Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (17 page)

After the dream came the habit. I decided to run off to Chicago, but hadn’t figured what I could do to stay alive, and I didn’t know Soul One in the town. But the guys on ’LS radio sounded like decent sorts, and they had a real warmth you could just hear when they did those Save the Children ads. You knew those guys would be the kind to give a poor kid a break. And that is where the habit and the dream got all mixed up.

I would maybe take the train—since that was the only way I knew to get out, from my father’s Depression stories—and I might even meet A-Number-One on some hard-luck flatcar, and him tracing old dreams on the car floor with a burned-out cigarette. Then me and old A-Number-One would take the Rock Island out of Kentucky, riding nonstop coal into the Chicago yards, and A-Number-One would tell about whole trains getting swallowed up, lost, bums and all, in the vastness of everything, never found. But I would make it off the car before she beat into the yards, skirt the stink on that side, and there I was at the Loop.

I would find WLS Studios and ask for a job application, and the receptionist, sexier than Mrs. Dent and a single to boot, would ask me what I could do. I would be dirty from the train, and my clothes would not be h.i.s., so what could I say but that I would like to sweep up. Bingo, and they hire me because nobody in Chicago ever wants to sweep up, and when I get down to scrape the Wrigley’s off the floor, they think I’m the best worker in the world. I figure I’d better mop, and Dex Card says I’m too smart to mop and for me to take this sawbuck, go buy me some h.i.s. clothes and show up here tomorrow. He says he wants me to be the day jock, and he will teach me to run the board, make echoes, spin the hits, double-up the sound effects, and switch to the news-weather-and-sports. Hot damn.

So I sat at the desk every night, learning less biology, dreaming the dream over and over, until one night I looked at my respectable—nevertheless Woolworth—slacks, and realized that the freight trains no longer slowed down at Rock Camp. There was always the bus, but in all three times I collected enough pop bottles for a ticket to where the train slowed down, the pool balls would break in my ears, and quarters would slip away into slots of time and chance.

“You can’t see the angles,” Chester said to me one day after he ran the table in less than a minute.

I was in the tenth grade and didn’t give two shits for his advice. All I knew was all my quarters were gone, there were no more pop bottles along the Pike, and Chicago was still a thousand miles away. I just leaned on my stick: I was sheared and I knew it.

“You know anything about cars?” I shook my head no. “Can you work a gas pump?” Again no. “You
can
wash a car.” I sneered a who-the-hell-couldn’t.

And from that day I went to work for E. B. “Pop” Sullivan in his American Oil station at seventy-five cents an hour, one-third of which went to Chester for getting me the job. I told myself it didn’t matter, I wasn’t going to make a career of it, I was hitting it for Chicago as soon as I got the money—I’d ride the buses all the way, I’d drive. What the hell, I’d save up and buy a car to take me to Chicago in style.

When I told Chester I wanted to buy a car, he let me off the hook for his fee, even took me to look at the traps on the car lot. Then I told Chester I didn’t want a trap, I wanted a real car.

“That’s the way you get a real one,” he said. “You make it to suit yourself—Motown just makes them to break down.”

We looked at a Pontiac with only 38,000 and a 327. Somebody had lamed in the rear and pushed the trunk into the back seat. There was a clump of hair hanging from the chrome piece around the window. Chester crawled under this car and was gone for almost five minutes, while I was more attracted to a Chevy Impala with a new paint job and a backyard, install-it-yourself convertible top that came down of its own when you pressed a button. Chester came out from under the Pontiac like he had found a snake, then walked over to me grinning.

“She’s totaled to hell and back, but the engine’s perfect.”

I told Chester I liked the Impala, but he just sucked his teeth like he knew what happened to tops that come down of their own. He walked all around the car, bent over to look under it, rubbed his fingers along the tread of the tires, and all the time I kept staring at the
$325
soaped on the windshield. Sure, the Pontiac was cheaper, but who wanted to pay $130 to walk around with an engine under his arm? Not me, I wanted to drive it away, make the top go up and down.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I got me a nice Chevy for that Pontiac’s motor. You buy the motor—I’ll rent the body to you.”

