Heads or Tails (7 page)

“What’s the next town?” Dad asked when we were back on the highway.

“The sign says ‘Trash Barrel’ ahead,” Mom replied and began to search the map. “I can’t find Trash Barrel anywhere on this map,” she said. Betsy looked over at me. I wasn’t going to say anything. Then we saw Dad grinning at us in the mirror and making the “crazy” sign with his finger twirling around his ear.

“Oh, God,” Mom said and burst out laughing. “I am losing my mind.” She laughed at herself and we all joined her and had an even bigger laugh when we passed “Trash Barrel.”

We drove on through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. When we reached Virginia, Mom wanted to change places with me so she could stretch out. I had been waiting for the opportunity to get at the radio. Once she got settled, I began searching the AM band for a UFO talk line. “Hey, Dad, do you believe in UFOs?” I asked.

“Just death and taxes,” he said dryly. “I only believe in what I can see and feel. There are no such things as UFOs.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. Besides, there is no proof.”

“But a million people have seen them.”

“And people used to think the world was flat,” he replied. “If I see it, I’ll believe it.”

“What about things you can’t see?” I asked. “What about things like luck and God?”

“If I can’t see it, I don’t believe it,” he said.

On the few Sundays we went to church, he stayed out in the car and read the newspaper. Once I overheard him say to Mom that only hypocrites went to church and that the good people stayed at home and lived decent lives. “That’s just an excuse to be lazy,” she had replied. “Besides, you’re going to confuse the children.”

He had me confused. If he didn’t believe in God, maybe he believed in luck. “Hey, Dad, was it just bad luck that you got caught cheating on your taxes?”

He flared up. “I didn’t cheat on my taxes. I’m being robbed by the government so another congressman can take a Hawaiian vacation. But you,” he said, pointing at me, “can go to the loony bin for believing in UFOs. Take a good look at your uncle Will. He’s a real flake and he claims to have seen UFOs.”

“Really?”

“That’s what he claims,” Dad said. “But everyone knows that Will doesn’t know his ass from his elbow.”

It was lucky Mom was asleep. I knew better than to get him talking like that. I couldn’t wait to see Uncle Will. I always thought he was a bit strange, but now I realized that he was just misunderstood, like a lot of people who had seen UFOs. “Do you think it’s bad luck that Grandpap had a heart attack?” I asked, changing the subject.

“It isn’t good or bad luck. It’s just part of life. I had a friend who was hit by lightning on the golf course. He had three young kids. And look at Johnny Foil. Nobody knows when their time will come. Grandpap probably died from working so hard in the coal mines all his life.”

When I was little, I used to sit on his basement stairs and wait for him to come home from the mines. He was black with coal dust, and he had his own shower down there. He would put his miner’s helmet on my small head and turn on the light and I’d play like I was digging coal. Then he’d open his lunch bucket and give me a piece of pickle he had saved just for me. I’d suck the vinegar out of it while he showered, and then he’d sit me down on his thigh and give me a horse ride while he sang, “Rattle up a June bug … A penny royal tea … Cat’s in the cupboard and can’t see me.”

I tried to keep Dad awake by talking, and even though I was excited to question Uncle Will, I still fell asleep.

When I woke, there was snow on the ground and my face was cold from pressing against the window. Mom leaned forward from the back seat and began to straighten up my hair. I knew we must be close. She picked at the sleep in the corner of my eyes, then licked her thumb and wiped a smudge off my chin. Betsy started to brush out her long hair, and then Pete woke, so Mom started to work on him.

We pulled into the driveway and up to the garage. Uncle Will and Uncle Jim came around the back of the house to greet us. Mom began to cry. Uncle Jim was holding a beer in one hand and wiping tears away with the other. “How you doing,” he managed to say to Dad as he got out of the car.

“I don’t know,” Dad said roughly. “If the good Lord don’t get you, then the tax man will.”

“Hush,” Mom snapped.

“I’m sorry,” Dad said. He seemed to be speaking to all of us. “Lately, it all seems like death and taxes. A man just can’t get ahead these days.”

Uncle Will kicked at the ground. Dad looked away. Aunt Nancy peeked around the corner of the house, her eyes as pink as a rabbit’s.

