Girls (4 page)

“Good eating, mackerel,” I said.

Fanny said, “Shit! You’re never that laconic unless you feel crazy. What’s wrong? Who’d you punch out at the playground?”

“We had to write a composition,” I said.

“Did he like it?”

“He gave me a D.”

“Well, you’re familiar enough with D’s. I never saw you get low about a grade.”

“I wrote about Ralph the Duck.”

She said, “You did?” She said, “Honey.” She came over and stood beside the rocker and leaned into me and hugged my head and neck. “Honey,” she said. “Honey.”

It was a terrible storm, the worst of the long, terrible winter so far. That afternoon, they closed the college, which they almost never do. But the roads were jammed with snow over ice, and now it was freezing rain on top of that, and the only people working at the school that night were the dispatcher and Anthony Berberich in the other truck and me. Everyone else had gone home except the students, and most of them were inside. The ones who weren’t were drunk, and I kept on sending them in and telling them to act like grown-ups. A number of them said they were, and I really couldn’t argue. I had the bright beams on, the defroster set high, the little blue light winking, and a thermos of sour mash and hot coffee that I sipped from every time I had to get out of the truck or every time I realized how cold all that wetness was.

About eight o’clock, when the rain was turning back to snow and the cold was worse and the road was impossible, just when I was done helping a county sander on the edge of the campus pull a panel truck out of a snowbank, I got the emergency call from the dispatcher. We had a student missing. The roommates thought the girl was headed for the quarry. This meant I had to get the Jeep up on a narrow road above the campus, above the old cemetery, into all kinds of woods and rough track that I figured would be choked with ice and snow. Any kid up there would really have to want to be there, and I couldn’t go in on foot, because you’d only want to be there on account of drugs, booze, or craziness, and either way I’d be needing
blankets and heat, and then a fast ride down to the hospital. So I dropped into four-wheel drive to get me up the hill above the campus, bucking snow and sliding on ice, putting all the heater’s warmth up on the windshield because I couldn’t see much more than swarming snow. My feet were still cold from the tow job, and it didn’t seem to matter that I had on heavy socks and insulated boots I’d coated with waterproofing. I shivered, and I thought of Ralph the Duck.

I had to grind the rest of the way, from the cemetery, in four-wheel low, and in spite of the cold, I was smoking my gearbox by the time I was close enough to the quarry to see I’d have to make my way on foot to where she was. It was a kind of hollowed-out shape, maybe four or five stories high, where she stood, wobbling. She was as chalky as she’d been the last time, and her red hair didn’t catch the light anymore. It just lay on her like something that had died on top of her head. She was in a white nightgown that looked like her sloughing skin. She had her arms crossed like she wanted to be warm. She swayed, kind of, in front of the big, dark, scooped-out rock face, where the trees and brush had been cleared for trucks and earthmovers. She looked tiny against all the darkness. From where I stood, I could see the snow driving down in front of the lights I’d left on, but I couldn’t see it near her. All it looked like around her was dark. She was shaking with the cold, and she was crying.

I had a blanket with me, and I shoved it down the front of my coat to keep it dry for her, and because I was so cold. I waved. I stood in the lights and waved. I don’t know what she saw—a big shadow, maybe. I surely didn’t reassure her, because when she saw me, she backed up, until she was near the face of the quarry. She couldn’t go any farther.

I called, “Hello! I brought a blanket. Are you cold? I thought you might want a blanket.”

Her roommates had told the dispatcher about pills, so I didn’t bring her the coffee laced with mash. I figured I didn’t have all that much time, anyway, to get her down and pumped out. The booze with whatever pills she’d taken would make her die that much faster.

I hated that word.
Die.
It made me furious with her. I heard
myself seething when I breathed. I pulled my scarf and collar up above my mouth. I didn’t want her to see how angry I was because she wanted to die.

I called, “Remember me?”

I was closer now. I could see the purple mottling of her skin. I didn’t know if it was cold or dying. It probably didn’t matter much to distinguish between them right now, I thought. That made me smile. I felt the smile, and I pulled the scarf down so she could look at it. She didn’t seem awfully reassured.

“You’re the sexual harassment guy,” she said. She said it very slowly. Her lips were clumsy. It was like looking at a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“I gave you an A,” I said.

“When?”

“It’s a joke,” I said. “You don’t want me making jokes. You want me to give you a nice warm blanket, though. And then you want me to take you home.”

She leaned against the rock face when I approached. I pulled the blanket out, then zipped my jacket back up. The snow was stopping, I realized, and that wasn’t really a very good sign. An arctic cold was descending in its place. I held the blanket out to her, but she only looked at it.

“You’ll just have to turn me in,” I said. “I’m gonna hug you again.”

She screamed, “No more! I don’t want any more hugs!”

But she kept her arms on her chest, and I wrapped the blanket around her and stuffed a piece into each of her tight, small fists. I didn’t know what to do for her feet. Finally, I got down on my haunches in front of her. She crouched down, too, protecting herself.

“No,” I said. “No. You’re fine.”

I took off the woolen mittens I’d been wearing. Mittens keep you warmer than gloves because they trap your hand’s heat around the fingers and palm at once. Fanny knitted them for me. I put a mitten as far onto each of her feet as I could. She let me. She was going to collapse, I thought.

“Now, let’s go home,” I said. “Let’s get you better.”

