by Jack Ketchum
She tried not to think about her mother, about the reason her father wasn’t home tonight. But it was like trying not to think about some stupid song that had popped into your head first thing in the morning. The more you tried to lose it the longer and harder it stuck.
Practically catatonic was what he’d said.
She could almost picture it, her mother crouched in some corner in a stark bare room, her mother thin and wasted, not eating, hair a mess and probably dirty. Would they have her in a straitjacket? No. That was only for the violent ones, not the catatonics. She wondered if they still let her wear her own clothes or if she’d graduated to some hospital gown open in the back so you could see her backbone and the crack of her ass.
It was not good, this kind of thinking.
She drew herself a hot bath and lay in the water for awhile sipping slowly at a third glass of Remy. Her father would never miss it. Her father drank so rarely that he never knew what was inside his liquor cabinet let alone how much of it. He ordered liquor in for entertainment purposes, for the occasional visit from a client. And when the visit was over the bottle went back into the cabinet and for the most part there it sat.
She showered after the bath and dried her hair, wrapped herself in a towel and padded into her bedroom and sat in front of the makeup table and mirror that had once belonged to her mother. It was still a wonder to her that her mother hadn’t smashed the mirror as she’d smashed so much else over the years. Kath had appropriated the table and mirror the same day they committed her, moved it into her room all by herself. At first her father’d been appalled. Couldn’t you have waited?
No. She could not have waited. She was going to get something out of the woman if it killed her. She’d made their fives such a living hell for so many years that dammit, she deserved something.
After a while her father got to thinking it was just Kath’s way of remembering her mother as she was in better days, of honoring her memory and accepted what she’d done as that. She never corrected his thinking but he was wrong. Practically every time she looked in the mirror what she was saying to herself was To hell with you mom, I survived you. Saying it with a grim smile, as though her mother were somewhere in the mirror and could see her on the other side free while she was trapped there, trapped and able to read her thoughts. No honoring, no remembering.
Not if she could help it.
She brushed her hair and applied her makeup and dressed—one of her father’s white starched Brooks Brothers shirts and a pair of tight new jeans and tennis shoes. No belt. Very simple. She imagined Ray would expect something more elaborate and didn’t want to play to his expectations. She never wanted to with a boy. It was simple policy. You kept them off guard at first. It always paid to do so. She fastened the silver necklace her father had given her for her thirteenth birthday around her neck and she was ready.
From her bedroom window she saw the car roll up in the driveway. He honked his horn once. Briefly. Politely. A single light tap.
She sat down on the bed and opened up a Cosmo and began to read.
It was not a good idea to hurry.
“How’d you get that walk, Ray? Mind my asking?”
“Nah. No big deal. I broke both my legs when I was a kid. You know, stupid kid stuff. I was nine, ten. There was this house under construction and a bunch of us were walking around on the frame, what was going to be the attic. They had just the bare rafters and the ceiling joists up, you know? So we’re doing this kind of tightrope walk back and forth and this guy, this asshole, this asshole pushes me. I fall thirty feet to the ground and fracture both legs. Ten days in the hospital, compound fractures, both of them. Then the damn doctors took the casts off too early so they didn’t heal right. I was varsity gymnastics that year. That was the end of that.”
He didn’t want to use the story about the drug dealer shooting him.
He was afraid it might spook her.
He definitely had her attention, though. He had the top down and he was shouting into the wind which was a good way to tell it. It made him seem tougher somehow, the story cooler. Elvis tooling down the highway with Lizabeth Scott in Loving You. Yeah, a lot like that.
They were on their way to a package store, heading down the mountain, you could see the lake glinting through the trees. She said she wanted some chips and stuff. Chips and stuff wasn’t his idea of how to start off a perfect date but he wasn’t going to argue with her. Even in a man’s baggy shirt she looked terrific. She wasn’t wearing a bra. The wind pressed the shirt flat to her tits and he could see the wind-stiff nipples. Damn! He was driving with a hard-on here. He wondered if she’d noticed. He figured it was a no-lose situation whether she did or didn’t, either way.
“I got the guy though,” he said. “I waited six months until he figured I’d forgotten all about it, and then one day after the movies we were all walking home, pretty much the same kids as before and I said, ‘Hey, Eddie, remember that fall I took?’ just a casual question and he looks at me and nods and so I sucker punch him. One shot right to the chin and he’s out, bleeding all over the sidewalk. Concussion and a fractured skull. So he got to have his little stay in the hospital too. No, I don’t mind you asking about it. Everybody does eventually.”
He pulled into the parking lot and cut the engine. The lot was almost deserted, only three other cars though the package store was the biggest in the area. She had her compact out and was checking her makeup in the mirror. He got out and walked around and opened the door for her. With a girl like this you wanted to be a gentleman.
As she stepped out of the car he saw that she’d unbuttoned her blouse almost to the waist. What the fuck?
They walked toward the entrance.
“So, uh, what’re we getting?”
“I’m getting some chips and a pack of cigarettes. You’re going to steal us a couple of six-packs.”
He laughed. “I don’t need to steal stuff, Kath. I got plenty of money. I can buy us a case of it. Two cases! Scotch, bourbon. Whatever you want.”
