Driving With Dead People (4 page)

The Monday after Sarah Keeler’s burial, I stood at the bus stop and hoped that I’d see her freshly packed grave as the bus passed Maple Creek Cemetery.

I knew Maple Creek because every school lesson in Ohio history ended with a field trip to Wendell Willkie’s grave. Wendell had been a Democrat, like Mom, but became a Republican, like Dad, and ran for president against Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wendell had lived in Akron after fighting in World War I. Sarah Keeler shared a cemetery with a famous man.

I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t famous. I wasn’t anything. So I told lies.

I looked at JoAnn, who was sitting on top of her backpack. Jamie was throwing rocks across the highway, trying to hit the Griswold’s mailbox, and Becky was talking to our neighbor Sally Whitmore. I turned to Kyle, Sally’s brother, who was kneeling on the ground, stuffing a sweatshirt into his backpack.

“Buddy has cancer,” I told him. “Our dog’s dying.” Buddy was in perfect health.

I expected a huge show of sympathy from Kyle, but he looked at me nonchalantly, sniffing in clear snot that was dripping just below his nostrils. Clearly, I would have to elaborate.

“Mom doesn’t think she’ll live till Friday.” Kyle pointed across the street, where Buddy was swiftly chasing a brown squirrel across Dottie Griswold’s yard. I was irritated.

I decided Kyle was just too green to understand the seriousness of cancer or to be aware that children could be killed for no reason at all. People in Galesburg didn’t know what mattered and what didn’t. Real life, exciting life, happened in Elk Grove, not out here in Hick Town, where there was only one blinker light and no courthouse.

Bus number sixty pulled up and we climbed up the tall steps, single file. Our driver, Walter Coons, welcomed us wearing faded blue overalls with a crisp red hanky tucked into his pocket. Most bus drivers in our county were farmers who were awake at dawn anyway, feeding hogs and cleaning out horse stalls. They earned extra money driving us around, which probably wasn’t that different from driving livestock.

I climbed into the third seat from the front with my
H. R. Pufnstuf
spiral notebook and sat on the side of the bus that would face Maple Creek Cemetery.

Looking over my shoulder, I saw JoAnn take two fingers and swoosh a “77” in the condensation that had formed on the windows, the year she would graduate and move away from Crap Town. Mine was “81”—a million years from now.

The next stop was Sam Lunsford’s house. I always made a point of watching him climb down the three wooden steps of his front porch and slump toward the bus. Sam was only ten, but he’d already killed a man.

He owned a rifle, just as all of us owned rifles, only mine sat leaning up against the wall behind the door in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. I didn’t care about guns. I cared about recreating
The Sound of Music
in our backyard.

When Sam killed that man, he’d been shooting tin cans off the wooden fence behind the old grain elevator. He’d barely noticed when the three o’clock freight train came rolling down the tracks. The train was about thirty feet away when one of Sam’s bullets missed the can, grazed a telephone pole, and ricocheted into the cab of the moving train, killing the engineer instantly. The engineer’s head flopped onto the windowsill as the train continued on down the track. It took several farmers and the entire Mason County police force (eight men and six volunteers) to jump the train and finally get it stopped.

The Whitmores and all of us were playing touch football in the grass next to the cemetery when we saw local farmers Ray Henderson, Hoover Griffin, and Jim Tracy running through the fields with rifles in their hands.

We heard Ray yell, “You kids get inside now. Go on home and stay in the house. Someone’s gone and shot the train conductor.” My heart dropped and all of us took off running. We looked out our back window at the policemen searching the fields for the shooter.

The next thing I heard, they’d taken Sam Lunsford, who was sweet-tempered and shy, into custody. They kept him a couple of hours for questioning and sent him home with his mom and dad.

After that, Sam didn’t talk at all. He climbed onto the bus, collapsed into the front seat, and slept the whole way to school. I felt sorry for him, but he knew what it was like to kill a man, so I watched him.

