Call Me Jane (7 page)

Lucy was pissed off because she couldn’t find Paul. We started at Krishna’s, whom we had picked up as soon as we left school. She sat in the back laughing, occasionally filling a bowl, asking if I needed a beer. I wasn’t drinking the beer. “Buckhorn tastes like carbonated piss water.”

“Give me some more of that carbonated piss water,” Ziggy said, when we stopped there to look for Paul. He smiled when he said this, looked right at me. “Where’d you get that hat?”

“Buy me a bottle of red wine,” I told him. He’d been along for the mad Paul chase ride for about an hour, and claimed he could always buy liquor.

We stopped at a bar so he could go in and buy wine. He wasn’t old enough, but he swore he could buy it.

“Just look ‘em in the eye. That’s all it takes,” he said, successfully holding my bottle of red wine and two more six-packs of carbonated piss water.

“Where the fuck is that son of a bitch! I’m gonna kill him when I find him!” Lucy’s face was pure rage. Her teeth gritted, and her lips curled back like a she wolf.

Ziggy laughed the fat-woman’s laugh, and the giggling poured from the backseat along with Krishna’s goddamn clove-cigarette smoke.

“What’d he do Lucy?” Ziggy asked, arms folded, looking slightly squished back there with his long legs shoved under Lucy in the driver’s seat of my compact car. And she kept adjusting her seat violently, jamming his legs, which didn’t seem to bother him at all, only added to his amusement.

“Oh,” Krishna waved her hand, “he’s just been hard to find, that’s all.”

“Goddamn it!” she cursed, and screeched to a sudden stop. “I see his car.”

“That’s not him,” Krishna said.

“Drop me off,” Ziggy said, “Maybe he’ll be at my house. I can call around for you.”

But when we arrived at Ziggy’s, he wasn’t there. But Gay was, and Glinda was leaving with some ridiculously handsome guy. The guy who banged on the door, was also ridiculously handsome, so I imagined this one banging on the door by this time next week. Off they went in his car as we were standing on the porch.

“Oh Jane,” she paused, putting her hand on my shoulder. “I want you to borrow this coat.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. Why did I say that? I didn’t want it.

She took off some long, white fur that went to down to her ankles.

“It’s white seal. Don’t get anything on it.”

Gay stood on the porch with her hands in the pockets of some really stupid pants.

“You guys got any dope?”

“Sure, get in,” we said. “We’re looking for Paul; you can go with us.”

“Not yet,” Lucy screamed. “Ziggy’s going to make some phone calls.”

Lucy ran upstairs. Gay’s eyes half closed and followed her through the slamming porch screen door. She didn’t need to say anything else; what she said with her eyes was funny enough.

We all sat on the grass next to my open car door. Gay and Krishna drank the now warm carbonated piss water, and I was working on my bottle like a wino.

“Do you know where Paul is?” Krishna asked.

“Uh, hiding from Lucy?” Gay said. Then she looked over at me. “You and Paul,” and she gave me a sly nod.

Krishna laughed at this and blew out a cloud of smoke with it.

“Let’s go,” Lucy jumped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. We barely made it in before the car took off. She screeched around corners. She drove ninety miles an hour. None of this bothered us; we were drunk and high as kites. It felt like a roller-coaster ride. The sun was going down.

“Didn’t Ziggy call anyone for you?” I asked.

“Hell no, as soon as we got in there he told me to get in the bedroom and lie down on his bed and wait for him. And he called me Prego. I hate that nickname. How dare he call me that? ‘Bite me Prego,’ he said. I fucking hate Ziggy.”

Well, Krishna and Gay could barely contain their howls at hearing about what Ziggy had done. They tried to smother their laughter as we picked up a few other stragglers here and there on our various jaunts all over town, going to places Paul might be.

Now it was black outside, and we were screeching down Main Street. We went from drunk to completely intoxicated. Inebriated. Seeing things double. I was nearly finished with my bottle of red wine when we finally found Paul in his car in a parking lot outside Pat’s Tap.

“It’s the same spelled backwards!” Krishna said giggling. “Let’s go there!”

“You son of a bitch! Where were you?” Lucy screamed at him.

Paul looked stunned at her outburst, like he’d been doused in the face with cold water.

