The policeman gives him another shake, then pushes him away as if overcome with disgust. “Get the fuck out of here. You can twang your twanger in your own outhouse. And from this moment on, if you so much as wish her good morning, if you say hi, you queer piece of shit, you won’t have jack to jack off with!”
The man’s gaze burns through Saint’s retinas to the delicate meat of his brain. The Tao has fled from Saint, every soothing, puzzling line. What’s left are the pale bags under Mr. D’s eyes and his crooked bottom teeth and his nose too small for his nostrils, too small for him to take an honest breath through. The man deserves to die; that is clear to Saint. Less clear is whether or not to be his executioner. With a bullet in the gut Mr. D would be more respectful. Under cover of his backpack, Saint feels for the gun’s trigger.
Then the policeman lowers his flashlight and suddenly his nose looks just like Vera’s nose, small for his face, the kind of nose you have to fight to protect. The man is a dick but no threat, a middle-aged creep with sour breath. The ancient masters were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive. Watchful, like men crossing a winter stream. Courteous, like visiting guests. Yielding, like ice about to melt. Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood. Saint sits back on his heels, still holding his pack, a posture that keeps the gun in place and looks natural. The width of the blanket separates them, a span Saint has no need to cross. “I hear what you’re saying, sir.”
Mr. D shakes his head as if he understands everything about Saint that he will ever need to, and he spits on the blanket. “I’m going for a beer. One quick beer. If she’s not home when I get there, you’re going to hear from me.”
With the swagger of a man who has no idea how close he just came to death, he walks back across the field, calling out for Garth, high and furious. Saint can’t move, even when a little later the headlights go on in the parking lot and the car drives off.
Even with everything silent again, Saint remains on the blanket, trying to understand what has just happened. He feels like a stone sinking in water of uncertain depth, waiting to touch bottom. Other men are clear and bright, but I alone am dim and weak. Other men are sharp and clever, but I alone am dull and stupid. Everyone else is busy, but I alone am aimless and depressed. He sets the gun down, refastens his pants, tucks his shirt in, while shame crawls up his spine. He had a gun and he let someone shit on him. He could have nailed the man. Made the world a better place. With all his self-governing he is fundamentally stupid.
The one thing he knows for sure is that he has to see Vera. He’s trying to decide whether to search for her or wait here a little longer—he’s about to get his watch out of the carryall and put the gun back—when he hears the crackle of underbrush. A tall, lanky boy enters the small clearing. It’s Garth, Vera’s brother. Saint is almost glad to see him. “Hey, bud,” he says to Garth, smiling, “where’s the big sister?”
The boy walks toward him, head down. He looks skinnier than usual, jeans low on his hips and held up by his belt. He has blond hair like Vera’s, not as long as hers but way beyond school regulations. Saint has always liked him. Respects him, even, for a cockiness that seems unfeigned. As if he genuinely doesn’t care what other people think. He says louder, “This might sound weird, Garth, but she took off when your dad showed up. You didn’t run into her, did you?”
Garth punches him in the stomach.
“Hey!” The blow was clumsy and didn’t hurt, but it annoys him. What to do when a younger, smaller kid starts a fight? You can’t fight back, and you can’t not fight back. It’s a dilemma. “What’s with you?”
Garth comes at him again, and his arms are long enough to reach him, but there is no force in his blows. Saint gives him an almost tender look and blocks a swipe at his face. “Cut it out. What’s wrong with you?”
“Leave her alone,” Garth says. His eyes send out serious hatred. “You keep your hands off her!”
“What? Who? Vera?”
Garth’s chin trembles. “Have you done it with her? You better tell me!”
Saint feels his cheeks heat up. “It’s none of your business!” He’d laugh, but he doesn’t want to hurt Garth’s feelings.
“Fuck you down to hell! I swear I’ll kill you!”
Saint smiles, but Garth lunges for him. Saint holds him by the arms. Garth shrieks, “Tell me the truth, you bastard!”
Saint is tired of Garth, but earnest ferocity shines from the boy’s face. “Look,” he says lightly but also, he hopes, respectfully, “you don’t want to be like your father.” Garth flings more obscenities. “What’s it to you? Are you trying to guard your sister’s honor or something? Vera and I love each other.”
