The Other Shoe (7 page)

A
T FIRST
, M
RS
. Ashcraft gave her a choice: Karen could ride on the class float, or she could go to detention with the noodle-heads. She might want to try wasting time in company with Keith and Hans Boethcher and Mr. McFeely and his son, the slavering Gabe; she might like to see how much she'd enjoy scraping fossilized gum for a couple hours off the undersides of desks and heat registers. But then Mrs. Ashcraft reconsidered, and she said that, no, there was no choice—this was homecoming. Karen was to report immediately to the rec room and have her face painted. “I'll be there in five minutes, too, so you'd better not try sneaking off to chem lab or the sick room or somewhere. You can show your support like everyone else, Miss Dent. Loosen up for once.” Karen admired silliness very much but could never join in it, for she had no personal dignity to spare, and she wanted no part of anyone's parade, not even to watch. There would be flags and cars and silly ways of walking; there would, she expected, be some horn honking.

The school was nearly empty. A locker slammed in another part of the building and echoed for seconds down the halls. Tennis shoes slapped linoleum, and Karen heard two shrilling boys as they ran together into, and then explosively through, the eastern exit. The big door echoed in the following silence, where it seemed at least that no one had been hurt. She read a butcher paper scroll rolled out along
a ceiling, a thing she'd read many dozen times before—H
AWK
'
S
E
GGSELL
—W
E
R
HAWK AND
R
OLL
!!!—and she took very short and very slow steps but reached the rec room in under a minute, and there she joined a short line of waiting girls, and there the vice president of the Hawk Chics, Darlene Mews, gave her a sponge heavy with paint. “Blue, okay? Everywhere there's skin showing, make it blue. You have to do it by feel at first, 'cause Yvette needs to use the mirror. Jannie Fay puts your finishing touches on you when you get to her. Okay?” Darlene spoke to her as if she were an exchange student or a special-needs student, and though she was herself notoriously stupid, Darlene, as a cheerleader, had to wear only a decal on her cheek, and a little eyeliner, and the lavender ribbons that coiled so prettily in her hair.

The girls in line ahead of Karen had already daubed themselves with this paint, which was in truth nearer black than blue, and it had made some of them almost unrecognizable, and their faces flexed to work against flesh suddenly, interestingly inelastic. Though at first touch it burned, and though it smelled to her of mold, Karen wet her whole face with it, and it almost instantly dried, leaching oil and sweat from her skin. The mix became a desiccated crust, and she looked and felt like the end of a mud puddle.

Her head still hurt when Jannie Fay Palmer filled the hollows of her eyes with orange and wrote SPIRIT in orange on her forehead. Mrs. Ashcraft completed her look by giving her an inflated inner tube to wear as a sort of belt. “Now run,” said Mrs. Ashcraft. “Run. If you move it you should still be able to catch up; they're leaving from down by the bus barn.”

The juniors had been assembled and were milling near an old overturned section of wooden bleachers. Mold and moss clung to its feet. As soon as Karen joined them there, Dennis Frame drifted to her edge of the crowd. He began to hitch his Levis very high so that his squashed privates were raised to press at his lower abdomen
and bulge in relief behind the denim. He narrated the move each time, “
Pres-to Change-oh. Wheeee
.” Karen was, except for Dennis Frame, the only person on earth who found this funny, and no matter how awful she happened to be feeling, no matter what company they were in, he would seek her out to give some performance like this, and she would laugh for him, and then everyone would continue to think them creepy, which she supposed they were, and so Karen turned her back on Dennis Frame and went to stand among a little clutch of religious girls where she knew he would not follow her.

Dingy Bergson was holding forth to the gingham crowd, and she knew her audience, “Teen Renewal,
that's
the program. That's where I met him, and now we get to see each other every Thursday. Justin's so responsible. He's putting a motor in one of his dad's old cars. Or he wants to. If he could find the right size. I think he was way too godly to need high school. Do these boys here know one psalm by heart? No, not one of them does. And he's mine, you might say, and it's because of Teen Renewal.”

