Piper

by John E. Keegan

  Lenny leaned into the window again. “Just drive normally, okay?”

  She returned her hands to the wheel and I watched the tendons flex in her forearms. “What’s normal?” she whispered.

  “Burn rubber,” I said, and we both had to bite our lips to keep from laughing.

  I couldn’t hear what Lenny was saying, but Bagmore handed him the wiper blade, which Lenny gave to Rozene, who handed it to me. Then he grabbed Bagmore by the front of his zip-up windbreaker, lifted his butt up off the hood, and held him in the air. Bagmore grimaced like Lenny had gotten some skin twisted up with the jacket.

  “Go ahead, Rozene,” Lenny said, with the unflappable tone of a man whose lot in life was to lift overturned cars off pinned drivers and carry children down the ladders of burning buildings.

  As the Corolla moved forward, Bagmore’s butt, then his heels dragged across the windshield and out of sight only to reappear momentarily in the rear window. I stuck my head out the window and watched Lenny lowering Bagmore to the asphalt. Bagmore stumbled backwards a few steps, but Lenny steadied him and smoothed out the wrinkles in his jacket. I’d always thought I wanted Lenny’s power, but now I wished I had his restraint.

  When Rozene was about to pull up in front of the Herald, I ducked down in the seat and waved her on. “Let’s go to the airport.”

  I stayed down while she motored along the storefronts on Commercial in case Dad had gone over to the drugstore or struck up a conversation with someone on the boardwalk. While we were stopped at the only light in Stampede, Rozene rolled down her window. “Hey, Dirk! Where you been hiding?”

  Oh, Jesus, Rozene, not now. From his voice I guessed he must have been in the crosswalk, and he was coming closer. I scrunched down further with my head against the floor and my butt up like an ostrich.

  “Hi, where you going?” Dirk said. “Nice wheels.” Now he was standing next to the car and I could tell from the drop in his voice that he’d seen me. Why hadn’t I said something about Rozene when I was with him last night? “Is that you, Piper?”

  Dammit.

  “We’re going for a drive,” Rozene added, cheerily.

  I uncoiled myself and crawled back onto the seat like a slug. My face was warm, probably red. “Hi, Dirk.”

  He seemed disappointed, confused. Maybe he thought if I hadn’t been there he could have gotten a ride with Rozene. There was an awkward silence while he probably wondered whether we were going to invite him along and make it a threesome.

  “Green light,” Rozene said. And she pulled away, leaving him standing in the middle of the street.

  I leaned my head back on the seat and closed my eyes, feeling very much a traitor. After all my preaching at Dirk to come clean, I was the orthodontist with crooked teeth.

  We took Highway 2 to Monroe, then Sultan and Startup. Rozene’s cast was off and she was acting giddy again. “We need elevation,” she said. The defroster couldn’t keep up with the heat I was throwing off from the twin engines of anxiety and arousal, and every time the windshield fogged up she’d open her window and let the wind flutter her hair. We were heading toward Stevens Pass. The Jimminy Cricket on my shoulder that Catholics called conscience was shrinking. On the way back from the billboards last night he was as mammoth as Lenny Miller and I’d vowed to have a heart-to-heart talk with Dad about the pickle Dirk was in. Dad knew the law and, better yet, he knew the people in the Prosecutor’s Office. If anyone could lead Dirk out of this morass, it was Dad. I was in way over my head and right now I wished Dirk hadn’t even told me. Knowledge always carried power in its frontseat and pain in the backseat.

  Rozene put her Evita tape in. Madonna was singing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” and snow was beginning to dust the discarded cigarette butts, beer cans and other man-made detritus on the shoulder of the road. My conscience had shrunk to a midget and if we didn’t turn around soon it was going to fit comfortably under my thumb. She turned off on a spur road that had been plowed wide enough for one lane.

  “Do we have chains?”

  “I won’t go in that far,” she said. Rozene wasn’t just pastry and sweetmeat. Behind the wheel of her car, she was a bulldog. She set her jaw and her nose flared as she glared through the windshield. If her ancestors could make it through the Bering Strait in canoes, she could do this.

