by Lois Ruby
“We’ve sure missed him,” I admitted, grabbing up their empty soup bowls. Tag’s was bone-dry, except he’d left all the lima beans and all the carrots, lined up on opposite sides of the bowl like rival football squads. “I’m throwing these away,” I told Cee Dubyah, “before Tag finds a way to sell them.”
After things had slowed down a little, Palmer stopped in for a quick bowl of chili. He wasn’t a bit happy to see Tag. “Hey, what happened to you? One day you’re my clean-up boy, next day you’re gone.”
“Sorry, sir,” Tag said, trying for the life of him to sound humble. “I had to move on.”
“Well, if a guy moves on, he ought to give notice. Two weeks’ notice,” Palmer grumbled, while the chili steam fogged up his glasses.
Tag said, “I agree with you a hundred and fifty percent, Mr. Palmer, but the circumstances were unavoidable. Tell him, Cee Dubyah.”
“Unavoidable,” his father agreed.
“So, sir, I’m hoping my moving on so quick won’t stand in the way of your writing me a letter of recommendation for when I apply for another job.” Tag took a small notebook out of his back pocket and flipped it open like Captain Kirk asking to be beamed up.
Palmer wiped chili down his overalls and took the notebook. “A letter of recommendation? Why sure,” he said amicably. Then his eyes narrowed, “If you scoot over there right now and mop the living daylights out of my station.”
“Yes, sir!” Tag said. He jumped down from the stool and ran to the door.
“Ever’ single corner, ever’ nook and cranny,” Palmer said. “I want it clean as an Army bunkhouse.”
“When I get done, you could eat off the floor, sir.” Tag opened the door, then looked back as if it were an afterthought—but I knew he had it planned this way all along. “You don’t mind, Mr. Palmer, if my dad fills up at your diesel pump, do you?”
Well, what could Palmer do, with all those truckers in the place hanging on every word, and him looking like a slave driver and a Scrooge, taking advantage of a sweet, innocent nine-year-old kid? “Naw, go ahead, Cee Dubyah. First tank’s on the house. But when you come through here next week, all bets are off, hear?”
Everyone finally cleared out, and we turned off the neon sign so no late travelers or bugs would come to our door. We pulled a circle of lawn chairs out in front of the Pig-Out Inn.
Cee Dubyah filled every inch of his chair; if he’d stood up, the chair would have gone with him. And Tag looked like a rag doll thrown into a corner of his chair. His feet barely hit the ground. Johnny took off his shoes and socks—good thing we were outside—and dug his toes into the dry summer earth.
Momma called the meeting to order. “Before Stephanie and that boyfriend of hers come home, we’re all eager to hear how things were settled in court.”
“Best possible way,” Cee Dubyah said.
“You and Tag are together!” I cried, clapping my hands.
“Yes, but that’s not the whole picture,” Cee Dubyah explained, while Tag fidgeted in his chair. “Here’s what that Judge Bohanan said. He said a boy needs a regular, steady home he can come home to after school.”
I glared at Momma, who pretended not to see me in the dark.
“A place to bring his friends home to, a place where there’s a hot supper ready every day, where he can spread out his homework on a table that he knows is going to be there every night of the week.”
“I don’t do homework,” Tag said.
“But you will, son. Fifth grade isn’t any picnic, like fourth grade. Now, that wasn’t all the judge said.”
“Get to the good part,” I urged Cee Dubyah.
“He said it was his opinion—”
“His ‘studied opinion,’ those were his words,” Tag said.
“Whatever. The judge said it sure looked like me and Tag had something good going for us. He said there was this study that said the average American father spends four minutes a week with his kids, and that even though I’m on the road half my life, or more, I always got time for my son. He said I’m sure not the average father.”
We all smiled at Cee Dubyah, stuffed in his chair and puffed up with pride.
“What about Bonnie?” I asked.
“Well, honey, Bonnie isn’t mine,” Cee Dubyah replied. “McFee’s her daddy. So,” he continued, “Judge Bohanan said the best thing for Tag is a joint custody deal. He’ll go with his mother during the school year, and he’ll come with me in the summers and other holidays, and weekends we’ll work out whatever’s best for everybody.”
