Four Years from Home Read online

  There weren’t many cars on Route 19 heading south toward U.S. 70 West. It was two days after Christmas, after all, and not everyone had a crazy family like me. Road crews were still out clearing the snow and I was stuck behind a dumb salt truck methodically spreading his briny contribution to the overall mess. Surely he could go faster than twenty-five miles an hour doing that? Salt is salt. You get it on the road and it melts what it touches. How hard could that be? I couldn’t tell which was worse — the crappy roads and being stuck behind a slow-moving jerk, or caving in to the crying and whining of my sisters and the logic of my younger brother. How could I let them bully me into going to Kenyon and doing the right thing anyway? This wasn’t the right thing. This was stupid. I was probably just sick of them and the whole ordeal and needed to get away from it. That was it. This was really my decision to leave them in their idiotic squalor and take six hours to make the normally three-hour drive from Pittsburgh to Kenyon in the aftermath of the worst snowstorm in years. My decision…

  Enjoying the sights really isn’t my bag. When I’m driving, I’m only interested in one thing — getting to where I am going as fast as possible, or possibly even faster than that. Speed limits, after all, are for losers. Lieutenant Frank Bullitt — that’s who I was behind the wheel, and one of these days I would catch that bad guy, the one with the nerdy glasses and black gloves. If only I could get him before his car blew up, maybe I’d get a few pointers on the proper screeching of tires. I was good at it, but whoever he was, he was the best. Because of him, I had long ago decided that in my kingdom it would be illegal to go through any intersection with all four wheels on the pavement. I would make it a ticketable offense; despite the fact that it had taken me years of practice on my family to be able to take the neighborhood roads at dangerous, tire screeching speeds, and even though I was still working on the flying through the air thing. My subjects would all have to comply or suffer the consequences (which I had yet to detail in The Book of Tom).

  Mom called me a holy terror behind the wheel when she had the pleasure of being in the car with me. I took that as a compliment, and having her there made it easier to judge how well I was doing by the sound of her screams. But, in all honesty, she did more damage to the car than I ever did. It was her constant death grip on the passenger-side armrest that had finally broken it off, not my driving. As if that would save her from the crash she expected every time I swerved around some knucklehead in my way. “The Post-Gazette reported this morning that a car carrying two people flew off Cochran Road, crashing into the woods. The driver was killed instantly but the female passenger survived because she was hanging on to the armrest.” I don’t think so.

  This salt truck had to go. I was getting ready to make my move around it when I noticed the sign to Mayview State Hospital. In the instant before I pulled out and around the truck I debated stopping at the loony bin to see crazy Aunt Lucy. I’d never gone with Mom and Dad to visit her after that first time. I was too freaked out by all the crazies. But that was okay — they didn’t visit her much either, maybe once a year. Dad said she wasn’t really Aunt Lucy anymore. I was curious what they had done to turn her into someone else and considered a pit stop to use the men’s room, check it out, maybe torturing the helpless patients in the process, but the buzzer sounded, the debate closed and I gunned it. It had nothing to do with this fear I had that someday it would be me stuck in there, sitting by the window, drooling, staring out at nothing in particular, hoping for a visitor who remembered my name and could remind me of it. I didn’t need anyone to confirm that I was indeed Tom Ryan and not someone else. I just wanted to get this over. I floored it.

  Route 70 was the main interstate between western Pennsylvania and southeastern Ohio. It was one of the few four lane highways around with a reasonable speed limit — doing seventy on 70 was what the kids used to say, though for me it was more like eighty-five on 70. It was always one of the first cleared whenever there was a snowstorm. I knew this because it passed through West Virginia, where we used to go drinking in high school because the legal age was eighteen there, and even that was not enforced unless you really screwed up. I know, because I was caught three times when I was only seventeen and never spent a day in jail. They never even called my parents. That may have been because they recognized their true king in my young punk disguise, or it may have been because they believed my stories, but it was more likely because they liked the color of my money. I tried to imagine how far a ten-dollar bribe would get me today. Inflation was a bugger.

