When we get home, I tell Mom I’m going to sleep out in the garden back bedroom. I show her the signal system Dad’s rigged and how to use it. She wants to know why I’m not sleeping in the house. I know if I’d said I’d sleep in the side bedroom, she’d want me to sleep in the garden. I know that. I’m not evasive enough to deal with Mom.
But I do sleep. Mom gets through the night without any problems, too.
But the next day I have to stop her five different times from doing crazy things that could kill her. Also, she can’t believe I can cook dinner.
Mom has the ultimate put-down when everything goes wrong; that is, when somebody else is doing anything right without her help. It goes like this.
‘My God, look what my idiot child can do, he can boil an egg! Who’d ever believe it? I didn’t know you had so many talents, Jacky. Soon you’ll be the best water-boiler for men over fifty on Colby Lane.’
We work through various versions of this during the entire dinner process.
Afterward, we go in and watch TV. Mother sits in Dad’s chair with a stool pulled up to put her feet on. She has a habit of crossing her legs or feet, and the doctor has made a point about how this is bad for circulation. It’s one of the things heart patients aren’t supposed to do. She’s always forgetting and I keep reminding her. I spend more time watching her feet than watching TV. Probably I’m trying to get even for the dinner put-down.
Also, the back-seating on the dishwashing was overwhelming. I happen to know she’s a sloppy dishwasher, sloppier than I am, and that’s saying something. But you’d swear we were preparing those dishes for brain surgery.
At about eleven o’clock, I get so tired I go back to the bedroom. She’s still sitting up in the chair and says she’s not sleepy yet. I don’t feel like fighting her.
Next morning, Billy really wants to drive. What the hell, he should feel I have confidence in him. If we have an accident, we’ll change places with each other just before we die.
Today we’ll be coming down the eastern side of the Rockies and it’ll be tedious driving. We leave early, but no matter how early you take off, it’s one long line of trucks. Not many trucks take Route 70, because of the pass, but enough do; so it’s a drag and the road isn’t wide enough for passing.
I make a rule, no passing unless we both agree. I’ve driven with Billy before. Also, I’m in charge of music. I don’t want to be nervous about his driving and at the same time have ‘Bobby boy’ singing through his nose; telling me how he has exclusively discovered the meaning of life.
It’s a gorgeous day. The pass is twelve thousand feet and we’re starting down. We curve along in the sunshine; massive trees and rocks, crisp creeks shining at the bottom of deep cuts. The road meanders through hairpin turns. All along are sections being built for the big highway to go through here someday.
We’re never going to agree on passing. Billy can’t see more than seventy-five yards along the road ever, and those semitrailer trucks are at least thirty yards long. They’re lined up in front of us far as we can see.
So after he’s put on the direction signal a couple of times and I’ve shaken my head no, Billy pushes back his seat and drives with his arms straight out. His head is tilted as if he’s looking through bifocals. Thank God, we can’t go more than thirty miles per hour.
There isn’t much in the way of music. We’re out of range for Denver and there’s nothing but Country Western from small towns.
I’d like to find a Glenn Miller eight-track. I wonder if they’ve made any tapes of that music. I’ll bet there’re a lot of people, people my age, who’d enjoy hearing those old tunes again … ‘Moonlight Cocktail’, ‘Sunrise Serenade’, ‘In the Mood’ …
I could tell Miller from the first bar. He’d set up his woodwinds to carry the theme; then his brass and percussion would move in, blend with some kind of magic weaving to pick it up. I could almost see it in my mind. It was like watching a dancer, or slow-motion pictures of a basketball player dribbling, making a shoulder fake, springing and pushing off a jump shot while fading.
I had every record Miller cut. When I was fifteen I bought one of the first portable record players. The replacement battery was the size of a motorcycle twelve-volter. The thing cost a fortune. I’d play Miller out there in the aviary for my birds. It was heaven playing those old 78s, three minutes on a side, listening to Glenn Miller having a concert with my birds. I even wrote him once about it but didn’t get an answer.
While I was in the army, my folks moved from Philadelphia to California. I’d packed my collection carefully and put it in charge of Joan; she was fifteen.
Joan tried to keep them on the floor of the back seat with her but that space was needed for suitcases to go in and out of motels, so they packed them in the trunk of the car.
They drove right across the desert in midsummer. When Joan unpacked the records, they were baked together into one solid wavy thick record, the thickest Glenn Miller record in the world.
During the war, I’d dream about those records. When I got home, I was going to play them for at least two weeks getting myself straightened out. I’d make up different concerts in my mind, trying to remember the music.
So I came home. After about an hour of welcoming, I ask where my records are. Joan motions me to follow her. Nobody says anything. She takes me into her room and from the bottom of her closet brings out this black, round lump. I cried. At that time I could cry easily. I was having a hard time keeping myself from crying about almost everything.
I was in a tent in the middle of a muddy field being transported back to my outfit after being wounded the first time when we got the news Miller had disappeared. I’d been being shuffled from hospitals to repple-depples for almost a month. This place had a genuine old-fashioned bed-check-Charley type who’d come over our field at chow time and bomb the tents from an antiquated monoplane. There wasn’t any anti-aircraft unit around, so we’d all run out to fire MIs and BARs at him; our before-chow evening target practice.
I think this nut dropped those bombs by hand over the side like W.W.I. They were handmade jobbies built from strapped-together masher grenades; about half didn’t go off. Another fanatic doing a German-style, old-man-Hemingway scene.
He’s just done his little circle and dropped two bombs. They both dudded in a muddy field and we didn’t hit him. I’m going back to the tent for my mess kit when the mail clerk of this transient company comes by, passing out copies of Stars & Stripes. I open mine and there it is. ‘MAJOR GLENN MILLER MISSING IN ACTION OVER CHANNEL! SEARCHERS INDICATE PLANE IS PROBABLY LOST!’ I can’t believe it.
I go back to my tent and let it soak in privately. All the music, the church dances, what seemed my wonderful abbreviated childhood, finished. I felt cheated; cut off from the best part of my life; knowing it would never be the same again.
Sure, this is true for everybody and everything, even without a war or critical deaths. But I’d been sustaining myself on the illusion I’d be going back; not only going back in the geographic sense but going back to the way it was, continuing where I’d left off.
Squatting there in the tent, in that spring evening, I let go. I was almost late for chow.
The cowboy music on the radio is incessant. There can’t be more than ten different tunes they use; only the words are changed. I try listening to those words and they’re American all right, upside-down America or maybe inside out.
I reach over and switch it off. Billy smiles.
‘God