Age of Consent (10 page)

“Sir, if you don't mind me saying,” the MacDonald's guy began. He was stuck in his little brick-and-glass box; he was a head in a square of glass. His hair curled against the dull uniform and you could see the reflection of sweat on his chin. His name tag, Dan, seemed like something a small child would wear.

Craig whipped his head around to the McDonald's guy. “WHAT?” he said.

“If you don't mind me saying—” The guy suddenly stopped. He was nervous, was young himself, only sixteen, seventeen at a stretch. His beard looked like stray hair that needed plucking. His hair had a hedge shape of tight curls. “In the car there I can see quite a bit of cash. More than three dollars seventy-five. Just there, sir. In your ashtray.”

Craig glanced down at the roll of bills in the ashtray, then at Bobbie, then at the McDonald's guy again.

“What is this all about!” he yelled, as though the two of them—Bobbie and Dan the McDonald's guy—were working together to swindle him. “
Everyone
, his dog, and his uncle, wants to separate me from my goddamned money!” He pointed into the ashtray with a single strong shake of his arm as though trying to hurl his index finger into the pot of cash. “That's mine, son! You got that? Nobody is touching this money! Now here, take
this
!”

It was Bobbie's money, almost three dollars. She watched as Craig handed it up to the boy, who nodded and thanked him. She waited as he counted.

“You going to give us our burgers, man?” Craig said to Dan. “Or are you going to stand there with our money
and
our food, working out how to wipe me clean of every red cent?”

The boy finished counting, then looked unsteadily at Craig. Bobbie could see the reflection of the car in the windowed booth and Craig's face snarled in the yellow-and-red lights that pricked the glass.

“Sir—” The boy looked distressed now, truly distressed. He stood on one foot, then another. He opened his mouth to speak and stuttered out the words, “This is…this is only three twenty-five.”

“Oh. Fuck. You,” said Craig, like he was tired now, wiped out with all the bullshit this kid was giving him. “Come on, sunshine, give us our burgers!”

The boy licked his lips. His shoulders were thin and sharp. He had a hollow chest, long arms, bony wrists, slender fingers, and you could see every pore on his face in the fierce laboratory-bright light. He leaned on his arms and sunk his head into his neck, then looked over his shoulder and back at Craig, and spoke again, this time in a voice that sounded even younger, “I'll ask my manager. Maybe he could do something—”

She felt Craig flinch and the colossal spear of his approaching anger. She saw how he fixed his eyes on the boy and knew what this meant. It was impossible to keep silent. The idea that Craig would hurt the boy filled her mind completely. It didn't matter that there was a window and, in fact, an entire wall between the car and the boy. Her mind was stuck on the memory of the motel manager, the sight of him down on the carpet, his face bent ninety degrees from center so the side of his nose pressed against the floor, mouth contorted, eyes squeezed shut, hands raised, swatting at the antennae as Craig pinned and beat him. It was all she could think about. From where she sat stiffly in her seat, she now leaned forward and caught the boy's gaze and motioned with her head in small, fractional side-to-side movements.
No
, she told him silently, wagging her head almost imperceptibly, so that Craig would not see.
Do not get the manager.

She saw the subtle change in the boy's expression and heard him say, “Never mind,” and she nearly collapsed with relief. “This is fine,” the boy said. He tried to smile, but it didn't look like a smile. He handed the bag of burgers, the cardboard tray of drinks, all the straws and slim packets of extra salt, and the napkins through the McDonald's window. Reaching toward Craig's open window with the bag, moving as carefully as he could with shaky hands, he delivered the whole thing down to Craig, who passed it all to Bobbie in a swift movement and then told the boy he was a peckerhead.

“You're a peckerhead,” he said to the boy. “Do you know that?”

The boy said nothing. He stared at Craig, swallowing hard.

“Say it!” demanded Craig. “Say,
I'm a peckerhead!
”

He waited until the boy did as he was told. “I'm a…” The boy was trembling. “I'm a peckerhead?” he said, his eyes fixed and staring.

