“Thank you, ma’am,” said Dad, escorting her out. “Mighty nice of you to do this on such short notice. My wife will be over to thank you.”
“Oh tell her not to bother, Mr. Musgrove, it was no problem at all. Y’all just feel free to call on me anytime! Bye, now!”
Dad went from room to room, closing and locking windows. “Okay now, no questions, just do what I tell you. Make up one box for each of you. Put the stuff you think is most important, the stuff they would really want to keep — Bud’s trophies and Janie’s dolls, and like that. Do it fast. I want to be out of here in half an hour.”
“Where are we going?”
“Son? Just do like I say, and everything will be fine. Now get busy.” He didn’t look all that grim when he said it. For once, I wasn’t what he was mad at. I decided to do myself a favor and not challenge him.
I built the boxes, carried one to the Freak Annex, and gathered clothes, my favorite jacket with the elbow patches, the Crimson Tide sweatshirt from Aunt June. We’re moving again. He’s been transferred. But wait. He got fired. They don’t transfer you after you’re fired. I can’t fit everything into one box!
Maybe we were going ahead to the new place. The other stuff would come later, with the moving van.
I made sure to pack my Converse high-tops and my cowboy boots. A few clothes, some birthday knickknacks: a cut-glass prism, an antique shaving mug and brush. I packed the few mementos that had survived the great moving-van fire of 1972 by riding in the trunk of our Oldsmobile: my Hardy Boys books, my Sir Edmund Hillary book, my one-eyed teddy bear.
I gathered Bud’s trophies, his Polaroid Swinger and photo albums, all the Boy Scout junk from his underwear drawer. Bud didn’t have much stuff, so I put more of my shirts in his box. In Janie’s room I started with the dolls, but then, no, she’s too old for dolls, so I loaded in coats and dresses and hats, the horse figurines, the storybooks I used to read to her when she was little and cute. I stuck a few dolls on top.
I taped up the boxes and wrote our names in Magic Marker.
Dad was locking windows, closing off the heating vents. He nodded at the sight of my boxes. “Go put those in the back of the car.”
I obeyed. Mrs. Grissom’s beagle was loitering at the end of our driveway. Dad came behind me bearing Jacko’s footlocker and another couple of boxes. He shoved it up to the wheel well and began arranging my boxes around it.
“Where are we going?”
“We’ll discuss it in the car.”
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
“We’re making a change, son,” he said. “For once I need you to cooperate.”
I felt my unease rising — what change? Why were we suddenly dismantling our normal lives? Mom was at the hospital with Janie, Bud was long gone, it was just Jacko and me and Dad packing our lives into boxes. What about my senior year, my best friend, my beautiful kissing girl? What about the valuable contribution I was making to life at Minor High?
I went to the phone in the family room and dialed a number.
Ella Beecham said, “Hey, Musgrove, how you been?” That was a surprise — I’d expected her to hang up, as she had the last ten times I called.
“Fine, Miz Beecham. Is Arnita there?”
“I told you. I don’t want you talking to her.”
“Please? Just for a minute. It’s important.”
“Don’t, Musgrove. We’re busy. We got a lot going on.”
“Miz Beecham, I need to talk to her.”
Slam! went the phone.
I tried Tim’s number. Patsy Cousins picked up on the second ring, bright and shiny. “Hello!” I hung up.
Okay, well, that’s it, I suppose. I’m leaving, and there’s no one to tell.
Maybe we’re moving someplace nice for a change. California would be good. It looked so beautiful and sunny on TV. I could talk Arnita into coming out to California. She could get a scholarship at some good school out there.
But no, Dad would do the boring, sensible thing: move us to a cheaper house in Minor, find a job selling insurance or cars. He always said a good salesman can sell anything.
He came from the kitchen rolling Jacko on his scooter. “We’re going for a ride, Jack Otis,” he said. “You want to bring a blanket for your legs?”
“I be all right,” Jacko said, “long as it’s summertime.” He looked feeble today, squinting up at me like Popeye with one blue eye. “What you lookin’ at, boy?”
“You, Jacko. You feeling okay?”
“Old as Methuselah, that’s all. Ol’ devil climb up on me in the bedstead last night.”
“Push him off next time,” Dad said. “Son, why don’t you roll Jacko on out to the car.”
“Sure, Dad.” My strategy of nonconfrontation was working. Dad hadn’t yelled at me since we got home.
I grasped Jacko by the shoulders, easing him over the doorjamb. His scooter rolled smoothly across the garage floor.
There was just enough room behind the boxes in the back of the station wagon for Jacko to sit looking out the back window. “Thankee, Danums.”
“You welcome, old man.”
“Where we gwine?”
“I don’t know, but we gwine somewhere. Watch your fingers!” I slammed the gate. “Dad won’t tell me. You’re the spooky one, you tell me what’s going on.”
“We gone have the light shining in our eyes,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“Gone shine in our eyes all night long,” he said, coughing.
“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 t
hink 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.
17
IT 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 in
to 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?”