Hail pelts my window, and my groggy, sleepy head clears. It’s not raining. Must be Rocket again.
Get lost, I’ve got a million logs to saw. He better have Stones tickets this time because nothing’s more precious to me than sleep. Then I think he must have scored some Who tickets, and the hair on the back of my neck flares. Owen Rooney told me they’re coming to the Pontiac Silverdome this fall. I’ve left the window down, and it sticks in the summer humidity. Shove, shove, shove. I should just go back to sleep. No one’s out there. Must be just my imagi—
BAM! A shaft of moonlight shines on a person on the grass like a spotlight on a singer on a stage. A Cleo-shaped girl. Is that her? I manage to open the window and crane my neck out. “What are you doing out there, Cleo?”
“Mom and I had a huge screaming match … I had to get out of that house.” Why are you here? I say in my head. Maybe she really likes me? “Let’s go somewhere,” she says.
My head pokes out the window. “Where to?”
“Anywhere.”
There’s only one place I can think of at this late hour. I grab my walkie-talkie, thinking Rocket might still be awake, and ghost-drift down the stairs and out to the side yard. Cleo’s leaning up against a tree, holding a knapsack in her hand.
“Hold on a sec,” I say and turn on the walkie-talkie. Radio static fills the air. “Roger. It’s me.” A loud belch returns. He’s awake.
“Identify location,” he says.
“Home. Where the hell are you?”
Two large burps. “Mission control, I have made contact with an alien life-form. It uses crude language and has … if I think I know who it is … a striking resemblance to a Sleestak. Requesting permission to remove all vital organs for examination. Warning: Idiot alien may be hostile to human life.”
A giggle erupts from Cleo’s mouth. “Giff … who is that?”
“Houston, I’ve detected a strange female alien species. A thousand alien-spawn eggs may be released on our planet, and we’ll be washing dishes for these lizardy half humanoids for the next millennium. Do you read, Mission Control?”
“Shut up.” I want to draw and quarter Rocket. “Identify location.”
“Desolate crater. Aliens have transported me to their cosmic lair.” Translation: backyard tent.
Nowhere else to go in my house because Virginia sleeps with one eye open and can hear a spider bark. I look at Cleo. “C’mon, then.”
Three houses down, we enter Rocket’s cave and sit Indian style. Two sleeping bags, a lantern, a half-eaten bowl of fossilized Grape Nuts, a radio, and The Book of Lists. He’s left us alone, thank the Lord. I turn off the walkie-talkie and switch on the lantern, illuminating Cleo’s long angular cheekbones and magnificent, dark eyes. Rocket’s left a dorky Star Wars lightsaber next to his bag (God, she’ll think I’m ten years old), and I slide it underneath and outside the tent but accidently bump the light switch.
“What’s that?” The lightsaber floats brightly in midair and slashes across the backyard in the hand of a headless horseman. That was close.
The old tattered The Book of Lists begs me to pick her up (it’s banned in school libraries for obvious reasons). Rocket and I have spent thousands of hours going through the book, so I know my fave lists. “3 People Who Died During Sex,” “10 Women Offered $1 Million Each – If They Pose Nude for A Girlie Magazine,” “24 Feats of Physical Strength” (Frank “Cannonball” Richards took a cannonball into his stomach at close range.), “The 8 Most Valuable Baseball Cards.” (#6 Gil Hodges, $50). And Rocket’s fave: “10 Beans and Their Flatulence Levels” (self-tested for veracity, to my dismay).
I flip open the book like I don’t know every list by heart and page through to a topic I think she’ll be interested in and tell her the list: “21 Best-Known Stuffed or Embalmed Humans and Animals.”
“Well? What are they?”
“You have to guess … that’s the game.”
“Oh, okay.” She ponders an answer and rolls her eyes to the ceiling. “I got one. King Tut.”
“Brilliant. That’s number one. First guess.”
“I knew it!” She laughs out loud and smacks me on the shoulder, which makes me smile. “Give me another one.”
“Irving Wallace’s 12 Favorite Dinner Guests from All History.” This one’s calculated on my part.
Cleo goes from Indian style to up on her knees. “Jesus Christ, I dunno.”
