Running Loose

by Chris Crutcher

  It was starting to seem there really was justice in the world. I hadn’t got all the things I thought I wanted, like being a football star and all; but Washington was getting even with Boomer in ways I could never hope to, Jasper’s and Lednecky’s stuff seemed less and less important all the time, and I was out at Becky Sanders’s cabin, getting ready to make love with Becky Sanders. Priorities, as Dakota would say.

  Anyway, we covered all that ground over soup and sandwiches. The fire in the fireplace was burning down, and Becky went over to put more wood on it. She sat down on the bed, which was one of those that comes out of a couch, and motioned me over. All the talk had loosened me up, and I thought I had things under control; but my heart shot straight up into my throat. The plain ugly truth of the matter was I just wasn’t ready. Think Boomer Cowans could have a field day with that?

  It’s a strange thing about life: how it keeps throwing you that inside curve to keep you off-balance, keeps setting you up for one thing, then showing you another.

  Becky took off my shirt and had me lie down on the bed; then ran her fingernails lightly in circles, slowly over my back and up into my hair. She massaged my shoulders and kissed the nape of my neck. When she took off her blouse and we crawled under the covers, I said, “Becky, I don’t think I can do this.”

  She smiled and kissed me on the forehead and said something I hope I’ll always remember about sex. She said, “It’s a funny thing about things like sex, that we’re supposedly not supposed to do. Once it’s okay to do it, it’s okay not to.” She kissed me again and whispered, “It’s okay not to.”

  We were quiet for a little while, and I finally said, “Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”

  She laughed. “There are probably lots of things wrong with you, but what you’re thinking isn’t one of them. Sex is scary business, and it’s probably best to wait until you’re really ready. I’ve done it because I thought I was supposed to, and I’ve done it because I really wanted to, and let me tell you, supposed to doesn’t cut it.”

  I wanted to ask her if she’d done it a lot, but it didn’t seem like I should. I knew she’d had a pretty heavy relationship with a college kid when she was off at one of those summer workshops, but we’d never talked much about him. All she said was that that was other times and other places. And she lived on the East Coast all her life before her sophomore year, close to Washington, D.C., and they say you grow up a lot faster there. Anyway, I didn’t want to pry.

  I didn’t have to. Madame Sanders was also a mind reader. She said, “Not a whole lot of times, Louie. Don’t worry about it. Right now, it’s just you and me.”

  I was pretty sure her past didn’t really bother me, though I’d get a little twinge sometimes. Actually I was glad to be with someone who knew enough about all this craziness to let me off the hook.

  “You disappointed?” I asked.

  She laughed and kissed me again. “You know what the very best thing about making love is?” she said. “It’s before and after. It’s lying together, taking care of each other and getting as close as we can. You don’t really have to have sex to make love.”

  So Becky and I made love without having sex, and when I look back on it now, when everything’s irreversible, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  It’s funny. You think you really know a girl. You spend as many of your waking hours as you can being with her and talking and asking questions, and you think you know it all. Then you spend a weekend like we did, and you find you didn’t know your rear end. You get so close. Your conversations take on new meanings. I mean, there are ways of showing your weaknesses—your vulnerability—that aren’t scary when you’re that close, when most of your communication with each other is through touch. What an amazing roller coaster we’re on.

  We lay there in the early-morning hours with the fire burning down to embers, just kind of wrapped around each other, coming in and out of sleep, and I said, “Becky, I’m scared about you going to California.”

  She said, “Yeah, me, too.”

  “I mean, I’m scared for me,” I said. “When you go down there, you’re gone. I’m scared to lose this—you.”

  “Me, too.”

  We lay there awhile longer, and I said, “Is it crazy to want to be happy?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s probably crazy to think you’re going to be all the time.”

  “I just want it to stay like this,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  She snuggled in under my arm. “The only reason it’s like this now is that it isn’t like this all the time,” she said. “My shrink used to say, ‘How can you know good if you don’t know what bad is?’”

  “God,” I said, “I hate it.”

  She kissed me and said, “I love it.”

  After a while she said, “My going to California doesn’t mean things won’t work out with us or that they will. But there’s a big challenge for me there. It’s big and scary and anonymous. And it isn’t my territory. I’m going down there like I own the place and see what happens. Who knows? I might be back by Halloween.”

  I forced it out of my mind because she started kissing and rubbing me again, and just before I finally drifted off, I remember being amazed at how much farther off Jasper and Lednecky and Boomer seemed. All my wars back in Trout didn’t amount to a medium-sized compost heap. For a little while I was free of all that. If Becky had stayed around, I think I could have stayed free.

  CHAPTER 12

  I said earlier how I think relationships work. I still wonder sometimes if ours was good enough to stand what would have happened in the next few years. It sure seemed like it was, but I’m no dummy—despite my 2.46 grade point average—I know things can change. Becky said if we should be together, we would, that things have a way of working themselves out. I wasn’t that confident. Things seem to have a way of screwing up pretty bad before they get around to working themselves out. I just didn’t want it to be one of those deals where we went off in different directions and never saw each other again except to say hi and be uneasy at Christmas parties.

