Whippoorwill

by Joseph Monninger

He bit into his sandwich. He put the sandwich down when Wally came back, and Danny chucked the branch into the water again. Wally launched.

  “Not anybody I want to talk to.”

  “Can we drive by the statue again before we leave?”

  “Sure. We can take more pictures.”

  “I still can’t believe it’s there. Thanks for bringing me, Danny. It means a lot to see it.”

  “Why didn’t your dad ever bring you up?”

  “I don’t know. It’s kind of weird that he didn’t. He’s all tied up about my mom’s death.”

  “How come?”

  “They had a fight, I guess, right before she died. You know. She stormed out of the house and he didn’t go after her, and then she drove off, and next thing you know, she’s in an accident. Dad doesn’t talk about it. No one talks about it. So to come up here and look at the statue, that would mean we had to talk about it. That won’t float with Dad. He’d rather keep it like a deep, sad secret.”

  Danny took a big bite of sandwich, then threw the stick for Wally again. Wally looked a little tired, but he still went after it.

  “Sorry,” he said. “About your mom.”

  “Things happen.”

  He nodded.

  “What about your mom?” I asked, picking at a chip. “She took off? That’s what my dad said.”

  “She went into a state hospital down in Mass. Mental problems.”

  He put his finger to his temple and swirled it around to indicate she was screwy.

  “Is she still alive?”

  “Yeah, she lives down in Florida now with her older sister. She’s not . . . what’s the word? Mentally competent. Her sister is her caretaker. Legal, I mean. I’m supposed to go down to see her one of these days, but it’s a long way to go and her sister is a little worried that me showing up might . . . I don’t know. Unhinge her, I guess.”

  “That’s really too bad.”

  “Well, living with my father wasn’t any joyride for her. He can be rough to be around.”

  Then he changed subjects. I had more questions, but I didn’t want to beat it into the ground.

  “We should give him something to eat,” Danny said, watching Wally.

  “We have some of those pig’s ears that he liked.”

  “So your mom grew up here?”

  “I guess so.”

  “This is north country. Halfway to the North Pole.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Probably be boring to be a kid here unless you were way into the outdoors.”

  “Might be why she got into the whole junk as art thing. She probably couldn’t afford much more. Not real materials, I mean.”

  “That statue is pretty good, though.”

  “It is pretty good. I’m glad it isn’t horrible.”

  “I think it is really cool, actually. I mean, she did it to signal what the town was all about. You know, fishermen.”

  “I wonder who sponsored it.”

  “Probably an arts council or something. Some government money.”

  Danny took another bite, then hopped off the picnic table and grabbed a pig’s ear from the car. When Wally came back, he offered it to Wally, but Wally put the stick down at his feet and waited. Food or play. Danny bent down and picked up the stick and threw it again. He didn’t throw it as far. Wally didn’t jump into the water this time, but simply waded in.

  “He’s going to sleep well tonight,” Danny said.

  “I heard him last night. The mosquitoes were getting him. I was glad you brought him inside.”

  “I was going to talk to you about that. You have any way to bring him in at your house? It’s not quite working out over at my place.”

  “I don’t know. I can talk to Dad about it. He might let me have him in if Wally is well behaved,” I said.

  “He’s still pretty nutty.”

  “He’s getting better, though.”

  “You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to bring him to Father Jasper. I’d like him to meet Wally. I’d like to show him off.”

  “It’s amazing how fast they can learn.”

  “I feel guilty about leaving him on a chain all that time,” Danny said.

  “You didn’t know any better. Neither did I.”

  “Yeah, but that was lousy. It wasn’t fair. Once you know what a nice guy he can be, it feels even worse.”

  A car pulled into the picnic area. It was a man with a small dog, a terrier of some sort, and the dog started barking like crazy when it saw Wally. Danny hurried off to grab Wally, and you saw the reason for training a dog with recall. Wally didn’t come, of course. He trotted over with the stick to investigate the small dog, and it was only luck and fatigue that let Danny snag him. Danny hooked him up and the man with the small dog said something about Wally and patted him.

