Running Wide Open

  “—if you ever say anything like that around Kasey, you’ll wish your parents had shipped you off to military school.”

  The surge of pleasure I got from his reaction would’ve been sweeter if it hadn’t come with a side order of guilt. I glanced away. “Jeez, dude. Don’t get so excited.”

  “I’m serious, Cody.”

  “Okay, okay.” Obviously he was completely gonzo about her. I shot another star at the dartboard. It missed.

  “And what the hell do you think you’re doing? My trailer might be a dump, but you don’t have to make it worse. If you wanna play with your little stars, take ’em outside.”

  I glanced at him disdainfully as I stepped across the room to collect my weapons. “These are not ‘little stars’,” I said. “They’re shuriken. Don’t you know anything about the martial arts?”

  “No, but then I never expected you to know how to tune up a race car, either.”

  I wrestled a shuriken out of the door. The paneling squeaked and cracked as it pulled free. “What makes you think I want to know how to tune up a race car?”

  Race didn’t answer, but as he watched me retract the remaining weapon, the anger in his expression drained away and a sort of understanding took its place. “I guess you’re really into that martial arts stuff, huh?”

  I shrugged.

  Race contemplated me for a few seconds then turned and left the room. He came back almost immediately with the Yellow Pages.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Race flipped it over in his hands, examining both covers. “Looks like a phone book,” he said, holding it out to me.

  “Oh, real perceptive, dude. What do you expect me to do with it?”

  For a second I was sure he was going to suggest something vulgar, but he resisted the obvious, even though I’d left myself wide open.

  “Look up a karate school. Sign up for classes.”

  For once, my rapier wit failed me. I stood staring at him, momentarily stumped, and then a surge of anger welled up. How the hell could he go on being nice to me?

  Part of me wanted to tell him to piss off, but I’d been begging my parents to let me study karate for years. Mom flat out refused, saying it was too violent, and Dad wouldn’t cross her even though he thought she was being ridiculous.

  “You know how much that would piss off my mom?” I asked.

  Race grinned wickedly. “That makes it even better.”

  * * *

  Left alone in the bedroom, I studied the torn, graffiti-embellished book. Could it be that easy? Just look up a school and make the call? What if he was messing with my head?

  I couldn’t believe he was offering me something I’d always wanted. Why would he do that? All I’d done was give him shit. And then it hit me. Race was gonna go on being nice no matter what I did. That’s just who he was. The kind of guy who thought to buy a sandwich for his crew chief, and took the time to draw a cartoon for a little kid, and gave advice to a competitor, even though it might bite him in the ass later. The kind of guy who’d take in his loser nephew, sight unseen.

  I dropped down on the bed, flipped through the phone book to the “k’s,” and spent the next fifteen minutes comparing ads for karate schools. When Race reappeared in the doorway, he was fully dressed and munching a Twinkie.

  “Don’t you ever eat real food for breakfast?” I asked. But this time it was an honest question, not an accusation.

  “Not if I can avoid it. Twinkies are fast energy. Just what I need in the morning.”

  “I thought that’s what coffee was for.”

  “Can’t stand the stuff. That’s Kasey’s poison.” Race licked sugar-infused shortening off his fingers. “I’m gonna be changing the oil in the van if you wanna go in the front room and make some calls.” He turned and left me alone.

  I phoned several karate schools. One had beginner classes starting the first of June and was located in the University neighborhood. I knew that was pretty close to the trailer park, so I jotted down the information and went outside.

  Race was lying under the front of the van. I sat down beside him in the gravel.

  “Find a class?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I guess I need to go check it out.”

  “We can do that.” Race reached up to twist an orange canister. Oil oozed over the sides and trickled down his wrist into the pan below. I gave him one of the rags at my feet. With a look of surprise, he accepted it and wiped his hands.

  “What made you think I’d want karate lessons?” I asked as Race twisted a bolt into a hole on the bottom of the oil pan and snugged it up with a wrench.

  “I dunno. What made you think I’d want a grease rag?” He worked a fresh orange canister out of its cardboard box and screwed it into place.

