Whippoorwill

by Joseph Monninger

  “Smitty’s. It’s up in North Haverhill.”

  It was such a bizarre question, I didn’t know what to say. I squatted next to Wally and petted him.

  “Sure,” I said. “I guess.”

  My stomach turned and vibrated and I thought I would throw up as soon as I said yes. I didn’t know why I said yes, but I did. It would have seemed weird to say no, because we had just finished with Wally. Luckily, we both continued petting the dog, giving more attention to the task than it deserved. I asked myself a series of stupid questions, but the main thing that kept going through my head was Danny Stewart?

  Not in a million years did I think of Danny Stewart as someone to date.

  And was it a date? I couldn’t even be sure of that.

  “You’re saying right now?” I asked, because I wasn’t clear on what he was proposing.

  “Yeah. You should probably grab a sweater or something.”

  “Let me run inside and leave a note for my dad. We won’t be back late, will we?”

  “Maybe I’ll kidnap you,” he said. “Ever think of that?”

  “That’s a weird thing to say.”

  “I’m just playing. Go ahead. I’m going to clean up. I’ll meet you back here in a minute.”

  Danny Stewart, I thought as I walked back to our house. Danny Jerk-face Stewart.

  My hand shook when I wrote a note for my dad.

  Grabbing a hamburger with Danny Stewart. Up at Smitty’s in North Haverhill. Won’t be late.

  I made a heart and signed my name. Dad would know, as well as I did, that what I left out of the note was way bigger than what I had put in it. Like: What in the world was I doing with Danny Stewart? Like: Who said I had permission to drive around with boys? Like: Who even knew I could date anyone?

  By leaving things out, by being casual about it, I had made the note much more dramatic than I intended. It was not a big deal, I wanted to say. But saying it was not a big deal was a way to make it a big deal, so I kept it short and sweet and taped it to the handle of the fridge, where he was sure to go about thirty seconds after he made it home. I didn’t look forward to the discussion we would have when I returned.

  I ran back upstairs and looked at myself in the mirror one last time. Then I sprayed a little bit of perfume—Beautiful by Estée Lauder, my mom’s big bottle that I took after she died—into the air and walked through it. Mom always said that was the way to put on perfume.

  Danny Stewart?

  What was up with those sideburns? I wondered as I came downstairs. And a sweatshirt about the blues? All I knew about Danny Stewart was that he went to the vo-tech, studied cars or diesel mechanics or something, had a maniac for a father, had a mother who sat at her kitchen table chain-smoking for a bunch of years before taking off to parts unknown, and had an uncle somewhere down south. The end.

  I also knew he chucked food at Wally. And then cleaned him up. Too strange.

  He stood next to the stockade fence when I came back.

  “You smell good,” he said.

  “Just soap.”

  “I hope you’re hungry, because they make big burgers up at Smitty’s. You ever had one?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they’re something. Come on.”

  Wally barked when we left. The sun fell on his black fur and you could see rainbow colors if you looked hard enough.

  Six

  HIS CAR WAS NICE. I had to give him that, although you also saw that it was a major big deal to him, and that kind of undermined it. It was a Chevy with the rear end raised up, like some boys like, and it smelled of wax and soap and ammonia. He had put a hula dancer on the top of the dash, and a pair of fuzzy dice on the rearview mirror, and those things inked a kind of thin line in my mind where I couldn’t say if they were cool or complete jerk behavior, because I didn’t know how he intended them.

  He drove hard. Not fast, necessarily, but hard, revving the engine when he could and jamming the brakes when we came to a stop. He wanted to show off, obviously, but he also seemed to think the car needed to be handled that way, and I’d been around my dad and his Harley enough not to think it was completely idiotic. I stared straight ahead and watched him driving from the corner of my eye, and I felt about a million volts of weirdness charging around in my chest. For one thing, he had a really good sound system in the car that he hooked his phone into. He played the blues, exclusively, from what I could tell, but I had a hard time connecting the dots between Danny Stewart, jerk-to-the-ten-millionth-power, and this sort of cool kid slouched behind the steering wheel, listening to blues and driving his muscle car and raking up after his dog.

