“She is after you?”
“She wants something I have. So I’m leaving.”
“You are going to take Scamp?”
“How am I going to leave if I don’t take Scamp?”
Betty pursed her mouth. Otherwise her brown face was still amid the black hair spread out on the pillow.
“You’re using that Oriental trick again, but it won’t work,” I said. I swung my legs down from the bed and put on my shoes.
“What do you mean, Oriental trick?”
“You lie there inscrutably refusing to speak, and it is a trick for causing me to have the argument inside my head instead of out loud.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said.
“Let me demonstrate,” I said. I came close to her. She was propped on her elbow now, and I got eight inches away and let all the expression drain from my face as I stared at a spot on her cheek. “Look, you can’t read me,” I said. “I’m inscrutable, I’m a cipher. I’m a crustacean.”
“Stop it.”
“That’s what you’re like! Always making me guess what you think.”
“What do you guess I think?”
“Oh, you’re thinking you are going to be alone, you have no Chinese friend, you can’t make revolution, you’re a snake in a hole.”
“So. I am not inscrutable.”
She smiled a sour smile that dimpled her chin. She seemed to think she had won the point.
I got up and gave my teeth a good long noisy scrubbing, followed by a vigorous rinse and spit. After that I went back to Betty and told her she should not feel all of this so much. “Though miles and an ocean separate you, you are still with your Chinese people in spirit.”
“You are right,” she said. “I will try not to feel it so much.”
She smiled again, strangely. The look was strange because it suddenly seemed unmysterious, like the way a friend would smile at you if something sad were happening. It confused me.
“I knew something was wrong when you didn’t brush your hair,” I said.
She took the brush from the nightstand and gave her head a good, fierce working over. At last, the shiny hair received its nightly spanking. When she was done she pulled a couple of long loose strands from the bristles and walked across the room to drop them in the wastebasket.
Ten minutes earlier I had known what I was doing, and now I did not know again.
“Why don’t you give me back that hundred and just come with me?” I said.
I returned the crisp bill to the envelope. Betty gathered her few things quietly, and we slipped out of Room 9 together.
61
The engine heaved but didn’t catch. Out of nervousness I had pumped the gas, once again flooding the carburetor.
“Is that your uncle?” Betty asked.
The door to Marilyn’s room had swung open, and a man stood staring at us. But no, it wasn’t a man, only Marilyn with her hair wet and dressed in a man’s set of striped pajamas. The cuffs were rolled up at her ankles and wrists. I flattened the accelerator and twisted the key, the engine roared, and we reversed through our own smoke across the parking lot.
Goodbye, Crown Motor Court. I sideswiped a light pole. Betty groaned. “What will happen to me?” she said.
“Now is a time to be quiet,” I said.
“What?”
“Stay out of my head!”
The white Caprice came after us and caught us at a red light. Marilyn got out in her pajamas and jogged to my window. “Let’s talk, Angela!” she said. “Let me in!”
I ran the light.
“I will be arrest and deport,” Betty said. “I will be send back to China and put in jail. Then confess, then execute. Very unpleasant to be execute, girl! Let me out of this Scamp!”
“Aunt Marilyn’s very drunk,” I said. “I think we can lose her.”
In fact she was soon in front of us. She slowed way down, swerving when I tried to pass. The Scamp had served me well up to now, but it didn’t have the power to get around Marilyn’s Chevy Caprice. Nor was I the driver to do it.
Betty was shouting in Chinese. Well, here it is, I thought. This is the moment of crisis. Now what? We crossed a river on a narrow two-lane bridge with low rails. Marilyn rode her brakes in front of us. We were going no more than thirty miles an hour when a third car came up fast behind me and had to burn its tires to stay out of my bumper.
The driver behind me leaned on his horn. As soon as we were off the bridge, I switched off my headlights and whipped the Scamp to the right. The angry fellow quickly closed the gap, helpfully flashing his high beams in Marilyn’s rearview mirror.
