Whippoorwill (15 page)

“This place is awesome,” Danny said, sitting and looking around. “Do you like it? I love places like this.”

“It's nice. It's nicer than I thought it would be.”

“Nice? I'd like to live next to a bar like this someday. You know, like a place you could go to every day, and people would know your name, and you could just, I don't know, hang out.”

“It might not be my first choice,” I said, sipping the soda.

When Danny spotted a jukebox over by the restroom door, he asked me for all my change so that he could play some records. I gave him what I had and he dug in his pockets for more, and something about the way he hoisted himself up off the chair to get to his pockets, and about the way he went over and leaned on the jukebox, made me wonder if he wasn't a time traveler. He seemed out of his time period; he was like a 1950s teenager, a boy obsessed with his car and the blues and sideburns. I couldn't tell if he came by it authentically, or if it was a kind of costume he had found to wear for the world, but it made me unsure of what to make of him. I liked kissing him, it was true, and I liked him pulling me onto his lap, the feeling of his
boyness,
if that was a word, but he was peculiar, too, and unpredictable. It struck me that you could never know another person all the way through, not him, not my mom, not anyone. That wasn't bad necessarily, just a fact of life, like wearing socks in the winter, or putting on bug spray in summer.

When the music came on, he asked me to dance with him. There
was
a little dance floor near the jukebox, so it wasn't as crazy as it might have seemed, but to dance, really dance, in the middle of the afternoon in a bowling alley didn't fit into anything I knew. But it seemed important to him, so I gave him my hand and he led me into a swing dance with him, twirling around, holding hands and gliding past him, and I saw he knew what he was doing. Ally the bartender came by carrying the fries, and she smiled at us, no problem, and after she put the food on our table she danced a little beside us, goofing around, shaking her hips, then dance-walking her way back to the bar. That spurred Danny on and he danced me harder, guiding me to try a slide between his legs, and if I hadn't seen it on an ice-skating show, I wouldn't have known what he wanted. But we pulled it off, me stabbing between his legs, him lifting and spinning, and I nearly fell but he got me back onto my feet and we lurched to the table, laughing hard and feeling absurd, but liking it too.

“We're pretty good,” Danny said, laughing. “We're really not bad.”

He held out my chair for me and that broke my heart a little bit.

I didn't know the happiest Danny had ever been in his life, but that moment—that moment in the bar, his face flushed, his skin glowing, his mouth cracked in a wide smile—had to be a top-ten moment for him. It was for me, too, and as I grabbed a fry and popped it in my mouth, I wondered if this was what men and women did together, this crazy sine wave of emotions, this attraction and repulsion all at once. How did people live like this? I wondered. How did people have the slightest clue what they wanted from another human being? It seemed insane and wonderful and just about the stupidest thing on earth.

I ate fries and drank my soda, and when Danny asked to dance again, I said okay, sure, let's go.

He kissed me again on the way out to the car. He kissed me up against the wall of the bowling alley, right where people came out to smoke, and I smelled cigarettes and spring mud and Danny's cinnamon gum. We kissed better now, more comfortably, but I still wondered where you put your hands, how much you tilted your head, what sounds, if any, you were supposed to make. The analytical part of my mind kept taking little snapshots.
So this is what it means to kiss a boy, and this is how they do it, and this is where his arms go, and this is how he breathes through his nose.
I wanted to remember everything. I liked that I was being kissed for the first time in my mom's town, in her childhood land, anyway, and I liked that it was spring, just at twilight, and that the birds called to claim their territory for the night. My arm felt tired and heavy from bowling, and my lips tasted greasy from the fries, I was sure, but for a second, just a second, I let myself fall into Danny. I used him a little, because I had always wanted to fall into a boy, surrender like they did in books and movies, and it might have been any boy at that moment, but Danny was there and so he was the guy.

And I also thought:
Danny Stewart is my first kiss. He is my first kisser. His lips are the lips that I kissed first.
I had no idea if that was a good thing or not.