  A few long moments passed in silence as I arm-wrestled my pride. I hated giving in, hated being wrong, but how could you go on slugging a guy who kept turning the other cheek?

  “Sorry about giving you shit.”

  The apology came out as a mumble, but Race managed to decipher it. “That’s okay. I know it can’t be easy, leaving home and moving in with a stranger.”

  I took a deep breath and blew it out, steadying myself against the emotional ripple his empathy caused. “So . . . did it take you a long time to learn this stuff?”

  “What, changing the oil? Nah, that kind of thing is pretty basic. But I’ve been hanging around racers and working on their cars since I was ten.”

  “Huh.” I stood up and leaned against the driver’s door, running the toe of one of my Converse high tops through the gravel till I’d dug a groove.

  Race wiggled out from under the van and lifted the hood. One by one, he opened several bottles of oil and poured them into the engine. “Kasey’s coming over tonight,” he said as he finished with the last of them. “You wanna go see a movie?”

  “Wouldn’t you two rather go alone?”

  “I would, but Kasey wouldn’t. And I don’t mind you coming along.”

  I pushed the gravel back into place with the side of my sneaker. “You really like her, huh?”

  Race glanced at me a little suspiciously as he stuffed the empty bottles into a plastic bag. “Kid, even if I do it doesn’t matter. She’s not interested. She’s my friend and my sponsor, and that’s it.”

  “You ever ask her out?”

  “Are you kidding? She’d shut me down in a heartbeat.”

  Thinking of the way Kasey had looked at him when she was telling her story the night before, I wasn’t so sure. Not that I was gonna argue. “Well, if she’s coming over, we better clean the place up.”

  “Definitely,” Race agreed.

  * * *

  We spent the afternoon trying to make the trailer a little less rank.

  “I’m not doing this for you, y’know,” I told Race as I washed the dishes. “I’m just embarrassed to have a cool chick like Kasey know I live in a dump like this.”

  “I understand completely.”

  The place still looked pathetic at seven o’clock when the Charger pulled into the driveway, but at least you could see the floor.

  “Wow,” Kasey said as she sat down. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this chair without a pile of laundry on it.”

  “Actually,” said Race, “it’s a little better looking with the laundry. I need some new furniture.”

  “Dude, you need a new house,” I said.

  The minute the two of them got comfortable, the conversation turned to racing. They might as well have been speaking Klingon.

  “Ah, hell,” I said, flopping down at the far end of the couch and leaning back into the cushions. “Am I gonna have to hear about race cars again all night? I thought we were going to a movie.”

  “We are,” Race said. “It doesn’t start till seven forty-five.”

  Sighing, I slid down until my butt was balanced on the very edge of the couch.

  “Kid, if you’re that bored, you can go wash my van.”

  I considered f
lipping him off but didn’t want to be that crass in front of Kasey. “I think I’ll go down by the river.” The previous morning I’d noticed that there was a trail leading along the bank. I’d wanted to explore it, but there hadn’t been time before we’d left for the speedway.

  “Well, just stay within earshot,” Race said. “We’re gonna leave in about half an hour.”

  Outside, I saw a kid pushing Matchbox cars around the roots of a cottonwood tree directly across from the driveway. He looked Robbie Davis’s age, maybe eight or nine.

  “Hey,” he said. “I haven’t seen you before. Did you just move in?”

  I wasn’t in the mood to be chatted up by a third-grader, but you can’t bite a little kid’s head off. “I’m staying with my uncle,” I told him, jerking a thumb over my shoulder at the trailer.

  “Race?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s cool,” the kid said, sitting back on his heels. “He gives me all his cans and bottles to take back for the deposit.”

  Now why didn’t that surprise me? I told the kid I’d see him around then continued toward the river.

  As dumpy as the trailer park was, there was still something wild and soothing about the stretch of the Willamette that ran behind it. I slipped along the bank, pushing my way through the shrubs and clumps of fern that intruded on the narrow pathway. Above, clouds clustered, shafts of sunlight glinting against their sinister gray. The scent of impending rain and the sweet smell of cottonwood hung in the air, pushed along by a faint, damp wind.

