B004XTKFZ4 EBOK (9 page)

On Saturday mornings we would jump onto the bike and rush across Riverfield Road, out of the housing tract, onto Bridgewater Avenue and over the long bridge that spanned the riverbed, finally reaching downtown Quiet. In those days the town lived up to its odd name (which I later learned was derived not from its quiet character, but rather from its founder, a farmer with the rather aristocratic name of Quincy Cuthbert Quiet II). Little was there to tempt the interests of a couple of very young girls, but we made do even without such seeming necessities as a movie theater or a proper department store. Main Street held a couple of small clothing shops, a dry cleaner’s, a grocery, barber’s, and a pharmacy; it was the last of these where we spent the greatest amount of time, especially on Saturday mornings when the owner, a heavyset young woman named Mrs. Marks, would stock the wire rotating rack with its
Hey Kids! Comics!
banner at the top. Few girls read comics, and in fact I didn’t until I knew Lucy; I enjoyed them because she did. Mrs. Marks was nice about letting us just sit on the floor and read them without buying any; I always felt a bit guilty about it, anyway, and invariably purchased some sodas and snacks from her for us to consume as we read. “Just don’t mess them up,” she would say pleasantly. But of course she had nothing to worry about: I would organize the comics before we left, leaving them in a state of virtually military order and perfection, flawlessly alphabetized, pristine.

I would do much the same thing at the library, a big old gloomy-looking building which Lucy and I would also ride to on those Saturday mornings. Initially she was resistant—“What do I want to hang around a bunch of
books
for?”—but she came to like it, spending her time in the children’s section while I browsed the grown-up paperback novels, paperbacks being a new thing in libraries then. Although I had only a children’s library card, Mrs. Klibo would allow me one adult book at a time based on her own personal approval. I would generally choose an Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes to go along with my steady diet of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, placing the books in a little rucksack my aunt had allowed me to buy for the purpose. Lucy never checked out anything, but she liked whatever had lots of pictures: big splashy tomes about the movies, nature books,
National Geographic.

There was a small general clothing store on the corner of Main and Birch Street, and it was there that I allowed Lucy to talk me into wearing jeans. “C’mon, Franny-Fran,” she said, “you look too
girlie
.” She helped me try on pair after pair until we found the ones that seemed to look best; then, later, I had the job of convincing my uncle (always the looser of the two with regard to the purse strings) to give me the money to buy two or three of them, which he finally did. Soon enough the little-girl dresses were put away at the back of the closet and I wore my jeans daily. The cardigans, too, vanished, along with the dress shoes, replaced with delightfully sloppy-looking pullover sweaters and sneakers. I never changed my obsessively clean and organized ways, not really, but Lucy’s makeover definitely caused me to look like a more normal twelve-year-old girl.

On the outskirts of town were two gas stations, a big shiny Enco and, across the street from it, a dirty and dilapidated Red Ball. It was the Red Ball that attracted Lucy. Its owner was Mr. Farrington, a friendly old man with a big hair-sprouting wart on his nose. He wore filthy coveralls that smelled of gasoline and motor oil and whose hands were permanently blackened from working on cars all his life. Mr. Farrington usually offered Lucy a free piece of candy from his rather meager store behind the cash register—she always took a strip of black licorice—and when she started to bring me by, I got the same offer. We would talk then, on days when he wasn’t busy; he had several rickety old chairs placed near the pumps and he could often be seen there with customers or pals, telling stories of World War II, which he’d fought in, or said he had. Sometimes he took a newspaper and read it aloud, interrupting periodically to comment on “those idiots in Washington” or “those heels on the City Council.” Once, as he read a story about a proposal for a tax increase, I found myself staring with fascination at the front page he held aloft before him:
Local Girl Missing,
it read. There was a photo beneath the headline: the smiling face of a high school girl.

