Fast Lanes (14 page)

Walking, I unfolded the paper. This one was a champagne ad: an oceanside terrace at sunset. A woman sat alone at a table in a diaphanous robe, touching her fluted glass; behind and below her, a couple walked along the beach, their backs to the camera, holding identical glasses. Kato had written, in block letters across the bottom, “your house!” No one was labeled and for a minute, pausing at the big trash can by the door of my soc. class, I wondered who was who. Then I folded the paper in half and threw it away quickly, as if it constituted some evidence against Kato, or maybe against me. It was as though she spoke a strange language and I understood the words against my will, but I couldn’t have explained their meanings to anyone else.

Kato wasn’t like the rest of us. In many ways she lived like an adult. She came and went as she pleased. She had a job—working in the pool hall making sandwiches, pouring drafts behind the bar except when the cops came in. She kept house, after a fashion, for Shinner and two older brothers, both employed now in steel mills in Ohio and seldom home. She’d never been a member of various girls’ cliques around school, never a Y-Teen or Girl Scout, a delegate to Girls’ Congress or church camp. Maybe it disturbed me that I’d done those things and still felt a nervous kinship with her.

She’d been an outsider, seldom spoken to by the girls in her class, teased warily by some of the boys. By virtue of her association with Billy she was no longer branded an outcast, and last summer she’d won the Miss Jaycees beauty contest. She’d borrowed a white formal of mine and entered on a dare from Billy and her father. When she won, her female compatriots at Bellington High were shocked into silence. Now she was accepted, included, even elected to the various positions high school kids invent, but she seemed to view the favor of the masses with an edgy disbelief. She knew too much to trust their change of heart.

Kato knew a lot. She knew what it was to be abandoned. A long time ago, her mother had taken off. She knew about drinking because Shinner sometimes drank. She knew about men and boys; she’d witnessed their private camaraderie and fights and gambling as a four-year-old, playing with her dolls under the pool tables. At twelve she was cooking grilled cheese sandwiches behind the bar and baking the frozen pizzas; even then, she knew about women because her dad and her brothers brought them home. She knew how to be discreet because Shinner, attractive, on the loose, occasionally got involved with someone’s wife, though his visitors were more often waitresses from the truck stops. She knew how Bellington viewed her family, living over the only pool hall in town. She didn’t want to know all she knew.

I wanted to know more. Last summer, in the same week Kato had triumphed in the pageant, I’d made love, twice, with an older boy from the state capital, a just-graduated senior taking courses at the local college. I liked riding down by the river in his yellow convertible. The river was steamy and brown and the trees dipped into it with the desperation of foliage choked by town dust and cinders. My friend, older, convincingly arrogant, weakened his considerable advantage over me by coming out with unbelievable, rehearsed lines like
a summer evening, a blue sky, a pretty girl
. But I liked being with him; it made me feel as though I weren’t in Bellington anymore. When I said good-bye to him at summer’s end like a casual friend rather than a girl who expected something, he insisted, with admiration, that I was “different.” I denied it. Now I sometimes remembered the lines he’d delivered, maybe because the embarrassment I’d felt for him in those moments was a sympathy akin to love. I’d never talked to anyone about making love with him and I wondered lately if it had really happened.

Kato and Billy were lovers. Neither of them talked about it but everyone knew. Other couples cruised the streets of the town in cars, finally wrestling in backseats on some country road. Billy and Kato simply went to her house after the movies on Fridays, sports events on Saturdays, Sunday afternoons. Billy’s car sat out front, parked in one of the angled spaces marked on the pavement in white paint. A door beside the pool-hall storefront led up a long narrow stairway to the Blacks’ apartment.

Once I asked Billy, half kidding, what he did all those hours at the Blacks’.

“Watch TV. Play cards.” He smiled.

And I believed him. They did have time to sit around like a married couple, then retire to Kato’s room. Around one
A.M.
Billy got up, put on his clothes, and came home to make his curfew.

Maybe my mother let herself believe at first that someone
was chaperoning them, but Shinner was downstairs in the pool hall, managing the peak hours of his business in a clamor of voices, cigarette smoke, jukebox music. I imagined the dull roar vibrating the floor of Kato’s square white room.

“Danner? Where’s your term paper?” My soc. teacher was peering down at me over her bifocals, a sheaf of papers in her hands.

I realized, fumbling through my notebook, that I’d left the folder in the gymnasium. “Sorry,” I announced, “I’ll be right back.”

“Just a moment,” she sighed. “I’ll have to give you a pass.”

