Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (41 page)

“It’s a pity that we are dead and stuck here,” I remarked aloud to the visitor. Something in his smile made me realize what I’d said. “I mean that
you’re
dead,” I amended.

On Monday, the daily documentary featured the irrigation system of the Netherlands, but neither my father-in-law nor I was ready to come back from the tropical paradises of the South Pacific. We sat there in gloomy silence for a few minutes, politely studying placid canals and bobbing fields of tulips, but neither of us could muster any enthusiasm for the subject. I clicked off the set just as he was beginning to fade out. “I’ll go to the library,” I said to the dimming apparition. “Perhaps I can borrow a video of the Pacific Islands—or at least a travel guide.”

Stephen occasionally sent me to the library to research something for him, but I had never actually checked anything out for my own use. I suppose Mrs. Nagata, the librarian, was a bit surprised to see me walk past Architecture and into the Travel section. Or perhaps she was surprised to see me in jeans with my hair in a ponytail. In my haste I had not bothered to change into the costume I thought of as Suburban Respectable. Half an hour later, I had managed to find two coffee-table books on the Pacific Islands, a video documentary about Tahiti, and the old Disney film of
Treasure Island
that I remembered from childhood. As an afterthought I picked up a guidebook to Polynesia as well.

When I entered the house again I could hear the strains of “Bali H’ai” being played on a honky-tonk piano. I wondered if that was a hint. Surely Bali H’ai would be featured in one of the books I had selected. Where was it, anyhow? And had my father-in-law been there before? I tried to remember his stories about World War II, but exotic islands did not play a part in any tale that I recalled. “He’s simply getting into the spirit of the thing,” I said. Realizing my pun I laughed out loud.

“What’s so funny?”

Stephen was home. I nearly dropped the books. He was lounging on the sofa watching the sports network.
“The air conditioning was broken at the office, so I came home,” he told me without taking his eyes off the flickering screen. “I was surprised to find you gone. I thought you moped around here all day.”

“I went to the library,” I mumbled.

“Oh?” He raised his eyebrows in that maddening way of his. “Whatever for? I didn’t send you.”

I felt like a child caught playing hooky. “I just went,” I said.

I edged closer to the screen, careful not to block his view, and held out my armload of books and videos. “I just thought I’d do some reading.”

A commercial came on just then, and he turned his attention to me, or rather to the materials from the library. He flipped through the stack of books, inspected the videos, and set them down on the sofa beside him. “The South Pacific,” he said, sounding amused.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“If you like heat and insects.”

“I thought we might go there some day.”

Stephen turned back to the television. “Paul Gauguin went to Tahiti. He was a painter.”

“Yes.”

“Went to Tahiti, got leprosy there, and died,” said Stephen, with evident satisfaction that Gauguin’s lapse of judgment had been so amply rewarded. Before I could reply, the commercial ended, and Stephen went back to the game, dismissing the subject of Polynesia from his thoughts entirely.

I left the room, unnoticed by Stephen, who was absorbed in the television and completely oblivious to my existence. Before I left, though, I took the pile of books, which he had discarded on the sofa beside him.

I was sitting on the bed, leafing through color pictures of beaches at sunset and lush island waterfalls, when my father-in-law materialized beside me and began peering
at the pages with a look similar to Stephen’s television face. Once when I turned a page too quickly, he reached for the book, and then drew back, as if he suddenly remembered that he could no longer hold objects for himself.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I sighed. “I wish I could see it for real.”

The ghost nodded sadly. He tried to touch the page, but his fingers became transparent and passed through the photo.

“Just go!” I said. “Do it! I’m tied here. Stephen refuses to go anywhere. I’m too depressed to go to the mall, much less to another country. But you!
You’re
not a prisoner. I wish
I
were a ghost. If I were, I certainly wouldn’t be haunting a tract house in Iowa. I’d do whatever I wanted. I’d be free! I’d go to Tahiti—or Easter Island—or wherever I wanted!”

The ghost shook his head, and immediately I felt sorry for my outburst. Apparently there were rules to the afterlife, and I had no idea what his limitations were. I shouldn’t have reproached him for things I don’t understand, I thought.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wish we weren’t trapped here.” My eyes filled with tears. One of them plopped onto the waterfall picture and slid down the rocks, as if to join the cascading image.

I looked up to see my father-in-law’s ghost smiling and shaking his head. He looked very much like Stephen for just that instant: his expression was the one Stephen always has when I’ve said something foolish. I thought over what I had said.
I wish we weren’t trapped here
.

Why was I trapped here?

I had grandmother’s legacy in the savings account. It had grown to nearly twelve thousand dollars, because in my depression I couldn’t be bothered to go out and actually buy anything. I had a suitcase, and enough summer clothes to see me through a few months in the tropics. And—most important—I had no emotional ties to keep
me in Woodland Hills. I felt that I had already been haunting Stephen for the last few years of our married life. It was time I left. And when I went, his memory would never haunt me.

I opened the closet and reached for the canvas suitcase on the top shelf. As I was pulling it down, I heard a thump at the back of the closet, and I stood on tiptoe to see what had been knocked over. It was a large bronze vase. I had to stand on a chair to reach it. When I pulled it out of a tangle of coat hangers, I saw the brass plate on the front bearing a name and two dates. My father-in-law!

I left the suitcase on the floor, and ran downstairs. “Stephen!” I said. “Did you know that your father’s ashes are in the bedroom closet?”

“Shhh! They’re kicking the extra point.”

I waited an eternity for a commercial and asked again, keeping my voice casual.

