Walking Dunes (3 page)

How he envied the lives of ordinary families! He had dated a nice, pretty girl for a while the year before. Sarah Jane Cottle. She had a clean bright beauty, plump chipmunk cheeks, a quiet air of courtesy and shyness. She lived in a white frame house that had curtains and rugs and an elm tree in the yard. Her mother sewed skirts and blouses for her. Her father was the owner of a restaurant supply company. He showed David his freezer in the utility room, stocked with New York strips, fat prawns, quartered chickens, for the family. Once when David was at their house for dinner, Mr. Cottle told his wife, “This is an excellent pot roast, dear.” David simply could not bear it; why did it seem so easy for them? How were they different from his family?
What is wrong with us?
He had quit dating the girl.

Little by little David realized that all the questions you had about your life could serve as a kind of inspiration, a springboard to whatever fiction you preferred. Of course David did not know how to construct stories yet. A story had to have a shape. His favorite teacher, last year's old Miss Bodkins, said great stories were about moments in people's lives when they saw everything clearly, if only for an instant, and so everything changed. Real life, for a boy, was a tedious unraveling, the rolling out of a ball of string. If David could have such a moment of apprehension as Miss Bodkins described, if he could see, if only for a moment, where he was headed, how his young life had meaning, he felt he could seize it—the meaning, the life. Miss Bodkins suggested books for him to read. She smiled when he said how he loved the passion of A. J. Cronin and Erich Maria Remarque, the largeness of their visions. She said all the great questions had been explored, the great characters had been written, that life now was smaller, and his generation would have to learn to write new stories. She said the atomic bomb had made them all insignificant. She said most people would pass their lives without a moment's serious reflection, but David could be a writer if he wanted. He had language, ambition, and something she called his “fine sensibility.” Still, he did not ask Miss Bodkins how to make stories out of his family's life. He would have been humiliated to discuss it. Miss Bodkins urged him to write stories about teen-agers. She said there was a lot of drama in kids' lives. “I've learned that if I've learned anything, teaching all these years. Teen-agers live on the edge of a knife.” Miss Bodkins found him in the library during her free period, and had these talks with him. She sat across from him at a table with her hands flat on the surface in front of her. The skin around her knuckles was loose and he wanted to tug at it, to see it come away from the frail mass of her hand. She spoke matter-of-factly, even when she said dramatic things. “You wonder why they do it,” she said, pointing at the newspaper, where it told that someone had committed a terrible crime. She was an old maid, with tight pin-curled hair. She wore the same two suits over and over again. He wondered what she would write about if she tried. He thought she probably had tried, and failed, and so she would spend forty years teaching dolts the difference between assonance and alliteration, and the meaning of Ozymandias.

In Fort Stockton, David got the idea for his first real story. There was a girl there. A woman, Teresa. She was twenty years old. Her parents had been killed when their car was struck by a freight train the winter before, while she was a student at the college in Alpine. She had come to stay with her mother's parents until she felt like going on. They owned the pharmacy, the laundry, and the beauty parlor.

David had met Teresa in late June, when he took his laundry in one day. Shorts, socks, shirts.

“Sibilant laundry,” she said when he came back to pick them up. She was pretty, with straight dark hair pulled back in a plain pony tail, dark eyes, a slim body—a type he admired. But she was older, and he thought she probably saw him as a kid.

He laughed and said, “Now clean, thank you very much.” He felt wonderfully sophisticated with his repartee, but when he saw her again, he felt oafish. He was afraid they had exhausted their wit with one another.

A few weeks later she came to the shop while he was folding shirts. She pushed some cloth back on one of the tables and hopped up to sit there. “My grandfather says your father is Jewish,” she said.

“My father is a Jew.”

“I think I'd like being Jewish, feeling that I go back so far.”

“Everybody does that. Goes back. Everybody comes from somewhere.”

She peered at him. “I thought you could tell me what it's like.”

“What are you asking?”

