Now Is the Hour

by Tom Spanbauer

  Me too, she said.

  Really? I said. So you still like me?

  Like you? Billie said.

  On the pickup radio, out through the cemetery, around the trees and headstones, Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow.” The cigarette in Billie’s hand was hot-boxed, a big orange fire sucked all the way up to the filter. The slow exhale from her lips was a cloud of moon.

  I think I love you, Billie said.

  Like you? I think I love you.

  Oh my heavens pretty woman so far. The same thing my mom and dad said, Billie and I said. Only it was the other way around, who said what to whom. They were sitting in a car listening to “Melody of Love.” Billie and I were next to the pickup listening to “Mellow Yellow.” No idea what the fuck this means, or the implications, other than it’s the universe saying the apple don’t fall far from the apple tree.

  That’s something hard for me to believe, though. I’ve always been so differnt from them, my parents.

  But then, so far the universe has had a lot of surprises for me, what I thought wasn’t at all the way things were, and after all that’s happened, I wouldn’t doubt for a moment there’s a couple more surprises coming down the road.

  Highway 93, my getaway route to San Francisco, is one long shiny black ribbon of tarmac. From the east, the alternating white line in the middle of the road comes right up to me, goes right on past me, then heads west on up the road and disappears. Somewhere in the direction of the Pacific Ocean.

  California California California.

  Since the semi truck, there’s been just one car passed, a convertible yellow Buick, going at the speed of Mom, going eighty. One big flash of noise, headlights bright and dim, bright and dim, a yellow streak, horn honking. Somebody with long blond hair in the passenger’s seat, waving at me, flashing me the peace sign. Or maybe it was the bird.

  Whatever it was that happened, it was loud and bright and didn’t last long.

  I was standing at the time. For a while, there I was back up standing, the perfect picture of a hitchhiker, on my feet, my thumb out, poised and ready to go. You got to think positive. You know, like the color orange back in the first grade when I found the color orange on the inside lining of my jacket.

  Faith, hope, and charity.

  Flaco, Acho, and Billie Cody.

  Just having these three people in my life is proof enough for me my life’s been lived successfully. Plus then there’s George. Cost a lot, though.

  Trouble is, in the yoga book Billie gave me, there was a joint and I took a couple tokes on Billie’s joint, and no time at all here I am on my ass, somewhere between standing and lying, between waking and sleep, between gravity and levitation, between here and there, hope and despair, between my second-to-the-last and my last cigarette, Rigby John Klusener one big lump of slow-moving land mammal sinking into the gravel strip between tarmac and barrow pit. Sparkly gravel running through my fingers.

  This gravel is beautiful.

  I’m talking to the still air, to the sagebrush, the moon, to whoever it is out here who’ll listen.

  The first thing about Billie I loved so much was that she was so damn smart. There was nobody in the world I could talk to like Billie Cody. And laugh. Man, we could laugh.

  It was on our second date when we first started talking. Really talking. Billie had asked me why I hadn’t called her, and I told her Mom had a five-minute limit on the phone, plus we had a party line, and who knew who was listening. But the real truth was because when I was around my mother and father I wasn’t something. I mean, I wasn’t me, a human being, I was theirs, and when I was around them I felt like theirs, so there wasn’t any me here to talk.

  Billie totally understood when I told her that. Her blue eyes lit up, and Billie’s big smile went all across her face. We both went for the cigarettes and started in talking. For two hours, all Billie and I talked about was how we disappeared around our parents. For me, both my parents. For Billie, just her father.

  Billie really loved her mother. Her mother had Billie when she was only eighteen, so they kind of grew up together. They were more like sisters than mother and daughter. In fact, at one point, Billie actually said her mother was her best friend.

  Hard for me to believe.

  No religion, no weird trips about sex and sin. Billie and her mom shared the same clothes. They even drank beer together.

  Billie couldn’t wait for me to meet her mother, but there was a logistical problem, because I had to meet her mother when her father wasn’t home. You see, as cool as Billie’s mother was, her father was that much of an asshole. Her father was a plumber and liked whiskey too much and guns and sports and liked to get drunk and break things. Macho stuff.

