Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books)

by Brad Whittington

  Well, the details got a little fuzzy after that, but I had every confidence that if I could only get to California, I would wing it from there. After all, she wouldn’t know I was a PK, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell her!

  “Mark . . . Earth calling Mark.” Hannah’s voice cut through the haze. My eyes focused on the group surrounding the kitchen table. “Where were you?”

  “Oh . . . uh.” I fumbled for words. “Sorry. I was thinking about something.”

  “Then think about food for a second,” Dad said. “What kind of snacks would you like to have for our picnic lunches?”

  I made some appropriate reply and muddled through the rest of the meeting. As soon as it was over, I rushed back to my room to figure out what I was going to wear while in California. I wanted to find the perfect combination that would perhaps be the catalyst of fate when I crossed paths with that anonymous beauty I was destined to meet.

  I dug through my wardrobe of Montgomery Ward mail-order shirts and J. C. Penney clearance-sale jeans. Those jeans must have been made of fiberglass. They didn’t fade and fray the way real jeans were supposed to. They stayed distressingly dark and disgustingly whole, regardless of the number of washings or abuse they received. I was certain NASA had designed the material as a heat shield for protecting capsules during reentry. And the shirts! I couldn’t decide if they looked more like something modeled by the Beaver or by Timmy from the Lassie show. I had acquired this stuff to facilitate my assimilation into Fredonian culture, but now I could see that it would not do at all. My wardrobe had atrophied into a weak and useless appendage.

  I was discouraged until I suddenly remembered the white bell-bottoms Mom had picked from some bargain rack. In honor of the election year, they had a donkey and an elephant stitched on the back pockets in red and blue. I thought those should be OK. After all, the counterculture was very politically conscious.

  I jumped up, dug them from a pile in the closet, and put them on. Next I located a royal blue, long-sleeved shirt. A pair of flag-design socks and some maroon-and-white patent leather shoes completed the ensemble. I donned a pewter cross on a heavy chain and took stock of myself in the mirror.

  It was a measure of the sartorial nadir to which I had descended that I found the combination hip, fashionable, and guaranteed to attract attention. I was right on at least one count. Fortunately for my emotional health, my assessment didn’t extend to my physical appearance. The mirror reflected a figure that was dismally pale and remarkably, if not painfully, skinny. (It was no great feat to count my ribs, even if I had a shirt on.) My hair strayed into my eyes, slightly longer than the school dress code allowed. Only through great euphemism and amazing grace could my complexion be described as “not the best.” And I had a Texas accent that would mark me for a sucker anywhere north of El Paso. Happily, as oblivious to reality as only a teenager can be, none of those details prevented me from feeling like I was ready to descend on L.A. in splendor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Planning for the vacation required attention to the bad head gasket on the car. Our budget dictated the shade-tree-mechanic approach to auto repairs, which were frequent. Dad never owned a new car. Consequently, I assisted in many midnight sessions, holding the light like an acolyte before the altar.

  These long hours were exercises in patience and restraint. There is only one thing more frustrating and unnerving than spending fifteen minutes trying to thread a slightly cross-threaded nut onto a bolt that is located in a remote cavity deep in the bowels of the engine and accessible only to octopi or species equipped with prehensile tails. That is watching someone spend fifteen minutes trying to thread a slightly stripped nut onto a bolt that is . . . you know the rest.

  Our current car of choice was a maroon 1963 Ford Galaxy. It was only nine years old, practically new! I was intimately acquainted with it, having assisted in several oil changes, a brake job, rebuilding the carburetor twice, countless tune-ups, and replacing the water pump, the thermostat, the fuel filter, the coil, two mufflers, a manifold gasket, and now a head gasket.

  It was late at night, as always, and Dad was putting the head back on the block. I, of course, was holding the light. I was looking forward to a late snack of Dr Pepper and pickled okra over a Ray Bradbury novel when Dad, who didn’t own a torque wrench, applied a little too much torque and twisted the top off a bolt.