  Also, the sideburns.

  I couldn’t get over the sideburns. I had known Danny Stewart a long time, almost since we were in kindergarten, and he had not done one cool thing, not even remotely, until he had grown out the sideburns. Driving with him, glancing over in quick bites from time to time, I saw he had a lot of red in his hair, and the sideburns collected most of it. It looked like his hair had leaked color into his sideburns, and they had spread out like two river deltas on either side of his head.

  “You into the blues?” I asked, because you couldn’t drive around in silence all the way up to North Haverhill and back.

  “Bigtime,” he said.

  “How come?”

  He shrugged.

  “I mean,” I said, “is there a reason? Why the blues and not something else?”

  “Why anything? Who knows why? I like the music, that’s all. And the bluesmen are pretty cool.”

  “Did your dad turn you on to them?”

  Danny looked over.

  “My dad is a jackass,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about. It’s just the way it is, that’s all. Some people get decent parents, some don’t, and some get no parents at all. Mine’s a jackass.”

  “Where’d your mom go?” I asked, although I had some ideas and had heard some rumors about violence and hitting.

  “She left. No big deal.”

  “We both live with single dads then. That’s weird.”

  “I guess that’s true. I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  “Funny the way things work out.”

  “I wouldn’t call our home life working out exactly. Would you?”

  “My dad’s okay.”

  “He’s a big Harley man. I respect that.”

  He came to a straightaway and shot past a slow-moving pickup. I imagined I was supposed to ask about the engine under the hood, but I couldn’t come up with a good reason to care. My stomach felt queasy anyway. It was strange having Danny driving, the blues coming through his sound system, the spring landscape pulling at something in my heart. Everything felt sideways, like we were two priests talking through the confessional boxes, both of us staring ahead. I had a hard time figuring out how Danny and I had lived side by side for so long and still knew next to nothing about the other person. My English teacher, Mrs. Philipone, would have found a metaphor about the human condition in that circumstance, but I couldn’t make my mind go there.

  Eventually he pulled into Smitty’s. It wasn’t much of a place from the looks of it. It had one large window in the center of the front wall, and down at the bottom the window had a hairline crack. I followed him inside. He didn’t hold the door for me, but he pushed through first and sort of turned back to make sure I had made it, then he walked right to the counter. The odor of grease turned my stomach.

  “I like the General Lee,” Danny said. “It comes with onions, though, so if you don’t like onions you probably don’t want the General Lee.”

  “I might just have fries.”

  “Oh, you’ve got to have a burger. That’s why we drove up here.”

  “Maybe a kid’s size,” I said, trying to make my eyes read the menu board. I felt jumpy and frazzled. I didn’t want to stuff my face in front of him.

  A girl came over and took his order. He turned and looked at me, waiting. I order
ed a Kid’s Classic, which was about the smallest thing on the menu. We both ordered Cokes. Then he walked over to a linoleum-topped table and sat down. I followed. The girl who took our order said she would call us when our food was ready.

  An old couple sat at the only other occupied table. They ate without talking. The restaurant was partial to country western music, because we heard a twangy song start while we sat. I knew the song, but I didn’t know who sang it. It was all about girls stepping out on a Saturday night.

  “So, you think it’s crazy that we’re sitting here?” Danny asked. “I mean, you know, the way we grew up next to each other?”

  “I don’t know if it’s crazy. It’s a little strange.”

  “You never thought much of me.”

  “I don’t know if that’s fair to say.”

  “Oh, it’s fair to say,” he said, and laughed. “You liked looking down your nose at me.”

  “I didn’t know you.”

  “You didn’t care to know me. That’s the truth. You put me over in a little box and you figured that was all you needed to find out about me.”

