A Stranger in This World (16 page)

“Linda,” he said.

She turned away from the door and stood uncertainly, as if she were trying to remember something, put something together. She was standing maybe two feet away from him, cans of ancient paint and weed killer and hose attachments on the shelves behind her. The bare skin of her arms, the curve of her neck. Kenny stretched his hand toward her and touched behind her neck.

He raised his eyes to her face and knew at once that he had mistaken her. Surprise, then fear, crossed her face as she edged away from him. “What are you doing?” Mrs. Jordan said, stepping back away from him. “What did you think …”

Her mouth was open, she couldn’t understand. In an instant Kenny moved from inside to outside, a camera zooming out too fast. He saw who they were, where they were: a boy, a woman, a Ford. He saw the fear plainly on her face and thought, for the second time that day, I could hurt you. I could fuck you if I wanted to. She was trying to unlock the car but she kept looking back at him and she couldn’t find the lock with her hand and he understood that he had the power if he wanted it.

“I don’t mean to hurt you,” he said.

But this only made her more scared, scared of Kenny. He could see it in her face as she backed toward the car, trying to make herself small, invisible. And Kenny thought, if that’s the
way you want it. He didn’t have the thought for long, just for a second, but it was long enough to remember, long enough so he couldn’t deny it: if I can’t get it any other way, I’ll just take it. As long as I’m nothing now, nothing but a fear, I’ll just take it. And this was the thing that scared him, that made him drop his arms to his sides and walk backward away from her toward the kitchen door. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“That’s all right but it’s time for you to go,” she said quickly, not looking at him. She got the car door open and then the garage door was rising up by itself and the daylight came flooding into the spidery darkness and it was gone. She was starting the car.

“Wait a minute,” Kenny said. “My bike. It’s in the trunk.”

She looked up at him, suspicious, wondering if this was a trick. Then she put the car into reverse and for a moment Kenny thought she was driving away with his bike; she backed the big car out of the garage and into the street and turned. Then she stopped the car and got out and opened the trunk and got back into the car before Kenny could reach her. He heard the garage door rolling shut behind him as he wrestled the ten-speed out of the trunk. When he slammed it shut she was driving away instantly, around the corner and gone, leaving him alone with his bike on the street of big blank houses. He tried to pedal the bike but it was no use with his bad knee—the bandage got in the way and the gravel inside was burning and grinding. He turned back for one last look at Mrs. Jordan’s big white house shining in the sunlight. It was a house without a face, without an expression. You couldn’t even tell if anyone was home or not. All the houses on this street. He felt like they
were staring at him as he started for home, pushing his bike, limping down the asphalt on his swelling, bleeding knee.

Smoking cigarettes on the porch in the cool night, the river sound of traffic on the avenue two blocks away, Kenny watched the streetlight shadows on the sidewalk. Taxis and cats. The smoke curling out into the light from under the eaves of the porch gave his eyes something to rest on. Kenny loved to smoke, but usually he didn’t let himself. He had drunk two of his father’s Ballantines, had thought about drinking four or five more—he wouldn’t get in trouble for it—but being drunk would only fill him with big useless emotions. Kenny had learned that much from his father.

If I can’t get it any other way, I’ll just take it. Her face in the light of the one bulb in the garage, the fear on it, over and over.

Kenny heard his father whistling before he saw him, “Sentimental Journey” from a block away. A little after two, closing time at the Moon Palace, the only tolerable bar in walking distance according to Kenny’s father. He was an expert whistler, a virtuoso. The plain melody of the song was broken and turned inside out, embellished with trilling melodic runs and odd accents, derived, Kenny knew, from the show-off jazz pianists his father loved, Art Tatum especially. He seemed to be walking all right. He hauled himself into one of the porch chairs and took a deep breath of the night air, shaking his head. Then turned to Kenny. “Get me a beer, would you?”

Kenny hesitated. Normally he wouldn’t, not when his father
was already drunk, they both knew that, but this was a day when all regular bets had been canceled. “For Christ sake, Kenny,” his father said. “Just a beer, OK?”

Kenny fetched the beer for him. Though he wanted one himself, he decided against it, not wanting to go along with his father. Not wanting to be his father’s son, he got himself a glass of water. The beer could wait; his father wouldn’t last long. He was smoking one of Kenny’s cigarettes when Kenny came outside again.

