by Maria Flook
The streets were deserted; they could smell the charcoal going in the backyards of the split-level houses. Acres of houses with no variance but for the decals on the mailboxes and the tiny footprints and signatures that ruined the new sidewalks. Their plan seemed highly feasible, even sensible in its way. A simple task necessitated by a complex mood resulting from a series of emotional outbursts in public places with their parents, until they reached their target consciousness.
Wayne inched up to a car, a ruby-red Monaco with a vinyl roof. Keys dangled from the steering column, caught the light, glittered. Margaret had a strange tickle in her throat, like the sharp threads of an artichoke.
Cam got out of the Chrysler and touched his toes. He stretched his arms over his head like it was seventh inning, then he got behind the wheel of the Monaco. The early cicadas were piercing the quiet in short ugly spasms that killed the whine of the flywheel as Cam started the engine. Cam rolled it away from the curb and the Chrysler followed. They left Wayne’s car in Westside Terrace and tumbled into the red car. Margaret sat up in front with Cam. Wayne nestled in back with Colleen; he was already pulling her neckline down over her shoulders. Cam floored the gas pedal so that the car shivered in place for a few seconds before flying forward. He circled the block to examine the patch, a couple thick black smears, variegated like snakeskin against the new white concrete.
Cam drove them everywhere around the city. The Monaco was a rental car, the key chain said WE TRY HARDER. There wasn’t anything personal in it. It was fresh, vacuumed, the vinyl seats smelled strong. It accelerated harsh but fast, it flew.
“We try harder,” Cam said, accelerating to beat a light. When Cam passed a cherry top or if he recognized an unmarked cruiser, he slowed the car. He sank in his seat and bounced up and down, twisting the wheel back and forth like a hick farmer driving an old tractor. He was baiting the police, but they didn’t seem to notice. His steering was becoming more and more exaggerated and frantic. Margaret began to feel weightless, anchored by a fragile string like one of those Chinese paper flowers unfurling in a glass of water. Her friends were grinding their hips together in the backseat, but Cam didn’t seem disgusted. Colleen was immersed in it, her hair looked bad, it looked spent, colorless as fishing line. She held on to the boy, pulling his collar, pressing his face with little sucking kisses. Margaret thought, It’s got nothing to do with me and Cam. Then the cruiser was abreast of them. The officer lifted the brim of his hat and tugged it down again. It was a tolerant warning, and he allowed them a moment to consider it before he turned on the siren and the light started circling.
“Guess what—” Margaret said.
Cam said, “I see him. I see him.” Cam accelerated in a straight line up the highway. He was cutting a path right through the moving traffic, making his own getaway lane right up the middle. Cam nosed between cars and the traffic veered to the left and right to avoid them. It was a reverse wake, a terrible seam ripping upward. Margaret could hear the sirens, several of them, but they seemed distant. Suddenly the windshield went dark, like an air raid curtain, but it was just an underpass and the light came back. Margaret tried to speak. Words clattered through her like small geometric pieces, sharp, lodging in her throat and lungs.
“One hundred, one hundred five.” Cam was reading the speedometer. Margaret couldn’t believe he wasn’t watching the road. His fear looked like a form of pleasure, a chilly, high-altitude intoxication. He kept reading the speedometer as it inched up. He looked as if he had suddenly found his purpose and accepted what it meant, its toil and labor, its rewards.
Colleen was leaning over the front seat, screaming for Cam to slow down. The intersection flashed, appeared and dissolved in an instant. They were hit once in the right front and immediately they were hit in back on the opposite side. The car whipped in a full circle, skated left, was clipped a third time, and its front axle flew off. The hood of the car curled through the windshield, glass sloshed in like a wave of rhinestone buttons. Then nothing. Stillness. Colleen fell between them. She was asleep with her eyes open. The girl whispered, but she wasn’t using words; a sudsy vermilion spray surfaced on her lips. She had bitten through her tongue.