“That’s number four on Amy Wallace’s list.” She tells me she wasn’t even guessing with that answer, then volunteers Robert Redford, but I tell her they have to be dead.
She rocks her spine back and forward. “Let me think.” A long pause. “Abe Lincoln.”
“Number five.” She guesses a trillion famous names—Elvis, Marie Antoinette, JFK, Leonardo, Anne Frank, Lennon, Lenin, Houdini, Gandhi … but can’t name one more on the list. Uncle Fred or Galileo are numero uno on my personal list.
Cleo grabs the book out of my hand. “Who’s number one?” She throws the book at me. “I should have guessed … Cleopatra.”
Blush from my cheeks makes the tent glow red. A whippoorwill whistles singsongily from a tree.
“Hey,” I say, “do you want to jump on Rocket’s trampoline?”
“Jumping makes me sick.” Her eyelashes are painted long and black to match her hair. “And really, any physical activity.”
I forgot she’s sick, and I hope Chimney’s just dead wrong. “It’s an in-ground one.”
She’s out of the tent in an instant. I bring the lantern outside, and after we take off our shoes I take her hand to lead her onto the rubber surface. She takes my other hand so we’re jumping up and down holding hands together so we don’t fall, like a couple of third-graders. She stumbles, and we lose each other’s grips. I jump solo, higher and higher and higher before I do a few routine moves. A sit to a stand. A knee to a stomach. Stomach to back to knee to stand. I’m showing off now while Cleo wobbles on the springs, watching my spastic moves. You get a little tingle in your belly every time you jump too high.
You can square—no, cube—that feeling and multiply by infinity, and then you’ll know how I’m feeling with Cleo right in front of me. This is a bit what floating in space must feel like. Suddenly she plops down on the trampoline, and she goes all quiet and teary eyed. Have I done something to upset her?
A cold northern wind sweeps across the lawn, and she shivers. “Freezing my ass off.” She has no meat on her bones to keep warm with.
We duck back inside the tent. A loop of black hair dangles loose down her face. She blows it out of her way, and I’m hypnotized as it billows around her eyes. A dog howls on a nearby lot, and a windy gust shakes the tent, crushing one side for an instant before straightening out again.
A humanlike hand enters the opening in the tent and tosses a grenade inside. What’s Rocket doing now? Get freaking lost! Just a box of Spaceman candy cigarettes. I owe him one for not playing the third wheel. It’s his own tent and backyard, after all. I pull out two candy cigs and give one to Cleo.
There’s a bit of a lull while we suck our fake sweet cigs, pretending to be cool, and I finally get around to asking her why she’s sitting in a tent with me this late at night. “You haven’t run away from home, have you?”
“Yeah. And maybe now my mom’ll understand.” Cleo gets all squirmy, casting her eyes at the tent floor. “I’ve been mad as hell at my mom, but I never thought once of hitting the road until tonight.”
I wonder where I’d run off to besides Rocket’s tent.
“Your mom might start to worry where you’ve gone.”
“Mom’s usually down for the count after three rounds of 7 and 7s.”
She begins to unload her feelings on me and tells me her parents divorced when she was only four. Her mom’s a control freak, and Cleo’s old friends want nothing to do with her because they think she’s become weird. Her
mom hates the Egyptian clothes she wears, threw Go Ask Alice in the fire last winter when Cleo was only halfway finished, and wants her to take some of her pills because she thinks Cleo’s depressed.
Cleo tells me she and Pippa Farnsworth used to be soul mates, but they’ve had a falling out over some boy. I don’t want to hear this last part because I’d be tempted to dismember any other guy she might be interested in with a pickax. Anyway, she got fed up with calling Pippa and never getting a return call, and then Pippa spread BS rumors about her dropping acid, and now her other friends won’t return her calls.
We stop to listen to a whippoorwill chorus. “I won’t change for anyone. My mother, Pippa. They can all go to hell.”
I ask about her stepdad, and she says he doesn’t judge a soul, gives her tons of space, and she can’t understand why he ever married his mother. She tells me she ran away from home tonight after a verbal brawl with her mom (she refused to eat her dinner and take a pill), and she just can’t breathe in her house anymore.
