Lunch-Box Dream (3 page)

Monday, June 15

When Monday came, their mother promised they would get going early, but the whole first day turned out wrong. She had said they would drive out of the city right after morning traffic, but they didn't end up leaving until afternoon, and even then it was late afternoon. Why had they waited? There was another phone call from his father midday; was that it?

The car had mostly been packed the night before and the rest was done in the morning by his mother and grandmother, but hour after hour it just sat in the driveway getting hot. Bobby had eaten four times already, waiting to get on the road.

Finally about three in the afternoon there was the sound of something breaking in the kitchen. “We'll start tomorrow,” his mother said sharply, and something in Bobby's chest fell. Ricky threw his suitcase on his bed, growling like a dog. Then, just as they got used to the idea and Ricky grabbed the tennis ball and headed for the back door, the phone rang again and, not answering it, their mother stormed from room to room, getting everyone into the car.

What had just happened? There was no answer except the jumbled scene of the four of them piling out of the house and into the car, Ricky hooting softly to himself as his mother slammed and locked and relocked the front door.

The car roared to life. Under the sound of the grinding engine they were all quiet as they drove down Green, then Cedar, past houses and churches and parks and more houses and endless streets in the neighborhoods south of their house, then on Northfield Road into Shaker Heights and Maple Heights, past Southgate Shopping Center and Handel's Ice Cream, and Bedford Heights, then railroad tracks and factories and everything getting tangled in Northfield Center until all the streets slowed in end-of-the-day traffic and it seemed they would never get out of the giant city, and then they were out.

They were out, free of the close streets. Even at suppertime, summer was full-blown in the long valley you entered after you left Cleveland on the way to Akron. Green wet heat had settled over everything, and the white roadways had already thinned of cars now that school was over. The constant dipping and rising on soft tires made the big car seem like a boat as they sailed out of neighborhoods and past fields of dry grass alive with the late afternoon hiss of insects.

Soon they were traveling through small towns separated from one another by woods and plank-fenced and wire-fenced fields and overgrown meadows and old gray trucks, doorless and wheelless on blocks. It was new, all new, Bobby thought when the sharp smell of Queen Anne's lace came in through his window. It was pungent and sweet and full of summer, but cut sometimes by the faint smell of garbage or the closeness of exhaust fumes.

Early on, Ricky cranked his window all the way down, pushed a pillow to his cheek, leaned into the air, and breathed openly. The wind pushed his hair back.

Coming from Cleveland, Bobby knew what a city was. These were not cities. West Salem. Lodi. Many looked like villages that held no more than a few hundred people. The centers of town were all piled up to the roadside and ugly, except for a trim brick bank or post office, and, because they were making such good time, soon gone.

“I'm so hot,” Bobby said, fanning himself with a folded map, because the car still hadn't lost the heat it had built up all day.

“And one of us stinks,” said Ricky. “Hint, hint, it's not me.”

Bobby shifted his head to the right and pulled in a sour smell. He did the same to the other side which was not as bad. “It's the Hungarian in me,” he said. “I sweat because of the Hungarian. I'm half—”

“Yeah, well, so am I,” his brother said. “And I don't stink. You have to wear deodorant.”

“It wouldn't matter if I did use it,” said Bobby. “Mom said some people just normally perspire more. That's what sweating is. Mom said Hungarians—”

“Stop it!” said Grandma. “Stop it!” She turned around in her seat, her hawk nose silhouetted against the sunlight glaring against the windshield, her eyes moist and small. “Marion! Vhat are you telling them?”

Their mother shook her head quickly and kept her eyes on the road. “Bobby, keep quiet. Please. Or play a game. I want to make it past Columbus before we stop for the night.” Bobby felt a slowing of the car, then a speeding up as his mother pressed down on the gas pedal. Was she mad at him again? He kept making mistakes. “You still stink,” Ricky whispered. “This is the only way I can breathe,” he said, and he pushed his face back into the wind. Bobby knew it was hard to breathe with the wind blowing full in your nose, but Ricky kept doing it.

Shut up, he thought. Just shut up.

It was after that, thinking about his Hungarian blood and sweating and secretly sniffing his armpits again, and then watching the back of Grandma's head after she asked that they stop and she hurried into a restaurant to use the bathroom, that Bobby realized that Grandma's car wasn't even Grandma's car.

Why had it taken him so long to work that out? Two slow hours of getting used to sharing the backseat with Ricky before he understood that Grandma's car wasn't even Grandma's car?
Grandpa
had bought the long green two-toned light-dark Chrysler for traveling the highways between Youngstown and Florida.
Grandpa
had bought it!

When the car door swung open and Grandma slid back in, Bobby now remembered seeing a snapshot of his grandfather, his features tight, his eyes obscured behind glinting spectacles, standing next to this very car, its high fins, heavy chrome, and wide white sidewalls. It was made for traveling long distances on turnpikes, and Bobby had known this—or should have known—from the moment the car first appeared in their driveway, but the surprise of realizing it now made him speak out suddenly.

“Was this Grandpa's car?”

