No Book but the World: A Novel (24 page)

I
N HIS WHOLE LIFE
he’d only ever known three people who reminded him of the Little Prince.

The first had been Kitty the day he’d met her, twenty-five years earlier: the day she’d sprung down to the ground from the sassafras tree with her short star-colored hair and her pin-striped conductor’s overalls and her bare feet and he’d hit her cheek with a wooden spoon. Never mind that the Little Prince doesn’t have overalls. Or bare feet. She had been like the pictures of him in Neel’s book that he had first seen when he was very small and Ava read it aloud to him up on the couch. She was like the Little Prince in more ways than her hair, although he could not have said how. Something unfamiliar and brave and a little fierce about her, and she sometimes talked in riddles.

The second person had been Thor, but he didn’t like to think about Thor.

The third person was brand-new and standing there right this second: the girl beside him at the bar. She, too, had short star-colored hair sticking out in tufts around her head. She wore a stretchy denim jumpsuit that clung to her, and she also talked in riddles. She kept calling him Sailor.

“Hey, Sailor,” she said. “What’s that you’re drinking?”

When he didn’t say anything back, instead of cutting her eyes and sucking her teeth, she turned to Dave. “What’s the matter with your friend?” she asked. “He shy?”

At first he hadn’t liked how dark it was inside. When they first got here, him and Dave and Dave’s friend Umberto, the summer evening had still been light, and the bar was so dark he was afraid he’d bump into things. He had to hold his hands out like a mummy while he walked, and then he did bump into something, a man, who swiveled his head around like an owl and looked Fred up and down. Fred said, “Ah-sorry,” but by then the man had already turned back around.

They got seats at the bar and Dave and Umberto ordered beer, and Fred asked for a Mountain Dew and the bartender said we don’t have Mountain Dew, only Sprite. And Fred said to Dave he was just going back outside to the deli on the corner, which he’d seen when they were driving up, so he could get himself a can of Mountain Dew. But Dave had taken a handful of Fred’s shirt, not roughly but in a way that meant they were friends and everything would be okay, and Dave said, “Just have Sprite, okay? It’s the same thing.”

So Fred got Sprite but it wasn’t the same thing. For example, Mountain Dew had caffeine and Sprite didn’t, and also Mountain Dew was special because it had real orange juice in it. He mentioned this to Dave, and Umberto said, “Bullshit,” and Fred said no, it wasn’t bullshit, you could check the ingredients on the label, and Umberto said, “Remind me why the fuck we had to bring this wacko,” and Dave just clapped a hand on Fred’s shoulder and said, “Okay, Buddy, I believe you, let it go.”

The reason they had to bring Fred was Fred couldn’t be left alone anymore in Dave’s house on the Cape.

The reason they had to be in here was they had to meet a friend of Umberto’s that Umberto had some business with.

But when they first came in, Fred really hated to leave the summer evening’s hay-y smell and the last snips of light blinking like sequins on the surface of the mill river that ran through the town. Fred knew it was a mill river from his map, one of the boxful from the old house that he had taken with him when June died. A shoe box stuffed with maps she’d picked up at gas stations when they were little, when their family used to go on trips. Some of the maps were still smooth and crisp to the touch, others were faded and soft as silk. These were easy to fold back up again, but also easy to tear, and he was careful to handle them gently whenever he went on a road trip with Dave. He would pull out the right map for wherever they were, find their position, ask Dave the name of where they were headed, and trace their route, counting up the miles between exits and intersections, those tiny black numbers inked in beside stretches of highway like a secret code. June had taught him they were mile numbers. She had taught him how you could count them all up and know how long your journey was.

Sometimes he could see how near they were passing to someplace he’d been long ago, someplace June had marked with a pink or yellow highlighter pen: a state forest where they’d camped, a college town where Neel had given a talk, a beach where they’d swum. Sometimes, to pass the time on those long trips, he would read the maps like they were picture books with illustrations too tiny to see. He’d spend long minutes with the map held close to his face, smelling the musty sweetness, filling in with his memory the microscopic details: the green tent they’d all slept in; the college students with their fringed jackets and Frisbees; the peanut butter sandwiches they’d eaten on the beach and the peppermint stripes on the umbrella and the cut he’d gotten on the bottom of his foot from a piece of glass.

