I was getting this kind of attention lately, and it was still new. Back inland near the Air Force base, the last place my mom and I had lived, I’d flown under the radar. I wore whatever clothes she found for me. I’d always hated my curly hair, so dark brown it might as well have been black except in the brightest sunlight. It tended to mat. I had broken a comb in it before. Then one glorious day last summer, I’d seen a makeover show on TV that said curly girls needed to make peace with their hair, get a good cut, use some product, and let it dry naturally. I did what I could with a cheap salon on my side of town and discount store product. The result was much better, and I’d made myself over completely in the weeks before we’d moved.
At my new school, my makeover had the desired effect. Nobody felt sorry for me anymore because my mom wasn’t taking care of me and I didn’t know how to take care of myself. I took care of myself and I looked it. The downside was that I’d gotten stares like these from boys like Mark, which prompted girls to label me a slut and stay away from me. But I knew what I was. I held my head high. Exchanging sympathy for pride was a fair trade-off.
Until I actually found myself entangled in a boy’s come-on, and then I wasn’t so sure. Supporting himself against the back of the seat as the bus rounded a bend, Mark crossed the aisle and bumped his hip against mine, making me scoot over to give him room to sit down. He glanced at my hand on my pocket and asked, “Can I help you with that?”
If he’d asked me a few months ago, I might have said yes. He didn’t have that solid, handsome look of older boys at school who’d gained muscle to go with their height. But for a gawky fifteen-year-old, he was good looking, with sleepy, stoned eyes that moved over me without embarrassment, and dark hair that separated into clumps like he wasn’t showering every day because he stayed out late drinking and nearly missed the bus in the morning. He was the type of guy I always found myself with, the adrenaline junkie who talked me into doing things for a rush that I wouldn’t have done on my own.
He reminded me of my boyfriend from the trailer park near the Air Force base, who apparently hadn’t minded that my hair was matted as long as he got in my pants. He’d convinced me to do it with him in the woods at the edge of the airstrip, with airplanes taking off low over us, exactly where they would crash if something went wrong. Through the sex and the rush and the sight of the streamlined underbellies of the planes, something had happened to me. And I had wanted more of it.
But when I told him I was moving to Heaven Beach, he took up with my best friend the same day. I was through with boys “helping me with that,” at least for a while. I glared at Mark as I stood up in the narrow space between the seats. “Move. I have to get off.”
He grinned. “Like I said, I can help you with that.”
Now I got angry. A nice boy from a good family, or even a not-so-nice boy like Mr. Hall’s hot and troubled son Grayson, wouldn’t make a comment loaded with innuendo to a nice girl from a good family. If I were stepping down from the bus at the rich end of town instead of the trailer park, I wouldn’t have to watch every word I said to make sure it wasn’t slang for an orgasm. God. I tried to slide past him.
“Come on, Leah. Why are you stopping here? Why aren’t you staying on the bus with me until the airport?” His words were a challenge, but underneath the bravado, I could hear the hurt. I shouldn’t push him too far and let him know I was avoiding him. For hurting his pride, he would make things worse for me at school if he was able.
“My mom likes to see me between school and work,” I flat-out lied. No way would I tell him the truth. He would mess things up just to get a rise out of me. The days I’d made the mistake of getting off the bus at the airport with him, he’d followed me into the office and lingered there, asking for brochures, asking for maps, threatening to set the break room on fire with his lighter if I didn’t pay him some attention, until he finally had to mosey over to the crop-duster hangar or get in trouble with his uncle.
The bus squeaked to a stop on the two-lane highway and opened its door to the gravel road into the trailer park. Ben Reynolds and Aaron Traynor stomped down the hollow stairs. If I didn’t make it to the front in the next few seconds, I’d miss this stop. I’d have to walk through the airport with Mark and backtrack to my trailer. I would die if I found out when I finally made it home that I’d missed my mom.
I banged into Mark again and said as forcefully as I could without the five people left on the bus turning around to stare, “Move.”
