by Ann Pancake
Janie knew it didn’t bother people at all when they were little. You noticed it then, the difference, but it didn’t get on your nerves. It was when your own brain grew to where it passed Uncle Bobby’s that the trouble started. First the struggle for control—who was boss of whom? who child? who adult?—and then, it never entirely resolved, the impatience with him, the frustration, the exhaustion. She’d seen it in each of her older cousins when they became teenagers, she’d seen it in her brother Ben. She’d even felt it a little herself when she was thirteen or fourteen. But this summer, she felt it hardly at all. Part of the spell of the summer, Janie recognized it even then, was the way she and Uncle Bobby almost matched.
“. . . . and he said they broke up.”
“Huh?” Janie said.
“I was talking to Nathan last evening while you were at work, and he said him and Melissa broke up again. But they got back together the next day.”
“Oh,” Janie said.
DURING HER FIRST few weeks in Remington, she’d gone out with two boys, one with an eleven o’clock curfew who kissed with his teeth, the other the kind of well-behaved smart boy who reminded her too much of her secret self. She and Uncle Bobby spent more hours in the garage across the street with Nathan and his bikes.
Nathan had two motorcycles, the one he worked on and the one he rode. The one he worked on, a 1972 Harley-Davidson, he loved with a nearly feral ferocity and hated even harder. Sometimes he’d stroke his hand across its cam cover, its forks and fender, explaining to Uncle Bobby and Janie its extraordinariness while Janie nodded gravely and said, “Wow. Huh.” The way she did with McCloud County boys when they talked about football, cars, and deer hunting; the way she had more recently with WVU frat boys as they talked about football, keggers, and “brothers.” Other times Nathan cussed the bike with a fury like a fuse had burned up from his stomach and detonated a bomb in his mouth, and once Janie had seen spit, not fly from his mouth, but bubble up at its corners, she’d seen it foam. While she and Uncle Bobby sat at a safe distance in their lawn chairs near the garage door in silent, but sincere, sympathy.
A full-sized stereo sat up on a shelf—there was another one, Janie would learn, in Nathan’s bedroom, yet another one in the living room—tuned to WAMO, the Tri-State’s classic rock, and Nathan always had in his dorm-sized refrigerator a case of Budweiser, which he’d share with them even when he wasn’t talking. Now and again he’d share his pot, too, skinny roaches in little stamped-tin ashtrays he’d lifted from Johnny’s, his favorite biker bar, the dirty ashtray, its slender string of smoke, a tantalizing aberration among the tools Nathan’d neatly rowed across the floor. The garage was unlike any working garage Janie’d ever seen, its sterility, its orderliness, the smell of clean concrete, not even an oil stain on the floor, and she’d wonder was it Nathan or his mother who kept it so. “Wacky weed,” Uncle Bobby would snigger. “Left-handed cigarettes,” then snuffle-squeal with laughter. Janie with one ear pricked always for Nathan’s mother to come down from the living room, but his mother never came. Often Nathan paid little attention to them, but it was enough to know he wanted them there. Plus, the never knowing what he might do next. It was hard not to watch.
Once, when she and Uncle Bobby were sitting by themselves in the dark on her grandparents’ front porch, Janie said, as offhandedly as she could muster, “What do you think about Nathan?”
“Nathan?” Uncle Bobby paused. “Oh, Nathan’s a good friend of mine.” He paused again. Janie heard his rockers stop. Then start. “I’ve known Nathan since he was born. I’ve known Nathan since he was born, Janie.”
There were photos at her grandparents’ house of her and Nathan and some other neighbor children playing together as little kids, but he was way bigger than she was in those photos, and she could barely remember Nathan before this summer she’d moved in. He was four years older than Janie, but now he was exactly her height, Uncle Bobby a full head taller than they were. But when he wanted to, how big Nathan could make himself. A fuse for that, too. Janie never hung around guys that much older than she was, and normally, she’d have been too shy, but with Uncle Bobby along, and the Budweiser, the pot, after half an hour, she felt as cool as anybody else. Besides, Nathan had a girlfriend, Melissa, who was a year older than he was. They’d already been together three years, and Melissa wanted to get married, but Nathan wasn’t ready. “I’m just not ready to settle down,” he’d tell her and Uncle Bobby, head hung, his voice glistening with pain. “Why can’t she understand that?” Janie and Uncle Bobby nodding, growing a little, glowing, in their role as Nathan’s confidantes.
He worked from seven to three as a bank teller, and if Janie didn’t have an afternoon shift herself, at 3:20 she’d hear his ’76 Scout slamming down Kentworth Drive. She’d slip to the window of the front bedroom to watch Nathan park and walk to his house in long heavy strides as though invisible boots weighted his feet. Him leaning forward from his shoulders, his head tucked down, his brow, too, the posture at all odds with the three-piece suit. A half-hour later he’d emerge from the garage on the riding bike in black leather. Then what that Yamaha would do. To the quiet street, the respectable yards, the middle-class 1920s brick homes with their mostly elderly residents, hardworking, churchgoing, now honorably retired. In one instant of ignition, that motorcycle slashed the whole scene to shreds.
Nathan’s moodiness was mesmerizing. One second throwing his tools and beating the concrete floor with his fists until Janie’d look for blood (she never saw it). The next smiling at Janie from under droop-lidded eyes and asking if she liked the way he’d shaved his beard and let his moustache stay, as if what she thought mattered. Fifteen minutes later, an anguished confession that he and Melissa were again “having some problems,” she just “didn’t understand him,” his deep voice making what could have been a whine come out a moan. He’d even ask them for advice, which neither she nor Uncle Bobby, sober or high, had any idea how to give.
