by Lois Ruby
But while Johnny hacked up the pie with a butcher knife and Momma scooped the ice cream, Tag tried to slip out on us.
“Hey, where are you going?” I demanded.
“Home,” the twerp said in a small, puppy-dog voice.
“No, you don’t!”
Momma went over and put her arm around him. Never mind that chocolate ice cream was dripping down his Red Sox shirt. “Please stay, Tag.”
He shook his head.
“Why not?” Momma asked.
“Because I pay my own way.”
“But it’s a party,” said Stephanie, who didn’t seem to have any problem mooching off us for the summer.
Again, Tag shook his rag-mop head. “I pay my own way,” he repeated. “And I don’t feel like paying for a piece of Johnny’s apple pie!”
Johnny howled and slapped his knee, and we all had a good laugh, and after a little while Johnny slipped out to see Tag safely back to Red Cottage 4.
Luckily for Dad, we didn’t get the whole U.S. Army on Saturday morning. Just Eddie Perini, with the perfect teeth, who spent about two hours in a back booth with Stephanie because Momma and Dad wouldn’t let her go anywhere with him.
Every so often I’d look over, and they’d be armwrestling and sneaking smooches and looking lovesick. Most of the time we all tried to ignore them, except when Momma brought them frosty mugs of root beer overflowing with foam.
Dad hadn’t got the hang of the restaurant business. He tried to help during the lunch-hour rush, but he was too big for our narrow work space. It was like bumper cars. “Dad, hand me the mayo,” I barked at him when the Pig-Out was full of truckers hungry for a quick lunch.
“The mayo, the mayo,” he said, looking around like a kid at the state fair.
“Mayonnaise,” I reminded him, and I pointed to the jar with my head, since my arms were loaded clear to the elbows with plates of food. Then Momma came tearing out of the kitchen, kicking the swinging door ahead of her, while Johnny slammed a plate of loose spaghetti on the pass-through. Dad was pinned between the swinging door and pass-through, with one hand stuck in the ice maker, as spaghetti sauce flew all over his shirt.
“Oh, Mike, I’m sorry,” Momma cried, rubbing his half-frozen paw with a warm towel, which we’d just used to mop up a cup of hot chocolate. Momma turned Dad around, the way you turn kids for Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey, and pushed him by the waist to the booth with the big hole in the upholstery where no one ever sat. “Here are the receipts, Mike.” She patted the solar-operated calculator in his shirt pocket. “Have fun!” she said, and then she got away quickly. Although Momma carefully kept the month’s bills and receipts in a cigar box, she never added anything up.
“Marilyn Chandler, how can you run a business this way?” Dad groaned.
Momma yelled back over the lunch counter, “Oh, you know me. I’m the creative force behind it all, but you, you’re the cool-headed businessman.” All the truckers knew she was flattering him outrageously, and they loved every minute of it. Stephanie and I had the feeling that our regulars were all half in love with Momma.
Johnny made us stuffed Rock Cornish hen for dinner. The only thing is, Rock Cornish hens are these tiny little chickens, and you have to buy one for each person, and Johnny found out it would cost a fortune and even then there’d be barely a scrap left over for Fenway. So he bought one giant hen of a turkey and called it stuffed Rock Cornish turkey broad.
After dinner, since truck-stop traffic is slow on Saturday nights, we all played poker for M & M’s.
Tag, of course, was a cardsharp. He shuffled like dealers in the movies, with fancy bridges and all, and he dealt one-handed, and he had a perfect poker face.
On the last hand, Tag dealt a five-card draw in about nine seconds flat. Deuces were wild. We were all holding our cards tight and low—family or no family, nobody trusted anybody. Stephanie was squirming in her seat; she’d probably drawn an ace, and we all had to know there was something earth-shattering in her hand.
Johnny’s face was absolutely grim, so you didn’t know if he was covering up a winning hand or if his ulcer was just kicking up. Momma’s free hand was under the table, and she was counting on her fingers. Then Johnny placed a bet—he must have something there besides an ulcer. Dad raised him one yellow (yellow and oranges were worth two browns). Somebody had to nudge Momma when it was her turn, and she kicked in two greens, which meant that either she had a dynamite hand, or she’d forgotten that greens were lots more expensive than the other colors.
