by Morris, Ian;
“That your boyfriend?”
“Who?”
“Guy in the Chevy.”
“I’m so sure,” she said, and when she was gone I laid my bike on the narrow strip of pavement beneath the canopy, then took off my pack and T-shirt, which made a sucking sound. The girl returned propping a tray on her shoulder. “The manager says you got to put your shirt on. It’s all the same to me but he says you got to put it on.”
“It’s wet,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said and made a face as I pulled it over my head. She said her name was Lois. She said she got off in fifteen minutes. She said, “I know a place where you can dry off.”
I ate the hamburger and float as fast as I could swallow. The clouds were gone, and it had turned into a lush summer evening. I watched the traffic ease by on the highway. The pickup that had been at the stand when I pulled up soon returned. The driver leaned across the passenger seat to stare at me—I saw mirrored shades and a mustache—then sped off.
“Asshole,” Lois said. She was standing over me, looking a lot better with her hair loose, her apron and visor in one hand and two cans of Pabst dangling from a plastic six pack holder in the other. “Come on,” she said and led me through a stand of pine behind the drive-in to an old shed that listed so far on its foundation that I thought it would fall over when she pulled the door open.
Inside there was a trailer with an insecticide drum on back and a generator on wheels. The air smelled of turpentine and varnish. I left my bike just inside the door and followed Lois through a forest of empty fruit baskets. Lois lit a candle and dropped the beer and her work clothes onto an old mattress that was bare except for a ratty hunting blanket.
“You wouldn’t have a cigarette in there?” she said, flopping on the mattress and pointing to the spot beside her where she wanted me to sit.
“Fact I do,” I said. “If they’re not soaked.” I unzipped the pocket and saw that the waterproofing had held up pretty well. She sucked hard enough to put the match out and I had to strike another to light mine. “Here,” she said, “ashtray,” and handed me an empty sardine tin.
“You live here?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “Where you from?”
“Up by Superior,” I said. “I’m on my way to school in Madison.”
“Prove it,” she said.
“You’ll have to take my word for it.”
She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, trying to think up a question that would trip me up. “What’s your wager?”
“Huh?”
“What are you wagering? My stepsister Sherlisse—she don’t live with us—wagered in business down in Madison.”
“Major,” I said. “What’s my major.”
She didn’t know what I was talking about. “Whatever,” she said.
“History,” I said.
“Get out of here. You know all that?”
“Not yet.”
As she thought up her next question, I thought I heard the big-tired truck slowing on the highway and waited to hear it turn onto the gravel. Then it was gone.
“Who’s the guy in the pickup?” I asked.
“Just some guy,” she said. She took a sip of her beer and then set it down so she could pull her shirt over her head. Her breasts swelled in a sweat-stained bra that was a size too small as she reached behind her and undid the fastener. It snapped free with the sound of a rubber band breaking. “I used to go with his brother when this guy was away in the Coast Guard.”
“So?”
“So I got a little girl. After I broke it off with Wayne’s—that’s this guy—brother, I got pregnant with this other guy, C.C.—who’s not very nice.”
“What’s the C.C. for?”
“Nothing, I don’t think,” she said.
She leaned back against the wall and propped the beer on the bare skin of her belly. She waited before finishing her story to see if I was going to kiss her and when I didn’t she continued. “Anyway Randy—that’s Wayne’s brother—Wayne tells Randy or I guess Randy tells Wayne that he wanted to have a kid with me and then Wayne comes to me and says if I was going to be so stupid, how come I couldn’t be stupid with Randy.”
“How come you couldn’t?”
She thought about it. “He never asked,” she said. “And now Wayne keeps coming around and saying he’s going to get C.C. only he doesn’t know what he looks like because C.C. lives over in Marathon City and don’t come around here.” She ground her cigarette into the tin, though there was more than half of it left. “Probably shouldn’t be smoking if I’m pregnant, but I don’t smoke ’em all the way down.”
“I thought you said you had the kid.”