  “Dadgummit!” he exclaimed. This was pretty strong language for Dad. The strongest exclamation I ever heard him make was “Hell’s Bells,” which astounded me.

  “What?”

  “I seem to have sundered the bolt, separating head from shaft, effectively decapitating said bolt. Now we’ll have to get the shaft out of the block somehow.”

  “Great. How do you do that?”

  “I don’t know.” He considered options as calmly as if he were deciding whether to have mayonnaise or mustard on his burger. “If I had a reverse-thread bolt, we could drill a hole in this one, thread it with my die-cutting set, and then screw the reverse-thread bolt in the hole. When it got snug, we could turn them both and get that little sucker out of there.” His voice dropped off. “But, I don’t have a reverse-thread bolt.”

  I kept my mouth shut. I figured the more I talked, the more it distracted him from finding a solution. We stood in silence for several minutes, both staring at the end of the bolt. There was a ridge where the head had broken unevenly. Dad grabbed a hammer and a screwdriver and tried to tap the bolt in a counterclockwise direction. He succeeded in barking his knuckles a few times and shaving off the ridge.

  Then he tried making a new ridge with a cold chisel. Then he tried drilling a hole in the bolt and wedging something in it to turn it. He tried several other things, approaching each as calmly as if it were the first thing he was trying. Each attempt was equally unsuccessful.

  I despaired of ever leaving the garage again. I envisioned myself still in the garage a year later. Ralph would stop by to see if I wanted to go swimming. “Sure, I’ll be out, just as soon as we get this bolt out of here. Try next month.”

  Dad broke in on my thoughts. “I know what we can do to get that bolt out of there.”

  “What?” I asked anxiously, not daring to hope after so many failed attempts.

  “We can pray.”

  The worklight in my hand reflected off Dad’s glistening forehead, echoed in duplicate in his glasses. I nodded impassively. As a PK I was immersed in religious concepts and practices, most of which I accepted with little thought or question. I had said the words, prayed the prayers, gotten saved, been baptized—the whole package—but since The Mysterious Stranger, nagging doubts plagued me.

  Sometimes, while sequestered in my tree house Fortress of Solitude, I would argue with myself. “What if there is no God? I accept it like . . .” I would pace the quaking boards, grasping for an analogy. “Like . . . like I accept the fact that when I ride an elevator, I face toward the door. What if I had been raised in Iran? Wouldn’t I accept Muhammad in the same way?” I would look through the trees to the pale blue sky, which looked as empty as a pocket with a hole in it. The whole thing seemed fantastic. Too irrational and unlikely.

  However, I never voiced these doubts or challenges to Dad. He wasn’t tyrannical, but I somehow felt that to suggest such things would be heresy. Besides, he knew a lot more about these things than I did anyway. That was his job, wasn’t it?

  So while I believed, I did so with unspoken reservations. I worried that I might one day discover that none of it was true. Placing it all on the line in such an irreversible way for the sake of removing a bolt seemed risky. What if there were no answer?

  Taking my silence for consent, Dad placed his hand on the car, closed his eyes, and started praying. I hastily closed my eyes.

  “God, You tell us that You see every sparrow and You know the number of hairs on our heads.” I thought this was a good start. Nothing to argue with here; it’s right there in the Bible.

  “If You are interested in what seems to us such tri
vial information, then You are surely interested in the problems we face in our lives.” This seemed like a reasonable conclusion.

  “Right now it’s late, I’m tired, and there’s a bolt stuck in this car.” I was deeply moved to shout “Amen,” but I refrained.

  “You say that if any man lacks wisdom, he should ask and You will give it generously, so I’m asking.” Uh-oh. Sure, it says that in the Bible, but I wasn’t certain it was a good idea to test it out on something so practical. That’s fine as long as it works, but what if nothing happened? The good news is, we could get the bolt removed; the bad news is, we might end up proving God doesn’t exist. If Twain’s Mysterious Stranger was right, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know about it.

  “Give me the wisdom to get that bolt out of there. Amen.” We opened our eyes and looked at the engine. I glanced at Dad, then looked away quickly, afraid that my doubt was plainly written in my eyes. We waited in silence for a minute or two.

