Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories (13 page)

Gug gug gug gug…. It failed to catch.

The old man whispered hoarsely: “Don't nobody breathe.”

He tried it again. G-gug gug …BBRRROOOOOO-MMMMI

The mighty six-cylinder, low-compression Oldsmobile engine rattled into life, rocker arms clattering, valve springs clanging, pistons slapping. After all, 142,000 miles isn't exactly around the block. He threw her into reverse and slowly she lumbered backward down the driveway, swaying under the immense load of half the available stock of the A. & P.

Safely out on the street, he threw her into first. Painfully she began to roll forward. I peered out of the tiny crack of window available to me, a square of glass no more than three inches across, and saw my assembled friends standing dumbly along the sidewalk. For a brief instant, I felt a deep pang of regret about all the great
things that were going to happen in the neighborhood while I was gone. From somewhere off to my left, amid the rumblings of the Olds, I heard the first muffled squeakings of my kid brother.

Two minutes later, we turned down a side road toward the main highway that wended its way listlessly past junk yards and onion patches toward the distant, rolling, sandy hills of Michigan. It was Sunday and already a solid line of automobiles, bumper to bumper, stretched from one horizon to the other, barely moving. The old man, his eyes narrowed with hatred, glared through the windshield at his most ancient and implacable foe—the traffic.

“Damn Sunday drivers! Stupid sons of bitches!”

He was warming up for the big scenes yet to come. As traffic fighters go, he was probably no more talented nor dedicated than most other men of his time. But what he lacked in finesse he more than made up for in sheer ferocity. His vast catalog of invective—learned in the field, so to speak, back of the stockyards on the South Side of Chicago-had enriched every Sunday-afternoon drive we ever took. Some men gain their education about life at their mothers knee, others by reading yellowed volumes of fiction. I nurtured and flowered in the back seat of the Olds, listening to my father.

At least we were on our way. No one could deny that. We crept along in the great line of Sunday traffic, the Olds muttering gloomily as its radiator temperature slowly mounted. My mother occasionally shouted back through the din in our direction:

“Are you kids all
right?”

All right? I was out of my head with excitement. I looked forward to this moment all year long; it made Christmas and everything else pale to nothing. I had pored over every issue of
Field & Stream
in the barbershop, dreaming about tracking beavers and fording streams and making hunters stew. Of course, nobody ever
did
any of those things in Michigan, but they were great to read about. One time, our scoutmaster took us out on a hike through Hohman and painted moss on the north side of all the fireplugs, so that we could blaze a trail to the vacant lot behind the Sherwin-Williams sign. But that was about the extent of my expertise in nature lore.

Hour after hour we inched northward, and finally burst out of the heavy traffic and turned onto the rolling, open highway that led through the sandy hills to Marcellus, Michigan. By now it was well along in the afternoon and the temperature inside the car hovered at maybe 15 or 20 degrees below the boiling point. The Olds had a habit of hitting a thrumming, resonant vibration at about 50 that jiggled the bones, loosened the molars, rattled the eyeballs and made all talk totally impossible. But over the roar, a faint squeak filtered through the cartons to my left. My mother turned in her seat, took one look and shouted at the old man to stop the car.

“WHAT THE HELL NOW?” he bellowed, as he pulled over to the side of the road under a pair of great, overhanging Michigan poplars. Everywhere around
us the yellow-and-dun fields, mottled with patches of grapevines, stretched out to the horizon.

My mother dashed around the side of the car to my brother's door. I heard him being hauled out of his tiny capsule. Oatmeal, Ovaltine, caterpillars—everything he had downed in the past couple of days gushed out into the lilies.

I sat in my slot, peering out of the window at the alien landscape, my excitement now at fever pitch. Randy always got sick at about this point. That meant we were halfway there. Ashen-faced, he was stuffed back into his hole. Once again, the starter spring stuck. Once again, the old man raged up and down on the bumper. We were off.

It was then that the bombshell struck. Oh, no! OH,
NO!
I slumped deep down into the seat, a two-pound box of rice sliding from the shelf behind me and pouring its contents down the back of my neck. The Oldsmobile boomed on toward Clear Lake and its fighting three-ounce sunfish, its seven-inch bluegills and its five-inch perch, all waiting for me under lily pads, beside submerged logs and in the weed beds.
Oh, no!
I had left all my fishing tackle in the garage, all piled up next to the door, where I had taken it the night before to make sure I wouldn't forget it! Every sinker, every bobber, every hook I had saved for, polished, loved and cherished stood all neatly piled up back home in the garage.

