The Road to Wherever by John Ed Bradley

Author:John Ed Bradley [Bradley, John Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

* * *

The backyard isn’t so bad. After seeing other areas of the town, I’d been expecting a whole lot worse.

The fog is lifting and morning light filters through the trees and runs in streaks across the grass. If you look past the boundaries of Mrs. McBean’s yard, you can see lonely pilings and cement slabs where houses once stood. As far as I can tell, there’s only one other house on her side of the street, and it’s three doors down—doors that don’t exist anymore, mind you.

“There it is,” Mrs. McBean says. She exhales longer than she might need to. “Preston’s baby. What’s left of it, anyway.”

The car’s covered with a plastic sheet held in place with cinder blocks. The plastic looks like Saran Wrap, only thicker. “Visqueen,” Larry says. “Not very durable, unfortunately.”

“Mrs. McBean should’ve changed it more often, I know that, but step up there and look closer. There’s a tarp underneath.”

The Visqueen hangs past the wheels to the ground. Cornell lifts it up and you can see mold and mildew, black and red dots and smears coloring the heavy cloth blanket.

“Whoa,” he says, squeezing his nostrils to block the smell.

A ratty-looking broom lays on the roof, and soggy brown leaves cover the hood. All four tires are flat and full of dry rot, and the wheels are buried in craters of dried mud.

“Moisture,” Larry says. “Boy, do I hate it. I wish your cover hadn’t extended all the way to the ground, Mrs. McBean. You’ve created the perfect lab environment for turning metal into rust.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Don’t despair, ma’am,” Cornell says in a softer, more positive tone. “Let’s not jump to conclusions just yet.”

I grab the broom and sweep the leaves off, then Larry and Cornell toss the blocks under some overgrown hedges. They return to the car, and Larry stands back and lets Cornell pull off the covers. Cornell does it the way a magician would. He shouts, “Voilà!” and jerks the Visqueen and the tarp off in one fluid motion.

The T-Bird is a disaster if I ever saw one, but Larry and Cornell are acting as if they’ve discovered the most important Ford rattletrap of all time. After an exchange of exploding fist bumps, they start walking around the car, eyes fixed on it, hands held out as if to warm them against a campfire. They must make ten laps this way, and the whole time you get the feeling they’re communicating with Henry Ford himself, or maybe even L. C. Ball, the ancestor who started it all.

A third piece of fabric covers the windshield, and it, too, is full of grime. You can see where either bugs or rodents have eaten large sections.

“And what is this, Mrs. McBean?” Cornell says. “Is that a quilt, a homemade quilt?”

“I was in a sewing club. That’s a little blanket I made.”

“But why did you put it on the windshield, when you had these other covers?”

“There’s a law against having too many covers?”

He shakes his head. “No, ma’am.

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