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  They called Duke “The Polack,” but only behind his back.

  He called himself a Polack, fine—but it really pissed him off if anybody else did and, sure enough, eventually one of them said it loud enough for us to hear across the yard. The other Eddies laughed. Duke jumped up, knocking his lunch pail over, and headed their way. Shit, I thought. He’s going to take them all on. He could have, too—and they knew it. It would’ve been funny the way they looked seeing him coming at them, except I knew that if Duke hit someone he might do real damage. Plus, he’d get fired, and where would that leave me?

  I stood, raised my fists. But when he got to where they were all standing, palms out, in anxious surrender, he stopped short, threw up his arms to the smoky sky, and shouted at the top of his lungs, “‘...The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like the fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…’”

  Then turned on his heel and headed back toward me, grinning.

  “Jesus!” I heard one of the Eddies say. “That guy’s frigging insane.”

  Duke brushed his hands, as if cleaning crumbs from them, and sat back down beside me. “Jack Kerouac,” he said. “On the Road.”

  “‘Yes, yes, yes,’” I responded. “‘Mad drunken Americans in the mighty land.’”

  “Whoa!” he said. “You know that book, too?”

  Suddenly, the few hours I spent alone in Greenwich Village rushed back into me, and the shock of possibility I’d felt that night hit me like a blow. I told Duke about finding the book there and the crazy time afterward, reading and rereading it, all the time thinking about running like hell from the life everyone had planned for me. Then getting slammed by what happened to my mom and Kathy taking care of us all through it—and now she was set on getting married.

  “Do you want that?” he asked.

  The whistle for the end of the dinner break blew before I could answer. Duke closed his Thermos, wrapped up the remains of the huge dinner his mom packed for him, and put them in his metal lunchbox, snapping it closed. I did the same. The Eddies passed us on the way back into the plant, keeping a wide berth.

  “Listen, pal,” Duke said. “We need to talk. What do you say I buy you breakfast when we clock out?”

  I said, “Sure. Why not?” Then spent the rest of the shift wishing I’d refused. I didn’t want to have to try to explain to Duke Walczek how I felt about marrying Kathy when I couldn’t explain it to myself. But when we got to the diner, he didn’t even mention it. Just ordered ham and eggs for both of us, flirting with the waitress the whole time, then told me about his wild date the night before, as if this were all the evidence against marriage that anyone could possibly need.

  No way was he going to end up like the rest of his family, he told me. “I got four brothers, all of them older than me, all of them butchers—like my old man.” He laughed. “They all hate me. Seriously. I’m the demon child: I refuse to go to mass. I refuse to take up the cleaver.”

  He had tapped the little spiral notebook he kept in his shirt pocket. “I’m going to be a writer,” he said. “As soon as I get out of this hellhole and get a life worth writing about.”

  It was his favorite topic of conversation: places he wanted to be instead of here. New York, California, Paris. Maybe even Russia; it would be cool to see what communism was really like. Or Africa—and go big game hunting, like Hemingway did.

  Kathy knew none of this. I’d stopped mentioning Duke after that night at the Big Wheel. She didn’t know I’d rediscovered On the Road, or that Duke had lent me other books, too. Or that he’d gotten me a fake ID and, lately, we’d gone to the clubs in East Chicago after work a couple of times—and that I’d liked it.

  “If you’re feeling guilty about your girlfriend,” Duke said after the first time, “what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. And if she finds out?” He grinned. “I’ll testify. You fought off those girls at the Cadillac Club and Mr. Archie’s like John Wayne taking on the whole Comanche tribe.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’m sure Kathy would think you were totally credible.”

  I did feel guilty, though. Not because I’d flirted with some girls, not even because, for all intents and purposes, I’d been lying to Kathy by not telling her I’d been hanging out with Duke. What I felt guilty about was how happy I felt in a bar in the early hours of the morning, blues on the jukebox, smoke swirling in the mellow light, the bartender measuring out the drinks.

