Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

by Pancake, Breece D'J

  When I came back, Ellen met me at the trailer door, hugged me, and started to cry. She showed pretty well with Lundy, and I told her Eddie’s letter said to say Hi. She cried some more, and I knew Eddie was not coming back.

  Daylight fires the ridges green, shifts the colors of the fog, touches the brick streets of Rock Camp with a reddish tone. The streetlights flicker out, and the traffic signal at the far end of Front Street’s yoke snaps on; stopping nothing, warning nothing, rushing nothing on.

  I stand and my joints crack from sitting too long, but the flesh of my face is warming in the early sun. I climb the steps of the Old Bank, draw a spook in the window soap. I tell myself that spook is Eddie’s, and I wipe it off with my sleeve, then I see the bus coming down the Pike, tearing the morning, and I start down the street so he won’t stop for me. I cannot go away, and I cannot make Eddie go away, so I go home. And walking down the street as the bus goes by, I bet myself a million that my Lundy is up and already watching cartoons, and I bet I know who won.

  THE WAY IT HAS TO BE

  ALENA stepped under the awning of the Tastee Freeze and looked out at the rain draining into the dust, splattering craters with little clouds. When it stopped, cars hissed along the highway in whorls of mist. She stood by the slotted window, peering through the dirty glass to empty freezers and sills speckled with the crisp skeletons of flies. Far down the parking lot stood a phone booth, but as she stirred circles in the bottle caps and gravel, she knew she could not call home.

  She sat on a lip of step by the porcelain drinking fountain and watched Harvey’s head lolling against the car window, his holster straps arching slack above his shoulders. She felt her stomach twitch, and tried to rub her eyes without smearing. She didn’t want it this way, but knew Harvey would never change. She laughed a little; she had only come from West Virginia to see the cowboys, but all this range was farmed and fenced. The openness freed and frightened her.

  Harvey jostled, rolled down the window. There was a white dust of drool on his chin. “Wanna drive?” he said.

  She started toward the car. “All last night I worried. Momma’s cannin’ stuff today.”

  “Lay off,” he said. “You gotta right to get out.” He tightened his holster and pulled on his jacket.

  “You love that thing?”

  “He’s got it comin’.”

  “Parole catches you, you got lots more.”

  “Lay off, it’s too early,” he said, reaching for a cigarette.

  While she drove, Alena saw the haze lift, but not like a dew. Instead, it left a dust film and far ahead there was always more haze. As they skirted Oklahoma City, it thickened, and the heat stuck to their skin. She pulled off at a hamburger stand and Harvey got out while she looked at the map. In a side panel, a picture of the Cowboy Hall of Fame called her away from the route. Harvey came back with a bag of sandwiches and coffee.

  “Harv, let’s go here,” she said, offering the picture.

  He looked, then grabbed her thigh just below the crotch and kissed her. “There’ll be plenty of time after this.”

  As they ate, Harvey took a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and checked the map. He stared at the dashboard for a long time, thinking. Alena watched his brow draw tight, but she could not ask him to give it up. She hoped Harvey was not dumb enough to kill him.

  Harvey took the wheel and they drove down a small secondary toward a farm. Alena watched the land slip by, growing flatter, longer in the new heat. Always the steady haze hid the horizon, and she wished she would see a cowboy.

  The stairwell was empty, quiet, yet Alena’s nerves twisted again as she looked at Harvey. He walked uneasily and his eyes were crossed from the whiskey. Two flights up and they opened their door. The room was small and old-fashioned, and opened to the street, where the dust storm turned the streetlights yellow. Harvey took off his jacket, opened his satchel and got out the whiskey. He was shaking, and his gun flapped loosely in its holster.

  “Jesus, Harvey,” she said, sitting on the bed.

  “Will you shut up?”

  She could still see it: the man reached out to shake and Harvey handed him three in the chest. “I’m afraid,” she said, and could not forget the old woman sitting on the porch, stringing beans. Alena wondered if she still sat there, her mouth open, her son dead in the yard.

  “Have a drink,” Harvey said. He had stopped shaking.

  “I’m gonna barf.”

  “Barf then, dammit.” He rubbed his neck hard.

  She stood by the sink and looked into the drain, but nothing would come up. “What’re we gonna do?”

  “Stay here,” he said, finishing the pint, looking for another.

  “I’m sorry I’m scared,” she said, and turned on the water to wash her face.

  “Lay down,” Harvey said, standing by the window.

  Alena sat in the chair by the sink, watching Harvey. His pint half gone, he leaned against the window casement. Not the man she knew in the hills, he looked skinny and meaner to her, and now she knew he was a murderer, that the gun he always carried had worked. She was not part of him now; it was over so easily she wondered if they had ever loved.

  “We’ll go to Mexico and get married,” he said.

  “I can’t, I’m too scared.”

  Harvey turned toward her, the yellow light of the street glowing against his face and chest.

  “The whole time I was in,” he said, “I waited for two things: to kill him, and to marry you.”

  “I can’t, Harvey. I didn’t know.”

  “What? That I love you?”

  “No, the other. I thought it was talk.”