He took my hand when we walked to the car and he held open my door. Wally didn't even budge, he was so tired from the swimming. The car smelled like wet dog, but that was okay, and Danny kissed my neck, right near the collarbone when I slid in on the passenger side, and I reached across and popped his door lock so that he could just come in and not fuss with his keys.

“You're a gentleman,” I said when he put the key in the ignition. “I appreciate that.”

He shrugged and smiled. Then he started the engine and shifted into first, but his hand came over and grabbed mine, let it go to shift, grabbed it again, then let it go. I looked out the window and felt close to crying, close to laughing, close to a thousand things. I thought of my mom's statue, the way the wind made it move in tiny pulses, the gears of the old bicycles clicking it awake and asking it to move.

F
ATHER JASPER SAYS
every time a dog is euthanized because it misbehaves, it is a mark against humanity.

Father Jasper says female dogs are better for a first-time dog owner, because female dogs tend to be more docile. Not always. But usually.

I thought of Father Jasper when the state trooper pulled up behind us.

I saw the car in the side-view mirror. In an instant about a dozen things occurred at once. I glanced at Danny and he glanced at me, and then his eyes flashed up to the rearview mirror. His body coiled; his hand reached for the gearshift and he pumped the clutch, and the engine that had been running smoothly all day suddenly burst into a loud roar and we took off. His phone buzzed again and again. I had been half asleep, half reclining against the window, but in a heartbeat that was over. I saw the lights shimmer on in the cop car, and a siren started, a squawk at least, and Wally turned on the back seat and looked at whatever was behind us.

“Danny?” I said, because I couldn't put it all together.

We hit sixty in no time. Then the speedometer really began to climb, and I knew we were going too fast. Gravel pinged against the bottom of the car, and the blues, Muddy Waters, kicked out a driving, traveling beat, and it felt like we were in a movie, only not. This was real, dead real, and Danny kept moving his eyes from mirror to mirror, his hands expert on the gearshift and steering wheel.

We hit seventy-eight miles an hour going around a turn. The back fishtailed a little, but then it straightened. Danny chewed his gum like a maniac. Wally sloshed around in the back seat, suddenly agitated and picking up on the new speed, his ears cocked high, trying to sort things out.

“Stop it, Danny!” I yelled.

Because the road was twisty. The road wasn't going to let us stay on it, and I thought of my mother, and of the way she went off the road into a bridge abutment, and everything compacted and seized in me all at once. We could not travel at the speeds we were going and hope to make it much farther, but maybe that was what he wanted. As I thought it, he geared down and he ran the next stretch at close to a normal speed, but the cop car ran right on our bumper and I saw the Smokey Bear hat on the cop, and the lights flashed and flickered and made everything impatient.

“Danny?” I asked. I couldn't control my voice.

A second cop car appeared in front of us. The cop had parked his vehicle perpendicular in a roadblock, and my mind scrambled.
This is not happening,
I thought, because the day had been fine, the day had been peaceful, and we had a couple dozen photos of the statue, and Wally had been great, and we had danced and kissed, and now a cop leaned against his car with a shotgun pointed at us. Another cop car tried to keep us pinned from behind, and Danny didn't seem to question what was going on. That was the strangest thing of all, so I turned around and looked, and Wally barked, and then Danny, somehow, reversed past the cop car behind us, rolled the steering wheel like a bumper car, and he shot off across a cornfield.

It was not the same cornfield we had walked in earlier when we stopped to take a photo at the forty-five-degree latitude sign, but it possessed the same stubble, the same ruts in the dirt, and I heard the car straining to gain traction, and I heard the cornstalks banging against the undercarriage, and not a bit of it made sense. The tires couldn't grab and the car was not made for this kind of travel, and then Danny stopped and jumped out of the car and began running.

He left the door open. Wally sprinted after him.

