The Lincoln Highway (27 page)

In retrospect, it probably would have been peaches and cream if Woolly had thought to set the thesaurus on fire on the fifty-yard line. But for some reason Woolly couldn’t quite remember, he had put the book in the end zone, and when he’d thrown the match, the flames
had quickly followed a trail of gas that had been sloshed on the grass, engulfed the gas can, and triggered an explosion that set the goalpost on fire.

Backing up to the twenty-yard line, Woolly had watched at first in shock and then amazement as the fire made its way up the center support, then moved simultaneously along the two shoulders and up the posts until the whole thing was in flames. Suddenly, it didn’t look like a goalpost at all. It looked like a fiery spirit raising its arms to the sky in a state of exultation. And it was very, very beautiful.

When they called Woolly before the disciplinary committee, it was Woolly’s intention to explain that all he had wanted was to free himself from the tyranny of the thesaurus so that he could do a better job in his exams. But before he was given a chance to speak, the Dean of Students, who was presiding over the hearing, said that Woolly was there to answer for the
fire
he had set on the football field. A moment later, Mr. Harrington, the faculty representative, referred to it as a
blaze
. Then Dunkie Dunkle, the student council president (who also happened to be captain of the football team), referred to it as a
conflagration
. And Woolly knew right then and there that no matter what he had to say, they were all going to take the side of the thesaurus.

As Woolly placed his dictionary back in the box, he heard the tentative creak of a footstep in the hall, and when he turned, he found his sister standing in the doorway—with a baseball bat in her hands.

—I’m sorry about the room, said Sarah.

Woolly and his sister were sitting in the kitchen at the little table in the nook across from the sink. Sarah had already apologized for greeting Woolly with a baseball bat after finding the front door wide open. Now she was apologizing for taking away the room that was and wasn’t his. Sarah was the only one in Woolly’s family who said she was sorry and meant it. The only problem, it seemed to Woolly, was that
she often said she was sorry when she hadn’t the slightest reason to be so. Like now.

—No, no, said Woolly. There’s no need to apologize on my account. I think it’s wonderful that it’s going to be the baby’s room.

—We thought we might move your things to the room by the back stairs. You would have much more privacy there, and it would be easier for you to come and go as you please.

—Yes, said Woolly in agreement. By the back stairs would be dandy.

Woolly nodded twice with a smile and then looked down at the table.

After giving Woolly a hug upstairs, Sarah had asked if he was hungry and offered to make him a sandwich. So that’s what was in front of him now—a grilled cheese sandwich cut into two triangles, one pointing up and one pointing down. As he looked at the triangles, Woolly could tell that his sister was looking at him.

—Woolly, she said after a moment. What are you doing here?

Woolly looked up.

—Oh, I don’t know, he said with a smile. Gadding about, I suppose. Traveling hither and yon. You see, my friend Duchess and I each got a leave of absence from Salina and we decided to take a little trip and see some friends and family.

—Woolly . . .

Sarah gave a sigh that was so delicate, Woolly could hardly hear it.

—I got a call from Mom on Monday—after she got a call from the warden. So I know you don’t have a leave of absence.

Woolly looked back down at his sandwich.

—But I phoned the warden so that I could speak to him myself. He told me that you have been an exemplary member of the community. And seeing as you only have five months left on your sentence, he said if you were to come right back of your own accord, he would do his best to limit the repercussions. Can I call him, Woolly? Can I call and tell him that you are on your way back?

Woolly turned his plate around so that the grilled cheese triangle pointing up was now pointing down, and the grilled cheese triangle pointing down was now pointing up. The warden called Mom who called Sarah who called the warden, thought Woolly. Then he broke into a smile.

—Do you remember? he asked. Do you remember when we would play telephone? All of us together in the great room at the camp?

For a moment, Sarah looked at Woolly with an expression that seemed so sorrowfully sad. But it was only for a moment. Then she broke into a smile of her own.

—I remember.

Sitting up in his chair, Woolly began remembering for the both of them, because while he wasn’t any good at rememorizing, he was very good at remembering.

