The King of Where-I-Go
by Howard Waldrop



When I was eight, in 1954, my sister caught
polio.

It wasn't my fault, although it took twenty years
before I talked myself out of believing it was. See,
we had this fight …



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We were at my paternal grandparents' house in
Alabama, where we were always taken in the
summer, either being driven from Texas to there
on Memorial Day and picked up on the Fourth of
July, or taken the Fourth and retrieved Labor Day
weekend, just before school started again in
Texas.

This was the first of the two times when we spent
the whole summer in Alabama. Our parents were
taking a break from us for three entire months.
We essentially ran wild all that time. This was a
whole new experience. Ten years later, when it
happened the second time, we would return to
find our parents separated—me and my sister
living with my mother in a garage apartment that
backed up on the railroad tracks and my father
living in what was a former motel that had been
turned into day-laborer apartments a half mile
away.

Our father worked as an assembler in a radio
factory that would go out of business in the early
l960s, when the Japanese started making them
better, smaller, and cheaper. Our mother worked
in the Ben Franklin 5¢-10¢-25¢ store downtown.
Our father had to carpool every day into a Dallas
suburb, so he would come and get the car one
day a week. We would be going to junior high by
then, and it was two blocks away.

But that was in the future. This was the summer
of 1954.

Every two weeks we would get in our aunt's
purple Kaiser and she would drive us the forty-five
miles to our maternal grandparents' farm in the
next county, and we would spend the next two
weeks there. Then they'd come and get us after
two weeks and bring us back. Like the movie title
says, two weeks in another town.