Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

by Pancake, Breece D'J

  “She’s totaled to hell and back, but the engine’s perfect.”

  I told Chester I liked the Impala, but he just sucked his teeth like he knew what happened to tops that come down of their own. He walked all around the car, bent over to look under it, rubbed his fingers along the tread of the tires, and all the time I kept staring at the $325 soaped on the windshield. Sure, the Pontiac was cheaper, but who wanted to pay $130 to walk around with an engine under his arm? Not me, I wanted to drive it away, make the top go up and down.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I got me a nice Chevy for that Pontiac’s motor. You buy the motor—I’ll rent the body to you.”

  I wasn’t about to bite, so I shook my head.

  “We’ll be partners, then. We’ll each only sell out to the other, and we’ll stick together on weekends. You know, double dates.”

  That made a little more sense, and the rest of that month the Chicago dream went humming away to hide someplace in my brain. I had nightmares about adapters being stretched out to fit an engine that shouldn’t be in a Chevy. I worried about tapping too far from the solid part of the block, could just see cast steel splintering the first time we forced her up to 80. I went to drag races, asked anybody I saw if you could put a Pony engine in a Chevy, and most people laughed, but one smart-ass leaned back in his chair: “Son,” says the smart-ass, “go play with yourself.”

  But the month went by, and the engine, for some reason I never understood, went in, but all the fire wall and all the fender wells came out. When Chester came down to the transmission problem, I came down with the flu, and for three days I neither dreamed of Chicago nor my car because I was too busy being sick. On returning to school, I saw her in the parking lot, the rear end jacked up with shackles, and when I looked in on the gearshift, Chester had a four-speed pattern knob screwed on it. I thought it was a joke, because I never saw the last gear used. She did 50 wound tight in third, and that was enough for the straight piece in the Pike.

  That summer was just one big time. Chester and I spent every cent we earned on gas and every free minute on the back roads. We discovered a bridge with enough hump that hitting it at 45 would send us airborne every time and make the buggy rock like a chair until we could get new shocks on it. Unbeknownst to him, Pop Sullivan supplied shocks all summer. We found a curved section of one-lane that was almost always good for a near head-on with a Pepsi truck. A couple of times, Pop supplied red-lead to disguise the fact that we had gotten too close to the Pepsi truck. Pepsi, I take it, got the message and rerouted the driver. Chester told me, “They sent a boy to do a man’s job.”

  But the best fun came when a Cabell County deputy was on his way to summons some ridge runner to court for not sharing his liquor revenues with the state. Deputy met us coming downhill and around a curve at top speed, and there was little else for Deputy to do but give us the right-of-way or kiss all our sweet asses good-bye. Deputy was a very wise man. Figuring that anybody coming from nowhere that fast had something to hide, Deputy then radioed ahead the liquor was in our car. They nabbed us at the foot of the hill, stone-cold sober, and found us holding no booze at all. What they did find were Deputy’s two daughters—both out with their momma’s permission. Chester got three days for driving away from a deputy, and neither of us was allowed to call the girls again. Don’t ask me what their momma got, as I am not sure if Deputy was the wife-beating kind or not.

  Chester served his three days in Sundays reading the paper at the county jail, and the first Sunday changed him considerably for the worse. At work the next day he wouldn’t talk about who he wanted to go out with or where we were going to find money for the next tankful, but by the weekend he loosened up. “It’s all a matter of chance,” he said. I thought he was trying to explain his jail sentence. It took four years before I figured it out. After his second Sunday, he came back with a sneak in his eyes like he was just waiting for something to drop on his back out of thin air. “It’s out there for sure, but it’s just a matter of being in the right place when the shit falls.” I agreed all the way. It was all in Chicago, and school was starting and I was still in Rock Camp.

  The next morning, Chester went on the lam in a most interesting manner. It was his turn to cruise around town in the car during lunch, smooching his woman, and I would get snatch for my grab on the high-school steps. We had both been caught getting too fresh with our girls, and now there was not a decent girl in Rock Camp that wouldn’t claim one of us raped her after her football boyfriend knocked her up. So it was that Chester’s main squeeze was a girl from Little Tokyo Hollow, where twice-is-nice-but-incest-is-best and all the kids look like gooks. So it was I had no woman that day. And Chester was making the main circuit with regular rounds so that from where I sat, I could see every move this slant-eye made.