I couldn't have stopped Wally if I wanted to, if I had
known
what was going on. Wally thought it was a big game, and I watched as he bounded after Danny and kind of ticked Danny's foot and Danny took a header into the dirt. Two cops ran after Danny, one fat and waddling, the other skinny and young, and the young one caught him, kept his gun on him. A third cop—I hadn't seen the third one arrive, but he crept across the last fifty yards of cornfield with his gun raised at shoulder height—and shouted,
“Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get on the ground.”

It took a long time, relative to everything that had happened, to realize the cop meant me. That I was in the car. That I had to get out. And that a cop I had never met had a gun pointed at me and he seemed ready to use it.

“
Getoutandgetontheground, getoutandgetontheground, keep your hands up, getoutandkeepyourhandsontheground.”

Over and over. And I still didn't get that he meant me. I looked at him and he looked at me, and I saw he was young, not much older than I was, and his left hand held the wrist of his gun hand and the whole thing wobbled. He was scared. I saw that as plainly as I saw anything, but then Wally came bounding back, not sure what was going on, and I glimpsed that Danny was spread-eagle on the dirt, two cops sitting on him.

I held up my hands like they do in television, and I opened the car door with one hand, then lifted it again. I moved my hands fast, so that he could see I didn't have a pistol or any kind of weapon. Then I fell forward, crawling out, and the cop ran toward me. I saw his feet kicking up dirt as he ran, and it was all crazy, all nutty. Wally dodged the cop and ran to me, thinking we were playing somehow, and the cop covering me ran forward and stopped directly next to my head.

“Do not move!” he enunciated.

DO, space, NOT, space, MOVE.

He had the gun pointing down at the ground, ready to use if he needed it. Veins stuck out along his neck, on his head, everywhere.

“It's the Stewart kid,” one of the cops on top of Danny yelled. “Confirmed.”

“Put your hands behind your back,” the cop above me said.

I did as I was told.

“What's this all about?” I asked. “Are you doing this because of the vines?”

“Keep your hands where I can see them.”

He knelt in the center of my back. Hard. He deliberately put his full weight on me, and I felt my face go into the dirt. I tasted dirt on my lips and tongue. He buckled a plastic cuff around my wrist.

“You have the right to remain silent,” the cop on my back said. “You have the right to be represented by an attorney.”

“What is this about?” I asked, my voice broken and shaky.

He kept talking, giving me my rights. I turned my head enough to see the two cops lifting Danny and bum-rushing him across the cornfield. They weren't happy. Danny's feet hardly touched the ground, and when they did, he stumbled. The cops seemed ticked off about that, too. They shook him between them. You could tell they wanted to grind him down, but the law prevented them from being as abusive as they wanted to be.

Another cop showed up as the first one finished reciting my rights. They both helped me to my feet. Then they pushed me against Danny's car. They patted me down.

“You people are freaking crazy,” I said to them.

“What's your name, miss?” the cop who had held the gun on me said. The gun was gone. I was glad about that.

“Clair Taylor.”

“You spent the day with Danny Stewart?”

“Yes.”

“We are going to take you up to the patrol car and put you inside. Is that your dog, ma'am?”

“Yes.”

“Is he friendly?”

“Yes.”

“We'll call animal control for him. Right now we're going to have to let him be.”

“He'll get lost. He'll come to me if you let me call him.”

“Ma'am, I don't think that dog is your biggest concern right now.”

“Where are you taking Danny?”

“We could leash him,” the second cop said. “Will he come over if we call him?”

“It depends.”

“Here, boy,” the cop said.

Wally looked at him, considered, then kept on sniffing, his legs shooting him forward into the brushwood along the edge of the river.

“We'll let someone know he's here,” the one who had put his knee in my back said.

“He'll get lost,” I repeated. I said the words slowly so they would sink into these two dimwits.

“Can't help it right now.”

They dragged me off the same way the other two cops had dragged off Danny. It was surreal; my toes only brushed the ground. We followed the car tracks back up to the road. Another police car had arrived and I caught a glimpse of Danny sitting in the back of the first car, his hands obviously behind his back. He had his head down. I tried to catch his eye, but they moved me along fast, and before I knew it I was in the back of the other cop car. It smelled of puke.