‘Sure I can.’ She nods like a little kid, you know how they nod too much. Then she stares at me through shining eyes. ‘What’re you gonna do?’
‘I have to disappear awhile.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘The hell you will. They’d catch us in a second.’
She presses her lips shut, and stares some more. I swear she’s like your cat or something, how she just stares. A truck growls along the Johnson road. I tense until it passes. Ella just keeps staring. Then a door bangs in the middle distance, and a lady’s voice screeches out.
‘E-lla!’
Ella’s face drops. I guess this was a real adventure we had just now; you can tell it broke the ice with Ella Bouchard. I squeeze her hand, for recent ole times’ sake, and pick up my pack. ‘If you see my ole lady, tell her I’m sorry, and I’ll be in touch. Or, no, better – don’t tell her anything, just slide the cash under the door. Okay?’ I stretch out of the grass, but Ella’s hand intercepts me at the leg. I look down at her face. It suddenly seems configured to make brave decisions in life, like willpower soaks through her pores or something. She leans up to my mouth and plants a clumsy kiss.
‘I love you,’ she whispers. ‘Stay clear of Keeter’s track, they’s settin up that SWAT thing tonight.’ She reaches for my hand and stuffs all her cash into it, all but my mom’s sixty dollars. Then she springs to her feet and swishes away down the alley like a cotton ghost.
‘Eee-lla!’
‘Comin!’
I still feel her spit on my lips. I wipe it on my arm. As I melt into the dark on the escarpment side of the road, I see a figure bobbing through the light at Keeter’s corner. It’s Barry Gurie’s unmistakable fat head. He ain’t rushing. The hiss of a car approaches from the other direction. Lally’s car. I run before its lights sweep the road.
Act III
Against all odds
fourteen
Martirio twinkles like a nest of fireflies from the land above Keeter’s. You can see the new sign at the Seldome Motel, and one corner of Bar-B-Chew Barn is visible, alongside the radio mast. If you squint, you can see the working spine of town, a centipede’s legs of pumpjacks lit up along Gurie Street – fuck, fuck, fuck. I trace the spine as far as I can, down to Liberty Drive, at least. My town is beautiful from up here. It’s as if a star shines for every creature in the constellation of Martirio, and a few more shine besides. There’s just one tiny black spot at the northern edge of town, where no star shines at all. That’ll be home.
Waves are coming. My survival instinct wore off when I left the Johnson road. Now, stamping Lally’s video into the fucken ground, I can taste the salt of waves. They come with pictures of Mom in her darkened kitchen, scraping up any ole crumb of hope, to parlay into pie. But all she scrapes is bullshit. It slays me. She’ll be muttering, ‘Well at least he has a job, and we still have his birthday to look forward to.’ But I’m halfway to the escarpment, on my way to goddam Mexico. Probably forever.
It’s a little before ten. I can reach the highway in a couple of hours, then maybe hitch a ride, or catch a bus or something, down to San Antone. I take a last look at Martirio sparkling across the flats, my universe for all these long years. Then I set off toward the hills, all crusty and alone. My coping mechanisms open up to some cream pie. Remember that ole movie, with the beach-house? Plenty of folks must do that, for real. Nothing says you have to be a particular kind of person to do that. I imagine Mom coming down, after things blow over. I buy her some souvenirs. Maybe I send a maid back with her; she can jam that up Leona’s fat ass. A learning: deep shit sweetens your plans like crazy.
It’s midnight when the first headlights flicker through the branches by the highway. To be honest, I don’t even know which way is south. My ole man thought Scouts was for sissies, so I don’t even know which fucken way is south in life. Instead of trying to figure it out, I call some Glen Campbell to mind, to help me lope along, crusty and lonesome, older than my years. ‘Wichita Lineman’ is the song I call up, not ‘Galveston’. I would’ve conjured Shania Twain or something a little more sassy, but that might boost me up too much. What happens with sassy music is you get floated away from yourself, then snap back to reality too hard. I hate that. The only antidote is to just stay depressed.
