Boy Minus Girl (7 page)

“Okay”—she hands me my ball—“now let’s see you do it.”

My game improves a little but still she totally beats me. Afterward I buy us Dr Peppers and nachos at the snack bar. I am in love.

“Where’d you learn to bowl like that?” I ask.

“My dad’s a league bowler from way back, and my uncle once won three hundred bucks on
Bowling for Dollars
. So, I guess it’s in my DNA.”

When we saunter out of the bowling alley, I see a full moon rising in the eastern sky—a sure sign that romance is in the air? I glance at my watch: 8:17, earlier than I thought. On Broadway several high schoolers cruise in their souped-up cars. We head in the direction of her house.

“I see you’re signed up to do magic for the talent show next Friday,” she says. “You want to give me a sneak preview sometime?”

“The Great Linguini never reveals his secrets, no matter how beautiful and cunning the temptress might be.”

“Can you do that trick where you cut someone in half?”

“Actually, I prefer quarters and thirds.”

Somewhere a dog barks.

“Do you have a magician’s assistant?” she asks, and I shake my head.

“Well, you do now,” she says, smiling big. “I seriously want you to cut me in half at the talent show.”

“You really want to be my . . . assistant?”

She nods.
This is good. I see many hours of rehearsal together. I see her in fishnet tights. This is very good.

We turn onto Arnold Street, and for the next ten minutes or so Charity tells me all about that Lauren girl, something about how talented she is as a sculptor.

“Lauren got me interested in art,” she says. “We’d spend hours together at the museums in St. Louis.”

I nod and try to figure out if, how, and when I should kiss her. Is a French kiss appropriate on a first date? I remember Uncle Ray saying this is a fact-finding mission, but my rapport with Charity is so great I sense I should take this to the next level tonight.

Now we are standing in front of her house. The streetlight reflects in her blue eyes as she talks on about that Lauren.

“Why don’t you come in for a little while?” she says. “Meet Grandma and Dad?”

“Thanks, but I was thinking, y’know, it’s so nice out maybe we should go down to Harker Park for a little while.” I stare into her eyes, allowing the silence to stretch. “It’s quiet there. We can be alone.”

She stares at me a long moment, standing very still. “Les . . .”

“Yes?”

My heart pounds—I feel a big confession coming on. She opens her mouth a crack, takes in a deep breath, then hesitates.

“What, Charity?” My voice is a pleading whisper.

“Les . . .” She lowers her eyes and exhales.

“What, what is it?”

“I need to tell you something—”

Suddenly the front-porch lights burst on.

“Charity?”

“Yes, Grandma!”

“Who’s that with you?”

“Les Eckhardt.”

“Oh, hello there, Lester!”

“Hi, Mrs. Conners!”

“Why don’t you two come in for some chocolate cake and milk?” her grandmother says, and opens the screen door.

“Can’t we go somewhere and talk?” I whisper to Charity.

“Um, not tonight,” Charity replies. “Come on in and let’s just have some cake.”

So close!

Seduction Tip Number 6:

Eyes Spy

“Mo-lester, be patient,” Uncle Ray advises, strumming his guitar as he sits on the edge of his bed. “Most women hate to be rushed. In the meantime try getting some experience with an easy lay.”

“Huh?”

He plays a little more, then says, “I never put all my eggs in one basket. So, while this is developing with Charity, go have some fun with a slut.”

“You don’t understand, Uncle Ray, I am seriously in love with this girl. I want her to become my girlfriend.”

“Son, you’re fourteen years old! Don’t ever confuse love with a need for pussy.”

“That’s disgusting!”

“Not necessarily. Besides, a little experience will do you a world of good. You don’t want to be completely green when it comes time to fool around with this Charity, do you?”

He has a point. Why should I fumble through lovemaking—as I’m pretty sure I would—with the girl I love? Still, it doesn’t feel right chasing after Regina Fallers, our school’s most obvious slut.

I decide to change the topic: “When’re you going to teach me to drive your car, anyway? Being able to drive will help me with girls, too, right?”

In a near whisper he says, “What do you say—once your folks’re asleep—you and me sneak out tonight, huh?”

“Y’mean it?”

I watch Johnny Carson with Mom, and for the first time practically everything about the show strikes me as unbearably corny. Once I hear Mom and Dad snoring like lawn mowers, I nod to Uncle Ray, who is polishing his guitar—and dressed up sharp.

“Let’s roll,” I say.

Outside, the moon blooms straight overhead. I help Uncle Ray lower the top on the Corvette. As we reverse out of the drive, he switches on the radio. “If you want my body and you think I’m sexy, come on sugar let me know,” goes the song.

Does Charity find me sexy? Does she want my body? Is she thinking about me right now? C’mon, Jesus, let me know.

The cool night air blows my hair and, despite it being almost midnight, I feel more awake—more alive—than ever before. Anything can happen with Uncle Ray and his Corvette convertible. Downtown, a few high schoolers are dragging Broadway. They gawk at Uncle Ray’s wheels, and I sit up straighter than straight.
My first night cruising and I’m in a vintage Corvette. Not bad at all.
We glide up and down Broadway for about ten minutes listening to Rod Stewart on the radio; then Uncle Ray turns into the parking lot of Al’s Liquor Store. “Be right back,” he says, and hops out.