They were taken to Wilmington General; everyone needed some stitches. Colleen was in surgery, but the others were placed in jail to wait for the appropriate signatures. That summer, they had one day in family court. It was decided that Margaret would meet with a probation officer in the basement of the Wilmington courthouse for a full year, twice a week after school. Cam went straight to boot camp at the crest of a record heat wave.
They traveled through a breadth of woods. “Is this the dead of night, or what?” Margaret asked Cam. She couldn’t stand watching the dark unless they kept talking.
“Take it easy,” he told her.
“The woods have eyes,” Tracy said flatly.
“I’ll get us back on the highway. Once I get on, I’m not getting off. I’m not stopping. Do you want something from 7 Eleven?” Cam said.
“I don’t see a 7 Eleven,” Margaret said. “You’re hallucinating.”
“Don’t be a bitch. I saw something.” Cam pulled over to the shoulder and made a U-turn.
“That’s an A&P,” Margaret told him.
“Correction. A&P. Are you already starting with this shit?”
Margaret didn’t like all-night supermarkets. It was always the sleepless, women with eating disorders, imperious college students, the lonely in their search, or the angry fleeing from a confrontation. Night-shift workers struggling against their biological clocks. These were the types. Then it was the three of them, sunburned, crazed-looking, twirling left and right, figuring which aisle to take.
Tracy collected some apricots and weighed them on a scale. Cam walked ahead as if he didn’t know Tracy. Margaret picked up a single strawberry and pressed it into her mouth between her cheek and gum. She picked up a bag of Eight O’Clock Coffee beans and she took it through the cashier line. Tracy said she had kicked the habit last year, why was she starting up again?
“Just for the trip,” she promised.
“Watch her,” Tracy said. “She gets twitchy on these, real south-of-the-border. She wants to tango.”
Cam pushed some sweet rolls and a carton of whole milk onto the rubber mat. “One of these days we’ll get some real food,” he told them, but he didn’t seem all that committed to the idea. Food wasn’t on his mind. Walking back to the Duster, Margaret noticed a baby had been left alone in a car. Someone had run into the store and just left the baby perched on the passenger seat. She leaned into the window. The baby was dozing, its eyes closed, the lids translucent, silky. The baby was tilting to the left, it was sliding toward the floor. Margaret wanted to arrange the infant more securely in the bucket seat. Then a fellow came toward her. “Hey, girl,” he was shouting at her, “get away from there!”
“I’m not doing anything,” Margaret said.
“Get your own baby.” The man got into the car and drove away. She watched him pull out into the traffic; he forgot to turn on his headlights and still he kept going into the dark.
Cam was chugging the carton of milk and passing it over to Tracy. Tracy pulled the sweet rolls from the foil tray; they were coming in a doughy grid and he had to separate them. Margaret bit into her first coffee bean, then into the next. They settled down again for a bit of restful touring on the interstate. Margaret leaned back against the passenger door, sitting sideways on Tracy. Tracy was quiet, his face shaded. Something inhabited him, a dark outlook that he supervised, shrugged off with an occasional twitch, an airy lift of his chin. This was when his mask would crinkle. He might stop in the middle of a sentence to tug his head back slightly, then let it fall level again. This mannerism, despite his efforts otherwise, revealed something. That’s why he kept the conversation moving. It was like watching a river, a strong current—occasionally a paper scrap floats to the surface before it’s tugged deep again.
Tracy pushed Margaret off of his
lap. He didn’t want her weight on him.
Cam looked tired. Some people look good when they’re tired. Margaret’s husband used to tell her that she looked good when she was sick. If she had the flu, after two weeks of coughing, he might say she looked seductive. It was her lack of color, the hollows and shadows of prolonged weakness that appealed to him. Cam looked tired but he didn’t look diminished; his fatigue seemed only to sharpen his features. His profile reminded her of something on an urn; it was angular, stern, frozen with mysterious intention. She had always loved his profile. In their early teens, Margaret and Cam shared a bunk in a small cabin on a yacht owned by the Atlas Chemical Company. Richard had been invited for a rub-elbows weekend cruise with a production supervisor of Atlas Chemical, and when Elizabeth refused to go, he took Margaret and Cam. Their cabin was narrow and tight; yet, the room had a tiny sink and a fat scallop of flowery English soap scudded back and forth in its bowl, scenting the air. Margaret shared the stiff foam mattress, letting Cam have the porthole side. A lantern enlarged Cam’s silhouette against the curved wall. Even his breath rising in the cool air made a shadow, a billowy turbulence.