“And?”
“And?” He snorts at the absurdity. “Obviously, we…” His ears feel hot. This is not a topic for Vera’s brother.
“Obviously what? Do you guys fuck or not?”
Saint smiles like an idiot, almost apologetically.
Garth stands up straight. The boy is tall but gaunt, like one of those starving kids in Africa that need your donation. For a moment Saint wants to put an arm around him, this earnest boy with his bizarre loyalty. Then Garth says, “Us too.”
The tone hits Saint first, the ferocious pride. His knee twitches. “What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean?”
“You love your sister,” Saint says. “I know that.”
Garth laughs shrilly. “Eat your heart out, man.”
It takes some moments for Saint to fully grasp what was implied. Then he tells himself that Garth is a sick kid. “You shouldn’t lie about a thing like that.”
“No, you shouldn’t.” Garth has mastered himself. He is looking straight at him, eye to eye to eye to eye. Saint makes himself look back. “Ask her, if you have the guts.”
Garth’s voice is challenging and sulky, like the voice of a small boy who thinks he’s finally got the pointless advantage. Their eyes are locked, Saint can’t look away. All he can do is will the boy out of his life. He wants to go home, lie down, fall asleep, and wake up days later with his mind clear.
Then it seems to Saint that it is he who has been willed away. He feels like a spirit wafting up and away from this craziness. He looks out over the field. The moon is behind a cloud, but the stars are thick. Light gleams on Garth’s belt buckle. As in a dream, Saint sees the belt unbuckling, the already loose jeans bagging down, the long, bony back and torso, the dirty fingers with their nervous bitten nails touching all the private places in the fragile body that he too has loved. Loves. With the howl of a crazy dog he drives his shoulder into the boy’s gut.
If Garth is hurt he keeps it to himself. They circle, arms out. Saint is stronger and heavier, but Garth is lithe and slippery, lacking in substance for Saint to damage. Their feet move on and off the blanket. They vie for the advantage; no one can get in a blow. Then Saint’s sneakered foot knocks against the gun, which he’d actually forgotten. He swoops down for it before the boy can get to it and holds it pointed at the ground, his other hand stretched out in a kind of plea. “Admit,” he says, “you’re a liar.” The face of the boy across the blanket moves in and out of focus. Saint wants to instill fear in Garth, to reduce him to the size of a bug to be stomped underfoot, but Garth remains unfazed. It’s as if he can’t even see the gun. Saint releases the safety, not to shoot, just to make that distinct, authoritative click. There are no limits to a gun’s authority, not just over people but over reality, it seems to Saint. The gun is the guardian of truth. “This is your moment,” he says to Garth. “You can’t go around telling lies about people.”
The boy looks at him gravely. “You wish I lied.” He makes no move, but it’s as if he did. Saint steps back, raises the gun. His knees are shaking. “I told you the truth,” Garth says, his face aglow. “The whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
Saint takes aim, but the gun is so light it won’t stay still. It’s wobbling all over the place. “Shut your face,” he says, sounding ridiculous to his own ear
s. “I mean it,” he adds.
“We screwed,” says Garth. “We made love to each other. She was completely into it. She panted and screamed. Like this.” He reproduces the panting, which seems comical to Saint in some inaccessible part of his mind. But Garth’s face is pale and solemn. “She loves me,” says Garth, “better than you. More and deeper than you.”
“Shut the fuck up! I’m warning you. Please!” Saint feels sickeningly weak. He’s pointing the gun at Garth, but it’s more like he’s handing it over to the boy. Begging him to take it.
“Shoot. I dare you.” Garth steps toward him with his arms out. “I’ll give you a hand. Give me that gun.”
Even now there is more than one thing that Saint can do. He can hurl the gun into the darkness behind them. He can put the safety back on, return the gun to his pants. In the prolonged fractional second in the adrenaline pump of a fight there’s time for consideration. He straightens his back, trying to maintain possession of the gun along with some trappings of the dignity that Garth seems determined to shred. Once uttered or even hinted at, a threat cannot be retracted. Not if you want to walk the earth with your head up.
