Harbinger (2 page)

Flat on my back on the lawn, I waited for the wind to find its way back into my lungs. Presently Nichole’s face leaned over me.

“God, are you all right?”

When I could inhale I said, “I’m excellent.”

We entered the house by the front door, which required less acrobatic skill. There was a weirdly herbal smell.

“Where’s your mom and dad?” I whispered.

“My mom doesn’t really live here. She’s staying with a friend or something. My dad. I guess he’s asleep.”

We were creeping up the stairs.

“What if he wakes up?”

“He won’t.”

“He might.”

We reached the top of the stairs. She stopped and looked at me. She was only about five foot one to my five eleven. She was wearing an oversized blue T-shirt and no bra.

“Ellis, he’s kind of drunk? Passed out on the sofa. That’s why my mom isn’t ever here.”

“Oh.”

“So it’s safe.”

“I wasn’t scared. I just wondered.”

“Okay.”

In her bedroom she closed the door and locked it. The walls were mauve, and the ceiling wasn’t flat like mine but had quirky angles and was sprinkled with hand-painted silver stars. She had a Gerard turntable and a shelf of record albums as long as my arm. A
Madman Across The Water
poster was thumbtacked over the turntable. It was basically the graphic from the album cover. I liked it that she didn’t have a picture of Elton John doing some flamboyant shit. I thought the poster was classy.

“Wow, you’re really sweating,” she said. “You want to take your coat off?”

“I don’t know.”

She reached out and pushed the coat off my shoulders, and I let it slip to the floor.

“You’re all flushed.”

“Yeah,” I replied.

We sat on the bed, which had the rumpled look of having recently been slept in. Nichole smoothed her hand over the white bedspread between us. I could
smell
her. My hand floated up to her face. I touched her cheek and then I took her hair in my fingers.

“Do you want to kiss me?” she said.

“Yes.”

She tilted her head, lips slightly parted. I leaned forward and kissed her mouth, just as if I’d been doing it my whole life. Oh, she was sweet.
Lie back
, I think she said, though it might have been my blood speaking. She stood up and removed the big T-shirt. I continued to breathe, but just barely. Her breasts were perfect, the nipples like pink eraser heads. She wore sheer beige panties, damp over a pubic shadow.

She straddled me and began moving her hips.

“What’s in here?” she said, playful.

“My sock monkey?”

She giggled. “Let’s take him out,” she said.

“—”

The zipper, the tugging down, the cool air, her hand firmly squeezing, thumb caressing. She stood long enough to slip out of her panties, and then she straddled me again, only this time I was inside her, where I belonged.

Time unwound, infinitely—for about fifty seconds. Afterwards we held each other while I fought a contradictory impulse to be away from her. Gradually that impulse retreated, and I thought I’d never want to be away from her again.

“It was your first time, wasn’t it?” she said.

“Sort of.”

“How can it be ‘sort of’?”

“Well, it was my first time with another person in the room.”

“Ellis, can I ask you something?”

“Sure, as long as it’s not a personal question.”

“What?”

“I’m kidding.”

“Very funny, boy. Do you believe in stuff, like reincarnation?”

We were lying side by side, facing each other, and I had begun to caress her hip.

“Sure,” I said, having not really listened to the question.

“I mean for real, Ellis.”

“Okay.”

“My mom knows all about it,” she said.

“All about what?”

“Fortune telling and channeling and past life stuff.”

“That’s cool.”

“My dad hates it.”

“That’s bad.”

She rolled onto her back. I couldn’t stop touching her. I stroked her belly and thighs; it was like being in a hypnotic trance, the whole thing, the whole night since I woke from the soap bubble dream, or whatever it had been.

“Because,” Nichole said, “it’s like I already know you.”

“You
do
already know me.”

“I mean from before we met.”

“What?”

“Ellis, keep doing that. Right there. It’s perfect. God.”

I kept doing what I was doing. She moved against my hand, and I brought her up, up, up.

A little while later I felt a cool puff of air on my back from the open window, then the rain started, and the thunder. She held me tight with her legs, and I was inside of her and outside of myself—outside in a way I’d never been before.

Afterwards we lay on top of the covers, not talking. The rain whispered and ticked against the partially open window, the curtains swayed, and the spring sky rumbled. I smelled our sex and the scented candle and the rain, and we lay there a long time. Once in a while the sky flickered, as if it had a short.

“What did you mean about knowing me before we met?” I asked.

