by Vicki Grove
“Ahhh, don’t be ridiculous,” Bud cut in. “I just mighta had somewhat of a little event, that’s all. Happens all the time. No reason to go on and on about it.”
Backed-up air came out of my lungs in a sudden puff and I sagged from the shoulders, still gripping the wheel, the only control I had over this impossible situation.
“I don’t blame you for not taking me to the license office today, son,” Bud muttered. “It’s nothing but a nest of thieving bureaucrats. I shoulda just stayed home myself this afternoon for all the good it ended up doing me. They have no respect for the rights of a veteran to operate his own vehicle. I been driving since I was fourteen years old with—”
“—no trouble at all. I know, Bud. I know.” The tendons in my shoulders were beginning to spasm, but I would not let go of that wheel. I sat there looking straight ahead, trying to figure how I could get Bud into the emergency room since I had no army with me, no police force, no SWAT team to help.
“Yeah, well, I got a map in here somewheres,” Bud mentioned as he pushed his thumb against a shiny button on the dashboard. The door of the glove compartment fell open, releasing a small landslide of junk onto Bud’s feet. A couple of flashlights, empty candy wrappers, and about four decks of loose playing cards. Three or four gloves, a handful of screwdrivers, and then, finally, a map of some kind.
Bud began unfolding the map and shaking out the dead insects, little ketchup packets, and old toothpicks that had been caught in its folds. While he was preoccupied, I quietly started the engine and took off the emergency brake. I’d finally noticed a small green sign with an arrow and the letters ER above it, and I was sneaking the car slowly toward that when Bud looked up from his map.
“Where ya think yer going?” This time, he was ferocious. “I told ya, no hospital!”
He jerked the emergency brake handle again. We both pitched forward, and this time around when the engine died, it did it with a painful, metallic whunk.
“But Bud . . .” I stopped helplessly at that. Could I sprint into the hospital and sprint back out with some burly medical guys who could strong-arm him or give him some kind of shot to make him go limp so we could carry him inside?
He didn’t say anything for at least a full minute, maybe longer. When he spoke, his voice was still gruff, but it was different, like he was talking more to himself than to me.
“A heart is just a pump, see. You can patch it, you can prime it, but all pumps eventually rust out. And never, ever forget, son, a man’s wounds are his own.”
It was the same words he’d used to get Janet to back off when she was determined to get some doctor at the clinic to fix my legs. My throat felt tight. From the corner of my eye I saw him holding his map up close to his face.
“What’s the map for, Bud?” I finally asked.
“Always keep a map in your vehicle, son.”
“But I mean, what are you looking for on it?”
He squinted harder at the wrinkled and splotched paper between his hands. “Thought we might go visit my old truck while we’re out in this direction,” he said. “It’s just over into Missouri and up Highway 71 a short ways.”
I stared at him in total bug-eyed shock, though he stayed engrossed in his map and didn’t indicate that he noticed how his offhand suggestion had sent me reeling. I didn’t want to upset him, especially since he was still the color of mashed potatoes, but there were a dozen reasons why that was a horrible idea, including that neither of us could—surprise, surprise—drive! I mean, of course I had just driven, but I’d done it mindlessly, in a white-hot emergency that left me no thinking-about-it space. Now that I had begun to think about it again, I figured I could maybe, just maybe, get us the twenty-minute drive home without falling completely apart. Given the choice, though, I would rather have walked the entire distance blindfolded on a tightrope strung over the highway.
“Bud? That truck may no longer exist,” I pointed out, very quietly. Why would it, after somewhere around seventy years? “I think we should do some Internet research to, like, learn more about the make of truck it was and—”
He snorted, insulted. “Course it exists. Why wouldn’t it?”
There were cars mounting up behind us, but I didn’t dare start the ignition again.
“Bud, please, just let the emergency room people check you out, then we’ll go home and turn on the game and peel potatoes for Janet to make supper and . . .”
He lowered his arms and let the map drop limply to his lap. Something about that really got to me. It was like a piece of his essential Bud-ness had collapsed in on itself.
“You know the worst thing about being old?” he muttered. “Look at me, son.”
