Random Acts Of Crazy (20 page)

* * *

The hair at the nape of Joe’s neck was damp and he smelled like industrial soap, the scent you get after spending the night in a hotel, with a hint of bleach. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I mimicked, and as I backed out of the parking lot there was just silence between us until I turned out onto the main road to head home. It was awkward, I won’t deny it, but I wasn’t about to break first. He had been the asshole and I sure as hell wasn’t gonna play that nicey-nice game where I would pretend that the assholery was fair and balanced and we were equally responsible. Fuck that. He was the jerk and if anybody was gonna say anything, it had to be him.

That made for three minutes of tense, quiet that was so thick it was like swimming in Davey’s brain. Finally Joe cracked and said, “Look, I’m sorry.”

I let the words hang in the air because I wanted to savor them. How many times are you right in this world and someone actually acknowledges it? If I replied with, “It’s OK,” I’d be lying because the way he was acting wasn’t OK. If I said, “I understand,” that would be a lie too, because I didn’t understand. Snobbery seemed so ridiculous to me because unless you earned the money yourself you were just piggybacking off of someone else’s luck or fortune and looking down on other people. To me, that just made you a douchebag. Finally I settled on a grunt of, “Huh.”

He smiled a little. “Well said.”

“I may not be eloquent, but I get my point across.”

He studied me; I could feel his eyes crawling over my profile as we drove along, the headlights illuminating a possum that barely escaped my tire, the backs of road signs shining in a quick glare as the headlights bounced off them. Just outside the beams, the thin, spindly twigs and branches of trees still mostly bare between their spring buds gave the whole night the suggestion of a horror movie, except I wasn’t creeped out so much as unsure about what the rest of the night held.

“It helps to have gotten a few hours of sleep and a quick shower,” he said, a congenial tone that I had not heard yet in his voice. Relenting a bit, I relaxed and smiled, turning toward him and just nodding.

“I’m gonna imagine that there’s no class at your college for what to do when your best friend disappears and reappears six hundred miles away…naked.”

“If there were such a class,” he said, “that would be at Hampshire College.” He laughed. The puzzled look on my face must have told him that I had no idea what the joke meant and he said, “You guys have Oberlin College around here, right?”

“On the other side of the state, yeah.”

And he said, “Well, Hampshire is similar.”

I got the joke about drugs and nakedness in general, hedonism, and laughed politely. I may have manners so unpolished that if you brushed up against me you’d bleed from hitting a sharp edge but I knew when to shine somebody on as they extended an olive branch.

“Why are you being so nice to Trevor?” he asked. It wasn’t an accusation; I could hear a genuine questioning in his voice and a little bit of prodding. He was curious and trying to figure out what he could and couldn’t talk to Trevor about. I needed to be guarded but open at the same time. Damn, if these men weren’t stretching me in new ways.

“At first it was just because he was so strange standing there, caught in my headlights, totally naked, with those thighs flexing and the guitar covering his nether regions.” I slowed the car down and went an uncharacteristic thirty-five in a thirty-five zone, no need to speed. In fact, I wanted to stretch this conversation out. It was pleasant and I hadn’t done pleasant with Joe. Time to see where that could take us.

“And then?” he asked.

“And then it was hey, here’s this really hot guy and he’s into me so…” I shrugged. “Why not?”

“Why not?” he echoed.

“And then,” I shook my head a little, “he needed a place to stay, some clothes, some food, and once he called you everything sort of snowballed from there and we knew what was happening next. We didn’t do anything special, I didn’t know he was Trevor Connor from Random Acts of Crazy.”

“Would that have changed anything?” Joe asked. “If you had known?”

I bit my lower lip and thought about that for a minute. I frowned and shook my head, my hands firmly planted at ten and two o’clock on my steering wheel as we now went thirty in a thirty-five zone. Nobody was behind me so I didn’t worry about it.

“Uhh… no.” My answer was indecisive at first and then clipped at the end, more a function of needing to think it through than of any actual hesitation about the emotional impact of his question. To the left I had an opportunity to take a road that would extend our journey but not get us unreasonably far from home, so I grabbed the chance. Might as well buy five or ten extra minutes.

“Why do you think Trevor ended up out here?” I asked.

“Because he’s a dumb fuck.”

“Well, there’s that.” I laughed. “But why would he get so fucked up and then what – hit the road naked? I don’t get it. I don’t understand.”