She took my hand and poked the index finger into her belly. “C.C. wants a boy,” she said. “Someone who’ll look up to him since there’s no one on earth who would.” Then she lifted my hand to her tit and held it there. Her skin was cool, and I didn’t pull away. “Not bad for having a kid and one on the way,” she said and lay on her back to slide out of her shorts.
“Nope.”
She rolled onto her hands and knees, her breasts hanging down to her elbows and soft, brown fur peeking from between her thighs, and she said, “Don’t you want to get out of those wet clothes?”
I undressed and lay on my back because I didn’t want her that way. She curled into my arms and her breathing got heavier as I moved my hand down her stomach, until I realized that I didn’t want her at all. I didn’t know if it was Wayne or C.C. or the thought of making it with somebody’s mother, but I was sure. “Is it okay if we just sleep together?”
“Sure silly,” she said and slid her hand between my legs.
“No, I mean sleep together.”
She must have understood because I felt her breath and heart slow almost as the words were out of my mouth. We fell asleep under the blanket, her with her back turned, me with my arms around her. When I woke up once in the night at the sound of a car on the highway she was still there. When I woke again in the morning, she wasn’t. On the table was a quart of root beer in a plastic jug and a note written in pencil on the back of a guest check that said, “See ya, Lois,” with eyes and a smile drawn in the o, in the dot above the i, and in the lower arch of the 5. Like three witnesses to a crime.
Considering how far I had ridden the day before, I felt awfully good as I snaked the strap on my bag through the handle of the jug and got ready to ride out. It wasn’t long past dawn. The shutters of the stand were closed. For Lois’s sake, I hurried to the highway before I was seen, though I doubt she would have cared if the whole town knew. At that hour of the morning there was nothing on the road but farm traffic and eighteen-wheelers. I hated the idea of sharing the road with them on a hazy morning, but I had a good ten miles before I could pick up a quieter road. Just south of Little Chicago was a sign that said, Marathon City 9 and I figured to get that far before stopping for breakfast.
I accelerated to pass a tractor, gave the farmer a wave, and veered back to the shoulder before a tanker rumbled past, throwing dust in my eyes. As it disappeared over the rise ahead of me I saw a second truck heading toward me and saw that it was the truck I’d seen at the stand the night before. As he passed, the driver stared through his shades, though the sun was not out yet. He hit the brakes when he recognized me and I heard him squealing through a u-turn. Pointlessly I sped up, sprinting to the top of the hill. The pickup sped by and skidded to a stop in front of me.
The first thing I saw of the man was a black cowboy boot stepping from the cab. Then he was standing in front of me and I saw he was a good half-foot taller than me. I stopped, straddling my bike, and said, “What’s up, Wayne?”
He stepped forward and tagged me with a fist to the chest that knocked me on my ass. Then he stood over me, his shades reflecting the stunned look on my face. He raised his fist when I tried to get up to show me what I’d get if I did. He said, “Hear this, C.C., you shit, anyone can have sex, but it takes a man to be a father.” T
hen he got back in his truck and drove away, leaving me lying in the road in a pool of root beer.
Aching in my chest and in the tailbone where I hit the ground, I dragged myself to the side of the road where I sat in the grass until the tractor I passed earlier rattled up the road and stopped a few feet short of the cracked jug.
“Have a spill?” the man asked and then the humor of his question struck him and he laughed. “What’d you hit?”
“Not sure,” I said.
“Where you heading?”
“Down to the Dells.”
He looked up the road as if he was trying to see my destination on the horizon.
“I’m going as far as Marathon,” he said. “Throw your bike on back.”
“That’s okay,” I said, testing the shoulder on the side I got hit. “I’m okay.”
He stared for a minute, then climbed down from the cab. “Get on,” he said. He lifted my bike off the road, straightened the handlebars, and wheeled it back to his trailer where he tossed it onto a hay bale. “You’re not okay.”
Because there was something in the way he said it that made me believe him, I climbed up and sat on the fender.
“Kind of late in the season for the Dells, isn’t it?” he said, shouting to be heard over the engine.