Walking back through the same halls I’d just negotiated, I could hear the jerky movement of the big clock on the wall. Classes murmured, and a cold wind outside blew dust around the building. It was nearly November. My mother wanted Billy to go away to a military school in January; she had a dozen brochures she’d collected through the mail, and she wanted to take Billy to see a school in Virginia as soon as the gym show was over. Billy wouldn’t really discuss it but Jean kept quietly referring to his coming absence. Kato couldn’t know yet—she would have asked me, questioned me, as though I could stop what was already happening.

I saw her then, standing alone at the end of the hall. She held one of the heavy gym doors open a few inches with her foot and watched Billy, her books and notebooks in a pile on the floor. She hugged herself, so rapt she didn’t hear me come up behind her. She shifted her stance as she felt my presence. Silently, we watched. There were spotters now, and the coach; Billy practiced a twisting back somersault with one, then two, twists.
Stay with the doubles for now
, said the coach, but Billy did a triple. In the air, he looked like a beautiful object, hurtling end-to-end along a fall of air. He landed perfectly, knees slightly bent, both arms thrust forcefully out as though he’d suddenly become himself again.

“Danner,” Kato said, “is your mother serious about sending Billy away?”

“I don’t know,” I lied.

She didn’t quit watching; she didn’t take her eyes from him. Her attentiveness, her focus, reminded me of my mother, but Jean could attend to business while the focus continued undisturbed, one clear note sounding under all her movements. She would have monitored Billy’s attempted flight with an unerring third eye while maintaining a 4.0 grade point in the class Kato had discarded. Jean wanted her children to be on track, but Kato was unpredictable; she had wild yearnings and no plans.

I had plans. Maybe I was in training to become my mother, become that kind of supremely competent, unfulfilled woman, vigilant and damaged.

Kato turned to me, her eyes bright and calm. “I like to watch him,” she said. “As long as I’m here, I know nothing bad can happen.”

When I got home from school, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table, polishing silver. She had covered the tablecloth with a newspaper and begun with a stack of spoons. The pale salve of the polish was drying to a chalky glaze on the spoons, and my mother had lined them up in a row. The polish smelled clean and chemical, like evaporating medicine. “Hello there,” she said softly.

I couldn’t imagine her younger, full of helpless, specific desires, but maybe she was a refugee from those feelings. Tom Harwin had died and my mother had stayed around town, married, worked her way through college. Now she had an advanced degree and administered the county welfare office. Today she was home a little early.

She smiled up at me. “Don’t ask me why I’m doing this. I suddenly thought that if I did a few pieces every day after work, I’d have finished all the silver in a week. Good therapy.”

“Then maybe you and Dad should polish those spoons as a team.”

My mother didn’t look at me. “I don’t think you’re very funny,” she said.

“Where is he, anyway?”

“He’s downtown—where is he every day at this time?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know where he is when he’s here.”

“I can tell you that. He’s sitting in the blue chair, in front of the television set.”

“That’s not true, Mom. Sometimes he and I are home at the same time, and I don’t even know it. I hear him walking up the basement steps and realize he’s been down there for hours. What does he do down there at his desk?”

My mother held a soft cotton rag in her hand as though balancing its weight. “I don’t know,” she said, “but whatever he does doesn’t bring in much profit. I’m tired of pulling the weight for this entire family. If your father’s going to spend time down there, I wish he’d do a load of wash or iron a few of his shirts.”

“It’s so dark and depressing in the basement,” I said.

She touched the rag to a pewter-toned spoon, rubbing; it began to shine as the cloth took on a bruise of smudge. “There are lights to turn on,” she said quietly. “It’s not so bad. I ought to know, I sleep down there in the spare bed every night.”

I nodded. “Why?”

She looked at me and lay the polished spoon at my fingers. “What do you mean, why?” Then she was silent a moment. “I can’t sleep in my own bedroom. I guess I resent him lying there snoring when I’m too wrought up to close my eyes. It’s dark and the house is still and I’m awake, wondering how I’m going to manage.”

“Mom, you wouldn’t have trouble managing if you’d forget this military-school idea.”

She leaned close to me. “Listen, you must not discourage Billy from going. There’s not a college in the state that’ll
accept him with a C-minus average. If he doesn’t get into college, he’ll get drafted. It’s as simple as that.”

“But Mom, you’re sending him to a military school. It’s like drafting him two years early.”

“No,” she said. “I know Billy. He’ll buckle down and beat them at their own game. And they’ll take a special interest in him, I’m sure of it.”

“Right. They’ll see Billy’s excellent potential as cannon fodder.”

My mother held one of the spoons near her face, polishing the cup of its shape. “You’re wrong. Kids who go to these military prep schools are just the ones who won’t go to Vietnam, unless they go as officers.”

“Officers get shot, Mom. They get shot by their own men.”

