Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

  “Won’t need that where we’re going, will I?” she said, about the jacket. She used the word “we.” Dooley couldn’t help noticing.

  They got off the bus at a fishing village somewhere along the Baja peninsula. Dooley hoped it was the right place, the one Karl had told him about, where you could live on the beach without being told to move on. They walked south from the village and found a dozen cement huts a hundred yards back from the water, a former compound of some kind, now occupied by the stream of travelling young people moving in and out of them. Dooley and Angela and her friends moved into one that was vacant, spreading out their sleeping bags on the sand floor and claiming wooden boxes and makeshift shelving for their backpacks and the few belongings they’d carried with them. Dooley hadn’t stopped thinking about Angela’s body draped across his on the bus, and neither, apparently, had she. They made out in a hidden spot in the sand dunes before the sun was barely down, Angela making it clear that she didn’t believe in exclusivity, Dooley saying he didn’t either, both of them trying to avoid the cactus that was everywhere and trying to remember what they’d been told about snakes and scorpions. Dooley thought about the word she’d used—“exclusivity”—and was happy to have met someone who seemed to think the way he did. He wondered why it had taken him so long to discover a life like this.

  “I never want to go back,” Angela said.

  “You won’t have to if you stick with me,” Dooley said. “I have a nest egg.”

  She started to laugh.

  “What?” he asked. “Why is that funny?”

  “I come from a bottomless pit of money,” she said. “There’s nothing as modest as a nest egg in my family.”

  He should have known. The expensive jacket she’d thrown out the bus window as easily as if it were an empty cigarette pack.

  He saw she was looking at the scar on his leg.

  “I drove into a bridge,” he told her.

  “Don’t you hate it when that happens?”

  Without words being exchanged, without commitment being spoken of, they became exclusive.

  DOOLEY DIDN’T HAVE much interest in the people coming and going on the beach. He’d spent most of his childhood hanging around with kids who were older than him, driving all over the countryside when he was only eleven or twelve years old. Now he was with people who were barely out of their teens, if that. Most days he ignored the band of dreamers and walked into the village and struck up conversations with the more interesting fishermen and the vendors in the market, and he kicked the soccer ball around with the Mexican kids in the plaza, not caring if they laughed at his limp, his complete lack of skill with both soccer and Spanish, his gesturing and mistakes and bad pronunciations. He learned. He could soon speak Spanish better than anyone else on the beach, even the Americans who’d studied it in school. The others began to look to him to take care of things, to talk them out of trouble when it appeared, to deal with the policía when they occasionally stopped for payment, some pesos or cigarettes. They began to count on Dooley to make decisions. Once he’d accepted that role, there was no arguing with him. It was Dooley who asked people to move on if they weren’t pulling their weight or following the few unspoken rules that kept things copacetic.

  “What the fuck?” whined one such evictee when Dooley informed him he wasn’t welcome anymore because he was suspected of helping himself to the pesos in someone’s wallet and he kept referring to Mexicans as bandidos.

  “They are bandidos,” the boy whined.

  Dooley gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder and said, “Vamos. Ahora.”

  The boy left.

  Angela told Dooley he had some kind of weird power over people, the way they listened to him and didn’t argue.

  “You’re like the king or something,” she said.

  It reminded Dooley of the school principal who’d tried to save him from truancy and called him cock of the walk.

  After the boy left, sulking his way up the road to town and the bus station, Dooley sat in the sand with an unopened bottle of tequila. Angela sat next to him and said, “You do have a nest egg, don’t you?”

  He was tempted then to tell her about his grandfather dying and Basie Moon’s solution to the trouble Dooley found himself in, the look on Basie’s face as he handed him the cheque. The look that said it was money well spent if it would get Dooley out of Elliot.

  Instead he said, “I have my resources.”

  Angela said, “I like a man of mystery. Are you Howard Hughes? I think you might be.”

