Sweet Sunday

by John Lawton

  Leo . . . the most rascally, streetwise, sneering, wisecracking of the Dead End Kids, as Bowery-brash as Mel Kissing. I’d spent hours in movie theaters watching him and Huntz Hall play the fool. I’ll never forget the episode where they inadvertently volunteer to be rookies and take the army’s induction test—banging square pegs into round holes. If you succeed the army won’t accept you as this is held to be the definition of a moron. If only we had that today.

  And . . . I saw the New York campaign ads for Mailer and Breslin—‘The Other Guys are the Joke’. But the other guys won. Mailer lost the Democratic primary. Fourth in a five horse race—so it wasn’t just my missing vote that did it. Maybe now it would be possible to talk to Mel about something else.

  When Dan and Dick had said goodnight, when Goldie Hawn had shrieked her last shriek, when Arte Johnson’s ‘interesting’ had ceased to be just that, when I’d read the papers and the books Mike had got me, I still had plenty of time to think. And reading about Leo Gorcey’s death plunged me back into childhood and thinking of my childhood I thought of brother Billy.

  §

  1950. Billy had the most remarkable mind of anyone I’ve met. Minds like Billy’s might be more commonplace now in an age that has overreached for thirty years or more, but 1950 was not a year in which anyone overreached. It was a year, and for that matter a decade, in which we played safe. We did right and we thought right. Billy thought pure left-field. A man born to come off the wall before the damn thing fell on us.

  By the time he was twelve he had outread his teachers. He’d come home from the library with an elementary textbook of physics or chemistry or astronomy and a week or two later would be reading a college level text. But he was not content with theory, in any matter—Billy’s was above all a practical mind. In those days there were vast areas of rural Texas that had homes lit by kerosene and water wound up from wells in buckets. This was the way we grew up, the way Sam had grown up and most likely the way Lyndon Johnson grew up. A world without gadgets, because a world without electricity. Billy fixed that.

  A feature of the Texas plains is windmills, pumping water for irrigation. Billy told Sam he could rig one to generate electricity. All he needed was a couple of trips to a scrap yard. I was six at the time, but I can still remember the conversation that took place, the three of us standing on the patch of footworn dirt in front of the porch.

  ‘Son, are you sure about this?’

  ‘Sure I’m sure.’

  ‘It’s just that it seems an awful lot for . . .’

  Sam could not finish but it was obvious, even to me, how the sentence had to end.

  ‘You mean it’s an awful lot for a kid to come up with,’ Billy said.

  ‘I mean it’s an awful lot for a kid to be asking.’

  ‘Trust me, Dad, I can see.’

  ‘I’m not so old I’m blind myself.’

  ‘No, Dad. I mean I can see.’

  Billy tapped his forehead just above the bridge of his nose.

  ‘I can see see. I mean I can see.’

  Sam looked foxed. Our mother appeared on the porch, shook a tablecloth free of crumbs and Sam looked at her as if to say, ‘He’s your kid, he sure as hell doesn’t get any of this from me’, but she folded the cloth, said nothing and went back inside. She knew no more of Billy’s schemes than Sam, but unlike him she expected her kids to put on seven league boots and stride past her. That’s what kids did. She no more understood Billy than Sam did, but she wasn’t baffled by him.

  ‘Billy, how much is this going to cost?’

  ‘Nickels and dimes, Dad.’

  Nickels and dimes was all Sam had—over in Europe and across the Pacific the Second World War was generating a boom economy for those back home. Lubbock was growing—reaching its adolescence as a town—as airbases and manufacturing moved in and brought new labor with them. As ever Raineses were not benefiting from this. All the same, Sam drove him into Lubbock and Billy came back clutching a box load of automobile innards. Bits I didn’t know the name or purpose of and I’m damn sure Sam didn’t either. For about a week Billy labored with yards and yards of electrical cable, with Sam doing just what the kid told him. At the end of the week Billy gathered the four of us into the cabin and threw the switch. Half a dozen twelve volt bulbs lit up the room. Hardly Times Square but five times brighter than kerosene, and as Billy reminded the old man, it was free. It was a glimmer in that house, a light that scarcely penetrated the corners of the room, but looking back it seems to me now to be the blinding light of the beginning of a dream.

