Angela Sloan (18 page)

I found myself sitting there crying on the curb outside the motel rooms, crying because my life was so wrong and backward. I was this hard thing—this clipping or scrap of a person. I would never be normal.

None of that matters to anyone but me. I mention these thoughts only because they came to me at this crucial time. I was about to make a step. I must make the call and place the ad to ask Ray to come back to me. It was against his instructions but I was relieved to have a need to do it because I was worried about him. I only had one question to answer first.

I got up and pushed into Room 9. There was Betty, cutting an apple with Ray's yellow-handled pocketknife. I snatched it away from her. “Where did you find this?” I said.

“On the ground.”

On inspection I saw it was not Ray's knife but a similar, cheaper one with a stainless steel blade. I gave Betty's apple knife back to her.

“Listen,” I said. “I know you've been talking to my Aunt Marilyn when I'm not around.”

“No, I have not talk to her. What is that?” She meant the snapshot in my hand.

“It's nothing.”

She took the picture and studied it. “Is this your father?”

“Give it back!” I grabbed her wrist in order to take the picture back. I got it.

She pulled free. She went into the bathroom, shutting the door and locking it behind her.

At the door I said, “You've talked to Marilyn in private. I know you have. She knows your name. I heard her call you Betty.”

Silence.

“I was stupid to trust you,” I said. “I tried to get you papers so you wouldn't be deported, and now you have lied to me about Marilyn. You may even be working for her. I suppose you are. You are a liar.”

The door unlocked and came open one half inch. “I have never talk to Aunt Marilyn alone,” Betty said.

The door closed again.

T
hat couldn't be true. Marilyn
had
called her Betty; I'd heard it. I'd been careful only to use the name Ding with Marilyn.

I was standing there by the motel sink outside the bathroom door when it occurred to me what had happened. Blood rushed to my skin. I had been very stupid.

It wasn't Betty who was working with Marilyn, it was the Gandys. After leaving their house I had driven all night through the mountains. I'd have been easy to find, easy to tail. In the morning, Marilyn changed my tire (after putting the nail in it herself, no doubt). Then she followed close so I would detect her. I had given myself the credit for making her, just like she meant for me to do. I let her
develop
me, in my state of crazed exhaustion. I was seeing old ladies in the road; then here came Marilyn with her war stories. She'd “lost an asset.” I was sucked in and quickly
involved.
She showed me that snapshot and fed me a lot of lies and bogus hints about Ray Sloan. “Is there something Ray feels guilty about?” What a poor sucker I had been. Nothing but a poor sucker. If not for the one slip on Betty's name, Marilyn would have turned me.

I saw it now. I had almost been
doubled.
The way Marilyn did it was to make me wonder who I was. Was I real? But it didn't matter. Ray was real: he was out there, alone and maybe sick, and I could still be true to him.
Idaho meant bug out.

Now I knew what I had to do. I tucked the stiff snapshot away. I slid it down in the brown envelope which also held my nine remaining hundreds.

It meant leaving Betty behind for good. The thought didn't please me. In spite of her foreign manners and Communist beliefs, she had been a companion to me. I'd put some time and energy into her, and I didn't like leaving her in Marilyn's hands. Marilyn would not indulge
her with shopping and gum as I had done. In the future, Betty would find herself doing as told, and it would cause her some pain. On the other hand, if her story about the party-official boyfriend convinced the right people, she'd get asylum and a legal set of papers. She could work anywhere, then. Even her dreamland of Sears and Roebuck.

As I tucked the brown envelope back into my knapsack, I kept out one of the hundreds. I slipped it into a pocket of Betty's black pants.

Just as I was doing this charitable deed she popped out of the bathroom. There was no warning flush, as she'd been in there only hanging out, a trick she had borrowed from me. My hand was in her pocket.

She snatched the black pants and gave them a close looking-over. She even smelled them.

“What are you up to?” she said.

“F
our-foot-ten,” I said.

She blinked. “Why will you handle my pants?”

“I was looking for a quarter for the candy machine.”