  Danny walked back with Wally in a heel. Halfway across the picnic area his phone buzzed again. Danny stopped to look at it, shook his head, and then stuck the phone back in his pocket.

  Fifteen

  AFTER LUNCH we started to leave Bolston, but when we got a little south of the town line, Danny spotted a bowling alley on the right-hand side of Route 3. It was an old alley, you could tell, with a vintage neon sign blinking in the afternoon sun, an arrow pointing toward the doors. ECHO LANES, the sign said, OP-N. Next to the sign a LABATT BLUE sign blinked, and next to that a sign said BILLIARDS. Danny slowed and he twisted a little toward me, lifting his eyebrows to ask if I was interested, and I nodded and he pulled in and jammed the car into a giant pothole. His face went white with the impact, and he slowed way down, so slow in fact that it seemed the bump hadn’t shocked the car but shocked him instead. He parked near a few other cars and a small Blue Bird school bus, and as soon as he turned off the engine, he hopped out and went down on the ground to look at the car’s chassis.

  “I hate freaking potholes,” he said, his voice genuinely angry, his head poking way under. “Hate them.”

  “Is it okay?”

  I squatted down beside him, but I didn’t know much about cars or the undercarriages of cars. He alligatored out after punching the muffler with the side of his fist to make sure it hadn’t come loose.

  “It looks okay,” he said. “I hate that. I hate when no one puts up a sign. You could lose an oil pan just like that.”

  He stood and dusted himself off. He took a deep breath, then reached in and petted Wally. Wally looked good and sleepy after all the swimming and exercise. Danny snapped down the locks on the doors and made sure to leave two cracked windows for Wally. He wasn’t going to freeze or fry in the car, given the weather. Besides, the day had grown tired and the bowling alley had already sent a shadow halfway across the parking lot. He was more comfortable here than he was on the pole beside his doghouse, that was for sure.

  “Sometimes I wish I could just keep driving,” Danny said, looking up at the sky. “Sometimes I really do. And if you wanted to come along, that would be even better.”

  “Where would you go?”

  He shrugged.

  “I’d just keep going. I don’t know. There’s something about driving that opens me up. I noticed you didn’t ask where we would go.”

  I blushed a little at that. I don’t know why.

  “You okay?” I asked him, because he looked a little tied up.

  “I’m fine. You ready to bowl?”

  “I’m a horrible bowler,” I said as we walked toward the front doors. “Really bad. Fair warning.”

  “I’m worse. I really, really suck at bowling.”

  But at the same time he grabbed my hand and started running. I couldn’t do anything but run with him, and it felt good to be beside him. We had had a great day and now we would have some more fun, and then we had the long ride home listening to the blues and watching the white lines come at us. I didn’t know if we were boyfriend and girlfriend, didn’t even know if that was something I wanted, but I knew I liked running hand in hand with him. He was still ridiculously Danny Stewart, still t
he weirdo with snow-shovel-shaped sideburns, but he tried to learn and be nice and that counted for something. He wasn’t the dream boy you sometimes hoped for; he was the boy next door, the annoying one, the one you had known forever, but he was real and living and he liked me. That counted for something, I knew now, and I ran with him and stopped just shy of the door. When he pushed through, he twirled me around a little, being fancy, and I nearly fell against an old El Camino that someone had parked inside the lanes as an advertising gimmick. Then he twirled me again and this time it worked and I spun around, feeling surprisingly dainty, and he pulled me toward him, bent one of my arms behind my back, and stopped with his face inches away from mine.

  I thought he was going to kiss me. I wanted him to kiss me, I think, but for a five count, both of us breathing hard, we stood and stared into each other’s eyes. And I had never done that. Not once, not with a boy, not with anyone, and his eyes made my collarbones tingle and I felt my head lean back a little, inviting him, but he simply spun me back the other way and then ran past me to the shoe desk.

  I walked after him, my body feeling clouded and untethered to my head, and I stood beside him and gave the clerk my shoe size, the crash of bowling balls like the sound of something violent and far away.