“Did you hear about this Miss America thing?” his father asked. “They caught her, I guess she was in one of these dirty magazines fooling around with another girl, I mean, Jesus. Everybody’s cheating.” He stubbed his cigarette out and lit another from Kenny’s pack. “People cheat on their taxes,” he said, “people cheat on their marriages. Everybody wants something for nothing, you ever think of that?”

It occurred to Kenny that the cigarette his father was smoking was bought with one of the dollars he’d stolen from Mrs. Jordan’s house. An intricate balance of right and wrong and just plain taking. You wanted something and you reached your hand out and took it. Kenny knew he had learned something that day he would not forget.

“Don’t ever go to law school,” his father said, and settled back into the chair.

There was nothing Kenny wanted to talk about with his father. He didn’t even know how he would put it into words: I saved a life today and then something happened … Something was taking shape inside him, his own life, his own life story. He felt restless, ready to move on, but he knew that his life would burst out of him when the time came, and not before. Still, he was restless, restless.

——

“That was really something,” the manager said. “You saved that boy’s life.”

Kenny wished he would go away. The night before had never quite ended, the day felt stillborn, hot and sluggish. His knee was swollen and bruise-purple and it hurt. The money kids gathered, as if around an accident. The manager said, “The board would like to give you this, and also to thank you for a tremendous service.”

He beamed at Kenny and offered his big hand, like congratulating a banjo, and the money kids broke into fake applause. Kenny smiled until they all went away, then climbed his chair to watch the morning sun crawl across the deck and wait for Mrs. Jordan. After a while it occurred to him to open the envelope that the manager had pressed into his hand, where he found a check from the club for twenty-five dollars, which seemed like the exact wrong sum of money. It should have been more or it should have been nothing.

The blue baby, he thought, the image already fading from his mind, like the sample photographs in drugstore windows, smiling faces disappearing into monochromatic blue. Our child. Nothing had really happened, it was just a misunderstanding. The waiting was killing him. The minutes before eleven o’clock, when Mrs. Jordan would or wouldn’t come, when she would or wouldn’t ask to speak to the manager, the minutes crept by like palsied old men. Something needed to happen. Wreckage would suit him as well as anything else. He wanted some definite action, some release, that moment when the wave takes and tumbles you underwater and you either come
up into the air or you don’t, but this day seemed stuck in a perpetual sunlit middle. Two teenage girls reclining on silvery air-mattresses, the smell of cocoa butter, the snack bar radio playing stale sixties hits: “My Guy,” “Crosstown Traffic,” “Ride My See-Saw.”

Eleven came and went without her.

She could not do this to him. If she was at the manager’s office, fine, if she was at the police station, if her husband—if she had a husband—was on his way down to the club. But to leave him like this, in between, Kenny would split open and spill his insides on the clean cement of the deck. This nothing.

A few minutes later, though, a few minutes late, she came out of the women’s changing room in her usual suit and her usual sandals. She swam her usual fifty laps and then arranged herself, without a word to Kenny or a look at him, on the usual chaise lounge and began to do whatever she did, which Kenny would never know. No managers, no police, no husbands. Things were just going on. Kenny’s mother was alive, his father, Mrs. Jordan was alive. Instead, this emptiness inside him, growing to fill his skin. The sunlight seemed hollow, slanting down on the empty patio, slanting toward September. From behind his dark glasses he stared down at Mrs. Jordan, her legs, her hips, the lovely line of her arms, her hair that sparkled artificial gold and silver in the sun. Useless anger boiled inside his chest. There were still six weeks of summer left.

HER HUSBAND IS STANDING IN FRONT OF THE BATHROOM MIRROR
, shaving. He has just taken a shower, and the glass is all steamed up except for a patch where he’s wiped it clear with his hand. Greg is naked but easy, not stiff and awkward, the
way most men get when they know they’re being watched. He’s still twenty, the age he will always be. And Candy is also naked, except for a pair of shoes, and she’s also still twenty. They’re dressing for a party or for dinner out, something fancy. He catches her reflection in the mirror and looks at her sternly, like a father. Candy asks him, “Do you like my outfit?”

