Once Upon a Day (5 page)

He turned a black knob then and music came on. A car radio. Father had one in the Land Rover too, and once Jimmy had taken his keys and snuck into the Rover to listen to it. He got caught when he forgot to remove the key and the car battery died. But “dead” for batteries turned out to mean something very different from the usual meaning of “dead.” Father was able to bring it back to life with the help of red and black wires connected to the battery
of one of the delivery trucks. My brother didn’t get punished of course; he never did.

When I asked Jimmy what he’d heard on the radio, he told me he was trying to find the news and see if anything important was happening in the world. The only thing he’d heard about, he said, was a smashing pumpkin drummer who was arrested. We both thought it was strange that someone would even want to smash pumpkins, whether or not they could be arrested.

I sat back and watched as we drove down street after street. We were still in the concrete part of the city: no trees, no flowers, lots of buildings with gaping holes where the window glass should have been. The music on the radio seemed to fit because it wasn’t at all pretty either. It sounded more like screaming than singing, but I realized that might just be me. No one can ever know what something really sounds like or looks like or even is; I learned that when Father taught us modern physics and relativity.

“Einstein!” I said, louder than I’d intended to, and I startled Stephen Spaulding. That was his name; I could see it on his taxi license. It sounded like the name of a poet.

“Dammit,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but my voice didn’t sound like a cello. It sounded a little out of breath, more like a squeaky violin. I wished I could ask Mr. Spaulding not to curse. Cursing made me nervous, always had.

“It’s all right,” he said, and shook his head.

I waited a bit. “Would you like to know why I said Einstein?”

“What the hell,” he said, but he smiled. His first smile. “If I say no, you’ll tell me anyway.”

“Actually, I wouldn’t,” I said, grinning. He had a really beautiful smile, this Mr. Spaulding. White teeth in rows as perfect as piano keys. No overbite, like I had. Mine was a slight overbite, but still. “However, I think you’ll find it interesting. I was thinking of Einstein’s theory of relativity, and then I realized there it was again! Theory!”

“Like the
Sesame Street
Word of the Day.”

“Sesame Street
?”

“Yeah.” He turned left, and his voice grew quieter. “I never watched the show much myself, but I knew a little girl who loved all the videos.”

“Video, meaning the picture on television, rather than the sound?”

“You really expect me to believe you don’t know what a video is? That you’re an American in 2003 and you’ve never been in a Blockbuster?”

He was angry again, but just like before, I heard that tired sadness in his voice that I knew so well from listening to Father. Even before he got sick, even before Jimmy left, Father sometimes sounded like this no matter how happy he claimed to be. I never understood why, and I didn’t understand now either.

I sat up straighter and looked out the window. After a moment, Mr. Spaulding told me we were almost there.

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

He nodded. Neither of us said anything until he pulled in front of one of the ugliest buildings on the block. It was at the top of maybe fifteen concrete steps. All the windows had bars and I shuddered at the thought that it was some type of prison.

“All right,” he said, turning off the cab. “Are you sure this is where you want to go?”

“It was on the envelope,” I said, gulping. My boldness was at a low point right then, but if Jimmy was in there, what choice did I have?

He waited a minute before he turned around and glanced at me. “You want me to go in with you?”

“Oh, that would be nice.” I exhaled. “Very, very nice, actually.”

He nodded, and then he was out of the cab and opening my door.

I stepped out right into a puddle, splashing my socks and soaking my shoes. I told him I hadn’t realized the rain collected on the
sides of streets. He raised those interesting eyebrows again, and I smiled. “I should have worn my rain boots, but at least my toothbrush is wrapped in plastic.” I took it out of my sock to show it to him, and that’s when I remembered. “Oh no, my poem!”

I sat down on the first step and slipped off my right shoe. But the page was fine. It wasn’t even damp. The shoe had protected it.

“Thick leather,” I said proudly. “These are handmade in Scotland, but my father says all shoes were like this in the fifties.”

He smiled, only a half smile, but still very pleasant to look at. It struck me as odd that he so rarely smiled since his lips looked more comfortable that way.