The town he and Dave and Umberto drove to was called Perdu. This word was printed in the smallest-sized letters on the map, next to the smallest-sized dot. A blue thread ran beside it. Fred had looked up from the thread and connected it to the narrow mill river running alongside the car. The map didn’t show the low brick buildings backed up along its far bank, or the laundry blowing on lines that ran between these buildings.

It had taken a long time to get here from the Cape. They’d driven all day, and he hadn’t liked going from the car immediately into the dark of the bar with the noise from the jukebox filling the room, fuzzing up against the wood-paneled walls and thudding in his ears, and he hadn’t liked the noise of the people who laughed in rough, sparky barks. “We get it. We know you don’t like it,” Dave had finally said. “Quit saying so over and over.” But it really made him think he might puke, and at first he’d had to cup a hand over his nose to try to block the smells of spilled beer and old fry grease and sweaty bodies.

He told Dave he was going to wait outside, but Dave pointed him toward a barstool. “Just grab a seat. You’re okay.” And Dave turned out to be right as usual, because after a while his eyes adjusted and his ears and nose adjusted, and he saw that all the bottles on the shelves behind the bar, with their different colors of glass and their different shapes, were like a city, with a pretty skyline he could lose himself in, trace with his eyes, another kind of map. And he drank more Sprite and had some wings with bright orange sauce that wasn’t too spicy, and Dave and Umberto had some wings and some drinks that came from one of the pretty bottles behind the bar. They also had some more beers only this time they called them chasers.

Umberto’s friend who he had some business with still hadn’t come in, but three girls came in, and they seemed to know Umberto. They walked in a swirly way toward the bar and pressed themselves up close to it, somehow making room where there hadn’t been any, and now two of them were sitting on the stools that Dave and Umberto had been sitting on, with Dave and Umberto wedged in behind them like almost-right-but-not-quite jigsaw pieces.

The one girl with star-colored hair didn’t have a seat. She was standing tucked up close to Fred, and he didn’t want to give up his stool so he didn’t smile or look at her when she said hey Sailor to him, but after she turned to face the others he snuck looks at her short, pale hair that stuck out around her head just like the Little Prince.

He wanted to tell Dave about it, but he didn’t know if Dave would say, “Cool, Buddy,” or “Not now, man,” or worse, nothing at all, just eye him coldly like the owl man and swivel his head back around. Dave was capable of all three. Fred met Dave at Neel’s memorial service. Both Dave’s parents had been Batter Hollow students, and Dave said he himself had gone there as a little kid, right before the school closed. Fred’s first memory of Dave was actually at the gathering after Neel’s memorial service, a big party back at Batter Hollow that wound up stretching late into the night. Dave had been a skinny guy standing outside in the dark, leaning against the wall of the Shed, smoking with the lighted end of his cigarette cupped inside his palm. That’s when he came up with the name Buddy. “Hey, Buddy,” he’d said when Fred wandered by. “Sorry about your old man.”

He stuck around a few weeks after the memorial service, staying in the abandoned Shed and doing odd jobs for June, replacing the rotten wood on the front porch of the Office, fixing the gutters, patching the roof. Then he got a call to paint a house back on the Cape and he left. But later, when June got sick and had to lie in bed all the time, she called him. Well, first she had to call Dave’s mother to get his number, and then she called Dave on the Cape and they talked. She asked Fred to leave the room while they talked. When she hung up she called for him to come back, and he sat in a chair pulled up to the bed and she lay there with no hair and her skin the color of beeswax on the pillow, and she said Fred was going to have a job and a place to live on the Cape. He was going to help Dave paint houses and he was going to stay in Dave’s bungalow with him. And she would make sure Dave got some money every month and Dave would make sure Fred had clothes and food and whatever he needed. After she told him this she looked like she might fall asleep, but instead she reached her hand out from under the sheet and touched Fred on the knee.

“You always liked the Cape,” she said.

Then she closed her eyes for eleven seconds and just as he was counting twelve in his head she opened them again and said, “You always liked the ocean.”

