A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (39 page)

One night we were making out in my room with the lights off and someone started screaming on the street outside my house. I barely registered it. People were always screaming in the streets around my neighborhood. Alex stopped for a second and whispered, “Is that okay?”

“Don't worry about it,” I said. “It happens all the time.”

After a while I was vaguely aware that the screaming stopped. I heard what sounded like a CB radio, and my brain filed it away, but I didn't think anything about it in the moment.

The next day, Kris told me that Scotty had died the night before. I was taken a little off guard by it; I'd seen him just a few weeks earlier. He'd loaned me his tent so I could take it on a school camping trip. I'd been surprised that someone like Scotty owned a tent, but he'd been really nice about it. He'd seemed fine. Now he was dead.

“What did he die of?” I asked.

“Yellow fever,” she said. “It happened really fast.”

“Jesus. Who dies of yellow fever?”

“People in the tropics. And AIDS patients, evidently.”

“Who found him?” I asked.

“Nobody. He died in the hospital. He was actually here last night. He crawled from his apartment. Three blocks on his hands and knees. But he couldn't get up the stairs, so he just lay there in the street screaming for Mark. I found him when I came home from work and called an ambulance.”

I stared at her, replaying what I'd been hearing the night before. Had it been “Help me, Mark”? Was that what I'd been hearing? I played the sound over and over in my head, until I could pick out the words. My breathing got fast. I started to sweat.

“Are you okay?” Kris asked.

I shook it off. Or tried to.

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean—no. Jesus. That's awful.”

“Yeah,” she said. “He was off his head with fever. It was terrible.”

I nodded and changed the subject.

A week later, my dad came home and gave me three pairs of jeans and a dozen pairs of wool hiking socks.

“Where'd these come from?” I asked.

“Scotty's apartment,” Dad said. “His landlord was throwing everything away, but these looked like they'd fit you.”

 

62

Alexis was my first girlfriend. I'd met her in Marine Science class in the winter of my eleventh grade year. We got partnered up to work on clay models of animals that live on the wooden pilings of piers. She was a big girl—five foot seven or so, broad-shouldered, and a little on the heavy side. She had curly brown hair, full features, and large blue eyes. She always looked startled. Her jeans were tight. Her shirts had gathers and ruffles around the shoulders and neck. She wore too much perfume, and tacky jewelry. I didn't know her personally before we were partnered together for class, but I watched people at school and I'd seen her date two geeks from the marching band—best friends, that she dated one after the other; guys I never thought would have girlfriends. After she dated them both, they repaired their friendship and became reasonably popular, having solved the mystery of girls. I watched all of this from a distance. None of them knew me. But when Alexis started giving me the look in Marine Science class, I had an idea where things might be headed.

After school that day, while I was sitting on my school bus, Marti, the girl from my German class, got on the bus and sat down next to me.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I said. “Don't you have a car? I thought you had a car.”

“I do,” she said. “I—”

“And also, you live in a completely different neighborhood.”

“Yes,” she said patiently. “I'm here to give you this.”

She handed me a folded piece of paper.

“What's this?” I asked.

“It's a phone number. My friend Alex wanted me to give it to you. She'd like you to call her.”

“Alex … Alexis? From Marine Science class?”

“Yes. She's my best friend. She found out I knew you, asked me to give you this.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Don't freak out,” said Marti.

“I'll do my best,” I said.

She got up and left the bus.

I had to admit, I was a little freaked out.

*   *   *

Brandon wasn't on the bus that day. Screwing Sadie seemed to have worked some kind of magic on his self-confidence, and his social life at Garfield had blossomed accordingly. He'd gotten on the staff of the school paper, and he was on the debate team, which he insisted was a great place to pick up girls. He even had a couple of friends who hung out with him outside of school. Some of these new guys had cars, so he ended up catching rides home more than half the time lately. I was sort of happy for him, in the conflicted tradition of the uncool guy whose partner in uncoolness suddenly becomes cool, but I wished he was on the bus to give me some advice about this Alexis thing.

