They issued a Silver Alert as soon as Mom called to let them know Gpa wasn’t at the Great Empty Blue, as she explained that I was gone, Old Humper was gone, and so was the Blue Bomber.
Only a few minutes later I have new messages from Mom, too. She’s texting. She’s not even calling.
On way to airport. Leaving Shanghai early.
Spoke with Dr. H.
What the hell are you doing?
Some time passes, and a fourth one arrives:
Are you ok? Just tell me you are ok.
We pull in to a Snak-Atak to get gas and I walk next door to the Trading Post to find us something more than a bag of chips for lunch. I find a few wilted, colorless sandwiches wrapped in plastic. When I get back, Corrina has pulled the Blue Bomber away from the pump and parked it beneath a stand of elm trees. Throughout the drive today, I realize, we’ve seen more trees than we have since we left LA. And they’re different here, like the air gets between the branches more, there are more leaves and in the light breeze the branches bow and wave independent of each other, like a clustered crowd of people all dancing independently together.
Corrina, too, is on her own. Gpa has Old Humper on the leash by the blue Dumpsters in the back of the lot, while Corrina sits on the hood of the car, staring at her phone. She’s in her black jeans and she’s wearing a black T-shirt with a large white blow-up of the parental advisory silkscreened on the front. The sleeves are rolled, as usual, and I can’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses, but I know, from the weight in her cheeks, there’s sadness there.
When I go to her she tells me she’s reached out to Aiko. She hasn’t heard back yet, but she’s hoping for a text, an e-mail, a call. Something. Anything. Just a hint that something waits for her, somewhere other than LA, her parents, and Rosewood.
“I feel like I’m really running,” she says. “Like I don’t want to go back, but I don’t know where I’m going, either.”
I nod.
We’re on the outskirts of Joplin, Missouri. This is Mark Twain country. This is where Bonnie and Clyde stayed for so long, shortly before they were caught. “We’re fugitives,” I say.
Corrina poses by the front of the car and we take pictures. She gets her guitar. She holds it out, Johnny Cash style, she says, but it looks like she’s holding a gun. We are fugitives. I get in some photos with her. I try to look dangerous, but I don’t. I look scared. I am scared. Corrina looks badass, like usual, but she’s scared too. She’s just better at hiding it than me. She has more practice. I wonder now if, somewhere deep within her, she’s always been as scared and anxious as I’ve been.
I walk out away from the trees, closer to the road, where the signal seems slightly better to send her the pictures like she asks, but then, because I’m still thinking about what Gpa said about Mom last night, and I feel bad she’s left Shanghai early, and I know there are so many people worrying back in LA, I send Mom a text:
We’re fine. Don’t worry about us. I’ll tell you everything when you get home.
And then it hits me, as soon as I press Send: We are going to get caught. Just like Bonnie and Clyde. I turn my phone off.
“Corrina.”
“Hendrix.”
“GPS.”
“What?”
“They can track my phone. The police. They might know exactly where we are. We need to go. Now.”
Corrina starts the car while I get Gpa and Old Humper, and when we’re all back in the Blue Bomber together, we zigzag over to Route 60 and take the small road out of Joplin toward St. Louis. We can’t get on the highway at all, where the state police patrol. Our license plate must be in the system now. They have some sense of where we are, and I wonder if Mom has given them any ideas of where to look for us. I wonder if she’s figured it all out, if she’s flying directly to Ithaca from Shanghai and she’ll be waiting for us on the porch as we pull into the driveway of a house none of us even know is still there or looks the same as it did when Gpa and Gma lived there.
Corrina drives as fast as she can without driving too fast. We can’t get pulled over. We can’t get caught now. Not yet. We just need another day or two. That’s all I want.
CHAPTER 23
WHAT WILL I DO NOW?
Our new back-trails route takes us into Mark Twain National Forest, and it’s long after the trees have enclosed us between two green walls that I realize that for the first time since we left LA, we’re driving without a view, without a sense of the horizon line, without being able to see what was behind us and what’s ahead. The road winds deeper and deeper into the forest and there’s no way of knowing what’s around each bend. Occasionally we pass a house, or the pieces of a house, alone and crumbling in what feels to me like the middle of nowhere.
But as the forest begins to break up around us a flat patchwork of farmland and grassy meadows opens up around State Highway P, the one-lane road that carries us. The landscape reminds Gpa of the fields around Ithaca. He hums a little and smiles in the backseat. Corrina and I stay quiet as he begins another story, and I’m glad I don’t have to jog his memory, or even ask him to think about it. The story just comes out.
THE STORY OF GPA FINALLY COMING HOME
Gpa had made the cross-country trip in this direction before. After surviving Vietnam and finally making it back at the end of his second tour with only time left in the reserves, he got to San Francisco, made his way to the bus station in Oakland, and took the six-day trip to Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Omaha, Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, and finally to Ithaca.