Here I am, in the middle of the night, sitting in the red glow of a liquor store’s Coors beer sign while Mom and Dad think I’m safely tucked into my little bed. I’ve never snuck out before. I’m not too worried Mom and Dad will find out—but part of me kind of wishes they would. Just to shake them. Just to upset them. A little. This would be worth getting grounded over. But will Jesus hold this against me?

Uncle Ray strides out holding a six-pack of Coors, which he hands to me. Soon we are thundering east out of town. The speedometer inches up to 90 mph before he slows and steers onto a gravel road. A few yards in he stops and faces me. “All right, time to trade seats.”

He helps me pull the driver’s seat up so I can reach the pedals. “Remember to let the clutch out slow-ly,” he says as he settles into the passenger seat. “Okay, now put her in first and make this kitten purr.”

I place my sweaty palms at two and ten on the steering wheel and slowly, hesitantly, lift my foot from the clutch. The car lurches forward, and the engine goes
phut!
and dies.

“Okay,” he says very patiently, “let’s try that again.”

It takes two more whiplash-inducing lurches and engine killings, and then—I’m driving! I’m steering us down the road! 5 mph . . . 10 mph . . . 15 mph . . .

“All right,” Uncle Ray says, “take her into second.” I hold my breath, say a silent prayer, push in the clutch, pull down the gearshift—and, yes! We’re in second! I did it! 20 mph . . . 25 mph . . . 30 mph . . .

As 40 mph approaches I shift into third gear—like a pro, I might add—and the fence posts in the ditch become a blur. When we hit 50 mph, I let out a “Whoooaaaa!” Uncle Ray laughs and squeezes my shoulder. I slow to make my first corner, and I’m amazed at how little effort it takes to turn the car. I’m
so
powerful!

Driving feels altogether natural to me, like a newly found extension of my own body. Uncle Ray lets me drive the back roads for the next half hour while he smokes and looks lost in thought. At one point I get this baby up to 60 mph! I want to drive all the way across the country, the planet. I feel capable of anything—anything!

“Hey, Speed Racer,” he says over the wind and the whine of the engine as we near Highway 76 going into town, “let’s go out to the old drive-in and celebrate, what do you say?”

I spin the wheel at the rusted Chief Drive-in marquee and turn into the long-abandoned lot. The rows of metal posts, most still sporting the gray speakers you’d hook on your car window, poke out over the weeds like periscopes. I remember seeing
Jaws
here years ago and being too scared to go into the town pool.

“Park over there by the screen.” Uncle Ray points.

As we bounce over the buckled concrete, the headlights swish across the half-collapsed white screen. I park, turn off the engine, and hand him the keys. “So, how’d I do?”

“You’ll be ready for the Indy 500 in no time.” He reaches down and comes back up with two beer bottles. “Seriously, you’re a helluva lot better than I was the first time.”

He pops off the caps and hands me one. “A toast! To America’s newest driver. Her sidewalks may never be safe again.”

We clink bottles and I taste beer for the first time in my life—cold and bitter and yeasty-tasting—truly awful.
How will I finish it?
But Uncle Ray is chugging his with smooth ease and speed. God, he does everything so well. A train engine blows its lonely horn somewhere in the night. The stars shine brilliantly and abundantly over our heads. Yellow and bluish streetlamps are strung out on the town’s eastern horizon like tiny Christmas tree lights. Somewhere among those lights my girl sleeps. Life has never been better.

“Y’know, I lost my virginity at this very drive-in,” Uncle Ray says, staring up at the old screen. “Was the summer between my freshman and sophomore year. I even remember what was playing.
Hud
—not that we watched much of the movie.” He drains more beer from the bottle and continues looking at the screen. “God, I was crazy for that girl. In some ways it never got better than it did when I was with her. Guess you could say I’ve been looking for her in every woman I’ve been with since.”

“Why’d you break up?” I ask.

Looking down at his bottle, he absently starts peeling off the label with his thumb and forefinger. “We went together for a couple years. I thought it’d be forever, it was that strong. Then one night, when I was seventeen, I got into a bad fight with my old man over her.

“He found out I planned to marry her and he didn’t approve, said she was some kind of gold-digging slut. Words that made me punch him in the jaw.” He laughs a little, shaking his head. “He kicked my ass out of the house.”

“Shit,” I say, a word I’d never say around my parents. “
Was
she a gold digger?”

“Hell, no! She came from a poor family, but she didn’t have a devious bone in her body. And she sure as hell wasn’t a slut.”

I see that half the label is off his bottle.

“After he gave me the boot, I went to her house and asked her to elope with me. She said she wanted to graduate first. Y’see, back then if a girl was married, she couldn’t graduate from high school. Anyway, the thought of being in the same town as my old man for two more months was unbearable. I told her I was going out west, that I needed to get far away, but that I’d come back for her on graduation day. She said she’d wait for me and we’d get married. I hopped a freight to Texas that night. But it was almost six months before I made it back . . . and by then she was engaged to someone else.”

