An Agent of Utopia

by Andy Duncan

  After a long pause, he added, half to himself, “It’s not as if I’m bringing anybody home, anyway—black or white or lavender.”

  “You bring me home with you sometimes,” I said.

  “Yeah, and they don’t like you either,” he said, and immediately cut me a wide-eyed look of mock horror that made me laugh out loud. “I’m kidding. You know they like you.”

  “Families always like me,” I said. “Mamas especially. It’s the daughters themselves that aren’t real interested. And a mama’s approval is the kiss of death. At this moment, I bet you, mamas all over town are saying, ‘What about that nice boy Jack? He’s so respectful, he goes to church, he makes such good grades,’ and don’t you know that makes those gals so hot they can’t stand it.”

  Tom laughed and laughed.

  “Oh, Jack!” I gasped. “Oh, Jack, your SAT score is so—so big!”

  “Maybe you should forget the girls and date the mamas,” Tom said. “You know, eliminate the middleman. Go right to the source.”

  “Eewww, that’s crude.” I clawed at the door as if trying to get out. “Help! Help! I’m in the clutches of a crude man!”

  “Suppose Kathleen’s home from Florida yet?”

  “I dunno. Let’s go see.”

  “Now you aren’t starting to boss me around, are you?”

  “I’m just sitting here.”

  He poked me repeatedly with his finger, making me giggle and twist around on the seat. “Cause I’ll just put you out by the side of the road, you start bossing me.”

  “I’m not!” I gasped. “Quit! Uncle! Uncle! I’m not!”

  “Well, all right, then.”

  On September 17, 1981, we turned the corner at the library and headed toward the high school, past the tennis courts. The setting sun made everything golden. Over the engine, we heard doubled and redoubled the muted grunts and soft swats and scuffs of impact: ball on racket, shoe on clay. The various players on the adjoining courts moved with such choreography that I felt a pang to join them.

  “Is tennis anything like badminton?” I asked. “I used to be okay at badminton. My father and I would play it over the back fence, and the dogs would go wild.”

  “It’s more expensive,” Tom said. “Look, there she is. Right on time.”

  Anna, her back to us, was up ahead, walking slowly toward the parking lot on the sidewalk nearest me. Her racket was on one shoulder, a towel around her neck. Her skirt swayed as if she were walking much faster.

  As we passed, I heard a strange sound: a single Road Runner beep. In the side mirror, tiny retreating Anna raised her free hand and waved. I turned to stare at Tom, who looked straight ahead.

  “The horn?” I asked. “You honked the horn?”

  “Well, you waved,” he said. “I saw you.”

  I yanked my arm inside. The windblown hairs on my forearm tingled. “I wasn’t waving. I was holding up my hand to feel the breeze.”

  “She waved at you.”

  “Well, I didn’t wave at her,” I said. “She waved because you honked.”

  “Okay,” he said, turning into the parking lot. “She waved at both of us, then.”

  “She waved at you. I don’t care, it doesn’t matter. But she definitely waved at you.”

  “Are we fighting?” he asked. He re-entered the street, turned back the way we had come. Anna was near, walking toward us.

  “Course we’re not fighting. Are you going to honk at her again?”

  “Are you going to wave at her again?”

  Anna looked behind her for traffic, stepped off the sidewalk, and darted across the street, into our lane, racket lifted like an Olympic torch.

  “Look out!”

  “What the hell?”

  Tom hit the brakes. The passenger seat slid forward on its track, and my knees slammed the dash. Dozens of cassettes on the back seat cascaded into the floor. Only a foot or two in front of the stopped car stood Anna, arms folded, one hip thrust out. She regarded us without expression, blew a large pink bubble that reached her nose and then collapsed back into her mouth.

  “Hi, guys,” she said.

  Tom opened his door and stood, one foot on the pavement. “For crying out loud, Anna, are you okay? We could’ve killed you!”

  “I was trying to flag you down,” she said.

  “What? Why?” Tom asked. “What for? Something wrong with the car?” I saw him swivel, and I knew that, out of sight, he was glancing toward the tires, the hood, the tailpipe.