Mr. Farrington had someone who worked for him by the name of McCoy—“Mike,” as he was called by everyone. He was a tall, reedy man, about fifty, with small black eyes and a confusion of yellow and gray teeth; he had a close-cropped butch haircut and dark beard stubble perpetually sticking out from his face, and he always wore a greasy old baseball cap on his head that said
California Angels
. Mike seemed to be Mr. Farrington’s all-around helper. In that time when “full service” still existed, he was sometimes out at the pumps, filling gas, checking oil, cleaning windshields; more often he was back in the garage, his legs sticking out from under some car he was repairing. Occasionally he would take customers’ money at the register. His accent was odd, obviously from somewhere else; I thought of it as
country,
Lucy called it
shit-kicker.
He smiled a lot and was very nice to the two of us, especially when we happened to show up in Mr. Farrington’s absence. Then he would be much more talkative than otherwise, asking us “What’cha up to?” or “How’s it hangin’, lovely ladies?” while also offering us the free candy, and sodas too. “What’re a couple of beauties like yourselves doin’ on this fine morning? Goin’ to a tea party with the other lovely ladies?”

I didn’t like it when he talked to us like that, but Lucy just laughed. “I’ve never even had tea, Mike,” she said. “Iced tea, yeah. Not hot tea.”

“Well, you oughtta try it,” he said, grinning at her. “Put a little rum in it. Give it some kick. You like rum?”

“Never had that either,” Lucy said, shaking her head and grinning. “Had beer.”

“You like beer?”

She shrugged, moving her hands absently over the displays of motor oil and air filters. “It’s okay,” she said.

“Well, you’re a little young for it,” he admitted. “It’s kind of a grown-up thing.”

Lucy’s eyes flashed annoyance. “I’m almost thirteen.”

Mike McCoy laughed. It was a harsh, throaty sound. “You’re almost there, then. You’ll be gettin’ wasted with the best of ’em.”

“You bet I will.”

“You come on by sometime,” he said to her, glancing at me, including me. “I’ll give you a little beer. Only a little, though. Stop by my place.” He lived in a tiny house some distance from town. I’d seen it; it was plain clapboard, run-down, streaked with grime, with nothing around it but dirt and weeds. It was a house, more or less, but I thought of it as a shack.

“Maybe we will, Mike,” Lucy announced boldly. “We might just do that.”

“You ought,” he said, nodding. “Got lots of things to do there.”

“Like what?”

“Got a pool table. You girls like to shoot pool?”

“Maybe. Never tried,” Lucy said.

“Oh, you’ll like pool, big girl like you. You’ll be good at it.”

She nodded. “Maybe we’ll come by sometime, then.”

“Yeah. The both of you. C’mon over. We’ll have us some fun.”

Later, as we rode back toward town, Lucy turned her head back toward me and said, “Nice guy. Kinda weird, though. Looks at me funny.”

“Me too,” I said. “I don’t like him, Lucy.”

“But pool might be fun,” she said, facing the road again and pedaling harder. “And
beer.
You want to go sometime?”

“Lucy,” I said, “he’s not supposed to give us beer. It’s illegal.”

“Oh my
God
, Fran, you’re such an M.R.!” She swerved the bike then, hard, which she knew would scare me. I shrieked, tightening my grip on her waist. She did it again.

“Don’t call me an M.R.,” I protested. “I’m not mentally retarded.”

“All right, you’re a dingleberry, then.”

“I’m not a dingleberry either.”

“Dingleberry!”

We came to a downhill. There was no traffic so she pulled into the middle of the street, picked up speed and swerved back and forth wildly.

“Lucy, cut it out!”

“Why? You afraid? You a fraidy cat?”

“No. Just cut it
out
.”

“Fraidy cat, fraidy cat!”

It suddenly occurred to me that, wrapped around her from behind, I had a weapon of my own, and I goosed her, hard, in her side. She yelped, reached around to slap my arm, and lost control of the bike. We careened to the left, then to the right. The handlebars seemed to spin backwards. For a moment I was airborne. Then my palm scraped against the asphalt and my knee banged against something hard and immovable as we crashed down into the gutter and tumbled over each other.