I swallowed hard and looked more directly at him.
“It’s that people treat you like you’re stupid just because your eyes don’t work so well and your feet got no feeling. What’s that got to do with brains, huh?”
It was a real question. He was clearly waiting for an answer. “Nothing, Bud.”
“Yeah, okay, then. You decided to bring me here, and it was a good call, seeing as how I was unresponsive, as they say on those TV medical shows. So thanks. But now, I am responsive again and so I decide whether to go to the hospital, and I say no.”
He faced the windshield and raised his chin a notch, set his teeth so his jawbone jutted. He painstakingly rebuttoned a place on his shirt that had gapped open, then clasped his hands together in his lap like I do at the dentist’s office.
“So. Let’s go home,” he said without a trace of anything resembling enthusiasm. In fact, his voice held the opposite of enthusiasm. He sounded so . . . flat. So flattened.
My mouth felt dry. He was right. It was his decision. I started the car and forced myself not to even look over at the turn lane for the ER. At the hospital exit I signaled left and sat there waiting for traffic to clear. The pump that was my own heart somehow synchronized itself with the turn signal—buhBOOM, buh-BOOM, buh-BOOM.
I glanced over at Bud. He was staring out the dirty windshield at the scruffy little browned-off cedar trees that lined the hospital parking lot like so many incurable patients.
Then suddenly I could hear Bud’s thoughts. I know it sounds strange, but I could actually hear them. Bud’s thoughts were clear and solid, which set them completely apart from the murky workings of my own sludged-up brain.
Bud was thinking that when he got home today, he would never again have the freedom to go anywhere that he wanted to go. The big Olds would go back into the garage and he would go back into his La-Z-Boy and his license would be a thing to toss when he scoured his wallet for trash like Trey had scoured his as he searched for that lost twenty last Saturday.
Except for the Trey comparison, those were Bud’s thoughts. And there was something else. Bud was telling himself to accept this, to buck up, to be a man.
The traffic cleared and I turned right. It wasn’t exactly a decision, just a movement.
“Hey!” Bud jerked in the same stiff way he jerked when the Chiefs did something either unforgivable or totally fantastic.
“I owe you one, Bud, so we’ll look for your truck,” I mumbled as I tried to get a handle on the consequences of what I’d just done. “Janet’s getting home at six thirty, though, so we don’t have long. Twenty minutes, half an hour max, okay?”
“Now you’re talking!” Bud rolled his window down and crooked his elbow outside, then relaxed back into the seat, letting his middle button go unbuttoned again. The map began flying around the car like some huge prehistoric winged creature. “Nothing can beat the open road!” he crooned. “A day of freedom on the open highway beats a year cooped up inside four walls, know what I mean?”
I summoned a half smile for him, but I just couldn’t manage a phony nod of agreement. Both legs gave me a simultaneous stab of bright pain, and I remember it crossing my mind that everyone but Bud and those people that were two-dimensional holograms could surely see that the open road was nothing but a horror show.<
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I didn’t have any idea how accurate that crazy exaggeration would turn out to be.
IX
I drove into Missouri in a cold clench, and by the time we reached Highway 71 and began climbing north, all the cells in my body were screaming with the effort of merely keeping the car on the road. The backs of my legs were screaming too as the plastic-covered padding of the front seat molded itself painfully around them and squeezed.
Meanwhile Bud sat grinning wide, the strong breeze from the open window spiking his few hairs. “Some fun, huh?” he kept calling across to me.
I gritted my teeth, pretending I didn’t hear, using sheer willpower to stay in control. It was just crazy to put something as flimsy as a human being into something as fast as a car and then to put that onto a stretch of hard and treacherous asphalt. Especially when some people behind the wheel were clueless losers who didn’t even deserve to be driving.
I had no idea where that last thought had come from, and I somehow knew I didn’t want to know. I focused on checking the fluorescent green dial of the dashboard clock, hoping it would hurry up and give me the excellent news that twenty minutes had passed.
Finally, finally, finally that happened, twenty minutes had inched by. I’d wiped my wet palms on my jeans so much by then I could feel clammy tracks down to my knees.
