One Mississippi (23 page)

“That’s nice. I think I hear Dad calling me.”

I went back inside. Dad yelled from the kitchen for me to grab the sleeping bags.

I fished our green Scout bags from the deep back of Bud’s closet, above the slide projector. I put them in the car and went back to find Dad up on the kitchen counter with the stove pushed away from the wall, aiming his flashlight down at something behind it.

“What else?” I said.

“Grab those oranges in the refrigerator. And that roll of paper towels. That bag of pecans and the crackers, and some Vienna sausages. We might need a snack.”

I gathered it all in a Jitney Jungle sack.

“The keys are in the ignition,” he said. “Go ahead and start the car, give Jacko some A/C. I’ll be out in a minute.”

I was never allowed to drive. Something was really out of whack. I backed the Country Squire down the driveway, turned it around, and backed to the house so that all Dad had to do was step in and drive off. Maybe he would even want me to drive when he saw how well I’d done it.

It was unsettling how calm, how reasonable, he seemed in his flip-flops. TriDex was his life, the thing he believed in the most. He had always been more devoted to that company than to our family or anyone in it, including Mom. And now they had fired him. Shouldn’t he be in a big foaming rage about now?

He seemed preoccupied, as if he was working out some complicated problem in his head.

Here he came in his old red plaid hunting jacket, wearing the straw hat Granny gave him many summers ago. In his arms he cradled a shotgun, a mop, and a broom. “Got her turned around ready to go, I see.”

“Yes sir.”

“Good job,” he said.

Good job.

Dad had never said these words to me. Never.

Who was this stranger inhabiting his body?

I got in the seat beside him. He slid the double-barreled shotgun behind my feet.

I didn’t know where we were going, but already it was better. The hardness inside Dad had softened, a little. It was the answer to a prayer I’d been praying my whole life without realizing it.

We sailed out of the driveway. Our house looked peaceful, normal. Mrs. Grissom’s beagle stood by the mailbox, watching us go.

If this is goodbye, I thought, it’s also good riddance. One forty-four Buena Vista Drive was not an address I would miss. Certainly I would not miss a single blade of that grass. It made me happy to see the seedheads poking up and to think I might never have to cut them again.

Mississippi? When we came here I thought I would hate it. While we lived here I thought I did hate it. To my astonishment, now that we might be leaving, I found that I loved it better than any place we had ever lived. Look at that kudzu running wild, swallowing that house and the telephone poles and the trees! You don’t see that kind of stuff in Yankeeland. Old billboards collapsed where they stood, and nobody bothered to pick up the pieces. The heat was stronger than in other places, the ceaseless chanting of bugs in the weeds. The pine trees didn’t offer much shade. It was not a place for soft people, but for some reason I felt completely at home here.

Besides, I couldn’t leave Mississippi. This was where Arnita lived.

“You all right back there, Jacko?” Dad called.

“Yassuh,” he said, “but I has been better.”

Dad rolled his eyes at me.

Amazing how fast I had abandoned my usual surly opposition to Dad and begun trying to win his approval, just like when I was younger. I was surprised to find myself still the same anxious kid, trying to keep from upsetting him, eager to please him if at all possible.

A couple of lawn chairs chattered together in the back. “Jacko, can you stop that rattling?” Dad called.

He tried, but couldn’t reach that far.

“I’ll get it.” I launched myself over the second seat and jiggled the chairs apart to stop the noise.

At the intersection with McRaven Road, Dad turned left instead of right, doubling back on County Road 11. I knew this road made a meandering loop to hook up with McRaven again, a mile to the east of our house. “Dad, where are we going?”

“Not too far now,” he said. “We’re almost there. You’ll see.”

“What’s the big secret?”

“Let me tell you a story, son,” he said. “You know I was in the Army Air Corps, right after the war? When I got out in ’forty-nine, I saw this ad in the Montgomery paper. ‘Chemicals Are Your Future.’ The fastest-growing chemical company in America was interviewing at the Whitley Hotel, and if you were a go-getter who wanted a bright future, come see the man.”

Dad never talked about anything in the past but the Depression. I listened.

“I got all shaved and bathed,” he said, “got myself all slickered up in my eight-dollar suit and took a bus down to Dexter Avenue. Got off at the fountain, walked over to the Whitley. I had to wait while the man finished up with the fellow in front of me. And then I shook Charlie’s hand. Charlie Fabricant. First thing he asked me was, did I want to be a TriDex man for the rest of my life. And I said, yes sir, I did.”