I wasn’t about to bite, so I shook my head.

“We’ll be partners, then. We’ll each only sell out to the other, and we’ll stick together on weekends. You know, double dates.”

That made a little more sense, and the rest of that month the Chicago dream went humming away to hide someplace in my brain. I had nightmares about adapters being stretched out to fit an engine that shouldn’t be in a Chevy. I worried about tapping too far from the solid part of the block, could just see cast steel splintering the first time we forced her up to 80. I went to drag races, asked anybody I saw if you could put a Pony engine in a Chevy, and most people laughed, but one smart-ass leaned back in his chair: “Son,” says the smart-ass, “go play with yourself.”

But the month went by, and the engine, for some reason I never understood, went in, but all the fire wall and all the fender wells came out. When Chester came down to the transmission problem, I came down with the flu, and for three days I neither dreamed of Chicago nor my car because I was too busy being sick. On returning to school, I saw her in the parking lot, the rear end jacked up with shackles, and when I looked in on the gearshift, Chester had a four-speed pattern knob screwed on it. I thought it was a joke, because I never saw the last gear used. She did 50 wound tight in third, and that was enough for the straight piece in the Pike.

That summer was just one big time. Chester and I spent every cent we earned on gas and every free minute on the back roads. We discovered a bridge with enough hump that hitting it at 45 would send us airborne every time and make the buggy rock like a chair until we could get new shocks on it. Unbeknownst to him, Pop Sullivan supplied shocks all summer. We found a curved section of one-lane that was almost always good for a near head-on with a Pepsi truck. A couple of times, Pop supplied red-lead to disguise the fact that we had gotten too close to the Pepsi truck. Pepsi, I take it, got the message and rerouted the driver. Chester told me, “They sent a boy to do a man’s job.”

But the best fun came when a Cabell County deputy was on his way to summons some ridge runner to court for not sharing his liquor revenues with the state. Deputy met us coming downhill and around a curve at top speed, and there was little else for Deputy to do but give us the right-of-way or kiss all our sweet asses good-bye. Deputy was a very wise man. Figuring that anybody coming from nowhere that fast had something to hide, Deputy then radioed ahead the liquor was in our car. They nabbed us at the foot of the hill, stone-cold sober, and found us holding no booze at all. What they did find were Deputy’s two daughters—both out with their momma’s permission. Chester got three days for driving away from a deputy, and neither of us was allowed to call the girls again. Don’t ask me what their momma got, as I am not sure if Deputy was the wife-beating kind or not.

Chester served his three days in Sundays reading the paper at the county jail, and the first Sunday changed him considerably for the worse. At work the next day he wouldn’t talk about who he wanted to go out with or where we were going to find money for the next tankful, but by the weekend he loosened up. “It’s all a matter of chance,” he said. I thought he was trying to explain his jail sentence. It took four years before I figured it out. After his second Sunday, he came back with a sneak in his eyes like he was just waiting for something to drop on his back out of thin air. “It’s out there for sure, but it’s just a matter of being in the right place when the shit falls.” I agreed all the way. It was all in Chicago, and school was starting and I was still in Rock Camp.

The next morning, Chester went on the lam in a most interesting manner. It was his turn to cruise around town in the car during lunch, smooching his woman, and I would get snatch for my grab on the high-school steps. We had both been caught getting too fresh with our girls, and now there was not a decent girl in Rock Camp that wouldn’t claim one of us raped her after her football boyfriend knocked her up. So it was that Chester’s main squeeze was a girl from Little Tokyo Hollow, where twice-is-nice-but-incest-is-best and all the kids look like gooks. So it was I had no woman that day. And Chester was making the main circuit with regular rounds so that from where I sat, I could see every move this slant-eye made.

The first three go-arounds were pretty standard, and I could almost measure the distance her hand had moved on the way to Chester’s crotch, but on the fourth trip she had him wide and was working the mojo. I knew Chester had done some slick bargaining to get that much action that soon, and I figured it was over from there, since I saw him turn around and head west back to the school. He was still only cruising, taking his time like he knew the bell would never ring unless he had gone to his locker. Then on the way by, I saw the slant-eye going down on him, her head bobbing like mad, Chester smiling, goosing the gas in short spurts. It wasn’t until he stopped at the town limits and put the girl out that I figured Chester didn’t care about coming back to class, but I went on anyway, sure as I could be that he’d be back tomorrow.

