JEWEL (33 page)

But I started over on that thought, tried to set in my mind the truth of where we were, California, not some back road in Lamar County, Mississippi. Every one here drove new cars. That was the plain and simple truth of where we were.

Leston pulled into a Shell station. As best as I could tell, we were in a town the map called El Monte, still a ways from the area Burton’d circled on the map for us to head to. I could see on the map, too, there was the Freeway coming up, Burton warning us in his last letter about how all the cars went fast on it and how there were no stop signs or lights anywheres, only Exits on certain streets. He’d warned us of it, but’d told us, too, there wasn’t much to fear if you just stayed the speed everyone else was going, and stayed on it until it ended on Garvey, once we reached there we wouldn’t be far at all from Bundy Mufflers.

I glanced up from the map at Leston, who had both hands on the wheel, holding it tight. His jaw was set, and only then did I see he’d gone through some middle place already, had lost something of all the light we’d been feeling coming in, and I knew right away it had to do with the cars, and the streets and the buildings and the driving. All of it.

The attendant came out. Leston told him to fill it up, then climbed out, quick walked away from the pumps and across the lot to a beat up flatbed truck heaped with empty bushel baskets.

“Momma, what’s wrong? ” Wilman said.

I put down the map, pulled my leg up over the bucket, climbed out.

“You just stay here, ” I said to them, and went to my husband.

He was rolling a cigarette from the pouch he carried in his front shirt pocket. His hands shook with the effort, his eyebrows knotted with the task at hand.

He finished, rolled the cigarette in his one hand while he stuffed the pouch back in his pocket. He licked it, put it to his lips, pulled from the shirt pocket the matchbox. His hands’d stopped shaking, but I’d seen it, and he knew I had.

He lit the cigarette, took a long pull at it, then looked up to the sky.

The air was filled with the sound of cars, somebody honking here and there, cars speeding up and slowing down, speeding up and slowing down.

“Getting tired, ” he said to the air, let out the smoke. He took off his hat, waved it in front of him like he was cooling off. “Driving in this heat’s tough.”

“Yes, ” I said, and I crossed my arms, pretended to see in the sky whatever it was he was looking at.

I said, “Wilman can drive.”

Leston nodded, took another pull. He still hadn’t looked at me, though he and I both knew that same fear, the fear I’d thought beaten with the toss of a lighter into woods, had just reared up in him in some small way. We were in new territory, new ground. This was the new world, I thought, and it was no wonder that fear could show up this quick.

So I played along with his bluff of a fresh cigarette, eyes to the sky.

The traffic and sound and light and noise and sun were all things l he somehow couldn’t take this day, the day he arrived in a place I knew he’d promised himself a million times he’d never come to. Now we were here, and I figured he had every right to bluff, every right to want me to talk him into letting his youngest son and not himself end up being the one to drive us on into Los Angeles.

“Leston, ” I said, and I reached up to him, touched his collar. “Think how proud it’d make him. You letting him drive in to his older brother’s shop. Think of that.”

He was quiet, took two more pulls, let out the smoke. He looked at me, said, “That’d be nice for him, wouldn’t it.” I said, “Give you a rest, too.” I touched the collar of his shirt again, then touched his cheek.

“You can’t help but be tired, ” I said.

He nodded, dropped the cigarette to the asphalt, rubbed it out with his toe. He put a hand to my waist, then bent to me and gave me a small peck at the cheek, and turned, went for the car. The hood was up, the attendant holding the dipstick, looking at it.

Leston came up to him, said, “Looks fine, ” and handed him a couple dollar bills for the gas.

The Freeway was just as fast and loud and frightening as Burton’d told us, but Wilman took it all like he’d done all this before, he had both hands on the steering wheel, his eyes on the car in front of him, yet he was sitting back in the seat, an elbow hanging out the window, and kept shouting at us to look at this building, look at that. It was near three-thirty, and we were headed due west, the sun about to slip down beneath the visor in front of him. The Freeway was built up high off the ground so that it was like we were floating above everything, cars all cutting in one on another, brake lights rearing up red and then moving right along. Wilman was keeping up with it all, but stayed in the right lane, and for that I was thankful. I was in the back seat and behind him, next to me Brenda Kay asleep, at the other window Annie calling out street Exits while I read the map in my lap. Leston was up where I’d sat most of the trip, his hat in his lap, a hand on each knee.

