Sentimental Journey (13 page)

Red leaned over and grabbed a warm Dr. Pepper from a crate in the corner. He slid it into the slot in the top of the cooler and a cold bottle came out the opposite side. He stuck the bottle top into the opener, popped off the metal cap, then pulled off the cork liner to see if he’d won a prize.

“Did you win?” Stiles was watching him.

Red shook his head. “I never win anything. I’m the only person I know who once got a Cracker Jack box with no prize inside.”

Stiles laughed.

“I’m not lucky,” Red said.

“You have to make your own luck, Billy Joe.”

He just looked at his mama.

She smiled and tossed him a slim pack of Planters peanuts she’d torn from the blue-and-white cardboard display next to her. He didn’t smile back—to punish her—but he took a long few gulps of his cold drink, then tore open the peanuts with his teeth and poured them into the Dr. Pepper bottle.

He looked up to find them both looking into each other’s eyes in a dumb way that made him angry. He tapped Stiles on the shoulder with a stiff finger. “Your car’s ready.”

Stiles pulled his attention away from his mama and looked at him. “How much do I owe you?”

“Five dollars and thirty cents.”

Stiles stuck his hand in his pants pocket and pulled out a monogrammed silver money clip that was a good two inches thick.

Red had never seen that much money in his whole life.

Stiles peeled off a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to him.

They didn’t have that much in the whole cash drawer. He just stood there staring at the twenty-dollar bill. “I don’t think we have change.”

“I don’t need any change, son. Keep it.”

Red glanced up at his mama. She had a funny expression on her face, one he’d never seen before.

The money began to burn his fingers.

She shoved away from the counter and said, “Oh, my Lord! What time is it?”

Stiles flexed out his left arm. His pearl-linked cuff drew back to reveal a large gold wristwatch. “Five-fifteen.”

“I’m going to be late for work.” She crossed over to the window, placed her hands on the sill and looked outside. “Where is your daddy?”

His daddy? She made it sound like it was all Red’s fault that she would be late.

“I’ll take you, Miz Walker.”

She cast a soft glance over her shoulder, at Stiles. She gave him the kind of smile that made you think you were the only person in the world. “That’s right kind of you, but I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“How could it be trouble when I would be driving the prettiest woman this side of the
Mississippi
?”

“Lord, how sweet you are . . . Let me get my things. I’ll be just a few minutes.” She left the station and walked toward the house.

They both stood there, staring at the empty doorway. After a minute the screen door on the house rattled closed.

“My daddy will back any minute.”

“It’s no trouble, son. I’m going that way.” Stiles finished the last of his soda and tossed the empty bottle in a trash bin next to the counter.

After a long moment of tense silence Red reached out and dug into the trash and picked up the bottle. He turned and put it into the wooden bottle crate in the corner, along with the other empties. They were worth a penny apiece.

“I’m ready!” His mama was waving at them from outside. She stood by that shiny new Ford in her blue-and-red dress.

Red followed Stiles outside, but stopped in the doorway underneath a double-sided flange sign that advertised the Firestone Tire slogan:
They’ll Get You Where You Want to Go.

Stiles opened the car door for his mama, then leaned in as he closed it and said something to her that made her laugh. He walked around the car without a look at Red. He got in and started it up.

His mama turned and waved at him as they drove off down a long, lonely strip of blacktop. The highway was a good five miles to the west.

As he watched them shrink smaller and smaller, his mama’s bright red hair whipping in the wind from the speed of the V-8, he thought for just one second that she looked as if she belonged in that car.

His mama must have thought so, too, because they never saw her again.

“TOOT, TOOT, TOOTSIE, GOO’BYE”

His daddy sat them down a few nights later, when he knew for sure she’d run off. He said it was his fault. That he couldn’t live in a city like she wanted. He couldn’t breathe in a place where there were so many people stealing the air from your lungs.

He had been a towering, black-haired man with light blue eyes and ears that were too big for his head. He was
so
tall that he had to duck when he came into a room or he would bump his head on the doorjamb.

In
Texas
, men walked tall, but for as long as Red could remember his daddy walked with a slight stoop to his shoulders as if he were carrying the weight of all the wrong choices he’d made.

Dina Rae sent Red and Nettie a postcard from
Dallas
with a picture of an oil well on it. She signed it
Love, Mama.

Their daddy got a fat yellow envelope from some fancy divorce attorney in
Jackson
.

