When they pulled up in front of Lisa’s house, Kellen turned off the engine. Panic engulfed her. She had not in fact invited him to spend the night, but there he was getting off the motorcycle and reaching to help her down.
“I’m fine from here,” she said.
“Coulda fooled me. You couldn’t walk yourself outta the bar. You’re welcome to try, though.”
She leaned on him all the way to the front porch and, once the door was unlocked, she remembered how empty the house was.
“Do you want to come in? I could make you some coffee.”
“If you don’t mind,” he said, right before she kissed him. With all the whiskey, it was hard to tell where her mouth ended and his began. He pulled back after just a few seconds and said, “We should go inside.”
Of course, he was right. No sense advertising her shame and desperation to the whole town. She stepped backward into the dark entry and he followed.
“Let me go put some coffee on.” Turning toward the kitchen, she nearly wiped out, the floor going crooked under her. He caught her under the arms and brought her upright.
“Why don’t you sit down and I’ll put the coffee on.”
It was ridiculous, but she nodded. He steered her to the couch, and then went into the kitchen. She slumped there, listening to him rattle around in drawers and cupboards. A few minutes later, the smell of coffee wafted out to the living room. He came in from the kitchen, carrying two mugs and handed her one of them. Then he stood there, sipping his coffee, and looked around at the dirty wineglasses, empty bottles, and record albums spread all over the rug. Having him witness the messiness of her grief embarrassed Lisa, and it seemed to bother him, too. He seemed to be thinking about cleaning it up until she set her coffee mug aside and patted the spot on the sofa next to her.
“So, where are you from?” he said as he sat down.
“Connecticut. I went to school there, too. I’d never been west of the Mississippi until I took this job. How long have you lived in Powell?”
“Forever. I was born six blocks north of here. Just across from the grain elevators.”
“No offense, but I hate this town.”
His only answer was a shrug.
“There’s nothing to do. Nobody I have anything in common with. Stacy, the girl I came to the party with, we’re only friends because everybody else our age is already married with kids. And everybody knows everybody’s business. I can’t even go on a date without everybody knowing about it.”
Kellen leaned forward to set his mug on the coffee table. Lisa scooted closer, so that when he sat back, their arms brushed together. She turned her head up to him as a hint, but he didn’t kiss her.
“Would you take some advice if I give it to you?” he said. Now that she knew how old he was, his tone of voice rankled. More paternal than he had any right to act. “You need to figure out how to live here or you need to get the hell out. I was you, I’d leave. Go on back to Connecticut.”
KELLEN
Miss DeGrassi asked me to stay the night, but I could see how she’d regret it as quick as she sobered up, and I’d likely regret it sooner than that. After I left her place, I shoulda gone home, as much as I’d had to drink. I shoulda taken my own advice, and got the hell outta Powell.
Except for Wavy. She kept me there. More than that. She kept me tethered, not just to Powell, but to being alive. In the whole world, she was the only person who cared whether I lived or died. If there was anybody who remembered tonight, it was her.
When I pulled into the drive at the farmhouse, there was a light on in the kitchen. I hoped it wasn’t Val, because I didn’t need that kinda grief. I was doing the best I could for Wavy, and Val always treated me like garbage.
I walked through the door, not sure what I was gonna find, but there sat Wavy reading a book. On the table in front of her was a chocolate cake with candles stuck in it.
“You made me a cake,” I said.
She put a finger up to her lips, so I reckoned Val and Donal must be asleep. I didn’t even know what time it was. While I took off my coat and pulled out a chair to sit, Wavy went to get the box of matches off the stove.
On the way back to the table, she stopped at the chair I’d put my jacket over. Leaning down ’til her nose was almost touching the collar, she took a long whiff of it. I started to laugh, until I figured out what she was doing. Wavy wasn’t sniffing my coat because it smelled like me. It musta smelled like Miss DeGrassi.
“I been down to Liam’s party,” I said.