With her funny, stiff lips, she said, “I’ve been very self-indulgent and weird and I’m sorry. But I’d really like to die.” She sounded so reasonable, I found myself nodding agreement.

But I said, “You can’t just die.”

“Aren’t I dying already? I took all of them, and then”—she giggled like a child, which of course is what she was—“I borrowed different ones from other people’s rooms. See, this isn’t some like teenage cry for
help.
Understand? I’m seriously interested in death and I have to stay out here a little longer and fall asleep. All right?”

“You can’t do that,” I said. “You ever hear of Vietnam?”

“I saw the movie,” she said. “With the opera in it?
Apocalypse?
Whatever.”

“I was there!” I said. “I killed people! I helped to kill them! And when they die, you see their bones later on. You dream about their bones in splinters and with blood on the ends, and this kind of mucous stuff coming out of their eyes. You probably heard of guys having dreams like that, didn’t you? Whacked-out Vietnam vets? That’s me, see? So I’m telling you, I know about dead people and their stomachs falling out. And people keep dreaming about the dead people that they knew, see? You can’t make people dream about you like that! It isn’t fair!”

“You dream about me?” She was ready to go. She was ready to fall down, and I was going to lift her up and get her to the truck.

“I will,” I said, “if you die.”

“I want you to,” she said. Her lips were hardly moving now. Her eyes were closed. “I want you all to.”

I dropped my shoulder and put it into her waist and picked her up and carried her down to the Jeep. She was talking, but not a lot, and her voice leaked down my back. I jammed her into the truck and wrapped the blanket around her better and then put another one down around her feet. I strapped her in with the seat belt. She was shaking; her eyes were closed and her mouth was open. She was breathing. I checked that twice, once when I strapped her in, and then again when I strapped myself in and backed up hard into a sapling and took it down. I got us into first gear, held the clutch in,
leaned over to listen for breathing, heard it—shallow panting, like a kid asleep on your lap for a nap—and then I put the gear in and howled down the hillside on what I thought might be the road.

We passed the cemetery. I told her that was a good sign. She didn’t respond. I found myself panting, too. It was like we were breathing for each other. It made me dizzy, but I couldn’t stop. We passed the highest dorm, and I got back up into four-wheel high. The cab smelled like burnt oil and hot metal. We were past the chapel now, and the observatory, the president’s house, then the bookstore. I had the blue light winking, the V-6 was roaring, and I drove on the edge of out of control, sensing the skids just before I slid into them, then getting back out of them the way I needed to. I took a little fender off once, and a bit of the corner of a classroom building, but I worked us back on course, and all I needed to do now was negotiate the sharp left turn around the administration building, past the library, then floor it for the straight run to the town’s main street and then the hospital.

I was panting into the mike, and the dispatcher kept saying, “Say again?”

I made myself slow my talking. I said we’d need a stomach pump, and to get the names of the pills from her friends in the dorm, and I’d be there in less than five minutes.

“Roger,” the dispatcher said. “Roger all that. Over.” My throat tightened and tears came into my eyes. I felt a kind of stupid gratitude.

I said to the girl, whose head was slumped and whose face looked too blue all through its whiteness, “You know, I had a baby once. My wife, Fanny. She and I had a little girl one time.”

I reached over and touched her cheek. It was cold. The truck swerved, and I got my hands on the wheel. I’d made the turn past the ad building using just my left. “I can do it in the dark,” I sang to no tune I’d ever heard. “I can do it with one hand.” I said to her, “We had a girl child, very small. I used to tell her stories she didn’t understand. She liked them anyway. Now, I do
not
want you dying.”

I came to the campus gates going fifty on the ice and snow,
smoking the engine, grinding the clutch, and I bounced off a wrought-iron fence to give me the curve going left that I needed. On a pool table, it would have been a bank shot worth applause. The town cop picked me up and got out ahead of me. He used his growler, then his siren, and I leaned on the horn. We banged up to the emergency room entrance and I was out and at the other door before the cop on duty, Elmo St. John, could loosen his seat belt. I loosened hers, and I carried her into the lobby of the ER. They had a gurney, and doctors, and they took her away from me. I tried to talk to them, but they made me sit down and do my shaking on a dirty sofa decorated with drawings of little spinning wheels. Somebody brought me hot coffee—I think it was Elmo—but I couldn’t hold it.

“They won’t,” he kept saying to me. “They won’t.”

“What?”

“You just been sitting there for a minute and a half, shaking, telling me, ‘Don’t let her die. Don’t let her die.’ ”

“Oh.”

“You all
right?
”

“How about the kid?”

“They’ll tell us soon.”

“She better be all right.”

“That’s right.”

“She—somebody’s really gonna have to explain it to me if she isn’t.”

“That’s right.”

“She better not die this time,” I said.

Fanny came downstairs to look for me. I was at the northern windows, looking past the mullions, down the valley to the faint red line along the mounds and little peaks of the ridge beyond the valley. The sun was going to come up, and I was looking for it.

Fanny stood behind me. I could hear her. I could smell her hair and the sleep on her. The crimson line widened, and I squinted at it.
I heard the dog come in behind her, catching up. He panted and I knew why his panting sounded familiar. She put her hands on my shoulders and arms. I made muscles to impress her with, and then I let them go, and let my head drop down until my chin was on my chest.