Red Earth and Pouring Rain (26 page)

“We went home. I mean I went home with her. To her room, I mean.” On the way up to Scripps she tucked her hand under my elbow.
I could feel her knuckles rubbing against my ribs, the softness of her sweater. Neither of us said anything till later in
her room, when she said, I’ll just be a minute.

“Did she say or do anything that would’ve indicated that she was depressed? Unhappy?”

“No. I don’t think so.” I know that she had on a black bra. I know that she liked the tips of my fingers, very softly, across
her shoulderblades. I know how her neck felt, taut, against my cheek, and how the sound that she made, finally, vibrated through
my skin. I know I lay unable to sleep, staring at her wall, at the jagged collage she had made of pictures cut from fashion
magazines, angular black-and-white people with the same cheekbones, all of them. This I know.

“Do you have any idea why she did it?”

“No.” No, I don’t. I am a victim of that boringly common ailment, sir, that malaise that cuts so many loose in a world overflowing
with connections. For everything, they assure me, there is a cause, but I feel like I am floating, adrift. I don’t believe
the sun will rise tomorrow. I don’t understand why the sky is blue.

“You have no idea?”

“No.”

“How often did you see her?”

“Once in a while. We weren’t, you know, seeing each other or anything like that.”

“What was the last thing she said to you?”

“She was on her way to class and she said she had three minutes left.”

“Three minutes?”

“Three and a half minutes.”

He stacked up his papers, laid his pen on top, and looked up at me. “Why did you come here? To this country?”

“For an education,” I said. “Of course.”

He nodded, and then he got up and walked down the hall. I sat alone in the room with its plastic chairs and tried to remember
why I had come. I had lied: an education is how I had come, with scholarships and grants. What I had come for was something
else. What was it? I tried to remember and all I could think of was one Saturday afternoon when we broke school bounds at
Mayo to see the matinee at the Imperial. There were five of us who always went, crowded into the tonga and happy with the
clip-clopping of the horse but terrified that there might be a master around the next corner. The darkness of the theatre
was a relief, and then, just before the movie, the manager always played a scratched, scraping record: ‘Tequila.’ I liked
the Westerns best. That afternoon we watched The
Magnificent Seven
. Afterwards in the tonga homewards we were quiet, stunned, as if we were still watching the movie. Now the town of Ajmer,
with the old mosque and even more ancient fort on the hill above, looked dirty and unreal and the bright afternoon sunlight
hurt our eyes.

At that time, in ninth class, we were breaking bounds every week, and sometimes even during the week. I used to long for ‘Tequila.’
It was like being in love. That afternoon we kept the tonga going past the Main Building, with the statue of the founding
British viceroy in front, past Ajmer House and Rajasthan House to the break in the boundary wall. We went over one after the
other and I came last, and it was only after we were all in that we noticed Katiyar waiting in the shadows for us.

‘Well, well, gentlemen,’ he said.

Katiyar was the school captain, and cricket captain, and a topper in his class as well. So later that night, after dinner
and prep, he drilled us
until we were dripping with sweat and hurting. He was wearing his blue blazer with his colours and his scarf and looked elegant
as always.

‘What a bunch of whining babies,’he said. His father had been at Oxford, so he had the same clipped accent. He had us sitting
in the invisible chair, with our hands held straight out in front, and my thighs were fluttering so badly I was sure I was
going to drop. ‘And I’m being so nice to you.’

‘Thanks, Katiyar,’ I said. ‘We’re really grateful.’

‘I could have taken you in,’ he said. ‘What would have happened then? Expulsion, don’t you think? Ask me why I’m being so
nice.’

So we chorused, ‘Why, Katiyar, why?’

‘Because I got an acceptance letter from Yale today. Full scholarship too.’

‘Katiyar,’ I said. ‘You’re a god.’

‘I am,’ he said. ‘Aren’t I?’