  “Nothing’s wrong with the car, Tom,” she said, chewing with half her mouth, arms still folded. “It’s a really neat car. Whenever I see it I think, ‘Damn, Tom must take mighty good care of that car.’ I get a lot of chances to think that, Tom, ’cause every day you guys drive by my house at least twice, and whenever I leave tennis practice, you drive past me, and turn around in the lot, and drive past me again, and every time you do that I think, ‘He takes mighty damn good care of that goddamn car just to drive past me all the fucking time.’”

  Someone behind us honked and pulled around. A pickup truck driver, who threw us a bird.

  “Do you ever stop? No. Say hi at school? Either of you? No. Call me? Shit.” She shifted her weight to the other hip, unfolded her arms, whipped the towel from around her neck, and swatted the hood with it. “So all I want to know is, just what’s the deal? Tom? Jack? I see you in there, Jack, you can’t hide. What’s up, Jack? You tell me. Your chauffeur’s catching flies out here.”

  Looking up at Anna, even though I half expected at any moment to be arrested for perversion or struck from behind by a truck or beaten to death with a tennis racket, purple waffle patterns scarring my corpse, I realized I had never felt such crazed exhilaration, not even that night on Bates Hill, when Tom passed a hundred and twenty. My knees didn’t even hurt anymore. The moment I realized this, naturally the feeling of exhilaration began to ebb, and so before I lost my resolve I slowly stuck my head out the window, smiled what I hoped was a smile, and called out: “Can we give you a lift, Anna?”

  A station wagon swung past us with a honk. Anna looked at me, at Tom, at me again. She plucked her gum from her mouth, tossed it, looked down at the pavement and then up and then down again, much younger and almost shy. In a small voice, she said: “Yeah.” She cleared her throat. “Yeah. Yes. That’s . . . that’s nice of you. Thank you.”

  I let her have my seat, of course. I got in the back, atop a shifting pile of cassettes and books and plastic boxes of lug nuts, but right behind her, close enough to smell her: not sweat, exactly, but salt and earth, like the smell of the beach before the tide comes in.

  “Where to?” Tom asked.

  “California,” she said, and laughed, hands across her face. “Damn, Anna,” she asked, “where did that come from? Oh, I don’t know. Where are y’all going? I mean, wherever. Whenever. Let’s just go, okay? Let’s just . . . go.”

  We talked: School. Movies. Bands. Homework. Everything. Nothing. What else? Drove around. For hours.

  Her ponytail was short but full, a single blond twist that she gathered up in one hand and lifted as she tilted her head forward. I thought she was looking at something on the floor, and I wondered for a second whether I had tracked something in.

  “Jack?” she asked, head still forward. No one outside my family had made my name a question before. “Would you be a sweetie and rub my neck?”

  The hum of tires, the zing of crickets, the shrill stream of air flowing through the crack that the passenger window never quite closed.

  “Ma’am?”

  “My neck. It’s all stove up and tight from tennis. Would you rub the kinks out for me?”

  “Sure,” I said, too loudly and too quickly. My hands moved as slowly as in a nightmare. Twice I thought I had them nearly to her neck when I realized I was merely rehearsing the action in my head, so th
at I had it all to do over again. Tom shifted gears, slowed into a turn, sped up, shifted gears again, and I still hadn’t touched her. My forearms were lifted; my hands were outstretched, palms down; my fingers were trembling. I must have looked like a mesmerist. You are sleepy, very sleepy. Which movie was it where the person in the front seat knew nothing about the clutching hands in the back? I could picture the driver’s face as the hands crept closer: Christopher Lee, maybe? No: Donald Pleasence?

  “Jack,” she said. “Are you still awake back there?”

  The car went into another turn, and I heard a soft murmur of complaint from the tires. Tom was speeding up.

  My fingertips brushed the back of her neck. I yanked them back, then moved them forward again. This time I held them there, barely touching. Her neck so smooth, so hot, slightly—damp? And what’s this? Little hairs! Hairs as soft as a baby’s head! No one ever had told me there would be hairs . . .