I stared at him.
Goddamn it
, I thought,
why do you have to be so gorgeous
? I was beginning to feel some of Lucy’s rage vicariously. I glared at Paul. He stared back like a question.

“Goddamn it!” I shouted.

I threw the bottle of wine on the parking lot and it shattered, shards of glass flying toward the wheels of his car. He stared blankly at me and then, zombie-like, climbed into his car and drove away.

“He’s going down a wrong-way street!” Lucy shrieked. “We have to stop him.”

“I’m nauseated,” Krishna yelled, “take me home.”

“No,” Lucy yelled, screeching out of the parking lot to follow him down the one-way street. “I have to follow him!”

We started following him to Ziggy’s house, but then Krishna wanted out of the car.

“Let me out; I’m going to throw up,” Krishna yelled from the back.

“No,” Lucy hollered. “I have to catch up with Paul. He will go to Ziggy’s house.

“Ugh,” Krishna said. “What is your fucking problem?”

“Let’s just get to Ziggy’s, and then Jane can take you home,” Lucy said.

But when we reached Ziggy’s, Paul’s car wasn’t there. We opened the door and pulled over so Krishna could puke into the grass. Gay had been so quiet I turned around to check on her. She was just staring peacefully out the window, as if she were on a Sunday drive. We drove Krishna to her house, and all the way there Lucy hammered the steering wheel. Finally she just drove to her house, left the car and said, “I’m nauseous. I’m going to just go home. I’m gonna kill that fucker when I see him.”

I let her out and drove back over to Ziggy’s. Gay and I went upstairs. When we arrived, Paul actually was there. He had hidden his car several blocks away. He asked me if I could give him a ride to it; he said he needed to go.

THIRTEEN

              When I reached his car, he asked me if I wanted to smoke a bowl with him. He had some great stuff in his glove compartment. We climbed in, and within seconds he leaned over, grabbed me, and I felt the heat of his lips on mine. I saw the windows fog up. It was so cold we could both see our breath.

“I drove down a one-way street,” he said, practically panting, rushing to push the words out, “and I knew it. I knew I drove the wrong way, but that’s not what I was thinking. Do you know what I was thinking?”

“No,” I said between kisses.

“I was thinking, ‘my God, she looks so beautiful in that hat.’”

“Wow,” I said between kisses, “really?”

“And then when you threw that bottle on the pavement, I should have been thinking about how I might get a flat tire on the cut glass, but I wasn’t. Do you know what I was thinking?”

“What?” I asked between kisses.

“I was thinking, ‘wow, she looks so beautiful when she gets angry in that hat.’ And that coat looks great on you, too. Where’d you get that coat?”

“It’s imported seal,” I said. “It really belongs to Glinda. See here, I got five tiny driplets of red wine on it.” I was only thinking that last part. I didn’t say it out loud. Or did I?

It was midnight; we’d left Ziggy’s about a half hour ago for me to give him a ride two blocks away where he had parked his car. He kissed just like that pitcher of honey dripping. He was good at it. I knew he was good at it, because I’d kissed one other boy, so I knew. Paul knew how to kiss.

“You and Paul,” Gay whispered, and winked, when I returned to Ziggy’s.

“What took you so long?” Ziggy asked. “It should have only taken you ten minutes. You’ve been gone forty-five.”

“What?” I asked. “Are you keeping tabs on me?”

“You should have been back here a half an hour ago. Did you get lost driving two blocks?”

“What is this,” I asked, taking a toke from the passing pipe, “the Spanish inquisition?”

Someone made a joke about the Spanish inquisition, and then Ziggy continued, “You’ve been inconsiderate.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You got red wine on my sister’s white-seal coat.”

Well, what could I say to that?  Number one, I was sitting on the floor and he was on the couch, and I may not have realized this consciously but he seemed above me. Number two, nobody rushed to my defense, they either seemed to be listening passively or talking amongst themselves and barely aware of my time on the witness stand, and number three, it was true. It was white, imported seal, it was his sister’s coat, and I did drip five red-wine droplets on it.

Gay leaned over, pressed against my shoulder, and whispered in my ear, “At least it wasn’t blood. I need a ride home.”

I drove Gay home. She needed a ride, and had been over at Glinda’s so long she said she was starting to call Mrs. Sinclair Ma. On the way home, she told me a story about Glinda.

