Chapter Ten

Heat rose off the Texas roads, making the asphalt shimmer in black waves like liquid tar. Daddy and I were farther from home than we’d ever been before. For nearly two days, we drove from the green rolling hills of east Texas to the dusty western plains, with boxes of school clothes roped down in the back of the pick-up truck.

It was Daddy’s idea to take the back roads rather than the interstates to Berkeley, where classes started in a couple of weeks. You could really see America on its back roads, Daddy had said, eager to get started. He’d never seen anything west of Dallas.

We stopped for gas and rest rooms at rundown, one-pump stations where all you could see on the Texas horizon was the gray of hills so distant they might’ve been clouds raining on Vietnam. Texas had the cheapest gas I’d ever seen: nineteen cents a gallon. That nineteen cents put Daddy in a great mood. He pulled into a one-pump station with a run-down shack and said, “Heaven on earth! Never dreamed getting across Texas could be so cheap.” He bought me a Bit ‘O Honey candy bar, and said, with a lilt in his voice, “Here’s a bit ‘o heaven, hon.”

But as I unwrapped it and started to bite, a couple of fat maggots were burrowing into the candy. I almost gagged. “Maggots!” I said, but Daddy didn’t hear, and I tossed it out the window when he wasn’t looking. After all he’d been through, did he need to know heaven had maggots?

In the hill country, the truck behaved like a beauty, like a farm nag outstripping race horses in a surprise finish. Every movement when the gears shifted was a perfect purr. Daddy snoozed, his elbow stuck out the window, his head lolling against a pillow wedged between the seat back and the door. When Daddy drove, he arranged a pillow beneath him to raise him high enough to see above the steering wheel. I’d gotten tall like Mama, so I could see fine.

The truck never performed so smoothly with him, I thought, letting the speedometer needle edge above seventy.

It would shimmy and jerk and stall out with Daddy. You just had to have the right touch, like Mama and me.

I distracted myself on that long, hot trip by thinking about the new life that lay ahead: California! At my destination, the Pacific Ocean stretched all the way to Asia. Maybe I’d never go back home, I thought, with a ripple of excitement in my stomach. On the West Texas plains, it began to rain, a hot, steamy splatter that fell in hard drops. “Like a cow peein’ on a flat rock,” said Daddy, squinting over the steering wheel.

On the passenger side, the windshield wiper was stuck about a third of the way up the glass, and above its slant, for a moment, Mama’s face appeared, the drops of rain like pearls sliding down her cheeks, but she was smiling, as if looking at me from the other side of a mirror. Despite the rain, her eyes were so clear that I could see my own reflected there, like a dream so strange you remember it for years. Her face was younger than when she’d died, and she looked like the Rita Hayworth-style picture of her that Daddy had kept on the mantel until he married Marilyn. Mama’s red hair was pinned up in a pouf, but this time, in the windshield, her face was relaxed and happy rather than pouty, and her hair lay in waves on her shoulders. I smiled back, the way I did when I saw her in dreams, but then the picture faded into Rob’s face and the smile disappeared.

Rob’s eyes had been teary when he’d hugged me good-bye. He ducked his head to wipe his eyes on his shirt sleeve, and whispered that he’d call and write every week. I couldn’t bring myself to cry. There would be lots of guys in Berkeley, I told myself, people who could make the world a bigger place. He pressed a cassette tape into my hands, the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper,” along with other cuts from Revolver. Since the truck had only an AM radio, Charlene bought me a cassette player and FM radio.

With it in my lap, I listened to Paul McCartney sing “She’s Leaving Home” while I drove. “I’m puddling up, sweetie,” Daddy said, his eyes watery as he reached for the radio dial. “Let’s find something else.” I was shocked, not that he was sad I was leaving; I already knew that. Daddy never did hide his feelings, and for a long time I thought all men were like that. What surprised me was that he actually listened to the Beatles’ words, just like he’d listened to Mama’s songs. Somehow, I had always thought rock ‘n roll was a secret language that adults couldn’t hear even when it was spoken in front of them.

Soon Daddy was snoring beside me and I didn’t want to wake him up. You couldn’t hear the boxes rattling under the tarp in the truckbed, with both the music and the snoring. Daddy’s face looked smooth, reconciled, in sleep at least, to my uncertain future in a foreign place, and to Charlene’s new future.

Sitting high behind the wheel, gunning the engine westward toward the spot on the horizon where an orange sun was slipping into a bank of blue clouds and distant mountains, I thought about how Aunt Sylvia told Daddy that people are just people, everywhere. Surely she didn’t really mean it. Look at how she’d fled Biloxi. It was just a good argument for Daddy to let me go, I thought. People had to be different in California.