—As the youngest, I always got to go first, he said. And I would lean against your ear and hide my mouth behind my hand so that no one else could hear me, and I would whisper:
The captains were playing cribbage on their ketches
. Then you would turn to Kaitlin and whisper to her, and Kaitlin would whisper to Dad, and Dad would whisper to cousin Penelope, and cousin Penelope would whisper to Aunt Ruthie, and so it would go—all the way around the circle until it reached Mother. Then Mother would say:
The Comptons ate their cabbage in the kitchen
.

At the recollection of their mother’s inevitable befuddlement, the brother and sister broke into laughter that was almost as loud as the laughter they had laughed all those years ago.

Then they were quiet.

—How is she? Woolly asked, looking down at his sandwich. How is Mom?

—She’s well, said Sarah. When she called, she was on her way to Italy.

—With Richard.

—He is her husband, Woolly.

—Yes, yes, Woolly agreed. Of course, of course, of course. For richer or for poorer. In sickness and in health. And till death do them part—but not for one minute longer.

—Woolly . . . It wasn’t a minute.

—I know, I know.

—It was four years after father died. And with you at school and Kaitlin and me married, she was all by herself.

—I know, he said again.

—You don’t have to like Richard, Woolly, but you can’t begrudge your mother the comforts of companionship.

Woolly looked at his sister, thinking:
You can’t begrudge your mother the comforts of companionship
. And he wondered, if he had whispered that sentence to Sarah, and she had whispered it to Kaitlin, and Kaitlin had whispered it to his father, and so on all the way around the ring, when it finally reached his mother, what would the sentence have become?

W
ith the cowboy at
the courthouse and Old Testament Ackerly, the balancing of accounts had been pretty straightforward. They were in the manner of one minus one, or five minus five. But when it came to Townhouse, the math was a little more complicated.

There was no question I owed him for the
Hondo
fiasco. I didn’t make it rain that night, and I sure as hell didn’t intend to bum a ride from a cop, but that didn’t change the fact that had I just slogged my way home through the potato fields, Townhouse could have eaten his popcorn, seen the feature, and slipped back into the barracks undetected.

To his credit, Townhouse didn’t make a big deal of it, even after Ackerly got out the switch. And when I tried to apologize, he just shrugged it off—like a guy who’s come to expect that he’s going to get a beating every now and then whether he deserves it or not. Still, I could tell he wasn’t thrilled with the turn of events, any more than I would have been were the positions reversed. So in exchange for his taking the beating, I knew I owed him something.

What made the math complicated was the Tommy Ladue business. The son of an Okie who hadn’t had enough sense to leave Oklahoma back in the thirties, Tommy Ladue was the sort of guy who looked like he was wearing overalls even when he wasn’t.

When Townhouse joined us in Bunkhouse Four as Emmett’s bunkmate, Tommy was none too pleased. As an Oklahoman, he said, he
was of a mind that the Negroes should be housed in their own barracks and eat at their own tables in the company of their own kind. To look at the picture of Tommy’s family in front of their farmhouse, you might wonder what the Ladues of Oklahoma were trying so hard to keep the black folks from, but that didn’t seem to occur to Tommy.

That first night, as Townhouse was stowing his newly issued clothes in his footlocker, Tommy came over to set a few things straight. He explained that while Townhouse could come and go to his bed, he was not welcome in the western half of the bunkhouse. In the bathroom, which had four sinks, he was only to use the one that was farthest from the door. And as to eye contact, he’d best keep that to a minimum.

Townhouse looked like someone who could take care of himself, but Emmett had no patience with that sort of talk. He told Tommy that an inmate was an inmate, a sink was a sink, and Townhouse could move as freely through the barracks as the rest of us. If Tommy had been two inches taller, twenty pounds heavier, and twice as courageous, he might have taken a swing at Emmett. Instead, he went back to the western half of the bunkhouse in order to nurse his grievance.

Life on a work farm is designed to dull your wits. They wake you at dawn, work you till dusk, give you half an hour to eat, half an hour to settle down, and then it’s out with the lights. Like one of those blindered horses in Central Park, you’re not supposed to see anything other than the next two steps in front of you. But if you’re a kid who’s been raised in the company of traveling entertainers, which is to say small-time grifters and petty thieves, you never let yourself get
that
unobservant.