Tag’s face was as blank as a Cabbage Patch Doll’s, and he saw Momma’s two greens and raised two more. Stephanie stayed in, Dad folded, I folded, Momma dropped two cards face up and was thrown out of the hand, and then it was just Stephanie, Johnny, and Tag.
When I tell you Stephanie was out of her league, I mean it kindly. Would I ever say anything mean about my favorite cousin? But she was betting piles of M & M’s, and when I leaned into her hand I saw she had an ace, a king, a queen, a six, and a four, in about eighteen different suits. She probably thought she had some kind of royal straight going. I told her she should just flush the whole thing down the toilet, and for once she listened to me.
That left Johnny and Tag. There was a delicious pile of M & M’s in the center of the table. Momma and Dad were holding hands and feeding each other browns—from her pile, not his, of course.
Then Tag said, “Johnny, are you conning me?”
“Could be.” Johnny peered over the top of the half-glasses he used just for seeing things up close, but his eyes didn’t give away a clue. The moment of truth. I had to crane my neck to see Tag’s cards. He was holding three tens and a pair of sixes, but what did Johnny have? Tag saw Johnny’s bet, twenty M & M’s of all colors, and he raised him five.
Aha! That fired Johnny up, and he slid his whole stake into the center of the table. The tension was so thick you could chisel it off in chunks. COCA-COLA flashed on and off in neon, and Tag had to make a decision, quick.
The little old fox, the tycoon, sized up the competition—and folded. Johnny laid down his hand: a pair of eights! He raked in the whole rainbow mountain of candy with this greedy gurgle of a sound from deep in his throat, while Tag grew smaller and smaller before our eyes.
But on Monday Tag was out at his roadside stand, selling plastic sandwich bags stuffed full of M & M’s. Propped up on a table was a fresh new sign: TAKE SOME CANDY TO THOSE SWEET BABIES AT HOME FOR ONLY HALF A BUCK A BAG.
ELEVEN
The restaurant was empty except for Pawnee, who sat in a booth reading the Sunday paper and nursing a glass of iced tea. It was almost two o’clock on a slow, slow day.
“Hey, Tag, put down the funnies a minute. I want to talk to you,” I insisted.
“What?” He rustled the paper.
“Listen, since you don’t work on Sundays, there’s no reason why you can’t come with me somewhere.”
“Where?” he asked, suspiciously. His head was still buried in the funnies, but I could tell he was interested.
“To the train depot.”
He slammed the paper down on the counter. “Now what do I want to go to the train depot for?”
Well, there was no real way to explain, other than to say that this was my favorite spot in Spinner, and it was no use taking Stephanie, and there was this conductor who was a perfect example of someone transplanted from half a century ago to the tail end of the twentieth, and he was just someone Tag ought to meet. But did I tell Tag all this? Oh no. I just said, “Because I said so, that’s why.”
Those were fighting words for Taggert Layton. He crossed his arms over his chest, those skinny little chicken-bone arms with the big biceps that pop out of nowhere like goiters, and I could see that it would take a forklift to move him down to the depot.
“Personally, I don’t care if you go or not. I’m going anyway. And then I’m going over to the Wall-Mart discount store across from the depot, where you can buy things cheap—combs, Life Savers, gum, note
pads, pencils, lots of stuff. I need a few supplies,” I said, looking off into the wild blue.
“Cheap?”
“Dirt cheap. And there might be a flea market on Sunday over near the depot. You never know what might turn up at a flea market. Dirt cheap.”
Tag went into the kitchen and fixed himself three pieces of toast, one with grape jelly, one with strawberry, and one with honey. He carefully recorded the price on his tab, which we had taped to the cash register.
Pawnee folded his paper and came up to the register with a couple of limp dollar bills he’d pulled out of the band of his cowboy hat. “Gimme a pack of Marlboros,” he said, helping himself to some free matches. He pulled the cellophane string at the top of the pack, slipped the matches into the cigarette wrapper, and rolled the whole thing deftly into the sleeve of his T-shirt. “Guess I’ll see you kids next week. I’ll be coming through here about Wednesday. Johnny fixing meatloaf on Wednesday?”