I was still staring up at him when he said, “Are you going to put your shoe back on?”

“Of course I am.” I crammed it on my foot and began to tie the soggy laces. “What kind of oddball goes around without shoes?”

“I can’t imagine,” he said, and let out a short soft laugh.

At some point during that day, it did cross my mind that I was breaking my word to Father. I’d said I would be careful and cautious, and here I was with this taxicab driver, a stranger and a fairly incomprehensible one at that. I had no reason to trust Mr. Spaulding, and yet I kept finding myself not only willing to take him into my confidence, but eager to. I would like to say it was part of my new boldness, but unfortunately it was the opposite. Many of the places I saw that day terrified me, and I increasingly relied on Mr. Spaulding to give me the courage to continue the search.

Jimmy was not at the first address we tried, or the second one, or the third. It was the middle of the afternoon; the taxi cost had grown to almost three hundred dollars when he said he was going to turn the fare machine off.

“Why?”

“So you won’t have to keep paying. I’m sure you don’t have this kind of money.”

“I do, actually.” I was leaning back against the seat with my eyes closed. I’d barely slept on the all-night bus from Denver, and now the disappointment had left me completely worn-out. “I took almost two thousand dollars from my father before I left.”

“I think you need to eat,” he said.

I mumbled something, maybe it was yes, though I was already floating away, telling myself it was all right to rest for a minute or two. My breath was steady, but I was sicker at heart than I’d ever been in my life.

My poor brother. How could I have been so wrong about his condition?

For all those months that Father had been worrying about Jimmy, I had been secretly angry with him for not coming home. Even though I’d never admitted it, even to myself—how could I admit it, when the world outside the Sanctuary was bad?—I had let all those postcards and letters convince me that he was out there somewhere having a wonderful time. Maybe he even wanted me to believe that. Certainly he never said anything about his real situation. He never gave me the smallest hint that he was living in hovels as squalid as in any Dickens novel.

The three places we’d been were uglier than anything I’d ever imagined. The rooms were small and dirty and inhabited by people who seemed as unlike my brother as if Jimmy really had been a Martian. No one could tell us where he’d gone, but they all knew who I was looking for as soon as Mr. Spaulding described him. (I was afraid to even talk to these people. Luckily, Mr. Spaulding graciously relayed everything I whispered to him: that we were looking for Jimmy O’Brien, a tall, thin boy with red hair and pale skin like mine.)

“Oh, Crazy Jimmy,” they’d say. Or “that crazy white boy.” Or “Crazy Joe,” as if his name didn’t even matter.

Each time when we got back in the cab, Mr. Spaulding told me not to take it too seriously. “They’re strung out,” he’d say. “They were on something.” I didn’t understand what he was talking about, but I was too disheartened to ask.

They had all called my sweet brother “crazy.” And they’d said other things too. “Crazy Jimmy, he couldn’t get no job.” “He freaked everybody out.” “He used to scream for hours at night, wake up the whole building.” “He stared and stared, and that’s just weird, man.” “You say she’s his sister? That’s funny, ’cause Crazy Joe said his family was all dead.”

If it wasn’t for my fear of having a breathing attack, I would have cried at that last part. Not that Jimmy said we were dead, but that he’d acted like it was true, even when we could have helped him. Father had told me over and over to offer Jimmy money and I’d done it nearly every time I wrote to him. But Jimmy always said no.

“He’d buy paints instead of food, Crazy Jimmy would. He painted the weirdest-ass pictures you ever seen. He left some of ’em behind, wanna look?”

Ever since the days when Jimmy penciled the Roman centurion on his wall, he’d wanted to be a painter. He’d always had a knack for drawing. Even when we were young, he could draw an apple and it looked like an apple, where my apples looked like circles with commas on top.

I was eager to see the pictures Jimmy left behind, and once I had seen them, I would have paid nearly every dime I had to have them, but Mr. Spaulding negotiated for me and I only had to pay a dollar a piece since they were, after all, my own brother’s property.

I would have paid every dime, even though I found the pictures so revolting I was glad when I first laid eyes on them that I hadn’t eaten all morning. Even Mr. Spaulding winced, though as we were loading them into the trunk of the cab, he told me they were quite good. “Your brother is a real artist, Dorothea.”

