Victory Over Japan (29 page)

“Here's what's going to happen,” I say to Crystal Anne, thinking I'd better tell her what it's going
to sound like when they start shooting. So she won't be surprised. But I never got time to tell her because about that time it all busted loose.
Someone at the pen has let a boar loose and he's coming across that field like a baseball. He's coming so fast my heart almost stopped. I
feel Jack jump into the trunk of the car. He let out a big yell and jump right in on top of his gun and here comes Miss Crystal running down off the
hill and she jump into the driver's seat and starts honking the horn as loud as she can and starts the car and then the car's moving and
she's chasing the pig. Trying to save him or run over him one, I can't decide. Then the pig he takes off in the direction of the sun and
we're chasing him in the car. Jack's in the back with the trunk top flopping up and down and Crystal Anne's laughing her head off, she
thinks it's wonderful. I look out the window and there's Mr. Phelan, running after us with his gun in his hand. He's sprinting like a
deer, heavy as he is. He's as mad as he can be.

Then we're on the asphalt and Miss Crystal's yelling.
“Traceleen, roll up the window. Lock the doors.” Jack's jumped out by then but the trunk top's still waving up and down and
we're on the road. “Where're we going?” I say. “What's happening now?'

“Were going
for the antelope pen,” she says. “We're going to ram it down.” Sure enough, she press her foot down on the pedal, lean into the
wheel, the seat's too far back for her but she doesn't even stop to adjust it, and we're headed for the ranch. Mr. Phelan's
still running after us, then I see him stop and help Jack up off the ground. We bust on down the road and turn on the gravel, one tire's sliding
off in the ditch but Miss Crystal, she holds it on the road. I wish you could have seen her, sitting there behind the steering wheel in her fringed vest
and her hunting pants with sandpaper on the knees and her khaki-colored hunting shirt, her hair all messed up and wild looking. If I live a million
years I won't ever forget the look on her face that morning or the ride we had.

First we come to the automatic gate. What you
call a Kentucky gate, you have to stop and pull a chain and it opens, then you got to close it by hand from the other side, but we don't close it
this time. We bust on down the road over the cattle gaps and go on past the house without even slowing up, almost run over a couple of dogs, then
we're to the antelope pen and Miss Crystal she just drive the car right into the gate, just ram it down. Then she backs up and rams it again. I
could see it giving in and the radiator on the front of the car starting to smoke. This is no way to treat a Mercedes Benz number six hundred that cost
twenty-six thousand dollars I couldn't help thinking. It would have been just as good to do it with the English truck. “Don't hit it
on the front,” I said, but she wasn't listening. “Hit it more to the side, with the fender.” She don't even hear me. She
just back up and ram it one more time. This time the whole gate and half the fence fall forward like they was made out of paper.

Then antelope are everywhere, all around us. For a minute it seem like the windows are covered with antelope faces, then they're
gone, spreading out in every direction, their little white tails waving behind them.

The biggest one, the one Mr. Phelan call the
horse, is taking off across the field behind the boar pen, two more following him. It's a field that stretches way off and ends in a wood beside
where that little dry river runs. I watched those ones until they disappeared into the trees.

Then we're backing out over the
boards and Miss Lauren Gail and her little girls and all the kitchen help are running out into the yard to see what's happened. The
radiator's really smoking now, but Miss Crystal she backs and turns and pulls up in front of the kitchen stairs to yell to Miss Lauren Gail.
“Send my clothes to New Orleans,” she yells out the window. “Tell Harry I'm sorry I had to leave him here.” Then
we're barreling back down the dirt road and through the gate and onto the asphalt.

“You think we ought to drive it with
that steam coming out in front?” I said.

“It will run,” she says. “If we don't stop it will get us
where we're going.” We make it through the gate and turn onto the main road and here comes Mr. Phelan in the jeep headed right at us.
“God in Heaven,” I'm yelling. “Here he comes. What if he shoots?”

“I'll run over him if
he shoots at me,” she says. “I'll knock his goddamn jeep off the road.” She was gripping the wheel like it was a horse she was
riding. She was
driving
that car. I held Crystal Anne in my lap. When we passed Mr. Phelan I laid my head down so I wouldn't have to see
him. I was sure he would shoot out our tires but I guess even Mr. Phelan knows better than to shoot at people. We passed him on that narrow road with a
swoosh, so close I could hear him screaming. I guess he could see the steam coming out the radiator. I was wondering if Miss Crystal caught his eye.