“You’re staring at me,” he had said.
The floral soap was strong; it made Margaret feel both refreshed and dizzy. She told Cam that she loved him, but she didn’t know what she was trying to get across. She had some uncomfortable surges, some half-defined insights she couldn’t follow to the end. She was leaning on her elbow beside Cam. She said she would do anything for him, but she might have said she would do anything to him. It was so sudden, a shock of hot laughter, then they weren’t saying anything. Again, they laughed. Before they fell asleep they placed a row of peculiar sandbag ashtrays between them as a barrier.
Looking for a restaurant, they rolled through Niles, Ohio. A diner emitted a wet glow from its humid picture window and Margaret begged Cam to stop.
“Don’t you know it’s always a diner where the troopers hang out?”
“Oh, come on. You’re crazy with this shit,” Margaret said.
“No diners,” Cam said.
Margaret insisted and Cam turned the car around and went back to the diner. There was no place to park and Cam had to leave the Duster beneath a huge yellow streetlight swirling with moths. Margaret watched the insects drawing dark coils and spirals on the Duster’s shiny hood. She liked the sensation—all that movement outside of herself as she, at last, stood still.
Cam wasn’t pleased with the streetlight. “Let’s just hang out a sign,” he told them. “It’s a fucking showroom.” They went into the restaurant, leaving the car to draw whatever attention it might. Margaret followed her brother with her eyes. He wasn’t trying to act like Clyde Barrow, but he was swaggering. Maybe he was just stiff from driving. His gait was that funny mix of psychic hurt and weary indifference that comes across as a kind of self-assurance. She recognized it from her prison work.
The diner was clean but shabby, the floor glazed from years of wax buildup over the disintegrating linoleum. There were the layered scents of fried onions, burned coffee, and a sweet trace of chilled whipped topping when the refrigerator display case was opened. Margaret studied a single pie in the mirrored case; it looked old, the crust separating and falling away from the fruit filling. There were some other watery desserts, but Margaret couldn’t identify them. They sat down at the counter and a woman in her fifties stopped watching the television to come over and pour them coffee. She spilled some as she served Tracy and she inverted the saucer and poured it back into his cup.
“Nice,” Tracy said.
“It won’t kill you,” Cam told him.
“Did I say it would kill me?”
“Those little things irritate someone like you, don’t they?” Cam said.
“What is it you’re saying?”
“You give me a pain. You’re a priss,” Cam said.
Tracy said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Margaret kept shushing them. It was getting out of hand. Cam said, “You can screw my sister underwater, can you do it standing up on solid ground?”
“What are you talking about?” Margaret was saying.
Tracy said, “Cam’s got a good case of marble balls.”
“God, will you—” Margaret said.
“Cam has a problem,” Tracy said.
“I’m not the one with the problem, pal.” Cam poured some salt on the counter, watching how it sifted.
“Classic symptoms,” Tracy said. “After looking at your diary, I say it’s some kind of patriarchal infatuation.
You never got your male bonding. You have a Vandalized Love Map.”
“A Love Map?” Margaret was asking. She tried to get Tracy to explain this to her; it might derail him.
Tracy wasn’t going to stop. He flicked her hand off his knee where she was pinching the flat ridge of cartilage. Tracy said, “This quest is sexual, this drive to Chicago. This is an excursion into the forbidden frontier. Your father rejected you and you think it’s personal, it’s a judgment on you as a man, not just as a child. You have a fixation, like one of those people who follow celebrities from city to city.
“How long have you been carrying around those yellowed newspaper clippings, those photographs of Lewis pretty as a bridesmaid? You’ve been calling him on the telephone for how many years? You think he’s waiting for the phone to ring? He’s not waiting. It’s a romantic delusion. It’s called erotomania.”
