Infinity + One

  “I don’t think Jesus would approve of our efforts, Minnie,” I said with mock solemnity. “I think he frowns on young girls lookin’ at naked men.”

  “Throw his coat over him,” Minnie hissed.

  I did as I was told, tossing the coat I was still holding toward the mostly naked, unconscious man. It wasn’t a very good toss. It landed over his face. His nether regions were still completely uncovered, just blowing in the wind.

  “If he throws up he’s gonna die laying on his back with that coat over his face, Bonnie!”

  We’d seen Hank and Cash drink enough that they threw up. Daddy had even thrown up in his sleep before, and if Mama hadn’t been there he’d have choked in his own vomit. Mama never drank more than a beer a day, and she said it was for her health—“to flush out her kidneys.”

  “Well, feel free to move it, Minnie.” I gestured toward the man’s covered head. I didn’t know why I had to do everything. Minnie shook her head frantically.

  “Fine.” I sighed. I hunched down and inched toward him, leading with my leg and keeping my upper body shifted to the side. Then I yanked the coat from off the man’s face and dropped it over his lower body.

  His eyes were wide open.

  He stared up at me unblinking, and I screamed and fell back on my butt.

  “What the hell?” he slurred. Then he reached out and grabbed my ankle.

  I pulled away, kicking my foot, and Minnie was there, helping me up. Our feet got a little tangled, and we tripped and fell and were up and running again immediately.

  “Hey! Come back! Why you leavin’?” The man yelled behind us. “Did I miss all the fun stuff? I don’t remember nothin!’”

  “Definitely not Jesus,” I puffed, and we ended up giggling all the way home.

  “We smelled like burnt tires, and I kept seeing his pathetic penis in my head when I closed my eyes,” I told Finn, laughing. “But Minnie was back at her do-goodin’ the next day, and the next. She was convinced that behind everyone in need was an opportunity to make the world a better place. It was like she knew she had only a little while to leave her mark, and that’s the way she decided to leave it. It wasn’t a bad way to be. But I still hate the smell of burning tires.”

  “There can’t be much money in burning tires.” Finn sounded skeptical.

  “It’s something. We never did it, but lots of folks did. Daddy made money traveling around singing, and Gran went with him. When we were old enough, Minnie and I did too. We sang up and down the Appalachians at county fairs and churches and family reunions. Daddy took cash or trades, and never claimed any of it on his taxes so he could keep his welfare check. With the government money and the money we made under the table, we did better than most families in Grassley and better than all the other families in the holler.”

  “What’s a holler?”

  “A valley, you know. A hillbilly neighborhood. A hollow.” This time I said it like the rest of America said it, with “o” on the end instead of “er.”

  “You realize when you say things like ‘holler’ you sound like you’re from the early 1930s talking about the Great Depression,” Finn said mildly.

  “You mean I sound like Bonnie Parker? I guess I can relate to her a little, after all.” I could relate to her a lot. “Appalachia hasn’t changed much since then, from what I can tell. Up and down the Appalachians—Iowa, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, North Carolina—there are hundreds of towns just like Grassley. And most of America doesn’t even know we exist. They just fly over us, and from the clouds, everything looks pretty.”

  Finn reached over and rested his hand on my leg, trying to soothe me, I supposed. And I stared for a minute at that big, strong hand resting on my thigh, wishing for a moment that I was small enough to crawl beneath his palm and pretend places like Grassley didn’t exist. But they did. And try as I might, they always would.

  “Minnie’s doctor said the poverty of the mountain people, people in Appalachia, rivals the poverty she saw in places in India when she spent time there on humanitarian missions. Nobody talks about Appalachia . . . so nobody really knows. I built my parents a nice little four bedroom house and they have nice things, but I still dream about Grassley, and I wake up with the smell of burning tires in my nose. To me, that’s what despair smells like. Burning tires.”

  “So is that the reason you have to put yourself out there for everybody you see? Stranded moms, homeless preachers, people on the side of the road?”

