22
I have a picture of my mother and father sitting on their graves. Always planning ahead, they purchased the plots in the Catholic cemetery years ago. They bought the monuments too, already engraved with their names and birthdates. They were optimistic enough not to have the 19 of the death date inscribed, but their names are there and their birthdates. The markers are simple slabs of polished granite the size and shape of swing set seats, very low to the ground. It looks as if they are sitting on the ground. They are smiling. We went there one Memorial Day to look at all the graves. My father's parents' and sister's, my mother's parents' and grandparents'. We ended up checking out how their own graves were doing. There they were. The stones were supposed to be that small and low to make the maintenance of the cemetery efficient. No flowers allowed. There were flags on Memorial Day but those were taken back up after a day or two. In the future, the mowers would cut right over the stones as they sank the rest of the way into the ground.
23
Our bicycles are piled in a wreck we have simulated. We are sprawled, casualties, on the strip of grass between the curb and sidewalk. After a while, we forget we have died. We look up at the streamlined and spoiled clouds, racing.
24
My father went to the time trials one year but it rained. The showers were scattered, and when the sun came out they tried to dry the track by driving ordinary cars and trucks around it. He sat in the fourth turn and watched fire engines, ambulances, wreckers, buses, and pace cars speed by, accelerating the evaporation. Just as it was drying off, racecars with their big slick tires revving their engines in the pit lane, it rained again. Bored, ushers with opened black umbrellas walked around the two-and-ahalf mile oval, and in the homestretch a few of them broke away from the group with longer and longer strides trying to be the first to cross the finish line.
25
Behind the chain link fence, the patients of the State Hospital and Training Center watch the parade. Some of them march along behind the fence, falling into step with the passing bands and color guards or drifting along with the creeping floats. The fence runs for what would be five blocks along Parnell. The streets that dead-end at the boundary of the hospital grounds are used as staging areas for the parade's start. The patients wear hospital gowns and robes of pastel pinks, blues, greens, and yellows. They press their faces into the fence. Some climb a foot or two to get a better view, their fingers wrapped in the weave of the metal links, until the orderlies, who have been listening to the race huddled around the radio in an old ambulance, peel them off and plop them on the ground again. The ones who have been shadowing the parade are stopped when the fence turns a corner blocks away. They race back to the beginning, focus on a new drum major who trills his whistle, high stepping in place. The patients turn with him and begin to march once again.
26
Stuck in the stalled traffic on State, this year's pace car, a red Ford Mustang. The local dealerships of the winning manufacturer would get a shipment of special-edition models each year to show off. You would see them racing around town, advertising the brand's fortune. On each door was a decal of a wheel with wings and the array of all the racing flags. One day each year, pace cars appeared, migratory birds or butterflies. A woman sat at the wheel blowing bubbles of bubble gum. Spring.
27
One year, something happened. A wreck at the start of the race had killed several drivers. I remember listening to the restart in school a day later. I was in art class rolling out clay to coil into pots. Others were kneading the clay or cutting blocks of it with wire. The teacher was firing pieces in the small kiln, and you could hear the whoosh of air as it burned. The announcers at the track were subdued and sad. It seemed the completion of the race was more of a chore now, something that had to be done. The engines sounded muffled. I liked my art class. It was quiet as we worked. The teacher moved from table to table, here smoothing the lip of a pitcher with his thumb, there applying a slip with an old brush. The radio muttered in the corner.
28
Sid Collins, the Voice of the Indianapolis 500, will kill himself. I'll hear the news on a radio in a car in Indiana.
29
We sit on the car hood at the end of the runway. The Phantoms, in formations of two, glide over us, their flaps flared and gear down. In the distance, we see them touch down. Then the afterburners ignite and they leap back up off the shimmering runway. The pilots are logging hours on the weekend. Above us, pairs of jets bank and turn, circling on approach. Climbing, their engines make a sound like ripping blue cloth. Some cars in the race this year have turbine engines. They whine and whistle on the radio, breaking records during practice laps. There's a war. There's always a war. But it is far away.
30
I practice driving in the cemetery. My father sits in the passenger seat playing with the radio. The yellow Rambler is a company car he bought at auction, a decal of the company's logo peeled from the door. It's a big cemetery. In the older part there are old trees and the monuments are columns and urns and obelisks. Wrought iron fences or low walls of stone outline family plots. The roads curve around in circles. I stop and start and signal. I ease out the clutch, and the engine bucks. I can gain a little speed on the straightaways of the new section where the markers are in ordered rows and next to the ground. Mary, the Mother of God, directs traffic at an intersection. I go by my grandmother's grave again. A troop of Boy Scouts carrying backpacks filled with toy flags sifts between the stones, dipping down to the ground, in ones and twos, to decorate them for the weekend.
31
I walk the sidewalks of the old neighborhood. Summer started after Memorial Day, and I spent those summers riding my bike behind the city crews cutting down the dying trees. The chipper with its long-necked Victrola hood sounded, as it bit into branches, like the whooping engines at Indy howling out of the corners. The people who live here now are not home. At the parade perhaps. Picnicking. At the cemeteries. In cars. At the race. Or on their way someplace listening to the race on the radio. The patio is still here. The owner's just hosed it down, and it is drying in the light breeze and warming sun. My name and the names of my friends. And, there, the dimple of my handprint holding a puddle of water in the depression of the palm. In some other backyard I hear the chirp of a radio.
32
We dream about the moonlight on the Wabash. We sang it before our own bike races along the meandering side streets and oxbow loops of the neighborhood. We sang the song like we heard Jim Nabors sing it on the radio before the race. We tried to swallow the words as we sang them, holding notes on the verge of a yawn. We sounded, to our own ears, operatic and oldfashioned and grown-up. We marveled at the transformation of his voice every time he sang. Our own voices were changing. Things could change. The crowd cheering at the end of the song had one voice, a static static. We could stay out until the streetlights came on. The streetlights came on. We raced our shadows between pools of light. The gibbous globes, dabbed with black paint during the war, were caught glowing softly in the black branches of the leafing trees.