Her smile was thoroughly wicked. “What I want, Ray, is for you to steal it. Cold, please, and something imported.”
They were almost to the door.
“Go on up the aisle to the left and get the beer. The chips are in the next aisle so I’ll head over there. When you see me go back to the counter you just take them and walk out the door, just like that.”
He laughed again. “Just like that. The guy’s gonna see me.”
“Ray.” She put her fingers to the side of the shirt and flashed him a pink-tipped breast. “The guy’s not gonna see you, believe me.”
He had his doubts but he did as she told him. Walked down the aisle eyeing the six-packs that were ranged along the cooler until he came to the Lowenbrau and then pretended to keep on looking further until he saw her walk up to the register with four bags of chips and a box of pretzels hugged to her chest. There was one other shopper, a woman, behind him to the left checking out the wines but she and some fat guy in the vodka section all the way over on the other side of the store were the only ones he saw. Casual, he thought. You can do this. No problem. But his heart was beating fast as he reached into the case for the Lowenbrau. He had to suppress a nervous grin.
The lady was a pistol.
Halfway down the aisle he saw her point to a pack of cigarettes behind the balding old guy at the register, saw him turn and get them for her and put them on the counter along with the other stuff and then, she was digging into her purse for her wallet, one shoulder cocked and the purse held low so that the shoulder pulled the baggy shirt open and Ray had all he could do not to laugh out loud just then because the bald guy’s eyes were going nowhere except to what was inside that shirt, the guy did not get to see this too often, the guy was riveted.
He put the beer in the backseat and waited for her outside the car. Leaning on the passenger side. Very cool, waiting for her with that half-smile on his face he’d copped from Elvis. She came out with the brown paper bag und
er her arm laughing and shaking her head. He laughed too. It was contagious.
“That is one embarrassed old man,” she said. She put the bag in back with the beer.
“How come?”
“I caught him at it. Got him dead to rights. I said, ‘How would you feel if your fly was open and I could see your you-know-what and I just decided stare at it?’ He didn’t know what to say. I think he apologized to me five times. He got saved by some woman with a bottle of Cold Duck coming up behind me.”
“You are bad, lady. I mean bad!”
“He’s going to be thinking about this all night.”
“Shit. He’s gonna be dreaming about it!”
She stopped laughing then and looked at him and smiled. The same wicked smile as before.
“And what about you, Ray? What are you gonna be dreaming about?”
Her fingers went to her shirt and began slowly to button it again. He had no answer for that one. That one wasn’t in the thesaurus. He just smiled at her and spread his hands as though to say you got me, darlin’, which was all he could think to do and then he opened the door for her and watched her slip inside.
“Take fifteen to eighty to forty-six.”
“Why? Where we goin’?”
“You’ll see. You’d better have a church key.”
“’Course I do.”
He reached past her and opened the glove compartment. Dug around awhile amid maps and scraps of paper and came up with the bottle opener.
She cracked a beer and settled back.
“Pass me one too, will you?”
“You’re driving.”
“So?”
“A cop sees you with a bottle, you get arrested? You expect me to bail you out? Get home on my own? Have a joint, Ray. It’s less conspicuous.”
“Okay. Not a bad idea.”
He reached into his shirt pocket and she watched him while he lit the joint. What to make of this strange little guy? She felt morally certain his story about the limp was just that, a story. Especially the part about decking the other kid. The limp, she felt certain, had sources which were probably a lot more mundane than that. Some childhood illness or something. The story was meant to impress her.
She didn’t mind a lie so long as it was a good one. This one wasn’t too bad. Not great but she liked the part about climbing around on the rafters, she’d done that herself as a girl. She’d find out the truth sooner or later if and when she wanted to. If she bothered to hang around that long. The jury was still out on that one.
She sat back to enjoy the view. Highway 15 rolled and twisted through small towns and long open stretches of land and thick dark forest where you had to be careful of deer at night. Where she was told people had even seen the occasional bear along the roadside. He was driving fast but he was driving well, taking care on the blind turns and hills. He knew how to handle an automobile.
She wondered how he’d handle New York City.
He was going to make an impression, that was for sure, at the place she was taking him. The duck’s ass hairdo, the black leather jacket, black T-shirt and black jeans. The black silver-studded cowboy boots and silver ID bracelet, the touches of makeup.
She was testing him, sure. It almost wasn’t fair to the guy.
But pass or fail on his part she had a feeling this should be kind of fun.
She wasn’t saying much so he did most of the talking. About his apartment, describing how he’d furnished it and how he was planning to enlarge it by knocking out the back wall—actually something he’d only just thought of that minute. He could probably get Tim to do most of the work in exchange for some hash. Not a bad idea. About his band and his wanting to become a rock star. About his expertise with the flying and still rings back in junior high. About the drag races in the hollow. She seemed particularly interested in the races. A whole lot more than his opinions of who was hot and who was not in music these days. He told her about the time Bobby Sylvester’d lost control and drove his Ford off the road so deep into the woods that he’d startled a mother raccoon and her three cubs Ashing in a stream.
