Daniel had sworn he hadn’t.
Putting on a white shirt and tie this morning, as his grandfather had told him he must, was part of Daniel’s attempt to turn the tables on Alec. Hoist him with his own petard, as Mr. Gibson who taught Shakespeare was fond of saying. If that old fart thought he was going to have a good laugh at Daniel’s expense, tricking him into a white shirt, a tie, and expectations of a trip, he’d better think again. Because how would Alec feel if, rather than going all foolish and sheepish at falling for a practical joke, instead Daniel went all downcast and heart-broken?
Alec might learn that there was more than one actor in this family. Oh, how could you play such a mean trick when you knew how I was looking forward to this? he’d accuse him mournfully. It’s a pretty raw deal, if you ask me, to raise a person’s hopes way up and then crush them.
He’d feel King Shit of Turd Island then, wouldn’t he?
And the bonus would be beating the old bugger twice in less than ten days. First the World Series, then giving him a dose of his own brand of mischief. He who laughs last, laughs best.
Yet this morning it had only taken Daniel a minute to realize the mistake was his. His grandfather really did expect them to leave on a trip within the hour. For Alec it was no joke, but a certainty, real. There he was, all in a fuss in his Sunday best, a wrinkled, dark blue suit. “There’s something else,” he kept muttering to himself as he quick-shuffled his feet from room to room. “Just hold your horses. It won’t take me but a second to find it once I think of it.” Daniel couldn’t take his eyes from the huge black oxfords which Alec dragged back and forth on the linoleum. He could see his grandfather had made a disastrous attempt at polishing the shoes. His eyesight must be as bad as he claimed because there were thick dabs and crumbs of polish stuck like mud to the oxfords, which left a dull, streaky finish.
Suddenly the old man brought himself up short, frozen in the effort to recollect what was nagging at him. Grandfather and grandson stood face to face. The boy glimpsed a series of black smudges all down Alec’s white shirt front, fingerprints left behind when he did up his buttons with shoe polish sticking to his fingers.
He’s dotty, thought Daniel.
A surge of blood chased this unbidden thought and heated his face. It was then he rushed off outside, to wait in the street and consider what he must do.
There was no longer any question that Alec meant what he said. The truck was the clincher. In all the time Daniel had known him his grandfather had never once washed or cleaned the truck. This morning it gleamed, even under the muddy sky. Months, maybe years, of mud and dust had been hosed and scrubbed from fenders and door panels. His grandfather would never have carried any joke that far. Never.
Every few seconds Daniel cast an apprehensive eye at the house. What in Christ was keeping him? It had been almost twenty minutes. Then the door opened and Daniel could guess the reason for the delay.
His grandfather forged his way down the walk, swerving unsteadily from side to side as he was buffeted by the wind, his suit jacket tail whipping and flickering out behind him, his left hand grimly pinning his hat to his head. Held tightly in his right fist an enormous bouquet of artificial flowers he had spent the last quarter of an hour turning the house upside down for wildly fluttered and flaunted their blooms in the gale. Mrs. Harding, the beautician famous for her useful hobbies, whom he had appealed to when he realized that all his own flowers were brown and withered in the garden, was much celebrated for her skill at manufacturing paper flowers to decorate wedding cars, high school graduation exercises, and anniversary parties. The bouquet Alec bore was testimony to her floral artistry. For him she had created three dozen red crêpe-paper poppies tastefully set off by contrasting Kleenex carnations in pink, yellow, and white. Each of Mrs. Harding’s flowers was furnished with wire coat-hanger stems wrapped in green tape.
Daniel’s need to purge himself of his bad news made him rude and abrupt. No sooner had his grandfather reached the truck than Daniel lunged forward at him, desperately shouting, “I can’t go. Forget it. There’s no way I can go. Just forget this trip, okay?” But his words were drowned in the roar of the wind, scattered harmless down the street.
“What?” shouted back Alec. “What?” He went to cup his hand behind his ear but when it came up full of artificial flowers, confounded he had to let it fall back down to his side. He leaned forward and tried to tip his head to better catch what his grandson had to say. When he did, the wind curled up his hat brim and the fedora shuddered, threatening to take flight.
“I can’t go on any trip with you!” cried Daniel, going up on tiptoe so that he was shouting directly into his grandfather’s face. Still, his grandfather couldn’t grasp what he said. The old man shook his head and gestured impatiently toward the truck, waving the bouquet. “You’ll have to get out of this wind! I can’t make out a goddamn thing you say!” he bellowed, jerking open the passenger door and clambering into the cab. Daniel was left no alternative except to crawl in on the driver’s side, where he didn’t want to be. He slammed the door and sat clenching the steering wheel while the old man fussily arranged the gaudy, showy abundance of the bouquet on the seat beside him. What was he doing with pretend flowers? Could it be that the old fart was angling to pay a visit to some woman? Daniel found the notion pretty disgusting. Yet he knew it was possible. One of Pooch Gardiner’s admirers had been nearly as old as his grandfather. Old Softy was Lyle’s nickname for him.
It seemed to have slipped his grandfather’s mind that Daniel had something to say to him. He was lost in sorting through his flowers, examining them for damage and carefully setting aside any whose petals had been torn by the wind.
“I can’t go on any trip with you,” said Daniel. His voice, pitched to overcome wind, was much too loud for the small space and quiet of the cab. “I just can’t,” he added, dropping his voice.
Monkman did not lift his eyes from the flowers. Only a pause in the sorting signalled he had heard his grandson. A white carnation hung still in his fingers. He twirled the stem and the bloom spun. “We aren’t going too far,” he said.
Daniel, his eyes fastened on the dizzy blur of spinning white, was tempted to say, We aren’t going anywhere. Instead, he asked, “How far is not too far?”
“A hundred and ten, maybe a hundred and twenty miles one way.”
“On the highway?”
“On the highway,” confirmed Alec quietly. He glanced up at the boy for the first time.
The undisguised, naked eagerness Daniel encountered in his grandfather’s face caused him to lower his eyes. “I can’t drive on the highway without a licence,” he said. “The police would arrest us.”
His grandfather’s failure to agree, his silence, condemned Daniel. Guiltily, the boy could feel Alec’s eyes crawling up the back of his neck. He struck out angrily. “Where do you get such a goddamn stupid idea! Expecting I could drive you so far! I couldn’t manage it. I’d likely kill us and somebody else too! You’ve got no business asking me to do it! What got into you? You ought to know better. You want to get us both into serious trouble?”
The only reply to this outburst was the dry stirring and rustling of paper. Daniel threw a furtive, sidelong look in the old man’s direction and discovered that he was gathering all the artificial flowers into his lap. They lay in a profuse, tangled heap across his thighs, a drift of blossoms banked against the bulge of his belly.