by Fran Kimmel
“Hello, Joey.”
I squealed, an octave higher than possible, flinging my arms, and Rebee’s T-shirt, high into the night.
Rebee sat on the porch step, small as a baby bird, arms hugging knees. My heart stopped beating. What was she doing out there all alone in the pitch black when a perfectly good house stood right behind her? I wanted to run — run far, far away — but my legs were rubber. So was my penis.
“Do you know how to drive?” she asked.
That was her question? Not, “What the crap are you doing on my porch in the middle of the night? or “How come you scream like a kindergarten girl?” I mumbled something incoherent about my excellent driving skills.
Rebee stood, lightning fast. She was wearing a white blouse and a flimsy little sweater. I could feel the whites of her eyes, a flash of teeth, her wintergreen breath. Then she seemed to float down the steps and pass on by into the soupy night. “Come on,” she commanded, like I was her dog. Like a dog, I followed.
We ended at the garage — a rundown version of the grandfather’s house, only smaller. Peeling white sides and a green roof. It sat close to the cliff at the back of the property, so saggy a good kick might push it over the edge. That building was creepy enough at lunchtime, let alone on a night like this.
She said, “If a van’s in there, I’ll smash all the windows.”
I stood frozen to her side. I wondered what weapon she’d use and whether she’d be able to stop smashing once she started. She jiggled the handle and the door cracked up an inch and she got her fingers underneath and yanked, so I did too. It took considerable heaving, but when the door finally squealed upwards a rush of musty air escaped. Gasoline and wet rag and old man and other smells crawled up my nose. I stumbled back a few steps, trying to get away, but I only had a few seconds before I bent over and retched, a symphony of dry heaves, loud enough to wake all of Chesterfield. Rebee peered into the garage, ignoring my hullabaloo. Then she disappeared inside. I was empty before I started, just spit lumps, and when I finally got upright I stepped inside too. A shiny silver car took up nearly the whole garage. It was one of those old-fashioned pointy types with a great wide hood and fins like wings that could launch into space. I stood in front of it, my hand clutched over my nose, and watched Rebee open the car door and slip in behind the steering wheel. I thought, this is how a deer in the headlights feels, except without the headlights. It occurred to me she might start the engine and floor the gas. But then she leaned across the seat and the passenger door creaked open, and I felt a flood of relief, partly because I was still alive, but mostly because she didn’t expect me to drive us out of there.
I squeezed myself into my side of the car, closed the door, and buckled my seatbelt, which was a waist-only kind like airplanes have. First I thought, well that’s great, if we get in an accident I’ll be sliced in half. Then I thought, idiot. There were no keys in the ignition. I’d never sat in anything like it. An antique for sure, like the Judge. The dashboard was jukebox glitzy, polished; the steering wheel round and skinny, like a bicycle tire. Everything was spotless, as if no fingers had touched anything. The smell was bearable, pleasant even, just a faint trace of old man cologne mixed with Rebee.
“Nice car,” I said. Rebee said nothing. She stared straight ahead, like we were driving down a highway. It was black out there. The world had disappeared. “I wonder what kind of mileage this thing gets.”
Her eyes were on some imaginary road, oblivious to everything, including me. Her little sweater was unbuttoned and from my side view I could see the points of her nipples pressing against her white blouse. I looked down to be sure the folds of my hoody hid the raw potato sprouting in my pants.
I didn’t know what she wanted me to do, but it got too hard to just sit there and imagine her and keep my mouth shut. “I guess this car used to belong to your grandpa. Doesn’t look like he’s driven it in a while. Right. Sorry. He’s dead. Of course not. Sorry. But good for him that he kept up the maintenance.”
I couldn’t stop. I prattled on, same as Grandma when she’s doing her cutouts.
“The rides I’m used to are more — disorganized,” I said. “Cracked windows, beer bottles, Timmy’s cups. You know, cigarette butts, burger wrappers, that kind of thing.”
Rebee ran her finger in a circle around the skinny steering wheel and I couldn’t help staring at the way it curled over at the end, like a claw.
“Billy, that’s my mom’s last boyfriend, he kept a deer head in the truck named Ned.” My hair was sweaty and my ears prickled. “Ned had his eye gouged out and a broken antler and a red scarf around his neck.”
