The Full Cleveland (3 page)

“Saint John's Cathedral,” Dad intoned like a tour man.

The doors flung open and people started streaming out, hordes of them, in a hurry, maybe to go catch the parade at the pond. Waving good-bye to them all was a black preacher in golden robes at the top of the stairs. So maybe that's what reminded me of church that morning and social consciences. You could see the resemblance, is all that I'm saying, and suddenly I was asking, “Hey, Egg Man? Does Clarine have a conscience?”

He glanced down at me with a frown. “Clarine? Of course.”

He was coaxing the Buick carefully through the church throng. But after he looked around at the people, he slowly wound up back at me. “Boyce,” he said, “you're too smart to ask that.”

“No I'm not.” And Matt immediately backed me up on it.

Dad shoved the car into park and waited for the people to cross. “But why would you ask such a thing?”

I knew what he was thinking. That I'd asked because Clarine was a black person, and I felt like showing how stupid I was. Except that wasn't the reason I'd asked. I'd really asked because Clarine and I, we were both black sheep. I'd realized it that morning in church. Even so, there was something wrong with asking about Clarine when I was just afraid to ask for myself, and now I was ashamed. I hung my head and admitted, “I might have lapsed.”

Dad leaned down closer and said,
“What?”

“Never mind. I just can't find my conscience.”

Matt laughed, but stopped when Dad snapped, “What's the question? Where's your conscience?”

The way he said it, I was scared.

“Well, is that the problem?”

“Right,” I said, pulling the brim of my Easter hat down.

“Do you know what conscience is, or not?”

I didn't answer. I was mortified. Here I'd told a Protestant I'd lapsed.

Dad sat there tapping the steering wheel. Then Matt started drumming the dash, keeping time. Then Dad asked him, kind of quick and sharp, “Can
you
define conscience for us?”

“Uh, you mean you want, like, a definition?”

“Cabot?”

Dead silence all around.

Dad sat there tapping the steering wheel so long, I sensed, even with my head down, that now all of the people outside were gone, had already reached the parade at the pond.

Luke whispered to Cabot, “How come no one asked me?”

Dad yanked the Buick out of park, stepped on the gas, and, with a jolt, we took off.

It was like we were starting all over, and already, this was the ride we'd been hoping for all along.

Now he was driving fast and didn't make any announcements about things outside. We raced out to a highway where Lake Erie was, up the ramp, opened up on the road, took another ramp and got off. Matt announced “Fred's Fish Market” in a deep, brief voice, trying to make it sound like a tour man, but he only knew it because he read it from a big sign on stilts, and you could see right through that. Not that we still didn't like it, though. It was a total ruin. A wrecked old restaurant sitting way out at the end of a broken-down pier.

“Do we get to go there?” somebody asked.

Just looking at Fred's Fish Market cheered me up right off. There were sailboats crossing back and forth on the water and there was a long metal barge that bobbed slowly along. Dad swung a right onto the pier. The wooden slats of the dock rumbled under the car as we thundered toward the end. This must be the place he was planning to take us all along. Right? The dirty lake? The source of the river that burns? I turned to check with Cabot. “Are we getting out of the car?”

Egg Man shook his head, Wrong. “But if you like it, Boyce,” he said, “then take a brain picture.”

I blinked up. “Really? How?”

“Just look at what you see and put it in your head and keep it there. Then, if you study it long enough, and let it develop over time, someday you might know something.”

Well fine, but it would be a hell of a lot easier if he'd stop the car. Instead we rounded the end of the pier between Fred's Fish Market and the dock posts at about a hundred miles an hour. Everyone screams. Except Lucy. She laughs.

Two seconds later, back at the entrance to the pier, Dad careened another right. And even though the sun was setting behind us on the lake, and dusk was settling all around, he drove us deeper and deeper into downtown Cleveland.

He sped us past old, abandoned buildings, junkyards and shipping docks, traveling way beyond the point where Mother surely would have said to roll up the windows and lock the doors. He swung quick lefts and fast rights, winding us farther into a maze of streets you began to wonder how he would ever manage to wind us back out of. So deep into those streets, somewhere in there, it seemed we passed a sort of point of no return.

When he finally slowed up to sixty, we were in what looked to be almost a neighborhood. Except there was no grass. There were no yards. Some of the buildings had no doors. Without glass, the windows were blank, like eye sockets without eyes, so, unlike our house, there were no intricate reflections mirroring wind in the trees. But you could tell, there were still people living in there.

Because I'd never seen anything like it, I thought I should take some of those brain pictures Egg Man recommended before. So I tried it. But he hadn't taught me to do it right. Nothing was taking. I saw a bashed up old car showered in broken glass. But as quickly as I saw it, it passed. I saw a man who lay by the road under a mountain of dirty blankets, with a clean white dog in his arms. I saw a boy in a bright pink tee shirt, with nothing to match it, nothing else on, not even pants. They all came and they went. Except when I saw the old lady sitting smack on the sidewalk. She was wearing an Easter hat, but she wasn't wearing any shoes. She must have tried to get dressed up for Easter. But then she must have realized, What's the use, you can't parade without shoes. And you just knew what happened. She just sat down.

I looked at my own shoes, and back out at her. I swore this time I'd take a brain picture, and it might have even happened, maybe not in full living color, but I know I heard a sort of click inside. To test it, I closed my eyes, and she was still there in my mind. But as soon as we rounded the corner, she vanished, and even when I looked at my shoes to remind me, all I could see was just white socks and black shoes, like always before.

