The car arrived in my garage three days after my grandfather's funeral. My father must have put it there because I clearly had not.
The death had been a suicide. My family had never been close with the man. He and my dad had ignored each other most of my life and I never knew why. I had one picture of him holding me and in it he looked like he wanted to be somewhere, anywhere else. In other words, when we got the to the memorial we felt more like awkward guests than family, and I kept wondering who the other seven people in attendance were.
The affair was held in the basement of a columbarium, a cold and damp space. No celebration of life with walls of photos, no rotating pictures on a big screen tv. Just an urn of ashes on a little table. Faded sunlight barely making it through the high windows. Someone from the funeral home presiding. All ten of us looking uncomfortable.
A short prayer and it was over. If the event was an example of my grandfather's creative planning skills he had obviously been a very dull guy. We never found out who the other people were and when we left, my father didn't look back.
And then the car showed up. It was old, the car. A 1961 VW bug, the blue color faded. I looked inside and saw seats covered with faded vinyl that had been duct taped in a few unobtrusive spots. A stick shift that had to mean a manual transmission, the wooden knob on top worn shiny and smooth where years of fingers and hands had gripped it.
I circled it three times, then opened the door and slid in, just to see that it felt like to sit in something that wasn't an SUV. The car wrapped around me like a glove that fit just right. I wiggled further into the seat and snapped the seat belt across my lap. No shoulder strap. Maybe people were safer drivers years ago. I pushed down on the clutch and moved the gear shift from neutral into first, second, third, fourth. Down and back to the left for reverse. Each gear clicked neatly into place. The car had been well taken care of, but that didn't explain why it had shown up in my garage.
I climbed out, opened the back where the trunk should have been and found the engine instead. Lifted the hood next and almost lost my hand when it didn't click into place. I grabbed it before it slammed back down, opened it again and realized just what that baseball bat in the trunk was for. Behind the spare and next to the gas cap there was a wooden box, polished to a sheen and decorated with a small white envelope that read To Sam From Your Grandfather in dark, bold handwriting. A small, white, empty envelope.
I settled the bat firmly under the hood and took out the box. The little gold latch was fidgety but one I got it to release I found piles of old maps, their colors dull and faded. I dropped down on the garage floor and started paging through them. They were in alphabetical order, some of them almost untouched. Others were hard to read, the road numbers and the miles between towns lost in the folds and creases.
My hands moved through them like I was touching ancient parchments that might disintegrate when they met the oil on my fingers. And no matter how careful I was for a few of them that was almost true. Nothing disappeared completely, but some tore along lines that looked like they'd been folded and refolded time and again. Those were the ones where town and river names blurred into splotches and smears. I kept looking.
I was on a hunt for something, like a treasure hunt where the only way you knew what you won was by finding all the clues. Why had I been given a full set of old Rand McNalleys? More specifically, why had I been given them by the grandfather I didn't know? I paused over a stack of maps labeled Alabama to Florida, shaking my head, and then I went back into the house.
"Why did we get the Volkswagen?" I asked my father. "Or more specifically, why did I?"
He tapped the remote and the baseball game continued with no sound. He shrugged and said, "It was something he said a year or so ago. He called me over, gave me a set of keys and said, "If anything ever happens to me take the car. So I did." He paused and added, "He didn't say it was for you."
I waved the envelope at him. "For Sam," I said.
He got up off the couch and took the little white square from my fingers, looked at the front, opened it, shook it, looked inside. "Where'd you find this?"
"In the trunk. You know, in the front. On a box filled with maps and journals." He looked puzzled so I added, "They're all in alphabetical order, the maps. I haven't looked through the journals yet." Someone must have gotten a strike because the silent crowd on the tv behind him went wild. He never noticed. He simply shook his head and said, "I don't know why he'd have those. I mean I understand the maps. It's a car. It travels. But journals? I sure never saw him reading, let alone writing."
I waited for more and when nothing more came I took the conversation back to the car. "So that was it? Take the car? And you just did it?"
He took a deep breath. "Sam, you know we weren't close. Maybe I missed things I should have paid attention to, but it's too late now. He asked me to take the car. If I couldn't do anything else for him, I could do that."
Okay. That made some sense. Probably more than my grandfather leaving me a car in the first place. Or maybe he'd just left me the box. I almost said that but then I decided no, just the box -- that didn't make any sense at all. The box and the car clearly went together. Maps and the thing you used to follow those maps. And also, To Sam right there on that empty envelope. I hesitated but I felt like I had to ask. I looked at my dad and said, "Do you mind? If it's for me?"
He laughed, one flat note. "What would I want with an old Volkswagen? If you want it, it's all yours." And he turned the sound back up on the tv.
I went back to the garage, back to the maps. In the next stack I found Illinois, the map that matched my state, and spread it out on the cracked concrete floor of the garage. The folds on that one were tissue paper thin, several tearing as I opened it. I closed my eyes, waved my hand in the air like I was starting a magic trick, and dropped my finger down on the worn paper. When I looked down I saw my finger in the middle of Chicago, close to the lake. "Look at that," I said out loud. "Almost home. That's got to be some kind of sign." It was too bad I didn't know what kind.
I moved the map gently to the side and stared at the rest of the things in the box. Journals, like I'd told my dad. Hardbound black books, all the same size, and one pen, dark blue with a wide tip, the ink completely dried out. I took out the first journal and started to page through it. The books were obviously made of sturdier stuff than the maps. The pages whispered secrets, and they looked fresh and new. Maybe they'd solve the mystery of my never around and now dead grandfather. But no. All I found were latitudes and longitudes, two pages worth. I flipped through but even when I got to the end I hadn't found anything else. No beautiful pictures, no lists of places or towns, no nothing. I tried the next one, and the one after that, all with the same result, until I hit on the one from Illinois. In that one, on the back endpaper, there was a note. The handwriting and the broad strokes of the pen matched the writing on my envelope, and it said Poets will save the world.
I sat back on my heels. I was a poet. Or I thought I was. I'd even planned on entering a poetry slam at the public library, but I'd chickened out at the last minute. Sure, I'd shown Jean and Jude at the Circle K to a couple of people at school and they'd said they liked it but in the end I just wasn't ready to share words I'd put together, to give a bunch of people that much access to what went on in my head. And by a bunch I meant all twelve people that showed. Which would have been twelve too many.
But here was this epigraph which was apparently from my dead grandfather that seemed to imply that he was a poet, too. My father wasn't. He couldn't rhyme moon with June. Maybe that kind of thing could skip a generation. Sure, he'd just said he never saw his father writing anything, let alone poetry. But it kind of made me pause. If I'd been the one to inherit the poet gene – and I still was figuring out if that was true -- did that mean I'd inherited the suicide gene, too? I knew my dad had some dark days. I did, too, but everyone did, right? But since I'd learned how my grandfather died I'd been feeling like maybe there was something sitting on my shoulder, waiting to be pushed. They said suicide ran in families, like diabetes or red hair. My father had never said anything, but was suicide really the kind of thing you talked about over tacos?
I ran my fingers over the words, over the slight indentations on the page. I flipped back to the front and looked at the latitudes and longitudes, and I matched the first set with that soft, faded map. Well, shit. It was practically in my driveway. It was practically an invitation.
Chasing ghosts in the movies never turned out well. But if my dead grandfather suddenly wanted to share something with me, who was I to ignore him? As an invitation the journals and the epigraph lacked some specificity, but maybe that was the whole point. Who knew what I might uncover, might start to understand? Like parallel train tracks, thoughts of poetry and suicide clattered in my mind.
I found an old pencil in the glove box and started to figure out the two pages of coordinates.