Driving With Dead People (9 page)

During the first week of summer break between fifth and sixth grades, all the kids in Galesburg were out on their ten-speed bikes or playing softball behind the community building over by Granda’s.

The Whitmore kids and I were playing army. We had a stash of plastic weapons (no real guns allowed) hidden under the pine bushes and snacks concealed in a dead log out in the field behind our house. There were two teams, five kids each, hiding from one another, trying to steal snacks and weapons.

If you were shot or captured, you were marched, blindfolded with a red bandana tied around your head, to the Whitmores’ white wooden shed, where you sat on a plastic milk crate until you got so bored and hot you just walked out and started playing like you hadn’t even been captured in the first place.

Kyle and I were rounding the corner of Mrs. Shaw’s house when we spied Jamie and his friends playing basketball. Jamie had just gotten a brand-new Wilson basketball hoop and backboard that Uncle Dale had nailed up on the telephone pole that stood beside our driveway. Jamie was too old to play army. He played basketball instead. For the past year the only time I saw him without a ball or a pole-vaulting pole in his hand, he was either eating or in church.

Kyle and I decided to engage in a surprise attack. He would shoot off an impressive amount of popgun bangs from his silver pistols while I ran onto the court and streaked off with the ball. This shit made Jamie so mad, but I couldn’t help myself.

Kyle and I were poised for attack when Dad’s pickup unexpectedly squealed into the driveway. Kyle took off running toward his own yard. We all knew there was no messing around when Dad was home.

I didn’t know why Dad was there, but it couldn’t be good. He never came home in the middle of a weekday.

I went into the house to pee, and when I came out of the bathroom, Dad was standing in the kitchen staring out the window at Jamie and his friends, who had resumed their game. They were laughing out there and calling to each other: “Throw it to me.” “Over here, man, I’m clear.” Dad was grinding his teeth, his jaw moving slightly back and forth. He was thinking something mean.

When Dad was little, he didn’t play; he worked. On the farm, he was up before dawn doing chores, walked to school in shoes that were too small, and came home to more work. His family was so poor that at Christmastime Dad pulled a wagon into the field and filled it with old corncobs, which could be used in fireplaces for fuel. He sold them in town to get money so his five brothers could have a present for Christmas.

I think those memories filled him with hate when he saw us kids having a carefree summer day or unwrapping a Christmas box and discovering exactly what we’d circled in the Sears catalog.

Dad slammed down the glass of iced tea he’d been holding and raced for the side door. I moved to the kitchen window, knowing that Jamie was in for it. I didn’t want to watch, but I stood there anyway.

“Goddamn it, Jamie, you stupid idiot. You can’t track mud all over the damn driveway,” Dad’s voice thundered out the door. The boys scattered, and Jamie’s face was scarlet. The sides of his eyes turned down and his jaw was tight to keep tears from coming. There wasn’t any mud on the driveway.

Jamie tried to say “I didn’t know there was mud there,” but Dad interrupted with “Shut up, you sissy,” which was the worst thing you could be called in front of Wayne Brooks and Duane Nelson.

Dad grabbed the sledgehammer that was lying against the side of the house and beat that basketball hoop to the ground. He pounded it until the metal rim was twisted beyond recognition and the backboard lay in splinters. Then he threw the sledgehammer on top of the mess and said, “That’s the end of that.”
The end of what?
I wondered.
The end of the basketball game? The end of the world?
It was definitely the end of something.

Jamie’s friends grabbed the basketball and headed over to the church to shoot hoops. Jamie stood there with tears of humiliation and rage rolling down his cheeks.

Dad turned on him. “That’s right. Cry like a girl. I should make you wear dresses.” It made no sense, and that was what worried me most.

Jamie took off on JoAnn’s bike that was parked on the back patio, his white T-shirt still tucked into the back pocket of his jeans. I watched him pedal down the sidewalk as fast as he could and out of sight.

Dad opened the back of his truck and took out pallets of bright orange marigolds and purple pansies, a hoe, and a shovel.

He had come home to plant flowers.

I watched from the living room window as Dad roughed up the dirt along the driveway, dug a series of holes, and delicately pulled the plants from their small plastic crates, placing them gently in holes, carefully covering their roots with dirt.