Case in point: I had noticed how Tommy had been cozying up to Bo Finlay, the like-minded guard from Macon, Georgia; I had overheard them casting aspersions upon the darker races as well as the white men who favored them; one night behind the kitchen, I had seen Bo slipping two narrow blue boxes into Tommy’s hands; and at two in
the morning, I had watched as Tommy tiptoed across the bunkhouse in order to stow them inside Townhouse’s footlocker.

So, I wasn’t particularly surprised when during the morning review, Old Testament Ackerly—in the company of Bo and two other guards—announced that someone had been stealing from the pantry; I wasn’t surprised when he walked straight up to Townhouse and ordered him to unpack his things onto his freshly made bed; and I certainly wasn’t surprised when all that came out of Townhouse’s footlocker were his clothes.

The ones who were surprised were Bo and Tommy—so surprised, they didn’t have the good sense not to look at each other.

In a hilarious show of poor self-restraint, Bo actually brushed Townhouse aside and flipped his mattress over in order to see what was hiding underneath.

—Enough of that, said the warden, looking none too happy.

That’s when I piped up.

—Warden Ackerly? I says, says I. If the pantry has been pilfered, and some scoundrel has impugned our honor by claiming that the culprit resides in Bunkhouse Four, I am of the opinion that you should search every one of our footlockers. For that is the only way to restore our good name.

—We’ll decide what to do, said Bo.

—
I’ll
decide what to do, said Ackerly. Open ’em up.

At Ackerly’s command, the guards began moving from bunk to bunk, emptying each and every footlocker. And lo and behold, what did they find at the bottom of Tommy Ladue’s but a brand-new box of Oreos.

—What can you tell us about this, said Ackerly to Tommy, while holding up the damning dessert.

A wise young man might have stood his ground and declared that he had never seen that light-blue box. A wily one might even have
asserted with the confidence of the technically honest:
I did not put those cookies in my locker.
Because, after all, he hadn’t. But without skipping a beat, Tommy looked from the warden to Bo and sputtered:

—If I was the one who took the Oreos, then where’s the
other
box!

God bless him.

Later that night, while Tommy was sweating it out in the penalty shed and Bo was muttering into his mirror, all the boys in Bunkhouse Four gathered around to ask me what the hell had happened. And I told them. I told them how I’d seen Tommy cozying up to Bo, and the suspicious exchange behind the kitchen, and the late-night planting of evidence.

—But how did the cookies get from Townhouse’s locker into Tommy’s? asked some helpful half-wit, right on cue.

By way of response, I took a look at my fingernails.

—Let’s just say they didn’t walk there themselves.

The boys all had a good laugh over that one.

Then the never-to-be-underestimated Woolly Martin asked the pertinent question.

—If Bo gave Tommy two boxes of cookies and one of the boxes ended up in Tommy’s locker, then what happened to the other box?

On the wall in the middle of the barracks was a big green board painted with all the rules and regulations we were meant to abide by. Reaching behind it, I retrieved the narrow blue box and produced it with a flourish.

—Voilà!

Then we all had a gay old time, passing around the cookies and laughing about Tommy’s sputtering and the flipping of the mattress by Bo.

But once the laughter subsided, Townhouse shook his head and observed that I had taken quite a chance. At that, all of them looked at me with a touch of curiosity. Why did I do it, they were suddenly
wondering. Why did I take the risk of pissing off Tommy and Bo for a barrackmate I hardly knew? And a black one at that.

In the silence that followed, I rested a hand on the hilt of my sword and looked from visage to visage.

—Took a chance? I said. No chance was taken here today, my friends. The chance was
given
. Each one of us has come from disparate parts to serve our disparate sentences for the commission of disparate crimes. But faced with a shared tribulation, we are given an opportunity—a rare and precious opportunity—to be men of one accord. Let us not shirk before what Fortune has laid at our feet. Let us take it up like a banner and march into the breach, such that many years from now, when we look back, we will be able to say that though we were condemned to days of drudgery, we faced them undaunted and shoulder to shoulder. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

Oh, you should have seen them!

They were rapt, I tell you, hanging on every syllable. And when I hit them with the old
band of brothers
, they let out a rousing cheer. If my father had been there, he would have been proud, if he weren’t so inclined to be jealous.

After all the backs had been slapped and the boys had returned to their bunks with smiles on their faces and cookies in their stomachs, Townhouse approached.

