Angela Sloan

by James Whorton

  We passed a sign saying KNOXVILLE CITY LIMITS. I could not find it on our Kentucky map. Yet the town was of some size, judging by the vastness of its GM dealership. We stopped at a café called Roby’s, I believe, and Betty cursed me for a long time in Chinese while we waited for some menus. I startled her by cursing back in imitation Chinese.

  “Don’t this one speak English?” the waitress said.

  “Count your blessings.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “Formosa,” I said. It just came out.

  “Tell her I said, Hello and welcome to Tennessee.”

  “Excuse me, what?”

  “Hello and welcome to Tennessee.”

  I studied the waitress, confused. She appeared to be wearing white eye shadow. You only saw it when she turned a certain way.

  “Go on, tell her,” the waitress said. “I know you speak her language. I heard you talking when I come over here.”

  Feeling that it would be the simplest way, I spoke some more of my imitation Chinese.

  Betty sat up straight. Syllables came out of her mouth.

  “She don’t sound happy!”

  “Their language always sounds grumpy like that,” I said. “She asks me to thank you and to tell you she would like to try your American-style bacon and two fried eggs. I’ll have the biscuits and gravy, please.”

  Later the waitress brought the cook out to see us, I mean only to look. He stood in the kitchen doorway.

  So this was Tennessee.

  As we were eating, a girl in a brown leotard and bell-bottom jeans came to speak with the cook. “I have to give you back that money for the orphans in Palookadong,” she said.

  I eavesdropped. Some boys at college had signed her up for a coin drive to buy record players for the blind orphans at Palookadong, so the orphans could listen to Time magazine. The girl collected almost twenty dollars in an oatmeal canister. Then she found out that Palookadong was not a real place. She asked the cook to remember how much money he had contributed.

  “A dollar.”

  “He never give you any dollar,” the waitress with the white eyelids said. “Look in that can and see have you got a dirty nickel that was run over by a train. He might’ve give you that.”

  “No,” the cook said, “I give her several quarters to help those blond orphans.”

  “They was blind, you idiot.”

  “It was raining that day,” the cook said. “I remember you come in here with your hair dripping. Isn’t that right?”

  The girl’s hair was long, straight, and reddish gold in color. “Maybe it was raining,” she said.

  “Either that or you had washed it,” he said. “But it was sure dripping!” He jabbed his finger at a pin on her leotard. “Why would you waste a vote on McGovern?”

  “George speaks to my generation,” the girl said. “Bobby Kennedy called George the most decent man in the Senate.”

  “That’s like calling him a clean turd.”

  “Those two over there speak Formosan,” the waitress mentioned.

  The girl in the brown leotard eyed us shyly and smiled at Betty. I worried she might come over, but then the cook announced that he did not want his quarters back, and to my relief the girl skipped out the door.

  It was my first time eating biscuits with sausage gravy. They made an excellent inexpensive breakfast. Betty ate her eggs with a spoon.

  48

  Betty asked me whether gum-chewing would be healthy for her teeth. It couldn’t have hurt them any. I encouraged her to give it a second try. I showed her how to put a penny in the Lions Club gum machine and slide the lever to get a gumball out. On the way out of Roby’s we got her several gumballs. Then, in the parking lot, the right rear tire of the Scamp was flat.

  With the biscuits and sausage gravy in me, I took it in my stride. “This is why we carry a spare,” I said.

  I was at the trunk when someone spoke behind me. It was the girl in the brown leotard, accompanied by a long, slouching fellow with a fringe of mustache and bangs in his eyes.

  “They told us your friend is from Formosa,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Eeyore can help you change your tire.”

  The boy lifted the spare out and dropped it. It rolled away. Off he went after it, Roman sandals slapping the pavement. His pants had colored stripes down the length of them, and the sandals looked as though they had not come off his feet for several weeks.

