Part Two 1 page

"Saxony, you can't take all of those suitcases! What do you think this is, Wagon Train?"

All she needed was an ancient steamer trunk to complete her lineup. There was a delicate yellow-and-red wicker basket, a scruffy knapsack that bulged like a bratwurst, an old brown leather suitcase with brass locks and edges. She'd topped it all off with several things just back from the dry cleaner's in plastic wrap on metal hangers.

She scowled at me and walked around to the back of the station wagon. She flipped down the gate and laid the first of her many things in.

"Don't you hassle me, Thomas. I've had one lousy day so far, okay? Just don't hassle me."

I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, looked at my new haircut in the rearview mirror, and wondered whether it was worth a fight. For a week I'd been telling her that I wanted to travel as light as possible on this trip. Since we had been together almost every day after my New York trip, I'd come to believe that she had about three shirts and two dresses and a white smock that looked like a peasant castoff. At one point I wanted to buy her an Indian dress she admired in a store window, but she wouldn't let me, even when I insisted. "Not yet," she said, whatever that was supposed to mean.

So what did she have in those bags? Another nightmare grew in my mind – groceries and a hot plate! She was going to cook our meals all the way to Galen! Banana bread… curry… apple tea…

"What've you got in those things anyway, Sax?"

"There's no reason to yell!"

I looked at her in the mirror and saw her with her hands on her hips. I thought of how nice those hips were without any clothes on them.

"Okay, I'm sorry. But how come you're taking so much?"

I heard gravel crunch, and then she was standing by my door. I looked up at her, but she was busy undoing the straps on the wicker basket.

"Just look."

It was full of handwritten notes, magazine clippings, blank yellow pads, yellow pencils, and the fat pink erasers she liked to use.

"This one is my work bag. Am I allowed to take it?"

"Sax…"

"The duffel bag has all of my clothes in it…."

"Look, I wasn't saying…"

"And the suitcase has some marionettes in it that I'm working on." She smiled and clicked the latches shut on the bag. "That's the one thing that you'll have to get used to around me, Thomas: wherever I go, I always carry my life around with me."

"I would hope so."

"Oh, you're very funny, Thomas. So clever."

June graduation ceremonies had taken place several days before, so the campus of my school was summer-green and silent and kind of sad when we drove away. Schools without students are always strangely ominous to me. All the rooms are too clean and the floors too polished. When a phone rings it echoes all over the place, and it will go eight or nine times before someone feels like answering it or the caller realizes that everyone's gone and he hangs up. We passed a huge copper beech tree that was a great favorite of mine, and I realized that I wouldn't sit under it again for a long time.

She reached over and turned on the radio. "Thomas, are you sad that you're leaving?"

The last part of "Hey, Jude" was on, and I remembered the girl I was dating on Nantucket when the song first came out in the sixties.

"Sad? Yes, a little. But I'm pretty glad, too. After a while you discover that you're talking and moving in a trance. Do you know that I taught Huckleberry Finn for the fourth time this year? It's a great book and all, but it was getting to the point where I wasn't even reading the stuff anymore. I didn't have to be able to teach it. That kind of thing's not good."

We sat and listened to the song finish. I guess the station was doing a Beatles retrospective, because "Strawberry Fields Forever" came on next. I drove up a ramp onto the New England Thruway.

"Did you ever want to be an actor?" She pulled a thread off the sleeve of my shirt.

"An actor? No, not after my father, hell no."

"I remember being madly in love with Stephen Abbey after I saw him in The Beginners."

I snorted but didn't say anything. What person in the world wasn't in love with my father?

"Don't laugh at me – it's true!" Her voice was almost indignant. "I'd just gone into the hospital for the first time, so my parents got me a little portable television set. I remember the whole thing very clearly. It was on Million Dollar Movie, which showed the same old film every afternoon for a week. I watched every showing of both The Beginners and Yankee Doodle Dandy."

"Yankee Doodle Dandy?"