After the bus left Sam’s house, the ride was uninteresting. I just wanted to get to Elk Grove so I could spot Sarah’s grave, but we still had ten stops to make, including Wanda Henderson’s house, and Wanda always made us late.

When the bus pulled up to her mailbox, she would just be starting her walk down the lengthy lane that led from her farmhouse to Highway 64, where the bus (and all of us) sat waiting. Soon Mr. Coons would toot the horn and Wanda would start running.

As her beefy red face came closer, I knew what was going to happen—we all did. She’d heave herself onto the bus with this queasy look on her face, take in a quick gulp of air, and throw up bacon and eggs onto the gray-and-white-speckled floor.

Mr. Coons would turn around and throw kitty litter (which he’d learned to carry with him) down the aisle, and we’d be on our way.

I watched her do this every single morning and was mad at her for not figuring out how to get down the lane
before
the bus pulled up, so she wouldn’t have to run. How hard could it be? We would
never
get to Maple Creek Cemetery at this rate.

The next stop was Liddy Ingle’s saggy house. This was where, almost every day, Dad’s truck would appear behind the bus. Without fail, he’d speed up, and despite the stop sign sticking out from the left side of the bus and the alternating flashing red lights, he’d pass us on the two-lane road. And here he came again.

Dad was gunning for someone, maybe even Liddy, who couldn’t afford socks and wore the same skirt almost every day. I was convinced he was going to kill someone, either a kid crossing the road to get on the bus or a person in the car waiting for the bus to move on. He was homicidal—especially in his truck.

The way I saw it, Dad was just mad. He drove mad, he ate mad, and if anything turned him happy, he ruined it immediately.

When we finally got to Elk Grove, Mr. Coons decided to step on the gas for the first time all morning and we rattled past Maple Creek as if we were suddenly competing in the Indianapolis 500. I couldn’t tell one fresh grave from another. Was it possible to have worse luck than mine? Now I’d have to wait until the afternoon to see Sarah.

As we rounded the corner at Orchard Street to head up to school, I saw Dad climbing out of his pickup beside his store. He’d only saved a few minutes by passing us.

What a shitty morning, and it was only Monday.

The following Saturday, Dad hollered for us to get into the station wagon. We were going someplace as “a family.”

I didn’t want to go anywhere as a family, but Mom told us to hurry and get dressed.

Becky, JoAnn, and I wore matching pant sets that Mom had laid out on our beds that morning: stretchy navy slacks and white button-down cardigan sweaters with white sneakers.

JoAnn was furious. She didn’t want to be associated with Becky or me; we were the babies and she couldn’t even believe she had to wear the same outfit as us. JoAnn preferred faded brown corduroys, her jean jacket with its many pockets for smuggled cigarettes, and a tan leather belt with acorns stamped all the way around the waist.

“Why does Jamie get to wear whatever he wants?” she complained bitterly.

“He’s a boy,” Mom snapped, as if that made any sense.

Mom supervised everything we wore, day and night. She’d just started making the three of us wear nightgowns with no panties underneath so we could “air ourselves out” while we slept. JoAnn had protested, crying and holding up pajama pants, but Mom wouldn’t let her wear them. I’d told JoAnn to sneak them on during the night, but she wouldn’t have gone against Mom.

JoAnn sat in the car wearing that pant set, head turned toward the window, biting the inside of her cheek. Becky and I were in the way back, singing:

We laughed so hard, tears were streaming down our faces. Jamie was plucking dried mud out of the soles of his sneakers with the tip of his hunting knife, trying to ignore us.

Finally (and we knew it was coming) Dad yelled, “Knock it off or I’m taking off my belt!”

We quit singing but couldn’t quit laughing. We ducked down in the way back and tried to stifle the giggling, but guttural noises kept spurting out of us.

As we pulled into the Rotary Club’s gravel parking lot, we saw that a barbecue was in full swing. There were huge charcoal grills covered with unshucked corn on the cob, steaks, and heavy metal pots filled with barbecued baked beans. This might be fun.

