You Only Get Letters from Jail (5 page)

“Those were in alphabetical order,” Darlene said. She was holding up the bar on the typewriter and blowing on some Wite-Out so she could get it to dry faster.

“I'm going home,” I said. “Can you let my dad know?”

“What about the Buick?”

“He'll manage. He doesn't need me.”

Darlene hit the carriage return on the typewriter, spaced the type guide into the next blank, and continued typing. “I guess there's always Nadine,” she said.

I slipped out the back door of the office, stepped down the short flight of bare wood stairs, and jogged around the back of the lot until I hit the alley and disappeared down the street.

It had been hot in the office and I knew it was hot outside, but this was furnace-blast heat and I was sweating before I reached the corner of Meadowview and Flower. The pavement was hot, and when the sidewalk broke away and I was forced to walk on the asphalt, I could feel my shoes sinking into the tar and I had to pull hard on them to lift each step and keep stride. I had skipped out on work and didn't have so much as two quarters in my pocket and I was so thirsty that I felt like the act of swallowing would take the last of my spit and make me cough until I puked. I felt a pinch below my ribs and knew I was getting a side ache. I was still a mile from my house and only two blocks from the lot and already I missed the little television on the shelf and the sound of water dripping from the air conditioner and the intermittent flutter from Darlene's fan lifting papers on the board. Maybe five bucks an hour wasn't such a raw deal, especially if it meant a ride home. By skipping out now I was a chickenshit and weak and probably kind of lazy and a disappointment, too, but freedom was freedom and it tasted a hell of a lot better than work.

I turned the corner at Sundance and headed for Coyote Street and the buried suburbs where every street was a
credit to the Battle of the Little Bighorn and Coyote Street hit Thunderhead Circle and War Horse and Arrapahoe and Black Hills and Custer Court, but there was no Sitting Bull on the map, no court or way or street, but there were soccer fields and a public pool, and Comanche Park in between them.

A car came up behind me and when it honked it knocked me out of my head and jerked me back to the sidewalk so hard that I screamed like a girl. I had been dreaming about chicken tacos and my ninth-grade German teacher named Fran. I turned around and readied my middle finger for the international gesture of fuck off, but when I turned to the street the Vette was behind me and even though I brought my hand up to shield my eyes against the glare, I could have sworn that it was Nadine behind the wheel, but it all had to be an optical illusion, the beginning of heatstroke. My dad didn't let the Vette off the lot—it was his centerpiece, maybe even his entire center. He kept it parked on a sheet of Astroturf near the front of the office. It was the one car he didn't let me wash because I might scratch it. He had a habit of walking past the car, stopping suddenly, squinting down at the metal, licking his thumb, and rubbing at something on the hood or the windshield or the roof or the door until he was satisfied that it was gone.

The horn went off again and this time I stepped off the sidewalk toward the car and reached out to touch the long front fender to make sure that it was real. I wasn't convinced until I felt hot fiberglass under my hand.

“C'mon,” Nadine said. “Let's go.”

I leaned in through the open T-top. “Why do you have my dad's car?”

“He took off with some couple and an ugly brown car, so I thought I'd take my own test-drive, you know? I washed all the cars.”

I opened the passenger door and slid onto the seat. I had on jeans but even so I could feel the hot leather through my pants and I wondered if Nadine's thighs were burning since they didn't have much cover.

“Why'd you leave?” she asked.

I pushed the button on my window so that it rolled down and I caught a quick puff of exhaust and breeze. “I got bored,” I said.

“You want me to take you home or do you want to take a test-drive with me?”

I thought about Nadine's duffel bag upstairs and the hot house or the cool car and her driving, and I hooked the seat belt across my lap.

Nadine drove fast, and she ran through the gears like they were water and she had been driving the car all of her life. The car was dark blue with wide tires and it had enough layers of wax on it to make it look brand-new. My dad had it in the Fourth of July parade a few times, with Darlene Mason driving and him in the gorilla suit and a big banner wrapped around the car advertising the car lot and the deal of the day—in-house financing, zero down, buy now pay later, Ford LTD blue book $2,250—yours for $1,999—but one year it got really hot early and both my dad and the car
overheated and there is nothing worse than seeing a sweating man dressed like a gorilla holding his monkey head in his hands, sitting on the nose of a car that is blowing antifreeze all over the pavement. He stuck to TV ads after that.

Nadine pulled in at a 7-Eleven and told me to sit tight. There was a bunch of guys in dirty orange construction T-shirts sitting in a big truck and Nadine walked over and they were all smiling at her and when she got to the truck one of them opened the door and she leaned against it and looked up at the group while they talked about something that I couldn't hear. The one in the passenger seat shrugged and the rest of them started laughing and he jumped down from the cab and spit a line of chew into the dirt and followed Nadine into the store, and when they came out again he walked her over to the car and handed her a bag and asked if thank you was all he got, and she laughed and said yes, that's it, and he waited a minute and then shrugged and walked back to the truck, where they all watched us back out and leave.

“Here,” she said. She put the bag in my lap and shifted into third and hit the turn signal.

I opened the bag and looked in and there was a six-pack of beer, something in green bottles. “Whoa,” I said. I wasn't sure what I'd expected, but I'd been thinking about Lay's potato chips and maybe some Gatorade.

“Is there someplace we can go?” Nadine asked. “Someplace with grass and stuff. And shade?” The sun pinned us through the open top and there was no break and I was burning.

“The park,” I said. “If you go in through the north entrance and stay on the road it curves around to some trees and a little creek.”

“Get me there,” Nadine said.

