Journey to an 800 Number (2 page)

I looked forward to Mother’s wedding, and I looked forward to moving into Mr. Malatesta’s house
and having Mother drive me to Fortnum from there. The house had six bedrooms and four bathrooms, a gardener, a housekeeper, and I think they sent their laundry out.

Mother looked forward to her wedding, and she looked forward to her honeymoon. Even though this was her second marriage, she told me that it was her first honeymoon. Mr. Malatesta was taking her on a cruise, and that was why I was to stay with my father, the camel-keeper.

I was to meet him in Smilax, Texas.

I asked Mother to get my school blazer before she left for her honeymoon cruise. She reminded me that at my age I could easily outgrow a jacket in a period of a month. I told her that I didn’t think that I would. She got me the jacket.

She and Mr. Malatesta drove me to the airport. Before I boarded the plane, Mr. Malatesta gave me fifty dollars, five tens. He didn’t make any big fuss giving it to me. He just said, “Spend it foolishly,” and I told him that I would.

I got off the plane in Smilax wearing my navy blue school blazer with the Fortnum School crest on the breast pocket. It was the first Saturday in August, and when they wheeled the steps up to the plane and opened the door, I thought that someone—God—had made a mistake. There was no out-of-doors there. There was no air there. I felt that I was breathing mayonnaise. I was sweating down to my insteps and
up to my eyelids. The heat made everything look wavy, but I still was able to spot my father from the top of the airplane stairs.

He was standing behind a chain link fence with a lot of other people waiting for the plane to arrive. I had not seen him in one month more than a year, but he was easy to pick out of a crowd. He wore the same red bandanna around his neck and the same black hat that looked like Pinocchio’s that he had worn on his last visit to Havemyer. My father is what adventure books call swarthy, and he adds a big black mustache to that. He is a hairy man. He has black hairs that grow like boogers out of his nose and his ears if he doesn’t cut them with a scissors.

Father spotted me and waved. I walked down the stairs and across the tarmac very slowly. I could not walk fast. The air seemed more solid than the asphalt I walked on. Actually, the asphalt was soft; I could feel my shoes sticking to it the way they do when you’re walking down the aisle in a really crummy movie. I could feel the navy blue wool of my blazer sop up sweat like a paper towel that was winning a contest in a television commercial.

I reached my father and extended my arm for a handshake, but Father reached over and—hot as it was—hugged me. “Hi, Bo,” he said, “it’s good to see you. Very good.”

“I’m called Maximilian now,” I answered.

“Well, Max, did you have a good flight?”

“The food was like a TV dinner.”

“So you’ve already had lunch?”

“That’s what they called it.”

Father studied me awhile longer, reached his arm around my shoulder and said, “Let’s go collect your luggage.”

The terminal was air-conditioned. Blasts of cold air were pushed through vents in the ceiling. The wind chill factor in the terminal building was minus fifteen degrees and felt good. As we waited for the luggage to come off the plane, I stood directly under one of the vents and allowed my sopping blue blazer to blow in the wind. Soon the conveyor belt began moving, and soon after that pieces of luggage came riding around on it.

“If you’ll point out what belongs to you,” Father said, “I’ll lift it off.”

I didn’t point it out, I lifted my two suitcases off the belt by myself and picked one up in each arm and said, “Shall we go?”

Father reached down to take one suitcase from me, but I held on. I started walking, holding one suitcase in each hand. Before I reached the door, I thought my hands would break off at the wrists, but I carried both pieces to the door without his help.

Father held the door open for me, and I walked through, my suitcases banging my knees, my shins, my thighs. Once outside, the hot air wrapped around me again. Once again I began perspiring like a lower species of animal. Sweat locked into the weave of my blazer and vaporized. I knew that there was a cloud
of steam lifting from where I stood. And it was only one-thirty in Smilax.

“You wait here,” Father said. “I’ll get the truck and pull around.”

I waited there on the sidewalk watching the sun flick off the windshields of the cars as they pulled up to pick up their passengers. I thought that I would (a) go blind, (b) rot like a piece of fruit, (c) faint. Father arrived before I did any of the above. He asked me if I would like to take off my jacket, and I told him no, not at all. He shrugged and drove us to his trailer camp out on Highway Six.

