There was another twenty minutes before fifth period bell and Bagmore asked me to join him in the tunnel under the grandstands for a smoke. When a couple of his buddies followed, he signaled them to beat it. Bagmore wasn’t the target of my campaign—I was aiming for a species rather than any particular person—but the invitation was encouraging nevertheless. It meant that my efforts were paying off, I was putting out the right scent. I figured there’d be a crowd in the tunnel because of the rain, and being seen with Bagmore wouldn’t exactly hurt the value of my stock. There were a lot of girls who’d trade their reputations to go out with him, and many of them had. He was one of the local horses who should have been shot, but was put out to stud instead. What the heck, I thought, I had to start somewhere. It wasn’t my way to nibble at the edges.
The tunnel was empty.
“It stinks in here,” he said. “I know a better place.”
We walked down the steps to the running track, turned left, and walked another twenty-five yards. Bagmore jiggled open the door to a storage shed under the stands that I didn’t even know existed. There were blocking sleds, hurdles stacked like portable chairs, yard markers, starting blocks, bags of wood chips, and other sports paraphernalia. The smell was pleasant, cut grass and cedar. He left the door open a crack, enough light to see the gleam in his eyes. He pulled a pack of Salems out of the inside of his jacket, jiggled the filters of two cigarettes out, and flicked a flame onto his lighter.
“Here,” he said.
“Sure.”
“You know what day this is?”
“No. Should I?”
“Evan went down seven years ago.”
Evan was his older brother, the one whose chute had failed skydiving over Harvey Field. I remembered the day it happened. There were sirens all over town and I was in the mountain ash tree in the backyard, trying to stop a cat from messing with a bird’s nest. The meter reader from the water department was walking down the alley in his short pants and I yelled at him to find out what the sirens were for, figuring that his being part of government he’d have access to that kind of information. He told me they were heading to the air field, and I figured a plane must have gone down. “Sorry about that,” I said to Bagmore.
We were leaning against a blocking dummy, shoulder to shoulder. “Hey, you didn’t do it. I don’t know why I mentioned it.”
“I understand.”
“Of course. You lost your mom.” He put his arm around me and pulled me tight against him. I had to admit it felt nice and stirred up the old attraction I used to feel for him about the age I was when I climbed the mountain ash. Maybe there was nothing peculiar about me after all. I just needed exposure. “We should form a club,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“The survivors.” He was massaging my shoulder so hard it was painful.
I dropped my cigarette to the ground and straightened up to grind it out. “We better get back.”
He swung around and corralled me against the blocking dummy. “I’ve been noticing you more lately.”
We were about the same height and I could smell the lunch on his breath. I tried to lift one of his arms, but he wasn’t budging. “Let’s continue this later, huh?”
“There has to be something to continue.” Then he pushed into me, grinding his package against my crotch, with his hands on my buttocks. “Come on. Haven’t you ever wondered what it’d be like to jump my bones?” My brain said spit, but I couldn’t. He put his mouth on mine. “I’ve wondered … those legs … I love long legs.” The grinding continued as I tried to move my mouth to wherever his wasn’t. His lips were smearing my cheeks. “You’d be like riding a tiger.”
He pushed his tongue between my lips and I clamped my teeth together, but when I gasped for air he locked his teeth into mine and swabbed his tongue around the insides of my gums. One hand squeezed the back of my head, while the other one pushed down inside the front of my pants. I tried to make myself fall to the ground, to put my crotch beyond his reach, but he was strong enough to keep me pinned against the dummy. The flashes and sparks of recrimination exploding inside me only made it worse. How I was so stupid to follow him into this cave. How this could be the way I’d lose my virginity. How I’d practically begged someone to screw me to prove a point.