“Me neither,” Joe answered.

“Why did he get so fucked up in the first place?”

“You mean back home? I don’t know. It’s what we do, it’s what Trevor does especially. Eating that entire bag of peyote though…man,” Joe made a low whistle. “That’s some fucked up shit. I haven’t seen anyone do that before.”

“Do you think that he was trying to get himself so deeply in trouble that someone would have to rescue him?”

Joe pounded his chest with a flat palm and said, “It worked, didn’t it?”

I smiled and we shared a conspiratorial grin and then I got serious. “No, I don’t mean that way. I mean more…maybe it was a cry for help.”

Joe pulled his chin back, his face shocked. His eyes roamed down over the dashboard to the floor, he stared at his feet and then looked straight ahead at the horizon where my headlamp beams seemed to force the bare trees to part for us. “That’s not Trevor,” he said. “That’s not who he is. He’s never been like that. If he were gonna do something like that he would just do it, he wouldn’t…” He seemed to struggle with his words and then said simply, “No.”

A huge internal sigh of relief whooshed out of me but I couldn’t hint at it. “Good,” I said, nodding slowly.

We drove in a nice sort of companion quiet, neither of us feeling the need to talk until Joe rested a warm hand, for the briefest of seconds, on my shoulder and then pulled back. “I see why he likes you,” Joe said.

Something in my belly tightened and my throat went loose, my heart slamming against my ribcage as Joe’s words triggered a reaction that made me lick my lips and try to quell the butterflies that fluttered down below. This was not how it was supposed to be. I was supposed to be excited to go see Trevor and grab whatever little bit of time we had, wringing it until we squeezed out every last lustful drop. He could go back to Boston and live his life and I could stay here and live mine.

And the way that the presence of these two men changed the execution of time for me would come to an end.

Joe

It just seemed so weird to me that I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her. Here we were, hurtling along these weird country roads, in her little rusted out box of a car. It looked like something from those Soviet era movies that we were forced to watch in AP World History, but with only the grimness, none of the fascination. She had a glow, a purpose and a grounding to her and she seemed to be completely unaware of it.

At home, everyone, guys and girls, were so focused on making sure that they controlled as much as possible what other people thought of them and at the same time were thoroughly manipulated by what other people thought of them. The congruity of opinion was what helped you to stay popular, or at least to stay not
not
-popular. Being on the fringe was the kiss of death. In fact, I couldn’t really name anybody who wasn’t part of my circle. We were all the captains of the sports teams, the heads of debate clubs and outdoors clubs and Young Whatever Political party clubs. I was editor in chief of the newspaper and part of the academic decathlon team. Finding an answer to “What do you do?” was what we did. It was who we were, meeting these milestones, fighting for a high school resume that showed the world that we weren’t as inadequate as we thought we were on the inside.

And along comes Darla.
Really?

She was the kind of girl…no, she was a woman. The kind we don’t have back home or, if we do, they don’t live in Sudborough. I could see why Trevor was taken with her, I got it and yet it seemed a little too much like slumming. If we knew we were around for months or even years I’d understand more because this wasn’t someone you fucked and left. This was the kind of person that made you stay.

A thin tremor of fear shot through my right arm and I gripped the car door handle to steady myself. Was Trevor thinking about staying? Is that why he was so cagey when it was time to leave? I did not want to be the messenger to Mrs. Connor with
that
missive.

The air was warm enough that Darla had the windows down or, perhaps, they just didn’t roll up. Her blonde curls, little tufts, flew out behind her face, her ponytail heavy and thick but her eyes animated and a little wild. Her excitement was for Trevor, I knew that. I’d been Trevor’s second best for a long time. He used to say that he didn’t understand why, that I was like something chiseled out of Esquire. But Trevor had something I lacked and frankly that I didn’t really want because it was a bit too untamed. And that drew women to him – the wrong women, of course. None of them actually wanted to be licked by the flames of the fire in Trevor’s belly. Darla looked like she wanted to be slow roasted in it.

“Darla?” I asked, quietly, my voice barely above a whisper. It made me feel weak so I cleared my throat and asked with a deeper, more authoritative voice. Her back straightened as I opened my mouth and said, “What’s it like?”

She turned her head, frowned and looked at me. Then her eyes went back to the road. “What do you mean? What’s what like?”

“Living here. Your life, your future.”

