If Jack's in Love (6 page)

Realizing I was about to lose her, if only from a distance of fifty feet, I recklessly called out her name.

She turned, smiling benignly, but quickly knit her brow as I drew closer and she realized who it was. (I hadn't yet garnered the automatically hostile expressions reserved for my father and my brother. Instead I received looks of dismay, of social concern.)

“Yes, Jack,” she said, patiently.

I caught up.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

“How's your summer so far?”

“Fine,” she said.

I stood blankly. What was there to say?

“I have to go,” she said.

“Wait. How come you don't talk to me anymore?”

“I should think you know why.”

“I don't.”

She regarded me with a raised eyebrow, tapping her foot.

“Perhaps you don't remember what happened at the drainage ditch the other day?”

“You mean Pop and Kellner? What's that got to do with us?”

“I can't be seen with you now.”

“Why not? It wasn't me who punched Kellner. I can't help it what Pop does.”

“You were
with
him.”

“Of course I was, he's my father.” I didn't want to defend him at this crucial juncture, but I couldn't exactly deny the obvious.

“Fine. I have to go.”

“Wait, I have something to show you.”

“What?”

I nudged my head towards the woods.

“Let's go over there.”

“Where?”

“In the woods, I don't want people to see.”

“I am not going in the woods with you, Jack Witcher.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the ring.

“I want you to have this,” I told her.

Myra stared. And then her face changed. She looked up with a softened expression.

“Whose is that?”

“It's for you. I got it at Gladstein's, I was just there.”

“You bought this for me?”

“Try it on,” I said.

She blinked in astonishment. The flattery implied by my gesture had made her forget her station. The air between us became charged with meaning. I noticed the down on her tanned cheeks softly quivering.

“No one has ever given me a ring, this is my first.” She seemed already to understand how fraught with sentiment this moment would be in the future.

“Daddy would never let me wear a boy's ring,” she said, “especially not yours.”

“Just keep it in your pocket.”

Myra kept staring into the blue agate, wrestling with the temptation.

“I can't,” she said.

“Sure you can.”

“What would it mean if I did?”

“That we're friends.”

While she struggled with the burden of that, I decided to go for broke. “Plus we'd be going steady.... If you want,” I threw in.

“Jack, are you crazy? I can't be your friend, and I will certainly never go steady with you.”

“Come on, you're always staring at me in class, I've caught you before.”

Tears filled her eyes. “I do not stare at you! Go away, leave me alone.”

“You know you like me.”

“I can't believe how conceited you are.”

“Just take the ring.”

She turned and ran.

“Chicken!” I called.

I don't think she heard me, and later I was glad. That would have marred our first romantic moment, for which I'd spent my last fifty cents; and even though the ring still lay in my palm, I can't say I'd been crushed by her. I had seen the tears in her eyes, and my angel was quick to reassure me.

I was ready to cut through the woods to call on Dickie Pudding, the only boy willing to claim me as a friend. But the emotion of the day was too much, so I went home and watched soap operas with Pop. Yet even with Pop I was restless. I'd had my first romantic encounter with a girl! I couldn't stop reliving it.

Somehow I wound up in the front yard kicking tufts of dirt and thinking about Myra. It must have been close to suppertime. Mom was due home any minute and I kept debating whether I should tell her what had happened.

Then I heard a car turn on our road. A horn tapped and a black Continental cruised past, driven by Gladstein. His fat, hot-sausage-demon grin was going a mile a minute. He swung his head to look as he passed and I took a step forward, thinking he was about to stop. But he didn't. He just grinned and waved and stared in the mirror.

Three fluffy dogs were yapping faintly through the rear window.

MY BROTHER WAS TALKING to himself, laughing out loud, swaggering about with the plug from the portable radio in his ear. He'd bought a pair of sunglasses that he rarely took off, and sometimes he wore them in the bathroom. We'd hear the toilet flush and out he would spring, grinning behind the shades. Then he might snatch the book I was reading and fling it across the room:
Rush to Judgment
,
Tai-Pan
,
The Source
,
The Fixer
,
A Texan Looks at Lyndon
—paperbacks my mother would buy at the drugstore rack and leave unfinished for me to pick up. He would accuse me of being a square. He laughed at my music. He assured me cool things were happening in the world, psychedelic things, and told me what a drag it would be if I missed out on them.

One day I went to the living room and found him silhouetted in the doorway. “Jack,” he said. He jerked his head towards the yard and we went outside. Silently he motioned me to hop on the back part of the banana seat of his Sting-Ray, and I was happy that my brother was being a brother. How rare that was these days. But it was a fact. Stan Witcher had once been a sweet boy. We had laughed and conspired; he had defended me, amused me.

We sailed along to the woods beside Clark Lane and then shouldered through some brush for about fifty yards, to a small trickling creek. The little patch of woods was well shaded and hard to reach, and if you were willing to brave the ticks and mosquitoes you might find some sylvan privacy there.

We sat at the edge of the creek. My brother took off his sunglasses, set them on the ground and pulled a box of Marlboros from his pocket. Then we lit up.

I was fairly new to cigarettes, maybe a year in. Smoking was an event during which I liked to meditate authoritatively on the relative merits of different tobacco brands while practicing my talent for smoke rings. Stan was diligent about introducing me to new vices, and he always seemed genuinely interested in how I was getting along in them. But now he had no regard for my ruminations. He kept cracking his knuckles and staring back in the direction of the street. Did he have some ulterior reason for bringing me to the creek?

