The Queen of Everything (32 page)

"You're not my mother, you know," Kale
said.

I stared out the window and fumed.

"You know why it takes ten women with PMS to
screw in a lightbulb?" Kale said. He waited, but I was trying to ignore
him.

"I don't know, goddamn it, it just does, okay!"
Kale said in a falsetto. He laughed away like he was the king of
comedy.

"Your seat belt is still unbuckled," the woman
said. She had a Japanese accent.

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"That chick's beginning to piss me off," Kale
said. He reached over and yanked his seat belt over him and clicked it into
place. We drove along in quiet a while, until Kale turned the radio on. Frank
Sinatra blasted out. Some old guy like that. Kale snapped his fingers, played at
loving it, then turned the dial and settled into his usual thumping. Kale liked
thumping.

The music improved my mood. I got thinking. I
made a plan. I looked around the glove compartment for a pen and paper. I found
a pad of paper that said air king--
heating and air conditioning, number one
in service,
and a pen that was slow to work until I scribbled a few
circles.

Kale looked over at me. "What are you
writing?"

"I just thought I'd better write down the
address of where we're going. You never know what might happen. Say I get
caught. You'll still be able to go on to the ranch without me."

"You think they'd still take me?" he
asked.

"Well, sure. You're my boyfriend," I
said.

"That is so cool," Kale said. "I mean, I can
see
myself there."

I got creative with the pen, ripped the piece
of paper off the pad and set it in one of the dashboard's handy compartments.
Those expensive cars have a lot of handy compartments.

"Do you feel that?" Kale said a moment
later.

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"What?" I said.

"Chick's getting fresh. She's warming up my
butt. Feel." He rubbed his hand on the seat. Now that he mentioned it, I could
feel it too. The seat was getting hot.

"Jeez, these old people must have cold asses;
it's eighty degrees out. Find out where to shut that off, will you?" He ran his
hand along the side of the seat. "Hey, I want my ass warmed, I'll ask," he said
to the Japanese woman. "You crossed the line now, babe," he told her.

I found a couple of switches by the parking
brake, decorated with a picture of wavy lines. "Try this," I said.

We waited a few minutes. "Yeah, she's cooling
down. Hey, didn't I say to hand me one of those doughnuts?"

I opened the container, took a white, powdery
doughnut between my fingers. "Try not to get that shit on the seats," Kale
said.

I licked my fingers, then took out one for me.
We ate doughnuts and drove for a while. Kale told me a long story about this guy
he knew who stole stereo equipment, which turned into a story about the sister,
who apparently liked tight dresses and had a thing for Kale. "Not my type, no
way," he was telling me. He had a small avalanche of powdered sugar on his upper
lip, which was all I could concentrate on. "Her bra, shit! It

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was so big you could carry your basketballs in
it when you go to the
gym."
He laughed at himself. "One of those chicks
you look at and you say "Ten years she'll look just like her mother,' and let me
tell you, that wasn't a compliment in this case. Even Ronnie called her
Wide
Load,
and that's her son talking. I said, 'Ronnie, that's your mother, show
some respect.'"

I watched the road signs. I listened to another
story about some friend of his who cracked his neck playing football, and heard
how much alcohol Kale planned to consume when he went away to college next
summer. My stomach leapt with nerves when Nine Mile Falls started to appear on
the signs. Soon, I thought. I was listening to Kale tell me how disgusting it
was that Jason Dale never cleaned underneath his fingernails "You watch him eat
and it makes you sick. I don't care, there's no reason you got to walk around
looking dirty when there's a thing called soap" when the Japanese woman piped
in.

"Low on fuel," she said.

I loved that woman. The great thing was, it was
her idea and not mine. See, I wasn't quite sure about that part yet. We were a
little farther away than I wanted, just before the town of Nine Mile Falls, but
close enough for me to walk.

"Oh man, we better pull off. That chick means
what she says," Kale said.

Kale veered over two lanes, then flicked
on

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his turn signal as an afterthought. We had to
look around a bit to find the gas station. We had driven through a couple of
large Seattle suburbs, but now the towns were getting small again.

"There," I pointed. Kale turned into the
Texaco. At the corner of the lot, a group of teenagers in shorts and tank tops
were waving signs reading car wash $5 and support girls Softball . A car sped
past them, ignoring their waving signs.

"Fuck you!" one of the girls yelled. That was
one way to deal with those pesky business rejections.

Kale parked at the pump. I looked around the
lot. Damn. No phone booth.

"I'm going to go to the bathroom while we're
here," I said.

"Jeez, we only left two hours ago," he
said.

"You know us girls," I said.

"You're not kidding," he said. He eyed the
Softball team. "Maybe I'll get a car wash while I wait. It's a crying shame to
have a car like this all dusty and shit."

"Why don't you do that first," I
said.

I reached in my wallet and tossed him a
five-dollar bill. It was the best five dollars I ever spent.

I slung my backpack over my shoulder and went
inside the mini-mart. The man who popped his head around the coffee machine
looked as reluctant to be there as Grandpa

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Eugene would have. He had a big belly that
looked used to sitting on swivel chairs across from a calendar of naked women,
not to unpacking box after box of Corn Nuts and Mountain Dew and Big Red. "Help
you?" he said.

"I was wondering if you had a phone book I
could use," I said.

He scratched his belly, then dropped a fat
phone book on the counter, which fell open with a sloppy splat. "Charge you a
quarter if you use the phone and no long distance."

"I don't need to use it," I said. "I just need
an address."

