Psychology and Other Stories (9 page)

Missy ripped a blade of crabgrass in half and tore another one out of the ground.

“We'll have to take
some
ride,” Slim hypothesized.

“Those goons would have raped us and left us in the ditch to die,” said Missy, as though she relished the idea.

Slim shrugged and walked off down the shoulder. The sky was turning mauve above the pines, which swayed slightly in the cool windless air, as though drunk. Slim rubbed her arm for three seconds, under the sleeve but without fingernails.

“Adolescent” was one of her gramma's favorite epithets, but now that Slim had run away, she felt more kindly towards The Gramophone. She almost wished her gramma were here to see Missy now. For the longest time, The Gramophone had had a very low opinion of Slim's friend, and was always insinuating—through proverbs, homilies, and allegorical newspaper clippings—that Missy was a “bad influence.” (This was another of her pet phrases; there were few people on the planet who escaped being a bad influence on someone or other at some time or another.) But after Missy “ran away from home” (her suitcase, Slim discovered, had contained little more than cigarettes and shampoo), The Gramophone had started treating her like a saint. It was no longer Missy but her mother, Mrs. Acorne, who was the bad influence. At the breakfast table (while Missy slept in) Slim's gramma now fulminated against not “peer pressure” but the creeping evil of “hereditary delinquency,” and newspaper stories about roaming gangs of wayward youth were replaced by tales of bank-robbing families and orphan
murderers. “I'm more of an orphan than
she
is,” Slim protested, but her gramma seemed to think this clinched the matter: In her book, you were better off with two dead parents than an absent one. Divorce, in her book, was about the worst thing you could inflict on a child.

Slim might have been inclined to agree that Mrs. Acorne was bad, but you could hardly call her an influence. No matter how loudly or how often she shrieked at Missy to do this or harped at her to stop that, as far as Slim could tell it trickled in one ear and right out the other without leaving behind the slightest residue. Missy did as she pleased, when she pleased. This was the very characteristic that had made Slim fall in love with her in the first place. She desperately wanted to attain that same imperturbable state of grace; she dreamed of a day when her gramma's harangues would slide right off her like grease off a hot griddle.

Even here, however, miles from home, she could not block out The Gramophone's voice. It was still in her head, still stuck in the same old grooves.

Stop that scratching
, it said.

Slim yanked down the sleeve. She had already scratched more today than she normally permitted herself in an entire week. If she kept it up she was going to break the skin. But it was not her fault; she was, she reminded herself, under some stress.

It was, beyond dispute, Missy who had made them miss the bus. On finding the toilet at the filling station locked, she'd gone off in search of another. Missy, of all people—with her air of world-weariness and her talk of going to live with her real father in the city—Missy did not know that sometimes you had to ask for the key! But Slim knew better than to make a federal case of it. Missy had, of course, when she'd come back and found the bus
gone, given Slim a look of accusation, but even then she had not dared say anything. For she knew what Slim's reply would have been.

“You can't seriously expect me to hold up a busful of people just for the two of us?”

Missy could blame her all she wanted with her eyes, but Slim, who knew that she was in the right, did not have to say anything, and could thus savor both her righteousness and her restraint.

According to the woman inside, the next bus was not due till the same time tomorrow. The bus company would hold their bags at the depot, but the girls had no way of getting into the city, and no money to pay for a hotel room—if there even was a hotel around these parts. When Slim had asked the woman the name of this place so she could try to find it on her map, the woman had replied, “Highway 9.” They were nowhere.

A semi-trailer hurtled by, about two feet away, and let out a blast of its horn. This shocked Slim no less than the vulgar insult had done, and she had to close her eyes tightly for a moment to muster her nerve.

When she turned around, Missy was no longer sitting under the sign but had moved to the edge of the road. She stood there sloppily, as if her torso had been dumped onto her legs, and stuck her thumb out at a passing car. The car stopped.

There were three people inside. Missy peered in and said, “Sorry, we thought you were someone else. We're waiting for our friends.” The car drove off.

Slim rejoined her friend. “What're you doing?”

“What's it look like?”

Another car approached and Missy pointed her thumb at it, but this one drove past without slowing.

“What'd you tell them we were waiting for someone for?”

Missy hummed through her teeth. This was one of her all-purpose sounds, which she used in a variety of situations to express boredom or disdain. She stared at Slim with dulled compassion.

“I didn't like the look of them,” she explained at last. “There was three of them.”

Slim clucked her tongue vaguely.

“There's two of us,” said Missy.

“No kidding.”

“You want to get murdered and raped?”

This, like many of Missy's questions, could not be answered by anything but a blasé or violent non sequitur. “Christ on a stick,” Slim grumbled, “I'd kill for a cigarette.”

“No you wouldn't,” said Missy. Because she had introduced Slim to smoking, she liked to treat her as a mere dabbler.

“You ladies in need of a ride?”

A car going in the wrong direction had pulled over on the opposite side of the road. The solitary driver, a man in a bright red T-shirt, was leaning out his window as though trying to climb through it.

Missy showed Slim her sardonic, unsurprised face, the one she used to say that she alone knew the answers to the questions that everyone else around her had not yet even formulated.

“Which way you heading?,” Missy shouted back.

Slim was, despite herself, impressed by Missy's lackadaisical use of the word “heading,” which would never have occurred to her. The sudden awareness of her own juvenility curdled her stomach.

The man seemed not to have heard her. “What's all your destination?”

“The city,” drawled Missy, tilting her head in the direction he'd come from.

“Which one?”

“Loyola,” drawled Slim, eager to break into the conversation.

“Shitfire,” the man grinned. “Me too.”

