All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

22

It was night and it was cool, and me and Jane were sitting in Mrs. Carson’s porch swing. Tony was inside at the table eating a large piece of chocolate cake. His third.

I could turn in the swing and look through the window and see him in there. Mrs. Carson was fussing over him, pouring him up a glass of milk. When she finished doing that, she sat down to talk to him. She really had taken a shine to Tony.

We were all clean, having bathed and washed our hair. We had been given clothes that Mrs. Carson had gotten from some of her church friends. Now me and Jane had cups of hot cocoa and were sitting in the swing, moving it slightly with our feet.

It felt good to be clean, but it didn’t feel good to have hoodwinked that poor lady.

“Mrs. Carson must be rich,” Jane said.

“You really had to say I was hired out like that?”

“It just come to me.”

“The man in the store didn’t believe a word of it. And you had to add in a dog?”

“It wasn’t as crazy as what really happened. Picked up by gangsters, saw a man shot, and then we snuck off in a grasshopper storm.”

“You forgot stealing a car from a dead man,” I said. “And leaving your father under his tractor and a pile of sand.”

“Me and him never did get along.”

“That’s still not a good reason to leave him under a tractor,” I said.

“It is sad,” she said, “but I didn’t have a family like yours. They loved you.”

“Daddy could have loved me better,” I said. “He hung himself and left me to fend for things.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t good.”

“But I’ll tell you, Jane. I think about them at least once every hour of every day.”

“I know you mean that symbolically,” she said, “because you don’t have a watch.”

I grinned at her. Sometimes with Jane, it was all you could do.

“Well, I think about them a lot. And it is every day. At first, I kept thinking about Daddy hanging and Mama dead in her bed. But now I don’t think about that so much. I think about the good times, and there was plenty. If Mama hadn’t got sick, everything would have been okay.”

“If there hadn’t been sandstorms, she wouldn’t have been sick,” Jane said. “There hadn’t been a dust bowl and grasshoppers and the like, we’d all be fine. Well, almost. Like I said, I was planning on leaving from the time I knew there was a way out. I was going to go just as soon as I could. Pa going down under that tractor was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. I wanted to be anywhere but where we was.”

“If Mama and Daddy had been all right,” I said, “I could have stayed.”

“Yeah, well,” Jane said. “Everyone’s not made the same.”

She turned and looked back through the window behind the swing. “Tony looks happy,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I was wondering if he should stay.”

“I take it we aren’t?” I said.

“Of course not. Mrs. Carson gets to thinking about that story, and that store man tells her he doesn’t believe it, and we have to back it up somehow, we’re cooked. But Tony, I think he could stay and they wouldn’t care about the lie.”

“He won’t stay,” I said. “He’ll go with you.”

“Maybe.”

“Where exactly are we going, anyway?” I said.

“I figured that was clear,” she said.

“Not to me.”

“We can’t let Strangler get killed on account of he stole money to help his kid.”

“We can’t?”

“We shouldn’t. Strangler being a father like that, he’s more than mine was. Pa wouldn’t have done nothing to make things bad for us, but if I needed an operation for something, I’d have had to cut on myself with a butter knife and patch it all up with flour paste and a roll of electrician’s tape. He’d have called it God’s will, me coming down with some problem or the other.”

“It’s really none of our business,” I said. “Strangler has to tote his own water.”

“I know that,” Jane said. “But it doesn’t hurt to warn him. I don’t like Bad Tiger and Timmy.”

“Of course you don’t. If you did, I’d be worried.”

“I didn’t like what I thought they were thinking when it come to me.”

“Ain’t no thinking about it,” I said. “That’s exactly what they’re thinking, only with a killing at the end of it all.”

“Yeah, well, I told Timmy I wouldn’t forget he hit me with that toilet paper.”

“So that’s what this is about,” I said. “You getting even. You think helping Strangler gets you even with Timmy over a roll of tossed toilet paper?”

“Some. But I don’t want some man’s death on my hands who was just trying to help a crippled child neither.”

“Strangler ain’t your father. He might be as bad as they are. He might kill you himself.”

“I don’t think so. Not with him doing for his daughter what he did. Robbing a bank to pay for her operation. That’s a fellow that’s got backbone. That’s love.… Besides, that’s not all that matters. Doing something to help someone else that’s between a rock and a hard place, it’s just the sort of thing that gives you a sense of worth.”

