Monthly Story (June '23): Scribble

fiction

Years later he would remember putting it out of mind, the faint bumping from somewhere underneath the car. It had started several miles back. When he got to the next town, he told himself, he’d take a look. He’d been trying to keep everything out of mind. The fight. His disgrace. His little guy abandoned. Now this. Car trouble, his old companion. 

Then it turned from a faint bumping to an insistent metallic bang—pause—bang! Up ahead he saw, poking up through a clump of trees on the horizon, the shape of a water tower. Soon he made out a grain elevator, too. A town, so maybe also a gas station that amounted to more than a couple pumps and a convenience store. Maybe there would be a mechanic. The sound had become a bang!-bang-bang! No pause between those bangs. He turned on the radio to cover it, but immediately flipped it off. Christian stations out here on the prairie. No, thanks. About then the car gave up and he guided it to the gravel shoulder. 

Wouldn’t she laugh to see this? He knew zero about cars. With his first one, her father had enlightened him—“You have to change the oil now and then, chief.” He’d had no idea. Now look. He climbed out and walked to the back. Leaned over to look underneath it. Was something loose under there? He walked around to the other side and squatted this time. Twisted his neck trying to see. “What the hell am I even looking for?” he said as he stood up. Either side of the road stretched endless rows of soybeans. She’d love this. He couldn’t help knowing that, hearing her voice, seeing that disdainful turn of her mouth. “With the insurance,” she’d said, “you’re worth more to us dead.” “Us” meaning her and their little boy. It was true, actually, if you ran the numbers. But he had to figure out what to do next. The sun beat down. Enervating. You could get sunburnt bad on a day like this.

His name was Ben.

Ben got back in the car, refastened the seatbelt, and turned the key, half expecting it to miraculously start up. But it wouldn’t turn over. “Just kidding,” it seemed to say. “Wanted to let you know who’s still in charge.” He’d have to walk into that town or wait until some helpful person stopped to rescue him. This is before cell phones, and he didn’t have Triple A. It looked to be a mile or so. A straight, perfectly flat mile. An easy walk, really, even in this sun. He kept a straw hat—less than ten bucks at Target—in the back seat. A canteen would have been nice. He pulled the hat down over his head and locked the car. A pick-up whizzed by going his way, but he wouldn’t hitch-hike. Those days were over. He’d pay for what he needed. He’d emptied their bank account to make his escape. Mean, he knew. And he had the credit card. It would be a good month before she got the bill. He told himself he’d keep count and send her the money to pay it from wherever he ended up. If he could, he would, anyway. Show her his good intentions. But it was his credit score. He’d send her money, anyway. If he could. Kidding himself, he knew now. A confused young man, not entirely on the up-and-up. He often didn’t know what he was talking about. He started to walk.

After a few minutes he turned and looked back at his car. He’d thought he’d gotten it completely off the road but saw now that its back end hadn’t made the gravel. A car full of teenagers steered around it and honked as it passed. Arms and heads out the windows, giving him the finger, yelling. Making a fuss over nothing, but he wished he’d done better getting it off the road. He kept walking. Distances in this flat landscape played tricks. The closer he got, at least for a while, the farther away it looked, until he found himself walking by a municipal park and the “Welcome to…” sign. He couldn’t help shaking his head at the “attractions,” a grassy baseball field, a swing set, and two picnic tables. The road cut straight through the middle of the town so you could see to the emptiness from one end to the other. “Downtown” was a grain elevator, a water tower, and a motel with no cars in the parking lot. Eight rooms. Standing there, he counted them. Across the road, a convenience store with two gas pumps. Next to it, a garage with a tow truck parked off to the side.

“Well, glory be,” he whispered. “Things are looking up for poor old Ben.”

He walked over to the garage and peered through the glass door. A big kid in a white T-shirt leaned on a push broom and looked back out at him. After a pause, something clicked in the kid’s head and he opened the door and came out.

“My car broke down,” said Ben, pointing in the direction he’d come from. “I need a tow. And a mechanic.”

“My dad’s not here,” the kid said.

The kid had shaved his head down from a line above his ears, leaving the top of his head in a short stand-up crop of blond hair. He wore fatigue pants with cargo pockets. His face still had that soft doughiness, that facial baby fat, before the features settle into steady lines. At least a year shy of a razor touching that chin.  

“You can’t drive that tow truck?” Ben said. “Really? That’s all I need until your dad comes back.”

He saw the kid taking that in, considering what he should do. Pulling himself up, slightly inflating.

“You’ve driven it before,” Ben pressed. “Right?”

The kid seemed to expand, as if to say, “Of course I have!” but stayed mum a good pause. “I could,” he said. “He won’t be back for a while.”

“But you know how to do this, right? You’ve done it before?”

