My mother wasn’t pleased about the admission fee to the Lincoln. “I can’t believe you charge your own son to sit in that car,” she said one evening, without looking at him. She rarely made eye contact when they discussed each other’s shortcomings. I imagined she thought his eyes possessed some sort of magical x-ray power, and if she stared into them for too long, she would lose bodily functions. Granted, his eyes were strange and growing more different each day—darker and sunk deeper in his head. By the summer of the Lincoln, he was rail thin from his relentless stomach problems, and the eyes seemed to burrow backwards little by little while the rest of him retreated to the surface of his bones.
“I’m teaching these youngsters a life lesson,” he said. “You want to be comfortable, you need to check the price tag. If you want a little cool air across your neck, you got to pay for that pleasure. Pleasure costs.” He paused. “The cold air is a metaphor, you see.”
“Maybe you can save up all those quarters you’re taking from the neighborhood and buy us an air conditioner. This fan won’t be much pleasure come August,” she said back, and she was right. The house was hot all the time now, and the little fans my mother planted in the rooms hummed day and night, doing nothing more than stir up the hot air. The noise from all of them running and oscillating made our house sound like the world’s largest active beehive. I learned to sleep without moving a muscle, which I thought was somehow cooler in the midst of the swelter. I taught myself to sleep inside the noise.
But my father wasn’t saving the money. He used the quarters to buy more Old Milwaukees at the IGA food store. Sometimes the line to get into the Lincoln would be a half dozen kids long. Never any adults, always kids. We each bought a half hour for twenty-five cents, and my dad would only let two at a time into the big back seat, because, he said, he “wanted us to have enough room to stretch out and really enjoy the cold.” I received special treatment because I was his son. I was allowed to go solo in the back seat. And sometimes he would let me stay more than a half hour. The inside of the Lincoln smelled like beer and pine trees. I liked to shut my eyes and feel the air moving across my skin and pretend I was at the North Pole. I listened without looking, imagining the words blowing in the air.
“You realize Eddie would tell us this isn’t really cold here in this car,” Eunice Baxley said. “You don’t know cold, he would tell us, until you are sitting waist deep in a mud hole that’s got ice floating on top of it and wondering if your toes are still attached to your feet and wondering if those infidel Chinese are going to run over the hill at you, but then you get to thinking that they are cold too because for all the things Chinamen ain’t got, they do have toes and their boots ain’t no better than yours and so Eddie figured their toes are freezing off so there will be no running involved with what they had heard was the impending invasion of mud holes by said Chinamen. That’s what he’d say. If he were here.” When Eunice became a spokesman for her deceased husband, she tried to spill out everything in one thin, desperate breath, like she wasn’t sure she’d be allowed the chance to draw another. I supposed that’s the way you begin to think when your husband rolls underneath a Ford one afternoon and never comes back.
My father always sounded more thoughtful, more philosophical when he talked about his war. “I saw a bug melt one day,” he said. “This bug was pretty as it could be, all multi-colored, and it flew through the air and alighted on my gun barrel. And when he landed, he just started smoking. Little puff of smoke. Then he melted into a greasy dot of Vietnam bug goo right on the barrel.” He paused. “That’s how hot it was. When you can melt bugs on your gun barrel, you got some heat going, sister. Trust me on that one.” He liked to let his words hang in the cold air, hovering above the low-throated idle of the big Lincoln.
There would be a silence, as they let their stories settle into the floorboards—the only sound the whirr of the air conditioner. I felt the Lincoln rumbling under me. And Eunice would inevitably reach across from her passenger’s seat and touch my father’s hand. “Eddie, Eddie, dammit,” she said, and I swear they forgot anybody else was in the air conditioning, as rapt as they were by the strength of their sad recollections.
The hotter the summer became, the more time Eunice and my father spent in the air conditioning. On Sunday mornings, my mother would half-heartedly ask my father if he was going to put in an appearance at church, and he would say, “Well, as a matter of fact, I’m heading to my place of worship right now.” Then he hauled the spackling bucket across the street to the Lincoln. We’d leave him there and drive our own car to the Methodist Church. “I don’t worry about him ending up in hell,” my mother said one morning on the way to church. “He’d figure out some way to make it fun. Or make a profit.”
I asked her once if it bothered her that Dad sat in a car most of the day with a woman. She said of all the things that bothered her about my father, him perched in hot broad daylight with a woman who couldn’t figure out how to let go of the dead was low on the list. “You don’t have to keep an eye on sad people much,” she said with the air of someone handing down a commandment. “Sad isn’t dangerous.”
At church, I liked to watch Reverend Scoggins from the second or third pew. Before he began every sermon, he made a big production of pulling his handkerchief from a hidden pocket in his black cassock. He snapped the starched folds out of it and put the cloth to his mouth, like a man wiping away a dab of barbeque sauce. Once he’d cleaned his lips, he closed his eyes and in a sawmill whisper that even the back pew could hear, he’d say, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, oh Lord, our strength and our redeemer.” Then, he gave a slight glance toward heaven or the ceiling and started his sermons. I only understood the most general gist of what he spoke about. Usually about living the right way when you can and asking for forgiveness when you don’t. I realized then I was destined to spend a lot more time in my life looking to be forgiven than doing the right things, which wasn’t so much a depressing thought as it was exhausting. I foresaw myself as a man chasing around somebody or something that would give me a pass for my indiscretions, both purposeful and accidental. But that summer, I had no clue what a decent indiscretion was.
Truth be told, I was addled. I had begun to spend my nights lying in the dark, blanketed by only the hot air, worrying about the nature of heaven, what it looked like, what kind of places folks lived in. Whether they would allow people to sit in air conditioned cars and swap stories. Were there even cars in heaven, for that matter? From what I could tell from Reverend Scoggins, gold was a prominent feature in the afterlife unless you went straight to Hell, which made me wonder if the fact that we did not have an air conditioner was simply a rehearsal for the future, preparing ourselves for the sizzle of eternal flames. Admittedly, I had too much time on my hands that summer, and I wasn’t sure if my friends were concerned with their afterlives, because I never asked them. Me and Lonnie Tisdale and the McElveen brothers talked about girls we’d considered kissing and the size of redbreasts we’d hooked in the Black River, but never once did I ask them about the nature of their souls. It wasn’t the kind of thing that came up by itself.
I did ask my mother. I told her that church made me nervous.
“What do you mean nervous? Does your stomach hurt? Do you make sure you go to the bathroom before services?” she asked. Although she was a nurse and well-practiced in professional and amateur diagnoses, she was convinced every ailment with her children originated with the lack of regular bowel movement.
“It’s more like I can’t sleep and I spend all my time worrying about things after I get back from church,” I said. “Things like hell.”
She glanced out the window across the street, toward the Lincoln. “Like you could tell me anything about worry,” she said. I knew what she meant. No matter how much she insisted Eunice Baxley was harmless, she still wondered what went on in the Lincoln. She’d asked me about it one afternoon, and I told her that Eunice and my dad just talked about wars and dead people. That was it. I didn’t tell her about Eunice’s wandering hand. I could tell she wasn’t convinced. She was over feeling sorry for my father, for his half a stomach and the way he kept shrinking into himself. He’d run out of