“You decided that quick?”

“That’s how it worked in those days, if you were lucky. Get a job with a good company, give ’em all you got, they’ll look after you the rest of your life.”

“So this guy who gave you your first job? He’s the one who laid you off?”

“He said how ironic it was, him being the one to deliver the bad news after all these years. They thought it wouldn’t hurt as much, coming from him. They were wrong about that.” His smile was cold. “Twenty-four years and two months. I’d be vested next May. Charlie says all the big companies are doing it now, any excuse to keep from paying retirement.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “They won’t pay your retirement?”

“Not unless you’re vested. And you can’t make ’em. Oh you can sue ’em, maybe force ’em to give you a little something eventually, but whatever you got would get eat up with lawyer fees.”

Dad flipped on the blinker and turned onto a two-lane dirt track running east through the woods. We drove the red dirt ribbons up the long spine of a hill, past the fresh stumps of felled trees. It was the early stage of a subdivision, odd piles of brush, scraped-off house sites, lots marked with string. At the top of the hill was a broad grassy meadow on a promontory overlooking the countryside.

Nice panorama up here. Dad drove to the far side of the grassy field. He backed the car up to a bluff with a view of the valley. He went to lower the tailgate.

“Are we gonna build a house up here, Dad?”

“No. Help me get these boxes out.” We spread a green plastic tarp on the ground and loaded the boxes from the wagon onto the middle of it. We covered the boxes with a second tarp, tucked it tight around the edges and weighted it with rocks.

Dad set up the folding chairs facing out toward the view. On the tailgate between the chairs, he spread a blanket for Jacko. He brought out a sack containing two cans of Coke. He cracked one open and offered the other to me. “Jack Otis, you want some Co-Cola? Daniel will split his with you.”

Jacko shook his head.

We sat in the lawn chairs drinking Coke, looking over the valley. I recognized the little grocery store at the crossroads, the bend in McRaven Road. I followed the road down a line of trees to the intersection with Buena Vista and realized I was looking directly down on our house. Right below us, that very roof showing through a gap in the branches.

So this was the hill that loomed over our street. Of course! Many times on my bike I had gazed up this ridge, forbiddingly wooded and steep. I never imagined you could just drive right up to the top like this. “Hey, Dad, that’s our house!”

“Not our house,” said Dad. “TriDex owns it. Not us. You knew that, didn’t you?”

“I think so.”

“It’s not a bad deal, long as you’re working for them. If they terminate you, they keep your house.”

“You mean they can sell it?”

“They will sell it, and keep all the money, even though I paid the taxes and took care of it. They got good ol’ Charlie Fabricant to call up and explain it to me.” He lifted his Coke can for a toast. “It really wasn’t his call to make. Here’s to Charlie. Doing their dirty work for them.” He banged his can against mine.

“I don’t get it, Dad.”

“I got robbed, son. They took my retirement. The car. And the house we live in. You know what I get? After twenty-four years and two months?”

“What?”

“Two weeks’ base pay, and a sincere thank-you.”

“That sucks!”

“Watch your language!” He swatted me.

I was dodging his hand when the first flash caught my eye. I turned toward it by instinct.

The windows lit up luminous orange shimmering to blue. The fireball expanded outward from the center of the house, carrying walls and roof with it, the pieces of our house swelling into a ball of fire rising and rising like a mushroom cloud, rolling up into the sky.

In four seconds the heat wave struck my face. A thunderclap shook the air — a huge boom that jolted me out of my chair and toppled Jacko on his side.

Dad shot his fists in the air. “Hooooeeeee!”

The fireball climbed into the sky on a tower of smoke. After the roar came the sounds of tinkling glass, falling metal, timbers crashing. Trees cracked and fell. A hundred dogs barked from every direction.

The ruins of our house made a hot fire. From above, it looked like a hole in the ground with a huge heap of fire at one end. I saw flickering in the trees — Spanish moss burning in the branches.

I pulled Jacko back up to a sitting position. He looked stricken, as if that big sound had jarred him too hard.

Dad stood with his fists raised in triumph.

“Dad, you blew up our house?”

“Not our house,” he crowed. “Their house!”

I’d never seen him so happy.