  “I don’t talk,” he said, and took a drink.

  “God, I wish you hadn’t.”

  “Whadaya want? To be back in the hills?”

  “Yes, I don’t want this anymore. I hate this.”

  He pulled his gun and pointed it at her. She sat, looking at him, his eyes wide with fear, and she leaned over the chair and threw up a stream of yellow bile. When she stopped coughing and wiped her chin, Harvey sat slumped in the corner, the pistol dangling in his hand.

  “You goddamned bitch,” he muttered. “Now I need you and you’re a goddamned bitch.” He lifted the pistol to his temple, but Alena saw him smile. A puff of air came from his lips, and he put the gun in its holster.

  “I’m gonna get drunk,” he said, standing up. “You suit yourself. I’m not comin’ back.” Down the hall, she could hear him bumping against the walls.

  Alena washed herself, then turned on the light. Her eyes were circled and red, her lips chapped. She put on makeup and went out.

  As she walked down the street, the dust blew papers against her ankles, and she went into a café with a Help Wanted sign. The girl behind the counter looked bored when Alena ordered a beer.

  “You need help?”

  “Not now, only in the morning. Come in the morning and ask for Pete. He’ll probably put you on.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and sipped.

  In the back was a phone booth, and Alena carried her beer to it. She made the call, and the phone rang twice.

  “Hello, Momma.”

  “Alena,” her voice trembled.

  “I’m in Texas, Momma. I come with Harvey.”

  “Stringin’ round with trash. We spoiled you rotten, that’s what we done.”

  “I just didn’t want you all to worry.”

  There was a long quiet. “Come on back, Alena.”

  “I can’t, Momma. I got a job. Ain’t that great?”

  “Top shelf in the cupboard fell down and made a awful mess. I been worried it’s a token.”

  “No, Momma, it’s all right, you hear? I got a job.”

  “All that jelly we put up is busted.”

  “It’s all right, Momma, you got a bunch left.”

  “I reckon.”

  “I gotta go, Momma. I love you.”

  The phone clicked.

  The night calmed, and most of the dus
t settled in eddies by the curb. As she walked along to the hotel, Alena felt better. Harvey was gone, but it didn’t matter. She had a job, and she was in Texas.

  As she passed through the lobby of the hotel, the clerk smiled at her, and she liked it. But on the landing to the room, Harvey waited. Cigarette butts were all around his feet, and he was rumpled, cripple-looking.

  “I come back to apologize,” he said, standing to hold her. She fell against him.

  “Nothin’s changed,” she said. “I’m stayin’ here.”

  “That’s it?”

  She nodded. “I got a job, so I called home. Everything’s okay.”

  “Can we talk upstairs?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Then let’s talk,” and his hand brushed against the revolver as he reached for another cigarette.

  THE SALVATION OF ME

  CHESTER was smarter than any shithouse mouse because Chester got out before the shit began to fall. But Chester had two problems: number one, he became a success, and number two, he came back. These are not your average American problems like drinking, doping, fucking, or being fucked, because Rock Camp, West Virginia, is not your average American problem maker, nor is it your average hillbilly town.

  You have never broken a mirror or walked under ladders or celebrated Saint Paddy’s day if you have never heard of Rock Camp, but you might have lost a wheel, fallen off a biplane wing, or crossed yourself left-handedly if you have. The three latter methods are the best ways to get into Rock Camp, and any viable escape is unknown to anybody but Chester, and he is unavailable for comment.

  It was while Archie Moore—the governor, not the fighter—was in his heyday that the sweet tit of the yellow rose of Texas ran dry, forcing millions of Americans down to the survival speed of 55 mph. I have heard it said that Georgians are unable to drive in snow, and that Arizonans go bonkers behind the wheel in the rain, but no true-blooded West Virginia boy would ever do less than 120 mph on a straight stretch, because those runs are hard won in a land where road maps resemble a barrel of worms with Saint Vitus’ dance. It was during this time that Chester discovered people beating it through West Virginia via Interstate 64 on their way to more interesting places like Ohio and Iowa, and for the first time in his life Chester found fourth gear in his Chevy with the Pontiac engine. Don’t ask me what the transmission was, because I was sick the day they put it in, and don’t ask me where Chester went, because I didn’t see him again for four years, and then he wasn’t talking.

  All I know for sure is that Chester made it big, and came back to show it off, and that I never hated him more in the years he was gone than I did the two hours he was home. The fact that without Chester I had twice as many cars to fix, half as much gas to pump, and nobody to road-race or play chicken with on weekends made up for itself in giving me all my own cigarettes, since Chester was the only bum in the station. And his leaving warmed over an old dream.

  Back in ’61 when I was a school kid, everybody from one end of Rock Camp to the other switched over from radio to TV, and although I still believe that was a vote purchase on Kennedy’s part, everyone swears it was a benefit of working in the pre–Great Society days. So the old Hallicrafters radio found its place next to my desk and bed, looking at me, as it later did through hours of biology homework, like any minute the Day of Infamy would come out of its speakers again.