“Like in a past life.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I don’t know, Ellis. Everything’s so strange tonight.”

“What do you want to do tomorrow?”

“And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow?” She was more confident than I about bard-quoting.

“Just tomorrow.”

“Nothing, I guess.”

“Really, nothing? Why not?”

“I have a date with Roy.”

“Come
on
.”

“He’s my boyfriend, Ellis. I have to sleep now. Okay? I’m sorry.”

Her eyes closed with a kind of drugged suddenness, and it was over. I watched her breathing for a while then I shut her window (the sill was wet) and let myself out the front door. Nichole’s father was still slumped on the sofa, the TV gone to white noise.

That was Friday.

Weekends she worked at the Arctic Circle on 148th Street in Burien. She’d told me so in class one day, and I’d taken that as an invitation and started hanging out there, hoping she’d notice me. She never did, and I quit going. But the Saturday after our inexplicable liaison I drove over to the A.C. in my beater Plymouth. The left front quarter panel was junkyard salvage, primer black. I parked it next to Nichole’s yellow Nova.

Inside, the wrong girl took my order for a vanilla shake and fries. Yes, it was Nichole, but she was still the wrong girl. I couldn’t take my eyes off her in her tight white pants and red apron, but she had no trouble ignoring me.

“Here’s your change,” she said, dropping it in my open hand.

“Hey, about—”

“Ellis, I’ve got customers.”

I had to move away from the counter to let the next guy put in his order. Sitting disconsolately in a plasticized booth, I dipped warm, salty French fries into cold ice cream and loaded them one after another into my mouth.

During a lull in business she came over. I’d been sitting with an empty shake cup and a greasy bag of salt for quite a while.

“Hi,” I said.

“Ellis. I told you I had a date, didn’t I?”

“But you’re working.”

“Roy’s picking me up after I close.”

“Oh.”

She glanced back at the counter, which was still empty of customers, then sighed, took off her stained apron, and sat down.

“Last night—”

“Yeah?” I said.

“It didn’t make sense.”

I concentrated on my empty shake cup, turning it in my fingers.

“I don’t regret it or anything,” she said. “I don’t mean that.”

I looked up.

“But it wasn’t like me. I had some kind of crazy dream and then I woke up and you were out there, and it all felt kind of  . . . wonderful.”

“But it’s not so wonderful today?”

“I don’t know, Ellis. Roy and I—”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well. Guess I have to get back to work.”

“Okay. See you at school next week.”

“Right,” she said, looking morose.

I was opening the driver’s door of my car when she came running out of the restaurant. She halted ten feet away, holding her apron with the tie strings trailing on the ground, and we stared at each other, and I knew she was my girl. That was that, and the hell with Roy Hathaway.

“I close at nine,” she said. “Get here at eight-thirty and help me. It’s against the rules, but I don’t care. Maybe we can slip out before Roy shows up. Go for a drive or something?”

“I’ll be here,” I said, grinning.

Behind the counter at the A.C. the air was hot and greasy. I helped Nichole wipe things down, drag the thick rubber step-off mats out back, sweep and mop. We did a halfass job but did it fast and didn’t care. The cook, who was sixteen and looked like a plucked chicken or something otherwise destined for the boiling grease vats himself, reluctantly agreed to be the last rat off the ship and lock the door behind him. Another no-no for Nichole, who was supposed to wait.

She liked to drive so we jumped in her yellow Nova and she cranked the engine. We were both wrenching our necks looking for Hathaway’s pickup. By the time we hit First Avenue we were laughing and in the clear, or so we thought. The big getaway.

“God, he’s going to be mad,” Nichole said, steering with one hand and dialing through the AM band with the other, finally landing on “Heart Of Gold.”

“How mad?” I asked.

“He’d kill us.”

We both laughed—Nichole somewhat less heartily than I. Of course she knew him better.

We headed south towards Des Moines. There was a new marina with a big parking lot. “Perfect,” according to Nichole, “for necking.” But way before we got there she said:

“I think he’s behind us.”

“For real?”

She nodded and stepped on the accelerator. I twisted around in my seat. A pair of yellow headlights loomed. We hit the S curves that followed the bluff north of town. Nichole didn’t reduce speed. I could feel the Nova wanting to drift. Facing forward again, I snapped my lap belt on and cinched it too snug. The tires squealed.

“Hey, take it easy,” I said.

She hunched over the wheel, white knuckling it with both hands.

