Little Bastards in Springtime (42 page)

“What’s the accent? Where are you from?”

“Um, the east coast,” I say.

“Oh, the east coast,” the huge man says, sounding more suspicious. “Well, what do you want us to do about your troubles?”

“Can I get a ride … that’s all.”

“To where?”

“Um, well. The closest town?” My teeth start to chatter.

The man suddenly relaxes. “Well, I suppose we could do that for you. Jump in, what’re you waiting for? It’s about five miles down the road, won’t take any time at all.”

I get in the back. The car smells of candy, and it’s warm. Sitting pertly next to me on the seat is a tiny dog. It looks me up and down, then squeals and scrabbles forward onto the woman’s lap.

“That’s He-Man, he’s our little baby goochy-goo. What’s up, baby-buttons?”

“How about a motel?” the man says. “That would be the best option at this time of night. Nothing is open in town now.” He’s driving cautiously, high-beams muscling bravely into the dense darkness. “Animals jump out at you like they want to commit suicide. You have to drive slow around here.”

The woman laughs. “We thought
you
were a wild animal at first. Just for a split second. A deer or a wolf. Didn’t we, goochums?” The dog looks up at her and licks its tiny black lips with a miniature pink tongue.

“Your face and neck and hands glowed very white in our beams,” the man says. “You looked a bit like E.T.”

“Yes, that’s right, Hank.” The woman laughs again. “He did look a bit like E.T., like an alien creature, but also very lost and lonely, like a human kid.”

“That’s it, hon. An alien creature and human-kid hybrid, that would be weird.”

“Yes, that would be weird. Anyway, we haven’t decided where we’re going to eat. We did Arby’s last week. Let’s go to Wendy’s. I’m really in the mood for their chocolate milk shake.”

“Oh, not Wendy’s, hon. I’m sick of that place. I don’t like their fries.”

“Well, I’m sick of Arby’s. Very sick of Arby’s. We always end up there.”

They go on like this for quite a long time and I sit back and taste the bitterness of relief in my mouth and listen to my stomach rumble. So, this is what normal people argue about in normal times in normal little towns all over this normal country, and it’s depressing and comforting at the same time.

“Well, what do you say to a motel?” Hank says, when they’ve decided to compromise over someplace called Five Guys. He looks back at me, eyes squinting into the rear-view mirror.

I pull myself forward so my head is hanging in the space between them. I see that Hank’s belly is pressing hard into the steering wheel, that his ruddy face is bristling with grey day-old stubble. The woman has long hair, it’s up in a ponytail like a girl’s, tied with a fuzzy purple ribbon, but her face is as wrinkled as a dried-up peach.

“Is there any chance you’ve got a garage or a shed or something that I can sleep in? Just tonight.”

“A shed?” The woman sounds alarmed immediately. “Sleep in a shed?” She lights a cigarette.

“Do you mind if I light up too?” I whip a smoke into my mouth and light it fast.

“Where did you say you were from?” Hank asks again.

“The east coast,” I say.

“The east coast? But what’s the foreign accent?” The woman half turns and stares at me with one thickly eye-shadowed eye.

“We don’t have anywhere for you to sleep,” Hanks says. “Unfortunately.”

Something’s shifted. I feel fear emanating from both of
them like body heat. Oh no, I think, I’ve passed it on like a virus. I wonder if I smell, if my breath reeks of the chemistry of life-and-death emotions. I know how terrifying that can be.

“I’d be very quiet, just sleep and get moving early.”

“I’m real sorry,” Hank says, his head ducking into his neck. “It’s just not gonna happen. We have no space at all.”

“You know, no extra beds,” the woman sing-songs. “Sorry about that.”

She leans toward Hank. “Faster,” I hear her whispering.

“Go faster.”

“We should have extra beds,” she continues, more loudly and slowly than before, because murderous hitchhiking psychopaths are known to be hard of hearing, “we’re thinking about it. But here, look, we’re almost at the motel. That’s your best bet.”

“Okay,” I say quietly and sit back. It’s a fucking tragedy that everyone is afraid of everyone all the time. “I’d be happy to sleep on your floor,” I say, trying one more time. “I don’t need a bed, just shelter.”

