Lilyth looked to Mom for support. “Mom, tell him.”
“Tell him what, Lilyth? I told you y’all gotta put clothes on. You too, Magda.”
“I shoulda just snuck out and been Cher!”
“You can go as Cher now, as long as she’s fully clothed.”
“If she can wear it on TV for the whole world to see, how come I can’t wear it two doors down to Magda’s?”
“She can wear it on TV because she’s not fifteen, Lilyth.”
Lilyth waited for them to change their minds. Mom and Dad ignored her and Magda’s pleading look of innocence.
“Fine!” Lilyth stomped off down the hall to her room to change, followed by Magda making apologetic faces at my parents.
Once the girls were out of earshot, Mom leaned in to kiss Dad and whisper, “Don’t you let her leave the house like that. I don’t want her endin’ up like Magda.”
By then, Magda had already had one abortion that got shushed up, but it was a small Texas town, so everybody knew. Too early, Magda and Lilyth had fed off each other to take the maximum amount of risk trying to get what they thought was the maximum amount of reward. To Lilyth’s credit, and Magda’s, from very early on, they were determined—usually just to randomly get their way without any real goals, but still they were determined. Grandaddy had already taught me that it never worked that way. The thing that bonded them early on was Girl Scouts, which my sister was thrown out of when she got caught in her hiked-up scout skirt with the head of that rotten-toothed scurvy guy from the Texaco station planted underneath. But before that, what bonded Lilyth and Magda happened one day when they were selling Girl Scout cookies. Two men driving a black Gremlin robbed their Girl Scout cookie cash right in front of the Utotem. The men ran to their car with two hundred dollars. Lilyth and Magda ran after the thieves as they climbed into their car. Both girls grabbed the driver by the hair as he drove off with his door not yet fully closed and pulled him completely out of the car as it continued straight into a light pole. I don’t know if the driver’s face was damaged more by the ground as he fell or the girls beating him after he landed. But his picture in the paper was pretty disturbing. So for Lilyth, sneaking out dressed up like Tinker Bell was nothing.
Lilyth tiptoed back toward the kitchen, out of Mom and Dad’s view, as my dad had joined my mom giving candy to trick-or-treaters at the front door. To the back of a frumpy old muumuu sweater, Lilyth had Scotch taped the Tinker Bell wings off her bikini top, and she was stuffing the bikini top in her shorts. She noticed me staring at her and put her finger to her lips with a smile shaped like I’ll kill you if you rat on me. And I knew she would. She had tried several times before, starting with the time she rolled my favorite red fire truck out into the busy street at our old apartment complex. Of course, I had toddled after it, smack into an oncoming postal truck that landed me in the hospital with my first concussion. If it weren’t for Steve McQueen having run interference, I’d be dead.
Magda was whispering, “Hurry up,” and I just stared back at Lilyth, but her Tinker Bell bikini was our secret. We heard Dad saying good-bye to the little goblins out front, so Lilyth and Magda made a run for it out the sliding glass door and down the back way. I watched them go, relieved as my eyes rested on Jane’s head rhythmically popping over the fence.
I waited. And there it was.
“One, two, three, four, five, let’s go!” The familiar yell wafted through the neighborhood like a soft prayer on a wing.
Jane vanished from my view.
* * *
That night I must’ve gone through the haunted ship four times, but I never saw Jane. They even had a dry ice machine making fog in there that made it a little hard to breathe, but walking through her garage was one of the most magical experiences I ever had. I would have gone through it another ten times if my mind hadn’t been completely on Jane.
There was a makeshift doorway that led to the garage, where the Bradfords had created a black tented passageway. Before you got into the garage, you had to walk through the passageway lined with a series of horrible tableaux, like bloody skeletons, severed heads that talked out of a tabletop, and a bowl of flesh-eating piranha that really were goldfish. Eerie music was playing, hollow sounding, like it was reverberating off the walls of an abandoned castle. The strobe light disoriented me, and by the time I reached the entry to the garage—the haunted ship, that is—I was bug-eyed. Then a bloody thing popped out at me from a garbage can, and I jumped back. It was a huge glow-in-the-dark gloved hand covered in fake blood, reaching out to grab ahold of people every time they passed. The trash barrel was painted to look like a beer keg with Cap’n Bolan’s Brew scrawled in red across it.
