Ghosts of Tom Joad (7 page)

We were alone, snuck off in the daytime into the woods. Being out there without darkness as a blanket was electricity between us.

“We'll whisper to make it more romantic,” said Angie. “Now Earl, let me see it.”

“No, it's embarrassing,” I answered her, looking away like something so fascinating was over there, I wanted her to look too.

“Over here, Earl. Now, c'mon, you're willing to put it in me, so at least let me see it up close.”

Most Reeve girls had learned somewhere that they were supposed to at least pretend it was embarrassing, 'cause it was over quicker usually I guess, like getting something done, eating when you're really hungry and not tasting the food.

“I like the top here, right here, this mushroom part. Soft, like a rose petal. What's that feel like when I touch there?”

Well, it felt goddamn amazing, and I shiver a bit to recall it now on this bus in front of people, what, some forty years later? That's a long time for a feeling to last.

“Now you look at me,” Angie said, smiling with a secret. I was feeling the sweat start around the edges of my hair when she pressed my head into a place I am pretty sure the last time I had been they said “it's a boy, ma'am” to my mom.

I might as well have journeyed to Mars, as it would have seemed more familiar. After seventeen years of imagining it, then thinking about it, then poking into it, here she was. It is easy now to forget that in 1977 there was no Internet porn, no magazines that you could get in Reeve, at least, showing such things, and even the human biology book with the drawings in it was on the restricted shelf at school and you needed Mrs. Coughlin's permission, which would be like asking Muley to see his mom naked. Actually, that'd be less embarrassing.

“So now you're gonna kiss me down there Earl. It's only fair, give and take, you know.”

This I thought I knew about. Muley had told us, having learned the mysteries of such things from an older brother who had been in the Marine Corps in Japan and thus knew. We didn't believe him, like we didn't believe him when he said people there ate uncooked sushi fish. Why would anyone do that? It made no sense.

Angie was pretty insistent, I guess having learned something about these kinds of things herself from a source more reliable than Muley's older brother in the Marines. She held my head and kind of directed me. Pink, soft, a little bitter, maybe astringent after I learned that word, oh, wetter now, starting to understand, faster, faster, no no, slower now, there, right there, easy now, put your tongue right there, there oh, oh oh—

Oh.

“Did I hurt you Angie?”

“No, no Earl. Shhh now, no more talking.”

I understood fully why people would do that.

Angie got to use her dead dad's old work car all the time. Her mom worked of course, but her being a widow, she also felt that desperate loneliness that pulled at her. She took up with a man from Monroe that involved her spending much time out of the house. So me and Angie would drive around, talking, listening to the radio. She kept liking to ask me what I was gonna do next. I thought I knew the answer and even trying to show off a bit, would tell her how expensive college was, and how pointless it was, and talked up the job at the factory I believed I would be starting the week after graduation. Hourly wage, health plan (whatever that was), retirement plan (whatever that was, we were seventeen years old) and paid holidays. Against the required calculus class and Freshman Writing Workshop Ohio State was going to make her get through, my job prospects seemed attractive, but to her college was gonna be about expanding her boundaries, whatever that was, maybe even dating a colored guy, she said while we were driving.

“What about running away?” she asked. “We got a tank of gas and my mom don't care if I'm home or not. We could drive somewhere, right now, go to Pittsburgh or New York. It'd be just us Earl, we'd get an apartment and we'd cook together and find jobs and we could sleep together in a bed every night. What do you say?”

I probably was thinking more about the together in a bed part than anything else, but I reached over, turned the radio up and pushed my foot past hers to kick the accelerator closer to the floor. “Let's drive,” I shouted, and I leaned out the window so I could feel the wind wash Reeve off of me. We pretended we had a top to put down, and as we crossed the Reeve city line Angie
leaned way out her side, hair flying behind her like a kite tail, and shouted “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck YOOOOOOOOOOOOOU I ain't never comin' baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!”