Grandma was in her bedroom, and after Mom saw her, she said it would be best to let her rest and just see the adults for now.

I was disappointed. I had been thinking of so many things to say to her. How sorry I was and how much I loved her. I drifted around the house, trying to find something to do, and soon I was thinking about Uncle Will. After what Dad had said I looked at him differently. His head was rounder than everyone else’s in the family. Maybe UFO doctors had worked on him. He had a lot of strange scars, but I knew they were from getting dragged down a hill by a car when he was my age. He had metal pins in his legs and a metal plate in his head. I had always wanted to hold a giant magnet up to him and see if he would slide across the room and stick to it. He was the youngest in Mom’s family, and she and Uncle Jim still teased him, like Betsy and I teased Pete. Before I asked him about the UFOs, I knew I’d have to wait for the right time when we were alone.

Betsy and I were playing pick-up-sticks in the kitchen when Uncle Jim said to me, “I’ll drive you out to Jackson’s house. You can stay there with Dale.” Dale was my second cousin. Whenever we visited, all of us kids got paired up with other cousins our own age. I liked staying with him because they didn’t have indoor plumbing, so at night, instead of going outside to the outhouse in the dark and cold, we just opened a window and peed down into the flower beds.

Aunt Stella had my favorite dinner waiting for me when I arrived. First, we all got a big hunk of fresh baloney that she cut off a huge pink coil that looked like a giant pig’s tail. And then we all got our own big mixing bowl full of her homemade berry ice cream. For dessert, we had oatmeal cookies the size of dinner plates. She was the smartest cook because she made what we really wanted to eat, not what some school nurse said we had to eat.

They didn’t have a television so Dale and I went to bed early. But in the middle of the night I woke up with a stomachache and had to go to the outhouse. I was already half dressed because it was cold in the house. I put on my shoes and Dale’s heavy coat and made my way downstairs and out the back door. They lived far out in the country, away from city lights, so the sky was clear and filled with a million stars. I looked up and saw the Milky Way, the Big Dipper, and Mars. I spotted a few green-and-red satellites, but no UFOs. It was too cold to stand still, and by the time I reached the outhouse, I was frozen stiff. With my luck, I thought, my butt will stick to the seat and I’ll freeze to death.

When I finished, I stepped out and heard someone talking. There was a light coming from a split in the barn doors, and I crept up to take a look. Inside, three women were walking in a circle while praying. “Please heal these chickens,” one called out.

“Amen,” said another.

I turned and ran back to the house. “Hey, Dale,” I said when I got upstairs. “There are women in your barn praying for the chickens.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said sleepily. “Mom let some Christian Scientist ladies pray over ‘em. There’s no cure for what they got, so she figured to give these ladies a chance.”

“Does this seem weird to you?” I asked.

“Sure does,” he said. “But if it works, I won’t knock it.”

“I guess so.” I crawled into bed.

In the morning, I went back outside to pump some water up from the well. Stella said she would heat it up for me so I could wash properly before the funeral. Jackson came out of the barn with a wheelbarrow stacked high with frozen chickens.

“They can pray all they want,” he said as he passed by. “I believe in prayer, mind you, but ain’t no prayers gonna save these chickens.”

After a breakfast of ice cream and hot chocolate, Uncle Jim arrived. He told Jackson there was trouble with digging the grave. “The ground is so frozen they have to set fires and then can only dig down half a foot at a time,” he said.

“They could keep him in the icebox at the morgue until the spring thaw,” Jackson suggested.

“I already mentioned it to Mom,” he said, meaning Grandma. “But she won’t hear of it. Says she won’t rest and he won’t rest till his body’s properly buried.”

“Can’t say as I blame her,” Jackson said. “I’ll take a run over there and see. They might need some extra wood. Hey, Dale and Jake,” he hollered from the porch, using my nickname, “go fill the truck up with firewood.”

After we piled the wood up over the dead chickens, Dale and I jumped into the cab. Even with gloves and two pairs of socks, my hands and feet were freezing. Dale started the engine and turned on the heater. Jackson hopped in and we took off for the cemetery.

“Jim said you can ride to the funeral with us,” he said as we drove through Mount Pleasant. We passed the hospital where I was born. We had moved out of town seven years before and I didn’t recognize anything else. The old cemetery was on a steep hill. A highway crew was salting and sanding the ice on the road.