  As he rolled the tire back across the parking lot he appeared sad and embarrassed. Even the feet with their long, groping toes expressed melancholy. The girl, however, was just as bright and cheery as you could ever want. I had the jack in my hands, and she said, “Eeyore, you can do that.” Eeyore puzzled over how to fit the handle on.

  “I never met anyone from Formosa before,” the girl said.

  Betty stayed in the Scamp during all this, working on her gum-balls. She added them to her mouth one by one, with long, attentive intervals between. In an effort to dominate the situation, I led the girl to Betty’s window and said, “This is my friend who is visiting from Formosa and does not speak a word of English.”

  “What is her name?” the girl said.

  “Ding Lo.”

  “Hello, Ding. My name is Renee.” Renee shook Betty’s hand through the window then asked me my name. I told her something which I immediately forgot.

  The boy dropped the jack handle on his sandaled foot and began to softly moan. Renee hustled over, cooing. There was a lengthy fuss during which I tried to remember what I had said my name was. Renee had Eeyore limp over to some grass and sit. He had sustained a short laceration on his pointer toe.

  I levered up the jack in the spot where Eeyore had placed it. Next I was interrupted by a woman with a scarf around her neck whistling at me from a white Chevy Caprice.

  The woman left her car. She studied the jack for only a moment, then took the handle away from me and used it to knock the jack out from under the Scamp. Where Eeyore had placed it, she said, it would only have crumpled the sheet metal. “You need to get your friend out of the car as well,” she added.

  I pulled Betty out. The woman raised the jack under the rear bumper. “Look how I’m doing this,” she said. “You want to loosen the lug nuts before you get the tire all the way off the ground.” In her blouse, scarf, tailored skirt, and tall zipper boots she applied herself to the task while the injured hippie boy lay vaporing, attended by his cheerful Renee. Inside of ten minutes my Good Samaritan had the spare on and had showed me the bright head of a nail in the tread of my tire. “Have that patched at your first opportunity,” she said. “Not plugged, but patched.” She had on large, green-framed sunglasses. She frowned at her wristwatch and left.

  Eeyore was back on his feet now. He asked to be introduced to Ding.

  Betty said something in Chinese. The hippie couple turned to me, waiting to hear my translation.

  “She said she is surprised at how outgoing the Tennesseans are. We have met so many new friends today.”

  Eeyore followed up with a series of questions. Why America? Did you come on a boat? What’s for breakfast in Formosa? Are there freaks there like Renee and me? Do they have a gassy youth scene? Betty gave long answers which I pretended to translate. Then Renee did some cartwheels.

  I put Betty back in the Scamp. Eeyore asked if we could give them a ride to campus. After establishing which way campus was, I told him we definitely couldn’t. “We have to keep moving the other way,” I said.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Nashville!”

  He appeared confused. “Nashville’s this way,” he said. Renee had him give us his mother’s phone number. “We don’t have a phone where we dwell,” she explained. There was another fuss as Eeyore searched his pants pockets for a scrap of paper. None could be found. The pockets were nearly empty, he explained, because the pants had just been washed.

  Finally he wrote out the number longways on a cigarette, which Bett
y smoked as soon as we were moving again.

  “Let’s get the hell out of Tennessee,” I said.

  49

  Nothing is simple, however. The man at Sears and Roebuck would not patch the nail hole because there was also an abrasion on the sidewall. “Truthfully, you need a whole set,” he said.

  That couldn’t be right, I told him, because I’d had a new set put on mere days ago.

  He took me around to look at the Armando Snacki tires. None of them matched, and the front right tire had fibers showing through the rubber. The new set would cost me one hundred forty-five dollars, and it would be an hour before he could put them on the Scamp because he had to replace the parking brake cable on a Ford pickup first.

  Inside Sears I followed an interested Betty down aisles of house paint and waited while she stared at a long bin of record albums. We stood at a wall of televisions. The soap opera faces were a little pinker on one screen, a little greener on the next. When we came to the women’s clothing Betty’s mouth clicked open, and I saw her eyes go soft and vague. She stopped at a rack of dresses and stood there like a child in the cereal aisle.