Hooded eyes resentful, he shifted his knees into the aisle, giving me room to slide out. As I hurried up the aisle, he called after me, “Smell you tomorrow.” A couple of girls tittered.
I felt myself flushing red. I did not smell. He probably did, judging from his hair today. But people expected me to smell. All he had to do was say the word at school, and everybody would believe it. In my mind I was already going through my closet for what to wear tomorrow, making sure it looked as hip and stylish as I could manage on no budget at all.
I took the last big step down to the road and squinted against the bright sunlight as the bus lumbered away. Ben blocked my path into the trailer park. His fingers formed a V around his mouth, and he waggled his tongue at me. Aaron stood behind him, laughing.
Training my eyes on the cement-block washateria that served the trailer park, I started walking. The TV said you should ignore bullies and they would stop harassing you. In practice this worked about half the time. The other half, you ended up with two tall boys shadowing you through a trailer park, their fingers taking little nips at your clothes, like dogs. But today the advice worked. Aaron picked up a handful of gravel and threw it at Ben’s crotch, then took off running. Ben chased him. They faded into the trailer park.
I felt relieved until I touched the permission form in my pocket again. Please be home. Now that the confrontation with my mother was imminent, my stomach twisted. Suddenly I was not in such a hurry. Anyway, if she happened to be home, she couldn’t escape me. There was only one road into the trailer park and one road out. I dragged my feet around the washateria to the side where the mailboxes were set into the wall so they were harder to break into, and unlocked ours with my teeth gritted. I had been checking the mail since I was ten because my mom never did. I’d been the bearer of bad news for the last three evictions, and I always expected that business-size envelope. There wasn’t one today, only junk, which I dumped in the trash. The nicer sections of Heaven Beach placed recycling bins next to the trash cans. The trailer park did not recycle.
Please be home. I fished my cigarettes out of my purse and lit one, relaxing into the first rush of nicotine. Back in our last town, my boyfriend had snuck cigarettes to me. Now that I had to buy them, they were a huge ding in my paycheck. I had tried to quit, but they were the only thing I looked forward to every day besides watching airplanes. Please be home. I entered the dark opening in the woods. Gravel crunched under my feet. Country music blasted from a trailer even though all the windows were shut. At least I knew someone was home. If Ben or Aaron came back, I could call for help if I needed it. Of course, my mom had called for help plenty of times in trailer parks when no one had come. Please be home.
I reached our lot, rounded the palmettos, and stopped short. A car older than me, faded red with a blue passenger door, was parked in the dirt yard. My mom didn’t have a car. A shirtless man with a long, gray ponytail edged out of the trailer, onto the wobbly cement blocks stacked as stairs, holding one end of the TV that had appeared soon after we moved in last month. We were being robbed again. Nicotine pumped through me and made me dizzy as I turned to run for the country music trailer.
Then the man was backing down the stairs, and my mom appeared in the doorway on the other end of the TV. I didn’t recognize her at first. She’d been a bleach blonde the last time I saw her a few days ago. Now she was a bright redhead. I knew it was her by the way she walked.
I exhaled smoke. The man must be my mom’s boyfriend. She’d said we were moving here
to Heaven Beach because he was going to get her a job at the restaurant where he worked. But she hadn’t gotten a job yet, and he hadn’t come over while I was home. I’d begun to think she’d made him up. Sometimes we moved because a boyfriend said he would get her a job. Sometimes this was what she told me at first, but I’d find out later we’d really moved because she’d owed someone money.
She must have been telling the truth this time. A TV was the first thing she asked for from her boyfriends because she knew I loved it. It kept me company. It was also the first thing to get pawned because it was worth so much cash and was easy to carry. The refrigerator had been pawned only once.
“Hey, hon!” my mom called to me. “Open that door for Billy, would you?”