That afternoon the guidance counselor called me in and asked me what I was doing with the rest of my life. It seemed Chester’s slant-eye had spilled the beans, and they were thinking there was something in me they could save. I told the guidance counselor I wanted to work for a radio station in Chicago—just as a joke.

“Well, you’ll have to go to college for that, you know.”

It was news to me, because Dex Card didn’t sound like a teacher or a doctor, and I said no.

That evening, when Chester didn’t show for work, I asked Pop Sullivan to sponsor me through college. I promised to stay at the station until I got my journalism degree, then send him the difference.

“I got all the difference I need” was all Pop would say. He kept looking out the window for Chester to come fix his share of cars. Chester never came, so I stayed until the next morning and figured out how to fix both our shares of cars with a book, and I thought maybe that was the way Chester had done it all along.

A week later, Pop hired another kid to pump gas and raised me to minimum wage, which by Archie’s heyday was about a buck fifty. That was when I got a telegram from Cleveland saying: “Sorry Pard, I got it into fourth and couldn’t get it out. I’ll make it up sometime, C.”—and I wondered why Chester bothered to waste four cents on the “Pard.”

I left the radio off and my grades went up a little, but I didn’t think I’d learned much worth knowing. The guidance counselor kept this shit-eating grin for when she passed me in the hall. Then weird stuff started happening—like my old man would come to bed sober at night and go to church twice on Sunday and drink orange juice at breakfast without pitching a bitch at me. And I got invited to parties the football players’ parents threw for them and their girls, but I never went. Then a teacher told me if I made a B in World History before Christmas I would be a cinch for the Honor Society, but I told that teacher in no uncertain terms what the Honor Society could go do with themselves, and the teacher said I was a smart-ass. I agreed. I still got the B. I started dating Deputy’s youngest daughter again, and he acted like I was a quarterback.

Then the real shit came down. It was snowing tons before Christmas, so I cut school to help Pop clear the passage around the pumps, and he called the principal to tell him what was up. I was salting the sidewalks when Pop yelled at me to come inside, then he loaded his pipe and sat down behind the desk.

“What’d I tell you about stealing?” he says, but I set him straight that I wasn’t holding anything of his. “I don’t mean you are, only I want to know if you remember.” I told him that he had said once-a-thief-always-a-thief about a million times. “Do you think that’s so?” I asked him if he’d stolen before. “Just once, but I put it back.” I told him once-a-thief-always-a-thief, but he just laughed. “You need a college sponsor. I need another Catholic in this town.” I assured Pop that my old man had suddenly seen the light, but I was in no way, shape, or form walking his path with him, and he was Methodist to boot. “You think about it.” I said I would think about it and went in to grease a car. All I could think was, Dex Card doesn’t sound like a Catholic name.

I walked home in the snow that night, and it did not seem like Chicago snow—it seemed like I was a kid before the radio moved into my room, and like when I got home from sledding and my old lady was still alive, still pumping coffee into me to cut the chill, and I missed her just a little.

I went inside hoping my old man would have a beer in his hand just so I could put things back to normal again, but he was sitting in the kitchen reading a newspaper, and he was stoned sober out of his mind.

I fixed us some supper, and while we ate he asked me if Pop had said anything to me about college. I said he would sponsor me if I turned mackerel-snapper. “Not a bad deal. You going to take it?” I assured him I was thinking on it. “There’s mail for you,” and he handed me an envelope postmarked Des Moines, Iowa. Inside was seventy-five bucks and a scrap of paper that said: “Less depreciation.
Adios,
C.” I put the money in my wallet and balled up the note. “You can buy some clothes with that wad,” he said. I assured my old man that I would need a car more if I was to drive to college every day, but he just laughed, gave me a dutch rub from across the table. He told me I was a good kid for a punk. Even the women in the school cafeteria sent me a card saying I was bound to become a man of letters—on the inside was a cartoon mailman. It took me a while to get the joke.