THE THREE SENIORS were waiting in the Datsun camper when I got back to the house—Zarlingo behind the wheel, my father between him and Cavallaro.
“Where you been?” my father asked thickly, his tongue dragging. “Get a move on.”
I strode up and studied their slowing faces. Cavallaro might have been sober, but Zarlingo and my father were drunk, smoking long cigars. Zarlingo was quite gone, drooling from the corners of his mouth.
He said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“You’re too drunk to drive,” I said.
He smiled moronically.
“Wassa matter, punk? Scared?”
“Scared to death. I’m not going.”
I started toward the house, leaving them staring. My mother watched from behind the screen door. “They’re bad company, Henry. Be a good boy. Don’t go with them.”
She followed me into the kitchen and watched as I made a salami sandwich. “I had an awful dream last night,” she remembered. “The car went over a cliff and you were killed. Your chest was broke wide open, and you kept screaming, but nobody came.”
“Gee, Ma. Thanks for telling me.”
Cavallaro walked through the house and stood hesitantly in the kitchen door.
“What do you want?” I said.
“Would you feel any better if I drove?”
“How sober are you?”
“Two beers, so help me God.”
I bit into the sandwich and thought it over. Cavallaro was trying to be reasonable. He had none of Zarlingo’s boorishness.
“Mama,” I said. “Can you trust this man?”
She moved to him and looked up at his face.
“Swear you won’t drink, Louie.”
“I swear,” he said, raising his right hand.
“Swear by the blood of the Blessed Virgin.”
“I swear.”
Mama gave me a confident smile. “Go with them, Henry. Everything’s gonna be all right.” Suddenly the camera of my fate projected a dark sea and I saw fish swimming among my white, clean bones. I looked at Cavallaro, at my mother, and I was mystified. Maybe the man who had pissed into the gloves was the maddest of them all.
They wanted me up front with them in the cab, but I stopped that one immediately.
“Lotsa room,” Papa said. “Sit on my lap.”
“No, thanks, Daddy-O. I’ll make out in the camper.”
It was heaped with Papa’s junk, which I moved this way and that until there was a place to upright the wheelbarrow. I spread a canvas over it and seated myself guru-style. No doubt Zarlingo’s wife had hung the pink organdy curtains. The interior was like a mobile whorehouse where a bricklayer with all his paraphernalia was being serviced. Peering through the window, I saw my mother weeping and waving a handkerchief as I gazed mournfully at what might be my last look at the house. Cavallaro cruised down Pleasant Street to Lincoln, then east on Vernon to Highway 80.
A few miles out of town the old tomcats began harmonizing, belting out the immortals of their youth: “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” “The Prisoner’s Song,” and “Three O’Clock in the Morning.” They were horribly out of tune, but they were happy too, companions of the road, free, going places, adventuring into old times.
Through the window the lovely autumn hillsides glided by, the manzanita, the scrub oak and pine, the farmhouses, the vineyards, cattle and sheep grazing among white stones, the peach and pear orchards. Autumn up here was a strong season when the earth showed its muscle and its fertility, and there was a wild feeling in the air.
There was a knock on the window behind the seat. I opened it. “Want a beer?” my father asked.
“Sure.”
He passed it through, dripping and cold from the cooler, gorgeous in my warm throat, perfection, with the hot sun above, the white peaks of the Sierras in the distance, and the Datsun humming confidently along the wide highway. I felt good now. Perhaps the trip would turn out well after all.