  “Wally,” Danny wrote on the overhead-projected scorecard.

  Beside it he wrote: “Mrs. Clair Masteller.”

  The last name was the name of my social studies teacher. The name of the biggest idiot teacher in the school.

  He was Wally. I was Mrs. Clair Masteller.

  The thing about bowling, at least for a girl, is that it makes you herky-jerky and unattractive. That’s how I felt, anyway. Maybe the pink-spotted ball I selected weighed too much, but I had trouble even getting it down the lane, and Danny tried coming over and showing me how to do it. I hated that. His lame instruction only made me more nervous, but finally, in about the fifth frame, I bowled a nine and just missed the spare, and Danny told me “Waytogowaytogowaytogo.”

  He wasn’t much better. For one thing, his phone kept ringing, and he finally turned it off and tucked it into his jacket, and then he bowled a little better. He clowned around a lot, throwing one ball between his legs, and another with his foot, and I knew he wanted to show off and I pretended to find it sidesplitting. It wasn’t, though, it wasn’t really funny, and I had another moment of seeing Danny as a somewhat desperate kid, a lonely kid who didn’t quite know how to interact with the world around him, and that observation got caught up in my memory of him holding me close at the bowling alley door and nearly kissing me. I thought of what my dad said, that boys are just wild ponies at this age, and I wondered if he wasn’t correct after all. I wondered, too, how it was possible to feel so many divided emotions about someone, to be so unsure, and I wished, for a minute, that my mom was around, was sitting someplace beside a fire, ready to let me come over and have hot chocolate with her and talk and talk and talk. You couldn’t let some questions just roam around the world. You had to know they had somewhere to go, someplace where they might get honest attention and an attempt at an answer, and I didn’t know if all moms tried to do that, but I hoped they did; I hoped moms helped their daughters understand these wild ponies, because I didn’t understand them at all.

  I didn’t break a hundred and Danny just barely did. We bowled a second game, but the fun had gone out of it, sort of. I couldn’t tell what Danny thought, but for me it seemed like we had gone halfway out on a bridge, maybe a shaky log someone had put over a creek, and we weren’t certain whether it was safer to go forward or back. Danny didn’t monkey around as much the second game and I bowled a little better, but near the last frame, when I walked past the Formica scoring table, he pulled me onto his lap. We had been building up to that all day, and when he finally had me next to him, his breath scented with cinnamon gum, he kissed me again. It felt clumsy and awkward, and I wanted to get up and get away from him, but his arms went around me and then something melted in me and I gave in a little. I kissed him back, my body filling with syrup, my head containing a panicked baby bird flapping around inside my skull, and for a long time we kissed and kissed and kissed. His tongue flicked into my mouth, and I wasn’t sure if that was something I wanted, or understood, but then it started to feel natural and exciting and real. He slipped his hands over my hips, pulling me closer, and when he let go I stood up and pretended it was my turn to bowl, I had to get to it, all official, the game must go on, but my head rattled around and I threw a gutter ball before realizing I had jumped Danny’s turn and bowled in his half of the frame.

  When I turned back from my second ball, I was afraid to meet his eyes. Not afraid, that’s wrong. I just couldn’t meet his eyes.

  “I could go for some fries,” Danny said after we handed our shoes back and the clerk sprayed them down with fungal spray. “You hungry?”

  “A little.”

  “Let’s go to the bar. I can smell something cooking.”

  “Only if I can pay,” I said. “You’ve paid for everything so far.”

  “Okay, twist my arm.”

  The bar was called the Oak Room Tavern, and it was a room that might lie down and take a nap when no one was around. It was 77 percent cheesy and 23 percent retro-cool, and Danny thought it was the best place he had ever seen. It was dark, for one thing, and a bunch of senior citizens played darts at the end of the bar, all of them drinking long-necked beers and talking. They looked up when we came in, but then someone did something pretty good on the dartboard, evidently, and they whooped and let us alone. A short, broad woman with a cheek stud took our order at the bar. She introduced herself as Ally, and volunteered that the fries were real, not frozen junk, and then she gave us two sodas and we carried them to a table on the side of the bar away from the dart players.