  “Danny, you’ve always been a jerk around the neighborhood.”

  He looked at me, then smiled. Then he laughed. It was a good laugh.

  “You’re probably right,” he said. “Don’t spare my feelings.”

  “You just were,” I said, feeling the tension I had held in all evening come bubbling up. “You annoyed a lot of people, not just me. Sorry, but you asked. Besides, you didn’t like me, either.”

  “My dad always called you Apple Annie,” Danny said. “You used to eat apples all the time, so that’s what he called you.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It was just a name he gave you,” Danny said. “Don’t sweat it.”

  “What are we doing here?” I asked.

  “We’re getting a hamburger, that’s all. Is there a law against it?”

  “I mean, why did you ask me to come out here?”

  “Because you’re hot.”

  “I am so not hot,” I said, blushing.

  “Depends who’s looking. I think you are.”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  Danny raised his eyebrows. He had gray eyes, slightly closed lidded, like a cat waking from a nap. I liked watching his face, I realized. He had an expressive face. It was almost like he was acting, but he wasn’t acting, so it was okay. I couldn’t make my mind push past the notion that he thought I was hot. No, I reminded myself, he said I was hot, but that didn’t amount to a hill of beans. Guys said anything to girls. They just did.

  Fortunately, the counter girl called us up for our food before we could go any deeper into things. I went up with Danny, and he paid. I didn’t know if that made it a date or not, but I supposed it did. He had a wallet made of duct tape, I noticed. It was gray and sleek. He slid it back into his pocket and held the tray in front of him on the way back. He told me to grab ketchup and some napkins from a counter. I did. We slid back into the booth just as the music changed. It was still country western, but it was a guy singing about loyalty and horses and something about a pickup.

  “Thank you,” I said when Danny slid my plate off the tray.

  “You’re welcome. They have buffalo burgers you should try sometimes. They taste pretty good and they’re supposed to be better for you.”

  “How’d you find out about this place?”

  “Oh, I don’t spend much time at home if I can help it. Not exactly a fun, family environment.”

  He smiled. It was a joke, I realized. Then he bit into his hamburger. It was big and he had to hold it between his hands like someone playing an enormous harmonica. A little juice dripped back on his plate. At least he kept his mouth closed when he chewed.

  I took a bite. It was good.

  “What I like to do,” Danny said, referring back to how he had found out about the place, although at first I didn’t follow his train of thought, “is drive. I don’t know why. I like driving, and I like working on my car, and it’s just feeling good with the window down. Maybe it’s a boy thing, I don’t know. But I go on little trips and get myself lost, and then I try to figure out how to get home, and how things are laid out. I have a gazetteer under the passenger seat and it has these maps all blown up so you can see the countryside, and I like pulling that out and comparing the roads to where I am and seeing the landmarks. You know, if you pay attention, you can see why things were built the way they were. Like, why did they put in a railroad here, down by the river, and then you realize, well, they had to follow the river because that’s the natural way for the valley to run. I mean, it’s not like they were going to put a train over a mountain, right?”

  “I guess not,” I said, watching him eat three fries.

  “So then you can figure out patterns. If you simply drive along in a car and don’t pay any attention, then it’s just roads going around and around and back and forth. But someone plans those roads, and that sort of interests me. I talked to my vo-tech teacher, Mr. Allan, and he said that’s all surveying and engineering, and he said, when you think about it, roads are parts of a motor, and if you could step back and see, then the entire U.S. is one big car of roads and airports and railroads. Do you see what I mean? You’re not eating.”

  I took another bite and then ate some fries.

  “I see what you mean, I think,” I said.

  “Probably a strange way to look at the world.”

  “Not really,” I said. “It sounds like you think like an engineer.”

  “Maybe. I like taking things apart. Anyway, that’s what I do. I drive around and see things, try to figure out how they work. And I stop for food now and then and I had always heard about Smitty’s, so that’s that.”

