by Terry Reed
I looked up at Mother. She was already leaning forward a little, peering through the windshield as we rounded the curve in the driveway, looking, like all of us, to make sure Egg Man was there. When he strolled out of the shadows of the garage into the sunlight, we knew we were finally home.
The Buick stopped right up beside Dad. Mother rolled down her window and stuck her face out, her green eyes blinking up, her long dark hair falling back, looking pretty but also impertinent, like a belle, from the South, which she wasn’t. She was born in New York City.
We all watched them kiss, though today’s wasn’t one of their best ones. Dad’s weekend wardrobe was probably why, especially on Easter Sunday. His same old paint-splattered khaki pants, canvas shoes, and white oxford shirt with the rips up the sleeves. Today he had Grandfather’s old gray felt hat also, pushed back a little which made him look like a boy, though a tall one. Mother liked him when he looked like an adman, in a proper suit and tie. That’s what he wore to work, but the minute he came home, he changed into something sloppy. She tried to upgrade him, she bought him cashmere smoking jackets with satin collars and such, but he’d just say “ah” when he opened the box, and that was the last you’d see of it. Anyway, you could tell by the kiss, she sure wasn’t backing down on the wardrobe thing, especially on Easter Sunday.
Dad put his hand on the top of the Buick, leaned down and looked in at us.
“Hi, Egg Man!” we all cried, making sure to call him that and not Dad today.
“Fair enough,” he said. “My turn. Into the car.” He swung around and went for the garage, and after Cabot and I nearly knocked off our hats grinning at each other, we climbed out of her blue Buick convertible and into his blue Buick hardtop. They really liked Buicks, is all I can tell you.
“Georgie boy,” Mother said while Dad snapped Lucy into the car seat. That’s what she called him when she wanted an answer, which was sometimes hard as anything to get out of him. “Just give me a hint. Just one little rhymed clue where you’re all going.”
Luke rolled down his window. “You’re supposed to call him Egg Man.”
Mother reached in and put her hand on Luke’s head, so she could shut him up without having to come right out and say so. She smirked at Dad and said, “Egg Man? What’s the itinerary?”
Dad got in the driver’s seat and stroked his chin, taking his time, so we’d all know how tough it was to come up with this stuff. “Hmmm. I’m not winking …”
We already started to look around at one another.
“… I’m thinking.”
This was a hard one.
“I’m smart, and I’m art.”
Mother frowned. “Not that statue at the Museum, George. Not The Thinker.”
I said, “Art?” Are you kidding. I’d been planning all day to see a river that burns. “Hey, Dad?”
He turned and winked at me. “Hey, Zu,” he said, which is an extra name he called me because of some movie.
“George, that statue was bombed. With dynamite.”
It was? I didn’t know that part.
Dad said, “Then how about some nice ducks in the pond?”
Only Luke looked anywhere close to bowled over.
“But the ducks are at the Museum, George. In the lagoon.” You could tell, she didn’t want us to run into The Thinker. Which only made us want to, to tell you the truth.
“Roses are red, boxes are blue,” Dad said, rolling up his window and reminding Mother she had some finding to do. If she didn’t find her blue box, she just didn’t get it. She might get more rhymed clues, but not the blue box and the thing she always liked that was in it. I already said, he’d let her look for a year.
As we went down the driveway, we turned in our seats to see Mother and Clarine, waving. They were like those two faces on the velvet curtains when you went for children’s plays at the Cleveland Playhouse. One laughing, one frowning. Clarine was laughing. But poor Mother, she hated losing us. To a Protestant, probably, and on a Holy Day of Obligation.
On the way to the ducks, we asked Dad more than once if he didn’t have something slightly more spectacular in mind for after, something more like a river that burns. But he didn’t answer. We just had to pray we’d see something worse.
We expected the ducks would be corny, but I guess we were wrong. Besides, Dad said it was a fine old tradition, for the people of Cleveland to see ducks on Easter.
We walked around the circular road for the Museum, and came out on top of the lagoon, looking down. Below us were hundreds of black girls with bright coats and purple corsages and patent leather shoes. Some had hats like we did, but the coolest had lots of bows, or braids with beads in their hair. Some carried minuscule pocketbooks over their arms. The boys looked good too, in their Sunday suits and ties. We glanced up at Dad. Even though we were dressed up, it didn’t seem that we really belonged. But he just started us down the stairs.
When we got down there, Dad pushed Matt and me into the crowd. Cabot caught right up, Luke grabbed her hand. Egg Man walked on the outside, carrying Lucy.
And once you got started, you could see right away why people had done it for years. It was just nice, is all. The way we were all going in the same direction, with parents and children and grandparents all holding hands. And even when somebody was slower in front, nobody passed. But the second time we came full around, Dad had us step out of line.
Then the way he turned to look, we all did, up to the front of the big museum, and looming there, massive and monstrous but not in a bad way—there was The Thinker.
We looked at Dad because of Mother to see what we’d do. He told us to climb.
