The Cardboard Combine on Main Street

The Pharmacy

I did not look for Brody. I want you to understand that.

I knew Amy and Jared would be somewhere along the street, probably in front of the pharmacy, because that is where Jared always stands. The pharmacist is one of his accounts.

But I did not look. I kept my eyes on the street ahead of me and the fourth-grade ghosts.

I did not want that boy to see me looking for him and think I had come to take him away from his dad.

If he saw me, he saw me. If he wanted to wave, he could wave.

If he stood there in his red suit and didn’t do a thing, that was his business too, and I would keep walking and go home and put the combine in the shop.

I was halfway down the second block, just past the café, when I saw Darlene on the curb out of the corner of my eye.

She had her hands in her coat pockets and her chin down, and she was not looking at me. She was looking at something farther up the street.

Then I heard it. A little voice, high and loud, coming out of the crowd outside the pharmacy.

“Grandpa!”

There was a red blur. Foam muscles. A black mask sitting crooked across his face, with one eyehole somewhere near his ear.

He came down the sidewalk at the edge of the street at a dead run, and he did not look back at anybody.

A boy dressed as a dinosaur stepped aside for him.

Brody did not slow down until he reached the edge of the sidewalk beside my combine, with both arms out, and grabbed hold of my front wheel.

“Grandpa,” he said, out of breath. “Can I drive?”

I bent down as far as a cardboard combine lets a sixty-seven-year-old man bend, which is not very far. I got about level with the top of his head.

“Well,” I said. “That depends.”

“On what?”

I didn’t have an answer to that. I had not planned that far. I looked up over his shoulder at the curb in front of the pharmacy.

Amy was standing there with both hands over her mouth. Her eyes were wet.

Next to her was Jared, in his good wool coat, holding a cup of coffee from the Legion. He was not smiling.

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he handed Amy his coffee.

And he stepped off the curb and walked straight toward us.

What Jared Did

I braced myself. I will admit that. I did not know what was coming, and I had a fair idea it might be a hand on Brody’s shoulder and a quiet word about getting back on the curb. That would have been his right.

Jared walked up and stopped in front of us. The parade went around us like water around a rock.

He looked at my flashlight, and the wheels, and the grain tank with the Milk Duds in it. Then he crouched down to Brody’s level, the way he always does.

“You want to drive Grandpa’s, bud?” he asked.

Brody shook his head. He pushed his mask up on his forehead and looked at his dad straight on.

“I want mine,” he said.

Jared stayed crouched there a second. Then he stood up and looked at me, and I saw his jaw work. “Where is it, Leon?”

“Truck bed,” I said. “Side street by the elevator. Under the sheet.”

He nodded once. He didn’t ask why it was still in my truck.

He turned around and walked back up Main Street, against the parade, past the café and the bank, in his good wool coat, and the crowd parted for him.

Brody stood next to me holding onto my front wheel. We waited by the café.

Darlene came off the curb and stood with us, and she put her hand on Brody’s head and didn’t say anything.

It took Jared about five minutes. When he came back, he was carrying that little green combine in both arms down the middle of Main Street, in front of maybe a thousand people, with the sheet over his shoulder and one of the flashlights flopping loose.

People saw him. Of course they did. He sells to half the businesses on that street. The pharmacist saw him, and the bank teller, and the men in front of the Legion.

Somebody started clapping, and then a few more, and Jared’s ears went red, but he did not stop walking.

He knelt down on the cold street and held the combine open, and Brody climbed into it over the top of his superhero suit.

Jared clipped my old suspenders on him and checked them twice. Then he reached back and clicked on both flashlights.

Brody pulled the mask off his head. He looked at it a second, and then he reached up and hung it by the elastic on the corner of my grain tank, where it swung against the green cardboard. He did it like he was putting something away for safekeeping.

I looked at that little black mask hanging there, and I had to look at the fire truck lights for a while.

“Okay,” Brody said. “Now I’m driving.”