  “Why the sideburns?” I asked, and the question was out of my mouth before I could pull it back.

  He touched his finger to his left sideburn and smiled. It was a funny smile, a smile that made you realize he was in on the joke and didn’t take it too seriously.

  “Why not?” he asked. “You don’t like them?”

  “I do like them. I guess I do. I hadn’t noticed them before.”

  “They’re supposed to match the side vents of my car,” he said. “Like tail fins. I like the 1950s.”

  “You’re weird, Danny.”

  “You’re just getting that now?”

  He was sweet on the way back, not hard-charging the way he was on the drive up, and he put his arm out the window and drove with one hand and he played the blues for me. He said the blues reminded him of rivers, that’s the way it was, and the blues players understood about pain and loss, but they made something out of it. He said they spun gold from straw, which was a bit much, was like a line he practiced, but I listened anyway. And the music played over the good sound system, and it squealed and squawked, and cried at its own pain, accepting it for what it was, and I liked that Danny’s hand beat with it on the side of the car sometimes, as if he couldn’t get enough of it, as if it entered his body and had to come out somewhere, and it did come out through his fingers and he discharged it toward the ground outside like electricity, like tiny lightning bolts that passed through him.

  I kept thinking, Is this a date, is this really a date, and is he going to try to kiss me? I thought yes, and I thought no, and I thought about how Danny reminded me of Wally, both of them left to their own devices, and how maybe I was like a Daily Growler that Danny had wanted but couldn’t reach, not sexually, not like that, but like proof of another person in the world, proof that someone else paid attention to him.

  “You want to walk Wally?” Danny asked when we pulled back in his driveway.

  “I do,” I said, glad to have the distraction, glad not to have to think about kissing him one way or the other. “But I should tell my dad where I am.”

  “Okay, I’ll meet you out at Wally’s post.”

  “Thanks for the hamburger.”

  “My pleasure,” he said, although he said it plais-ir
, like French, like it should rhyme with brassiere.

  I hurried through the Stewarts’ yard and then hustled up the stairs to our kitchen. Dad wasn’t there, but he had left a note where I had left mine.

  Gone to Jebby’s for a part. Back soon. Hamburger? Smitty’s? Danny Stewart?

  He had underlined “Danny Stewart” about five times. I couldn’t blame him.

  Seven

  WHAT WE FIND in a dog is what we bring to a dog. That’s what Father Jasper says.

  I felt a little sick walking over to Wally, and excited, too. With my luck I knew Dad would return right when I was over with Danny, and then we would all undergo an awkward, crazy moment or two while Danny and Dad tried to figure each other out. Dad would have to see Danny that way, as a suitor, or at least as a boy marginally interested in his daughter, and Danny would have to see Dad as Dad, an old bearded Harley guy, who maybe wanted to stick up for his daughter.

  All of that was possible. And it was also possible Danny simply wanted to go for a hamburger and I was around so he asked me.

  I couldn’t think it through too much. I saw Danny playing with Wally when I came around the stockade fence that separated our two yards. He had Wally dancing around off the post. I heard the Daily Growler squeaking, and Danny’s voice was high and happy, saying things like “thataboy,” “thereyougo,” “thatsit.” He was probably doing what Father Jasper wouldn’t want him to do, getting Wally crazy and associating human companionship only with play, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him. Danny looked kind of good in the late-evening light, kind of young and happy, and the same way I had seen the puppy in Wally, I now saw the puppy in Danny. He looked like he did before the sideburns, before the jacked-up car and bluesmen, looked like the kid I had occasionally glimpsed in our neighborhood. Cute, sort of.

  “Hey,” I said, coming around, letting him know I was there.

  “Look at this good boy,” Danny said, dancing around with Wally.

  “He’s a nice dog.”

  “He’s a great dog,” Danny said, bouncing around with him.