An hour later the club was closing down, and Mel said, You hungry? I’ll buy you dinner. Least I can do.
She was shining with sweat. Her dancing had left her hair looking like a bird’s nest. Brad himself stunk of sweat and smoke. His ears rung. And he couldn’t stop smiling. He remembered that: right away, Mel had made him feel good.
Let’s go, he said. I’m nowhere near tired.
Great, she said, I know a place. And she grabbed his hand and pulled him out the door, almost at a run.
MEL LED HIM to an all-night diner. There they sat in a back booth and ate hash browns and drank mug after mug of coffee. Mel kept asking him questions; right when Brad was sure he couldn’t say another word, she’d ask, And then what?—and all the time her eyes would be bright, alert, widening and narrowing as though what he had to say was really and truly interesting, as though his life was some kind of adventure.
So he told her about growing up in Indiana, about his father being a prick, about his folks splitting up, about how he’d been alone with his mother for a long time, from when he was ten until he was seventeen, and how they always got along all right, even if he was a troublemaker—
You? Mel said, laughing.
(And sometimes—every day, actually—since then, he’s wondered why she said that; he is, and always has been, a troublemaker, a fuckup. For as long as he can remember he’s been doing the wrong thing, sometimes by accident, but a lot of the time just because he can’t bring himself to give a shit. He has tattoos on his arms, he has long hair and a scraggly goatee and squinty eyes; if he showed up on a movie screen, everyone would think, bad guy, and wait for the hero to take him out.
But not Mel, not this one laughing girl asking You?)
Me, he said, heat in his cheeks.
And he told her: about his mother meeting his stepfather, Jim, at some church singles group, and how, once Jim moved in, he and Brad hated each other immediately; Jim was one of those guys who staked a claim, and this time the claim was Brad’s mother. How Brad had spent the previous six years warning his mother about the men who’d come around, only to realize she’d gone and married the worst one. And then how, boom, one Sunday morning it all fell apart; Jim found some weed in one of Brad’s jackets, and laid into him, and Brad couldn’t help it; they’d all been living in the little house together for six months, and Brad’s mother was walking around saying Jesus loves you, like some fucking zombie, and here was this shirtless hairy asshole standing next to the coffeemaker, jabbing a finger at Brad and telling him his mother didn’t need all this bullcrud—
Mel laughed. He said that?
Brad did his stepfather’s voice: Boy, your mother’s ten kinds of saint, and here you are tracking bullcrud all over her clean floors!
You hit him, Mel said, and shook out a cigarette for him. Please?
Brad nodded and lit up. Yeah, he said. I couldn’t let him use that kind of language.
Well, actually—he told her this—he kind of lost his shit, taking everything out on old Jim, screaming and threatening to kill him, and that ended with Jim grabbing the phone away from Brad’s hysterical mother and, pulling a bloody bath towel away from his mouth, shouting: I don’t need a goldurned ambulanth! Thend the polith!
And so Brad was arrested, and Jim pressed charges—For your own good, his mother told him, before adding, I couldn’t talk him out of it—and Brad ended up with a three-month suspended sentence and a lot of time with a counselor. His mother told him it’d be better if he moved out, so he got a place with a buddy in Hammond. His mother begged him to apply to college, but—
No offense, he told Mel, but I really didn’t see myself as a fucking scholar, you know?
She’d told him, earlier, that she was a junior at DePaul, was studying to be a teacher.
None taken, Mel said. People are different. When I was a kid I thought college was the coolest thing on earth, but I meet all kinds of great people who never go, and all kinds of shitheads who do.
She smiled at him, and he believed her.
So then what?