  I hoped that if I got far enough downstream, out of sight of the bridge that crossed the river into Springfield, I might find a peaceful retreat. A place I could sit and read without being discovered. A place where I could pull out my notebook and engage in a little creativity.

  The truth was, reading was only half my secret. The thing I really kept under wraps was my ambition to be a writer. Since the summer after sixth grade, I’d spent a good part of my free time messing around with short stories and song parodies—stuff like Weird Al sang. I’d have been mortified if anyone found out. Mom had hassled me enough when I was younger for being a geek. She had this idea that creative, bookish guys were destined for a pathetic life of working minimum wage jobs and having their asses kicked regularly by real men.

  There was only one person I’d talked to about my writing—my English teacher last fall. After he’d shoveled on the praise about the first couple essays I’d turned in, I mustered up my courage and showed him one of my stories. It took him most of fall term to get it back to me. Even then, he didn’t give me any real feedback. He just corrected the spelling and grammar in hateful red pen, taking all the art out of it. And he put the dialog in proper English, not getting that I wanted to write it the way my characters would really say it. When I tried to explain that to him, he said, “You have to learn the rules before you can break them, Cody.” The memory of it made me feel like I’d been caught walking buck-naked through the school auditorium.

  I made it about a quarter mile downstream before I realized it was time to be getting back. A couple places looked promising for a hangout—a cluster of boulders, forming giant stepping-stones down the bank, and a downed tree, which jutted out into the river. Even though things were looking up a little with my uncle, it was a relief to know there was someplace I could escape to.

  As I neared the trailer park, the curses and shouts of a fight overpowered the whisper of the Willamette. I scrambled up the bank to see the kid who’d been playing under the cottonwood getting the snot beat out of him by a guy as big as me. With as much trouble as I’d been in, I thought twice about getting involved. Somebody else’s fight is somebody else’s problem. But I hate bullies. Being on the left side of the bell curve for sheer bulk, I’d gotten clobbered too many times when I was younger.

  The big kid had the little one backed up against a tree. Most of the real damage had already been done. Now he was just tormenting him, poking him in the shoulder and ribs with two rigid fingers to emphasize his threats.

  “Hey, leave him alone,” I said.

  The bully, gripping the bloody T-shirt of his victim, shot me a disbelieving look. “You gonna make me?”

  “Only if you ask nice.”

  The kid sneered, shifting his weight slightly to include me in his circle of menace. With prey-like instinct, the little guy took advantage of his distraction and pulled a Houdini.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  I should’ve guessed that, deprived of his quarry, the bully would turn his aggression on me. Still, when he head-butted me in the ribs, the attack caught me off guard. Rage soared up like a summer squall as we hit the ground, floundering in the dirt. I unloaded on the kid, slamming my fist into his cheek, his ribs, his eye. Shouts filled the air around us, but they barely registered. The bully got in a few good licks before I felt someone pulling me away.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Race’s voice cut through my fury. The bully, restrained by another guy, was just close enough to catch me in the shin with the toe of his Nike. I lunged against my uncle’s grip but wasn’t able to break free.

  “Damn it, kid, lay off!” Race shouted.

  “I didn’t start it!”

  “I don’t care. That’s no excuse for beating up a twelve-year-old!”

  Race’s words drained the rest of the fight out of me.

  “He’s twelve?” I’d been getting my ass kicked by a sixth-grader? I shook off Race’s grip and wiped my nose with the back of my hand. It came away bloody. Humiliation rolled over me in a cold, sick wave. Then I saw Kasey and discovered a whole new meaning for the word.

  “Get back to the trailer,” Race said. The disappointment in his eyes hit harder than anything that stupid kid had thrown at me. How could he be so ready to believe the worst?

  “But—”

  “Now!”