  Although the road was still fairly flat, the snow must have been two or three feet deep and the boughs of the pine trees were lazy with it. I couldn’t help but think what could happen to us. Worst case, we’d run out of gas and freeze to death while trying to combine our body heat in the backseat. There were worse ways to go. On a wide turn that had a lookout down to the Skykomish River, she left the friendly troughs of the spur road and headed for the vista. The Corolla rocked and bumped, then slowed until the tires finally lost their grip and whined like tomcats on the make.

  “Well, how’s this?” she said, pointing toward the river.

  “It’ll have to do. We’re stuck.”

  I had two cigarettes left in a pack I’d rolled up and stuck into the breast pocket of my jeans jacket for emergencies, and I offered one of them to Rozene. I didn’t know about her, but I needed something to calm my nerves. She hesitated, then took the cigarette and punched in the lighter. I pulled out the ashtray and noticed it was clean except for a layer of quarters.

  “Mom saves ’em for the laundromat.”

  She lit her cigarette off the lighter, but when she offered the lighter to me I directed it back into the well. “You light me,” I said.

  She put the cigarette back in her lips, and drew on it until there was a hot coal that I leaned into, nose to nose, and lit mine.

  The foot vents were blowing warm air on my legs and the tape deck was turned down low. It was already getting dark and I could only see the river where it frothed over the boulders. The windows steamed up and she cracked hers, letting in the breathy sound of the river. Once again I relished the opportunity to have her so close, and I wondered if the reason she wanted to talk bore any resemblance to the reason I wanted to see her.

  “Did you notice my leg?” she said, lifting it onto the seat between us. She’d kicked off her shoe and the arch of her foot rested against my thigh. I could feel my motor starting to run. “It’s skinnier than the other one. See?” She put her other foot against me, pulled her pant leg up, and pushed the top of her sock down under the ankle bone. “Feel it.” I had practically creamed my jeans the first time she’d put her leg on me at Harvey Field when she still had a cast on and the only live part I could touch was her toes. Now I reached over and put my hand around the narrowest part of her ankle, and rubbed my middle finger up and down one side of her Achilles tendon. “That part hasn’t changed,” she said, “but check out the muscle.”

  When I cupped my hand and let it slide up the soft fuzz on the back of her leg, it was like rubbing dry sticks together and I thought something was going to ignite. I kneaded the soft part of her calf with my thumb.

  “Now, try the good leg,” she said. In this tactile paradise, it was easy to forget the purpose of my mission. Which good leg? Was there a better one? I didn’t want to let go of the first one, so I assigned a hand to each ankle and moved slowly up and down both calves trying to memorize every slope and curve. “That one is skinnier.”

  “It’s like comparing satin and silk.”

  She curled her toes against my leg. “Oh, Piper, honestly. Let me see yours.”

  I let go of her instantly. “It wasn’t me who broke a leg!” We weren’t in the same ballpark when it came to calves; mine were as skinny and unyielding as a broomstick. She’d get slivers if she rubbed too hard.

  “I just want to see.” She put her feet back on the floor and leaned over into my compartment, trying to reach my ankles. I stretched my feet against the firewall to put them as far away from her hands as I could. Her chest was pressed against the top of my legs and her hair cascaded over the top of her upside-down head. I could feel her fingers working under the cu
ffs of my pants. “Come, on, Piper, I showed you mine.”

  We were both laughing, mine as much terror as delight. Sloppy clothes hid a lot of imperfections, but I knew that if she ever discovered that the circumference of my calves was comparable to most people’s wrists, I was history. Finally, she stopped struggling and went limp in my lap with her arms draped over my legs. Except for the tiny green light on the tape deck, it was pitch dark and we were operating strictly by touch. I meant to just slide my hands under her jacket, but they slid under her shirt. She was warm and each vertebra I dallied on felt like a precious stone sewn into the fabric of her skin.

  “That feels nice,” she said, as I worked my way back up, stretching her bra strap far enough to let me reach her neck.