The garage was so crowded with trick-or-treaters that I couldn’t scan feet for Jane’s moccasins, so I scrutinized the crowd for a beaded headdress—but her feather, which would have pointed her out, was home safe in my Charles Chips can. The ship was meant to scare, but I absolutely loved being there. I desperately wanted to see Jane in that ship, but after a while even the creepy exhibits were turning a sickly shade of green from all the dirty hands touching them, so I headed out completely disappointed into the chilly night air.
Lilyth didn’t show up to walk me home, as she had been instructed. By the time I walked around the corner past The Dancing Mailbox, Mom and Dad were asleep on the couch, holding hands with a melted bowl of ice cream in front of them. They had fallen asleep waiting for Lilyth to come home with me, but she never did. I just listened to “The Sounds of Silence” in my room, with Steve McQueen curled up on the foot of my bed, and tried to towel off the green stain on my hands from one of the grotesque concoctions I had blindly placed my hands into at the Halloween party. My sister ran away that night, but we found her at the Utotem the next day. When he saw us come in, the Utotem manager, Samir, had tipped his hand, bobbling his blinding white smile in the direction of Lilyth’s whereabouts. Mom and Dad just had to follow the scent of her latest cheap fragrance down the aisle to where she was playing pinball with a bunch of hippies. Samir had attempted to soften Dad’s ire, saying, “Surely she is have go home when she no more quarters, Mr. Mic-mic Father.”
Chapter Five
Jumped. Fed Donovan. Saw the mean sister and her friend. Mom said stay away from girls like that. Did the spooky house. I loved. In the morning I waited by the bean tree as long as I could, then mom said it was school, I think he was asleep.
* * *
Jane,
Why only when I do stupid things? I’m a lot cooler than the me you’ve seen.
* * *
The Houston fire hydrants were about head height when I was a kid, set up on a cement slab that gave them more height. They had a bulbous top, larger than nowadays, and two valves protruding from either side like little arms. My dad called them the creatures on the corner. Well, the arms were outstretched and my dream was Jane, so I closed my eyes and imagined. I remember the hydrant being prohibitively cold with our narrow window of winter coming on, so I took off my Cowboys jacket and clothed the little creature. I hugged it and hugged it until Jane and her mother drove right by me in their orange van. I saw Jane staring right at me. I don’t know why it was always in those moments that she came, but I was utterly humiliated. I was so lost in thought about hugging Jane that I didn’t even register that syncopated thrumming of the VW that I had become so attuned to detecting from blocks away. To this day, it still boggles my mind as to where the audio went hiding as her van approached.
* * *
Jane,
I know you saw me on the corner that day. And just so you know, you were The Fire Hydrant. At first you were to cold to really hold. But then I gave you my jacket. And I think that’s all you needed, you felt great in my arms.
* * *
Calculating my pursuit of Jane, I would sit in the dark in my bedroom for hours watching Jane footage projected on my celery green wall with our blue feather twizzling between my fingers as I hugged my Charles Chips container, a limp
ing German Messerschmitt overhead trying desperately to evade the deadly sights of my most lethal allied fighter, the P-51 Mustang. But the enemy had nowhere to go. Alone under my padded black headphones, I listened over and over to Jane songs.
“Mom, can I do swim team?”
“What’re you still doing up?” asked Mom, lighting a cigarette.
“They’re having sign-ups tomorrow at homeroom, but we have to have permission.”
“I don’t like the idea of you going all the way across town alone for practice. Especially nights. And, Sug, that’s way the heck out by the golf course.”
“The days’ll be longer then.”
“Not for a while, Sug. We’ll talk to your dad at breakfast. Oh, and remember tomorrow your sister will meet you out in front of school to go to the movies. And stay out of the garage. Your father’s using dangerous chemicals in there that’ll kill you.”
I hugged my mother and ran to bed, and thrashed for hours under the covers imagining what it would be like to pull up past the golf course to the swimming pool. I knew Jane’s new house was being built somewhere on the golf course, whose eighteenth hole ended at the country club where a horseshoe-shaped parking lot wrapped around that gorgeous new swimming pool. Now I just had to find a buddy for swim practice.
