Patchwork

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Mamaw lets loose a stream as loud as a cow’s. This trip is crazy. It reminds Sam of that Chevy Chase movie about a family on vacation, with an old woman tagging along. She died on the trip and they had to roll her inside a blanket on the roof of the station wagon because the children refused to sit beside a dead body. This trip is just as weird. A month ago, Emmett wouldn’t have gone to Washington for a million dollars, but after everything that happened this summer, he changed his mind and now is hell-bent on going and dragging Mamaw along with them.

  “I was about to pop,” Mamaw says.

  That was a lie about her pill. Mamaw just didn’t want Emmett to know she had to pee.

  When they return the key, Mamaw buys some potato chips at a vending machine. “Irene didn’t feed us enough for breakfast this morning,” she says. “Do you want anything?”

  “No. I’m not hungry.”

  “You’re too skinny, Sam. You look holler-eyed.”

  Irene is Sam’s mother, Emmett’s sister. They spent the night in Lexington with her in her new house—a brick ranch house with a patio and wall-to-wall carpeting. Irene has a new baby at the age of thirty-seven. The baby is cute, but Irene’s new husband has no personality. His name is Larry Joiner, but Sam calls him Lorenzo Jones. In social studies class, Sam’s teacher used to play tapes of old radio shows. Lorenzo Jones was an old soap opera. Sam’s mother’s life is a soap opera. The trip would be so different if her mother could have come. But Sam has her mother’s credit card, and it is burning a hole in her pocket. She hasn’t used it yet. It is for emergencies.

  Emmett is in the driver’s seat, with the engine running. He is drinking a can of Pepsi. “Are y’all ready?” he asks, flicking cigarette ash on the asphalt. He has moved the car, but it’s still close to the gas pumps. A scene of a sky-high explosion, like an ammunitions dump blowing up, rushes through Sam’s mind.

  “Give me a swig of that,” says Sam. “Did you pay?” She takes a drink of Emmett’s Pepsi and hands it back.

  “Yeah. It was six dollars and thirty cents. I wrote down the mileage. We averaged thirty-one to the gallon.”

  “That’s good!”

  The gas gauge is broken, and Sam has to estimate when to get gas. To be safe, she gets gas every two hundred miles. The VW is a seventy-three, with a rebuilt engine. Tom Hudson sold it to her less than two weeks ago. His fingerprints are still on it, no doubt—on the engine and the hubcaps and the gas cap. His presence is everywhere in the car.

  “I love this car,” Sam says, giving the VW an affectionate slap. “She’s a good little bird.” She suddenly feels strange saying that. Emmett is always watching birds and writing them down on his life list. There is a certain kind of exotic bird he has been looking for. He claimed such birds sometimes stopped off in Kentucky on their way to Florida, and he keeps looking for one, but he has never seen one in Kentucky. When Sam suggested that they could see one in the Washington zoo, he said it wouldn’t be the same as seeing it in the wild.

  Sam climbs in the back, and Mamaw starts to get in, but then Mamaw says, “I better check on my flowers. I should have watered them this morning.”

  She walks behind the car and peers through the back window.

  “They don’t look droopy,” Sam says, glancing at the pot of geraniums wedged behind the seat.

  “I reckon they’re O.K.,” says Mamaw doubtfully. “I’m just afraid the blooms will fall off before we get there.” She gets in the front seat. “I’m still so embarrassed, spilling dirt on Irene’s nice floor. I guess she thought I was just a country hick, dragging in dirt.”

  Emmett stubs out his cigarette and takes off, sailing into fourth gear by the time they hit the highway.

  “Reckon we’ll ever get there?” Mamaw asks. “We’ll probably get lost.”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Hughes. We’ve got a map.”

  “You can’t get lost in the United States,” Sam says. “I wish I could, though. I wish I’d wake up and not know where I was.”

  “Lands, child, where do you get your ideas?” Mamaw says.

  Emmett drives in silence, intent on his job, like a bus driver. Emmett is a large man of thirty-five with pimples on his face. He has been very quiet since they left Hopewell yesterday, probably because Mamaw is getting on his nerves. He has bad nerves.