“So, Bud?” I called across to him. “It’s been over twenty minutes and we’re surely past where you thought your truck might be. I’m turning back at the next exit.”
I held my breath, wondering what he’d have to say. I could feel the car pulling against me, veering slightly right and left, trying to ease itself from my hands. The Olds knew I had no business on the road, so surely Bud had figured that out by now as well.
Bud took the map and snapped it open. “Lemme just check something here.”
I waited as long as I could stand it, then I asked, “So, do you . . . see it?”
He didn’t answer. A quick sideways glance showed me that he’d dozed off, still holding up the map. “Bud!” I guess I really yelled that, and when he jerked awake, I repeated, a little more quietly but even more desperately, “Hey, Bud, do you see it?”
He blinked and peered at me. “See what?”
“Your truck, Bud! Your pickup truck! We’ve been traveling for thirty-seven minutes now! You said twenty, at the most thirty! Do you see it on the map?”
Bud snorted a low laugh. “They’re not about to show a pickup truck on a map, son.” He grabbed my shoulder. “Listen, kid, try to relax a little bit, huh? Get back on the horse that bit you. No, on the dog that bit you. No, get back on the horse that threw you.”
I felt something warm go into my tense right shoulder from Bud’s wide, blunt-fingered hand. He was trying to get me past the awful thing that had happened, that was now clear, but I fought against relaxing like he’d advised. When you relax is when all hell breaks loose. One day you come home from first grade with a picture of a pirate you’ve made and you find your mother in bed and four months later she dies. You come home from school another day to find your father gone and he never comes back.
The last thing you can do is relax into safety. Just look at what happened . . . this time.
Bud tossed the map over his shoulder and it sailed around the backseat and finally flapped out the open window. “You gotta know when to use a map, son, and you also gotta know when to lose one,” Bud said. “We’ll find that truck by feel, I reckon.”
I shot him an openmouthed look, too shocked to do anything else.
“Did I ever tell you about my dog, Pedro?” Bud asked, crossing his arms and chuckling. “Little crazy-looking white dog with one black ear, skinny as a rabbit. I had Pedro for all of thirteen years, then the day I started high school, I came home and Pedro was nowhere to be found. I looked for him every night for a week, but no Pedro. Looked in all his favorite haunts over and over again—in the goat pen, back behind my dad’s blacksmithing shed, up under the front porch where he’d tunneled himself a nice cozy sleeping place. The night I finally decided he was gone for good, I walked behind the barn and just sat there. I loved that dog, good old ugly little dog, that Pedro.”
He slapped his knee. “You know, I won more money playing poker on the troop ship going to Korea than I got in my paycheck. Don’t tell Mary that! Oh no, don’t tell Mary.”
He got quiet for a few seconds, the heavy kind of quiet. “To this day I forget my Mary’s gone,” he mentioned in a soft, sad way. And then he reached across and clutched my shoulder again. “Hey, I lost my train of thought. I meant to tell you that the paperboy is coming over for dinner tonight! Yeah, Janet gave him an invite when he came in this morning. After he left, I told Janet you and me would make ourselves scarce, grab a burger someplace. So see? The later we get home, the better.”
Make ourselves scarce? “Bud, the paperboy is just a fifth grader! I mean, I guess Sam might be big for his age, but you know he’s only ten or eleven years old, right?”
“Who’d ya mean, Sam?” Bud asked. “This guy’s name is Stephens. Henry Stephens. Knows you from the police station Saturday night. Been stopping by to check and see that you’re all right, or so he says.” He snickered. “I say he’s checking out Janet, just using you and bringing in the newspaper as a coupla big fat excuses to see her.”
I was boggled by all this and missed an exit where I could have turned around.
