Now Is the Hour

by Tom Spanbauer

  The Buick was a blue and white streak flying low over the Tyhee Flats. Under Mom’s new big plastic glasses, her eyes were still green. The ripple up the side of her face. She was grinding her teeth. The speedometer hit eighty-five miles an hour.

  Gott im Himmel! Mom said, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Where can you be safe if you can’t even be safe in a Catholic hospital?

  Weird what a secret can do. It separates you from the rest of the world, insulates you because you’re the only who knows. It’s like you’re finally somebody because you have something nobody else has. A place where nobody else is.

  At first, my secret was pretty simple. I had a wild night fighting with a crazy Indian in the hospital and came out the hero. People had slapped me on the back and smiled at me special. The doctor had told me I was brave.

  Something real, something tangible, something big, had happened in my life, and my mother didn’t know a thing about it.

  It was a great pleasure, my secret.

  Always before what had kept me from my parents was some faraway unreachable place in them, in her. A place I wasn’t allowed.

  She was the one who decided. For whatever reason, when she decided to come back, when the light came back in her eyes and she looked at me — like in the hospital that day when she told me about Grandpa — it never failed, I was always there, the place for her eyes to land.

  Then came the wild night in the storm of ’66 fighting for dear life with George Serano.

  After that night, what kept me from my parents, what kept me far away from Mom, wasn’t something she decided anymore.

  Now it was my turn. I was differnt.

  I had a secret, and the secret was real.

  Mostly, I kept the secret to protect her from what happened to me.

  But that was only part of the truth.

  The whole truth. It was the place I went to instead of her.

  The whole truth I kept even from myself most of the time.

  What I knew for sure was I started seeing Indians everywhere, and every time the wind blew, I thought of Thunderbird.

  6 Cast Your Fate to the Wind

  SAINT FRANCIS DE Sales is the patron saint of teenagers, so that’s why Sis and I got to drive the pickup into town one night a week on Wednesday. Supposedly De Sales Club provides the Catholic teenager with a social life. You know, teenagers getting together to talk about what it was like being a teenager and maybe find a boyfriend or a girlfriend. But don’t be fooled. De Sales Club doesn’t have anything to do with help growing up and a social life, or any life at all. Unless you call kneeling on the cement floor praying the rosary a life. And as far as boyfriend or girlfriend goes, forget it.

  In fact, the only thing differnt about De Sales Club from religion class was in De Sales Club instead of the other nine commandments, what got beat into your head was the sixth commandment.

  Everybody knew it, even the nuns. Especially the nuns. We were all in the sex years now.

  The only good thing about De Sales Club was Joe Scardino never showed up.

  Father Dominic Arana, a new young priest at Saint Joseph’s who was a Basque, was the priest in charge of De Sales. He lectured to us about what a venial sin was and what a mortal sin was when you were making out.

  As far as I could tell, kissing without tongue and hugging were venial. Everything else was a mortal sin.

  Same old thing, we studied The Lives of the Saints, but hip saints like Saint Dominic Savio, and Saint Theresa of Ávila, and Saint Sebastian, who was tied naked to a tree and pierced with arrows. There was even homework sometimes, but nobody ever did the homework, which was a discouragement to Father Arana because he was trying to be a good influence.

  What a sorry sight he was standing in the sophomore classroom at the blackboard under the bright fluorescent lights, a heavyset man, sweating hard, smelling of garlic and incense and altar wine, with his white handkerchief in his big, black, hairy hand, wiping the sweat off his forehead and around his neck, his thick neck bulging out over his tight Roman collar, the pointer in his hand pointing at the words venial and mortal he’d chalked onto the blackboard.

  You had to hand it to him. Father Arana tried hard to reach us. He used words like cool and what’s happening and can you dig it, but really we couldn’t help it, none of us, no matter how hard we tried, none of us could give a shit.

  He lasted only one year. Right after Christmas, Father Arana ran off with some woman. Some woman, Mom said, who he was giving marriage counseling to.

  Mom and us must have prayed a thousand rosaries for that guy. And the bitch who led him astray.

  Father Dominic Arana. One big Basque, sweaty, hairy example of walking, talking mortal sin.

