The Tie That Binds(32)
Then, before we made town, my dad said to Lyman, “I don’t suppose you thought to tell Edith you’re leaving.”
“Why sure,” Lyman said. “She knows.” He patted his coat pocket. “She packed me some sandwiches. I got them right here with me.”
“What does she say about it?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Lyman said. He leaned forward to look past me at my dad. “She says for at least one of us to get away. That’s what she told me last night.”
“Jesus Christ,” my dad said. “When’s she going to quit?”
“And I’m going to write her about it,” Lyman said. “Edith says for me to see all the sights I can and taste pleasure.”
“Well, see that you do it.”
“I will. You can bet on that.”
“I’m talking about writing her,” my dad said.
“Oh,” he said, and sat back again to look ahead down the road. He brought one of his big red winter-chafed hands up to play with the belt strapped around the metal suitcase on his lap.
When we drove into Holt all the houses were dark and the big globes suspended above the corners on Main Street were off. I didn’t see anything moving. No one was at the depot either; Lyman was going to have to buy his ticket once he got on the train. My dad stopped the pickup beside the cobblestone platform, and though we were almost an hour early, Lyman got out with his suitcase under his arm and stood to face east up the tracks. My dad and I stayed in the pickup with the motor and heater running and watched him wait. Once while we watched him, my dad said, “Well, this is a piece of history that won’t appear in no history books.” But he was talking more to himself than he was to me.
Finally when the train got there, waving its beam light back and forth above the tracks and making the ground vibrate, we got out to say good-bye. In the light of the conductor’s lantern I could see that Lyman’s eyes were bleary from the cold and that there was a drip of watery mucus at the tip of his nose. Lyman looked cold and scared. My dad shook his hand, and Lyman patted me on the shoulder, and then in his long overcoat and his best shoes and with his corduroy earflaps tied tight under his chin, he mounted the steps to the train, and that was the last we saw of him. That was the last anyone in Holt County saw of him for almost twenty years. Including Edith.
LYMAN WAS forty-two when he left on that west-bound train, and as I recall his plan involved joining the U.S. Army. The train stopped in Denver, but he didn’t get off there and he didn’t get off in Cheyenne either, nor in Salt Lake, nor in any other place, until the train had finally stopped for good in Los Angeles to turn around and come back east. I suppose he wanted to be sure there were enough mountain ranges and enough Mormons and mesquite between him and that old stump-armed man to prevent himself from being dragged back and put to work again. Because once he had actually managed to escape he sure as hell wasn’t going to take any chances; he wasn’t ever going to sweat his overalls plowing sand again, not if he could help it, not if it was just a matter of putting enough miles between himself and that sand. And in the confusion of December 1941, he had that ready excuse: he was going to join the army to fight the Nips and the Huns—never mind that he had never fought a thing before in his life.
I gather, though, that it didn’t take him long to discover that, as much as everybody was watching the sky for Hirohito to come drifting down out of some imperial orange-and-red cloud, still, the army recruiters were not about ready to sign on any middle-aged farm boy from Holt, Colorado, even if he was as eager as a mongrel bitch in heat. The army recruiters weren’t that desperate yet. So I guess he tried the navy next, and being a little smarter now he no doubt lied about his age, but he wasn’t the fuzzy-cheeked piece of dough the navy was looking for, either; not that he wasn’t used to being treated like a dog, you understand, they just couldn’t be sure he could learn their new tricks. So after the navy I don’t guess he even tried the marines, because I know for certain that he hired on instead to work in a Los Angeles airplane factory. And he stayed there in the factory until the war was over, working his daily shift, pulling levers or grinding gears or running rivets and not talking to anybody much but just doing the work they gave him to do. During lunch break he sat off at the edges of the mechanics and welders where he could watch them and listen to their talk, but he never complained, like they did, because he figured he knew of at least one thing that was worse than this. All the time, anyway, he was saving his money so that when MacArthur returned to take that cob pipe out of his mouth and to sign those surrender papers on board that boat in the Pacific, Lyman already had more than enough money saved up to buy his first new Pontiac automobile.
Then he took off again. His new Pontiac had a full tank of gas; he had seen to the air in the spare tire, and he spent the next sixteen years doing what he said his sister had told him to do: he saw the sights and tasted pleasure. For a half a year to as much as a year and a half he stayed in one city after another. He paid his rent on time for a succession of cheap rooms upstairs over some pawnshop or dentist’s office. He worked at a minimum wage pushing cement up construction ramps or pumped gas or shoveled ballast under railroad ties. Afterwards in the evenings he drank beer in dark bars that had booths along one wall and ranks of bottles in front of chipped mirrors on the other. And about twice a month he would follow the big hips of an aging barmaid up the stairs to his own rented room, where he would release her from her girdle and then sweat on her while she watched past his moving shoulder to see how soon the cracked plaster on the ceiling was going to fall and smother them. Meanwhile, of course, he bought more Pontiacs and he kept moving. Whenever the color of his last car didn’t just suit him anymore, he would buy another new one, and whenever it seemed that he had seen what there was of Boise or Omaha worth seeing, he would take off and drive to Dubuque or Oklahoma City or Memphis. But he never came home again.