When my mom and dad started dividing up the contents of the old house, they divided up the kids, too, put their names on us like they did with the books and the records so that they could mark their territory and take their ownership. I didn't want to go with my mom. It had all started with a group she joined, and she stopped doing our laundry, and then she went on weekend retreats with these other women who smelled like the Indian mini-mart around the corner from the car lot, and then she stopped cooking. She bought a pottery wheel and took over the garage and she started displaying lopsided vases that didn't hold water and then she took a class at the rec center and figured out that she didn't want to do this anymore and left us all to figure out what exactly
this
was and my dad started sleeping on the sofa bed downstairs. Then he got the house across from Comanche Park and she kept the old house and my brother, Jerry, and we all just divided like a cell.

We took the road that went deep into the park, and Nadine parked at the curb, cut the motor, and the engine ticked and cooled. She took the bag of beers off my lap and dug through her front pockets until she found a quarter. “Watch this,” she said. She fitted the edge of the quarter under the bottle cap and tipped the quarter up just a hair so that it pried into the groove, then she pressed
it down against the index finger of her right hand, which was wrapped around the neck. There was a pop and the cap flipped off the lip of the bottle and onto the seat.

“That was cool,” I said.

“This trucker in Fresno taught me about fulcrums,” she said. She passed the bottle to me and then she opened one for herself. “Cheers,” she said. We clicked bottle necks and both of us stretched out in our seats. There were tree branches tangled above us and we were circled with shade. I could hear birds moving around in the leaves, but there was no one else parked. Everybody was across the field at the pool.

“Drink up,” she said. I watched her tip her bottle and swallow fast over and over again until the bottle was pointed straight at the sky and I could see thin foam slip down the green neck and then nothing at all. She wiped the back of her hand across her lips and closed her mouth on a burp. “Sorry,” she said, “but warm beer is no good.”

I copied what Nadine had done, and the first few swallows were easy, but then the beer started flowing in faster than down and I thought I was going to choke it up before I could get the bottle drained.

“Good one,” Nadine said. She took the empty bottle from me and handed me a full one. I was trying to hear the creek, but there was no sound except for the birds and the traffic on the other side of the park and I wondered if the creek had finally dried up and quit. Jerry and I used to hunt for turtles in the shallow water. Somebody had told us that there were baby red-eared sliders in the creek,
and we would spend half the summer trying to track them down. All we ever found was a giant pollywog with two legs and a dead snake.

“Fulcrums and what truckers meant when they offered me twenty to punch the ape,” Nadine said. “That's what I learned in Fresno.” She laughed but it sounded like a reflex without anything being funny at all.

I took a drink of my beer. In my mind I saw my dad in his gorilla suit jumping out from behind a wall of balloons and Darlene on the hood of the Vette and Nadine dressed in Rocky Balboa trunks and a pair of red Everlast gloves, throwing jabs at my dad. I wanted to ask Nadine if she'd seen my dad's commercials and if maybe she had this vision, too, but I didn't. There were probably other apes and my dad's commercials didn't reach all the way to Fresno.

Nadine was staring out the window, but other than a picnic table under the trees there was nothing to look at for so long. “You have a girlfriend, Floyd?”

April's yearbook picture jumped into my head, and I saw the page and her in the second row on the left side, between Tiffany Small and Aaron Smith. April Smiley. It was the worst name ever. “Sort of,” I said.

Nadine nodded and I could see the stray hairs behind her ear where sweat had plastered them to her skin. She had a small beauty mark on her neck just behind her jaw-line. “You like her?”

We had done an English project together and eaten lunches at the same table for a couple of weeks and then there had been a note passed from April to me, something
she had given me between classes when I was on my way to chemistry and it was still cold out and there was a lot of wind blowing garbage against the fences.
Do you like me?

I had carried the note in my back pocket through the rest of the day, and I took it home with me and spread it out on my desk, unfolded the college-ruled binder paper that still had jagged edges from the spiral binding, and I took my yearbook off the bookcase and opened it to the sophomore
S
pages. April Smiley. The picture was okay. She was a good essay writer. I wrote
yes
on the note, under her question—wrote it in pencil so I could erase it later if I needed to.

“I haven't been home in weeks,” Nadine said. “I can't remember anybody there.”

“Don't you miss your family?”

Nadine was quiet for a minute but I could see her fingers gripping and releasing around the steering wheel so that her knuckles turned white and went pink and then white again. “Family is kind of a funny thing, don't you think? You don't really know who you are until there's nobody there to make you somebody that you're not.”

The engine was still ticking and the six-pack had been reduced to two bottles. I wondered if the water in the swimming pool across the field was cold, so that you had to stretch your towel out on the hot cement in order to warm up after you swam for a while and then your towel never got completely dry—just a tepid damp, and flat, and stuck with pebbles.

Cars started coming into the shade and a family claimed the picnic table, spread
it with a cloth and started unpacking bags of food. Out in the grass a guy and a girl were throwing a Frisbee for a white dog. Nadine and I watched the sun spread itself thin through the pollution and turn the sky bright orange and pink and yellow and purple, watched it turn the reflections on the car windows red, and then slip over the edge and pull the colors with it. We didn't leave until the crickets told us to.

My dad's Ford was in the driveway and the lights were on in the house and I remembered that Nadine had taken the Vette and he hadn't really lent it to her. My stomach clenched a little and I got ready to get in trouble. Nadine saw me slump in the seat when she rolled to a stop next to the Ford and she knew what I was ready for without me having to say anything.

“I'll handle this,” she said, and then she was out of the car and walking up the steps and pulling the screen door open and there was no rod in her back holding her straight. She was genuinely not afraid at all.

My dad was sitting on the couch with his work shirt on and his tie loosened, and the television was on but there was no sound. He was just staring at the screen.