So then his mother was lonely without him, and started calling him every night to cry about his future, to beg him to come to church. And in the meantime Brad and his buddy got work as overnight floor cleaners; during the day they mixed music and drove around looking for old records at garage sales. And then one day his buddy came home and announced that he was tired of sitting on his ass, and that he had a little money saved up, and that if Brad had that much, too, then he knew a guy who’d sell him a brick of weed, and that the two of them could do pretty well for themselves. And Brad, who was so tired of cleaning fucking floors he could barely force himself out of bed—a night running the cleaner left his hands so shaky that he could barely work the sliders on his four-track—thought that was a pretty good idea.
For a while they did all right. Neither he nor his buddy got rich, that was for sure, but they covered their rent and their own smokes, and Brad managed to pick up a better board. But then—
You get caught? Mel asked.
Sort of. Mom had been sending me checks—she felt guilty about kicking me out, right? Turns out Jim didn’t know about them. And then it turns out that one of the guys we were selling to was the son of someone Mom was in church with, and he got caught by his folks . . .
Ouch, Mel said.
Yeah.
And so the next night his mother showed up at his apartment, alone. He knew she’d found out, right when he opened the door: she was pale and thin-lipped and kept her hands folded in front of her.
He couldn’t quite tell Mel what his mother said to him. He could feel Mel’s eyes, wide and dark, wanting to believe anything he told her—and, more than that, to feel what he told her, whatever that might be—and holding out on her seemed wrong. Sneaky. But he wasn’t even sure how to put it in words.
It was a bad scene, he said.
Did she call the cops? Mel asked.
She threatened to.
Which was a lie, more or less, though his mother had told him she’d considered it. What she said was, Bradley, I’ve tried and tried to make you a son I could be proud of. But now I see you’re like your father, and I’m done with men like him.
Brad shouted at her, but he could see the way her face shut down, and that’s how he knew she was telling him the truth: this was the same look she’d gotten when Brad used to beg her to leave his father, the man who’d beat her for ten years, who’d put her in the hospital twice with broken arms.
His mother, still blank, said, Goodbye. He waited for her to start to cry, to crack. He told himself to apologize, to cry and beg her. But his mother turned around and left.
He told this part to Mel: He decided that night to leave town for good. That next morning he split for Chicago, where he crashed with a guy he knew from high school. He got work at a club, sort of as a house roadie, and then one night at a party a girl he knew introduced him to a friend who sold pot, and sometimes meth, and he and Brad started trading stories about weird deals they’d seen, and at the end of the night the guy took Brad aside and said he might know a way to get Brad some work, and Brad said sure, and started selling weed the next week—
For real? Mel asked. She leaned forward, looking theatrically sly. You got any on you?
He looked at his hands and said, Oh, Mel, I wish I did.
And, cheeks burning, he told Mel that he was, at the moment, on probation. And that was because Brad had—because he’d gone up, for possession, and his PO was required to drug-test Brad once a month, and since pot stayed in the fucking system for so long—
You did time?
Yeah. Six months. I’ve been out three.
He waited for that empty look to come into her face; she was a nice girl, this Mel, but they’d reached the part of the evening when she’d figured out she was in the wrong place, when she’d decide she had to run back to her dorm or wherever—that Brad didn’t just look like a bad guy but maybe was a bad guy.
But she said,
They sent you up for pot?
Yeah. God, it was the worst. I sold to an undercover cop. Brad tapped his fingers on the table. It was all for shit. They only arrested me to get the guys up above me. The cops offered me a deal—you know, names for probation? But the guys I worked for would have fucked me up if I said anything. So jail it was.
Jesus. Was it bad?
He didn’t know what to tell her about that either.
He thought of his cell mate, Delroy, stupid or brain damaged or both, who was in for trying to feel up his ten-year-old cousin. Delroy who sobbed, sometimes, when he was in one of those moods where he thought God was going to kill him; Delroy who would jerk off in the bottom bunk every night, with noisy grunts, sometimes right before sobbing. Delroy who, early on, had beat the living shit out of him, after Brad had yelled at him to keep it down. You ain’t my boss, Delroy had said, at the end of it, grabbing Brad by the hair and giving his skull a knock against the cell wall. You want me to fuck you?
