While He Was Away (2 page)

I loosen my hold.

“Okay?” I ask.

He nods. “Sorry. Just got a little—” He falters.

“What?”

He shakes his head. Whatever he was going to say, it’s been dismissed. “Nothing. Gotta catch my breath. That’s all.”

I go for the light touch, just enough of a hold to keep me from pitching off the back of the bike, should David decide to gun it again. I peer over his shoulder at the speedometer. We’re barely pushing thirty now. Out here in the country, the limit is seventy, and I can’t help it: I want it to be months ago, last year again. Him, the senior guy, graduating a semester early. Me, the junior girl, just moved to Killdeer and new to school. I want David to drive away from tomorrow, not toward it. I want him to drive fast.

“I’m wearing my helmet,” I say.

But David isn’t wearing his. “Don’t want any extra weight. Not tonight. I’ll be packing it soon enough.” That’s what he said earlier when I tried to put the helmet on his head.

We ride on, slow and steady, with David silent and watchful. Grassy fields spread around us. Starry sky arcs above. I lift a hand from David, and, what the heck, I reach for the stars. I tell David what I’m doing. He doesn’t make me feel like a jerk for being myself, like some guys from my past. He doesn’t do worse, like other guys. David loves me.

And he’s about to do what he signed up to do, right before I met him.

I reach higher. I will snag a dark but spangled cloak of sky. I will drag it down and drape it over David’s shoulders. He will be dressed like a hero. He will be a hero. He will come home from Iraq.

But the stars slip through my fingers, and then the whole sky too.

I wrap my arms lightly around David again.

“Don’t go,” I whisper.

He doesn’t hear, for the wind.

•••

We turn back toward Killdeer, driving slower yet as David takes a last, long look around town. We cruise past the shopping mall. The big department store stands empty now. There’s a string of little stores, all but gutted.

David groans.

“Oh great, just great,” he calls back to me. “The Piggly Wiggly’s gone under too.”

We pass the barren supermarket, and I see the darkened sign—that familiar pig in his funny hat. Once the pig shone bright and jolly. Now in the gloom, he sports a menacing leer.

“This whole town is tanking. I’ll never get a job.” In despair, David leans back against me.

“You’ve got a job,” I remind David. “Fifteen months, you’ll be done. I’ll be graduated. We’ll be out of here. Together.”

“And don’t forget my leave.” David sits up straight again. “Eighteen days. I’ll do my best to bring in the New Year with you. Allocations go first to the guys who have, like, pregnant wives. But if I can get the holidays, I will.”

“It won’t matter when we’re together as long as we’re together,” I say.

We drive past Killdeer High. (One more year. My new mantra.) Beneath the bright streetlights I glimpse our reflection, flickering along the tinted windows of the cafeteria. David got so dark at OSUT, sweating all day in the sun. Compared to him I’m a ghost. I tell him that.

“So haunt me over there. Promise you will.” Then, as the bike slows even more, he says, “Hey. It’s Ravi. Hey, Ravi!”

I glimpse a tall, broad-shouldered guy with straight, black hair, trudging along a parallel path past the school, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of a gray hooded sweatshirt. That’s Ravi, all right. I’ve seen him around town. And David has told me about him: how when they were young, they were just about the only brown-skinned kids in school. On bad days David got called “spic” and “beaner.” Ravi got called “A-rab” and “towelhead.”

In spite of the bullying, or maybe because of it, they played by the rules. They did park district sports—David, soccer, and Ravi, basketball. They joined the lily-white Cub Scout troop. They earned badges, went on campouts, entered pinewood derbies. David, always charming and easygoing, became increasingly popular. Ravi, shyer and more intense, hung in there. They were loyal to each other.

Then in fourth grade 9/11 happened, and things got way worse for Ravi. Kids didn’t know exactly where his family came from, but they called him “terrorist” anyway. He got beat up all the time. Year after year he kept getting pounded. David tried to protect him. But as time passed, Ravi hung more and more in the shadows. He just wanted everyone to leave him alone—even David. That’s how David remembers it anyway.

Junior year, Ravi dropped out of school. David said he’d heard that Ravi was waxing floors over at the Walmart, graveyard shift. I saw Ravi there once late one evening in the parking lot but never said anything.

“Hey, Ravi! Where you been, man?” David yells.

At the sound of David’s voice, Ravi glances up. His striking black eyes widen. He waves.

“That dude is so lost. And what’s with the sweatshirt on a July night like this?”

David speaks loudly so I can hear. From the way Ravi’s expression hardens, I think he probably heard too. David would feel bad about this, so I don’t tell him.

David revs the bike. Ravi watches us drive away. I wave. This time Ravi doesn’t raise his hand.

“He’s probably on his way to work.” I rest my chin on David’s shoulder. “The Walmart’s always so cold. I bet it’s freezing in the middle of the night.”

It’s weird, defending someone I’ve never even met. But something about Ravi’s eyes got to me.

David shrugs. “Man, shoot me if I ever look that desperate. Okay, Penna? People must just think ‘Taliban,’ seeing him. They’d probably think that about me too.” David shivers. “I’m so over getting hurt.”

David could still be talking about Ravi, the bad stuff they endured in grade school. Or he could be talking about soccer, since we’re passing the high school’s soccer field now. Or he could be talking about OSUT.

Or he could be talking about whatever’s next.

I won’t think about whatever’s next.

I’ll think about now, our roundabout ride. David and I know this route like the backs of our hands. We know this route like the life and love lines creasing the palms of our hands. I pressed our hands deep into plaster last week, so we know them really well.

“For keeps,” I said when the plaster molds turned out perfect. David agreed.

“When I come back,” he said, “we’ll add this to your portfolio.”

