The Bewildered

by Peter Rock

  Alone again, she headed back out from under the bridge. Was the rain picking up? She told herself not to care; natives didn’t even notice, they seemed born with gills. She walked, alert, her eyes searching, nose twitching, head jerking from side to side. If they were out here, she would find them.

  Another lingerie catalog would be enough—she wasn’t greedy. She did not like the hardcore, however; she preferred some softness, some pride and suggestion. Her favorites were the old Playboys, like the ones she’d first found, twenty-five years ago. She could tell that her memory was not strong, but memories sometimes came all at once, and the important ones repeated, vividly—she had been a girl in Denver when she came upon the magazines; in a city park, under a bush; someone’s stash, some boy her age or slightly older, stolen from some father or uncle (Entertainment for Men—that subtitle deliciously raising the stakes). This was back during the Bicentennial; Natalie was twelve and tender and caught up with the ideas of freedom and possibility, her body testifying, not really developed but hinting toward the promise that the women, the Playmates demonstrated in their poses, their freedom, there in the seventies when it wasn’t ironic. They believed and she believed, a girl holding the rain-stiff, ripped magazines, hoarding the photographs and memorizing the women’s names. She had never felt better, more excited and full of anticipation than then, and as she walked through the rain this morning she sensed some of that same energy.

  2.

  CHRIS HAD SCRAPED HIS ELBOW. He bent it up so Kayla and Leon could look at it; Leon frowned, and Kayla—the tip of her tongue between her teeth, the jagged part in her hair shining—looked disappointed. The wound was not as serious as they had hoped. It really wasn’t swelling or bleeding the way they would have liked. It hadn’t even been an impressive wipe-out, either—he was simply dropping in off the low wall, and his board went out from under him.

  The skatepark beneath the bridge had been crowded, like it always was in the late afternoon, full of older guys with tattoos and stocking caps and pierced eyebrows. Of the three friends, Kayla was the best skater, by far, but she had trouble getting in rides without someone cutting her off. She’d been the only girl at the park; that was why she practiced so early in the morning, hours before school.

  “Where is she?” Leon said to Kayla.

  “She’s coming.”

  “She’s never been late before.”

  “And it’s a school night,” Chris said.

  The air felt heavy, muggy. This would be the fifth night they’d worked for Natalie in the last month, and still they were anxious. The three of them stood at the curb on East Burnside and MLK, waiting, each with a backpack of books, each with an instrument case in one hand, a skateboard in the other. Leon was taller, bigger than the other two, but this had not always been the case. They’d met in fourth grade, set apart as gifted students in a program called Horizons; that was more than five years ago, and now all three were fifteen, in high school, inseparable. Over time they’d developed a sharp disdain for their peers, especially as these peers began the slide toward the superficial, pathetic lives of adults. The three believed that there had to be a less desperate way to live one’s life, and this last twist—this Natalie, found by Kayla—felt especially promising.

  Kayla sat down on her board, rolling slightly from side to side, her feet on the ground, knees bent up. Leon skated away with his trombone case over his shoulder, up half a block, searching, demonstrating that he wasn’t afraid of the Mexican men who stood there in a group, smoking and speaking Spanish, here in this gathering place like so many others. This was where someone came when they needed illegal, cheap labor, some night work somewhere, off the books. The men didn’t even notice as Leon rolled past, as he skidded the tail of his board, stopped, did a one-eighty, and skated back to Chris and Kayla. He pointed back to the intersection, at the stop light, the rusted-out pickup idling half a block away.

  “There,” he said, and already Kayla was standing.

  As usual, Natalie drove her broken-down Ford slowly past, as if they had no pre-arranged meeting, as if she were looking for the best possible laborers. A man up the street yelled something in Spanish, stepped off the curb and flexed his arm. Natalie drove past, then stopped, then reversed slowly to where the three stood. She left the engine idling, like every time, as she got out to look them over.

  Her long, blond hair hung straight and loose. Her boots were black, heavy. She wore blue coveralls, long sleeved, a zipper up the front.