He made it and he was home, and he and Gma sat on the porch staring at each other, trying to find words. Gpa intuited what the sweaters were for and reached for Gma’s hand. “I’m home,” he said. “I don’t have to go back.” She knew some figures. The war was all about figures these days, body counts on the news, number of villages reclaimed, budget numbers, vote counts in Congress, but the figures she knew were about days, all 786 of them since he’d left for basic training. But now he was home.
As they sat on the porch, all Gpa could think about was a similar porch on a similar hill in town where they’d sat six years earlier and begun what they’d called their nondate the night they fell in love. And as they sat there holding hands, Gma eventually told him what she feared the most. “This isn’t going to be easy.”
“I know,” he said.
And it wasn’t. Everything was different. It was April 1969, and Ithaca was not the same as when he left. He couldn’t figure out what was what. Everything was different when he got home from the war. The clothes, the way people talked, their strange air of ironic bitterness—didn’t matter what they believed, what their politics, to Gpa, everybody now acted like a know-it-all. He had a hard time adjusting. He fell out of bed at night with nightmares chasing him to the floor. He punched a hole in the kitchen wall when he couldn’t operate the new can opener.
Change: even some of the things that had changed for Gma. Not just the music—now it really rocked, Aretha Franklin’s “Think,” Big Brother and the Holding Company’s “Piece of My Heart,” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Canned Heat, Toots and the Maytals, Joe Cocker, the Who, hard music with voices almost shouting—but even what she was doing with her days. He didn’t understand the unrest at home. The antiwar protests, the civil rights marches, the mayhem in the streets of Chicago at the Democratic convention. Even in Ithaca, the students from the Afro-American Society had taken over Willard Straight Hall at Cornell. She’d been there on the lawn outside supporting them and the SDS protesters on the front steps.
“I’m fighting the war at home for you,” she told him. “If you were fighting for freedom over there, I was going to do it back here. Otherwise, what were you fighting for, Charlie? I was doing it for you. I was doing it for us. I was doing it for everyone I considered an American. What are we fighting for if we say we’re fighting for freedom and democracy in Vietnam, but we don’t fight for it here at home?”
Days passed. Weeks. The National Guard h
osed protesters in California with skin-stinging spray from helicopters. Riots erupted in downtown Manhattan outside the Stonewall Inn after an assault on gay Americans. The summer spun and he tried to listen to Gma. In July, human beings walked on the moon. Nothing seemed the same. Nothing was the same.
“Charlie,” Gma kept telling him. “The way for us to find each other again is for you to trust that I’ve been keeping your home worth something while you were out risking your life for ours. I love you. Let me show you how I loved you.”
And he did. He believed her. What else could he do? He didn’t recognize his own home—all he recognized was the woman he had promised he would come home to.
This is how Gpa finishes telling the story this time: “This is what I’m always saying, Teddy. The point of living is learning how to love.” He pauses, then continues. “Your grandmother. She lived with love, boy. She was love. That’s what I called her until the day she died, that was her name to me: Love. I’ll call her that until the day I die.” Then he pauses and looks at me. “Won’t I?”
It’s nearly seven as we cross a few short bridges over the Meramec River and Butler Lakes in the southernmost reaches of the St. Louis metropolitan area. We need gas and food and because it has taken all day to get here, we have no plan for the night.
“We need to get to Ithaca tomorrow,” I say.
“I don’t think we can,” Corrina says.
“Let’s just drive through the night.”
“I can’t do that.”
“We’ll take turns.”
“I don’t think you should drive anymore,” Corrina says. I’m about to take offense at this when I realize she’s looking out for me; however silly and small the notion, it’s still her saying I care for you.
We can’t cut through St. Louis, but we do think we can get back on a real highway, the 70, northwest of St. Louis, in Illinois, and on the 70, we can get across Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and into Pennsylvania without paying a toll. Beyond that New York State waits for us with whatever else is there, and if we make it there, at least we can sit on the steps of the church and say, “Here, Gpa, right here. This is where you and Gma got married. Tell us the story. Tell us so we know you remember.”
But right where we have to pick up the 70 to make that last long leg of the journey is the little city I’ve been trying to imagine since I first heard about it in Las Vegas, and the woman, CC, who’s too close for me not to go find her. I feel like Dead Dad, renavigating my course, wanting nothing more than to chase the rhumb line to CC.
We’ve merged onto a larger road and have joined traffic heading to a bridge. It’s the Mississippi. Once we cross it, we’re in the flat, green wash of Illinois. The sun is low behind us. The west is a blur of red, yellow, and orange through the rear window, and yet somehow, my past is ahead of me, waiting just up the road, the ghost of Dead Dad.
All too many days at school, in my lonesome daze, his ghost would haunt my daydreams. I’d be thinking about one thing in geometry or bio or English class, and then my mind would drift, and I’d be half asleep and the nightmare would surface of a tsunami hitting the California coast, the school submerged in the flood, and Dead Dad’s giant pale arms surging, rising up and crashing down on us like the crests of enormous waves, pulling the whole school down with him to his watery grave.
I’m a windblown mess inside and I look back at Gpa, hoping he’ll brace me, hoping, I realize, he’ll keep up the family lie, so I don’t have to face what I’m heading straight for.
