Sam’s mother Lorraine smelled of Evening in Paris and mouthwash when she showed up at the high school to pull Sam out of algebra class. As soon as they were out of the building, Sam turned to her and said, “What is it this time, Ma? I was taking an algebra test, for Christ’s sake!”
“We need you to drive, Sammy. Jimmy’s been drinking.”
“Yeah, so?”
“He’s been drinking since yesterday afternoon, and I can’t get him to go home. He wants to stay with me.”
“Well, can’t he stay with you at the house? Jesus, Ma, I was taking an algebra test.”
They had reached the end of the walk, where one front tire of Jimmy’s battered red Saab had been driven up onto the curb. The rest of the car jutted into the street. Jimmy was slumped in the back seat with his head resting against the window, dressed in his usual green Dickies. Jimmy appeared to be asleep. Sam had the fleeting thought that if Jimmy were dead, he could go back to his algebra test. He’d been well on his way to getting a perfect score on this one, the variables so easily becoming constants under the confident direction of his sharpened No. 2 pencil.
Sam started the car and gingerly bumped it down off the curb, with a raucous clinking of empty Genesee bottles from the back. When the car was level again, he pulled a U-turn, drove to the end of the street, and stopped. “All right, Jimmy, where to?”
There was no answer from the back seat.
“Where to, Jimmy? I don’t have all day here. There’s somebody coming up behind me.”
Jimmy spoke for the first time since Sam had gotten into the car. “Vergennes. I need to see a man about a part.”
“Do you know where this place is in Vergennes, where you need to see a man about a part?”
Lorraine answered him. “Of course he does, Sammy.”
Jimmy’s voice from the back seat echoed Lorraine’s. “Of course I do, Sammy.”
“I don’t want to get all the way down there, and he says, ‘Oh, I don’t think it was the guy in Vergennes. I think it was the guy in St. Johnsbury. Or maybe it was the guy in White River. Or the guy in Grand Isle.’”
“You know that only happened once, Sammy,” Lorraine said.
Sam didn’t answer her. He pulled away from the stop sign and headed down Main Street out of town, still with the beer bottle accompaniment from the back seat. “Can’t you do something with those damn empties?”
“No,” Jimmy said. “Ain’t nobody empty around here!” He laughed and nudged the back of the driver’s seat with his knee until Sam yelled, “Quit it!”
Lorraine twisted around and reached her arm behind her. “Gimme one of them, will you, Jimmy?”
“Ma, if he doesn’t cut that out, I’m going to turn this car around and go back to my algebra test, and you two can find somebody else to drive you around.”
As expected, when they got to Saint Albans, Lorraine directed Sam to stop in front of her sister’s house, where she blubbered for several minutes and refused to get out of the car because she didn’t want her sister to see her in such a sorry state.
Sam, who had left the car running this whole time, put it in reverse and backed out of the driveway into the street. “Are you sure you want to go to Vergennes?”
Lorraine nodded and dug a Kleenex out of her pocketbook. “Yes,” she said dabbing at her eyes, then her nose. “We’ll get the part Jimmy needs, and then we’ll go home. Okay, Jimmy? Is that okay, Jimmy? We’ll get your part and go home, Jimmy?”
“So long as we get that fuel pump. A car can’t run without a fuel pump, Sammy.”
Lorraine started crying again, and Sam reached his hand behind the seat until Jimmy put a beer in it, which Sam passed to his mother.
When they reached Vergennes, Jimmy directed Sam to an auto salvage yard, with only two wrong turns. Several minutes later, as expected, Jimmy returned to the car empty-handed. “He didn’t have it. It musta been the guy in Grand Isle. But I coulda sworn it was the guy in Vergennes, I coulda sworn it was–”
Sam interrupted him before he could say that Sam now needed to turn the car around and drive to Grand Isle. “I am not driving you two to Grand Isle. It’s getting dark, and by the time we got there, the place’d be closed.”
“No, Harlan stays open late. And if he’s closed, we’ll go to his house. I know where he lives.”
Sam lowered his voice and leaned over to Lorraine. “Forget it, Ma. We are not going to Grand Isle.”
“But, Sammy–”
“No.”
Sam still had not started the car.
Lorraine looked over her shoulder. “I think Sammy’s right, Jimmy. It’d be too late by the time we got there.”
As Sam headed north out of town, Jimmy said, “Are we going to Grand Isle to see the guy about the fuel pump?”
“No, Jimmy. Sammy says it’s too late.”
“But what am I gonna do? The MG won’t run without a fuel pump.”
“You’ve got plenty of other cars that run.”
“Yeah, but the MG won’t run without a fuel pump.”