As I sped along that West Texas road, my mind wandered with the hum of the engine. In California, no one would know how Mama had died, not if I could help it. The idea was so exhilarating I wanted to push the accelerator to the floor. Daddy was still sleeping, his head against the window, the wind ruffling his hair, a frown now between his eyebrows, as if he were worried even in sleep. Had he known, back then, that Mama was capable of saying “I love you, sugar muffin” to another man? The speedometer needle was on eighty when Daddy woke, stretched his legs, then almost leaped from his seat. “Slow down! Eighty miles an hour! For cryin’ out loud, Jubilee Starling!” He clutched the edge of the seat. “Is that how you’ve been driving this truck while you’ve put all those miles on it? It’s a wonder you haven’t had a wreck.”

He’d noticed the mileage, then. “But it wasn’t even shimmying. See how smooth it rides? And there’s not another car in sight.” I started to press on the accelerator again, but he grabbed my arm.

“I’m driving.” He flapped a hand to tell me to pull over. “It’s getting dark, and we’ve still got a hundred miles to Seminole.” That was our destination, the next town Daddy had circled in red on the map.

The truck jerked under his control, and my words came out with a start. “Daddy, what did you know about … I mean, did you know anything about, well, what they were doing before it happened?” I couldn’t bring myself to say Levi Litvak’s name, or to use the word “murder” in the same breath with Mama’s name.

The truck slowed more, though there wasn’t another car in sight. He shook his head. “No, honey, I didn’t have any idea, but if I had, you can bet I’d have put a stop to it.”

It was hard to believe those words were coming out of Daddy’s mouth. He was actually talking to me about Levi Litvak. I took a risk, scarcely daring to breathe. “But what if she loved him?”

“She might’ve thought she did. But love’s foolish sometimes. She came to her senses, even if it was too late. I tell you, I could’ve punched him out. He didn’t want to take responsibility for anything.”

“What do you mean, she came to her senses?” All I could think about was the phone call I’d overheard years ago, Mama telling Levi Litvak she had too much to lose. “What did she tell you, Daddy?”

He glanced over at me, eyebrows raised. “Same thing she told you, I expect.”

“Why would she tell me?”

Relief came over his face, and he lifted his chin higher over the steering wheel. “Well, I’m glad she didn’t. Some things, well, it’s just too … intimate for Charlene to be talking about with her little sister.”

Charlene! I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So he’d been talking about Charlene the whole time, not Mama and Levi Litvak. It was the most intimate conversation I’d ever had with Daddy and we’d been talking about entirely different things.

“‘Course, you’re not so little any more, and you need to know …” Daddy cleared his throat. “You need to know things so you won’t wind up where Charlene is.”

“Mama told me the facts of life,” I said, wondering if I should ask, Would you have gone after Levi Litvak the way you went after Ernie Crenshaw and his father?

“I wish Charlene had known a little more,” he said. “But she’s seen the truth about that boy. I’m a Christian man, but I could punch the lights out of Ted Crenshaw. You look at the father, you see why the son got to be the way he is. An acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“Daddy,” I said, taking a deep breath, “Did Mama ever eat light bulbs?”

He smiled, like he was remembering something nice. “Oh, your mama could be silly sometimes. When she was young, she loved to be the life of the party.”

“You mean she did?”

It must have been the shock in my voice that made him frown. “Just once, at her senior prom. She was singing, and it was part of her act. Where did you hear that?”

“I don’t remember,” I lied, remembering Mr. Langstrom’s voice from the teachers’ lounge, the nasty laughter.

“It was just one of those little bulbs, for flashlights.” He showed me how big it was, holding about half an inch between his thumb and forefinger. “She crunched it up real fine, like sand, so it never cut her.” He gave me a sharp look. “Don’t you go trying it out, just because your mother did. And don’t you go trying any drugs, either. If anybody offers you a marijuana cigarette,” he said it like, “marriage-wanna.” “Then you say, ‘no thank you,’ you hear me? If I hear tell of you doing any drugs out there, I’ll come get you before you can say ‘help me, Daddy.’”

“We’ve talked about this a million times.”

“And we’ll talk about it a million times more if we have to,” he said.

I thought for a second. “Did anybody offer Mama that light bulb, or did she just bring it to the prom, herself?”

He wasn’t smiling now. “Honey, it was just a trick she read about somewhere. Folks in New York were doing it, I reckon. Don’t get funny ideas about your mama. She just did that once, and she was lucky it didn’t hurt her.”