Now we were on another street. And this one was different from the others. Here there were three freshly painted white houses, huddled together like hope in the middle of the desolate block. That's when Egg Man finally hit the brakes and the Buick came to a total stop.

It was now as quiet as a church in the car.

We all sat there, eyes glued to our father. All in all, we all already knew, he had taken us far beyond a river that burns.

Then suddenly, without any warning, just like that, Egg Man started telling us things.

“See those three white houses?”

We all nodded. Each of us looked around to see if the others were looking the right way. But you already knew where to look, you only had to follow Dad's eyes.

“Well, they're bothering my conscience.”

My eyes shot back from the three houses, to him.

“See, those three houses belong to me. To all of us, really. They were part of Father's estate. Before that, they were part of your great-grandfather's estate. The problem is, we haven't collected rent on those houses in about a hundred years. Nobody would do it because the people who live there are poor. So now I pay the upkeep and I pay the taxes. But in a year or two, that investment might finally pay off. Because a developer is planning to build a highway through here. I'll be able to sell those houses for a lot of money. Actually, for a lot more than they're worth, almost any price I ask.”

He stopped, drew a cigarette from his pocket, lit it with the lighter in the dashboard, opened the window, and sent the smoke out.

He was smoking in front of us. He sent it out, casual and long. “And I'd like to do that, I really would. But if I do, what happens?”

Nobody really wanted to say it, the answer was too sad. But Dad said, “Cabot? What happens?”

“I think,” she said, not wanting to say it, for sure. “Then the people won't have a house to live in anymore.”

“That's right, Cab, they won't. And they can't afford to go somewhere else. They'11 end up on the street.”

Everybody was all quiet, all leaning forward a little, all staring out. Something like this, the place, the problem, him talking and smoking like he did with Mother or Clarine or his best friend Mr. Carter, had never really happened before in our lives.

“So, Boyce. Why don't you tell us what to do?”

“Me?” I scowled up at him. Ask Matt, he was oldest. Ask Cabot, she was smartest. The other two could talk.

“You.” He pulled my hat off and tried to put it in my lap. But it was too big for that, so he handed it off to Matt, who bolted around about holding it like he'd been handed a bomb. But he did keep his mouth shut.

Then Dad said all I had to be was “brutally honest.” I didn't have to be a hero. But then he added, “But better let your conscience be your guide.”

Yeah, I got it. You knew what he was getting at.

So I looked out at those three white houses. Then I crossed my leg, put my elbow on my knee and my chin in my hand, and tried to think along the lines that
The Thinker
had.

But in the end, pure thinking let me down. Because all you had to do was stop thinking and look around. Your conscience wasn't in your brain. It wasn't in your stomach either. Or even in your heart. It was easier than that to find it. It was in your eyes.

Matt said, “Do we have this kind of time?”

I looked up at Egg Man. “May I decide in a year or two, please?”

He kind of laughed. “Listen. Say in a year or two, you can't really afford to give assets away. That will make your decision even harder. You can't just have a conscience when it's convenient….” He sort of drifted off. When he snapped back, he said, “But as you say, we do have a year or two to decide.” He opened the ashtray in the dashboard, pressed his cigarette out, and looked again at the three white houses with all of us. “Those people in there are old. Poor and old is a bad combination.”

I couldn't even look at the three houses after that.

“Hell, our house only cost one dollar. Don't you remember?”

Of course. The memory was my first, and him saying it like that, gentle and everything, that went straight to my heart. “So are you going to do that and give them those three houses for a dollar, Dad?”

Cabot said, “Three dollars.”

Dad said, “It's your call.”

I pressed my lips together. I could still choose anything I wanted. I didn't have to be a hero. All I had to be was brutally honest. I closed my eyes.

I opened them when Matt slapped my hat in my lap. “I can't do it, Dad.”

“Do what.”

“Can't give the houses away for a dollar and can't sell them to the development man either. I think we should just leave it the same.” Then I added timidly, “And maybe wait for the poor old people to die.” There. There was your brutally honest.

Matt said,
“Man.”

Even Cabot gasped out loud.

Dad said, “Hmmm.”

“Maybe we could take a brain picture,” I said.

He looked down, distracted. “Huh?”

“You said someday we'd know something.”

“Did I?” He stared down at me, I up at him, but for his part, he probably wasn't really looking, or he would have turned away. After winking or something. He twisted the key in the ignition and revved up the car.

That was it? What was he doing? Maybe I knew in that moment what an Egg Man was. How much mysterious power one had. Like fathers, when they were finished with you, they could just start the car.

Without further discussion, without answering questions, simply without elaboration at all, he drove us safely back through the maze of dirty streets that had gotten us there.

•   •   •

At Easter dinner that night, Mother was wearing her new ruby ring with pavé diamonds, an heirloom Dad stashed away when Grandfather died. She had decoded her clues successfully, and on the very first day. So she looked extra sparkling when she took a sip from her water glass. She held it up as if to toast someone special, which turned out to be us. She smiled at Luke. Everyone always smiled at Luke. “Did you see ducks, Lukie?”

Fork in midair, Luke looked as if he didn't know whether he'd been caught in the act, or what. But turns out, he just wasn't listening. “Yes, I like ducks.”

Saw
ducks, we all wanted to say, but sure didn't.

Mother looked down the table straight to Dad, as if shooting an arrow, but one of those soft, love ones. “And did we see anything else?”

Dad faked a frown, and steered her away as smooth as a Buick.