“Being Jewish! Doesn't it make you different?”

“I don't think about it.” This was not altogether true. “I don't think of it as the reason I feel different.”

“You do feel different, though?” she persisted.

“Maybe, in some ways. But from what? Different from rich kids? Hah, that's obvious. Different from dumb ones? Let's hope so. I'm not weird. I have friends. I play tennis, I'm on student council.” He felt a flush of hostility toward her. He hardly thought of himself as a curiosity! The only thing strange about him was that he read so much. He didn't know other kids who did. His tennis partner Ellis read auto and sports magazines, his buddy Leland read science fiction and the newspaper. Glee read girls' magazines. Saul read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, the same books over and over. He kept them in the bedroom. Of course he wasn't a kid.

“The only thing different about me is I'm alone,” Teresa said. “I suppose I should be glad I'm grown, and there's a little money for me.”

“You should be glad, if there's money!” he said quickly, then blushed deeply when he realized it would have come from her dead parents. “Were you away when it happened?” He knew it was a terrible question. There was no right thing to say. He had this crazy thought: I've never said anything serious to a girl.

She stared at him a moment. “I might get married. A rancher's son I know in Alpine. My grandparents think I should. They think I'd cheer up if I had a baby. What do you think?”

He sat down on the cot across from her. From her perch on the table, she looked down on him, grasping the table edge and swinging her legs. She wore a long Crayola-green cotton skirt. He said, “People should marry if they're in love and they want to.” He felt silly. She was making fun of him.

“Do you have a girlfriend? You look like you would.”

“I guess so.”

“Don't you know?”

“I'm not in love with her. I like her.”

“You don't date other girls?”

“Not right now. I could, if I wanted to.”

“Do you sleep with her?”

He shifted on the cot and stared at the floor between his feet. What the hell, he thought; he would never see her again after this summer. “Yeah, sure,” he mumbled. When he lifted his head, she was going out the door.

That was when he had the idea for a story. That was when he really started his notebook.

Three or four buddies are on their way somewhere (where?), and they're coming to a train crossing. The kid driving is always the careful one. It's a joke with his buddies. He studies for tests, he begins assignments the same night he gets them. The other boys razz him. In an instant, he decides to show them, he decides to play chicken with the train. They are all killed.

Teresa's parents' car stalled. Couldn't they have gotten out and run? Did they sit there while her father tried to turn the key? Did they think the train would stop in time?

Were they completely stupid?

He went for weeks without seeing Teresa. He passed her on the street. Her eyes were red, her face drawn. She didn't seem to see him. Well, why wouldn't she cry? She had lost her parents.

He lay on his cot at night and dreamed of making love to her. His father had once warned him:
Never fuck a crying woman, it will obligate you
, but his father could not have foreseen this.

He thought of her with her blouse open. Her bra would be very clean and white. He would be scared. He would whisper,
Why?
and she would answer,
I'm so sad
. Then, gently, he would push her down on the cot. He would kneel and touch her reverently; she had lost her parents. Making love with her would ennoble him, draw him into her grief. It would be wonderful.

He kept thinking about the boys in the pickup, the train wreck. Each of them would have a story. One of the boys just found out his girlfriend is pregnant. He loves her. He doesn't really realize it until that last instant, that tiny part of a second when he knows he can't ever tell her. If he had lived, he would have married her.

He wondered: The girl who was pregnant, when her boyfriend is killed, would she kill herself? Or would she defy her family, keep her baby, remember him always? He didn't think many girls had that kind of grit. They buckled under. Of course his own sister had eloped, hadn't she? With Big Pete Kelton.

He kept thinking about the pregnant girl. He thought about her when he drove away from the cop and the girl with the rabbit. He thought about her later that night in the beauty parlor. But when he sat down with his notebook, intending to write about her, he wrote instead:

A woman, heavy with grief, goes to a young man, to touch his innocence, to feel young again
.

