Special Topics in Calamity Physics (23 page)

"I don't want her to see us," Lu said.

Jade yanked on her seatbelt. "We'll take another car. Jefferson's boyfriend's. His heinous Toyota's in our driveway."

"What's going on?" I asked.

"We'll probably bump into Charles," Jade said, ignoring me, glancing at Lu as she jammed the key in the ignition and started the car. "He'll be wearing camouflage and those night-vision goggle things."

Lu shook her head. "He's with Black on a double date. Sophomores."

Jade turned around to see if I'd overheard this (a triumphantly sympathetic look on her face), then accelerated out of the parking lot, merging onto the highway and heading toward Stockton. It was a cold night, with thin, greasy clouds streaking the sky. I pulled the gold lamé tight over my knees, staring at the passing cars and Lu's fancy parenthesis profile, the taillights signaling her cheekbones. Neither of them spoke. Their silence was one of those tired adult silences, that of a married couple driving home from a dinner party, not wanting to talk about someone's husband getting too drunk or how they secretly didn't want to go home with each other but someone new, someone whose freckles they didn't know.

Forty minutes later, Jade had disappeared inside her house for the car keys—"Only be a sec"—and when she emerged, still in her rickety red sandals and firebird dress (it looked like she'd gone through the garbage at a rich kid's birthday, removed the most exotic scraps of wrapping paper and taped them to herself), she carried a six-pack of Heineken, two giant bags of potato chips and a pack of spaghetti licorice, one piece dangling from her mouth. Looped around her shoulder was a giant pair of binoculars.

"We're going to Hannah's house?" I asked, still confused, but Jade only ignored me again, dumping the food into the backseat of the beat-up white Toyota parked by the garage. Leulah looked furious (her lips were pulled tightly together like a fabric change purse), but without a word, she walked across the driveway, climbed into the front seat and slammed the door.

"Fuck." Jade squinted at her watch. "We don't have much time."

Minutes later, we were in the Toyota, merging onto the highway again, this time heading north, the opposite direction of Hannah's house. I knew it was pointless to ask where we were going; both of them had fallen into that trench-silence again, a silence so deep it was difficult and tiring to heave oneself out. Leulah stared at the road, the sputtering white lines, the drifting red

sequins of the cars. Jade was more or less her usual self, though as she chewed a strand of licorice (the girl was chain-licoricing; "Hand me another one/' she demanded three times before I wedged the packet by the emergency brake), she wouldn't stop fiddling with the radio.

We drove a half hour before swerving down Exit 42—"Cottonwood," read the sign—barreling across the deserted two-lane road into a truck stop. A gas station was off to our left, and, in front of the eighteen-wheelers slung across the pavement like dead whales, a wooden A-framed restaurant sat glumly on bald hill. STUCKEY'S, announced the yellow letters over the entrance. Jade was slinking the Toyota between the trucks.

"See her car?" she asked.

Leulah shook her head. "It's already 2:30. Maybe she's not coming."

"She's coming."

We circled the lot until Leulah tapped a fingernail on the window.

"There." She was indicating Hannah's red Subaru; it was sandwiched between a white pickup truck and a van.

Jade swung into the next row and reversed into a spot by a bank of pine needles and the road. Leulah flung off her seatbelt, crossed her arms, and Jade blithely helped herself to another black shoelace, gnawing one end, and wrapping the other fast around her knuckles like a boxer before he puts on his gloves. Hannah's Subaru was in front of us, two lines of cars away. Across the parking lot on the hill slumped the restaurant, legally blind (three windows in the back boarded up) and seriously balding (roofing coming off in clumps). You couldn't see much in the dimmed windows—a few shifts of tired color, a row of green lamps hanging down like moldy showerheads — but one didn't have to go inside to know the menus were sticky, the tables seasoned with pie crumb, the waitresses crabby, the clientele beefy. One definitely had to beat the saltshaker senseless — maggot-like grains of rice visible inside—to coax out a mere
speck
of salt. ("If they can't do salt, I wonder what makes them think they can do chicken cacciatore," Dad would say in such a place, holding the menu at a safe distance from his face in case it sprang to life.)