When I got home I spent twenty minutes or so dithering, then called Alexis. She answered the phone at her house.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hi. This is Jason. Marti's friend. I mean—from Marine Science.”

“Oh, hi!”

“Hi.”

Long, awkward pause. The lines buzzed quietly.

“So, how's this work?” I asked. I realized it was something I'd heard in a TV show, where some rich guy was talking to a kidnapper about how to ransom his son.

“You wanna hang out tonight?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I mean, yes.”

“Great! I'll come by and get you. Where are you?”

I gave her my address and she said she'd be there in about forty-five minutes. After I hung up I felt vaguely nauseated. I got up and changed clothes. Then I changed them again. One more time for good measure.

She showed up right on schedule. I was sitting on the porch waiting for her when she arrived. When she came up the stairs she was wearing a pair of tight cutoff jeans, rolled up and hemmed, and a loose rugby shirt and a pair of Reeboks. Her curly, light brown hair was tied up in a kind of topknot.

“You ready?” she asked. Her smile was huge. Her eyes were huge. Her teeth were huge. Oh, Grandma …

“Sure,” I said.

She drove an old Saab in one of those modern noncolors; silver-white with an undertone of blue or something. When we got downstairs and climbed in, she put on a pair of fingerless leather driving gloves.

“Are we going fast?” I asked.

“Only way I like to drive,” she said, putting the car in gear and launching us up the hill toward Broadway in a smooth, constant acceleration.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Marti's house,” she said.

I knew Marti lived somewhere up north, but I was fuzzy on the details. Alexis took the long way, so she could hit more straightaways. She kept looking at me out of the corner of her eye to see how I was reacting, but I kept cool. There were plenty of things I was afraid of in life, but dying in a car accident wasn't one of them. She seemed to regard my lack of reaction as a challenge and kept pushing the little car harder, pounding out of stoplights in first and standing on the gas for fifty or sixty yards before she shifted up and let the engine take a breath. She blew through Montlake, took us across the ship canal, and was making her way into a north Seattle neighborhood called Wedgwood when the car suddenly stalled.

“Shit,” she muttered, throwing it into neutral and restarting before we'd come to a complete stop on the road. We got another few blocks before the car died again. She did the same restart trick, but she looked worried now. We pulled in at an ice cream place next to a trestle bridge for the old Burke-Gilman railroad, and Alexis used a pay phone to call Marti, who suggested running the car up to a garage just north of her house if we could make it that far.

Alexis coaxed the engine back into life and managed to get us sixty blocks north to the garage.

“You know anything about cars?” she asked me.

“Not really,” I said.

“All right.” I couldn't read her affect. She seemed sort of mad and businesslike, while at the same time she was trying to maintain some kind of mood. Like an actress whose script reading has been interrupted.

We got out of the car and a tall skinny guy in his early twenties came out of the garage to see what we needed. Only now that we were here, it didn't look like much of a garage. More of a gas station, with an advertisement saying they could do brakes and lube.

“You all need some help?” the skinny guy said. He was wearing blue coveralls and had a greasy rag in his back pocket.

“My car died,” Alexis said.

“Well,” said the gas station attendant. “Let's take a look at that.”

He popped open the hood and proceeded to engage in a weird pissing contest with me, asking me what I thought was wrong with the car, then talking about his own theories when I said I didn't know. I realized after a minute that he was trying to show off for Alexis, and that my role was to be all jealous and weird about it. I had just enough experience with girls to know that I was perfectly capable of being jealous and weird. But the fact was, I didn't know Alexis well enough to have that much invested in the situation. So, for once in my life, I got to play it cool. And, just like in the car with Alexis driving, my reserved behavior seemed to push the guy to want to do something stupid.

“Well,” he said finally. “I think what happened here is you just overheated her. We put some water in there, she should be good as new.”

I perked up a little at this, remembering something Sean, our mechanic/dealer friend in Eugene, had said about cars and engines and how they had different systems that operated in different ways.