I was mesmerized by her finger going round and round. I wondered if she’d trained it to bend over like that. “I don’t know how his antler snapped in half, whether it was before or after he got shot, and whether it hurt, or if it was more like when your nail rips off at the tip, and you don’t even notice until you try to scratch something.”
She turned to me, and when I finally tore my eyes away from her crooked finger she said, “Seen enough?” Then she made a fist and pressed it into her stomach like a slow motion punch.
I felt dumb as a truck. Sweat trickled down the sides of my arms. I didn’t dare look at her. Then I felt even dumber because I thought maybe I’d embarrassed her into hiding her finger in her stomach.
“I have a really ugly birthmark on my thigh,” I blathered, my voice cracking. I felt fluttery, not the jolt to the stomach kind, but an all-over lightheadedness, like if I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, I would float into space. “It looks like a giant purple starfish. Carla says it’s because my daddy was sea scum. I’m sure somebody was sea scum, but who knows who’s who. Does your mom have boyfriends?”
I think she shook her head no. It moved slightly.
“You’re lucky. Carla’s don’t last. A couple of times we moved in. This one guy had a monster dog that lived in a car in his backyard. The car had a dangling back door and the dog spent his days sprawled out on the shredded back seat, panting.”
She was looking out the window again, popping a Wintergreen behind her pink lips, passing me the package.
“I did a spreadsheet once.” I fumbled with the wrapping. When the Life Saver hit my tongue, the mintiness nearly bowled me over. “For possible matches. I was planning to cross-reference my personality traits against every gook Carla looked at. If a guy puked after a binger, he’d get a tick. Skinny arms — tick. A sick fear of rodeo clowns — tick. But then I started making stuff up and it was tick, tick, tick. It just got too weird.”
Rebee laughed, a throaty raw sound. “Every kid without a dad makes up stuff about a dad,” she said.
She was actually talking to me. “Did you?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Like what?”
She sighed. “I don’t know.” I figured that was that, but then she said, “We met a man at a campground once. There was snow.”
I wasn’t sure if I should ask questions. Like did she build a campfire? Did smoke get in her throat? Were there marshmallows on a stick? Did they make her stomach cramp?
We just sat there. I thought, well, at least your mom took you camping, but I couldn’t say that. I could feel Carla’s stop your whining smack on the side of my head.
“He took Harmony for a drive in the middle of the night,” she said finally.
“And not you?” I asked.
She looked straight ahead. I guessed that meant no.
“Afterwards, I made up stuff. I might have pretended he was my father.”
“Well, at least he brought your mom back. Obviously. That was good.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Were you scared?” No, of course not.
“Maybe a little. Not so much. Not when he took her away. Just when he brought her back and everything stayed the same.”
I didn’t know what she meant, not really, so I asked, “Did he say sorry?” He should have, I thought.
She shook her head.
A piece of her hair fell onto her cheek. “We disappeared. I don’t think about him any more.”
“Maybe he’s still looking for you?” If I were that guy, I’d still be looking for her.
“Right,” she said.
“Don’t you still want to find him?”
She shrugged. “It was just kid’s stuff. That’s what kids do. They make stuff up.”
“What about your real dad. Don’t you want to know?”
Rebee swivelled and looked straight at me. I blinked several times because her eyes looked icy cold and she didn’t look away. “My father’s dead,” she said finally. She seemed more angry than sad.
“That’s crappy,” I stuttered. “Maybe my dad’s dead too.” “There’s worse things than not knowing, Joey.”
“Okay.” I nodded dumbly.
I looked about, feeling awkward. The garage doorway had become an open mouth wanting to swallow us into the black night. I thought of what might be hiding under the rocks up there on the hill. A thousand pair of eyes stared in. If a creature pounced on the hood, she might expect me to do something. I shuddered and edged my arm up the side of the door and popped down the lock.
Then, out of the blue, she said, “It’s harder than I thought it would be.”
“What’s harder?” I was hoping she didn’t mean me.
“Staying in one place.”
“Oh.” According to my count, she’d been in Chesterfield all of twenty-one days. “I guess you and your mom move around a lot?”
