Road to Bountiful

by Smurthwaite, Donald S.

  “Levi, that was awful. Simply awful. You should apologize.”

  “I should. It was. I couldn’t help myself. I’m sorry.”

  “How much longer before you go back to school?”

  “Two weeks. A little less.”

  “Your senior year, right?”

  “Yep. Then it’s off to see what life is all about. Places to go. People to see. Impressions to make. Upward and onward. I’m going to make a dent in this world.”

  “I have no doubt that it will be a large one. A very large dent. You have good skills.”

  I was thinking that Barbara was my favorite aunt. I could hear clinking and chinking as she moved the phone from one ear to the other and her baubles and bracelets flopped around. I could picture the light bouncing off her bleached blonde hair, sort of like a sunset over a big lake.

  “I have a business proposition. Would you like to earn a little pocket change? I have something in mind.” She paused, and then she said slyly, “I’d make it worth your time.”

  I liked those words. I liked them very much. Worth my time. Speak on, Aunt Barbara.

  “I’m interested. Anything to boost my meager checking account. What were you thinking about?”

  “It’s my father, Loyal Wing. He lives in North Dakota, alone now. My mother died a long time ago, and I worry about my dad and the awful winters and being far from us. I want to bring him to the valley to live, but it’s not as easy as putting him on a plane and getting him here. He doesn’t like to fly. And he has some things that I know he’d like to take with him that he couldn’t get on an airplane. And he likes to drive. He absolutely loves to be chauffeured. He’d just rather drive and look out the window and watch things go by than get in a plane and zip here in three hours. He’s a quiet man but a perfectly lovely man.”

  Okay, I was thinking, so what did this have to do with me?

  “He has agreed to come and live here in an assisted living home, but we need to get him to Utah. He lives in North Dakota, where I grew up. Did I already say that?”

  This was becoming clearer. She said something about pocket change. Talk on, Lady Barbara. Speak to my heart, with words bracketed by dollar signs. Speak to me!

  “I was wondering if you could get away from the grocery store, although I am sure they would miss you there because I am also sure that you are an excellent employee. I wondered if we flew you to North Dakota and rented a car, if you could drive the two of you to Utah.”

  The punch line. I was about to become a chauffeur, a driver for hire. But what about the bottom line? My bottom line, to be exact. I thought, Minimum of three hundred, plus expenses. She must have shifted the phone again from one ear to the other because the clatter of two armfuls of jewelry came tinkling over the phone.

  “Of course, we’d pick up all the expenses, absolutely. The plane ticket, the car, money for food, and we could pay you five hundred dollars for your time and driving my father back.”

  My mind whirred with giddy delight. Five hundred dollars! Let’s see, at my paltry boxboy wage, times forty hours, take away a little tax and the kick-in for the union dues, and cha-ching, I’d get to see beautiful North Dakota and take home more than twice what I would earn in the employ of the gigantic grocery store chain where they treat cans of tomato soup better than me. All of this was zinging through my head, and I was about ready to say, “Deal!” But Barbara, mistaking for reluctance the silence that accompanies my quick calculations, chipped in, “I know it’s a sacrifice, Levi, and you would probably rather spend the last weeks of your summer with your family. Would six hundred dollars be fair compensation for your time and labor?”

  Fair? Yes, more than fair. Twice as fair as what I had in mind. This is a deal. This is easy money. Take a flight, pick up the uncle unit, and then bomb back to Salt Lake City in record time, and I’ll have six hundred bucks in my pocket. For six hundred smackers, I’d go pick up Attila the Hun on an elephant in the Alps.

  I was coy enough to speak slowly. “I was hoping to spend time with my family because family comes first and we are close, as you know, but I think I can help you, Aunt Barbara. And I’d like to help your father out, because he’s family too. You bet I remember him. Uncle Lewis. A great man, an idol to me. Yes, Uncle Lewis. What a sweet guy.”

  Uncle Lewis, no, Lawrence, no, Loyal. Loyal, Levi, not Lewis or Lawrence. Tall or short? Bald or full-head of hair? Thin or round? I was clouding up. Bald. Camp stool. Quiet. Them’s the basics. And arched, bushy eyebrows that framed his face into a kind of triangle.