  I shrugged. “That’s what Minnie did. I thought about her when William was preaching to us about angels in disguise and clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. I told you about that song we always sang. The one about the mansions? I believe in mansions in heaven, but it’d be nice if people stopped hoping and started doing.”

  “Doing what?” he asked.

  “Doing something more than just dreaming of mansions in the sky. Minnie and I started a foundation called Many Mansions. I was the money and Minnie was the manager. We wanted to help kids make a detailed plan to accomplish their dreams, and then help them carry out their plan. We wanted to make ‘many mansions,’ and not just in the sky.”

  I felt tired just talking about the foundation. It was Minnie’s baby. Maybe I should change the name from Many Mansions to Minnie’s Mansions. The idea actually cheered me.

  “You said Minnie was trying to improve the world before she left it. Is that what you’re trying to do? Improve the world before you leave it?” Finn’s eyes were intent on my face, his voice flat.

  I guess I deserved questions like that, considering how Finn and I met. I didn’t know why I was compelled to do the things I did. I just got an impulse, and I went with it. Usually it served me well. Sometimes, not so much.

  “I think I’m just trying to find what’s real. Dreamin’ of mansions isn’t a bad thing. But there’s got to be more to life than just enduring or dreaming. And too often, it feels like hope is the only thing most people have. Rich, poor, sick, healthy—we’re all just drowning in dreams and hoping someone else will make them come true.”

  “ENTERTAINMENT BUZZ HAS been following the ongoing drama surrounding singer Bonnie Rae Shelby which began with her abrupt departure from the stage last Saturday night. Just a recap, Bonnie Rae’s inner circle called police in the early hours of Sunday, February 23, after they were unable to locate the star. Cash, credit cards, and personal items were also reported missing from the vicinity, heightening concerns that someone was involved in the disappearance of Miss Shelby, and that she might not have left the premises of her own free will.

  Later sightings paired Miss Shelby with this man, an ex-convict named Infinity James Clyde. Clyde was incarcerated for armed robbery six years ago, and recently resided in the Boston area. He was last seen the night Bonnie Rae Shelby disappeared from the TD Garden in Boston. Police have contacted his mother, Greta Cleary, who still lives in the area, and have said she is cooperating with police. Police contacts say Ms. Cleary claimed her son had a job offer in Las Vegas, but close friends of Infinity Clyde’s mother say she did not see him before he left and was hurt and surprised by his sudden departure.

  Miss Shelby’s manager, Ms. Raena Shelby, claims her granddaughter, Bonnie Rae Shelby, did not know Infinity James Clyde before that night, making these sightings very troublesome.

  We have since had reports of assault, theft, an impounded vehicle owned by the ex-con containing Miss Shelby’s clothing and items stolen from her dressing room at the TD Garden the night of February 22, as well as a bizarre confrontation at a small bank just outside of St. Louis—”

  I flipped the television off immediately. I didn’t want to listen to the rest. We were in a miniscule Oklahoma town in a roadside lodge that was actually a series of little individual red cabins not too far off the freeway, and we’d made the mistake of turning on the TV the moment we were settled in the room. The newscaster was cut off mid-sentence, and our stunned silence immediately filled the void. But her words hung in the air as
if she stood there between us, waiting for us to defend ourselves. And the words weren’t the worst part.

  They’d shown stock footage of me singing, signing autographs, and waving at fans. But they showed mug shots of Finn. The pictures of him in an orange jumpsuit facing both forward and in profile, with numbers stamped across the bottom, made him seem dangerous, like he was an escaped, armed convict on the loose. His hair was short in the pictures, and he was younger, but it was undeniably him.

  “This is gossip. It’s just gossip, Finn,” I whispered. “There’s no meat in it. Shows like that take bits and pieces of what they think they know, and they try and stitch it together so it seems like they’ve got a real story.”

  Finn nodded woodenly, but his face was drawn and his lips were pressed into a tight line.

  “Do you know how often I’ve seen stories like this? Not just about me, but about friends and acquaintances in the industry. Sometimes, there isn’t a shred of truth to be found in any of it. And eventually? The story just disappears. No apologies, no recants. They just move on to someone else.”