Dad wheeled into a dirt parking space, and we all piled out before the dust settled.

I looked around for someone I knew.

JoAnn disappeared into the crowd with our cousin Ben, who looked exactly like her. With their reddish brown hair and freckles, people often mistook them for twin brothers, not realizing JoAnn was a girl. When I saw them later, they were sharing a cigarette behind the wooden grandstand, JoAnn wearing Ben’s blue jean jacket pulled clear down over her stretchy slacks.

Becky ran off with Donna Frazee, who looked exactly like Becky. The two of them looked like every girl in Mason County: blond ponytails, perfect complexions, and a few freckles sprinkled across their noses.

I was a brunette with my hair cut hopelessly short. The only person I resembled was lying over in Maple Creek Cemetery.

Donna and Becky didn’t invite me to tag along, so I pretended not to care. Becky was only eighteen months older than I was, but we were two years apart in school. When we were alone, she was happy to build blanket-forts or play Mousetrap, but when her friends were around, I was invisible.

Jamie headed down to the dirt track to look at the tractors that were competing in the tractor pull. I was sure Papaw was down there, and since he was capable of turning on you at a moment’s notice, I stayed where I was, climbing up to sit on the hood of the car.

Dad wouldn’t notice me on the station wagon because he was doing a solo stampede toward the grills, where most of the men were hanging out.

Dad cracked some hilarious joke as he arrived and everyone started laughing. “Glen, you always liven things up.” I watched Dad grab a red-and-white-checked paper apron, tie it in the back, and pick up a spatula. Flipping steaks was the only way to be the center of attention at a barbecue, and in Elk Grove, Dad was a popular guy.

He was kind to everyone but us, happy to help his neighbors change a tire or to lift a heavy bag of groceries for a senior citizen at Kroger Supermarket. At home he didn’t bother to step around me if I was playing Barbies on the floor, choosing instead to kick them across the room. I watched his friends enjoying his company and wondered why Dad hated us so much.

Dad was president of the Rotary Club and chairman of the sesquicentennial the previous spring, reigning over all the special events and local attractions that helped celebrate Elk Grove’s 150th anniversary. In May he rode a flying horse attached to a small platform in a giant parade with twenty marching bands from all over the state, and floats like the one from the
Elk Grove Courier
“Depicting 132 Years of News.” Diana Reynolds’s majorettes twirled and threw their batons in unison, and even Dwight Lovejoy’s four-horse hitch-and-beer wagon rolled by. Mr. Kenworthy, the mayor, rode in an old-fashioned convertible, covered in red-white-and-blue bunting.

Coming down Main Street, Dad and the spectacular mechanical horse led the parade. Dad was a superstar in his red-and-white-striped barbershop quartet jacket, waving his straw hat to the crowd, the horse bucking up and down. The crowd cheered and waved back.

I stood on the curb and saw Dad turn in my direction. My hand automatically flew up to wave, but I quickly realized he wasn’t waving to me.

In Elk Grove, Dad was a great guy.

At the Rotary Club barbecue, Mom drifted over to where Martha Whitmore (Kyle’s mom) was holding court. I watched her pad over in her brown leather loafers, burnt-orange-and-brown-plaid pants, and a beige sweater. Her hair, which had just been frosted, was pulled back off her face and swooped up into a French twist on the back of her head. She always looked clean and sophisticated, even at a dusty barbecue.

I looked back at Dad, who was now wearing a paper chef’s hat and gesturing with the spatula. I couldn’t watch him another minute. I slid off the hood of the car, slammed into a man who was walking by, and ended up on my butt in the dirt.

“Oh my gosh,” I said, jumping up and wiping dust off my pants.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He smiled. “Are you a Peterson?”

I had to admit I was.

“I saw you pull up with your mom and dad,” he said. “Which one are you?”

“Monica,” I said, checking my elbows for bloody scrapes.