With that, the man's voice became more
friendly. "One thing or another with that phone. That GTE picked it up and took
off with it. Whole damn booth like it was a fish on a line." He jiggled with
laughter at the memory. I turned the pages quickly. I was afraid to look over my
shoulder and see what Kale was doing. I knew I didn't have a lot of
time.

I rolled my finger down the list of names.
"Course now all anyone comes in here for is the phone," the man said. He rolled
a pen across the counter without me even asking. I wrote the address on a napkin
that he slid over next.

"Thank you," I said.

I saw the big map, pinned on the wall over the
freezer case filled with Eskimo Pies and Dum

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Dum's. I peeked out the window before going
over and saw Kale eyeing the softball team as they soaped up the car. Even from
across the parking lot, I could see the splotch of powdered sugar still on his
upper lip. On the map, I found the red star showing where we were. I looked
around the map for the street name. Black Nugget Road. Black Nugget Road. Black
Nugget Road.

"You're kidding," I said aloud.

"What's that?" the man said.

I wanted to laugh. For the first time in days,
I felt a tiny bit of joy. The possibility of joy. "This map," I said. "It says
Bobcat Road."

"You want to get to Bobcat Road?" he said.
"Just a couple blocks from here. Over by the old school."

"No, I'm actually ... I'm looking for a place
in Nine Mile Falls. I just can't believe there really is a Bobcat
road."

"Bobcat Road, Cougar Mountain, Tiger Valley.
You want a cat, we got it."

"That's great," I said. "That is so great." I
laughed.

The man shrugged his shoulders as if to say
Whatever floats your boat.
"You find Nine Mile falls there? You got,
what, maybe two, three miles. You need directions?"

I knew this trick. Ha ha, I knew this trick
well. "No, I see it. I think I got it."

"That boyfriend of yours gonna get
gas?

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He's gotta pay first. I don't have none of that
pump-first-pay-later business."

"Believe me, that guy out there is not my
boyfriend," I said.

"Well, not to get personal, but it's a good
thing, considering what his eyes are glued to over there," the man
said.

I thought of Kale that night on the boat. I
thought of the sound of that storm, of Kale on top of me. I remembered his thick
tongue, poking into Wendy Williams's mouth. I let hatred fill me. Finally I let
it fill me and it felt so good.

Felt good and also cleared my head. My plan had
been to send Kale east of the mountains without me to some place that wasn't
there. But running out of gas, Kale's interest in the softball team, and my new
friend in the mini-mart gave me another idea. A better idea.

"He's not going to be getting gas," I said. I
was sure about that. "And there's another thing you should probably know," I
said to the man. "It's about that car he's driving."

"His Daddy's?"

I shook my head.

"Stolen?" His voice rose.

"I didn't know until after the fact, I promise
you. And there's no way I'm getting back in it," I said.

The mini-mart man watched Kale out the window
for a moment. Watched as this girl

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flicked a clump of soapsuds at Kale and he
flicked some back. One big breath could pop the buttons of that mini-mart man's
shirt right off and send them skittering along the floor.

His eyes traveled away from the window. He
looked back at me. "I didn't see no girl with him, Officer," he said.

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Chapter Fifteen

I could have walked right up to Kale, stuck my
thumbs in my ears, and waggled my fingers around, and he wouldn't have noticed
me. Kale had become suddenly overheated and now had his shirt off. He'd lit a
cigarette. Behind me, I could feel the mini-mart man pick up the phone. I could
feel his voice speaking into the receiver. I walked around the back of the
building where the bathrooms were. And then I ran.

Maybe,
I thought for the first time, my
life isn't over.
That's the best part about joy. How you can think it's
gone for good and then it sneaks up on you, just a small bit making you fill up
and feel you are someone for whom things are possible.
Stupid dumb-ass
Kale,
I sang in my head.

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What did your parents pay to get you in that
gifted class? And what's your favorite hook, Kale?
I sang.
Let me
guess.
The Yellow Stream,
by I. P. Freely, right, Kale?

I ran, my pack beating a rhythm on my back. I
didn't know exactly where I was going. I just ran south, through neighborhoods
of cham-link fences and little dogs and inflatable wading pools in the front
yards. Past the gates of a forested park, from which I could see a peek of a
small lake, dotted with lazy air-mattresses and kids running around in drippy
bathing suits holding their flip-flops in their hands. I knew I was getting
close when the traffic picked up and suddenly there were a few small stores and
finally the main street of a town.

"And what's your favorite thing to do, Kale?
Besides having sex with girls too stupid to say no?" I said to myself. "Oh, roll
rubber cement boogers and kill helpless animals," I said in Kale's
voice.

With that, the joy that had filled me
disappeared. The game stopped being fun. I had thought of the rabbits. I thought
again about the look that must have been on Wes D'Angelo's face that night. I
quit running. I was tired, hot, thirsty. I needed a bath. Mostly I had
remembered again why I was out there, standing on the main street of a town that
was a stranger to me. My pack felt heavy. I felt stupid that I had
been

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so sentimental. My pack would have been a whole
lot lighter without that architecture book.

You could put Nine Mile Falls in your pocket,
it was so small. And it was either trying hard to be charming or it really was,
I couldn't tell which. Flower baskets hung from the lampposts, although the
flowers looked limp and thirsty, and the building-fronts were those of an old
mining town. From the street you could see three forested mountains rising in an
arc above the town, as if they held it like loving mothers in their laps. An old
man crossed the street and raised a hand in greeting to the car that had stopped
for him. A dog sat under the bus-stop sign.