When We Get There Read online

  The navigators who worked for Christopher Columbus were Croatians from Ragusa. My father liked to tell me about this. All of his people were Croatian. He was born in Banning, but he didn't learn English until he went to the first grade. He would say I might think my homework was a heavy chore, but going to school for him was like going to a new country every morning. He told me that navigating was a science, but it was also sorcery, because it was looking into the future. What was up ahead? Islands with friendly people? Storms with waves big as mountains? Without the Croatian navigators, my father said, there would be no coal mines in America because there would be no America. So it was our own fault we had to work them.

  Every morning when he was getting ready to go into the mine, my mother would lodge a piece of cotton between his pinky toe and the one next to it. This way if there was an accident, we could know him from his piece of cotton. But the real reason she did it was to make sure nothing would happen in the first place. To her mind, if she spent the morning preparing for a disaster, there wouldn't be one.

  The fireshot that exploded next to him was so strong that pieces of his bones got lodged in the coal wall. They had to mine those parts of him out with picks.

  My mother never dreamt about my father, even when he was alive. That story was just something she cooked up to say to Zoli, because it was hard to argue with the widow of an exploded miner when she said something like that.

  My dad used to say King mine was a mine fit for a king. He rode the mantrip down into its pit every day. He was navigating his way through the seam with fireshots.

  "Fire in the hole," he'd shout.

  Boom.

  I found the path out of Eli's woods back to the field. I heard something move behind me, a click, and then there was a bright flashlight shining at me. Zoli's hands were on my collar. I kicked at his legs. "I don't know where she is."

  He had a good grip on me. I couldn't get loose. He said, "You couldn't live without her for two seconds. You know where she is."

  He pulled me across the field to his car. He smelled like gasoline. He opened the driver's door and pushed me across the wide vinyl seat. He pressed the boxy orange flashlight against the side of my head. "You ready to tell me where she ran off to?"

  I pressed my teeth together. I shoved my hands under my legs and leaned forward so he wouldn't see I was shaking.

  He held the flashlight there for a while, and then he leaned back against his door, rested one hand on the steering wheel and the other on top of the seat behind me. "Are you gonna tell me?

  "Smells like gas around here," I said.

  He nodded toward the back. I turned and looked. There were two metal containers on the seat. I said, "What's all that for?"

  "Gasoline's for burning."

  "Burning what?"

  He shrugged. "None of your beeswax." He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and scratched his neck. He usually had his brown hair and sideburns kept neat, but they were getting away from him, and hair was growing in splotches on his cheeks and all the way down his neck. He said, "Thick as thieves, her and Slats. Pair of thieves, those two. Maybe Slats wasn't shitting me—maybe she is in California. Slats knows. If she told you she don't know, she's lying." He looked out the window, then back at me. "Think she found some old Russians out in California to have a Christmas with her?"

  He kept staring at me, waiting on me to say something. He had heavy black eyelashes and sad-looking brown eyes. It didn't matter what he was doing—he could be laughing with my mother, or making a sandwich, or saying something to scare the crap out of me—half the time those eyes made him look like he was about to fall over crying.

  He said, "I bet she did. Probably not having a thought in her head about either one of us. Having a warm drink someplace, eating that kutya mush."

  He leaned over, opened the glove compartment in front of me, and took out a pack of cigarettes. Taped inside the glove compartment door was a picture of my mother holding a bushel of tomatoes. She wasn't looking at the camera. She was looking just to the side of it, smiling to herself like she had a secret.

  He closed the glove compartment and started taking the wrapper off his cigarettes. Before he finished opening them, he breathed out a long sigh and dropped them on the seat between us. He said, "You're gonna have to tell me where she is. I miss her too goddamn much."

  "I don't miss her," I said.

  He reached out, picked me up off the seat by my shoulder and pressed me against the window. "Don't disrespect her, you little shit. Think you're something else, huh, like Slats and her brothers? They'll learn their places."

  I could feel his fingernails through my jacket and shirt. I said, "She's staying in an old hunting camp around here."

