Golden States

  “No,” David said. He and Lizzie were sitting at the table. Lizzie scraped the tines of her fork along the table’s edge and did not speak.

  “Well, he’s probably halfway to Santa Barbara by now,” Mom said. She beat the eggs with a gentle lap-lap-lap that sounded like Mom herself.

  “I guess so,” David said. “He was weird.”

  Lizzie skated her fork along the tabletop so hard a pair of thin curled shavings, like question marks, rose in its wake. “Hey,” David said. “Lizzie’s digging into the table.”

  “Shut up, you pinhead asshole,” she said, She gripped the fork handle and looked at David with such hatred he thought she might jump across the table and stab him. He said, “Mom?” just to be sure she was keeping an eye on things.

  “Please don’t murder each other,” she said. She prodded the eggs in the frying pan. “Lizzie, don’t destroy the furniture, I just finished paying for it.”

  Lizzie’s tightened face drooped in on itself, as if some of the air had been let out. She blinked and pressed a single tear from each eye. Then she got up and walked, slowly, out of the kitchen, still holding tightly to the fork. She could be heard walking slowly upstairs.

  “What’s the matter with her?” David said.

  “Never mind,” Mom said. “Just eat your breakfast and get off to school. I’ll take care of Lizzie.”

  She put a plateful of eggs and toast in front of him, and went upstairs. David sat alone. He pushed the eggs around on his plate for a while, then dumped them in the trash and covered them with a few wadded-up paper towels. He took the milk carton from the refrigerator and stood there with the cold air falling down over his pants and shoes, downing the milk in big gulps that made his head ache. He put the carton back. He was surprised and a little disappointed at having no hangover.

  David had a dull ache in his chest, a coldness, like a sack of old wet leaves hung heavily around his neck, and he wondered if that was what was meant by a hangover. It was subtler than he’d imagined it. On his way out of the kitchen he checked his reflection in the toaster, and found his face in order. He triedout a new smile, a close-lipped, crooked one like Gonzo’s on “Trapper John.”

  He picked up his books and his lunch and the note Mom had written excusing yesterday’s absence. Outside it was a regular morning, with a high pale sky and a flock of round, plump clouds that lay just above the rooftops. The horizon was just beginning to deepen with the day’s smog.

  David checked the street for Rob’s car. It was not there; all he found was the usual string of Camaros, Mavericks, Gremlins. He must have been halfway to Santa Barbara. It was over. Janet could start studying for medical school and the worst David had to worry about was Billy. The sun was shining and he walked along the familiar tree-lined street with his arms (his own!) swinging, their tiny gold hairs catching the speckled sunlight that worked its way through the branches of the trees.

  He thought that today he’d try talking to Billy. They had been best friends since second grade, they had seen each other naked—it wasn’t possible for Billy to just turn into somebody else, a stranger. As David walked toward school he planned his approach. He’d walk right up to Billy, unafraid, and say something like, “Don’t be crazy, Billy, you know what good friends we are.” Something like that. He pictured Billy’s face as he hesitated, adding it up. “Come on,” David would say, and Billy would smile in that unwilling way of his. When Billy had to smile he couldn’t stop himself, it came over him like a sickness. Remembering Billy, just like that, struggling to stay serious but giving in always, finally, to the power of friendship or a good joke, David felt cheerful about the possibility of everything.

  He felt so good he started to sing. “Beat It” was the first song that came into his head and he sang it under his breath. He tried out a new walk, a bouncier one, more like a dancer, as though a cord tied around his chest kept lifting him slightly off his feet.