He told her he’d take her there sometime. She asked if she could do the driving. He said that first he’d have to see her drive but maybe.
You couldn’t promise them everything right up front.
By now he knew where they were going. They’d been on the road about an hour and fifteen minutes and were on Route 3 headed for the Lincoln Tunnel. He thought it was very cool of her to have thought of driving into the City but wondered exactly what she had in mind. A movie, maybe, at one of the big movie palaces? Some bar? He seriously doubted it was going to be a topless bar but he had the sense that with this one you never could tell. Even that was possible.
It was her call.
Traffic was heavy but he kept it at an even sixty until they hit the Tunnel and then he had to slow to thirty-five. He hated tunnels, especially this one. It was one of the reasons he didn’t go into New York too often, to tell the truth. The Chevy always seemed too big and wide for the narrow lanes. Especially when you were shoulder-to-shoulder with some goddamn Greyhound bus. The tunnel had been built for the smaller cars of another time. The light inside was piss yellow against piss-yellow exhaust-stained tiled walls and tended to do more to distort your vision than to aid it. There was the sense of falling, of moving far faster than the reading on your speedometer. The fact that he was buzzed on the joint and the meth didn’t help any. He couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.
“Turn up Tenth.”
He pulled into uptown traffic. Felt much better now.
“I got a question. How’s a California girl get to know the city?”
“My dad used to fly us here on vacations. He was born and raised in South Orange and used to like to take these sentimental journeys across the river. So I got to know the Tunnel pretty well. We’d stay at either the Olcott or the Sheraton so I got to know the Upper West Side. Think like a cabbie, Ray. You’re going to make a right turn on Sixty-eighth.”
“Like a cabbie?”
She laughed. “My father always says that. ‘You’re all right driving in New York if you think like a cabbie.’ That means you drive defensively, you watch out for the other guy but you also drive like hell, you find the holes in traffic. You don’t bother signaling, you don’t worry about the speed limit, you just find the hole and move it.”
He grinned. He could do that.
He shot up the hill, saw a van pulled over curbside on the right and darted left between a beat-up ’65 Buick and a Checker Cab. This was fun!
“That’s it. Stay at roughly this pace and you’ll hit green lights all the way uptown.”
Evidently everybody else on the street had the same information. They kept the traffic moving. At Sixty-eighth he slowed and took a right. By contrast cross-town traffic crawled.
“Look for a parking space. Anywhere around here.”
He got lucky. Two and a half blocks down just a few yards from the corner of Columbus Avenue a steel-blue Corvette pulled out in front of him. It was going to be a tight squeeze but parallel parking was something he was good at. He got in at the first pass and straightened out. Turned off the lights and pressed the button to put the top down and cut the motor. He grinned at her.
“How’d I do?”
She leaned over and gave him a peck on the cheek. “You did just fine.”
He had too. The whole drive. So far, perfect performance.
“I guess we’d better stash the beer though.”
She nodded. She’d only had two of them along the drive. He took the six-packs and the empties out of the backseat and opened the trunk and put them in and was about to close it up again when she appeared behind him with the paper bag full of chips and pretzels.
“These too. This neighborhood’s pretty quiet generally but in this town they’ll break into your car for a subway token on the driver’s seat.”
He put them in and closed the trunk and fastened the clamps on the canva
s top, slipped off his leather jacket and slung it over his shoulder, then turned to her.
“Okay. Where to?”
“Give me your arm.”
“Huh?”
“Give me your arm.”
He did. They strolled the line of vine-covered brown-stones. The street was noticeably clean. He always pictured New York City as filthy. Small lean struggling trees studded the curbside every building or so, fenced in against the inevitable dog piss. The air was thicker here than it was up north in Sparta, more sticky and humid but there was a breeze that made it tolerable. A real nice summer night. He felt like a million bucks walking with this girl on his arm, here in the Big City. He couldn’t wait to tell Tim and the guys.
He hoped he had enough cash. New York could be expensive, depending on what it was she wanted to do. He’d taken fifty out of his account that morning. Which, after gassing up, left him thirty-five or so. He figured it ought to be enough. He knew she’d probably have her own cash on her but to run through his and have to ask her for some would be humiliating. Especially here where everybody had money. Just to live in one of these brownstones you had to have money. They were a long, long way from Times Square. Which was basically all he knew about New York City.
A horror-movie double feature at Forty-second Street.
Beers at Jack Dempsey’s. Pricey beers but worth it for the old-time atmosphere and all the famous stars pictured on the walls. A place where you could almost feel like a star yourself just by standing at the bar.
The pale junkie dancers with pasties on their nipples at the Metropole.
Shops that sold whoopie cushions and fake vomit, knives and handcuffs.
That was what he knew. Not even Central Park, which she pointed out they were coming up to now. He’d heard the park was dangerous at night. You could get robbed and mugged. He could see a low stone wall across the street and a lot of tall trees behind it. Like the trees were being held prisoner there. They crossed the street and walked two blocks south and she led him up a set of stairs to a well-lit cobbled walkway leading into the park. The sign by the stairs said Tavern on the Green. There were shade trees and hedges and a trellis above him and electric streetlights that looked like gaslights from way-back-when.