When we got to the top, Matt whispered, Awesome. Because Mother was right. The Thinker was bombed. He was missing half his face, much leg, and some arm. Yet he was still thinking. The bomb hadn’t ruined him, it had improved him. You’re a better thinker once you can think through a bomb.
Luke said, “Hey, Dad? What happened to him?”
Matt answered, “Dynamite.”
Luke said, “Hey, Dad? What’s he thinking?”
Matt answered, “He’s thinking that someone blew him up with a bomb.”
I said, “Why doesn’t Mother like him? Because of the bomb?”
Dad didn’t answer. But at least Matt didn’t either.
Cabot said, “Don’t worry about the bomb, everybody. It’s still art.”
Fact is, nobody was that worried about that part. But Cabot came here a lot, so she probably knew. She had lessons in drawing two times a week at the Cleveland Museum school. In the evenings. Dad took her. Mother didn’t like the art lessons. They were downtown.
Dad said, “So tell us the artist, Cab.”
“Rodin is.”
We all stood in a half circle like a museum group and nodded.
Cabot said, “He’s a sculptor.”
We nodded.
Cabot said, “He’s French, and he’s dead.”
We nodded.
“He had his first drawing lesson when he was ten years old. At age fourteen, he entered the Petite Ecole, as distinguished from the more prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts, which wouldn’t let him in there. However …”
Enough already. This was all about her. We broke ranks and started circling around.
Until now, I hadn’t been thrilled with men statues before. They were usually on a horse, going to war. You had to worry so much for the horse. But I really did like The Thinker. I told Cabot another bomb could go off, and nothing would stop him. He’d think until he was just a heap of stone on the ground.
Cabot said, “But he’s bronze.”
“That doesn’t bother me.”
Then we stopped circling and stood there, regrouped around Egg Man. Matt asked him who put the bomb there and Luke asked him why.
After a long silence, during which he appeared to think about it almost as hard as The Thinker himself, Dad shifted Lucy to the other arm. And didn’t answer. He just looked us all over, and then looked up th
e road, toward the car.
And that was it. It made you wonder why he’d brought us here if he didn’t have anything to teach us. Even Cabot knew more.
We all stood there, holding our hats if we had them, and then, it was funny, but we all turned together to look back down at the pond. But below us, the paraders no longer looked festive. The sun was gone. It made the whole march look as if it had slowed right down.
“Okay,” Egg Man said. “Back to the car.”
We all looked around at one another, and all trudged off.
This time I sat up front, between Matt and Dad. Then we drove farther downtown, but only just cruising, and we had to keep asking, Seriously, Dad, in addition to a statue that was bombed, would we now see a river that burned.
But Dad wasn’t talking. Though sometimes, like a man on a tour bus, he’d stop in front of big, fancy, gray buildings and announce their names out loud. “Athletic Club.” “Union Club.” “Terminal Tower.” We already knew the buildings, from other Easters, or from children’s Christmas parties in these very places, if that’s where they were. But we still liked when Dad stopped and announced things, very deep and slow and unnecessary, because it all told you he was joking around.
“Saint John’s Cathedral,” Dad intoned like a tour man.
The doors flung open and people started streaming out, hordes of them, in a hurry, maybe to go catch the parade at the pond. Waving good-bye to them all was a black preacher in golden robes at the top of the stairs. So maybe that’s what reminded me of church that morning and social consciences. You could see the resemblance, is all that I’m saying, and suddenly I was asking, “Hey, Egg Man? Does Clarine have a conscience?”
He glanced down at me with a frown. “Clarine? Of course.”
He was coaxing the Buick carefully through the church throng. But after he looked around at the people, he slowly wound up back at me. “Boyce,” he said, “you’re too smart to ask that.”
“No I’m not.” And Matt immediately backed me up on it.
Dad shoved the car into park and waited for the people to cross. “But why would you ask such a thing?”
I knew what he was thinking. That I’d asked because Clarine was a black person, and I felt like showing how stupid I was. Except that wasn’t the reason I’d asked. I’d really asked because Clarine and I, we were both black sheep. I’d realized it that morning in church. Even so, there was something wrong with asking about Clarine when I was just afraid to ask for myself, and now I was ashamed. I hung my head and admitted, “I might have lapsed.”
Dad leaned down closer and said, “What?”
“Never mind. I just can’t find my conscience.”
Matt laughed, but stopped when Dad snapped, “What’s the question? Where’s your conscience?”
The way he said it, I was scared.
“Well, is that the problem?”
“Right,” I said, pulling the brim of my Easter hat down.
“Do you know what conscience is, or not?”
I didn’t answer. I was mortified. Here I’d told a Protestant I’d lapsed.
Dad sat there tapping the steering wheel. Then Matt started drumming the dash, keeping time. Then Dad asked him, kind of quick and sharp, “Can you define conscience for us?”
“Uh, you mean you want, like, a definition?”
“Cabot?”
Dead silence all around.
Dad sat there tapping the steering wheel so long, I sensed, even with my head down, that now all of the people outside were gone, had already reached the parade at the pond.
Luke whispered to Cabot, “How come no one asked me?”