  As it turned out, though, in the end, Father Arana helped me out a lot. I figured if he could run off, so could I.

  Wednesday nights. There was no better feeling than Wednesday night after supper, Sis at the wheel of Dad’s ’63 Chevy Apache pickup, cranking the wheel and spitting gravel out of the driveway, KWIK on the radio, the windows rolled down. The first Wednesday of De Sales was hot, late September and warm air blowing all around us, the sun-baked soft, gold world speeding by, Sis still in her off-white spaghetti-strapped summer dress and tanned legs, me in my clean Levi’s and blue T-shirt, a fresh pack of Marlboros on the seat between us, Sis and I smoking away, the twelve miles to town ahead of us, twelve miles of top-ten rock-and-roll hits blaring freedom, freedom, all the way to town.

  Those twelve miles of freedom got us hooked on freedom, Sis and I. We got so free during those twelve miles, the second Wednesday of De Sales we didn’t show up at De Sales Club at all. As soon as we pulled off Main Street and headed down Hayes, soon as we saw the cross on the steeple of Saint Joseph’s Church, we just couldn’t help it. Sis and I had to have another cigarette, we had to listen to more top-ten hits, we had to drive around some more.

  At the Snatch Out, around the corner from the Dead Steer Drive-In, across Pole Line Road and from the Portland Cement Company and the Kraft cheese factory, is where we ended up. Parked in the Snac Out Drive-In everybody called the Snatch Out or the Red Steer Drive-In everybody called the Dead Steer, watching everybody else drive by.

  I mean to say, I sat and watched everybody drive by.

  It was just too queer, Sis said, a brother and a sister sitting together at the Snatch Out.

  I couldn’t have agreed with her more.

  Sis took off with Gene Kelso, going from venial to more and more mortal sin in the back seat of his red ’56 Mercury.

  And I sat, just sat, sat and smoked, and even though I’d had my nighttime driver’s license for a whole week, I didn’t drive. To tell the truth, I was afraid to drive but wasn’t about to let myself know it.

  It wasn’t so bad being alone. Scardino wasn’t around, and I had enough money for French fries, and I sat behind the wheel so it looked like I was driving. I got to listen to the radio. Plus Gene Kelso gave me a Budweiser.

  For holding down the fort is the way he put it.

  Somewhere in there, as I was sitting and smoking, drinking my beer, listening to the radio, watching the cars go by, a ’67 green and white Cadillac with wire wheels pulled in. When I looked to see who was driving, what I saw was a car full of Indian kids my age.

  Jeez, even in the Snatch Out, Indians.

  It was that night, the last Wednesday night in September, parked at the Snatch Out holding down the fort, right after the Cadillac full of Indians, that I met, really met, Billie Cody.

  “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” by Sounds Orchestral was on the radio. It was my favorite song.

  Maybe it was fate, I don’t know. Billie says so. Billie always says, As fate would have it.

  Anyway, out of the blue, the pickup door opened, and up stepped a girl with dark red ratted hair. Pink lipstick. White plastic sunglasses, dark green glass. When she got her butt on the seat, she reached back and slammed the pickup door behind her. A white shirt, a man’s oxford shirt with a buttoned coll
ar. Around her neck, a tiny gold necklace that looked like a hand, an open palm facing out. The hand hung down between what looked like two cantaloupes underneath her white shirt. Black pants with stirrups around the feet. Her bare feet barely touched the pickup floor. She pulled one foot up, cupped her foot in her hand, turned and leaned against the door. Her tiny toenails were painted dark blue.

  Outside all around us, kids lined up parked in cars. The kids in the parked cars looking out at the cars passing by, a slow idle through the Snatch Out. Across from me in the cab, Billie’s eyes were dark behind the green glass of her white plastic sunglasses. The sun was setting in through the back window of the pickup. The whole inside of the cab was Technicolor, how gold and pink can be sky blue. All the sunset colors on Billie’s skin. Wind, just a little for a moment, just enough wind to feel on your skin.