We came out of the S curves at a flat forty miles per hour. Nichole braked at the controlled intersection marking the north end of Des Moines. The Nova skidded a couple of yards over the stop line.

Immediately a dark blue pickup truck swerved around us on my side and stopped. The driver’s seatbelt, pinched in the door, dangled over the running board. Hathaway had his window down. When I rolled mine down he said:

“Who the fuck are you?”

He was a square-headed guy with a sketchy unibrow who looked older than a high school senior. His beard stubble looked like black sand paper.

“Nobody special,” I said, going for modesty.

“Dickwad.”

“No,” I said. “It’s Ellis. Ellis Herrick. I don’t know any Richard Wad. Is he a senior?”

Nichole laughed out loud, which was just the frosting on my smartass remark. Hathaway banged his door open against the Nova. As soon as he had one leg out of the truck, Nichole punched the accelerator and we were
gone
.

We decided to postpone the necking. Nichole violated various laws and rules of the road and got us through town and up the hill to Pacific Highway in record time. Here there was more traffic, and one set of headlights pretty much resembled another.

“Do you see him?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“He was
really
mad, wasn’t he.”

“Yeah. Nichole?”

“Hmm?” She was fiddling nervously with the radio dial again.

“Why him?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, Ellis. Because he’s strong and uncomplicated and knows what he wants. Because he wants me, but kind of acts like he doesn’t care and treats me like shit. And I
know
it’s screwed up, so don’t tell me.”

“It’s not that screwed up,” I said, thinking of her father passed out drunk on the sofa in front of a hissing TV screen and her mother gone off somewhere. Not really that screwed up at all.

A pine tree air freshener dangled from the rearview mirror. I flicked it with my fingernail, and Roy Hathaway pulled up on Nichole’s side. We were just coming to the big four-way intersection by Sea-Tac Airport. The light was yellow.

“
Shit
.” Nichole had been slowing to stop, but now she took her foot off the brake, hesitated, then jumped the gas again. The hesitation is what did it. The light had gone red, and we rolled into the intersection without conviction.

A black sedan struck us first, broadside just behind my door, and the Nova spun around. Nichole screamed. Time seemed to attenuate. The air freshener was still swinging wildly when the bus came on. I glimpsed a pair of headlights higher than my head, started to turn, caught a hurtling wall of silver, and then it smashed into us. My door frame buckled like pasteboard. The Nova launched into the air, tumbling. Hotels and lights and traffic and even a landing 737 flipped upside down, right side up, upside down. The windshield fractured like a sheet of ice. My lap belt dug painfully into my waist, unbearable. Then, in an instant, the force broke my restraint and flung me through the windshield.

An interval of darkness. Out of it, very distinctly, my brother said:
Don’t be afraid, Ellis
. Which was dumb, considering.

Then somebody let there be light. But no noise. A black puddle with a rainbow sheen on its surface. In the puddle lay a human hand severed raggedly at the wrist, white dowl of bone protruding, the pinky finger erased to a bloody nub. It didn’t strike me as particularly horrible; I felt pretty detached myself.

Without moving my head I looked around. I mean 360 degrees. The Nova was flipped onto its roof, windshield gone, and Nichole was hanging from her lap belt, hair falling straight down, mouth open. Her eyes were closed, but I knew she was alive and mostly unhurt. If she were dead, we’d both be looking around with Super 360 Omnivision, right? But she wasn’t dead, and somehow looking at her I could feel her strong heart beat and even sense the quiet electrical impulses of her brain. She was unconscious and undreaming.

My brother Jeremy and my mother had died together in a car wreck. October thirty-first, 1968, coming back from the store with a load of Halloween candy. Some teens driving around in monster costumes and drinking beer crossed the center line and hit their car. A policeman came to the door to tell us. I stood behind my dad, still wearing my dumb homemade Star Trek uniform. My mom had glued shiny gold sequins onto the officer’s patch, and she’d helped me make Spock ears out of cardboard and “flesh” colored tape. I was a little old for trick-or-treat, I guess, but this was my last time. My brother had been away in the army for almost a year, and I’d missed and idolized him. As soon as he got back from the store, he was going to walk with me around the neighborhood. My big brother. I remember looking at that policeman and thinking his uniform was a costume, thinking that until my father burst into tears. Trick-or-treat. Now I wondered if my mother and brother had witnessed a muffled tableau similar to the one I was seeing tonight.