  “This transmission’s getting worse,” he says after a while. He glances back at Sam. “It just popped out of fourth gear again.”

  “Tom said he worked on that transmission. It’s supposed to be O.K.”

  “Well, it’s popping out. Just thought I’d tell you.”

  “Well, I’m not sorry I bought the car, so don’t throw it in my face!”

  She leans her head against the pillow they borrowed from her mother and watches the cars fire past. On the shoulder are blown-out truck tires, scraps of rubber flung out like abandoned toys. The scenery is funny little hills shaped like scoops of ice cream. Where she lives is flat. She has never been this far away from home before. She is nearly eighteen years old and out to see the world. She would like to move somewhere far away—Miami or San Francisco maybe. She wants to live anywhere but Hopewell. On the road, everything seems more real than it has ever been. It’s as though nothing has really registered on her until just recently—since the night last week when she ran off to the swamp. The feeling reminds her of her aerobics instructor, Ms. Hotpants—she had some hard-to-pronounce foreign name—when they did the pelvic tilt in gym last year. A row of girls with their asses reaching for heaven. “Squeeze your butt-ox. Squeeze tight, girls,” she would say, and they would grit their teeth and flex their butts, and hold for a count of five, and then she would say, “Now squeeze one layer deeper.” That is what the new feeling is like: you know something as well as you can and then you squeeze one layer deeper and something more is there.

  Emmett’s cigarette smoke floats back and strangles her. She is glad when a while later he lets her have the wheel again. She’s proud of the car. It is off-white, with bright orange patches where Tom fixed the spots of rust. The rebuilt engine sounds good.

  “This car will look better when I get a paint job,” she says.

  “What color do you aim to paint it, hon?” Mamaw asks.

  “Black.” Sam has been thinking that when winter comes she will get a black motorcycle jacket and dye her old tan cowhide boots black. They lace up, and they will look sinister if she dyes them black. A truck that she passed two minutes ago passes her now, with a wheeze and a honk. She slams the horn at him. Trucker-fucker, she mutters to herself.

  “Why, look at that, would you!” cries Emmett, pointing to a station wagon pulling a small flat-bed trailer loaded with a dish antenna. “The license plate says Arizona. They’ve hauled that all the way from Arizona. Imagine having one of those. You could watch everything on earth with that.”

  “It probably belongs to Big Brother,” says Sam.

  “Yeah. He’s probably got one of those, and his own satellite too,” Emmett says thoughtfully.

  “Whose brother are y’all talking about?” Mamaw wants to know.

  “Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-four. It’s a book I had to read in English.”

  “There goes that transmission again,” Emmett says.

  “Oh, shit,” groans Sam, not loud enough for her grandmother to hear. Cussing shocks Mamaw.

  Actually, Sam never really cussed much before this summer. But now she feels like letting loose. She has so much evil and bad stuff in her now. It feels good to say shit, even if it’s only under her breath.

  PART 2, CHAPTER 1

  It was the summer of the Michael Jackson Victory tour and the Bruce Springsteen Born in the U.S.A. tour, neither of which Sam got to go to. At her graduation, the commencement speaker, a Methodist minister, had preached about keeping the country strong, stressing sacrifice. He made Sam nervous. She started thinking about war, and it stayed on her mind all summer.

  Emmett came back from Vietnam, but Sam’s father did not. After his discha
rge, Emmett stayed with his parents two weeks, then left. He couldn’t adjust. Several months later, he returned, and Sam’s mother let him live with them, in the house she had bought with her husband’s life insurance policy. Emmett stayed, helping out around the house. People said Irene babied him. She treated him like someone disabled, and she never expected him to get a job. She always said the war “messed him up.” She had worked as a receptionist for a dentist, and she received compensation payments from the government. In retrospect, Sam realized how strange those early years were. When Emmett moved in, he brought some friends with him—hippies. Hopewell didn’t have any hippies, or war protesters, and when Emmett showed up with three scruffy guys in ponytails and beads, they created a sensation. The friends came from places out west—Albuquerque, Eugene, Santa Cruz. Boys in Hopewell didn’t even wear long hair until the seventies, when it finally became fashionable. Sam had a strong memory of Emmett in his Army jacket and black boots, with a purple headband running through his wild hair. She remembered his friends piling out of a psychedelic van, but she remembered little else about them. People in town still talked about the time Emmett and the hippies flew a Vietcong flag from the courthouse tower. One bleak day in early winter, they entered the courthouse through separate doors and converged at the base of the clock tower. The county circuit court clerk saw them head up the stairs and said later she knew something was about to happen. They fastened the flag to the side of the tower with masking tape, covering part of the clock face. Merchants around the square got nervous and had them arrested for disturbing the peace. The funny part, Emmett always said, was that nobody had even recognized that it was a Vietcong flag. He had had it made by a tailor in Pleiku, the way one might order a wedding suit. Soon after the flag incident, when burglars broke into a building supply company on Main Street, using a concrete block to smash a window, people were suspicious of Emmett’s crowd, but no one ever proved anything.