He flicked a half-finished cigarette into the water and pulled the box from his pocket. Only this time, using his thumb and forefinger as tweezers, he brought forth a white-wrapped stogie and dangled it in the air with the satisfied expression of a surgeon displaying a diseased kidney.

“Grass,” he said.

I didn't understand what he meant.

And then it dawned on me.

“Is that a joint?”

He nodded, very seriously.

I gaped over my shoulder, half expecting the cops to come crashing through the brush behind us. Drugs were an entirely new social malady at the time, more a rumor than a reality. Stan was probably the first person ever to bring pot into El Dorado Hills.

“Where did you get it? Let me see.”

I flipped it back and forth in my hand.

“Where did you get it?”

“I have my sources.”

Now I knew why he'd been hitchhiking downtown so much of late. I understood the muttered phone conversations, the hanging up whenever someone came into the room.

“Have you tried it?”

“Of course. In fact, I'm going to smoke this one. Now.”

“No!” I hollered.

“Relax, it's not what they make it out to be.”

He took a few tokes while I glanced about in alarm. I remembered what had happened the last time he'd brought me to the woods, when he had picked up a rock and brained a squirrel with the same dead-on accuracy he used to deliver sucker punches. I'd gotten all flustered and pained by that and yelled at him to quit. I hated squirrels as much as the next guy, but I couldn't see any point in killing them. And then he whipped out his knife, sawed into the creature's legs and tail, and, using a few rusty nails that he yanked from some moldy boards lying in the brush, he hung the amputated appendages like strips of hairy meat to a tree. What kind of psycho did things like that? And why on earth did I get stuck with him as a brother?

Smoking the joint took forever. He closed his eyes, held his breath and spat air. Seeds were popping. The very burning of the weed was sinister.

When he finally smoked it to a nub, he dropped the roach into the Marlboro box.

“You save them?” I said.

He just grinned.

“Are you hooked yet?” I asked.

He burst out laughing and stared at me with his silly eyes. Which pretty much answered my question.

What would be the next calamity to befall the House of Witcher?

“Let's go home,” I told him.

“Are you crazy? I can't face Pop in this condition.”

“You better watch it, you'll be addicted in no time.”

This well-meant warning brought forth another peel of drug-addled mirth. He wavered his hands like a spook and taunted me: “Look out, I'm stoooooned.”

How quickly was I learning the futility of reasoning with a hophead. I turned away, depressed.

“Hey, come on, I wanna show you something,” he said.

He put his sunglasses on and leapt across the creek, and I followed. We climbed a slope, shooing away briars until we came to a narrow ridge. After that the ground sloped downwards. We shoved through some branches and leaves and wound up at the other end of the woods; and then we got in a hunkering position and surveyed the newly cleared plot of land upon which Thurston and Lovey had built their palatial homestead. We were staring directly into their back yard.

“Her name is Anya,” my brother said.

“How do you know?”

“I was here yesterday. I heard the old lady calling her from inside the house.”

“The girl was in the yard?”

“Yeah, she was sunbathing, wearing a bikini.”

“Were you high?”

Stan laughed and pushed me over.

We sat cross-legged. It was a hot day, but there was a lovely breeze and everything was peaceful. We watched the large, inclined yard. Close to the house the ground leveled out, and that is where Thurston and Lovey had placed their swimming pool, surrounding it with a green slatted fence. Stan told me the pool hadn't been filled with water yet. At the far end of the yard, near the garbage cans, stood piles of empty boxes and discarded padding material from the move.

“What kind of name is Anya?” I asked.

“Pretty, huh?”

We heard a door whoosh open. She stepped out to the yard, laden with empty boxes she intended to haul up to the garbage area. The moment she stepped outside, Stan's nose jutted like a pointer's. He watched as she marched through the yard in her sandals and white shorts. His nose was quivering.

He whistled between his teeth.

“Quit it, we'll get in trouble.”

“This ain't their property, we can sit here all we want.”

The hippie girl dropped off the boxes and headed back to the house. Stan whistled again and she stopped. We were behind sparse brush, partially obscured.

She smiled and came over.

“Who's there?”

“Peace,” Stan said. He gave her the peace sign.

She kept craning her neck. This time her hair hung in ringlets. She came to within three feet of us.

“Who are you?” she said.

“Peace,” my brother said.

Anya laughed and gave the peace sign back. “What are you supposed to be, a hippie?”

“We're the Welcome Wagon.”

“You are not,” she protested blithely, in an accent more southern than ours.

“Where you from?”

“Dallas. We just moved in.”

“Dallas, Texas.” Stan nodded familiarly, as though Dallas were a place he'd been to a hundred times. “You must need someone to show you the town,” he said.

“Doesn't strike me there's a lot to see.” She nudged her chin at me. “Who's this with you?”

“He's my bodyguard.”

Anya found that funny. She gave me a flirtatious wink.

“Hi, Cutiepie, how old are you?”

I scowled.

“Do you smoke grass?” my brother asked.

She tossed him a look. “Now I think you're being impertinent.”

Her use of the word “impertinent” made me nervous. It demonstrated clearly that she outclassed us. I could handle “impertinent,” but Stan didn't possess my scholastic talents and he resented it when people put on airs. I looked to see what he was thinking, but he only stared at her from behind his sunglasses.

“It's just a question,” he told her. “If you smoke with me I was thinking we might have some fun.”

“You haven't told me your name,” she said.

“It's Gaylord.”

Why did he say that?

Anya laughed, unwilling to believe anyone would be named Gaylord.

Suddenly a voice called from the rear door.

“Anya, what are you doing?”

It was Lovey!

“Nothing, I'm talking!” she shouted over her shoulder.