When he finished, the driveway looked warm and welcoming.

The next morning at breakfast Jamie was mean to me. I tried to scoot behind his chair to get to my place at the breakfast table and he shoved his chair back and pinned me against the wall. It knocked the wind out of me. When he finally let me go, I was holding my chest, not so much in pain as in shock. Jamie was changing.

One Saturday morning Julie and I decided to clean the mortuary. We needed to earn money to buy the new Carpenters album
A Song for You
.

At Kilner and Sons we took the body elevator down to the basement to pick up cleaning materials. The doors of the elevator were outside the mortuary so a dead person could be rolled in from the parking lot. We stood inside as it slowly rattled to the basement—the one place I knew for sure Sarah Keeler and I had both been.

The supply room, which was cold and damp, freaked us out, so we picked up Endust, Windex, and paper towels as fast as we could. The door to the embalming room was closed. We yelled “Hello” to Max as we ran by and he began clinking his tools to scare us.

“Very funny,” Julie yelled, but it unnerved me.

We rattled back up in the body elevator.

While we were cleaning, we heard the elevator clattering its way down to the basement. I looked over at Julie.

“Somebody corked,” I said. Julie shrugged. “Who do you think it is?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Julie said.

“Aren’t you curious?” I asked.

“Not really.” She squirted the window with Windex.

I walked to the top of the stairway and leaned down. I saw Hugh Kilner, Dave’s brother, pull a gurney out of the elevator. It was a person covered in a black velvet drape with red trim. Hugh rolled it into the embalming room.

I turned to Julie. “It’s a body, all right.”

She started laughing. “Monica, there are bodies here every day.”

I walked away from the staircase and sprayed Endust on the wooden podium that held the guest book. I had just finished dusting it when I heard the elevator going back up.

“It’s going back up,” I said.

“Hugh’s putting the gurney back in the van,” she said.

It didn’t matter how many times I heard the elevator or saw a family walking into the office to make arrangements, I wanted to know who had died and how. Was the person young, old, or in between? Had they left children behind?

I sat down on the third step from the top and listened to noises coming from the embalming room. I couldn’t imagine what all the clinking sounds were. The week before, Julie had offered to take me in there while Max was working, but I wasn’t ready for that.

Later in the afternoon Joan drove us to Lewisburg to buy
A Song for You
. We listened to it in Julie’s bedroom as we lay on her green shag carpet, our bare feet propped up on her bed. We read the lyrics off the inside of the album cover and sang “Top of the World” together.

On slow days at the mortuary Max took Julie and me for rides in the back of the hearse, where the casket usually sat. People always pulled to the side of the road when they saw us coming, even though there was no casket back there. One time Mr. Bartlett jumped off his riding lawn mower, took off his green John Deere hat, and saluted us. Julie and I peered out the long, skinny back windows: a dead person’s perspective.

We made intricate plans regarding who would drive us to our graves and which route we would take. I, of course, chose Dave to drive, with one complete trip down Main Street, through Bob’s Burgers drive-through, and on to Maple Creek Cemetery to be buried next to Sarah Keeler. Julie, who was more sophisticated than I was, chose Mick Jagger to drive and just a quick trip through the Dew Drop Inn liquor store drive-through window. She figured it wouldn’t matter that she was underage if she were the one in the box.

Aside from rides in the hearse, I also took rides with my mom in her car—not rides to the grocery store or the pharmacy—scenic rides.

There was no better afternoon for Mom than a Henry Mancini cassette drowning out the crickets while we coasted along Ohio back roads, her foot off the gas, watching for bright red cardinals and spotted deer.

Mom and I were noodling along with the windows open one summer afternoon when I asked about my birth. I knew the story, but I hadn’t heard it since I was little.

She smiled. “Well, you came early, for one thing. You weren’t supposed to come for a few days, and it was the night before Uncle Larry and Aunt Betty’s wedding. I was excited because I thought I was going to make it to the wedding, but around four in the morning, here you came. I got your dad up and we headed to the hospital.”

“Were you excited?” I asked.