"Yes, with James Cagney. I was madly in love with both James Cagney and your father when I was in the hospital."

"How long were you in there?"

"The hospital? For four months the first time and two the second."

"And what did they do – skin grafts and that kind of thing?"

She didn't say anything. I looked over at her, but there was no expression on her face. I hadn't meant to pry, and as the silence continued, I felt like apologizing, but I didn't.

A big thunderstorm was brewing up over the hills in front of us, and we drove into a lowering curtain of smoky pearl clouds. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the sun still shining down on where we'd just come from. I knew that most of the people back there had no idea of what they were in for later that afternoon.

"When did you fall out of love with my father?"

"Thomas, do you really want to know about when I was in the hospital? I've never liked to talk about it, but if you'd like to know, I'll tell you."

She said it with so much conviction in her voice that I didn't know what to answer. She went on before I had a chance to say anything.

"The first time was horrible. They'd put me in these baths so that all of the dead skin would come off and the new could start to grow. I remember that there was this stupid nurse named Mrs. Rasmussen who took care of me and always talked to me like I was a moron. I don't remember much else about it except that I was scared and hated everything. I guess I've blocked a lot out. The second time was a lot of therapy, and everyone seemed much nicer. It's probably because they knew I'd be walking again. When I was in there, I discovered that people treat you much more… I don't know, humanely, when they see that you're going to be all right again."

A snake of yellow lightning skittered across the clouds, followed closely by one of those quick cracks of thunder that make you jump a little in spite of yourself. The radio had become almost pure static, so I switched it off. Big marbles of rain began to fall, but I held off turning on the windshield wipers until the last moment. My side window was down, and I could feel the dying heat and heaviness on the air. I thought about a little Saxony Gardner sitting bolt upright in a hospital bed with her little-kid legs bandaged all the way up and down. The picture was so sad and sweet that it made me smile. If I'd had a kid like that, I would have bought her so many toys and books that she would have suffocated under them.

"What was it like being the son of Stephen Abbey?"

I took a deep breath to put her off for a minute. In the time that we'd been together she'd asked me very few questions about my family, and I was damned grateful.

"My mother called him Punch. Sometimes he'd walk off a set in the middle of the day, come home, and take us all out to someplace like Knott's Berry Farm or the beach. He'd run around and buy us all hot dogs and Coke and ask us if this wasn't the best time we'd ever had in our lives. He got pretty manic sometimes, but we loved it all. If he got too crazy, then my mother would say, 'Take it easy, Punch,' and I'd hate her for it. He always had to be the life of the party when he was around, but since he was around so little then, we all ate him up."

The rain came down in transparent curtains, and you could hear it slooshing up under the wheels. I was driving in the slow lane, and whenever someone passed us there was so much water flung across the windshield that the poor wipers could barely keep up with it. The lightning and thunder were simultaneous now, so I knew that the storm was right over us.

"He took me to the studio once when they were filming A Fire in Virginia. In a way, it was one of the greatest days of my life, I guess. All I remember about it was that someone was always asking me if I wanted an ice cream, and that later I fell asleep and was carried into his dressing room. When I woke up he was standing over me like a white mountain, smiling that famous smile. He had on an all-white shirt and a huge cream panama hat with a black band." I shook my head and tapped out a tune on the steering wheel to swish away the memory. A Grand Union trailer truck floated by in slow motion.

"Did you love him?" Her voice was quiet and held back, I guess a little afraid.

"No. Yes. I don't know – how can you not love your father?"

"Very easily – I didn't love mine. His greatest dream in life came true when one of his students got into Harvard."

"What do you mean – your father was a teacher?"

"Uh-huh."

"You never told me that."

"Yes. He taught English too."

I slid a quick look at her, and she puffed out her cheeks so that she looked like a squirrel with a lot of nuts in there.