1
7

I
T WAS CRAZY
as hell, a total catastrophe, but still I shared some of Dad’s exhilaration when he blew up our house. It was the kind of plot Tim and I might have dreamed up — but Dad was a grown man who had figured out how to actually do it. With no one to stop him, least of all me.

Apparently the idea occurred to him shortly after he slammed the phone down on Charlie Fabricant. We’d always been a TriDex family, moving when TriDex said move, jumping when they said how high, twisting our lives into the shape of that familiar triple-D logo.
TriDex — We Know What Bugs You!
One phone call from Charlie Fabricant brought it all to an end.

By the time he came to pick me up at Full Flower, Dad had calculated the cubic volume of the house, the rate at which natural gas would flow from the pipe behind the stove, how long it would take to fill seven rooms. Once he found out from the
World Book
that natural gas is lighter than air (I told you those books would come in handy), he decided to place Mom’s silver candelabra on the floor of the bedroom farthest from the kitchen, so the house would be well loaded with gas by the time the fumes reached the source of ignition.

He wanted a big explosion with no large pieces remaining. He didn’t want some insurance inspector finding a candelabra in the bedroom, for instance.

I watched smoke billowing from the hole where our house used to be. I had spent my life being afraid of Dad. For the first time it occurred to me that others should be frightened too.

“Man, that was big!” he exulted. “Heck of a lot bigger than I thought!”

“You blew up our house? All our stuff?”

He dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “We saved out what was important. The rest was just yard-sale junk.”

I thought of all the Saturdays we’d spent scouring yard sales for that junk while he sat home watching football. I kicked the lawn chair across the grass. “Where are we supposed to live now?”

“Go pick up that chair,” he said.

“But my bike was in there!”

“You can get another bike.”

Over the barking of dogs I heard sirens wailing from the direction of Minor.

“We need to get back down there,” he said. “I called Mississippi Gas before we left. I told her we smelled gas in the house, a strong odor of gas. She told me to get out, they would send a crew right away. Do you understand?”

“You’re saying it was an accident?” I said. “It was a leak or something?”

“That’s right. A leak in the kitchen. Probably the stove. We’d been having trouble with that stove, remember?” He watched to see how I received this news. But then he was looking past me. “Jack Otis, what the heck is the matter with you?”

Jacko sat glaring up at us with a peculiar look of outrage. His jaw was working but no sound was coming out. His skin was a nonhuman gray, the color of fireplace ashes.

“The noise knocked him over,” I said. “You think it hurt him?”

“Jacko.” Dad snapped his fingers in front of his eyes. “Say something.”

Nothing.

“He doesn’t look so good,” I observed.

“You’re right. Oh for the love of — we better get somebody to look at him. Grab those chairs, hurry. Get in back with him.”

I shoved in the lawn chairs and crawled in beside Jacko. Dad stepped on the gas. The Country Squire bounded off across the pasture on wallowy shocks.

Jacko was barely breathing, a shallow pant.

“What, Jacko?” I patted his hand. “What do you need?”

“Water,” he croaked.

“I haven’t got any water. Here, drink my Coke.”

I poured some in his mouth. I could tell it hurt him to swallow.

“Did he drink it?” Dad called.

“A little. Most of it ran out.”

Jacko closed his eyes and slumped against the wheel well. “Jacko?”

“What’s he doing?” said Dad.

“Jacko? Come on, wake up.” Had I killed him with Coke?

“Don’t let him go to sleep,” Dad said. “They say if they’re having a stroke you’re supposed to try and keep ’em awake.”

“You think he’s having a stroke?”

“Well how should I know? Stop talking to me and watch him!”

We flew down the ramp onto I-20. All those years pulling himself across the floor had given Jacko huge leathery hands with knobby knuckles. I massaged those arthritic knobs until I got him to open his eyes, but he didn’t seem able to lift his head. He lay gazing up at me. I didn’t see any sign of fear in his eyes.

Up to now, I had thought of Jacko as mostly a nuisance. Now that he was dying, it was like leaving Mississippi — suddenly I realized I would miss him.

We raced around the Robinson Road off-ramp and into the emergency bay of the West Central Mississippi Regional Medical Center. Two guys in white hurried out.

Jacko’s eyes widened as they lifted him onto a gurney and whisked him away.