“I’m very sorry, young man,” Hank says, his voice trembling a little with the effort of being firm. I know he’ sweating. I know that her heart is racing. “We don’t have any floor space, we live in a very small house, no sheds, no space in the garage. You’ll have to make do with the motel.”

He’s rocketing down the road now, and I bounce gently behind him on the car’s soft springs. “It’s not like I’m going to rob you or anything,” I say. I’m feeling sad now, really fucking depressed, because I can suddenly see so clearly how this whole web of emotional connectivity works. Fear begetting fear begetting more fear, endlessly, until the human race has destroyed itself out of fright. Because I feel it happening right here, in myself, how their fear is making them cold, unfriendly,
and their coldness and unfriendliness is making me antsy, confrontational, furious at all of existence. How their grovelling and refusal make me more crazy boy, and the more crazy boy I become, the more scared they are, the more heartless and badass it that will make me, on and on, to a bad end.

“I mean, who doesn’t have a few feet of floor space to offer a kid?” I sit forward again. I just can’t let it go. I watch Hank white-knuckling the steering wheel, I watch how the woman clasps the little panting dog to her chest. “A kid with no money.”

“Here it is,” Hank sings out. He overshoots the driveway, steps on the brakes, stalls the car again, and there we are, the three of us sitting in silence on a country road, a motel sign blinking on and off behind us. The windshield wiper is going, turned on in Hank’s panic to stop the car. For several seconds, we watch it scraping back and forth.

“The motel, it’s just back there,” the woman whispers, finally. “Please, there is the motel. We brought you here. Please, go.”

I get out slowly, reluctantly. I want to beat some generosity of spirit into these two, with their greasy hamburger and chocolate milkshake fetishes. My fists are itching for it. After all, all I want is a warm place to sleep, just for a few hours, is that really too much to fucking ask? I want someone to say
yes
to me,
what can I do to help.
I leave the back door open so they don’t drive off, then lean into Hank’s window as he scrabbles for the window power button. In his terror, he’s forgotten where it is.

“Thank. You,” I say slowly. “I. Really. Appreciate. Your. Help.”

They stare up at me with wide glistening eyes. All they want to know is that they are free to go. I step away from the window and close the back door slowly. The car pulls away and
I watch the tail lights until they’re out of sight, cursing the two inside but also forgiving them. What have I done to instill confidence in humanity?

I turn. The hotel’s neon O
PEN
sign is on, the letter O flashing on and off at regular intervals, but there are no lights in the office. There’s one car in the parking lot. I walk quickly to the end of the building and around to the back where the property is wild and overgrown and black as a cave. I discover by feel that each room has a small window in the back wall, about shoulder height, that several are boarded up. I scratch around in the weeds and find a rock, pick a window, break it quickly, brush the shards away, pull myself through the opening into the stuffy, smelly gloom within. I drink from the rusted tap in the bathroom for a long time, then open the curtain of the front window a sliver and sit in the broken-down armchair watching my knees appear and disappear in the light of the defective sign. I think about a hot shower, about an unhurried cigarette, about lying on the bed and closing my eyes for a hundred years. But I’m too tired to move.

I’m still sitting when I wake to foggy morning light filtering into the room through the crack in the curtains and the feeling that Dušan’s been here, that he crashed on the bed, that he lay there all night telling me a long story about a wolf pack that found a newborn baby on the doorstep of a church in a small village high up in the mountain forest. This wolf pack discussed among themselves whether they’d eat the baby then and there or take it with them and save it for a later meal. They made their decision and picked it up gently by the blanket knotted around its tiny body and carried it into the forest where a wolf-mother nurtured it with wolf-milk alongside her seven wolf-pups. Dušan told me how the wolf pack watched the
baby thrive and grow, how they fed it meat scraps when it was old enough to chew, how they brought it along on hunting trips when it could run fast enough to keep up. How each year they licked their lips and dreamed of the day when the baby would be a large, healthy man and they could all eat their fill.