  “Nobody cares if you touch them,” I said.

  She scraped one coat hanger along the chrome.

  There was a pitiful tenderness in the little Maoist’s gaze. At the shoe department, she lost all resemblance to her former self. She resembled a spilled Pepsi. I reminded her, “You have a hundred bucks tucked away somewhere on your body. Buy whatever you want.”

  Betty put her finger on one shoe, then another. Then the lady measured her foot. Betty smiled bashfully when her ankle was touched. The first pair of shoes she tried on was a set of espadrilles with a very tall cork heel, and she fell over into a chair when she tried to walk on them. It was the first time I saw her laugh, and downright strange.

  After ninety minutes of the dresses, shoes, sun hats, and shoulder bags I was both bored and starving. A big breakfast will always make you hungry for a big lunch. We found a coffee shop in the mall and ordered some chili dogs. Betty speared the wiener on a fork and took small bites off it, ignoring the bun. Her new dress was pink gingham with a white spread collar.

  “You are quite the clothes hound,” I said. “I didn’t think you Communists went in for a lot of clothes-shopping.”

  “Everybody like to have some new things,” she said. “Maybe now I will blend.”

  “You will never blend while eating your chili dog with a fork,” I said. “Look here. See how I do it?” I picked my dog up in the bun and bit the end off.

  “Messy way.”

  “That’s what this is for.” I fluttered a paper napkin.

  On ways of eating, Betty wouldn’t be steered. She took lots of very small bites and bent low over the plate, though I told her that looks coarse to the Western eye. “You eat like a pet from the dish,” I said.

  “You eat like a squirrel,” she said. She straightened her spine against the chair back and twitched her head as though she were monitoring the whole room while chewing.

  Earlier, while Betty was waiting to check out at Sears, I had left her and bought two hairbrushes, a light blue one and a green one. I presented the green one to her now. She was so surprised and pleased with it, it made me feel a little poor. They were cheap plastic hairbrushes, and the only reason I had bought two was so I wouldn’t have to share the blue one.

  50

  Back in the Scamp, Betty got to work thrashing at her hair with the new brush. She used her whole arm very fast and vigorously, as though she meant not only to brush the hair but to teach it an important lesson. Then she made two long braids and tied each one with a piece of green yarn. I don’t know where she got the yarn. When she was done with that she slid her new white tennis shoes off, folded her legs on the seat, and began to sing in English in a queer, quiet falsetto: “Why, somebody? Why will people break up?”

  Soon she went to sleep in her easy way.

  We got onto the new expressway, which was straight and monotonous. The sky was dull like smoked foil, the pavement flawlessly smooth. My eyes were sore.

  My head became empty, and then I saw a fat old woman in a housedress run into the road with a platter of food. I swerved. Betty threw her arms out.

  “Sleeping! Wake up!”

  It was true. I was very tired, but I wanted to keep going until we made Virginia.

  But first, the new expressway ran out. I got onto an old stop-and-start U.S. highway. I left Betty dozing in the Scamp while I stepped into a truck stop. At the counter a man in a denim shirt was tearing packets of sugar three at a time for his coffee. A shred of paper fell in. His hand trembled when he used the spoon to dip it out.

  I asked him where I could get on the expressway again.

  “Past Bristol,” he said. “I’m not headed that way.” He wanted to know where my parents were.

  Too tired to make something up, I simply told him, “It’s all right,” and got my coffee and left.

  We had exited the parking lot when Betty said she needed to use the bathroom. I asked her why she had not done that before we left, and she barked at me in Chinese.

  I turned the Scamp around and told her not to speak to anyone.

  While I waited in the Scamp, something changed in the look of the day. Shadows came out where there had not been any before, and a gray bush beside a gas meter was now a green holly plant. I got out to wake myself up and look at the sky. The haze had clotted, organizing itself into clouds. A lot of small birds were moving around.

