Truants (8 page)
“What happened?” Ramirez asked me.
“An accident. He’ll tell you.” I pointed to Mr. C. B. Borkanida who was climbing into the ambulance, thinking it was for him. The paramedics were having a session trying to get the stretcher carrying Ring squeezed in alongside the mumbling spotlight associate. I helped Louisa to her feet, and waving at Ramirez, I walked her back to her trailer.
*************
It was just like any trailer, a desk drawer with windows, a tin-can closet. The continuing rain conducted snare-drum experiments on the roof. Which leaked. A fiber of water ran down inside one wall, separating into two rivulets when it split on a wooden crucifix nailed there. Louisa sat on a shedding hassock in the middle of the small room and caught her face in her hands. I noticed a large gash in the far wall, evidence of a multi-home collision. Ring had functionally placed an old brass fireplace screen over the area.
Louisa sat up straight while I traced the blood on her neck up to a little cut in the back of her head. It wasn’t bad, just an open cut, bleeding freely like any head wound. Handling her hair in that manner made me doubly aware that I didn’t have my shirt on; it made me feel what others have described as “naked.”
“Could you hurry,” she said as I tried to place a Band-Aid over the cut.
Finally, reluctantly, I let go of her hair, saying, “There.” She reacted as if I’d said
run
. She stood up suddenly before me, offering a brief, but arresting vision of her bottom—two white arcs of her buttocks which didn’t make it back into the suit—and she skipped to the rear of the trailer. I also, in that microsecond saw the backs of her legs webbed with a hundred red hexagons, the impression of the chickenwire collision.
In a minute my shirt came flying out and I put it on, listening to her ransack the backroom like a burglar. She wasn’t gone long. I had just begun cataloguing the dozens of decals stuck on the windows of the mobile home, when she ran back into the room dressed in boots and jeans and a sweater. She carried a small satchel. Before I could ask even one stupid question, she dropped through the door and was gone.
“Where are you going?” I called from the trailer steps as if I were her mother.
She did not answer; I ran to catch up.
“Where are you going?” She looked at me as if I had requested the procedure for drawing the next breath. Her eyes still looked spacey.
“Away!” That was all. When I bugged her, skipping sideways to keep up, she added, “This is my chance.”
I interpreted this to mean she was not going to the hospital to visit her ailing father. I paused and thought:
fine. Let it go. People seem capable of a variety of actions
. I, myself, was leaving for California tonight.
Louisa Holz walked toward the grandstand, her dark figure cut out by those lights, her shadow stretching on the rainy street. It was exactly like the end of a movie.
Then she fell down. The figure was on its knees, bent, one hand held the head. I ran to her and lifted her up. Her face was slack, the broad buttons of her eyes vacant. She tried to look at me. “What?” she said.
“You’re hurt.” We were in front of an attraction known as “THE DEATH CAR: the freakiest accident ever!!!”
“I’ve got to go.”
“There’s blood on your neck.” It was true; a thin line of blood ran down in the old place. As she turned around so I could look at it, a set of headlights turned onto the lane. Louisa jumped and ran behind the billboard fence for THE DEATH CAR. The carlights passed. I resumed the replacement of Band-Aids, and then we moved under a little light by The Death Car shack, and Louisa stopped intoning “Hurry, hurry …” and instead read the newspaper accounts of how The Death Car had missed a curve and been impaled on a guardrail, and how the guardrail had sliced some guy’s girlfriend in half without touching him and how it now remained a grisly reminder as a permanent part of The Death Car.
Louisa’s hair was wet, and I could not find the spot as I blinked in the rain, and finally I wrecked the extra Band-Aid by sticking it exactly together. I tapped her on her shoulder and showed it to her.
“Oh shit!” she said. She looked wicked and fatigued; she looked like a seventeen-year-old girl who had flown into the chickenwire at thirty miles an hour and wanted no more of it. “Oh, just shit!” And she started crying. I held her and she cried and bled on me. Then we leaned against THE DEATH CAR STORIES, and her face rose to my own. It was an advanced kiss, reserved for members of the inner circle, and yet she didn’t know me at all. It awed and inspired, scared me. It made me, like so many things in my life, feel too young.