He was very excited. The mind, the unconscious mind, has its own way!
Here
was the story. This woman, she would be much older, of course. In her thirties. It would be her child who had died. And he, the boy, would be innocent. It would be his first time. Not like with Glee, who had teased him and led him along like an animal, then turned simpering, as if it had not been her idea.

In the story, the woman would kill herself. He could not think just how.

He had been eager to see Teresa again in this last week in Fort Stockton, but now he realized that making love to Teresa didn't really matter. Knowing her didn't matter.
She
didn't really matter. It was the idea that counted. So, on Wednesday, when a man in a red pickup truck came for her, and David saw them drive away, he did not feel bad that they had never talked again. He did watch to see if the pickup came back, but he had to go to Iraan for a day, and after that, pack up, and go back to Basin.

He went home on Saturday. In Monahans, he stopped at the A & W and ate a cheeseburger and drank a root beer float. He felt queasy afterwards; it was too hot for so much food.

He drove to the sandhills and pulled over for a while. The dunes stretched across the plains for sixty miles, a gleaming, sugary, shifting whiteness. Some of the dunes were fifty feet high. He had heard his uncle say how hard it was to work the sandy areas, how at the bottom the ground was hard clay, but above, where the sand had not been anchored by grass and mesquite, the dunes resisted man and machine, gave way and closed around intruders. The winds kept a trickle of sand moving on their peaks; some days the sand shifted so fast they said the dunes walked. On the other side of the dunes, the plains stretched out. Once they had been thick with buffalo grass, a sea of flat sameness that the Spanish marked with stakes as they traversed it, afraid they would not find their way back again. Monahans was a finger, a peninsula of the plains. By the time he reached Basin he could, theoretically, look due north and see Canada.

For just a moment, he wondered what it might have been like if he had been the one driving away in the red pickup with Teresa. They would go to Santa Fe, he thought. He had always wanted to go there. There were kids in Basin who went to Ruidosa and Taos, plains kids who knew how to ski, had seen horses race, owned shoes made especially for walking. In Santa Fe, he would find work in an inn. He would work at the front desk, giving people their keys. At night he would write stories, like F. Scott Fitzgerald. One day he would move on.

He laughed aloud and started the car. He was glad nobody had any idea about the notions that flooded his head, what a fool he would seem. He dismissed Teresa. When he left west Texas it would be on his own, he would be in pursuit of something better. He would not go away hanging on a girl's skirt hem. Leaving would not have anything to do with girls at all.

4.

“Your girlies have been calling.”

David was startled by his father's voice coming out of the darkness of the closed-up living room. As he stepped in from outside, he was blinded for a moment. The house was stifling.

“Your mother talked to one,” Saul said. “She left you a note in the kitchen. Your mother, not the girl.” He barked a laugh. “The other was your little chickadee, wanting to know when you'd be in town. If you're going to have her on your string, you need to jerk it now and then, son. You shouldn't leave her in the dark.” He was sprawled in an easy chair, his feet propped on an ottoman. He was wearing boxer shorts, and a wet washrag was draped over his scalp. On a rickety side table he had positioned a small fan so that the air would hit him directly. He had one hand on his chest, plucking at his thick hair, and with the other hand he held a brown bottle by the neck. “I told her you might not come back, you were thinking of moving to El Paso. She shouldn't count on seeing you, she should get on with her own life.”

“I hope you're joking.”

“With her I was joking.”

“She's nobody for you to razz, Dad. I told you. She doesn't understand your sense of humor. And I told her not to call here.”

His father waved David's protest away with his hand. “I told her she should come and wait in your room if she wants. She should squat in the alley to catch you the minute you return. She should pull your mother's weeds, to pass the time.” David's mother grew tomatoes, all harvested or dead by now, and sunflowers, along the fence, in the alley.

David's chest hurt sharply. He bent forward slightly and took a deep rattling breath. “Now you're giving me a load of shit,” he managed to say. He pushed air out of his lungs and coughed noisily.