Across the blanket, Saint can see Garth’s face, so much like Vera’s that he can’t bring himself even to hit the boy, let alone blow his brains out. But Garth is grabbing at the gun and Saint’s finger is hooked around the trigger, and what can be done? Even before the blast Saint feels it coming, but the hand is slower than the mind. Which, even before Garth falls to the ground, perceives the future as pure, empty space. Like an old TV screen, contracting to a line, then a tiny point, then, after a moment, winking out.
24
Flight
We drove south toward Chicago. The plan was to find a motel near Interstate 80, a crappy place where no one would question us. In the morning we’d head west toward San Francisco. It was CJ’s plan. I had no plan.
After an hour or so, in which CJ monologued and I sat in dead-feeling silence, he pulled into a rest area. Toilets, drinking fountain, Plexiglassed-in map (YOU ARE HERE). Got to powder my nose, he said, and tap-tapped into the small building, steady in his high heels like he was born wearing them.
I couldn’t smile. I stayed in my seat praying for something to change. 4EVER was indelibly inscribed across my calf, but where it had been in my mind was a gaping hole. People said don’t put all your eggs in one basket, but I had only one basket, the best imaginable basket. Without which I was (ha-ha!) a basket case?
He returned with two cups of coffee, one for me, along with a packet containing two saccharin tabs. He smelled of air freshener. “Ladies’ is nicer than Men’s,” he said. “I had a feeling about that.” He was carrying long gloves and he put them on, pulled them toward the twin small swells of his biceps. He smoothed his skirt. “We have met the enemy and he is us. Now, let’s drown our sorrows.” He sipped from his cup and put a gloved arm around me. “Have you ever wanted to make it with a girlfriend? I hear it’s nifty. So much surface area.”
I was running on shock. I didn’t even try to keep up with him. “Did you get high in there?”
“I’m high on you, dear. On the freedom of the night.”
I let him hold my hand. But his lips were bright red, and his female face made me woozy. My tactic for quashing despair (besides eating) was sharing pain with another person—two grieving hearts better than one—but he was jabbering away as if nothing had happened. I said, “I don’t understand you at all.”
“You’re in the majority, Kay. Along with me, myself, and I.”
He smiled. I felt even more tired. “Doesn’t anything ever get to you? Is everything a joke?”
“There are good jokes and bad jokes.”
“I hate when you do this.”
“Do what?” he said.
I put my mouth to my coffee but didn’t tilt the cup. In some ways it was like when my mother died. Bleakness to infinity. “I don’t know about this.”
“You mean this trip? Should we go back home?”
I closed my eyes. For a moment I hated all four of us, the glitter of our self-conscious pain. Our pride, as if pain was heroic. I sat in my seat, stiff with self-revulsion. “It’s like you’re always onstage, CJ. Always acting.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
I’d meant to insult him. His neutral question opened a little space in my mind. Maybe it was fine to be theatrical. He was never at a loss, never seemed to flounder as I did. “Do you ever”—I paused—“examine yourself?”
“There madness lies.”
“What do you mean?” He started the car. He didn’t seem to want to explain. “Don’t you get depressed?”
He gave a twisted smile. “When it threatens, I do the first thing that comes to mind no matter what. Any crazy act, however humiliating, is better than nothing.”
I examined his made-up face. I touched his gloved arm. He pulled back involuntarily, then exaggerated the recoil, batting his eyes at an imaginary third party. “She’s coming on to me. I’ve waited so long.”
“Be quiet.”
“You mean, ‘Shut the fuck up, asshole.’ ”
“I said what I mean, asshole.”
He cocked an ironic eyebrow and smiled so painfully wide that I put a hand to my own jaw. His narrow shoulders looked like my mother’s at the end. “Shall we stop in Chicago and play with the hippies? Or spy on them from afar?”
“Just go.”