“With shoes like that, you don’t need an outfit,” he says, and continues to shave. Candy embraces him from behind, and her shoes have made her tall: she can see over his shoulder. She can feel his soft, damp skin with her hands. She tries to remember what kind of shoes she has on, but she can’t remember and it doesn’t matter now. There’s a strange feeling in her body: it’s almost like she has a penis. She can feel it rising, getting hard against Greg’s backside as he continues to shave. It’s a strange feeling but familiar, as if she’s had a penis all her life but forgotten it. How could she forget such a thing? The wind is rising next to her head …

The wind was rising next to her head and Walter was saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Candy took a moment to realize that she’d been dreaming—and even then, the flavor of the dream persisted, stronger than the real thing. She turned to Walter, her boyfriend, and said, “What?”

“We need to figure it out, what we’re doing,” Walter said.

Candy sat up, straightening out her shoulders and her neck, which had a crick in it from sleeping on the car seat. She could still feel Greg’s skin on her hands, but outside the window the Smoky Mountains were rolling by at sixty miles an hour. “How long was I out?” she asked him.

“A couple of hours,” Walter said. “Since Asheville, anyway. You slept through the best part.”

“Little do you know,” Candy said. She lit a cigarette and put her knees up on the dash and watched the scenery unwind. When she turned up the radio the Reverend Al Green came through the speakers, Jesus will fix it, which seemed about right. She felt the countryside calling her out of the dream, felt the allure of driving: movement, freedom, scenery. They were coming out of the mountains on a wide, empty white concrete highway, warm in the afternoon sun. Where the hills had been left alone, they were covered with green forest, the hundred different greens of spring. Where the highway cut through, or where developers had leveled the ground for a supermarket or a tire store, the earth showed through as a wounded red. Sometimes the road would curve up next to the woods and she’d look into the darkness to see the wild dogwoods deep inside, white flowers shaking in the wind like escaping deer.

“What’s this decision of which you spoke?” she asked him. “Which you disturbed my slumbers for.”

“Well, it’s getting late and I was thinking—we can stop now, get a motel for tonight, or else we can just keep going.”

“How far?”

“I don’t know, seven or eight hours,” Walter said. “There’s all of Georgia still to go.”

“And miles to go before I sleep,” she said, “and miles to go before I sleep.” She stared out the window at the passing forest, unfocused her eyes so it became a green blur. She wished she were back inside her dream, safe with her husband, who had been dead for twelve years, killed in a plane wreck on the runway in Izmir, Turkey. He was a fighter pilot. Walter was a boyfriend. When do they stop being boyfriends? she wondered. Candy was thirty-four years old and she still had a boyfriend.

“Maybe we should just skip it,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve got a college friend in Sarasota, she lives on the beach.” With her husband and three kids, Candy remembered suddenly, but still it might be better than Walter’s parents.

“I already told them I was coming,” Walter said. “There’s no escape for me. I can drop you at the bus station if you want.”

“Do they think we’re getting married?”

“I have no idea what they think. I mean, that’s why I moved fifteen hundred miles away from them.”

Candy thought wistfully of the white-sand beaches of Sarasota, spring sunshine and college boys with ladders of muscle up their abdomens. She said, “Let’s just keep going, I guess.”

“If that’s what you want to do. I don’t know why you’re in such a hurry to meet my mother. I wouldn’t be, if I were you.”

“Well,” she said, “you know, firing squad. Get it over with.”

“You don’t know, Candy, you just don’t know.” He sounded like he was scolding her, like a husband, or a father, and for that moment she hated him. It wasn’t fair, he didn’t mean anything by it, but she hated him. He was so even-tempered, he knew so much, he was so reasonable and rational and good with his hands that she hated him. In contrition, Candy scooted toward Walter, across the bench seat of the Impala, and leaned up next to him like a high school girl. She turned the radio up again and the Gospel Harmonettes of the Full Zion Baptist Church of Durham, North Carolina, were singing “He Gives Me Strength.” Walter put his arm around her and tapped his fingers on the wheel in time to the beat of
the choir. She slipped her hand between his open legs, aligning her fingers with the inside seam of his jeans.