“Dad? Sure. I took them after the funeral. I thought it would upset Mother too much to leave them on the mantel where she’d have to see them all the time. I figured I’d wait for the anniversary of his death—next month, isn’t it?—and then scatter him under the rose bushes out back. Bone meal. Great compost, huh?”

“Great,” I murmured.

As I fled back upstairs I heard him call out, “Thanks for reminding me!”

It took me twenty minutes to clean out the fireplace in the den, and another half hour to pack. Ten minutes to locate my passport and the passbook to my savings account. Five minutes to transfer the contents of the urn to a plastic cosmetics bag in my suitcase and replace them with the fireplace ashes. I didn’t think I’d need my coat, but I put it on anyway, as a gesture of finality. My father-in-law was wearing his.

We stood for a moment in the foyer, staring at the back of Stephen’s head, haloed in the light of the television. I
picked up my suitcase, and flung open the door. “I’m going out!” I called.

“Yeah—okay,” said Stephen.

“I may be some time.”

T
HAT AFTERNOON THE
Haskell girls came by collecting money for a funeral wreath. Davy gave them a nickel and ten pennies from the baking powder can in the pantry. Mama would probably have given them a quarter, since Dad was working a couple of days a week at the railroad shop now, but she was visiting over at the Kesslers, talking about the accident. All the mothers in the community would be talking about the tragedy, with their eyes red from crying, because, as the preacher said, death is always a pang of sorrow no matter who is taken, but sooner or later, every one of them would say, “It might have been my boy.” It wasn’t one of their boys, though; it was Junior Mullins. Fifteen cents was enough for Junior Mullins, Davy thought.

The money collected from the twenty-three families living back in the hollow of Foggy Mountain would be enough for a decent bunch of store-bought flowers from the shop in Erwin. One of the Haskell girls would write every family’s name on the card to be given to Junior’s parents. There would probably be bigger, fancier wreaths from Mr. Mullins’s fellow managers at the railroad, maybe even one from the president of the railroad himself, considering the circumstances, but the neighbors would want
to send one anyway, to show that their thoughts and prayers were with the family in this time of sorrow.

Davy was still in mourning for his bicycle. Nobody was collecting flowers for it. Two dollars it had cost. Two dollars earned in solitary misery with sweat and briar-pricks, picking blackberries in the abandoned fields, and selling them door to door at ten cents a gallon. It takes a lot of blackberries to make a gallon. Getting two dollars’ worth of dimes had cost Davy two precious weeks of summer—two weeks of working most of the day dragging a gallon bucket through the briars, sidestepping snakes and poison oak, while everybody else went swimming or played ball at the old gravel pit. Two weeks without candy, soda pop, or Saturday matinees.

Saturday afternoons were the hardest. Davy would be alone in a field of brambles, so hot that the air was wavy when you looked into the distance, with the mountains shutting him in like the green walls of an open air prison. Somewhere on the other side of that ridge, his friends were having fun. Hour after hour he stooped over blackberry thickets, and to keep his mind off his sore back and his stuck fingers he’d try to imagine what was playing at the picture show. The cowboys, like Buck Jones or Tom Mix and his horse Tony, were his favorite, but he went every Saturday he could afford, no matter what was playing. When you’re eleven years old and home seems duller than ditch water, anything on the screen is better than real life. You had to want something real bad to miss the movies on account of it. Right now the movie house was showing
Hills of Peril:
Buck Jones helps a young woman save her gold mine from outlaws. The pictures were silent, but the dialogue was printed on cards that were projected onto the screen. Davy reckoned most of the boys in the county had learned more about reading at the picture show than they had in the schoolhouse. At Saturday matinees, with all those boys reading the lines out loud as they flashed on the screen, the theater hummed
with a steady drone that sounded like the Johnsons’ beehives at swarm time.

Davy’d missed most of the Phantom serial. He’d had to make do with a summary of the story from Johnny Suttle, who forgot bits of the story and kept repeating the parts he liked. But Davy didn’t care. There’d be other movies, and his reward for missing this one was his very own bicycle. He had done it.

His hard-earned two dollars bought one bicycle frame with no accessories: no tires, no brakes, no pedals. He had made tires for the wheels himself, with a little help from Old Lady Turner’s yard. She had never missed that twelve feet of red rubber garden hose, and the tires he made from them were the perfect width and strength for the homemade bike. He’d caught hell, though, for cutting Mama’s clothesline and taking the galvanized wire to run through the four lengths of garden hose so that he could fasten them around the wheel rims. The beating he got for taking the clothesline had been worth it, though. Now he was riding.

Davy’s two-dollar bike had cast-off railroad spikes for pedals, and the Morris coaster brakes didn’t work, but that didn’t matter. He was riding. Dad had brought home an almost-empty can of blue paint from one of the railroad shops, and Davy had painted his bike so that from a distance it looked almost store-bought.

Up and down the gravel pit he wheeled and turned, dipping into the chug-holes and jumping out on the far side high enough to clear an upright Quaker Oats box set there as an obstacle. If he needed to stop the bike, he pressed his foot on the front wheel. That worked fairly well for solitary riding, but when he wanted to get into the bicycle polo games in Wells’s pasture, he needed something more reliable.

Bicycle polo was played with an old softball and croquet mallets that one of the boys had scrounged from somebody’s trash pile. They would divide up into teams
and race up and down the pasture on their bikes, swatting at the softball. You needed brakes, though, to keep from crashing into your teammates, or so that you could change directions suddenly when the ball was intercepted by the other team and swatted off in the other direction. After a few hours of tinkering, he had repaired the Morris coaster brakes with a brake drum fashioned from a Coca-Cola bottle cap. After two or three hours of hard riding, the cap would grind up, leaving him brakeless again, but by then the polo game would be over, and he could go home and make repairs for the next match.