Dad yanked the Buick out of park, stepped on the gas, and, with a jolt, we took off.
It was like we were starting all over, and already, this was the ride we’d been hoping for all along.
Now he was driving fast and didn’t make any announcements about things outside. We raced out to a highway where Lake Erie was, up the ramp, opened up on the road, took another ramp and got off. Matt announced “Fred’s Fish Market” in a deep, brief voice, trying to make it sound like a tour man, but he only knew it because he read it from a big sign on stilts, and you could see right through that. Not that we still didn’t like it, though. It was a total ruin. A wrecked old restaurant sitting way out at the end of a broken-down pier.
“Do we get to go there?” somebody asked.
Just looking at Fred’s Fish Market cheered me up right off. There were sailboats crossing back and forth on the water and there was a long metal barge that bobbed slowly along. Dad swung a right onto the pier. The wooden slats of the dock rumbled under the car as we thundered toward the end. This must be the place he was planning to take us all along. Right? The dirty lake? The source of the river that burns? I turned to check with Cabot. “Are we getting out of the car?”
Egg Man shook his head, Wrong. “But if you like it, Boyce,” he said, “then take a brain picture.”
I blinked up. “Really? How?”
“Just look at what you see and put it in your head and keep it there. Then, if you study it long enough, and let it develop over time, someday you might know something.”
Well fine, but it would be a hell of a lot easier if he’d stop the car. Instead we rounded the end of the pier between Fred’s Fish Market and the dock posts at about a hundred miles an hour. Everyone screams. Except Lucy. She laughs.
Two seconds later, back at the entrance to the pier, Dad careened another right. And even though the sun was setting behind us on the lake, and dusk was settling all around, he drove us deeper and deeper into downtown Cleveland.
He sped us past old, abandoned buildings, junkyards and shipping docks, traveling way beyond the point where Mother surely would have said to roll up the windows and lock the doors. He swung quick lefts and fast rights, winding us farther into a maze of streets you began to wonder how he would ever manage to wind us back out of. So deep into those streets, somewhere in there, it seemed we passed a sort of point of no return.
When he finally slowed up to sixty, we were in what looked to be almost a neighborhood. Except there was no grass. There were no yards. Some of the buildings had no doors. Without glass, the windows were blank, like eye sockets without eyes, so, unlike our house, there were no intricate reflections mirroring wind in the trees. But you could tell, there were still people living in there.
Because I’d never seen anything like it, I thought I should take some of those brain pictures Egg Man recommended before. So I tried it. But he hadn’t taught me to do it right. Nothing was taking. I saw a bashed up old car showered in broken glass. But as quickly as I saw it, it passed. I saw a man who lay by the road under a mountain of dirty blankets, with a clean white dog in his arms. I saw a boy in a bright pink tee shirt, with nothing to match it, nothing else on, not even pants. They all came and they went. Except when I saw the old lady sitting smack on the sidewalk. She was wearing an Easter hat, but she wasn’t wearing any shoes. She must have tried to get dressed up for Easter. But then she must have realized, What’s the use, you can’t parade without shoes. And you just knew what happened. She just sat down.
I looked at my own shoes, and back out at her. I swore this time I’d take a brain picture, and it might have even happened, maybe not in full living color, but I know I heard a sort of click inside. To test it, I closed my eyes, and she was still there in my mind. But as soon as we rounded the corner, she vanished, and even when I looked at my shoes to remind me, all I could see was just white socks and black shoes, like always before.
Now we were on another street. And this one was different from the others. Here there were three freshly painted white houses, huddled together like hope in the middle of the desolate block. That’s when Egg Man finally hit the brakes and the Buick came to a total stop.
It was now as quiet as a church in the car.
We all sat there, eyes glued to our father. All in all, we all already knew, he had taken us far beyond a river that burns.
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Then suddenly, without any warning, just like that, Egg Man started telling us things.
“See those three white houses?”
We all nodded. Each of us looked around to see if the others were looking the right way. But you already knew where to look, you only had to follow Dad’s eyes.
“Well, they’re bothering my conscience.”
My eyes shot back from the three houses, to him.
“See, those three houses belong to me. To all of us, really. They were part of Father’s estate. Before that, they were part of your great-grandfather’s estate. The problem is, we haven’t collected rent on those houses in about a hundred years. Nobody would do it because the people who live there are poor. So now I pay the upkeep and I pay the taxes. But in a year or two, that investment might finally pay off. Because a developer is planning to build a highway through here. I’ll be able to sell those houses for a lot of money. Actually, for a lot more than they’re worth, almost any price I ask.”
He stopped, drew a cigarette from his pocket, lit it with the lighter in the dashboard, opened the window, and sent the smoke out.
He was smoking in front of us. He sent it out, casual and long. “And I’d like to do that, I really would. But if I do, what happens?”
Nobody really wanted to say it, the answer was too sad. But Dad said, “Cabot? What happens?”
“I think,” she said, not wanting to say it, for sure. “Then the people won’t have a house to live in anymore.”
“That’s right, Cab, they won’t. And they can’t afford to go somewhere else. They’11 end up on the street.”