Fast Lanes (16 page)

I made my way outside and stood by the big double doors of the school. Boys from the country stood out there—the ones who wore boots and hunting caps with earflaps, and torn, fleece-lined leather jackets. One of them offered me a cigarette. We stood, smoking, and I watched them. What made sense? This moment was real. In some other instance these four boys might sneer at me, as they often sneered, threateningly, at girls from town. Or they might attack me. Why was the world one thing and not another?

I stood breathing the cold air, smelling the stark, clean cold. The boys jostled each other, drinking from a flask, and filed slowly out into the dark. They walked toward a pickup truck parked in the high school lot, where they could drink without fear of discovery. I watched them go and looked into the darkness in front of me, into the circular, empty drive of the school and the highway beyond.

A man walked unsteadily toward me out of the snow.

I wasn’t afraid of him; I felt a solidarity with all outcasts. I wasn’t supposed to have to wrap bleeding girls in towels, or walk us both half naked into a school hallway for help. I wasn’t supposed to smoke cigarettes with country boys, or smoke cigarettes in the light where anyone could see,
or even stand in the snow in a skimpy gym suit, shivering. Besides, I recognized the man by his thick, broad shoulders, and the set of his body. He came nearer and stopped opposite me. It was Kato’s father.

Shinner Black weaved slightly in the dark. He stood with legs spread and might have sunk slowly into one of the graceful gymnast’s splits I’d seen inside. “I knew your mother in high school,” he said to me.

I moved a little, stepping back toward the shelter of the building. “Maybe you’d better stand against this wall here,” I said.

He brought his feet together, straightened, and walked two steps closer. “Did you hear me?” he asked softly.

His voice was melodic. Despite the haze of his drunkenness, he seemed informed by some wonder and looked carefully at me. Now he stood in the light as the snow fell behind him, and I saw in his face the smooth, shadowed face of the boy in my mother’s scrapbook photographs. He sensed my surprise and my apprehension; his light eyes were unfocused but oddly alert, the eyes of a person hypnotized rather than blearily drunk. He searched my face with his distant gaze, as though looking for another face beneath my features.

“I was Tom Harwin’s best friend,” he said. “After that summer, I joined the army.” He stared off into the weather, then jerked his head as if something had occurred to him. “You know who I mean? Tom. Your mother’s beau, Tom and Jean.”

“Yes, I know.”

He came suddenly close, bent forward as though he were falling. Reflexively, I put my hands up to stop him. He leaned heavily against me at arm’s length, his chest against the palms of my hands. His coat was open. I felt the warmth of his skin through the thin fabric of his shirt, and the vibrations of his voice.

“You should have seen this town then,” he said, looking at the ground. “We had a good time the year before he died.
Everyone was gone to the war. We high school boys, we were the men of the town.”

To keep my own balance, I had to lean slightly toward him. “Mr. Black,” I said. Across the parking lot, I saw the boys pause in the passing of their flask and stand watching us.

“I found out better,” Shinner Black said. “In the war, in France, nobody even spoke English. That was a joke we had.”

I waited, then he smiled and seemed to regain his balance. He stood, his face inches from mine, and put his hands on my shoulders. He held me so tightly I felt the pressure of each of his fingers. “People can’t live in this world,” he said. His voice was furious and tender; I felt the supportive, viselike grip of his hands and an unfamiliar, charged dizziness. The pressure of his grasp seemed to lift me toward him and I didn’t resist. I moved my hands in confusion and inadvertently touched his warm throat. We stood totally alone in the snow, and the space in which we stood seemed to turn in unhurried, resolute circles. What remained outside—the walls of the building behind us, the white ground and the highway, the parking lot and the boys, who yelled Shinner’s name once, twice—blurred and receded. Shinner’s hands relaxed their hard grip and he still held me, near him. We stood motionless.

I must have looked terrified. The boys had begun walking toward us; when they were close enough to see my face, they broke into a loping run across the powdery lawn. Their dark forms were silhouettes in the quiet snow. Someone’s shoulder jarred my face as he moved to stand between Shinner and me; the cold leather of his jacket was against my eyes and smelled of smoke. The boys themselves smelled dirty, oddly sweet, like urine, and the open flask had spilled on someone’s sleeve. Suddenly the clear cold was full of commotion. The boys surrounded Shinner as though to protect him and began to pull him away; one of them trod heavily
on my feet and left the print of his boot on my canvas shoes. Excluded by the jostling of their big bodies, I understood they were saving Shinner, not me. “I’m sorry,” I said to no one. Shinner didn’t look back and the boys led him quickly toward the truck; one of them waved me away good-naturedly.

