The Full Cleveland (22 page)

I don't know at what point it came to me, it was all mixed up by now, one road was quickly leading to another, and the path I took seemed laid out long ago, and I couldn't really distinguish destination from point of departure anymore.

The Dream Machine and I were heading in the exact opposite direction, out toward the interstate and the Oasis Motel—when I suddenly remembered what I'd forgotten since I was ten years old. What I'd relentlessly and religiously forgotten to ask my father. Never once had thought to ask it even though the memory was no less than profound. So I had to stop the car and turn around.

We took the route Dad had taken Easter when I was still ten, first down Euclid Avenue, past the Cleveland Museum and
The Thinker
, still sitting there, leg crossed and chin in hand, still with half a face, one leg, and some arm. But still thinking, and still bombed. They sure hadn't scrambled to fix him up. Seeing him again, all wrecked, all ruined, but still strangely not less art but more so, I started thinking of Cleveland as some kind of philosophical kind of town.

Somehow I knew just where to take every turn. Could be your deepest, most affecting memories have an awesome accuracy, are working for you overtime, and when the moment of truth comes, won't let you down. Quick jogs right and left, deeper back into downtown Cleveland, through a mind-boggling maze of dingy streets, a route as complex but determined to get there as a thought process.

Which miraculously arrived at the clearest vision I'd ever had. The three freshly painted white houses huddled together like hope.
Still
freshly painted, still standing, still looking like a little moment of peace in a war zone. Dad had never sold them to the developer after all. You knew because there was a highway there now, but it had a bend in it, an upward bend, an arc, made from massive girders of steel. And it rose right over the three white houses.

It's a wondrous thing when you're sitting right under it, to see a whole highway can bend. Dad must have made them bend it, but when you're sitting right under it, it gives the illusion of looking less like Dad and more like an act of God.

I stared out at those three white houses and had the wild idea my family was now living inside. But you somehow knew those old people in there hadn't died. They'd had a little help, and they'd survived. I even opened the door to the Dream Machine to go do it, go look in the windows, but when that didn't seem quite right I closed it again and drove off.

We were all set heading for the highway that would lead out of town and back to the Ohio border. But then I saw the big sign on stilts, and thought I should see Fred's Fish Market one last time.

The Dream Machine rumbled out the wooden dock to the end, and I parked and got out and went straight to my dock post and leaned out over the water, just as Mary Parker and I had done countless times during our truancy on our way to the million movies downtown.

Though I had never admitted it to Mary Parker, what I often did during the silence between us here was flip through the brain pictures Dad taught me to take when I claimed I didn't know what conscience was the Easter I was ten years old. My best one, the one I saved the longest and looked at the most, was snapped not staring at the lake, but right on it, when Dad and I went sailing alone in his beaten-up old boat one time.

It happened when I was hiking. I was hiking off the lee side, which was all wrong, seeing as you're supposed to hike on the high side, the side rising out of the water, to use your body weight to balance the boat. I was so young, I must have thought it didn't matter which side you were on.

So I took it upon myself to go practice my hiking, but I already said, I chose the dead wrong side. In fact, if I kept this up, you wouldn't be able to call it hiking. You'd have to call it suicide.

Dad was at the helm, and the storm that nobody knew was coming was coming, and coming fast. Suddenly all the proportions of wind and sail were off. There was too much of it up, and the jib was so full I couldn't see Dad and he couldn't see me. And it was loud, the halyards and things like that on the boat were clanking riotously against the metal mast. Or I would have heard Dad yelling. Yelling, goddamnit, to get to the other side.

But here I was, leaning out, happily and cluelessly practicing my hiking, and then my back was dragging in the water, then my head, except for my face. The boat was now moving very fast, and I started clutching the guard rail with all my might, and I'm sure I would have been afraid, if, all at once, I didn't see the most promising brain picture ever. It was simply one perfect instant in time. The quickly changing sunlit water, the foreboding sky, the full white sails. A beautiful moment in which all possibility seemed contained, right and wrong, hope and despair, even spring and winter. The best of times and the worst, all held in a certain neutrality, or potentiality, I didn't know how to say it, but I felt certain it would pass. So I took the picture.

And then my head went under. It was only seconds before I couldn't hang on any longer. I was going to have to let go, and drown.

But then somehow that's not what happened. The boat veered abruptly into the wind, and my father dragged me back in.

After that, he didn't care that I was all wet and cold and crying, he sat me down in the cockpit and while the sails luffed loudly and the clanking gizmos made their racket and the wind blew his words out to sea, he knelt down and gave me a long lecture about safety in sailboats, and what that meant in terms of living out one's life in a forthright, honorable, and upstanding manner.

I can't remember anything he said, I don't think I even heard it because of the sails, but I still knew it was some kind of privilege, to have my picture and now to have his words that went with it, like a caption to a photograph. And of course, still to be alive.

But there's a flip side to that picture. I keep it on the other side, which is the good thing about this particular kind of picture, as there's such flexible storage involved.

I took it that same day, after the storm, when Dad rescued two teenage boys who were clinging to the mast of their tiny, swamped boat. That is, Dad rescued the boys, but he couldn't rescue their swamped boat too. Even though those teenagers made it clear the minute Dad dragged them on board that they would rather
die
than lose that tiny blue boat, Dad couldn't do it. Or maybe, he just wouldn't do it. The teenagers started shouting they wanted to go back to their boat, I don't know what they had in mind, all you could really see of it by now was the mast, but Dad told them to put a blanket around them and sit down. Personally, even though I was much younger than they were, I thought those big boys were being crybabies about it. Let's face it, it's the boat or your life, I felt like laying it out for them, You can't have it both ways, You'll get another boat, you won't get another life, You're going to have to choose. Even so, even though I thought all that and didn't say it, I'm saying nevertheless, I was awfully sorry when the boat sank too. I took the picture the moment its blue bow lurched up, just before it slipped beneath the surface.

