Lunch-Box Dream (7 page)

The sun is going down behind the trees, but the air is still warm like a blanket over your face. That's okay. It's still cooler than Atlanta. It's the water always moving in the creeks and the wind in the trees and not so much pavement that makes it cooler.

A person needs time on his own sometimes. It was just too small and hot in that kitchen, the two of them singing and cooking, Cora and Aunt Irene. So I left them jibber-jabbering at the counter, and see where I am. Fishing was all right today but too short, since Frank had to look for a job, and I want to sit on the bank some more. See, I have his best pole and my box of baits.

The road is getting long shadows across it now the sun is leaving. Some birds singing. Fewer now than before. Is this the road I walked with Uncle Frank and Aunt Olivia that first day after we left Hershel at the station? It should be the same, but it doesn't look the same now. Maybe that's because of the sun going down behind the trees and shade coloring the road. Or maybe there was a road I forgot to turn on.

I don't know why Uncle Frank got so mad at me that way. Everyone is always getting mad at me.

“You shut up and you stop that,” he said. His eyes were small like buttons. “You just stop that!” He yelled it.

No. I do remember. It was because of something I said about Mrs. and her red lips and her yellow car. That I would drive it someday soon and she would let me. Was that all I said? I say too much. Never mind. It's only Dalton and I'm from Atlanta. Cora says things to me all the time. No one heard me anyway except some tangle of people at the market counter. I didn't say anything bad, did I?

A little farther to the creek. I think I'll sing to keep myself company. Frank is funny sometimes. Like when Cora and I brought him home from the tavern. The “market.” That was funny. It wasn't any market.

The road curves up ahead. That's not right. It's nearly been an hour. I should be there already. Maybe more than an hour. Maybe it's too late to fish the creek now. I didn't say anything bad, did I? Who heard me if I did?

I talked to Weeza only twice because she wasn't around yesterday when I called. It was early. I just want to be home with her and Poppa now. I don't want to fish here anymore. I better go on back. Is this the way? It still doesn't look right. Maybe that turn ahead.

Something's making noise in the shadows up there. Someone running now?

“Are ve lost?”

Ricky flicked his eyes up at Grandma and said, “I don't know.”

“Nuh. Ve are lost.”

“I don't know,” Ricky said.

They'd left Chattanooga in the early afternoon, Bobby gazing sullenly at signs that said Ringgold (there was another battle there, but they didn't stop) and Tunnel Hill and Dalton, and after another drive-through at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, had reached the outer streets of Atlanta before supper.

Atlanta was a huge city, flat, ugly, and sprawling away from the route they were on.

Ricky sat between their mother and grandmother in the front seat, commanding the maps. Though shadows were already growing over the streets, and they were beyond tired, there was one more site to see before they stopped for the night.

“It's in the guidebook,” their mother said, hunkering over the wheel. “I read it before. The big house is right out here somewhere, and the memorial for the Union soldiers.”

The tension in the car was electric and silent and heavy. Every breath Bobby took was wrong. He was a criminal now. A thief with a mean streak, an animal, while his brother was sainted.

“I don't know, Mom,” Ricky said, blinking through the window and removing the blue slouch cap his mother had bought him at the gift store when she returned the stolen bullet. “Why would they even have a Union headquarters in Atlanta? Georgia is a Rebel state. Why would they keep it as a place to see? They hate the Union. They hate Sherman because he set fire to Atlanta. And why would there be anything down such a junky street, anyway? Practically right on the railroad tracks.”

She pressed forward. “Because the guidebook says so. It's in the Triple-A. The Union cemetery and the headquarters. And it's this way.”

The car edged along the narrowing road, which buildings pressed even narrower. There were low brick and cinder-block structures and high-windowed warehouses. Tiny sheds and dismal, large-doored depots.

“Well, it doesn't make sense,” Ricky said. He held the map up to his face and scanned the lines on it. “This map stinks.”

“Ve are lost. Nuh.”

“We are not lost. We're not lost. I'll just go down here,” their mother said, barely slowing into a turn, “and if it doesn't work…”

“Marion,” said her mother, “vatch out, the fence—”

The right headlamp nicked a length of fence that was bent in toward the road. Bobby pulled his face back from the window. There was a squeal and a crack.

“Marion!”

Bobby looked at the back of his mother's head. She made a sound on her tongue and slowed. “All right—”

“We don't have to go here, Mom,” Ricky said.

“I'm here,” she said. “I'm already here!”

