Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories (14 page)

My father pored over the creased and greasy map.

“Aha! Eight-seven-two. Here it is. It goes through East Jerusalem and hits four-three-eight. I'll tell you what. I'll bet we can beat this detour by crossing through four-three-eight to this one with the dotted red line, nine-seven-four. Then we'll cut back and hit the highway the other side of Niles.”

Two and a half hours later, we were up to our hubs in a swamp. Overhead, four large crows circled angrily at the first disturbance their wilderness had seen in years. After backing and filling for half an hour, we finally managed to regain semisolid ground on the corduroy road that we had been thumping over for the past hour or so. None of us spoke. We long ago had learned not to say a word in times like these.

Our spattered, battered hulk hauled itself, at long last, back onto the main highway, after traveling over
patches of country that had not been seen by the eye of man since Indian times.

“I knew I'd beat the damn detour.” When my father
really
loused up, he always tried to pretend it was not only deliberate but a lot of fun.

“Did you kids see those big crows? Weren't they big? And I bet you never saw quicksand before. That was really something, wasn't it?”

Leaving a trail of mud, we rumbled along smoothly for a few minutes on the blessed concrete.

“How ‘bout some of those Mary Janes? Would you kids like some Mary Janes?” He was now in a great mood.

My mother scratched around in the luggage a few moments until she found a cellophane bag full of the dentist's delight. “Be careful how you chew ‘em,” she cautioned us futilely, “because if you're not, they'll pull your fillings out.”

The sound of our munching was drowned out by the RRRAAAAWWWRRRR of a giant, block-long truck as it barreled past our struggling flivver, eclipsing us in a deep shadow. As the truck roared past, inches away, sucking the car into its slip stream, an overwhelming cacophony of sound engulfed us—a sea of insane squawks and duckings.

“Chickens!” Randy hollered ecstatically.

Thousands of chickens peered at us through the windows on our left side. Stretching for a mile back of us, a wall of Leghorns was going by. Then they were past us and the mammoth truck pulled into the lane directly
ahead of us, shedding a stream of white feathers that struck the windshield and billowed around us and in the windows like a summer snowstorm. Almost immediately we were enveloped in a wrenching, fetid, kick-in-the-stomach stench; it swept over us in a tidal wave of nausea.

“When the swallows come back to Capistrano …” the Inkspots chimed in on the radio.

“Gaak! What a stink!!”

“Maybe you'd better pass him,” suggested my mother through her handkerchief.

“Yeah. Here goes.”

He floored the Olds, but nothing happened. She was already going her limit. Ahead, the driver of the chicken truck settled into the groove, a lumbering juggernaut rolling along at 55, spraying feathers and a dark-brown aroma over the countryside. Again and again, the old man edged out into the left lane, gamely trying to pass, but it was no use. The truck stayed tantalizingly just out of reach, the chickens squawking delightedly, their necks sticking out of the iron cages, their beady red eyes wild with excitement, as the driver happily headed to market. Occasionally, a stray egg whistled past or splashed into the radiator grille to join the dead butterflies, grasshoppers and dragonflies.

“I have to go to the toilet,” Already we had stopped at 74 gas stations so that Randy could go to the toilet. His output was incredible.

“You'll just have to hold it.”

It had begun to rain—big ripe summer drops. The
windshield wipers were stuck and now my father drove with his head craned out the window in order to see. Rain ricocheted off his face and splattered everything within a two-foot radius. It carried with it chicken feathers and other by-products that streamed back from the truck ahead. But this was not the first time we had been caught behind moving livestock. A load of ducks make chickens a pure joy. And one time we had been trapped for over four hours behind 37 sheep and at least 200 exuberantly ripe porkers on U.S. 41.

The rain suddenly stopped, just when the menagerie boomed into a turnoff, and peace reigned once again. A few feathers clung to the headlights here and there, but the last lingering aroma of the barnyard finally departed through the rear windows. Then:

“WAAAH! I GOTTA WEEWEE!”

“All
right!
But this is the last time, ya hear?”