“That sounds like the ideal arrangement, Cee Dubyah,” Momma said.
“Well, I disagree.” I stood up furiously, overturning my chair. “The judge didn’t listen to a word I said.”
“Aw, sit down,” Johnny commanded. “It looks to me like you’re the one who’s not listening. Tell me if I’m wrong, kid. You got the best deal, right?”
Tag squirmed around, but didn’t answer Johnny.
“Don’t sit there like a pimple on a forehead. Speak up.”
“I don’t want to,” Tag said quietly.
“What’s with him?” Johnny asked Cee Dubyah. “All of a sudden the kid with the biggest mouth in Kansas shuts up like a clam.”
Cee Dubyah gave Tag a chance to say something, but when he didn’t, Cee Dubyah tried to speak for him. “I think what’s going on here, Johnny, is that the boy is afraid he’s gonna hurt my feelings if he tells his true heart.”
I sat down to listen.
“He thinks he’s not supposed to want to live with his mother and sister and stepdad. He thinks that a manly guy would want to be on the road all the time, with his real dad.” Cee Dubyah paused, gathering up his words. “But deep down, he knows he belongs in one place, at his mother’s, during school time, and I reckon he loves his mother. What the kid doesn’t know is that, sure, it’s okay if he loves his mother, even if I don’t.”
Tag said, “How come all those hours in the truck, you never said that before?”
“Couldn’t trust myself to say it and not drive off the road.”
Tag smiled and rearranged himself in the chair, more at home.
“We’re going to have fine summers, son, fine, sweet summers.”
SIXTEEN
Halfway through the summer the heat set in permanently. You’d wake up on those 90° nights, sweating just from the sheer effort of sleeping. The wheat was newly harvested, and all along the highway sunflowers with big black and yellow faces began sprouting up. Weeds again. But these were weeds that were programmed to show up every year, same time, same place. Emile Joe told me you could snap off a blossom one year, and if you remembered just which stalk it came from, the next year you’d find a wound at the very spot you’d plucked the flower from. Sunflowers were regular, dependable flowers. They were growing here long before I ever made my small splash in Spinner, and they’d still be here long after I was gone.
The sunflowers meant it was time to go into town and register at the high school, just like Tag was probably doing at his school in Wichita. Momma drove me in, though all the other kids came without parents. A whole pickup full pulled up just ahead of us and unloaded fourteen guys and girls, all dressed alike in shorts and floppy shirts. I, of course, had forced my sweaty body into a gingham skirt and a pink roll-up sleeve blouse, and I looked ridiculous beside the others. The Fourteen stared at me, but no one said hello. They poured into the school and disappeared down the dark hall.
Momma and I stood outside, cupping our hands at our foreheads to block the sun, and looked the building over thoroughly. It was two stories, with air-conditioning boxes outside each small, dark window. The building was made of limestone slabs in a forbidding grayish brown shade. There were water stains etched into the limestone beneath each air conditioner.
Stuck out there in the middle of a field, the school had no protection from the prairie wind, and a chain clanged mournfully against the bare flagpole. It looked and sounded just like a jail. I tried to picture it
in the winter and couldn’t imagine how it could be any worse. Momma nudged me along to the door.
Inside, there were no signs telling where the office was. Well, of course not, everyone knew. I was probably the first new student in the school in eighty generations. Maybe more. We finally found the office.
“My daughter’s here to register,” Momma said.
A secretary, fighting a losing battle with the papers blowing around on her desk, snapped, “In the gym.”
We went looking for the gym. The Fourteen, of course, were already there when we found it. A coach-like teacher in a white short-sleeved shirt said, “Name?”
“Chandler.”
He flipped through some cards.
“Bedelia?”
“No, Dovi.”
“No Debbie here.”
“I’m not here. I mean, I’m not there. I’m … new.” I was ashamed to have this overheard, not that the Fourteen couldn’t tell already.
“Mrs. Englebrecht,” the coach-type yelled across the gym, “we’ve got a new student here!” Mrs. Englebrecht came gliding over and landed on me eagerly, like a vampire who’s just discovered a plump, fresh neck.