  The friends went away eventually, and Emmett calmed down. For a couple of years, he attended Murray State, but then he dropped out. He did odd jobs—mowing yards, repairing small appliances—and got by. Now and then a rumor would surface. At one time, neighbors had the idea that Patty Hearst was hiding out with Emmett and Irene. For a week, Sam had been too embarrassed to go to school, but later she was proud of Emmett. He was like a brother. She and Emmett were still pals, and he didn’t try to boss her around. They liked the same music—mostly golden oldies. Emmett’s favorite current groups were the Cars and the Talking Heads.

  Irene’s new husband got a good job in Lexington, but Sam refused to move there with them. Somebody had to watch out for Emmett, Sam insisted, and she didn’t want to change schools her senior year. The house was paid for, and Sam still got government benefits. After her mother went away last year, Sam and Emmett got into the habit of watching M*A*S*H every evening. Usually, they grilled something and then watched the news, two reruns of M*A*S*H, and a movie on Home Box Office or Cinemax. Sam’s boyfriend, Lonnie Malone, used to join them before he started working late at Kroger’s. Sam’s favorite M*A*S*H was the one in which Hot Lips Houlihan kicked a door down when she learned that her husband, Donald Penobscott, had requested a transfer to San Francisco without telling her. Emmett preferred the early episodes, with Colonel Henry Blake and Frank Burns. Burns reminded him, he said, of his C.O. in Vietnam, a real idiot. That was about all Emmett would say about Vietnam these days. Emmett had a hearty, good-natured laugh like Hawkeye’s. Hawkeye’s laughter was so infectious that sometimes when Hawkeye and Trapper John let loose, Sam and Emmett couldn’t stop laughing, just laughing for pure joy.

  Years ago, when Colonel Blake was killed, Sam was so shocked she went around stunned for days. She was only a child then, and his death on the program was more real to her than the death of her own father. Even on the repeats, it was unsettling. Each time she saw that episode, it grew clearer that her father had been killed in a war. She had always taken his death for granted, but the reality of it took hold gradually. Now, when the episode was repeated, and she saw Radar report to the surgeons in the O.R. that Colonel Blake’s plane had gone down over the Sea of Japan, she felt it was poignant because Radar had looked up to the Colonel like a father. The Colonel’s last words to Radar had been, “You’d better behave or I’m going to come back and kick your butt.”

  The summer had been wet. Early in June, a tornado touched down on the main highway south of Hopewell and knocked a few trailers together, but no one was hurt. One night a week later, another tornado watch was in effect. Emmett had been nervous all evening as he listened to the weather channel on the radio. It was ten twenty-four by the kitchen clock that sticky night before the storm. The air conditioning was grinding and thumping, and the TV was on, but above the noise Sam heard Lonnie’s van turn into the driveway. The van had a faulty post-ignition shut-off jet, which meant that the engine bucked along for a few moments after Lonnie turned it off, like a stubborn child making an annoying sound.

  “Did you get off from work early?” Sam yelled under the porch light. A moth flew in and whizzed around the bulb on the hallway ceiling.