And Delroy was better than the rest of them. Brad could at least predict him.
He told Mel, Yeah, it was pretty bad.
Mel watched him, calm and even, and he could see: she was telling him she wasn’t going anywhere.
God, she said. That sucks. I like pot. I hate that it’s illegal. I get these anxious spells? She shook her head again. I could use some now.
Me, too, he said. The moment I’m off probation I’m going to smoke the biggest bowl known to man.
She smiled. I won’t get you into trouble. I promise.
Mel held up her coffee mug, and Brad held up his, and they clinked them together. Coffee sloshed out of Brad’s, all over the basket that held the salt shaker and the sugar packets. Story of my life, he said.
He looked at the clock and saw he’d been talking for two hours. Hey, he told her, now it’s your turn. Tell me about you.
Soon, she said. Right now I want to go home.
She touched the back of his hand with a fingernail.
I want you to come with me. You okay with that?
He turned over his hand; she ran the same fingernail across the ball of his thumb, then pressed her palm flat against his.
Her irises were the color of strong, dark coffee.
He said, I’m okay with that.
III.
Late in the afternoon of their second day at the cabin, Brad relents—Mel’s been bugging him all day to get his ass in gear—and the two of them head out to the nearest gas station for supplies, which they’re starting to need.
But they haven’t even made it halfway, the truck rattling and skating around the turns in the gravel road, when the engine begins to sputter.
What’s wrong? Mel asks. She takes her feet in their torn sneakers down from the dash.
Don’t know, Brad says. The CHECK ENGINE light comes on, glowing orange, and the truck stalls. Brad curses and steers toward the side of the road, only a few yards away from the drive to another small cabin: two ruts that vanish down into a hole in the trees.
On the drive up from Chicago they found that the truck’s gas gauge can only be read as approximate. Now that they’re stopped, the needle, which has been bouncing up and down around a quarter-tank, settles all the way down below E.
And Brad knows he’s fucked up—he remembers it like a bill he forgot to pay.
Fuck me, he says. Out of gas.
Mel peers at the gauge. But we got gas.
When? he asks, scrambling.
Yesterday! At the gas station back on the highway.
They didn’t fill up—but Brad can’t say so to Mel, not yet. He climbs out of the truck and, on his hands and knees in the gravel, peers underneath at the tank, hoping he’s wrong, hoping for a leak. He pops the hood and pretends to look at the engine.
They’d stopped at the same station they’re headed to now, at the intersection of the gravel road and the highway. And while Mel was inside getting groceries—when Brad was supposed to be filling up the tank—he’d noticed that, through a break in the pines at the back of the station’s lot, he could see Lake Superior. That endless blue glittering water, framed by the green pines, in the sunshine—he couldn’t do anything but stare, smoking a cigarette, waiting for Mel to find him. And she had. She’d put her arm around him and said, That’s so beautiful. She’d said, I’m glad we did this, and kissed him, and he’d kissed her back, and he’d been so busy thinking about how he was going to get laid when they reached the cabin that he forgot all about the gas.
Mel chews the side of her thumb and looks over the engine, which is old and rusted and covered in sludge. Is it supposed to look like that? she asks.
Yeah, Mel, he says. It’s really fucking old.
I was just asking.
He covers his eyes. I know, he says, and then turns to her. I forgot the fucking gas, all right?
She stares at him. How could you forget?
I just did. We were making out. I’m sorry.
Brad looks right and left, down the empty road, at the darkening valleys between the hills. The sky’s bright blue, like it ought to be warm out—but it isn’t. All day long it’s gotten colder, windier. The trees around them are bending and shushing. Brad fumbles a cigarette out of his pocket, warms up his lungs. He sneaks a look at Mel.
She doesn’t look mad at him. He’s never seen her face look like it does now. She glances wide-eyed into the woods, up at the sky, and then again at him, her hands jammed into her jeans pockets.
