To Come and Go Like Magic (11 page)

Lenny steadies his jug under the faucet.

“Is that the preacher’s?” he asks, nodding toward the blue shirt.

“Well, yes, it is,” Rose says. “How’d you know?”

“Zeno’s little brother threw up on it,” I say.

“What?” She examines the shirt for stains.

“You sure got it as clean as a whistle,” Lenny says. He’s grinning, probably still picturing a monkey in that starched blue shirt.

“I suppose I did,” Rose says proudly.

Jack and Momma are waiting for us with the trunk open. I hand my water jugs to Jack and slip into the backseat beside Lenny. When we get ready to go, Aunt Rose leans in through Jack’s open window.

“You all ought to stay awhile,” she says. “You can go home when you can’t go no place else.”

We’re all still laughing when Momma turns the key and pulls out into the going-down sun.

You can always go home. Your true home stays put. It’s all those other places in the outside world that you can’t always go to, maybe never go to, except in dreams. These mountains keep a firm hold. I once read about an earthquake on the other side of the world and that night I dreamt the mountains moved. The river and the meadow and the woods got smaller and smaller as the mountains closed in and squeezed out all the air.

Sometimes when a storm whips through this valley on its way to someplace else, I feel trapped, caught in the wind.

I
n Line at the Piggly Wiggly …

We’re stuck in line behind some woman in bell-bottom jeans and a rabbit-fur vest. It’s way too hot for a vest like that.

She takes her time emptying the cart, talking to Rusty Peters behind the counter.

Aunt Rose turns around and rolls her eyes at me. “That one’s bound to be a VISTA,” she whispers.

I look down at my feet, hoping the rabbit woman doesn’t hear.

Rose shakes her head. “The only time they come here to trade is when the A&P over in Jellico Springs runs out of something,” she says.

The rabbit woman turns around, but she looks past us and scans the aisles. People are always getting halfway checked out and then remembering something else they need. She bends over the counter and says something to
Rusty, but I can’t hear because of all the adding-machine noise.

Rusty stops tapping keys and goes up on his toes so his head’s above the stack of cornflakes on sale at the checkout.

“Hey, Jimmy!” he shouts to Jimmy Dupree, the produce boy. “Where’s the
falafel
mix at?”

Dead silence. Heads in line at the two other checkout counters turn and look our way. Somebody says:
“Awful
mix?”

“Aisle three,” a voice calls from somewhere between the oranges and cabbage.

The rabbit/VISTA woman squeezes past Aunt Rose and me and hurries down aisle three like she’s headed to a fire.

“What on earth is that?” Rose asks.

Rusty smiles and shakes his head. “She had us special-order it,” he says. “It’s probably foreign.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” says Rose. She scoots our hot rolls and tea bags and buttermilk down the counter so she has enough room for the bleach and the Ajax. Rose is planning to clean and cook today while Momma’s at work. She’s tired of looking at the tea stains on our sink, she says. We’re too sloppy. Rose couldn’t stand to live with us for one minute. She’d go crazy, she says. Still, she’s at our house almost as much as I am.

We wait in line, listen to Roger Miller singing in the
background.
I’ve been a long time leaving, yeah, but I’ll be a long time gone…
. I look down aisle two and spot the cassette player stuck on the top shelf beside the Tide laundry detergent.

When the rabbit lady comes back, I look at the box in her hand and memorize the spelling so I can add it to my list.
Falafel
. On one side of the box there’s a picture of a man in white pants gathering some kind of grass in a big field.

Rusty’s fingers dance across the keys on the adding machine like he’s playing a piano while the rabbit lady loads up her own bags. She pays with cash and leaves. Through the big picture windows we can see her put the grocery bags into a blue jeep that’s covered with mud, like it’s been up and down every hollow in the county.

“What’s Mercy Hill coming to?” Rose says, clicking her tongue.

“Beats me,” says Rusty.

Jimmy Dupree comes up and leans over the partition behind Rusty.

“We had to order a dozen boxes of
that falafel
stuff,” he says. “The main company wouldn’t let us buy just one.”

“That’s a dirty shame,” says Rose.

“We need more people to buy it,” Jimmy says.

“Don’t look at me,” says Rose.

They all laugh like this is some kind of joke.

We do not eat weird food in Mercy Hill. Last month
Momma bought a
Ladies’ Home Journal
magazine so she could try a recipe for Polynesian pork, but she had to throw away most of the pork because nobody liked it except Lenny and me. It had pineapple in it. “Who puts pineapple in stew?” Pop said. “It’s a waste of money to cook food that nobody eats.” So mostly we eat fried chicken or meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans out of the garden, and everybody’s happy. Uncle Lu says magazine recipes are for city people anyway, people who can’t cook.

Sometimes I see Momma reading the recipes in magazines at the Piggly Wiggly store, but she just looks now. Buying magazines is a waste of money, too.