In the Mojave Desert, we passed through a sand storm so thick we couldn’t see anything but swirls of brown sand outside the windows, peppering the glass like gritty sleet. I could even taste the sand, feel it in my eyes and nose. Daddy slid the truck to a stop on what we hoped was the side of the highway. The desert hurled itself at the truck so hard that the hula dancer tipped and bowed all the way to the dashboard, but she stayed on her feet. I looked at her while I prayed, and I thought of Mama and how she would hold me in her arms if she were here. Not now, God, I prayed. Not before California. I thought of pioneers in that great desert, whose wagons would have filled with sand, and whose skeletons would lie buried far beneath the roiling sea that the desert had become in just a few seconds. Charlene would say it was the wrath of God, and I wondered if I deserved this for wandering too far from home. But Daddy handed me his handkerchief to put over my mouth and nose, and then he pulled his shirt up to his face, squinting his eyes shut. Semi-trucks whizzed past us, invisible through that sunless sand, with a rumble that made the pick-up shake even more.

And then, finally, it was gone. The truck shook in only little trembles, and the air got brighter, then the sun came out and the wind stopped.

We saw that we were barely off the asphalt. Ahead, other cars became visible, and they, too, started up slowly as if dazed. “That was scary,” I said, trying to spit out the grit in my mouth. Daddy squeezed my hand.

“We got through it,” he said. Then we moved on, slowly, though the windshield was so pocked by the grinding sand that we could barely see through it. Daddy drove for miles against the blinding sun until we came to a town with a garage that could replace the glass. All those tiny towns looked alike, a main street with dusty storefronts and lazy dogs dreaming on the sidewalks.

Aunt Sylvia’s admonition that “people are all the same” came to my mind while we waited for the windshield to be fixed. The kids who lived here survived, just like I had in Biloxi. Someone had painted a bright mural on a grocery store’s cinder block wall, showing brown-skinned people eating vegetables. Maybe that was how they passed the time.

Everywhere we went, though, if there was a radio station, it was playing “Hey Jude.” It was as if all the small towns couldn’t get enough of hearing a song everyone in the big cities was listening to. It made me feel at home there in the barren towns in the middle of the desert, like coming from a small town, whether it was Biloxi, Mississippi or Seminole, Texas, made you part of a bigger community. All those people all over the globe living in villages might be joined together even more than people in New York or Los Angeles. Even in small desert towns and in tiny Mississippi hamlets, in the late-August heat of 1968, people were singing about taking a sad song and making it better …

I couldn’t wait to get to Berkeley.

Daddy insisted on driving when we neared Stockton. We’d driven all the way from Oxnard, near Los Angeles, but now there was no choice but to hit the main highways. He climbed into the driver’s seat and clutched the wheel with both hands. I realized, when Daddy worked his jaws every time he shifted, that the real reason we’d taken back roads across the country was because the interstate scared him to death. I eyed him, and a rush of pity made me put my hand over his. Without taking his eyes from the road, he shook it off.

“I need both hands to drive, sweetheart,” he growled. With Daddy jerking at the wheel, it was a harrowing drive to Berkeley. Beyond, the San Francisco Bay was spread out, sparkling under the late sun like a jewelry box filled with precious stones, and you could see what I knew must have been the Golden Gate Bridge. It was like the pictures, except it was brighter orange. The city sparkled under a white light, like someone had waved a wand over it.

On campus, the air smelled different, and trees with long silvery purplish leaves lined the streets. Eucalyptus, I thought. They smelled vaguely like the oils Grandma Tattershall had used on Charlene’s and my chests when we were little and sick with colds. It was a good smell, a comfort. Everywhere Daddy turned the truck, there were more buildings than I’d imagined a university could have. We wound our way through narrow lanes that ended in parking spaces marked “Professor Emeritus,” and Daddy would have to turn around. “Must be a pretty famous guy,” he said, shoving the gear stick into reverse once again.

The eucalyptus trees shivered in the coolness of the late afternoon, and the kids we passed wore jackets with their jeans, and either sandals or hiking boots. My white Keds already seemed out of place, and people stared at the truck while we meandered through the twisting roads up the campus, looking for the dormitory I’d been assigned.

When we found it, the sky was getting dusky, and parents stood clustered, kissing their kids and climbing back into their shiny new cars. We rattled up in the truck. It shimmied and coughed to a standstill, the way it did when Daddy turned off the engine. Two skinny guys in patched jeans and tie-dyed tee-shirts turned to stare. One of them had a scraggly mustache, and the other wore a macramé peace sign around his neck. I jumped out, eager to meet the people who were going to be the friends I hadn’t been able to make at Tallulah High. “Are y’all in this dorm?” I asked, picking at one of the ropes knotted onto the truck bed.

The one with the peace sign frowned, like he didn’t understand. A disbelieving smile slackened the other’s mouth. His eyes tightened as he gazed at the truck and settled on the license plate, with its white magnolia and “Mississippi, the Hospitality State” stamped on it. At least it didn’t say “Home of the Two Miss Americas” any more.

“Not real friendly, huh?” Daddy grunted and yanked at a heavy box.