“DAD!” I cried out in anguish. The great thrum of the Olds drowned me out.

“HEY, DAD!”

He glanced into the rearview mirror. “Yeah?”

“I LEFT ALL MY FISHING TACKLE IN THE GARAGE!” That meant
his,
too.

“WHAT?!” He straighted up in his sweat-soaked pongee shirt. “YOU DID WHAT?!”

“I … I….”

“Oh, fer CHRISSAKE! What next!” He spit through the open window into the onrushing hot air. It arced back into the rear window and missed my brothers head by an inch. My mother had been asleep now for some time. She never stirred through this disaster. Deep in my hole, I wept.

The steady, rumbling oscillation of the ancient Olds rolled back over me. Way down deep inside, the first faint gnawings of car sickness, like some tiny, gray, beady-eyed rat scurrying among my vitals, merged appropriately with the disappointment and the heat. A faint whiff of the sweetish-sour aroma of my kid brother filtered through the camp gear, drifted past my nose and out the window to my right. I stared with glazed eyes at the blur of telephone poles; at a barn with a huge Bull Durham sign on its side, with its slogan,
HER HERO
; at farmhouse after farmhouse; at a rusty tin sign with its faded message:
HOOKED RUGS FOR SALE
—
ALSO EGGS.

The low hills, green, yellow and brown, wound on and on. I had wrecked the vacation. You might just as well tell Santa Claus to go to hell as leave your split-bamboo casting rod that you saved all year to buy and that had a cork handle and a level-wind Sears, Roebuck reel with a red jewel in the handle, and your Daredevil
wiggler, so red and white and chromy, back in the garage amid the bald Goodyears and empty Simoniz cans. Oh, well, nothing ever works out, anyway. My little gray, furry rat reared on its hind legs, his fangs flashing in the darkness.

Over the steady hum of the mighty Olds engine I could hear the pitiful keening of my kid brother, who had now burrowed down to the floor boards in his travail. I stared sullenly out the window over a huge, rolled-up, dark-green comforter and an orange crate full of coffeepots and frying pans.

Suddenly: BA-LOOOMMMMPPP! K-tunk k-tunk kk-tunk k-tunk.

The car reeled drunkenly under the wrenching blows of a disintegrating Allstate tire. In the front seat, the driver wrestled with the heaving steering wheel. Overloaded by a quarter ton at least, the car continued to lurch forward.

Ding ding ding ding. It was down to the rim now. My father hauled back on the emergency brake. We slued up onto the gravel shoulder of the highway and rolled to a limping stop. He cut the ignition; but for a full 20 seconds or so, the motor continued to turn over, firing on sheer heat. Finally, she coughed twice and stopped. Dead silence enveloped us all. My father sat unmoving behind the wheel, his hands clenched on the controls in silent rage.

“Do you think it's a flat?” my mother chirped helpfully, her quick, mechanical mind analyzing the situation with deadly accuracy.

“No, I don't think it could be that. Probably we ran over a pebble.” His voice was low, almost inaudible, drenched in sarcasm.

“I'm glad to hear that,” she sighed with relief. “I thought for a minute we might have had a flat.”

He stared out his window at the seared corn stalks across the road, watching the corn borers destroy what was left of the crops after the locusts had finished their work. We sat for possibly two minutes, frozen in time and space like flies in amber.

Then, in the lowest of all possible voices, he breathed toward the cornfield: “Balls.”

Very quietly he opened the door, climbed out and stalked back to the trunk.

“ALL A' YA GET OUT!” he shouted.

My mother, realizing by this time that it hadn't been a pebble after all, whispered: “Now, don't get on his nerves. And don't whine.”

The four of us gathered on the dusty gravel. Along the road behind us for a quarter mile at least, chunks of black, twisted rubber smoked in the sun and marked our trail of pain.