What are we going to do? she asks.
Mel’s afraid, that’s what she is. He’s being stupid again. Mel’s the smart one; she’s already thinking about the math: It’s five thirty in the afternoon. They’re maybe three miles away from the cabin, five miles—at least—from the gas station. The sun will be setting soon. They’re both wearing T-shirts. No way they’ll be able to walk for gas and back before sunset.
We need to get to the cabin, he says. If we go now we can just get there before dark.
But what about the food? she asks. The propane?
We’ve got a little lunch meat left. Right? And a six-pack. We’ve probably still got half a tank of propane. We’ll be all right.
She’s looking up at the sky. Probably? It’s going to be cold tonight.
Mel, he says. We have enough. Come on.
He holds out his arm, and she stares at the sky for another few seconds before sliding underneath.
Okay, she says.
Brad turns to look at the truck, sitting out here in the middle of nowhere. Cars did come by—they’d seen their first one a little while ago: a yellow Jeep, heading the other way. What are the odds somebody will see the truck before they get it moving tomorrow? A local would be immediately suspicious. Brad’s not sure how Lou got plates onto the truck, but he is sure he didn’t do it legally. One person calling in those numbers might produce a policeman checking the cabins . . .
Wait, he says.
He walks down to the new cabin, tucked away in its pocket of trees. Its windows are empty and dark, and both cabin and drive are pretty well hidden away from the road.
Help me out, he says.
Mel sits behind the wheel, the truck in neutral, while Brad heaves himself at the inside of the driver’s side door, again and again, until at last the old beast is rolling forward. Mel noses the truck, creaking, into the drive. The slope is just gentle enough to keep it moving, down into hiding, until the brake lights glow red in the shadows.
Before they leave Brad walks around to the back of the cabin. He tries the doors, but of course they’re locked. He looks around, listens; the only sound is wind, woods.
Brad? Mel asks.
Maybe they’ve got some gas hidden around here, he says. Or extra clothes.
I don’t know if that’s a good idea—
Damnit, he says, you got a better one?
She turns away from him, and he’s immediately sorry. This isn’t her fault, this was never her fault; he’s being a prick for no reason. This is shit his high-school counse
lor could have told him. He’ll apologize on the walk back. He’ll rub her shoulders tonight until she falls asleep.
He pries a rock out of the ground, then breaks a window near the back door, and reaches through to turn the dead bolt.
They find no gasoline, and no propane either, but he’d expected that much: this place is just as much of an empty shell as their own cabin—there is an electric space heater inside, and electrical outlets, but the power’s off. In a kitchen cabinet Mel discovers six cans of tuna—Some fisherman this guy was, she says, and he’s glad to hear her make the joke—and an unopened box of crackers.
A wool watch cap hangs on a hook by the front door, and a pair of gardening gloves, crusted with dirt. Brad takes them both. Before they leave the cabin he tugs the cap over the tops of Mel’s ears.
She looks up at him, eyes big and dark. He’d give just about anything to take the worry out of them.
He puts his hands on her shoulders and makes himself smile, until Mel’s smiling, too.
See? he says. Better already.
IV.
Mel’s house was three L stops away from the diner, a big two-story house north of DePaul that looked like it ought to be condemned. Her five housemates lived upstairs, in the bedrooms. Mel had a corner room in the basement, with her own door in the alley.
Her room was a disaster. Mounds of clothes on the bare concrete floor. A trash basket spilling over with empty cans of Diet Coke and beer. An unmade single bed. A little desk piled high with books and papers and a computer whose screen showed a picture of a raccoon. A low bureau with half its drawers pulled open.
Even in early summer the air had a basement’s clammy chill.
Brr, Mel said. Come here.
Mel kissed like she smiled—with all her energy, with her entire body. She pressed her thighs against him, gripped the sides of his head with her long fingers. Sometimes she bit at his lips. After a few minutes she pulled him down onto the bed.
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