  Billy did not, probably could not stop. The water that one mill had pumped into a tank from which it was bucketed for household use he next piped into faucets. For the first time in her life my mother had running water—cold only—at the sink.

  By the following summer Billy had added hot. A machine on a colossal scale that had the two of us digging old bottles out of every dump in town. We unearthed the archaeological strata of Lubbock, dug right back to the turn of the century I should think, and came home with around fifteen hundred glass bottles. He went to the old man and said, ‘I need a thousand feet of black rubber hose pipe and a small industrial diamond.’ The old man protested the cost, but didn’t argue for long. Our mother blackmailed him, said if he didn’t buy the boy a diamond she’d prise one out of her engagement ring. Then Billy made a device that looked a lot like a giant geometry compass, with the diamond set in the sharp end, that neatly lopped the bottoms off all the bottles by inscribing a perfect circle in the glass. One tap with a wooden mallet and the bottle broke in two without shattering. Then Billy threaded the hose through the bottles and made a glass snake in three high rising coils next to the house. Then he went to Sam again and said, ‘I need three 100 gallon steel drums—used won’t do, they have to be new ’cause they have to be clean.’ The old man demurred, thinking this was it, but then Billy came back and said, ‘I want twenty bales of hay.’ He got them too. Hay cost Sam nothing—I think he was relieved that his son had finally asked him for something he didn’t have to go out and buy. Billy built a hay box two feet thick around each barrel. Last of all, he hooked up the whole thing and plumbed it into a cold water feed. It wasn’t pretty. It rose up the side of the house like a series of cockamamey pyramids, each barrel higher than the last till they reached the roof, the glass coils leaping between them reflecting the light back at you in a blaze of sunshine. Each barrel fed a separate faucet—lukewarm from the first, near enough boiling from the last. It worked. Like a dream. Sam scratched his head and wondered about the mystery of genetics—or he would have done if he knew the term. Billy baffled him.

  It was about 1949 when Billy’s reading of geology started to pay off. He had now turned his mind to Sam’s great obsession. Oil. Sam set down his rig and drilled at random. Pointless, if you think about it. The man had no system whatsoever. Billy grasped strata and sedimentary layers—he could recognize an anticline when he saw one—Billy could read stone like it was text. As far as Sam was concerned it might be stone but the text was hieroglyphic. All the same he let Billy steer him across the plain, let him choose the spot, let him read the geological samples the drill brought up.

  ‘What exactly are we looking for, son?’

  I watched Billy crumble a handful of red earth to dust between his fingertips. I wonder if he’d already seen how close we had come. Already he rationed what he told the old man, he’d learnt to give him no more than he could comprehend in a single grasp.

  ‘Salt, Dad. We’re looking for salt.’

  Sam looked blank. Billy might as well have said shinola as salt.

  ‘It’s often the crust over an oil deposit. The first sign you get that you’re approaching a gusher is salt. Pays to slow up when you see it.’

  When he was eighteen he won a scholarship to UT at Austin. All tuition, room and board paid for—wouldn’t cost Sam a c
ent. As reward Sam let him take me on a holiday to Arizona. Billy had long wanted to see the red rocks of Sedona. Sam even agreed to swap vehicles with him, just for the week. We got the pickup—only a year or two old—Sam got Billy’s renovated, string and elastic band, rust and cowgum 1928 Oldsmobile flatbed. I liked the flatbed. Billy had rescued it from ruin, all it needed to be complete was a mattress tied to the back with Grandma Joad on it. Nobody thought it would make Arizona and back. It was a mark of Sam’s faith in the two of us that he lent us his most prized possession. I was twelve. I’d never been out of the county let alone out of the state. My excitement was limitless. I did everything Billy told me—I carried the books he wanted me to read, even read some of them, a basic geology, a history of the settlement of the West—fine by me, it was full of characters like Wyatt Earp and the Ringo Kid—and a couple of English novels. The summer of 1950 was the first big summer of a short life lived under a big sky. We drove Route 66—so long ago I doubt there was even a song about it.

