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to pack it in and return home. I’d nd a job and put o college until the following year.
Or maybe I’d contact my father. You never could tell with him. Sometimes he’d just
happen to have what you needed, and if he had the money he’d buy me a plane ticket to
Arizona or help get me on a road-construction crew if he didn’t. But my mother knew me
as well as I knew her, so she had to know what was going through my brain, and the
closest she ever came to calling it quits was to remark, at the end of one of those long,
hot, dusty, scarifying days, “Ah, Ricko-Mio. When are we going to catch a break?” As if
our problem were bad luck.
Not long after, though, our luck did change, in the Ozarks of all places, where a gas
station attendant with the smallest head I’d ever seen on an adult sold us a brown
canvas water bag shaped like a pancreas that he swore would solve our radiator
problem. As near as I could tell from his toothless explanation, oered up as he attached
the thing to the Galaxie’s bug-splattered grille, the hot outside air would be cooled as it
passed through the bag, the cooler air then blowing directly onto the radiator. I had my
doubts, but the gadget seemed to reassure my mother, who now had only entrance and
exit ramps, reverse gear, wrong turns, and running out of money before we got to
Arizona to worry about. First thing each morning, and every time we stopped for gas, I
relled the bag with cool water as quickly and unobtrusively as I could, hoping no one
would ask what on earth I was doing and oblige me to repeat, this time with added
consonants, the pump jockey’s rationale. But guess what? The car stopped overheating.
Then, a couple days later in the Texas Panhandle, somebody actually stole the bag when
we stopped for lunch. This was a blow to my mother, whose excellent opinion of people
outside of Fulton County was being rubbed raw by actual experience of them, but the
theft cheered me considerably, suggesting as it did that there were apparently other
idiots in the world. They weren’t all in our car. Over the next several days, though,
every time we stopped for gas in the parched southwestern desert, my mother inquired
of the attendant whether they sold those great water bags, the ones you attached to the
grille to keep car radiators cool. Even after she patiently described the bag’s size and
shape and color, nobody seemed to know what she was talking about. Apparently you
could buy them only in Missouri from congenital nitwits.
MY MOTHER’S NEW JOB at the General Electric plant in Phoenix had always sounded a little
vague to me. When I asked what she’d be doing there, if there’d be any correlation
between her new duties and the work she’d done in the computer room in Schenectady,
or how much of a pay cut she was taking, she said she’d nd out all that when we
arrived. The main thing, she added, was that the people were nice. Her new boss was
somebody she knew, sort of, having talked with him on the phone, o and on, for years,
and he was always saying how great it would be if she came out west. She spoke of him
in the same tone of voice she used to describe the men she occasionally dated at GE,
which might be why I never pressed her for details. Maybe they’d met in Schenectady.
Maybe this was one of the guys who’d taken her out for lunch. I didn’t want to know,
that’s for sure. Whatever her reasoning, she seemed condent that any salary or tenure
she lost as a result of the move, she would quickly be able to make up. After all, the