"I guess I shouldn't say this, but he was awful, from everything I remember about him." She put her hands on the dashboard and patted out a kind of soft African beat. She spoke while she patted. "He used to eat sliced pineapple and read Hiawatha out loud to my mother and me."

"Hiawatha? 'By the shores of Gitchy Gummi, / On the bottom of the lake, / Hiawatha and his buddies / Playing poker for a stake.'"

"Gee, you must be an English teacher too."

The sky was so dark that I switched on the headlights and slowed down to forty. I had often wondered what she was like as a kid. That nice, moony-pale face in miniature. I could see her off in a dark corner of a dark living room playing with her marionettes until nine, when her mother would tell her to go to bed. White socks that were falling down, and black patent leather shoes with gold buckles.

"You know, Thomas, when I was little about the only exciting thing my family ever did was to go to Peach Lake on the weekends in the summer. I used to get sunburned."

"Oh, yeah? Well, the only exciting thing that ever happened to me was reading The Land of Laughs and drinking Hires root beer out of a big glass bottle. Whatever happened to Hires root beer in a big glass bottle?"

"Oh, come on, you can't tell me that your life out there with all of those famous people wasn't neat. You don't have to try to make me feel better."

"Better? That has nothing to do with it. At least you had a normal father! Look, being his son was like living in this birdcage. You couldn't open your mouth without everyone being fake-nice to you or telling you how much they liked your 'Papa's' movies! What the hell did I care about his movies? I was a little kid, for Christ's sake! All I wanted to do was ride my bike."

"Don't shout."

"I don't have to…" I wanted to say something more, but I saw the turnoff for a roadside rest stop so I took it instead. It was dark as night outside as I crept down the exit ramp. The parking lot was filled with camper trucks and cars with overflowing luggage racks. Many of them were open to the rain, so the exposed suitcases, baby strollers, and bicycles were totally soaked and shiny. I found a parking space when a white Fiat with Oklahoma plates almost hit me while backing out of it. I switched off the motor and we both sat there while the rain hammered on the roof. Her hands were folded in her lap, but mine still gripped the steering wheel. I felt like ripping it off and handing it to her.

"All right, do you want something to eat or what?"

"Eat? Why? We've only been on the road for an hour."

"Oh, well, I'm sorry, dear – I'm not supposed to be hungry, huh? I'm not allowed to eat or anything unless you do, is that it?" I sounded like a kid who's just discovered sarcasm but doesn't know how to use it yet.

"Just shut up, Thomas. Go outside and have a fishburger or something. I don't care what you do. I don't deserve your anger."

There wasn't much else I could do but go. We both knew that I was making more and more of an ass of myself, but by then I didn't know how to stop. If I'd been her, I would have been royally bored by me.

"Do you want any… ? Oh, shit, I'll be back in a little while."

I opened the door and stepped right into this monstrous puddle, drenching both my sneaker and sock in one plunge. I looked to see if she'd been watching, but her eyes were closed, hands still folded in her lap. I put my other, dry foot carefully into the puddle and left it there until I felt the cold seeping in. Then I paddled both feet up and down in my new little footbath. Splish splat.

"What… are… you… doing?"

Splish splat.

"Thomas, don't do that." She started to laugh. It sounded so much better than the rain. "Don't be crazy! Close the door."

My back was to her, and I felt her grab a handful of my sweatshirt. She laughed harder and gave a strong tug.

"Will you please get back in here? What are you doing?"

I looked up into the rain, and it was coming down so hard and sharp that it forced my eyes closed. "Penance! Penance! All of my fucking life people have been asking me what it was like to be Stephen Abbey's son. Every time I try to answer that question, I sound dumber and dumber."

I stopped flapping my feet. I felt so sad, like such an idiot. I wanted to turn around and look at her, but I couldn't. "I'm sorry, Sax. If I had anything to say, God knows, I'd tell you."

The wind was blowing the rain right into my face. A family walked by and gaped at me.

"I don't care, Thomas." The wind gusted and closed my eyes again. I didn't know if I'd heard her right.