“Yes, you are!” Craig laughed, then put the car into gear and they got the hell out of there.

THEY LEFT MCDONALD'S
and sailed forward, the car now filled with the smell of burgers. It was midnight and she was caught in the cloud of noise from the radio and the road and him saying, “Take the wheel while I unclog this thing,” meaning the pipe. She scooted over and sat close to him, her head pulled back away from the spear of the antenna as he held the pipe in his mouth and poked the sharp end inside, then took it out and examined the bowl in the passing glare of streetlamps. Her fingers were locked around the steering wheel and she tried to watch the road out ahead the way he had instructed her many times before, not allowing herself to focus on the bleached cement that fed itself under the car just in front of the hood, which was where she naturally looked.

The road was straight, banked occasionally by leafy birch trees with bark that peeled in silvery paper upon their trunks. Above them was heat lightning and a faraway storm, but also the silent, sure flight of a jetliner aiming for the airport. If she weren't having to concentrate so hard on keeping the car on the road, if she didn't have to
drive
, she might have leaned against the door and stretched her vision up to the pretty halo around the moon, then tracked the plane's red-and-white lights across the map of sky.

“Keep her steady,” he said.

“Next year I can get my license.” She squinted ahead, shifting her legs so they unstuck from the sweaty seat.

“Don't remind me. You can already see it happening. Girls change. You're already argumentative and pissy. You'll be finished by sixteen.”

“I'm not
pissy
,” she said. She wondered what he meant by
finished
. “Am I driving okay?”

“Fourteen is optimal. I liked you better then. And I thought you'd turn out better than you did, too. Stay a bit straighter. Here,” he said, and pushed the wheel with his thumb.

“How far ahead should I be looking? Like a hundred feet or fifty feet or ten?”

“I'm not saying I don't love you. But you were nicer then. Much. You had promise. I've seen this happen before. A nice girl one minute, then they hit fifteen, sixteen, and suddenly they turn into little bitches.”

“I'm not a bitch.”

She felt the weight of his disappointment in her, but she had to concentrate on the road. She had to be careful. She could get hypnotized by the road immediately in front of the car. It looked like what the arcade games looked like when you put in quarters and got to pretend you were a race-car driver. The car was tricky. Its headlights weren't aligned and the beams turned in on each other so she was driving into a cone of light. Meanwhile Craig was cleaning out the pipe bowl with the broken antenna. He took a few tokes, leaning back and sucking the pipe, poking it with the antenna every now and again to get a better draw. “That's good,” he said.

He seemed like he might fall asleep, resting on the nylon seat, so she said, “You're not sleepy, are you? Don't forget you're the one with the brakes.”

He said, “Can't you tell we're going a steady sixty?”

“I'm just saying.”

“How could we be doing sixty like this if I weren't doing my part with the gas pedal?”

“Okay, sorry.”

“See what I mean? Now you're telling me how to drive. You don't even have a damned license yet but you're the expert.” He pinched some grass and held it above the bowl, talking all the while. But he looked like it was too much trouble to get mad at her. “Remember last year when we'd go down to the quarry and swim and have a good time?” He sighed. “You were sweet then.” He stirred around the leaves with the end of the antenna, then told her again to keep the damned car in a line so he didn't get seasick. “
Steer
,” he said, exasperated.

She hooked her fingers tighter around the wheel and said, “I'm doing my best.”

“Make your best a little better, then.”

She said, “Please hurry. This is hard, keeping it straight when I'm sitting at an angle.”

“It's not hard. I'll show you hard.”

He took one of her hands from the wheel and she nearly screamed. He laughed, and put her fingers between his legs. She was already too short for the seat and had to lean over, and now she was one-handed, and he expected her to keep the car steady.

“Please,” she said.

“I got no time for you anyway,” he said. “I'm already late as hell.”