“It’s a tradition,” I promised.
“Well, save me a good hunk, an end piece. So, kid,” he said, turning to Tag, “it’s a real bunk day, huh? Whatcha gonna do? You fixin’ to go down to that train depot place?”
“I guess so,” Tag said glumly.
“Well, clang that bell once for old Pawnee, hear?” He waved to us from the door, and again from the cab of his truck as he started down the lonesome Sunday road.
Mr. Malroy, despite the 102° temperature, was decked out in his navy blue conductor’s uniform. It was frayed at the cuffs and shiny at the seat, and it must have fit him better around the middle years ago, but still it looked just right on him. One glance at Mr. Malroy and I understood how Momma felt about uniforms. Even the limp gold braid at his shoulders was impressive, and his black wing-tip shoes were shined to a high polish.
He smiled when he saw us coming. Johnny dropped us off and headed for the Pizza Hut, which was the only restaurant he trusted in Spinner. Probably because the national headquarters of Pizza Hut are in Wichita.
“Good afternoon, miss, mister,” the conductor said. “Are you coming aboard?”
“Is he kidding?” Tag whispered.
“Absolutely not,” I snapped, shoving Tag ahead of me. He started up the first step.
“Ho, wait a minute, son,” said Mr. Malroy. “You got to have a ticket.”
Tag shot me a nasty look, but Mr. Malroy reached into his pocket and pulled out two well-worn tickets.
“Here you go. The conductor inside will collect the tickets after the trip gets under way.”
We climbed the steep steps into the passenger car. I knew Mr. Malroy would let us explore the locomotive later, but we had to do things in their proper order on his railroad. Outside, we saw him pacing back and forth, yelling, “All a-boar-rd!”
Tag loved the car right away. He ran his hands over the smooth red velvet seats and sank into one that had been worn in by bodies much larger than his. His feet touched the brown leather footrest only if he slouched way down.
There was a deep quiet in the coach; even our heartbeats were muffled by the immense velvet seats, the flocked wallpaper, and the thick red carpet. I slid out of my sandals to squirm my feet around in that soft wool.
Tag climbed over me and, like a kid, had to touch everything. I let it go until he ran his hand the whole length of a brass rail at the back of the coach. “For Pete’s sake, Tag, keep your grubby hands to yourself. Can’t you see how Mr. Malroy has polished that thing up like glass?”
Once more we heard, “All a-boar-rd!” but apparently we were to be the only passengers. We felt two stout raps on the flank of the car, Mr. Malroy’s signal to the engineer that everyone was aboard. He hoisted himself up the steps with surprising ease, considering that he had to be close to eighty. We watched him slide the door open to the locomotive.
“He’s talking to the engineer now,” I whispered. Somehow the deep silence of the velvet required soft voices. “He’s telling him all’s clear for departure.”
“What engineer?” Tag asked, craning his neck. “There’s nobody up there.”
“Haven’t you got even a shred of imagination?”
Everything was apparently okay with the engineer, so Mr. Malroy closed that door and slid open the one to our coach. “Afternoon, folks,” he said amiably. “First stop, Elgar, then Brooksville, El Dorado, Andover, Wellington, last stop Ponca City. Where to, miss?”
“Wellington.”
“You, son?”
“Uh, Ponca City.” Tag looked at me smugly.
“Bad news at Ponca City. We got some switching trouble, but I believe we’ll get it patched up before the train’s due to pull in.” He drew a gold watch with a chain out of his breast pocket. “Plenty of time,” he assured us, stuffing the watch back. “Tickets!”
We handed over our tickets, Mr. Malroy continued down the aisle, stopping at each seat on the coach. Finally he came back and perched on the armrest of the seat across from us.
“Did you ever think where Kansas would be without the railroad?” he said.
“In Missouri?” Tag suggested.
“In Missouri!” Mr. Malroy shook with laughter, and the shiny buttons around his middle strained sorely. His laughter stopped as suddenly as it began. “There’s nothing more important to the economy of this great nation than the railroad.”
Tag said, “My dad’s a truck driver.”