Back on the highway, I couldn’t drink my coffee. I lowered my seatback and tried to doze to the dual hums of the engine and tires on asphalt. Signs flashed by: WALHALLA 23. Every three or four minutes we passed something or something passed us. SPEED LIMIT 65, TRUCKS 60. I thought about hippies, kids with long hair driving Volkswagens, starting communes, having communal sex. Hippies were fine. WALHALLA 12. I knew Walhalla from Norse mythology, heaven for brave men who died in battle. Greeks had the Elysian Fields. I pictured rolling hills full of poppies, lupines, grasses soft on the soles of your feet. Both seemed more credible as well as aesthetically preferable to Christian heaven, the fluffy clouds and horn-blowing angels.
I closed my eyes, tried to feel love for CJ; I willed it. Vera had Saint, so I had CJ; I could do the math, 4 – 2 = 2. The group was supposed to be 4EVER, but things had changed—all my life I was training to roll with punches. Saint loved Vera, Vera loved Saint, two pairs of hands holding each other with no need for anyone else’s blessing or permission. “CJ, you know,” I said, “you’re really a good person.”
“Wrong again. I’m a shithead.”
“But you’re a good-hearted shithead.”
“Don’t overdo it.”
“I always overdo it. I like to overdo it.”
I lowered the window and let my hair blow in the wind. I took off my shoes, stuck a foot out the window, and wiggled my toes in the rushing air. Just beyond the shoulder of the highway, trees seemed to slap at the car, one, two, three, four. CJ sang “Light My Fire” along with the Doors on the radio and directed me to his purse in the back with its joint-rolling materials. Would I do the honors?
I wasn’t always good on pot. Sometimes it made me giddy and talkative, but sometimes it turned me inward so far I’d get claustrophobic and panicky. But now I dragged hard on the joint, toking several times before handing it over. Sky’s the limit, I said to myself. I wanted to see what would happen, to burst out of my miserable skin. I looked out the window. WALHALLA, NEXT RIGHT. I’d wanted to die in battle for honor’s sake. For the dark thrill that would curl around my heart. I turned the radio up loud. “Could you drive a little faster, CJ?” He hit the gas and the engine roared, the music roared, the wind roared in my ears. And we were inside a wind tunnel, little hydrogen atoms, once considered the smallest particle of matter to exist as its whole self, atomic weight one, till they were blasted into electrons and photons and then quarks, and probably one day there would be something even smaller, I could easily imagine that—our quest for the essence of things. I stuck my head out the
window, face to the wind, to be blasted into my own essence. There were no other cars on the road, no lights but ours. “Step on it, buster! Faster!” Then, as our speed increased and the rush of sound thickened around us, I felt myself growing larger. Not fat; simply massive and accruing ever more mass, agglomerating the onrushing O2 and N2. I was everything around me. For the first time in my life, size equaled power equaled freedom from pain and fear. And the faster CJ drove, the more mass I accrued, till thought stopped and infinity loomed like God, like matter nearing the speed of fucking light.
An hour or two from Chicago, CJ turned off the highway. He needed a rest. We drove down a series of asphalt roads without center lines named with letters, then narrower nameless roads, unmarked intersections that materialized in the headlights, then, poof!—gone. The radio played static; I turned it off. Depression was back. “Let’s do one more joint, CJ?”
He didn’t respond, but I rolled one and toked, trying on futures. With CJ in San Francisco in an airy apartment with a view of water. We’d host dinners for our many friends who enjoyed his mind and understood his vulnerabilities, and mine too. I imagined myself without him, in a dorm room at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with a roommate who didn’t wish she had been paired with someone else. How about an upscale mental hospital for the troubled children of the well-to-do? Pale gray walls, a window giving onto a soothing landscape? I took another hit. “Where are we? My God, where are we going?”
I was sinking. The blackness inside the car was relieved only by the little dashboard lights, the blackness outside only by the twin beams of the headlights, and there was fog on the country road turning darkness into light as opaque as the darkness. I couldn’t help moaning.
“Are you nauseous, Kay?”
“Maybe a little.”
The car braked sharply and turned. Gravel clacked under us. We went a short ways down a leafy tunnel, jounced then stopped. Lights off, engine off. Darkness and silence, like the cut of a sword.
Once, in Lourdes Page 23