She nodded and climbed up in the chair across from me. After she lit the candles, I let them burn for a while, just to look at them reflected in Wavy’s eyes. When the wax started to run down to the cake I blew out the candles in one big go.
The knife was there to cut the cake, but neither of us reached for it.
“You wanna know what I wished for?”
“Won’t come true if you say,” she said in this husky voice.
“I don’t believe that. Lean across here and I’ll whisper it to you.”
She got up on her knees in the chair and put her hands on the table to lean across. I put my hands on either side of the cake and met her half way. I put my mouth up to her ear, like I was gonna whisper something, but all I did was blow a big puff of air into her hair like it was more candles. She ducked her head down against my chest and started laughing, so I kissed the only part of her I could reach: the top of her head.
“It already came true. You remembered my birthday,” I said. “And I got cake.”
6
KELLEN
July 1981
Wavy walked around the garage bay, looking at herself in the finish on the Barracuda. I picked the thing up cheap at an insurance auction and bought a new back end from a salvage yard down by Tulsa. For a good six months, Wavy had been watching me put it together in the evenings. I was all the time teasing her about how I was gonna paint it Moulin Rouge.
“That’s a factory color,” I’d say. Just to get her to roll her eyes, thinking about me driving a pink car. I ended up painting it black with metallic gray striping.
I’d planned to sell the car, but the way she looked at it once it was painted and ready to go, I wasn’t sure. She looked impressed.
“Wanna take it out?” I said.
She nodded and gave me that squinty look of hers that meant, “Let’s go fast.” She was like me that way, kind of a speed fiend, and the Cuda was built for it. We took it easy out around the lake, taking in the view, but the damn thing was champing at the bit. So I took it out to Highway 9 and opened it up a little.
Wavy leaned back in the seat, smiling, the wind blowing her hair around. I put my foot in the gas, kicked it up to about eighty. Then we came over a hill, damn near on top of a cop sitting on the shoulder. I braked hard, got it down to somewhere around sixty, and coasted past the cop.
I held my breath, but a mile on, the cop hadn’t come after us. I looked over at Wavy, who’d sat up to see why we slowed down.
“You tired?” I said.
She shook her head. She was a night owl.
“Feel like doing some drag racing?”
Hell yeah, she did. We ran the Cuda into Garringer and down to the flatlands where they drag on the weekends. It’s not legal, but the cops mostly look the other way, because it keeps the draggers off the main roads. And if you’re looking to sell a car like the Cuda, that’s where you find buyers.
The place was nothing but hard-packed dunes and old gravel pits. Not a tree to cut the wind and just ugly. When we pulled in, there were probably thirty cars, guys talking trash and checking out the competition. I parked and got out, went around to put up the hood. Let people know I was thinking about selling. Behind me, I heard some guy say to his buddies, “Look, it’s that big goddamn Indian.”
That was Billy, still wearing a letter jacket for football, when he’d been outta high school longer than I had.
“What’re you driving tonight?” he said.
&n
bsp; “You’re looking at it.”
I didn’t know him from anywhere else, but I’d seen him out there plenty of times when I had my ’64 Polara. Summer before I met Wavy, I was out there nearly every weekend, dragging that old Dodge.
While Billy and his buddies checked out the Cuda, Wavy came up and slipped her hand into mine. Right away, Billy got his eye on her.
“Say, what’s this little girl’s mommy gonna do if you lose her in a race?”
“I ain’t losing nothing tonight,” I said.
“She’s a little young for my taste,” his buddy said, “but she’ll be worth racing for in a couple years. I do like blondes.”
Wavy glared at them, even though it was just a joke. Nobody ever won somebody else’s girl. The drags were strictly about the money and the winning, showing your car was faster. I mean, I’d won plenty of races, and only ever took home two girls. One was done with me as soon as she sobered up. The other one went home with a different guy every week.