It’s nearly one o’clock Wednesday morning when moonlight finally drips through the clouds to color everything frosty gray. Texas is so fucken beautiful. If you ain’t here already, you should come. Feel free to skip Martirio, that’s all. Herds of trucks and cars pass on the highway, but none of them look like they’d stop. I mean, I know they won’t stop if I don’t get up and stop them, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t like my chances. A better idea is to wait for a bus, which has an established tradition of stopping. I settle in the crook of a bend in the highway, pull my jacket from the pack, and fashion a backrest against a bush. I sit and wait, and turn some learnings over in my head.
Where TV lets you down, I’m discovering, is by not convincing you how things really work in the world. Like, do buses stop anywhere along the road, to pick up any kind of asshole, or do you have to be at a regular bus stop? You see plenty of movies where some crusty dude stops a bus in the middle of the desert or something. But maybe that only applies in the middle of the desert. Or maybe only the drivers who saw those movies will stop. This all scuttles through my head, and starts to warp into other kinds of movies, like the one with the black devil-car that has a vendetta against this guy. I feel my hair wisp in the breeze, the grasses and bushes wisp around me. Just nature and me, wisping, while the devil-car has this vendetta.
A chill wades through my skin to wake me. It’s after five in the morning. I hear the roar of a bus on the highway, and hoist my pack up to the roadside. A motorcoach hammers around the bend, glowing cool and cozy inside. I flap my arms, and make like I just arrived from the scene of an urgent reason to travel. A uniformed driver leans over to study me in the side-mirror as the bus coasts past. Then, ‘Pschhsss,’ he pulls over and stops, two hundred yards down the highway. I fly towards those tail-lights.
The door puffs open. ‘You in trouble?’ asks the driver.
‘I have to get to San Antonio.’
‘Martirio’s only a few miles away, you should pick up the next service there – I can’t just stop on a whim, y’know.’
‘Yeah, but – I’m stuck out here, and . . .’
‘You’re stuck out here?’ he looks around. ‘We have like predetermined stops, you can’t just hail the service any old where.’ I shoot him these puppy-dog eyes, and he eventually says, ‘I’d have to charge you the whole fare, like from Austin – thirteen-fifty.’
I climb aboard without even checking where the cowgirl’s sitting, or even if there is a cowgirl. I just gulp down the aura of crumpled bedclothes, of travelers messy with chippings of sleep, and shuffle to an empty row at the back. My adrenal gland coughs as we move away, half expecting Lally to appear, or Ella’s mom, or some kind of shit. I don’t even want to think what, because Fate always pays attention to what you think, then slams it up your fucken ass.
‘Drrrrrr,’ the motorcoach hits the road, and after nameless miles I hang suspended on the knife-edge of a doze, my brain like crystal grits. Then we pass a field of manure or something, the type of smeary tang your family pretends not to notice when you’re in the car with them, and it suddenly floods my senses with Taylor Figueroa. Don’t ask me why. I sense her in a field by the highway. She’s down on all fours behind a bush, naked except for blue synthetic panties that strain hard into her thigh-vee, and glow dirty ripe. I’m there too. We’re safe and comfortable, with time on our hands. I surf her upholstery with my nose, map her sticky heem along glimmering edges to the panty-leg, where the tang sharpens like slime-acid chocolate, stings, bounces me back from her poon. In my dream I bounce back too far. Then I see we’re in a field of ass-fruit, and suddenly I don’t know if it’s Taylor’s scent, or just the field I can smell. I scramble back to her cleft, but
the edges have vanished. The forbidden odor dissolves into the bodyheat and aftershave of the bus. I wake up snorting air like crazy. She’s gone. Empty distance rolls past the window.
I sit up straight in the seat, hoping to fool myself into normality. But the waves start tumbling in, tidal waves of horror on the back of this beautiful dream. Now bright images of Jesus form around me. He doesn’t look at me. He looks away, and takes the barrel into his mouth, tastes its heat. Around him, milky eyes dot the school yard like flowers, jerky eyes getting slower, fading dead away. Boom. Fractured air oozes coughs and gurgles, the hiss of desperate clotting, of vital last messages nobody hears. Mr Nuckles the teacher is here too, his face trimmed with bubbles of young blood. The memories are back. I shoot disorderly tears for the fallen, for Max Lechuga, Lori Donner, and everybody, and I know I’m fucked for the rest of the journey, maybe for the rest of my life, fucked and nailed through the eye of my dick to the biggest cross. How could they think I did this? I hung out with the underdog, moved out of the pack, that’s how, and now I fill his place, now anything original I ever said or did has turned a sinister shade. I understand him for the first time.