  What did come out, and only between the dusk and dawn, was WLS from Chicago. Chicago became a dream, then more of a habit than pubescent self-abuse, replaced beating off, then finally did what the health teacher said pounding the pud would do—made me crazy as a damn loon.

  Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town…

  Don’t ask me to sing the rest, because I have forgotten it, and don’t ask me what became of the dream, either, because I have a sneaking suspicion Chester did it in for me when he came back. But the dream was more beautiful than the one about Mrs. Dent, my sex-goddess math teacher, raping hell out of me during a tutoring session, and the dream was more fun because I believed it could happen. When I asked Mr. Dent, the gym teacher, if the angle of his dangle was equal to the heat of her meat, he rammed my head into a locker, and I swore forever to keep my hand out of my Fruit of the Looms. Besides, Chicago had it over Mrs. Dent by a mile, and Chicago had more Mrs. Dents than could rape me in a million years.

  Dex Card, the then–night jock for ’LS, had a Batman fan club that even I could belong to, and the kids in Chicago all had cars, wore h.i.s. slacks—baked by the friendly h.i.s. baker in his own little oven so the crease would never wash out. They all chewed Wrigley gum, and all went to the Wrigley Building, which for some reason seems, even today, like a giant pack of Juicy Fruit on end. The kids in Chicago were so close to Motown they could drive up and see Gladys Knight or the Supremes walking on the goddamned street. And the kids in Chicago had three different temperatures: if it was cold at O’Hare Airport, it was colder in the Loop, and it was always below zero on the El. It took me ten years to get the joke. It took us two days to get the weather—if it rained in Chicago on Monday, I wore a raincoat on Wednesday, and thought of it as Chicago rain.

  After the dream came the habit. I decided to run off to Chicago, but hadn’t figured what I could do to stay alive, and I didn’t know Soul One in the town. But the guys on ’LS radio sounded like decent sorts, and they had a real warmth you could just hear when they did those Save the Children ads. You knew those guys would be the kind to give a poor kid a break. And that is where the habit and the dream got all mixed up.

  I would maybe take the train—since that was the only way I knew to get out, from my father’s Depression stories—and I might even meet A-Number-One on some hard-luck flatcar, and him tracing old dreams on the car floor with a burned-out cigarette. Then me and old A-Number-One would take the Rock Island out of Kentucky, riding nonstop coal into the Chicago yards, and A-Number-One would tell about whole trains getting swallowed up, lost, bums and all, in the vastness of everything, never found. But I would make it off the car before she beat into the yards, skirt the stink on that side, and there I was at the Loop.

  I would find WLS Studios and ask for a job application, and the receptionist, sexier than Mrs. Dent and a single to boot, would ask me what I could do. I would be dirty from the train, and my clothes would not be h.i.s., so what could I say but that I would like to sweep up. Bingo, and they hire me because nobody in Chicago ever wants to sweep up, and when I get down to scrape the Wrigley’s off the floor, they think I’m the best worker in the world. I figure I’d better mop, and Dex Card says I’m too smart to mop and for me to take this sawbuck, go buy me some h.i.s. clothes and show up here tomorrow. He says he wants me to be the day jock, and he will teach me to run the board, make echoes, spin the hits, double-up the sound effects, and switch to the news-weather-and-sports. Hot damn.

  So I sat at the desk every night, learning less biology, dreaming the dream over and over, until one night I looked at my respectable—nevertheless Woolworth—slacks, and realized that the freight trains no longer slowed down at Rock Camp. There was always the bus, but in all three times I collected enough pop bottles for a ticket to where the train slowed down, the pool balls would break in my ears, and quarters would slip away into slots of time and chance.

  “You can’t see the angles,” Chester said to me one day after he ran the table in less than a minute.

  I was in the tenth grade and didn’t give two shits for his advice. All I knew was all my quarters were gone, there were no more pop bottles along the Pike, and Chicago was still a thousand miles away. I just leaned on my stick: I was sheared and I knew it.

  “You know anything about cars?” I shook my head no. “Can you work a gas pump?” Again no. “You can wash a car.” I sneered a who-the-hell-couldn’t.

  And from that day I went to work for E. B. “Pop” Sullivan in his American Oil station at seventy-five cents an hour, one-third of which went to Chester for getting me the job. I told myself it didn’t mat
ter, I wasn’t going to make a career of it, I was hitting it for Chicago as soon as I got the money—I’d ride the buses all the way, I’d drive. What the hell, I’d save up and buy a car to take me to Chicago in style.

  When I told Chester I wanted to buy a car, he let me off the hook for his fee, even took me to look at the traps on the car lot. Then I told Chester I didn’t want a trap, I wanted a real car.

  “That’s the way you get a real one,” he said. “You make it to suit yourself—Motown just makes them to break down.”

  We looked at a Pontiac with only 38,000 and a 327. Somebody had lamed in the rear and pushed the trunk into the back seat. There was a clump of hair hanging from the chrome piece around the window. Chester crawled under this car and was gone for almost five minutes, while I was more attracted to a Chevy Impala with a new paint job and a backyard, install-it-yourself convertible top that came down of its own when you pressed a button. Chester came out from under the Pontiac like he had found a snake, then walked over to me grinning.