Jane Two (8 page)

“Two! Three! Five!” hollering out back somewhere over on Sandpiper Drive woke me up the next morning with a start, and I smelled autumn. I stared at the ceiling where all my World War II model airplanes were perfectly hung in various dogfight positions with fishing line, and I watched them gently sway in the humid Texas breeze. When Dad had time off from work, he and I had painted one of my bedroom walls white, one forest green, one celery, and the ceiling baby blue as a backdrop for a perpetual airstrike. My shelf held my favorite football, and race cars. Having been in the air force himself, my dad had a love of all things airborne and helped me to build squadrons of 1/48th scale World War II model airplanes to hang from my ceiling. Each plane was a piece of art. I knew every fact and spec of everything that flew in World War II. From fishing wire on I-hooks there hung in mid-fight two German Messerschmitts, two Focke-Wulf fighters, a gaggle of Japanese Zeros, Corsairs, a B-17 Flying Fortress, Hellcats, Spitfires, P-38 Lightnings, Thunderbolts, Douglas Dauntless dive-bombers, and others. My dad had used a hot sewing needle of Mom's to strafe some of the airplanes, like machine-gun holes, and made them look like they were on the losing end of a dogfight. He pulled cotton into one-inch strands and blackened it, then added bits of yellow, red, and orange paint to create a fiery smoke that came out of the cowling of a shot and limping fighter. But my absolute favorite, the P-51 Mustang, had come loose and was now dangling by its tail in a sort of death dive, as if it had been shot down by a Messerschmitt, of all things. But the P-51 was the baddest thing in the skies in World War II. That Mustang put fear in the hearts of everything it came into contact with.

After I'd watched my reel of Jane on her trampoline, hidden everything in my Charles Chips can, and prepared her letter about seeing her at the football game, I stood up on my bed and restrung the P-51 Mustang's wings to the ceiling and righted that Mustang's trip of vengeance on its foes. It was Halloween morning, so I raced to school on my bike wearing a perfect Speed Racer costume, complete with helmet and goggles. Leaves were pretty much off the trees by then, but some still fluttered around me, joining the others to crunch under my tires. The eight-track Steve McQueen had mauled had turned into two perfectly constructed streamers on the end of each handle grip. I passed other kids on their bikes all in various costumes that were cool, but I was Speed Racer. I was always Speed Racer, from the earliest Halloween that I can remember.

As I left my bike in the rack outside school, police sirens were splitting my eardrums. Kevin tore past with his plank in the Firebird racing a '70 Chevelle, followed by the cop car. Kids were still hooting and cheering when Mrs. Bradford appeared out of nowhere in front of me, dressed up like an Indian medicine woman.

“SPEED RACER! Did you bring a record?” The only thing I wanted more than to see Kevin race that Chevelle was to talk to Jane's mom.

“Yes, ma'am, I did, ma'am.” But that was too many
ma'am
s for her to tell her daughter that I was cool. I had music that I wondered if Jane had ever heard. I tried to pull my records out of my brown paper lunch bag while holding the door for Jane's mom and just barely missed accidentally letting it go too early. “I got ‘You ain't nuthin' but a Hound Dog' by The King and ‘Sunshine Superman' by Donovan.”

And Mrs. Bradford smiled that lopsided, smirky Jane way as we entered our classroom. “By The King, huh? So, you're an Elvis fan, Mickey?” She plugged in the box record player that sat on a stool by her desk.

The classroom writhed with a monster mash of ghouls, characters, witches, and fairy princesses. Emmalyne was Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz
and Firefly was the bionic man, with circuits and wires coming out of his arm.

“So Speed Racer is the only one who brought a record today? Mark my words, in a few years you're gonna
wish
your teacher would let you listen to music in class.” Emmalyne raised her hand. “Go ahead,
Dorothy
. As long as we are all polite to one another, we won't have to raise our hands.”

“Oh, well we don't have any records at my house, Mrs. Bradford. My dad threw them all out when we got our new cassette tape player.”

“Shut up, Emmalyne, showin' off yer daddy's got money!” nipped Firefly.

“Don't you see my blue gingham dress and pigtails? I'm
Dorothy
, stupid!”