With my lights still off, I turned back the way we had come. There was half a moon tonight, enough for me to see by. I crossed back over the river to where some orange sawhorses were lined up along the road. I edged the Scamp past the sawhorses and drove it over some rutted clay.
“Where are we go?” Betty said.
I stopped the car.
A number of trees had been pushed over intact beside the road, and the big machines that do that kind of thing were parked nearby. The trees lay on the clay with boulders knotted in their roots.
I told her what I intended to do.
“Bad idea,” she said.
“It’s my only idea,” I said. “Help me.”
“Bad idea. We will try.”
I found the biggest rock I could lift and heaved it into the back seat.
Behind the wheel again, I punched the gas. The new tires spun, then grabbed. I covered a long stretch of rough ground, then pulled the wheel and bumped up three inches onto a new slab of rich, creamy-smooth black asphalt pavement. I was on the new road.
It felt like driving on sheets of cake. We were traveling north now over what would later become the southbound lanes of Interstate 81. If you will check the 1972 Esso map of the eastern United States, you will see this stretch marked by a heavy broken red and white line—one of the last gaps remaining to be paved on the long route down from Canada through Syracuse, Scranton, and the Shenandoah Valley into East Tennessee.
It was a great big open night. For the moment, Betty and I drove in perfect, blank solitude. The tires whispered against the new surface. The lines were not even painted on it yet. The good Scamp gave what I asked of it. Its transmission clicked up into third gear, and the sound of the engine evened out.
An orange cone marked the beginning of the bridge deck. I’d expected something more substantial than one orange cone, but no. I simply drove around it, then I stopped and put the Scamp in park.
Betty and I got out and stood awhile. There was no sign of Marilyn, and yet I felt as though someone were watching us. I guess Betty felt it, too. “Strange time,” she said. We were alone at the edge of an unfinished bridge, a hundred feet over the Holston River, at night. Many unfinished thoughts were in my head. I guess no one was watching.
Well off in the distance we saw long cones of light bouncing over the ground. I knew she’d be along.
I took off one of my thick-soled black oxford shoes and jammed it behind the Scamp’s brake pedal. Then I pushed my sunflower knapsack down onto the floor. I wadded a towel and my Toughskins and a map and shoved them down in front of the seat to form a little nest on top of the accelerator. I did it quickly. Then I dropped that big rock into its nest, causing the engine to rev.
Only then did I remember the brown envelope. And the picture. So stupid! I bent to get it. The knapsack was at the bottom, flap side down, and my arms were shaking. Betty was screaming something. There wasn’t time.
“Marilyn will see you!” Betty said.
I had to let something go, so I gave up the envelope. I pushed down on the rock. The engine raced.
Marilyn’s headlights bounced. From the driver’s-side door, I jerked the gearshift lever. The car jumped, veering toward me. I pushed the steering wheel to straighten it. Betty had my arm. She tore me free of the car, and we bolted, me in my one shoe.
The Caprice’s headlights
lit the Scamp as the Scamp cruised over the edge of the bridge deck. It didn’t go straight off. It hit the edge at an angle, bottomed out, scraped, and tipped and went over, out of sight. The engine ran away and whined. There was a long, slow crash when the car hit the water.
Marilyn stopped. She walked up ahead of the Caprice and stood in her headlights in her men’s pajamas. Betty and I lay flat behind a bundle of steel bars. Marilyn wasn’t looking for us, though. She thought she knew where we were.
Pretty soon she left. Betty and I ran off into the darkness, and that was when something hit me in the face.
62
Betty ran on some ways until she noticed I wasn’t with her anymore. Upon coming back to me, she claims, she found me lying stone dead with my hair full of warm blood under the scoop of a front-end loader. She pounded on my chest until my heart began to “walk” again, as she put it. She placed my limp body over her shoulder and carried me several miles along the side of a rocky hill in the dark.
She washed my face and hair in a hole of dirty water. I revived. She then persuaded a garbage man to drive us to North Carolina in his garbage truck.
