Red Earth and Pouring Rain (9 page)

“Okay. Talk to you later.”

I stood there for a moment, stretching, watching her white skirt move on the back of finely muscled calves as she tip-tapped
away with quick, little steps. Back at New Dorm, in the lounge, I sat and listened to the Talking Heads echo in the courtyard
outside: “Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est? Fa, fa, fa, fa; fa, fa, fa, fa fa fa.” There was a torn newspaper under my foot,
and a tank platoon ploughed through a field on the front page. The door opened in and Tom walked in, wearing silver-rimmed
glasses with mirrored lenses. Again, I felt like I was in a film, and I liked it less and less, that feeling, I mean.

“What’s up, buddy?” He sat down next to me. “You look like you dropped down a cliff. What’s the matter, hungover?”

“No,” I said, again unable to talk about Babuji, and so I pointed at the newspaper. “It’s just geo-fucking-politics. Gets
me down.”

“You’re not supposed to talk about it,” he said, thumping me repeatedly on the back, just below the neck. “No, no, no, no.
Very passé, Abhay. It’s much better just to say it’s angst. Everyone will understand.”

“Right. Yeah. Let me wear those.” I put on his glasses.

“Let’s go see what Lawrence is up to.”

So I sat in my booth and Lawrence went looking for whatever he was looking for across the burning desert. After the movie
was over and I had put away the reels I was exhausted, drawn out like a string. I told Tom this.

“You’re just susceptible to depression today, asshole,” he said. “Or actually the last few days. Listen, let’s go into town.
Somebody’s playing at Parachute. It’s a bummer being around you when you’re like this. Got to get you up again.”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll get a ride. There’s a whole bunch of people going.” “I don’t know.”

But there wasn’t much else to do that evening, and I didn’t want to be alone, so I sat in the backseat of somebody’s car and
listened to the tires humming on the freeway. The club was in a basement, very dark,
and the music was loud, violent, the usual stuff. I bought a beer and walked around, scraping against the wall. I leaned on
a round pillar and watched the band for a while, but then Tom found me and crooked his arm around my neck.

“Let’s slam, Abs,” he said.

“Isn’t that passé?” I said.

“But it feels good,” he said, and dragged me through the crowd, to where a circle of people, men and women, boys and girls,
spun in a circle, bouncing off each other, impacting.

“Come on.”

“Slam-dancing is passé.”

“Come on, shithead.” He pulled me into the circle, and instantly I was almost knocked off my feet. In a few moments I began
to feel the rhythm of it and soon I was ricocheting from body to body, my eyes half-shut. It looked harsh, but it did feel
good, and you could lose yourself in it. When I finally staggered out, my head spinning, my body was already starting to ache,
but I could feel a smile on my face.

“Hello,” she said.

She was dressed in black again, a skirt this time, with the ubiquitous T-shirt. The red hair was pulled back tightly into
a braid, leaving her face exposed. She looked very young.

“Amanda.”

“How are you?”

“Good,” I said. “Good. And you?”

“Okay. The people I came with left.”

“The girls from the hall?”

“They thought this place was gross.” She shook her head. “Gross. Assholes.”

“It is pretty seedy.”

“Pretty seedy?”

“Something like that.”

“You have a funny way of talking.”

“I come from a funny place.”

“Funny?”

Behind her, a bald head moved in the yellow light, perfectly spherical, with a curving scar caterpillaring up the lower hemisphere.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“You like this?”

“Do you?”

I shrugged. “Do they do this in Texas?”

“Everywhere.”

I got another beer, and one for her, and we sat at a round metal table at the back, where it was so dark that all I could
see was a flash when her eyes moved. There were black shapes around us, almost motionless. Listening to her voice in the darkness
reminded me, for some reason, of being very young, of my friends and myself when we were at school together, of sitting up
in bed, wrapped in blankets and telling each other ghost stories. I told her this and she laughed, and said that when she
was very young she would lie alone in bed, eggs in both armpits, waiting for them to hatch.

“You what?”

“I thought I could make eggs hatch, so I took eggs out of the fridge and put them in my armpits when I slept, thinking maybe
I’d wake and there’d be chickens. But they never did, and I guess after a while they would start to rot or something, my father
would come and take them away, throw them away I guess. But I always thought I could make them hatch so I would get some more.”

