Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (32 page)

After that it was like he’d found a trapdoor at the back of my head. When I saw a layer of dust on the base of a lamp, I wondered would Dwayne feel like I did, that it was the smallest snowfall in the world? When I swung open the refrigerator door my eyes went first to the bologna in white butcher paper, a food I knew he liked. What was Dwayne’s favorite color? My guess was ivy green. “My Eyes Adored You” came on the radio. Did Dwayne agree it was a cheesy throwback and should be dynamited off the dial? I spent a lot of time playing back things he’d said to me over the years and trying to figure out if they had some secret message. When he said he liked my shirt with the brown piping was he serious or did he really think I looked like an idiot? When he asked if I wanted to go riding with him, I knew I should say no, but I just nodded my head.

I told my mom I was going to a friend’s. She asked a few questions. What did my friend’s father do?
Insurance. Would they drive me home? Of course. I made up some stuff about the mom being a nurse and how my friend was first chair on flute in the high school orchestra. While I spoke to her, I sang the Carpenters song “Top of the World” in my head. I had taken to doing this while she told me about the plans for Rose Kennedy’s birthday or that Teddy Kennedy was still drinking. My mother knew something was off; even as out of it as she was, she could sense I was lying.

I sat in the backseat beside a twelve-pack of beer. Dwayne’s friend Larry drove and Dwayne sat in the passenger seat. I recognized Larry from pictures in the newspaper. He had blond hair with dark eyes and handsome features. He was the son of Louis Hancock, who owned the store in the French Quarter where Dwayne worked. He’d gotten into trouble in Blacksburg, where he’d been at college.

Besides my brother, I had never been alone with boys before. Should I ask about football or horror movies? If you didn’t know their lingo, boys made fun of you. As the jeep turned onto 419, I found it hard to believe that I was actually sitting in a boy’s car. And I was with Dwayne, the same Dwayne who’d gotten suspended from school for spray-painting curse words on the wall of the boys’ bathroom and setting a pile of towels on fire in the locker room, the same Dwayne
who was seventeen and going into 10th grade because he’d failed both sixth and seventh grade, the Dwayne who had given me an Indian handshake so violent my wrist was sore for a week.

Luckily, I didn’t have to say anything, as he started to talk about Hutch. How all day people came into the store and told him he looked exactly like the TV character. He broke down a fight scene from a recent episode, first pulling his arm back, then tucking his head sideways. He gently punched the dashboard and then sunk back deeper into the seat.

“All you talk about is Hutch,” Larry said. “I’m sick of it!”

“It’s just not fair,” Dwayne said, “that David Soul gets to be Hutch and I just get to look like him.”

People loved to look like famous people. Sheila loved that she looked like Laura, and my mom often mentioned how, when she was younger, people said she looked like Grace Kelly. There was a girl in school who looked like Jodie Foster and a boy who looked like David Cassidy. Even our neighbor Mrs. Smith was always pointing out how she looked just like Mrs. Robert E. Lee. But what good did it do to look like a famous person? You were not that famous person, you didn’t even know them, and looking like them didn’t make you their sister or cousin. It made you smaller, not bigger, to look like somebody else, as if the famous person had swallowed you whole and you were just a tiny worn-out doll stuck inside their stomach.

“You could be an actor,” I said.

“You are not getting it,” Dwayne said, turning around to glare at me. “I am Hutch!”

Drops of water stabbed the window and it started to rain. Steam rose up off the asphalt. The headlights lit up the monkey grass and milkweed by the side of the road. Splotches of blurry gold-and-red light came through the window.

“Hellhole number one,” Larry said as we pulled into the parking lot of the Ground Round. The Ground Round parking lot was the best lot in all of Roanoke. It had spaces in front but also in back. In back the kids hung out along the tree line or near the Dumpster. Back here it wasn’t glaring with dusk-to-dawn lights like most of the lots on the highway; there was just a single lantern suspended near the restaurant’s back door. The downside was the stench of fryer grease. Also, the manager came out every now and then and chased everybody off.

Tonight the lot was packed with cars and clumps of kids standing under umbrellas. Larry hit the brakes and slowed the jeep to a stop. They checked out all the cars. Not seeing any vehicles they recognized, they pronounced the Ground Round lame. Larry spun the wheels a bit on the wet pavement as we pulled away from the lot.

We moved on to hellhole number two, the Happy Clam. The Happy Clam was a seafood restaurant that featured beach music at night. Beach music was
a throwback to fifties swing. For some reason the rich kids loved to dance to it. The dance was called the shag and had lots of turns and twists and was maybe fun to do but really stupid to watch. We parked in a big lot completely devoid of character. I was unclear why we didn’t go to the Pizza Inn, with its dark and cozy lot. Even the Hardee’s lot had more charm. The band must have stopped because kids streamed out, boys wearing madras pants and Izod shirts and girls in bright pink or yellow wraparound dresses.

“There’s Naomi,” Larry said, pointing to a girl with long, dark hair wearing a white shirt with a giant scallop shell on it and a blue skirt.

“You went out with her?”

Larry nodded.

“Three years. Then that asshole Willmont Vanhoff is with her two weeks and gets her pregnant. He was a loudmouth about it too. He might as well have put flyers under every windshield wiper at the mall.”

“That’s sick,” Dwayne said.

“Hey Naomi,” Larry called to her and her friend. Her friend was short with broad shoulders, while Naomi was tall and skinny, with a gap between her front teeth and bangs cut straight across her forehead.

“Larry,” she said, walking over to us. “I heard you were back.”

“I want you to know it was bogus,” he said. “They dropped the charges.”