Billy wanted to put fifty bucks on our race, so while me and him queued up for the track, Wavy headed off to where all the spectators were.
The track was shaped like a D. A loop around the big gravel pit, then a quarter-mile straightaway. It was a good track, except for this tight spot early on. About a hundred yards from the start, the track cut into the side of a dune. It meant you had to ride close to the other car until you passed it.
As I pulled up in the line, I glanced out of the corner of my eye and caught Wavy staring up at the stars. She was the prettiest girl there easy, with her hair blowing back like a flag. Amazed me how fast she was growing up. She’d be twelve in a couple weeks and she was gonna be long-legged like Val. Every time I looked at her, the gap between the bottom of her skirt and the tops of her boots was bigger. As soon as I thought it, I got to worrying about all the other guys there looking at her and thinking the same thing. We had a minute before the flagger sent me and Billy around the loop to the straightaway, so I called her over.
“Come gimme a kiss for good luck,” I said.
She walked over and rested her arm on the door panel. Leaning in through the window, she pressed her lips to the corner of my mouth, real soft. The wind whipped her hair up, and blew it all around, brushing against my face and my neck. As she straightened up, she tucked it back behind her ears.
“Thanks, sweetheart.”
Then it was time for me to roll around to the start line. I watched in my side view mirror as she walked back to the spectators. She was still smiling when the flagger gave me the nod.
The trick with drags like that is not to win by too much. You wanna feel out the other guy and win by just enough. You go smoking the first couple of guys you race and pretty soon nobody wants to race you, and they sure don’t wanna put any money on it.
Billy had a Trans Am, ’73 I think, and for an automatic, it had some oomph, but when we came outta the squeeze between those dunes, I stepped into the Cuda and kept a car length ahead of him all the way to the finish line. He was a loudmouth, but he was a good loser. Paid up and said, “Not too shabby considering how much weight she’s hauling.”
“Maybe next time,” I said. To remind him he pretty much always lost to me.
I raced four more guys after that. Beat a Camaro, and a Charger same year as mine, and then got my ass handed to me by this scrawny Mexican kid in a Corvette with a 427 under the hood. I knew I wasn’t gonna beat him, which was why I only put twenty bucks on it, but I wasn’t planning on getting smoked that bad.
I only raced him so that when I was paying him, I could give him the number for the shop.
“You bring it around, I’ll give you a good deal. Make it look as nice as it rides,” I said.
“It still beat you, man.” He gave me this chin-up look, like we were gonna get into it.
“Yeah, well, you’d look better beating me with a new paint job.”
After that race, Wavy and me took a break for a while. I sat up on the hood, watching the other races, and she sat down on the bumper while I braided her hair. She never kept braids in it, but my sister taught me how to do it a couple different ways. Just something to do with my hands.
“What is this, a hair salon?” this guy walking by said.
I shrugged him off, but a couple minutes later, he was back.
“You racing tonight?” he said.
“Yeah, I took her ’round a couple times. You wanna go?”
He didn’t say nothing, but he walked around the Cuda, looking it over. When he came back around to the hood, he was grinning.
“Looks like that saying is wrong. I guess you can polish a turd.”
“The question is whether you can beat it,” I said.
“Hundred bucks.”
Now I didn’t have a clue what he was driving, but I didn’t care. Anybody wanna walk up to me and talk that kinda shit, I’ll give it a go.
I nudged Wavy and she hopped off the bumper, so I could get up.
“Hundred bucks.” I stuck out my hand and we shook.
“See you up at the starting line, Chief.”
“Asshole,” Wavy said, not really under her breath.
“Somebody oughta wash your mouth out, little girl,” he said.
“You wanna ride with me while I go beat this guy?” I said.
Wavy nodded. We were gonna show that jackass a thing or two.
We pulled up alongside him and I didn’t know what to think. I leaned out my window and hollered, “What the hell is that?”
“Mazda RX-7!” the guy yelled back. Might as wella said, “Martian Armpit Smeller.” Some kinda ricer car.