  The blow hit him on his shoulder blades, so strong it carried him three gigantic steps before he pitched over onto hishands and knees. Rather than his dropping down, the sidewalk seemed to rear up and collide with him. For a moment the cement was a vertical surface, he smacking into it as if he’d flown into a wall. A weight flung itself onto his back, and he knew it by the smell. Billy. Hands scrabbled for his neck and though he squirmed like a weasel the fingers closed around his windpipe. He wriggled his way onto the grass but the hard squat fingers dug in and he knew instinctively that resistance was no way out; the only hope was to go limp. He collapsed onto the grass, his elbows squeaking over the slick waxy surface. The two hands lifted his head by the neck until he thought it would crack, then brought it down. He saw the patch of lawn like a miniature landscape, each grass blade throwing a shadow. He managed to tuck his chin so his forehead took the brunt of the blow, and when his head struck a dazzling white light erupted before his closed eyes. Billy’s hands pulled his head up again and loosened a bit, uncertain of how much damage had been done. David was able to flip halfway around and get a purchase on Billy’s shoulder. Billy lay diagonally across David’s back and David pushed with the angle of Billy’s position, forcing him off. He struggled to his knees and was met by Billy before he could stand. Their faces locked. They grappled one another, briefly fumbling and rearranging themselves like lovers. Billy dug his thumbs into David’s shoulders and David grabbed hold of Billy’s arms. They pushed, each trying to force the other over and to end up on top. Billy was stronger than David and as David felt himself start to falter he threw his weight to the side instead, to save himself. Billy went with him and they landed hard on their shoulders, still locked together. Billy’s strong breath whistled into David’s face. Billy tried to roll on top and David pitched him over and then David tried to do the same and Billy pitched him over. They rolled along this way. David felt the grass prickling under him. Blood flowed warmly from his nose, and he tasted the iron of it as it crept over his lips. It seemed to him that the fight was failing,its main fury used up in the clumsy jockeying for position. He was about to say, “Okay, Billy, that’s enough, let’s call it a tie,” when Billy, on one of his swings to the superior, worked an arm free and punched David in the stomach. The wind rushed out of him and suddenly he was watching Billy from far away. He heard himself gasp, a thin squawk like no sound he had ever made before. It scared him and it scared Billy too, he saw it on Billy’s face. That scared him worse. He could not pull air in and the harder he tried the louder and more insistent his squawking grew. Then the air caught in him, roundly. He drew a deep rapturous breath. Billy’s face lost its worried look and with gleeful confidence he swung back and planted a good one on David’s jaw.

  The world turned blazing white. David’s head rang hollow, and his vision when it returned came from the outside in. Though he could see sky and earth at the periphery, a pale fireball hung stubbornly at center, where Billy ought to have been. He tried blinking it away. He realized Billy had gotten off him and he began to make out, through the corona, Billy looking down at him with satisfied contempt. David tried to stand but when he moved the brightness flared hotter. He sank back down to rest his head on the grass. Faintly, he saw Billy point an index finger at him and shoot.

  “That’s it,” Billy said. “You’re really dead now.” He blew the smoke from the tip of his finger, turned, and walked away.

  David lay waiting for his vision to return. He dabbed at his nose and felt the gummy wetness of blood. It came to him that Billy had jumped out of the tree; he must have been waiting there, knowing David would pass underneath. He must have been there yesterday too, waiting. David wondered if a passerby would stop and take him to the hospital. His body had not yet quieted enough to feel much pain, and he didn’t know how badly he was hurt. He thought probably he should not move, in case anything was broken. A couple of older boys walked by, smoking, on their way to school. One of them said, “Hey,kid, did you get hit by a car?” David said, “No.” They paused, ground out their cigarette butts, and moved
on.

  After a while the pain gathered and centered itself in his head, a steady pulsing. The pain had roots in his jaw but they extended from a seed of pain buried deep inside his skull. His bones did not seem to be broken. Cautiously he sat up and looked around. His books were scattered. The geography book lay open on its spine, the breeze flipping its pages. His pale brown lunch sack lay fatly on its side. He got to his feet and gathered the books and the lunch. He also found Mom’s note, vivid in its white envelope on the grass. He could not quite believe a fight like that would stir so little commotion in the neighborhood. On both sides of him houses similar to his own sat placidly unconcerned. This made neither more nor less sense than the fact that Billy hated him to the point of murder when David had done nothing. Nothing. You could edge so mysteriously into the wrong: for spilling milk at the table or scratching yourself in public or for nothing at all, for not doing something you were supposed to do but didn’t know about.