Farther down, the road wound even closer between buildings on one side and a link fence on the other and led directly toward the crisscrossing tracks.

“How do we get out of here?” asked Bobby.

No one answered. Of course not. Why talk to him? His mother hunched over the wheel, looking out the windshield to the left. What was she looking for? Had they gone down the wrong road? Maybe they'd made a bad turn off the main street. What was wrong with the maps? Had the street sign been twisted? Bobby remembered that maybe it had been. Maybe it was pointing the other way and they'd made a mistake. Maybe it was done to trap people. Isn't everyone down here against you anyway?

“It looks wrong,” Bobby whispered, half to himself. He searched out his side of the car, then the back window, then the other side, knowing his words sounded odd after so long a silence, but hoping this mix-up might allow him a way to start talking to them again.

Then the pavement stopped, and the road was packed dirt and narrower still. Maybe it wasn't even a road. There was no place to turn around. The way ended near a couple of low wooden buildings that might be storage houses. A car was parked next to one of them.

Dust flew up when they passed a warehouse leaning at the road, and then, in the gap between the buildings, standing up on a hill behind them, they saw a dead house in a field of high grass.

“What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Then what are you looking at?”

“Car.”

Jimmy's brow was wrinkled at what he saw going on out the window. One suspender dangled loose below his belt. He held his tie in his hand. I knew he had to leave.

“Who'd think anybody would come here and block up our road?” he asked. “I have my job to get to.”

“So go out and help them,” I said.

“Who would come here?” Jimmy said.

“Northerners,” I told him, pushing my chair away from the table and smelling now the steam iron from the other room. “Coming to see their Yankee house up the hill. You know that.”

“They'll hit my can,” he said, leaning both hands on the sill.

“I'll hit it,” said a sweet voice from the other room.

“My
ash
can,” Jimmy said over his shoulder.

“I'll hit that, too!” said the voice.

“Aw, honey.” Jimmy shook his head, then looked more closely out the window. “Driving all over creation to see their Yankee houses.”

“So go out and help them,” I said. “Or I'll go.”

“We can't go out there, Dad,” he said. “They'll say we robbed them.”

“Yeah, and you got dressed up for it, too,” I said, pulling the back of his shirt down from where it bunched under the suspenders. “Look, Ohio plates. Told you. They're just lost.”

“Lost? Then why's she driving so fast?”

I laughed. “To see the Yankee house!”

“Can't they see it's a ruin?” Jimmy said, flapping his tie around his collar. “Atlanta wants to forget that war ever happened.”

“Lincoln happened,” I said to him, feeling clever for having thought of it. I liked the way it sounded.

“Aw, Dad,” he said.

“Lincoln happened,” I said again. “And just see how good off we are!” I waved my arms around the room and laughed and heard Jimmy's wife chuckle from behind the door. With that, I was done and sat down.

Jimmy grunted to himself, watching from the open doorway now, and said over his shoulder without looking away from the dust coming up the road, “Lincoln died of a hole in his head and that war never happened and she's going to hit that can!”

The dead house was surrounded by wild trees. The bottom-floor windows were boarded up, the upper windows shattered open. Paint on one whole side of the house was worn to the wood. A couple of smaller buildings nearby were leaning and roofless. The grass in front of them, growing up the hill from the roadside, was two feet tall. There were a few rounded, tilted heads of grave markers lost in the weeds. The air smelled of tar and pine needles and coal smoke.

“That's it?” said Ricky, holding open the guidebook, almost snorting disgust like his father. “That's the Union headquarters? That's the cemetery for the Union soldiers? It looks haunted.”

“Maybe it is,” said Bobby, his first words to Ricky since the bullet on Lookout Mountain.

“Look how they ruined it,” Ricky said, but not to him. “They hate the North here. Nobody likes us. Did you notice that?” He said this to their mother, almost angrily, like their father might have. “Look what they did to the place.”

“Who?” said Bobby. “The chocolates?”

“Bobby!” said his mother. “You are really asking for it.”

Ricky made a noise in his throat. “Not them. The regulars. They hate us. Negroes don't hate us. We freed the slaves.”

Negroes. His brother said Negroes.

“We did?” asked Bobby.

The squeak of an opening door hinge behind them. Bobby turned. The door on the building near the road was swung wide. A black man was coming out. He wore a white shirt and a tie.

“Oh, my God,” his mother said, looking at the outline of the man in the doorway. “Get back in the car.”