  “You appear to be very hard workers,” she said. “Certainly.” She looked up and down the street and the Mexican men glanced back, interested.

  “Yes,” Kayla said.

  “Of course,” Natalie said, “you seem very young to me.”

  This was all part of it; it was impossible to say if Natalie was kidding at all, or if she forgot, as if it were slightly more than coincidence yet new to her every time. She stood still for a moment, thinking, her old truck—two-tone, brown and white—rattling next to her.

  “My name is Natalie,” she said, “and you have never seen me before.”

  “Never,” Leon said, and Kayla elbowed him in the side.

  “The job I have for you,” Natalie said, “this job is not especially difficult; I will not ask you to break the law or do anything that you don’t want to do. All I ask is secrecy.”

  As she spoke, she walked around the back of the truck. A fiberglass top covered the bed. She opened its hatchback, then the truck’s tailgate.

  “Your name?”

  “Kayla.”

  “Kayla, I’d like you to ride up front with me. You boys in the back.”

  Leon and Chris tossed in their packs, their instrument cases, and their skateboards, then crawled in after. The truck’s bed was covered by a piece of plywood, a scrap of old, orange shag carpet that smelled of dust and yarn, old sun. The two boys stretched out flat as Natalie closed them in. After a moment, the truck began moving.

  “‘I will not ask you to break the law,’” Leon said, and snorted. “Right.” Flat on his back, he clasped his hands behind his head. He closed his eyes.

  Leon’s hair was black, curly, and there were dark freckles across his nose. He hated to be called “husky,” but that’s what he was, and strong, his arms and legs muscled, his wrists thick, his movements always slow and calm. He could sleep anywhere. Chris rested on his side, looking at his friend, then rolled onto his back. He stretched out, lining up his feet with Leon’s, then dragged himself up, so they were the same height, lying there with their shoulders touching. He kept his eyes open, staring up at the cracks in the white fiberglass shell.

  The truck jerked and jolted, the shock absorbers shot. Chris sat up, to check where they were. They’d crossed the river now and were still on Burnside, traveling through downtown, climbing up a slope. He looked forward, at the back of Natalie’s head; her hair was swept to one side, and he could see her necklace, just four or five thin copper wires against the pale skin of her neck. Two panes of glass separated the front of the truck from the back, two sliding windows there; last time Natalie had opened them, handed pieces of beef jerky back to Chris and Leon. Today she looked straight ahead. Kayla, meanwhile, sat with a heavy book in her lap, reading, probably about electricity. That was her deal—the hard science, the numbers; Chris was better at history, at English; Leon specialized in music, in debate, but he could do it all. Now, he slept.

  Chris squinted through the two windows. He saw writing on Kayla’s hand, ballpoint pen. LEON, it said; why hadn’t he noticed that before? And why not his name, too? He checked her other hand. It was bare, unmarked. Then he watched as Kayla leaned forward and changed the radio’s channel; her shirt rode up, and he saw the almost nonexistent hairs at the small of her back, in a crescent there like a rising sun. The soft hairs of his own arm rose in a shiver. He knew that Kayla wished the hair on her own arms was blonder, so it wouldn’t show; he knew that she’d just started shaving her legs. He pressed his ear against the win
dow and heard something, past the truck’s rattle; it sounded like a classical station, some cheesy Mozart. His head facing out, he looked through the porthole window of the fiberglass shell. A cemetery, a hillside of white gravestones, flashed against the dark sky. It was going to rain; Natalie never had work for them when the weather was decent.

  Chris checked his elbow again; there was a disappointing lack of blood, and what there had been had already dried. It wouldn’t even be a decent scab.

  “Well?” Leon said, his eyes still closed.

  “Heading toward Beaverton, maybe.”

  “You want to quiz me on my Biology?”

  “Not right now,” Chris said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Thinking.”

  “Did you finish The Sound and the Fury?”

  “Over-rated,” Chris said.

