Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

He took another of the trucker’s bennies. Not that he felt the need, but the speed edge was starting to wear the slightest bit thin and he didn’t just yet want to let go of it. He was feeling real good and he wanted to ride the crest of that feeling as long as he could.

He drove back to the gravel road, turned back in the direction he’d come from, and with unerring instinct retraced his route to 281. He hadn’t even made any particular point of remembering the turns he’d taken, but when you were working at top form you didn’t have to; it all stuck in your brain and waited there until you needed it, and then it all came to you. If you knew how to make it work. If you knew how to get inside yourself and on top of yourself and make it all work, make everything work.

He drove north on 281. He bought gas in Wichita Falls and sat back cool and proud while the attendant made a fuss over his car. His car — why, it had really been his car from the moment it stopped for him. From the moment he willed it to stop. Even before, for why else had he sent the old Ford packing? All along he’d been waiting for this particular car to come and belong to him, and it had come provided with a gun and a box of shells and a man who was good at sizing men up and taking the right kind of chances.

The car took eighteen gallons of gas but didn’t need oil. No, it wouldn’t be an oil burner, not this car. Very low maintenance costs. And the lowest possible initial cost.

He crossed the Oklahoma line and stopped at a Burger King in Lawton for a cheeseburger and coffee. After eating he stood around for better than fifteen minutes, waiting to see if the food would have to come back up again. But it stayed down, and finally he knew it was going to stay down permanently, and he got back into the car and drove north.

WELL, I would say I knew the boy.

Now this is going a ways back. I was living common-law with his Ma, Ellie Hall, or Ellie Jenks which was her maiden name that she sometimes used. Hall, she must of told me his first name but it’s slipped my mind, he was long gone before I came in the picture. I lived with her common-law for a year or thereabouts.

As far as the boy is concerned, I would have to say he was all right. To be truthful I didn’t have too much to do with him. He kept to himself mostly. I was working days when I worked, which was pretty steady then, so I wouldn’t see him much aside from breakfast and supper. I sometimes gave some thought to being a daddy to him, taking him fishing and such, but it never came to that.

He was a boy kept to himself a good deal. I do recall he was always neat and clean about his person. He was respectful, too. If he gave his mother any grief I honestly don’t recall it.

I have this memory of him playing with a slingshot. He would just sit out back of the trailer afternoons with this old slingshot and a pocketful of pebbles and practice with it. There was rats prowling about the garbage and he would go after them with the slingshot. I don’t suppose he ever hit anything but he would pass the hours that way.

See, this was ten, twelve years ago, and him just a young boy at the time. I don’t know if it was a whole year I lived with her or not. The way I started, I just thought I’d keep company with her for a short time, and it stretched out to longer than that. She was a pleasant woman, easygoing, and didn’t make no trouble for a person. She would like to take a drink or two and just talk easy about any old thing. Why I left, my cousin over Waycross got this service station and wanted me to help him run it. So I went.

Never did see Ellie after that. I had word of her a couple of times. Now a couple of years back I do believe somebody told me she was in the hospital. I have a memory that it was the state hospital, something to do with the mind, but I could be wrong about that. Whether it was, and whether she’s still there, I would have no way of knowing, but you could find out about that, I’m sure. Just a question of knowing who to ask.

About the boy, I would have to say I’ve had no thought of him in years. I was little to him and he was little to me and I moved on out and forgot about him.

Since all this came up, and realizing it’s Ellie’s boy, why, I’ll sit back and try to recall him to mind. But what I keep coming back to is how little I do remember. Just that he was there. That he was in the background. And such little things as him practicing with the slingshot. To be honest, I can’t even get a clear picture of him in my mind. Just that he always stood up straight and tall. I believe he was tall for his age and I remember his posture was good, not slouched over like so many boys tall for their years.

Also his eyes. I remember his eyes, and the way he looked at a person.

Mr. McCulloch was talking and she just couldn’t make herself concentrate on a word he was saying. This was sort of a shame because she liked Mr. McCulloch, she really did. He was awfully young for a teacher. Twenty-five or thereabouts, certainly no more than thirty, and most of the teachers at Grand Island Central had been saying the same dull things since the Spanish-American War. Not in the same building, of course. Six years ago they had finished building the new high school, and the old brick building at the corner of Palmer and Whitemeadow had since been converted into another elementary school. Her sister Judy had been in the last class to graduate in the old building. Judy had not been able to graduate, of course, but that was the class she’d been in.

One of these days Judy would come for her. No, not come for her — Judy would never come back to Grand Island, Nebraska, not if they made her the mayor. She remembered that parting scene, Judy on the porch, her father in the doorway, the words flashing like knives. “Out of here, you whore! Off my property!” “You’ll never see me again, goddamn you!” “Never’s too soon for me. This is a decent house.” “Keep your decent house. Keep your whole fucking town.” “You don’t use that language here, you little—” “Don’t you touch me! You touch me and I swear I’ll kill you!” “Just you get out of my sight.”

No, Judy would not come back. She would not set foot in Grand Island, probably not in the whole state of Nebraska. But someday Judy would send for her. There would be a postcard or a letter or a telegram, or the telephone would ring and her mother would answer it and say wonderingly that there was a call for her, a long distance call for her, and it would be Judy. “You pack your things and get on a bus, Betty Marie. It’s time you got out of that hole and took a look at the world.”

Someday.

And then Judy would take her away, and the two of them would live together in a clean apartment in a brand-new building. Judy would help her get a job as a stewardess, and sometimes they would work the same flights together, the Deinhardt sisters, always bright and cheerful and pretty, always knowing the right thing to say, never too busy to help a mother with a sick baby or ease the fears of a passenger flying for the first time.

She was pretty sure Judy was a stewardess. It was the kind of thing Judy would do. Unless she’d become a nurse. That was also a possibility, and she wasn’t quite sure which way she would prefer it. There was more glamour to being a stewardess, all that travel and excitement, and the interesting people you met. But nursing also had a lot to be said for it. She could picture Judy in a starched white uniform, standing at a doctor’s side, passing scalpels and sutures in a tense open-heart operation. Or making the rounds in a terminal ward, her heart heavy with sorrow at the inevitable fate of her patients, but the smile on her lips and the music in her voice calming the nerves of those poor doomed men and women. And she could do this too. Judy would help her, would guide her, and the Deinhardt sisters would be the bulwark of the hospital’s nursing staff, always prepared for any emergency, an inspiration and comfort to doctors and patients alike.