‘You all right?’ asks an ole lady, approaching down the aisle. I must be gasping like a fish or something. She brings her hand to my face, and I meet with it like it was the hand of God.
‘I’ll be okay,’ I say through a curtain of spit. She withdraws her hand, but my face follows it, without instructions from me, aching for another touch.
‘I’m so sorry you have troubles. I’m right over here – if you need some company, I’m right over here.’ She pulls herself back to her seat.
An angel from heaven, that ole lady, but I can’t feel a thing except pain and darkness, the darkness of purgatory. I bury my face in my hands, and sit shaking with hurt, praying for some kind of hopeful distraction. Then, I swear on my daddy’s grave, Muzak starts to play in the bus. Just a welling violin note at first.
Sailing, take me away . . .
It’s light when we roll into San Antone, but too early to be busy. I’m as hungry as a loose dog. My eyes are still gritty with salt. I skulk around the terminal restroom until eight o’clock, then I go to the phones to call Taylor Figueroa’s folks. I just feel empty, drained of my life juices. The current logic is this: if I can get Taylor’s number, and take the first step into my dream, it’ll boost me up, maybe even enough to call home and explain things. If I don’t get Taylor’s number, then I’ll have so little left to lose that I’ll call home anyway, because I won’t care about being boosted up.
I punch in the number. A thought comes as I do it, that maybe my ole lady became best friends with the Figueroas overnight, and is over there drinking coffee, or bawling, more likely. You know how Martirio is. It’s shit, because my ole lady never went to the Figueroas’ in her life. But you know how Martirio is. The number rings.
‘Peaches,’ Taylor’s mom answers in a cool, deep voice.
‘Mrs Figueroa? This is a friend of Taylor’s – I lost her number and wondered how I could get in touch.’
‘Who’s speaking?’
‘Uh – just an ole school buddy, like, from school.’
‘Yes, but who?’
‘Oh, it’s – Danny Naylor here, excuse me.’ Big fucken mistake. Her voice immediately gets all relaxed and intimate.
‘Well hi, Dan, I didn’t recognize you at all – how’s life treating you up at A&M?’
‘Oh, great, great, I’m loving it, actually.’
‘I saw your mom at the New Life market the other day, and she tells me you’re coming down for the bluebonnet cookout.’
‘Oh, sure – you know me.’ Sweat runs down my fucken back, my vision gets metallic, like I just downed forty cups of coffee.
‘Hooray,’ she says. ‘I’ll be seeing your mom at the committee meeting tomorrow, I’ll let her know you called, and that you’re fine.’
‘Oh, great, thanks a lot.’
‘And I just know Tay’ll be pleased to hear from you – hold on, I’ll get you her number.’
Now there’s a fucken thing. ‘I just know Tay’ll be pleased?’ I get a sudden twist of the knife over that. Typical of asshole Naylor to horn in on my thing. Like, he only ever had one good joke in his whole school career. It makes me want to go, ‘Yeah, I’ll just update her on my genital cancer,’ or something. Fucken Naylor, boy.
‘Here it is Dan, she’s still down at UT Houston – I know she has a lunch date, so you’ll catch her then, if not right now.’
I list the number under ‘T’, and under ‘F’, in case I get amnesia, then I write it across the cover of the address book as well. ‘Thanks Mrs Figueroa – you take care now, and give my love to Mom.’
‘Sure, Dan – see you at the cookout.’
I hang up the phone, shaking my head from the dumbness of it all. You can picture Danny arriving at the cookout and going, ‘What fucken call?’ Or everybody finding out he died in a line-dancing accident a week ago, or something. I just take the fucken cake, boy. I mean, there must be some highly twisted gangstas out there, really hard cases and all, but I bet they never got involved in a dorky piece of slime in their lives. Like, I bet ole Adult Hitler, a nasty piece of action, never had anyone looking out for him at the cookout because he called pretending to be Danny Fucken Naylor.
