Small towns and historical markers
are circled in ballpoint. Scenic highways,
dots along a blue highway, darkened
in pencil by my mother. Dad never stops.
There’s a broiler pan for pee in the third seat.
My brother has dropped cherry Fizzy
tablets in it. When the Plymouth breaks down
outside of a small Missouri town,
Dad leaves my mother
with my brother and sisters and takes me
down a hill through a stand of trees.
He says that a man and a boy
are less frightening than a man alone.
We stop at the first house.
Already, it is dusk.
Dad tells the lady behind the door
that we’re broken down on the highway.
Could we have some water? She weighs
our sweat, my Yankee ballcap,
my white Converse shoes.
She returns with a pitcher of ice water
and two small glasses. Dad explains
the water, the car, the radiator.
There’s a bucket in the garage
and we fill it from the hose. Dad offers
the woman a dollar for the bucket.
The sun has angled towards the horizon.
Our car is filled with last light, with heat,
with sweating children. Mom holds a towel
in front of the baby’s face to block the sun.
Dad wraps athletic tape around the rubber hose,
fills the radiator from the new bucket.
We inch forward into town, not the one
circled on the map, but one we’ve never considered.
There’s a 24-hour mechanic.
Mom buys hamburgers in the all-night diner.
There’s air conditioning.
Dad sits on a folding chair outside the garage.
A whip-poor-will rakes the distance between us.
What’s that? I ask about the welding iron, the pop
of flame under the hood. A rosary dangles
in the quiet between dad’s fingers.
He says, some kind of bird.