No answer. Randy was promising nothing. Ahead, a one-pump gas station crouched amid the cornfields next to a white shack that had once been a diner but was now sinking into the clay, carrying with it its faded red sign with the single word EAT. Under a rusted soft-drink cooler sprawled a mangy hound, who greeted our arrival by opening one rheumy eye and lifting a leg to scratch wearily and indiscriminately at his undernourished room-and-boarders.

We pulled up next to the pump. A thin, creased, dusty old man wearing a blue work shirt and faded jeans sat chewing a toothpick beside the screen door on an old
wooden chair, with his feet on a “Phillips 66” oil drum. He didn't stir.

“Fillerup, bub?”

“The kid's gotta go to the toilet.” He shifted the toothpick. “Round the side, past them tires.”

“You can check the oil while we're waiting.”

Taking one foot off the oil drum, then the other, the man struggled to his feet with painful deliberation, shuffled over to the car and fiddled with the hood latch for a minute or so. Finally getting the knack of it, he yanked it open, leaned over the engine, pulled out the dipstick and held it up. It dripped rich, viscous sludge onto the gravel.

“Needs about two and a half quarts.” It
always
needed two and a half quarts. “You want the good stuff or the cheap stuff?”

“The cheap stuff. Put in the heaviest ya got.” The old crate burned oil like a diesel.

My mother and Randy were back in the car now. It was a typical pit stop on our long caravan route to Clear Lake and paradise.

Doggedly, we swung back out onto the highway. Randy relieved, the Olds refreshed. A mile up the road, my mother, making conversation, said:

“Why didn't you get gas?”

“I didn't want any of that cheap bootleg gas that guy had. I'm waiting for a Texas Blue Station.”

“The gauge says empty. Maybe you shoulda got some.”

“That gauge is cockeyed. When it says empty, there's
over an eighth of a tank left. There oughta be a Texas Blue station ahead.”

Texas Blue was an obscure gasoline that had at one time sponsored the Chicago White Sox ball games on radio, thereby winning my fathers undying patronage. If Texas Blue backed the White Sox, it was
his
gas. He would have used it if they had distilled it from old cabbages.

Thirty seconds later, the car sputtered to a stop, bone dry. After sitting stony-faced for a long time behind the wheel, the old man silently opened the door, got out, slammed it, opened the trunk, took out the red can he always carried and continually used, slammed the lid shut and set out without a word for the gas station we had left a mile and a half behind. He plodded over the horizon and was gone.

We played animal, vegetable or mineral and drank more warm lemonade while we waited in the steamy heat. Forty minutes later he returned, his two gallon can filled to the brim with gas so cheap you could hear it knocking in the container. He smelled heavily of both gasoline and bourbon. He poured the former into the tank and shortly thereafter we once again entered the mainstream of humanity.

A single red sign stuck in the road's shoulder at a crazy angle whizzed by; in white letters, it read: LISTEN, BIRDS. My father lit another Lucky and leaned forward on the alert, peering through the bug-spattered windshield.

THESE SIGNS COST MONEY. The second red-and-white
announcement flashed by, followed quickly by the third:

SO ROOST AWHILE.

The old man flicked his match out the side window, his neck craning in anticipation of the snapper. We drove on. And on. Had some crummy, rotten fiend stolen the punch line? Another sign loomed over the next hill. He squinted tensely.

GENUINE CHERRY CIDER FOR SALE.

“Fer Chrissake!” he muttered amid the thrumming uproar and the constant ping of kamikaze gnats and bettles on the spattered windshield. But finally it came, half hidden next to a gnarled oak tree at the far end of a long, sweeping curve: BUT DON'T GET FUNNY.

I didn't get it. But then, I didn't get much of anything in those days. A few yards farther on, the sponsor's name flashed by: BURMA-SHAVE. Up front, the old man cackled appreciatively; his favorite form of reading, next to the
Chicago Herald-American
sports section, was Burma Shave signs. He could recite them like a Shakespearean scholar quoting first folios. He had just added another gem to his repertoire. In the months to come, it would be referred to over and over, complete to location, time of day and pertinent weather information. In fact, he and his pal Zudock even invented their own Burma-Shave signs—pungent, unprintable and
single-entendre.
It would have been a great ad campaign, if the Burma-Shave company had the guts to do it.