“Let’s get out of this goddamned rain!” she said against my face. I lifted her satchel over the turnstile into the shack and helped her over. The Death Car turned out to be a ’64 Chevy Supersport, with a genuine steel guardrail knifing right through the engine block, radio, and front seat. We looked at it for a minute, then I opened the back door for Louisa and she slid inside.
As I closed the door she was against me, her mouth wet, her clothes damp and warm, her neck salty with the little blood. This is an overture, I thought. I’d read it in some pamphlet on petting at the Home: this must be an overture.
One night out at the Home as we watched dawn bring up the mountains, Steele had told me about the overtures of women in distress. “Women in distress are prone,” he’d said. “Move on them.” And as Louisa arched and I leaned, my intentions magnified themselves into that blind urgency which came calling from time to time. She was clearly in distress, and I was moving on her. “The violent distractions of puberty,” a phrase from that pamphlet, came to mind in waves, as we raced around corners in The Death Car. My pressing vigor erased the fact that
I
liked her
, and wrote in that
I wanted to do something to her
. My hand dove up under her sweater and cupped the round mug of her breast, and thereupon I was shaking hands with her. She’d found my roving hand with her own. Ah, now the perennial frontier push-pull, as her hand repelled mine, while my mind was in my heart, my heart in my stomach and my stomach beating in my throat. My hand was ejected a dozen times at least before my mind reascended to the sound of “Don’t!” which is a sobering contraction, and I sat up straight to find myself held at arm’s length.
She looked in my face: “Don’t, you simple shit. Save it for your girlfriend. Leave me alone.” But as she said the final word she fell, limp, passed out or half asleep into my surprised arm, which just lay there and held her until sleep rose also into me.
Oh, it was wayward behavior all right, inspired by the confused signals in this world. What kind of life is it which impels the glimpse of perfect breasts into the yes-no-backseat struggle? Which brings women out of light down to earth? We would run away the way others have gone swimming: with the buddy system, and my foul-mouthed, red-haired buddy would teach me a thing, or as they say,
two
. It wasn’t much of a version of running away either, it seemed, sleeping there, but it beat the next few hours by a million miles.
So, I slept with a girl in The Death Car while Arizona turned toward the sun. It was, for me, a long way to go with a girl.
**************
In the first degree of flat dawnlight, Louisa lurched awake with such a start that I thought we’d had an accident.
“Oh no!” she said looking around. “I’ve got to get out of
here!
” She was almost screaming. She tried to crawl across me to get out of the door, an action that was seriously impeded by the fact that my arm and left side were completely asleep, minutes away from even the pins and needles of effervescent blood. She began hitting me, the way we hit our jailers, in antic distress, and she literally did not know which way to turn.
“Come on, you bastard! Ring will be back. He’s crashed forty times and he
knows!
”
I clambered out and leaned against The Death Car, until I was sure of which way was up, and then I suggested Hector. If it was before six, he’d still be at work.
I led her out to the shack at a run-walk, yawning to get air. It wasn’t hard to hurry now, because I realized I, too, was a fugitive. I liked the word:
fugitive
. It is much more attractive and affirmative than
orphan
.
Hector was beached out on the old couch, his flowered shirt unbuttoned and spread open, his T-shirt rising and falling with each belly-felt snore. He was the most well-fed sleeping man I’d ever seen.
“Hector,” I shook his arm. “
Hec-
tor!”
He opened his eyes placidly and said, “What?”
“We need a ride! Hurry!”
“Fine. My father said you might come by.” He scratched his stomach deeply as if to put it back into place.
To hurry things along, I climbed in the cab of the pickup. Louisa was making little noises that indicated we should hurry, but I told her everything would soon be all right, that we’d be in California any minute, and my father would serve us breakfast. Hector sauntered out, started the old Dodge, and we were off.
Unfortunately, Hector, not having spent a night in The Death Car, and not having the Louisa Holz runaway résumé, motored us directly over to Ring’s trailer where every door and window was open and ablaze with light. I could perceive the trailer vibrating.
“
What are you doing?
” Louisa screamed.
As the I-thought-I-was-taking-you-home confusion spread across Hector’s face, Ring Holz in person, his head taped like a skullcap, his left arm in a cast, leaped onto the trailer stairs.
“
Go!
” Louisa screamed again, and I concurred by snapping the gearshift down a notch into second, sending the truck twenty feet ahead in a shudder.