  The anonymous camaraderie of the drinkers, in which I could be anyone I wanted to be.

  THREE

  On the Friday after Labor Day, I walked out of the mill, saw that it was just barely light, and it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be all that long before I’d be driving home in darkness. In the dead of winter, if I hit the sack about the time the sun came up and slept till three-thirty or four in the afternoon, like I’d been doing since I hired on in June, I’d see maybe an hour of daylight.

  I was in a foul mood by the time I got home. Pissed off at the whole idea of clocking in for work at eleven every night, clocking out at seven in the morning, so deaf from the roar of the machinery that I had to turn the radio up full blast to be able to hear anything at all. Pissed off at myself because, the truth was, I was kidding myself about eventually going to college; the way things were shaping up, I was going to be working there for the rest of my life—the only difference between now and ten years from now being that in ten years I’d be married, coming home to Kathy and the four kids she’d made up her mind we were going to have instead of coming home to my goddamn brother standing at the open refrigerator drinking out of the milk carton, like I did that morning.

  He knew Mom had hated that. It seemed to me he ought not do it, even though she was gone. Which was crazy, I knew. I drank out of the carton myself before she got sick. I got annoyed when she took it from my hands, poured me a glass and handed it to me with this aggrieved expression on her face, like she was so disappointed that I’d turned out to be such a boor.

  She’d probably have gotten all teary-eyed to know I didn’t do it anymore, because of her, even though how could it really matter?

  “Oh, Paul,” she’d say. “Honey.”

  It killed me to think that. I grabbed the carton from Bobby, sloshing milk on the floor.

  “Could you please grow up?” I said. “For once, could you not put your frigging cooties all over the milk carton?”

  He stepped back, his hands up in surrender. “Hey! What’s with you, man?”

  The air suddenly went out of me. I was beat, my eyes scratchy with fatigue, and all I wanted was a hot shower and to fall into bed and sleep. Maybe forever.

  Bobby followed me down the hall, like a puppy. He stood in the doorway of my bedroom while I unlaced my work boots, peeled off my grimy clothes. He was wearing his football jersey, and I remembered strutting around in mine a year ago, so cocky and cool, like there was nothing in the world that could hurt me.

  “You’re coming to the game tomorrow night, right?” he asked. “You and Kathy? Because Coach said to tell you to come on down to the locker room before, if you want.”

  Great, I thought. And join all the other has-beens who show up, reliving their glory days before the team hits the field—guys we used to laugh about.

  I planned to stop in, but there was no time to answer, because his ride pulled into the driveway, blasted the horn twice, and he was gone. No sound but the ftzz-ftzz-ftzz of Mrs. Wampler’s sprinkler through the open window.

  I don’t know how long I stood in the shower, hot water streaming down my body. Ten minutes, maybe. Not thinking. Just feeling the water, breathing in the steam. Back in the kitchen, I picked up the box of Wheaties Bobby had left open on the counter, poured some into a bowl, splashed on some milk, sprinkled a little sugar, and chowed down.

  Breakfast of frigging
champions.

  Kathy put me in an even worse mood, just the sound of her chirpy voice, when she called before leaving for her job at the bank, like she did every morning. I hurt her feelings when I asked if she really thought it made any difference whatsoever to me whether she wore a skirt or her new plaid slacks to the game tomorrow night.

  “What’s wrong with you, Paul?” she said.

  I didn’t answer. Where would I start?

  I just made a static-y noise through my teeth, as if the phone had suddenly gone on the fritz, put my finger on the button to break the connection, and left the receiver dangling against the kitchen wall. If she tried to call back, I didn’t want to know.

  I flipped the TV channels for a while, coming up with nothing but moronic shows that only housewives would watch, which reminded me of dinner at Kathy’s house the night before. Mrs. Benson falling all over herself re-filling my plate of meatloaf, making sure I was happy in every possible way in between nagging Mr. Benson to death about chores that, if you listened to her, had to be done ten seconds after dinner was over, or the whole house was going to fall down around us. The sheepish grin Mr. Benson cast my way when she wasn’t looking, as if to say get used to it, buddy, a few years from now this will be you.