“Isn't the cooling system pressurized right now?” I asked.

“There is no cooling system,” he said. “Just the water in the radiator.”

“Uh. Okay. But, I mean, if you … the water's hot now, right? And it runs through the engine, to cool it off? Engine's hot, water's hot. So, if I understand how this works, when the car overheats, it's because the engine kind of swells up and stops working. The parts stop fitting together right. Water swells up, too. Lots of pressure. If you open the radiator, won't … something bad happen?”

Alexis and the attendant stared at me.

“Good point,” the attendant said, taking out his grease rag and wrapping it around his hand. “I'll use this, in case some comes out of there when I open it.”

“You think that'll do it?” I asked doubtfully.

“Sure,” he said.

The attendant reached in carefully and started to unscrew the radiator cap. He did it from as far away as he could, arm fully extended, rag-encased hand working quickly. He got it through about six turns before it exploded, violently. Alexis screamed. The radiator cap shot twenty feet into the air, blasted out by a geyser of steam and boiling water. The attendant ran out of the blast area before the hot water came back down, then stood in the middle of the parking lot jumping in circles, cursing and waving his scalded hand around.

“Well, shit,” the attendant said, when he'd finally calmed down. I could see from a distance that his right hand was bright red, and there were white blisters forming on his thumb and forefinger. “Guess we may as well at least get our money's worth out of that little show.”

He went to the gas pump island and reeled out the water hose toward the car. Another fun fact about engines and heat was percolating around in the back of my head, but I didn't manage to recall it before the attendant started running water into the radiator. When he had it topped off he told Alexis to try starting the car again.

I pursed my lips, but I was too embarrassed to say anything. For some reason, being right about the radiator pressure seemed like a bad thing in this context. I had a feeling that the only thing worse than being right about something else would be saying it and having it turn out to be wrong. So I stood there, trying to figure out what I should do, while Alexis got behind the wheel and tried to start the car.

It made a sad little whirring sound and then just stopped. After that, it wouldn't even turn over. I leaned awkwardly down to look under the car without actually getting on my hands and knees, and saw a mixture of water and antifreeze leaking out of the bottom in a slow, ponderous drip.

“Maybe the oil,” said the gas station attendant.

“Maybe not,” said Alexis. “Can I leave this here until I can have it towed?”

“Sure,” said the attendant.

Alexis walked over to the bank of pay phones next to the parking lot and called Marti to come pick us up.

“Marti!” she said. “My car just exploded!”

She paused to take in Marti's reply.

“I know! I love that car! I hope it doesn't cost too much to fix.”

I just listened. I was pretty sure the gas station moron had just cracked the engine block, but it didn't seem worth saying so at this stage.

*   *   *

Marti came to pick us up in her little yellow Volkswagen Beetle and drove us back to her place, fifteen blocks to the south. I was quietly appalled that people from this far north were being shipped all the way down to Garfield, at the same time I was being quietly appalled that there were people this far north at all. As Marti turned left onto a tar-and-gravel residential street with no sidewalks, I could see block after endless block of ugly mid-century suburban-style houses on oversize lots, reeling off in every direction.

“I've never been to this neighborhood before,” I said, as I followed Marti and Alexis into the house.

“It's nice,” Marti said. “Lots of room to move around.”

The house reminded me a lot of the places my dad's family lived in, up in Stanwood and Camano Island: California-style architecture imported to the Pacific Northwest during the housing boom after World War II. The ground floor had a living room with wall-to-wall mustard yellow carpeting and a kitchen separated from the main room by a bright orange counter. The walls were covered in fake wood paneling. Big glass doors led out onto a deck that I couldn't see very well. An overweight white guy was sitting in an easy chair next to the front door, watching a baseball game. He wore a blue button-down shirt and a pair of well-used jeans; shoes off, holes in his socks; short, light brown hair with some gray in it; silly little mustache. Big soulful eyes.