He was, really, and that night he finally let us go after having us each bend over and sending us through his door with a
stinging whack, a single smacking blow across the rear with his fine imported English cricket bat, and somehow even in that
sharp pain it seemed he was gifting us with possibility, with all the promise of America. So the news of his suicide, years
later as we were finishing our own applications, came to us as a kind of impenetrable hieroglyphic, something we speculated
endlessly about but never grasped. We were told he hanged himself in his room at Yale during Thanksgiving break. It was stunning
and unbelievable and finally absurd. I never knew him very well but I refused to believe in his death. I was sure it was not
suicide but something else, a plot of some sort, a lie. To think of Katiyar at Yale was to dream a kind of paradise, and,
though I tried, I could never see clearly in my imagination the scene of his death: the room, the rope, the reason why.

When I stepped out of the police building, it was dark, and there was water on the ground, slick black, mirroring my steps.
The Jaguar slid noiselessly across the parking lot, spraying white from its wheels. It stopped beside me and a door clicked
open.

“Get in, Abhay,” Tom said as I leaned over. “We’re going on a road trip.”

“A road trip?” I said, pulling the door to behind me, feeling safer
almost instantly amid the dark, artificed surfaces of the interior, the comfortable soft hum of the machinery as we swept
onto the metalled surface of the street.

“Uh-huh,” Amanda said. “A trip.”

“Where to?”

“We’re going to go look for heaven,” Tom said.

I turned my head to him. In the scrolling light from the street lights, I could see only fragments of his face, but it looked
like he was smiling.

“Heaven?”

“Yeah. We will seek heaven,” he said, in the voice of a television announcer. “Or at least a little piece of it.”

“So we’re going into the city?”

“No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. “If you’d paid any attention in English 101, Abhay, you would know
that one doesn’t look for heaven in the city. Quite the opposite.”

“In the other direction,” Amanda said.

“Exactly. Abhay, we will find heaven in the great open spaces,” Tom said, waggling a finger in my face. “In the prairies and
in the mountains.”

“Go east, young man,” Amanda said, giggling.

What about school? I started to say, but felt my stomach knot at the thought of it. So I said, “What about money? I don’t
have anything with me.”

“Our young friend here has a stack of credit cards, supplied by dear old Pop. Stop trying to make trouble,” Tom said. “Think
of the adventure. Think of heaven.”

“Heaven.” I couldn’t help laughing.

“See. You’re feeling better already.”

He leaned across my shoulder and switched on the radio. The Japanese are buying MGM, a voice said, Sony wants Universal. So
we glided up onto a freeway and headed east, past the deep red and blue glow of neon, the facades of huge buildings like frozen
black oil, with the comfortable, anonymous companionship of other drivers and, always, the music, the simple but satisfying
beat of metal and electricity. We all lapsed into silence, taken, of course, by the slow curves of the freeway, by its loneliness,
its giant sprawl, the glittering constellations above and below, the dark, the speed.

* * *

In a McDonald’s, as I squirted out red sauce —ketchup, they called it —from a plastic bottle, onto a hamburger, I asked, “Where
are we going, really?”

“Just going with the flow, man,” Tom said, doing a mellow sixties voice.

“Really?”

“Really.”

But Amanda, she reached out then and took hold of my wrist, made me put down the bottle, and pulled my hand into her lap,
where she cradled it in both of hers, not letting go until we were out in the car again and she had to drive.

“… it was just one of those high school things, but it drove me crazy and crazier than anything before or after, and I don’t
know, still, why.” I had changed places with Tom, and was now jammed into the backseat, half asleep, my neck stretched back
against the curve of the leather. We had bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and passed it back and forth until my head had drooped
to the seat. His words, slurred, came to me distant and distorted through the steady hum of the engine and the pulling swamp
of my own sleep.

“A high school story,” Amanda said.

“Sure,” Tom said. “A silly adolescent-type thing. See, this was how it happened…”

I had known her, known of her for years, we had gone to the same school since fourth or fifth grade, and all that time I knew
who she was and she knew who I was, but she went with her crowd and I did with mine, so we never really knew, never even talked
with each other, I think. But senior year, second semester, we both ended up in advanced English, AP, you know, American Life
through American Lit, with Mrs. Christiansen, and so all of a sudden she’s sitting in front of me, all this blond hair falling
over the back of the chair, I’m catching whiffs and gusts and zephyrs of her perfume, and she’s throwing her head back, you
know how girls with long hair do, and Ling’s rolling her eyes at me.