“That’s a sad story.”

“They never broke though.”

“What does your father do?”

“He’s a judge. He has white hair.”

Tom came listing through the tables, leaning over bottles of beer and glasses and cigarettes, peering at the mannequin-still
shapes.

“Tom.” I raised my voice over the music. “Tom.”

He slid into a chair, tilting to get a good view of Amanda’s face.

“Amanda,” he said. “Hey.”

“Hi.”

“Abhay, they’re leaving. We have to go.”

“Already?” I said, and saw the soft white of his teeth.

“You don’t have to,” Amanda said. “You can come with me later.”

“You have a car?” Tom said.

“Yes.”

“Perfect,” he said, his head turning toward me, and I picked up a
butt from the table and flicked it at him. It hit him somewhere around the chest and fell to the ground.

“Asshole,” I said.

“Abhay doesn’t drive,” he said. “He wants to live in L.A. but he doesn’t want to drive.”

“Why?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t like it. It’s not like I can’t. I learnt. But I don’t like it.”

“You’re weird, boy,” Tom said.

“Tom’s a redneck from Ohio. His parents put him on one of those three-wheel motorcycle things before he could walk. Went tearing
over the countryside chewing tobacco and drinking Jack Daniel’s and chasing gals.”

“Damn proud of it,” he said. “Good ol’ ‘merican stuff, little Indian boy. What did you do?”

“Rode in horse-carriages, I guess. I don’t know.” A bubble, a little hard place of pain expanded in my chest then, and my
voice changed, and I didn’t want to talk anymore. I suppose they sensed it, because they began to talk about bands they had
seen, in other cities and states.

We came up out of the club into the smell of piss. A black man with a speckled beard sat in a doorway, staring down at his
feet, splayed before him on the sidewalk. He looked at us as we passed, then down again. Tom veered off to the left and staggered
into the middle of the street. I ran after him and put an arm over his shoulders, pulling him back.

“What now?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Home?”

“Maybe.”

“We’ll think of something,” Amanda said.

“It’s early,” Tom said.

A neon tube at the entrance to a parking lot buzzed and flashed as we passed under it. In the lot, Amanda dug in a pocket
as we squeezed between vehicles. Tom ran his hand, on the side away from me, over windshields and roofs. Amanda stopped by
a low-slung black car and put the key into the door.

“This is yours?” Tom said.

“Yes.”

“This is yours?” he said again, pulling away from me and putting his hands on the car, leaning over it, stretching out on
it.

“Uh-huh.”

“This is yours?”

“She just said so, bonehead,” I said.

“This,” he said, turning to me, “is a Jaguar, bonehead.”

“Oh,” I said.

He bent and clambered into the car, uttering little sighs of ecstasy: “Smell that leather. Sweet. Sweet. I can’t believe you
drive this thing.” Amanda shrugged: a nervous, awkward movement. I got into the front seat and buckled myself in, and then
we were all quiet until we were on the freeway. Amanda pressed a button and the cabin —that’s what it felt like, flying above
the hunkering houses, separate —filled with music. I could feel the power of the machine in the way it kissed the road, lightly,
smoothly, and in the way that Amanda drove, one hand on the stick shift, confident, veering from lane to lane.

“You’re a good driver,” I said.

“This is a good car to drive,” she said. “You can really feel the road through it.”

“You must learn young in Texas. I’d like to go there some day, just to see.”

“What do you do?”

“What do I do?”

“What’s your major?”

I smiled, realizing she hadn’t wanted to ask the question in a way that would make her seem like a freshman.

“Anthropology,” I said. “But I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

“Who does?”

“Where are we going? —that is the question,” Tom said.

“Go to sleep,” I said. “We’ll wake you up when we get there.”

“Surprise me, surprise,” he said. He twisted around for a moment or two, knocking knees against the back of my seat, and then
was still. We drove on toward Claremont. Amanda and I talked now and then, but mostly there was just the music, and metal
tearing at the wind.