“Jesus Christ, Fran! That was
your
stupid fault.”

“No it wasn’t!” I said furiously.

“You’re the one that goosed me!”

“You’re the one calling me
names
!” I was crying. My hand and knee hurt, but mostly I was just frightened.

“Aw, crap,” she said, disgusted, brushing herself off. “Now you’re gonna be a crybaby. Great.”

“Shut
up,
Lucy!”

I sat up on the sidewalk then and buried my head in my arms, gave myself over to tears. I’d been disturbed by the
Local Girl Missing
headline, the photo of the girl beneath it; uncomfortable with Mike McCoy’s eyes and the things he said; terrified by Lucy’s dangerous bike-riding; and finally hurled into the street, my hand torn and bleeding. I’d had enough, enough of everything.

I calmed down after a while, my breath slowing, my tears subsiding to hiccoughs. I felt lost, alone, cut loose. I felt as if my life had ended right there in the gutter.

“Here.”

The voice surprised me. I looked to my left and there stood Lucy, an ice cream cone in her hand. She sat, offering it to me.

I looked away, aggrieved.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have called you an M.R. I’m the M.R.”

Our eyes met. She handed me the cone.

“You’re not an M.R.,” I told her quietly.

We were silent for a time.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

She pointed behind us with her thumb. “Drug store. At least we were smart enough to crash in front of a place that sells ice cream.”

“I guess that was a good idea,” I said, starting to lick it. Involuntarily I smiled.

“Yeah,” she said, with a little chuckle.

We sat there in the peaceful morning, sharing the ice cream cone between us, best friends again.

Quiet ended a mile or so past Soames Elementary, at the place where the land was suddenly bisected by Highway 101. At the freeway onramp was a small state-run rest stop for travelers—nothing much, just a big colorless concrete building with restrooms and vending machines alongside a big parking lot. Surrounding this was half an acre or so of grass, a few picnic tables, a handsome oak tree. It was the kind of place thousands upon thousands of travelers had stopped at over the years on their way north to San Francisco or Seattle or south to Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Diego—stopped at, taken a quick stretch, gone to the bathroom, perhaps grabbed a Coke or a candy bar from a machine, and then departed, the memory of the place vanishing as quickly as the image of it in their rear-view mirrors. But for Lucy and me it became a hangout. No local kids ever came here, and the lawn was well-tended, the tree good for climbing. Though only a couple of miles from our houses, it was a place set apart, a different world: we were in the freeway culture here, people rushing up and down the state to get to their exotic, unimaginable destinations. Strangers we would never see again got out of their cars, ambled around, moved on. License plates displayed mysterious dreamlike place names: Nevada, Wyoming, Connecticut, New York.

“Santa Barbara,” Lucy said one Saturday, lying on her back in the grass with her arms folded behind her head, chewing on a grass stem. “Malibu. That’s where I want to go. Where there’s
ocean.
And Hollywood. I want to meet John Travolta. He’s a fox.”

I was sitting up next to her, tearing little clumps of grass out of the ground and sprinkling them across her shirt. “He’s cute,” I said. “I like Donny Osmond better.”

“Donny
Osmond
?”
She gathered the grass I’d placed on her chest and tossed it lightly into my face. “You really
are
a spaz, Franny-Fran.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, smiling. “I still like him better, though.”

She shook her head in mock-disgust, looking toward the parking lot. “We should hitchhike with somebody over there,” she said. “Let ’em take us to Malibu and those places. Seems like we’ll never get out of this dump.”

We stayed there for a long time, peacefully sipping sodas and watching the traffic pass by to its unknowable destinations. I found myself looking at Lucy, noticing again the pale brown birthmark that ran from her jaw to the middle of her neck.