I step into the shower and stand there until the hot water runs out. As I dry off, I turn on the ancient TV and flip through the channels, looking for a news bulletin on local stations warning about a menacing teenager from the east coast with a foreign accent. But the news flash is about a basement fire in a town called Harmony. Dressed, I slip out the front door into the dawn gloom and trot fast across the parking lot. I ache with hunger and instantly feel frozen as I walk along the road back toward the highway. The sun is rising behind the brown haze of tree trunks, painting swaths of pink and pastel blue across the eastern horizon, and birds are beginning to sing. After walking for half an hour, I see a light blinking at me through the undergrowth. I turn off onto a dirt driveway and follow its curves until I see a house in a small clearing. Lights in several windows, downstairs and upstairs, glow deep yellow in the surrounding forest gloom, and smoke spirals up to the treetops from a metal chimney on the roof. I walk closer and see a man in a housecoat in the kitchen, pots hanging from a rack behind him, a potted herb on the windowsill. He’s moving back and forth, passing the window, head down, concentrating, and steam is rising from a pot or a kettle to one side of him. In an upstairs room the head of a child appears briefly in the window, then the flash of a white towel. I need to get in there, I think, looking around for a fist-size rock. I yearn for the morning they are having, waking slowly in warmth and quiet surrounded by their own things,
sensing each other moving in different parts of the house. I want to get in there right now and take it from them.

Instead, I crouch down in the bushes and wait patiently, shivering and breathing on my hands. Nothing is inevitable, Jim says, which I guess also includes what I want and what my wants make me do. After the family, a man, a woman, two small kids, gets itself together to face the world, after it trundles out the front door, dragging knapsacks and briefcases, after it drives off in the family hatchback, I enter the house as gently as possible, forcing the back door, no tinkling of broken glass, no smashed window frames. So I go in just for the food and drink, just to keep me going, and I find that the kettle is still warm and leftover porridge is still in a pot on the stove. I eat the porridge, as well as two bananas and an apple that are in a bowl on the counter, a whole slab of cheese, and a pack of sliced ham from the fridge. Then I make myself a giant egg-and-tomato sandwich and a pot of strong coffee. While I eat the sandwich I wander from room to room and poke at the scattered early-morning artifacts of a peaceful life.

I
WAIT
in the windy vortex of interweaving highway ribbons for Samuel L. Jackson’s friend to pick me up. Hour after hour he doesn’t show up at the very centre of this buzzing continent, so I sit cross-legged like a half-starved Buddha who’s out of smokes, trying to focus on my next move. I visualize the west coast, I visualize Ujak Luka and his crew of hoods, how I’m going to fit in with that, how I no longer feel the urge, the itch, for that kind of life. The sun says it’s early afternoon when I spot a cop car circling around the ramps for the third time, and
I feel totally exposed. I’m a skinny kid from another country in someone else’s clothes, no ID, no luggage, no money, an accent. I make myself small and sink low into the dirty grass. It’s no big challenge to turn myself into a pile of garbage, rags, bones, crap hurled out of car windows. I lie still, my head down. But when I look again, the cop car has stopped, the cop is getting out, he’s looking right at me, and I’m thinking of stories to tell him. If I knew where I was, what local town I could say I’m from, just a stupid high school kid being stupid, that would help. I think of Harmony. I could mention the basement fire and chat to him about that. But the cop isn’t walking toward me. A large transport truck has pulled over and he and a tall, thin, beak-nosed trucker in a Leatherman cap are discussing something and pointing in my direction.

I stand up and walk toward them, there’s nothing else to do. I feel like cursing them and begging at the same time, the usual mix. I can’t and I won’t go back to detention, that’s one thing I know for sure. The cop stares at me with cold eyes.

The trucker yells, “Git your ass in the cab, boy.” And I do.

The cop struts off, the trucker hauls himself in, and we’re roaring up the gears to a wild vibrational speed, and there I am sitting high and dry again, looking down on the world of little vehicles and the little heads and torsos going about their day. I let my body relax a notch or two. We drive in silence for a while, then my saviour asks me if I want a cigarette. Yes, I say. In that moment I want a smoke more than anything else in the world.

‡ ‡ ‡

T
WO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED MILES DRIVING
into sunsets from the middle of the continent to the west coast and you’re still in the same damn country. I wonder how our war back home would’ve gone if our own collection of united states weren’t so small. If they were as big as this, it would’ve taken forever for the militias to move around, standing for days and days in the backs of trucks, too exhausted to wave rifles in the air and shout slogans, the drugs and alcohol wearing off long before they got anywhere to do their fucked-up shit.