I opened the driver’s door of the car and leaned the seat forward so they could wrangle the TV into the back. They had a hard time of it, cussing at each other. The TV was almost as big as the backseat itself. They propped one end inside. My mom held it while Billy sauntered around the car. While she was bent over like that, it was obvious her shorts were too tight, but she still had a great figure for a mom. She should have, since she was only thirty.
Finally she straightened, left the door propped open for Billy to slide into the driver’s seat, and turned to me. “You look so pretty today! Give me a hug.”
I walked into her embrace and felt my whole body relax, just like after my first puff on a cigarette. At the same time, I held my lit butt way out so it wouldn’t set her hair on fire. I wasn’t trying to hide the cigarette. I’d gotten over my fear of her seeing me smoking. I’d thought at first that she’d be mad, but she’d walked in on me smoking a couple of times and hadn’t said a word.
She squeezed me and let me go. “I’m sorry we have to take the TV. Billy needs to make a car payment.”
This was either a lie or just stupid. Who would make payments on this car?
“It’ll only be for a few weeks,” she said, “until he gets paid.”
Also a lie or stupid. Pawnshops didn’t work this way. They would give Billy so little money for this TV and charge him such high interest to retrieve it that I would never see it again. Besides, if he didn’t have enough money to live on now, this was not going to change the next time he got a paycheck. I’d been through this scenario with my mom and her boyfriends enough times to predict the outcome. I was never sure whether she didn’t know or didn’t care or simply saw no way out.
She flinched and her eyes snapped skyward as a plane roared overhead. The trailer park was at the end of the airstrip where the planes landed. The prickly forest shielded the trailers from some of the noise, so the planes could sneak up like this. The unlikely piece of machinery suddenly appeared overhead and loomed in the sky as if by magic, slow enough to look like it ought to fall, loud enough to vibrate the corrugated metal of the trailers. Adrenaline rushed through my veins, like nicotine but better.
“God, I hate those fucking airplanes,” my mom said. “Billy’s going to get me that job soon and we’ll move someplace nice, I promise.”
“Okay,” I said with no emotion. She said stuff like this all the time. Occasionally she really did get a job, but the longest she lasted was a month. I watched the plane until it dropped behind a stand of pines. Even after that I could hear the engine, and I looked in the direction of the airstrip where it had gone.
“Wait a minute,” my mom said. “You have some money you could give to Billy.”
My cigarette had burned down to the filter. I took a drag anyway as I turned back to my mom, concentrating on not glancing down at my pocket where all my money was. Exhaling smoke, I asked casually, “From the airport? I don’t make very much. They take out taxes. And I’m already paying the power and the water.”
The afternoon light glinted weirdly off the creases in her heavy blue eye shadow as she considered me skeptically. “You work there every day after school and all weekend long.”
“Actually…” I was horrified at how easily the lie came out. “I’m not working half the time I’m there. They won’t give me enough hours. My boyfriend works there, and I hang out with him.”
“Really,” my mom said, raising her penciled eyebrows. “What’s his name?”
Mark. Mark was the obvious answer, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell that fib. Before I knew what I was saying, this came out: “Grayson Hall. His dad owns the airplanes that tow the advertising banners at the beach.”
“I hate those things,” she said. “But a boy like that, maybe he’ll stay in school and amount to something.”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling sick.
“Sheryl,” Billy called from inside the car. “This year.”
“See you soon, hon,” my mom said. She air-kissed her fingertips and blew the kiss to me, then shuffled around the car, kicking up dust, and got in on the other side.
Waving to the car as it disappeared into the forest, I realized I was still holding a dead cigarette. Normally I would have taken it inside, made sure the fire was out, and deposited the butt in the trash. Today I tossed it onto the dirt along with countless butts from my mom and everyone who’d ever lived here, then climbed the cement blocks and went inside the trailer.
The wall where the TV had been looked bare, even though it wasn’t. Before the TV had appeared, my mom had hung my first-, second-, and third-grade school photos there in frames. Fourth grade was the year she started saying the school was gouging her and the pictures were highway robbery. My newly exposed smiling faces watched me as I passed through the combined den and kitchen. I escaped down the hall and into my bedroom, where I opened my dresser drawer and pulled out the trailer lease agreement. My mom threw stuff like this away. I tried to snag it from her first. Sometimes having the paperwork helped when a landlord wanted to kick us out. This time it would help me forge her signature.