* * *
I sat down at a table in the school cafeteria, where Firefly slumped across from me fuzzing his red buzz cut with his palm. After he stole and downed half of a bologna sandwich without asking the kid next to him, he said cautiously, “Hey, Mic, I saw your name on the sign-up sheet for swim team.”
“Yeah?”
“Can you swim?”
“Not racin’ strokes, but I think they’ll teach us those anyway.”
“My dad told me to sign up. I think he just wants to get me off the couch so I’ll stop watching Gilligan’s Island. Man, I swear to God sometimes you can almost see Ginger’s titties! Who you like better? Ginger or Mary Ann?”
“Well, my Grandaddy always says Ginger for an hour, Mary Ann for a lifetime, and I’m gonna live a lot longer than an hour anyway. So, Mary Ann.”
“What? Are you stupid? Ginger’s a fox!” He waited for me to change my mind. “Mary Ann…that’s the most dumb-assed shit I’ve ever heard. So, Mic, d’you think we can do swim team without putting our head under the water?”
“Um, well, I think we’ll hafta do the ones they do on the Olympics.”
“What? WHAT? I ain’t scared of gettin’ my hair wet, I just don’t like puttin’ my face in the water. And don’t eyeball me! You eyeballin’ me, fuckhole?” Firefly kept on staring at me for a reaction. I just looked at him, wondering how he went from calm to enraged so fast. Then I reached into my paper lunch bag and pulled out an aluminum foil pouch. I opened my milk carton and poured the pale brown powder into it and shook it up. “Hey, hey, what the hell’s that, Mic? Is that Quik? Damn, your mom’s cool.” I chugged my chocolate milk out of Firefly’s reach, but then I handed him the other half of the Quik powder left in the foil pouch. “Really, Mic?” I pulled it back out of his reach.
“Only if you do swim team with me.”
“Really? Whoa, I gotta go get a cut.” I watched Firefly run straight up to the front of the lunch line and barge right through the crowd to claim a milk.
* * *
I hoped and prayed that my future with Jane was sealed with Quik and chlorine, so I floated to the movies that night to meet my sister, completely neglecting that I was supposed to wait for her out in front of school. Had Lilyth actually been outside school waiting for me, like she was supposed to, of course, I would have walked with her to the movies, like my mom had instructed me to. But Lilyth wasn’t there. And I doubted she’d be waiting for me at the movies, either. I swept through the heavy glass double doors of the fusty old theater and stared around at the chipping paint and gum-spotted red carpet. Lilyth was not in the lobby, so I went back outside to look for her and glanced down the alley along the theater wall, where I guessed maybe she would be smoking.
“Hey! Are you Mickey?” A tall, skinny teenager in an usher’s uniform popped his head out from a cracked theater exit door and gestured enthusiastically for me to come down the alley, and I obeyed without thinking. “Your sister’s in the fourth row. Yeah, she’s really a fox, wow. C’mon, quick, I’ll let you in this way, but stay behind the curtains until the lights go down.”
I nodded just to make him leave and went and hid behind the heavy green velvet curtain that smelled like old books at the public library. It was a full house. I spotted Lilyth as the lights went down, and went and sat inside her cloud of fruity perfume.
“Didn’t Mom have enough money for my ticket?”
“Yeah, she gave us money, but you want candy or not?” I nodded, hungry from the long walk. “Good, ’cause we ain’t got enough for both. All right, you little shit, sit here and don’t move. I’ll be back.”
Lilyth got up to leave and left me sitting there alone to watch the previews. I waited and watched, glad the air was clearing. My stomach rumbled. But Lilyth never came back. At the end of the movie, I left the theater alone in a throng of people all over twenty years of age. I sat on the front steps looking around for my sister and noticed a crowd my age slowly filtering out of the theater on the other side of the building. From the younger crowd, someone was calling to me.
“Hey, Speed, you fall in love with her?” Kevin came up behind me and tipped my head up to look at him upside down, then released me. “Shit, I’d fall in love with her but she’s too little for me. Any chick with wings though’s gotta be pretty damn close to perfect. Too perfect for Peter, that’s for sure.”
