Truants (10 page)
“It’s all right,” I said. “He’s not here.”
“You don’t know.”
I walked over to the little town square.
“What now?” she asked again.
She walked a step behind me as I surveyed the courthouse grounds in a broad circuit, and I told her the story of Magan, a kid I had known when I was ten and lived with my father in a house in Phoenix. He had slept out ninety-nine times in a row. True story. It was a record.
“And …?” she asked.
“Well. Ninety-nine times. We’re just ‘sleeping out.’ It’s warm and dry, probably …”
“Oh, shutup. You’re such a queer asshole!” she said sitting down on the curb.
“Look. I am going to spend the night on the far side of those stone steps to the courthouse. It’s a safe place. I’ll see you.” I didn’t care what she did.
She was right in one regard: unless you are near home and trying for a record, sleeping out is generally a threatening exercise. If you fall asleep in the wrong place, who is going to sneak up on you in the middle of the night and strike you with a logging tool? Who is going to step on your slumbering face?
My father probably had a pull-out couch in every room, clean sheets, and a bedside fridge.
Later, I felt Louisa snuggle against me on the grass next to the wall. “This is the shits,” she said. “Don’t get any ideas.”
But even later, she whispered, “What would they do with that girl?”
“What?”
“The girl in The Death Car. Would they bury both parts?”
I had the sense not to answer that one, and finally she slept, and then, as the light came, I slept, the earth as our mattress, the stars going out, Wickenburg, Arizona 85358.
**************
When we woke up, we saw that a man had passed out right around the corner. The man’s shoes were about five feet from Louisa’s face. It just wasn’t what she wanted to see first thing. When we took a look at the withered old guy, it was clear that he might have bettered Magan’s record. I imagined his thirty children sleeping in their new condominiums all across the continent.
We walked the length of Main Street three times waiting for the cafés to open. We didn’t talk, just strolled around in our dirty clothes looking like two chimney sweeps on a shopping adventure. The store windows were loaded with raw deerskin jackets and moccasins, and the dusky reflections of the ghosts of ourselves.
At last, the Help-Wanted Café opened and we drifted in. It was actually the Quartzite Café we found out inside; the window sign had been covered by the handwritten job advertisement. I wasn’t exactly sure what was bothering Louisa. She kept looking around as if expecting Ring Holz himself to take our order.
“What’s the matter?” Nothing. “Okay,” I tried again, “what do you want to do? You’re glad to be here aren’t you? On the way, I mean.”
“He’ll find me.”
“No, he won’t.
You
don’t even know where you are.”
“Wickenburg.”
“He’s not as smart as you are.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to my father’s house. He’ll take care of everything.”
“What about me?”
“That’s what I mean. He’ll take care of everything. You can stay there, do what you want.”
She lifted her coffee cup to a face that was not overcome by my argument. The Quartzite Café was one of those schizy gathering places that serves coffee, toast, and eggs until about eleven in the morning and then lowers the curtains and slides beer along the bar. The red carpet was worn like a desert trail to the restroom, where I washed my entire self as best I could.
Outside, seated against a parking meter, was my associate on the lam. The angle of sunlight was a promise in the Wickenburg morning.
“Okay, which way?” Louisa stood up.
“Right over there,” I said. “California, land of the patio …”
“And how do we go?”
“Bus, plane, taxi-cab, but no train, okay.”
“You got enough money to take the bus?”
Money, looming its greasy countenance into our itinerary. Money. Something married people worried about, I thought.
“We could rob a train,” she said.
“We could hitchhike,” I said, knowing that hitchhikers in Arizona usually end up in shallow graves forty feet from some side road.
I could tell from the way Louisa walked by my side toward the highway that besides being apprehensive, she was already weary of our Orphan Annie lifestyle. We stood at the last turn in the highway in Wickenburg, Arizona, thumbing for a ride. Several cars full of citizens bound for Las Vegas hurtled past us.
At nine or so, a man in a white late-model Chevrolet pulled over, and I ran up to the car to check out the driver. He wore a white shirt and a polyester tie patterned with television static. His pale blue leisure-suit jacket was draped over the back of the front seat and I saw an oversize valise on the back seat. He could have been a truant officer.