Cleo’s No. 2 pencil thin but tells me she was pudgy as a toddler, and her mom never let her eat a thing, especially ice cream, and every time she heard the ice cream truck bell ring and the kids screaming with laughter outside of her house, she’d gaze out the window with envy and wish she was dead. I think of Chimney’s sense of cancer smell and wish she hadn’t said that.
“Why don’t you move in with your real dad?” I ask.
“My dad’s got a new wife. Darlene,” she says with sneering contempt. “Anyway, he moved all the way over to Dearborn so he can be close to Metro Airport ’cause he’s a pilot. But he’s promised me forever we’ll fly to Paris or London someday.” She picks at her black, chipped toenails. “Right now he’s stuck with the Delta route to Columbus. Like I would ever go there.”
It’s Virginia’s hometown, but I don’t say a thing. Rocket’s left a transistor radio in the tent, and I turn it on to search for music, and Ernie Harwell, the Tigers’ announcer, says hello to a kid in right field from Wyandotte. I twist the knob and tune it past commercials, pause on that mesmerizing funk-music station with the DJ called the Electrifying Mojo (“may the funk be with you”), and then past that pukey, midnight music show called Pillow Talk with the deep, slow-throttle voice of Alan Almond.
“STOP.” I turn the dial back. Chuck Mangione’s flugelhorn fills the tent with mellow dentist music, and it dumbs my wisdom teeth and numbs my brain cells. “I love this station … perfect before going to sleep. And that dreamy voice.”
I don’t say anything to Cleo about Chimney and our weird encounter at her house for fear I’ll chase her away or make her even more freaked out than she already is, but she can’t run away from home without getting some kind of medical checkup. Maybe she can live in Rocket’s tent all summer, because his mom never checks it, his dad’s always traveling for work, and Basil’s too cool to step foot in a camping tent unless it’s with some far-out hippie girl at the Sleeping Bear Dunes up north. I’ll think of something to coax Dr. Clark down here to give Cleo a medical exam, if a shrink is even qualified to detect cancer. One thing I know from every doctor visit I’ve ever had is a swollen neck is a sign of something wrong. It’s the first thing they grope at before they bring out the wooden tongue depressor.
We each curl into the two sleeping bags, and at some point I realize she’s really not going home tonight. She rolls her bag over so our two blue sleeping bags are touching like two mummies in an Ancient Egyptian tomb built for two. I start to tell her one more list: “8 Cases of Spontaneous Combustion,” but she’s fallen asleep. In a low bass Allan Almond-voice, I say to her, “Sweet dreams, Cleo.”
Phyllis Newcombe comes to mind from the list. She died at age twenty-two, combusting into nothing but a pile of ashes while waltzing at a smoky dance hall. Before I turn off the lantern, I hover it above her neck to check if it’s swollen but only see a faint freckle and the most perfect, lovely neck in the world, fitting for an Egyptian princess. I wouldn’t trade this night for a lifetime backstage pass to Springsteen’s concerts.
After I wake up the next morning, I think it must have been a dream because she’s gone, but I can smell her raspberry perfume on her sleeping bag, so I know it was real, and feel like I’ve never felt before. After unzipping the tent to a ribbon of purple-pinkish sky, I stretch my arms wide and gaze around, but she’s nowhere to be found. I return to the tent and roll up her sleeping bag, wishing I could bottle her scent, and find a scrap of paper.
Giff—I have to get home before mom wakes up and knows I’ve been gone all night and throws a crazy fit. I guess I lost my nerve. If there’s one favorite person I’d like to have dinner with, it’s you (alive, not dead!) & I know you’ll be famous one day. Cleopatra.
I stare at it in awe and realize something.
I think I love Cleo.
tall hedge separates our driveway from the Clarks’, and I peer through the bushes, working up the nerve to approach Dr. Clark. Kate’s catching rays on a towel in her bathing suit in the lone footprint of sunshine in the backyard portion of the driveway.
Rocket whirls up on his unicycle and spins round and round Kate. “Are you spying on Jenny Clark, Ford?”
Since the beginning of time, he’s floated from house to house on that pole on a wheel of his, up and down Dot Ave without a care in the world. He clips Kate’s towel, and his cycle tilts perpendicular, but he somehow rights the ship and pedals past me.