It began to rain again. My father rolled up his window part way. Normally, the atmosphere in the Olds in full cry was a faint, barely discernible blue haze, an aromatic
mixture of exhaust fumes from the split muffler, a whiff of manifold heat, burning oil, sizzling grease, dust from the floor boards, alcoholic steam from the radiator and the indescribably heady aroma of an antique tangerine, left over from last year's trip, that had rolled under the front seat and gotten wedged directly in front of the heater vent. Now subtly blended with this oleo were the heavenly scents of wet hay, tiger lilies, yellow clay and fermenting manure.

Ahead of us, a house trailer towed by a Dodge drifted from side to side as they, too, rumbled on toward two weeks away from it all. The old man muttered:

“Lousy Chicago drivers”—a litany he repeated over and over to himself, endlessly, while driving. It must have had the same sort of soothing effect on him that prayer wheels and mystic slogans had on others. He firmly believed that almost all accidents, directly or indirectly, were caused by Chicago drivers, and that if they could all be barred at birth from getting behind a wheel, cars could be made without bumpers and the insurance companies could turn their efforts into more constructive channels.

“Look at that nut!” The old man muttered to himself as the house trailer cut across the oncoming lane and rumbled out of sight up a gravel road, trailing a thick cloud of yellow dust.

My mother was now passing out Wrigley's Spearmint chewing gum. “This'll keep you from getting thirsty,” she counseled sagely.

We were doing well, all things considered, having
stopped for Randy at only 75 gas stations so far. After licking off the sweet, dry coating of powdered sugar, I chewed the gum for a while and leafed restlessly through a Donald Duck Big Little Book that I'd brought along to pass the time; but I was too excited and kind of sick to worry about old Donald and Dewey and Huey and Louie.

Suddenly the front seat was in a great uproar. I sat up. My mother screamed and shrank away toward the door. The old man shouted above her shrieks:

“Fer Chrissake, it's only a
bee.
It's not gonna kill you!”

A big fat bumblebee zoomed over the pots and pans and groceries, banging from window to window as my mother, flailing her tattered copy of
True Romance,
cowered screaming on the floor boards next to the gearshift. The bee zoomed low over her, banked sharply upward and began walking calmly up the inside of the windshield, like he knew just what he was doing. Every year, a bee got in the car—the same bee. My mother had an insane fear of being stung. She had read in
Ripley's Believe It or Not!
that a bee sting had killed a man named Howard J. Detweiler in Canton, Ohio, and she never forgot it. The subject came up often around our house, especially in the summer, and my mother invariably quoted Ripley, who was universally recognized as an ultimate authority on everything. She screamed again.

“Goddamn it! Shut up! Do you want me to have an accident?” my father bellowed. He pulled off to the side of the road, flung his door open and began the chase.

“Gimme the rag outta the side pocket!” he yelled.

My mother, shielding her head with her magazine, interrupted her whimpering long enough to shriek: “Where is he? I can hear him!”

The bee strolled casually up the windshield a few inches farther, humming cheerfully to himself. The old man tore around to the other side of the car to get the rag himself. Sensing that he had made his point, the bee revved his motors with a loud buzz and was out the window. He disappeared back down the road into the lowering skies of early evening, obviously getting set for the next Indiana car to show up over the hill.

“He got away, the bastard!” My father slid back into his seat, threw the Olds into gear and pulled back out onto the asphalt.

“OK, he's gone. You can get up now.” His voice dripped with scorn.

My mother crawled back up into her seat, flushed and shaking slightly, and said in a weak voice: “You never can tell about bees. I read once where….”

My father snorted in derision: “Howard J. Detweiler! I'd like to know where that goddamn bee stung him that it killed him. I'll bet I know where it got him!” he roared.

“Shhhh. The kids are listening.”

“Hey, look! There's Crystal Lake.” My father pointed off to the left.

I sat bolt upright. Way off past a big gray farmhouse and a bank of black trees under the darkening sky was a tiny flash of water.

A gravel road slanted off into the trees, bracketed by a thicket of signs:
BOATS FOR RENT BATHING FISHING OVERNIGHT CABINS BEER EATS
. We were in vacationland.