by Pete Hautman
He sorted through the bills and counted out four hundred dollars, all in twenties. There was plenty left.
“Four hundred, right?” he said as he handed them to me.
“Yeah . . . Um . . . where’d you get all the cash?”
“Here and there. You know, I mow almost every lawn on the block.”
“You do?” I’d had no idea. “But you never spend any money. You’re the cheapest guy I know!”
“That’s how come I can afford to buy your Wonder Woman. I’ll probably sell it on eBay.”
“Whatever.” I picked up my box of junk. “See you.”
Garf followed me outside with his skateboard under one arm and his new shoes slung over his shoulder.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Park.”
The skateboard park was on the way to my house.
Neither of us spoke for the first block. I was irritated about him planning to sell Wonder Woman. I’d been thinking he bought the doll because he wanted to help me out, and because he liked Wonder Woman. But it turns out it was just a business deal for him, a way to fill up his cigar box with more money.
“How much are you going to sell it for?” I asked him.
Garf shrugged. “I’ll have to do some research.”
“I didn’t know you were such a wheeler-dealer.”
“It’s not like you know anything about me.”
He had a point. We’d been friends for six or seven months, but most of the time we just talked about comics and movies and games. I supposed there were things he didn’t know about me, too.
“I mean, you spent practically the whole summer with Gaia.”
Thud. Why did he have to mention her name?
“And now that she’s dumped you, we’re hanging out again.”
I wanted to tell him to shut up, but I didn’t say anything. My chest felt all bubbly, like there was an explosion building inside my rib cage.
“Where’d she go, anyway?”
“I don’t know.” My voice sounded as if it was somebody else talking.
“You don’t know?”
“She’s staying with Maeve.”
“Maeve Samms? Didn’t she move to a farm or something?”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do. What did you do to piss her off, anyway?”
That did it. I dropped the box. Plastic rattled, matching the sound in my head. Garf, surprised, stopped walking. I snatched the shoes off his shoulder, swung them once, and sent them flying like a bola, end over end. It was a perfect throw, even though I hadn’t been aiming. They hit a power line and wrapped around it, then hung there swinging, thirty feet up, sticky rubber soles bouncing off each other.
Garf stared up at his shoes, his mouth hanging open.
I picked up my box of junk and upended it. Darth Vaders hit the sidewalk with a noisy clatter. I threw the empty box out onto the street.
“Sell them on eBay,” I said. My voice sounded shaky and far away. “Buy yourself a new pair of shoes.”
“Fast Car”
Tracy Chapman
4:57
The Kansas City Greyhound depot is in an industrial area. I get off the bus still half-asleep. Dave steps out right behind me. We both stand there looking around. I’m trying to figure out which way is south. Prairie Village is about eight miles away. I’ll have to walk.
“You got a ride coming?” Dave asks.
“No, I’m walking,” I tell him. “Do you know which way Prairie Village is?”
He points, then says, “My girl is picking me up. We could give you a lift if you want.”
“Sure!” My luck must be changing. “Thank you!”
“She should be here anytime now. You’ll like her. Pam’s great!”
Dave and I grab some drinks and snacks from the vending machines inside and wait in the parking lot. Dave watches the cars coming down the street. He’s smiling, but his brow is furrowed. He reminds me of a worried dog waiting for his master to get home.
“How do you stay so happy all the time?” I ask him.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re so positive. I’m kind of jealous. Like with that waitress last night. She was a total sourpuss until you showed up, and then she got all cheerful.”
“If people think you’re glad to see them, they’re nicer. If you act like you think they’re nice, they act nice to you. Nice makes nice, that’s what my mom always told me.”
“I think I’m the opposite. The people I meet always turn out to be assholes. I’m an asshole magnet.”
He laughs as if I’ve just made the funniest joke in the world. I laugh too.
“I guess that makes me an asshole,” he says, still laughing.
“No! You’re an exception.”
“Thank you.”
