The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (5 page)

For a few minutes, it's just us. The regulars,
as Jane says, which caused Leroy to dub us "the Irregulars."

"Depressed," Nick says out loud. "I ought to
know."

"I vote with the gals," Joe says. "Gay. Too
pretty. Manicured nails. Probably never even been to a boxing match in his
life."

"But I bet he's been to Rio," Trina
says.

"Italy," Jane says.

"Why buy a mattress an-y-where else," Luigi
sings.

My shift is almost over when Funny lifts her
head from the notebook she's been writing in. "Has anyone thought about all the
places you've ever laid your head?" she asks. "All the places you've ever woken
up?"

31

Leroy walks in then. He's so much later than
usual, I had given up on him coming in at all. The bells on the door jangle, but
still he's heard Funny's question. He raises up his hand, as if the teacher
might call on him. Under his right forearm is a mermaid, with twisty golden
hair. "Do backseats count?"

"Rough night?" Nick asks. He says it with a bit
of longing. Nick is this nice, straight guy who would've had this nice, straight
life had his wife not fallen down those stairs.

"Anyone got aspirin?" Leroy says.

"I do," Funny says. She lifts her purse,
rattles what sounds like twenty pill bottles in there.

"Eighteen places," Jane says. She scrunches her
nose around instead of itching it. Jane's got allergies. "I counted eighteen
places I've woken up. No, nineteen. One airport chair in Dallas during a
layover."

"Seventy, eighty?" Trina says.

Nick whistles.

"Roger and I did a lot of traveling. And then
you've got ... miscellaneous apartments."

Nick blushes. He takes a sip of water that has
maybe three or four flat shards of ice left in it.

"God, Trina," I say.

"Some were just
friends,"
she
says.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit my answer.
"Five or six," I say. Mom's, Dad's, camping trip with Dad, Bomba and Bompa's.
Ramada Inn with Dad. I add another, just because five seems too pathetic. I
refill Nick's water glass; the new ice sloshes in merrily.

"You're young," Leroy says. He winks at me.
Leroy and I understand each other.

32

"Hundreds," Joe says. "Hundreds and hundreds.
But then again, I'm old."

"So old, Jesus was in your math class," I say.
I crack myself up.

"You probably toured the country with your
boxing, right?" Jane says. She clips Jack to his leash, getting him ready for
his late-morning pee. Whenever Jack sees his leash, it's like he's looking at
two plane tickets for around the world, even if he's just going to the corner
and back.

"Oh yeah. For years. When I got back, my family
barely knew who I was." Joe's big hand is covered with wrinkles that look like
the chocolate piping on Harold's cakes. It's a hand that trembles, though, as he
brings a triangle of toast to his mouth and crunches.

"Well, they know you now. Look at that picture
they sent. Beautiful baby granddaughter," Jane says. Joe's got the photo propped
up against a water glass.

"With her in Saint Louis, I'll be lucky to see
her before I'm dead," Joe says, chewing. He has a lump of toast in one
cheek.

"This is getting goddamned dark," Funny
says.

"You'll see her someday," Jane says. "Don't
give up hope." Jack pulls her to the door like he's a sled dog and she's the
sled. Jack is an old dog, but strong, same as Joe. If you ever saw Joe
arm-wrestle Leroy, you'd know what I mean.

Right then, Bill and Marty come in, these two
guys that work at True Value with Nick. I pretend I don't know their names, even
though I do. Actually, we all pretend we've never even seen them before. This is
in keeping with the Respect Hierarchy of Names, which naturally progresses from
the reverential first-name-last-name-plus-
bonus-points-initial (John F.
Kennedy, F. Scott

33

Fitzgerald, Edward R. Murrow) all the way down
to the bottom of the ladder, the hazy description (That Guy from Safeway,
What's-His-Name). One step below that are the folks so little deserving of
respect you pretend their existence is forgettable. This is Bill and
Marty.