Now the guy was studying Daddy’s elevator shoes. “Wow!” He nudged his friend and grinned, showing little pearl-like teeth. “Hey, man, take us all the way up to the penthouse.” He snickered, and his friend shrugged and turned away.

What happened to peace, love, and understanding? I hoped Daddy didn’t get his lame joke.

He did, but he didn’t stop untying the rope. “Nope,” he told them, without even looking their way. “I reckon you’re high enough as it is.”

The guy looked stunned, then burst out laughing and walked back to the dorm. He poked his head inside and yelled up, hand cupped to his mouth just like Mrs. Guest used to do when she’d call Mama over for coffee. “Hey, the Beverly Hillbillies are here!” he called. He came back out, grinning, his hands shoved in the back pockets of his jeans, his elbows standing out like skinny chicken wings.

It reminded me of the way some football players in Biloxi made fun of me once in the hall when I was wearing black eyeshadow and green nail polish: “Hey, it’s a runaway from the Addams Family!”

Daddy looked the guy straight in the eyes. “It’s a fool who makes the world a little colder, isn’t it? Why don’t you try not to be so damn cool? You’re working too hard at it, buddy.” I couldn’t believe it: Daddy quoting Paul McCartney!

The guy with the chicken wings couldn’t believe it, either. He stared with his head cocked like a bird. All those times “Hey Jude” blared from the radio during the trip, the words had gotten into Daddy’s brain. He was listening to every word. It made me wonder what else he might know.

Two girls came out to stare at the truck. “Mississippi!” one of them whispered. She had long, straight hair, the kind I’d envied when I used to iron my waves to look like Jane Asher. They looked at me like I was from Mars, some alien invader posing as a backwoods immigrant to the “love capital” of the world.

Daddy winked at me. “You want to come back home, you say the word, sweetheart. But if you want to stay, you’ll show these characters what it means to be a self-respecting human being. They could learn a lot from you.” He put his arm around me and kissed my cheek. “You’ll teach them some things they never even thought about.”

I was proud of him. It was a side of Daddy I’d never seen before, the side Mama must’ve fallen in love with: he was cool. He was comfortable with who he was, as long as he wasn’t driving a truck on the interstate.

As I lifted one of the boxes from the truck, a deep voice bellowed out. “Man, this is what I call a superior vehicle! And from Mississippi, blues capital of the world!” A guy with hair that stood out like amber cotton candy held both his hands before the grille without touching it, framing it reverently. His loose white pants fluttered in the light breeze, and he wore a satin vest embroidered with silver stars but no shirt, so you could see blonde hairs curling on his chest. When he saw me, he strode forward, his hand extended. I propped the box between my hip and the truck and shook hands. “Look at those side vents on this truck,” he said. “1948, right?”

“How’d you know?” I asked.

One of the girls looked at me, new respect in her eyes. “It’s Cat Heller,” she said, as if that answered my question.

“Who’s he?” I asked.

“A D.J. on KZEN,” she said.

Of course. California was like that, I thought, famous people everywhere. Cat Heller backed off and admired the shiny finish. “Far out. Look at the shape she’s in! This is one truck that’s been respected.”

The two kids in tie-dyed tee-shirts looked sheepish when he lumbered over to them, like a cat would walk, leading with his hips, his shoulders thrust back. He took the skinniest one’s elbow. “Now that’s your elbow, and that’s your ass,” he said, nodding to the guy’s rear end, where a tear in his jeans revealed a pink square of flesh. “You oughtta stop showing your ass around here. After all, buddy …” he turned to me. “Sorry, I didn’t get your.…”

“Jubilee Starling,” I said, too eagerly, so I caught myself and put my hand on my hip, trying to look cool.

He smiled, like he was trying not to laugh, and turned back to the two guys. “After all, Jubilee’s new in town.” He took the box from me, and carried it to the dorm, then went back for another.

“Thank you, sir,” said Daddy, and shook his hand when they were both going back for more boxes. I was glad Daddy didn’t give him the Shriner handshake. He and Daddy worked silently, while the band of people who’d been sneering began to gather, admiring the truck now that this guy had blessed it. A couple of other guys pitched in to help unload the boxes. With new confidence, I turned Charlene’s cassette player to “With A Little Help From My Friends,” but before I could click it on, someone in the crowd sang, “Hey Jube, don’t be a rube …”

It was so soft I wasn’t sure I heard it. Daddy and the guy with the silver stars on his vest were grunting and scraping the boxes against the truck, so they didn’t hear. I had a second thought. I flipped over the tape and let “Eleanor Rigby” sail out, with the Beatles wondering where all the lonely people come from.

That afternoon was my introduction to the magic of Berkeley. Aunt Sylvia had been right when she told Daddy people were the same anywhere you went.

Everywhere, people thought I was a weirdo. Maybe I was.