  He opened his hand. I dropped back on the seat. He turned on the car and said, "Then that's where we're going. I knew you knew."

  I pointed him around the barn and over to the woods behind the old cornfield where Great-grandfather had tried digging for oil. I wasn't sure there was a hunting camp, but I thought there might be some little place like Eli had.

  Zoli parked the car and pulled me across the seat out his door. He had me hold the flashlight up to his face so that he could fix his hair in the window reflection. All the windows were lit in Great-grandfather's house. Sounds came up from it, not separate voices, but a kind of hum, people talking and laughing.

  Zoli took the flashlight and I showed him into the woods. They were just as much a mess as the ones where Eli lived, vines and brush everyplace. I kept saying, "There's a path around here somewhere." I picked through the bushes pretending I was looking for it.

  "Jesus Christ, Lucas, come on, hurry up."

  "I think we went into the wrong place. It's down a ways. We have to go back out."

  We made our way out of the woods and stood on the edge of the old cornfield. I said, "I don't think I can find it without the flashlight."

  "How long has she been staying back there?"

  "Since she left, couple of weeks."

  He handed me the flashlight. I aimed it in front of me and bolted across the field, dodging the craters, jumping over the deep holes. He yelled after me. I kept running. I heard a thud behind me and his voice got muffled. I stopped and listened for him. A high-pitched bird noise came up out of where he was. He'd fallen into one of the craters.

  I dropped the flashlight and walked the rest of the way back to the house.

  Inside, they were all lit up like lampposts, singing and talking too loud. Benci was asleep under the dining room table, hugging a bottle of something, hay stuck to his shirt. Great-grandfather was in the kitchen singing some sad Russian song. One of the great-aunts stood in the door watching him, translating it into English for no one in particular.

  I know now that I should have sent the great-uncles out to find Zoli. Maybe if I had, they would have stopped him, and none of what came later would have happened at all.

  I didn't tell them, though. I wanted to look at the map of California I'd taken from Eli. I went upstairs to an empty bedroom. The bed was piled high with coats. I unbuttoned my jacket and started to take it off. I smelled gasoline on it and remembered the canisters in Zoli's car. I opened the window. It took a few minutes of looking into the dark before I could make out the Skylark. It was parked next to the pear tree with its doors hanging open, the lights on inside. Zoli was standing next to it. I saw a flash of metal. It took what felt like minutes and minutes more of staring into the dark before I could understand what he was doing. He was swinging a can back and forth, throwing gas all over the pear tree.

  I ran downstairs and yelled for everyone to go outside. They stopped their singing and eating and drinking and everything turned quiet and it was just my voice ringing through the rooms. I wasn't saying anything about Zoli or gasoline or the pear tree—I was shouting for my mother over and over.

  Slats went for the door. We all followed her into the cold and ran together, the ladies in their heels, the men in their boots. When we
got to him, Zoli was standing in front of the tree holding a lighter. He threw it behind him and the grass caught and the bottles at the foot of the tree exploded, and the whole thing went up in red and blue and purple.

  Chapter 2

  Great-grandfather got the idea for the pear tree from Slovenian monks he met on his way out of Europe. He was walking. He was headed for the sea. He wandered into the monks' monastery, and then into their arbor. It was full daylight. There was something in the arbor that made him think he was dreaming—the trees were shining. It seemed to him that the monks had performed an act of magic possible only because of their relationship with God—they had wrapped the pears in glass.

  He and the monks hunted for a common language. They discovered that one of them could speak a little Russian. So he learned how they made the pears grow that way and how they made their pear brandy. They shared a bottle of it with him and he said it was the finest brandy he'd tasted. As he drank, he marveled at the fruit lodged in the bottom of the bottle. Before he left, he took an unbottled pear from a tree, ate it, and kept the seeds.

  He sailed to America on a boat called Philadelphia. Somewhere in the Atlantic, he gambled away almost everything he had. He arrived here only with what was in his pockets—a little money, a list of names and addresses, the pear seeds.