“Becky was only eighteen months old, so we had our hands full. We’d only planned on having three children but, suddenly, there you were.” Mom pulled the car over to watch a hawk circle overhead. I hadn’t known that part of the story.

I looked at her, confused. “What?”

“We were planning on three children, but I guess you wanted to come too.” She stuck her head out of the window, trying to track that bird.

“I wasn’t planned?” I asked.

“We didn’t know it was
you
. When I found out I was pregnant, Becky wasn’t even walking yet.” She laid the back of her head on the windowsill and looked straight up. “We were finished with babies.”

I was trying to figure out how to process this information, when Mom pulled her head in, found a comb in her purse, and smoothed down the top of her hair.

“When I realized I was pregnant again, I cried for six weeks straight. I waited as long as possible to put on maternity clothes, but when I finally
had
to, I saw Genevieve Linsley at the post office and she said, ‘Oh, Patricia, I’m so sorry.’ I could have died from humiliation. But what was I supposed to do? I was stuck. I felt like white trash, having one kid right on top of the other.”

She looked over and saw my eyebrows pressed together. “We didn’t know it was
you
,” she repeated, pulling the car back onto the road and leaving the hawk behind. “We didn’t call you Monica until you were two years old. We just kept saying ‘Get Baby’ or ‘Baby needs a bottle.’” I was startled, so she clarified. “Babies aren’t really people until they’re at least two years old.”

“What are they, giraffes?” I asked.

“You know what I mean,” she said. I didn’t.

“Becky was supposed to be the baby of the family,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter now.”

I wasn’t sure what had shifted, but something had. My chin started to quiver, but I couldn’t figure out why I was so upset. It wasn’t such a bad story.

We drove along in silence until Mom popped in a 1950s gospel cassette. I hated gospel. The music started:

If I got Jesus on the line, I’d sure as hell ask why he sent me to Galesburg. My family didn’t even want anybody else. Surely there were people somewhere in the world who were hoping for a baby girl. Why squeeze me in here?

I put my arm on the windowsill and rested my chin on top. The hot Ohio breeze was making my forehead sweaty. I tried to think of happy things, like playing Checkers with Jamie or riding my bike around the firehouse parking lot, but the tears came anyway.

For most of my friends, summer vacation was something they wished would never end. For me, it couldn’t end soon enough.

One of those summers, Mom found a key to Dad’s truck and secretly made a copy at Ben Franklin’s Five-and-Dime. Dad didn’t think the government needed to know how much money he made, so he kept large amounts of cash in bank bags stashed under the driver’s seat of his pickup. Mom knew because she’d helped Dad with his bookkeeping when we were little.

Mom needed to burgle Dad’s truck because if he was mad at her or us, he cut off her grocery money. She’d pace the house wringing her hands, wondering how she was going to pay for everything, until Dad relented and gave her some money.

In similar fashion, every week Mom made the four of us go into the bedroom and wake Dad so he could give us lunch money. This made him irate. Every Monday at breakfast I couldn’t eat, knowing we’d have to wake him.

At the last possible minute before the bus came, we’d walk into the bedroom and stare at him.

He’d open his eyes and snarl, “What do you want now?”

“Lunch money,” one of us would blurt out.

“Goddamn moochers,” he’d yell, throwing off the covers and swinging his legs off the side of the bed. Dad slept in boxer shorts and a white T-shirt, so I worried about the gap in the front of those shorts as he bent down to grab his wire-rimmed aviator glasses off the side table. Then he’d walk over to his crumpled jeans and search around in the pockets for money.

“It never stops,” he’d complain. “‘I need money for this, I need money for that.’ All you do is stand around with your hands out.”

By then we were waiting outside the bedroom because the bus was going to be there any minute. Finally he’d toss our lunch money, coins and dollar bills scattering, on top of the stereo. I’d grab my two dollars and fifty cents, feeling like I’d just robbed someone, because that’s exactly how Dad felt—robbed.

By copying that key, Mom was stealing a little financial security.

The heists took place during the week when Dad came home from work just long enough to change out of his jeans and into polyester stretch pants and a nice dress shirt so he could get back to Elk Grove for a Rotary Club meeting.