"What?"

"I said that I don't care about your father." She touched my back with the flat of her hand, and now her voice was strong and insistent and loving.

I turned around and put my wet arms around her. I kissed her warm neck and could feel her kissing mine.

"Hold me tight, you old sponge. You've already got me soaked." She squeezed tighter and gave my neck a bite.

I couldn't think of anything to say except for a line from France's book The Green Dog's Sorrow: "The Voice of Salt loved Krang too. When it was with her, it always whispered."

We had planned to make the trip in two days, but suddenly we were stopping at Stuckey's for pralines, Frontier Town or Santa Claus Village or Reptile City whenever we saw them advertised, and anywhere in general if we were in the mood.

"Wait a minute. Do you want to see… hold it… the site of the Battle of Green River?"

"I don't know. Sure. What war was it in?"

"What's the difference? Five miles to go. Sax, what's your favorite France book?"

"It's a toss-up between Pool of Stars and Land of Laughs."

"Pool of Stars? Really?"

"Yes, I think my favorite scene of all is in there. The one where the girl goes down to the beach at night. When she sees the old man and the white bird scooping those blue holes out of the ocean."

"Jeez, I couldn't say what my favorite scene is. Something out of Land of Laughs, though. Definitely. But I'd have trouble choosing between a funny scene and a magical one. In many ways I like the funny scenes more now, but when I was little those battles between the Words and the Silence… phew!"

"Thomas, don't drive off the road."

Sometimes we pulled off the highway into a parking area and perched on the hot hood of the car, watching everyone fly by. Neither of us would say a word, and there wasn't any urge to keep moving, to get there.

The first night out, we stayed in a little town just west of Pittsburgh. The people who ran our motel raised black-and-tan coonhounds, and after dinner we took a few puppies out onto the front lawn and let them bite us for a while.

"Thomas?"

"Uh-huh? Hey, catch him before he gets away."

"Listen to me, Thomas, this is serious."

"Okay."

"Do you know this is the first time I've ever been to a motel with anyone?"

"Is that right?"

"Uh-huh. And you know what else? I'm very pleased." She handed me a puppy and stood up. "When I was younger and used to think about my burns all the time, I never thought any man would ever want to go to a motel with me, the way I looked."

The next morning when we were about to leave, the woman came out of the office and gave us these beautiful lunches she had packed, complete with beer and Milky Way candy bars. She whispered something to Saxony and then went back into the office.

"What'd she say?"

"She said that you were too skinny and that I should give you my Milky Way."

"You should."

"Nothing doing."

The whole trip went like that – one nice thing after another – so by the time we got to St. Louis and saw the Saarinen Arch, we were both a little rueful that we'd already come this far. We stopped in the middle of the day in Pacific, Missouri, and wandered around the Six Flags amusement park there. That night we went back to our air-conditioned motel room and made love. She kept saying my name over and over again. I'd never been with anyone who'd done that. Things were so nice now. I looked in all the dark corners of my life and wondered which one of them had something up its sleeve…. No answer. Not that I was expecting one.

I pulled into a Sunoco station and a pretty blond girl with a bright red St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap came out of the garage.

"Fill it up, please. Also, how far is it to Galen?"

She bent down and put her hands on her knees. I noticed that her fingernails were short and that two of them were completely blackened. As if something heavy had fallen on them, the blood came up from the finger underneath and stayed.

"Galen? Oh, 'bout four miles. You go straight down this road to the junction and turn right, and you'll be there in a few minutes."

She went back to filling the tank, and I looked at Saxony. She was smiling, but she was obviously as nervous as I was.

"Well…" I flipped my hand in the air.

"Well…" She dipped her head in agreement.

"Well, kid, we're almost there."

"Yes."

"The Land of Laughs…"

"Marshall France Land."

