I had been on family vacations as a child. I had been on a bus to Omaha. I had been on the train to Kansas. I had flown a plane to Arkansas to see the McMullens for my high school graduation present. But I had never gone anywhere under my own steam.
Now I drove like a bat out of hell. I drove straight through sleeping by the side of the road. I drove like it was my job to–I thought along the way I’d be a good truck driver pulling down lots of money and living the life of the road if I wanted to.
I didn’t stop for the Snake Farm or the Mormon Tabernacle or Caves Next Exit. I skipped the sights. I didn’t browse for any souvenirs I knew would be junk anyway. It would drive you crazy anyway if you tried to pick out some one thing for every one you ever loved. And when I came back from Arkansas that time with gifts they treated them like poison the way they always treated me after Uncle Wayne.
I crossed the plains. I crossed the Continental Divide. I crossed the desert. I followed that pioneer trail Dad was not able to trace to its conclusion.
I thought often of that long ago trip with Dad and at night in my van sleeping at the side of the road I dreamed of Dad as I had each night since. Dad always came to me in these dreams with half a head–in answer, you felt, to Wesley’s and my childhood question of how much of you would be left. So when Dad tried to talk to me in these dreams I couldn’t understand, since naturally, blood would be bubbling up in Dad’s mouth, because, after the police took me away and Uncle Bill left Dad alone in his rented house he blew his brains out with a shotgun down in the basement. Frustrated, Dad would wave his arms semaphore style in these dreams.
I often thought too, on my journey, of Aunt Mona and Uncle Arthur, two people who I never got a chance to know because of what Mr. Burrows would term Time and Tide. I had never met my Uncle Arthur and my aunt only at two funerals. Up in my room after we buried Grandma, Mona described their move to California in the Depression: how Grandpa had called this a fool’s errand, how everything they owned in the world was in the rumble-seat or lashed to the top of the car, how the radiator kept boiling over, how they kipped out under the stars, how joyful they felt when they reached balmy Los Angeles where grapefruit grew on the trees.
I drove straight through. I did not stop. It was night when I pulled up in front of that house.
I turned off the ignition. I sat back in my seat.
The house was hacienda–style. It was painted white. The roof was tile and so were the window sills.
My van creaked cooling down. I sat there. All sorts of things ran through my head. Presently the porch light went out but I still just sat there looking at the dark house I was afraid to go up to.
*
These were giant rubber rollers like the ones on the printing press you see in the window at the newspaper office downtown except they were a zillion times life size, I was running over them and they were rolling fast under my feet, at every step they would break my legs if I just once slipped, the noise was worse than any thunderstorm. Then up in the corner was this lady dancing a waltz in a beautiful gown like a wedding dress but blue, she danced and her blue dress tolled like a bell, I could not reach her. Dad was running alongside me trying to explain, fortunately he could not keep up, I had received two good legs. Then I was in this alley behind this shed with Wesley, Wesley said Go ahead, go on in, so I opened the door but it was the privy and Dad was sitting inside with his pants down around his ankles and his half a head. Blood was filling up his lap. Outside a giant black dog’s head was barking showing its yellow teeth then I sat up bolt upright and saw I was in my own van but the dog outside the window was real, and his claws clicking against the van and squeaking down the side were too.
I had locked the doors and rolled up the windows that night before, so it was one–hundred degrees in there and I was sweating like a pig. My heart was pounding in my chest and in my ears.
I figured this big black dog must be tall as a man for he could just put his feet up on the sill and look right in leaving a slobbery trail along the windows. He would circle the van, snuffling at all the doors. Then he would be gone and when I looked out I’d see him laying with his head on his paws on the sidewalk.
But if I moved he would stand up like he was expecting me to throw the ball for him and he would come up again and look in. I could see him wondering whether he wanted to bark some more, which he always did.
Then his head snapped around and he dropped back off the side of the van. He trotted up the walk to the house with his tail wagging but on the way he looked over his shoulder and grinned at me. Then I saw the screen door open and the dog slink in.