He must have thought he was entering heaven, all those people around him in white. They wheeled him into a stretcher bay, strapped a mask on his face, pulled a curtain.

Dad went to the nurses’ station to do the paperwork. I sprawled on a chair in the waiting room, leafing through
Modern Medical Technology
. Whenever I closed my eyes I saw a superbright flash, and Spanish moss burning in the trees.

A young doctor came out to tell us it wasn’t a stroke but viral pneumonia, very serious for an elderly man with all of Jacko’s infirmities. Probably he would be here a week, minimum.

Dad said, “I’ve got a daughter in this hospital too. Third floor.”

“Why don’t y’all go on up to her room? I’ll come find you when we get Mr. Bates admitted and settled into a room.” I’d forgotten Jacko even had a last name. Of course: Mom was a Bates originally, and Jacko was her mother’s brother.

In the elevator I said, “At least he’s not dying.”

“Yeah, pneumonia is better than a stroke,” Dad said. “I thought I’d killed him.”

“What are you gonna tell Mom?”

“About what?”

“The house. Don’t you think she’ll notice it’s gone? You’re gonna have to tell her.”

Dad got this exasperated gleam in his eye. “Why do you have to be such a smart aleck? No, it ain’t gonna be easy to tell her, and no she won’t like it. But it’s done. Nothing she or anybody else can do about it now.”

I considered a minute. “You want me to tell her it was an accident?”

He stared as if he could see my bones. “You think you could make her believe you?”

“I think so.”

He looked skeptical. “You would lie, to keep me out of Dutch with your mother?”

I was skeptical myself. I felt like a kitten that has wandered into the cage to play with the big tiger. It may seem at first as if everything’s going along okay, but you just know it’s not going to end well.

The elevator door slid open. Mom was in the third-floor waiting room with her palm pressed to the window, staring out at the interstate. When she saw us she began waving the smoke of her cigarette away with one hand, as if it didn’t belong to her. “What are y’all doing here? Who’s home with Jacko?”

Dad explained.

“Pneumonia! My Lord! I knew he had a cold, but I had no idea it was that bad!” I could see droplets of guilt condensing on her instantly.

Dad said, “You know how old folks are with pneumonia.”

She frowned. “Half the time that’s what kills ’em. They get pneumonia, then they die.”

“As mean as that old man is, he will live to be a hunnerd,” said Dad. “Peg. Something else. There’s been a little accident at the house.”

Her head jerked around. “Accident.”

“Listen to me, now. Try not to get upset. There was a gas leak — a natural gas leak in the house. It must have started in the kitchen.” He was looking at me, talking to her. Looking directly into my eyes, as if that way, we were both saying the words, he was binding me to him with his Lie. “The gas company said to get out of the house. We got out in time. But honey . . . the house was destroyed.”

She shook her head as if she did not recognize the word. “Destroyed?”

Gravely he nodded. “It was a big explosion. There’s nothing left.”

Mom took a breath of smoke from the cigarette. “Really.”

Dad said, “I know it’s hard to believe, that it could happen to us again. And we have to start all over again, for the second time. But this time there’s a difference.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Insurance?”

He nodded. “Yes ma’am. Entire contents, full policy. Five-hundred-dollar deductible.”

Mom’s eyes welled. “Oh Lord, Lee, tell me it’s not true. Tell me this is April Fool’s Day . . . Why does everything bad have to happen to us?”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I know it does feel that way sometimes.”

“Our poor house,” she said. “Oh Daniel, you must have been so scared!”

I nodded. “It made this big noise.”

That made her cry harder. Dad and I stood on either side of her. He put his arms around her and let her sob into his shoulder.

“I don’t think we were meant to live in Mississippi,” she wailed. “God doesn’t want us to live here.”

I stood still and said nothing while Mom wept. This was the first time I’d ever conspired with Dad against Mom. I didn’t like it.

“My pictures of Mama,” she wailed, “all those things of Gran Bates, her Sheaf of Grain china, and oh Lord, not her tea service too?”

“I saved that box of old pictures,” Dad said. “And your mama’s Bible, and your jewelry box.”

“Thank God,” she said.

“And some of your shoes,” he said. “Dadgum fortune in shoes, I wasn’t about to let ’em all go. And Daniel packed a box for each of them, didn’t you?” He fixed me with a look.