His daddy wasn’t the same after that. He stayed in the old gas station with its chipped sign that swung back and forth, back and forth, waving good-bye to everything that might have been. He stayed there between the wood walls that seemed to turn suddenly gray like his hair had. And it was there, with that unending
Texas
sky above him, that he spent his days and his nights with his head hidden under the hoods of countless cars the way an ostrich hides its head in the sand.

Red and his sister came to accept the myth that their daddy never came to Red’s basketball games or to see Nettie in the school play because he had to work late on Jimmy Jessup’s delivery truck or Homer Wilbarger’s John Deere tractor.

Some nights Red would look at him, bent over their kitchen table and working on some engine part. Every once in a while his daddy’s eyes would go blank, as if he had gone someplace else, someplace hopeless. Later, he would stand at the sink in the kitchen for the longest time and scrub his hands so hard that by morning they would crack and bleed. He never could get that grease out from under his fingernails.

Two years to the day that she’d left, Red woke up and found his daddy slumped over a carburetor he’d taken apart the night before.

The doctor said his heart just gave out.

“No. It broke,” Red told him. “It just, plain broke.”

He quit school at fourteen and took over the station. Nettie married a nice boy named Louie Lee and they set up house in
Vernon
.

Red worked hard enough to pay the bank without much left over. He didn’t need much. But every once in a while, as he was walking inside the station door, wiping the grease off his hands with a rag he still kept in his back pocket, he would stop and look up at the Firestone Tire sign and wonder if his mama got where she wanted to go.

“DEEP IN THE HEART OF
TEXAS
”

MAY
, 1938

Charley Morrison looked down from the cockpit of the bright yellow Piper Cub for the hundredth time in the last two hours and searched for some kind of distinguishing mark on the land below.

A futile effort.

There was no mountain, not even a hill beneath the broad
Texas
sky. Just flat land with an occasional clump of green or a gray strip of road that didn’t look like any kind of highway, and came and went as often as a sailor. There was nothing below, and there had been nothing below for most of the afternoon, nothing but brick-red faceless land and mesquite the color of a biscuit.

Over the last half hour, a few scattered farms and a small town had appeared, but not a single building among any of them had a roof that looked sturdy enough to paint an airmark on it.

A group of five experienced pilots with a minimum of over two hundred flight hours had been hired by the federal government to airmap the
U.S.
It was their job to fly over the nation—sixteen thousand or so towns and cities—looking for rooftops where a mark would be visible from the air as a navigational aid for pilots.

Charley was one of the five.

At six foot one, Charley was tall enough to see easily from the cockpit of the small plane, although that height didn’t help much now, when there was nothing to airmark but tumbleweeds.

There was no choice but to turn back and head for the last marking spot between here—wherever here was—and Lubbock. Plainly speaking, nothing left to do but start all over again after wasting almost a full day flying around for nothing.

But airmarking was a job, and a good one, at a time when jobs were hard to find. A person was lucky to have a regular paycheck, even luckier to have a government check. Both were rare for a pilot in these pinched times when the economy had gone bad so fast and no one but the very wealthy had money for flying lessons and joyrides.

It had been a long and dismal nine years since the Stock Market had crashed and sent the country into a tailspin, one that left little prosperity and a lot of people who were hungry, homeless, and out of work.

Charley was one of those lucky five pilots who, for the last four months, had flown from state to state, city to city, town to town, mapping
America
from thousands of feet above the land.

Almost nine years ago to the week, another lucky pilot called Lindy had set down in Paris in the dead of night after flying alone for thirty-three hours and thirty-nine minutes across the unpredictable Atlantic. Who’d have thought then that man would have discovered a whole new wilderness, that he would have a new perspective of his place in the world—from the air high above it.

The five airmarking pilots covered different regions of the country. There was one in the North, three in the middle and one in the deep South. Charley was one of the three in the middle. Although today, it looked like this particular section of the middle was not the place to be. At least not in a plane.

It hadn’t been clear weather this morning, but high clouds seldom stopped a plane from taking off. By early afternoon, those clouds had changed into a heavy, gray sky, the kind that happens just before the weather turns real ugly.

Now the wind had picked up, too.

A savvy pilot understood that the air could change quicker than the weather; it happened that way often in the
Midwest
, especially in
Oklahoma
and
Texas
, where the weather was as wild and woolly as the region’s history.