“How do you do it?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I guess it just comes natural. Hey! That’s Pam!”
A small SUV pulls into the lot. Dave waves. She pulls up alongside us and rolls down her window. Pam is blond, about thirty years old, with frown lines framing her thin lips.
“Sorry I’m late, DQ,” she says, making it sound as if she is not sorry at all.
“No problem,” Dave says. “God, you are beautiful!”
She rolls her eyes and pops the tailgate. Dave throws his bag in back. She is looking at me with a weary, puzzled expression. I don’t know if I should introduce myself or what.
“Pam, this is my friend Stiggy. I told him we could give him a lift.”
Pam is clearly not pleased. “Lift to where?”
“Perfect Village. He has to pick up his car.”
“And I have to get back to work.”
“It’s cool, Pam. It’s almost on the way.” He’s giving his smile everything he’s got.
Pam tries to hold it back, but she gives up and grins back at him. “You are so full of it, DQ. Prairie Village is the other way.”
He grins. “You know I got no sense of direction.”
“You’ve got no sense of any kind.” Still smiling.
I say, “It’s okay. I don’t want to inconvenience you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says. “Hop in.”
Dave walks around to the passenger door; I get in back, and she takes off.
“How’s Trent?” she asks.
“He’s doing great! I mean, considering he’s in jail. Seems happy enough.”
Pam shakes her head. “You Quigleys, I swear to God. You’d call tornado weather a beautiful day.”
Dave laughs and turns to look at me. “Do you have an address?”
I dig out the cell phone bill and read off Bran’s address.
“You know where that is?” Dave asks Pam.
“No, but my phone does.” She thumbs the address into her phone, driving with one hand on the wheel and one eye on the road. “Fourteen minutes,” she says, and speeds up.
I spend the next fourteen minutes in a mental loop. Dave and Pam are talking, but I’m not listening. I’m wondering what the chances are that Bran—and my car—are actually going to be there. He could be anywhere in the country. And if he’s not there, then what? Walk back to the bus station? Hitch a ride and hope I don’t get picked up by another pair of meth heads? And hitch a ride to where? Right now, I have no destination sounds pretty damn unappealing.
We enter Prairie Village, and I can see right away how it got its nickname. It’s a suburb of curving streets, gentle hills, and immaculate houses with immaculate yards. The maples on every block are blazing red and orange like they’ve been programmed for fall, and the shrubbery is trimmed with cartoonish precision. It’s one of those almost-wealthy neighborhoods—not mansion and chauffeured-limousine rich, but a lot richer than where I grew up. It figures that Bran would come from a place like this.
We come to one of those homes that are designed to look older than they are, with fake-weathered brick front, a red tile roof, and a circular driveway.
“This the pl
ace?” Pam says.
I can see the Mustang from the street, parked under an arbor next to the garage, and my heart almost explodes.
“Yes!”
My car! Where I thought it would be! I claw at the door handle. Dave throws an arm over the seat and grabs my shoulder.
“Easy,” he says. “Wait for us to stop.”
“That’s my car!” I exclaim.
“Cool. Just be cool.”
Pam brings her car to a stop a few yards past the driveway. Dave shifts around in his seat and gives me an uncharacteristically somber look.
“This dude stole your car, right?”
I nod.
“You got another set of keys?”
I don’t.
“So, what are you gonna do?”
“Knock on the door?”
“You want me to go with you?”
“D!” Pam jabs him with her elbow. “I have to get back to work!”
“I’ll be fine,” I say as I shoulder open the door. I’m not sure that’s true, but I don’t want Dave’s smile to get my car back. I don’t want there to be any smiling.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” I step out. “Thanks for the ride.”
“No problem!” Dave gives me one last grin for the road. I close the car door, and they drive off. I walk across the perfect lawn to my car. Maybe he left the key in it. Nope, the doors are locked. I peer through the driver’s side window. Except for a couple of crumpled McDonald’s bags on the passenger seat, it looks okay. But I need my keys.