  But Finn still didn’t respond. And I felt a sudden rush of anger, so swift and so alarming that I almost gasped at the intensity. I placed a hand on the wall to steady myself.

  “You haven’t done anything wrong, Finn!” I made myself whisper so that I wouldn’t shout. “I haven’t done anything wrong! I just wanted to be left alone for a little while. You helped me. We haven’t hurt anybody. We haven’t done anything!”

  Finn looked up at me, and the expression on his face was so discouraged I wanted to slap him. I wanted to wipe the sorrow from his eyes, to slap the sadness away. I wanted to make him angry like I was. Anger was so much better than grief. Instead, I fisted my hands in my hair and repeated myself, the words coming out much louder than they had before.

  “We haven’t done anything!” I wanted to run from the room, and shout those same words to anyone who would listen, but as suddenly as my anger had appeared, it morphed into fear. I’d so enjoyed my brief hiatus from caring, but my interlude with ambivalence was apparently over. All at once, I’d never been so afraid in my whole life. Not when I stood on a stage for the first time in front of thousands of people, not when Minnie got sick, not when her cancer came back. Not after I fell forward into the fog on a bridge in Boston. Not ever.

  There was no way we were going to survive this. And I wasn’t talking about life and death survival. I wasn’t talking about incarceration. I wasn’t worried about the police. We really hadn’t done anything wrong. But we weren’t going to survive. Us. Finn and me. Bonnie and Clyde. The two of us. I wasn’t going to be able to keep him. He wouldn’t want to stay.

  I ran into the bathroom and slammed the door, shedding my clothing in a frenzy, as if removing them would ease the panic that was coursing in my veins. My chest felt tight, incredibly so—so tight that I couldn’t breathe, and I wondered if I was having a heart attack the pressure was so intense. I flipped on the shower and stepped under the spray before I checked the temperature. The blast of icy water shocked me, distracting me from the vice around my heart for several welcome seconds, but as the water warmed, the fear came back, and I moaned at the simultaneous pressure and pain.

  I thought I heard the door open and close. Not the door to the bathroom. I would have welcomed Finn, even in the state I was in. But it was the door that led outside. Finn had gone.

  HE RAN AS fast as he could for the first fifteen minutes or so, up and down the streets of the little town, the little blip on the map that he couldn’t even remember the name of. All he knew was they were hugging the northern border of Oklahoma, more than five hundred miles from St. Louis, Missouri, where they’d started their day. And Bonnie was back at the motel, crying in the shower where she didn’t think anyone could hear her. He’d wanted to step beneath the spray with her, damn the world, damn them all, and just be with her. That’s what he’d wanted to do. But instead, he had pulled on his shorts and running shoes and fled out into the cold, quiet streets trying to purge the fear that warred with his desire for the girl who cried for him and confounded him, and made everything so much more complicated than it had to be. And none of it was really her fault. He understood that. But fault or no fault, the situation still existed.

  He loped past what appeared to be an elementary school, resting beneath the soft glow of street lights, and he circled the campus until he found a playground and, using the monkey bars, hoisted himself up, over and over again, one pull-up after another, until his back, shoulders and arms were as weary as his legs. The sight of the tall slide made him smile, in spite of himself, and he wished Bonnie were there so she could climb it and sing to him, sing the worry away like she had the night before. Had it only been twenty-four hours ago? Finn became dizzy at the thought. The number of life-changing, plan-altering experiences wedged and crammed into the last few days was mind-boggling.

  He resumed his run back toward the direction of the motel, his legs weary, his thoughts heavy, and failed to notice until it was too late, the police cruiser that had idled up next to him. Shit.

  “Kinda late for a run, isn’t it?”

  “That depends,” Finn said mildly, keeping his pace, and hopefully his tone, steady and unconcerned. “I like it best when it’s quiet. Helps me unwind so I can sleep.”

  “Hmm,” the officer said, non-committal. “You from around here?”

  “No sir. Just staying at the motel off the freeway up there.” Finn pointed in the general direction of the group of cabins that called themselves something quaint but looked like a row of fish shacks.

  “What’s your name?”