Lorraine didn’t say anything for a few minutes, lighting a cigarette and drinking from her beer. Just as Sam was about to turn on Route 7, she said, “No, wait. I know what. Let’s go to The Sap Bucket. Somebody told me there’s a real good country and western band playing there. I can’t remember the name of them, but they’re supposed to be real good.”
Sam turned the blinker off and put his foot on the brake. “What? What do you want to do?”
“I want to go to The Sap Bucket.” Lorraine’s voice rose. “To listen to country and western music!”
“All right, all right. You don’t have to yell. Where is this place?”
“Jeffersonville.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Jesus Christ, Sammy, do I have to repeat everything I say to you?”
When they arrived at The Sap Bucket, and Sam saw the Volvos parked outside, he knew they had the wrong bar, or the wrong information, or something. “Are you sure this is the place?” he said to Lorraine, who was buttoning her coat.
“Of course I’m sure.” She opened the car door and scrambled out. “You think I’m stupid or something?” She continued talking as she pushed the driver’s seat forward and reached into the back to help Jimmy out. “This place has been here for twenty years. I know where the hell I am. Don’t I, Jimmy?”
“Listen to your mother,” Jimmy said as he followed Lorraine out of the car. “She knows where to go, she wouldn’t steer us wrong.”
“All right,” Sam said, not wanting Jimmy to get started. “I’ll stay in the car and wait for you here.”
“You will not!” Lorraine said. “It’s too cold. You’ll freeze out here in the car. And anyways, I want you to listen to this band. This is a good band. You like good music. You come in with us and listen to the band, and we’ll dance, won’t we, Jimmy?” She stumbled and clutched Jimmy’s arm. The thin soles of her high heels slipped on the icy surface of the parking lot. Jimmy lost his balance, and they both went down, laughing.
“Shit,” Sam said. He locked the car, put the keys in his front pocket, and picked up Lorraine and Jimmy, who were both still laughing.
“Shit,” he said again, this time to himself.
As soon as they walked into the bar, Sam knew for certain they were in the wrong place. The band, warming up on the tiny stage, was a bunch of aging hippies. One was leaning over a stand-up bass, tuning it.
Lorraine found a table near the small dance floor, in front of the band, and they got themselves settled, Lorraine laughing and repeating herself to no one in particular, Jimmy just sitting there mouthing his cigar and looking glazed. When the waitress came to take their order, Lorraine asked her how they had got the wood inside the plastic table. The waitress informed her that it was the other way around.
“Well, it don’t look that way to me,” Lorraine said.
She and Jimmy ordered a pitcher of beer, and Sam ordered a Coke. He thought briefly about going out to the car and getting his books so that he could do his algebra homework for tomorrow, but the bar was so noisy he knew that he would never be able to concentrate.
To his dismay, Sam saw that his mother was crying again. Loudly. Wetly. Profusely. Her nose had turned red and her cheeks had mottled.
He hissed across the table. “What is your problem? Why are you crying?”
Jimmy said, “It’s my fault. My fault. I asked her to marry me. I was just joking, you understand. But I meant it. I shouldn’ta done it.”
Sam knew that the only thing to do was to distract them, one way or another. Bringing up the fact that Jimmy was already married was pointless. Sam was sure that neither one of them knew what the other was talking about anyway. Jimmy didn’t know why Lorraine was crying, and Lorraine didn’t know why Jimmy kept asking her to marry him.
Lorraine was still sniffling and Jimmy now had tears in his eyes. “I been hurt,” Lorraine explained to Jimmy. “I been away too long and I come back hurt, and I don’t want you to know about it because we was such good friends in high school, such good friends. You’re a good man, Jimmy, and you have a good wife and a good marriage and two good sons. Me, I got no husband, no marriage. I’ll never marry again, never. It’s too much pain. I got four little kids with no daddy, a big baby so damned foolish he stays in trouble all the time, two growed-up boys with shit for brains that don’t have half a brain between ’em. And Sammy. Sammy is my only son, my only boy. He is so good to me.” She began sobbing loudly.
Jimmy was looking a little pale, and that distracted Lorraine’s attention for a few minutes. Would he puke or wouldn’t he puke? Sam assumed that he wouldn’t, or if he did, he would have the decency to make it outside first. He was not a puke-on-people’s-shoes drunk.
The band was warming up under the soft glow of muted lights over the small platform that served as a stage. When they were through with the plunks on the bass and the honks on the saxophone and the blatts on the trumpet, another aging hippie, this one dressed in faded bell bottoms and an embroidered muslin shirt, came out from behind the bar and went up to the microphone, tapping it with his finger. If he said, Testing, testing, like some dipshit school principal, Sam decided he was going to get up and leave. He would just go out and sit in Jimmy’s car, turn on the dome light, and work on his algebra problems.
Sam was watching the guy in the embroidered shirt say, Testing, testing, and sure enough, he even said, One, two, three. Sam started to get up, but then he noticed that Lorraine had stopped crying, and Jimmy looked less pale and more alert.