  He came to Banning and rented a room in a farmhouse. He got work in the mine. Secretly, he planted the pear seeds in a field he could see from his window on the second floor of the farmhouse. He didn't know who owned the field, but he liked the way it sloped down toward a pond at the bottom of the valley. He collected empty bottles for the day when the pear tree would grow large enough, would bear fruit, and he could put them on the buds. He learned in a book that it could take eight or nine years for fruit to come from a tree grown with seeds. He decided that in eight or nine years he would buy the farmhouse and the field. And after eight years had come and gone, he bought them.

  Sometimes when I'm falling asleep, I taste the fire. I was close enough to get it in my mouth. It tasted like smoke and gasoline and live things coming apart from burning.

  Since it was winter and the grass was dry, the fire spread quickly. The great-uncles who were chasing after Zoli had to give up on him to chase after water. I might have been the only one watching when he got in the Skylark and drove off. I felt that was the only way I wouldn't be afraid of him—standing in front of a house full of knives and guns, surrounded by people protecting themselves and me.

  The headlights threw an arc of light against the woods and I saw a slip of white. I thought it was one of those bone-colored trees, but then it moved. It was a person, a man, stripped to the waist and all pale, like a fresh ghost. I opened my mouth to tell them to look, but then the man walked out of the trees toward us and I saw that it was Great-grandfather. I closed my mouth.

  He got closer to us. Other people caught sight of him. "Dad?" someone said. "Grandfather?" someone said. He got down on his knees, dug his hands into the ground, and started shoving fistfuls of dirt and grass into his pockets. The great-aunts and great-uncles circled him, but it seemed like he couldn't hear or see them. He took some of the dirt and grass out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. Slats grabbed my arm.

  "What's he doing?" I said.

  She put her hand on my back and pushed me in front of her. "In the house. In the house."

  Inside, she shoved my head under the faucet to get the smoke smell out of my hair. She put a towel on my head and pressed down. "You don't need to worry. He's going to be all right," she said. "What do you think, some Zoli can ruin him? Your coat stinks. Give it here."

  I went to one of the empty rooms and sat on the bed. Slats stood in the doorway holding my coat. "Go to sleep," she said. "Okay? I don't want to catch you staring out the window. Like I said, you don't need to worry about him. He's a grown person, a couple of hundred years old."

  "Who said I was worried about him? I just want to know why he was putting dirt in his mouth."

  "Get under the blankets." She turned out the switch. The white walls caught the shadows and light from outside.

  "I thought you were going," I said.

  "I'm going. I'm going," she said, but she pulled a chair over to the window and sat down. "If your grandfather was still living, he would have chased that Zoli off a long time ago and none of this ever would have happened."

  "Wouldn't have happened either if you hadn't told him to start coming around."

  She held her hand up like a policeman stopping people at a crosswalk. "You don't want to get yourself into a battle of the wills with me. What was I supposed to do about her? Nothing? It's not my fault he turned out the way he turned out."

  A few weeks after my father got taken, my mother fell into a long sleep. There were other women in Banning who had husbands or sons dead from the mines or from the war in Vietnam. I saw them almost every day, walking around, buying groceries, awake and talking to people. I thought that I'd just have to wait and then my mother would be up doing errands like them, instead of asleep with Slats and me sitting on either side of her in bed, reading her the paper.

  He'd been gone for half a year by the time she worked up to taking a walk in the afternoon. She'd go over to Slats's and sit on her porch swing. I was in school and Slats was working, so for a while neither of us knew she was going out there. Later, she told me that it was easier for her to be awake at Slats's. At our house, all she wanted to do was close her eyes. Slats lived right across the road from the Plate Glass, and my mother would sit there and listen to the goings-on in the factory—the machines grinding and screaming.

  One afternoon, Slats had to carry a broken sheet of glass outside and she saw that someone was on her porch. She walked halfway across the street, squinted, and it seemed to her that she was seeing a person brought back from the dead. She shouted. Her arm shot up in a wave. My mother waved back.