If the Dream Machine had been young and modern enough to be equipped with cruise control, then one might explain how it made the left turn out of Fred's, opened up on the road, and totally took over the driving from there. I tried to coax it onto the interstate and my plans for the Oasis Motel, but it shied, stubbornly refused the ramp, then galloped like a madman past Cleveland proper, beyond Shaker Heights, through Gates Mills, around the Hunt Club, past the long, tree-lined entrances of the country clubs I had competed against in swimming and tennis, making an elaborate series of turns toward the polo grounds.

It's not what I wanted at all. After the revelations of Cleveland, what could possibly be the point of racing like a quarterhorse toward the polo grounds? Here where we once went to ridiculous parties in tents and sent someone under the canvas to steal illicit champagne. Here where silly women in sensible shoes eagerly replaced divots in the grass, as if believing the notion that that made them part of the team. Here where I first saw Rey McDowell staring at me steadily as an entire string of polo ponies passed. I had no use for this now.

But the Dream Machine seemed to have its own sense of direction and purpose, and even a highly developed instinct for not only left and right, but right and wrong. Because it was the car that decided our destination in the end.

We were cruising down the long road, cutting through the dark park. And it was there, in the deepest dark of that park, that the Dream Machine decided to die.

•   •   •

I slapped the ivory steering wheel, I ground the key in the ignition, I stomped on the accelerator. But there was nothing I could do to revive it. It had galloped too far and too fast. And now it was dead and gone.

I opened the glove compartment and started digging, shoveling the maps and stolen fast-food napkins to the floor. A tiny flashlight fell out. It was one of those promotional items Dad was always bringing home because he was in advertising, and it had an inscription that read “You Light Up My Life.” It doubled as a ballpoint pen. That's how much wattage we were looking at. I scowled at it but still took it and popped the hood and got out of the car.

But the flashlight had a feeble, coquettish beam, with about as much power to illuminate as a firebug. Besides, I couldn't begin to tend to the car, because I had to keep defending us against the terrors of the night. I kept whirling around, trying to locate the exact point of darkness that would materialize, that would have eyes, where the portal would open, leading to the true point of no return.

Maybe I didn't see it, but I sure heard it. The transformational howl. It wasn't a dog. It sounded half-human. It was a werewolf. I ran back into the car, locked the doors, and covered my face with my hands, believing this was my darkest hour. Except one hour led to another, and each got darker than the one before.

I don't know what, if it hadn't been for the Old Trooper.

He just appeared. Floating in the windshield, without any face to speak of, backlit by his own headlights, identifiable only by his rounded brown hat and fringe of white hair. I heard him tapping on the windshield first, and when he tapped again I looked through my hands. It took me a second to see what he was, but I instantly sensed from the soft curve of his hat that he was not to be truly feared.

But I still didn't open the window. He tapped again and I shook my head no.

So he yelled, the way old people do even if they don't have to do it through glass, “Lost your way, there?”

I rolled down the window and blurted, “It's dead.”

“Well, let's have a look.”

“It's
dead.
Gone.”

He scratched his hat. “Are you old enough to drive?”

I showed him my license. He had to get his glasses out to read it and it took him a while to do it, but he studied it very thoroughly. Then he handed it back and looked around at the dark park. “Maybe I should take you home.”

He'd chosen the worst possible word.

“I can't go
home.
They sold the
house.
It cost a dollar, but they sold it anyway. And my grandfather died, and now I've killed his car. I went too far.”

“Well hold up now, did somebody die?”

I didn't say anything for quite some time. He was patient, even though it was cold out and he kept rocking from foot to foot to keep warm. Maybe he thought I would burst into tears. I suppose my lip was quivering, and my face was doing something strange. But I didn't cry. I finally told him, “A child has not died.”

He frowned. “Maybe you should start from scratch.”

I mean he kind of asked for it. I hesitated. “Do you want to get in the car?”

“Mine has heat.”

So that's what we did, we got in his car. It had a light on top, but he turned it off. And the minute I got in there, I swear, it was like a confessional or something, which also has a light on top. I went on a blue streak talking jag, like the guy who cornered the Wedding Guest on Mary Parker's reading list, the guy who killed the white Albatross and just couldn't get over it no matter what. I mean I told that Old Trooper everything, my entire life story, every single thing I've said up until now, excluding only the restaurant scenes, because you don't make that same mistake twice.

Through the whole thing, the Old Trooper listened politely, even nodding encouragement every once in a while. Once or twice he chuckled, and more than twice he yawned. When I was all finished, he said, “So they sold your house.” Which summed it up nicely.

“Yes, sir. They certainly did. I saw the
SOLD BY
sign.”

“Did you call information?”

“No, sir. I don't want information.”

He said, “Hmmm.”

“I've made up my mind to go live somewhere else. I'd be on my way now. Except the Dream Machine died.”

“Now, now. Let's have a look at this remarkable old car of yours.”

So we got out again. He had a real flashlight and he poked around under the Dream Machine hood, taking his time, while I stood around thinking what a total exercise in futility it was. I was actually just being polite, letting him look at it, like when you sometimes let someone else try their hand at the lid to a jar, just because they want to so much even though they can't get it open any better than you can.