  I started wondering what would happen if God did answer the prayer. Would the shaft start turning and drop out on the floor? Would an angel appear and hand Dad a reverse-thread bolt? Would a mechanic appear at the garage door with a toolbox and a nimbus? I looked intently at the bolt, straining to see or hear anything supernatural.

  I almost dropped the light when Dad said, “Hey! That just might work.” He turned to the workbench and started digging in the trunk underneath.

  I regained control of my pounding heart. “What might work?”

  “I just had an idea.” He turned and grinned at me. “What a coincidence, eh?” He rummaged around and pulled out an old brace-and-bit contraption, one of those big hand-powered drills with the crank handle, like the safecrackers in old black-and-white movies used. This one looked like Pa Kettle had tossed it off the truck when he was a kid. “We can turn this forward and backward.” He attached a bizarre-looking bit, and in five minutes the bolt was out.

  Twenty minutes later I was having a long-delayed midnight snack. Instead of reading Ray Bradbury, however, I was reflecting on the miracle I had just witnessed. I always thought they were accompanied by smoke and lightning and an angel telling everyone not to be afraid. But still the doubt lingered. What if Dad had just sat there ten more minutes instead of praying? Would the idea have come anyway? I felt guilty for harboring this haunting skepticism. I did have to admit that the idea came after he prayed. But I also knew that Dad had a great ability to improvise, financial necessity doubtlessly the mother of sometimes bizarre invention.

  It was while planning the vacation that Dad had one of his strangest inspirations. On past trips we had washed our clothes in the homes of people we stayed with along the way. On this trip, however, we were taking our cue from the turtle and bringing accommodations with us. Dad had acquired a pop-up camper, which I christened the Beast. An eight-by-twelve-by-four turquoise slug that mushroomed into bed and breakfast for four.

  Dad just couldn’t see pumping all those quarters into a laundromat. After several weeks of fiddling around with various twenty-gallon drums, sometime in March he found a resealable, plastic drum to suit his purpose. He called an impromptu meeting in the backyard and announced his plan to a less-than-enthusiastic public.

  “OK. Here’s what we do. Each morning we take the clothes we wore the day before and put them in this drum.” He held up the lid and pointed into the drum, which was half full of water. “Then we add water, a half-cup of detergent, and seal it.” He put on the lid, secured the latch, and turned it upside down. “Notice how it is watertight,” he added, smiling at this revelation. We all murmured our approval for his benefit. He stepped over to the car. “Then we strap it onto the luggage rack and drive five hundred miles. The normal movements of the car will provide the necessary agitation. At the end of the day, we will remove the clothes, rinse them out, and hang them overnight to dry.” He spread out his arms with a flourish as he ended the presentation.

  I exchanged glances with Heidi and Hannah while Mom asked, “You’re not serious, are you?”

  “Of course,” Dad answered, his smile slowly fading.

  “It’s only going to take us three days to get to California. We can wait until then to do the wash. And if not, we would only have to do one or two loads on the trip. That couldn’t cost more than $1.50 in a laundromat.”

  “But this won’t cost anything at all,” Dad countered. “And we won’t have to lose road time sitting around in a hot, dirty laundromat reading back issues of True Detective.”

  “I’m willing to sacrifice the $1.50 to avoid using that thing.” She pointed with obvious disgust at the watertight drum. “And I’ll bring along a Reader’s Digest.”

  “Look, let’s give it a chance. If it doesn’t work out, we can dispose of the drum along the way. OK?”

  Mom reluctantly agreed, probably because Dad seemed so taken with the idea that she didn’t want to discourage him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO As spring turned to summer, Dad held practice drills in erecting and dismantling the Beast. He inspected every crevice and opening, noting where he could pack items that didn’t fit in the trunk.