I pulled the permission form out of my pocket and unfolded it. For something to press down on, I drew the magazine off the top of my dresser: last month’s issue of Plane & Pilot, which I’d borrowed from the airport office. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time. I liked to read the articles in bed at night. They kept me company. I’d always intended to take the magazine back. Suddenly I felt like a thief.
And I wasn’t done. Watching my mom’s signature on the lease, I copied the S in Sheryl onto the permission form. It wasn’t a perfect imitation. My hand shook. But Mr. Hall wouldn’t have her signature on file for comparison like the school did. I copied heryl. I was going to get in trouble for this. It would come back to haunt me, I knew. I copied the J in Jones. The alternative was to stay on the ground and never go up in an airplane. I copied ones. Go ahead and fork over my last dollar to my mom so she and Billy or whoever her boyfriend was that month could fund a party with my money, he could get a new fishing rod and a shotgun, they could pawn it all for beer money or for crack if he was one of those boyfriends, then try to win the money back at the Indian casino in North Carolina. I underlined Sheryl Jones just as she did, like an eighth grader still in love with her own signature.
I pocketed the form. With the magazine under my elbow, I locked the trailer door behind me and walked to work. I skirted just beyond reach of my neighbor’s chained pit bull, prompting the dog to bark and lunge maniacally at me. As I popped out of the forest, into the long, wide clearing, the barking was drowned out by an airplane engine. The World War II Stearman biplane that Mark’s uncle once used for crop dusting was coming in for a landing.
Mark had told me that his uncle, Mr. Simon, had bought three Air Tractors just recently—the ugliest planes I’d seen at the airport yet, with ridiculously long noses and harsh angles, painted garish yellow. Now that Mr. Simon used those monstrosities for crop dusting, he’d converted the biplane back into a passenger plane so one of the crop-duster pilots could give tourists a joyride.
The biplane was beautiful, the huge motor in the nose balanced by the long wings above and below. It looked like it had soared out of a time machine. I watched it sail downward
and held my breath for the crash—but planes always seemed to me like they should crash. None of them had actually crashed while I’d been a witness. The biplane skimmed to a smooth landing and slowed. I tripped and realized I’d stumbled out of the long grass and onto the asphalt tarmac.
Way in the distance, the men of the airport lounged in rocking chairs on the office porch. Mr. Hall. The Admiral, an actual retired admiral who looked anything but in his cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirt. Mr. Simon, looking exactly like the owner of a crop-dusting business in overalls and a baseball hat from an airplane manufacturer. Another retired Navy guy—Heaven Beach was a popular place for them to settle. The jet pilot for one of the local corporations. As I drew close, several of them turned to watch me.
As I reached hearing distance, all of them watched me, and they fell completely silent. I was sure they were staring at the copy of Plane & Pilot under my arm. I hoped my elbow covered the label with the airport address. I stepped under the awning.
Mr. Hall said, “Hello, Leah.”
“Hello, Leah. Good afternoon, Leah,” came a chorus of voices.
I grinned blankly, staring past them at the runway, as I backed through the glass door.
The town sent one of their maintenance guys, Leon, to take care of the airport when I wasn’t around. He put chocks under airplane wheels just fine, but he didn’t have the greatest telephone skills, and I’d made him promise never to touch the files because I wasn’t a hundred percent sure he could read. I took the keys and the airport cell phone from him. After he left, I listened to the messages he’d let go to voice mail. As I called a man back about renting a hangar and went over the lease agreement with him, my skin caught on fire. If I got caught forging my mother’s name on Mr. Hall’s permission form, I couldn’t very well claim I was only fourteen years old and didn’t understand what was legal in paperwork and what wasn’t.
Going Too Far Page 22