He gave me some cold Coke and asked me if I would like to see Ahmed. I told him no thanks and asked him where I was to put my things because I had some letters I wanted to write.

“I do my writing at the kitchen table,” he said. “And you’ll sleep in the bottom bunk unless you prefer the top.”

“The bottom will do quite nicely,” I said.

Father said that he had to go to Pickwick Mall because he had advertized that Ahmed would be there between three and six. He invited me to go along, but I told him no thanks, that I thought I had mentioned that I had some correspondence to take care of, and he said that yes, I had mentioned it, but he thought that maybe I would like to go with him and postpone writing my letters, and I told him that postponing things was not something I was in the habit of. He told me to help myself to anything in
the refrigerator or the pantry and that he would be back about seven-thirty. He mentioned our going out for our first supper.

The minute he walked out the door, I took off my blazer. I turned the air-conditioner to
COLDEST
and turned the vents so that they blew right over me as I threw myself across the lower bunk and fell asleep.

I woke up because I sensed a strange light coming into the trailer. It was only the afternoon slant of the southern summer sun. It didn’t look like ordinary light. It looked as though if you touched it, it would punch back. I felt trapped by the blaze of light falling in slats through the windows of the camper.

I walked outside. My father’s camper was a runt among the others in the park. A one-room aluminum job with a slope on the back. It looked more like a giant turtle than a trailer. There were almost no people outside. I walked around and saw through the windows the pale blue flickering light that told me that television was on. I couldn’t hear anything, for all the trailers had air-conditioners thundering away at one window or another.

I went back inside my father’s trailer feeling the chill blast of his air-conditioner. I started to shiver and decided that I should probably get something to eat. The refrigerator was a little half job with a tiny yellowish light like a single bulb on a Christmas tree. I found some bread and some beer.
The bread was stale; I didn’t know if the beer was, for it was the first I had ever tasted. I sat at the kitchen table tearing off pieces of bread between my teeth and swigging beer and wondering how many afternoons I would have to spend this way. I knew that I would not be going to shopping centers helping Father sell camel rides.

I opened my suitcase and took out my paper and my ballpoint pen. I intended to write my mother a beautiful letter full of descriptive phrases and no split infinitives. I intended to write her every day, so that at the end of the month she would have a chapter of letters that would tell her what I thought of the meaning of life. I would give her permission to publish them when she asked.

I felt chilled again. I poured the rest of the beer down the drain and thought some hot tea would taste good, but it seemed like a lot of work to make it I turned the air-conditioner to
OFF
and still could not warm up. I climbed under the covers of the lower bunk and fell asleep on and off, half-waking only long enough to notice that the brazen light had softened and moved to the other side of the trailer, and then to notice that the trailer was dark. Finally, I was awakened by a sound. Father had returned. I sat up.

“Hi,” Father said. “Did you get your letters written?”

“My letters?”

“Your correspondence.”

“My correspondence. Oh.”

“That’s all right. You were probably tired from your trip. I’ve got Ahmed fed and settled. Now, how about us, Max? Ready for dinner?”

I said all right.

So I got my blazer, and we went. Father drove around Smilax, and we didn’t speak very much. Smilax is mostly highways with quick-food chains, gas stations and motels and no houses more than one-story high. And the evening air, although not cool, at least moved. Or we moved, and it seemed to. Father pulled up at a cafeteria named Sweetbriar’s. We went through the line, and the things did look good. I took three more items than I could eat. I didn’t seem to have much appetite once I smelled the food up close. Father asked, “Don’t you like it, Max?”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Mr. Malatesta took Mother and me to a restaurant on the top of the First Guaranty Bank Building in Philadelphia. If you walked around to look through each of the windows, you got a view of the whole city below. They had candles on every table and white tablecloths and napkins. Cloth, not paper. And the waiters wore tuxedos.” Father said nothing, but he looked interested, so I continued. “It’s a private club, and you have to wait on a waiting list and have people recommend you before you’re allowed to join. And even
then you have to pay money, a thousand to join and some every month. That’s
besides
paying for the food.”