  That was all pretty scary, but it didn’t seem to get in the way of all the fun and quiet good times we had together. Becky had a nice way of reassuring me and making me believe that whatever was going on at the time was all that needed our attention. Anyway, that’s all rhetorical now, as they say, because Becky’s not alive anymore. I mean, she’s dead. Things didn’t work out.

  It was Saturday, March 21. Basketball season was over, and spring was right on time. The dirty snowbank piled up the length of Main Street was melting so fast in the fifty-five-degree breeze you could almost see it dropping. Jelly rolls were popping up all over the place. The sky was blue and clear, and I was out on the island, hosing six months of sediment out into the street. It was the first weekend of the year I worked without a coat.

  Carter was there, leaning against the oil cabinet, talking about how he wished our school had baseball instead of track because track is such a pain in the butt. The reason we don’t is that the diamond is usually covered with snow until late in the season. The track is, too, but we run on the back roads until it melts down. Our high jumper actually practices his form over a snowbank in a rubber suit.

  I was washing down the pumps when Dakota streaked by in Doc Hamilton’s makeshift ambulance, siren screaming, horn blasting. Carter said he must be going down to Cougar Mountain Lodge to get a sandwich. It was about one in the afternoon.

  “Wanna go bowling tonight?” Carter asked. “What time do you close?”

  “Nine,” I said, “but I’ve got a date.” We don’t keep the place open till midnight until trout season opens in early June.

  Carter shook his head. “Whipped,” he said. “Never seen anybody so whipped.” He laughed. “Can’t blame you, though. Maybe I’ll get a date with Sandy. Wanna go bowling if I can drum up a date?”

  It sounded fun. “Sure,” I said.

  “Okay if I use your phone?”<
br />
  “Just leave a dime on Norm’s desk.”

  “Charge it,” he said, and disappeared into Norm’s office.

  Brenda drove in the south entrance and pulled up beside the pumps.

  “Hi,” I said. “Need gas?”

  She shook her head. Her face was chalky white. “Louie,” she said, “I have some horrible news.” She swallowed.

  Norm, I thought. Something happened. The ambulance.

  “Becky’s been in an accident. Just over the hill at the bridge. She swerved to miss some kids on a motorcycle and hit the side of the bridge. The car went into the river.” Brenda lowered her eyes.

  “She can swim,” I said. “The water’s shallow there—”

  “She’s dead, Louie. She hit the windshield when the car hit the bridge.”

  “She always wears seat belts,” I said. “She always wears her seat belt.”

  Brenda just shook her head. “The ambulance is there now. Dakota couldn’t do a thing. Oh, Louie, I’m so sorry.”

  I flashed for a second on Becky darting out from beneath the covers to throw a log on the fire, her muscular legs flexing as she scooted to the fireplace. Alive.

  Then my chest and throat clogged in panic. “Tell Carter to watch the place!” I said. “Please! Get somebody to watch the place!” I sprinted to the pickup, thinking somehow I could still save her. Brenda let me go.

  When I got to the bridge, the wrecker was just pulling up. Dakota was slamming the back door of the ambulance. I stopped and got out slowly, staring straight at him. He grimaced and shook his head. I walked over and looked in the back window, at the long lump that was Becky just a few minutes ago.

  “Dakota, can’t you do something?” I asked. My voice sounded a long ways off.

  He shook his head again. “I’m sorry, Louie. I know that doesn’t mean a damn thing, but I’m sorry as hell.”

  I backed away from the ambulance and looked over the edge of the bridge at her car. The front was stuck in the riverbed, but the back of the roof and the tail were well above water. It couldn’t have been more than four feet deep there. I started down through the brush.

  “Don’t go down there, Louie!” Dakota hollered.

  I stopped and looked up at him, then continued down.

  “Damn it, Louie!” he screamed. “Get back up here!” He closed his eyes. “Her blood is all over.”

  I stopped and sat down and stared at the car.

  “Come on back up, son,” he said again. “Come up and go home. There’s nothin’ you can do. Give yourself a break.”

  Dakota’s been driving the ambulance almost as long as he’s been running the chain at football games. I guess he’s seen a lot of that kind of thing. In a town this size, if somebody gets it, it’s always somebody you know. Just last year he had to pull Zack Cameron out of his logging truck after the brakes locked and the whole load shifted forward, severing off the top of the cab and the top of Zack right with it. Dakota had to tell Zack’s wife. He knew he couldn’t help me, but he did get me to come up.

  Just then Carter pulled up behind the pickup in his mom’s car. He jumped out but stopped when he saw my face.

  “Somebody watching the station?” was all I could think of.

  He nodded. “Brenda’s there.”

  I looked over at the ambulance and back at him and shrugged. Tears welled up in his eyes. I know he wanted to help me somehow, hug me, something, but his feet were glued to the spot. “I’ll follow you back,” he said.

  I nodded.