“These are some of your ‘pap’s friends,” Jackson pointed out as he waved to them. “They wouldn’t come out here for just anyone.”

Up at the grave site two workmen were in a hole about three feet deep. We unloaded the wood and they set it up for a fire in the grave. They poured gasoline over the logs and threw a match to it. It caught with a
whoosh.

“Don’t worry,” said one of the men who was wearing a football helmet to keep his head warm. “We’ll be ready for you at two.”

“Hey, Dale,” I whispered, “does all this seem weird to you, or is it just new to me?”

“It must just be new to you,” Dale said. “Seems about the same to me.”

We came back at two. The cemetery crew was just unrolling fake grass around the grave and driving in the last of the iron tent stakes. Mom and Grandma were in the back seat of Dad’s car. No one else was with them, so I opened the front door and slipped in. It was warm inside. Dad had the radio news on. “How’s it going?” I asked. I still didn’t know what to say to Grandma.

“I don’t know why I listen to this damn radio,” he said under his breath. “They catch one congressman having hanky-panky with his secretary and they catch another taking kickbacks from a rocket manufacturer and so they slap their hands and send them both to a luxury prison in Arizona. Now, how much do you think that cost the taxpayer?”

I was silent. Maybe it was a trick question and there was no answer.

“Jack,” Mom said, “would you like to say something to your grandmother? She’s been wanting to know where you’ve been hiding.”

I wasn’t sure if Mom was rescuing me from Dad or scolding me.

Grandma smiled at me. She was wearing all black, with a veil over her pale face. “Hi, pumpkin,” she said and held my hand.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I love Grandpa and said my prayers for him.” That was all I could say before my throat tightened up. She squeezed my hand and I squeezed hers back. I turned my head away but kept holding on.

“It’s always the good ones that go before their time,” Dad said out loud. “The lousy ones are left alive—”

“That’s not necessary for you to say,” Mom cut in.

“Bye, Grandma,” I said quickly and stepped out of the car. By then, the tent was ready and the bright green plastic grass was in place. Soon Dad and my uncles and Grandpap’s younger brothers carried the coffin to the rope sling that would lower it down into the ground. But first they opened the coffin for one last look. He still seemed like Grandpap, only he was pink with makeup, like an old black-and-white photograph that was hand-painted. Mom lined us up and one by one we went up to him. I took a little school picture of myself out of my wallet, and when it was my turn I tried to slip it into his jacket pocket. But the pocket was sewn shut. I dropped it down into the satin lining, then pulled my hand away as I said a prayer and goodbye.

It was so cold I couldn’t cry much. But when Grandma fell across his body, crying, “Jim, Jim, don’t leave me,” I burst into tears. Mom and Uncle Will gently pulled her off, and Mr. Gotts, the funeral director, closed the casket and sealed it. They lowered it into the hole. The preacher gave a short blessing, and we all filed back to the cars, with Grandma crying out between breaths.

The after-the-funeral party was held at Grandma’s house. People from all over came to say how sorry they were. They brought trays of food, which overlapped each other across the long kitchen table. Since Grandma stayed in her bedroom, they mostly left after a cup of coffee.

It was dark when I found Uncle Will sitting alone in the living room. He looked tired, but I had to talk to him, because we were returning to Florida in the morning. “Uncle Will,” I said quietly, “I heard you saw a UFO. I believe in UFOs, too. What did it look like?”

“I didn’t see it up close,” he said, “but it came in real slow, down from Canada. It looked like a meteor with a fire tail, but the folks who saw it in the air say it steered around like it was looking for a place to land. Then it went down in the woods behind the Yablonskys’ farm. A bunch of us were parked up on the ridge and saw like a whitish-blue light glowing, then fading back up in the trees. We didn’t get down to it, but the fire company had gone out there because of the possibility of it being a small plane or something. The army hadn’t arrived yet to chase everyone out, so some folks came up to it in the woods and saw it real good.”

“Wow.” I sighed. “Was it broken open? Were there aliens?”

“Tell you what. I’ve had about all this party I can handle. Let’s take a ride over to the fire station and you can talk to the guy who touched it.”

I started to put my coat on when Mom saw me. “What are you up to?” she asked.