So we know this route like the five-fingered molds we made, which I will fill with honey and flowers soon. Baby’s breath for love lines. Purple nettles for life. I’ll preserve our hands. Somehow. I’ll keep them safe. When David comes home for good, we’ll add this to his portfolio too.
Scholarship
material. Art Institute, here we come
, we’ll say. We’ll clap our honey-hands together.
Applause! Cheers! War and high school—over and done!
We’ll crack our honey-hands open.
We’re heroes for holding on!
We’ll spoon honey into steaming cups of tea. We’ll swallow ourselves.

Then we’ll pick up this roundabout ride where we left off. Country roads. Red dirt. Starry sky. David showed this all to me early last fall, back when we bought Cokes at the Piggly Wiggly for the first time. He showed me Killdeer too, with its moldering, nineteenth-century brick buildings.

“That was a bank once. That was a brothel,” David said. “Now they’re both just wannabe bed-and-breakfasts, for when Killdeer finally comes into its own again. Ha.”

David showed me the oaks, scrub pines, locust trees, red patina bushes, stinging ants and scorpions, brazen sunsets, sulfuric storm clouds, and red clay earth. He showed me abandoned oil rigs. Right here in the center of town by the shuttered train station, David showed me the one rig that’s still pumping crude, its derrick seesawing like a giant’s teeter-totter. There were tons of rigs here back in the ’80s, David said, when oil was busting out all over. Most of those have dried up now, and the towers and pipes have come down.

“But,” David told me, “there’s still one fat-cat corporation lining its pockets. Some CEO big shot’s making some cold, hard cash. Example for us all, I guess.”

Even this time of night, that rig is pumping away.

•••

We jounce over the train tracks. By day, girls perfect cartwheels on the iron rails. Boys set out pennies to be flattened.
Where
are
their
parents? I’d like to know.
That’s what I think, seeing those kids.

“My mom would never let me do that,” I told David once. This was close to Christmas.

David laughed. “
Let
you? You’re eighteen, Penna. Shake off Linda’s clutches.”

Then David helped me tie my old Barbie dolls to the bitterly cold train tracks. He cast his shadow over their plastic bodies while I snapped photos before the next freight train thundered through town. One blasted by right after David and I unbound the Barbies, but for once I didn’t feel like Linda was hovering, afraid for my life.

I’ve pretty much shaken off Linda’s clutches now. But still, I can’t help myself. I glance back, checking, and glimpse my house a block away, sagging like the neglected thing it used to be before Linda and I moved in and tried to spiff it up a bit. Four end-of-the-season azalea bushes, planted by the front steps, that just managed to hang on. A new coat of gray house paint on the front and the back. (Linda says we’ll get to the sides next year.)

Linda has left the porch light on. The round ring of the kitchen light glows blue too. Otherwise the place is dark.

I see
her
then. I catch my breath.

David must feel the change in me—a sitting-up-straight—because he glances back. “She’s home already?”

“No.” I shake my head until my helmet wobbles. “It’s just that old lady who walks our block. I swear this is her third time today, though. Way late for her.” I bite my lip, feeling concerned. “Too late for someone her age.”

I watch the lady’s frail figure grow smaller as we zip away. Like always, she wears a simple dress—it was pale yellow earlier today, so it probably is now too. She clasps her hands at her thin waist. She picks her way over a broken stretch of sidewalk, lifting her feet in their sandals almost as blind people do, searching for the next safe place to set them down. Her ankles are so narrow that any wrong move might snap them in two. She keeps her eyes fixed on the horizon as she did this morning and afternoon when she passed by. And yesterday morning and afternoon. And mornings and afternoons before that, like clockwork. She looks fairly steady on her feet, even this late. I have to give her that.

We turn a corner and the lady’s gone. I lean into David again. “Linda’s still at Red Earth.”

David nods. No real surprise. More and more in the past few months, Linda seems to have shaken me off too. She’s always at the old-time saloon she inherited, along with the house, from her dad. I never met him before he died, but I’d heard that he was a mean drunk who ran my mother out of town when she was about my age. At the very, very end of the day, dead, my grandpa made amends as best he could for his actions.

“Unlike some people,” Linda likes to say. Linda’s not big into trust.

If Linda were home, it would be way past midnight and our whole house would be ablaze. It takes Linda a while to wind down from work. She’s wired like that. Plus, for the first time ever, she cares about her job, so she’s got this extra buzz thing going on.

“Adrenaline rush,” she says. Ultimately, though, she likes to wait up for me. The last of her clutches, I guess. “I like to know where you’ve been. I like to know where you’re going,” she says.

When I glare, Linda glares back.

“I’m entitled. We’re the only family we’ve got,” she says.

Until this year, that fact didn’t bother me. Linda and I didn’t need anyone else. We didn’t need people who dumped us, ran off on us, or worse.

Now, in those moments when I feel like Linda is suffocating me, I just breathe in the scent of David, lingering on my skin.

I breathe him in.

What will I do when he’s gone?

We pull to a stop at a crumbling viaduct flanked by a U-Store-It warehouse and a boarded-up brick factory. At least the factory was boarded up last time I looked. Someone must be trying to turn it into something else now. There’s some kind of neon flaring over there, some kind of noise.

But David and I don’t care about neon or noise. Not tonight. The viaduct is where we want to be.

Other kids come here too, especially when some local band sets up its amps in the dry streambed that runs beneath the viaduct. The acoustics are wild. The parties can be fun. But David and I have always liked the viaduct best abandoned.

It’s abandoned now. David turns the key in the ignition, pockets the key, and toes down the kickstand. I jump off, whip off my helmet, and hook it on the bike’s seat. I lean into David, press my cheek to his hair. His hair is a shadow of its former thick and curly self. But even scalped army style, bristly and prickling, his hair still smells good, like him.

David hugs me fiercely, swiftly.