We drove that car way too fast, and it was only a couple of hours when we had to stop for more gas, at a highway place along Interstate 70 halfway into Pennsylvania. Even being in another state felt sexy and tingly and exotic.

“Let's pretend we're married,” she said, laughing as we went into the service plaza fast-food place to see we were the youngest there by two or three lifetimes. “Gimme your jacket over my shoulders.”

“Honey, did you remember the milk?”

“Oh no dear, sorry. I thought I'd get it after my bowling night.”

“What time is the mortgage due, dearest love?”

“Perhaps, my darling, we should travel again soon.”

“Oh sweetheart, darling, I love it when you take me out!”

Starting a life-changing adventure spontaneously with only $27 in loose bills is not necessarily the smartest plan. Filling up burned through half of that money and after two burgers and some Dr. Peppers, me and Angie were sitting too quietly.

“Maybe we should head back now,” I told her. “This was fun and all, but my folks'll be expecting me before midnight or I'll get grounded and I got football practice starting soon.”

“What're you talking about? New York's still hours away. We're gonna have to drive all night just to get there by sunrise. I wanna see the sun come up there.”

“You're serious about this? C'mon, like when you tried to convince me you got a real tattoo, it was all fun playing at it, but
when it got boring you just wiped it away with spit. Let's go home.”

“Earl, I'm going. I meant it, and I meant for you to come along. Nothing to go back to in Reeve.”

“Your mom—”

“My mom won't be home for days and until she gets around to doing laundry and don't see my clothes in the hamper, probably won't even notice me gone. Kids run away all the time, it ain't that big a deal. You ain't gonna learn nothing more in high school anyway, and then what, work in that factory? That what you living for, to turn into your dad? You wanna marry me, get drunk on Saturday, slap me around a little and throw me on the bed before you pass out sweaty on top of me? Hell Earl, even that ain't likely. The factory laid off men for the first time ever, and when James got Evelyn pregnant and went for his job, he only got one 'cause his daddy begged the foreman. You wanna die in Reeve alongside the whole goddamn town? This is about doing something, getting off your ass, saying something, seeing what a shitty place this is and what a jam place we could move to. I don't want to be living in Reeve at age sixty in my mom's house with her books and cats. Let's go.”

“Angie, I thought you were kidding about New York, like you do. I'm seventeen. My mom still makes my bed. What I gave you for gas was allowance money. I ain't never been more than five miles from Reeve alone before. I can't live in New York, get a job, or move in with you. I mean, I'm on the football team.”

“Let's go.”

The words hung up high enough that I couldn't reach them.

“I can't.”

It sounded like a fight, but a fight was where one side is trying to win over the other. Sitting there alongside Interstate 70, we were just saying goodbye in a really crummy way. I know now that I simply did not know how to love her. Interstate 70 runs practically anywhere. But not me, not that night. I was scared and I had too much of the small town in me. I didn't see—couldn't see—that the road went both ways. Angie did kiss me, did thank me for the gas money, and made me again scribble down my address so she could write from New York. She took my jacket off her shoulders and folded it, handing it back to me. I stood alone in that fast-food parking lot, and I watched the tail lights of her car merge into traffic, into the night, the wind, the new rain until I could not distinguish her ride from any of the others heading away. It was chilly, and I unfolded my jacket, smelling the last of her fade off as the wind came up and took even that from me. I struggled with women for a long time, trying out different things, learning to repeat things I read in Hallmark cards to make them feel I cared, often to good results. But it was hard, and I could remember when, once, it had been effortless.

Angie wrote me a postcard like I heard tourists buy ten for a dollar in Times Square that said G
REETINGS FROM
N
EW
Y
ORK,
but I otherwise never heard from her again. Kept the postcard though, for a long time, kept that instead of her, I guess. There were never two days in a row that I did not think of her, never a time when I watched cars on a highway that I didn't wonder why I didn't have the courage for Angie.