  He was just like everyone else. Washing his hands of me, not even waiting for an explanation. The crappiest thing about it was that I should’ve known better. I’d sold my soul for a few karate lessons, and he’d wadded it up and tossed it in the trash.

  “Piss off!” I said.

  “Cody—”

  Turning toward the river, I ran.

  Chapter 6

  The path along the river had been tricky enough to navigate while walking. At a full run, I tripped over rocks and lurched down the muddy bank, soaking myself to the knees. None of that slowed me down. Neither did Race shouting my name, or the dampness in my eyes that meant I was close to losing control in a way I hadn’t since I was little.

  Panting hard, I finally collapsed against the rough bark of a Douglas fir, steeling myself against tears that I’d be damned if I let fall. I cursed myself for being so weak. Much as I’d scorned Race for his softness, it was me who was the real wimp. Mom used to ride me about it all the time. “Big boys don’t cry, Cody,” she’d say whenever I started sniveling.

  The crazy thing was, stuff like falling off my bike or not getting my own way didn’t faze me. I just seemed to feel things nobody else did. It was like my emotions were an instrument the universe could play at will. Every time I saw a dead animal beside the road, or heard my mom screaming at my dad, I’d get all weepy.

  “Stop being such a baby,” Mom would say.

  Somehow I’d gotten a grip by the time I started school. Kids wouldn’t put up with a crybaby, and since I was short and scrawny, bullies already had enough reason to single me out. But the feelings never stopped, I just found ways to disguise them. Getting mad was easiest. No one questioned the manliness of a guy who lost his temper, and it was satisfying to channel that onslaught of emotion into a good rage.

  The blood drying on my face started to itch, so I stumbled to the river. Wet jeans clung to my calves as I squatted to wash. Even though my shoes and pant legs were saturated, I wasn’t about to go back. Not with Kasey there. Instead, I slumped against the Douglas fir and stared out at the water.

  I couldn’t
believe I’d done it again. Let down my guard. Got suckered in. How pathetic could I be? For over an hour I sat there, hating myself and wondering what to do next. After what had happened, I couldn’t stay.

  Eventually, a plan began to form. I’d pack my stuff, sit tight until Race fell asleep, and slip out. I could hitchhike south. Go someplace cool like L.A.

  * * *

  I waited until dark before returning to the trailer, then snuck in through the back door—the one that led directly into my bedroom. Race heard me and came down the hall, but the confrontation I expected didn’t happen. Instead, he stood outside my door, not even pushing it open.

  “Cody?” he said. There was no anger in his voice, just a high, questioning note.

  “Go away.”

  Race hesitated, then his footsteps retreated to the front room.

  Once I was sure he was gone, I jammed my writing notebooks, some clothes, and my favorite books into my duffle bag. Then I pulled out The Outsiders and read it for the fiftieth time. It seemed like forever before Race finally turned off the TV.

  After giving it another half hour to be safe, I eased open the back door. Cool night drifted in, smelling of cut grass and river mud. The rain that had threatened since late afternoon still hung back, but something in the wind told me it wouldn’t be long before it fell. I stepped cautiously down the squeaky stairs and made for the road outside the trailer park, where I’d seen a sign pointing to I-5.

  The hike to the freeway turned out to be only about a mile and a half. Getting there was the easy part. Catching a ride was a bitch. I stood at the base of the southbound on-ramp for half an hour, but the few people out at twelve-thirty on Sunday night didn’t trouble themselves on my account. At last, an old dude in a pickup stopped and offered to take me as far as Creswell. With rain beginning to spot the asphalt I didn’t bother to ask where that was. Only about ten miles south of Eugene, it turned out. Fifteen minutes later I was back on the side of I-5, rain pelting me with a vigor that Race’s shower could only wish for.

  I started walking. My leather jacket kept most of me dry, but my hair and shoes soaked up the water. Cars whizzed by, trailing red streaks that shimmered on wet asphalt before fading into the night. No one even slowed down. Still, I didn’t let myself think this might be a bad idea. Sure, it was wet and cold now, but by this time tomorrow I’d be in sunny southern California.