“Wait a minute.” Mom sniffled, wiping her eye with a Kleenex. “When did y’all have time to do all this packing?”

“It wasn’t that much time,” Dad said. “We had to move fast.”

“You mean while the house was filling up with gas, you had time to run around packing boxes?”

Dad said, “More like grabbing what we could on our way out.”

“Why didn’t you open the windows and let the gas out?”

“There wasn’t time, sweetheart,” Dad said. “I mean the house was
loaded
with fumes. Opening one window was not gonna make any difference. We were lucky to get out of there at all.”

“Daniel, you’re mighty quiet,” said Mom. “You helped your father do this?”

“Yes ma’am. It’s just like he said.”

Mom frowned. “You’re a worse liar than Daddy. Lee, what have you done to our house?”

“What do you mean? I just explained to you what happened.” I don’t think he could have looked more guilty if he’d been wearing black and white stripes.

Her bitter smile. “You destroyed our home, didn’t you? Because they got Charlie Fabricant to fire you. And it belongs to the company, so you thought this would be a good way to get back at them.”

He thought about it a moment. “That’s about right.”

“I know you so well, Lee.” Her voice thickened. “How dare you lie to my face! To my
face!
How stupid do you think I am, that I wouldn’t see right through you?”

“You didn’t.” He stuck his thumb out at me. “You saw through him.”

I fought an urge to grab his thumb and sink my teeth into it. “I’m going to check on Janie,” I said, rushing out before they could stop me.

I went in to face the sight of my sister bleary-eyed, red-faced, nose running, jowls puffed up like Alvin the Chipmunk. You hear about tonsils like it’s no big deal, but Janie looked like someone who’d just had her throat cut out.

She was furious at Mom. “She practically kidnapped me,” she whisper-croaked. “She said we were going to the doctor. She didn’t say a word about tonsils till we got here!”

“Yeah, I thought it was stupid,” I said, “but she didn’t want you getting all flipped out in advance.”

She blinked. “You knew about it too? Thanks, traitor!”

“I was going to tell you, Idjit. Really. I forgot.”

“If you knew how much it hurts —”

“Stop talking, then,” I said. “You’re the only person dumb enough to keep talking even when it hurts.”

I told her Jacko was in this very hospital at this moment, breathing through an oxygen mask. I told her Dad blew up our house and everything in it, a fact we had to keep to ourselves so the insurance would pay. Janie didn’t seem all that surprised. “Mommy said he lost his job,” she croaked. “He was really mad last night.”

“He still is,” I said. “Although he looked pretty happy when it exploded.”

Janie sipped 7-Up through a straw. Mom was a strong believer in the magic healing powers of 7-Up. Janie said, “Does this mean Dad is crazy?”

“No more than usual,” I said. We shared a grim humor — the quiet jokes of prisoners sharing a cell for life. “Think how it’s gonna be when they try to put him in a straitjacket.”

“You think they will?” she whispered, in awe of the idea.

“I wouldn’t be surprised. This is big. He blew up our house.”

“Does this mean we’ll be poor now?” said Janie. “He always said we were driving him to the poorhouse.”

I told her to stop talking. For once in her life, she did.

In the waiting room I found Mom and Dad watching the five o’clock news. Kent Williams of Channel 12 stood before our house, the smoking hole in the ground. The camera zoomed in on the blown-out windows of Mrs. Wagner’s house across the street.

There was Mrs. Wagner, trembling. “They were the nicest family,” she quavered. “I was over there this morning. It’s a wonder I wasn’t killed too!”

“She thinks we’re dead,” Mom cried. “Lee, they think we’re dead on the news!”

“Well, we’re not,” he said. “That just goes to show you.”

“But you’ve got to call somebody!”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, the TV station, the police! How should I know?” There she went, crying again. “Oh Lee, what have you done?”

Mom asked me to please go find Jacko, since everyone seemed to have forgotten all about him. I navigated the maze of elevators and hallways to the information desk. The lady told me Jacko had been admitted to a ward on the fifth floor. The nurses on five would know the room number.

The nurse at the desk on five was a wide woman with that orange-reddish hair black women get when they bleach it. When I said, “Jack Otis Bates,” she stiffened. “Oh, are you connected with him? Cause we been looking for whoever brought that old man in here to tell you, if you can’t get him to control that nasty mouth of his, he ain’t gonna be able to stay on this flo.”