Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (18 page)

And about that time the price of gas went up. I bought a ’58 VW without a floor, drove it that way until it rained, then bought a floor for more than I paid for the whole car. Deputy’s daughter missed a couple of months and decided it was me, and it probably was, so she joined me in catechism and classes at the community college in Huntington, and we lived in a three-room above Pop’s station. The minute Deputy’s daughter lost the kid, Deputy had the whole thing annulled, and Pop made me move back in with my old man. My old man started drinking again. I quit school, but stayed on at Pop Sullivan’s garage to pay him back, and it was about then that I saw the time had gone by too soon. I had not turned the old radio on in all these years and I couldn’t stand to now. I decided working for Pop wasn’t too bad, and pretty soon my old man was going to have to be put away, and I’d need the money for that.

I drove home in the VW singing,
“Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town…”
and that was when I knew I had forgotten the rest of the words.

Then I saw it coming down the Pike, just a glimpse of metallic blue, a blur with yellow fog-lights that passed in the dusk, and the driver’s face was Chester’s. I wheeled the bug around, headed back into town, wound the gears tight to gain some speed, but he was too far gone to catch up with. I cruised town for an hour before I saw him barreling down the Pike again, and this time I saw the blond in his car. When they pulled in on Front Street to get a bite at the café, I wheeled up beside the new Camaro. I had seen that girl of his lick her teeth in toothpaste ads on TV.

I asked Chester how it was going, but he forgot to know me: “Beg pardon?” I saw all his teeth were capped, but I told him who I was. “Oh, yes,” he said. I asked him where he got the mean machine, and his girl looked at me funny, smiled to herself. “It’s a rental.” His girl broke out laughing, but I didn’t get the joke. I told Chester he ought to go by and say hello to Pop on the way out. “Yes, yes, well, I will.” I invited them out to eat with me and my old man, but Chester got a case of rabbit. “Perhaps another time. Nice to see you again.” He slammed the car door, went into the café ahead of his girl.

I sat there in the VW, stared at the grease on my jeans, thought I ought to go in there and shove a couple of perhaps-another-times down Chester’s shit-sucking face. Don’t ask me why I didn’t do it, because it was what I wanted most to do all my life, and don’t ask me where the dream went, because it never hummed to me again.

When Chester left town, he left a germ. Not the kind of germ you think makes a plant grow, but a disease, a virus, a contagion. Chester sowed them in the café when Deputy recognized him, asked what he’d been doing with himself. Chester told Deputy he was on Broadway, and gave away free tickets to the show he was in, and a whole slough of people went up to New York. They all came back humming show songs. And the germ spread all over Rock Camp, made any kid on the high-school stage think he could be Chester. A couple of the first ones killed themselves, then the real hell was watching the ones who came back, when Pop told them there was no work at the station for faggots.

But one thing was for sure good to know, and that was when Chester was chewed up and spit out by New York because he thought his shit didn’t stink, or at least that was what the folks said. I don’t know what happened in New York, but I think I’ve got a hitch on what Chester did here. He was out to kill everybody’s magic and make his own magic the only kind, and it worked on those who believed in Archie’s heyday, or those who thought the sweet tit would never go dry, and it worked on Chester when he came back, started to believe it himself.

Standing in the station on a slow day, I sometimes think up things that might have happened to Chester, make up little plays for him to act out, wherever he is. When I do that, I very often lose track of when and where I am, and sometimes Pop has to yell at me to put gas in a car because I haven’t heard the bell ring. Every time that sort of thing happens, I cross myself with my left hand and go out whistling a chorus of “Chicago.”

Check the oil? Yessir.

H
E
sees the bridge coming, sees the hurt in it, and says aloud his name, says, “Ottie.” It is what he has been called, and he says again, “Ottie.” Passing the abutment, he glances up, and in the side mirror sees his face, battered, dirty; hears Bus’s voice from a far-off time,
I’m going to show you something.
He breathes long and tired, seems to puff out the years since Bus’s Chevy slammed that bridge, rolled, and Ottie crawled out. But somebody told it that way—he only recalls the hard heat of asphalt where he lay down. And sometimes, Ottie knows. Now and again, his nerves bang one another until he sees a fist, a fist gripping and twisting at once; then hot water runs down the back of his throat, he heaves. After comes the long wait—not a day or night, but both folding on each other until it is all just a time, a wait. Then there is no more memory, only years on the hustle with a semi truck—years roaring with pistons, rattling with roads, waiting to sift out one day. For this one day, he comes back.