  Towns rolled by just like they do in the song, Albuquerque, Gallup, Flagstaff. It took us a day and a half to get to Flagstaff. Ike hadn’t built the interstate yet and you slowed through every small town you passed. We ate in truckstops most of which advertised ‘the best cup of coffee on Route 66’, and when night fell we just pulled up the first dirt road we saw and pitched our tent. Nobody hassled us. Nobody appeared out of the gloom toting a shotgun and the stereotypical look of an inbred halfwit. It was still the Restofamerica but it was Anotheramerica. Remember, we’d just fought the last good fight of the Twentieth Century. We’d won the century—the rest of it was ours to do with as we pleased. We still had fifty years to build New Eden. Even God had only seven days—or was it six? America was a kinder, gentler place, because it was a more optimistic place.

  On the evening of the second day we stood in the mainstreet of Jerome, AZ—a town that seemed to be made of matchwood and perched on a cliffside to spit in the face of gravity—and stared at the red and purple streaks that tore across the mountainside above Sedona. Billy could read strata like the plot of a novel. He reeled them off to me, the congealed story of the earth’s crust writ large on the face of Arizona. I wish I could remember a word of what he said, but science has always been a foreign language to me. Permian, Mesozoic, Eocene, Pre-Cambrian—if he’d said Martian I’d of believed him. I was in awe of my big brother, in thrall to the magic of his words. He was young Copernicus to me. We trailed around among the sandstone mountains for three or four days. Billy chipped away with his rock hammer and filled a sack with lumps of stone and each evening he’d set them out in a row and give me the history of each one. Sandstone—that’s about all I can recall. Sandstone. Every hue from salty white to veinous puce.

  The night before we were due to turn around we were camped three or four miles from the truck. We were on the Mogollan Rim that cuts across the north east corner of the state, and had walked, backpacks and all, along a narrow, winding, perilous path high above Wet Beaver Creek to a rocky outcrop set above a clear, clean pool of water. A slice of the old Eden. As the campfire burned low Billy set to musing, just like he did on nights when we sat on the side of Bald Eagle and looked out across the plains. Only now we looked up through a cloudless sky to the stars.

  ‘You read those books I gave you?’

  ‘Sure,’ I lied. I’d skimped through the geology primer, read all the history of the West, but I’d got halfway through one of the English ­novels—The First Men in the Moon—and switched to Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. It had seemed the more appropriate.

  ‘First Men in the Moon, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  It was shining down on us, full, faintly blue and bouncing off the pool below us.

  ‘We’re going there.’

  ‘What? You and me?’

  ‘No, stupid. America. Man. Man is going to the moon.’

  I don’t know when NASA got started, but if anyone had thought of it in 1950 I’ll be amazed.

  ‘When?’ I asked, knowing that what could sound fanciful with Billy was often merely literal.

  ‘Oh . . . 1965 . . . 1970. No later than that.’

  ‘In a gravityless iron ball?’

  (That was how H.G. Wells had done it, and I think Jules Verne had fired his guys out of a big gun.)

  ‘No,’ said Billy very matter-of-fact, eyes still fixed on heaven, not looking at me. ‘That won’t work. Nice idea, but it won’t work. No, it’ll be rockets, rockets as big as skyscrapers.’

  There was a long silence. At the end of it Billy said, ‘I have a dream.’

  I had no idea what to say to this. The kid was a dreamer. But it did not sound to me as though he was simply stating what was obvious.

  ‘I have a dream of America.’

  Another long silence followed. We stared at the moon. I could feel my teeth begin to chatter. Billy broke reverie, ducked back inside the tent, emerged with a blanket, wrapped it around me, and took up exactly where he had left off.