  I tried to supplement my wardrobe in anticipation of my crosscultural experience. I found a denim workshirt in Beaumont, which I wore and washed as much as possible, picking up patches when I could—American flags, ecology symbols, whatever I could find on sale. I had considered adding a peace sign until Dad got some literature in the mail about it being a satanic symbol. (A broken, inverted cross. Everybody knows that!) I gave up that idea without even bothering to ask. It would hardly do for the PK to be walking around Fred advertising for the competition.

  I also checked out the love beads and incense burners in head shops and import stores. On the romantic front, I had managed to get the attention of the bucktoothed cowgirl with freckles and a brother named Joe Bob. By April, she acknowledged my existence and had actually allowed me to sit next to her during lunch once. However, the day I came to school sporting a set of love beads I detected a distinct cooling of her interest. Joe Bob went so far as to suggest that I was experiencing problems with my sexual identity. Not exactly in those words.

  This setback forced me to reconsider my position. Evidently I was going to have to choose. If I prepared myself for California, I would jeopardize, if not decimate, my chances for social success in Fred. However, cultivating Fredonian culture would impair my transition to the counterculture. This dilemma was the focus of several sessions in the Fortress. By the end of the school year I had made my choice. I was already an anomaly in Fred and evidently would always be one, regardless of my decision. I could not spurn the golden and perhaps only opportunity fate had set before me.

  Only one month remained before I was to embark on my odyssey of actualization. I felt as if all the events of my life had pointed toward this journey, this pilgrimage, beginning with the dawning of the age of WLS. Only a few trials lay before me.

  First, I had twenty-eight days of preparation. I spent them completing my self-imposed regimen of cultural indoctrination. I memorized the names of every type of incense I could find. I studied album covers and liner notes, finding out who played in which bands. I stood in bookstores reading Rolling Stone until the clerks kicked me out. I even contemplated stealing Abbie Hoffman’s book (titled Steal This Book! ) but I figured I’d get caught and maybe blow my chances of going to California at all.

  My second obstacle was the week of revival meetings Dad had planned, culminating in the Sunday night baptism service before our departure on Monday morning. Dad decided to lead the music and invited Brother Bates, a former heroin addict turned traveling evangelist, to preach.

  On the first night, the auditorium was half full, not bad for a Monday night. I saw Old MacDonald off to the side near the organ, where he normally parked his wheelchair to be out of the way of traffic. The Harmons were a few rows back. I was surprised to see Sonia with them. Although she had been living with them, she had not been coming to church.

  Brother Bates n
odded gravely from the podium when Dad introduced him. He was skinny, almost emaciated, with a thick shock of chestnut hair brushed back from his bony face. He wore a cornflower blue suit, white shirt, and white shoes. A gigantic black Bible rested in his lap. After the special music, Dad sat next to Brother Bates. I settled in for what I expected to be a protracted ordeal. Brother Bates stood, seeming to unfold and stretch into an impossibly tall skeleton. He walked to the pulpit, his knees rising up unnaturally high so that his thighs were almost parallel to the floor. To my surprise, he walked past the pulpit, down the steps, to the space in front of the table where they put the stuff for Communion.

  He stood there, silent, scanning the room, his large, thin nose jutting between piercing eyes that matched the color of his suit. The small settling noises always present in a room full of people died out until we could hear the breath whistling in and out of his nostrils. Then he spoke, and the sound rattled my bones. I found myself wishing someone would turn down the microphone, but he used no microphone. The sound poured forth from him like the sound of many waters, like a waterfall pouring into an abyss. And from the abyss he brought forth visions of the torture of the damned, the agonies of those who die without hope, without love, without God.

  Fortunately, since it was a Baptist church, nobody was sitting on the first row. Or even the second. The unfortunate souls on the third row, in addition to having their eardrums pounded by this cataract of sound, also had their psyches singed by the flames of hell. I’m sure it was small consolation that the fires were partially extinguished by the saliva and sweat pouring forth from Brother Bates as he labored to literally scare the devil out of us. By the time he had preached himself into a frenzy of apoplexy and back down to a hoarse, rasping plea for our souls, I was so exhausted I couldn’t have come forward during the invitation without a wheelchair, and the only guy with one wasn’t offering shuttle service to salvation.