  He didn’t know who Howard Hughes was. For the first time ever, he wondered if he’d missed something by disregarding school. When it came to facts, there seemed to be a lot he didn’t know.

  He opened the bottle of tequila and passed it to Angela.

  THE WORST THING that happened was when one of the beach inhabitants drowned. The boy—a twenty-year-old American—hadn’t been listening when he was told about the currents, and he went swimming and found himself being sucked out into the surf, and he wasn’t a strong enough swimmer to last until help reached him. A fisherman with a boat tried. It was too late, but at least he was able to retrieve the boy’s body. No one on the beach knew who he was, but they found his driver’s licence in his things and gave it to the authorities. A few weeks later his father showed up from Nebraska, grief-stricken, wanting to know about his son’s life in Mexico, wanting affirmation that his life had not been wasted and that he’d been doing something useful—learning something, at least—but no one had known the boy well enough to tell him much. Angela stepped up then and asked the man, the father, if he wanted to go for a walk with her along the beach, and she pointed out the spot where his son had gone into the water and made up some things about how he—Alec?—was teaching English to poor children in the village, and in return one of the parents had given him a guitar and taught him to play Mexican folk songs and he was very talented, they all thought so. Alec spoke sometimes of his family, Angela told the man, and he was planning a trip home before too long and considering a return to school to become a teacher.

  “Really?” the father said when Angela told him these good things about his son. Disbelieving but wanting to believe, choosing to do so, and then asking Angela if she knew where his son’s guitar was, he would like to have it, and Angela had to think quickly and asked the man to wait while she went to find it. There were lots of guitars around, and she walked into the huts, searching, and took the first one she came to, with a plan to purchase a better one for its owner, a girl who sang mournful English ballads. She gave the girl’s guitar to the man. He thanked her for spending the time with him, and then he left with the guitar to take his son’s body home.

  “Did you see he was crying?” Angela asked Dooley afterward. “It was incredibly sad. What was his name, anyway? The boy who drowned. I hope it was Alec.”

  Dooley thought it was Allen, but he didn’t say so. He was flabbergasted by Angela’s kindness. He had never before met anyone like her. How, he wondered, had he, Dooley Sullivan, had the good fortune to walk into Fernando’s Hideaway Cantina and find Angela there waiting for him? Dooley Sullivan, who had been raised by a grandfather he couldn’t seem to please and carried with him, always, a feeling of disappointment, even though he lived in one of the nicest houses in Elliot and there was plenty of food on the table. Always a feeling that his grandfather wanted to punish him just for being there, disappointment morphing into an anger that almost killed him in a flaming wreck. As he and Angela walked along the beach after the grieving father left, he wanted to ask her about her past, why she was here, what so-called advantages she had run away from. The thing he didn’t understand was how she could have grown up with all the privilege of wealth—obviously more privilege than even he had had—and be the person she was.

  Instead of asking her this, he asked if her parents had had pretentious fucking international dinner parties when she was growing up.

  She looked up at him, studying him, until he wished
he hadn’t asked. Then she said, “Exactly. How did you know?”

  He had a homemade clay pipe in his pocket and he took it out and lit it, and they passed it back and forth. He felt himself seething just thinking about the dinner parties, and how he had been well aware of his grandfather’s wish that Dooley be absent while the guests were in the house, pretending. Pretending to be richer than they were. Pretending to know the right people. Pretending to live somewhere other than Elliot. His grandfather hadn’t wanted Dooley, the boy who seemed always to be in trouble, ruining his epicurean charade.

  What no one had understood was that Dooley didn’t want to be in trouble. He wanted to please people. He tried to be smart, but he wasn’t, at least not in the way his grandfather wanted him to be. He was funny, he knew that, but teachers didn’t appreciate funny. They told him to stop being clever, and then they turned around and told him to smarten up. When he tried to be good, he got in trouble for that too. He’d had a teacher he liked in second grade—they called her a practice teacher, and she’d thought he was funny and spent extra time with him on arithmetic—and he’d wanted to give her a present when she left, so he took a pair of bookends from his grandfather’s house, two praying hands, and wrapped them up himself in gift paper he’d found in a drawer. It was red and green for Christmas, but he didn’t think that would matter. The practice teacher’s face fell when she opened the present; he saw that, recognized the look, and knew he was in trouble again.