Then something strange happened. I could feel it rise in me like the flushed water in a toilet bowl. An otherworldly calm. I stopped struggling and concentrated on his breath, which was coming faster and faster, in shorter and shorter strokes. Pranayama. Even as it was happening, I realized this had nothing to do with me. Bagmore was snorting and thrusting against me, but I could have been anybody. He was in a zone. If I could have stepped out of the way, he would have just banged away against the pad on the blocking dummy. This wasn’t sex. I was bait. This was masturbation with his pants on. It ended in a series of moans as he shot his wad, loosened his grip, and withdrew in a daze.
When I pushed him to the side, he offered no resistance. I should have kneed him in the balls or swatted him around the side of the head. “You’re pathetic, Bagmore. And a premature ejaculator.”
“Fuck you,” he said.
“I doubt it.”
The light from the door made a stripe down his body. His shirt was ruffled, the belt buckle unclasped, and there was a wet spot the size of a half dollar on his pants, which was twenty-five cents more than he was worth.
I showered that night until the hot water ran out, then sudsed up my head and shaved. My hands were so shaky I made nicks that I had to dab with toilet paper. So what? There was no way I was going to let myself be the least bit attractive to the likes of Condon Bagmore again.
Bagmore trying to screw me with his pants on in the supply shed convinced me I wanted less to do with school. I told Dad I’d take the job at the newspaper, anything they had. I was steering my dinghy between the rocks and I had to plug my ears with wax to avoid hearing the singing of the Sirens.
They converted a storage room off Dad’s office into an after-school work space for me at the paper. Dad was on the phone when I arrived on the first day, so I tiptoed through his office to get to mine, which was stuffed with stacks of xerox paper, old issues of the newspaper, toner cartridges for the copy machine, and extra swivel chairs, boxes and tables that had been nested together. The walls were blank except for nail holes and patches where pictures must have hung and been painted around. At one end there were black steel shelves mounted on uprights. A bare light bulb hung over my desk, which had a water-stained deskmat full of doodles and curled at the edges. On the desk, there were dusty “In” and “Out” trays, a staple puller, metal bookends, and one of those prongs for spearing telephone messages. The typist’s chair, a swivel model with five legs and casters, squeaked when I leaned back and popped up when I got out.
“I’m not sure it’s such a good idea for the most junior employee to be next to the boss,” I told Dad.
“Titles don’t mean anything around here,” he said. “Besides, you don’t have a window and I’m going to make you work harder than everyone else.”
“You’re the boss,” I said, laughing.
“Carlisle’s the boss. I’m just a drone. But you working here was his idea too.”
“Whatever.” I didn’t want to get into it about Carlisle on the first day.
“Hey, you’re going to fall in love with this place. When you’re a newspaper reporter, you can knock on a door and someone else’s life plays out before you. All you have to do is shut up and listen.”
“But I’m a copy editor, right?”
“For starters. But never forget you’re part of something larger.” I still wasn’t sure if I believed what he was saying, but it sure beat hanging around the athletic field.
The first few days Dad kept sticking his head into my office with tidbits of advice. “It’s your job to fly-speck the first run for spelling mistakes, punctuation, capitalization, and bad grammar,” he said. “Ignore the content, unless it affects your
editing choices.”
I worked from the hard copy and when I found a mistake, I put a tent over a new comma, a circle around a missing period, or double lines under a letter that was supposed to be capitalized. Dad rounded up Strunk and White, A Writer’s Reference, a dictionary, and the AP stylebook. “The dirtier the copy is when you pass it on to me the better you’ve done your job,” he said. Dad had final say over which edits were entered into the computer. Copy editing practically ruined my reading for pleasure. I found myself at night looking for typos and syntax and pretty soon I was unable to keep track of the story line altogether.
I usually got to the paper in time for the afternoon break when everyone except Dad drifted into another windowless room they called the “doghouse,” where there was hot coffee simmered to the bitterness of castor oil, a refrigerator full of leftover brown bag lunches, and old magazines people brought in and dumped on the coffee table. You could gauge where we were in the cycle of weekly deadlines by the level of energy in the doghouse. I liked the way people called each other by last names. Everyone took me under their wing.
