Free Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick Page B

eyes and looked at her reflection the way Bacall had looked at Bogart, trying to make with her mouth the sounds and syllables she had heard coming from Bacall. She practiced for hours, until she finally realized that she wasn’t Bacall, she didn’t have her body, and her neck got tired from keeping her chin on her chest all the time the way she did. She was somebody, but she wasn’t Bacall.
    That night at supper, Sylvan said to Boaty, “Harrison? Will we go on a honeymoon?”
    The question took him aback. He figured he’d already spent enough on her.
    “It hadn’t occurred to me, baby.”
    She got up from the table, sat on his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck, “Well, Harrison, honey, I’d like to. People do. Even my daddy and mama, they did. And I want to.”
    He didn’t say anything. She kissed him on the neck, and he smelled the perfume he’d bought her at Grossman’s, Eau de Nile, by Elizabeth Arden. “I think it’d be nice.” She kissed him again, and he felt her tongue dart onto his neck, leaving a small wet spot he tried not to wipe with his hand, but he did, anyway.
    “And where would you want to go? I’m not saying . . . where? Niagra Falls? I hear that’s popular.”
    “I want to go to Hollywood, California.”
    He laughed. “You say what? All that way? What in hell for?”
    “I want to see where they live. Those movie stars. I want to eat in the restaurants they eat in. The Brown Derby. I want to go to Warner Brothers studio, if they’ll let us, and see where they make those movies. Is it far?”
    “It’s all the way across the damned country. The whole country. Takes five days on a train.”
    “I’ve never been on a train. I want to go on a train to Hollywood and see a movie star, face to face. Please, Daddy.”
    He seemed confused.
    “Will we sleep on the train?” she asked.
    “Yes, if . . . yes, we would get a compartment and sleep on the train. And eat on the train and brush our teeth on the damned train.”
    “All by ourselves?”
    “Well, of course, by ourselves.”
    “I’d be so nice to you, sweetie. I’d be just as sweet as pie.”
    Boaty wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that, but his mind started working, and there were some things, some things he’d heard about, some things he’d heard girls could do, and while he wasn’t sure he wanted to do them, he knew he was supposed to want to do them, and if Hollywood was what it was going to take to find out, then he figured he might as well give it a shot. It began to seem like it wasn’t such a bad idea.
    So, of course they went, five days there and five days back, in a Pullman car, and a week in a fancy hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, the Roosevelt, cost a fortune. He never talked about it, but whatever he found out about what women could do didn’t seem to make him any less cranky or mean.
    That was pretty much it, for Boaty. He’d seen the world, he thought, although the limits of the world for him outside of Brownsburg were forever confined to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Hollywood, California, and that was just fine with him. When Boaty came home from that last place, a place so vile and filled with bad food and rude people and high prices for even the smallest things and too much skin on everybody and too many teeth in every mouth, he’d pretty much had it.
    But Sylvan, that’s a different story. Sylvan Glass was just getting started. That’s why she needed Claudie Wiley.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    C LAUDETTA WILEY WAS a genius. She was born that way. She lived in a falling-down old clapboard house way out on the edge of town with the other black folks, with an idiot daughter nobody had seen since she was a baby so maybe she was there and maybe she wasn’t, and maybe she was an idiot and maybe not. Claudie lived in the last house before the fields started, and her house was so crestfallen that even the other black people wouldn’t have gone there if they didn’t need to, and some people said it was green and