Cam was stirring his coffee until it revolved, swelled over the brim of the cup. “Who’s calling who queer?”
“That’s my point.” Tracy’s eyes were black. “You tell me.”
Cam stood up and nudged Tracy off his stool. They exchanged a few tight punches, inexpert uppercuts to the hollow at the breastbone, dead center at the diaphragm. Both men connected, both felt their breath seared. They turned away, stood back, and looked at Margaret, looked at the row of silver stools as if to count them.
“Enough,” Tracy said, coughing. He declined to continue. Margaret knew they were evenly matched. It could have gone on quite a while. The woman behind the counter was waiting to see what was decided.
“We came in here to eat something,” Margaret told the woman, “but I guess they’re too exhausted to eat. We’ve been driving.” The woman nodded to Margaret, then she shrugged. She had no opinion. She was wiping her ashtray, the one she kept behind the counter for herself. It was an abalone shell. Margaret watched the woman dabbing at the shell; it was deep lavender, mirrory on the inside of its bowl, but along its edge there were several gorgeous dark-blue grommets. Margaret couldn’t take her eyes off it.
II
Tracy said he had a cousin who lived a little south of Akron. They could have some rest and get back on the road the next day. Cam wasn’t too sure of this idea, but he was rubbing his hand over his lips now and again, and Margaret knew he was tired.
“This is my cousin Franklin. He’s great. He’s a talk-show host on a local station. UHF. He won’t mind us showing up. He’s a card-carrying night owl.”
Margaret said, “Does he have a shower? I’d love to take a shower.”
“Of course. Everyone in my family reveres the bath.”
Margaret looked at the map and measured the miles with a piece of gum cut to fit the legend. “It’s not out of our way at all,” she told Cam. “And look, we’re going to go right past Bowling Green, that’s near Tina’s commune. We can stop there tomorrow.”
“Look, I’m not taking some kind of family vacation,” Cam said. “We’ll sleep at Frank’s place, that’s it.”
Tracy said, “It’s Franklin. Two syllables. It would be good if you could remember that. Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, never Frank Delano.”
“Frank, Franklin,” Cam said. He didn’t see the difference.
Franklin answered the door in a crepe de chine bathrobe with a flamingo print. Cam looked at Margaret. When Franklin turned around, the bathrobe said BOCA RATON RESORTS and this cleared it with
Cam. The flamingos were just part of a respectable hotel advertising campaign. Tracy introduced everyone and they sat around the kitchen table drinking some ginger ale from a bottle with a rubber cork. The cork was a gadget from the fifties, a rubber stopper with some kind of tension spring inside. Franklin showed Margaret how it worked. The rubber squeaked against the mouth of the bottle until Tracy asked Franklin to cut it out. Even the little glasses were from an earlier period; they were pink, green, blue aluminum tumblers with a flared lip. She liked how the tinted aluminum began to sweat, revealing secret scratches. Then Franklin brought out the Welch’s jelly jars with cartoon characters on them.
“Those are the Hanna-Barbera ones, there’s some Disney and Warner Brothers. I have them all.”
“Where did you outfit this place, a thrift shop in the Twilight Zone?” Tracy said.
“I’m a collector. I like domestics.”
Cam was looking at his ginger ale, wiggling the glass so the fizz would rise. He was smiling.
“I saw your dad last June in Bridgeport,” Franklin told Tracy.
“How nice for you,” Tracy said.
“No, really, he’s got a good situation there with Carlene. It’s a new start. Of course, she’s not trying to fill someone else’s shoes, but she’s a nice lady. They took me to that big steakhouse, you know the one? It has a great raw bar set up on an old skiff, a Boston Whaler or something, right in the middle of the room. For atmosphere. Out here in Ohio, you miss the clams and oysters. It was a nice spot.”
“Never heard of it,” Tracy said.
“Littlenecks, crab claws, stuffies—”
Tracy said, “Is that right? A regular Yankee smor-go-borg.”
“Next time you’re down there, with your dad, tell him I told you he should take you over there.”