  I heard Barbara clear her throat, and then her smooth, deep voice came flowing across the phone line. “Then let’s put the plans together. Do you think you can make the trip next week?” She must have been happy because I heard clinking from her arms, her ears, her neck, and maybe even her toes. It was a happy clinking, I thought.

  “I guess so. I’ll check my calendar. Next week.”

  And so we made the plans. It was all quite simple, really. Just what she described. Fly to Bismarck, rent a car, pick up Uncle Loyal, and then zip him to the promised land. North Dakota. Is that where the place is where all the presidents have their faces carved into rock? Maybe we can take a little side trip. This is too easy. Way too easy. Pass go and collect my six hundred. I am The Road Warrior. I had worn the green grocer’s apron for the last time. I gave notice the next day at the giant grocery conglomerate of which I someday hope to be the CEO.

  That’s the way it started, and how I came to blast across this dry, flat land on my way to pick up Uncle Loyal. It was as simple as that: a series of remarkable coincidences. Right place, right time, punch out of the grocery store, and set out on a most profitable and satisfying journey. Six hundred bucks! Whoa!

  Let me make the noise one more time. Cha-ching!

  I think Loyal is already becoming my favorite uncle.

  Chapter Three

  He Comes for Me in a Very Fast Red Car

  I sat on the front steps of my home for only a quarter of an hour. I know what time my great-nephew arrived at the airport. I added in a little time to arrange for a car and then another two hours to make the drive to my old brown house. I assume he will drive fast across the flat land. There is a rhythm and cadence to life on the plains, and I have lived here long enough to understand it and the way it influences the comings and goings of people.

  Levi, I am certain, will drive fast across the plains. He will think them ordinary. He likely knows no better.

  What is there to do? Everything is packed, sent off, or sold. I taped a note to the front door for the new owners of the house—welcoming them, telling them it is a wonderful home. I understand they are a young couple. He has a sales route that takes him to the farms around this part of the state. They came from Wisconsin. They have two young children. I think my house will enjoy the young voices, the scuffling, the laughter, the joy of a cold Christmas morning when bright paper is sheared from gifts with abandon.

  Across the street, Harriet Van Acker peers at me from her window. We have been neighbors for more than three decades. She lost her husband, Carl, six years ago. She waves to me shyly. She will not come out and bid me farewell. She did so a few days back, packing with her warm sweet rolls and a photo of Carl and me from many years ago, standing stiff as toy soldiers in front of my house. I cannot recall the occasion, why the photograph was snapped. Maybe there was no special occasion, just that we were there and someone had a camera. I am glad for the picture now. Carl was a good man and a good neighbor.

  We have relied on each other, Harriet and I. Not in large ways, not in tangible ways. But we both knew the other was there and that we had the shared experience of losing a spouse. At times, that knowledge alone was helpful. Neither of us was quite alone in what we thought and felt and remembered.

  “I will not come over to say good-bye,” Harriet told me, her words sharp and chippy. “With Carl gone, and you leaving, and with Daisy and all. I feel alone now. Do you know? Yes, you must know. You feel it too
.” She lifted her hands, palms up, almost in an act of supplication. Then she dropped her hands to her sides. There is nothing to be done. She knows I am leaving.

  “Tell me what it is like when you get there. Take care, Loyal, take care of yourself and come and visit if you can.” She hands me the pan of sweet rolls and turns to leave. Over her shoulder, she says, “I will not come back. I will not. Don’t even try to get me to.”

  She is a short, stout woman with gray glasses and gray hair. She wore an old blue dress, walking shoes, white socks, and despite the heat, a button-up sweater, top button clasped. She walked briskly back across the street to her home.

  “Good-bye, Harriet. Good-bye and thanks. All will be well. I will tell you about Utah.”

  She turned and said, “I won’t come back. I won’t say good-bye to you, Loyal Wing.” She resumed her pace and again spoke, straight ahead, words in a stiff line, “I hope the people who bought your home won’t mind looking in on an old woman.”

  And those are the last words I heard from my neighbor.

  But now, as I sit on my front porch, she looks at me from her window. I hold a hand up in acknowledgment. She waves a gallant hand back and then turns away.

  I look toward the west from my front porch. Tall thunderheads tower, their anvil tops the shade and texture of cauliflower, and tens of thousands of feet below, their tails steel gray. A rain line drips from their fuzzy base.