She thought for a moment, then said, “Is there any chance of me getting home?” She didn't want to bring it up again, but she didn't want to sleep in the car while he did his show, either. She'd done that back in March and it hadn't gone well. He'd found it funny when he got back to the car and discovered her huddled under a blanket, a thin glazing of ice on the windows. She'd been unable to sleep for the cold and she begged him for the hot coffee that steamed in a paper cup held in his hand. Her mother had been in New Jersey that night, too, working one of the trade shows and sleeping in a Marriott. She'd phoned Bobbie to say she was bringing her some chocolate coins they sold in the gift shop and something else, too, that was going to be a surprise, and Bobbie had been so groggy she could barely say thank you.

But now, as she steered the car with Craig beside her with his matches and his pipe, she noticed the branches to the left of the road became unsettled and suddenly, as though out of a fairy tale, there sprang an enormous deer in a graceful arc before them, its legs folding and unfolding, its back stretching and unstretching. From the veil of forest, it landed for an instant upon the road much like a bird lands momentarily upon the bare ground, awkward in stillness, its eyes toward the approaching car. In the blaze of headlights, she saw the stag's bright golden pelt, the overlong legs, the elegant neck. She saw the antlers, angled and strong and fixed on its broad head, and she was mesmerized by the dark eyes, and the deer's steady gaze. The car was still coming fast, the brakes untouched, the tires rolling dumbly toward the deer. She called out to Craig as the animal took in the car with its bold, soft eyes. It did not turn away but waited on the road, framed in the headlights, the colors of its coat filling her vision, planted before them as though it had been searching for death all evening.

Craig did not brake, or at least he did not brake early enough. He'd said he was doing his part with the gas pedal, but it hadn't been true. She turned from the deer and the car became a missile, aiming for the trees. White sparks flashed against battered trunks as the whole of the woods charged toward them. She felt the tires blow out, the rims banging, and a terrible dropping as though her body were suddenly reduced to nothing but her head. Her head rolling like a ball in the dark of the car.

The accident seemed to go on forever, the car dying slowly as it looked for a landing among the forest, the trees falling, breaking, and bending, with tremendous cracks and jolts that came from all sides, all at once, even under them. They had passed the area of hardwoods and come off the road's shoulder into a section of farmed Christmas pines with their bushy fans of needled branches and scaly bark, all precisely planted. They'd been driving so fast the car had hit the weak line of wire fencing and somehow gone up, climbing the wire, snapping the posts at their bases, and flattening the fence so that it lay on the ground like a tarpaulin. The pines were immature, the sound of their breaking trunks like that of guns firing. She heard great explosions of wood, then a blast of glass as the rear window crumbled. A cape of branches flowed over the car and then she saw nothing at all. She smelled burning rubber. She smelled an oily cedar scent and gas fumes and blood. Her nose was bleeding. She hadn't been wearing a seat belt and had flown downward into the well of the floor in front of the passenger's seat where she had stayed until at last the car stopped moving and the explosion of wood ceased to echo in her ears.

She felt herself roll out of consciousness, and then her mind sprang forward as a current of sensations and images flooded her. It was like dreaming with a broken brain, all these sharp little thoughts firing inside her skull. She threw up hard, her chest heaving to bring in air that was suddenly in short supply. She was a rag doll, weightless on the floor. She thought she was dying, then threw up again.

It was as though they'd entered a cave with a blackness so complete she could not tell if her eyes were open or shut. The space of the car seemed to have transformed around her. She banged her head as she lifted herself from under the dash, feeling for the seat behind her, filled now with broken branches and bark scrapings. The whole car consumed by the forest, stuffed with wood and branches and great shavings of bark so that she was poked by their jagged ends coming through from the open window beside her.

She tried the door but it was stuck, the car wedged at an angle. It was possible the door was so damaged it might not work in any case, even if she managed to clear the pressing branches. The headlights were punched out, the engine silent. She touched the window and it suddenly disintegrated into broken glass. It was difficult to believe the car had been perfectly functioning along the open road only moments before. She pushed all her weight against the door but it sprang back just as hard. She felt for the inside light and switched it on and looked at Craig next to her, understanding at once that he was dead.