  Meanwhile, Kathy bringing me up to date on the big party she and her mom were planning for her birthday in October, the very thought of which filled me with dread because I’d come to think of it as The Day I Have to Give Kathy an Engagement Ring. Or Not. Worse, finally alone, we got into an argument when “Blowin’ in the Wind” came on the radio.

  “I just love that song,” Kathy said.

  “You love it,” I said. “But you don’t listen to it. The truth is, it’s saying the same thing as that commercial you don’t like.”

  “It is not,” she said.

  “Same message, but prettier,” I said.

  The commercial, which had interrupted the movie we were watching on TV a few nights earlier, started with a little girl standing in a sunny meadow, counting as she picked the petals off a daisy, one-by-one. When she got to nine, her voice was replaced by a man’s voice counting backward, as if for a missile launch. The girl looked toward something she saw in the sky until the pupil of her eye blacked out the whole screen. When the voice got to ten, there was a flash and a mushroom cloud, President Johnson’s voice speaking over a raging firestorm: “These are the stakes—to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the dark. We must love each other, or we must die.” Then the screen went blank except for the white words: “Vote for President Johnson on November 3.”

  “For example,” I said. “‘How many times must a cannonball fly before they’re forever banned?’ What do you think that means? You don’t think that’s about the stupidity of war?”

  “World War II wasn’t stupid, Paul.”

  “I didn’t say World War II was stupid. I’m saying what the song says: War is stupid. People need to learn to get along. The commercial says it, too.”

  “The commercial is repulsive,” Kathy said.

  I shrugged. “It’s true, though.”

  “So what? What’s the point in scaring people to death about it?”

  “To make them think?”

  It was same argument we had the first time we saw the commercial and, later, when it was on the news because a lot of people felt the way Kathy did and went apeshit. She gave me the look she’d been giving me all summer when I said any little thing that offended her, like, I know where that’s coming from.

  Meaning Duke Walczek.

  Which was more or less true. But I hadn’t given her the satisfaction of taking the bait.

  I turned the radio on to make myself stop thinking about her, turned it off, then turned it on again—to a Chicago jazz station, thinking that would mellow me out, but the music felt like fingers twitching all over me. I turned it off again. But in the silence, memories came. They always did.

  Like Bobby bolting when the surgeon told us that Mom’s tumor was malignant, me chasing him down the hospital corridor, finally cornering him at some double doors where a sign said, “Staff Only. Do Not Enter.” Bobby slugging me; then, suddenly, he was sobbing—and I had my arms around him, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” just like Mom would have, if she hadn’t been the one he was crying about.

  How it was like living in The Twilight Zone when she was finally gone—as if our house was still our house, just in a whole other universe. Things turning green in the refrigerator, the bathtub all scummy, Bobby’s favorite sweater shrunk to the size a seven-year-old could wear because he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to put it in the dryer.

  Stop, I told myself. You can’t think about this goddamn stuff all the time. It’s over, there’s nothing you can do about it now. I dropped to the floor, did a hundred push-ups in sets of ten, and then willed myself to sleep.

  I felt better when I woke up, at least alive, and by the time I picked up Kathy that evening, I’d half-convinced myself, again, that it was summer winding down, the realization that we were grown up now, responsible for our own lives just now settling in that had been making us crabby and out of sorts with each other. I said I was sorry for being a jerk that morning. I remembered to tell her how nice she looked—and she did, though it didn’t have anything to do with the outfit she’d chosen to wear.

  No matter how aggravated I got at her, she always looked beautiful to me. She was small and curvy, with a heart-shaped face and big brown eyes. She had a quiet way about her, she knew who she was and what mattered to her—not like other girls, all silly and loud and changeable, so that you never knew where you stood with them.