  The first three go-arounds were pretty standard, and I could almost measure the distance her hand had moved on the way to Chester’s crotch, but on the fourth trip she had him wide and was working the mojo. I knew Chester had done some slick bargaining to get that much action that soon, and I figured it was over from there, since I saw him turn around and head west back to the school. He was still only cruising, taking his time like he knew the bell would never ring unless he had gone to his locker. Then on the way by, I saw the slant-eye going down on him, her head bobbing like mad, Chester smiling, goosing the gas in short spurts. It wasn’t until he stopped at the town limits and put the girl out that I figured Chester didn’t care about coming back to class, but I went on anyway, sure as I could be that he’d be back tomorrow.

  That afternoon the guidance counselor called me in and asked me what I was doing with the rest of my life. It seemed Chester’s slant-eye had spilled the beans, and they were thinking there was something in me they could save. I told the guidance counselor I wanted to work for a radio station in Chicago—just as a joke.

  “Well, you’ll have to go to college for that, you know.”

  It was news to me, because Dex Card didn’t sound like a teacher or a doctor, and I said no.

  That evening, when Chester didn’t show for work, I asked Pop Sullivan to sponsor me through college. I promised to stay at the station until I got my journalism degree, then send him the difference.

  “I got all the difference I need” was all Pop would say. He kept looking out the window for Chester to come fix his share of cars. Chester never came, so I stayed until the next morning and figured out how to fix both our shares of cars with a book, and I thought maybe that was the way Chester had done it all along.

  A week later, Pop hired another kid to pump gas and raised me to minimum wage, which by Archie’s heyday was about a buck fifty. That was when I got a telegram from Cleveland saying: “Sorry Pard, I got it into fourth and couldn’t get it out. I’ll make it up sometime, C.”—and I wondered why Chester bothered to waste four cents on the “Pard.”

  I left the radio off and my grades went up a little, but I didn’t think I’d learned much worth knowing. The guidance counselor kept this shit-eating grin for when she passed me in the hall. Then weird stuff started happening—like my old man would come to bed sober at night and go to church twice on Sunday and drink orange juice at breakfast without pitching a bitch at me. And I got invited to parties the football players’ parents threw for them and their girls, but I never went. Then a teacher told me if I made a B in World History before Christmas I would be a cinch for the Honor Society, but I told that teacher in no uncertain terms what the Honor Society could go do with themselves, and the teacher said I was a smart-ass. I agreed. I still got the B. I started dating Deputy’s youngest daughter again, and he acted like I was a quarterback.

  Then the real shit came down. It was snowing tons before Christmas, so I cut school to help Pop clear the passage around the pumps, and he called the principal to tell him what was up. I was salting the sidewalks when Pop yelled at me to come inside, then he loaded his pipe and sat down behind the desk.

  “What’d I tell you about steal
ing?” he says, but I set him straight that I wasn’t holding anything of his. “I don’t mean you are, only I want to know if you remember.” I told him that he had said once-a-thief-always-a-thief about a million times. “Do you think that’s so?” I asked him if he’d stolen before. “Just once, but I put it back.” I told him once-a-thief-always-a-thief, but he just laughed. “You need a college sponsor. I need another Catholic in this town.” I assured Pop that my old man had suddenly seen the light, but I was in no way, shape, or form walking his path with him, and he was Methodist to boot. “You think about it.” I said I would think about it and went in to grease a car. All I could think was, Dex Card doesn’t sound like a Catholic name.

  I walked home in the snow that night, and it did not seem like Chicago snow—it seemed like I was a kid before the radio moved into my room, and like when I got home from sledding and my old lady was still alive, still pumping coffee into me to cut the chill, and I missed her just a little.