G
oing to Mexico …

Miss Matlock brings a bag of plastic cars to school. Blue four-door sedans for the boys and pink convertibles for the girls. The boys would be jealous of the convertibles except none of them would drive a pink car.

She has us put our chairs in a big circle like we used to do in kindergarten.

“Story time!” Zeno Mayfield says this loud enough
for everyone to hear, but Miss Matlock doesn’t even look at him.

“Put the library table in the middle,” she says, pointing to the long work table back near the lockers. The boys carry it to the center of the room. Zeno pulls up his shirt sleeve and flexes his make-believe muscles.

“Are we having a race?” a bunch of voices cry at once. They roll cars across the desks and make zooming sounds.

We’re way too old for this.

Miss Matlock unrolls a map of Canada, the United States, and Mexico and tapes it to the tabletop. She circles the spot in Kentucky where Mercy Hill is and takes a kitchen timer from her desk.

“Who wants to be first?”

All the boys jump up, but Zeno gets to the table first. Is that any surprise?

“Start here in Kentucky,” Miss Matlock says. She has him close his eyes and tilt his head toward the ceiling so there’s absolutely no cheating. “Drive until the timer dings.”

Half a breath after
Go
, Zeno’s car is sitting in the Pacific Ocean. Miss Matlock draws a little
x
on the spot and writes his name.

All the boys
zoom
their cars across the country, but no one else gets to the Pacific. Two cars end up in Canada, but the rest stop in states across the West. The girls drive
slower. Since we don’t know what kind of game we’re playing, it’s best to be cautious.

“We’re going to Mexico,” Miss Matlock says when we’re all done and every spot has been marked with an
x
. The boys in California and Arizona and Texas are excited. They’re almost there already. Willie Bright is sitting in Laredo, right on the border, even though he didn’t try to zip across the states like the others. He just headed in the right direction.

“Willie knew where we were going,” Ginny says. “He had to know.”

“I didn’t know,” says Willie.

Miss Matlock says: “This is not a race.”

Ginny whispers to Priscilla: “A welfare wouldn’t have enough gas money to get to Texas.” The two of them giggle and everybody wants to know what they’re laughing about.

“Enough nonsense,” says Miss Matlock. She explains the project. We each have to do a short report about the state we landed on—the historic places, the weather and crops and customs, what the land looks like. Are there mountains? Or prairie? Or wilderness? And how about lakes, rivers, or deserts? What do the people do for work? The boys who’ve made the most progress cross-country will also have to write one extra paragraph about each of the states they have driven across to get where they are sitting. They all groan. It’s not fair, they say. The girls have it easy.

“But everyone must end up in Mexico,” Miss Matlock says. The next time we can each choose where we stop so long as we get to Mexico in two weeks. “We’ll arrive together,” she says.

“That’s not a race,” says Zeno.

“Exactly,” says Miss Matlock. “This is not a race.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Zeno asks. “I’m floatin’ in the ocean.”

“Tell us about the Pacific,” Miss Matlock says. “And, of course, a little something about all those states you drove so fast through to get to the ocean.”

“What if I didn’t drive?” Zeno asks. “What if I flew in an airplane? I could be in Mexico in a minute.”

Everybody laughs.

“Hardly a minute,” Miss Matlock says. “And we’re all driving.” She takes Zeno’s blue car and places it on the coast of California. “Let’s say you stopped in Los Angeles. There is much to see and do and
write
about while you wait for the others to get across the country.”

Zeno grabs the blue car from Miss Matlock, but she doesn’t scold him. Just raises her eyebrows, looks over her glasses.

After class, everyone pours into the hallway, and soon there’s a huddle and they’re all complaining about Miss Matlock and the stupid assignments and how this is supposed
to be English class and we haven’t opened our grammar books since she came to teach.

“We’re writing papers,” I say. “That’s grammar.”

“Why do you always take up for her?” Ginny asks.

“You and that Willie Bright Eyes,” Zeno says. “The two of you knew about this project, didn’t you? Chili and Willie in a conspiracy with the old crazy lady.”

When the bell rings, we have to run to get to the next class. Obviously, Zeno didn’t notice that I landed in northern Indiana. I would be closer to Mexico if I’d stayed in Mercy Hill, Kentucky.

O
fferings 1 …

Sunday morning. We fill up a whole pew since Pop talked Myra and Uncle Lu into coming to church.

Two strange men and a woman walk in and sit across the aisle from us where the Murphys usually sit, and the Murphys have to take the next row and push everybody else back. Ginny’s mother is not pleased. You can tell by the look on her face.

The men are wearing T-shirts and the woman has on
black pants. Around here women don’t wear pants to church. Everybody stares and whispers.

“VISTAs,” Momma says. “They have to be VISTAs.”

The man sitting at the end of the pew pats his foot when the organ starts playing. Up front Pop stands to sing his solo, the first verse of “Whispering Hope.”

Sunlight falls in streaks of color through the stained-glass window.

On the last two verses everybody stands and sings, even the VISTAs. But they don’t know the words and have to look at the songbook.