  Over dinner, we talked about her day at the bank. I told her about Bobby going off this morning all pumped up, wearing his football jersey.

  “It’s weird not going back to school, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I don’t miss it,” she said, surprising me. “All that pressure, you know? Studying all the time, cheerleading practice, student council. One stupid bake sale after another. I like working at the bank. I do my job, go out for lunch, come home and have the whole evening for myself.” She smiled and slid closer. “For us. It’s nice, you know?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I know.”

  Both of us fell quiet as I headed toward the place near the river we liked, a run of slow songs on the radio, as if the deejay knew where we were going. I parked in a pocket of overgrown bushes, beneath a huge maple tree, and turned off the engine. The crickets shrieked in the sudden silence, thousands and thousands of them out there, rubbing their wings in a last song of summer.

  We moved to the backseat, which seemed made for two people to lie together, cradled in darkness. Time slowed. Kathy loosened my shirt, moved her warm hands along my back, like you might rub a child’s back to help him go to sleep, and I felt hypnotized. I wanted her to do this, only this, forever.

  Until—I wanted more. And more and more.

  And she gave it to me. She gave me her whole self.

  Part of me was still at the river with her when I got to the mill an hour later and found Duke waiting for me where we clocked in.

  “Hey!” he smacked me in the arm with a folded newspaper. “Paulie. You’ve got to read this. Right. Now.” He opened the paper, cocked his head toward a little filler stuck in down in the bottom corner of the obituary page, and I read: “Sister of Beat Writer Jack Kerouac Dies in Florida.” I skimmed to the part where it said the woman was survived by her mother and brother, residents of St. Petersburg, Florida.

  “Wild,” he said. “Kerouac living in Florida?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “No lie.” Though, actually, I’d never thought of Jack Kerouac living anywhere. I’d never thought of him as a real person, for that matter. Until this moment, he’d been caught in the pages of On the Road, a stoned hipster on a dark highway, the lights of whatever magical city he was heading for spread out in the distance, like stars.

&nbs
p; Duke snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Dig it, man! ‘The time has come for you and me to go and see the Banana King.’”

  I just looked at him.

  “The road,” he said. “It beckons!”

  “Are you crazy?” I said.

  “Yeah, man!” Duke affected a low, gruff hipster tone of voice. “Craaaazy!”

  I headed for our workstation, and he followed, jumping around me, snapping his fingers to music only he could hear—a sight to see in a guy the size of a small bear, which got me laughing. He wouldn’t shut up. On breaks, all through supper, he recited his favorite parts of On the Road, regaled me with images of palm trees and girls in bikinis.

  Kerouac himself, cooler than anyone on earth, anyone, welcoming us with open arms—

  “Why wouldn’t he,” Duke said, “Two cool cats like us.” And, in spite of myself, I saw the silver ribbon of highway in my mind’s eye, the two of us setting out on it.

  FOUR

  On Saturdays, Dad and Bobby went out for burgers and a movie, which they’d been doing since I started at the mill. Kathy had been doing most of our laundry since my mom died—we just didn’t get it right ourselves, she said. So she’d come over around the time they left to catch up on it. She’d taken up drinking coffee when she got the job at the bank, so she’d make a pot and drink it at the kitchen table while she waited for the clothes to wash and dry, reading whatever magazine she’d treated herself to on payday.

  Then she’d fold everything, making stacks for Bobby, Dad, and me, which she set on our dressers. She kissed me awake when she delivered mine, and slid under the covers with me, still kissing me, until I turned to make love to her. I had to admit that waking up that way—in a bed, the two of us alone, in a quiet house—made me think marriage wouldn’t be all bad.

  But when Kathy slid into my bed this Saturday, I was in the middle of a dream about Duke and me on the road, and I wanted to go back to sleep, back to the dream. She kissed me again, pressed the length of herself against me. Her cool skin felt good against mine; instinctively, I took her in my arms. I felt myself quicken. But I couldn’t shake the dream from my mind.