“Danner, will you stop?” She gave me the spoon. “Brandenburg has an excellent gymnastics team, and if Billy finishes well academically, they’ll help him get a scholarship to a better school than I could ever afford.” She looked into middle distance, her gaze sadly hopeful. “By the time he graduates, this war will surely be over. And the officers who teach at the school—I think Billy will find he respects these men.”

“Well,” I sighed, “Billy loves a worthy adversary. Why do you think he wants Kato so much?”

My mother pushed the bottle of polish to the side of the table. “I know exactly why he wants Kato. Everyone in town knows.”

“That’s my point, Mom. What’s your real concern? Everyone in town? Why do you think Billy hasn’t just refused to go? It’s as though he’s testing you.”

“He’s not testing me, he’s depending on me. He’s a loyal boy, and he’s in over his head. What if she gets pregnant?” My mother touched my hand with hers. “It happens. People’s lives get ruined.”

“Maybe, but—

Jean shook her head. “You don’t know all there is to
know about Kato. County welfare has had a file on that family for years, since she was a child. They had her in counseling when she was just a little girl. Of course, the way the state counseling center is run, it probably didn’t do Kato much good.”

“What do you mean? Counseling for what?”

“Apparently the mother drank, like Shinner, only worse. Periodically she’d put the kids in the car and drive off. She’d rent a motel room in some town and leave the kids by themselves. Finally she left them somewhere in Pennsylvania and didn’t come back.”

“How old was Kato?”

“Young, six or seven. Shinner wasn’t around then, but his mother took the kids. She was a seamstress, lived down near the tracks. She died in just a couple of years. Shinner sold her house and bought that run-down pool hall.” My mother paused, dusting each piece of the finished silver, putting each gently aside. “It’s not that I have no sympathy. I was in love young; I know how it feels to pin all your hopes on someone. But Billy can’t change things for a person like Kato. No matter how old he acts or how little he takes orders, he’s just a kid.”

I stacked the gleaming spoons carefully and put them away while she talked, one on top of the other. Their silver handles were monogrammed and bordered with delicate, minuscule leaves.

“Danner, do you have a better idea? Mitch won’t discipline Billy. Brandenburg may not be the perfect solution, but it’s a way to buy time.” My mother looked at me levelly. “Do you really think I’m wrong?”

Two years before, Kato had gone to gymnastic meets in someone’s parents’ car, an unofficial, lone cheering section. The “gymnasts” in those days were a small unheralded group of boys working out on the horse and the rings. They went to a state meet as a team and placed fourth, and the
school bought more equipment. Jean took her turn driving the boys to practice when they were too young to have licenses or cars. Later she drove to the meets, and Kato sat in front between Jean and Billy. Jean was amenable but she seemed to view Kato and gymnastics with the same quiet concern, maybe because both coincided with Billy’s lack of interest in his grades. Jean wasn’t silent about that.
You won’t get into a decent college with below-average grades
or
Don’t you know you’ll get drafted? Vietnam is on the news every night now
.

I went along to a few of the meets. One was in Wierton, a steel town in the southern part of the state. Kato was there, looking pleased to sit beside Jean in a nearly empty gymnasium. Risers were set up the length of the floor as though for a basketball game, and the few of us in attendance felt self-conscious. Kato looked uncharacteristically proper, her hair curled and sprayed into a perfect flip. Wierton had looked gritty and deserted as we drove through the main street, and the school was dirty too. Winter sunlight fell through the high, grimy windows in beams, and motes of dust swam in the air. All the gymnastic meets seemed to be held in secret, at odd hours, early Saturday mornings or Sunday afternoons, in one deserted gym or another. There were no audiences, just the parents and a row of judges seated on folding chairs with tablets of paper in their laps. Between the routines they conferred quietly, figuring on paper. Scores were announced and marked on a blackboard. No noisy jostling among the boys waiting to perform; they sat still, concentrating, full of tension. It was a mysterious atmosphere, like the heavy silence that permeated the soundtrack of the professional-bowling show Mitch watched on Sunday television. The announcer spoke in a heavy whisper, as if the televised proceedings were forbidden. Watching Billy, I could almost hear that low, breathy male voice, commenting from somewhere beyond Kato’s profile. When she looked down at her hands, her blond lashes seemed to touch her cheeks. Jean sat perfectly still, holding her purse on her
knees. In front of us, Billy performed on the horse. He was a beginner and his moves must have been relatively simple; to us, they looked complicated. Balancing straight-armed on the iron pommels, he swung his legs like lethal weights, as though the lower portion of his body could be manipulated at will. There was the hard, firm slap of his hands grasping the pommels, switching off, one leg after the other scissors-kicked high and straight. He moved with clean, violent force, splicing air. Then he dismounted, and it was over.