“See that spot on the wall?” Gerry Alexander, the wiry photographer with the cleft lip, said. “That’s where Rummage threw his peanut butter and jelly sandwich when they announced the layoff. It stuck for weeks, everyone betting on when it would drop.”
There seemed to be no resentment about the editor’s daughter getting a cushy job at the paper, mainly because they’d long ago canonized him. Now they were in the legend-telling phase, sharing stories I’d never heard. “You knew he had an offer to go with the Seattle Times,” Louise Mead said, fiddling with one handle of a can opener, which was a surrogate for the cigarettes she’d given up. “Tom could have had his own column, probably syndicated it. You know how smart your dad is.”
All I could do was nod and pretend I had at least an inkling of the glow that shone from his halo. The stories helped me though to understand the ceaseless devotion he’d given to this place, but I wasn’t sure he could live up to their heroic expectations. I’d seen him defer too often to John Carlisle.
I was going over the “Nickel Want Ads” when I heard a familiar voice in Dad’s office. It was John Carlisle. I was the one who’d insisted on closing the door between our offices, for purposes of independence, but I could still hear Dad when he talked on the phone. Most of the time it was wearisome business stuff—advertisers and suppliers—and I couldn’t have cared less what was said.
I tiptoed over to the door.
“It’s a chance of a lifetime, Tom. Maddock’s the major leagues.” I’d never noticed how thin Carlisle’s voice was compared to Dad’s. It made his sports metaphor ring hollow.
There was some shuffling of papers “I didn’t work this hard,” Dad said, “so I could cut and paste the Seattle Times into bite sizes for our readers.” I wished I were a fly on the wall so I could have seen his face. “There are almost twenty thousand people counting on us. Maybe that’s not LA or Salt Lake City, but they’re ours and I think they deserve their own voice.”
I put my ear on the crack between the door and the jamb. “Tom, it doesn’t have to mean the end of all that …”
“I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of media giants telling me what I’m supposed to think. They don’t know Stampede. They don’t care about Stampede. Let’s put it to a vote of the staff, what’s left of them.”
“Tom.”
“Why not? United Airlines belongs to its employees. While we’re at it, we can hire back some of our people.”
“I told you you’ll have a position.”
“This isn’t about me!”
“I know this has been a rough year, Tom. It was just an inquiry. Think about it, okay?” I could imagine Carlisle’s fleshy hands reaching out to glom onto Dad. He was one of those touchy-feely people. “Let’s talk tomorrow.”
“What’s wrong with right now?”
I couldn’t make out the beginning of John Carlisle’s answer, but the end was clear. “… I don’t want to have to use my prerogative as owner.”
“Get out!” Dad yelled. I clenched my fist and shook it. Yes! That’s what I would have said.
There was foot movement and the sliding of chairs. I backed off the door, picked up A Writer’s Reference, and sat on the edge of my desk in case one of them came in. The outer door to Dad’s office shut hard and then there was silence. I wanted to burst in and congratulate Dad, but I knew he’d be upset for me butting into his business. If we couldn’t talk about Mom’s death, how did I expect him to tell me about the fate of the newspaper?
I went back to my desk and made up an ad to slip into the proof that I was working on, so he’d see it when he reviewed my work:
Proud, local newspaper with promising future seeks new owner with the guts to put his heart ahead of his wallet. Terms non-negotiable.
But I chickened out and wadded it into the recycle box. I’d think of a way to tell him in person, to break this habit of communication by misdirection.
That same night, after Dad came home, he got a call from the Stampede Police and we rode in the patrol car out to the scene of Willard’s accident. The wrecker was already there as well as another police car. Willard was in the frontseat of his Olds, shivering. Freeway was sitting next to him, licking the back of Willard’s hand. Thank God, I thought, he hadn’t brought the whole stable with him. Given Dad’s mood, Willard couldn’t have picked a worse time to go for a joyride. He must have stolen the keys out of Dad’s dresser. Willard was basically an honest man, except for his hiding of the dogs, and even that was for a humanitarian purpose, if you could refer to it that way. But he’d gotten sloppy and must have figured that negotiating an Oldsmobile Skylark along the back roads of Cascade County wasn’t any harder than shuffling five dogs in and out of the underground railroad which was our basement. He hadn’t figured on Buzz Little backing out into the road from nowhere. Buzz turned out to be drunk, per usual, but that didn’t mollify Dad.