  Now why in the hell did this guy need to know his name? He was obviously jogging, not bothering anyone. Finn wanted to punch something, but he decided lies would get him nowhere. Lies only made people look guilty when they were uncovered. If this was it, so be it. He would almost welcome it, and Bonnie’s words rung in his ears. “We haven’t done anything wrong!”

  “Finn. Finn Clyde.” He jogged over to the officer’s open window and extended his hand, the friendly neighborhood felon. His forthcoming answer seemed to satisfy the officer, who shook his hand briefly but didn’t act as if he recognized the name at all.

  “Well, Finn. It’s kinda cold out and you aren’t very warmly dressed, and our streets are more like country roads. Not very well-lit and full of pot holes.”

  “I’m warm enough. And it’s not too much farther.” Finn tried not to let his relief show. The officer hadn’t typed his name into a computer or called it into dispatch, as far as he could see. A call came in, and Finn stepped away with a quick wave of his hand. The officer answered the call with his badge number, and then tossed some parting words toward Finn before his attention was pulled elsewhere.

  “All right, then. Welcome to Freedom. Have a good night.” The cruiser pulled away and slid down the road. Finn almost stopped running he was so dumbfounded. Then he started to laugh as he remembered. Freedom was the name of the town.

  THE ROOM WAS dark when he stepped inside. He let the door swing shut behind him and turned the lock. The drapes were pulled wide, providing enough light to find his way to his bags. He didn’t know why he was digging. His only relatively clean shirt was the one Bonnie had bought him earlier in the day—and it was in the car. He’d had plenty of clothes in the Blazer. Little good that did him. He walked back into the bathroom and pulled off the sweat soaked T-shirt. At least he could get clean beneath the shirt.

  When he stepped out fifteen minutes later, Bonnie was sitting in the dark, perched on the end of one of the beds, wearing a little white top and very little else, judging from the bare length of her legs folded beneath her. He had hoped she was asleep. He stopped a few feet from her, rubbing the towel across his head, hand drying his hair before he tossed it toward a chair. He wore his shorts but hadn’t pulled his sweaty shirt back on after his shower. Seeing Bonnie made him wish he had. He felt naked with this girl, defenseless, exposed, and i
t had very little to do with his bare chest or lack of clothing.

  “I thought maybe you left,” she said softly.

  “And left you here?”

  “I did it to you.”

  “And left me a note and two thousand dollars. I was pissed, but I didn’t feel abandoned. I knew why you ran. I didn’t like it. But I understood.” They were both almost whispering, and Finn wasn’t sure why.

  She nodded, but stood slowly, her eyes on the ground. Finn kept his eyes on her down-turned face so he wouldn’t see what she’d paired with the white undershirt.

  “Will you hold me, Finn?” Bonnie asked, her voice so faint he wasn’t entirely sure that was what she’d said. Because he wasn’t sure, his response was cautious, questioning even.

  “It won’t end there, Bonnie—”

  “It’ll begin. And that’s what I want,” she interrupted, and he welcomed her honesty, reveled in it, even as he made himself reject her.

  “It’s what I want too. But it’s not what’s going to happen.”

  “Why?” she whispered, and the sadness in her sigh softened his response even further.

  “Because I will hold you, and I’ll want more. And I’ll take it, Bonnie. I won’t be able to stop. And then it will be over, and you and I will have crossed a line we can’t uncross.”

  “I want to cross it.”

  “Really? ‘Cause I’m not sure you know what that means. You and I go down this road, there won’t be any going back for me and the things they’re saying out there? About me being a loser? And a criminal? And a piece of shit, taking advantage of you, hanging onto you because you’re somebody and I’m nobody? All that stuff will be true.”

  “No it won’t! But why do we care what people think?”

  “Because it will be true! Don’t you see? Right now . . . right now I’m your . . . your friend.” Her eyes shot to his in disbelief, and he almost flushed thinking about the way he wanted her, the way he’d kissed her. Several times now. Friends didn’t kiss like that. He ignored the qualm. That was all before he saw the news report. It changed things, and he had to make her understand.