The old man silently opened the trunk, peered into the tangled mess of odds and ends that always filled it and began to rummage glumly among the shards. He removed the clamp that released the spare tire. In his world, spare tires were tires that had long since been given extreme unction but had somehow clung to a thread of life and perhaps a shred or two of rubber. Next, the jack.

We sat at a safe distance next to the cornfield, in the shade of an elm tree suffering from oak blight

“Let's have a picnic while Daddy fixes the tire,” suggested Mother cheerfully.

Daddy, his shirt drenched in sweat, tore his thumbnail off while trying to straighten out the jack handle, which was insanely jointed in four different spots, making it as pliable as a wet noodle and about as useful. While he cursed and bled, we opened the lunch basket and fished out the warm cream-cheese sandwiches and the lunch-meat-and-relish sandwiches.

“Gimme a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich,” said my kid brother.

“We don't have peanut-butter-and-jelly.”

“I want a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.”

“We have nice tuna and egg-salad sandwiches. On rye bread. You can pick the seeds out and have fun making believe they're little bugs.”

“I WANT PEANUT-BUTTER-AND-JELLY!” Randy's voice was rising to a shrill pitch. Off in the middle distance, the jack clanked and rattled as the Olds teetered precariously on the flimsy metal support.

“GODDAMN IT! IN TWO SECONDS, I'M GONNA COME OVER AND BAT YOU ONE GOOD!” yelled the tire repairman.

Randy threw his tuna-salad sandwich out into the road, where it was instantly smashed flat by a Mack truck. Our little picnic went on. We drank lemonade, ate cookies.

Finally came the call: “OK. Pile in.”

“How ‘bout some music,” my mother asked rhetorically as we rolled out onto the highway.

My father stonily drove on. Sometimes, after a particularly bad flat, he didn't speak to the family for upward of two weeks. I suspect that he always pictured heaven as a place where everybody was issued a full set of brand-new, four-ply U. S. Royal roadmasters, something he never in his life attained, at least on this earth.

My mother fiddled with the car radio, which hummed and crackled.

The Andrews Sisters were always rolling out barrels and having fun.

“Isn't that nice? Now, how ‘bout playing a game, kids? What am I thinking of—animal, vegetable or mineral?”

We always played games in the car, like who could tell quicker what kind of car was coming toward us; or Count the Number of Cows; or Beaver, where the first guy who saw a red truck or a blue Chevy or a Coca-Cola sign could hit the other guy if he hollered “Beaver” first. Then there was Padiddle, which was generally played when there were girls in the car and had a complicated scoring system involving burned-out headlights, the highest point getter being a police car running
one-eyed. But Padiddle was never played in cars carrying mothers and kid brothers.

“NOW
what the hell!” My father had broken his vow of silence.

Ahead, across the highway, stretched a procession of sawhorses with flashing lights and arrows and a sign, reading: ROAD UNDER CONSTRUCTION—DETOUR AHEAD 27.8 MILES.

Muttering obscenities, the old man veered to the right, onto a slanting gravel cow path. Giant bulldozers and road graders roared all around us.

“Holy God! This'll kill that spare!”

The Olds crashed into a hole. The springs bottomed. She bellowed forward, throwing gravel high into the air. The trail wound through a tiny hamlet—and then, a fork, where a red arrow pointed to the right: CONTINUE DETOUR. The road to the left was even narrower than the other, marked with a battered black-and-white tin sign perforated with rusting .22-caliber bullet holes: COUNTYROAD 872(ALTERNATE).

We fishtailed to a stop, yellow dust pouring in the windows.

“Gimme that map!”

The old man reached across the dashboard and snapped open the glove compartment just as a truck rumbled past, raining gravel onto the windshield and along the side of the car.

“What the hell is THIS?” He yanked his hand convulsively out of the glove compartment. It dripped a dark, viscous liquid.

“OK,” he said with his best Edgar Kennedy slow burn. “Who stuck a Hershey bar in the glove compartment?” No one spoke.

“All right, who did it?” He licked his fingers disgustedly.

“What a goddamn mess!”

The mystery of the Hershey bar was the subject of bitter wrangling off and on for years afterward. I know that
I
didn't stick it in there. If my brother had gotten hold of a Hershey bar, he would have eaten it instantly. It never did come out—but then, neither did the chocolate; forevermore, the Oldsmobile had a chocolate-lined glove compartment.