This hill-country valley is not his place: it belongs to Sheila, to her parents, to her cousin Buster. Ottie first came from outside the valley, from the welfare house at Pruntytown; and the Gerlocks raised him here a foster child, sent him out when the money crop of welfare was spent. He sees their droughty valley, but cannot understand—the hills to either side can call down rain. Jolting along the Pike, he looks at withered fields, corn tassling out at three feet, the high places worse with yellowish leaves. August seems early for the hills to rust with dying trees, early for embankments to show patches of pale clay between milkweed and thistle. All is ripe for fire.

At a wide berm near the farmhouse, he edges his tractor truck over, and the ignition bell rings out until the engine sputters, dies. He picks up his grip, swings out on the ladder, and steps down. Heat burns through his T-shirt under a sky of white sun; a flattened green snake turns light blue against the blacktop.

The front yard’s shade is crowded with cars, and yells and giggles drift out to him from the back. A sociable, he knows, the Gerlock whoop-de-doo, but a strangeness stops him. Something is different. In the field beside the yard, a sin crop grows—half an acre of tobacco standing head-high, ready to strip. So George Gerlock’s notions have changed and have turned to the bright yellow leaves that bring top dollar. Ottie grins, takes out a Pall Mall, lets the warm smoke settle him, and minces a string of loose burley between his teeth. A clang of horseshoes comes from out back. He weaves his way through all the cars, big eight-grand jobs, and walks up mossy sandstone steps to the door.

Inside smells of ages and of chicken fried in deep fat, and he smiles to think of all his truckstop pie and coffee. In the kitchen, Sheila and her mother work at the stove, but they stop of a sudden. They look at him, and he stands still.

The old woman says, “Law, it’s you.” Sunken, dim, she totters to him. “Where on earth, where on earth?”

He takes the weak hand she offers and speaks over her shoulder to Sheila. “Milwaukee. Got to get a tank trailer of molasses from the mill. Just stopped by—didn’t mean to barge your sociable.”

“Aw, stay,” Sheila says. She comes to him and kisses his cheek. “I got all your letters and I saved ever one.”

He stares at her. She is too skinny, and her face is peeling from sunburn with flecks of brown still sticking to her cheek, and along her stomach and beneath her breasts, lines of sweat stain her blouse. He laughs. “You might of answered a few of them letters.”

The old woman jumps between them. “Otto, Buster’s awful bad off. He’s in a wheelchair with two of them bags in him to catch his business.”

Sheila goes to the stove. “Ottie don’t need none of that, Mom. He just got here. Let him rest.”

Ottie thinks of the abutment, the wear on his face. “It’s them steel plates. They don’t never get any better with them plates in their heads.”

Old Woman Gerlock’s eyes rim red. “But hush. Take your old room—go on now—you can table with us.”

Sheila smiles up at him, a sideways smile.

Upstairs, he washes and shaves. Combing out his hair, he sees how thin it has gone, how his jaw caves in where teeth are missing. He stares at the knotted purple glow along the curve of his jaw—the wreck-scar—and knows what the Gerlocks will think, wonders why it matters. No breaks are his; no breaks for foster kids, for scab truckers.

He sits on the edge of the bed, the door half open, and hears talk of the
ugly accident
creep from the kitchen up the stairs. Ottie knows Old Gerlock’s voice, and thinks back to how the old man screamed for Bus, how his raspy yells were muffled by saws cutting into twisted metal.

As he tries to find the first thing to turn them all this way, the pieces of broken life fall into his mind, and they fall without the days or nights to mend them. He opens a window, walks back to his low table. Those things are still there: dried insects, Sheila’s mussel shells from Two-Mile Creek’s shoals, arrowheads, a plaster angel. All things he saved.