As they moved off into the snow, a blur of arms and broad backs, I saw my father’s big Pontiac turn into the half-moon drive of the school. The car slid as he braked too sharply and slowed to a stop. Across a small sea of weather and darkness, the white car sat like a gleaming boat, headlights throwing their long beams into the slant of the snow. The snow was turning to rain. My father put the car in parking gear as he opened the door and the interior light clicked on. Inside this small, lit room I saw the familiar movement of his shoulders, his gloved hands. He pushed the heavy door of the car quickly open, and half stood in the drive, one hand still on the wheel. His questioning face was in shadow, lit from below by the dim yellowed light of the car.

I raised my hand to tell him everything was all right, to wait while I went inside for my coat, but he misunderstood and walked over toward me. His boot buckles jangled with every footfall and the abandoned Pontiac buzzed, the keys still in the ignition.

“What the hell is going on here?” my father asked when he reached me.

“Nothing. I came out for some air and he was here, talking to himself.”

“Who was here? Who was that?” Mitch looked after them into the parking lot.

“Mr. Black, Kato’s father.”

“You mean Shinner Black?” My father shook his head, half in sympathy. “Christ,” he said.

A gust of wind peppered us with sharp snowy rain and my father pulled his hat down over his eyes. I was trembling but I wasn’t cold. A slow warmth had eased through me.

“What are you doing in the cold with nothing on?” Mitch said. “Go get your coat. I’ll wait right here in the car.”

He hunched his shoulders and moved back into the rain as I turned and felt for the cold knob of the heavy door. It pushed open easily, as though pulled from within by the crowded warmth and bright fluorescence of the gymnasium. I could hear cheers; the girls were beginning candling maneuvers and the loudspeaker system crackled air. The lights went dim. I got my coat from my locker and watched by the gym door. They stood in formation, the candles two hundred lights in the dark, and stereo speakers released the melody: “Blue moon, I saw you standing alone.” Flames circled and dipped as the spotlight lit the crescent we’d cut from a sheet and stretched across a wood frame. The silver foil clouds moved on dependable wires, gliding slowly across the face of the moon.

Monday morning I stood on the corner near our house, waiting for the school bus. In my pocket I had a letter to Kato from Billy—Shinner would send it to her. I didn’t want to go to school, and the pool hall would be empty now. Abruptly, I turned and walked down the hill into town. It was a bright winter morning, snow thawing to slush. I could hear gutter water flowing in the street drains, a sound loud and close up and fresh. The air felt like early spring, as though everything had emptied, lightened and warmed, because Billy and Kato were gone.

Before I got to the pool hall, I could see Shinner’s truck parked in front. Evidence of his presence gave me pause, but I kept walking. If my nerve failed I could just pass by, walk past the movie theater onto Main Street. But I crossed, touched the chrome bumper of the Chevy truck, and walked up the steps of the hall. Through the storefront window I saw Shinner at the bar, smoking and looking at notebooks. His expression was serious and he looked the picture of normalcy:
a man at work. If I’d found him in the same state in which he’d appeared to me the night of the storm, a kind of apparition that canceled everything else, I’d have felt more confident. I knocked on the steel door and heard him walk over. The door opened.

“I’m Billy’s sister,” I said, as though he wouldn’t remember.

He stepped back to let me enter. “Billy get off OK?”

“Yes. Yesterday morning.” I followed him across the big room to the bar. The hall was empty, the tables covered with plastic cloths. The notebooks were account ledgers, full of figures. Beside them sat an ashtray full of butts and a Styrofoam cup of coffee.

“Want some coffee?” He moved behind the bar to pour it before I could answer, then set a steaming cup in front of me. “I don’t have any milk, just these things.” He pushed forward a basket of creams packaged in individual plastic cups. “Half-and-half, pretty fancy.”

“I have something for Kato,” I said quickly. “A letter from Billy. He said you would send it to her.”

He shook his head. “Not yet. You keep it. In a week or so, I’ll call and give you the address.”

