Ghosts of Tom Joad (6 page)

Of course, she was more mature than the rest of us, hell, making fart sounds with our armpits still cracked us up, so it did not take much. Angie was from Cleveland, a big, far away and exotic place to us in Reeve. She read books, not just for school. Her dad had been killed in an accident there, working on the high steel constructing the office buildings that was still being built then, and her mom, originally from Reeve, moved back when she inherited the family home. But when I first met Angie her dad was still alive and she was just visiting her grandparents in Reeve. Me and Muley talked her up one day at the city pool, and when I saw her again the next day I said, “Me and my friend was the guys who talked to you yesterday,” and she said, “I don't remember your friend, but you can keep me company.” We went on to spend afternoons at the Dairy Queen, and at the end of the summer she asked me something no one ever had before, to write down my mailing address. She said it was a romantic thing to do, to write letters. I had no idea about this and was surprised two weeks later when Mom said I had mail. Angie wrote inside a card, like a birthday card we knew but this one didn't have nothing already printed inside, not store bought words but stuff she thought of. She said the “sun shines for me today” and drew some flowers and signed it Molly “Bloom,” I guess because of the flowers.

I dreamed about her, regular dreams and, you know, those kind of dreams. My head was full of her, playing on every station. When dreaming wasn't enough, then I knew I missed
her. I carried her card around until it got dirty and sweaty from being pushed and pulled in and out of my pocket. I didn't know what to do. After days of worrying about this, I bought a post card at Schottenstein's Drug Store, which became Discount Drug and Market before it became a CVS and now a DrugCoMart, currently owned by an investor group from Singapore that hires people to find places like Reeve on a map so they can buy more things when old men like Schottenstein die. I worked there for a while, almost a rite of passage during high school, pulling in about four bucks an hour stocking shelves alongside my friends. Our girlfriends ran the registers, our moms and dads shopped in the store and a good story about a date could get you a night off from the sympathetic manager. When someone graduated, the manager would hire one of the workers' friends and the cycle continued.

I asked Angie once, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and she answered “Do I have to grow up?” She said she didn't want to borrow someone else's dreams, she wanted her own, going everywhere she'd never been until she'd been everywhere. I never knew what to say back, but I liked listening to what she said.

After she moved back to Reeve, we fell in hard with each other, firing up almost without effort together, a camp fire that hadn't been put out and just walked away from. I'm not sure what she saw in me, though it was a good postcard I had selected to send back to her that first summer, one with a picture of a giant rabbit that said B
IG
T
HINGS ARE
H
APPENING
H
ERE IN
R
EEVE,
so that might have helped. It was like texting nowadays
but on paper and slower. Must've scratched her right where she itched.

So then I told Angel we were like Romeo and Juliet, which was the most romantic thing me and Muley could come up with from the library. Don't know why the old librarian looked at us so weird when we asked together for the most romantic book. It was a stupid library anyway.

“No, we're not Romeo and Juliet,” said Angel. “My dad's dead and my mom just chases around replacing him with a new guy every week. Your mom's a broken robot and your dad's drunk into a coma. None of them give a twist about us.”

Which I did not fully understand, but Angel kept on holding my hand, so I guess nodding along was the right move.

I said, “Sometimes I feel awkward when I talk, I don't always know what to say.”

“So why talk?” was the way Angie replied.

Then I said to her, “You're beautiful,” and she said, “What?” She laughed and told me she heard me clear enough, but just wanted to make me say it again. When I first wanted to kiss her, I was scared, not sure, so I asked if it was okay. She said I shouldn't have asked, I should have just done it. That's how things were with Angie. I mean, we were still kids, and I tasted Dentyne when we kissed. But we told each other we were in love, and I'm pretty sure we were. It was a new thing to me, but you don't always need to know a thing, to have seen a thing before, to know it. Some things just are. I understood there was so much I didn't know, but those nights Angie made me believe what I felt. We'd go out under the black umbrella of night and sit as close to the Baltimore and Ohio line as we dared, and
when the diesel coalers came past she'd pull me down on her so's I could feel her breasts and she'd scream as loud as she could as the train carried past, saying she could feel my heart even then, pounding, and I'd kiss her like I was trying to pull her heart into me with the generosity of all that moment and I'd hold her like mine were the arms of God themselves. After those nights I'd feel tired way past sleep, but I never wanted to sleep, not 'cause I wasn't exhausted, but because being awake was so good. Lying by the railroad tracks, looking up at the sky, I said, “It all seems so big,” and Angie said, “Ain't big enough.”

One time she said, “I want to count all your freckles. Can we spend the afternoon doing that?” We did.

I am a little shy to admit I was an educated virgin. There wasn't much to do in Reeve and so we had to make our own fun, and in that respect virginity wasn't innocence as much as simple lack of experience. You had to be flexible in a small town, however, 'cause it was always that you liked the pretty ones and the less pretty ones liked you. My first, second, and several subsequent times were with girls from school, rude jabs in someone's car or after church outside in the woods fooling we were Adam and Eve, but the good part, us all sticky with apple juice, summer's a messy collection of drips, explosions and squirts like I was a hyperactive Irish Setter, my tongue foraging inside some girl's mouth. Most sex then was more of a struggle than a pleasure of its own, as teenage boys and patience do not fit. Looking back, I think the first time I ever had sex inside, not counting cars and vans, I was already twenty-five years old. Our version of an STD was poison ivy. I ended up with a lot of terrible songs burned into the part of my brain that memorized
everything around some big event, so the opening chords of “Smoke on the Water” and Debbie Radnick's tube top are forever paired, God bless them both.