I cross the cobblestone driveway. The front door is massive. It looks as if it has been hammered by a thousand workers with tiny hammers, then painted over—fake antique. A brass door knocker is affixed to the door at head height, but it’s fake too. It takes me a minute to find the doorbell, which turns out to be a button on the fake door knocker. I press it and hear, faintly, a series of chimes from inside the house.
It takes approximately forever. I look up and see a beige plastic box mounted above the lintel. Security camera. The door opens. A woman looks out at me. She has a face like a marble statue and a helmet of platinum blond hair that looks as if it would crack under pressure.
“Can I help you?” she says.
I haven’t rehearsed what I’ll say. What comes out sounds like a croak.
“That’s my car,” I say, pointing toward the Mustang.
She doesn’t exactly roll her eyes, but her lack of expression conveys as much. She closes the door partway and calls out.
“Brandon! One of your friends is here.” She leaves the door slightly ajar. Not open enough to imply an invitation to come in, so I stay where I am. After another minute the door opens wide.
I almost don’t recognize him. Bran’s hair is now short, clean, and brushed back from his forehead. He is wearing clean jeans and a white polo shirt almost identical to mine, except his is newer and whiter. Instead of a penguin embroidered on the left chest, his has a little red-and-blue KU.
His eyes widen when he sees me, but it only lasts a moment before he recovers his blasé face.
“Oh,” he says. “You. What do you want?”
“What do you think? You stole my car!” My fists are bunched hard, and I’m shaking.
He shrugs and sniffs. “I just borrowed it, dude. Don’t get all drama queen. I don’t want your crappy car.”
“Give me my keys!”
“All right, all right. Just hang on.” He backs away and disappears. I step inside. The entrance foyer is enormous. An elaborate chandelier hangs from the twenty-foot-high ceiling. Bran is ascending a curving, carpeted staircase. The woman—his mother, I assume—is posed with her arms crossed in front of a side table. On the table is the life-size armless torso of a goddess. A plaster copy of some Roman relic, I think. The woman and the goddess look like they could be related.
“Your son stole my car,” I say.
Her mouth tightens slightly. “Brandon borrowed your car,” she says, as if correcting a grammatical error.
“Yeah, right. Without permission. Then drove it three hundred miles away.”
No reaction. A few seconds later Bran comes padding down the stairs. He is barefoot. A set of keys dangles from his forefinger. When he reaches the bottom step, he flicks his wrist and the keys come flying toward me. I catch them, barely.
“You’re a real asshole, you know that?” I say.
Bran smiles and shrugs one shoulder.
“I think you should leave now,” his mother says.
I look at the keys. Car key, house key, and a key to my bike lock. No reason to stay, but I’m mad, and I want some acknowledgment that I’ve been wronged.
“He owes me money,” I say to his mother.
“I didn’t take your money!” Bran says.
“You took my car. I had to come all the way across Missouri to find it. You owe me—” I don’t know what he owes me. “You owe me bus fare at least! And for my time.”
Bran’s mother makes a pfft sound with her lips and lifts her purse from the table behind her. She opens her wallet, extracts a bill, and hands it to Bran.
“Give this to the boy, Brandon,” she says.
Bran twists his face into a pained expression, then crosses the foyer and thrusts the bill at me. It’s a hundred dollars. More than I expected, since I didn’t think I’d get anything.
“Thanks, Cake,” I say.
The startled expression on his face almost makes it worth it.
Dreams
Getting rid of all my Darth Vaders—and Garf along with them, I guess—felt like tearing off a scab. It hurt, but in a way I was relieved. It was as if I’d moved on to the next thing, whatever that was.
Mom was sitting in the kitchen in her Zumba outfit with a cup of herbal tea, staring into space the way she did a lot. She barely acknowledged me when I walked past her and grabbed a carton of orange juice from the fridge. I guess I didn’t acknowledge her, either. We’d been ignoring each other a lot lately. I drank the juice straight from the carton. Usually she would yell at me for doing that, but she didn’t. She did look at me, though.