  Sure enough, someone called his grandfather, and he accused Dooley of stealing the bookends. Stealing, of all things, when his grandfather was always giving away books to people, books by novelists and poets—classics, he called them. He’d take them right off the shelves and say, “Take this one, please. You’ll like it.” Now Dooley was not only in trouble for stealing—which he didn’t think he’d done, or not intentionally—but also embarrassed in front of the teacher he liked, who gave the bookends back to him. She tried to be nice and said they were too much of a gift, she couldn’t accept them. “But thank you, Dooley,” she said. “I appreciate the thought, that was really nice of you.” And he knew she’d been told by the principal what Dooley had done, that he’d stolen them. “You’re a good boy, Dooley,” she said, and that was the worst, because she hadn’t had to say that to anyone else, no other child in the class. Dooley wanted to hang his head, ashamed, but instead he threw a rock at the school and broke a window. That was the first time he’d had his after-school playtime taken away. Grade two and he was already grounded.

  After that, Dooley didn’t try very hard to be good. He didn’t seem to know how, and it turned out he was better at being bad. He could make the other students laugh when he was bad, and sometimes even the teachers, as though they couldn’t believe what he had just done. It was as though he could please them—or at least give them a way to understand him—by being bad. He started smoking in grade four, as soon as he found a way to buy cigarettes from the older boys. Not long after, one of them asked Dooley if he wanted liquor to go with his cigarettes and he said sure, and he went with them in a car, out into the country, and he got drunk for the first time. Then he was stealing his grandfather’s liquor—he hid his thefts by topping up the bottles with water—and he lied when his grandfather confronted him. He started skipping school, and the principal would drive around Elliot until he found him and hauled him back, calling him a truant. Once he said to him, on the way to the school after one of Dooley’s attempts to skip, “You’re lucky your grandfather isn’t still principal. He wasn’t as lenient as I am,” and Dooley thought, You don’t have to tell me that. The principal had delivered him to his classroom and Dooley swaggered in like a hero, and the other students clapped until the teacher said, “Don’t encourage him.” When the principal saw him in the hallway after school that day, he said, “You’re just the cock of the walk, aren’t you, Dooley?”

  In seventh grade, he failed five subjects. He got 13 percent in science, and when his grandfather saw that on his report card he said, “Thirteen percent . . . you’ve learned nothing,” and Dooley said, “Technically, thirteen percent isn’t nothing,” and his grandfather called him disrespectful. He was held back that year. That’s what they called it, “held back,” like you were trying, wanting to go somewhere, even though Dooley wasn’t. Dooley’s grandfather called it failing. He called it a great humiliation that a Sullivan and the grandson of a former principal would fail a grade. He told Dooley about the hedge schools in Ireland and the lengths people went to in order to make sure their children were educated, even when the rich English tried to prevent it. “You’re lucky,” he told Dooley. “Privileged. You’ve had every advantage.”

  Every advantage. That’s not how Dooley saw it. And where were his parents, he wondered, if he was so privileged? Why was he living with his grandfather, who didn’t even seem to like him much? And if his grandfather thought living with a teacher was an advantage, he had that wrong.

  He failed grade seven again.

  By the time he finally got to grade eight he was both the tallest and dumbest boy in the class. He didn’t like being the dumbest, not really, but he just couldn’t seem to figure how to put any effort into school, and anyway, if he did make an effort, that would mean he cared. He skipped regularly, even though there was some enjoyment in keeping the other students on the edges of paying attention to the teacher, keeping them constantly aware of him, the way you are aware of a wild animal—a sly coyote, say—lurking, up to something. The eighth-grade teacher called him disruptive, which meant that he could make the others laugh pretty much anytime he wanted. Like the day he swung his legs out the open second-storey classroom window while the teacher had her back turned to write something on the blackboard, and he silently polled the other students as he sat in the window, mimed, “Should I? Should I?” raising his hands to ask the question while the teacher wrote with chalk in her neat hand, pleased with her ability to keep the lines straight, ignorant of what was going on behind her.

