Free A Long Way From Chicago by Richard Peck Page A

looked pale, shaken. Boy, did he need a cigarette. But they had to get Grandma down from the plane, and getting her out was twice the job of getting her in. She’d plant one big shoe on a shoulder and the other on another. They had her by the ankles, then by the hips. She tipped forward and back, and the pocketbook swinging from her arm pummeled their heads. She brought two big men to their knees.
    At last she was on solid ground, scanning the crowd for me. She crooked a finger, and I went forth. As always, I couldn’t see a moment ahead.
    “Ma’am, I’m sorry,” Barnie Buchanan was saying to Grandma. “But I was just carrying a little more . . . freight than this old crate could handle.”
    Grandma waved that away. “Don’t give it a thought. You can take my grandson instead,” she said. “If he wants to go.”
    The heavens opened. I thought I heard celestial music. Somehow I was up in the front seat of the plane, buckling myself in with trembling hands. And Barnie Buchanan was handing me up a pair of goggles. Goggles from the Great War.
    Now we were taxiing, Barnie and me, bumping over the ground, gathering speed behind the yearning motor. And I felt that moment when we left the ground, and the fair fell away below us, and ahead of us was nothing but the towering white clouds. And beyond them sky, endless sky. I didn’t know there was that much sky, as we flew, Barnie and me, in stuttering circles higher than birds, over the patchwork fields.

    That night Mary Alice went up to bed early, tuckered out. Still in her fair finery, Grandma sat in the platform rocker, working out of her shoes. They’d been a torment to her all day. Now she kicked them aside. “If I could pop all the corns on my toes,” she said, “I could feed a famine.”
    I’d settled on the settee, watching her in the circle of light, after the big doings of the day.
    “Grandma,” I said at last. “I’ve got a couple of things on my mind.”
    “Well, spit ’em out,” she said, “if you must.”
    “About your plane ride. You never did expect it to get off the ground, did you?”
    “Lands no.” She turned down a hand. “When I was dainty enough for a plane to lift, they didn’t have them. We couldn’t have dusted the crops with me on board. I just wanted to see what it felt like sitting up there in that hen roost.”
    “Cockpit, Grandma,” I said. “Then you meant for me to have the ride all along?”
    Grandma didn’t reply.
    “And another thing. I’ve got a confession to make,” I said. “I know you wanted first prize on the pie. You wanted it bad. And I thought you’d switched the card on Mr. Pennypacker’s pie with yours so you could win with his pie.”
    She shot me her sternest look. But then easing back in the platform rocker, she said, “I did.”

The Phantom Brakeman

    1933
    D own at Grandma’s the only thing that reminded us of home and Chicago was Nehi. This was orange pop at a nickel a bottle. With the twenty-five cents apiece that Dad gave Mary Alice and me, we could each buy five Nehis during our week, if we could slip off from Grandma long enough to get our allowances spent.
    The Coffee Pot Cafe kept the Nehis along with the Grapettes and the Dr Peppers in a sheet-metal vat of ice water with a bottle opener hanging down on a piece of twine. Grandma said she didn’t like Nehi because the bubbles in it gave her gas. Mary Alice said anything that cost money gave Grandma gas.
    We made ourselves scarce that first afternoon and headeduptown before Grandma could find us some chores. I was thirteen at last, so I’d thank you to call me Joe, not Joey, and I walked a few strides ahead of Mary Alice.
    For one thing, she’d been taking dancing lessons all year and never went anywhere without her tap shoes in a drawstring bag. The greatest movie star in history was sweeping the country at that time, a girl younger than Mary Alice named Shirley Temple. Shirley could sing and act, and she was a tap-dancing demon.