  Perfectly skidding around the entrance ramp, I regained control and merged into the light traffic heading west — mostly truckers — poor suckers, out on a day like this. I felt their pain, having been forced out in this weather like me. Maybe they were out because of their stupid families or maybe it was their bosses who decided that taking a chance on making more money outweighed the potential danger of being anywhere other than home in that kind of weather. Maybe it was both. Maybe they were doing the right thing, too and were getting paid for it. Now why didn’t I think of that? Rental cars aren’t usually much to speak of but the Pontiac I had gotten was a V8 and its weight made it a good handler on slick roads. I eased into the left lane and let her rip, keeping it at a consistent eighty. I didn’t want to push it, what with the slick roads and all.

  The more miles I put between Pittsburgh and myself, the better I felt. No more nagging family, no more snow shoveling, no more turkey leftovers. But it wasn’t just them I was leaving behind. I was also leaving Harry back there in Australia while I conquered the Risk world. Crazy thoughts. Being in a car alone on a long drive with nothing to keep your mind occupied brings them on. That’s when you start to think of things like how sorry you really are for some of the nasty stuff you’ve done and how much you actually miss someone despite how long you have worked at hating them. What good is a BB rifle with nothing to shoot at? Why would anyone, apart from me, want to kill him? Would I undo any of my dirty tricks if I had known it would turn out this way?

  I cranked up the radio and as the distance grew between my rifle and me and all the things I had done to Harry, he took his place as just another memory buried in the side yard. Maybe I wouldn’t stop at Kenyon at all. Maybe I’d just keep driving. Maybe I’d stay lost for years. Four years from home would just about do it. I glanced at the speedometer. I was doing ninety-five. I unclenched my clammy hands and let up on the gas. Maybe four years wasn’t enough. Maybe it should be longer.

  There wasn’t much of West Virginia to go through on the way to Ohio. I guess the scenery was pretty. I didn’t care. If you’ve seen one snow-covered mountain, you’ve seen them all. And then there was Wheeling. The only thing I could really tell you about that city was that the bars there served watered down beer to minors. They paid for that transgression often in broken windows and deflated tires. Not that I had anything to do with that, it’s just something I heard. I was hungry, but decided to blow through that unpleasant memory as quickly as I could and stop for something to eat once I crossed the border into the Buckeye State.

  Buckeyes — great ammunition — small, light, and deadly; I could carry a bag of them in one arm and easily do a strafing run of the streetcars that had the misfortune of crossing Caswell Drive after school. Streetcars are great. They run on rails, are powered by electricity, and the way they jostle about on their wobbly suspensions makes everyone riding them sick. They can also crush coins, rocks, and other valuables. I have yet to test just how big a rock, but that is on my to-do list. Streetcars will definitely be the primary means of transportation in my world and no one will be allowed to call them trolleys either. The world will all call them streetcars or suffer my wrath.

  The scoring system for a buckeye run was easy: one point for a direct hit, two for an open window shot, three for an audible cry of pain from one of the sick passengers. And a curse word? That was not only a five-point shot, but it also came with a bonus of two hundred grace points. My top score was twenty-four poin
ts in one afternoon. It would have been more but the streetcars were only running every fifteen minutes and, with my attention span being not much more than a one hour episode of Combat!, I get bored easily. There was just not enough danger in disrupting enemy supply lines, and Sergeant Saunders was too valuable a weapon to waste on that kind of mission. The Nazis never fought back and the streetcars never stopped, not like the convoys on Conner Road. Streetcars had a schedule to keep and weren’t about to back up, stop, and chase a bunch of stupid kids around on foot.

  Finally through West Virginia without seeing a single hillbilly or state trooper, and without a single shot being fired (miracle of miracles), I entered the great state of Ohio, or as the locals pronounce it, Ahia. A sign for a Pancake House caught my eye and I took the exit for it. Pancake House was a chain of dinky little joints that made greasy, smelly, smoky breakfasts all day long for truckers who slept in their greasy, smelly, smoky cabs and carried their own personal time zones with them from state to state. Truckers and Pancake Houses were a match made in heaven.

