Where's My Wand?: One Boy's Magical Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting (13 page)

I stood rocking uncomfortably on my heels until, finally, they pulled apart.

“I’m sorry about the bedroom,” Grandma said. “I can send you a few dollars a month until—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mother replied, waving her hand airily. “Valerie hated those curtains we’d bought her.”

Mother walked with us to the door and opened it.

“Well,” Grandma replied, patting Mother’s hand as she slowly navigated the two steps into the garage. “They’re certainly nothing
I’d
choose.”

M
idwest Bus Lines service to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, now boarding.”

The monotone delivery of these words probably spoke volumes about the career of the woman on the PA, but they were music to my ears. And they were about to change my life.

Dad and I were beginning the second leg of our annual pilgrimage to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where each year we drove one of our cars up to leave in the grease-covered hands of Earl, a mechanic friend of Dad’s, who spent the next week turning it into a purring model of used Pontiac perfection.

I had never particularly liked Earl, for no other reason than that he had a habit of enthusiastically attempting to explain the inner workings of the combustible engine. As someone who would crawl beneath a car only to retrieve a Cher album that had rolled under it, I found his explanations so soporific that I simultaneously appeared to be both rude and narcoleptic.

Because Earl and Dad were old friends, Earl performed all the labor for free. When Dad had recently mentioned this in passing, Earl’s stock shot up in my eyes, since his generosity was what made these trips economically feasible and allowed Dad and me to stay in the glamorous Roosevelt Hotel in downtown Cedar Rapids—a twelve-story high-rise with an
elevator—
a far cry from our family’s typical travel lodgings, where the headlights of returning guests lit our room up like a Broadway stage.

We were now returning to Cedar Rapids to pick up said car, and for my money, the sooner we were on our way, the better. I was no fan of hanging out in bus terminals, since many of the passengers did not appear to be on the best of terms with either soap or the voices in their heads.

Ironically, taking the bus was actually less stressful than having Dad drive, since he tailgated the cars in front of us so closely that the bumpers eventually smoked a cigarette. It never seemed to be an act of aggression—Dad was so laid-back he could pass for dead—but more like a confidence borne of one too many unfathomable escapes.

“Ray!” Mother would scream, throwing her hands against the dashboard to brace herself for the bloody crash about to ensue. “RAY!!”

“I’ve got it,” Dad would reply calmly, slamming on the brakes just as we were about to violate the backseat of a Buick. During road trips to Kansas City to visit our grand-parents, Val and I preferred to lie on the floor of the backseat, theorizing that the front seats would provide a cushion against the carnage.

Now, as Dad and I marched onto the belching bus, sizing up the slightly tattered seat covers and the toothless denizens with whom we’d be held hostage for the next six hours, I poked my father.

“What?”

“Maybe sometime,” I whispered, “we can take Grey-hound instead?”

“Why?”

“Well, their buses are so spiffy.”

“Yeah, I guess they are pretty deluxe.”

“And I’ll bet their customers have murdered less people.”

Dad glanced around to see if any other passengers had heard me, although most of them were probably too busy selecting a victim to notice.

“Midwest is the bus line that runs north-south. They’re the only game in town. But at least we get to stay at the Roosevelt, right?”

I would have stayed at San Quentin with Dad. I looked forward to these trips, for they were our special time—time that, unlike our other activities of togetherness, didn’t involve annoying contraptions like a weed wacker, a circular saw or my sister. And Dad seemed to enjoy our lengthy conversations, which mostly consisted of my dissertations on why Diana Ross left the Supremes, the importance of snow days to the sixth-grade psyche, and our visitation plan should Mother be institutionalized. Nothing went wrong when Dad and I were alone together.

I even looked forward to our destination. I had spent the first eight years of my life in Cedar Rapids, and had reasonably fond memories of this city, given that its biggest calling card was a Quaker Oats factory and the entire town smelled like oatmeal. My grade-school classes had taken a field trip to the factory every year, and although the assembly line was an exercise in hearing loss, the tour finished big: each kid got two single-serving boxes of cereal, a gift from the fine folks at Quaker Oats.