“Hello, hello, hello,” she chirped. “Where are you from?”
Well, that was a tough question. Did she have an hour for my whole life story, or did she mean where was I living?
“I was in eighth grade in Wichita,” I said.
“Wonderful! We shall have to send for your records.”
Momma pulled out a neatly printed list of all my schools, their addresses, and my immunization records from three states. Mrs. Englebrecht was speechless. We couldn’t have done more harm if we’d choked her with a gym sock. She handed me a yearbook to glance through while she studied my amazing records.
The girls in the yearbook all had the same hairstyle, and there weren’t any black or Asian faces to be seen. The teachers looked like they’d sprouted from the limestone slabs and hadn’t ever been kids. I flipped to the Blue and Gold Society picture, where all the top leaders of the school were crammed together on the bleachers in the gym, wearing cute little tams on their heads.
Biscuits and red-eye gravy would have been less nauseating.
“Let’s get out of here, Momma,” I whispered.
She shot me a stern look as she wrote out the check for enrollment. Well, I signed everything they stuck in front of me, and I picked six classes, though I’m not sure which ones they were.
Despite the enormous steer painted on the floor of the gym and the horns hanging all over the place, I was utterly sure I did not want to be a Baby Cow after all. In fact, I had no intention of setting foot in Spinner Joint Union High School again. It was so—forever.
Momma and I rode home in silence, and I couldn’t wait to tell Stephanie about the school. I was dreaming up ways of making it hilariously funny. A longhorn steer on the floor! Mrs. Englebrecht! Signs on the walls saying ABSOLUTELY NO CHEWING TOBACCO ALLOWED ON PREMISES! I pictured Stephanie rolling around on the floor, clutching her side.
But what I found instead was a pitiful blob of whimpering flesh—Stephanie with her heart broken clean in two. She didn’t think she’d survive three days, with this misery. It was worse than Papaya’s tragedy, worse even than anything Honorée ever suffered through: Eddie Perini had gotten his orders. He was going to Munich, Germany, to run the Army’s radios there.
“It is positively cruel of the Army,” Stephanie wailed, “to break up two people in love.”
“That’s the Uncle for you,” Johnny said, not exactly oozing sympathy. “At least he probably won’t get shot up, in Germany.”
“I—will—never—get over this,” Stephanie said. “We’re going to write every day.”
“It’ll cost you a fortune in stamps. You’ll have to take a part-time job when school starts,” I teased. “So, is Wayne Firestone starting to look good again?”
“Dovi Chandler, you are crass and rude and insensitive,” cried Stephanie.
“That’s her specialty,” Johnny agreed. “Next to pigs, she likes rudeness best. In fact, I’ll bet she’s wild about rude pigs, like those two up there on that wall.” He pointed to the poster of Sweeney and Petunia rubbing snouts ecstatically and bumping each other’s pork chops.
The lovers only set Stephanie off again. “The worst of it is, I won’t be able to finish my fiction novel,” she wailed. “I’m much too heartsick to create.”
Well, that was a big loss to the literary world. I was hoping the gentleman English teacher would come back so I could spread the good news.
With Eddie shipping out any day, there wasn’t much to keep Stephanie at the Pig-Out any longer. So she made plans to go home and have her parents take her to Steak and Ale, where she could drown her sorrows in medium-rare sirloin.
Momma and I sat in the ripped booth, talking about all this. She absently picked cotton stuffing out of the cushion, and I recognized the look in her eyes. “Stephanie’s leaving, and Tag’s gone, and school will be starting next month. After the summer, things will slow down around here,” she said. “We’ll have a quick, cool fall, and how many drivers will be on the road in the dead of winter?”
“Things still have to get from one place to another, like you’re always saying.” I had to remember to take Momma to meet Mr. Malroy.
“I know, I know, but we’ll feel the slowdown. Everything slows down for the winter. Animals and birds and trees. Why not the trucking industry?”
“I’m getting the idea of where you’re headed, Momma, but I need more clues. What exactly’s on your mind?”
“Don’t you think we could use a winter venture, Dov? Somewhere warm. Florida? No, too many retired people there, though the Haitian refugees could use some help. How about Arizona? Or Texas!”