One time I forgot to throw out the rubber, the old kind too, the ones that smelled like a new shower curtain, and my dad found it the next day on the car floor like a skin some snake shed. “Don't get no one pregnant or you'll have to get married,” he told me, ignoring the obvious thing that I'd used a condom. Me and those girls were certainly never in love, but there was always a little affection as we snorted and rutted, a kinda desperate fun at worst, me laying on 'em like I was protecting them from flying shrapnel, so full of teenage hard up some days I'm embarrassed to say I would've fucked mud, and I kissed a lot of girls.

With Angie it was different. Hell, it was always different. We did a lot of what the health education books in gym class called “heavy petting.” This was sincere lust, but it was also a kind of testing. With other girls the testing was more like taking her temperature, seeing if she was willing, trying first base not because it felt like melted chocolate electricity to tongue kiss but mostly to see if you thought she'd let you get under her Peter Frampton t-shirt later. The girls knew it, knew their role in the game, and must've talked among themselves about who to let do what when, 'cause when we boys talked amongst ourselves it all seemed that what we was getting was the same as everyone else. Except James, who was going steady with Evelyn I think since when we still took naps in school. Evelyn unsnapped her bra just to change her mind, and James got her pregnant junior year and
his dad had to pay for them to get an apartment and then find him a job at the factory.

But with Angie it was all fun; lust born from love instead of the opposite. She always seemed to indicate she'd go all the way right then and there, but wouldn't it be more fun to look around some. I never felt dirty, never felt that I was taking something or being given something like with them other girls. Even when another girl would signal it was okay, she'd still offer up a hand job so she could appear, you know, reluctant and not seem like some tramp. I never saw the way things could be something other than some kinda job until much later.

So with Angie it felt natural and good and warm when we went to a place in the woods together. I had known the place since I was a kid, a worn spot next to a field, surrounded by blackberry bushes except for one small space you could crawl through like a tunnel. Blackberry bushes have tiny thorns, but lots of them, and pull at clothes and pinch your skin, so you don't want to try and bull through them. When I was littler we caught grasshoppers there in the field, holding them in our cupped hands 'til they spit what we called tobacco juice, all brown and sticky and we had to let them go.

The ground was hard underneath us, Ohio clay baked into rock through a dry June, mingling just a little dust with our sweat into an odor I can summon up on this bus and make myself smile. Heat piled up in that time in Ohio like snow accumulated in December. As kids I played soldiers in there, looked at Tim's dad's Playboys in there and on a lot of nights I took Angie there. I remember every kiss, every time I touched her, the way her hair
smelled up close in the sun when I pressed my nose into it, the way her tongue was bright orange from the Cheetos we ate.

Bras in my youth were complex, heavy elastic and nylon evil things with hooks and clasps and wires to struggle against while the girl waited to see if you could, but Angie just that night reached back with one hand and changed all that too in my mind. Looking at the faint red lines left on her, I never got to second base faster or easier, and I never felt stupider again for thinking of it as second base. She had shoulders, soft curves I was pretty sure I never noticed on girls before. Boys is all about parts, boobs and butts and legs and hips like a bucket of fried chicken being divided up, but Angie changed my eyes. She taught me to trace the outline of her with my hands like a whisper, a breeze, one finger, my tongue, always saying slower, softer, let's enjoy the trip. God, I could drink a whole bottle of her.

I thought I knew what to do, indeed had had some significant practice alone (99 percent of people do and the other one percent lie about not doing it) and with girls by that point, but the more I pressed with the urgency of having 99 percent testosterone in my bloodstream the more Angie would move slower, press back softer, remind me we had hours until curfew and that we were sixteen and naked and alone together, slowly and perfectly. Her skin was so warm it scalded me. She held out the rubber in her cupped hands, like we used to do with the grasshoppers. I lost the push-pull and melted into her, and as quickly started to apologize for how I was over and she just smiled and said, “Well, you sweet boy, we'll just have to do it again. It's not fattening.” I have no more powerful image not
messed up by a photograph available to me after fifty-two years and nor would I want one. I couldn't help thinking this was as close to Heaven as I was ever gonna get, things so warm I hadn't yet dreamed of them.

I wasn't sure what it was that I smelled, but it was familiar growing up around Mom at home, them things in the bathroom waste can, a little sweet and a little coppery, not typical among blackberry bushes but not entirely out of place or something worth slowing down because of. I found her. I heard a song in my head,
So, play on, I'll dance for you.
Angie took my finger in her mouth, I felt her tongue, warm, and she whispered to me that she wanted to curl around it until it's all inside of her.

I wondered if there was yet something else I did not know that could cause sex to be even more messy. Well, indeed there was and for Angie it was just another part of her, her naturalness, her liquidity. I felt dirty but she didn't, I felt unsure in her confidence, but with her saying it felt best really around the same time each month and finding some tissues in her twisted up pants to end the matter softly as she reached up to touch my ear, then near my lips. I felt her nails trace up the back of my neck, a path miles long that seemed to just go on and on until I was dizzy for it. Her happiness became essential to my own.

“That felt different that time Earl, like something happened.”

“A'course something happened Angie.”

“No, I mean different than just that. I don't know, felt like something. Something special between us.”

“S
OMETIMES WHEN
I was sad I cried to myself,” Angie told me, “and I wished I had a twin sister. The boy next door would hit me, and I'd hit him back and I'd tell my mom and she'd just only say ‘be nice.' That's when I knew I wanted more boyfriends and fewer husbands.”