“What happened to you?”

He laughs. “What happened to me? What
didn’t
happen to me! Y’see, for the first time I was out from under my old man’s thumb and I went hog wild. I smoked peyote with medicine men in Taos, I shacked up with some free-lovin’ hippies in Flagstaff. One morning—get this—I woke up on the Vegas strip and had no clue how I got there. A week later I was living in a microbus with two senoritas on Venice Beach.”

“Sounds wild.”

“It
was
wild. Anyway, when I finally made it back to Kansas, I found her at the state university. She was pissed off, of course, but I could tell she still loved me. But the thing was, she didn’t trust me anymore—and no matter how hard I pleaded, she wouldn’t take me back.” The label is now off of the bottle. He balls it up and flicks it into the grass.

“What became of her?” I ask.

“She married a guy and they had a kid.”

The train whistle moans again, this time farther away. In the north a falling star streaks across the horizon. I point and say, “Look, make a wish.”

“A funny thing happened between my old man and me,” Uncle Ray says, lost in his memories. “Toward the end of his life I think he came to respect me ’cause I stood up to him, ’cause I did my own thing.”

“Unlike my dad,” I say.

Uncle Ray looks at me, surprised.

“Your dad’s a decent, hardworking man,” he says. “Nothing phony about him and nothing wrong with that. Thing is, your dad and me are, well, we’re just very different people.”

“Dad’s a total pushover.”

“Maybe. But he’s that way for a reason. Y’see, our old man broke his will. Roger never stood a chance. After all, he was
Roger Eckhardt Jr
. He was going to be the town doctor come hell or high water.”

After a moment I say, “Uncle Ray, Dad doesn’t get me at all. And he doesn’t care if he gets me, either.”

Uncle Ray looks at me and I explain: “It’s like he doesn’t even see me. He works all the time, and then when he’s home, he’s staring into a newspaper or fooling with his ham radios. I mean, five months ago he told me he’d build the Chinese vanishing box for my magic act and he’s hardly touched it.”

“Your old man, he loves you very much,” says Uncle Ray. “He’s just busy.”

“Why are you defending him?” I snap. “You’re never around. You don’t know anything about what it’s like to be stuck with them.”

“You’re right,” he admits. “I don’t know nothin’ about that.”

“Someday I’m going to run away and get a real life in a real place. And you know what? Dad won’t even notice I’ve left.”

“You really believe that?”

I nod. “I know it. He’ll just go on with his ham radios and his patients and his doomsday scenarios and it’ll be like I never existed.”

I’m on my fifth taste of beer and feel a small headache coming on.

Uncle Ray stands and scurries off into the grass. “I gotta piss.”

Another falling star in the north. Another wish?

“Shit! Jesus! Yowza!” Uncle Ray yells.

Heart pounding behind my eyes, I call out, “You all right?”

“Hurts like hell whenever I piss lately!” His back to me, he is leaning over, clearly pained. “Goddamn it, I better not have the clap again.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Never you mind, Mo-lester, just never you mind.”

A
tap
-
tap
-
tap
wakes me.

The sun burns painfully through my bedroom window, and I pull the blanket over my eyes. Never again will I touch beer, I promise myself. My brain pounds like a marathoner’s heart and my tongue feels like sandpaper.

There’s that tapping sound again. “Les,” Dad says in a soft voice.

I lower the blanket and squint. Dad stands in the doorway. “Your mother and I need to speak with you downstairs,” he says, throws me a weighty look, and shuts the door.
Do they know about last night
?

I swallow four Bayer aspirins and stagger into the kitchen, where Mom and Dad are seated like the stone-faced judges at Nuremberg.

“Have a seat,” Mom says.

“We want to talk to you about your uncle Ray,” Dad says in a low voice.

Uh-oh.

“Now, don’t get us wrong, Ray’s a great guy in many ways,” Dad says. “He’s got a good heart and he’s a lot of fun and, no doubt about it, he’s lived an exciting life. . . .”

“But the fact remains,” says Mom, “your uncle Ray hasn’t exactly been a responsible person.”

“He bounces around from place to place—which, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” Dad says.

“But he’s never settled down, never planned for the future. Never really grown up.”

“And your mother and I fear he’s a poor role model for you.”

Why has it taken Uncle Ray’s coming here for Dad to notice me?

“You’re a smart boy,” Dad says, gripping my shoulder. “As long as you take what he says with a grain of salt, you should be fine.”

I roll my eyes and head back to bed.

Later that morning I phone Charity several times, but her line is always busy. Who can she be talking to for two hours? That Lauren? I have an urgent need to profess how I feel about her. I must see her now! I run to my closet, take out my black and red magician’s cape and affix it to my neck, load my magic red rose inside my right shirtsleeve, and put on my black top hat. There.

“What the hell, Les?” Uncle Ray asks from the beanbag, where he’s tuning his guitar.

“I’m going to get my girl!”

“Dressed like
that
?”

Outside, I straddle my bike and speed off, my cape billowing behind me. As I roll across the Missouri Pacific railroad tracks, I pray.