We came off Exit 47 and turned north, toward the quiet dark mass of the mountains, sensed more than seen in the moonless night.
“Let’s go
up Baldy,” I said. Amanda nodded and we swung up past the colleges and into the lower slopes. Below us the city began to form
itself into a checkerboard grid, into straight lines of light stretching on forever, into a cool Cartesian beauty that promised
order and sanitation. Amanda drove off the road, onto a dirt track, and we stopped on an overhang looking out on the valley.
She began to rummage through a purse.

“I wish we’d thought to bring beers,” I said.

“Better,” she said, holding up a little square of glassine. She pulled a rectangular mirror out of the bag.

“Oh, no,” I said.

“You don’t like it?” she said, raising her eyebrows.

“No, I like it too much,” I said. She poured the white powder onto the mirror and began to cut it with an industrial razor.
“Isn’t coke supposed to be passé?”

“Who gives a shit?” she said.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter.” She cut the lines and gave me the mirror, and began to roll a five-dollar bill. I twisted in
my seat and reached back to shake Tom awake. He came up with a look of terror on his face, with pupils dilated and lips pouting.

“What, what…”

“Easy,” I said. “Want some candy, little boy?”

He rubbed his eyes, yawned, twisted his head from side to side. “It’s so dark. I mean, up here.” He took the mirror from my
hand.

“There’s no moon,” Amanda said. “And it’s cloudy.” She gave him the rolled-up bill. We did the lines, passing the mirror around,
and I was last. I let my head roll back and savored the clean, clean rush of it, the hard chemical taste and the buzzing numbness
around the gums and lips.

“Hallelujah,” Tom said, running a moistened finger over the mirror. He smiled and shook his head. “We are blessed.” He put
a hand on Amanda’s shoulder. “Let me sit in the seat. If I can pretend I’m driving this thing I’ll be in heaven.”

She giggled. “Okay.” So she got out of the car, and I went around the front and stood beside her, and we watched Tom wiggle
into the front seat and take hold of the wheel. He made a low purring sound in his throat, turned the music up and started
to dip his head forward and back, shoulders hunching up and down, in time to the beat. “Whooeee,” he said. Amanda and I laughed.

After a while Amanda cut some more lines and we sat on the grass with our backs against the car. I reached up behind me and
tapped on the door. “Tom,” I said, “Tom.”

“What?”

“Here. Turn the music down.”

“No way. I’m having too much fun. Where’s that bill?”

“Here. Roll up the windows.”

He handed the mirror back to me and then I heard the quiet hiss of the windows as they slid up, cutting off the music. I shivered.

“Are you cold?”

“Feels like it’s going to rain.”

I lay back and put my arm under my head, and sure enough, in a few moments, I felt a drop on my forehead, in the middle, a
little above my eyes.

I heard my voice say, “Let me read your hand,” surprising myself, because this had been a well-known gambit even at fifteen,
allowing you to hold and caress the other’s hand, but Amanda responded enthusiastically.

“You can tell the future?” she said.

“Yes, Madame. Not only the future but also the past.”

“But you can’t see anything, the lines and stuff.”

“Tell Tom to switch on the light inside.”

She leaned across me and motioned at Tom. A weak illumination hit our bodies, and as she moved to lie down beside me, elbows
on the ground, facing me, I felt the long coil of hair move across my chest.

“Here,” she said, holding up her right hand. Her skin was cool and crisp, like paper. I ran my finger across the mound at
the base of her thumb. “What?” she said.

“Nothing, nothing.” I tried to remember the astrologers at home, the ones on the sidewalk who would let a parrot pick out
your destiny from a pile of dirty pieces of paper. “You will have many children,” I said, putting on a generic non-American
accent. “I see in these excellent and clean lines in your palm much success and little pain, much joy and little sorrow.”

She laughed. “Liar,” she said. We kissed and her lips were supple, moving. I could taste the powder on both of us. She moved
up and put an arm across me, smoothing away the water from my forehead. The
bones of her shoulders were thin, fragile under my hands. She turned her head and began to kiss my neck, finding, instantly,
a long bruise that curved downward. She said something indistinct and ran her tongue over it.

“That’s a cliché,” I said.

“What?”

“Kissing bruises or scars and that sort of thing,” I said. “It’s a cliché.” I raised her chin back to me, to my lips.