Faraway Places by Tom Spanbauer Read Free Book Online Page A

those hot nights in August: burning up, thunder and lightning from down there shooting up to my brain, me in my bed sweating away and staining things yellow. My mother just couldn’t wash that yellow out, and I knew that she tried. She’d soak my shorts in the kitchen sink in Clorox and bluing for the whole day.
    I wanted to stop—stop yellowing things up—because it was a mess and a sin and I had to count the times and tell Monsignor Canby about every occasion, tick off those sins like the red triangle flags snapping, marking the miles, in the wind. Mortal, every one of them, mortal, every time. But I just couldn’t stop the yellowing or the counting neither, couldn’t stop counting the red flags. I couldn’t let up, just like the sun couldn’t that August.
    THAT YEAR THE Blackfoot State Fair was in August, the last week. We always went to the Blackfoot State Fair: my mother, my father, and me. Usually we would get up early and drive to Blackfoot and go to the fair and spend the whole day there and then see the fireworks in the grandstand that night and stayovernight at my Grandma Hannah’s—my mother’s mother—then go back home the next morning.
    I always used to look forward to the Blackfoot State Fair, used to count the days to go on the calendar, crossing them off. But that year, that year of the chinook, that dry, hot, river-jumping, staining-things- yellow year of those three forbidden people, the year my father lied to the sheriff, was different. I didn’t even want to go to the Blackfoot State Fair that year. I wanted them—my mother and my father—to go to the Blackfoot State Fair without me. But my father wouldn’t hear of it. I went and did those things like I did every year that I used to like to do and hated now: I put on my black polished Sunday shoes and red socks and my new stiff Levi’s—washed only once—and the new shirt my mother bought me at J.C. Penney’s: short-sleeved and blue that looked like it was two shirts—a blue plaid shirt under a solid blue vest—but it wasn’t. It was all one shirt, and I rolled up the sleeves. I put my toothbrush in with the rest of the bathroom stuff that my mother put in a plastic bag, and a change of underwear, and I got in the back seat of the Oldsmobile. My father drove—he always drove—and we bought Cokes and RC Colas at the Wyz-Way market like we always did and I got a Snickers, and my mother wanted me to sing those same old songs with her: “Faith, Hope, and Charity” and “Going to the Chapel and We’re Going to Get Married.” I sang along, all right, but I didn’t like it. I wanted to listen to the radio, to the rock-and-roll station.
    For the first time that year, as I sang away in the back seat, I wondered why the old man, why my father, never sang with us. Other years, when my mother and I sang those old dumb songs, we were singing for him. We were entertaining him. Seems like everything my mother and I did was for him, and that year, that August, things were different. I was older and figured out what was going on and didn’t like it.
    Why couldn’t he come up with a song once? Now, that would be entertaining.
    When we got to Blackfoot, there was a lot of traffic and it took a long time to get to the main gate. Then once we got to the main gate, we had to park the Oldsmobile way out there in the sun. It took us a long time to get to the barns, and when we did, we were all covered with dust, and there wasn’t any decent place for my mother to freshen up.
    But none of those things were really that much bother—at least they didn’t bother me. What did bother me at the Blackfoot State Fair was the same thing that bothered me every year. My mother and my father always seemed to pick the Blackfoot State Fair to be mad at each other—be mad and stay mad. Until that year, my mother and father only got mad at each other