Having Taylor’s number makes me look like I’ve got Attention Defecit Disorder, or whichever one it is where you freeze on the spot, or do mime acts or whatever. I devise a facial expression to cover it, frowning like I’m calculating Pi to eight billion decimal places. Underneath my new expression, I run all the thoughts that would’ve made me look stupid. Like the thought that my ole lady will be up by now. Probably being fucken defibrillated already, or whatever it is when the paramedics yell ‘Clear!’ I shuffle to the terminal doors, where a bus schedule is displayed. Buses leave regularly to Houston, which means I have plenty of time to call my ole lady. And buses from Houston leave regularly to Brownsville and McAllen, down by the Mexican border. I’m tempted to buy two tickets to the border, and just present one to Taylor, like a wedding ring or something. But my brain says no, don’t even buy one yet. Chill for a second. Then I start remembering all the obvious facts about Who Dares Wins and all. Like, maybe the fact I don’t take a ticket means I won’t get her to come. I end up frozen at the fucken door, re-calculating Pi.
Say, for instance, two guys want to drag Taylor Figueroa to Mexico right away. One brings her roses, and says he has this plan to go to Mexico, and would she like to come along. The other dude turns up with a quart of tequila, a joint, and two tickets to the border. He doesn’t show her the tickets right away, but says, ‘I have hours to live – help me kill the pain.’ He gets her wasted in three minutes flat, sucks her tonsils out of her throat, then pulls out the tickets and says, ‘Ten minutes till the cops arrive and take you in as an accessory – let’s jam.’ Which one does she go with? You know the fucken answer, I don’t have to tell you. And let me say, it ain’t all on account of one being nice, and one being a slime-ball. It’s because one of them knew she would come. As Americans, we know this to be true. We invented fucken assertiveness, for chrissakes. But in amongst all the books and tapes, in between that whole assertiveness industry – and I don’t mean how to fast-talk people, and increase sales and shit, like, that’s a whole other industry on its own, I mean in the industry where you end up knowing like day is day that something’s going to happen for you – you never once hear how to actually fucken do it. Like, for my money, just thinking positive doesn’t cut the ice at all. I’ve been thinking positive all year, and fucken look at me now. My ole lady thinks a new refrigerator will turn up on her doorstep, but you ain’t seen the fucker yet.
I limp back to the phones. I ain’t sure Taylor will come along. In fact, if I’m really honest, I guess I feel she won’t. She has a lunch date, and her life is all separate, and full of sunny-smelling skin and panty lace. I just have grisly fucken reality, uninvited, with its sm
ell of escalator motors and blood, and whirrs and beeps that suck away your shine. Dreams are so damn perfect, but reality just always tugs the other way. The fact that our two lives will rub together for the time it takes to say hello doesn’t automatically mean sparks will fly. The best you can probably expect is that her peachy-lace life gets smeared with booger-slime. It’s enough to make you bawl. Specially because now I’m in the wrong frame of mind for it to happen. There’s the learning, O Partner: that you’re cursed when you realize true things, because then you can’t act with the full confidence of dumbness anymore.
In the end I just piss myself off. I pack up my goddam philosophical activity set, and pull a quarter from my pocket. I toss it. It comes down heads, which means call her in Houston immediately. I pick up the phone, and punch in her number.
fifteen
‘Hello?’ The voice is liquid ass in panty elastic.
‘Taylor, hi – it’s Vern.’
‘Wait up, I’ll get her,’ says a girl. ‘Tay! Taylor – it’s Vern.’
‘Who?’ calls a voice in the background.
Then you hear giggles. I fucken hate that. Your chances with a girl fall sharply in the vicinity of giggles. Learning: never try to deal with more than one girl at a time.
She finally clatters onto the line. ‘Tayla.’
‘Uh – hi, it’s Vern.’
‘Vern?’
‘Vern Little – remember me?’
‘Vern Little? Like, gee . . .’ As she speaks, you hear the other girl in quiet hysterics nearby.
‘You might’ve seen me on the news, Vernon Gregory Little – from Martirio?’
‘Like, I’m real sorry – I heard about the massacre and all, but I usually only, like, watch cable, you know?’
‘Anal Intruder Channel,’ squeals the other girl.