The road had long gradual dips and rises, and the ups and downs felt good after the straight monotony of the turnpike. We passed a true-to-life railroad dining car, a lumberyard where the fresh smell of cut wood was in and out of the car in a second, and a veterinarian's office with the harsh sound of scared and sick dogs barking crazily from within. At the junction there was a stop sign that had been riddled with bullet holes and BB dents that had rusted orange. A kid was standing next to it, hitchhiking. He looked harmless enough, although I admit that a couple of scenes from In Cold Blood flashed through my mind.

"Galen."

We told him that we were going there too and to get in. He had a kind of limp Afro of red hair, and every time I looked in the rearview mirror I saw him either looking me straight in the eye or his burning bush of hair blocking my view.

"You guys are going to Galen? I saw that you've got Connecticut plates." He pronounced it "Connect-ticut." "You didn't come all the way out here to go to Galen, didya?"

I nodded pleasantly and looked him over in the mirror. A little positive eye contact. The old stare-him-down game. "Yes, we did, as a matter of fact."

"Wowie, Connecticut to Galen," he said sarcastically. "Some trip."

I had had so many twerps like him in class that his rudeness didn't bother me. Boondocks hippie. All he needed was a "KISS" T-shirt and his underpants showing above his blue jeans to make him complete.

Saxony turned around in her seat. "Do you live there?"

"Yeah."

"Do you know Anna France?"

"Miss France? Sure."

I chanced another look in the mirror, and his eyes were still on me, but now he was contentedly chewing a thumbnail.

"You guys are here to see her?"

"Yes, we've got to talk to her."

"Yeah? Well, she's okay." He sniffed and moved around in his seat. "She's a hip lady. Very laid-back, you know?"

All of a sudden we were there. Coming over a small rise, we passed a white house with two thin pillars and a dentist's shingle hanging from a lamppost on the front lawn. Then there was the Dagenais Lawnmower Repair Service in a blue-silver tin shack, a Montgomery Ward outlet store, a firehouse with its big doors swung open but no fire trucks inside, and a grain store that was advertising a special this week on the fifty-pound bag of Purina Dog Chow.

This was it. This was where he had written all of the books. This was where he had eaten and slept and walked and known people and bought things like potatoes and newspapers and gas for his car. Most of the people here had known him. Had known Marshall France.

The main part of the town was on the other side of some railroad tracks. As we approached the crossing, the safety bars started to descend and a bell began its warning. I was delighted by the reprieve. Anything that would postpone our seeing Anna France was welcome. I've always liked to stop and watch trains go by. I remember the cross-country trips that my mother and I frequently made on the Twentieth Century and Super Chief when my parents were still married.

When we got to the lowered bars I switched off the engine and rested my arm on the back of Saxony's seat. It felt hot and clammy. It had turned out to be one of those summer days when the air feels like soft lead and the clouds can't decide on whether they want to downpour or just move on.

"You can let me off here."

"Can you tell us where Miss France lives?"

He stuck his skinny arm between our two seats and jabbed his index finger forward while he talked. "Go to the end of this street, It's about three blocks. Then you take your right onto Connolly Street. Her house is number eight. If you miss it, just ask anyone around there. They'll tell you. Thanks for the ride."

He got out of the car, and when he walked away I saw that he had colorful patches sewn onto both of his back pockets. One of them was a hand giving you the finger, the other was of a hand giving you the V-for-peace sign. Both patches were red, white, and blue, and the fingers had stars all up and down them.

The train turned out to be a slow-moving two-hundred-car-long freight. A passing parade of Erie Lackawanna, Chesapeake & Ohio, Seatrain… Loud, even clickety-clicks, the different sounds each car made when it passed. Then the coziness of the little brick-red caboose when it passed and a guy in its high square window was reading a newspaper and smoking a pipe, oblivious of the world. I liked the whole thing.

When the train was gone, the red-and-white-striped bars began rising slowly, almost as if they were tired and weren't in the mood to go up. I started the engine and bumped the car up and over the tracks. I looked in the mirror and saw that there was no one behind us.