At last the word was passed to load up. The junior float this year was nothing more than a flatbed truck, and mounting it, Karen happened to see in a rearview mirror that the paint had caused her face to swell in lumps, and the whites of her eyes were pink, shot with electric veins, and she would, of course, be hideously allergic to something that was for everyone else just fun. Ugly, she rode at the front of the truck, to get it over with, being seen this way, and when the parade turned down Main Street and into a wind predicting early winter, the additional sting of it made her eyes boil up in tears she dared not wipe away. Underclassmen led afoot, marching in loose order and throwing penny candy to spectators and to places where spectators should have been. The band followed in a bus, desecrating “Dixie,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “Sugar, Sugar,” every tune broken on the same thready pulse, and the whole band blared in vain against
Elston Cannon's more persuasive drumming. Elston, a free agent, a sort of thief, staggered to carry a bass drum he'd taken from the music room, and he stroked it with the heaviest mallets to be found there, a three-beat phrase, inexhaustible,
Boom Boom Boom
. And they shouted “Let's go Hawks!” over and over, and in undertones the wits were whispering “We're no good, we're no good,” for the Hawks had yet to win a game that season, and the drumming, the whispering, the perfectly genuine hatred for people they knew only slightly if at all, kids with similarly dismal prospects whose only fault lay in matriculating at the next hick high school down the state highway—all of it was born instantly away in that wind which also burned the cheerleaders' knees the color of strawberry ice cream. Elston's drum sounded inside and outside Karen's beating skull, and it carried down to push at her stomach as she rode along, stretched low and wretched over the cab.

As the parade came abreast the Buck Snort Saloon, Karen saw Henry Brusett in the parking lot of Paulson's Dollar Store, a business that had been dead for as long as she had any memory of it. Mr. Brusett was turned away from the passing noise, stroking at a metal casing with a wire brush, and she recognized him by the top of his head, knew his pickup. He sat on its tailgate, surrounded by a dozen pieces of chain saw, and when he took up one of them, a part no bigger than a pea, and when he held it near his eye and compressed his lips in concentration, she realized how much she had been missing him, if not precisely why, and before she could think better of it, Karen made her way to the edge of the flatbed, sat on it, and pushed off. She felt the inner tube catch behind her, and this pitched her forward so that she landed on the balls of her feet and the heels of her hands, which she sacrificed to the asphalt to save her face from the pavement, and she bounced up bleeding, glancing back at Mr. Pingre, the junior class adviser, who had chosen to pretend he hadn't noticed her leaving.

Neither stealth nor speed was possible for a painted girl in an inner tube, but she ran as best she could, bent at the waist, and she took cover behind a beer truck and waited there until its driver came out of the Buck Snort with a keg on a dolly and a very puzzled look at seeing her there, crouched near his truck. He nodded to her. Karen nodded back and went on. The parade had advanced another block by then, and she felt free to move away from it as she liked. She crossed the street to Mr. Brusett, and as she approached him, Mr. Brusett looked just to her left, then just to her right, and then, as she closed on him, he became transfixed by her stomach. The inner tube. Karen raised a bloody palm. “Hi,” she said. “It's me. Remember me?” She hoped he'd recognize her voice.

“You in some kind of trouble?”

“I'm Karen. Jean's girl. Karen Dent?”

“You okay?”

Karen considered the heels of her hands. Black pebbles were embedded in them and they were leaking blood and some other fluid, something clear and viscous. “I'm fine. You wouldn't believe how often that happens to me. I just go down. Skin myself up. Graceful, I'm not.” She could think of nothing else to say, no reason that might make any sense to him, or to her, for her being there. The air around him smelled of solvent.

“It's homecoming,” she said.

“So I figured. We used to have that, too.”

“They make you, oh . . . you know, do stuff. Did you even know who I was?”

“Yep.” Mr. Brusett fitted steel rings onto a piston.

“I didn't know if you could tell,” she said at last.

“Sure.” With the tip of his tongue visible between his lips, Mr. Brusett slid the piston into its sleeve in the little engine block. He secured it to a wrist pin.