  Slats looked out the window for her from the Plate Glass the next day, and the next. She kept coming. Slats wanted to talk to her, but she could never leave during those hours in the afternoon. She grabbed Zoli as he was leaving one day—his shift let out before hers—and asked him to walk over to say hey to Mir­jana and see if she needed anything. He started to visit her every day. I heard her tell Slats about how quiet he kept on the porch swing, as if they were in some kind of church. She liked that.

  Outside, the great-uncles were shouting, Benci's voice above the rest of them. Slats said, "It's times like these I get to missing your grandfather so much it feels like a sickness, like a flu. I did have a dream just a few nights ago that he was still living. He came in the bedroom and asked me for a hammer. I said to him, It's up in the attic,' and then he went up there, and hearing him stomping around, I remembered it wasn't in the attic at all, it was out in the garage. I woke up feeling terrible about making him go all the way up there. You know how it is, got to climb the ladder and undo the latch and push up that door—it's a labor. I didn't think it meant anything, but maybe it meant something."

  "Meant what?" I said.

  "That something was going to happen," she said. "Why aren't you sleeping?"

  "Because you won't shut up."

  "When he was in the Navy, he worked on a ship, your grandpa. He was a flagman. He made messages with semaphores and—"

  "I know. I know what he did."

  "He still does it, sends signals, sends them to me. Of course I can't always understand what he's trying to say. It comes through confused, in some kind of code."

  "He tell you in a code my mother went to California?"

  She turned away from the window and looked at me. "I think I liked it better before, when you were acting like a mute. We were getting along then. I told you already about California. It just came out of my mouth. It doesn't mean anything."

  "Zoli says you know, and that maybe it's true, about California."

  "Oh, she isn't out there. But if he thinks she is, that's fine by me."

  "You know where she is then? How
come you been telling me you don't know?"

  "I didn't say I know where she is. I said I know where she isnt.

  "How can you know where she isn't if you don't know where she is?"

  "Who are you now? The Federal B.I.?"

  She turned back to the window and after a few minutes of quiet, said, "Your grandfather gave me a sign the night your mother was born. He was away with the Navy, on a ship someplace. I was living by myself in the row houses—"

  "Zoli said you and her are thick like thieves. Says you know."

  "I'm not listening to you," she said.

  "I'm not listening to you either," I said.

  "I was too pregnant to sleep or go anywhere. One night I get this idea to waddle out to the picnic table across from the houses. While I'm sitting there—and it's late, dark—some kid, blond and waify, comes and sits on the sidewalk and starts pounding on something with a hammer. Usually, I would have said, 'Hey, kid, what are you doing? Cut it out.' But I couldn't manage it. I got all mesmerized by that hammer going up and down, up and down. Then the kid turns to me and says, 'Oh, hi Mrs. Jankovic. Hi.' And the hammer hits the thing and the thing goes baboom, blows up loud, real loud. His mother comes screaming down the road. Kid was okay, but he could have gotten his arm ripped off. He was beating on a blasting cap he'd found by the mine."

  "That's no sign," I said.

  "The blasting cap going off, that was a sign if ever there was one—my water broke at the sound of it."

  The house turned noisy. Downstairs, people were walking in and out of the rooms. Slats said, "Maybe that's why your mother is the way she is. Her being so good-looking always set her apart a little, but, you know, starting out with a blasting cap like that might do something to a personality."

  I heard Great-grandfather getting carried up the stairs and falling into his bed. I finally fell asleep, and it was maybe the heaviest sleep of my life. I felt like I was dropping through deep water.

  My dad used to tell me about this B-25 bomber that crashed into the river up in Pittsburgh when he was a kid. Most of the crew made it out alive and they pointed right to the place where the plane went under the water. But even after dragging the river a couple hundred times, they couldn't find the plane. They never did; it's still under there, even now. Whenever my father talked about it, he always seemed so surprised at the way it had vanished. Going down into that sleep, I understood, in that way you understand things when you're falling asleep, half dreaming, that they hadn't found the plane because it was still going, dropping and dropping, on and on. I'll explain it to him when I wake up, I thought. I'll tell him they have rivers running underneath the rivers there, always more and more dark water to move through.