I have no memory of any of that, so I can’t vouch for how she got us to North Carolina. She did it somehow. As for my having died and come back, I would say that she imagined or made that part up, except for one thing. When I finally did come to—I mean when I was able to look around myself and see that I was in the woods, barefooted now and wearing someone else’s dress—there was one thing missing from my head, and that was my usually reliable sense of how long I had been asleep. It was not like waking up. It was more like starting from Go.
I was thirsty and confused. When I closed my eyes, my mother’s plain, kind face seemed to hover in my brain, and I remembered her singing and gently scolding me.
Then I thought of the picture of Ray with his daughter and wife that I had lost, and I sat up. Everything came back to me now, and I couldn’t believe I had been so stupid. All my money was gone as well.
The loss of the money was serious, and yet it was the loss of those people in the picture that discouraged me more. How could I ever tell Ray what I’d done? I had no right to lose the last trace of them.
I recalled the family set of stolen driver’s licenses that I had seen at Lucky Bus Tour. Those sad, smiling faces. It made me feel bleak. Names can float off one way, faces another. People can just get lost. Most people will be remembered a little while, not long.
I lay like a rug in the dappled, humid spot in the woods where Betty had put me.
A creek muttered nearby. At my side I had a hump of mossy limestone. Below the leaves, the black soil had cottony white tendrils in it, tiny red mites, and bits of sparkling mica. A blotch of sunlight crept up my leg. I watched it go.
There was nothing to do but slowly eat the time. I thought of Ray Sloan on surveillance and surveillance detection drills in Newport News and Williamsburg. In a parked car with his elbow out the window and a cigarette burning in his fingers, he remained still for so long that he sometimes resembled a mannequin.
The use of being still, he told me once, is that there is a range of things you will never see, until the rustle of your most recent movement has completely dissipated. “The first half hour doesn’t count,” he said.
It was true. I was staring at a mound of violets by my leg when I saw that the thing just behind them was a box turtle. It had a yellow rim around its eye.
Another hour went.
A dark bird the size of a duck or a little bigger swooped in and took a short, clumsy walk along the creek. Its bill was sharp, and its curving neck was as long as its body. A black crest pointed backward from its head. I have since looked it up: it was the Butorides striatus or green heron.
To avoid confusion it is better to learn a creature’s Latin name when you can. For example, the bird called a redstart in England is the Phoenicurus phoenicurus, but the bird we call a redstart over here is a Setophaga ruticilla. Two different birds.
I like to keep things straight like that, though I suppose it doesn’t matter to the bird what you call it, no more than it matters to the dead person when at last his name has floated away. It doesn’t matter, does it? I’ll remember while I’m alive. The world will carry on. I don’t really think I died this time, but if so, dying was not so awfully bad.
63
Days passed. Betty fed me from cans of deviled ham, tuna, and fruit cocktail. When I asked for something different, she left and came back with a can of potato sticks and a fresh pear. She also brought me some jeans, a Western-style shirt with snaps, and tennis shoes. I asked Betty how much cash she had left.
“Hundred dollar.”
“That can’t be right,” I said. “I took back that hundred at the motel the other night, so it’s gone now. How did you get all the food and these clothes?”
“Stole.”
“Wait a minute. Are you talking about the hundred I gave you at the lake? I thought you broke it buying clothes at the Sears in Knoxville.”
“I stole!”
“You walked out of Sears without paying?”
“Mm.”
I contemplated her. As I’ve said, there wasn’t much to her—just a wiry brown Chinese girl who looked like she wouldn’t mind fighting. Some people are that way, and it has nothing to do with being Oriental or not. Her hands were black because she’d been scraping mud off an enamel pot that she’d pulled from the creek. It made me sad and frustrated to think she would salvage a dirty chipped pot when there were a hundred U.S. dollars tucked away in one of those secret pockets.