Hitchhiking back to Reeve took less time than I worried it might. First trucker refused to take me, pointing to a sticker on
his cab that said N
O
R
IDERS,
N
O
E
XCEPTIONS.
I asked him which was more important, a person or a sticker and he kinda laughed, kinda didn't, said he had a wife and kids and drew a circle in the dust around the N
O
E
XCEPTIONS
line. I had better luck later and made it home. My old man grounded me even though Mom said she was just glad I was safe after doing something so stupid.

W
E STARTED OUT
like we often did, jumping the fence and climbing up one of Reeve's two water towers. Me, Muley, Tim and Rich were always together that summer, always had been together since whenever. We were on the football team together, and we planned one more big night out before training started. The ladder up the water tower had sort of a cage around it, but it was old and rusty even then and you had to wonder each time if you'd be the one in the newspaper story about the dumb teenager killed climbing the water tower. Evening was creeping as delicately as that new kid on the first day of school. We fought over who'd climb up first, 'cause the first guy didn't get his fingers stepped on like the trailing three, and I won. First up was best too because you'd look up that ladder and the light would fade off into the dark a couple of yards ahead of you. You'd look up and see nothing but night and you were flying.

Up top was a walkway with a railing you never felt right leaning against. Muley grabbed my belt and shoved me at the
same time, pulling me back of course even as I saw all the way down just for a second. It was an old trick for us but it made my balls tingle every time. A bunch of kids had spray-painted their names, their graduation years and their favorite bands up there, but that was little kids' stuff. For us, standing there with all of Reeve unfolded below, that was the prize. You could see the factory, giving off an orange glow, the dark streak where the river was, see cars moving along like Matchbox toys. Little kids would say, “There's my house,” the first time up, but that was only for first-timers. Each of us was quiet, tracing streets we knew, picking out our last girlfriend's house and wondering if she was home, and of course looking down at the high school and that football field where we'd sweat and suffer over the last few weeks of August for Coach. We're all always somewhere, but this made our connection to the place real. We were not a group prone to talking about beauty and art and that kind of stuff, but that view from up there was beautiful. Every one of us imagined flying off the walkway and sailing over Reeve and that wasn't a little kid thing to think. Up there that night, measuring the awesomeness, everything was still ahead of us, anything seemed possible to us.

“Hey Earl, you believe in Heaven?”

“What Muley, you drunk already man?”

“No, it's just up here, I don't know, I start to think about those kind of things.”

“I guess so. My old man's always talking about going to Hell, so I guess that means there's Heaven, too.”

“Why don't you two go hug under a rainbow and write a fucking poem or something?”

“Seriously guys, I been to Heaven. Her name was Patty Kennedy.”

“And if she blew you that must've been a living Hell for her.”

“What if every time you said something that stupid God made your wiener one inch shorter?”

“Shut up, this is serious.”

“Muley's would be like only that long.”

“No you guys, seriously, do you think we're going to Heaven?”

“Shit, Muley, now you got me thinking about it.”

“So whatta you think?”

“I think so. Whatever we done wrong, it ain't been nothing so bad, just screwing around stuff. We ain't never killed anybody or nothing.”

“I heard Earl's dad tell someone to go to Hell. Wouldn't it be cool if you do that, like it was a God kinda secret that if you said it, then it happened to the person you said it to.”

“The way Earl's old man cusses, Hell'd be full already.”

“I had this dream once where I was a girl.”

“Me too, but I had to go to school naked.”

“You guys are stupid, remembering things that never happened.”

“So what about this then. What if we inherited sins, like from our dads?”

“Isn't that what Jesus fixed?”

“What's your problem? Did your mom smoke during pregnancy or somethin'?”

“Man, we'd better check because that's important.”

“So we'd go to Heaven then right, 'cept maybe Earl's dad?”

“Shut up you guys, and be serious. Lookit out there, how pretty. That'd be what Heaven looks like.”