  Then I hear it, then I see it. Jagged lightning and the crack of thunder and the roar of an engine. My great-nephew Levi, it must be, announced by a magnificent thunderstorm.

  A car, a very red car, driving too fast for our quiet street, turns the corner two blocks away. It is a car too new and too red for anyone in our town to drive. We are conservative in things of that nature. The driver is in a hurry, as most young people now seem to be.

  I can see the driver, a young man, light brown hair, no longer a towhead. He is peering at addresses, looking to the right, then the left, then back to the right. He looks down at what I presume is a slip of paper with my address on it.

  He sees me. He nods his head, gives me a half smile. He raises a hand in the air and gives me a wan wave, nothing like Harriet’s stout farewell. Yes, this is my Levi, come to take me away, come to lead me home.

  The car stops and he stretches before opening the door.

  I wonder how much Barbara is paying him.

  It looks as though I will be carried to my future in a red car that can be driven very fast.

  I lift my suitcases and walk toward the car as Levi comes around the front and says, half-questioning, half-greeting, “Uncle Loyal?”

  I do not look back at my brown house.

  Across the street, Harriet Van Acker again waves forlornly and weeps like a child.

  Chapter Four

  The Drone of a Car on the Road May Be My Salvation

  I don’t know what I was looking for in Uncle Loyal. Just some old guy in a lime-green jumpsuit and shoes with Velcro. Maybe that was it. I hoped, and I don’t want to sound unkind here, but I hoped he was mostly with it. Mentally, and I think you understand. Barbara hadn’t said anything about him, you know, slipping. I hoped his gears still meshed.

  “He’s a sweet man. You’ll love him” is about all she said. “Everyone loves him. He was a pharmacist. Forever. He knows everyone and everything in that town, right down to who has bunions. Everyone in that county and probably the next two over.” I didn’t have any more of a scouting report than that. Not much to go on.

  Maybe he’d sleep all the way or most of the way like so many of the other older guys at church. He hears the drone of the highway and, boom, he’s in dreamland. Drone of the highway, drone of a church speaker, about the same thing with the same results. The monotony of the scenery, the monotony of wheels on asphalt. Monotony could be my salvation. Suddenly, monotony is my friend. I’m pulling for monotony, which should come easily in this flat and plain land. My original plan still seems as though it will work. I’ll blast across North Dakota, bomb through Montana, turn left toward Yellowstone, cut across the boot heel of Idaho, and then catch good old Interstate 80 and follow the Wasatch Front all the way to Bountiful. Home in a flash. I could be in Aunt Barbara’s front yard by this time tomorrow night, maybe the following morning. It would mean driving almost straight through. But I could get a few winks here and there at a rest stop if I need it, slosh down fizzy energy drinks, then peel back the eyelids and hit the road again. This is too easy. Six hundred dollars!

  Me and the road. We are one. And the hot red car. We are one. Uncle Loyal and me, we are not one. Please, as long as he isn’t in a jumpsuit, as long as he has most of his marbles, as long as he can take care of himself. As long as he doesn’t have the old-guy smell. Please. Anything else I can handle for twenty-four hours.

  Steel yourself, Levi. You can do this. You passed business calc. This is a business proposition. Even Aunt Barbara used that word: proposition. She knows. A contract. She has a business need; I have the means to fulfill it. That’s what America is all about. That’s what free enterprise is all about. Make a buck by helping each other out. That’s the American way. That’s what I’m all about. An agreement to take care of a transaction that meets mutual needs. I remember something like that from an entry-level business class textbook. A man of business, that’s what I am, and I’m about ready to pocket a tidy profit for fairly easy duty.

  Six hundred bucks! Did I mention I’ll earn six hundred dollars for about one long day’s worth of work? What does Barbara think I am? A doctor? A lawyer? A plumber?

  She said if we decided to stay over somewhere to just put it on the shiny yellow credit card that she handed to me at the airport. I don’t know. I’d rather just head straight from here to there and not have to worry about being roommates with an old guy. That might be a little too weird for me, the old-man talk, the old-man wheezing, the old-man habits. On the other hand, I suppose we could get separate rooms. I could order room service, a dream of mine. Big, greasy, meaty, cheesy pizza. I could get a room with a balcony and a view and watch sports all night long and take a dip in the pool. Why not? Someone else is paying the freight, Levi.