  “This place is awesome,” Danny said, sitting and looking around. “Do you like it? I love places like this.”

  “It’s nice. It’s nicer than I thought it would be.”

  “Nice? I’d like to live next to a bar like this someday. You know, like a place you could go to every day, and people would know your name, and you could just, I don’t know, hang out.”

  “It might not be my first choice,” I said, sipping the soda.

  When Danny spotted a jukebox over by the restroom door, he asked me for all my change so that he could play some records. I gave him what I had and he dug in his pockets for more, and something about the way he hoisted himself up off the chair to get to his pockets, and about the way he went over and leaned on the jukebox, made me wonder if he wasn’t a time traveler. He seemed out of his time period; he was like a 1950s teenager, a boy obsessed with his car and the blues and sideburns. I couldn’t tell if he came by it authentically, or if it was a kind of costume he had found to wear for the world, but it made me unsure of what to make of him. I liked kissing him, it was true, and I liked him pulling me onto his lap, the feeling of his boyness, if that was a word, but he was peculiar, too, and unpredictable. It struck me that you could never know another person all the way through, not him, not my mom, not anyone. That wasn’t bad necessarily, just a fact of life, like wearing socks in the winter, or putting on bug spray in summer.

  When the music came on, he asked me to dance with him. There was a little dance floor near the jukebox, so it wasn’t as crazy as it might have seemed, but to dance, really dance, in the middle of the afternoon in a bowling alley didn’t fit into anything I knew. But it seemed important to him, so I gave him my hand and he led me into a swing dance with him, twirling around, holding hands and gliding past him, and I saw he knew what he was doing. Ally the bartender came by carrying the fries, and she smiled at us, no problem, and after she put the food on our table she danced a little beside us, goofing around, shaking her hips, then dance-walking her way back to the bar. That spurred Danny on and he danced me harder, guiding me to try a slide between his legs, and if I hadn’t seen it on an ice-skating show, I wouldn’t have known what he wanted. But we pulle
d it off, me stabbing between his legs, him lifting and spinning, and I nearly fell but he got me back onto my feet and we lurched to the table, laughing hard and feeling absurd, but liking it too.

  “We’re pretty good,” Danny said, laughing. “We’re really not bad.”

  He held out my chair for me and that broke my heart a little bit.

  I didn’t know the happiest Danny had ever been in his life, but that moment—that moment in the bar, his face flushed, his skin glowing, his mouth cracked in a wide smile—had to be a top-ten moment for him. It was for me, too, and as I grabbed a fry and popped it in my mouth, I wondered if this was what men and women did together, this crazy sine wave of emotions, this attraction and repulsion all at once. How did people live like this? I wondered. How did people have the slightest clue what they wanted from another human being? It seemed insane and wonderful and just about the stupidest thing on earth.

  I ate fries and drank my soda, and when Danny asked to dance again, I said okay, sure, let’s go.

  He kissed me again on the way out to the car. He kissed me up against the wall of the bowling alley, right where people came out to smoke, and I smelled cigarettes and spring mud and Danny’s cinnamon gum. We kissed better now, more comfortably, but I still wondered where you put your hands, how much you tilted your head, what sounds, if any, you were supposed to make. The analytical part of my mind kept taking little snapshots. So this is what it means to kiss a boy, and this is how they do it, and this is where his arms go, and this is how he breathes through his nose. I wanted to remember everything. I liked that I was being kissed for the first time in my mom’s town, in her childhood land, anyway, and I liked that it was spring, just at twilight, and that the birds called to claim their territory for the night. My arm felt tired and heavy from bowling, and my lips tasted greasy from the fries, I was sure, but for a second, just a second, I let myself fall into Danny. I used him a little, because I had always wanted to fall into a boy, surrender like they did in books and movies, and it might have been any boy at that moment, but Danny was there and so he was the guy.