She snorted. “Future? What future?”

“You have fifty or sixty years left. What are you going to do with it?”

She exhaled and her shoulders slumped, just a bit. Her foot moved on the pedal as she slowed the car down and turned down another road. I didn’t remember the drive between her trailer and the hotel being quite this long but I didn’t care much either. This was the most enjoyable conversation I’d had in a long time and for once the focus wasn’t on my looks or my permanent record.

“Around here, Joe, people don’t…” she faltered, clenched her jaw and then relaxed a bit, “people don’t think that way. If you’re gonna go to college it’s either because your parents have enough money to send you away or because you need to be a nurse or get a criminal justice degree to become a cop, or maybe some specialized training like computers, or auto-tech. A lot of that can be done in high school, though, for free. People here, we work construction, we clean the houses of people like you though – there aren’t many around here. We don’t think in terms of futures and careers beyond, ‘Oh, I want to have a family some day,’ though, more likely it’s, ‘Oops, I guess I’m having a family now’.”

That made me laugh, and not in a funny kind of way. It made me nervously sick. The handful of girls I knew our age who’d gotten pregnant just got abortions. I wasn’t going to say that aloud right now to Darla. She was opening up to me and I didn’t deserve it after being such an asshole to her. Blowing it again meant that she wouldn’t give me a second chance.

I nodded. “I think I understand.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Well, give me a chance.”

“It’s not about chances.” The car turned onto the gravel road of her trailer development and an immediacy, a sense of urgency swept over my entire body, making me tense without the usual irritability. “Your whole life is about having plenty, even if it’s plenty of things it doesn’t even occur to you to want. You have plenty of food, plenty of nice space in your house, plenty of nice cars, plenty of good tutoring, plenty of orthodontics.” She pointed to her crooked teeth. They were straight on top but the bottom jaw was a mish-mash of teeth thrown hither and yon inside her gumline. “You have
plenty
– but you also have plenty of rules, and around here we have our own set of rules. One of them is: don’t make too many plans, because people who don’t have money don’t get to have that kind of control over their life.”

“So it’s about money?”

The polite thing to say would have been ‘no’ and back home, if I’d asked that question, someone would have given a socioeconomic diatribe that explained that no, it had nothing to do with money, that it was about culture and that the working class were a morphism and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Darla’s refreshing answer, “Fuck yeah it is!”, made me double over with laughter.

I finished my chuckle and held my palms out, knowing she’d be offended if I didn’t explain right away. “I’m laughing because you’re so honest.”

“That’s funny?”

“It’s awesome.”

She pulled the car into her spot next to her little shed and our eyes locked. Before I could think about it, I began to lean forward, just wanting some part of her earthiness. She was the most real person I think I’d ever met. Her face softened and I swear she began to lean in, too.

And then
tap, tap, tap!
Trevor was at the window.

Darla

“So, where’s your uncle?” Joe asked me, pulling back and acting as if we hadn’t just had a moment. Trevor waved and smiled like a minor maniac out there, his shoulders raised and hands shoved in his pockets. A slight night chill made me feel a bit sorry for him. Maybe I should grab a flannel shirt of Mike’s to keep him warm.

Or maybe I could just keep him warm…

I looked around – no truck. Hmm…that was weird. Sometimes Mike’d bring it home without a trailer attached although the manager of the trailer park didn’t like that too much. It stirred up too much dust and rutted the roads so I knew he’d been parking it and then driving his junky, old beater truck here but neither vehicle was within sight.

“Hang on, let me call him,” I said. I could see Joe’s agitation level rising. I wasn’t sure how much of it was from our being interrupted by Trevor and how much was from Mike not being here. A little part of me hoped that it was more the former than the latter.

How could I be doing this? Who finds themselves attracted to two guys at once like this and doesn’t feel bad about it? That’s the part I didn’t understand. I didn’t feel bad about it – I felt exhilarated, like there were more possibilities than I’d ever imagined. I knew that from just meeting Trevor, it had been pounded into me – literally – by our time together but now here I was leaning in for a kiss from his best friend and…nope, not a pang of guilt. Nothing. More than anything I seemed to think I
should
feel guilty rather than
actually
feeling guilty, and that was all kinds of fucked up crazy.

“Hello? Uncle Mike? Where are you?”

“I’m here.”

“Here where? At home?” Craning my neck, I looked around again for a sign of him.