“Yes. A lot.”
“Everything moves in slow motion here,” I said. “It takes Grandma all morning just to get down the hall. How long are you staying at your grandpa’s?”
“Perpetually.”
“Like in forever?”
“Exactly.”
“On purpose?” I couldn’t imagine anyone with choices staying in Chesterfield.
She nodded and said quietly, “But it’s hard.”
I thought she sounded sad. I didn’t want to point out that she was being illogical. With all the comings and goings after the Judge’s funeral, I was pretty sure she was the one telling the grownups she’d stay, not the other way round. Seems to me, she could change her mind. Hey, Mom. Thought I’d like it here. Turns out, it sucks. Come get me. Carla says girls’ thoughts are like spit; they don’t change so much as evaporate. But Rebee didn’t seem vaporous. She seemed like the kind of girl who grabbed hold of an idea and it stuck.
I wanted to say something bright, but nothing came to me. It was getting colder, the air in the car breathlessly quiet. It felt like something was out there, coming for us.
“You must be used to new places,” I said with gusto. “With all your moves. That’s good. And you get out and about a fair bit. That’s better than being in a coma. Not that I’m spying or — ”
“I used to pretend I was ready for anything. But this is the end of the road, and I can’t think of what the anything might be.”
I was utterly without an idea of what my anything might be either. I was thinking this could be it. We stared straight ahead into the shadows and sucked on our Wintergreens.
I’m not that experienced with women, except for Carla and Grandma and a string of lady teachers that I’ve managed to avoid making eye contact with. Oh, and there was the ice cream girl encounter, the one I would have replayed a thousand times if I hadn’t already had Rebee in my head. But here I was, sitting in a dead man’s car beside the most amazing girl of all girls in the world, and she wasn’t even trying to get away.
A wind rose all of a sudden, hard and mean, whistling through the window cracks. Some heavy broken thing clattered against the garage roof. Clank. Klump. I hoped it wasn’t Rebee’s grandpa. Or grandma. Or anything dead. Or anything alive either.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked. I was in way over my head.
“It’s just the wind.”
“Yeah, I know that.”
She hugged the steering wheel and rested her chin over top. My waist was still mashed against the seatbelt, but I’d shrivelled back down to my normal shrivelledness, so I tugged at the clasp and sprung myself loose. I stretched out my legs and leaned against the Judge’s car door to face her.
“Seems like you could do anything you wanted,” I said above the whomp, whomp, whomp of the trees. Strangely, my stomach didn’t hurt at all, which worried me a little.
Rebee turned to me and almost smiled. “I don’t know how to drive.”
“Me neither,” I confessed, rather too quickly.
Rebee examined me closely. “You’ve got time.”
“We only do beaters. Our last had a flat tire. Carla left it on the side of the road, got on a bus, and never went back.”
Rebee took her Wintergreen out of her mouth and held the tiny white round sliver on the tip of her finger. Then she flicked her tongue and it disappeared.
“Harmony can change a flat in less time than it takes to lick the powder off a Fun Dip stick. We have a van. We’ve always had a van. The Judge took care of that.”
“Vans are expensive. He must have been generous.” Vans are expensive. I was such a dork.
Rebee shivered and hugged herself. The car was cold as a refrigerator. The wind was actually screeching through the window cracks.
“Did you like him? Your grandfather?”
Grandma called him a decent fellow. Broken-hearted, but decent.
“The Judge? We never met. But he gave us money. Regular as alimony. Harmony made her living by stepping up to a bank machine.”
It didn’t seem that bad, having her grandpa pay the rent every month. It was better than a church. Running off to save orphans.
“Harmony could drive for hours and hours. She never got lost. Sometimes she’d pull over on some stretch of back road and tell me to take over.”
“Did you?”
She shook her head.
“At least she taught you to drive.”
Rebee laughed her throaty laugh. I would recognize the sound of it anywhere.
“God no,” she was saying. “But I’d watched her since I was a kid. That should be enough.”
“I got into an accident once when we were parked at the Liquor Barn,” I said. “Carla was inside, buying booze. I stayed in the car. It was parked on a hill, sheer ice, and the car started sliding backwards in slow motion. I hit an old man in a station wagon.” I actually had my head between my legs, and when we thumped, I made a bite mark on my knee, but Rebee didn’t need to know that part.