“Soonest I could get away,” I said. “Only been once. My dad, my uncle and aunt, and my cousins and I stopped on our way up from Chicago. Truth is, I’m on my way down to the university.” The whole while I talked, the farmer nodded his head, or at least I thought he was until I saw my own head bobbing in the rearview mirror from the vibration of the engine and I realized he hadn’t heard a word I said.
He stopped at a crossroads north of Marathon and cut the engine. “You’ll want to head down that way,” he said, still shouting, though I could hear him well enough. “The highway just gets busier from here on south. You can take that road as far as Junction City.”
“Thanks,” I said and tried to give him a couple of bucks from my pocket but he wouldn’t look at it.
“Try to keep your behind on the seat,” he said as he rattled off.
Around two o’clock in the afternoon, I reached Wisconsin Rapids, where I bought a hot dog from a vendor at a softball tournament and leaned against the outfield fence to eat it. I picked a team to root for, Ed’s Fiberglass, only to see them fall behind by fourteen runs in a sloppily played fifth inning.
West of Port Edwards I picked up Wood County Highway G and followed that south along the river. It was pretty country and flat in relation to the hills that rose on both sides of the valley. Late in the afternoon I reached Mauston where G met highways 12, 58, and 82. After thinking it over I took 12, which turned out to be a mistake because of the traffic. I backtracked to 82 and followed that due east until I picked up the county roads again. The detour cost me an hour and meant I would sleep another night on the road.
It was getting late when I rolled into the Dells. I looked for the attractions that I remembered from when we had come through thirteen years earlier.
Twelve years and a summer later, King Cole’s Castle was closed down for the season. And the robots from Robot World, which I had remembered as space-aged, were galvanized tin and pvc tubing, and looked, slumped powerless on their stands in the dark, kind of ghastly—dormant but not benign, like a race of zombies waiting for the signal to wake.
Neon vacancy signs were lit all along Highway 16, but the sky was clear, so I coasted out of town and found a good place to camp in a dense patch of wood overlooking an amusement park. It was closed like everything else and the lights were turned off, except for a single bulb on the ticket booth beneath the Ferris wheel.
I set up camp beneath an oak tree, where I could see the amusement park and the road to the south. Using my bike, my air pump, and my jacket, I fashioned a tent, then sat down to smoke a cigarette and wait for dark, which came fast.
Hoping to find a pear from the Mexican’s truck, I rummaged through my bag. There were none left. I came out instead with my worn copy of Johnny Tremain, dug around some more until I found the flashlight, opened the book to the first page, and heard my Aunt Berthe’s voice, “‘On rocky islands gulls voke. Time to be about der biss-ness.’ Like so,” she’d say and point to the pencil drawing of the gulls.
Uncle Karl and Aunt Berthe, but especially Aunt Berthe, took the job of turning us into Americans very seriously, too seriously to suit my mother, who didn’t like having to sleep on a cot and didn’t like it that my Pop was allowed to work with Uncle Karl at the butcher shop while she had to stay home. Berthe spoke to us in English, except for the many words she didn’t know, for which she lapsed into her native Frisian dialect. And every evening she kept us at the table after dinner for our lessons in practical conversation.
“Mr. Butcher,” she would say, with a nod at my uncle on the couch, in case we didn’t get it, “I fould like four sausages.” She would wave four fingers, “four, fo-were.” Once we had learned to shop, she taught us useful weather conversation. “Today fas dry, but tomorrow fill rain.”
After a half-hour of these drills, we read. She gave my father an English version of the Bible, which he was to read. It was an assignment that would occupy the next twenty years of his life and one that did him no good at all.
Berthe made my mother copy recipes from the food ads in her women’s magazines. She sat at the table, legs crossed in the blue jeans that my aunt let her wear only in the house, a pencil in her teeth, her foot bouncing up and down, and her lip turned upward to blow her bangs out of her eyes. My mother never could take much of this without getting exasperated. She didn’t like the way Aunt Berthe bossed her around or the way Pop always took sides with his sister-in-law.