Holz ran after us hollering something in his native tongue which sounded a lot like the instructions for breaking necks, and I leaned to Hector and said, “Hector—No! Out!” And Hector wheeled through the square, under the grandstand, around a sharp turn by the concessions, and onto the raceway. The stands were empty. Halfway around, he swerved wide, dipping through the pits’ gate, motoring by all the burned-out wrecks, turning finally out onto Grand Avenue, the most misnamed street in the real world.
I assured Louisa that everything was fine, but she was shaking her head with her eyes closed: “You bastards! He’ll kill me this time.”
Hector was driving north on Grand, casting curious looks my way for an explanation.
“It’s okay, Louisa,” I said. “We’re safe now.” It was a moment of stress, and that statement was a reflex; I have never said it since.
She just shook her head, and after a minute, she nodded backwards while giving each of her fingers a serious bite. I looked back two lights and saw the unmistakable white cap of that vitriolic motorcyclist, Ring Holz. Louisa didn’t have to turn around; she had recognized the faint buzzing of his cycle.
“How many motorcycles does that man have?”
“Five.” She said the word the way Davey Crockett had said “Surrounded” at the Alamo.
“Hector,” I said. “That man on the motorcycle must not catch us.”
“I see,” he said. “But if I wreck this truck, my father is going to kill me.”
It was now first sunlight, and there was not much traffic, but because Grand Avenue runs diagonally northwest out of Phoenix, the intersections are tangled six-spoke gambles, the semaphores flashing in nineteen directions, and only one of them was ours. The traffic was triply complicated that morning because of a freight train moving parallel to Grand Avenue at only twenty-five miles per hour, shutting off our left-turn escape.
Against all odds, Hector made six intersections, dragging the wily, wind-bent Ring Holz like a waterskier. Holz, due to his myopic disregard for traffic regulations, ran the lights and was closing the gap. His bandaged head floated toward us like a disembodied skull. Also, he seemed mad. Angry
and
crazy. I took the expression on his face to be the logarithm of anger.
When we were two hundred yards from Glendale Avenue, the lights registered against us.
Red, red, red
.
“
Run it!
” Louisa said. And Hector downshifted cautiously, his head forward and swiveling in preparation. This is not the way to run away from home, I was thinking: this is not correct at all. This is simply reckless driving ahead of the relatives.
Hector entered the intersection and stomped the brakes. We swerved up to—and nearly under—a semi-trailer carrying, by its own gigantic admission on the side: FOSTER’S CUPCAKES. I read each three-foot letter as it passed in front of our noses and then I turned in time to see Ring Holz clench his own brakes behind us, open his mouth, close his eyes, and skid under the rear-end of Hector’s pickup.
The collision was signal enough for Louisa, who was over my lap again, exiting this Death Truck. Hector looked at me as if to ask if he should back up and extinguish the villain who had given us such chase. Before I could answer, I noted with stomach-affecting curiosity Louisa run across the front of the truck, through four lanes of traffic, and without missing a step, she leaped and grabbed the rung on the side of a coal car and boarded the railroad train. It was a desperate act.
Louisa accomplished this as if she had done it before. Oh good, I thought:
the next thing
. My choices, I’ll say, were made.
As Holz’s bandaged head rose over the rear of the truck like any creature from a black lagoon, I thanked Hector, who slapped me five back, and I ran on foot after a railroad train carrying new friends away.
Using Holz’s bellowing as final inspiration, I was urged to leap up the gravel bed of the track and attach myself to the train, suddenly being too aware of why arm sockets are made to give. But when my feet cleared the ground, it was quite the feeling. Try it sometime, if your father invites you to California.
Holz had extracted his machine from under the truck. It was still running and he remounted and continued. The guy was no quitter.
He took the traffic island like a ramp and flew over the highway into the ditch that separated the tracks from the roadway, speeding up and down the sides maniacally, calling menacing foreign words. The train was moving slowly, evenly, in town, and I was ready for full steam. When Holz crossed the runnel in the bottom of the ditch, a frothy yellow rooster tail would fly out behind him. He passed me in a moment, and then slowed to negotiate a short incline for the crossroad, then down again into the ditch. I could see Louisa biting her fingers in turn, up five cars from me. I wondered if I should hurl some coal at her father, but decided against that, and sat in the black stuff, helpless as the baggage that I was.