“You have put one hundred dollars in here.”

“I don't like to keep all our cash in one place,” I said. “That's not smart, in case my knapsack gets stolen.” I held it up by the strap for her to see—my knapsack with the sunflowers on it. It was a good lie and would have worked, had I not already told her the other lie about the candy machine.

Yet she accepted what I said with a nod. She folded the pants and set them back on the dresser where they had been. They were clean—she had rinsed the lake water out and dried them on the shower rod. The white blouse was draped over the chair back, also clean. Betty sat on the edge of the bed and held her green hairbrush.

I got on my side of the bed with my back against the headboard and my black oxfords on. I had the knapsack on the floor nearby. All I had to do was wait for Betty to get to sleep, and then I'd slip out the door. Marilyn was into her gin; she'd be asleep soon, too, if not already. If I didn't get lost I could be in Bristol and on the new express-way in under an hour; I'd abandon the Scamp in Virginia and would be on a Greyhound bus before Marilyn knew I was gone.

Betty held the brush in her lap. I asked her if she wanted the television on.

“No.” She laid the brush on the nightstand and got under the covers.

“No brush hair tonight?”

“My hair is not important,” she said.

“Nobody's hair is important in the long run of things,” I said.

I took my shoes off and laid them together on the floor beside the
bed, where I could get into them quickly in the dark. I faked a yawn. “I'm so sleepy I could fall asleep just like this, right in my clothes on top of the bedspread.”

Betty said nothing.

“Time for lights out,” I said. I switched off the lamp.

“Goodbye,” Betty said.

I sat up and switched the lamp back on.

Betty lay there like a small angry mummy. Her eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling.

“I don't owe you anything, by the way,” I said. “You're in your box and I'm in mine. Anyway, Marilyn's not after you, she's after me.”

“She is after you?”

“She wants something I have. So I'm leaving.”

“You are going to take Scamp?”

“How am I going to leave if I don't take Scamp?”

Betty pursed her mouth. Otherwise her brown face was still amid the black hair spread out on the pillow.

“You're using that Oriental trick again, but it won't work,” I said. I swung my legs down from the bed and put on my shoes.

“What do you mean, Oriental trick?”

“You lie there inscrutably refusing to speak, and it is a trick for causing me to have the argument inside my head instead of out loud.”

“I don't know about that,” she said.

“Let me demonstrate,” I said. I came close to her. She was propped on her elbow now, and I got eight inches away and let all the expression drain from my face as I stared at a spot on her cheek. “Look, you can't read me,” I said. “I'm inscrutable, I'm a cipher. I'm a crustacean.”

“Stop it.”

“That's what you're like! Always making me guess what you think.”

“What do you guess I think?”

“Oh, you're thinking you are going to be alone, you have no Chinese friend, you can't make revolution, you're a snake in a hole.”

“So. I am
not
inscrutable.”

She smiled a sour smile that dimpled her chin. She seemed to think she had won the point.

I got up and gave my teeth a good long noisy scrubbing, followed by
a vigorous rinse and spit. After that I went back to Betty and told her she should not feel all of this so much. “Though miles and an ocean separate you, you are still with your Chinese people in spirit.”

“You are right,” she said. “I will try not to feel it so much.”

She smiled again, strangely. The look was strange because it suddenly seemed unmysterious, like the way a friend would smile at you if something sad were happening. It confused me.

“I knew something was wrong when you didn't brush your hair,” I said.

She took the brush from the nightstand and gave her head a good, fierce working over. At last, the shiny hair received its nightly spanking. When she was done she pulled a couple of long loose strands from the bristles and walked across the room to drop them in the wastebasket.

Ten minutes earlier I had known what I was doing, and now I did not know again.

“Why don't you give me back that hundred and just come with me?” I said.

I returned the crisp bill to the envelope. Betty gathered her few things quietly, and we slipped out of Room 9 together.

T
he engine heaved but didn't catch. Out of nervousness I had pumped the gas, once again flooding the carburetor.

“Is that your uncle?” Betty asked.