Yeah. He’d helped his dad. He knew how to do it. Soon they were up in the cab of the truck heading down the road. “You couldn’t get it off the road better than that?” the kid said as they climbed down. “Wow,” he laughed. “After dark somebody woulda hit you.”

Ben kept his mouth shut. That’s the sort of thing she would have said, too.

“Better make sure it’s in neutral,” said the kid. “We don’t want to make some dumb-ass mistake.” He said it so you could hear like your parking job.

Ben unlocked the door and took the car out of park, put it in neutral. He knew to do that as much as this teenager did. He’d been towed lots of times. “Okay,” he said. “Do your thing, sarge.”

They didn’t speak on the tow back into town. The kid skillfully backed Ben’s car into the garage and unhooked everything with the ease of a lifelong repro man. Ben took his back-pack with all his stuff out of the passenger seat. He had no idea what he was going to do next. Hang around the garage and wait for this kid’s dad to come back? Go sit in that dinky little park? Swing on the swings? He came out of the cool garage into the sun and looked up and down the town, fields and straight road at either end. The kid pointed to the motel across the road. “Better go see my aunt over there. My dad won’t get to look at your car until tomorrow.”

Ben nodded and started across the road, then stopped and reached into his pocket. “Hey, kid,” he called. “You better have this,” and he threw him the keys. A good throw, too, although he’d never been known for that. Under the circumstances, it was a relief.

Homey, he thought, tossing his backpack onto the bed. A single bed, with a quilt he’d bet there weren’t two of in this world. He liked that. A television, of course, probably no cable. They probably didn’t get cable way out there. Not in those days, anyway. He didn’t see a remote. An overstuffed easy chair. The place had the look of having been furnished from the estate sale of somebody’s grandmother. The room did have a mini-fridge. Homey. He’d always remembered that room. And the old aunt. She had been nice enough and it was cheap, but she’d gone all stiff and sour when he took out the credit card. Suspicious eyes. “Cash only, mister,” she said. A tough old bird, after all. He counted out the bills.

Starting to feel hungry, he walked across the road to the convenience store. If you wanted chips or crackers, cigarettes or motor oil, miscellaneous candies or sodas, you were in luck. He bought a box of saltines and a bottle of lemonade, then saw a small refrigerator case in the back and added a package of salami. As he came out the door with his plastic bag, he saw the tow truck ready to turn out onto the road, a grown man behind the wheel. Ben hurried to flag him down.

He waved his arms and the driver lowered the window. “That’s my car your son brought in,” Ben yelled.

The guy nodded. Ben glanced past eye contact. The driver had a red face and a full head of white hair, and Ben could see he was heavy. He held the steering wheel with thick fingers, had rings of fat around his neck. Everything about him was sunburnt. Then he hung a meaty arm out the door and patted the side of the truck. His white T-shirt sleeve hugged an enormous bicep. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I’ll look at it in the morning. Right now, I gotta go.”

And he went.

Ben stood and watched as the truck shrank to a dot leaving town.

“How do you like that?” said a voice from behind him. “Pretty cold treatment, huh?”

Ben turned around and saw a tall man with a long black beard and a bald head at the gas pump. A couple kids bounced around in the back seat of the rusty Volvo station wagon he was filling up. For some reason Ben started walking toward him. “Yeah,” he said. He looked off toward the motel and nodded. “I guess I’m here for the night.”

The tall man tilted his head, spread his hands out in resignation. Blue eyes that toggled between sympathy and laughter. “Is that dinner in the bag?”

Ben lifted his purchase and looked at it. “Saltines and salami,” he said. “I guess I’ve had worse.” He was thinking of the time she’d dumped a serving bowl of spaghetti on his head, and he now almost smiled at how awful it had been, how humiliating in front of their friends and their little boy.

The guy laughed as if he knew. “We can do better than that for you,” he said. “Why don’t you go put that stuff in your room and I’ll swing around and pick you up after I pay for this? We’re having spaghetti and meatballs tonight.”

Why not indeed? Ben could have said no thanks, thought maybe he should have, but he didn’t know why he should have. “Okay,” he said. “I think I can do that,” and turned and walked across the road.

He waited to leave his room until he heard a car in the parking lot. When he did, he parted the curtains to make sure it was for him. “These are my kids,” the tall man said as Ben climbed into the passenger seat. “Wren and Starr. Two of ‘em, anyway. I’m Paul.” He held out his hand and Ben shook it, noticing a long tattooed cross on Paul’s forearm. The beard went to the middle of his chest. Neatly trimmed. More than a few white hairs. He avoided those eyes. He figured Paul to be in his forties.