  ‘I have a dream.’

  ‘Is that like the American Dream?’

  ‘No. No. In fact I’d say it’s almost the exact opposite of the American Dream. What is the American Dream? A dream of easy money, of get-rich-quick? Of making it anew in the newest country?’

  ‘I guess so.’ I hadn’t a clue what it was. He made a fundamental concept of being American sound plainly vulgar.

  ‘Fine. In its place, fine. But I have a dream of America, not an American Dream. And that’s different. The founding fathers dreamt America.’

  ‘They did?’

  ‘Sure they did. No other country had ever sprung into being overnight. Somebody had to dream it. Thomas Jefferson and George Mason had to dream it first. They invented America. That’s what we all have to do. We have to dream America so we can invent it. America is ours to reinvent.’

  I struggled towards meaning, straining for a spark of anything big brother might take as a sign of intelligence.

  ‘But America’s already invented—the Constitution and that.’

  ‘We’ll reinvent that too.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if we do not we cannot reinvent ourselves. We have to dream America anew to reinvent it, and then we dream ourselves and reinvent ourselves. All this will happen in our lifetime as surely as man will go to the moon.’

  Another long silence. I was falling asleep, but I dared not. I knew he wasn’t through yet.

  ‘I have a dream. I shall invent myself. I shall become.’

  ‘Become who?’

  ‘There was no word missing there, Johnnie. That’s the whole damn sentence. I shall become.’

  I asked the perplexing question. Had to.

  ‘Will I “become”?’

  ‘Only if you dare to dream.’

  I awoke under the blankets inside the tent. He must have picked me up and put me to bed. Sunlight filtered through the canvas. I could hear the crackle of a wood fire, smell the sweet aroma of woodsmoke. I threw back the flap and found Billy sitting more or less where I’d last seen him. On the flat rock, above the edge of the pool, his back to me, still looking up.

  ‘Did I fall asleep?’

  ‘You always do. There’s coffee in the pot. Eat and pack. We have to go soon.’

  ‘What’s the hurry?’

  ‘Nothing. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be fine?’

  ‘I have to drop you at the bus depot.’

  ‘The bus depot?’

  ‘I’m not coming back with you.’

  I took a couple of steps toward him, meaning to spin him round and get a look at his face. It was a gag, right? I had to know it was a gag. But he dived off the rock, a butterfly arc, to slice the water. When he bobbed up again he said what he’d just said. ‘Don’t wo
rry, you’ll be fine.’

  All the way into Flagstaff I kept asking why and he’d say, ‘I told you last night.’

  In the Greyhound station he stuffed a one way ticket to Amarillo in my hand, about fifteen dollars in notes and change and said, ‘Call the old man when you get to Amarillo. Don’t worry, he’ll come and get you.’

  ‘What do I tell him?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘When will you be back?’

  But he hugged me and never said another word. Walked back to the truck, pulled out of the terminal and headed west. Never looked back. Never waved.

  §

  I rode Route 66 east in a Greyhound bus seated next to an old cowhand who clearly thought me beneath his attention or his words. He just chewed tobacco, occasionally slurping back a river of black spittle from his chin, and stared out the window. I got to Amarillo and called Sam collect. I sat three and a half hours in the depot, ate chocolate bars from an automat and waited.

  Lois was first to tumble out of the Olds. Threw her arms around me and kissed me and cried. Sam had questions. Lois would not let him ask them. All he knew was what I’d told him over the phone. Billy was gone. And the truck was gone with him. I guess Sam wanted to ask the question I’d asked, ‘When will he be back?’ But if he’d been able to ask I would not have been able to answer.

  It was a bumpy, slow, silent ride home. Sam seemed more sad than angry. Every so often Lois would squeeze my hand, but she’d no more speak than the old man. Me in the middle, Lois slipping one arm around me. I can smell her perfume to this day. And Sam gripping the wheel like it was a lifesaver thrown to a drowning man, eyes fixed on the road ahead.