  Leon sat up, rubbing at his eyes, looking from side to side. “It’s a good thing she has a lid on this thing,” he said. “You know, dogs that ride in the back of trucks are always getting their retinas detached; they go blind. There’s a whole area in any Humane Society, any dog pound. Cages and cages of these blind dogs. Rednecks’ dogs, mostly.”

  As he spoke, he pulled his instrument case toward him and undid the hasps. He opened it; instead of his trombone, it held all the equipment that Natalie had given them to keep. All the straps and ropes and buckles and gloves. The orange phone headset spilled out, trailing its cords, alligator clips at the ends. Kayla said she was going to figure out how it worked; she was reading up on it, on the Internet.

  “I saw Kayla change the radio channel,” Chris said.

  “Perfect. What did Natalie do?”

  “Nothing. How old do you think she is?”

  “Too old to trust,” Leon said.

  Out the window, strip malls and new condo developments trailed off. Open fields stretched; cows and sheep, green grass.

  “So what do we think her deal is?” Chris said.

  “We’re still gathering information.”

  “I know that.”

  “It’s interesting,” Leon said. “We’ve all agreed on that. Not boring, yet.”

  “Yet,” Chris said.

  Natalie skidded to a stop on the highway’s gravel shoulder; Chris and Leon jostled against each other, just sitting upright again as she jerked the back doors open.

  “Out!” she said. “Line up, now.”

  This was part of it. The skateboards were left behind in the truck, the backpacks, with Chris’s clarinet and Kayla’s flute. Chris stood between Leon and Kayla, facing Natalie, who was excitedly pacing, pointing up and down the highway, at the setting sun, the darkening fields, the black wires between metal towers.

  “Beautiful,” Natalie said. “What time is it, now?”

  “Eight,” Chris said.

  “I’ll be back at ten,” she said.

  “Nine-thirty,” Kayla said. “It’s a school night.”

  “All right,” Natalie said, turning away, looking over her shoulder. “Don’t disappoint me!”

  And then she leapt back into the truck, slammed her door and accelerated away, gone.

  “Whoa,” Leon said. “Was she acting that crazed the whole drive?”

  “Not really,” Kayla said. “She was just talking.”

  “She wasn’t even wearing a watch,” Chris said.

  “What was she talking about?” Leon said.

  The three friends sat on the shoulder of the highway, alone for miles in every direction, fields stretching out. They began to untangle the harness, the ropes. There was not the slightest hint of a breeze. The power lines ran between metal towers, their tops spread in triangles and with smaller metal triangles like ears on top, so they looked like the faces of cats. The wires stretched over low, distant hills, trees clear-cut to make way.

  “Oh, man,” Kayla said. She pointed across the street, to where the lines ran between regular wooden poles. “Not on this side. Let’s go over there, where at least the voltage has been stepped down some. What’s she thinking? Holy crow!”

  “What kind of expression is that?” Leon said. “‘Holy crow?’”

  “Are you going to disallow it?”

  “Not yet.”

  The three had rules about clichés and hip phrases, and did not allow cursing.

  “So what was Natalie talking about?” Chris said.

  “Nothing,” Kayla said. “Creepy questions about being a girl, about which one of you was my boyfriend, just ridiculous and stupid adult stuff.”

  “She’s just another adult,” Leon said, “but she pays us, so she’s working for us as much as we’re working for her.”

  The horizon flickered; faint thunder sounded; above, the stars were becoming visible.

  “Is this smart?”

  “Not really.”

  The three hurried across the highway, into the tall grass. They continued their preparations, watchful for headlights, their voices low. They only understood some of the equipment; Natalie had given it to them in a bag that said Qwest on it, so it was clear that she’d stolen it from the phone company. They admired that.

  “I could do the next one,” Chris said, “or the one after that.”

  “We’ll see if I get tired,” Leon said. His feet were the biggest, so the spikes fit him best. He liked to be the one to climb the poles; once he got up there, he’d start to boss them around.

