Big Easy Bonanza

car’s coming up behind us. Get out of the middle of the road. Get out of the middle of the road! Get out of the middle of the road!”
    Henry accelerated, but the car leaped forward erratically. Again, Chauncey grabbed the wheel, and pulled it too far. The car ran off onto the shoulder. “Now see what you made me do!”
    Henry’s acne-mottled face was dead white, his bottom lip tight. Bitty knew he was biting it to keep the tears back. “God, Henry. Get out of this car. You stink to high heaven!”
    It was true. The fear and stress were taking their toll, along with Henry’s fifteen-year-old hormones. He certainly did stink, poor darling baby. Bitty wanted nothing so much as to hold him in her lap and rock him and sing him a lullaby.
    He hurled himself out of the car and stood on the shoulder with his back to them, shaking. But he had forgotten to set the emergency brake and the car began to roll. “Shit!”
    Chauncey shouted, pulling it up. “Haven’t you got the sense God gave you?”
    Bitty said, “That’s enough. Let’s go home, Chauncey.”
    But Marcelle whined, “I want to try.”
    “Okay, baby,” said Chauncey. “We’re going to give you your chance, dollin’.”
    “Chauncey, no. Henry—”
    “You don’t think Marcelle should get a chance?”
    What was she supposed to say in front of Marcelle? “I think it would really hurt Henry’s feelings—”
    “Henry! He had his chance. Come on, baby. You come on around.”
    Marcelle got out and Bitty made to follow. “I’ll stay with Henry.”
    “No!”
    Marcelle got in and closed the door. Chauncey said, “Let him stew in his own juices. The boy just doesn’t think, that’s all! Let’s give him a chance, for once.” He turned to Marcelle. “Now, dollin’, turn the key gently.…”
    Marcelle took to driving as she had to reading, and finger painting, and piano lessons, and everything else she did. All she really needed to be told was the name of the ignition and accelerator, and brake—the rest seemed to come naturally. Smoothly, like a pro, eyes barely higher than the steering wheel, she maneuvered the car around the S curves and back again, while Henry sat on the shoulder, an outcast.
    Bitty could have died, would certainly have cried, except she couldn’t, just couldn’t, in front of Chauncey and Marcelle. There was already enough strife in the family. She could make it okay till she got home and got herself a glass of wine or something.
    On their second pass they noticed Henry was no longer sitting on the shoulder. Ahead, they could see his miserable hunched shoulders as he walked away from the spectacle of Marcelle the baby girl once again outshining him, the star of her own show after he’d once again been booed and hissed offstage.
    Chauncey had Marcelle stop and change places with him. Driving like a maniac, truly endangering their lives, as Henry really hadn’t, he whizzed down the road, came to a violent stop, leaped out and shouted, “Where do you think you’re going, young man?”
    Henry kept walking, didn’t answer.
    “You answer me when I speak to you!”
    “Home!”
    “You get in this car right now!”
    For answer, Henry began to run. Chauncey chased him down, grabbed him by the arm, and marched him ceremoniously back to the car. He pushed him in like a cop getting tough with a felon.
    Now he and Bitty were in the back seat together and she could feel the full blast of his humiliation. She blinked away tears and laid her hand gently on his leg. As she had known he would, he pushed it away and turned to stare out the window, but not before she caught the hunted, trapped-animal look in his eyes.
    Chauncey thrashed him when they got home, on the excuse he had disobeyed and tried to run away, but she knew he didn’t need an excuse. He was determined to beat up on his son, and that was all there was to it. It was the only time he’d ever done that, and she threatened to leave him if he ever did it again.
    Afterward Henry left to walk the streets for hours (she later learned), finally ending up at Tolliver’s. Like the good uncle he was, Tolliver listened to the story—or whatever tiny bits of it Henry’s pride would let him tell (not much was Bitty’s guess, but she also knew that Tolliver would have read between the lines).
    In the end Tolliver had taught him to drive, and Chauncey had seemed grateful, thanking him for endangering his life and enduring “what no human being should have to.”

2
    Marcelle