  It’s funny. You get around a girl for a while, somebody you love and care about and respect, and you start doing things she’d approve of. You get to asking yourself how what you’re doing would look to her, even if she’s not around at the time. I didn’t know where to go—couldn’t think what Becky would want me to do—so I just drove slowly on through town. People stared at me from the sidewalk and through store windows; I could feel it. News travels fast. As I passed the turnoff to Carter’s place, I waved him off, then headed for the lake, across the spillway and into the woods, out to the meadow where we used to park. I hiked across it and up into the woods, coming out at the shoreline about three miles north of the city dock, and walked another three or four miles along the shore. The funny thing about that afternoon is I can’t remember anything I thought. Pretty soon it was dark, and five or six hours of my life were gone nowhere.

  There was a pretty good moon—maybe just less than half—and I didn’t have any trouble working my way back down the shoreline and over the hill to the meadow. The big pine cast a long, dim shadow clear back to the pickup. I walked over and sat down under it.

  I’ve never been really religious, at least not in the way most people think of it. I mean, I light the candles sometimes at the Episcopal church; but that’s mostly because they need somebody to do it, and it’s easier than saying no when Reverend Watts calls and asks. But I pray sometimes, when I think it’s God’s business. I don’t ask Him to give me things or make me better than somebody, but when something comes up that nobody can help me with and that I just can’t understand by myself, I’ll pray. Up until that day I felt like I had a pretty good relationship with Him.

  So I gave it a go, sitting there under the tree. I looked through the branches and past the moon and right up at heaven and I said God, I don’t get this, and it just isn’t acceptable. I didn’t do anything to deserve it. Nothin’. If there’s a good reason, then you owe me an explanation, so let’s have it. And I don’t want to hear that you work in strange and wondrous ways that we don’t understand because I’ve heard that before—every time something happens that’s so ugly nobody can believe it. You just figure out a way to give me an answer, or you can count me out.

  God didn’t say diddly. The branches moved a little in the breeze, and the moon just kept shinin’ on.

  I said that’s not good enough, and waited a little while longer.

  Nothin’.

  I said after what all had gone on that day, it wouldn’t be totally out of place to give me some kind of answer, damn it.

  Same response.

  Sometimes when things are really going bad and everything around you has turned brown and you feel like a part of it all, instead of trying to make things better, you try to make them worse. I don’t know why that is, but it is. After I figured I’d given Lord God Almighty plenty of time to answer and He didn’t, I walked over to the pickup and dragged my granddad’s old double-bitted ax out of the bed and came back and brought that tree to the ground. I’m sorry I did it now. It was big and tall and stood there like a king, and it was one of the nicest memories I had of Becky’s and my first time together. But I dropped it. It must have taken me forty-five minutes, but I just stood there blasting away and screaming, “Is this yours? How do you like it? Is this yours? How do you like it?”

  Then I drove back.

  CHAPTER 13

  When I pulled up to the house, Brenda’s face was staring at me out through the kitchen window. I imagine she’d probably been there for a long time, hoping I’d come home before doing anything foolish. As I came through the kitchen door, she turned to face me, registering some shock at my appearance. “Are you all right?” she asked quietly.

  I nodded and said yeah, that I’d been trying to work things out. She came over and hugged me. I could feel her tears against my neck, but by the time I pushed her away, gently, her eyes were dry and clear. Brenda’s tough. Tough as hell. Three years ago, when my uncle got cancer and died miserably, by inches, she kept my aunt occupied at least six hours a day for more than seven months and still got all her other work done. The only time she broke was when she thought she was alone. She still doesn’t know I saw her pounding her pillow and cussing God for not getting it over with. I guess our family has given the Old Geezer a rough go over the last few years.

  “I know you don’t feel like eating,” she said, “but it would be good if you did. Norm’s already eaten, but there’s food in the oven.”

 
I nodded. “Where is he?”

  “Out looking for you,” she said. “He should be back soon.” It was a little after ten. Tracy was in bed.

  The kitchen door opened, and Norm came through. He stopped, and we looked at each other for a second. My eyes dropped, and he walked over to put a hand on my shoulder. In Trout that’s as close as a man gets to hugging another man.

  “Bad break,” he said.

  I nodded.

  He took a deep breath. “Well, this can’t get us anywhere. Have something to eat, and we’ll play it by ear.”

  Somehow we got through the rest of the evening, talking and watching TV. Norm and Brenda filled in all the silent moments they could, keeping me at least partially preoccupied.

  When the late movie was over and they were playing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I figured we’d all had enough. “Look,” I said, “I’m going for a short drive. Just for a little while.”

  Brenda shot a quick uneasy glance at Norm.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I just want to be alone for a little while. I’m not going to do anything stupid.” I smiled at her. “Really, Brenda, it’s okay.”

  I drove down the deserted main street. The Buckhorn had closed a few minutes ago, and the people going home were the only action anywhere. I took a left at the Mercantile and a right at the next block and found myself in front of Becky’s place. A light burned in the living room, and smoke poured out of the chimney. Mr. Sanders was alone in there, probably being eaten up. I had to go in.