Truants (22 page)
“Oh yeah?” It was more a challenge than a question.
“Well, what do you like?” He changed directions.
“I don’t know. I know the things I don’t like. I don’t like all those horny fucking bastards swarming around. I don’t like being yelled at and looked at and made to ride the unicycle. And then the fucking trapeze. I don’t like my father, the rotten sonofabitch. I don’t like being scared.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“Thanks,
old man
,”
“You like this? Driving with us?”
She leaned forward, with a bit more authority this time, and turned off the radio.
“Going with you guys is okay.”
“Okay? Isn’t it something you like, something you’d choose?”
“What is this?” Louisa began. “Who do you think you are, the fucking police?”
“I just …”
“Going with you guys is okay, because we’re going
away
. I like that. You’re okay, but he’s screwed up … going
to
his father. He’ll grow out of it, maybe. But times being what they are, this is
okay
.”
“What are times?”
“Hard. Full of swarming assholes.” And with that she shifted in her seat. End of interview. To avoid the new silence she tried the radio again; I was beginning to understand the uses of media.
But the radio only confused me. On center-dial stations, wayward disc jockeys played rock music, blood-thud ballads recounting sexual intercourse between sophomore dropouts. I preferred the distant signal radio stations found only at the crumbling edge of the dial: 1650, 1666. On these, some earnest soul broadcasting out of his basement in Pocatello, Idaho, would be yelling bad news from the Bible, and giving his address five times an hour so that we could order prayer blankets and autographed religious calendars. The word “A-Men!” was a lament and not a benediction.
The lessons fought. One said:
Don’t grow up!
The other:
if you do,
REPENT
!
There’s a world out there
, I thought, listening to the radio,
but I’m not sure it’s ready for me
. Or vice versa.
Later still, Will started talking, telling a story that I thought was going to be another tall tale, ending with little creatures running the show. But it was not.
“Her father despised me.” He was speaking about his late wife, Elizabeth. “He knew my brother ran a ‘tavern’ and that I was just a plumber, and when he found out that my dad had worked for the railroad and we weren’t Mormons, that about sealed the deal. Four strikes against me.
“One night when I took her out to her farm after a dance in Salt Lake, her father was sitting in his old Buick with the motor running. He told her to go in the house and
me
to get in the car. On the way back to the “M and M,” George’s café, he told me that it was the last time he expected to be taking me home, since it was the last time I was welcome at their place. What a ride! I think I may have said, ‘Yes, sir,’ maybe a few times.
“When I got out of the car in front of the M and M, and he wheeled that big old car around and headed home, I thought, ‘broken heart.’ “Will laughed.” I mean, I thought my heart was broken!
“The next morning, I found my car parked in front, where he’d delivered it, and I got embarrassed all over again, but I wanted to see that girl.
“So I had to court her right under her old man’s nose. In the fall I would fire my old L. C. Smith double-barrel so she could find me near the river basin, half a mile from their house, and somedays we’d hunt and somedays not.
“The next time I went to the farm proper was for the wedding, and he treated me right, because he knew Elizabeth was okay and that I was a good plumber.” Will looked at Louisa. “He’d asked around. But that was excitement, hunting through that river basin with her, a rifle shot from the farmhouse.”
“You should have just shot him,” Louisa said.
“No, we became great friends,” Will said. “Though he never came to the M and M, because George served beer. But time lets people do that, become friends.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Then Will went on to tell a story about the engagement ring that he almost lost in a pumpkin at Halloween, and he laughed a lot about how clever he had thought he was to deliver the ring in a jack-o-lantern.
As Will was speaking, I began to get a very real sense of time, of time running, of time running out, and I felt the acid burn on my neck where Louisa had kissed me, or had tried to, three nights before. In fact, everything in my body from my eyes to the blood beating backward in my heart told me that I wanted to kiss her. I felt it as a thrill in the back of my legs. I was sure the feeling was tangible in the car, sure that she felt it anyway, but when I moved toward her, tilting my head like an actor, I guess, she caught my face in her palm like a volleyball and my lips met only her hand. It was salty.