“Where’d you think you were going anyway?”
Willard was rocking back and forth, staring straight ahead over the top of the steering wheel.
“Huh? Answer me.” I wasn’t sure if Willard had even heard him.
“Going to Bonnie’s,” he finally mumbled.
“What?” Dad had one hand braced on the wheel and the other against Willard’s shoulder, like he was going to pry him open.
“It was only a fender bender,” I said, tapping Dad on the back, but he ignored me. This temper, twice in one day, was something I hadn’t seen.
“Who in Sam Hill is Bonnie?” Dad said. Willard kept up his catatonic rocking, still not looking at Dad. This Bonnie woman must have made some impression on Willard when she was alive, I thought. The pilgrimages to her were becoming a habit. “Look, old man, I don’t know what you’re talking about or what you’re trying to prove, but I’m not going to have you living in my house and sneaking around stealing keys and wrecking cars.” He was madder than he was when John Carlisle came into the office. I thought he was going to drag Willard out of there and just shake him till he broke. “You understand?”
“Dad, that’s enough. It wasn’t even his fault.”
Dad swatted his hand back at me. “Watch it or you’ll never drive either.”
“I don’t want to.”
“This isn’t over, Willard.”
The right front fender of the Oldsmobile was pinched against the tire and the radiator had lost its water, making the car undrivable. The police officer put Freeway in the frontseat and Dad put Willard between us in the back. All the way home, Dad kept grumbling at Willard. “You’re going to pay for the damage out of your Social Security and this is the end of your privileges.” I wondered what privileges he was talking about, unless you counted the roof over Willard’s head and running water. “This isn’t the end of it,” Dad kept saying and I knew what he meant by that, probably so did Willard, although he didn’t utter a protest all the way home. I wished the of
ficer had put Dad in front and Freeway back with me and Willard. It would have been more pleasant all the way around. I knew there was more going on in Dad’s mind than the accident on Skylar Road, but it didn’t seem fair that Willard had to take the hit for something John Carlisle was trying to pull off.
9
Monday night when I came home, there was a sack inside the front door with toilet paper, Scotch tape, toothpaste and a frayed paperback copy of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. Inside the book, there was a folded piece of notepaper with a printed header that said, “From the desk of Rozene Raymond.” For some reason, I put the note to my nose and inhaled. It was just paper, but the words were sweet:
Thought this would satisfy your curiosity for the mystery of it all.
Rozene
Maybe she had noticed that insipid article I was reading in Hustler. What a nice comeback. I was distracting myself with cosmetics and she was diving into her soul.
I put the note in my pocket and headed downstairs to drop off a spare roll in the basement bathroom. Willard’s door was open. Except for Freeway, the dogs were lying on the floor. Since we’d become buddies they knew they didn’t have to get up and greet me each time I entered the room, which smelled like dog hair mattresses.
“Hey, how’s Crash Corrigan?” I said.
He swung his shoes off the spread and planted them on the oval rug next to the bed. “I was thinkin’ of you.”
“Good or bad?”
“You’re gettin’ to be just like your dad.”
“How’s the head?”
He looked down at his ankle boots. “I’m fine. Now it’s him.” He pointed to Freeway, who was lying on his side next to Willard, his front paws crossed, tail drawn tight between his legs. A grey snotty substance oozed from Freeway’s eyes and his breathing was labored and jagged. Willard had covered his midsection with a pair of grungy boxer shorts. Willard rocked back and forth, rubbing his palms against the top of his thighs. “Am I going to jail?”
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