“Welcome,” said the guy in the embroidered shirt, now that he was sure the microphone was working properly, “to The Sap Bucket. We are proud to present for your listening pleasure, The Chet Arthur Five.”
The crowd had quieted down as soon as the guy in the embroidered shirt stepped up to the mic and was now suitably mellow to applaud The Chet Arthur Five when they took the stage. This band of rejects had better be good, Sam thought, to take the name of his favorite president–although it was damned rude and disrespectful to call themselves Chet instead of Chester A. Ever since he had first gone to see Chester A. Arthur’s birthplace, a tiny four-room farmhouse stuck way out on a dirt road in East Fairfield, he had been a great admirer of Chester A. Arthur. For a man to be born and raised in East Fairfield, Vermont, of all places, and become President of the United States was nothing less than a wonder. Such a man should be admired and esteemed.
The Chet Arthur Five played jazz, some blues, a few cheesy songs. They weren’t bad, and they weren’t good, just some guys getting together who could play, who knew some weird old songs, songs from before their time, some from their grandparents’ time, the lead singer announcing the history of each song as though he were giving a lecture at school. Lorraine was quiet through the first set. Sam could see that it was taking a while to sink in that this was not the country and western band she had been expecting to see. After the break, when they swung into a syncopated little number called “Java,” about all the different ways you can prepare and drink coffee, she objected. “This band is shit,” she said. “They can’t play for shit. Now if Hank Williams hadn’ta died, we wouldn’t have to listen to this shit.” As it splatted loudly on the wood floor, each shit was as loud and as noticeable as if it had come from a cow herself.
“It’s all right,” Jimmy said. “I like it. They don’t do the songs as good as the originals, but they’re pretty good.”
“See what happened when Hank died?” Lorraine continued.
Now that she had a stupid idea in her head, she was going to beat it to death, and if she bored her son insensible and embarrassed the rest of the people in the bar, that was no concern of hers.
“Music has just gone to shit since Hank died. To shit. The only one now who even comes near to taking his place is Patsy Cline.”
“Patsy Cline is dead,” Sam said. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them.
“No, she ain’t,” Lorraine said, raising her voice. “She sings all them good songs. I’ve got three of her tapes, and one of ’em’s brand new. She ain’t dead. You’re thinking of Hank Williams, Sammy.”
“O.K., Ma.”
“Don’t you ‘O.K., Ma’ me. You still think she’s dead, but she ain’t. Is she, Jimmy?”
“Who?” Jimmy said.
“Patsy Cline!!”
“What about her?” Jimmy said. “She’s dead.”
Sam put his hands over his face. He couldn’t listen to any more of this. He wouldn’t listen to any more of this. He would just sit there with his hands over his face and listen to The Chet Arthur Five play their weird old songs until his mother finally took it in her head that they could leave.
After a few minutes, he heard Jimmy stand up and say, “Time to go. My show’s coming on.” Sam took his hands down from his face and watched as Jimmy mentally counted the glasses on the table, took a bill out of his wallet, and dropped it on the table.
When they walked out to the car, Sam unlocked the driver’s side door, but when he pushed the seat forward so that Jimmy could get in the back, Jimmy put out his hand and asked for the keys. “I’ll drive, Sammy. I don’t want to miss my show.”
Sam looked at Lorraine across the roof of the car, fully expecting her to object, but she didn’t, saying instead, “It’s all right, Sammy. Give him the keys.”
Sam turned to Jimmy, then back to Lorraine, his hand closed in a fist around the keys. “He shouldn’t be driving.”
Lorraine walked around the car and gestured for the keys. “Jimmy’s going to drive so he don’t miss his show. He’s going to have to hurry to make it back to the house in time. You’re going to watch it at the house, ain’t you, Jimmy?”
Jimmy nodded. Sam handed over the keys and climbed into the back seat. As he fastened his seatbelt, he wondered almost idly if this would be the night he would die. Jimmy backed the car out of the parking lot with little trouble, easing the front-wheel drive over the snow.
The road from Jeffersonville to Enosburg was narrow, winding, and dark. Each time they met another car coming towards them, Sam flinched, telling himself it was from the car’s headlights suddenly shining in his eyes, not from the knowledge that Jimmy was driving the little Saab over eighty on the narrow winding road. Even though the heater was on in the car, he could tell how cold it was outside. Little drafts of cold, dry air came in through cracks around the rear and side windows. The blackness of the road and the pine trees beside the road made it seem all the colder. He could see snow on the trees as they drove, glowing dully in the darkness but with no sparkle when the car headlights shined on them. The road was dry with a thin white layer of salt visible in the headlights, the occasional patch of black ice sliding under their tires giving no indication how treacherous it was.