  Situated among several hundred-foot high gas station signs, this particular Pancake House looked like one even a trucker would avoid. Maybe I was in luck and it was too clean for them. Or maybe it was closed. I saw no trucks at all when I pulled into the lot, and I was the only car. Was this trip worth it? Was anything really worth it when you came right down to it? Just what was the point of it all? I rarely pondered questions like that long enough to matter before they found their way to my mind’s trashcan. Why worry? Those incredibly tall, turnpike gas station signs were actually alien-constructed monoliths, homing beacons of an advanced civilization and someday they would return, realize their mistake in creating us and totally obliterate everything on the planet except me. I would be king of the planet and none would be left to challenge my rule, not even Harry.

  The entrance to the restaurant reminded me of an airlock — an outer door led to a glass-enclosed, airtight confine, and then an inner door that opened into the restaurant proper. Was the concern letting the foul air in or out? Pulling the outer door open I got a whiff of things to come and stepped inside. I looked around for the green light that would flash when it was safe to open the inner airlock door. There was none. The odor was an overwhelmingly delicious combination of bacon and sausage. This was definitely not the irresistible smell that those disgusting fast food places pump into the air around their restaurants; you know — those artificial chemicals that remind you of charbroiled hamburgers? Whatever those certainly deadly concoctions are, they attract the passersby, who, if they are dumb enough to be enticed by the smell, and stupid enough to enter and actually order lunch, find out too late that the burgers are the same old greasy, fried, preformed mystery meat served at every fast food place since the dawn of McDonald’s. No, this was not that smell. This was truly the rich, greasy smell of honest to goodness griddle-fried, home cooked, dead animal. No pretense. No deception. This Pancake House was the real deal. I went in.

  Both walls on either side of the door were lined with empty booths. No one was sitting at the counter either. No greeter. No waitresses. A lone cook was fiddling with a few strips of bacon on the griddle. I couldn’t see her face but I guessed she was unhappily pushing them around with very little kindness, with a total uncaring indifference appropriate to her meaningless task. The door creaked closed behind me.

  I waited until she waved her metal spatula over her shoulder, “Sit where you like. I’ll be right with you.”

  She sounded cheery enough. Maybe she enjoyed bacon pushing. I stared at her back for a second and took a seat in the booth nearest the door. More or less knowing what I wanted to eat, I passed the time flipping through the jukebox selections. Most of them were old, piece-of-crap songs. Didn’t they ever update their song list? Here was one from 1968 — four years ago and still it made the Pancake House Top Forty. Impressive. I dropped a quarter into the machine and pressed I8.

  As the sickeningly sweet lyrics of Hey Jude began, the cook stopped fiddling and looked my way. She was actually kind of pretty for someone who had obviously been overexposed to the Pancake House. Her dirty, blonde hair was slick with bacon grease and stuck to her forehead where she had pushed it out of her eyes. Her smile wasn’t all that bad either, except for that missing lower tooth, or maybe it was just a hunk of bacon stuck there. I immediately crossed her off my list of potentials. I couldn’t have a bacon-smelling beauty for my queen.

  She was still smiling when she turned back to the griddle. With one quick motion, she swept away the bacon ashes she had been tending to oblivion and threw a few fresh pieces on the griddle. I heard the crack of a couple of eggs and the enticing sizzle as she dropped them onto the hot surface. She was good. Her free hand was pulling two pieces of white bread out of a loaf of Wonder and dropping them into a toaster while she scrambled the eggs. Who flipped her on switch?

  It must have been the extended na-na-na-na version we were listening to because she was at the booth with a plate of freshly scrambled eggs, three strips of bacon done just the way I like them, and two pieces of toast before the last “Hey Jude.”

  “Hi,” she smiled again. “I did them scrambled, just the way you like them. Everything’s just the way you like it.” I looked at the plate in front of me. It was true, everything was just the way I liked it. She even brought me a glass of orange juice after setting down the food.

  One of my cardinal rules is one I call DLS — Don’t Look Stupid — not in front of anyone, ever, no matter how stupid you really feel. In order of precedence on my list of rules that one comes right after: Do unto others before they do unto you — the theory being that if I can’t do unto them, that’s when I need to not look stupid.