  I went inside hoping my old man would have a beer in his hand just so I could put things back to normal again, but he was sitting in the kitchen reading a newspaper, and he was stoned sober out of his mind.

  I fixed us some supper, and while we ate he asked me if Pop had said anything to me about college. I said he would sponsor me if I turned mackerel-snapper. “Not a bad deal. You going to take it?” I assured him I was thinking on it. “There’s mail for you,” and he handed me an envelope postmarked Des Moines, Iowa. Inside was seventy-five bucks and a scrap of paper that said: “Less depreciation. Adios, C.” I put the money in my wallet and balled up the note. “You can buy some clothes with that wad,” he said. I assured my old man that I would need a car more if I was to drive to college every day, but he just laughed, gave me a dutch rub from across the table. He told me I was a good kid for a punk. Even the women in the school cafeteria sent me a card saying I was bound to become a man of letters—on the inside was a cartoon mailman. It took me a while to get the joke.

  And about that time the price of gas went up. I bought a ’58 VW without a floor, drove it that way until it rained, then bought a floor for more than I paid for the whole car. Deputy’s daughter missed a couple of months and decided it was me, and it probably was, so she joined me in catechism and classes at the community college in Huntington, and we lived in a three-room above Pop’s station. The minute Deputy’s daughter lost the kid, Deputy had the whole thing annulled, and Pop made me move back in with my old man. My old man started drinking again. I quit school, but stayed on at Pop Sullivan’s garage to pay him back, and it was about then that I saw the time had gone by too soon. I had not turned the old radio on in all these years and I couldn’t stand to now. I decided working for Pop wasn’t too bad, and pretty soon my old man was going to have to be put away, and I’d need the money for that.

  I drove home in the VW singing, “Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town…” and that was when I knew I had forgotten the rest of the words.

  Then I saw it coming down the Pike, just a glimpse of metallic blue, a blur with yellow fog-lights that passed in the dusk, and the driver’s face was Chester’s. I wheeled the bug around, headed back into town, wound the gears tight to gain some speed, but he was too far gone to catch up with. I cruised town for an hour before I saw him barreling down the Pike again, and this time I saw the blond in his car. When they pulled in on Front Street to get a bite at the café, I wheeled up beside the new Camaro. I had seen that girl of his lick her teeth in toothpaste ads on TV.

  I asked Chester how it was going, but he forgot to know me: “Beg pardon?” I saw all his teeth were capped, but I told him who I was. “Oh, yes,” he said. I asked him where he got the mean machine, and his girl looked at me funny, smiled to herself. “It’s a rental.” His girl broke out laughing, but I didn’t get the joke. I told Chester he ought to go by and say hello to Pop on the way out. “Yes, yes, well, I will.” I invited them out to eat with me and my old man, but Chester got a case of rabbit. “Perhaps another time. Nice to see you again.” He slammed the car door, went into the café ahead of his girl.

  I sat there in the VW, stared at the grease on my jeans, thought I ought to go in there and shove a couple of perhaps-another-times down Chester’s shit-sucking face. Don’t ask me why I didn’t do it, because it was what I wanted most to do all my life, and don’t ask me where the dream went, because it never hummed to me again.

  When Chester left town, he left a germ. Not the kind of germ you think makes a plant grow, but a disease, a virus, a contagion. Chester sowed them in the café when Deputy recognized him, asked what he’d been doing with himself. Chester told Deputy he was on Broadway, and gave away free tickets to the show he was in, and a whole slough of people went up to New York. They all came back humming show songs. And the germ spread all over Rock Camp, made any kid on the high-school stage think he could be Chester. A couple of the first ones killed themselves, then the real hell was watching the ones who came back, when Pop told them there was no work at the station for faggots.

  But one thing was for sure good to know, and that was when Chester was chewed up and spit out by New York because he thought his shit didn’t stink, or at least that was what the folks said. I don’t know what happened in New York, but I think I’ve got a hitch on what Chester did here. He was out to kill everybody’s magic and make his own magic the only kind, and it worked on those who believed in Archie’s heyday, or those who thought the sweet tit would never go dry, and it worked on Chester when he came back, started to believe it himself.

