by Stan Hayes
“Well, we’ll know pretty soon, one way or another. D’you still think that this’s a good idea?”
“What else can we do? We’ve got about all we can get from this ole car by itself. We can’t go on not knowin’ why he attracts us th’ way he does. If we get the car close to him for awhile, maybe it’ll come.”
“We’ll know in a minute,” Diana said as she turned left onto Seventh Street. “If his car’s there.”
It was. The ’52 Roadmaster wagon, clad in brown wood with blond trim, sat alone in the Hamm County Beverage Company’s parking lot, big bucktoothed grille bars snarling at the empty street. “Drive on past and turn around, Di,” said Dolores. We can sit over there behind that old truck on the other side of the street ‘til he comes out.”
“Hope he don’t work late. They’ll be wondering what we’re doing if we don’t get home pretty soon after six.”
“We miit get sump’m just sittin’ out here. Just cut this motor off.”
They sat with the car’s radio off, close behind the old black pickup, watching raindrops hang briefly on the rust-and-silver edges of the Ford stamped into its tailgate. “It’s comin’,” said Dolores.
“Mm-mmm… maybe,” said Diana in a low voice. “Siga, Pedrito.”
“We’re thinking in Spanish a lot more now,” said Dolores. “Whether it’s about him or not.”
“Yep. Spanish class’s almost like cheatin’.”
“It’s not like we asked for it. We’ve just got it.”
“Well, I’d just as soon we didn’t,” said Diana. “I mean it’s fun sometimes, looking back and forth. But it scares most people. Look what happened with Mama.”
“Yeah. Seein’-ahead scares me sometimes. Uh-oh; here he is!” Moses tripped boy-like down the building’s front steps. He walked to the left side of the building, unlocked the door to the alarm system’s switch panel, fiddled inside for a few seconds, closed it and sauntered back to his car. Seconds later, a thin cloud of steamy exhaust spewed from the tailpipe. The girls held their breath, waiting to see if he’d turn down Seventh Street toward them. He turned the other way, giving no sign of having noticed his old car. When he turned right at the Academy street stop sign, Diana pulled the white car out of its parking spot. “Don’t get too close, Di; if he turns right on Lee, then he’s probably headed home; we can just lay back and keep ‘im in sight.”
Moses cruised out Lee Street at a leisurely pace. After a productive afternoon alone in the office, he was looking forward to a workout, a hot bath and an evening’s reading. He was a little over halfway through Atlas Shrugged, and nearly half of the big lasagna that he’d made on Sunday was still in the refrigerator. Life, he reflected, was good. A little strange in spots, but good. The wonder of where he was, and, even more, at the role he’d assumed, was intact. Best of all, there was Jack. The kid now sat squarely at the center of his life. The quickness of his mind was a continuing delight to Moses; he was an excellent flight student, who would, with Ríni’s OK, solo sometime this summer. He’d had his own room at the house for a couple of years, and he and his friends worked out in the gym that Moses had set up in the well-built barn that no quadruped would ever again call home. About time, he thought, I started to feel at home here.
The woody rectangle of the wagon’s tailgate was growing bigger at way too fast a rate. “Hey!” Dolores squawked. “Slow down. We’re catchin’ ’im!”
“I can’t,” Diana grated. “The gas pedal won’t come up.”
The houses on Lee Street grew in size, then shrunk and strung out over the countryside as Moses drove out of Bisque. He glanced up into his rear-view mirror, then locked his gaze onto the fast-growing image of what was unmistakably his old car, its collapsed left-side springs making it look like an aircraft correcting its landing approach in a crosswind. What the hell, he thought, that thing’s doing seventy anyway. He eased the wagon as far to the right as possible to give this pesky relic of his past as much room as possible to hurtle by him. With no oncoming traffic, it flew by with room to spare.
“Hell!” said Diana, her teeth clinched. “It won’t let up. I’m switching it off while we’re on a straight stretch.”
“Might as well, while he’s behind us,” said Dolores. “We can flag him down for help. Hey! This way he’ll be closer to the car than we ever hoped!”
“We’ll be closer, too,” Diana observed, reaching over to the switch’s key and turning the motor off.