  “You’ll have to rub harder than that, Jack.” Still holding her hair aloft with her right hand, she reached up with her left and pressed my fingers into her neck. “Like that. Right—there. And there. Feel how tight that is?” She rotated her hand over mine, and trapped between her damp palm and her searing neck I did feel something both supple and taut. “Oooh, yeah, like that.” She pulled her hand away, and I kept up the motions. “Oh, that feels good . . .”

  The sun was truly down by now, and lighted houses scudded past. Those distinctive dormer windows—wasn’t that Lisa’s house? And, in the next block, wasn’t that Kim’s driveway?

  We were following the route. We were passing all the homes of the stars.

  Tom said nothing, but drove faster and faster. I kept rubbing, pressing, kneading, not having the faintest idea what I was doing but following the lead of Anna’s sighs and murmurs. “Yeah, my shoulder there . . . Oh, this is wonderful. You’ll have to stop this in about three hours, you know.”

  After about five minutes or ten or twenty, without looking up, she raised her left index finger and stabbed the dashboard. A tape came on. I don’t remember which tape it was. I do remember that it played through both sides, and started over.

  Tom was speeding. Each screeching turn threw us off balance. Where were the cops? Where was all the other traffic? We passed Jane’s house, Tina’s house. Streetlights strobed the car like an electrical storm. We passed Cynthia’s house—hadn’t we already? Beneath my hands, Anna’s shoulders braced and rolled and braced again. I held on. My arms ached. Past the corner of my eye flashed a stop sign. My fingers kept working. Tom wrenched up the volume on the stereo. The bass line throbbed into my neck and shoulder blades, as if the car were reciprocating.

  Gravel churned beneath us. “Damn,” Tom muttered, and yanked the wheel, fighting to stay on the road. Anna snapped her head up, looked at him. I saw her profile against the radio dial.

  “I want to drive,” she said.

  Tom put on the brakes, too swiftly. Atop a surging flood of gravel, the car jolted and shuddered to a standstill off the side of the road. The doors flew open, and both Tom and Anna leaped out. My exhilaration long gone, my arms aching, I felt trapped, suffocating. I snatched up the seat latch, levered forward the passenger seat, and stepped humpbacked and out of balance into the surprisingly cool night air. Over there was the Episcopal church, over there the Amoco station. We were only a few blocks from my house. My right hand stung; I had torn a nail on the seat latch. I slung it back and forth as Tom stepped around the car. Anna was already in the driver’s seat.

  “You want to sit in front?” Tom sounded hoarse.

  “No,” I said. “No, thanks. Listen, I think I’ll, uh, I think I’ll just call it a night. I’m nearly home anyway. I can, uh, I can walk from here. Y’know? It’s not far. I can walk from here.” I called out to Anna, leaning down and looking in: “I can walk from here.” Her face was unreadable, but her eyes gleamed.

  “Huh?” Tom said. It was like a grunt. He cleared his throat. “What do you mean, walk? It’s early yet.”

  The car was still running. The exhaust blew over me in a cloud, made me dizzy. “No, really, you guys go on. I’m serious. I’ll be fine. Go on, really. I’ll see you later on.”

  “We could drop you off,” Tom said. He spoke politely but awkwardly, as if we had never met. “Let’s do that. We’ll drop you off in your yard.”

  Anna revved the motor. It was too dark to see Tom’s expression as he looked at her. Her fingers moved across the lighted instrument panel, pulled out the switch that started the emergency flashers, ka-chink ka-chink ka-chink, pushed it back again. “Cool,” she said.

  “I’ll see you later,” I said. “OK? See you, Anna. Call me tomorrow,” I said to Tom.

  “OK,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “OK,” I said, not looking back. I waved a ridiculous cavalier wave, and stuck my hands in my pockets, trying to look nonchalant as I stumbled along the crumbling asphalt shoulder in the dark.

  Behind me two doors slammed. I heard the car lurching back onto the highway, gravel spewing, and I heard it make a U-turn, away from town and toward the west, toward the lake, toward the woods. As the engine gunned, my shoulders twitched and I ducked my head, because I expected the screech of gears, but all I heard was steady and swift acceleration, first into second into third, as the Firebird sped away, into fourth, and then it was just me, walking.

  ——

  They never came back.