“I’m Ben,” he said. He screwed himself around to look at the kids. Little girls, maybe seven and five. He smiled at the smaller one. “Which one are you? Wren or Starr?” She said Wren. “So you must be Starr,” he said to the older girl. They both had wavy blond hair to their shoulders and wore long cotton dresses and tennis shoes. Wren’s were blue and Starr’s were red. “I like your shoes,” he said. “They look comfortable.” Wren took one of hers off and held it up for him to inspect. “Very nice,” he said.

Paul turned onto a shady residential street. Ben expected theirs would be one of these houses, but then they turned along a creek and followed it out of town. The fields sloped away into trees in a mile or two. They’d entered a river valley and left the hardtop for gravel. The girls were chattering away at him about their new cat, their “new old cat,” as Starr put it, but Ben had stopped listening closely. He was being taken farther and farther away from his car and his uneasiness with each unexpected mile increased.

“So you don’t actually live right in town,” he said. He couldn’t believe he’d stated the idioticly obvious.

Paul only smiled. “No,” he said. “We like it out in the country. God’s country! We always wanted to have lots of kids and lots of room for them to run around.” He said this as they pulled into a dirt lane in the woods. “Home again, home again!” he sang over his shoulder. The girls piled out the back seat.

A teenage girl in a dress exactly like the ones Wren and Starr wore came out of a log house—built from a kit, Ben realized later—carrying a watering can. Blue tennis shoes. Ben took in the scene slowly. The teenager watered what appeared to be herb beds terraced into a wide clearing up the hill next to the house. Starr and Wren had gone off looking for their “new old cat.”

“That’s our oldest daughter Sarah doing the watering,” Paul said. “Come on in.”

Ben followed into a busy house smelling of spaghetti sauce with plenty of garlic. The way he liked it. A short woman drying her hands on her apron came toward him. She wasn’t fat, just what you would call filled out in pleasing curves, and she smiled the warmest smile Ben had seen in he didn’t know how long. The fetching Mary Katherine with her hair twisted up in a bun. He’d never forget that first impression. She took his hand and patted it, then glanced over at her husband.

“Car trouble,” said Paul, as if that explained everything. “Ben is staying at Ida’s.” Then, with the slightest laugh, “Her nephew hasn’t been much help so far. Drove off on some mission.”

“Oh, goodness,” said Mary Katherine, still holding Ben’s hand. “We’ve all been through that.” 

Ben couldn’t tell how many kids they had. They came into and out of doors in unlikely places, climbed down from or disappeared into a sleeping loft above the kitchen, everybody busy gathering up books and papers and then setting plates and utensils on the long trestle table where they ate and did homework. Mary Katherine and all the girls wore the same style long dresses. He noticed a sewing machine in front of a window next to the fireplace. Across the room, under floor lamps, were two rocking chairs with wicker baskets filled with balls of yarn. Ben’s mother and sisters had sewn and knitted, too. He noted a desktop computer in a far corner.

“How can I help?” he said, and a boy he hadn’t noticed handed him a pile of cloth napkins.

It was what he’d been raised to do, helping out, but something that had not translated to his marriage. Instead, he’d sat in an armchair and watched or read a book with their little boy. They both worked, so no wonder he wore a spaghetti hat that time. He’d been a lousy husband, had left everything in the house to her. He even had to be reminded to mow the lawn.

He folded each napkin neatly and placed it under the knife and spoon on the right side of each plate. He counted the settings. Ten, so seven kids. Mary Katherine rang a bell and they all somehow materialized. Paul went to the head of the table and signaled Ben to come and take the place next to his. Mary Katherine, hanging up her apron, came and stood at the other end. They all joined hands. Starr’s little hand took Ben’s left one and Paul took Ben’s right. Ben shifted weight, twisted at the waist, shifted back as he bowed his head with the family, surveyed the scene from under his eyebrows.

“Blessed Lord,” Paul began, “we thank you for this food and for each other. Thank you for bringing Ben, this nice young man, to be our guest, and we ask that you show us the Way toward wisdom and kindness.”

Ben mumbled along with the chorus of “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen” as the family made the sign of the cross. He sat down and unfolded his napkin over his lap. The oldest boy sat directly across the table. He had pimples and his voice rose and fell in pitch. Wren sat three places down, next to her mother.

“Daddy said I could sit next to you,” Starr told Ben. “Because I helped find you.”

She would be older than his boy, who was probably almost Wren’s age. He smiled down at her. “Well, I’m glad we could be next to each other,” he said. “Let me guess—you must be in about, I would say, second grade, when school starts again. Am I right?”

She laughed. “You hit the nail right on the head,” she grinned. “That’s an expression. Did you ever hear it before?”

“I think so,” he answered. “I might have.”

“Do you know what an id-iom is? Because that’s an id-iom.”

“Yeah. I must have heard of that, too. Did you learn that in school?”

“Daddy told me,” she said. “He’s going to be my teacher in third grade and he teaches all the expressions.”