—I owe you, he said.

And he was right. He did.

Even if we were a band of brothers.

But all these months later, the question remained: How
much
did he owe me? If Ackerly had found those cookies in Townhouse’s footlocker, Townhouse would have been the one sweating in the penalty shed instead of Tommy, and for four nights instead of two. It was a credit to my account all right, but as credits go, I knew it wasn’t enough to offset the eight strokes of the switch that Townhouse had received on his back.

That’s what I was mulling over when I left Woolly at his sister’s house in Hastings-on-Hudson, and what I kept mulling over all the way to Harlem.

At some point, Townhouse had told me that he lived on 126th Street, which seemed straightforward enough. But I had to drive the length of it six times before I found him.

He was sitting at the top of a brownstone’s stoop, his boys assembled around him. Pulling over to the curb across the street, I watched through the windshield. On the step below Townhouse sat a big fat fella with a smile on his face, then a fair-skinned black with freckles, and on the bottom step, two kids in their early teens. I guess it was arranged like a little platoon, with the captain at the top, then his first lieutenant, his second lieutenant, and two foot soldiers. But the order could have been reversed, with Townhouse on the bottom step, and he still would have towered over the rest of them. It made you wonder what they had done with themselves while he was in Kansas. They’d probably bitten their nails and counted the days until his release. Now with Townhouse back in charge, they could exhibit a studied indifference, advertising to any who passed that they cared as little about their futures as they did about the weather.

When I crossed the street and approached, the young teens rose and took a step toward me, as if they were going to ask me for the password.

Looking over their heads, I addressed Townhouse with a smile.

—So, is this one of those dangerous street gangs I keep hearing about?

When Townhouse realized it was me, he looked almost as surprised as Emmett had.

—Jesus Christ, he said.

—You know this cracker? asked the freckle-faced one.

Townhouse and I both ignored him.

—What are you doing here, Duchess?

—I came to see you.

—About what?

—Come on down and I’ll explain.

—Townhouse don’t come off the stoop for no one, said freckles.

—Shut up, Maurice, said Townhouse.

I looked at Maurice with a feeling of sympathy. All he had wanted was to be a dutiful soldier. What he didn’t understand was that when he says something like
Townhouse don’t come off the stoop for no one
, a man like Townhouse has no choice but to do exactly that. Because while he may not take instructions from the likes of me, he doesn’t take instructions from his second lieutenant either.

Townhouse rose to his feet and the boys made way for him like the Red Sea making way for Moses. When he got to the sidewalk, I told him how good it was to see him, but he just shook his head.

—You AWOL?

—In a manner of speaking. Woolly and I are passing through on our way to his family’s place upstate.

—Woolly’s with you?

—He is. And I know he’d love to see you. We’re going to the Circus tomorrow night for the six o’clock show. Why don’t you come along?

—The Circus isn’t my sort of thing, Duchess, but give Woolly my regards just the same.

—I’ll do so.

—All right then, Townhouse said after a moment. What’s so important that you had to come to Harlem just to see me.

I gave him the shrug of the penitent.

—It’s the
Hondo
fiasco.

Townhouse looked at me like he had no idea what I was talking about.

—You know. The John Wayne picture that we went to see on that rainy night back in Salina. I feel bad because of the beating you took.

At the word
beating
, Townhouse’s boys dropped any semblance of indifference. It was like a jolt of electricity had gone right up the stoop. The big fella must have been too insulated to feel the full force of the charge because he just shifted in place, but Maurice came to his feet.

—A beating? asked the big fella with a smile.

I could see that Townhouse wanted to tell the big fella to shut up too, but he kept his eyes on me.

—Maybe I took a beating and maybe I didn’t, Duchess. Either way, I don’t see as it would be any cause of concern for you.

—You’re your own man, Townhouse. I’d be the first to say so. But let’s face it: You wouldn’t have had to take this beating that you did or didn’t take, if I hadn’t hitched the ride from the cop.

This sent another jolt of electricity up the stoop.

Townhouse took a deep breath and gazed down the street almost wistfully, like he was looking back on simpler times. But he didn’t contradict me. Because there was nothing to contradict. I was the one who baked the lasagna and he was the one who cleaned up the kitchen. It was as simple as that.