  Billie pointed her tiny blue toenails at me, then pulled her legs under her, knelt on the seat. She reached up, pulled off her white plastic sunglasses, folded them, put the glasses in her white oxford shirt pocket. The white oxford shirt at that moment a Technicolor illumination out of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

  Something about her eyes. She looked like she’d been crying, but she wasn’t crying, she was smiling. Like a little kid, the way she was smiling. In all that Technicolor, those sad bloodshot Billie Cody eyes looked close at me for the first time. Jesus.

  Tear duct cancer, she said. You got a cigarette?

  What? I said.

  My eyes, she said. I have a condition. The tear ducts get plugged up. The tonsillectomy didn’t do shit. Do you have a cigarette?

  It’s cancer? I said.

  No, silly, she said. I’m being affected.

  Sis had taken the Marlboros with her and left me with four cigarettes. I had two left. I reached in my shirt pocket, pulled out a cigarette, handed it over to Billie, then pulled out the other cigarette for me. I pushed in the cigarette lighter.

  Billie and I sat looking down at the cigarette lighter, waiting for it to pop out, both of us with cigarettes in our mouths looking, waiting. For some reason I had forgotten my native language. I couldn’t even remember if it was English.

  Besides the cigarette lighter, the only other thing in the pickup was a beautiful smell. Really clean like soap but not Mom’s White King or Sis’s White Shoulders. Some smell so fresh and differnt, it smelled French. This girl smelled French.

  Myself, I’d been transformed into a wheelbarrow of Redi-Mix cement, either that or a big block of Kraft extra-sharp Cheddar cheese. When I looked over at my arm and hand, they were ridiculously poised just above the front edge of the seat, my middle finger and my index finger and my thumb perfectly formed waiting to grab the cigarette lighter when it popped out, and my little finger, there it was, how embarrassing, sticking up the way English people drink tea.

  Then outside just like that, it wasn’t sunset. It was dark, dark inside too, headlights passing.

  On the radio, the guy was singing So tired, tired of waiting, tired of waiting for you. So I started singing So tired of waiting too.

  That’s when it happened all at once, the way it does with laughter. Coming up fast from so deep and hard your belly hurts. When the lighter finally popped up, my whole body spazzed, which made Billie let out a little scream, which made me let out a little scream. She cut a fart too, which was so fucking funny. Even with Sis, I’d never heard a girl fart before. We laughed for I don’t know how long for a while there, just staring at each other no sound coming out of us except for gasps.

  When Billie had herself calmed down, and she thought she could speak, Billie said: Waiting for Godot.

  Billie spit Waiting for Godot out of her mouth more than said it, and maybe you had to be there, but she barely had Waiting for Godot out of her mouth, and we were holding our stomachs again, our bodies slamming around inside the pickup, arms flailing, feet kicking, high screams, laughing like a couple of damn fools.

  Billie Cody. Laughing is how I met her.

  I got my hand steadied enough, and I held the lighter to the end of her cigarette. Billie puffed away, and the end of the cigarette started fire, and the smoke started.

  In the orange light of the cigarette lighter, behind the bloodshot tear duct cancer, it looked like Billie’s eyes were blue.

  After our cigarettes were lit, and after laughing like that, it was real quiet again like before when we were staring at the cigarette lighter. I thought maybe we might start in on it again, but this time we didn’t laugh. It was just the radio and some song and us in the dark smoking. I was back to being Redi-Mix cement or extra-sharp Cheddar. Billie looked down at her fingernails. Her fingernails were small too, like her toenails, and they were painted dark blue too.

  Can I have a sip of your beer? she asked.

  Billie’s red hennaed hair rats poked up through the white neon light of the Snatch Out sign. I handed her over the Budweiser. Billie tipped up the bottle, took a swig, handed the bottle back to me. When I put the bottle back to my lips, I tasted pink.

  Say, I was thinking, Billie said. You want to go on a date?

  My tongue on my lips, beer mixed in with pink.

  Sure, I said.

  You would? she said. Even after I farted?

  Before that night, I’d never heard a girl fart, and I’d never heard a girl say fart.

  I wanted to say yes right off, and my mouth was right there, but I stopped. The reason I stopped was because even though I didn’t know her name, I knew she was a junior at Highland High School. She was a year older than me and wasn’t Catholic, and I was just a sophomore at Saint Joe’s.