It looked brand new, but newness don’t count for a thing. My old Polara was proof of that.
Either way, I figured if his car had any go, it’d be at the start, and I was right.
When we came off the line, he was in the lead. I did like always, hung back a little to see what he had. In the squeeze, I was half a car length back from him, but I pushed on through, and coming out the other side to the open flats, I put my foot to the floor. That Barracuda damn near redlined on rpms, the speedometer needle squeezing up past 105. Wavy was laughing out loud, when we reached the finish. Guy in his rice burner ate our dust.
We coasted down to the turn around and circled back to get our winnings.
I pulled up at the end of the row of cars and shut the engine off. Before we got back on the road, I wanted to make sure I hadn’t rattled nothing loose. As soon as I popped the hood, a couple guys come over to look. They couldn’t quite believe I’d hit 105 in the quarter mile.
The guy in his Mazda came barreling in while we were standing there. He threw it into park and jumped outta the car. Didn’t even bother to shut the door.
“You fucking bumped me, asshole!” He grabbed my arm to turn me around, so I put my hand on his chest to make him step back.
“I didn’t bump you,” I said.
“You fucking bumped me in the tight spot!”
“Show me. You show me where I bumped you, because I wanna see it.”
The guy stepped around me and started looking down the side of the Cuda.
Now I shoulda been trying to throttle him back, but I went and popped off with, “New car. Maybe you don’t got the hang of it yet.”
“You fucking bumped me, dickface!”
By then we had an audience. Some of them started looking over the cars, too, but there wasn’t a mark on the Cuda. Because I hadn’t bumped him. He prolly clipped that dune.
“I don’t see anything,” Billy said.
“Motherfucker!” The guy kicked the front quarter panel on the Cuda. He wasn’t wearing boots, just sneakers, so I figured worst he’d done was give me a scuff, but that was bullshit. I went to grab him, but he backed up, right into Wavy. She shoved him back, and he smacked her.
I grabbed the front of his jacket and slammed him into the side of the Cuda. If somebody was gonna put a dent in it, it’d be me. I punched him in the face until I was the only thing holding hi
m up. Then I dropped him on the ground and kicked him a couple times for good measure. Next thing I knew, I had Billy on one arm and Wavy on the other, pulling me back.
“You better stay down, man,” Billy called to the Mazda guy. “He’s liable to stomp a mudhole in you. I seen him do it.”
Before I could, a couple of guys who knew the Mazda asshole came and got him by the arms. They walked him over and sat him on the bumper of somebody’s Charger. I turned around and got my head cleared enough to see Wavy standing there with a big red mark on her cheek.
Nobody stopped me when I walked across to that asshole’s crap car and planted my boot in the door. I kicked it half a dozen times, stove that fucker in. If he could still drive himself home, he was gonna have to get in from the passenger side.
WAVY
I’ve been hit harder. The guy didn’t even knock me down, but Kellen went crazy. After he kicked in the car door, he came back to me with a black cloud look on his face. He leaned down to look at my cheek, close enough I could see tiny freckles of blood on his face. Not his blood.
“Goddamnit,” he said. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.”
He tilted my head up and brushed his thumb over my cheek.
“We need to get some ice on that before your eye swells up.”
People whispered as he opened the car door for me to get in. The guy in the Mazda was sitting on the bumper of another car. His face and his blue satin jacket were covered in blood.
“You still owe me a hundred bucks,” Kellen said to him. Then he slid into the front seat next to me and started the car.
I sat in the middle and Kellen kept his arm around me while he drove. He breathed out hot and angry on top of my head.
“I’m sorry, Wavy.” He apologized until I had to say something.
“Not your fault.”
He kissed the top of my head five, ten, fifteen times.
At the gas station, while Kellen pumped gas, I folded my arms on the window ledge and watched him. He was calmer, but he was still under his black cloud.
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things Page 11