Ling’s my best friend since seventh grade. Taiwanese, her full Chinese name is Ling-Ling Lee, both her parents are doctors,
and Ling’s going to Stanford —early decision —and then medical school, then
surgery. Ling even had her specialty, right, what she’s going to do as a doctor, when she was a junior. She’s incredible.
She works harder than anyone else I know, and is pretty funny when she wants to be, and wears her hair cut short and wears
round gold glasses, with her dark eyes behind. So Mercy —the blond —has her hair over the back of the chair and I’m leaning
forward a bit to get a good look and Ling’s got her lips together, like she’s on the verge of a smile.

Now I guess you could smile at Mercy. Her full name is Mercy Fuller Cunningham and that’s how she writes it on her books,
she’s got all this hair, teased and brushed and whatever till it falls like the proverbial cascade, and she’s got blue eyes
and pale skin and these breasts that gently swell the Saks shirts she wears, you get the idea. When she walks through the
parking lot in front of the school all the little freshmen sitting on the back of cars fall silent and a hush follows her
as they watch her legs working the back of her skirt. But in any case she twisted around in her chair and stuck her hand out
at me, and gave me this big awful bruising smile and said, “Hi, Tom. I guess we’ve seen each other around but we’ve never
really met, so I’m Mercy Cunningham.”

So it takes me a minute before I can get up a smile and grab for her hand, because I’m so stunned and charmed that here’s
Mercy Cunningham actually introducing herself, as if anyone in the whole school doesn’t know who she is. Then Mrs. Christiansen
starts in, but I sit there and watch the hair for the whole hour, and miss whatever Mrs. Christiansen and the others say about
poor old Rip Van Winkle, who had to go off into the mountains. So now you’re thinking I’m already a goner, but actually I’m
sitting there kind of admiring how Mercy Cunningham can be so perfect and yet so incredibly sweet, and I’ve heard other people
say this at school —“She’s nice, really, she is!” —but I never really believed it before, because she hung out with the really
snotty crowd, the kids with the magazine good looks and the perfect green sweaters and the whatever-it-takes-to-wear-them
and the parties you heard about after they happened. And Ling and I, we were always the ones on the edges, we did the theater
club and we won the scholarships and we were going to go to great colleges, but in high school we walked around together and
nobody really knew us except our friends. So when Mercy Cunningham shakes my hand I just sit there thinking it’s true, it
is, but I’m not imagining anything else, and anyway I don’t
like blonds. At this point I’ve had one girlfriend, Sarah Nussenbaum, and she’s Ling’s best girlfriend, and is dark and cute
and small and very Jewish —Princeton, early decision. Sarah and I went together for six months, and we nearly did it twice,
and the second time she jumped up from the couch (her parents’ house), trying to rehook her bra and turning away, crying,
saying we had to be friends. I said all right, okay, no really it’s all right, very comforting and sensitive even though I
was throbbing painfully inside my jeans, so Sarah and I are friends now.

Mrs. Christiansen is going on about Rip, and Mercy Cunningham is bent over her notebook, writing industriously. I notice Ling
watching me watching the hair, and at this I feel a little embarrassed for Mercy. See, Mrs. Christiansen has a gift for stating
the obvious, and most of the kids in AP have read
Poetics
about sixteen times, and some of them like to talk semiotics, so it’s like a point of honor never to write down anything
Mrs. Christiansen says. And now Mercy suddenly perks up and says, “So, you mean, like, Rip is an
artist?”

Mrs. Christiansen flushes with pleasure and I hear a snicker or two, and Ling rolls her eyes. Then the class is over and I
stop at the door to let Mercy by, and she says with another one of those smiles, “See you around, Tom,” and reaches out and
touches me very lightly on the wrist as she passes. This time that fleeting touch really paralyzes me, I’m left standing by
the door staring, preferring brunettes but still feeling a hammer on my heart. Then Ling grabs me by the elbow and pulls me
outside, along the corridor.

“She must shampoo that hair every single day,” Ling says. “My grandmother, in Taiwan, says that modern shampoo destroys hair.
All the chemicals, you know. She’s going to lose it someday.”