“Oh, is he now? Well, how do you think they get the goods to the trucks? Every one of those grand manufacturers and the big farm co-ops and your major grain elevators, they all back up to railroad tracks. We move the lifeblood of this nation down thousands of miles of track, and the trucks pick up the goods for the short hauls where there aren’t any tracks. Believe it.”
Tag didn’t look like he believed it.
“Oh, but the days of the grand passenger trains are gone,” Mr. Malroy said, pulling a huge rumpled red handkerchief from his back pocket. He dabbed at his eyes and blew his nose soundly. “Gone. Why, I remember when President Woodrow Wilson came through here in the prettiest coach you ever saw. Painted yellow, it was, and all the upholstery was white. And the world-renowned actress, Sarah Bernhardt, she had an aunt over in Elgar, and she came through whenever she could, with a whole car full of luggage and packages for the folks in Elgar.”
Tag asked, “Did you ever have any baseball players on your train?”
“Did we! Why, it was maybe 1940, ’41 when the great Ted Williams rode in this car.”
“Ted Williams? No kidding? Ted Williams of the Red Sox? He rode this car?”
“As I recollect, he sat in that very seat. Yours, or the one behind you, sure enough.”
“Wow!” Tag cried. “This is unbelievable. Wait till I tell my dad!”
“Say, son, isn’t that a Red Sox cap you’re wearing?” Mr. Malroy asked.
“Yes, sir,” said Tag, beaming.
“Can you beat that coincidence?” Mr. Malroy said, chuckling. “Well, the railroad’s full of romance, son, it’s full of romance.”
TWELVE
I was in charge of local arrangements for the Beach Boys’ concert tour. They liked thick rare steaks served backstage right after each performance. Johnny had his hibachi set up behind the scrim. Smoke curled up into the lights of the show. Just as Johnny was lifting his machete to attack the side of beef and tame it into T-bones, I woke up: there was something out there.
I bolted up in my bed, my ears alert as a hound dog’s. Footsteps. Heavy footsteps trying to be light, trying not to grind the gravel of our lot, trying not to upset a single stone. I pulled back a corner of the curtain. A large man had just passed my window, tiptoeing like a clumsy Frankenstein. He was heading—where?—for another cottage? Maybe he was a hobo needing a place to sleep for the night. But something said no. Even in the dark, with just a memory of light from the sliver of a moon, which was so high up in the sky that it was almost ready to give way to morning—even in that light I sensed that the man wasn’t a bum. There was nothing untied about him, n
o clothes flapping or trailing behind him. He wore something all one piece—overalls, and high-top tennis shoes. He walked past Green Cottage 5 and stopped in front of the next cottage. He seemed to be looking it over carefully. Then he raised his beefy hand and knocked on the window of Red Cottage 4. Cee Dubyah!
I pulled on my jeans and a loose T-shirt and stole past Stephanie. The night was almost cool, like it was forgiving the stones under my feet for being lumps of coal during the day. Crickets sang their summer song, stopping for only a second as I passed their love nests. By now Cee Dubyah was inside Tag’s cottage. The door was wide open, and barely outlined in the darkness was the giant Cee Dubyah with Tag scooped up in his arms like a puppy. Fenway circled them both.
I tried to look away but couldn’t. I was drawn back to those two—Tag with his legs wrapped around his father’s waist, and their faces as close to each other as a bow to a violin.
But they never noticed me out there in the dark, and soon they fell to whispering and talking in low mahogany tones, and I had to strain to catch as much as possible.
“You come for me, Cee Dubyah? I can be ready in thirty seconds.”
“Not yet, son. Just wanted to see how you’re getting along.”
“Aw, I’m doing okay. I made a clean profit, more than fifty dollars already after I pay them for my meals.”
“Are they giving you any hassles, son?”
“The one, Dovi, she’s real bossy. She thinks she’s in charge of the world. But I figured out how to get her to do my laundry every Sunday.”
He figured out!
“And she warned me when the cops came looking for me with a picture.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what I got to talk to you about.” Cee Dubyah put Tag down and closed the door. I had to move to the window where it was open around the air conditioner Tag never bothered to turn on, and hook my ear to the opening. Cee Dubyah talked up louder anyway, since the door was closed.
“Your mother, she’s missing you, son. Bonnie too.”