  He took Mom’s note from its envelope and read it. “Please excuse David’s absence, he was feeling a bit under the weather. Beverly Stark.” The note would be just as good tomorrow as it was today. David started walking toward school but when he got to a particular corner he cut between two houses, after checking to be sure no one was watching him. He went around behind the row of houses that lined the street, straddling a poured-concrete gutter, with people’s backyards bordered by chain-link fence on one side of him and, on the other, the steep embankment that led up to the freeway. Cars made their whizzing noises as they passed overhead, invisible as rockets. The embankment was covered with shiny green ice plant, touched here and there by a reddish blush; people said black widows made their nests in ice plant. On his right, through the diamonds of the fence, were the things that were always there: a redwood picnic table, a swing set, a dry plaster birdbath doneup like the stump of a tree, an empty plastic wading pool covered with pictures of goggle-eyed fish.

  He scrambled along this passageway until he reached open country, the broad expanse of undeveloped earth he and Billy used to consider their own private terrain. The scraps of orange plastic hung limply on their stakes. At the far end of the raked plain was a shallow valley full of weeds, and in that valley, sunk down among the brush and foxtail, was the front seat of a car. It had been there for as long as David remembered, a brown tuck-and-roll that had faded gradually to the color of an old cigar. Gray stuffing puffed out of a sickle-shaped cut along its backrest though the stuffing was almost gone by now, having been picked at, David supposed, by birds building their nests. Here the great man-made mountain of the freeway swung around in a slow graceful curve like a dam. It marked the limit of the neighborhood. If you went farther than this you went in a car. David and Billy had pulled the seat around so it faced the freeway and sometimes, when they couldn’t think of anything else to do, they had sat there watching the big supple arm of the green wall as if it were a movie screen.

  David spent the day on the car seat, with his books stacked neatly on the powdery dirt. The blood dried around his mouth and he picked it off with his thumbnail. He knew he should be thinking of something but for a long while he sat thinking of nothing at all, the bearded heads of foxtails rattling softly around him. He could not seem to hold Billy in his mind for more than a second or two; Billy had become too strange to think about. Instead his mind kept settling, of its own accord, on Dad.

  Dad used to drop down like a panther from a tree. He would come home mad from work and when he was like that you stepped carefully, hoping you wouldn’t break a secret rule. A bomb was hidden somewhere in the house and you had to duplicate all your ordinary movements perfectly, to keep it from going off. Even Lizzie knew about it, and she was a babythen. On the angry nights she played quietly, without talking to herself, and when her dolls’ arms and legs wouldn’t go into their clothes right she treated them gently, like important but slightly retarded guests. When Dad wasn’t around she bit them and knocked their heads against the floor. David, too, played cautiously, and didn’t make a sound.

  But try as you might, sooner or later someone would make a mistake. It could be anything. Once David scratched his crotch, though Dad had told him before never to scratch himself in front of people. The moment he did it an alarm sounded in the back of his head but it was too late. Dad snatched him up from behind, lifting him by his armpits, and David let out a shriek, which was a stupid mistake because noise made everything worse. Dad held him dangling in midair while Lizzie and Janet watched, sympathetic but helpless. The big hands would shake him the way a dog shakes a rag and then put him down so as to swat him on the butt and on the shoulders. It was important to keep quiet. If you kept your mouth shut it would end faster.

  For a while he’d thought of himself as a girl, a tough girl who fought crime. He started acting out adventures with Lizzie’s dolls, but Mom and Dad put a stop to that. So he went back to his own toys, his cars and soldiers. He picked out one of the soldiers, a small khaki-colored man with a helmet and bayonet, and made up stories in which the man was really a girl, who cut her hair short and joined the army. Her name was Donna but she called herself Don. She was such a good soldier that even when they found out she was a girl they let her stay in the army, leading the troops. David carried that one soldier around in his pocket for years and he had it still, tucked into the top drawer of his bureau.