“What are you doing?”
I desperately wanted her to interpret my enthusiasms correctly, as a vague tenderness and not as part of the cosmic horniness she saw the world promoting. So I said honestly, “I don’t know. I thought I’d lose my head for a moment. It’s small and I’m not really using it for much these days. I like you; I want to kiss you.” Saying the word
kiss
multiplied the charge.
“Sure you do.” Her hands were still up.
“Look,” I said, raising my own hands as a gesture of truce, “I’m going to kiss you. I know you’re going to hit me, but I want to kiss you. Okay?”
“Try it.”
I did try, and in the ensuing tussle, I think I might have actually kissed her. Or part of her. She was wrestling fairly actively, and I can’t now be sure if my lips found her face or not. My efforts were brought to an end by her fist, which wound free of my hands, and punched my breastbone in a breathtaking way.
She leaned back into her corner of the seat, as triumphant and scornful as the heroine of a thick novel, but I won the moment by saying, with the little air I could purchase, “It was worth it.”
It was always late in the car at night, late and it grew later, until we were the only car on the road for hours. Then, when the light started to come so slowly and so suddenly that you couldn’t see the change, I always felt as if I had slept, even if I hadn’t. The change of light gave me energy. Time expanded and contracted that way staying up all night; morning came too soon or was it days late? The first car would pass us going the other way, and we knew it was tomorrow.
So I drove until we passed the first semis headed south, and then Will sat up and asked me if he had been asleep. I told him it was a hard question for me to answer. I told him that he had at least been
slumping
for about an hour. That was all the evidence I had. The way he shook his head at me made me wonder if he might know me too well after all.
Will used the first light to tell me how he made his fortune in the swimming-pool business. He made it sound like the jump from plumbing to installing swimming pools was just a natural evolution, something that any plumber would do sooner or later. I liked the way Will told his stories, a step at a time, as if he were laying bricks or setting tile, carefully.
After twenty-six years building pools in Salt Lake City and the nearby Utah communities, Will’s company, under the new management of Robbie, his son, moved to Las Vegas to expand and more efficiently serve the tri-state area. “It was a good plan,” Will said. “Robbie’s put more pools in Vegas than I ever set here.”
“I’m not impressed,” Louisa said.
In the new daylight we could see that we’d entered a region dominated by mountains. I had to lean forward to the windshield to see their tops and the snow there. The huge plate of pea-green water opposite the mountains was Utah Lake, Will told us. Then we passed the steel mill which made the lake pea-green. We passed a mammoth “Y” stamped white into the mountainside. It resembled a martini glass, and held me oddly: letters on the mountain. Will explained it as the
Y
for B. Y. U. Institutions of higher learning place their letters on mountains. The concept attracted me. We could have built a
W
at Noble Canyon. For
Wayward
. An
O
at Blue Mesa for
Old
.
Then we mounted and crossed a broad sandy moraine deposited by the last intermountain glacier, one million years
B.C.
, and we glimpsed the green channeled valley of Salt Lake City. The city itself grew right up the far hills, and on one brown hillside I was satisfied to read:
U. Undecided
. We descended into the valley gradually, on the freeway, motorhomes and motorcycles passing us left and right.
Will gave me explicit traffic directions and I drove us through the swampy result of a zoning squabble west of the city, past theaters and homes and boat factories and Arctic Circle drive-ins and junkyards. His last instruction—“left”—was coupled with the benediction, “Spared again!” And we turned into the abandoned parking lot of the Redwood Mortuary and Memorial Park. Next door was Heavy Equipment Sales and yellow bulldozers rusted in the morning sun.
“We’re going to have breakfast here?” Louisa said.
“I’ve a little business,” Will said, stretching out of the car. “I’ll be back in five minutes.”
“Five minutes
only
,” Louisa yelled at him. She turned to me. “What’s he doing in there?” She looked scared.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t like this shit. Redwood Fucking Mortuary City.”
When Will came out, he carried a manila envelope. He waved it at us as he came down the cement steps. “My fortune!” he said. “Now we can eat.”