He drove Mom’s Cutlass at night, leaving his locked pickup in the driveway. No one locked cars in Mason County. They threw keys under the front seat and went about their business. But Dad couldn’t take any chances.

After Dad pulled out, Mom asked me to stand at the end of our driveway as a lookout. Out by the road, I’d anxiously scan the horizon in case Dad forgot his tie clip or wallet and turned around to get it. Then I’d eyeball Mom, who’d be poking around under his seat. I didn’t know why they had such big problems, but I knew I shouldn’t have been standing there.

One night I looked over and saw Mom’s car heading back up the street.

“He’s coming back,” I screamed. “Mom, get out of there. He’s coming.” If he caught her, he’d probably beat her to death. I ran up the driveway as Mom slammed the door of the pickup. We both raced around the house to the back door. I hustled into my bedroom as Mom opened the refrigerator and looked inside.

Out my bedroom window, I watched Dad climb out of the Cutlass and walk over to the truck.
He knew. He had to know.
He tried the driver’s door, found it locked, and walked back to the Cutlass. To my surprise, Mom stepped outside.

“Why’d you come back?” she asked.

“No reason,” he said.

“Did you leave something?”

“I thought I forgot to lock the truck,” he said, climbing into the car.

Mom came back inside the house. I met her in the dining room as he was pulling back out.

“That was close,” I said.

“Too close. He thought the truck was unlocked,” she said. “I think I was the one who locked it when I slammed the door. Let’s forget it for now.”

On another night a little while later, Dad hadn’t come back—yet. I stood at the end of the dark driveway, hopping up and down, saying, “Hurry, hurry,” under my breath. Once Mom was inside the truck, it wasn’t a quick transaction. She couldn’t take the money out of one bag, or Dad would figure something was up. She had to steal a little from each. Also, the bags had to be returned to their exact original position because he was wily and suspicious.

Mom helped herself to twenties, tens, and fives, swiping an extra twenty for me.

It was unnerving stealing from my father, because I always had the feeling he was watching me.

I put my dirty money in my flowered jewelry box with the plastic ballerina, who twirled in front of a diamond-shaped mirror and collapsed flat when I closed the lid.

The extra money helped Mom relax about the future. She wouldn’t go without as long as he didn’t trade in that pickup.

In the beginning of that summer a tornado came through around five o’clock in the morning, waking everyone up and sending us hurrying to the basement. On the way down, I stopped in the hallway and called Granda. It took her a while to get to the phone because I was waking her out of a deep sleep and her bad hip always slowed her down.

“This had better be good,” she said when she picked up the phone, breathing hard.

“Granda, there’s a tornado warning. You need to get over here and get in the basement,” I urged.

“Honey, there’s not a tornado strong enough to blow my fat ass out of this trailer. Don’t worry about your granda.”

“Please come over,” I pleaded.

“You get yourself in the basement. I’ll be just fine. Now go on, honey, I don’t want you talking on the phone when there’s lightning around. It could come through the phone and kill both of us.” I reluctantly hung up, grabbed Buddy by the collar, and headed to the basement.

The storm blew in quickly and was so violent that all eight of the Whitmores (who had no basement of their own) came running over in their pajamas to join us in our basement. If it was too dangerous for Dad to grab his movie camera and speed away, it was the real deal. The entire town could blow away.

I sat on the filthy cement floor in my nightgown, with Buddy situated between my knees. I held on to her brown leather collar with both hands. Our neighbor’s dog, Buttons, ran away during a storm and was never seen again. I imagined that crazy-eyed black-and white mutt tumbling and swirling around inside a giant black tornado and landing somewhere in Pennsylvania.

The idea of Buddy being lost and wandering the countryside looking for us was the saddest, most heart-wrenching scenario I could imagine. I held on tight.

The worst of the storm blew through with a sudden dip in temperature, and the pressure dropped so fast, my ears popped. Sheets of rain pelted the windows, and hail pinged off the roof and the top of our car. I was so keyed up, I had diarrhea, but I couldn’t leave the basement to go to the toilet.

Dad was running up and down the basement stairs, reporting the blow-by-blow with a transistor radio pressed against his ear. First he was standing at the top of the stairs looking out the back door.

Then he hurried back down and said, “There’s a tornado southwest of Elk Grove. A house was hit.” He raced back up.