“Ma'am…”

“Just get in—”

They climbed back into the car, and she started up, shifted into reverse, and gunned the engine. The tires spun in the cinders, scattering them against the undercarriage of the car. When the tires grabbed finally, the car jerked back into the garbage can at the bottom of the steps, knocking it over, crushing it, and flattening two fence posts that held up no fence. “Oh, my God—”

“Puppa's car!” Grandma said.

A louder voice from the house. “Hey…”

Electricity shot through Bobby. “Mom—”

“Marion!” said his grandmother.

“Quiet, both of you!” said his mother.

Grandma's mouth dropped open as if to say something, but nothing came out. Her eyes were fixed on the black man. She crossed herself. She said something under her breath, biting her lip.

Two men were coming toward the car now. The one in the white shirt was younger. The older one wore gray pants. Were they angry at them for crumpling their ash can? Bobby's hand reached for the window crank, jammed it around until the window was closed, then held it fast. The men came down two steps toward the car, and Bobby and his brother shared a frantic look.

“Mom—” said Bobby. “They're getting closer—”

“I know! I know!”

The right front of the car slipped off the road and into a fence. A loud pop.

“Oh, my God!” said their mother, the car moving forward only slightly, swaying, but she didn't release her pressure on the gas pedal. “The tire—”

The men's faces were clearly visible now. Bobby saw eyebrows crinkling, eyes squinting. One said something he couldn't hear over the noise inside the car. The older man raised his hand at them and said something else. His palm was light, almost pink. Bobby's mother tried furiously to get the car back onto the road, jamming her foot down, moving the wheel back and forth, cursing, pumping the pedal, trying to escape before the men came too near. He imagined how absurd they must all appear, the crazy scrambling inside the car, while outside the Negroes were able to just walk up to it. The car did not move forward, but slid sideways, spitting up cinders behind it, as if stuck on something. Were they hooked into the fence?

“This is ridiculous!” his mother said. “Totally ridiculous!”

Bobby remembered with horror the sandbank on the bridge and wondered if the car was cursed to get stuck in things. What if they'd have to get out to dislodge it? The engine whined and the wheels spun as the men approached his window, motioning to the back of the car. The old one's face was heavy with folds. His lips were strangely wet and alive and moving, but the car noise was too loud to hear what he was saying. His eyes were pinched nearly closed because of the dust.

“Mom—” Bobby said. “Maybe he just wants—”

“Keep quiet!” she shouted. “My God, keep quiet!” The younger man was right up at the car now. Then he shouted something and started kicking at it. Bobby's mother screamed, hit the gas, and cranked the wheel one more time. The car lurched forward out of the ditch, taking a section of fence with it, bounced onto level road, then coughed and stalled. Their mother forced the stick on the steering column to the left. “Oh, my God—”

“Mom, maybe he was unsticking us—”

“Bobby, shut up!”

The older man was there again, still speaking. He reached his hand to the window at Bobby's face, his pink palm moving at him. The car raced suddenly and the man with the tie jumped back with a shout. Did he swear at them? The other tried to knock on the window.

A sharp gasp. “Oh…Marion!”

His mother cursed, then revved the engine loudly and tore off, leaving the older man with his hand raised to his face, the other still yelling out indecipherable words. The engine raced as if it would whine off into space, and they stuttered down the road on one burst tire, dragging a length of metal fence. Bobby looked out the back window. A figure was moving in the open doorway of the house now. He saw a flowered dress. And a silver glimmer. An iron? There was a woman in that tiny house?
A woman?
She turned away from the car and was back in the shadow, while the two black-faced men, voiceless, stood next to each other, staring, arms moving up and down. Were they waving away the dust or calling out to them?

The Chrysler twisted swiftly along the narrow road, finally giving up the fence it had dragged hundreds of feet, but nicking the walls of buildings over and over, until it bounced out on the main street, flopping on its one airless tire, toward a truck turning from the other lane.

Ricky yelled, but their mother had been going too fast to safely turn the wheel. She jerked it once and slammed the brakes hard, so the car struck the curb full on. A second tire burst, and the car lurched up hard into a chain-link fence and a telephone pole, cracking it—the pole fell across the fender, and steam exploded from the buckled hood. For seconds everything stopped.

“Who's hurt?” said their mother. “Is everyone okay? Mom?”

“I'm not hurt,” Ricky said. Grandma's forehead had struck the dashboard, but lightly. It was dull red, not bloody. The truck had already gone down the street. A dented car with a black face at the wheel drove slowly past, its driver leering openly at Bobby, but not stopping.

Bobby released the window crank, his fingers strained and white.

“I'm okay,” he said.