“You’re as screwed up as he is,” Louisa said to the old man. “Crazy people sit in back.” And she climbed in the driver’s seat.
***************
After breakfast—another real-life drama featuring a lethal encounter with uncooked pork—we walked to the post office to mail another card to Leonard. The food sat on my all-night excitement like a sumo wrestler, dragging me to earth. The sunlight called, but I could barely answer.
I was getting accustomed to Will winking at me over lunch counters and saying, “Go ahead, order the pork.” I had already suffered from things worse than trichinosis, but still I deferred. “Live dangerously,” he’d add before ordering his eggs and bacon. “Take a chance.”
“I am by hanging around with you,” was the best answer I could come up with.
In the lobby of the post office, I paused to rifle through the wad of FBI-wanted poster sheets. Most of the individuals were wanted for taking firearms to family reunions. Louisa saw me.
“Nobody I know,” I said.
“Yet.”
Will had gone inside to mail our card to Leonard. (“ … remember us? … ”). Seeing a coin photocopy machine in the lobby, I decided to send Steele a missive as well. I stalled for a moment, unable to cook up anything thrilling. Finally, I placed the car keys on the glass plate. Then, before I pushed the button, I pressed my hand to the glass with Louisa’s.
“Oh? Is this symbolic?” she said as the machine hummed and flashed.
“No,” I said. “It’s a legal copy of the current artifacts for the criminal archives.”
“You’re no criminal.”
“You don’t know.”
Our sheet came out, a negative photograph. It looked like a map.
“Steele will love it.”
“You love it,” she said, following me to a window where I bought a stamped envelope. “Why not make another copy and send it to your father?”
I dropped the letter in the slot and walked out through the double glass doors ahead of her.
Send one to my father. My father. I’d seen him in advertisements, and as the third bad guy in television shows, and I expected, as we drove into the center of Salt Lake City, Utah, I expected him to step out of a crowd of extras on the street in the crosswalk and take my arm, call my name, perhaps just look my way. I’m waiting, I thought, for something to happen that can’t. I am trying to do something impossible by driving around the United States of America. My father steps down the long bright drive in California to his mailbox and finds a Xerox copy of my hand. I couldn’t picture it.
Will drove us down through the grid of Salt Lake City, explaining the geometric street system. The streets became wider and wider as we moved into the center of the city. “Wide enough to turn a wagon and a team of horses.” And to support his history, he wheeled our car in a U-turn on a wide street three blocks west of the Mormon Temple, and parked in front of a warehouse.
CLARE AND SONS REFRIGERATION AND HEATING
.
Louisa jumped out of the car and said, “Spared again. Right, old timer?”
“We’ll see.”
Will looked over at me, his eyes smiling. Getting out of the car, he said to her, “You think driving around with us is just okay?”
At a counter inside, a husky man with rising curly hair was dealing with a customer. Behind him at steel desks, two women typed. The rest of the gymnasium was full of refrigerators, air-conditioners, and heaters, rows high, in crates.
One of the women rose and asked us if she could help us. Will said we’d wait for Bo. When he said
Bo
, the young man turned a moment, puzzled. He guided his customer across into the neighborhood of equipment, opened the back hood on one of the heater units and returned for us. He gave Will a strange look and said, “Can I help you?”
“Bo?”
“Yeah.”
Will extended his hand. “Will Clare. Clare Pools.”
“
Uncle Will?
God, I haven’t …”
“Seventeen years. You work here now, eh? The old man put you to work at last.”
“Right.”
“Where is he? Could we see him?”
“Of course. In his office. He’s still around.” And he directed us through the counter, into a back office where an old man with the telling thick white hair sat at a bare steel desk. In fact, the whole office was bare except for the phone and a Clare Refrigeration and Heating calendar.
“Got a new sign out front,” Will said.
“Will! For christssake. It
is
you!” The man stood and clamped Will’s hand. “Where have you been? I thought you were dead like everyone else.” He laughed, “I thought you were in South America!”