Chinaberry Sidewalks by Rodney Crowell Read Free Book Online Page A

firing up the engine.
    The trip home takes over an hour, but it seems more like an eternity. Whatever pissed my father off has caused him to severely underestimate the intensity of the storm he’s steering us into.
    Raindrops pelt the windows like liquid lug nuts. Low-lying intersections are flooded halfway up the side doors. In a stalled Studebaker, we stand a better than even chance of getting washed down some raging bayou. It’s more likely, however, that a power line will simply blow over and decapitate all three of us.
    On the verge of panic, my mother breaks out speaking in tongues six decibels above the roaring hurricane. “Praise God, praise Him, the Devil is a liar. Jesus, come to us now in our time of need. Deliver us from the darkness that has descended upon this Earth.”
    The agitation is almost unbearable.
    My father delivers his rebuttal with controlled meanness, his quiet seething the opposite of her shrill hysterics. “Got-dammit, Cauzette, if you don’t shut that shit up I’m gonna put your ass out in the storm.”
    “J. W. Crowell, you’ll do no such of a thing. And you’ll not take the Lord’s name in vain, neither, not in front of me and your son.”
    I lie low in the backseat. “Ya’ll leave me out of this.”
    Then she’s off praying again, louder. “Our Father who art in heaven and on this Earth, deliver us from the evil that is upon us!”
    In the middle of her tirade my father snaps, slapping her hard with the back of his hand and driving the car into an intersection that’s under three feet of water. The Studebaker stalls. That he’d just hit his wife is instantly relegated to back-burner status, since getting the car started again is now a matter of desperate importance.
    “You steer!” he yells, motioning for me to climb over the seat and take the wheel. When he opens his door, a rush of water floods the floorboards, and the wind nearly rips the door from its hinges. In the driver’s seat I’m thinking of World War II submarine movies: the walls sweating and the air stale as we take on massive amounts of water.
    In the rearview mirror my father reminds me of Gregory Peck as Ahab in the part of that black-and-white movie where he’s finally hooked Moby-Dick with his harpoon but has gotten tangled in the rope and is about to be drowned. He starts to push the car, little by little, out of the intersection, though with no chance of ultimate success. Sobered by the slap in the face, my mother calmly lights a Viceroy and acts as if her husband’s just run into the 7-11 for a loaf of bread. I can’t tell if she’s convinced her prayers will be answered or else is just ready to drown.
    Scrambling to her side of the car, motioning for her to roll the window down, my father poses the question I know he’s been dying to ask since he climbed out: “Are you gonna do something to help or not?”
    My mother’s reply? “Yeah, I’ll smoke my cigarette.”
    Considering what happens next, I have to think my mother’s prayers, off-putting as they are, might well have been answered. From out of nowhere, yellow and white flashing lights appear in the fogged-up rear window, and three blasts from an air horn signal my father to get in the car and steer.
    The tow truck pushes our drowned Studebaker for over three miles as my father pumps the accelerator and sweet-talks the engine nonstop. “Come on, now, you little red hotrod,” he’s cooing. “Turn on over and fire up for ole J-Bo”—his self-appointed nickname.
    In the middle of all this, my mother lights a fresh Viceroy and scoffs, “The Lord’s done answered my prayers, J.W. If you had any sense, you’d just let him push us on in.”
    But my father won’t be denied the right to zoom off in a huff. He flatters and begs and threatens to sell the flooded car for junk metal until it coughs and spits, a string of backfires announcing his triumph.
    Despite hating it when he hits my mother, I love seeing my father enjoy this victory and