You Only Get Letters from Jail (18 page)

“No, that's Diane Kenyon, and she is very much alive. I saw her at Holiday Market today, bagging groceries.”

“Then who is she?”

“I don't know exactly. I know I've seen her, though. Look at this—Mrs. Irwin is out in her yard in her robe again. Disgusting.” He tightened the focus on the binoculars.

I read articles I'd already read in the mechanic's magazines, and eventually the sun disappeared and we were shut into darkness. It was Thursday and the streets were quiet. One-Legged Ed's driveway was lined with motorcycles and big guys smoking cigarettes and talking loud, but his garage was dark and there wasn't much to look at. Sometimes we would see someone pass by the windows in his house and we would follow his movement for a while, watch him step out on the back porch, light a cigarette, stand out there and smoke until someone else came out, joined him, took a hit, passed it back.

“I wanna go see her,” I said.

Hurley was quiet for a while. He set the binoculars on his bed and rubbed at his eyes. “What are we going to do with her, Reece? I think we should tell somebody.”

“I don't want to tell anybody.” I could feel my heart under my shirt. I felt hot. “Not until we figure out who she is and we can report it. Maybe there will be some kind of reward.” I wasn't sure why, but I wasn't ready to lose her and I had to go see her and I would go with or without Hurley. We heard a motorcycle fire up and I closed the magazine. “Nothing in the garage?” I asked.

“Nah, it's quiet. Just the usual.” Hurley lifted the binoculars and looked out on One-Legged Ed's house. “There's girls there tonight.” He handed me the binoculars and I moved forward on the bed beside him. I could feel his bare arm against my shoulder, and I could feel the heat on his body, and I could smell him beside me—soap and sweat and laundry detergent. I looked into the darkness and tried to pick out faces in One-Legged Ed's crowd. The girls were young, but older than us, and they stayed close to each other and to the men, and sometimes they reached out and grabbed one or another by the arm and there would be laughter and we could hear it over the rooftops.

“I count five,” I said.

“What are they doing?”

“Nothing. Laughing. Drinking beer. Smoking. One is putting on lipstick. You want the binoculars back?”

Hurley rolled onto his back and shut his eyes. “No. Just keep telling me. Where's Ed?”

“I don't see him,” I said. Then the light flicked on in the garage and I waited and finally someone passed in front of the window and I could see it was One-Legged Ed and he had a girl with him. In the light I could see her better than the
others, and she was small with long brown hair and skinny legs and she was wearing a skirt and she looked bored.

“He's in the garage. With one of the girls.”

Hurley opened his eyes for a second. “What are they doing?”

“Nothing. I can't tell.”

“Does he still have the bomb?”

“Wait, she's fucking kissing him. I swear to God, she has her tongue in his mouth.”

Hurley sat up. “Give me the binoculars.”

We sat on his bed and watched the girl kiss One-Legged Ed and I was turned on and disgusted and couldn't seem to stop watching, and Hurley pulled his shirt off and I took the binoculars back and smelled Hurley and watched the girl and didn't want to stop doing any of it. Hurley was whispering song lyrics, and he kept his eyes closed and he pushed at the front of his jeans with his palm. When he was asleep I left his house and walked out into the street and I could hear the music from One-Legged Ed's and I wondered what would happen if I just went over there, knocked on the door, and invited myself in. I wondered if they would let me stay, or if they would beat the shit out of me and drag me home by my laceless shoes.

I went home but did not sleep. I lay on my bed and didn't fold the covers back, just waited for the light to come back to the sky and for another day to start. The heat did not break in the night and I was slicked with sweat by the time I heard my dad start the shower and my mother start the coffee and both of them move toward work. My
parents liked to fight in low whispers and there was a lot of that lately, but I couldn't decipher any of it and tried to forget it anyway.

When there was less than light, and only the promise of it, I left my house and went back to the slough and cut through the grass and the trails and found the path to the shore where the girl was tied. I expected her to be gone, cut loose, and was just as scared as I was hopeful that I would find a broken stick, dirty laces, and nothing but green water, but of course she was there, just as we'd left her, facedown and not breathing and flexing with the small ripples of water. When I got close enough to the shore to see her, I heard a frog jump and there was a big splash and I screamed a little and then laughed at screaming and that sound scared me, too.

I sat on the grass in front of her and saw the remnants of where we'd been the day before—the crushed cigarettes and stamped weeds. The shoelace was still tight on her wrist and the stick was still upright and anchoring her to the shore. Her hair covered her head in all directions and there was no chance even to see the profile of her face.

“I wish I knew who you were,” I whispered. “I wish I knew you.”

I stretched out on the grass and the ground was cool beneath me. Moisture crept up and dampened my shirt and it felt good and I closed my eyes for a second and when I dreamed, she was with me, in my dreams, and we were on our way to the prom, and I was in a tux with a pale blue shirt, and she was in a blue dress and I had a car that I had
never seen before, but it was mine and instead of going to the dance, without saying anything, we decided to park out by the river, the real river and not the slough with its warm slow algae and green bullfrogs and smell, but by the river that moved and ran and went deep and stayed cold. We sat in my car and I played the Stones and she started kissing on me, on my neck, and I let her and she was beautiful. When I looked at her, it was as if I couldn't see her exactly, but I could tell that she was beautiful, and I kissed her back and then it was as if I was watching it all from a window and I could see my silhouette in the car, through the rear window, and I was sitting up in my seat and she wasn't, and I could feel her next to me, and also watching all of this from the window was Hurley, and he had his hand on the front of my jeans and he was pressing me, and I could feel him, too.