Then the Freeway ended, and we drove to the bottom of a ramp and back down onto streets, around us now more buildings and more cars and more stores and what-have-you than I’d seen my whole life. New Orleans was only a stick in the mud compared to this.

Everywhere were huge signs trying to sell Camel cigarettes and Beeman’s gum, Nehi and Firestone Tires, Chevrolets and Buicks, the buildings all made out of concrete and stucco and circled with parking lots.

We stopped at the light at the bottom of the ramp, and Wilman said, “Where to now? ” I i

“We’re on Garvey? ” I said, trying to read both the map and Burton’s letter at once.

Out the corner of my eye I could see Leston’s head bob a little, looking for a street sign. “Garvey, ” he said. “Looks like.”

“Then we go to the right, and we start looking for Olympic Boulevard, ” I said, figuring from what all I had in front of me that was the best way we’d ever find this Bundy Mufflers. Already I held some kind of awe for Burton’s moving out here and finding a job in the middle of all this noise and confusion. My son, I thought, and reread the directions yet again.

Wilman drove, and drove, and drove, dodging between cars while we all read any street sign we could find, looking for Olympic Boulevard. But somehow we weren’t coming up on it, and so Wilman drove, still around us all the billboards and grocery stores and big intersections.

Near four o’clock we came up to the tallest of all the buildings we’d seen so far, a white one poking up what looked a couple hundred feet in the air. Annie called out from her side that it was the Los Angeles City Hall we were passing, and then Wilman tooted the horn, put a hand out his window and waved, hollered, “Hello, Los Angeles City Hall! ” “Wilman, ” Annie whined, stretched his name all out in how embarrassed she was, and shrank back away from the window. Still Brenda Kay slept, and still Leston sat stiff-in the front seat.

Finally I told Wilman to turn around, head back the way we came, and once we did, it seemed only a minute or so before he hollered “Olympic Boulevard! ” and stopped at the light. He turned to me, said, “Now which way? ” I turned the map round and round, then set it in my lap what I thought might be the right way.

“Turn right? ” I said.

He shrugged, said, “Lucky we’re in the right lane, ” and turned to the front.

I had no clear idea where we were any of the next ten minutes, everything here looking so much like everything else, street signs missing or twisted or hiding behind more street signs and telephone poles so that I was just about to give up, drop the map out the window, when Wilman said, “Well, will you looky here.” He clicked on the blinker, turned left at the intersection, then made a quick right into the parking lot of Bundy Mufflers at the corner of Bundy and Olympic.

It was a long, low building painted a light yellow not much different from the color the sky had turned the last few minutes, a big yellow billboard up on the roof with Bundy Mufflers spelled out in black script letters. Across the front of the building were five or six garage doors standing open, in each a car high up on a lift, at the far right of the building was a glass door into what I figured must be the office.

Wilman pulled the car up to the first bay, shut off the engine. The man working beneath the car in front of us stopped only a second, flipped up the visor he wore against the shine of his welding torch.

His face was black with grease and dirt, and he was squinting. He had no front teeth, and said nothing, only gave a quick nod of his head, and the visor snapped into place. He popped the torch to high, started back in on the car.

I opened my door, climbed out, leaving Brenda Kay still asleep on the seat. There she lay, mouth open and hair matted down with sweat, the front of her pale blue blouse sweat through.

My baby daughter had arrived, sweaty and hot and asleep, in the promised land.

Leston and Annie and Wilman were already out, each of us just standing next to our own door. We were all looking around, just looking, waiting for whatever was supposed to happen next. Heat shimmered up off the asphalt of the lot, and I took a step, felt the ground give with my weight, smelled the black and sharp odor of it.

Then from the third bay down came Burton, walking at us and working off his leather gloves, a smile on his face, that face just as dirty as the man with no teeth. He had on gray coveralls, Burt stitched in green thread just below the words Bundy Mufflers above his chest pocket, and though I felt like running to him, hugging him, the energy wasn’t in me.

We all just stood next to our own door, and smiled back at him as he came to us.