Get lost, Rocket. I have something important to do, and I don’t need him messing it up.
I eye a thorny gap in the branches for signs of a Clark, but all I see are car parts and the ruins of old motorcycles. Pop’s carped from the beginning of time, What are they runnin’ next door, a chop shop? The Clarks are a source of fascination and fear for me. All the houses in my neighborhood are King George colonials surrounded by well-kept lawns, but the Clarks live in a spooky brown-striped Queen Victorian ringed with oily crabgrass and discarded oil filters.
Rocket keeps pestering me about why I’m looking next door. “I need to borrow some brown sugar for Virginia from the Clarks.”
“I forgot!” Kate tears off her sunglasses, and springs to her feet. I haven’t seen her move that fast since David Cassidy’s tour bus was rumored to be parked uptown. “The Clarks have a new litter of kittens, and Mom said I can have one!”
Did she run this by Pop? He despises the Clarks and wouldn’t be caught dead living with a Clark-bred cat.
We arrive at the Clarks’ front door. Two tepid knocks on the door by Kate are followed by shuffling footsteps from inside the house. Rocket idles on the front walk on his unicycle. The door opens wide and Pauley Clark appears, wearing only a towel around his waist. His brown, shaggy hair falls just above his naked shoulders below his doughy, pimply cheeks.
“We’re here for the kittens, Pauley,” Kate says, folding her arms. “Your mom said we could have one.”
“So you guys want some pussycats?”
A sinister chuckle escapes from Rocket’s lips, and he collapses his unicycle. I figure we’re dead meat if we dare step into the house.
“I do, not them,” Kate says, pointing her thumb at us.
“C’mon in, then,” he says, opening the creaking door. “They’re in the basement.”
I sense a trap, but I say nothing, too nervous to talk. We follow him inside, stepping past an ancient rug below an antique bronze chandelier and onto a creaky worn wooden floor. I look around the house and am surprised at how normal everything appears, except for a few animal paintings on the wall and sculptures of naked ancient Greeks. The house smells like a mixture of cigarette smoke and sweet licorice. Books are piled everywhere—the floor, the shelves, a window seat. A library with no librarian to put the books away.
Kate’s eyes dart wildly. “Where’s your mom?”
“Heh, heh, heh,” Pauley gurgles. “She’s in with a psycho, doing a therapy gig.�
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Rocket perks up. “A real lunatic?” I elbow Rocket to shut him the hell up.
“Probably, but we’re going to find out for sure.”
“What do you mean?” Rocket skips a step to catch up with Pauley.
“You can hear everything through the heating vent down in the basement.”
“Maybe we should come back when your mom’s done,” I suggest, thinking nothing about this feels right. I’m freaking out, but I try to stay cool.
“Don’t worry about my mom. She’s busy. You’ll hear.”
We make our way down the basement stairs. Pauley flips the light switch. Five kittens peer up at us from a large blanket next to the furnace. The kittens are pressed up against their mother’s stomach, whining, their little lungs not large enough to sound a meow.
Kate gently picks up the smallest kitten in the litter. “Oh, how cute.” The black cat barely fits in the palm of her hand. She pets the kitten’s head as it tries to squirm away.
“C’mon, you two,” Pauley whispers. “Let’s enter the psycho session.”
Rocket treads on Pauley’s naked heels. I stay put with my sister, who holds the kitten close to her chest. The scrawny kitten’s claws have already latched on to my sister’s heart. She has her kitten. Rocket’s voice whisper-booms from the other room. “Quinn, get your butt over here … you gotta hear this stuff.”
I step through a curtain wall and see Rocket and Pauley standing on top of an avocado-green-colored Maytag washer and dryer, their ears glued to a heating vent.
At least Pauley has put some clothes on—a painter’s smock. Rocket reaches his hand down and pulls me up next to him. Dr. Clark’s voice is crystal clear, the patient’s muffled.
“Tell me again, how did that make you feel?” Dr. Clark’s voice.
“Like total crap.”
Faint, but I can just hear the words.
“Say it again.”
“Total crap.”
Becoming clearer now.
“Louder.”
Looper Page 10