He picks up the angel, likes its quiet sadness. A time ago, it peeked through flowers when he came to himself in the hospital, and the old woman prayed by his bed while he scratched the bandage-itch. He hears children shouting. When he was a child, he held a beagle puppy, looked into the trunk of a hollow tree: on the soft inner loam was the perfect skeleton of a mouse, but grabbing for it, his hand brought up a mangle of bones and wet wood. He puts the angel on the table, and looking into the yard, he sees no such tree.
Show you something.

In the hot yard, Gerlocks unfold their tables, and their laughter hurts him. They are double-knit flatlanders long spread to cities: a people of name, not past. He has been in their cities, and has jockeyed his semi through their quiet streets seeing their fine houses. But always from the phone book to the street he went, and never to a doorstep. Fancy outside is fancy inside, and he never needs to look. He knows why they come back—a little more fancy.

The sun makes long light-bars on the floor; walking through them, he thinks of the wire grille bolted to his window at Pruntytown, so far from this valley, and he wonders what became of all the boys waiting for homes. From the closet he takes an old white shirt, its shoulders tan with coat-hanger rust, with years. He puts it on, strains to button it across his chest. He wore this same shirt to church back then, sat alone, saw the fancy way Bus and Sheila dressed. This time he knows himself better, stronger, and it is good to wear the shirt.

On the closet shelf is a box of old photographs of distant Gerlock kin, people from a time so far that names have been forgotten. Years ago, wet winters kept him in, and he laid out pictures, made up lives for these people, and made them his kin and history. He felt himself part of each face, each person, and reached into their days for all he could imagine. Now they seem only pictures, and he carries the box downstairs to the porch.

The back porch catches a breeze, and he lets it slip between the buttons of his shirt, sits in the swing, and listens to the first dead water-maple leaves chattering across the hard-packed path. His hand shuffles through old photographs, some cardboard, some tin. They show the brown and gray faces of Gerlock boys; men he almost knew, old men, all dead. The women are dressed in long skirts; only half-pretty women, too soon gone old. He wonders about the colors of their world: flour-sack print dresses, dark wool suits; a bluer sky by day, a blacker night. Now days and nights blur, and the old clothes are barn rags, brown with tractor grease. He puts the box on the floor, watches the Gerlock families.

The families walk the fields to see how neatly generations laid out this farm. Ottie knows the good way it all fits: hill pasture, an orchard with a fenced cemetery, bottoms for money crops. He can see what bad seasons have done to warp barn siding, to sag fences he drew tight, to hide posts with weeds.

Wasps swarm under the porch’s eave. Warming in the late sun, they hover, dip, rise again, and their wings fight to cool the air around their nest. Beyond the hills, where the landline ends, he sees the woods creeping back, taking over with burdock, iron-weed, and sassafras. A day forgotten comes to him.

On the spring day he spent with Sheila, they caught a green-gold bass, and watched it dangle as the light sprinkled on it.

Sheila said, “I think the belly’s the prettiest part.”

Ottie grabbed her, laughed. “All that color and you pick the white?”

Sheila giggled and they held each other, fighting for breath, and leaned against the spotted bark of a sycamore. Then the fish flopped from the hook, and slipped into black water. They sat on roots, rested, listened to their breathing. With his fingers laced under her breasts, Ottie felt her blood pumping.

One wasp reels, circles, butts beaded ceiling, and Ottie watches the brown wings flash over bright yellow bands, and knows he can pack his grip, be in Columbus by midnight. He lights another cigarette, wonders if being with Sheila that day has turned them.

The old woman’s voice tunnels through the hall to the porch, a soft cry: “It’s for disgrace you want Bus here.”

“Done nothing like it,” the old man yells. “He’s a part of us. He’s got a right if the murderous devil yonder has got a right.”

Hearing Sheila calm them, he breathes out smoke, rubs fingers along the fine stubble near his scar.

Old Gerlock comes out, Sheila and her yellow dog behind him; Ottie stands to shake hands, looks again at the old man’s stiff face. He sees eyes straining from hard years, and there are lines and wrinkles set long ago by the generations trying to build a place.