Lorry’s Lincoln

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Laurence. Lorry’s father lived in an abandoned traincar with blond triplets named Mandi, Candi, and Sandi. His mother lived in the house of a rich family as the housekeeper’s second assistant. Lorry lived with his grandmother, Velvet.

Velvet had a giant Victorian house at the edge of town. The pain had peeled off and lay in piles on the ground like rotting banana peels. There were no carpets inside because the house flooded every spring. Even in summer, after the walls had tried out, taking flakes of paper with it, Lorry could still hear water dripping nearby.

It was the kids at school who had first called him Lorry. He didn’t realize they were trying to insult him by giving him a girl’s name, he assumed that they were using the British word for "truck." Velvet watched a lot of BBC, Lorry knew all about flats and Bobbies and how to ring someone. He didn’t mind be called Truck. He loved cars.

His prize possession was a foot-long model Ford Lincoln. He’d found it in the junkyard and cleaned it up himself. Two wooden babies were in the backseat, wrapped in strips of crinkling toilet paper that Velvet filled her purse with whenever they went to a public restroom. A naked Barbie sat in the front passenger seat. Lorry’d had to saw off her legs at the knee with a bread knife so that she would fit into the car.

"It’s okay," Velvet had said when she saw Parapelegic Penny. (Lorry had learned the word "parapelegic" on BBC special.) "Maybe her babies will help her cook."

"No," Lorry said. "Penny doesn’t have to cook."

"Why’s that?"

"She has a maid. Like Mom is."

Velvet lifted her eyebrows but didn’t comment. She asked Horry to come help her fold the laundry.

He looked for a proper father doll but couldn’t find one. Loyal Laurence didn’t have a big grin like Ken, he had a strong face that didn’t smile much at all, like the member of British parliment. And he had a pee-stick between his legs like Lorry’s. But bigger.

So the driver’s seat remained empty.

Lorry’s own father showed up every full moon. He would crawl through the bedroom window – not hard to do, since the glass had been broken and replaced with cardboard – and shake Lorry awake by the foot.

"Bill," he’d say. "Bill, wake up."

"My name’s not Bill," Lorry told him one night. "It’s Lorry."

"Laurie’s a girl’s name," his father said. "I told your mother we should have called you Bill. I warned her you’d grow up like a girl."

"I’m not a girl!" He sat up in bed.

"Can you pee standing up? ‘Cause only girls sit down."

Velvet hadn’t taught him how to pee standing up. She didn’t know how.

After that, Lorry ended his search for a Loyal Laurence. He began looking for a Brawdy Bill doll. (Brawdy was another word he’d learned off BBC.)

"What about a grandma doll?" Velvet suggested.

Lorry thought. The two babies – Smart Sam and Fast Frank – needed to learn how to pee standing up. A grandmother doll couldn’t help, and neither could Parapelegic Penny, who couldn’t stand up at all, let alone pee that way. And if he never found a Brawdy Bill, who would teach the kids?

"No, Grandma," he said. "They need a grandpa doll."

This time Velvet frowned. Lorry had pounded nails into the crotches of the baby dolls, giving them hard, shiny phalluses with curious steel foreskins. One was a little bent.

"Maybe you and I should spend more time together," Velvet said thoughtfully. "I found a ten-dollar bill on the ground today. Why don’t we go to White Castle for dinner?"

"Can I take my car?" Lorry asked.

"No, but we won’t be gone long."

Lorry knew that his grandmother didn’t like his Ford Lincoln very much. That’s why he always put it under his pillow where she couldn’t find it before he left the house.

On his way out the front door, he saw a full moon plowing up through the rainbow sunset. That meant his father would come see him tonight. He hoped he was home from dinner before his father got there.

The White Castle was very clean, and so were all the families who were eating there. Velvet put her coat over the back of a chair and told Lorry to sit down and wait while she bought their food. The chair was made of metal and the back of it hurt his shoulder blades, but he waited like she had told him to.

She came back with two small sodas in smooth paper cups and a white bag. She examined the recite and carefully counted the change to make sure the girl had gotten it right. When they got home, she would put all the pennies in a jar on the kitchen counter with a label that read, "Lorry’s College Fund." He’d seen her take pennies out of it once or twice, but he never said anything because she cried while she did it.

"Here’s your soda," she said. She showed him how to take the paper wrapper off the straw and stick it into the plastic lid. "And here’s a hamburger."

Lorry had seen a lot of hamburger ads on television. He knew what to expect.

He peeled back the wrapper and stared at the burger.

It was wrong. It was as wrong as anything he had ever seen, as wrong as peeing sitting down.

There was no lettuce. No tomato. No onions. No Special Sauce.

But worst of all, the hamburger was square.

He didn’t know what that meant, and he didn’t care to find out. A strange scent wafted from the burger to his nostrils, making him wrinkle his nose. Across the table, Velvet was chowing down.

She saw Lorry with his back pressed hard against the chair, spine straight as an arrow, eyes round. "What’s wrong?" she asked.

He wouldn’t answer.

"Lorry," she said, "I bought you that hamburger. It’s yours. Eat it."

He didn’t want it. That wasn’t a hamburger and she couldn’t make him eat it.

Velvet tried to always be patient with Lorry, but tonight her patience was wearing thin. "Lorry," she said sternly, "eat your dinner before it gets cold."

He just shook his head tightly.

"I paid good money for that food and you’re going to eat it."

