Piper (36 page)

I wasn't sure if he was serious or joking, until he laughed that warm Irish Tom Scanlon laugh that was as much chagrin as grin.

Dad made a last minute plea to rent a Winnebago, but desperately needing to finish something I'd started I said it had to be the Skylark. At Willard's urging, I did agree to a full lube and tune up, and I made one more concession. I stood for the Washington State driver's license exam and passed, despite hitting the windshield wiper instead of the turn signal for a lane change on the way back to the licensing office. Willard declined Dad's suggestion that he renew his license.

“I'll goof up drivin' and Tom'll yell at me,” he said. “Besides, this trip's for you and your dad. Me and the dogs are just baggage.”

We picked up Willard at Edda's place, a little farmhouse just outside of town surrounded by a picket fence, with moss on the shakes, a porch roof that swayed like the back of a workhorse, and hanging baskets full of geraniums and black-eyed Susans. The cats were perched on railings and window sills, watching the dogs bound off the porch and run circles around Willard and Edda as they walked arm-in-arm toward the car. Instead of the broken suitcase held together with bungee cord, Edda had lent Willard a soft navy blue Pullman case with leather trim. When they embraced at the gate, Willard seemed slight next to Edda, but he closed his eyes hard and finished with a grab of her behind.

“You all take care of my Willard now,” she giggled as I shooed him and the dogs into the backseat.

Once we were on the road, things became a little tense when Willard asked to stop at the first three rest areas.

“Again?” Dad said, looking at his watch, and I thought Willard must be regretting his insistence on Dad coming along.

“It's for the dogs,” Willard said, but I noticed that each time they reached the pet area, he unzipped and peed right next to them.

“Willard, how is it you could keep those dogs in the basement for a year without me seeing you and now you have to run them in and out of the car like a hockey squad?”

Willard couldn't see the smile on Dad's face. “Sorry ‘bout that, Tom. We'll reorganize back here.”

There was always at least one rear window cracked open and the dogs took turns sticking their noses out. The noise from the wind had the effect of cutting the frontseat off from the back. Dad and I could converse fairly normally, but we had to yell to be heard by Willard. When we passed an exit sign for a rest area, Dad automatically put on his blinker and looked into the back …

Each time, Willard waved us on with a zip of his lip. I leaned over and looked behind the seat to see if they were peeing into a milkshake carton. Willard had a smug look on his face. He and Dad were in a duel.

Finally, at the La Grande exit, Dad blinked. “Okay, Willard. Uncle! I'm going to burst if we don't pull off.”

Willard whistled through his teeth and everyone laughed.

By the time we reached Boise, I figured Dad and I had spent about as much time one-on-one as we had the whole previous year, and we were running out of things to say. I was grateful, therefore, when we slipped into a rhythm of next driver sleeping. It was especially hard to talk about anything important in the broad daylight, strapped next to each other in the frontseat like a cosmonaut and an astronaut who'd rendezvoused in orbit, neither speaking the other's language except for basic survival phrases.

Each night we found a battered motel, usually with buzzing neon signs that said “Hot water” and “Color TV.” Anything qualified as long as they took dogs. The place south of Provo, called the Motel Utah, consisted of twelve dilapidated white cottages in green trim, set in a U-shape around what used to be a swimming pool but was now a children's play area half full of garden bark and cluttered with rusty sand buckets, one-pedaled tricycles, and candy wrappers. Instead of packaged soap bars in our room, there were slivers and ovals in greens, golds, and ivory that had been used by previous guests. The hot water warmer for coffee had a chunk of plastic missing at the base that exposed the coils. The toilet paper ran down to the cardboard on my first pull and I had to use a piece of newspaper from the wastebasket.

After we washed our plates and cups in the sink, Dad and Willard poured themselves a glass of Chablis from the jug we were carrying and things loosened up. Dad proposed a slam poetry contest, where each of us had five minutes to write a poem and recite it out loud. My nutty ideas fell onto the paper like acorns, randomly and with long pauses in between. By the time I was done, there were more words crossed out than not, and I figured it didn't really matter which ones I read because random selection would probably improve it. Dad's poem was flowing and melodic.