Soon he’d holler back down, “They think it’s heading this way.”

I wished he’d shut the hell up. His commentary was making a tense situation a hundred times worse. I was petrified, worried, and freezing all at the same time. I hugged Buddy and quietly sang the prayer from church:

I didn’t want to meet the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost that day, so I praised them and hoped for a reprieve.

When the lights went out, my terror level shot up and I braced for the big hit. I pictured the wooden ceiling above us splintering into tiny toothpicks and all of us being sucked up into the furious tornado that Dad had reported was just outside of Galesburg. Mom turned on the one flashlight we had and threw blankets over our heads. Buddy was sweating from the end of her tongue, saliva dripping onto my leg.

The wind became stronger, and suddenly we felt a thud that bounced me about three inches off the floor. My heart was racing and Buddy was whining and struggling to get away. I held her tighter.

“Something fell,” Martha said.

“Something’s definitely down,” Dad confirmed, bolting back up the basement steps.

I looked up and saw the house still over our heads, so that was good.

“Two houses destroyed in Elk Grove,” Dad yelled down the stairs. “But they’re not saying anything about what happened here.” We weren’t going to see the sun come up, I was sure of it. We’d be dead, buried under debris that would include our shitty oven that never worked and all of Mom’s fancy furniture.

Five or ten minutes later the wind died down and, miraculously, the rain stopped.

“Looks like it’s headed over to Harrisburg,” Dad reported, setting down the radio. All I knew about Harrisburg was that I’d seen an enormous billboard that read
JESUS IS LORD OVER HARRISBURG
right outside of town. If that were true, they’d probably be okay.

We climbed up the basement stairs. Buddy was jumpy but had settled down enough that I could let go of her.

Dad ran outside to see what had fallen. I was dreading the moment when I’d discover what the wind had destroyed.

The sun was just coming up and the clouds were creating a spectacular sunrise, complete with thick rays of light shooting up in the east. Through the sunrise, I saw the back of the storm, black angry clouds swirling toward Harrisburg.

The backyard was littered with leaves and branches. But when we walked around to the side of the house, we saw our maple tree, one hundred feet tall and fifteen feet around, lying on its side. It gave me gooseflesh to see its heavy, wet branches crunched onto the highway and its scraggly long roots sticking seven feet up in the air. Nothing that big should be on its side.

The Whitmores and the Griswolds were looking at the damage and saying, “You were lucky, Glen. If that tree had fallen the other way, it would have crushed the house.”

That caught my attention. Smashed to smithereens was not the way I wanted to go. I loved trees, but I looked at the remaining two maples with absolute dread.

That night I heard Dad say, “I’m gonna take those other two trees down tomorrow while we have the city out there hauling away all those branches.”

“You aren’t touching those trees. We’ll have no shade at all,” Mom said.

“Would you rather have them come down on the house?” he asked.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Mom answered.

“You’ll think ‘dramatic’ when they do come down and we’re hauling dead kids outta here,” he said.

“You aren’t touching those trees,” Mom said. I heard a door slam.

I didn’t like my father, but I trusted him when it came to disasters. After all, he was an expert.

The first night after the tree fell, I stayed up as long as I could, straining to hear creaking that would indicate the trees were falling, giving me time to get the girls up and out of the house. From that night on I imagined those two trees hovering like death’s hand, ready to swoop us up in the night; scoop us up while we were sleeping, only to be deposited on Max Cooper’s embalming table.

In the fall I was turning eleven and starting sixth grade and, most important, JoAnn, Becky, and I were going to get our own rooms. Dad hired a contractor, Mr. Thorton, to turn the attic into three bedrooms.

It was just in time because I had finally, and for no reason I could explain, quit wetting the bed. One morning I woke up dry and was never wet again. I’d pictured that day arriving with a marching band or an expensive gift from Sears, but it snuck in like any other day. I was finally liberated from the moldy pee bed.

Mr. Thorton worked up there all summer, and when he was done, I was surprised to see the ceilings were triangular-shaped, just like the roof.

In an uncharacteristic move, Mom allowed each of us to pick out furniture, colors, and carpets for our own rooms.