She had planned it all before it happened. Well, not the exact way but near enough. She had put a bag for Crystal Anne into the car
and had her pockets stuffed with money and credit cards and we drove to San Antonio at ninety miles an hour and cruised into the parking lot at the
airport and got out and left the car sitting there with steam coming out the bottom and the top. It had made it to San Antonio but I heard later that
all it was good for after that was to sell in Mexico. I sure hated to leave that car like that. I ran my hand across the leather dashboard as I was
getting out, admiring one last time the way the leather parts fit into the steel so fine you couldn't tell where one began and the other ended.
Even the button on the dashboard looked special, like it had grown there. Look like a navel on a baby, I was thinking. Or a navel orange.

We got a ticket on a United Airlines 747 and started for home. We were traveling first class, traveling in style. That's how Miss
Crystal does things. She's always saying she's going to stop and save some money but she can't ever seem to find the right place to
stop.

We strapped ourselves into these nice big seats, with Crystal Anne sitting in the middle and Miss Crystal leaned back and
took a moment's rest for the first time since she'd opened her eyes that morning. She still had on her hunting clothes. Looked like some
famous actress that had been on a location shot. She reached over and touched me on the arm. “We're going home in triumph, Traceleen. What a
trip. I could never have followed my conscience today if you hadn't been there to help, you know that, don't you?”

I accepted the compliment. I knew it was the truth. Nobody can get anything done all by theirself. That's not the way the world is
set up.

“It is very sad,” she said to me later, when the plane was in the air, and we had been served some French
Columbard wine and were having our lunch. “When you cannot love your one and only brother. It breaks my heart, Traceleen, here he is in the modern
world and still killing things all the time. Like he was from another century. He was such a smart little boy. He was destined for better things.”

“I wouldn't waste too much time feeling sorry for Mr. Phelan,” I said. “He looks to me like he does about
what he wants to do.”

“You're right,” she says. “That wine was making my mind soft. Listen,
Traceleen, let me tell you a story about what he did to me one time. I was thinking about it this morning while I was getting up my courage, waiting for
the boar to come. This was a long time ago, when I was eight years old and he was twelve.” She took a big sip of her French Columbard wine and
started telling the story.

“It was one Sunday, in Indiana, right in the middle of the Second World War. It was in this
Spanish house we had. There was this living room, with very high cathedral ceilings, and I came downstairs one Sunday and there was Phelan, sitting at
Momma's cardtable driving an airplane. There were footpedals for his feet and a steering wheel and a dashboard with all sorts of dials on it. It
was a special kind of plane where the pilot is also the bombadier and Phelan was flying over Japan, dropping bombs on cities and ammunition dumps.

“Ack, ack, ack, his guns would roar. Ziiiiiinnnnnnnggggg, as the bombs fell. Then he would lift up into the clouds barely escaping
the zeroes. I almost fainted with envy when I saw him. It drove me crazy. Finally I went over and asked him if I could fly it and he said no, it was
against the law because I wasn't a pilot.

“So I went to my room and got my new Monopoly set and brought it out and
offered to trade. ‘No,' he said. Then I went back into my room and got my butterfly collecting kit and I brought that out and still he
wouldn't let me have a turn.

“All day I kept adding to the pile of things beside the fireplace and still Phelan flew on
and on as if I wasn't even there. Ack, ack, ack, the guns would roar. Ziiiinnnnnnnggggggggg.

“Finally I went to my room
and came out with the binoculars my great-uncle Philip Phillips had used in World War I and I said, ‘Phelan, I will trade you these binoculars for the
plane.'

“He got up from the pilot's seat and took the binoculars and the Monopoly set and my rubber printing
stamps and several other things that interested him and we shook hands on the deal. At our house a deal was a deal forever. If you shook hands it was
over. So Phelan took my stuff and I sat down at the plane and reached for the steering wheel. It was only an old piece of cardboard he had painted. I
put my feet down on the pedals. They were two old shoeboxes with cardboard springs. Traceleen,” she said. Her voice was rising. “Traceleen,
are you listening? Can you hear me? This is everything I know about love I'm telling you. Everything I know about everything.”

“Momma,” Crystal Anne said, laying her hand on her momma's cheek to calm her down. “Momma's talking.”