  Tom’s parents got a couple of letters, a few postcards. California. They shared them with Anna’s parents but no one else. “Tom wants everyone to know they’re doing fine,” that’s all his mom and dad would say. But they didn’t look reassured. Miss Sara down at the paper, who always professed to know a lot more than she wrote up in her column, told my father that she hadn’t seen the mail herself, mind you, but she had heard from people who should know that the letters were strange, rambling things, not one bit like Tom, and the cards had postmarks that were simply, somehow, wrong. But who could predict, Miss Sara added, when postcards might arrive, or in what order. Why, sometimes they sit in the post office for years, and sometimes they never show up at all. Criminal, Miss Sara mourned, criminal.

  Anna’s parents got no mail at all.

  I never did, either, except maybe one thing. I don’t know that you could call it mail. No stamps, no postmark, no handwriting. It wasn’t even in the mailbox. But it felt like mail to me.

  It was lying on my front porch one morning—this was years later, not long after I got my own place, thought I was settled. At first I thought it was the paper, but no, as usual the paper was spiked down deep in the hedge. This was lying faceup and foursquare on the welcome mat. It was one of those Hollywood maps, showing where the stars can be found.

  I spread it across the kitchen table and anchored it with the sugar bowl and a couple of iron owl-shaped trivets, because it was stiff and new and didn’t want to lie flat. You know how maps are. It was bright white paper and mighty thick, too. I didn’t know they made maps so thick anymore. I ran my index finger over sharp paper ridges and down straight paper canyons and looked for anyone I knew. No, Clint Eastwood wasn’t there. Nor was anyone else whose movies I ever had seen at the mall. A lot of the names I just didn’t recognize, but some I knew from cable, from the nostalgia channels.

  I was pretty sure most of them were dead.

  I searched the index for Tom’s name, for Anna’s. I didn’t see them. I felt relieved. Sort of.

  “California,” I said aloud. Once it had been four jaunty syllables, up and down and up and down, a kid on a bicycle, going noplace. California. Now it was a series of low and urgent blasts, someone leaning on the horn, saying, come on, saying, hurry up, saying, you’re not too late, not yet, not yet. California.

  It’s nearly eleven. I stand in the cool rush of the refrigerator door, forgetting what I came for, and strain to hear. The train is passing,
a bit late, over behind the campus. My windows are open, so the air conditioning is pouring out into the yard and fat bugs are smacking themselves against the screen, but this way I can hear everything clearly. The rattle as my neighbor hauls down the garage door, secures everything for the night. On the other side, another neighbor trundles a trash can out to the curb, then plods back. I am standing at the kitchen counter now. Behind me the refrigerator door is swinging shut, or close enough. I hear a car coming.

  The same car.

  I move to the living room, to the front door. I part the curtain. The car is coming closer, but even more slowly than before. Nearly stopping. It must be in first gear by now. There was always that slight rattle, just within the threshold of hearing, when you put it in first gear. Yes. And the slightly cockeyed headlights, yes, and the dent in the side. I can’t clearly see the interior even under the streetlight but it looks like two people in the front.

  Two people? Or just one?

  And then it’s on the other side of the neighbor’s hedge, and gone, but I still can hear the engine, and I know that it’s going to turn, and come back.

  My hand is on the doorknob. The map is in my pocket. The night air is surprisingly cool. I flip on the porch light as I step out, and I stand illuminated in a cloud of tiny beating wings, waiting for them to come back, come back and see me standing here, waiting, waiting, oh my God how long I’ve been waiting, I want to walk out there and stand in front of the car and make it stop, really I do, but I can’t, I can’t move, I’m trapped here, trapped in this place, trapped in this time, don’t drive past again, I’m here, I’m ready, I wasn’t then but now I am, really I am, please, please stop. Present or past, alive or dead, what does it matter, what did it ever matter? Please. Stop.

  Please.

  The Pottawatomie Giant

  On the afternoon of November 30, 1915, Jess Willard, for seven months the heavyweight champion of the world, crouched, hands on knees, in his Los Angeles hotel window to watch a small figure swaying like a pendulum against the side of the Times building three blocks away.