  Dooley wasn’t really planning to jump, but he was enjoying that all the other students were nodding their heads and trying not to giggle. He milked it—Should I? Should I?—until he noticed one girl frowning at him, and he knew, just knew, she was about to tell. He could see her hand shooting up, hear the words “Teacher, teacher, Dooley’s in the window,” and so he impulsively jumped. Without really thinking how far it was to the ground. He heard the collective roar of laughter behind him as he went hurtling into space, trying to figure out how to roll when he landed, past that little girl in the window, Basie Moon’s daughter, with her curly hair framing her face, and he landed all wrong and broke his ankle and a rib, and that wasn’t actually funny. There was a big fuss when Elliot’s only ambulance came and he gave the thumbs-up from the stretcher to all the kids sneaking peeks from the various classroom windows, even though they were now closed. The little girl with the curly hair was still there, leaning out of an open window. She waved at him and ducked back inside, and then they’d hauled him away in the ambulance. When he ventured out a few days later and hobbled around town with his taped ribs and his cast and crutches, he got lots of “Hey, Dooley, good one!” This coming from high school boys wanting to sign his cast. Girls, lots of girls, saying, “Let me sign, Dooley.” Just to be a smart aleck, he asked his grandfather if he wanted to sign, but of course he didn’t. Surprisingly, his teacher did. “Dooley, Dooley, Dooley,” she said as she wrote her name in blue ballpoint, “what is the world going to do with you?” For some reason that question unsettled him—the way she used the word “world” instead of asking, “What are we going to do with you?”

  When Dooley passed grade eight—barely—his grandfather bribed him to keep him from dropping out of school. A car, he said, to be confiscated if he quit. Dooley negotiated. He wanted a truck. Not a new one, but one he could work on himself. They had a shop in the high school. He could take motor mechanics and auto body and work on his own truck. His grandfather didn’t want him to take shop cl
asses. That was for boys who weren’t academically inclined, he said. Dooley thought, Are you losing your mind, old man? What have I ever done to give you even an ounce of hope? He didn’t say this out loud, but he drew a line. The truck and motor mechanics, or he was quitting. He was sixteen now, so no one could stop him. His grandfather argued, but Dooley won. He didn’t think for a minute that he would stay in school long enough to get his graduation certificate, but he got his truck, a 1952 Chevy short bed with a lot of miles on it and a rusty body crying out for restoration. He pictured himself cruising around town. Red. He would paint the truck red.

  That fall, he started drinking in earnest. He hung around with farm kids who’d been driving since they were twelve or thirteen, and with older town kids who had their parents’ sedans or their own beaters, and every weekend they hit the roads and found new places to party—in an old barn or grain bin if it was cold, outside on nice summer nights, in a stand of trees in someone’s pasture, at the gravel pit, where it was sheltered and you could have a fire and no one would notice. He’d get so drunk he would have no recollection the next day of what he’d done, but whatever it was, it must have been entertaining because wherever he went he’d hear, “Hey, Dooley! Epic, man!”

  There were girls at the parties, and Dooley liked them—chicklets, he called them. He liked to hang out with their little cadres and cliques and tease them and make them giggle, but he was not obliging with the girls who wanted too much of his attention, and he developed the reputation of being a difficult catch, which made some of the girls want to be with him all the more. He pushed them away. He’d have sex with them, yes—in a stand of trees, on the beach, in the back seat of someone’s car—but only once, and if one of them got drunk and cried at the next party because he’d moved on, he’d turn his back. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, but he didn’t want a girlfriend. Brushing a girl off was better than breaking her heart.