Of course I’d told him my name. If he was going to know Jimmy’s name, he might as well know mine. He’d also told me to call him Stephen rather than Mr. Spaulding, but I hadn’t been able to do it.

I nodded just to be polite, and because I couldn’t trust myself to say anything without crying.

The pictures were all of death. One had a small beautiful dove that was being eaten alive by a lion. Another had what looked to be the corpses of two children floating in the middle of a pool. A third had nothing but a wall splattered with blood and the curse word “bitch.” The last was a man screaming and out of his mouth came a snake with its head torn off.

I had to rest after seeing these horrible images and escape from my own fear about what could have happened to my brother to change him into this. The last time I saw him he was sauntering down the dirt road, waving a happy good-bye. In his most recent letter—some weeks ago, but still—he’d said he was looking forward to spring in the city. He wanted to get outside more and take long walks. He was hoping to go to the outdoor theater. He was going to ask a girl to a movie.

I was only planning to shut my eyes until Mr. Spaulding stopped the cab, but instead I fell into a deep sleep that lasted nearly three hours. For all that time, we were parked in front of a restaurant where Mr. Spaulding had driven us. When I woke up, it was almost dark, suppertime, and I asked him why he hadn’t told me we were here.

He was listening to the radio. “It didn’t matter to me,” he said, and shrugged. “Ready to eat now?”

I stretched and looked at him in the mirror. “Fine,” I said. I was starving.

The restaurant he’d picked was called Steak ’n Shake. It looked like a clean, bright place, and I loved the idea of eating steak after so many months of eating bread and cheese at home. The steak turned out to be steak burgers, but good enough. I also ordered a chocolate milk shake. Mr. Spaulding ordered his burger with fries and a milk shake, and I realized that he hadn’t eaten today either.

“Good outfit,” the waitress said, and laughed. “Going to a sock hop?”

I didn’t reply. I’d already heard comments all day about these clothes, most of which I didn’t understand. If I could have changed into something more modern right then, I would have. Obviously,
Father’s beliefs about the fifties were a lot easier to go along with when people weren’t laughing at me.

The food came quickly. I ate without talking for several minutes, and then I told Mr. Spaulding how much I appreciated what he’d done for me today.

“Not a problem,” he said, but he didn’t look up.

I waited another moment. “I’ve been thinking about something all day. Do you know of any reason someone would want to come to Missouri?”

“I take it you’re not impressed with our fair state?”

“No, I am, very much. It’s really the most interesting place I’ve ever seen. It’s just that my brother left home with the explicit goal of coming to Missouri, and he wouldn’t tell me his reason.”

“It does seem like an unusual choice. You don’t have relatives here?”

I shook my head, and fell silent as I watched a family sit down in the booth across from us. The man and the woman were holding hands, and the two children, a boy and a girl, looked very young, though the boy was a bit older than the little girl. It struck me that the composition of this family was the same as ours had been, before my mother died. If only she were here right now, she could help me get Father to a hospital and help me find Jimmy. If only she were here, I thought, none of this would have even happened.

The gloom was overtaking me, but I shook it off and concentrated on what remained of my food.

“This is delicious,” I said, holding up the cylinder-shaped green food I’d just taken a bite from. “I’ve never tasted anything like it. What’s it called?”

“A pickle,” Mr. Spaulding said, and laughed that soft, musical laugh of his. I’d only heard it a few times all day, but it never failed to cheer me.

“Of course,” I said, smiling. “I’ve heard of those. I don’t think my father likes them though.”

We’d both finished eating when I finally admitted I had no idea
what to do next. He looked at me. “Maybe you should start again tomorrow. Where are you staying? What hotel?”

“I don’t know. It probably sounds foolish, but I was hoping I wouldn’t need to stay the night. I thought I would have Jimmy with me and we could go back.”

He took a long breath. “Do you want to keep looking? I know a few places we could try. No guarantees.”

“Oh yes. Thank you so much.”

“I’m not promising anything.”