“Were you okay?”
“Yeah. The old guy told Carla to shut the hell up, that if she couldn’t figure out how to put on the emergency brake, how was her kid supposed to.”
Rebee looked at me closely. “It wasn’t your fault.”
I swallowed. I never imagined an older girl like this. I’ve imagined a lot of girl stuff, but not sitting across from one and talking. I didn’t have the least inkling to barf.
I blurted, “So if your Mom wanted you to drive so bad, she should have taught you.” Carla would have said, What do you expect, a fucking Mother Teresa? Well, the pre-Jesus Carla would have said that. Now she’d probably say, God go with you, my son.
“Harmony would crawl in the back, and I’d just sit there and stare at the dangling key. Then I’d get out and trudge up and down the road and kick at rocks and wait for her second wind to blow us to the next town.”
“Oh,” I said.
After that, we sat for a while and didn’t say anything and listened to the wind all around us. The windows fogged and my toes felt numb. Rebee seemed sad, lost in her own little world. I wanted to make her laugh again, come up with something funny — maybe a story about Grandma’s bone collection — but my nose started to run and I couldn’t concentrate. I was using my sleeve when it happened. I’ll never forget. She crawled across the seat and buried backwards into my hoody and pulled her legs up close so that all of her leaned into my chest. I could smell her cucumber hair and Wintergreen breath and I put my a
rms around her shoulders and tried not to touch her breasts and she pressed harder into me and I could feel her shivering and my heart thudding against her sweater and I held on tighter and rested my chin on the top of her head and my lips accidentally touched a piece of her hair and I kept my eyes wide open and looked down and could see her breasts like apples and I thought for sure I would explode because this was really happening. This was not my hand wrapped around my dick. This was Rebee and she was a real girl and she was completely beautiful.
“I can hear the highway in my head,” Rebee said after awhile, her voice muffly in my shirt.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s the wind.”
“We’re okay,” she said.
I don’t know how long we stayed like that. A long, long time. I woke up shivery, hugging myself, neck crinked, skin prickling with goose pimples. Sometime in the night, she’d disappeared. I didn’t even feel her go. I stumbled out of the car into the morning’s quiet breeze. Birds chirped happily. A pair of squirrels chased each other. The sky had little pink swirls. Everything was where it was supposed to be.
The house, the hedge, the cracked empty birdbath. If there weren’t twigs and branches thrown about, you’d have never guessed a wind had howled through there.
* * *
But I know I didn’t imagine her. Rebee left four hairs on my hoody. One is as long as my arm from my elbow to my wrist. It’s soft and shiny and sparkles in the sun.
Carla says a girl will watch a boy drown and then step on his head. Maybe she’s right. I feel like I’m drowning. Rebee won’t talk to me. I don’t know what I did wrong. It’s been three days.
That first day I knocked on her door. Then I sat on her porch step and waited. There was the sound of a chainsaw in the distance. Then it stopped. The mosquitoes came and I slapped at my arms. The chainsaw started. The air smelled too summery, like dirt and dandelions. I barfed a little in the mossy stuff beside the porch. I wandered over to her grandpa’s garage and stared in at her grandpa’s car and listened for the sound of her voice, but there was nothing but the faraway chainsaw and a few crickets and a caw, caw, cawing crow in the white sky. So I sat in the car where she sat and smelled her clean cucumber smell. I traced my fingers everywhere hers had been. Then I leaned into the horn with my head and held it there and listened to the tinny beep bounce off the walls. After a while I got out of the car and tugged on the garage door and watched it fall sticky slow. I went back to the porch and knocked on her door. When I felt too dizzy to stand in one spot, I sat on the porch step some more. A breeze came up over the tops of the trees and the leaves swirled a bit and the mosquitoes went away. I dozed and woke with a start and barfed a little more on top of a different piece of spongy ground. The crow lifted from the tree, circled on top of my head, then landed back on the branch, hopped to its tip, and stared back at me. The sun shifted and the shade on the porch disappeared, and I just sat there and fried.