  Standing in the station on a slow day, I sometimes think up things that might have happened to Chester, make up little plays for him to act out, wherever he is. When I do that, I very often lose track of when and where I am, and sometimes Pop has to yell at me to put gas in a car because I haven’t heard the bell ring. Every time that sort of thing happens, I cross myself with my left hand and go out whistling a chorus of “Chicago.”

  Check the oil? Yessir.

  IN THE DRY

  HE sees the bridge coming, sees the hurt in it, and says aloud his name, says, “Ottie.” It is what he has been called, and he says again, “Ottie.” Passing the abutment, he glances up, and in the side mirror sees his face, battered, dirty; hears Bus’s voice from a far-off time, I’m going to show you something. He breathes long and tired, seems to puff out the years since Bus’s Chevy slammed that bridge, rolled, and Ottie crawled out. But somebody told it that way—he only recalls the hard heat of asphalt where he lay down. And sometimes, Ottie knows. Now and again, his nerves bang one another until he sees a fist, a fist gripping and twisting at once; then hot water runs down the back of his throat, he heaves. After comes the long wait—not a day or night, but both folding on each other until it is all just a time, a wait. Then there is no more memory, only years on the hustle with a semi truck—years roaring with pistons, rattling with roads, waiting to sift out one day. For this one day, he comes back.

  This hill-country valley is not his place: it belongs to Sheila, to her parents, to her cousin Buster. Ottie first came from outside the valley, from the welfare house at Pruntytown; and the Gerlocks raised him here a foster child, sent him out when the money crop of welfare was spent. He sees their droughty valley, but cannot understand—the hills to either side can call down rain. Jolting along the Pike, he looks at withered fields, corn tassling out at three feet, the high places worse with yellowish leaves. August seems early for the hills to rust with dying trees, early for embankments to show patches of pale clay between milkweed and thistle. All is ripe for fire.

  At a wide berm near the farmhouse, he edges his tractor truck over, and the ignition bell rings out until the engine sputters, dies. He picks up his grip, swings out on the ladder, and steps down. Heat burns through his T-shirt under a sky of white sun; a flattened green snake turns light blue against the blacktop.

  The front yard’s shade is crowded with cars, and yells and giggles drift out to him from the back. A sociable, he knows, the Gerlock
whoop-de-doo, but a strangeness stops him. Something is different. In the field beside the yard, a sin crop grows—half an acre of tobacco standing head-high, ready to strip. So George Gerlock’s notions have changed and have turned to the bright yellow leaves that bring top dollar. Ottie grins, takes out a Pall Mall, lets the warm smoke settle him, and minces a string of loose burley between his teeth. A clang of horseshoes comes from out back. He weaves his way through all the cars, big eight-grand jobs, and walks up mossy sandstone steps to the door.

  Inside smells of ages and of chicken fried in deep fat, and he smiles to think of all his truckstop pie and coffee. In the kitchen, Sheila and her mother work at the stove, but they stop of a sudden. They look at him, and he stands still.

  The old woman says, “Law, it’s you.” Sunken, dim, she totters to him. “Where on earth, where on earth?”

  He takes the weak hand she offers and speaks over her shoulder to Sheila. “Milwaukee. Got to get a tank trailer of molasses from the mill. Just stopped by—didn’t mean to barge your sociable.”

  “Aw, stay,” Sheila says. She comes to him and kisses his cheek. “I got all your letters and I saved ever one.”

  He stares at her. She is too skinny, and her face is peeling from sunburn with flecks of brown still sticking to her cheek, and along her stomach and beneath her breasts, lines of sweat stain her blouse. He laughs. “You might of answered a few of them letters.”

  The old woman jumps between them. “Otto, Buster’s awful bad off. He’s in a wheelchair with two of them bags in him to catch his business.”

  Sheila goes to the stove. “Ottie don’t need none of that, Mom. He just got here. Let him rest.”

  Ottie thinks of the abutment, the wear on his face. “It’s them steel plates. They don’t never get any better with them plates in their heads.”