While my parents got on the best they could in the dining room, Aunt Berthe read to me on the sofa, her arm around me, squeezing my head into her breast each time she turned a page. She read me many books, all meant to teach a lesson to a boy beginning life in America, but Johnny Tremain was the book out of all these that I liked the best. It was about a silversmith in the American Revolution. He is apprenticed to the Lapham family, who all like him because he is good-looking and talented at silversmithing for a boy of fourteen. His problem is that he is vain, so vain that he picks on the other boys and doesn’t see the payback coming until it is too late. Johnny burns his hand on a cracked mold that Dove (the dumbest and laziest of the Lapham apprentices) gave him on purpose. The Laphams, who liked him so well before, throw him out, and he has to find his own way in the world.
I’m sure Berthe picked this book to show me that there was a lot about Johnny’s life that was like mine. Like him, I lived in a house that wasn’t my own, like him, I lived with girls who bugged me, and like him, Aunt Berthe hoped, I’d be a working man of good character because she believed it was the duty of Germans who came to this country to be good workers, not soldiers or policemen.
Setting the book face down on the grass, I retrieved the weed and papers from my shaving kit. The pot was the last of an ounce we got from Alvin Deere at the beginning of the summer. He said it was Columbian, but we suspected it came from farther north. It’s funny how much importance we attached to such things, especially since we had no idea what we were talking about. I lit the end with the Zippo, and held the smoke in until I coughed. For the first time since I’d been on the road, I felt a sense of confidence and purpose. I felt as if I had mastered a difficult undertaking and proved myself worthy.
Once the last of the joint had burned down to a roach, I trained the flashlight on the book again. Since the first time my Aunt read it to me, I had always skipped the last chapter “A Man Can Stand Up,” in which Johnny’s best friend Rab is killed. I skipped it because I didn’t like books that ended that way and because I liked Rab better than I liked Johnny. I liked Rab for seeing things clearly and I hated it that he died.
But I read the chapter again that night and saw it wasn’t that bad. Rab dies, shot by the Redcoats, but not before he gives his m
usket to Johnny, who figures out for the first time what Rab knew all along. As I was reading, I thought about Aunt Berthe and then about my father and Grey, and I wondered about what everyone was doing back home—Pop asleep in his chair, the Reeds watching TV, and Grey and Callie out riding around.
There was the sound of a breaking twig in the woods. I switched off the flashlight and lay flat. All night long the woods had been alive with noises. Branches and twigs had fallen from the trees with the regularity of a light rain, but this had been a footstep. As I lay still, I heard a second and then a third, each closer than the last. There had been a lot of murders in this county (every one of which made its way onto page three of the Star), and that’s what I was thinking about as I clenched the flashlight in my fist and shouted, “Who’s there?”
No one answered. The footsteps stopped. “Who’s there?” I yelled again, and again no one answered, but the footsteps resumed, only a few yards away, and I felt a chill as I realized that whatever it was was not afraid of me. Knowing I was cornered and hoping for the element of surprise, I charged forward, switched on the light, and saw first the yellow eyes, then the white tail as the skunk turned its rear end toward me.
Luckily, it was not as scared as I was. It waddled away, annoyed, but not enough to waste any of his stink on me. Feeling the need for some kind of atonement for my cowardice, I opened Johnny Tremain to its back cover and with a ballpoint pen wrote the following principles:
I will be loyal to my father.
I will be a worthy representative of Zimmermann Cycles.
I will not do anything to prove Jack wrong in his trust of me or otherwise embarrass him.
I will be loyal to Grey and Callie.
I will not be afraid.
When I finished I read what I’d written and felt wise and still a little high and didn’t remember falling asleep. I woke at dawn sore in the legs and tired. With nothing to eat for breakfast, I broke camp and began the last day’s ride. There was not much farther to go, sixty miles, seventy tops. Still I felt like I’d never make it. I rolled onto Highway 18 convinced that I was making a serious mistake, that I was destined to be the failure Pop thought I was.