  He isn’t going to like you, Billie said. We’ll have to play this one carefully.

  Which, as you’ll soon see, as things turned out, Billie was right on.

  Besides her father, everything else about Billie was damn near perfect. I knew everything about her. Jean Paul Sartre was God, but God was a She, and She was an atheist. Her favorite color was black. And blue because of her eyes. She got A’s in all her classes except PE, but she hated all her classes, especially PE, except for drama and English lit. She hated Elvis Presley, loved the Beatles, loved Dylan. She hated her big boobs. Her feet were too small, her toenails too tiny. She was too fat, too short, she had no hips, and there was not one particular quality to her face that was important — except for her tear duct cancer, which was a curse. When she graduated from high school she was going to some college in the east, Smith, Brown, Wellesley. After college, she was going to get a breast reduction and move to Paris. She didn’t like men, most men, except for me and her drama teacher, Mr. Woolf as in Virginia. She had a lot of friends, even the popular girls, who were a bore, but Billie could put up with them. She felt sorry for them because most women weren’t really alive as people yet. She was for integration. Malcolm X was her hero, and Martin Luther King and John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. The only thing good about Idaho was that nobody in the world knew about it yet. She loved hippies and was considering becoming a hippie herself. As Thomas Jefferson said, she said, a revolution every now and then can be a great thing. She had to have at least three cups of coffee in the morning before she could even think. Then toast. The toast had to be buttered right out of the toaster, and the butter couldn’t be soft. A morning without a cigarette was a morning without sunshine. She liked body hair on men and women, but she herself hadn’t yet arrived at the place where she could not shave her armpits. Her legs were no big deal because at the most on her legs it was peach fuzz. She loved gold and silver jewelry, and especially gold and silver together, like the Bedouins. The gold open palm that hung around her neck on a gold chain was the Hand of Fatima. She didn’t know what that was, but it was Arabic. Bananas and chocolate milk were her favorite foods, and peanut butter. She was a vegetarian, but sometimes she ate hamburgers and hot dogs. Especially hamburgers from the Dairy Queen, and hot dogs that were Jewish hot dogs, kosher, that didn’t have all that crap in them, the rabbi saw to it. She thought reincarnation was a lovely idea, but probably just an idea because mankind found it so hard to face death. She never wanted children. Henry Miller and James Joyce were overrated tap dancers of the English language. Hemingway sucked except for A Moveable Feast. Sylvia Plath was self-indulgent. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was her favorite book so far. Tennessee Williams was a fucking genius. The C on her front door didn’t stand for Cody, it stood for cunt. She wanted to smoke marijuana and take LSD, but she didn’t know any dealers, and it was important that you knew your dealer.

  That’s a lot to know about somebody, especially a girl.

  And Billie knew everything about me.

  I thought I was ugly. My mom was really weird. My dad was weird too. My sis was weird. I was raised Catholic, but like Teilhard de Chardin I believed that God was the process of the evolution. My whole life at school was trying to stay clear of Joe Scardino. When I was five, my brother, Russel
l, was born. He screamed for a hundred days, and then he died. His hands were open. I hated mush. Mush constipated me. Besides mush and my egg thing, there wasn’t any food I knew of that I didn’t like.

  Every story I’ve told you, I told Billie, except for dress-up and the sex stuff.

  Billie loved to hear me talk and tell my stories. She’d stare up into my eyes, and her blue eyes made me feel like what I was saying was important, and funny. I could really make Billie laugh. The story of Dad and Mom and Sis and me in the early days going to the Spa Plunge, the public swimming pool, in Lava Hot Springs, made Billie laugh her ass off. And the story of Mom buying her blue felt hat with the pheasant feather at LeVine’s, the fancy shop her sister Alma shopped in when Alma and Theresa were in town. The first time I tried to shave. How all of a sudden there were Indians popping up everywhere. Really, I didn’t know I could be so funny.