“They did this thing in class when we were in 6
grade,” she said. She lived at least twenty minutes out of town, so we had time for a lot of stories. “Where they were trying to make a point about abortion. They told us a story about a woman who’d already had like thirteen miscarriages, right? And that if she had another miscarriage, she would most likely die. Then they asked us would we vote for an abortion? Yes, the class voted. ‘Well,’ the teach said, ‘you just killed Beethoven!’ The next day Glinda asked permission to address the class,” Gay continued, and at this part of the story she really began to light up, “the teacher said yes, and Glinda got up and told the class about a woman who’d had thirteen miscarriages. With the next one she will surely die. What do you vote for: an abortion, or force her to carry it to term? ‘Force her!’ they shouted. ‘Well,’ Glinda said, ‘you all just saved Hitler!’”

“That’s genius!” I said. Then she gave me directions to Lake Street, which was right off Bowen, which turned into Highway 45 at the edge of town.

“You like Paul, don’t you?” Gay asked.

Gay didn’t smoke. But she asked me for a cigarette, and I gave her one and lit it for her because, of course, since she didn’t smoke, she would probably not be carrying a lighter, and she never carried a purse. And the lighter lit up her face, which, for all the world, should have been a boy’s.

“You want him, don’t you? Turn here,” she said, and managed somehow to point with her stream of smoke.

I turned right toward the lake, in the middle of a sentence in which I floundered around for an answer.

“Fuck Lucy,” she said. “Do what you want to do.”

The road wound around to the left and became narrower and narrower. Trees hung over us on each side, scraping the windshield and nearly making the road into a tunnel. We had the windows open. The branches came into the windows and scraped the sides of our cheeks. We could hear every sound from the lake and the thick woods around us, around the tiny cabins and houses. Some of them were okay, but many of them looked like hers. Like neglected shacks overgrown with weeds and moss and wild, out-of-control bushes that covered up windows so that if anyone lived there, they couldn’t see out, and we couldn’t see in. Then we began to hear the croaking. And worse. Something much worse. It was thick, it was everywhere. It was so loud we slowed down and looked at each other. Her eyes were a question.

“You’ve never heard this before?” I asked.

“No!”

I turned on the brights so I could see them. Hundreds of them. That explained the sounds we were hearing under the wheels. It was the sound of bodies being smashed and popped and spurting their liquids all over the road. It was the sound of slippery frog blood under the tires. So thick and viscous it could have caused my car to spin out just like the ice would in the winter when I was speeding.

They jumped onto the windshield and slid down. I watched the body of one slide right in front of my face. It was ghastly.

“Roll up the windows,” I said, quickly turning to Gay, who stared with her mouth open at the horror show. I wasn’t driving fast, yet they were still being squished against the glass.

It was too late to stop them from hopping into the car. I don’t know how many made it inside, but one was enough to have us panicking and screaming, “Get them off me! Get them off me!”

I skidded to a stop, nearly hitting a tree. I started to open the door, to leave the car, to force them out of my car. Gay waved her arms and flung some out the window, shouting, “Don’t open the door! You’ll let more of them in!”

As we both rolled up our windows as fast as we could, the inevitable happened.

“Oh God, that’s so gross!”

A part of the frog’s leg was sliced off. It dripped down both the outside and the inside of the door. Gay screamed in terror, wiping as much of it away from her and onto the floor as she could.

“What do we do?” I screamed. “I can hear them inside the car! I can’t drive home like this.”

“Drive to my house. Maybe it will be better there.”

“Why would it be better there?”

“I don’t know. There are more trees here.”

I drove the rest of the way through those creepy woods till I came to her yellow house, and pulled into the long drive that ran alongside it, my car facing Lake Winnebago. It was better there.

“Do you still hear them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Turn on the dope light,” Gay said.

She inspected the disgusting mess, took off her jacket, opened the door, and flung the thing outside.

“Open your door and get some of them out. I will run into my house. I will try not to let anymore in when I shut the door,” she said. She took a deep breath, opened the door, and flew out, slamming it behind her. I knew there still might be some frog’s body in the car, but I would just have to drive anyway.

It didn’t matter if I sped up or slowed down, I killed the same number of them either way. I drove out of the creepy woods, hearing them pop and seeing them land on my windshield. I turned left onto the highway and sped up, driving as fast as I could away from that memory, pushing it down as far as I could into my subconscious.