“Are you a businessman?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“Come on!” I waved Louisa up. I climbed in the back seat and she boarded the front.
“Where are you two going?” he asked Louisa.
“My sister and I are going to Palo Alto, California, where we live in comfort with our parents. Our father is a brilliant actor.”
“Oh, who is he.”
“Gordon Ardor. Perhaps you’ve seen him in one of his many motion pictures.”
“No, can’t say that I have. But I rarely get to the movies.”
“What do you do?” Louisa asked.
“I’m a salesman. For Grebco.” He checked her out.
“That’s great,” I said. His hair looked peculiar. It had just been cut too short. The pale line behind his ears was going to cost him hundreds in sales for the next two weeks.
“What’s Grebco?” Louisa was loosening up.
“Fixtures,” he said. I loved it:
fixtures;
there’s a word to trust.
Then he turned on the radio, and the desert flew by for a long time, repeating itself, as we listened to disco music broadcast from the Union Plaza in Las Vegas, Nevada. Like many Arizona highways, this road was an extended shock absorber exercise, and as the three of us nodded up and down through the desert, I was lulled into a narcotic carsick sense of well-being. There hadn’t been much sleep last night and the air-conditioner in Grebco’s company car pretty much stopped at the front seat.
When I was younger, maybe ten or eleven, before the trouble really started, my father promised to teach me how to drive. We had an old BMW which was pretty beat up and complicated by a dozen wrong and partial repairs, but my father promised to teach me how to drive it. I think it was something he just said as he “carted me around,” because he never got to it. I should really never have expected him to. At night sometimes, I mean right in the middle of the night at three or four or later, I would go out to the carport and sit in the old thing. It had a nice feel, the old leather seats, and it smelled like my father. But later I began finding things in it: cocktail glasses, women’s combs, worse things. They were not my mother’s things. So I’d get out and release the brake and roll the little car back until it took the low hill of our yard, rolling, and buckled into the rocky ditch across the street. He knew it was me but he never said anything. I did it three times in my last month at home. He never said a thing.
When I woke, still bouncing along the roadway, my nausea had grown a size, and I pressed the small chrome switch to lower the window. When it did not move, regardless of how I toggled the lever, I looked up into the front seat. That is when I saw Captain Grebco doing something strange. He had turned off the radio, and he had control of the doors and windows, and he was doing something strange.
Louisa’s head lolled against the window, so I angled my foot under her seat until she felt it and squirmed awake, swearing. She gave off swearing when she saw Grebco putting on the gloves.
He was driving down the highway pulling on a pair of black kid-leather gloves. We both watched as he pulled them tighter and tighter, squeezing and smoothing every knuckle. He took his time pressing hard between each finger. We watched him carefully, as if he might ask one of us to do it next.
“Hands cold?” I said. I tried to say it with a lilt.
No one said anything.
Louisa looked sick. Grebco looked sick, too, but in a different way. He could have been smiling; I wasn’t sure. A veneer of sweat coated his face. There was a line of sweat reflected beneath his hairline. I could see the newspapers: MAN WITH TOUPEE ATTACKS ORPHANS.
“Hey,” I said, hoping to talk us down from this terrible place, “what kind of fixtures do you sell?”
Grebco said “Shhhhh.” And we started going faster. I did not care to go faster. I wanted to be let off right here. “Okay, this is fine,” I wanted to say:
We’ll get out. This is where we were going. Really
.
But I said: “Those sure are nice—”
“Shhhhhh.”
“—driving gloves.”
“Look, kid!” Grebco shouted, swerving onto the shoulder but not slowing down. He waved a glove past my face. I don’t know if it was a right hook or not. “You fucking hitchhikers!”
Grebco was going seventy miles an hour now, and I could see the muscle knotting in the hinge of his jaw.
“You smart-ass fucking hitchhikers! Do you know what happens to hitchhikers?” He grabbed a gloveful of Louisa’s hair. As he jerked her head around, I could see that her eyes were shut. “Huh? Do you know what happens to hitchhikers?”
This is not a question, I thought.
“You strut out on the highway, then wonder why somebody rapes you and throws you in the bushes. For days … your bodies …” He broke off, his eyes in a stare, his hands still in Louisa’s red hair.