  There was one story, though, an important story, I couldn’t share with Billie.

  Why I couldn’t bring myself to kiss her.

  Flaco and Acho could have helped. For sure, they’d have some good advice for me on how to kiss. It wasn’t the kissing so much, though. I’d tried kissing my pillow, and I did pretty good. It was how to work up to the kiss. What to do with my arms and hands when they turned into forty-pound blocks of cheese, and should I close my eyes or keep them open. How do you know if your breath is bad?

  There was nobody else around to talk to. Sis had gone AWOL years ago. Every time I talked to Tramp about kissing Billie, he just raised his paw and poked the air. Who else was left? Mom and Dad, Monsignor Cody, Father Arana. No thanks.

  And something else. More something I couldn’t talk to anybody about. The more I got to know Billie, the more I got scared.

  When Flaco and Acho left, I felt hurt in a way I didn’t have words for. With Billie, the stakes seemed even higher. On the one hand, with Billie I was feeling strong like I’d never felt. On the other hand, there was that sore place in me next to my heart. What would happen if Billie decided to split?

  So many times I’d gone to kiss Billie, but something always happened. Some nights, sitting there next to her, my arm just on her shoulder, her French smell and her pink lips, I really wanted to kiss her, but for the life of me, I couldn’t imagine that Billie wanted to kiss me. I needed to be bigger, stronger, needed to go home and do some pushups, or maybe I had a zit and I couldn’t kiss her with the zit, or she was so much smarter than me, or I’d probably miss her mouth altogether, or I’d forget how to breathe out of my nose again.

  Truth is, I was afraid to kiss Billie because a kiss would make us so close, and already I was so close.

  Billie Cody. Love.

  The story I told myself, though, was a differnt one: the reason it took us so long to kiss was because we liked to talk so much. Every Wednesday night in September, October, November, and December, Billie and I parked in Mount Moriah. We had only two hours Wednesday nights. With Billie at Highland High and me at Saint Joe’s, we never got to see each other. It took us two hours just to say hello and catch up on all the shit that happened the week before. Really, we needed another couple hours to get through all we wanted to say. Then before we knew it, it was time to leave each other at the Snatch Out and go home.

  Don’t get me wrong, though. Talking was important. The Lord knows I needed to talk. To Billie especially. Billie helped me with shit I hadn’t even thought about yet. Before Billie I was thinking some pretty stupid things. For example, I thought John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X were killed by communists.

  Communism was a discussion Billie and I went back and forth on. One Wednesday night, I said: If we don’t fight communism in Vietnam, then the communists will take over Southeast Asia, and then India and Africa, and then they’ll take over the whole world.

  Billie’s drag on her cigarette was long. Scary long. The cigarette poked up out of her fist like the finger finger.

  Isn’t your fear of communism like something else you’re afraid of? Billie said.

  There I sat like a dumb drut, trying to figure out what else I was afraid of. I couldn’t think of anything I was afraid of right then, except that I wanted to kiss her and I couldn’t kiss her. All the air went out of the cab, and the sweat started going down the inside of my arms. I thought for sure that was what she was going to say and I knew if she said it, it would ruin me.

  Like what? I said.

  How about Joe Scardino? she said. Don’t you think your idea of communism is a world where the Joe Scardinos run amok?

  A deep breath came back to my lungs, and I was breathing again, but it wasn’t long before I felt something that scared me even worse.

  I hated that I’d told Billie about Scardino. What had I done that for? What kind of guy went around telling girls he was afraid of other guys.

  Dizzy in my head, and I felt the puke come up in my chest. I didn’t know what the fuck to say, but I had to say something so I didn’t look like a total dumb ass.

  So I said: Scardino’s Italian.

  That made Billie laugh, and thank God she laughed, so I laughed too, and I was off the hook.

  But no, no, not with Billie.

  That’s when, for the first time, Billie looked at me in a way I’d come to know her looking at me. Her eyes opened wider and she seemed to take in all of me for a moment, and in that moment while she was taking me all in, she was thinking of just the right way to say what she had to say.