  Then: Sure, I said. But, I mean, are you sure you want to go out with me?

  I’m only a sophomore, I said.

  This was the moment when everything stopped, and all there was was Billie Cody and her cigarette. You know how each of us does things over and over, things nobody else does, or if they do they don’t do it so particular? For instance, the way Mom gritted her teeth, or her eyes got gold, or Sis always stuck the fingernail of her index finger between her two front teeth, or Dad pushed back his black hair off his forehead.

  Here’s something Billie Cody always did. With the cigarette. I think she knew she was doing it. Bille was into theater, and I think she practiced. Then maybe at some point, she’d done it so much she didn’t know anymore.

  Anyway, that evening in the Snatch Out was the first time I saw her do the cigarette thing.

  Her left arm across her belly under her breasts, Billie cupped her right elbow. The cigarette was always in her right hand. Her right hand connected to her right arm, her right arm connected to her right elbow, her right elbow rested in her left-hand palm, Billie Cody’s right arm connected that way at the elbow, came to life as something of its own. A windshield wiper, a wand, a pointer, a metronome, the minute hand of a ticking clock, one of those lawn sprinklers that spurt spurt spurt, then razzle razzle, back to spurt spurt spurt again. A jab, a poke, a twirl, a wave of disgust, any kind of emotion really, sarcasm, joy, terror, surprise, the fuck-you finger, a blossom bursting forth in the morning dew, a fist and forearm up your ass, you name it, Billie’s right arm could do it. Always, always with the cigarette in her hand at the end of the arm, the exclamation point to whatever it was Billie had to say.

  Plus her mother was half Italian and half Jew.

  Like I said, theatrical.

  Billie’s right arm, the hand, the cigarette, did a little tornado by her ear, then she lowered the cigarette to her knee. Tapped the ashes off the cigarette onto the floor with her index finger.

  You’re old for your age, Billie said. And besides, I liked how you handled that guy in the hospital.

  The scared place in my chest jumped up into my throat.

  What guy? I said.

  You know, Billie said, the Indian guy.

  You saw that? I said. How did you see that?

  I was standing at your door with everyone else in the hospital, Billie said.

  Everyone else?
I said. Who was that?

  Billie inhaled, Bette Davis, on the cigarette, blew the smoke out her nose. I could blow smoke out my nose too now that I had my nose drilled.

  Three nurses, the doctor, Billie said. The woman next to me with the gallbladder, and the candy striper.

  I inhaled, blew smoke out my nose.

  What did you see? I said. The lights were out.

  The cigarette in Billie’s hand, the way Monsignor sprinkled the audience with the holy water font.

  I saw a lot, Billie said.

  Those hospital gowns, I said.

  Yes, Billie said, I saw that. But I’m talking about something else.

  The smoke in the cab, the headlights of the cars, “My World Is Empty Without You” on the radio, the big rats of Billie’s red hennaed hair sticking up through the neon of the Snatch Out sign.

  Finally.

  Finally somebody saw and somebody knew the worst thing, the most shameful, the curse of my soul my life gathered around.

  Who knows where my breath was. My shoulders were up around my ears. The helpless feeling in my arms. I braced myself for what Billie Cody was about to say.

  But Billie didn’t say what I thought she’d say. Billie didn’t say I saw into your soul when you fought George Serano, a queer man, and you’re queer too.

  Billie said: I saw somebody scared. I saw somebody defending himself and yet, Billie said.

  Billie’s arm went down like a speedometer going from eighty to zero. She stuffed out the cigarette in the ashtray in the dash.

  You were kind, Billie said. Very human.

  Maybe tears couldn’t come out of her eyes, but that doesn’t mean Billie Cody couldn’t cry. I don’t know if she cried right then, but I remember her as crying. Maybe I’m remembering with what I know now, and she didn’t cry.

  What I know she did was put on her white plastic sunglasses with the dark green glass. Pushed them up on her nose.

  My heart felt so wide open, and the scared place in me wasn’t scared, and I loved God so much right then, and out of the blue the whole world was crying.