He went to me first, and I held him, pulled him close and patted his back, rocked a little with him in my arms.

“Momma, ” he said, and pulled back, looked at me. He was sweating even more than us, of course, and wiped the back of his hand at his chin.

“You made it, ” he said, “you made it.”

“We made it, ” I said, and looked into his eyes for some clue as to how his life had been this last year. I said, “I told you this wasn’t going to be any dream.”

He looked puzzled a moment, a moment long enough for me to feel exactly how tired I really was from the trip, from the heat, from the noise and light. Cars still honked, still slowed down and sped up, and suddenly I could feel the weight of it all on me, on my legs and arms and eyes, all of me just standing out here in the soft tar of the Bundy Mufflers parking lot.

Then he realized what I meant, smiled and shook his head at the I memory, I figured, of our talk after Brenda Kay’d walked off into the woods. He said, “Yep, I guess you’re right, ” and he let go of me, moved back a little. “And I’m your foot in the door.”

He stood looking at me, at the car, at all of us, no one else having yet said a word to him, all of us just as tired as me, and what I saw, buried beneath the grime and sweat and the Bundy Muffflers uniform, was a man. He was older by only a year since I’d seen him drive away in his pickup, but he was a man. It was in how he stood, how he was sizing up us all, and it was in his eyes and what I thought I’d seen there, hard work and hard work, a big sun high up in the sky every day shining down on him and his hard work in a way it never had in Mississippi, because this was his own work, his own life. He was already burrowed into the real world, already dug in for the long fight he had the rest of his life to try and win.

Wilman stood with one arm resting on top of his open door, the other at his hip. He said, “Drove us in here myself.”

“Indeed I am impressed, little brother, ” he said, and put out a hand.

They shook hands like men do, no hint anywheres that it might mean something, though when Burton let go and came around the back of the car to where Annie stood, bent down and kissed her on the cheek, I could see Wilman grinning a boy’s grin, proud at himself and at his big brother both, the two of them, I could already see in his smile, in cahoots here in sunny California.

Annie said, “Billie Jean’s married, got married the night before we left.”

Burton straightened up, put a hand to his neck. He looked from her to me, said, “No.”

“Yep, ” Annie said, and I nodded. She said, “To Gower Cross of Jackson.

You should have seen them when they came in. She was all ” “Gower Cross? ” Burton said, and looked to Wilman, to Annie. Then he looked to Leston, who was leaning against the car, his arms crossed. He said, “Gower Cross, Daddy? ” Leston nodded, pushed himself off. “Why? ” “I know him, ” Burton said. He rubbed at his neck, looked at the car.

“Know of him. Used to sell pallets over to the ice cream plant.” He shrugged, looked up at me again, then to his daddy. “Don’t matter though, ” he said, and now he held his hand out to his daddy, smiled.

“What matters is y’all made it.”

Leston took his hand, shook it, let it go. He turned to the car, slapped the roof. “Brand-new, ” he said. “Sixteen hundred dollars cash money.”

Burton whistled, touched the top of the trunk with a hand, the took it away. “Don’t want to dirty it up, ” he said. “We hosed her off in Indio, ” Wilman said.

“Hilburn! ” someone shouted from inside one of the bays, a huge and deep voice that made Burton’s eyes dart toward the building.

He started moving away from us. He was putting on the gloves, walking backwards and toward the bay he’d come from. “I get off in an hour or so, ” he said. “Y’all just do what you want until then.” He got on the gloves, started to wave, then stopped. He said, “Where’s Brenda Kay? ” “Asleep, ” I hollered, and I moved aside from my open door, pointed in to where she lay.

He smiled, shook his head. “Asleep, ” he said. “Asleep upon her arrival to California.” He laughed, then turned, ran back toward the bay just as “Hilburn! ” thundered out again.

I turned, saw the rest of my family was still looking to where he’d disappeared. Then Leston leaned against the car again. He brought out the pouch, rolled another cigarette, lit it up.

He said, “Burt.” He’d said it to no one, just himself, but we all heard it, and we looked at him.

Finally, Wilman said, “Daddy, what do you want to do? ” I looked from him to Leston, watched him shoot out smoke.