“Dummy,” whispered Ricky as they pulled quickly onto the road again. “What's wrong with you?”

There was quiet for a while, then Grandma said, “Yes. It vas Puppa's car.”

His mind was grinding so slowly. If it had been his grandfather's car, was it the same car stuck in the sand on the bridge?

Of course it was!

Grandpa had died because of this car!

Sitting forward on the seat, Bobby remembered the day his mother got the phone call. She said nearly nothing into the receiver, then put it down, not in the cradle, but on the table, the distant voice still speaking. Her face bunched up, her hand moving up to hide her eyes, she went to her bedroom and closed the door. It was the middle of the day. He and Ricky were quiet and stayed in their room. He heard her crying all afternoon and into the evening. His father went in and out of the room, closing the door each time. Bobby was afraid his mother was somehow changing herself inside that closed room, becoming a different person. Later, when she reappeared, her face was red and puffy, and she was quiet. He and Ricky had to stay at a relative's house while his mother flew to Florida and his father went back to school. (“What do you think, I can just leave my work?” “I don't know,” she had said. “No, I can't do that. They don't care about that. It's the new semester. This is graduate school.”) The man Bobby and Ricky had stayed with was a wide-faced, mustached Hungarian with wiry eyebrows who grew angry when Bobby did not eat fast enough. “Gerta!” he said, which wasn't a word Bobby had ever heard.

Leaning forward on the edge of the seat as they drove past brown farmland, Bobby imagined the big car stuck in a sandbank on a new bridge. Maybe only a few cars were driving over the bridge. Maybe none. Maybe Grandpa was out there alone. No, he remembered. There was someone else. There was a man.

Was it the rear bumper that his grandfather had been gripping, trying to lift it, when his heart failed? Another question: Had he been facing the car or away from it? Had he hooked his hands under the chrome bumper? His grandfather was not a large man. He was short and thin. Were his slender handprints and finger marks, those fingers that held the gentle pencils of his drafting kit—the empty one he had given Bobby that smelled of powdered graphite—somehow still there, smudging the chrome?

Or had he taken up position on one side of the car, his back to the fender, lifting the wheel well with upturned palms, as the passerby who had stopped to help (a truck driver, Bobby had heard), sat behind the wheel and depressed the accelerator to try to dislodge the car from the sand?

He finally didn't know any more than this: the car he was sitting in right then was the car that had killed his grandfather.

Don't look at a white person the wrong way or any way.

Yesterday afternoon Jacob and I didn't go to the Negro store, since it was Sunday and the store is closed on Sundays. So after the rain Jacob went fishing with his uncle Frank, and Olivia and I went right to town from church.

A family was walking down our sidewalk, so Olivia crossed the street, trying to pull me along with her fingers. But the cars honked at her running in front of them, so I was scared and kept back. Because of my new shoes I did not step into the wet gutter. And this family comes on up, a man and his wife and two boys around Jacob's age. I nearly held my breath. I knew the man's eyes were on me, you always feel that. I wouldn't look up until he was past.

Finally I looked up. It wasn't the man anymore, but it was his wife, and the look in her eyes! As if I'd have anything to do with her fat old man! She wore a pillbox hat of powder blue with white pleats around it. A short blue buttoned jacket. I wouldn't say she spat on the sidewalk near my shoes. I wouldn't say it if anyone asked me about it. But she did. Her two boys didn't notice.

Maybe we should move again. I don't want to live my whole life in Dalton and be buried near the train yard. Not when there are stores like Miller's in downtown Chattanooga.

But I did have a good time in the choir loft with Jacob yesterday morning, looking down on those heads with red necks and all that perspiration running in the crisscross cracks. The bald men sweated! Tamping their necks with wet hankies. I nudged Jacob and he rolled his eyes and I knew right then I liked him lots. I wonder now if the man who walked by, looking me up and down, was sweating in one of those pews. I don't remember seeing that pillbox hat on any lady's head, but then I wasn't looking for it, either. Those folks never knew what we whispered up there. I tapped Jacob and told him that being in the loft, Negroes were a little bit closer to God than those fat men were.

Jacob? It was all he could do not to laugh out from his nose when I told him that. Sunday was a good day.

Just before sunset and still not out of Ohio, they passed through the town of Mount Gilead. It sounded old, like Ricky's battleground names, from a far-gone century, and not at all like Cleveland, which was clearly a city of airplanes and electricity and freeways. To Bobby, Mount Gilead was like all the other dim, stifling places they had passed since leaving home and was soon to be forgotten, until Ricky sat up in his seat.

“Gilead,” he said, reading the road sign. “Mount Gilead.”

“So?” said Bobby. He had seen signs for it for miles. “What about it?”

Holding one of his books up to the window, Ricky flipped page after page until he pressed his hand flat across a large map whose main feature was a long heavy line wandering from east to west. Making a sound in his mouth, he pushed his glasses up on his forehead and held the book close, squinting at it, until he pressed his finger on the map.

“Mount Gilead,” he breathed out.