Moses, to his surprise, watched the white car slow quickly and turn onto the shoulder. A hand extended from the window of the driver’s door, waving him over in a circular motion. He was almost on top of it as the door opened. One of the Bishop girls, smiling brightly at him, continued to wave, running to the side of the wagon as he stopped ahead of the white car. She was tall, five-eight or so, dark and coltishly pretty as only a young girl can be. “Hi,” she said. “We couldn’t get our motor to slow down, so we just turned it off. Can you give us a hand?”
“Sure,” Moses said, getting out. “I know a little about this car. It was mine once.”
“We know,” said Dolores. You probably don’t remember us; I’m Dolores Bishop, and this is my sister Diana. We saw Ziggy run into you on his bicycle when you first came to town. You did a little tap-dance to show us you weren’t hurt.”
“Well I’ll be doggoned. You’re the little girls who hadda jump out of th’ way! Sure, I remember. You thoughcha knew my name. What was it that you called me…?”
“We called you Pedro,” said Dolores.
“That’s what it was. Who’s Pedro?
“We thought you were. Didn’t anybody ever call you Pedro? For a nickname, maybe?”
“Nope. And didn’t one of ya’ll say sump’m about me breakin’ my leg?”
“Sure enough. You did, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but how’d you know?”
“Well, Mr.- is Kabeesky the right way to say it?”
“Kubielski, but that’s as close as most people around here ever get.”
That’s why they call you Cueball, she thought. “Well, anyway, you just walk like you probly had a bad leg one time, and you still favor it.”
“Oh. Well, what about this fine old Buick? Guess we’d better run on out to my place and call somebody to tow it in. You all better call your folks, too. Tell ’em I’ll bring y’all home as soon as we get a tow truck.”
“Uh- would you mind just taking us now?” said Diana. “Our daddy’ll have some of the hands to come get the car. That way we won’t be late for dinner. Our folks hate having dinner held up- for anything.”
“OK,” said Moses. “Hop in, then.”
Moses hadn’t driven out McEver Road in quite some time. “Don’t let me run past your place,” he said as they drove through flat reddish-brown fields speckled with the bright green of new crops.
“Oh, it’s a ways yet,” said Dolores, who sat next to him, her fresh girl-smell teasing his nose. “Just look for the first hill on the left-hand side. You’ll see it way before we get there. Guess it’s pretty much the only hill, out this way.”
“Guess you girls know my friend Jack Mason,” said Moses.
“Oh, sure,” said Diana. “We have a couple of classes with Jack. He’s really nice.”
“Sure is. He was one of the first people I met when I came here. I lived at th’ hotel for awhile, and he was the first person in Bisque that I got to know. Showed me around town while I was waiting to have my- your- car fixed.”
“We had this really funny feeling the first time we sat in that car,” said Diana. “We get feelings about things sometimes. About whoever’s been around whatever it is that gives us the feeling. That time, it felt like the car turned into an airplane.”
“An airplane?”
“Yep. We were flying it; not both of us in the plane, but we both there, and we both saw everything. We could see out front, and out back, over the sides of the plane; we couldn’t see too much straight up or down because of the wings. And
we were going down; the engine wasn’t running any more, and we were headed into a field with some cows in it. We landed OK, but then we hit something that bounced us back into the air. Then we turned over, and we saw the ground coming up again. We hit hard, and things turned black as night. It scared us so bad we couldn’t move for a long time. All we could do was hold ourselves and shake.”
Moses, having no idea what else to do, kept his eyes on the road. “Sounds awful. Has anything like that ever happened to you all before?”
“Not just liike that,” Diana said,”but we get feelings, liike I told you, from people’s stuff. That’s been happening for a long time, but we’re gettin’ better at it as we get older.”
“And the longer sump’m stays around,” said Dolores, pressing her thigh hard against his, “the more we get out of it. We can start puttin’ things together, from one time that we get a feeling to the next time. Like that first time with you, when we saw Ziggy run into you and we got that feelin’ about your broken leg. You had that little limp, of course, but we definitely got that feeling. We even saw into your leg, where the bones broke. Riitchere,” she said, tapping her right leg just below the knee.