The resulting sugar rush—as kids tore into their boxes before they’d even exited the sample room—resulted in a spectacular free-for-all that was only quelled when Carl Tompkins’s mother, who drove the school bus, blew her whistle and threatened to “beat the living crap” out of every last one of us. It was a much-anticipated annual event.

As Dad and I boarded the bus, we took the row across from a hippie-ish woman with long brown hair. She was wearing a poncho and carrying a guitar. I wondered if she would lull us all to sleep with a medley of Carpenters hits, or if—as I had learned in Sunday school—the guitar was simply where she stored her LSD and Satan worship paraphernalia. Behind us was an old man who kept fiddling impatiently with his hearing aid, cursing as a high-pitched squeal emanated from it.

I glanced at the driver. He was considerably younger than most of the Midwest drivers I had seen before. Perhaps twenty-five or thirty, he was a small, wiry black guy with a great deal of nervous energy. Why was he so eager to get this trip under way? I thought to myself. As I patiently searched the vast treasure trove of wisdom innate to a twelve-year-old, it finally came to me: he’s got a girl waiting for him on the other end.

I could relate. I had recently begun going steady with Alice Larkspur, a pretty, lanky girl from my church. It wasn’t her religious affiliation that drew me to her, or her long, dark curly hair, or a desire to go steady with anyone. It was what she had in her backyard: a thirty-foot-long aboveground pool with a deep end, which catapulted Alice from a 7 to a 10 in my book, and resulted in the understandable need to lock her up long-term.

I knew that at some point I would have to kiss her, but figured that I could stall this until summertime, when the cannonballs and Marco Polo games would make this unpleasant task worth the sacrifice. I was currently in no hurry to get back to Alice, since it was the dead of winter, but our driver obviously had other reasons for wanting to see his girl. Perhaps she had a toboggan.

As we settled in for the ride, I gazed out the window at the gray, icy day. The weather the previous weekend had been uneventful, but today it was sleeting.

“It’s gonna be slow going today,” Dad said apologetically as he opened his Star Trek novel.

“That’s okay,” I replied cheerfully. The later we arrived, the less time Earl would have to explain spark plugs. “Hey, Dad, can we get a room on a high floor at the hotel?”

“Maybe. Why?”

“Oh, no reason.” Immediately upon our arrival at the Roosevelt each visit, I would grab the ice bucket and head down the hall, ostensibly to fill it up—although in reality, my time was spent pushing all the buttons in the elevator and riding it up and down. The hotel’s other guests seemed unusually put out by having to stop at every floor, which mystified me, given the absurdly high quotient of fun. I would return an hour later with a bucket full of ice, explaining that the machine on our floor was out of order, a story that never seemed to lose its credibility with Dad.

As we passed through the city and headed out into the countryside, Dad put his book down and began his favorite ritual: pointing out livestock, something he had done since Val and I were toddlers.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a cow.

“A sheep,” I replied dutifully.

“And that?” he said, pointing to a horse.

“A buffalo.”

The old man seated behind us leaned up to Hippie Chick and motioned to me.

“Got a retard on board,” he announced at a vocal level indicating a rather immediate need for fresh hearing-aid batteries. Hippie Chick smiled at me sympathetically.

My face became beet red as I turned back to Dad. “I’m too old for this, you know.”

When I was six, teaching me the wrong names for a host of farm animals had been highly amusing to Dad, and highly disturbing to my first-grade teacher, who had called Mother and Dad in for a conference to discuss my apparent learning disability.

“Are you really ever too old,” Dad replied, “to have fun?” He started to tickle me.

For me, a feather within five feet would cause an epileptic seizure of giggles, and Dad’s tickling normally sent me into spasms. But today, for some reason, his good-natured torture ticked me off.

“Stop it!” I hollered. I pulled away from Dad.

Chatter on the bus grew quiet. The driver glanced in the mirror. Given the clientele, everyone doubtless assumed I was being maimed, and several people hurried up the aisle for a better view.