“How was the food?” Father asked.

“Excellent,” I answered. “Why?”

“Oh,” Father said, “I heard that most times those restaurants on top of tall buildings have what you might call
food with a view
instead of food that tastes good.”

“Just because you’ve never been and likely never will be is no reason to put them down.”

“Nobody ought to put them down,” Father said, “because then they wouldn’t have anything at all to recommend them.”

“Very funny,” I said.

“If you don’t want your Jello, mind if I take it?” Father asked.

I pushed it over toward him. He dipped his spoon in it and held it up where it wiggled in front of his eyes, then he ate it. He played that way with every spoonful. I didn’t say anything, and neither did he.

We didn’t speak all the way back to the trailer park either. Father had opened the windows of the truck again, but I closed the one on my side. I felt cold. And my stomach was being unkind; it was rolling around like a maniac salami, pitching back and forth, even when the truck was stopped for a red light.

The first time I threw up was against the front
wheel of the truck just after Father arrived at the trailer park.

Father led me toward the kitchen sink in case I was going to make a second deposit. He supported me and held my head. “You have a fever,” he said.

“A fever?” I yelled. I put my hand on my forehead and said, “I’m burning up. I’ve caught some dread disease. I must have a hundred and six. Where’s your thermometer?”

“No one gets a hundred and six fever. I don’t have a thermometer,” he said.

“You don’t have a thermometer?” I asked. “How can you appreciate how sick I am? How will you know when to call a doctor?”

“I think you have the flu.”

“Isn’t that dread?” I asked.

He touched my forehead with his lips. “I’d say you have about a hundred, a hundred and one,” he said.

“Your mustache is probably insulating your lips from feeling the full heat,” I said.

Father handed me two white pills. “Here, take these aspirins with a big glass of water and go lie down.”

The lying down part sounded good. I did as he suggested. I remember Father reaching to the upper bunk and taking down a cover and covering me and putting his hand to my forehead again. Next I remember waking now and then to the sounds of music. I thought at the time that it was the TV; later
when I was fully awake, I saw my father sitting in the kitchen area strumming a guitar. A grown man amusing himself with a guitar. He needed a shave. His mustache was ragged, and even from a distance I could see the hairs poking out of his nose.

He saw me awaken. “Well, hello there,” he said.

“Did you get the thermometer?” I asked.

“Well, no,” he said. “Except to feed Ahmed, I haven’t left the trailer for two days.”

“Ahmed,” I said, throwing myself back down on the bed. “Ahmed!” I repeated, putting as much disgust in my voice as I could manage. Then I realized what he had said. “Two days?” I asked.

He smiled and nodded and strummed his guitar.

“Do you mind telling me what I’ve been doing for the past two days?”

He continued strumming and said, “You threw up a lot.”

I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “What else?”

“Not much. You slept. You moaned in your sleep. You peed in a bottle.” He strummed his guitar the whole time he said this making it like a folk song.

“Did you call a doctor?”

“No doctor did I call.” Strum, Strum.

“Do you realize that I have lost two days of my life?”

“Me, too.” Strum, Strum.

“Can’t you tell me about them?”

“You took liquids and you slept and you peed in a bottle.” Strum, Strum.

“Lost,” I said. “Two whole days of my life lost,” I said to the ceiling.

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” Father sang. Then he laid down his guitar and came over to my bunk. He sat on the edge and laid his hand on my forehead and then ran his hand slowly down my face. Then he rested the back of his hand under my chin. “Welcome back, Bo,” he said.

“Name’s Max,” I said. “Maximilian.”

It was not until the middle of the week that I had any appetite or energy. I woke up one morning and instead of finding Father rattling around or reading or strumming his guitar, I found a note Scotch-taped to the refrigerator door. Half door. The note said:
Ahmed and I are at summer school fair. Back about four.

That suited me just fine. Now I would have time to put my thoughts in order. The five days since I had arrived had had no nights, no days, just long sleeps interrupted by crazy dreams (really crazy). I decided that first I would walk around the trailer park and get some fresh air and exercise.