Before either girl could reply, he had ducked back inside the car and begun attacking the steering wheel. Through what appeared to be sheer strength alone, he managed to turn the car around and pull it across the highway—which luckily happened to be empty just then.

“Meet me at the pumps,” he called to them through the cloud of black exhaust that the car belched into the air.

The girls watched him leap out of the car and confer with the pump boy. He made several expansive gestures towards his vehicle, then hustled inside the filling station.

“Well, there's only one of
him
,” said Slim tartly.

“C'mon.”

“You're crazy.”

Missy looked around for her bag; remembering that it was already on its way to the city, she gave her look-around an air of sarcastic valediction, then launched herself towards the man's car like a novice swimmer kicking off from the side of a pool.

Slim chased after her. “But he lied! He was going in the opposite direction!”

“He's going our way now,” she shrugged, but slowed her pace. “He probably turned back to get gas.” She stopped altogether and crossed her arms as though waiting for Slim, who was right beside her, to catch up. “I like his
car
,” she said at last through an impenetrable fog of sarcasm.

Slim looked at the car. It may have been a color once, but all the paintable surfaces had long ago been overrun by rust. There was a deep and complex dent near the back end which prevented the trunk from shutting properly. Over all of this—rust and dent and windows and tires—the entire vehicle was coated in a thin,
even layer of dirt, like a rum ball that had been rolled in cocoa powder.

“It's a hunk of junk,” Slim said. She noticed that the pump boy had come no nearer, but stood there still contemplating the car, or the vision of it that the man in the red T-shirt had conjured for him.

Missy made the sort of sound that an heiress might make at the sight of squalor. “Would a rapist drive around in that hunk of junk?”

Slim knew little of the automotive preferences of rapists, and doubted Missy knew more. But her question, as usual, was rhetorical, and did not admit much scope for reply. Slim responded with a sigh of expostulation, as if Missy had been twisting her words; but the argument was already lost.

The man came out of the filling station and waved energetically, like someone in a crowd. He half strode, half jogged back to the car, clapped the pump boy (who had done nothing more than remove the squeegee from its bucket) on the back and pressed a coin into his palm. “Thanks, buster.” Then he threw open the car door and called to the girls, “Hop in, ladies!”

“C'mon,” said Missy.

Slim, to deny that she had been coerced, made sure to reach the car first.

“There's a dog back here,” she said. The dog looked up at her without raising its knobby, triangular head from its paws. Slim thought she probably hated dogs.

“That's Good Dog,” said the man from the front seat. “He's a good dog.”

Missy opened the front passenger door.

“What're you doing,” Slim hissed at her over the roof of the car.

Missy made her eyes round and reproving, as if this were something they'd already discussed. “It'd be rude for us to
both
sit in back,” she whispered, and climbed in.

The man started the car. Slim went around to the other side, where the seat was covered in books and papers and cardboard signs.

The pump boy watched the car till it was out of sight. “Didn't look like much,” he muttered, and dropped the squeegee back in the bucket of dirty water. He hitched up his overalls by the pockets and trudged back inside. The highway, for a moment, was silent. The sun had gone down behind the mountains and the pines shivered in the windless air, as if chilled.

Mr. Custard told the girls about himself. This was as great a pleasure for him as it was for his audience, for he no more knew than they did what he was going to say. To his satisfaction, he learned that he had been born in Hawaii (which explained the T-shirt), had been raised amid six siblings by a stern saint of a mother, had rather listlessly excelled in his studies, had volunteered for the army and fought in “the war” (the horrors of which he left to their imaginations), had rambled around the country for a time, had boxed professionally (winning, he humbly implied, every fight), and had finally fulfilled his lifelong dream by becoming a psychologist. He was at first vague about his career, but the more he talked, the more he warmed to the topic.

“I'm a sane man working with insane men, that's all,” he said. “But let me ask you: Ain't that the description of every sane man that walks the earth? Let me tell you all a little secret. When I was all your age, maybe younger, folks around thought
I
was nuts.” He shook his head, sharing their disbelief. “I know, but it's true. Even my own dear mama—who had the kindest, most generous soul of any woman that ever lived—even my own mama thought I was a bit, well, let's say ‘different.' I didn't fit the mold. They didn't have the word back then and she wouldn't've known it if they did, but
she thought I was
autistic.
That word comes from ‘auto,' which is Latin by way of Greek for ‘yourself.' Like ‘automobile,' which is a ‘yourself-mobile,' yourself
mo
-bile, that is, a thing you drive yourself around in. Well,” he chuckled, “that's enough of my showing off. Another word for it is ‘selfish.' That's the word my mama used, as a matter of fact. She used to say I had no feelings for no one but myself. She used to say it was like nobody but myself existed. Harsh words! Now let me tell you the secret. You ever lied staring up at some clouds? Shitfire—course you have. You ever notice how it starts to feel it's not
them
that's moving, but
you
? Well, that's what it's like in the world these days for a sane man. It's
everyone else
that's nutty as a goddamn fruitcake but it's
you
that starts to feel crazy! Eventually I figured it out, that feeling crazy is about the sanest way to feel in this world.
Crazy
people don't feel crazy! Let me tell you, I got patients who think God is sending them private messages on invisible rainbows tied to their—well, certain parts of their bodies, let's just say. And
those
sons of bitches are convinced, I mean dead positive, that they're the sanest thing going. You tell them they're mad as a hopping June bug making love to a March hare and they just smile and say ‘Pass the potatoes.' So a psychologist's job ain't so different from the average person's. Ain't we all surrounded by sickos and loonies who think there's something wrong with
us
? I mean, holy coyote: my own mama!”