“You don’t have to have known him all that well, he’s family.”
My little sister, Terri, came in then. She was twelve and had her hair cut straight across in front and short in back. She had on overalls with a work shirt and work boots. She almost looked like a boy. She said, “I was thinking I ought to go with you.”
“You was thinking that, huh,” I said.
“It might not be such a bad idea,” Mama said. “She can read the map.”
“I can read a map,” I said.
“Not while you’re driving,” Mama said.
“I can pull over.”
“This way, though,” Mama said, “you can save some serious time, having her read it and point out things.”
“He’s been dead for near two weeks or so. I don’t know how much pressure there is on me to get there.”
“Longer you wait, the more he stinks,” Terri said.
“She has a point,” Mama said.
“Ain’t they supposed to report a dead body? Them people found him, I mean? Ain’t it against the law to just leave a dead fella lying around?”
“They done us a favor, Uncle Smat being family and all,” Mama said. “They could have just left him, or buried him out there with the chickens.”
“I wish they had,” I said. “I made that suggestion, remember?”
“This way we can bury him in the cemetery where your daddy is buried,” Mama said. “That’s what your daddy would have wanted.”
She knew I wasn’t going to say anything bad that had to do with Daddy in any manner, shape, or form. I thought that was a low blow, but Mama, as they say, knew her chickens. She knew where I was the weakest.
“All right, then,” I said, “I’m going to get him. But that car of ours has been driven hard and might not be much for a long trip. The clutch hangs sometimes when you press on it.”
“That’s a chance you have to take for family,” Mama said.
I grumbled something, but I knew by then I was going.
“I’m going too,” Terri said.
“Oh hell, come on, then,” I said.
“Watch your cussing,” Mama said. “Daddy wouldn’t like that either.”
“All he did was cuss,” I said.
“Yeah, but he didn’t want you to,” she said.
“I think I’m gonna cuss,” I said. “My figuring is, Daddy would have wanted me to be good at it, and that takes practice.”
“I ain’t forgot how to whip your ass with a switch,” Mama said.
Now it was figured by Mama that it would take us two days to get to the Wentworths’ house and chicken coop if we drove fast and didn’t stop to see the sights and such, and then two days back. As we got started out early morning, we had a pretty good jump on the first day.
The clutch hung a few times but seemed mostly to be cooperating, and I ground the gears only now and again, but that was my fault, not the car’s, though in the five years we had owned it, it had been worked like a stolen mule. Daddy drove that car all over the place looking for spots of work. His last job had been for the WPA, and we seen men working those jobs as we drove along, digging out bar ditches and building walls for what I reckoned would be schools or some such. Daddy used to say it was mostly busywork, but it paid real money, and real money spent just fine.
Terri had the map in her lap, and from time to time she’d look at it, say, “You’re doing all right.”
“Of course I am,” I said. “This is the only highway to Marvel Creek. When we need the map is when we get off the main road and onto them little routes back in there.”
“It’s good to make sure you don’t get veered,” Terri said.
“I ain’t getting veered,” I said.
“Way I figure it, it’s gonna take three days to get there, or most near a full three days, not two like Mama said.”
“You figured that, did you?”
“I reckoned in the miles and how fast the car is going, if that speedometer is right, and then I put some math to it, and I come up with three days. I got an A in math.”
“Since it’s the summer, I reckon you’ve done forgot what math you learned,” I said.
“I remember. Three days at this pace is right, and this is about as fast as you ought to go. Slowing wouldn’t hurt a little. As it is, we blowed a tire, they wouldn’t find nothing but our clothes in some bushes alongside the road, and they’d be full of shit.”
End of that day we come near the Oklahoma border. It was starting to get dark, so I pulled us over and down a little path, and we parked under a tree for the night. We had some egg sandwiches Mama had made, and we ate them. They had gotten kind of soggy, but it was that or wishful thinking, so we ate them and drank some water from the canteens.
We threw a blanket on the ground and laid down on that and looked up through the tree limbs at the stars.
“Ever wonder what’s out there?” Terri said.
“I read this book once, about this fella went to Mars. And there was some green creatures there with four arms.”
“No joke?”
“No joke.”