“I plagiarized Yeats,” he confessed.

Willard's, which he didn't bother to write down, we called doggerel:

A prince of toads named Willard

Fell head over heels for Edda.

The dogs ate the cats,

And the cow jumped over the moon.

“Bravo, Willard,” Dad said, clapping for him. “There's no such thing as a bad poem.”

By the fourth day, Dad and Willard seemed to be warming up to each other. I attributed it to the state patrol pulling Dad over for speeding near Rifle, Colorado.

“Who's Willard Cooper?” the patrolman asked after he'd examined the registration.

Dad pointed sheepishly to the backseat. “He is.” Willard had been emancipated. Dad had signed the Skylark back over to him.

Willard and Dad started acting like kids who'd never been out of Stampede. They wanted to climb Pike's Peak, buy souvenirs in Kit Carson, and stop in Russell, Kansas to find Bob Dole. Willard, of course, had to mail postcards to Edda from every town. We'd sit in front of post offices with the engine idling, helping him spell words like
fervent
and
voluptuous
. We were his thesaurus. Dad even lent him lines from Yeats.

“She wants to mark our trip on the globe,” Willard said.

At rest stops, Dad and Willard started racing the dogs to the pet area and worked on their retrieving skills with a ragged tennis ball Dad had found. I was the one who had to coax them back into the car. Just as you could tell by the way someone held a baby whether or not they'd raised kids, you could tell Dad had grown up with dogs the way he knew how to rub them so they'd roll over on their backs and beg him to keep doing it. But he could also be firm and he scolded them if they jumped out of the car before he said okay. They seemed to love him for that too. I'd catch him palming pieces of his sandwich, slipping it to them in the backseat, and letting them lick off his fingers.

At Topeka, we left the interstate and headed north to take the path less traveled. “We've got to get in the mood for the river,” Dad said, “and away from those little reflectors that shoot at your tires when you veer across the lane.” While Dad drove and Willard slept, I read passages from
A Portrait of the Artist
out loud and asked Dad to explain them to me. It was better than talking to his brother Seamus. I learned about his affection for the Jesuits, how they'd encouraged him to become a priest just like his mother had. “You just grip the bedpost at night if you have impure thoughts, they told me.” But I was relieved to hear of his reservations. “I kept imagining doing some horribly scandalous thing and being drummed out of the order. I felt dirty next to their aspirations for me.” Of Dad, I was beginning to think the same thing that Samuel Clemens's mom had said about her son.
He's a well of truth, but you can't bring it up in one bucket
.

Crossing through Cameron, Chillecoth, Meadville, Wheeling, and other small towns in Missouri that didn't look that different from Stampede, we did word associations, which I liked because there were no wrong answers and no commentary. Each word was the trigger for the next one.

Dad: “Sign of the cross.”

Me: “Guilt.”

Him: “Sweat.”

Me: “Crotch.”

Him: “Humm, athletic supporter.”

Me: “Penis.”

Him: “Pig.”

Me: “Chauvinist.”

Him: “Chaucer.”

Me: “Tales.”

Him: “Pony.”

Me: “Sunset.”

Him: “Romance.”

Me: “Impossible.”

I tried to figure out why the chemistry was different, why I wasn't feeling overwhelmed by him, and decided it was because we were meeting on neutral space. Not the interstate highway or the cab of the Skylark, but an imaginary space out there that neither one of us was used to visiting called childhood.

At Shelbine, Missouri, Dad splurged and pulled into the full service pumps at a Texaco. We sat there while Willard walked and watered the dogs. A high school girl scrubbed the bugs off our windshield, and I popped the question that had been bugging me since reading John Carlisle's will. “Whose idea was the adoption, Dad?”

He raised his eyebrows and puffed his cheeks and I wondered if he was going to sanitize his answer so as not to offend me. “It wasn't that simple.” He studied the remains of a yellowish-green bug on the windshield. “Of course, your mom was intrigued by the idea and, well, it seemed like the right thing to do.”

“You were skeptical.”