I nodded. We sat awkwardly, looking at the cup and its dark liquid.

“I’m sorry about the other night,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”

“That’s OK.” I turned to face him. He sat, just watching me, in his dark green flannel shirt with the cigarette pack in the pocket. His forearms were muscular. His features were strong and regular but he looked almost as old as my father, handsome and ruined. His pants were a little too short and he wore white athletic socks and sneakers. I saw every detail of him, the way he looked.

“I sent Kato to my sister,” he said. “It’s good they’re apart. She did it to keep Billy from leaving, but if he’d stayed, what would that tell her?”

I wasn’t sure, so I didn’t answer.

“Everyone’s so shocked,” he said, looking into the room, “like kids don’t know enough to be that serious. Hell, that’s when it happens.” He paused. “And she did it in front of you.”

His voice was full of sorrow. Again, I wondered if I was somehow culpable. She was trying to influence Billy, not me; why hadn’t she done it in front of him? Regardless, she had Billy now—he would not outdistance her, even if he tried, no more than my mother had moved past Tom Harwin. And I was witness, connected to her; the boundary I’d imagined between myself and anything I saw or touched, was gone. Everything was different now, larger, enveloped by a shadow. Shinner Black was silent, waiting as my thoughts fell against each other like a long line of dominoes. It felt as though my vision had altered, as though I’d seen things through a dull filter that now disintegrated.

Shinner Black moved his hand across the bar and touched my wrist. “It feels like the world has ended,” he said. “But you kids are not like us. You won’t always live here. Already, you’re practically gone.”

I looked away from him, at the wall behind the bar, and my gaze fell on an eight-by-ten glossy of Kato, the picture that had been in the papers last summer when she’d won the pageant. Even now, the Scotch tape that held it to the plaster was yellowed.

T
here are two photographs of Callie, both in those dark sepia tones that look so brown and velvety. He was my mother’s brother, and he died a year before she was born. My mother had a surviving brother and sister, but they were ten and twelve years older than she; to her, they seemed grown up from the beginning. Callie was the one who had disappeared, a baby she herself seemed to have lost, the child who would have changed her childhood. In one portrait he wears a smocked dress, stockings, buttoned shoes with straps, like any baby of that era. His moving hands are a blur. In the other he could be a contemporary two-year-old in a diaper, holding a ball; the haircut looks modern, and you can see faint lines on his calves where the stockings hugged his legs. He was a husky, healthy baby. Throughout her childhood, my mother heard his story in particular phrases.
He died of diphtheria and whooping cough. The girl brought it in with the butter
.

Before the Thornhill reversal of fortune, before they themselves
kept cows and sold milk and butter, they had dairy goods delivered by horse and wagon. The house in Bellington was a small Victorian mansion with stained-glass windows and warm, burnished woods; there was a three-story floating staircase, butler’s pantry, buttons in the floor wired to sound in the long kitchen at the back. Those fine old homes in isolated towns were cut up into apartments later or turned into funeral homes. The Thornhill home became a funeral parlor; it is a funeral parlor today. Back then, in a West Virginia of 1924, the house was gracious, filled with the same antique furniture and dishes my family used as I was growing up, things my mother told stories about.
Your grandmother rocked all her babies in this Eastlake cradle; someday it will be yours
. I was my mother’s only daughter, the one who would inherit the dishes, the cradles, the women’s things, and the stories.
These are the Baltimore pear goblets that belonged to your great-grandmother, here are the sugar, the creamer, the butter plate
. The butter plate, round, of a glass so fine it rang, has a globular lid, a round bell with the glass pear subtly swollen on the front.
They molded the butter to make it beautiful. When Mother used the plate, I would ask for the story. She used to tell me, “Callie was my best baby,” and to the end of her life, her eyes filled with tears when she spoke of him
. Her best baby? I thought this an odd thing to repeat to a surviving child, and told my mother so.
He never got to live
, my mother retorted, exasperated.
What more could she give him, after she’d lost him, but to say that? Good heavens, I didn’t mind. It was a terrible death for her
. Not the only death, but the worst one.
They quarantined the house, and Mother fought it for four days and nights, the fever and the terrible cough. Oh, you know the sound, like croup, like the cry of a strange, barking bird, almost a nonhuman sound, and then they stop coughing, and they drown
.