  The spikes were hard to walk in, like having long knives attached to your ankles, stabbing into the ground with each step. Chris and Kayla helped Leon to his feet, then to the pole; they got the thick canvas belt around it, then through the harness, and boosted him up. Spikes dug into the wood, Leon slid the belt up, leaned back, dug a little higher. Slowly, he ascended, pausing to pull splinters from his palms. He had forgotten the gloves. Below, Chris and Kayla set to hiding the trombone case, the things they wouldn’t need, and then they returned, ready.

  “Only the neutrals!” Kayla shouted, hands belled around her mouth, “don’t touch the live wires with the cutter.”

  “Right, right, right.” Leon’s whispered voice hardly reached them. “The air is hotter up here.”

  “What?”

  “Forget it.” He put his small, metal flashlight in his mouth, so he could get to work.

  The first time, Natalie had explained it so fast that it was surprising they hadn’t killed themselves. Each time they knew a little more, and Kayla read about it, so they were a little better at what they had to do.

  Leon cut the neutral, the grounding wire that ran with the live ones; it went with a snap and the pole swayed, settled, that tension gone; the heavy copper wire came down like a whip, cracking up and out, winding and unwinding around the other wires and back upon itself, stiff and slackening, coming down.

  Kayla and Chris ran after it, racing each other to get the very end. Then, as Leon descended behind them, they began to bend the wire, to roll it into a ball, larger and larger. Chris balled it up, and Kayla lifted the wire from the tall grass, to keep it clear.

  When these skeins of wire grew more than a foot in diameter, they became heavy, more difficult to carry. By that time, Leon would have climbed down behind them, taken off the spikes, and caught up with the clipper. He cut the wire, and they set the heavy skein aside and began to roll another, all the way to the next pole, which Leon would climb so they could finish this stretch and begin the next. Now, they kept an eye out for headlights; this highway was not heavily traveled. The night was still, the air close. A cow, grazing nearby, moaned low. It lifted its black and white head and blankly stared at Chris and Kayla.

  “Dude’s watching us.”

  “Concentrate on what you’re doing,” Kayla said.

  “She could help us,” he said. “Natalie. She could at least stick around.”

  “Too risky. Besides, she’s an adult. What do you expect?”

  “I wonder where she goes.”

  Natalie sat in a booth, in a roadside diner, watching the trucks pass on the
highway, wondering how her kids were doing out there. Before she had entered the diner, she had gotten out of her coveralls. She wore a silk, flowered blouse and sandals with blue straps, an outfit that owed something to Whitney Kaine, Miss September, 1976.

  “Are you ready to order?”

  Natalie looked up at the waitress, who wore a hemp necklace, a tattooed ring on her finger.

  “Strange weather,” the girl said, eager to fill any silence. “Are you visiting the vineyards? Passing through?”

  “Business,” Natalie said.

  “What do you do?”

  “Maybe I’ll have a steak. Do you have any vegetables that came in tin cans?”

  “Only fresh vegetables; we’re an organic restaurant.”

  Natalie could not remember the last time she ate a fresh piece of fruit, or a vegetable; she liked the hint of metal in the canned versions, but even they were not a major part of her diet.

  “And we don’t serve any meat,” the waitress said.

  “Just give me anything. The first thing on the menu.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You don’t really have to order anything.”

  “Yes, but I’d like to sit here, I’d like to pay you for the time and space. Does that strike you as suspicious?”

  “Do you like things that are hot, spicy?” the waitress said, trying.

  “I used to,” Natalie said.

  “I’ll bring you the special,” the waitress said. “It’s eggplant, but I bet you’ll like it.”

  Natalie turned away, back to the window. She had no time, no patience for chatter, weather talk, petty divulgements of opinions or vocation. What did she do? How did she come to her current employment? Is that what it was, when she gave away all the earnings to the children, her workers? Number Six hard-drawn copper was running sixty cents a pound, two hundred and forty dollars a mile, at worst. All that mystery she worked on the kids, all that drama and commando bullshit wasn’t really necessary, but she knew exactly how to play them, and didn’t mind feeding their attitude, their sense of superiority. She liked their serious, dependable way, how they acted like miniature experts, how little respect they actually showed her.