“Let’s skip it,” I say suddenly. “Let’s just push on. I don’t want to do this.”
“What?” Corrina says.
“We need to get to New York. I can’t stop us.” I’m trembling.
“Do you know what pisses me off?” Corrina says, almost shouting at me. “Here you are. You have a chance to find something out about your dad.”
“I don’t have a dad,” I say, and I hate how I sound like a baby.
“Yes you do. He was someone. He still is someone. You could find out more.”
“What am I going to do? Go look at his grave? He’s buried in Ithaca, anyway.”
“You have to go talk to her.”
No, I think, but that’s not what I say. “Yes. I know.”
“Good,” she says bitterly. “Because you know I would, if I could. You’re right here, Hendrix.” Her voice cracks, and I think about how much of an asshole I am.
“Okay.” I nod at Corrina. “I’m ready. We just have to figure out how to find her.”
I know this is going to be strange for Gpa, too. How could it not be? And I’m turning around to talk to him, to begin to explain why I need to do this, why it has been on my mind for so long and now, with the Blue Bomber gliding so close to the source, I have to learn a story I fear no one but CC can help me know, when Gpa leans forward and puts his hand on my shoulder.
“I know she’s in Troy because she sent me flowers when your grandmother died. She’d already moved here. Found a job in St. Louis shortly after your father died. She said she was sorry. I never wrote her back. I should have.”
I’m speechless. It’s all I can do to get air in and out of my nose.
Old Humper is in tune with the moment, because he, too, is sitting up and alert, watching me and Gpa. He whimpers slightly and then nuzzles Gpa’s side. Gpa takes his hand off my shoulder and gives Old Humper some attention, and I stare out the window.
Eventually I find some words in my throat. “Do you blame her?” I ask. “For his death?”
“No.”
“Did you then?”
“I’m not sure. I was angry, but I don’t think I blamed her. I don’t think it was her fault.”
“Why not?”
“Your father was the one who was out here. He was the one who traveled back and forth to be with her. I blame him for being out here or there, or wherever. But I don’t blame her or him or anyone else for his death. I’ve seen too many die to go looking for reasons why every time. Why cancer? Why war? Why a car accident? Why do we die? That isn’t a question for an old man. I’d rather ask myself what I’m doing while I’m still here.”
I sit with this for a long time. We get gas, we find our way onto the 70, the last straight line east to where we set out to go, but we coast on it for the short stretch from Collinsville to exit 18, Route 162. Corrina pulls the Blue Bomber into the right lane, takes the off-ramp, finds Edwardsville Road, and within minutes her phone tells us we’re there.
Troy is everything LA is not. If there is a town here, we can’t locate it. Scattered low buildings, a few streetlights. There is nothing to see but the magnificent bowl of infinite night enclosing the world around us. In the mostly darkness, without a city’s light pollution, without any other cars on the road, with only the land and the sky and us in between, I realize that this is what most of the country is like, a sea of land that wants you to get lost in it. I am a city kid, and I think the city hides the majesty of the universe too easily. But not out here. Out here, I am reminded of the ancient Greek word poiesis, the root of the word poetry. It basically means making something out of nothing. And out here, in what I once would have called the middle of nowhere, I am reminded of humility, because out here I am reminded of how small and insignificant I am, and yet, in the face of that, I want to make poetry. I want to make a life that could mean nothing, mean something instead.
CHAPTER 24
CC’S STORY
It isn’t easy to find someone’s address, but it is when their name is their business and it looks like they work from home—at least according to the website. It’d be strange if there was more than one Cecelia Devons, and the one we want to find wasn’t the owner of CC’s Farm, right out there at the edge of town.
Her house is down a winding street that takes us back out into farmland. A short, chipped wooden fence runs along one side of the road, a ditch with hedges along the other. There are no streetlights and a few lonely trees loom over the road. There is a slight breeze, a
nd the trees’ limbs dance and seem to laugh in the glare of our headlights. Soon there are no other houses, only the road, and the map says the road is about to end. No cul-de-sac, no housing development, just the end of the road.
We slow as we approach the end of the pavement. Nothing extends from it, not a dirt road, not a bridge, nothing, just grass and a field and whatever lies beyond the reach of the headlights. And then we see it. Off to the left, hidden behind the final hedge, sits the dark wooden house, with two front windows glowing. There’s a driveway up to the garage, but we don’t use it. Corrina parks out front, pointing the car back where we came from.
“Are you ready?” she asks.
“No.”
We all get out, but we leave Old Humper in the car for now, with the windows down enough so he can breathe. We’re not sure what to expect and we might have to get out of here quickly. Gpa’s walking slowly, shuffling, as we climb the slight rise to the house. An invisible cloud of barnyard smell hovers everywhere around us. The low bleating of sheep or goats, the grunt of a pig—we can’t see them, but they are out there, and it is almost magical in the darkness. The buzz and hum of the insects and the wind rustling the hedges and the cornstalks in the field to our right bring us back into the moment.
The Last True Love Story Page 18