Bill wears a camouflage baseball hat, which
might tell you all you need to know. Marty has a mustache, though no one has a
mustache anymore. Nick gives a little wave and smile that means
I know you,
sure, but don't sit here.
But Bill and Marty don't get the finer points of
social etiquette, because they head right on over to sit at Nick's table. Nick
isn't dressed that differently from them-- jeans and a short-sleeve chambray
shirt, but it's like a couple of Coors cans have just been set on the table with
a martini.

"Hey, Killer," Bill says.

Nick grimace-smiles. "It gets funnier every
time you say it," Nick says. "Ha, ha, ha."

"I hope they've got corned beef hash," Marty
says. He takes his napkin and wipes his mouth, as if there's some layer of slime
there even he can't stand.

"Excuse me," Nick says. "I was just heading
out."

Nick rises and walks to the register to pay,
takes his wallet from his back pocket. He still wears his grimace-smile. "Should
I spit in their coffee?" I whisper.

"Arsenic's better."

I give Nick some thin mints wrapped in green
foil. Nick's face just makes you want to give him
something.
This is the
kind of shit he takes from these guys day in and day out. I'd love to tell them
off myself, but Jane says they're our
customers.
This means that we may
secretly hate them but still have to smile and take their money.

34

"See ya, Killer," Bill says one more time and
waves.

"Ooh, boy, you got me again!" Nick says. He
pushes open the door and goes through it, his back looking sadder than I've ever
seen a back look.

I give the idiot bookends their menus, but
luckily Zach (who works the afternoon shift) arrives, so I don't have to serve
them. Instead, I untie my apron and lift it over my head and grab my backpack
from the back. I cut a piece of apple pie with crumble top and wrap it up in
foil for Mom, say good-bye to the Irregulars.

Trevor isn't there yet, but I see Jane and Nick
talking at the curb. Jack stands politely, alert as a secret service agent, his
eyes surveying the territory for any criminal cat, squirrel, or bird activity.
Suddenly, though, I can't believe my eyes when I look down at Jane's hand. I
feel a rising wave of anger. Now, I'm not what anyone would call
conservative--people at my school probably called me anything but that. I think
they thought I was weird, but I noticed that every time I changed my hair, a
bunch of girls would come the very next week with an attempted version of it
until I changed again. I didn't really care, which is exactly what my friend
Melanie said people loved and hated about me.

But I'm straight about one thing, and that's
smoking and drugs, and I'm not sure why I'm so crazy about it except that drugs
fucked up Trevor's life for a while and cigarettes are just nasty. We had this
police officer come to our class in the fifth grade, and she brought us glass
jars filled with a healthy person's lung tissue (aside from the fact that the
lung tissue was minus a body, which is not generally a healthy thing) and a
smoker's lung tissue. The former was pink and spongy-looking and cheery, and the
latter was this desperate, dingy shade of gray that made you

35

think of motel rooms where crimes had been
committed. You saw this sad lung as a hopeful straight-A student who'd somehow
tragically descended into a life of heroin and prostitution and had died with a
needle in her arm. That's how gray and wretched it looked. I never forgot it,
and it frankly just pisses me off to see people smoke, knowing what they are
doing to their poor, formerly positive lungs.

So anyway, I look down, and there's this
cigarette held between Jane's fingers, and it's right down by her side where
Jack is just breathing all this shit. And Jane doesn't even smoke.

"What are you doing!" I shriek.

Jane looks a little shocked. She swivels her
head around as if there must be some robber with a bag of loot running around
somewhere nearby. There's the crime, right in her own hand, and she doesn't even
realize it.

"No! You! There!" I point.

"Indigo, jeez," she says. "You scared me to
death."

She thinks I'm kidding, but I'm not. "You
should be scared to death, 'cause you're certainly gonna put Jack in a coffin,
not to mention yourself."

She looks down at herself. I can't believe it.
She still doesn't get it.

"Your cigarette," Nick offers
helpfully.

She holds it up as if she has no idea how it
got there. "This?"