Moses laughed, trying in vain to suppress the shiny projectile of panic that was flying back and forth from the pit of his stomach into his throat. What’s next, he thought. “That’s amazing,” he said. “When did y’all realize that you could do stuff like that?”
“Way back,” said Diana. “One of the first times I remember was when Daddy bought that bull.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Dolores, laughing. “We’d just turned three. Had our birthday party a day or two before. Daddy came drivin’ up by th’ house with this ol’ bull in a trailer. We rode down to the pasture with ’im to see it, and while they were walkin’ ’im in, we went up in the trailer. We’d never seen it before, and just wanted to see what it looked like inside.”
“Yeah,” said Diana,”We walked up the ramp into that trailer. Ol’ Stoney- that’s what they called ’im for short- he had one a’ them godawful long-ass names on his papers- he’d gone Number Two in there. It really stunk! And as soon as we smelled it, we knew one thing about Ol’ Stoney.”
“And what was that?” Moses asked.
“He was through bein’ a daddy. That’s what our daddy told us that he’d bought Ol’ Stoney for; a new daddy for the cows. We didn’t want to tell Daddy, but we knew as soon as we smelled the bullshit; that bull’s daddyin’ days was over.”
“And were they?”
“Daddy said Ol’ Stoney never hit a lick. He took ‘im back to the man he bought ‘im from a couple months later. Anyway, that’s the first time I can remember.”
“Yep,” said Dolores. “That was the first time. And just liike we didn’t tell Daddy about ’Ol’ Stoney, we’re careful about tellin’ people about th’ stuff that we feel. If what it is won’t make much difference to ’em, we just let ’em find out in their own time. We don’t wanta be fortune tellers or anything like that.”
“There’s our house,” said Diana.
Moses slowed to turn onto the gravel driveway, the wagon nosing up as the grade increased. He heard the gravel’s message as it skrunched under his wheels: getemout getemout getemout getemout getemout. As they reached the parking area behind the house, a woman stepped through the back door and onto the porch. “That’s Momma,” said Diana, waving through the window at her. The woman kept coming, heading for the wagon with a big smile. “Hey, Momma; the car broke down.”
Diana opened the wagon’s door, got out and hugged her mother. As she did, Dolores hugged Moses. In the instant that it took for him to think about whether or not to hug her back, she’d kissed him, tongue first, and was sliding across the seat. “Get out and say hey to Momma,” she said over her shoulder. Seeing that there was no choice, and wondering if she’d left lipstick on his mouth, he did. “Momma, this’s Mr. Kubielski. He was passing by when the car quit. And guess what? It used to be his car.”
The woman smiled, somewhat perplexedly, at him. She seemed somehow to be accustomed to the condition. “Hello, Mr.- ”
“Kubielski. Moses Kubielski. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Bishop,” said Moses.
“You too,” she said, not meaning it. I know exactly who you are, she thought; you’re the yankee bastard that screwed my sister- once. “Thanks for bringin’ these girls home; since they started drivin’, I just can’t keep up with ‘em. What happened to the car, sugar?”
“It wouldn’t stop; just kept goin’ faster, so we cut it off and pulled off the road. We’d just passed Mr. Kubielski, and he saw that we were havin’ trouble. He pulled over to help, and gave us a ride home. We thought Daddy’d want one of the hands to go get th’ car.”
“Yes, I guess he will,” said Mrs. Bishop. “Well, thanks again for your help, Mr. Kabeesky. Drop back and see us if ever you’re out this way.”
“Yes,” said Dolores. “Please do.”
“Be seein’ ya!” said Diana.
Jesus Christ, he thought as the wagon hauled him back home, what the hell’s happening? Her kissin’ me like that. Those little witches are scary. They already know too much about me, and they’re probably tellin’ anybody who’ll listen. That “Peter” shit’s gonna be all over high school, and then around town, in no time. May be already. The question is, what do I do about it? If there’s any truth to that business about them getting “feelings” from people’s “stuff,” they’re gonna be gettin’ more about me every time they sit down in that car. Not that anyone who hears what they know so far would be able to make much of it; it sounds like so much bullshit at this point. Maybe the connection between me and the car’ll peter out. Ah, shit. I can’t even say my own name without being worried about what they know, or guess, or whatever the fuck it is they’re doing. Question is, what’m I gonna do?