“What’s wrong?” Dad said, mystified.

I folded my arms across my chest and stared out the window. I was angry. And confused as to why I was angry.

Dad pulled away. “Sorry.”

We fell into an awkward silence. Dad picked up his book and pretended to be engrossed by the latest logs of the star-ship
Enterprise
.

One hour passed, then two. The sleet had become slushy light snow, and now seemed to be turning to plain old rain, which didn’t bode well for arriving late to Earl’s latest mechanical monologue.

As I watched a guy several rows up swat at imaginary birds, the guilt over my outburst weighed on me. I knew that Dad hadn’t meant to bug me. He was simply a blundering adult who, through no fault of his own, couldn’t possibly understand the deep and complex emotions of a twelve-year-old.

I decided to strike up a conversation, selecting a tried-and-true topic that I figured we could agree on.

“Did you hear Mother the other night, when she found out that I’d used the bathtub in the hall bathroom? She asked God to strike her dead.”

“That bathtub is for guests.”

“We never
have
any guests.”

“Well, that’s true,” he said, setting his book down, “but what if there was a tornado and the neighbors’ house was destroyed and we had to take them in?”

“She’d make us turn off all the lights and pretend we weren’t home.”

Dad chuckled. “You got me there. But she means well.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

There was a long moment of silence. Dad put his book down. He turned to me and lowered his voice. “If I tell you something, you can never tell your mother I told you. Do you understand?” He suddenly seemed very serious.

“Sure,” I replied with anticipation. He’d never told me a secret before.

He took a breath. “Your grandmother has always seemed to favor your uncle Stewart. And I think your mother always felt like she wasn’t good enough.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Your mother is the one who sends your grandmother money. She’s the one who calls and writes every week. And she’s the one who’ll take care of her if anything happens. But it never seems to be quite enough to win your grandmother’s approval.”

“But why is Mother so mean to
us
?”

“I think she just thinks if everything looks perfect, she’ll measure up.”

The bus skidded slightly.

“Whoa!” I exclaimed, grabbing my armrest, grateful for the opportunity to steer the conversation away from this now uncomfortable topic. “The road’s getting slick, huh?”

“Yeah,” Dad replied. “It must be turning to freezing rain.”

I looked at the driver’s face in the rearview mirror. He seemed unperturbed by the growing road hazard, which made me feel better. He may be young, but this meant his reactions were razor sharp, like a cheetah’s.

The bus skidded again. Those passengers who were awake and/or sober yelped slightly.

“He better slow down a little!” the old man behind us bellowed.

Dad returned to his book, and, reassured by his blithe lack of concern, I began to hum “American Pie” as I watched the oncoming cars zoom past.

We began barreling down a hill. Wow, the driver’s really in a hurry, I thought to myself. His girlfriend must have a snowmobile.

As we rounded a corner, the bus hit a patch of black ice. Then, everything seemed to happen in slow motion.

The bus fishtailed, the back half scissoring out into an oncoming lane of traffic as the passengers screamed, the old man behind us nearly imploding my one good eardrum. Before the driver could react, a Ford Pinto slammed into the side of the bus with such force that I thought we were all dead.

The impact thrust the bus off to the side of the road, rocking but still miraculously upright. The horrendously smashed Pinto, however, remained in the middle of the highway, as cars attempted to dodge it.

“Are you okay?” Dad said, grabbing my arm.

“Uh-huh,” I replied, breathing fast. I stared out the window, horrified, at the accordionlike car. The windows were smashed, and I thought I could see two people—a man and a woman, perhaps—slumped inside.

“Ohhh, this is bad,” I said, rocking in my seat as I stared down at the car.

“Great,” the old man bellowed. “This is gonna make us late!”

The bus driver jumped up. “Is anybody hurt?”

Gradually everyone managed to eke out responses in the negative, and the driver radioed for help, then swung himself out the door and attempted to cross the busy highway to get to the Pinto.

I closed my eyes, summoning all the power of my magic.