“You’ll go back in the fall?”

“My only plan is to party all summer long.”

Naomi laughed.

“Same old Larry.”

“No, not same old Larry. Different Larry. New-and-improved Larry.”

“Yeah right,” she said.

“Seriously,” he said. “You all need a ride?”

“No,” she said, “I’m spending the night with Josie. Her mom is on her way to get us.”

“Sluts,” Larry said, as soon as we pulled out of the lot. “That little one fucked Buddy Eclor while his friend watched.”

I knew Larry was lying. I glanced at him in the rearview mirror. Even features, his Star of David necklace illuminated in the oncoming headlights. I saw his cheek move as he clicked his jaw. He rolled his window down all the way and leaned out so the wind was full in his face. As we drove on 419 past the mall, the electric sign flashed over a huge and empty lot:
GO GET ’EM KNIGHTS
. The windowless mall looked like a space station and the asphalt like the domesticated surface of the moon. I wanted to break the tension in the car, worse even than the force field of static at my own house—but how? I could say something about Cher, how long it must take to sew the beads on one of her fantastic outfits. Sometimes to go to sleep at night, instead of counting sheep, I’d imagine a pair of hands sewing one small bead after another; sometimes I even thought of them as tears threaded into a
tapestry of water. But that sounded, even to my mind, girly and ridiculous. Maybe they’d be interested in my dad’s dream theories. He’d just told me that fluxes in the earth’s magnetic fields made dreams more bizarre.

Dwayne turned on the radio and Skynyrd came blaring out of the dashboard speakers. Larry pushed the gas pedal and we zoomed by the mechanic’s shop with the giant tire out front, a strip mall with a pet supply and an
ABC
store, past the beauty parlor in the trailer, and into a stretch of woods. Headlights showed leaves, gray trunks of trees, fern fronds, a stump turned over, red with mud. Sheila told me she’d been to a bonfire at the dump where boys drank moonshine and one girl got so drunk she took her shirt off and danced around the fire.

I knew Dwayne might try to kiss me or even zipless fuck me. Parking, like babysitting, was dangerous. Everyone knew about the couple who heard a strange scraping sound. They raced away only to discover a hook dangling from their door handle, left by a one-handed mental patient escaped from the local loony bin. Those two got off easy, though, compared to the boy who went out in the woods to pee. His girlfriend waited all night for him to come back, but it wasn’t until sunrise that she got out of the car and saw her boyfriend’s head stuck onto the radio antenna!

We pulled onto a dirt road and drove, cones of headlights on a swath of kudzu vine that smothered the underbrush and reached up into the trees. Light
illuminated two boys in army jackets, one holding what I knew was a roach clip; then they fell back into the dark. We drove into an opening where the trees had been cleared and I could see the stars overhead; a few cars were parked and kids sat up on the trunks. Inside the tree line was a bonfire, and I saw kids’ faces illuminated in slashes of orange and red.

We pulled into the far end of the opening and parked. The air smelled of wood smoke and sweet rot. I’d heard about the dump as a place where girls lost their virginity and boys puked and passed out. The blanket beside me had taken on scary implications. I was worried Dwayne and Larry were going to make me walk into the woods.

I heard the door click open and Larry got out and walked away from the car. I heard his zipper and the flat sound of urine hitting the ground.

Dwayne turned around.

“Want to get out?”

“What’s the alternative?”

“I could come back there.”

“Let’s get out,” I said, pushing the handle down and stepping out onto the ground.

We sat on the trunk. Dwayne passed me a beer. They were warm now and tasted terrible. Larry came back, leaned against the trunk, and bent forward to the flame of his lighter, his profile illuminated and then gone.

“How are the lovebirds?”

“Better than you,” Dwayne said.

“Shit, man,” Larry said, “I don’t know why I’m hanging around you preschoolers.”

“Maybe because you don’t have any other friends.”

“You better shut your mouth,” Larry said, “if you want to keep your job.”

“Did you know that elephants cry when they’re lonely?” It was something Kira had told me and it just came down from my mind and blew out of my mouth like a soap bubble.

“Is that so?” Larry said.

“Leave her,” Dwayne said.

“What do elephants do after they fuck?”

“I’ll tell you what they don’t do,” Dwayne said. “They don’t hold a gun to a girl’s head.”

“It was a joke,” Larry said. “Can’t anyone take a joke?”

Light shimmered back in the woods toward the highway, first dim and then brighter as a car drove into the opening and pulled up near us. The Volvo doors opened and boys in Izod shirts, madras shorts, and docksiders got out. One was holding a bottle of bourbon and the others silver Jefferson cups.

“It’s Willmont,” Larry said, motioning with his head to a kid wearing a blue button-down and a puka bead necklace.

“Be cool,” Dwayne said.

“You know me, I’m Mr. Cool,” Larry said, though he stood straight now and glanced with undisguised hostility at the boys.

“I mean it!” Dwayne said.

“Fucking preppies,” Larry said.

“Dirtbags,” Willmont said, and all the boys laughed.

“You going to stand for that?” Larry said, holding his arms out.

“Be cool,” Dwayne said. “Don’t let them get to you.”

A lit cigarette flew from the group toward us like a tiny shooting star, landed with a spray of red embers on the back window of Larry’s car, and rolled down the trunk onto the ground.

“Don’t.” Dwayne tried to hold Larry back but it was too late; he flew like a fly out of an open car window, swung his arm back, and punched Willmont in the head. There was a sound like a bag of flour falling off a table and hitting the floor and then voices rose one over another, like birds squalling. Larry pulled his shirt over his head; his stomach was pale, muscular, and shiny with sweat.