I hunched forward and cleared my throat, a signal for Jade or Lu to explain what we were doing at this awful roadie watering hole (a place Dad and I would go to great distances to avoid; it wasn't unheard for us to take a twenty-mile detour simply to avoid breaking bread with "men and women who, if one squinted, resembled piles of tires") but when they
still
said nothing (Lu, too, was stuffing her mouth with licorice now, chewing goatishly) I realized it was one of those things they couldn't put into words. Putting it into words made it real and they'd be guilty of something.

For ten minutes, the only sound was an occasional door slam—some loot-stomached trucker coming, going, starving, stuffed—and the angry hisses of the freeway. Visible through the dark trees edging the parking lot was a bridge with an endless bullet-fire of cars, red-and-white sparks shooting into the night.

"Who'll it be?" Jade asked blandly, looking through the binoculars.

Lu shrugged, chewing her licorice cud. "Don't know."

"Fat or skinny."

"Skinny."

"See, I think pork this time."

"She doesn't like pork."

"Yes, she does. They're her Beluga. Reserved for special occasions.
Oh."
Jade jolted forward, banging the binoculars on the windshield. "Oh,
fuck me
. . . shit."

"What—is he a baby?"

Jade's mouth was open. Her lips moved, but there were no words. Then she exhaled heavily: "Ever seen
Breakfast at Tiffany's?"

"No,"
Lu said sarcastically, putting her hands on the dashboard and leaning forward to survey the two people who'd just emerged from the restaurant.

"Well"—without looking away from the binoculars, Jade's right hand plunged into the bag of chips and stuffed a clump into her mouth —"it's that awful Doc person. Only ancient. Normally, I'd say at least it's not Rusty Trawler, but in this case I'm not so sure." She sat back, swallowed, and, with a grim look, handed Lu the binoculars. "Rusty has teeth."

After a quick glimpse (a revolted expression spilled all over her face), Lu handed me the binoculars. I swallowed and pressed them to my eyes: Hannah Schneider had just left the restaurant. She was walking with a man.

"I always hated Doc," Lu said softly.

Hannah was dolled up as I'd never seen her before ("painted," they'd say at Coventry Academy) wearing a furry black coat—I guessed rabbit, due to its teeny-bopperish look (the zipper graced with a pompom)—gold hoops, dark lipstick charring her mouth. Her hair recoiled from her shoulders and sharp, white high heels peered out of the cuffs of her Saran-tight jeans. When I shifted the binoculars to inspect her companion, I immediately felt sick, because in comparison to Hannah, he was shriveled. Wrinkles Etch A Sketched his face. He was in his late sixties, maybe even early seventies, shorter than she and skinny as a roadside curb. His torso and shoulders were meatless, like thick plaid flannel had been chucked over a picture frame. His hair was pretty thick, his hairline not eroding (his lone, remotely attractive feature). It mopped up whatever light was around, going green as they passed under the floodlight, then an oxidized, bicycle-spoke gray. As he moved down the steps after her—Hannah was walking swiftly, unzipping a weird pink fur purse, searching for her car keys—his bony legs jerked out to the sides like a retractable drying rack.

"Retch, you going to let anyone else look or what?"

I handed Jade the binoculars. She peered through them, gnawing her lip. "Hope he brought Viagra," she muttered. Lu slouched down in her seat and froze as they climbed into Hannah's car.

"Oh, for God's sake, you idiot, she can't
see
us," Jade said irritably, though she, too, sat very still, waiting for the Subaru to move out of its space, sneaking behind one of the semis, before starting the car.

"Where are they going?" I asked, though I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

"Fleabag motel," Jade said. "She'll bang the guy for a half-hour to forty-five minutes, then throw him out. I'm always surprised she doesn't bite off his head like a praying mantis."

We followed the Subaru (maintaining a polite distance) for three, maybe four miles, soon entering what I assumed was Cottonwood. It was one of those skin-and-bone towns Dad and I had driven through a million times, a town wan and malnourished; somehow it managed to survive on nothing but gas stations, motels, and McDonald's. Big scab-like parking lots scarred the sides of the road.