"Ugh, God, put it out, I can smell it," I say.
I wave my hand in front of my face. I hold my breath so none of the three
thousand toxins and tars and chemicals can get in.

"It
is
a nasty habit," Nick says, giving
me another reason why I like that guy. "I didn't even know you smoked," he
says.

"I don't," Jane says.

36

"This is just a mirage," I say.

"No, I mean, I
haven't.
For years.
Wait," she says. "Why am I explaining myself to you people? I'm a grown woman. I
can smoke if I want." But she tosses the burning stick of tar and chemicals to
the sidewalk and smashes it with her heel.

I say the one thing I know will affect her,
whether it's true or not. "Smoking is for Republicans."

"That's just mean," she says to me. "I've been
under a little stress lately," she says to Nick. "In regard to what we were just
discussing."

"I can imagine," he says.

"What?" I ask.

"Nothing," Jane says.

"What!" I ask again.

"If I wanted everyone to know, I'd get a
billboard."

I let it go, because just then we hear knocking
on the glass of Carrera's. We look that direction, and there's Bill in his
yeah-right-I-almost-mistook-
you-for-a-tree hat, gesturing heartily at Nick.
He's waving, then pantomimes slashing his finger across his throat, drops his
head down and gaggles his tongue out.

"God, I wish I could get out of this place,"
Nick says.

I hear the growling rumble of Trevor's Mustang
before I see the car itself. Then it turns the corner, pulls up along the curb.
Trevor parks, gets out, opens the door for me. For a reformed pot-head, he knows
how to be a gentleman.

Trevor doesn't kiss me, because he also knows
how I feel about public displays of affection in front of my boss. I say goodbye
to Jane and Nick, edge onto the cream-colored seats that Trevor says are "pony
interior," though I don't have a clue what

37

that means, other than there are horses on the
seat backs.

"God, I'm starving," Trevor says.
"Cheeseburger. Beef attack, baby! Fries, shake. You don't mind if I stop,
right?"

I guess everyone is hungry for
something.

38

3

"Baby, look at this," Trevor says. He taps the
odometer in front of the steering wheel, and I lean over him, my elbow on his
thigh. We're in the parking lot of XXX Root Beer, which sounds like a porn
theater, but is one of the last drive-ins in the history of mankind or at least
in the Seattle area, and has the best hamburgers you've ever had in your life,
with buns as big as salad plates. Trevor's got the top down because it has
gotten warm, and there are napkins and balls of crumpled foil on the floor
around us. Carnivorous massacre. The Battle of the Burger.

"Two hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred
sixty," I read.

"You know what that means."

I'd been with Trevor long enough to guess. We
met two years ago when I was walking home from school past the Mountain Academy,
which is where the druggies and pregnant girls go when they get shunned from
regular society. Trevor was one of the former. Now he's formerly of the former.
When we met, I was in my crunchy phase--natural, no makeup, braids, sandals,
flowy gauze skirts. I'd started the guitar the year before, still couldn't play
worth crap, but I wanted to be Joan Baez, who was even before Mom's time, in the
days of folk music, peace, love, groovy, and love your brother. I had enough
gauze for a harem by the time this got old, but I thought it was great then.
Trevor started talking to me when I passed. Actually, he said, "Hey, gorgeous,"
which shows what a sucker for a compliment I was (am).

39

I liked the way his eyes danced. It was like he
had an internal joy flame always lit. Other people's eyes are flat as ash, but
Trevor Williams has flames. Anyway, we've been together ever since, so when he
says,
You know what that means,
I know what that means.

"Three hundred thousand miles," I say. Trevor
likes stuff like that. He'll call you into the kitchen to watch the microwave
clock change from 1:10 to 1:11, or to 1:23, or better yet, 12:34. He'd phone me
up on my birthdays, the exact minute I was born, 4:17 a.m., setting his alarm
clock for four fifteen, to make sure he had time to become conscious and
dial.