"You see? That's the difference between here and in the East."

"What is?"

"We were just at that crossing for what, five or eight minutes, right? Well, in the East if you were there half that long there would be a line of cars ten miles long waiting to go. Here… well, just look behind us." She did, but she didn't say anything. "You see? Not a car. Not one. That's your difference."

"Uh-huh. Thomas, do you realize where we are on this earth? Do you realize that we are actually here?"

"I'm trying not to think about it yet. It makes my stomach ache." An understatement. I was quickly on my way to being terrified of talking to Anna France, but I didn't want Saxony to know that. I kept thinking of every word David Louis had said about her. Witch. Neurotic. To avoid any more conversation, I rolled my window down all the way and took a deep breath. The air smelled of hot dust and something else.

"Hey, look, Sax, a barbecue! Let's have some lunch."

A big green canopy had been set up in an open lot between Phend's Sporting Goods and the Glass Insurance Company. Underneath the canopy about twenty people were sitting at redwood picnic tables, eating and talking. A hand-painted sign in front announced that it was the annual Lions Club barbecue. I parked the car next to a dirty pickup truck and got out. The air was still and redolent with the smell of woodsmoke and grilled meat. A slight breeze pushed by. I started to stretch, but when I happened to look toward the eaters I stopped in mid-flight. Almost all of them had stopped eating and were looking at us. Except for one nice-looking woman with short black hair who was hurrying by with a couple of boxes of hamburger rolls in her hands, they were all frozen in position – a fat man in a straw hat with a sparerib held near his open mouth, a woman pouring an empty Coke can into a full cup, a child holding a stuffed pink-and-white rabbit over his head with two hands.

"What is this, Ode on a Grecian Urn?" I mumbled to no one.

I watched the woman with the rolls spear open a box with a barbecue fork. The freeze on the rest of them lasted maybe ten long seconds, and then a loud engine noise which turned out to be a truck carrying a palomino horse broke the spell. One of the men behind the grills smiled and waved us over with a greasy spatula.

"There's plenty here, folks. Come on over and support the Galen Lions."

We started over, and the man nodded his approval. There was space on one of the benches, so Saxony sat down while I went over to the smoking grills.

My new pal scraped grease off the silver bars into the fire and called over his shoulder for more ribs. Then he looked at me and tapped the grill. "Connecticut, huh? You came all this way just to taste my spareribs, huh?"

He had on a puffy white cooking glove that was stained grease-brown on the palm. I smiled stupidly and laughed through my nose.

"Now, you see, I got the ribs and Bob Schott over there's got the hamburgers. If I were you, though, I wouldn't eat 'em, because Bob's a doctor and he might try to poison you so he'll have a couple of new customers later."

Bob thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He looked around to see if everyone was laughing as hard as he was.

"But now, you take some ribs from me, and you'll know what good is, because I own the market here and this meat is fresh off the truck this morning. It's the best stuff I've got." He pointed at the grilling ribs. They were basted in a red sauce and dripped hot grease onto the coals, which in turn gave off an almost continual sizzle. They smelled great.

"Sure, Dan, sure. You know that they're just the ones you couldn't sell last week."

When I looked over my shoulder at Saxony to see how all these knee-slappers were going down with her, I was surprised to see her laughing.

"Us dopes's keeping you from eating, friend. What would you and your lady like?"

Dan, the master of ceremonies, was shiny-bald except for some short brown hair on the sides of his head. His eyes were dark and friendly and set into a fat, red, unwrinkled face that looked as if it had eaten a lot of spareribs over the years. He had on a white T-shirt, rumpled tan pants, and black work boots. Overall he reminded me of an actor who died a couple of years ago named Johnny Fox, who was infamous for beating his wife but who nevertheless always played the part in cowboy movies of a cowardly small-town mayor or shopowner. The kind who's afraid to challenge the Dalton gang when they come into town looking to tear everything apart.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 569