  The DLS rule has gotten me through many tough scrapes like the time Brother Friar Tuck hit me on the head with a book for not having my homework. He had a real name, but no one could remember it once they saw his haircut, and he always hit his students on the head with a book when he was mad at them. That was back when every Sergeant Teacher in the Christian Brothers had a powerful right-hand man in their squad to do their dirty work — Corporal Punishment. It was hard to argue with the book so I reminded him that he had excused me from the assignment because I had been sick. The good Brother had a terrible memory.

  So instead of saying what I wanted to say, which was “How the hell did you know what I wanted?” I applied DLS and simply said, “Thanks, this is great,” I read her nametag, “Amy.”

  However prepared I thought I was for anyone or anything, however cool I thought I was in every situation, I was neither prepared enough nor cool enough for what happened next. She slid into the booth, sitting across from me, and held my gaze with eyes that pleaded for me to take her outstretched hands. I couldn’t help myself. I slid my breakfast aside and reached across the table to her, wrapping my hands around her slender, warm, greasy fingers.

  “I’m glad you came back. I knew you would,” she whispered, smiling in an odd way.

  Whatever had been caught in her teeth was gone. Her hair didn’t seem gross at all. I got out my eraser and searched for that list of potentials. It was like the ending of that sappy movie Casablanca, where Rick says good-bye to the girl. No matter how sickening that movie was, it always made me swallow hard and clench my teeth to avoid crying. I learned that technique the first time I had been beaten up on the playground. I was only in first grade, but smart enough to know that showing any weakness to the gang that had bested me would only make them come back for more. Dumb movie — the ending was all wrong.

  The tires screeched as I swerved out of the parking lot and headed for the entrance ramp to U.S. 70 West. In addition to being the king of the realm, I was also master of the escape. No, I didn’t say, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and watch her head back to the grill to return to her noble life of bacon pushing without me. It was nothing as clever as that. Clever doesn’t cut it in most situations where escape is necessary. Clever is best used when subterfuge and cov
er-ups are required because there is no alternative. No, in this case, I simply said, “I have to hit the restroom. I’ll be right back.” The window in the restroom wasn’t all that convenient an exit, but it did the trick.

  The few sentences of conversation before my abrupt departure made no sense. None of this trip made any sense…

  “It’s funny how my life is still the same since you left, but things mean so much more to me now. I mean I still cook here all day and still smell like bacon when I get home at night, but now I feel like I make a difference. I feel important. You taught me that. Everyone has their place in this world and their job to do, and everyone is important.”

  “That’s… super. I couldn’t be happier for you.”

  “Those few hours we spent together… I will keep them and you in my heart forever. I love you, Harry. I know nothing can ever come of it, but I want you to know that. I love you…”

  Freaked out? Totally. Beyond totally, actually. I had to book. Immediately. I’d often been mistaken for Harry by people who didn’t know us, but in an obscure Pancake House off Route 70 in Looneyburg, Ohio? Never in my wildest dreams. Harry must have stopped there on his way to Kenyon just like I did, but what the heck had happened between those two? If they had made out, you’d think she’d have known I wasn’t Harry. I was sure he couldn’t be as good a kisser as me. I had at least three girls-worth of experience more than him since, as far as I knew, his count was zero. So they must have just sat and talked in the Pancake House over eggs and bacon… once…four years ago. Harry always did have that kind of impact on people.

  Sister Concepta, the meanest, toughest, most feared nun at Saint Catherine’s, never gave an inch, never let up in her quest to purify every grade school kid of his mortal and venial sins, and beyond that, she never, ever, smiled. She was the principal and set the standard of cruelty that the others followed — willingly or not. I almost admired her for that. She was the one who had lined up the entire seventh grade one year to paddle each and every one until they cried because someone refused to confess to the crime of puking in the hallway. Everyone else in grades five through eight had to witness the brutality. I probably should have told her it was Derrick Dietz because it was me who had punched him in the stomach so hard he threw up, but it was more fun to watch them all suffer. And Derrick knew that diming me out was pointless. Sister Concepta wouldn’t believe him anyway, and I would find him later and make him really sorry.