My Blog

THE RIVER ROAD
Part 8 of  8

Lola and Charlene

Will you remember me?  Lola thought to herself as she walked beside Charlene down the Red Ball, south, back toward home.  Will you remember me when you've gone off to do what you will do and life has become large and many branched, and you have a husband and children, and a big city, and your universe of books, and meals to cook, and a mother-in-law who doesn't like your eyes or how much salt your put in your chicken gravy?  Will your write me, Charlene?  Will you remember us the way we are tonight in this cold with aching toes and the breath ghosting out of our mouths?

A car geared up behind them and spotlighted them in its headlights.  They listened for it to slow down--they expected the car to pass them cautiously--but instead they heard it accelerate, working up through the gears and bearing down on them.

"Charlene!" Lola screamed, grabbing her friend by the waist and flinging them both through the dried cattails of the ditch.  The car had missed hitting them by inches.  They lay panting in the ditch as they watched the taillights of the car disappear over the ridge.

"It was him!  I know it!"

"Oh Lola, don't scare me!"

"Who else would it have been?"

"Anybody.  Jim Stubens.  He's almost blind."

"Jim has a broken hip.  He can't drive, Charlene."

"Lola, I'm scared.  What are we going to do?"

"Well we're not going to sleep in this ditch.  Are you all right?"

"I think I'm going to have a few bruises, but I can walk."

"What we're going to do is go straight home.  If we see him coming, we'll hide flat down in the ditches if we have to."

Lola thought about the pistol that had belonged to her father.  It was an odd little .22 revolver that always frightened her even to look at.  It was locked in a drawer of the letter desk at home and now she wished she had it in her coat.

Although she had never fired it herself, she had watched her father squeeze off rounds at squirrels and raccoons or at soup cans balanced on the roof of their tool shed.  He'd drill some dead center with a crack and a ping and then twirl the gun on his finger back to his side as if there were a holster to put it in.  She wished she had that gun.

Lola thought, These rotten little towns with no policemen and the fat sheriff by his fire in St. Albans, smoking cigarettes and drinking store bought beer and eating cheese and bologna sandwiches into the night.  God I'm hungryYwhat I wouldn't give for a sandwichCthick bread, thick bologna and hot, hot mustard.  God don't torture yourself, girl.  If I were one of them gangster's women, I'd roll down my stocking and touch the warm handle of a derringer.  Nice and warm..

The road upon which she and Charlene walked had been graded and graveled by her father's CCC crew.  A mile or two down further was where he died.

Lenny and Elmo

When morning came, it found Elmo and Lenny both in bed, upstairs.  Elmo's head was at the foot and Lenny's at the headboard.  Lenny had all the covers.  Neither one of them felt well and neither one could remember the night.

Lola and Charlene

Lola and Charlene were quiet now and feeling their bruises. The road curved, parallel to the river, and entered the leafless November trees.  They were near Jeromy Sunfish=s and Lola began to feel the ease of home territory loosen her tense neck muscles.

Then the lights of a car flashed blindness upon them.

"Going somewhere?" A male figure called out drunkenly from behind the bright headlights.  Was it Red?

Lola grabbed Charlene's hand and pulled her into a run.  They were at the entrance to Jeromy's property and Lola guided Charlene down the path she (Lola) knew well enough even in the moonlight.  The male figure chased them.

"Where do you think you're going girls?"

Lola ran and tripped screaming near Jeromy's doorstep, upsetting a loud metal canister.  The cabin door smacked opened and Jeromy's 12 gauge boomed and flashed brightly above them, and the man-shadow beat a quick retreat back to his car (it appeared to be the Model A) and started it and drove skidding northward at speed.

"Lola, is that you?  Who's that with you?  Charlene Sullivan?"

"Jeromy!  Oh, Jeromy!"  The girls held each other and cried.  Jeromy reached out to touch their heads, but pulled back, and put his chin down on his chest and listened.

"You girls go home, and I'll be behind you about twenty yards all the time.  And I'll have this," Jeromy shouldered his gun, Athough I don't think he'll be back none.  I'll see you to the bridge."

Jeromy walked behind them all the way to the bridge.  They had crossed and entered Ottie, and when they had turned around to wave to him goodbye, he was gone.

Lenny and Elmo

"Coffee is what is needed here."  Elmo groaned and he rose unsteadily and stumbled downstairs to stoke the stove.

Lenny woke up to the banging from the kitchen downstairs and he looked around in aghast uncertainty until he fully remembered where he was.  He stared at the calendar, Sunday, December 7, 1941.  He heard Elmo scream.

"Great Mother of Jesus, we've been attacked!"

"What do you mean?"  Lenny yelled down the stairs.

"Just look at my car!"

Lenny stumbled to the bedroom window and shoved it up.  He stuck his head out and peered down.  A giant spool of wire had smashed into the windshield.  The jag-toothed mouth of the glass was bearded with snow.

Lola and Charlene

 Hap had always given Jeromy eggs and Jeromy always supplied Hap with a generous supply of homemade, as Jeromy called his illegal whisky.  When Hap was buried, Jeromy went to the grave that night and drank to the friend with whom he had shared very few words over the years and he dribbled a tin mug of whisky on the mound of soil.

So many years and the mound had flattened and the grass had blanketed it, though brown grass now it was.

Hap Hessen's house was made of limestone blocks and it sat at the top of a hill above the river, a bend away from the Civil War cannon.  A road sloped down from his house and intersected in a T at the river road.  And so the river was a short walk away, as it was from any home in Ottie.  There were several such stone houses.  The building material was abundant and could be pried from the walls of the small bluffs that bordered the Little Cedar. 

I can't go home right now.  It's only midnight and I don't want to catch momma coming back  from the dances.  Especially if she's got a man with her.  I want to go to the cemetery and talk to my dad.  I wonder if Charlene will think I'm crazy.  But I don't care.  I'll tell her I want to pray, but it will be you I'm talking to, papa.  I can't even see your face anymore, can't see it when I think of you.  What is it that's you right now, daddy?  I thought I smelled your smoke at Jeromy's as Charlene and I sat so scared on the ground.  I thought I could smell your shirt, your pipe, like before.  We are walking and Charlene is looking at me.  I knew it was really you who saved me tonight.  I knew it was really you.

"Why in the world did we come here, after all we=ve been through," Charlene asked.

"I feel safe here, Charlene, more than any other place.  I come here a lot at night."

"I didn't know."

"Here's my daddy." It was a small monument, a small, house-shaped block of

limestone. "Will you kneel here and pray with me a moment, Charlene?"

"Of course I will," she whispered and she knelt and took Lola's hand.

The constellation Orion made a bright curtain over the eastern boundary of the cemetery.  When she was done praying, Lola moved her arm around Charlene's waist.

Charlene looked at the night stars and whispered,  "Do you think anything good will last?"

And Lola drew her breath above the bones of her father.

"Endlessly," she replied.

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