He could see her getting angry now. Tears filled her eyes and her big old hands clenched around the edges of the table. Gritting her teeth, she said, "We are going to sit here until you eat that burger, Laurence. I don’t care if we have to stay all night, you’re going to learn to be grateful for what you’re given."

He looked at the burger and back at her. No way. He was not eating that thing. She couldn’t make him.

Then he realized that she didn’t have to. All she had to do was wait until the sun went down. Then Lorry’s father would crawl into his room through the broken window and find the Ford Lincoln under the pillow. He would break it down and sell it for parts the way he did cars that had crashed on the side of the highway and left to rot.

Velvet was trying to get rid of the Lincoln.

"I want to go home," Lorry said.

"Not until you’ve eaten your burger."

"I have to go home."

"No."

"Yes."

"No."

Lorry’s heart started to pound. "I have to go home," he whispered.

"Eat your burger and we can."

He looked at the burger again. He couldn’t eat that. That wasn’t a burger.

He wasn’t Brawdy Bill, he wasn’t a strong man. But they had one defense in common.

Jumping out of his chair, he pulled his pee-stick out of his pants. "Laurence!" Velvet cried, and he felt the pee shooting out of him. A hot stream him Velvet in the face, blinding her, and she fell down on the floor. Lorry turned to run but he couldn’t stop the pee once he had started and it went shooting all over the tidy families in the restaurant, all over their strange, square burgers.

Everyone began screaming. Lorry was screaming, too, out of his mouth and out of his pee-stick at the same time. He slipped in his own pee as he ran toward the door and fell down. He got back on his feet and he was still peeing, on the floor, on the walls, on his own feet. He barreled through the door and into the parking lot, where his boiling pee turned into steam as it hit the pavement.

He ran until he had stopped peeing and then he walked. He walked all the way back to Velvet’s house on the edge of town. He climbed into his bedroom through the window with the cardboard and got the Ford Lincoln out from under his pillow. Then he went outside and walked to the house where his mother was the housekeeper’s second assistant.

The butler told him to go away but he cried and finally got inside. He was all sticky from the pee and he didn’t feel very good. His mother didn’t seem to feel very good, either, when she saw him standing in the polished parlor of her employers, dripping urine onto the Oriental rug.

He didn’t want to go back to Velvet’s house but his mother said that he couldn’t stay here. He begged and begged, and finally told his mother that Velvet was dead. Then she began crying and sent him to his uncle, Junior.

Uncle Junior was nice. Not as nice as Velvet, but nice. He let Lorry keep his Ford Lincoln and even take it to school when he wanted to, and in the evenings he always drank too much and fell asleep in front of the TV, so Lorry could watch whatever he wanted. He didn’t cook much, either, mostly just crackers and peanut butter, and most of the time he forgot to wash Lorry’s clothes so they all got worn out and ugly.

But living there was okay. Uncle Junior taught Lorry how to pee standing up.

Lorry grew up and went to technical school. He became a plumber and married a tiny woman named Annie who only knew two words, "yes," and "okay." She could never sit still and sometimes Lorry had to yell at her to make her stop bouncing her legs.

He bought a big old Ford from a neighbor. It wasn’t a Lincoln, but it was okay. Annie sat in the front seat and opened and closed the glove compartment and flicked the ashtray lid up and down. Sometimes she would push the lighter in when she didn’t even want to smoke until Lorry told her to stop.

They had two kids. They were boys. Annie wanted to name them after her brothers who had died in the war but Lorry said they had to be Sam and Frank. When they had a third baby they called it Bill.

When Bill was born, Lorry felt pretty proud. He had a nice big car and a tiny little wife and three boys with good-sized pee-sticks. It made him think of his grandmother, who he hadn’t seen since the day he ran out of the White Castle peeing.

"Annie," he said, "put the kids in the car. We’re going to see Velvet."

He wasn’t sure that she was still alive, but he drove the Ford and his family out to her house on the edge of town anyway. It looked the same except that the paint was completely gone now and the front porch had rotted off. Lorry parked on the grass and honked on the horn.

He honked again and again and finally an old woman came to the door. He rolled down the window and yelled, "Hey, Velvet, come look!"

Velvet was almost a hundred years old by that time. It took her a long time to get down the cement steps, especially with the railing gone, and she wasn’t even sure it was worth all this trouble to see the grandson who had treated her so poorly. But she made the trip anyway, her hips screaming at her the entire time, and forced her old legs to walk until she was standing in a cloud of exhaust beside Lorry’s Ford.

"Hey, Velvet," he said. Now that he was here, he was excited to see her. "Look, that’s my wife, Annie. This is my car. It’s not a Lincoln but it’s a Ford and it’s real good. And those are our kids, Sam and Frank and Bill." He decided not to say anything about their good-sized pee-sticks.

He saw Velvet peer into the backseat of the car and nod. She was a lot shorter than he remembered.

"Want to take a ride with us? Annie, get in the back. Come on, Velvet, get in up front with me."

Velvet walked very slowly around the to the other side of the car. Annie helped her sit down and then got in the back with the boys. She put Bill on her lap.

Lorry drove all over town, showing Velvet how he could drive fast or slow, and how he knew where everything was. He drove past the house where he and Annie lived, which Uncle Junior had given him in his will, and the house where his mother lived with Old Man Richards. Then he drove the long way around the town, back to Velvet’s old Victorian house.

That whole time, she hadn’t said anything, just nodded and stared out the window. But when Lorry pulled up in front of her house, she was ready to talk.

"I never could pee standing up," she told him.

He looked down and realized that the front seat of the Ford was full of pee.

The End

Jory San-Corinth

February 10, 2001