Seventy-two. Seventy-five. If he threw a wheel on the shoulder we would all do our last desert cartwheel in the company car.
The car was riding hard, leaving the wavy roadway at every dip and I could feel the frame trying to fly. At over eighty, we hit a bad one. I saw the oil spot on the center of the road where other cars had bucked. We slammed against the rise like a sled and jumped. The guy was still driving with one hand. The road curved and we came to earth out of line, skidding once very hard, tearing rubber.
I reached up, slowly, and put my hand on his forearm, just put it there. “Could I ask you to slow down. Please?” I said. “We know what happens to hitchhikers. We know. We don’t wonder why people do the things they do. We don’t wonder why someone rapes us and throws us in the bushes! Now, for God’s sake, slow down!”
The muscle in his cheek re-formed, vanished, came back. He held, staring. He looked at me in the rear-view mirror, squinted.
“I could kill us all.”
“I know,” I said.
He let go of Louisa’s hair.
Seventy. Sixty-five.
Fifty.
The desert slowed and I grabbed Louisa’s shoulder with my right hand. I did not want any leaping around. At thirty, Grebco swerved off the road into the roaring gravel. He was going faster than he realized, and he had his hands full keeping the car in control.
When the car stopped, it was swallowed by its own train of dust. “Get out!” Grebco screamed into the swirling dust. “Get out! Get out!” He sounded as if he were crying, but I couldn’t see. Louisa ran away from the car into a shallow wash, and as I staggered back way from the car, Grebco accelerated through the dirt cloud, finally mounting the highway and sucking air for minutes into the distance.
Louisa was sitting in some rocks well back from the highway. Her knees and elbows were gathered together in a posture unique to women. She was shaking a little. Behind her a hundred wrens peeked out from their apartments in a gigantic ten-armed saguaro cactus to see who was disturbing the neighborhood.
“Well,” I said, walking over, my throat scared dry, “that was rude of him.”
She gasped, looking at me, gasped a laugh, but it turned on her. I put my arms around her and she shook me and the desert for a while.
************
Later, walking along the shoulder of the highway, not trying for a ride, we talked.
“We are going to have to do that again, you know,” I said. “I mean, we can’t walk to California.”
She walked straight ahead.
“We’re going to have to get a ride or have our brains simmered crispy by the large and powerful desert sun!”
Her hair swayed with her stride.
I stopped. “Louisa, I don’t even know what the next town is or how far it is!”
She continued.
“Oh, this is wonderful behavior! This is heartwarming. I yelled at her back, and I fell in behind, twenty yards, and followed her across the desert.
We were walking through a rocky passage, lined with the spillage of twenty-ton boulders. They were piled up and down like huge rough eggs, and every glance at the horizon provided a grotesque and comic profile of Snoopy or Donald Duck. It was like being lost on Easter Island.
An hour passed. I broke the hot silence with, “This is how people die in the desert, Holz! One person, refusing a ride, the other yelling!”
She turned. “Don’t call me that!” And she resumed her heroic desert trek. We hadn’t even passed a sign.
Another hour later, we climbed out of a wash and walked into the cluster of shacks known as Wikiup, Arizona 85020. The gravel shoulder widened, and with the new resolve the sight of architecture gives to any lonesome venture, I ran up to Louisa’s side.
“Come on, Louisa, I’ll buy you nineteen sodas and then we can select a ride from a wholesome and good Samaritan and be on our way.”
“I’m taking the bus to the next large town and I’m getting a job.” She’d been thinking the sentence for two hours.
“We don’t have the money to take the bus.”
“I don’t care. I’m going on the bus, somehow.”
“Oh.” It was all I could say in light of her recent decision. We hiked up to the largest shack in Wikiup, a gas station. It was called the No-Brand Self Serv and Motel and featured a century’s worth of old rodeo posters in the greasy windows. The motel was a series of tiny mobile homes strung along the back like a train derailment. Inside were the quaint remnants of a lunch counter. The proprietor was a person whose grimy curls were molded forever into a ring the exact shape of her motorcycle cap which sat on the counter like a pie. She wore a faded green flannel shirt and a gun belt complete with an unfaded gun the size of any large home appliance.