  She rubbed my legs through the pants, which felt safe, and I let go of the tension I’d been holding like a cocked bow in the lower half of my body. I pulled one hand off her back and followed the mound of her buttocks to the thigh. If I were a kitten, I would have been purring.

  When Evita started over for the second time, Rozene sat up. Her face was inches from mine and I could feel the warmth of her breath. There were lots of places where she could have placed her hands, but she’d put one of them on my crotch. So many times when I reconstructed this moment later, it seemed as if I was intoxicated, operating under the influence of something I wasn’t very good at: intimacy. So maybe I didn’t have all my wits about me, but I knew if you’d put me back in that same position a thousand times I would have done the same foolish thing. I kissed her. At first, it was just the cheek, but that was only because it was dark and I’d missed. I suctioned my lips to the corner of her mouth, then to the center, and I pressed and prayed it would last forever. However long we held it, I would have sworn it was voluntary on both our parts. It was long enough that our tongues found each other somewhere in the middle of the wineskin we’d made of our mouths and that’s when she broke.

  “Oh, God, Piper! We can’t do this.” I remembered the we part later, which I took to be an admission of complicity, testament to the fact I hadn’t just dreamed all this up and remodeled it to fit my preconceived fantasies. “I’m not like that,” she said, wiping her lips with the sleeve of her jacket. “I want to have a house and kids and get married. Don’t you?”

  At that moment, I knew I’d lost her. I’d been caught, with the blood in my groin, but throw me out of a plane and I knew how to land on my feet. I had to. “Me too. I was just …”

  “Experimenting,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “It was my fault. I’m not even supposed to be seeing you. It was dumb to come out here like this. We’re probably stuck.”

  I had answers to everything she’d said, because I’d already thought of the same questions. We could move away from Stampede and be anonymous, just two nine-to-fivers in a high-rise apartment in Seattle. And when we’d saved up enough for a down payment, we could get a fixer-upper on Capitol Hill, with a picket fence and a patio with evergreens planted around it for privacy, and a dog. As far as kids were concerned, we could adopt them, two, three, as many as she wanted, as long as there were more than just one. I was stupid. I rushed you, Rozene. But don’t throw out the laundry with the wash.

  She patted my hand, but her mind had already shifted gears. It was over. She turned on the headlights and they cast double-barreled beams that grazed the bank in front of us and then joined before shooting out into the void over the North Fork of the Skykomish River. When she revved the gas pedal, the tires just spun.

  “Goll dang it,” she said.

  I got out and traipsed to the front of the car, figuring it would be easier to backtrack than make a new path forward. I’d done this before with Dad when we were cutting a Christmas tree on the Weyerhaeuser tree farm and had to help the people in front of us. Rozene kept trying to gun it.

  “Rock it,” I told her. I didn’t know why I was being helpful, because I didn’t really want to go home.

  She rolled the car up onto the wheel wells we’d spun and then rocked back. Front, back, front, back. Each time it started back, I put my shoulder against the grill and pushed. The vessels in my neck bulged and I could smell the exhaust and feel the heat of the engine on my face. Finally, in one perfect combination, the wheels broke over the back of the snow wells and the car kept going. I churned my feet, trying to keep pressure against the car, but as we reached the troughs in the spur road it picked up speed and I fell down face first in the snow. The blurry headlights bounced away from me, and I realized I was crying. God, tell me it didn’t happen this way, it’s not over, this is just a matter of calibrating our timing, this isn’t the last time we’ll ride in the little brown Corolla together.

  “Piper! You okay?” Rozene was yelling at me from behind the glare of the headlights.

  I stood up and cleared my throat. Snowmelt had worked into my shoes and soaked the arches of my socks. My face was as wet as the front of my pants, but she would assume it was from falling down. It didn’t really matter anyway; I could have stripped off my pants and let her see my skinny legs. We had so many other hurdles to clear. “I’m coming!”

  Rozene backed the car up for what seemed like a mile until we found a wide place in the road to turn around. Then she turned the tape deck off. Everything was eyes ahead and straight again.