“I worry about you stealing things, Betty,” I said. “That’s not how we do it here! Get caught, and it causes me all kinds of problems. Now you’re stealing potato sticks. The whole can costs twenty-seven cents! You’re an illegal alien. Just pay for the can!”
“I never will be bother by police. Only have to be a little smart.”
“I know you are a little smart. I’m talking about best practices.”
“You do not trust me,” she said. “You are bad to me. I am very angry now. Maybe I will leave you alone in this wilderness.” She threw some leaves on me.
“Don’t do that. I’m sorry,” I said.
“Not enough! Not enough.”
“What do you want me to do?”
She barked something, climbed over a fallen tree trunk, and stomped away.
It was time for us to move along. I knew something about Betty that Betty didn’t know: namely, a meal in a restaurant would do her a world of good. At her best she was no Mary Poppins, but the grouchiness had hit a new extreme here in the woods. I also had begun to form a notion in my mind about heading south to Florida. Why not? My next idea was a change in our appearances.
I got on my feet. I could walk okay. That afternoon, Betty and I walked into the town of Singleton, North Carolina. It wasn’t much, just a couple dozen storefronts along Main Street. You could take the whole place in with a turn of your head. A man with a beard like a dirty hand towel winked at me on the sidewalk.
I checked a paper in the door of a newspaper machine. It was the third of July, a Monday, and the hairstylist’s shop was closed. An establishment called Beauty’s Light Touch Grooming was open for business, however. I told the lady what I wanted.
“This is a dog-grooming establishment,” the lady said. “I don’t do girls’ hair.”
“But you could.”
“It doesn’t work that way, dear.”
The drugstore next door had a delightful smell coming out of it. “Let’s go in here and break that hundred,” I said. We took a pair of stools at the counter. “I am getting a grilled cheese with onions on it, and I want you to order whatever you like,” I told Betty. She chose a ham sandwich.
If you have ever watched a cat enjoy a ham sandwich, that was how Betty ate hers, too. She flipped the bread over and devoured the ham from inside, then picked at the lettuce and the tomato slice. I saw her forehead become smooth again. I noted, too, tha
t she was one of these people who raise their eyebrows when taking a bite. I was getting to know old Betty pretty well.
The onions on my grilled cheese sandwich were finely minced. The bread had been grilled rather dark, per my request. I was so pleased with my sandwich and with myself for thinking of it that I hardly noticed the tall boy sliding his sandals over the dusty tile until, by accident, our eyes met. It was Eeyore! He looked away shyly, giving no sign of having recognized me. He slouched away to the register, where he paid for a wind-up alarm clock and carried it out of the drugstore in a paper bag.
I thought we were okay. Betty fed with her face two inches from the plate, so maybe he hadn’t noticed her. My own face was nothing memorable, I supposed. Then someone cried out, “Ding!”
It was Renee. She ran toward us, hurling a smile ahead of her.
64
I was very suspicious, and I nearly came right out and asked Renee, “Who has sent you after us?” But before I could get the question out she clapped both her arms around me.
“I’ve got friends everywhere!” she proclaimed.
We were on the sidewalk now—Renee, old long Eeyore in his sandal shoon, Betty/Ding, and me, whom Renee kept calling Lucy, since that was the name I had told her back in Knoxville, evidently.
“Why are you here?” I said.
“I don’t know!” she said. She laughed in her high-spirited way, and even Eeyore couldn’t help smiling, though he tried not to. Then Renee spun and gave her hair a great flick so that it flew out in a platter shape with the sun pouring over it. Honestly, she was quite a specimen. She caught the eye of the man with the hand-towel beard.
“You’re pretty,” he said.
“Thanks,” Renee answered politely.
He worked his hands rapidly one against the other, as though he were knitting. He was dressed in crusty jeans and four flannel shirts. “You sure are pretty,” he said.
Eeyore squirmed. He was a foot and a half taller than the other man but lacked his intensity. “We better go,” Eeyore said.
Angela Sloan Page 14