“I also didn't know if you'd remember my name. I wasn't sure you ever even knew it. They never call me that at the house, so . . . I didn't know. It's been a long time since you quit coming out.”

Mr. Brusett caressed the saw's teeth with a small round file.

“I wish you would've kept coming,” she said. “Those other ones drive me crazy, the ones my dad rounds up. We had one of 'em wet his pants last Sunday.”

“It's quite the crowd they gather out there.”

“So, why don't you? Come?”

“Oh, I get kinda busy. What're you? You the queen?”

“What?”

“Of homecoming,” he specified.

“Are you kidding? Me?”

“I thought that might be why you were in that getup.”

“This is not,” she said, “what the queen wears.”

“No, I guess it wouldn't be. But you're not . . . I saw you kind of . . . you're sure you're not in trouble?”

“Would you help me out if I was?”

Mr. Brusett filed at the saw, every stroke a sigh. Shifting foot to foot, Karen watched him. Her stomach had settled but her head still hurt. Mr. Brusett blew at the file and a shimmering rode on his breath, tempered steel made stardust. She could hear the pounding and horns honking down at the baseball field where the school was rallying.

“Is this what you do? You fix saws? I never really knew what you did. You didn't talk about that. But I guess you never said anything about anything.” He had been her speculation. He'd been, mostly, whatever she wanted or needed him to be at the moment, and it occurred to Karen that it might be better to leave things that way. To truly know someone, she suspected, could be hard on a friendship.

“I ran into Sandy Dean in the hardware section of the drugstore, and he wanted to know if I can get a saw going for him. Told him I'd
take a look at it. All it actually needed was cleaning. Which he probably knew.” Mr. Brusett's voice was like an old toy, something enduring but fitful in its operation; this was so much more than he'd ever said before.

“This paint is killing me.”

Mr. Brusett screwed the spark plug back into the machine.

“They probably shouldn't use this kind of paint on people's bodies,” Karen said. “Least not their faces. This stuff is bad. You know how to get it off?”

“Gasoline'll take about anything off, but that'd be awful. Maybe just soap and water? You tried that?”

Mr. Tanner, the principal, came trolling up Main Street in his Ford, probably only going back to school, but there was some chance that he was looking for her, so Karen put Mr. Brusett's truck between herself and the street and ducked down beside the front fender. She did not believe Mr. Tanner had seen her. The rest of the student body and faculty followed along, headed back to fourth period, and through the ten minutes it took them to straggle past, Karen squatted by Mr. Brusett's truck, hidden, she hoped. In this posture her nose was not far off the inner tube, which smelled overwhelmingly of rubber and of the benzene compound used to patch it. She heard Mr. Brusett's tailgate slam; he came around to where she was crouched. “They're outta sight now. They've all gone around the corner.”

Karen, having stiffened in the knees, stood in stages. She stepped out of the inner tube. “You want this? It's school property, and it's got this harness thing on it, but . . . What a day this has been.”

“What kind of help you need? They had you crying, didn't they?”

“Crying? Oh no, that's just, like I say, it's just this paint.”

“You're not in any trouble?”

“I might be in a little bit now. I think I'll get an unexcused absence out of it. Kind of a hooky thing. I'll miss the bus home, too. Never did
that before. But the main thing, I gotta get this paint off my face. This is the worst stuff they ever invented.”

Mr. Brusett drove her to Cale's Gas and Pawn, and in its powder room there was a cold-water tap, and she pumped granular soap from a plastic onion mounted to the wall. There was a towel dispenser and its stiff, filthy loop of toweling, so she tried wiping herself with toilet paper, and when that clotted and shred, Karen wet soap by the handful to make two supple grinding stones which she used to rasp at herself, cold water running off her wrists and all down her best Pendleton shirt, which was now irretrievably, she supposed, streaked with the blue of her school colors. The paint yielded in layers, the last of them nearly fused with her skin, and she scrubbed and scrubbed to achieve at last the complexion of a tie-dyed T-shirt. Her eyes felt better, but her face burned now, and she was wet and cold.