  I tried to get back on task once we were on Highway 2 and in the relative safety of wet asphalt. I had to prepare an excuse for missing work and decide if I still had the courage to talk to Dad about Dirk. Each time we met an oncoming car, I watched Rozene’s sculptured face to guess what she might be feeling. Her face was so wise, the lips succulent, her cheekbones pillows for the eyes. Rather than soothe me as it had just hours before though, her beauty tore into me like a whiff of Purex straight out of the jug. I was foolish to have thought she’d share it with me, but I wasn’t sure I could stop the wishing.

  17

  Willard was waiting on the front porch when Rozene dropped me off, just sitting there in the glow of the yellow bug light, chewing on a red plastic stirrer, and petting the Irish terrier who’d curled down next to him, arching its chin up onto his leg. In the summer I used to sit in that same spot reading when the house was too hot and the whitewash would come off onto the back of my shirt like chalk. I wasn’t particularly in the mood to see anyone, but better Willard than Dad. Willard knew about hiding the things you loved.

  “Where in blazes you been?” This wasn’t the greeting I wanted.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “Been here and gone,” he said, jutting out his jaw. I assumed Willard’s hard-heartedness was simply an imitation of Dad’s mood when he stormed through the house earlier looking for me.

  “We go to print day after tomorrow. It’s no wonder he’s upset.”

  Willard took the plastic stirrer out of his mouth. “I thought you wanted to burn the paper.”

  My socks and pants had dried out from the heater in the Corolla, I was starving, and Dad was peeved. Adding it all up, I knew what I had to do. In one of her diary entries, Anais Nin said, Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. He couldn’t do anything worse than Rozene had already done.

  I never went to the paper at night. Like school, it was a daytime thing. I peered into Marge’s on the way, which was full of people I didn’t recognize. Marge was talking to a man with an Afro and a Channel 7 emblem on the back of his jacket. The men in the booths had loosened their ties, a sure sign they weren’t from Stampede, not because they’d loosened them, but because they wore them at all. They must have been here for the John Carlisle trial, which started tomorrow.

  The front door was locked so I rang the after-hours buzzer, which echoed like a tin can walkie-talkie down the hallway. Dad usually walked to work so there was no way of knowing if he was in by virtue of spotting his car. He only drove when he had to go out of town or he wanted to gas up at Carlisle’s private pump at the back of the Herald. I didn’t want to ring again and jangle his nerves
any more than they’d already been jangled. Hello, Dad, it’s me, your diligent little copy editor. Maybe I’d catch him with a woman and he’d be the one that had to do the explaining. You have to be the captain of your passions, Dad. Then there were footsteps, the bolt slid back into its hatch, and the door cracked. Dad’s sleeves were rolled up and he had a pen in his hand. In order to avoid further shrinkage, I kept my eyes open.

  “About time I checked in, huh?” I expected him to look at his watch and unload on me, but he just stood there staring, which forced me to go on. “Something came up at school. I had to do something with … with Dirk.” I crossed my fingers hoping Dirk hadn’t come around looking for me at the paper. It was working. Dad’s grip on the edge of the door relaxed. “I’m sorry I screwed up. Can I still help?” I did everything but kneel down.

  He opened the door and I followed him down the unlighted hallway towards our offices. Except for the crackle of the linoleum where our feet stepped on places that had bubbled up, it was dead quiet, sans the usual buzz of fluorescent lights, word processors, and staff chatter. If I had to work down there alone, I’d at least crank up some background music, a little Enya or one of the other New Age artists Mom had listened to while she painted. Dad had lost his music. The tap, tap, tapping on his computer had drummed it right out of him, truth in lieu of rhythm, the hardbound declaratory sentence instead of the jazz riff.

  I marched right through his office, which was warm with his smell, and flipped the wall switch as I entered my cubicle, the “annex” Dad called it, expecting to find copy on my desk, but it was bare. Of course, I thought. Dad had probably done it himself, as he had a thousand editions before I ever came along. It wasn’t as if he needed my edits. They were make-work. Maybe it was my Catholicism showing through, but I was disappointed. I needed work.

  “I already finished the back section,” he said, startling me from behind. “How would you like to start on the front page? We’re coming out a day early.”