“Who’s Peter?”
“Yeah, who the hell’s Peter? And he can’t fly without her pixie dust anyway. Kid, where’s your sister?”
“I don’t know.”
“You here by yourself?” I was afraid to answer. “Well, how you getting home?” For a long time I looked out at Kevin’s piece of my garage in his grille and then past the thinning parking lot at the horizon, buying myself time to swallow the lump in my throat.
“My mom’ll come.”
“If you say so, kid.” Kevin looked off toward his Firebird.
“Why don’t you fix your car?”
“’Cause the same piece that made the hole is keepin’ the water in. Some wounds you just gotta live with, ya know?”
“I guess.”
“Radiator’s stayin’ together so far, and a new one’s a hundred bucks.”
“Is it pretty speedy?”
“Three hundred and seventy-five horsepower without nitrous, and it only weighs thirty-five hundred pounds.”
“My dad says handling is more important than horsepower.”
“Yeah? Well, neither one’s as important as the windshield.” Kevin swaggered over to his car and opened the driver’s side door. “Come here and listen to this!” Kevin climbed in and opened the passenger door for me. He fired up the engine, and the ground under my feet shook in sync with the four-hundred-cubic-inch engine.
I liked it. So I climbed into the passenger seat to sit for just a second. In awe, I took in the vibe and the scent of the car, which still smelled new mixed with saddle soap, marijuana, and a hint of Lilyth’s latest fruity trend. The engine fell back down to a loping idle like a well-fed wolf. The sun visor on my side was down, and I noticed a heart carved in it with Lilyth in the middle, and an arrow pointing down. I understood why Lilyth liked him.
“What a punk! Will y’look at that, Speed!” Kevin was staring out his window at a primer-matte ’67 Chevy Nova driving by, revving its engine. Suddenly, Kevin’s hand dropped down onto the gearshift and the car was in motion. My door was thrown shut as we leapt forward. The car made a U-turn out of the parking lot with the back end stepping out under heavy acceleration. The Firebird came to rest at a stoplight right beside the waiting Nova. “Here, kid!” Kevin leaned over to fasten my lap belt, quickly glancing up at the cross traffic light as the Nova prepared to l
aunch. “Unscrew that red nozzle on that nitrous tank at your feet.” I started to unscrew the top nozzle of what looked like an oxygen tank for a deep-sea diver, and I heard the rush of some type of gas filling the lines that left it. “Good, now tell me when that light turns.”
“Now!”
Kevin’s hands weren’t even back on the wheel when the light turned green and the Chevy pulled its front wheels off the ground as it left the line. The Firebird lit up the tires in pursuit. We steadily gained on the Chevy as a grin streaked across my face. The engine screamed as Kevin’s hand slapped the Hurst ratchet shifter. The back end broke loose as the car happily found second gear. The rear bumper of the Nova was now racing toward us as second gear approached the red line. I glanced at the speedometer as it flew past eighty miles per hour. We were gaining, creeping steadily past the Nova just as a cop drove by in the opposite direction. The Nova locked up the brakes and turned off on a side road. Kevin looked in his rearview mirror to see the police car whip a U-turn in pursuit. Kevin braked and turned down a street lined with cluster housing. Before the police car rounded the corner, Kevin had doused his lights and coasted with the engine off right up a driveway to a house that had all its lights off.
“Get down!” I hit the floorboard as Kevin ducked down by the steering wheel. Fascinated and exhilarated, I just stared at Kevin as he brought the car to a stop by using the emergency brake, just in front of the garage door. “Emergency brake won’t turn on the brake lights, kid,” he whispered. We both hunkered there, two statues, staring at each other in silence as the police car drifted slowly by, its radio squawking. “Shh! Make your heart stop beatin’ so loud, kid. They’re gonna hear us.”
I saw his eyes go down to my heart, and then back up to my eyes.
“How do I do that?”
Kevin grinned at me. “I’m just kiddin’, man. You can’t control your heart. Figures, too, the most important part is outta our control.”
Jane Two Page 9