Then her face sort of crumpled, and her yellow skin looked like a candle someone had taken a fork to, and she didn’t smell a thing like June.

“Hey!” The star-haired girl whipped her head around. Fred had leant in close to the girl’s hair; he’d been smelling it. It smelled like raisin cookies. Now he sat back quickly on his stool, careening his gaze over to the bottles behind the bar, tracing with his eyes the rise and fall of their glass silhouettes.
Bumpity bumpity bump
.

“Don’t think I don’t know your type,” the girl added more slowly, looking him up and down. But not like the owl man had looked him up and down. With her it was more like he was a path in the woods she was thinking she might go down. “You get me, Sailor?”

He didn’t know if he got her, but he nodded, which was something he’d learned to do whenever people asked him a question that didn’t make sense or spoke in riddles. Then he was afraid he might keep bobbing his head up and down the way that felt good but Dave had informed him was
a little weird, Buddy
, so he looked away again, back toward the skyline of colored bottles.

“You always this talkative?”

This was a joke and he knew to smile. “Ha ha,” he added after a moment.

When she smiled, one cheek got a dent in it, curvy and dark. It was a little like the dent in Kitty’s chin. He wanted to put his finger in the dent. He turned away from her and touched his glass of Sprite instead.

“You must have a secret, huh? That’s why you’re so quiet. So what is it? How come you won’t tell what you’re drinking?” She leaned over right in front of him and he could see, because she had not zipped her denim jumpsuit all the way, where a shadow slid down between the tops of her small breasts. She closed her hand around his glass and slid it toward herself, brought it to her own lips, slowly, slowly, and drank, keeping her eyes on him the whole time. “Hm.” Sounding surprised, she set the glass back on the bar, tipped her starry head to one side and narrowed her eyes at him.

His Adam’s apple slid up and down his throat. “Ah, have you-ah, ever read
The Little Prince
, by-ah, Ant-ah, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry?”

Her eyes popped big like in a cartoon. “It talks!” she screamed. She reached around and whacked her friend, on the next stool, with the back of her hand.

“Ow. Bitch.” The friend rubbed at her shoulder and looked over at them both. Her eyes, beneath heavy lids, had a mean look. They were the color of a bruise.

The third girl was busy laughing at something Umberto said.

“Sailor boy can talk!” announced the star-girl. “Listen to this.” And to him, “Repeat what you just said.”

“Ah . . .”

“Ask me that thing again.”

“Ah, are you-ah, familiar with-ah, that book? It’s-ah, a novel by-ah, by-ah, by-ah, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.”

“Dassant eggs-
what
?” She yelped the last word so high he flinched. “You are priceless. You kill me, what language is that?”

“S’ah not-ah a language,” he explained, and she let out a happy scream and gave her friend another whack. This time her friend shoved her back. She stumbled against Fred, who steadied her.

“He was-ah a writer,” Fred said. “And-ah a pilot. In Africa. You-ah, you-ah, look like the drawings of-ah the little prince.”

He talked on then, wanting to explain about the book, which he had never read through all by himself but which Ava had read to him long ago, and whose illustrations and sweet pervading sadness had made a lasting impression, so that now he liked to bring the book with him wherever he went, and sometimes he would flip through and read himself a line or two—he liked where the snake says,
It is a little lonely among men
—or just page through the pictures, and as he talked to the star-haired girl about the book he noticed it was unusual he wanted to talk so much; noticed, too, that as he went on the words began to slip more effortlessly out of his mouth, following smoothly upon each other without needing those little pockets of air to come between so many of them. But he also noticed how his voice got lost in the surge of the jukebox and spikes of laughter throughout the bar, lost in the tumult of milling bodies that flashed in and out of the corners of his vision, heavy with sweat and muscles and fat; lost, too, in the glint of pint glasses bobbing along on trays held high, and in the glint of tongue studs and nose rings and the neon Genny Light sign over in the little box window, so that Fred had to look back at the bottle city again, rest his eyes by letting them travel the miniature glass skyline, and while all this was going on, the girl with the Little Prince hair leaned in and laid a hand on his crotch.

“Ah,” said Fred. He looked down. There were her fingers, idle and innocent.