Driving on the Rim Read Online Free Page B

spasmodically assured, she gave a great sigh and remarked, “Never a dull moment.”

2
    I WAS NEARLY MIDDLE-AGED before I learned that my mother’s hometown in Arkansas was not called, as my father had said, “Crackeropolis.” It was Ayers. Ayers, Arkansas. When I figured this out, I then invested way too much time in analyzing my father’s odd little satire. Was it contempt for my mother’s origins? Probably he was just being funny; but I wasn’t sure. I did a bit of research on Ayers and learned that it was the site of an annual slasher film festival held in a big old Art Deco movie theater that was in the registry of historic buildings. Otherwise, a quiet soybean town peopled by farmers in dashboard overalls.
    Unwinding my mother’s pointed remark to my father to the effect that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, I eventually grasped that it referred to his few droplets of Cree blood. My father always pretended to be of French Canadian stock, but I’d heard from other of his relatives that they were originally mixed-race folk who worked the lime kilns after the buffalo disappeared. All those people went back and forth between here and Canada looking for work and so got into the habit of saying they were French Canadians as a way to avoid being called half-breeds. The war and generations of marriage evaporated all that, turning that class of folk into garden-variety Americans with slightly exotic names like mine. My full name, Irving Berlin Pickett, will never find its way into common usage.
    When I was in my teens I bought a set of drums: a snare, a bass with a foot pedal, and a broad, handsome Zildjian cymbal. I didn’t go far, much past Gene Krupa’s “Lyonnaise Potatoes and Some Pork Chops,” which I got off a 78 rpm record called
Original Drum Battle: Gene Krupa & Buddy
Rich
and which I blasted for weeks out the window of my parents’ house, exhibiting early and alarming antisocial tendencies aggravated by my rhythmless accompaniment. One day the drum set was gone.
    “Where’s the drums at?” I demanded of my parents with a fierceness neither I nor they had ever seen. I was just back from school and close to going off the deep end when they said—and I knew it was a lie—that they didn’t know where the drums “was at.” A neighborhood tipster, one Mrs. Kugel, a member of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and so an enemy of my parents and their Holy Roller ways, confided that my drums were in the town dump. So they were: I stood on a cold winter day staring at them, crushed among the DeSoto parts, shattered lava lamps, and sundry garbage, paper, and dry-rot wood. I was alone with three crows.
    Those drums had enabled me to dominate my household and substantial parts of the neighborhood without resort to ideas or speech. I was practicing, I explained, to join a big band like that of Harry James, he of the screeching trumpet. This last detail was entirely strategic, as Harry James was known to me only as a favorite of my parents, who, with their big black vinyls treasured in original sleeves, sometimes fell into music-induced reminiscence of the war years, even to the point of dancing by candlelight while I presumably slept. Their necking during “You Made Me Love You” grossed me out, as it would have any youngster observing his parents being happy in quite that way. I didn’t want to join a swing band, whatever that was; I wanted to rule by noise, and in that I had entirely succeeded. Until the day the drums vanished.
    Certainly my parents had made off with them, and I am in no doubt about the great courage required to cross their only child, but their lives had become unbearable: when I was not drumming, I was playing
Drum Battle
from my room and down the stairwell. My father read his newspaper in the backyard. I now see with shame that our home was really not habitable.
    “I know you pinched ’em,” said I. “The whole kit, to get even.”
    “Where’s he come up with this stuff?”