“I’m gonna demonstrate a Chandelle to ya now,” said Moses, pushing the J3’s stick forward as he spoke. “That’s French. Far as I know, there’s not even a rough English equivalent; guess that’s why they still say “Chandelle.” Anyway, what it is, is a zoom climb combined with a hundred-eighty-degree turn. You trade some air speed for altitude, and reverse th’ aircraft’s direction. Th’ Chandelle saves ya energy and gains ya altitude. Ya stay in th’ fight an’ keep your eye on th’ target, lookin’ back and down.” As the J3’s airspeed indicator touched 120 he pulled its nose up into a shallow climb. “What you want is a nice coordinated turn, with a little back pressure on the stick, so that you’re gaining altitude throughout the turn. But watch how much you pull back; you don’t want to lose any more airspeed than you have to.”
“Why use a Chandelle?” Jack called back to Moses as they leveled off at six thousand feet. “Why not just do a level turn back the other way?”
“Well, it’s kinda like th’ pushups and situps ya do at fuhbawl practice,” said Moses to the back of Jack’s head. “They give you some extra strength that you can call on when you need it. When ya fly, you have to assume that things won’t always go right. When they go wrong, ya need to get th’ airplane out of trouble. You may need to find a place to put it down, or you just may need to get it headed another way, at another altitude, as quick as you can, like in a combat situation. Practicing maneuvers like the Chandelle makes sure that ya have th’ skill and experience to do whatever ya need ta do ta stay alive. Now you try one. Just check around you for traffic with a couple of clearin’ turns; then nose ’er down about twenty degrees ’til ya see 120. Then pull the nose up gradually, and make your turn to th’ right.”
They were headed due north. Jack followed Moses’ instructions, watching as the airspeed indicator’s needle approached 120. The late afternoon air had some bumps in it, and the J3’s fabric covering flexed as it absorbed them, making little drumlike thumps as it did. At 120, the thumps came faster and louder as he pulled the stick back and over to the right. “Not too much back stick,” Moses cautioned. “Get your rate of climb to 800 feet a minute, and hold it. You’ll
lose too much airspeed if ya pull up too fast.” Jack eased his back pressure on the stick, continuing his turn. As the compass neared the 180-degree mark, he began releasing his sidewise pressure on the stick, settling down on a southerly heading and dropping the nose to level off. “Not bad,” said Moses, gently shaking the stick. “I’ve got it.”
They had drifted gradually north and east with the prevailing winds. As they proceeded on the southerly heading back toward Bisque, the Savannah River snaked along their route a few miles to the left. Just south of the city of Augusta, it ran along the western border of a sprawling open wound of cleared red clay soil and a clutch of large unfinished buildings, most of them only a story or two in height. “That’s the a-bomb plant,” said Moses, banking the plane to the left to get a better look. “They’ve been working on it for awhile now; looks like they’ve still got quite a ways to go.”
“Goddamiteydayum, it’s big,” said Jack. “You could put a buncha Bisques in that patch. Let’s get a little closer, can we?”
“Nope. I’m not gettin’ my ticket pulled for flying into restricted air space. Hell, they might even shoot at us.”
“Guess the rough English equivalent for that’s ‘Keep the hell out,’ “ Jack laughed. “We must need one helluva lot of bombs.”
“Guess so,” said Moses.
“Jesus, that Marlene,” said Lee Webster, as Moses slid onto a stool, waving a hand at Ribeye in drink alert.
“Zo… zuh boss lady uff Rrancho Notorrious vass atrrraktif to you?” said Moses.
“Never more so, old as she may be. Fritz Lang got a hell of a performance out of her, stringing those horny young gents along. She’s been down that road before, of course. Remember Destry?”
“Yeah, she has. But I liked this one better. Takes a Kraut to get the most out of a Kraut, I guess.”
“Don’t tell Hemingway that, or John Wayne either,” Webster said with a grin. According to the columnists, they got quite a bit out of her.”