  In a few weeks, when school was out, he and Lizzie would go to Spokane. Dad was different now. He didn’t hit you, he seemed to be having a better time. Marie, his new wife, was all right too, but she carried a silence with her. She was so thin David could see the ribs that started under her collarbone; you could tell she had a skeleton inside, and looking at her sometimes made him lose his appetite. She cooked thin stews with big chunks of squash and eggplant and baked loaves of dry brown bread.

  Dad wore plaid shirts now and smoked hash from a green stone pipe he bought in Mexico. He laughed his sudden laugh that was like a spring popping out of a box. He called David and Lizzie “the only good energy I put out in my old life.” He hoisted Lizzie up onto his lap and pinched her bottom. Lizzie didn’t like it but neither she nor David ever worked up the courage to say anything. They were all alone in a strange city with Dad. Quiet Marie, who smoked hash and went hours at a time without speaking, did not seem as if she’d be any help if things started getting dangerous.

  David spent the whole day hiding out in the little valley, thinking alternately of Dad and of nothing at all. When he grew tired of sitting he’d walk around, pitching stones and practicing his dancing. He worried about growing up to be a bad dancer. Then he’d go back and sit on the car seat some more. By afternoon the seat had come to seem like his rightful home, the only place he had ever lived.

  He estimated when it was time to go back. He forced himself to wait until the sunlight had turned golden and his shadow stretched out long and thin, for fear of leaving too early and getting caught walking around the neighborhood. He realized when he climbed up out of the valley and started across the bare field that he’d probably waited too long; school might have been out for an hour by now. As he walked through the concrete gutter a kid in one of the backyards, a kid from third or fourth grade, stared at him. The kid sat cross-legged on a redwood picnic table, squeezing a yellow tennis ball. He was foreign-looking, with big astonished eyes and thin purplish lips. David had seen him around. It occurred to him that he hated this kid; this kid was everything weak and stupid in the world. David hollered, “Stop staring at me or I’ll climb over this fence and pound you.” To his surprised satisfaction the kid jumped up, terrified, and ran inside through the sliding glass door. David hurried on.

  He got to the house forty-five minutes late, but Mom still wasn’t home. He remembered she had a doctor’s appointment today. The heavy afternoon stillness hung in the house, squares of yellow sunlight stalled on the living room carpet. Time always stood like this until Mom came in. She tipped the balance and things tumbled with increasing speed toward evening, din
ner, TV, bed. David had for a long while been afraid that if Mom ever failed to come home the house would stay frozen, with nothing connecting one minute to the next. The enormousness of her importance made her seem correspondingly prone to accident. Last year he had had a habit of phoning the office if she was so much as ten minutes late, but she made him stop doing it.

  Janet didn’t seem to be home. He walked upstairs, avoiding the fifth tread, to clean himself in the bathroom. He had decided not to tell anyone about the fight with Billy, at least not until he understood it better. At the moment it struck him as embarrassing, his not knowing why Billy jumped on him. What if the reason was obvious to everybody else?

  When he passed Lizzie’s room he heard her inside, talking to Pia Rogovsky, her current friend, who David called Pee-U Rogovsky because she smelled like a combination of Vicks and old cooking. Lizzie fought with all her friends and had to find new ones every couple of months. Pia Rogovsky had pierced ears with little gold hoops in them, and she lived in a world of blissful puzzlement that put her beyond insult.

  David went into the bathroom and got a look at himself in the mirror. A thin circle of dry brown blood clung to one nostril, and he had a little bruise on his forehead, no more prominent than a brown spot on an apple. It was less than he’d expected. He took off his dirty jeans and shirt and stuffed themin the clothes hamper, then went to his room in just his underpants, hoping Pia Rogovsky would choose that moment to step out of Lizzie’s room and see him. She didn’t. He put on his old jeans and the Stevie Wonder T-shirt and lay down on his bed to look at the stars.

  The first of the phone calls came about half an hour later, just before Mom was due home. David ran for it and beat Lizzie by four or five feet. When he said “Hello,” though, the caller hung up. David kept the receiver to his ear for a second before putting it back.