“Okay, there,
Mr. Austin
. Well,
Dorothy
, let's hope that your father at least gave them away and didn't just throw out the vinyl with the bathwater.”

“Huh? Yeah, I think he did.”

“Well, class, we have two from Speed, and I brought one. Since we only have three, we can probably get to them all.”

Mrs. Bradford turned the lights off and placed one of the records on the turntable, with two of them above it waiting to drop.

“The first one is my daughter's. It's her favorite. It's called ‘The Sounds of Silence' by Simon and Garfunkel.”

The room got very quiet as we listened intently to the crackle of the needle waiting for the song to start. After a bit, most of the kids were fidgeting with their desks or each other. Except me. I was listening to what Jane heard. I was hearing The Silence Jane loved. I wondered if she had ever heard mine when she was jumping. Though it was barely audible, I could hear Mrs. Bradford singing along.

When I woke up, Donovan's “Sunshine Superman” was finishing as the bell jangled me back into the classroom.

“Mickey? You fell asleep?” I raised my head off my desk to see that Mrs. Bradford and I were the only ones left. “I think your ‘Hound Dog' was the big hit, huh, Mickey?”

I didn't even remember it playing.

“Mrs. Bradford, do you think I could trade you my two records for Jane's ‘Silence,' just for tonight?”

I already had my own, but I wanted Jane's. I wanted to touch her “Silence.”

Mrs. Bradford regarded me thoughtfully for a moment, probably wondering how I knew Jane's name, since Mrs. Bradford had only ever referred to Jane in class as “my daughter.” “Certainly, Mickey, I don't think she'd mind at all. As a matter of fact, I think she'd really love ‘Sunshine Superman.'”

And as simple as that, I was holding her “Silence” in my hands.

“Thank you, Mrs. Bradford, I'll bring it back.”

She smiled again and turned to go.

“Oh, Mickey, I almost forgot. We're having a haunted house in our garage tonight. A haunted pirate ship, actually. The pirate idea was…my daughter's. I thought I'd let you know because your mother said that ya'll lived right behind us on the other side of the ditch. You should stop by.”

“Yes, ma'am, I'll try,” I said, in full knowledge that absolutely nothing I had experienced up to that point in my tiny little life could possibly block my path to that garage. I was Speed Racer. Propelled down the hallway by rowdy students pushing like cattle in a stampede, all aching to get home and scarf down their dinners so they could go trick-or-treating and egging cars, I was soon ejected by the crowd down the main stairs and found myself close enough to the bike rack to spit on it by the time the tide of costumes subsided. I was still lost in Jane and the record I held in my hand, when I saw it. And it stopped me cold.

The bike rack was empty. My bike was gone. And there was that noise again, that noise that my throat would make so it would be too busy to cry—a little Grunt that came when I called on every one of my personal resources to not burst into tears. I stared in disbelief, as a sharp pang of loss drowned out my thoughts of Jane. On the very first day my parents ever allowed me to ride that Schwinn Sting-Ray to school, I had left the chain and padlock negligently wrapped around the seat post. I would have always preferred anger to come from my dad and Grandaddy, but I knew that it would instead be a devastating dose of disappointment that waited for me.

Walking home, I accepted that I would be late for dinner and Mom would be worried, even if I took the shortcut through the football fields past the baseball diamond and through the stand of trees with The Hole. The Hole scared me terribly. Even on a practice day with my entire football team covering my back, I wanted nothing to do with it. Now it was just me, no bike, no Steve McQueen. It was Halloween and nobody would be at any practices, so I would have to walk alone past The Hole, an inexplicably harrowing crevice in the earth that I was sure was the doorway to the devil. The one time I would eventually try to climb down into The Hole it was breech, while The Pole would be headfirst. Yet, oddly enough, while The Hole took me further into this world, it was the The Pole that would take me away.

When I got past the stand of trees, I sprinted past The Hole, pausing only long enough to glance into that black gash to hell. I finally got past it and came to the baseball diamond only to find The Plank and its red Firebird right there, directly in front of me. It was silent except for the sound of a radio playing “Crimson and Clover” by Tommy James and the Shondells. I never thought Kevin would, but I actually loved that song. I couldn't see him anywhere around, so I cautiously approached his car on the passenger side and looked in. Stretched out on his back across both front seats was Kevin with his mouth wide open and his head propped up on the driver's side armrest. Radio blaring.