“Couldn’t you find something else other than trying to keep Strangler from getting killed to give you worth?” I said. “We could turn out worthy but dead.”

“I’m not asking you to do a thing,” she said.

“The heck you aren’t,” I said. “I’d say you’re asking me plenty.”

“Jack, you don’t have to do a thing you don’t want to do. It’s me I’m talking about. I want to do something that gives me adventure and does something noble for someone. Something that makes me want to get up and get going in the morning, not just lie there hoping the wind quits blowing. Life needs to be about something more than milking a cow or throwing corn at chickens. King Arthur and his knights weren’t about milking cows and feeding chickens. They had quests to keep them busy.”

“We’re not King Arthur or his knights, and they weren’t fooling with gangsters.”

“You, Jack Catcher, are easily satisfied. Pa never figured anything for me but what he had. Getting married, and maybe having a husband that didn’t run off, and me having babies between putting up canned goods and frying a chicken.”

“Lots of people do that,” I said. “They get along okay.”

Jane nodded. “It’s all right if they want it. But no one asked me what I wanted. Pa, everyone else, just expected me to do a certain thing because that’s what they thought life was. I don’t need some obligation to hold me down. What I need is a choice that isn’t already made for me. What I need is to go out and see if the world is flat, round, or some kind of triangle. I need to feel I’ve seen something and done something that isn’t the same thing everyone else has seen or done.”

We sat and listened to crickets for a while. I turned over in my head what she had been saying. It was more than I could get hold of.

I looked up, smiled at her. “Say, where is that toilet paper, anyway?”

“I left it in the pig truck,” she said. “I figured he ought to have something for his troubles.”

“It isn’t much,” I said, “but it was nice of you.”

“Actually, I just forgot it.”

We sat for a little while without talking. Finally I said, “Do you really want to try and find Strangler?”

“We need a mission,” Jane said. “A goal. Like Sir Galahad. He went searching for the Holy Grail. Strangler will be our grail. The quest will teach us who we are.”

“You have to teach someone that?” I asked.

“I think you do,” Jane said. “And through the process of the quest, we learn what we’re looking for. The quest is everything.”

“What are we looking for?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I reckon we’ll know it when we find it.”

“What’s a quest, by the way?”

“Same as a mission. Same as a goal.”

“Then why not say goal or mission?”

“Because it gives it weight to call it a quest,” she said. “It gives it true purpose and meaning. It just sounds better.”

“What about Tony? Maybe he don’t want a mission. Maybe he wants to be like everyone else.”

“I don’t know about Tony. He’s just a kid. I practically raised him. What with Mama running off with that Bible salesman—which, by the way, put me off church forever—and our pa not really caring if we was loved, just doing what he thought was responsible because it’s what was responsible, I’ve been pretty much all the mother and father Tony’s had.”

“Being responsible isn’t all bad,” I said.

“Not all bad. But it sure means a lot more when you do it because you love somebody, and not because you think you’re supposed to and the church wants you to, or your neighbors, or whoever. I just wanted to be loved like any daughter. And Tony ought to have been loved like any son. Not just loved by his big sister. You got some of that kind of feeling, Jack. I can tell. Your pa may have lost his place when your mama died, but he loved you. Mine didn’t. Me and Tony was the same as property. We might as well have been middlebusters and cultivators for all the love Pa gave us.”

“I don’t know I had it so good,” I said. “Daddy wrote me a suicide note.”

“What did it say?”

I told her.

“There you go. At least there was an apology involved.”

She leaned over close to me and said, “Look here.”

I turned and she leaned forward and kissed me. I liked it.

We did it again.

When I pulled back that time, I hardly had any breath.

I leaned forward for one more. Jane said, “No. That’s enough. Don’t make more of it than what it was. A kiss between friends.”

“It was mighty friendly,” I said. I moved toward her again, but she put a hand on my chest and gently pushed me back.

“Wouldn’t do us any good if Mrs. Carson saw me kissing my brother, now, would it?”

“I ain’t your brother,” I said.

“Yeah, but Mrs. Carson don’t know that. That story I told earlier, I figure they’ve already got us pegged as a pretty odd family, so we don’t want to put fuel on the fire, now, do we?”