  Now, to find his place. Brown house, even numbered, must be on the right side of the street. All the houses look pretty much the same. Welcome to Small Town, North Dakota, where the checker game at the fillin’ station every Saturday night is the biggest show around. Every other house, I bet, has a Sven, a Lars, or an Ole in it.

  I think I see the house.

  And that must be Uncle Loyal. He looks vaguely familiar. He fits the description: old, white male, monster eyebrows, sitting in front of a house with a sold sign in front, two suitcases and two big boxes. All that is missing is a little sign that says, “Utah or bust.”

  And no jumpsuit. Life is good. I love being an American and earning a buck the old-fashioned way. Easy. Quick. Not much to it.

  No doubt. This is the place. I’ve spotted my quarry.

  I get out of my car and I call him by name. He nods and moves toward me, carrying one of the old suitcases and a small brown paper bag under one arm. He leaves a suitcase and the two large boxes on the porch.

  He looks like a little old owl. “Levi. My pleasure to meet you once more,” he says. He speaks in a formal way, draws out the vowels. Must be sort of a plains accent. And he tosses in an occasional “eh” at the end of a sentence. Local color, local speech pattern, I suppose.

  Levi, your ship has come in. And he’s not wearing a jumpsuit. Did I mention that?

  If I hustle, we can make four hundred miles before midnight.

  This is so darned easy.

  It’s time to get down to business.

  Chapter Five

  In the Red Car, We Meet the Anvil Clouds of Zeus

  My nephew looks at me curiously. He doesn’t know who I am, what to make of me. I hope he is a nice young man who doesn’t mind spending a few days with a nice old man.

  “Loyal? Loyal Wing?” he
calls. “Uncle Loyal?” His gaze shifts from side to side, quickly, nervously. He seems in a hurry, which is something I am unaccustomed to. Here on the plains, men my age, we move slowly. We move deliberately, a purpose to our motion. I wonder if most young men of the next generation are like Levi, and I conclude they probably are. They have yet to recognize the beauty of slowness.

  “I am Loyal. You must be Levi, my great-nephew, eh? We met once before, a few years back in a lovely canyon with a stream running through it. I thank you for coming. Your grace is appreciated. There must be many other things you’d rather be doing than taking a distant relative to Utah.”

  He shuffles his feet a bit and says, no, this is what he wants to be doing, it was all fine, it was all good.

  “Do you have any other suitcases? Anything I can give you a hand with? There’s still some daylight left, quite a lot, I’d say, although I’m not sure when the sun sets here in Minnesota.”

  “North Dakota,” I remind him.

  “Whatever. One of those states in the middle and toward the top. Anyway, I thought we could get on the road and head out, maybe make a few hundred miles yet tonight. Or we could just drive until I get tired. But I don’t get tired much when I’m behind the wheel,” he says.

  I purposely do not look behind me at my old house. “Yes. We could. There is no purpose in me staying here longer. This part is over for me. It might prove more difficult for me to linger. As you said, we could put some mileage behind us. I suppose there isn’t much of a reason to stay here, no reason to prolong what must be done. We may as well go.”

  But my will fails me. This time, I cannot resist the call to turn around and look at the old brown house once more. In my heart, I say good-bye to the house, to the memories, to my girls when they were little, to Daisy, to the blizzards of the plains, to the draining July heat. I say good-bye to sprinkling my lawn, hose in hand, on those summer evenings, the gentle hissing of the water pouring forth, the random thoughts floating pleasantly through my mind after a long day. Yes, I could have solved any problem in the world at those times, with the heat of the day over, the hose gently vibrating, and time to think the thoughts that came naturally. I say good-bye to the big front porch, to each tree I had planted, to the big-headed sunflowers in my yard, to each shrub I had tenderly placed in the good plains soil. I say good-bye to the azure spring sky of North Dakota, the violent black sky just before a late-summer thunderstorm sweeps in. I say all of those good-byes in mere seconds, look at my feet, heft one of my suitcases, then watch as Levi walks back to the porch for the remaining boxes and suitcase. And then I follow Levi around to the trunk of the car.