The door to Marilyn's room had swung open, and a man stood staring at us. But no, it wasn't a man, only Marilyn with her hair wet and dressed in a man's set of striped pajamas. The cuffs were rolled up at her ankles and wrists. I flattened the accelerator and twisted the key, the engine roared, and we reversed through our own smoke across the parking lot.

Goodbye, Crown Motor Court. I sideswiped a light pole. Betty groaned. “What will happen to me?” she said.

“Now is a time to be quiet,” I said.

“What?”

“Stay out of my head!”

The white Caprice came after us and caught us at a red light. Marilyn got out in her pajamas and jogged to my window. “Let's talk, Angela!” she said. “Let me in!”

I ran the light.

“I will be arrest and deport,” Betty said. “I will be send back to China and put in jail. Then confess, then execute. Very unpleasant to be execute, girl! Let me out of this Scamp!”

“Aunt Marilyn's very drunk,” I said. “I think we can lose her.”

In fact she was soon in front of us. She slowed way down, swerving when I tried to pass. The Scamp had served me well up to now, but it didn't have the power to get around Marilyn's Chevy Caprice. Nor was I the driver to do it.

Betty was shouting in Chinese. Well, here it is, I thought. This is the moment of crisis. Now what? We crossed a river on a narrow two-lane bridge with low rails. Marilyn rode her brakes in front of
us. We were going no more than thirty miles an hour when a third car came up fast behind me and had to burn its tires to stay out of my bumper.

The driver behind me leaned on his horn. As soon as we were off the bridge, I switched off my headlights and whipped the Scamp to the right. The angry fellow quickly closed the gap, helpfully flashing his high beams in Marilyn's rearview mirror.

With my lights still off, I turned back the way we had come. There was half a moon tonight, enough for me to see by. I crossed back over the river to where some orange sawhorses were lined up along the road. I edged the Scamp past the sawhorses and drove it over some rutted clay.

“Where are we go?” Betty said.

I stopped the car.

A number of trees had been pushed over intact beside the road, and the big machines that do that kind of thing were parked nearby. The trees lay on the clay with boulders knotted in their roots.

I told her what I intended to do.

“Bad idea,” she said.

“It's my only idea,” I said. “Help me.”

“Bad idea. We will try.”

I found the biggest rock I could lift and heaved it into the back seat.

Behind the wheel again, I punched the gas. The new tires spun, then grabbed. I covered a long stretch of rough ground, then pulled the wheel and bumped up three inches onto a new slab of rich, creamy-smooth black asphalt pavement. I was on the new road.

It felt like driving on sheets of cake. We were traveling north now over what would later become the southbound lanes of Interstate 81. If you will check the 1972 Esso map of the eastern United States, you will see this stretch marked by a heavy broken red and white line—one of the last gaps remaining to be paved on the long route down from Canada through Syracuse, Scranton, and the Shenandoah Valley into East Tennessee.

It was a great big open night. For the moment, Betty and I drove in perfect, blank solitude. The tires whispered against the new surface. The
lines were not even painted on it yet. The good Scamp gave what I asked of it. Its transmission clicked up into third gear, and the sound of the engine evened out.

An orange cone marked the beginning of the bridge deck. I'd expected something more substantial than one orange cone, but no. I simply drove around it, then I stopped and put the Scamp in park.

Betty and I got out and stood awhile. There was no sign of Marilyn, and yet I felt as though someone were watching us. I guess Betty felt it, too. “Strange time,” she said. We were alone at the edge of an unfinished bridge, a hundred feet over the Holston River, at night. Many unfinished thoughts were in my head. I guess no one was watching.

Well off in the distance we saw long cones of light bouncing over the ground. I knew she'd be along.

I took off one of my thick-soled black oxford shoes and jammed it behind the Scamp's brake pedal. Then I pushed my sunflower knapsack down onto the floor. I wadded a towel and my Toughskins and a map and shoved them down in front of the seat to form a little nest on top of the accelerator. I did it quickly. Then I dropped that big rock into its nest, causing the engine to rev.