“Doing what?” I asked, already seeing the brown mountains of El Paso spread out before us, the clogged streets of Houston, the hotels along the river in San Antonio. I looked out the window of the Pig-Out, toward the high school I’d never have to set foot in again.
Momma stuffed a wad of cotton back into the cushion. “Oh, I’m just daydreaming. You know me. No one would buy the Pig-Out Inn anyway,” Momma said, giving me one of her supremely discontented sighs.
“Well, we could try to find a buyer,” I said hopefully.
“Your father would have a heart attack if we did this to him again.”
“You saw that school, Momma. He wouldn’t want me there.”
“Never judge a book by its cover, Dovi,” Momma said, but not very convincingly.
“But you saw it from the inside. Would you and Dad want to go to Parents’ Night there? Would you want Mrs. Englebrecht cheerfully calling you to bake cupcakes for the Blue and Gold banquet?”
“You’re no good for me, Dovi. You cater to my weaknesses,” Momma said sadly. “It’s time I settled down and grew up.” Momma looked around the Pig-Out, at the identical booths with napkin and sugar and hot pepper dispensers, and salt and pepper shakers, and ketchup and mustard bottles arranged in the same neat pattern on each table. “I am not afraid of tornadoes or rats or being poor, but, Dovi, I am terrified of boredom.”
SEVENTEEN
The next day’s mail brought a letter from the Omaha modeling agency, Flair, Inc.
Dear Ms. Chandler:
I think you may have the very hands we’re seeking for a jewelry store commercial. Please arrange to come to Omaha, at your own expense, for a final review of your hands, after which we might possibly be in a position to offer you a modest contract.
We are widely known throughout the Midwest. We tell our clients, “For just the right look, send up a Flair.” Remember, Ms. Chandler, Madison Avenue scouts are always monitoring locally produced commercials. It is possible that your involvement with Flair, Inc. could be parlayed into a lucrative national contract.
And remember also, you need not have the face or the body to go with the hands.
I shall look forward to meeting you as soon as possible.
>
Sincerely yours,
Mae Evans Bannister
Once again, before Stephanie jumped ship, we left Johnny in charge and Momma and I drove to Omaha. I slept a lot of the way, with a scarf over my face to keep the dust out of my mouth. When I was awake, I used up about half a bottle of rosewater-and-glycerine on my valuable hands. I daydreamed about seeing these hands of mine on all three major networks. I pictured a fifty-year-old woman with streaks of gray in her hair. She’d wear a lavender organdy apron over her cocktail dress and talk about how new lemon-scented Dish Delight is so good to her hands. The camera would zoom in on her gnarled, arthritic fingers, then show her in Dish Delight up to her elbows, then pan to thirty flipping pages of the calendar—and her never out of the dishwater all those days—and finally, ta-dah! My hands would wave under the nose of the camera, proving to every housewife and bachelor out in TV land that Dish Delight is a miracle! I’d use Dominique as my professional name. Dominique fit hands like mine.
Momma interrupted my lucrative national career. “I wonder if Johnny would buy the Pig-Out.”
“Johnny? He hasn’t got two quarters to rub together.”
“You’re right.” Miles sped by. The sun played tricks and made us believe there were puddles of water on the road ahead, which was actually so hot that the asphalt turned soft as putty. And then Momma got an inspiration. “What do you think of this, Dovi? Say we leave Johnny in charge for the winter, and we go somewhere else for a few months.”
“For the whole school year,” I said, “or no deal.” I was getting too old to do half a year in one school and half a year somewhere else.
“Oh, of course, for the whole school year.”
Why not? I wasn’t about to sacrifice my life and be sentenced to four years at Spinner Joint Union High School. I didn’t need cows. Why not a school in some other town in Kansas? Why not a school in some other state? Was there anything wrong with Mexico?
We were just south of the Nebraska border, outside of Concordia. Momma’s throat was dry, and it was time for lunch anyway. “Let’s pull into that truck stop,” Momma suggested. “It can’t be bad. Look at all the diesels parked there.” Walking into the Y Cafe was just like going home for me, but I could tell it made Momma even more restless.