I untangled myself from Grandma’s blankets and crawled between the seats up front. The house did not look so bad in the daylight.
I looked at my watch. I’d slept the sleep of the dead.
Well, I said to myself, may as well face the music.
Have to some time.
You have come thousands of miles.
I looked at myself in the rearview mirror and mashed my hair down a little. I tucked in my shirttails. I looked around for more dogs. I stepped out of the van.
This street of stucco houses with little front yards and picket fences bordered on a kind of no-man’s-land filled with junk yards and warehouses. At one end was a big frame house which once upon a time rose all alone in the middle of a truck farm.
At the other end a teeny grocery store sat in the shadow cast by the elevated highway–you could hear the buzz of cars on asphalt. A mile or so distant lay the Pacific Ocean.
*
Sprinklers were twirling on little patches of lawn. It was already a scorcher–the blacktop was sticky underfoot.
The porch was overhung with sumac. Sumac slush crunched underfoot. I could hear cartoons on the TV.
The dog growled out of the gloom behind the screen door and barked once, but his tail was wagging again and it was more like he missed me, not wanted to tear me limb from limb.
The doorbell button had a little crescent moon on it. I pushed it and it chimed. The dog stood up and pressed his wet black nose against the screen.
“Hi boy,” I whispered.
His tail smacked the inside door where it stood ajar.
“You’re some watchdoggie, huh?”
Slap-slap. The dog was panting and shifting from one foot to the other. I think if he could have he would have lifted the latch and let me in himself. Instead, he turned around in a circle a couple times, then he vanished. When he came back Uncle Wayne was with him.
*
For “Did you know,” my Aunt Mona had said the day we buried Grandma, “there is someone else in California?”
“You’ll have to see for yourself,” Aunt Mona had said in answer to all my questions.
Aunt Mona told me she had wanted Uncle Wayne to come to Grandma’s funeral but the others wouldn’t permit her to invite him. She said they didn’t even want to notify him but she had felt it was her duty.
“Why didn’t he come then? Why couldn’t he come to Grandpa’s?”
Aunt Mona said she couldn’t answer these questions. I must see him myself if I wanted to know. What she could tell me was that Uncle Wayne asked after Skeezix all the time.
So Uncle Wayne was now living in Southern California and he spent every Thanksgiving with Aunt Mona and Uncle Arthur. They themselves had visited him at his home down the coast. And no one in my family knew this, of course, for as Betty explained to me in whispers once when Uncle Wayne had to go away for his own good it killed Grandpa and we must never utter his name.
“But what does he do for a living? How many kids does he have?”
All Mona would say is “You will see for yourself, he is not the same man.”
*
I knew it was Uncle Wayne right away but he was in some way you could not quite put your finger on whizzen. It was his squinty eyes, but also his face was creased the way paper would be if you balled it up tight and then uncrumpled it and tried to smooth out every single wrinkle.
He looked ready to go somewhere–he was wearing a starched white shirt and dungarees. He just looked at me.
“Hi. Morning. You don’t know me, huh?”
“I’m not supposed to order any magazines,” Uncle Wayne said in a new voice. “The last time I did that I got in hot water.”
“Uh, you don’t know me, do you?”
His hand was holding the door like he could close it any second.
“I must look pretty grungy,” I said with one of those nervous laughs. “I’m Craig, Uncle Wayne.”
Sometimes Uncle Wayne looked like someone who thinks he might have heard the phone ring. This was one of those times.
“Your nephew,” I added.
Uncle Wayne just stared.
“I have come all the way from Nebraska.”
“I can’t sign anything either so come back later,” Uncle Wayne said and he closed the door and I heard him lock it.
“Hey!” I said. I knocked on the screen door. I rang the bell.
__________________________________
From Nebraska by George Whitmore. Used with permission of the publisher, The Song Cave. Copyright © George Whitmore Estate.