When I woke up the ground was dry and the sun was already hot and I was thirsty and there were yellow weeds pressed into my cheek and a short trail of ants on my arm. The girl was still in the water and everything was the same. I heard a plane overhead but could not see it, just the trail of white it left behind as it split the blue down the middle like a seam. I kicked off my shoes and pulled off my jeans. I waded into the water next to her. There were places on her body where the water did not reach and she looked dry and hot and exposed, so I splashed water over her, slowly, cupped it in my hand and sprinkled it over her like rain. I stood close enough to her that I could feel her fingers touch me when the water shifted the right direction and
she knocked against me and I let her. Her fingers did not feel like fingers, but I knew that they were and I knew that they were hers and even though I wanted to, even though I almost did, I could not put my hand around her arm and lift her enough to see her face, roll her onto her back and turn her to the sky.

I went to Hurley's but he didn't open the door. His mom finally did and said that he didn't feel well, was still sleeping, but she was having a party that night and I should tell my parents and I was welcome to come over and keep Hurley company. As I was walking back to my house, I heard an upstairs window slide open and I turned around just in time to take a Hot Tamale to the head. “Get back here, fucker,” Hurley shouted. The noise set off a string of dogs barking and old Mrs. Irwin in her robe looked up from her front flower bed. Hurley gave a shrill whistle and then slammed the window shut. Mrs. Irwin looked at me and smiled.

The mechanic was already at work and Hurley's mom had called in sick so she could pick up the liquor and food and she was in such a good mood that she let me and Hurley eat Pringles and watch cable and let the air conditioner rip all morning. We repaid her kindness by tapping the keg for her and getting chairs out of the garage and hosing things down and putting out plates and bowls of peanuts and testing the beer to make sure that it was fresh and testing the cups by filling some with beer to make sure they'd hold the liquid and tasting the beer to make sure that it wasn't lite beer because nobody drank that shit we
said and by the time she sent us out of the living room and back to Hurley's room, we were about half drunk. We took full cups with us and decided to try to keep them full for the rest of the night.

By nine o'clock there wasn't one person in the house who wasn't holding on to someone else for balance, and the volume had reached its peak and Hurley's Uncle Walt had put on
Frampton Comes Alive
and there were too many voices who thought they knew most of the words and were trying to join in on the choruses. At a quarter to ten, Hurley and I were sipping warm beer from the bottoms of our red cups, and we had the binoculars pegged on the street below, but all of the action in his house had moved to the backyard and all we could see were the cars parked nose to tail on the street. At eleven, One-Legged Ed left his front door and started crutching his way down the sidewalk, toward the Gatz house and the party that it had become.

“You won't believe this,” I said. “One-Legged Ed is coming up your driveway.”

I passed Hurley the binoculars and he climbed up beside me and I watched him swing them onto One-Legged Ed, who had a brown bag pressed tight to the crutches as one blue tennis shoe traded places with nothing, step after step.

“I don't fucking believe it,” Hurley said.

“Let's go answer the door.”

The front door wasn't even closed, so it was stupid to answer it and we found ourselves standing there like a
couple of jackasses when he finally made the turn at the end of the walk and started up toward the porch. In the background I could hear my mom's voice and she was saying something about chicken and then One-Legged Ed was right in front of us, gap-toothed, bomb-making, and spit-shined in what looked like a new shirt.

“Howdy, boys,” he said.

And then he did something that neither of us expected. He winked one eye closed, touched it with an index finger, and then pointed at us, separately, one by one. And then he was crutching past us toward the noise in the kitchen and somebody yelled,
Gary, you old son of a bitch, good of you to come
and it sounded like the mechanic, and maybe it was, but neither me nor Hurley turned around to watch the greeting or the greeter or the moment when the crowd broke and swallowed him in.

“I want to go see her,” I said.

We went back to Hurley's bed and listened to the music pound through the floor. “Forget about her,” Hurley said. “Give me the binoculars.” Downstairs, someone screamed laughter and there was the sound of glass breaking, and then more laughter, and a car door slammed, somebody coming or going, and then the music stopped and a few minutes passed before something else came on again.

Hurley leaned forward, half out the window, knocked his cup off the sill, and let it roll down the roof to the gutter below. “You won't believe this,” he said.

He passed me the binoculars and I tried to figure out what I was looking for, and then he pointed right and
down and I followed his finger, and I landed on One-Legged Ed's house and bounced around from window to window looking for something to catch. There was nothing, and there was nothing strange about that, One-Legged Ed was here, and then I realized that there was more than nothing, too, and it hit me that the side window of the garage was gone. It just wasn't there anymore. I spun the wheel between the lenses, tightened focus and tightened again, and then I saw that the window was there but it wasn't a window anymore—it was and it wasn't. Someone had painted it black, and it was impossible to see through—there was the hint of light behind it, the black wasn't completely dark, but there was nothing to see through to anymore. Our sight ended at the window now, and there was nothing to see—just light and the absence of what was once there, and over the rest of the house the curtains had been drawn and that was it. The hole inside to One-Legged Ed was closed.

“That son of a bitch,” I said.

“You ain't kidding.”

I tossed the binoculars onto the bed and stared at them for a second. They were worthless. Missy was moving to Southern California for college and nobody wanted a close-up of old Mrs. Irwin in her robe in her front yard.

Hurley exhaled hard enough to lift the hair off his forehead but he didn't say anything for a while. “It's all over, Reece. This summer is officially done and gone.”

“It's not even August, Hurley. Why are you being like this?”

“It's August in a week. School in a month. Summer is done. This is boring. I want to do something else.”

“I thought we were having fun,” I said.

“We were. But now I'm not. C'mon, Reece. It's time.”

Downstairs, somebody had plugged in an electric guitar and was trying to play along to the music. Finally they gave up and went into the intro for “You Really Got Me.”