“Dad gave up farming for a while in the early 1940s,” Bud said quietly. “It got too hard to make a living on the land, too much drought, and he took up trucking, though Mama and my little sister and me stayed put on the farm. Sometimes he let me go with him on a run of three or four days, to get outta my mother’s hair, I suppose. He’d fall asleep driving sometimes and my job was to grab the wheel and nudge him awake again. Or sometimes he’d even take a nap back in the truck bed and I’d drive, though that wasn’t until I was twelve or so, plenty able to keep the loaded rig on the road. We spent a coupla nights in jail once. Cops pulled us over and our load was confiscated. Don’t know what was packed in those wooden boxes back there, all Dad knew was he was given it by a crew in Omaha. Police said it was empty bottles from a Nebraska glass factory, bound for Al Capone’s illegal whiskey operation, up Chicago way. Mama was never told about that little incident. Then we got stuck on a bridge over the Mississippi once when we were overloaded with ripe watermelons, down in the Missouri bootheel. They had to gather up a bunch of farmers and horses to—”
“Wait, wait, wait! You were involved with bootleg whiskey, Bud?”
“Nah, just the bottles. And then once Dad and I skidded right off the road in heavy rain near Des Moines and . . .”
I began remembering Bud telling Trey and me these kinds of stories back when we were in third grade while we sprawled on the blue oval carpet over by Bud’s chair with sofa cushions under our chins and just kept listening right through the shows we’d meant to watch. Janet let us bring food in there, and Ding Dongs became our special story-listening food, with Twinkies a close second. . . .
“Well, we ended up waiting overnight for the truck to get fixed, so we took in quite a peep show at a carnival that was passing through. That is, Dad bought a ticket and went in and I waited outside as I was told to do until a couple of boys that were sneaking in under the back side of the tent beckoned for me to join them, and oh boy, did I get an eyeful!”
Bud talked on, and I felt my grip on the wheel get both more relaxed and firmer. I’d forgotten how Bud telling you his life had been like watching the kind of movie that makes you forget where you are and even who you are for a welcome while.
But suddenly the traffic grew much heavier and one of those green highway signs floated by—Raytown, 6 miles. How could we be nearing the suburbs of Kansas City?
Panic dropped on me again like it’d been stuck to the ceiling of the car.
“I can’t do this, Bud,” I wheezed. “Look at me. I’m shaking so hard I can’t grip the wheel! I’m not kidding, I don’t know h
ow we got so far from home and I . . . I can’t drive clear back from here, there’s absolutely no way!”
“Just once in my lifetime I’d like to see them Chiefs lose to my face,” Bud mentioned.
Then he turned to look directly at me. “Kid, you’re right, you’re not looking so good. Pull over awhile, why doncha? Eat a candy bar or something. Get your second wind.”
I swung out of traffic and onto the wide gravel shoulder, where I turned off the ignition and collapsed with my forehead against the steering wheel. I heard Bud rummaging in the glove compartment, and after a couple of minutes he poked my arm with what turned out to be most of a Milky Way bar, its chocolate gone white with age.
It was rock hard and what Janet would call “questionable,” but I ate it anyway, pretty much inhaled it. And while I gobbled that ancient candy bar, Bud closed his eyes, slouched back with his head against his seat, and told a different sort of story.
“There’d been heavy artillery fire on us for days,” he began in a raspy whisper. “We three were sheltered together in a trench cut through a minefield we’d cleared the week before. Tom Gulliver—this was my buddy from back on the farm—Tom Gulliver and me and a city boy named Clark Jackson who played good poker. We three shared that shallow space there in that Korean mud, crouched down with our carbines and grenades at the ready but with the enemy hid from sight.
“We were cracking every kind of joke, hunkered down with our helmets pulled low on our foreheads and so scared we couldn’t think. Others in our platoon were somewhere along the length of the trench. We’d hear ’em laughing at their own forms of jokes, but it was dark by then, too dark to see what was what or who was where. So, all right, in comes your worst nightmare, a mortar blast, tore a big hole in Clark and killed him instant like. Tore off Tommy’s legs and he died later, raving, no more’n ten feet from me, though I couldn’t get to him through the smoking rubble since I myself was laid open from hip to shoulder. I talked to Tommy all through the night, mostly about his sweetheart from back in Nebraska, his fine horse he was fixing to rodeo with when he got out of the army, his grandma’s applesauce cake he was always going on about.