  A woman was looking at me from a phone booth across the lot. Her brown hair was draped in barrettes on both sides of her head. When our eyes met she turned her back to me like a figure on a cuckoo clock, smooth and mechanical.

  I thought I must be hallucinating again, because I knew that woman’s boots. I had seen them before, and her scarf as well, and that didn’t seem possible. But I wasn’t hallucinating. There by the phone booth was her white Chevy Caprice.

  51

  I got into the Scamp to drive away, but something stopped me. If she was the person GRISTLE had sent to shoot me on the sidewalk, why had she changed my tire?

  I blocked her car with the Scamp. I walked right up to the phone booth and straight-armed the door. “Tell me who you are,” I said.

  “Back up and let me come out.”

  “Are you with the FBI? If so, you are required by law to tell me.”

  She laughed at me. “How old are you, kid?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “I’m twenty-nine. Now we’re both liars.”

  I let her get out of the booth and she gave me an odd, sultry “Thank you.” I noticed her unusual eyes. The blue irises had dark rings around them. It puzzled me that I hadn’t noticed them before, until I remembered the sunglasses. She asked me why I was following her.

  “Don’t be cute,” I said. “You’re following me.”

  “It’s been a while since anyone called me cute,” she said.

  A dozen thoughts fell through my head. I couldn’t read her face—there was too much going on there. The mouth had a smirk on it, but strawberry blotches had come out in front of both ears. She looked past me, then down at my hands. Her hand went slowly to her pocket.

  I shoved her and ran. I had left the Scamp idling. She was smart, though. Instead of chasing me, she simply got into the Scamp on the passenger side. It was the same trick Betty had used.

  “Are you going to shoot me?” I said.

  “Shoot you? Why would I shoot you?”

  “Get out or I will crash the car.”

  “Easy, now,” she said. “Let’s talk. Let’s figure this out.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Well, I was following you. I wanted you not to see me.”

  “Who told you to follow me?”

  “I’m working with Ray,” she said. “I’m on Ray’s side.”

  Across the lot, Betty was standing on the curb with her chin in the air, looking for the Scamp. I felt as though I were
watching her in a silent movie. She spotted me, and I saw her come a few steps. Then she saw that I wasn’t alone, and she stopped.

  I reversed the Scamp in an arc, backing onto a curb.

  “Why don’t you let me drive?” the woman said.

  I didn’t answer. I just drove, leaving Betty behind in the parking lot.

  “All right. We’ll do this if you want.”

  The look of everything changed again. Shadows blurred, and it rained. I was stuck and felt childish, persisting in harmful behavior, but I didn’t know what else to do. This was not the way in which Ray had promised to contact me.

  The woman smelled like cigarettes and shampoo. She had to remind me where the switch was for the windshield wipers. She asked me where I was taking her.

  “Is Ray sick?” I said.

  I could see that she was considering.

  “Don’t consider, just tell me! How is he?”

  “Ray’s all right. He’s worried about you.”

  There was a fidget in my steering, the kind of thing that scared Betty awake.

  “You cannot keep driving without sleep,” the woman said. “I’ve seen you drifting all over the road. You’ll kill someone. Look at you, Angela. You’re so tired, you look like a little old man.”

  “Shut up about that,” I said. And yet something broke. I had to pull over.

  “Go on and cry,” she said. “Nobody minds it.” She lit a cigarette and waited for me to get straight and clean up my face on my sleeve.

  52

  ME: Tell me who you are.

  WOMAN: I’m with the Agency. We met once at the Farm, but you don’t seem to remember.

  ME: No, I don’t.

  WOMAN: I caught you hiding in the library.

  ME: Oh. That was you?

  WOMAN: My hair was different then.

  ME: I wasn’t hiding, I was reading. What is your name?

  WOMAN: Marilyn.

  ME: Ray told me to stay clear of Agency people.

  WOMAN: I was keeping an eye on you, that’s all.