After fifteen minutes, Hannah switched on her blinker and turned left into a motel, the Country Style Motor Lodge, a white flat arc-shaped building sitting in the middle of a barren lot like a lost pair of dentures. A few maple trees sulked close to the road, others slouched suggestively in front of the Registration Office, as if mimicking the clientele. We pulled in thirty seconds after her, but quickly swung to the right, stopping by a gray sedan, while Hannah parked by the office and disappeared inside. Two or three minutes later, when she reappeared, slimy light from the carport splattered her face and her expression scared me. I saw it only for a few seconds (and she wasn't exactly close) but to me, she looked like an off TV—no breathy soap opera or courtroom drama, not even a wan western rerun — just blank. She climbed back into the Subaru, started the car, and slowly pulled past us.

"Shit," squeaked Lu, slipping down in the seat.

"Oh
please,"
Jade said. "You'd be the crummiest assassin."

The car stopped in front of one of the rooms on the far left. Doc emerged with his hands in his pockets, Hannah with a minute grin spearing her face. She unlocked the door and they disappeared inside.

"Room 22," Jade reported from behind the binoculars. Hannah must have immediately pulled the curtains, because when a light flicked on, the drapes, the color of orange cheddar, were completely closed, without a splinter through them.

"Does she know him?" I asked. It was more a far-flung hope than an actual question.

Jade shook her head. "Nope." She turned around in the seat, staring at me. "Charles and Milton found out about it last year. They were out one night, decided to swing by her house but then passed her car. They followed her all the way out here. She starts at Stuckey's at 1:45. Eats. Picks one out. The first Friday of every month. It's the one date she keeps."

"What do you mean?"

"You
know. She's pretty disorganized. Well, not about this."

"And she doesn't. . . know you know?"

"No
way."
Her eyes pelted my face. "And don't even think about telling her."

"I won't," I said, glancing at Lu, but she didn't seem to be listening. She sat in her seat as if strapped to an electric chair. "So what happens now?" I asked. "A taxi pulls up. He'll emerge from the room with half his clothes, some

times his shirt balled in his hands or without his socks. And then he'll limp away in the taxi. Probably back to Stuckey's where he'll get into his truck, drive off to who knows where. Hannah leaves in the morning."

"How do you know?"

"Charles usually stays the whole time."

I didn't especially want to ask any more questions, so the three of us lapsed into silence again, a quiet that went on even after Jade moved the car closer so we could make out the 22, the safari leaf pattern on the pulled curtains and the dent in Hannah's car. It was strange, the wartime effect of the parking lot. We were stationed somewhere, oceans from home, afraid of things unseen. Leulah was shell-shocked, back straight as a flagpole, her eyes magnetized to the door. Jade was the senior officer, crabby, worn-out and perfectly aware nothing she said could comfort us so she only reclined her seat, turned on the radio and shoved potato chips into her mouth. I sort of Vietnamed too. I was the cowardly homesick one who ends up dying unheroically from a wound he accidently inflicts upon himself that squirts blood like a grape Capri Sun. I wouldVe given my left hand to be away from this place. My Pie in the Sky was to be next to Dad again, wearing cloud flannel pajamas and grading a few of his student research papers, even the awful ones by the slacker who employed a huge bold font in order to reach Dad's minimum requirement of twenty to twenty-five pages.

I remembered what Dad said when I was seven at the Screamfest Fantasy Circus in Choke, Indiana, after we'd taken the House of Horrors ride and I'd been so terrified I'd ridden the thing with my fingers nailed to my eyes— never peeking, never once glimpsing a single horror. After I pried my hands off my face, rather than chastising my cowardice, Dad had looked down at me and nodded thoughtfully, as if I'd just revealed startling new insights on revolutionizing welfare. 'Yes," he'd said. "Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging—not enlightenment but enleadenment. If one recognizes the difference and prepares oneself—it is extraordinarily brave. Because when it comes to certain human miseries, the only eyewitnesses should be the pavement and maybe the trees."