  Lonnie Malone was a bag boy at Kroger’s. He had a six-pack of Falls City with him and an open can in one hand. He was five-eleven and muscular, and he had brown hair with a kink in it. Sam thought he had a sexy build. On his chest he had a beautiful birthmark, a splotch the shape of an Izod alligator. Lonnie had been a guard for the Hopewell Indians. When he reached the porch, Sam pushed his hair back over his ear and smacked him on the lips. He smelled like beer. Beer smelled something like a runover skunk.

  “I saw a cop on I-24, and I was going sixty,” he said with a grin.

  “You’re lucky he didn’t catch you with this beer,” Sam said. The screen door slammed behind them, and like an echo, thunder scattered across the sky. “Where’d you get it anyway?”

  “Down at the Bottom. I got a guy to go in for me. Crazy old coot. He was just setting out on the county line, straddling it in his pickup. He was swigging from a bottle of Jim Beam in a sack and just daring somebody to look at him wrong.”

  “Is it storming down that way yet?”

  “No. There’s a tornado watch, but I don’t think it’ll hit here.” Emmett appeared in the kitchen doorway, filling it up so completely that he shut out the light from the kitchen. “Hey, I’m making muffelatas, y’all,” he said. “Do you want one, Lonnie?”

  “Yeah, I’m starving. All I had for supper was a hamburger.” Lonnie jerked one of the cans from its plastic noose and handed it to Emmett. “Have a beer, Emmett, good buddy.”

  Emmett opened the can and took a drink. Then with his oven mitt he swatted at the moth and missed.

  Lonnie had done a double take when he saw Emmett in his wraparound skirt. He was wearing a long, thin Indian-print skirt with elephants and peacocks on it. Now Lonnie burst out laughing.

  “Where’d you get that skirt, Emmett?” he asked.

  “It’s a joke because Klinger wears dresses on M*A*S*H,” Sam said.

  Emmett struck an exaggerated fashion-model pose against the kitchen door facing, with his cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “I got it at the mall in Paducah,” he said.

  “Are you bucking for a Section 8, like Klinger?” Lonnie asked.

  “Wouldn’t hurt,” Emmett said with a grin.

  Sam suspected Emmett was using the skirt to draw attention away from the pimples on his face. They had been getting worse. She was dying to squeeze them, but he wouldn’t let her.

  Emmett shoved the muffelatas in the oven and then turned around and pranced like Boy George, modeling his skirt. Emmett had a gleeful expression that said he had gotten away with murder.

  “Far out!” Lonnie said, grinning at Emmett. Lonnie emulated Emmett, and they often shot baskets together at the high school. Lonnie even had an Army jacket that he had found at the surplus store, but Sam knew he would never wear a skirt just because Emmett wore one. He wouldn’t go that far. Lonnie didn’t
even like Boy George.

  “How come you’re here at this hour of the night?” Sam said, sitting down on the lumpy couch in the living room. The couch tilted at an angle.

  “I quit,” said Lonnie. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking across the room to a rock group riding on a roller coaster on the television screen. He took such a huge slug of beer that his cheeks bulged out.

  “Oh, shit,” Sam groaned.

  “What happened this time, Lonnie?” Emmett asked sympathetically.

  “It wasn’t for me. I want to have my own business someday, and I wasn’t getting anywhere there.” Lonnie paused and lit a cigarette. “I’d like to do something outdoors, where I’m my own boss. I’ve got to be independent.”

  “Good for you,” Emmett said.

  Lonnie laughed and took a shot of beer. “At least now I can catch up on my video games with the guys, if I can scrape up enough quarters.”

  “You can play with Emmett’s Atari,” said Sam.

  “Emmett ain’t got Donkey Kong. Or Hard Hat Mack.”

  “Hey, Lonnie, I scored over fifty thousand today on Pac-Man,” said Emmett.

  “Gah!” Lonnie blew smoke out slowly. “I’ll never catch you, Emmett. You’re too good.”

  “I’ve figured out the secret of Pac-Man. The trick is you ignore all them little vitamin pills. They’re just there to distract you and make you think you can get something for nothing. But if you keep your mind on your business, you can just keep going forever.” Emmett drank some beer and added, “That’s the Zen of Pac-Man.”

  “I’ll have to try that,” Lonnie said.

  “It’s too bad you quit your job, Lonnie. I need to borrow some money to pay back a debt I owe the government.”