seconds later, the car sputtered to a stop, bone dry. After sitting stony-faced for a long time behind the wheel, the old man silently opened the door, got out, slammed it, opened the trunk, took out the red can he always carried and continually used, slammed the lid shut and set out without a word for the gas station we had left a mile and a half behind. He plodded over the horizon and was gone.
We played animal, vegetable or mineral and drank more warm lemonade while we waited in the steamy heat. Forty minutes later he returned, his two gallon can filled to the brim with gas so cheap you could hear it knocking in the container. He smelled heavily o
f both gasoline and bourbon. He poured the former into the tank and shortly thereafter we once again entered the mainstream of humanity.
A single red sign stuck in the road’s shoulder at a crazy angle whizzed by; in white letters, it read: LISTEN, BIRDS. My father lit another Lucky and leaned forward on the alert, peering through the bug-spattered windshield.
THESE SIGNS COST MONEY. The second red-and-white announcement flashed by, followed quickly by the third:
SO ROOST AWHILE.
The old man flicked his match out the side window, his neck craning in anticipation of the snapper. We drove on. And on. Had some crummy, rotten fiend stolen the punch line? Another sign loomed over the next hill. He squinted tensely.
GENUINE CHERRY CIDER FOR SALE.
“Fer Chrissake!” he muttered amid the thrumming uproar and the constant ping of kamikaze gnats and bettles on the spattered windshield. But finally it came, half hidden next to a gnarled oak tree at the far end of a long, sweeping curve: BUT DON’T GET FUNNY.
I didn’t get it. But then, I didn’t get much of anything in those days. A few yards farther on, the sponsor’s name flashed by: BURMA-SHAVE. Up front, the old man cackled appreciatively; his favorite form of reading, next to the Chicago Herald-American sports section, was Burma Shave signs. He could recite them like a Shakespearean scholar quoting first folios. He had just added another gem to his repertoire. In the months to come, it would be referred to over and over, complete to location, time of day and pertinent weather information. In fact, he and his pal Zudock even invented their own Burma-Shave signs—pungent, unprintable and single-entendre. It would have been a great ad campaign, if the Burma-Shave company had the guts to do it.
It began to rain again. My father rolled up his window part way. Normally, the atmosphere in the Olds in full cry was a faint, barely discernible blue haze, an aromatic mixture of exhaust fumes from the split muffler, a whiff of manifold heat, burning oil, sizzling grease, dust from the floor boards, alcoholic steam from the radiator and the indescribably heady aroma of an antique tangerine, left over from last year’s trip, that had rolled under the front seat and gotten wedged directly in front of the heater vent. Now subtly blended with this oleo were the heavenly scents of wet hay, tiger lilies, yellow clay and fermenting manure.
Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories Page 10