I knew I'd stumbled into a room where I didn't belong because his face tightened and he put his hands on the top of the steering wheel and pushed himself back against the seat. I noticed he'd started wearing his wedding ring again on this trip, a simple gold band. “I just wanted to make sure it was best for everyone. Especially you.” I tried to imagine the debate that must have transpired between them eighteen years ago. I remembered Seamus telling me how Mom was such a Bohemian. When I had asked him what that meant, he said, “She didn't give a whit about china patterns.” “So? Neither does my dad,” I answered, and he said, “Yeah, but your dad respects people who do,” and I kind of understood.

I waited until the girl had finished squeegeeing the soap off my side of the window. “Why couldn't Mom have a baby on her own?”

“We tried,” he said. “Fertility drugs, sperm tests, the works. It wasn't meant to be. Then the situation with Ashley presented itself.”

“What did Ashley think about it?”

“The family had already decided she had to give up the baby. We met her in Minneapolis, just before you were born. It felt very awkward, like we were window shopping. Everything was hush-hush. The Carlisles didn't want anyone to know she'd conceived a child out of wedlock. She was sixteen.”

“That's younger than me.”

“She was gifted, smart as a whip. That's why the family sent her away to a prep school for girls in St. Cloud. That was the Carlisle way.” The way he said it I knew Dad didn't agree, and I wondered whether he knew what kind of abuse Ashley had been subjected to by her mother. “But things didn't go well. She had the baby, dropped out of high school, and then bummed around until she finally fell through a crack somewhere.”

“Who was the father?”

“Ashley would never tell.”

“He must have been tall and skinny.”

Dad cupped his hand on my bony knee. “Oh, come on, you've got a model's build.”

“Do you think losing her child set her off somehow?”

Dad took a deep breath and gripped the steering wheel again. “I didn't think so then, but maybe it did.”

My paranoia over the adoption seemed a pittance in comparison to Ashley's plight. She didn't have any more choice in the matter than I did. If I was the result of a pinhole in a condom or no condom at all, at least someone had stepped forward to claim the mistake. Ashley didn't have a savior. “I guess I had no business prying into all this.”

“The hell. We probably had no business keeping it a secret.”

It was late when we arrived in Hannibal, but Willard insisted we find Mark Twain's boyhood home, which wasn't hard because of all the signs. We parked in front of the home, on Hill Street, and Willard and the dogs burst out of the car. I was beginning to realize there was a method to Willard's exuberance. Every chance, he'd made sure Dad and I were alone.

The Mark Twain home was a rather small, two-story frame house and, even though it was closed, Dad and I walked over to it. I leaned against a tall wood fence that connected to a corner of the house and looked heavenward. They said that Halley's Comet flashed across the world the night Samuel Clemens was born, scattering Stardust through the skies, and it didn't come back again until the night he died, seventy-five years later. I kept looking for a signal in the air, something particularly evocative, something that would have inspired a man to write his brains out, but everything looked so normal. Even allowing for the fact that the sidewalks and asphalt were probably added later, I was still struck with how much it was
like
every other town I'd ever seen.

“Are you disappointed?” Dad said.

“A little bit. Maybe Willard shouldn't have seen this.”

“It teaches you something about the power of imagination,” he said. As we'd gotten closer to Hannibal, Dad had explained how Mark Twain was a newspaper man before he ever turned literary. He worked for his brother Orion on the
Hannibal Journal
, a weekly they had to move into their house to keep alive. It finally went dead broke when cows wandered into the house and ate the type rollers.

There was a streetlight almost directly overhead that buzzed, reminding me of the crickets in the field next to the double billboards. I kept thinking of Mom and how she was supposed to have ended up here with Willard and that made me flash for the umpteenth time on the Jacuzzi and then I thought of something worse than dying and that was the prospect of living short. In all the ordinary days when Mom and Willard had lived in the same town they could have said anything to each other, gone anywhere together, come to Hannibal, but they'd busied themselves in their lives and let the sand run out of the hourglass. I was feeling the pain of distance, from the biological parents I never knew, from Mom, and even from the dad who was standing by the fence with me.