I had never seen a dead person before, but this one looked anything but alive. I was both fascinated and shattered with fright at the same time. But at such a tender age, fear inevitably wins. I backed away from the car and ran into the stand of trees by The Hole to find a small tree branch. Nervous, I peered down the dark crevice again and ran back to the car and stuck the branch through the open window and slowly poked at Kevin's cheek. Nothing. I waited a moment and then pressed that stick even harder up his cheek—so hard that his upper lip crept high enough to expose his teeth. I held that stick there and prayed for some movement—any movement. But there was none. I dropped that stick right in Kevin's car and ran for help. I got about twenty feet in ten directions when I heard something coming from the car, so I stopped. I had to go back. When I approached the open window this time, I heard a low, sort of guttural moan coming from inside the car. Slowly and carefully I stuck my head back through the window and picked up that stick to touch again. Suddenly, Kevin's eyes popped open and I immediately jerked myself back, violently cracking my head on the top of the roof before I fell to the ground. I heard another groan as I sat on the ground looking up at that car, so I gathered myself and slowly approached the window until I could see him…and he could see me.

“Sorry, I thought you were dead.”

Kevin pondered that before asking, “So, wha'd I look like, man? Happy or just sorta peaceful?” And it looked like he really wanted to know.

“Just dead, I guess.”

Gradually, Kevin sat up, staring out at the horizon, but not the way Grandaddy stared out at it. I don't know if Kevin was fried out of his mind on something or if he just saw things that no one else saw. Their faces were pointed in the same direction, but what they would extract from the view was completely different. Kevin saw smears of color, not hard specifics, whereas my Grandaddy saw every detail before it even got there and long after it was hidden.

“Where's Trixie?” Kevin demanded and I just stared at him. “If you're Speed Racer, where the hell's Trixie?”

I really had to think about this. “I don't know.”

“Speed, she's up above you in a helicopter watchin' your every move, man, that's where she is.”

Kevin drew himself up and stretched, climbing on the hood of the car right in front of my curiosity.

“And all we're left with is a monkey in the trunk that likes playin' with this weird-lookin' fat kid. But don't worry, ya know the higher you go, the thinner the air gets up there. She gets too far away, she'll come crashing down faster'n she can handle.” It seemed like he was really contemplating this for a while, and even looking for her up in the clouds for me, when he suddenly started chuckling to himself. “Besides, we got a fast car! Hah! She's got a chopper, but we got a
car
, kid! We got us a fuckin' car, Speed!” Kevin patted his car and lay back against the windshield to stare wild-eyed at the sky.

“Uh…do you know what time it is, Kevin?” I think that was the first time I ever called him by his name, and probably about the first time we had ever had any kind of conversation.

“I try not to…Sometimes ya can't help but know, but myself, I try not to.” Kevin stared me down for a long time and it felt weird, but then he suddenly focused. “Why, you gotta be somewhere, Speed?”

“Just home. My mom worries.”

“Nice to have a mom's worries.” His eyes drifted off.

I noticed the stopwatch tied around his car's rearview mirror with a lightning bolt logo on the back, and I pulled my leather thong up to show him my dad's stopwatch. Kevin smiled and closed his eyes.

“It usually takes me fourteen minutes and eight seconds. Well, that's the record. I coulda broke it today. But they stole my bike.”

“Who's they?” I had to think about that, too.

“I don't know.” Kevin smiled at me this time, not at his horizon.

“Yeah, they're always stealin' shit ain't they, Speed, the fuckers. It's a dog-eat-dog world, man, you can't be sportin' Milk-Bone underwear. Where do you live?”

“Just on the other side of the park, over there.” I pointed toward home.

“Wanna ride? I'm thinkin' we can crush fourteen-eight.”

“No, my mom won't let me ride with pot smokers.” Kevin chuckled, normal this time, and looked me square in the eye.

“Your mom's smart.” I nodded my thanks for his approval and waved bye. I got about forty feet from Kevin's Firebird before he yelled after me, “Hey, Speed! Tell yer dad I'm sorry 'bout tha garage door, but I know he duddn't got a bathtub to drown me in.”