“How was school?” she asked, pretending to care.
I shrugged. “Same old.”
She nodded. I went to my room and looked at the empty shelves. I counted the money in my wallet. I called Gaia’s number and listened to the voice telling me that the number was no longer in service. I looked at the blister on my heel. The loose skin had rubbed off from walking to Brain Food, and there was just a weeping red circle the size of a quarter. I got some ointment from the bathroom cabinet and smeared it on and put on a Band-Aid that didn’t quite cover it. I turned on my computer and searched for Prairie du Chien on Google Maps. Turns out it’s a small town on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi, a couple hundred miles southeast of Saint Andrew Valley. I clicked on satellite view, zoomed down to street level and cruised around town. I saw frozen images of people walking, driving, sitting. None of them were Gaia. Of course not—those photos had been shot in the spring. I could tell from the lilacs blooming. Gaia and I had just been getting to know each other back then. Besides, what if I had seen her? She didn’t want anything to do with me.
I flopped down on my bed and put my pillow over my face, wrapped my arms around it, and squeezed it over my ears so I couldn’t see or hear, wishing there was something I could do to shut down what I was feeling. A drug, maybe, like a huge shot of novocaine that would make my body and mind completely numb. Was that how drug addicts got started? Something bad happened, and all they wanted was to shut it down? Was that what had made my dad shoot himself in the neck on a park bench all alone? What if it was genetic?
No. My grandparents—the three I had left—had all made it into their eighties, and so far as I knew, none of them were suicidal. Although, Grandma Teresa—my dad’s mom—was kind of cranky. I couldn’t blame her. She lived in a senior living place up in Saint Cloud with a bunch of other cranky old people.
Why was I thinking about Grandma
Teresa? I squeezed the pillow harder, so hard I could feel my skull pressing in on my brain, and I saw Garf’s new shoes swinging from that wire. I blocked that out and thought about Gaia alone in the caves with a dead flashlight, feeling her way along the rough sandstone walls.
I couldn’t breathe. Was it possible to smother yourself? I’d probably just pass out.
I let go. I could see the impression of my face on the pillow, the dent where my nose had been and two wet spots from my eyes. I’d been crying and I hadn’t even known it. I threw the pillow aside and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling, more familiar to me than my own face. I waited for the next god-awful thought to descend upon me. Something inside my abdomen stirred, a new sensation. Hunger! Yes! I could do something about that! I turned my head and looked at the clock. Seven-forty-six? How had it gotten so late?
Out in the hallway it was dark, but I could see a bar of light beneath Mom’s bedroom door. I went to the kitchen. The sink was full of dishes, and there was one place setting at the table with a chicken breast, some fried potatoes, and a cucumber salad on the plate. Why hadn’t she called me for dinner? Maybe she had, and I hadn’t heard her because I’d had the pillow wrapped around my head.
I ate the cold chicken and the cold potatoes and the salad, then found a bag of chips in the cupboard and crunched on those until they were gone. When I stopped chewing, the silence was sudden and complete. What was my mom doing? I went to her bedroom door and listened. After a minute of hearing nothing, I knocked.
“Mom?”
“What?” Her voice sounded normal. Some of the tension went out of me. I didn’t want to think about what I’d been thinking.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just wasn’t sure you were home.”
“I’m reading.”
Of course she was reading. She read all the time. But usually she read in her chair in the living room, not in bed with her door closed.
“Okay,” I said.
I washed the dishes, a task I usually hated, but on that night I welcomed the mindlessness of it: wash, rinse, dry, repeat. When I’d finished, I went out to the garage and sat in Dad’s car, hands on the wheel, eyes closed, imagining a road, any road. I saw the landscape flashing by, and something on the horizon. A mountain? Clouds? Smoke? What was the last thing my dad saw? The river? The trees? The sky?