Paul, who had been following this with a bemused face, leaned into the conversation. “I teach third grade. It’s a small school, so I catch each of the kids as they come through. Starr’s next in line after this year.”

They didn’t ask him his story, where he was going or why, but Paul told theirs, as if to say that Ben could tell his if he liked. They had moved from Chicago as newlyweds, wanting to find a peaceful place. He’d been in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley as an eighteen-year-old. They’d returned to Catholicism together and belonged to a small parish in the next big town, fifteen miles down the river. An elderly couple had taken them under wing. Their children had all been born at the nearby medical center.

Ben nodded and smiled. They passed the food politely. The children spoke their minds as if they took being listened to as a given. And they cleaned up together, each with a job to do. Paul’s was to take Ben for a short stroll to see the garden and the chicken coop. Ben felt pretty sure this would be where the sermon about Jesus and his love would come in, and he wasn’t so sure how he would react. He certainly didn’t want an argument or walking out in a huff and humping it back to the motel on foot. “It’s been an amazing journey,” said Paul.

That word, journey. It still landed, so long after that day. He’d gotten lost, made himself the stranger. What were they doing right that moment, he’d wondered, the people where he wasn’t a stranger? He’d stolen the money from his child, not just from her. She’d screamed at him as he drove the car that time he’d missed a turn. “You fucking idiot!” she’d screamed, and their little boy, three at the time, buckled into his backseat chair, had repeated it. “You fucking idiot!” he’d yelled, and Ben burst into tears. But he deserved it. He’d smacked her face the night before. He was a fucking idiot.

None of this he could tell for the longest time, so he sauntered along with Paul, who stroked his long beard and gauged Ben with kind eyes. The chickens clucked and pecked around their feet. A grey cat with a closed eye like a ragged eye patch watched them lazily. “That’s Starr’s ‘new old cat,’” said Paul. “She found her on the road. We’ve adopted all sorts of animals over the years. Dogs and cats, birds, a rabbit once. Even a turtle. All sorts of things. Children are naturally kind, don’t you think? It’s later we learn to be cruel.” Ben felt Paul’s eyes but kept his own to himself.

Ben nodded. He suspected a Bible verse hiding behind the next tree. He’d stay quiet, respectful. He had no right. This guy had been in one of the worst battles of the Vietnam War. What had he ever suffered, really suffered. But, even then, he knew. He had. We all do. Differently, maybe, but we all do. That wound from the back seat had never healed. This running away haunted the relationship he finally managed to create with his son. The little guy had been crying his eyes out when Ben stormed out the door. They’d married too young and immature, both of them damaged in their separate ways. She wasn’t to blame. He wasn’t about to share any of that back then, or even see it, and he’d turned his back on Jesus long ago.

When they went back inside, Paul rolled a long ream of paper out over the table and one of the boys cut it off at the end with a scissors. Boxes of crayons and colored pencils appeared as the family sat down again. Before he knew it, Ben found a chair, too, and Wren and Starr scrambled to take their places on either side of him.

“We just make whatever pictures we feel,” said Mary Katherine. “And we talk to each other.” She sat across from him now, oddly alluring. Their oldest daughter, more a young version of her father than her mother, had taken Paul’s place at the head of the table. Paul sat with the boys far down from his usual spot.

“I’m going to make the school,” said Starr. “What are you going to make, Ben?”

Ben stared at the paper. Wren had already started to make a green scribble. He picked out a grey crayon from the box and began drawing pointed ears. “I’m going to draw a new old cat,” he said, “but I don’t know his name yet.”

Starr didn’t stop the progress of her school or turn to look at him as she said, “That’s like our cat, but she’s a she. Her name is Roady because I found her on the road.”

“I’ll have to think of a good name,” he said. He gave his cat whiskers and drew the tail wrapped around the body. His cat was resting and only had one eye.

Starr paused to pick another color out of the box and leaned over to see his work. “Hey!” she said. “That’s Roady! Wren, look! Ben’s making Roady!”

At first he couldn’t be sure what this attention meant, but soon both children were leaning up against him in delight, just as his son had always done when they read a book together. He drew the chicken coop and some chickens, then a log house with a tall girl watering a garden. She wore blue tennis shoes and a long dress.

“It’s our house!” sang Wren.

They drew on from there, the pictures merging as they talked. Starr drew the road from the log house to their school. Wren scribbled trees and rocks in brown and green, places she knew. And, off in her woods, Ben drew a man holding a small boy’s hand as they walked through the scribble.

“What are they doing, Ben?” asked Starr. “Where are they going?”

Their faces lifted to him.

He watched his hand place the crayon on the table. He couldn’t meet any of their eyes, but he knew then he would go back. Though it be a thousand miles, he would go back. In his shame and regret, he would do what he had to do, no matter how long. He would go back.