  Billie’s cigarette was between her fingers, in her hand, her hand on her knee.

  Don’t you think, Billie said.

  The cigarette came up to her ear, an orange whirlwind.

  That your fear of communism comes from your Catholicism? Billie said.

  The cigarette was between Billie’s puckered pink lips. Breath-in inhale.

  Don’t you think you’ve been brainwashed to believe there is an evil force in the world? Billie said. Breath-out exhale.

  The cigarette was a slow arc down to her side. Her head turned, blowing the smoke up and away.

  Aren’t you just substituting communism for the devil? Billie said.

  I opened the pickup door, got out, slammed the door, and stood out in the winter and smoked a whole cigarette. It was that night, during that cigarette, that I looked out of my eyes, these same two eyes I’m looking out now, and when I looked, I tried to imagine a world that had no devil, no eternal hell and damnation, no punishment, no doom.

  I could not do it. But the fact that I could not do it said a lot to me.

  So I opened up the pickup door and got back in. Billie was on the other side of the pickup on her second cigarette. The radio was back on, and it was some commercial, so I turned the radio off, turned the key off. I lit up my third cigarette. I didn’t say anything for a while. Sitting in the pickup, no radio light, in the dark and the silence, I knew I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what, and I didn’t know how. When I finally spoke, my voice was high and weird. It seemed like someone else was speaking.

  I said: Maybe you’re right, Billie. It seems like all I’m ever doing is waiting to screw up. Or waiting for the universe to conspire to screw me up. I wish I was differnt.

  Even if it was dark, I could see Billie’s face light up, that big smile of hers, her blue eyes blue even in the dark. Billie came sliding across the seat. She put her palm against my cheek, the fingers of her hand soft across my eyes.

  Billie’s voice was deep. We called Billie’s voice like that her Simone Signoret voice.

  Rigby John Klusener, Billie said, I love you so much.

  Or at least I thought that’s what she said.

  I pretended I didn’t hear her, and still I didn’t kiss her.

  Then, still in her Simone Signoret voice, Billie said: What are you going to do about the draft? Have you thought about it?

  Thought about it? I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And the only thing I could think about it was stop thinking about it.

 
I wouldn’t even make it through boot camp, I said.

  Before I knew it, my lips were on Billie’s lips. It was the only thing that could stop me from crying. I was breathing through my nose, and my mouth was exactly on her mouth — maybe a little off to start with, but everything slid into place.

  In an instant, my body was just my two lips. Two lips against two lips soft with a kind of suck, tobacco, and the taste of pink. Something inside fell away, something that was holding me up, a scaffold that held my head up and made my shoulders square, crash, a high-rise building in a city blown up, falling in on itself.

  Billie’s breath, my breath. Breath suddenly a remarkable thing, how it happens without you.

  It was still winter when our lips stopped kissing. In a cemetery in a pickup right next to Russell’s grave. Our breaths, puffs of steam in the cab.

  Around the dark round center, the blue of Billie’s eyes a hundred differnt blues. White outside the round of blue.

  Promise me something, Billie said.

  Billie’s best Simone Signoret.

  All the tea in China. An audience with the Pope. The moon.

  Here was where I wanted to stay.

  Promise me, Billie said.

  Her lips against my lips on the pr and the m and the m.

  What? I said.

  No bones in my neck to hold up my head.

  That no matter what happens, Billie said, we will always be friends.

  The moon, the goddamn moon, up in the branches of the elm, the light of it through the back window, the frost on the glass, little diamonds of moon onto Billie’s face.

  I promise, I said.

  Some time in January, I finally got the gumption up.

  Mom was in her red housedress, her back to me, her hair hanging down in her face. Oatmeal cookies or peanut butter cookies or chocolate cookies or pound cake, eggs and flour and sugar, there she was bent over a bowl, beating things into shape.

  Can I have the pickup Friday night? I asked.

  My feet were exactly in a blue square of the kitchen tile. I was sitting in Dad’s chair at the head of the table.