Reaching over the front seat between his mother and grandmother, Ricky fumbled for the TripTik, brought it into the back, and laid it open alongside the map. He glanced past the front seat through the windshield and Bobby saw him start to smile.

“Mount Gilead,” he said again. “And Cardington and Ashley. We're passing through them all.”

“So?” Bobby repeated. “They're crummy and little.”

“So?” Ricky said without turning. “I'll tell you what so. The Lincoln train passed through every one of these towns. The train that carried his body after he was assassinated.”

“Vhat?” said Grandma.

Bobby had heard of the Lincoln train.

“Listen to this,” Ricky said, “from Euclid Station in Cleveland—you remember, Mom”—she turned her head sideways and nodded—“down to Columbus and then to Springfield, Illinois. It went through all these towns, into and out of all the train stations without stopping. It rolled really slow. Sometimes no more than five miles an hour. It left Cleveland at midnight and came through here during the night. The train rode down the tracks through every single one of these towns. Mom, it came right here!”

He searched out the side window now. “Can we stop at the train station? Can you find the tracks? I have to see them—”

“Oh, Richie,” said their grandmother. “It's getting late.”

“Mom, can you stop the car?”

“We're on the road…we kind of have to keep going.”

“Mom?” he pleaded.

She shook her head slowly, then raised a finger instinctively at a round yellow street sign marked with a black X and two Rs. “There…” she said, slowing slightly and tapping on the inside of the windshield. “That looks like the railroad coming up. Maybe it's not too far…”

“Switch seats,” Ricky said, and had practically done it before Bobby knew what was happening, then stuck his whole head out the right window like a dog. “Turn, Mom. Turn here. Go slower. Oh, cool!” He held his glasses to his face.

They took a slow right turn off the route and crawled east from the town center for a block, then two blocks, then several, for what seemed miles, and their mother started making sounds under her breath, until there was another road sign, and she slowed.

Ricky gasped. “There they are! The tracks. I see them. Drive across.” And she drove the car forward on the flat road, nearly stopping where the dark rails sliced it, then rolled over them without power, until horns started honking behind them and they had to speed up again. After they had driven over the twin bands of scraped iron, laid out north and south along endless dry fields and trees, as inevitable and straight as lines drawn by a pencil and ruler, and they had turned back to the main route and finally left Mount Gilead, Bobby glanced at the book on the seat next to him.

Light was fading now from his side, but he could make out below the map a photograph of the Lincoln funeral car, and he imagined the train crawling like a dying person down the tracks mile after mile through the long night until it reached its rest.

That was April, too, he remembered. Just like Fort Sumter.

Had people crowded the tracks the whole way, in towns like that one, even in the lonely stretches of land between one station and the next—for certainly the villages and towns were not built up as now, but must have had far fewer buildings, more plains, more farmland, more…nothing?

The people must have numbered in the thousands, tens of thousands, just ordinary folks, lining the tracks in the depths of the night. Bobby could imagine them coming out hours before, in ones and twos and more, families gathering—
No, no, Joey, you can sleep late tomorrow. No planting
(or woodchopping or praying or whatever boys did back then).
This is important
—and neighborhoods, communities trickling out, sleepily at first, then streaming through the streets like a flood, talking to begin with, hailing one another, recognizing this or that neighbor, surprised perhaps at seeing so-and-so there, then growing silent as they all approached the iron tracks, taking their places side by side, sound draining away from them as they slowly lit torches and candles in the long wait, their hearts full and heavy and hurt.

And when it came through!

But before it came through, before that, they would have heard its gradual rumbling beneath their feet. Bobby knew they felt it, the ground moaning before they caught sight of the dark engine. He knew that feeling from waiting for the Rapid Transit that brought them downtown, and he imagined how out of the quiet they heard the slow ticking, then rocking, then clattering of iron wheels on iron rails, the breathing rhythm coming down the line before any sight of it. The muffled silence of thousands in mourning, taking the sound of that train into themselves, crushing their hearts flat.

And then it came!

The black engine, moving soberly toward them on tracks laid straight across the land with such horrible certainty, and they themselves shocked speechless, as if they had never thought of it before: that something so irrevocable and heavy and iron could tame this mess of rolling land and life and forest. The somber bunting draped on the sides of the one car (out of how many cars?) that bore and carried the weight of the dark casket. The heavy fabric moving slowly in the slow air on both sides of the train. The coming of the train in the night, the train passing, the leaving of the train, vanishing slowly into the night, changing the world entirely. The weight of the great man's passing in the wheeled iron coffin, the lost, best president.

And did chocolates watch with their families? Were they right there next to the white ones? Lincoln was about them, too, wasn't he? Bobby couldn't quite remember their story. Were chocolate boys and girls there, too, up late like white children?
Time to see him, honeybunch. Wake up now. Time to see him one last time.

Bobby felt his heart sink and sink as the sun sank and sank, his insides drowning in sharp hot tears.

Certain it was not the same and could not be the same and was utterly different, yet Bobby knew that they now drove the gathering darkness of the Ohio roads in their very own—finned, chromed, and plushly carpeted—death car.