One night the heat stayed so heavy it drove her and Uncle Bobby off the porch and down to the steps between their yard and the street in hopes of a little air moving. She’d gotten home from the theater an hour before. Now, as she and Uncle Bobby perched in the streetlight, she listened half-eared to her uncle, listened with the other ear and a half for the sound of Nathan’s bike turning off Norway Avenue and onto Kentworth Drive. But what she heard instead was Nathan’s front door open.
She lifted her head. Nathan floated, silent and gray, across his dim lawn and the street. He stopped a little off to the side of them, just out of the streetlight’s beam. He was dressed in a polo shirt and a pair of shorts. He usually favored black T-shirts, and Janie could remember him in shorts just once. The legs looked strange naked. His feet bare, too. Janie felt braver, and sadder.
“Well, Bobby,” he said. “It’s for sure.”
“Uhh-hmmm,” Uncle Bobby nodded, knowingly.
“It’s over.”
“Yep,” agreed Uncle Bobby, the conversation camouflage, decades of practice of acting like he knew exactly what you were talking about whether he had an inkling or not.
“This time . . .” Nathan halted. He swallowed. “This time. It’s for good.”
“Umm-hmm,” said Uncle Bobby.
Then Nathan looked directly at Janie. He had his head tilted to one side, almost limp. The pale legs. The bare feet, one heel scuffing gently at the grass.
“What do you think, Janie? Three years, and just like that. It’s all gone.” He halted again. Janie peeked at his face to see if she could catch in his eye what she thought she’d heard. Then she looked away. “All because she just can’t wait on me a little while. That’s all I asked.”
“I’m sorry,” Janie finally said. “I’m real sorry.”
Nathan drew a deep breath.
“Well. Good night, you all.”
“G’night,” said Uncle Bobby.
“Good night,” said Janie.
Once he’d gotten far enough away that she figured he wou
ldn’t turn back, Janie watched him. He flowed up the steps and vanished into the house, and a week later, Janie was riding the motorcycle behind Nathan.
BY THAT SUMMER, they’d docked the Alexander Henry’s glory by cutting the opulent theater of Janie’s childhood into a big central box with two smaller, rectangular theaters at its sides. They’d bought an adjacent shoe store and converted it to hold a fourth screen. The popcorn, she discovered, arrived from someplace else in big plastic bags they stored on a landing over one of several sets of basement steps. Ronnie, the gentle year-round usher, scuttled up railings in his slick dress shoes and threw down the bags to waiting popcorn girls, and the “butter” they poured out of plastic jugs that listed coconut oil and yellow number something as ingredients one and two. When kids twelve, ten, eight came in for R-rated movies, Gus would march them to the pay phone—“Oh, that’s just awful! That’s awful, Janie!” Uncle Bobby said when she told him this—and sell the ticket after he got whatever passed for parental permission over the phone. Some of the candy was left over from the 1960s—the Chuckles wouldn’t give under your thumb no matter how hard you pressed—and Gus marked them down to a “special price,” then ordered the popcorn girls to “really push ’em.”
“Ooooo. I wouldn’t eat those.” Uncle Bobby screwed up his face. “Would you, Janie? Would you?”
“And this one lady who’s worked there twenty years. She says there’s ghosts in the bathrooms.” Janie stopped and looked at Uncle Bobby. His face got serious, then worried, just a little. “She says somebody died of a heart attack down there in one of the stalls, and people have been seeing the ghost ever since.”
“Oh.” Uncle Bobby was stroking Tina’s back, and now the strokes went a little faster, a little harder. Janie saw Tina brace. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that, do you, Janie? Do you?”
Janie thought.
“If I saw a ghost down there,” he said, “I’d just laugh at it! I’d laugh at it, Janie!” Tina slipped behind the couch. “Do you believe that, Janie?”
“Nah,” Janie said. “It’s just what they say.”
Most of the new hires at the Alexander Henry were girls from the in-town college, and if they hadn’t known each other before becoming popcorn girls, they had friends who had. They were all sorority girls, at least in type. Not the snobby and mean variety, but the variety who knew how to make themselves look cute even in red popcorn girl smocks and health department regulations about loose hair, who knew the right girl giggle or quip for every circumstance, who stayed cheerful and pleasant always, as though they’d never recovered from their high school cheerleader careers. They treated Janie the way they’d treat a person they were visiting in a children’s hospital or a nursing home: with kindness, then forgetfulness, never with inclusion.
The other three were long-timers, year-rounders. Besides Ronnie, there was Tommie Sue, a long, pointy woman with high, hard hair who held between her fingers always a phantom cigarette. She had worked at the Alexander Henry for twenty years, longer than anybody else, longer even than Gus, and she reminded him of this regularly without ever speaking to it or of it. Both she and Betty drove into Remington from someplace out in the country, but not the same place, and Betty was snowman-shaped, with a constant sad smile and a tiny silver cross riding her large breasts. Intelligent, competent, organized, Betty had put in fourteen years and usually sold tickets, something the popcorn girls weren’t trusted to do. Tommie Sue was vinyl and wire. Betty, cottonball and artificial flowers. And although neither of them was more like Janie than the sorority girls were, they were far more familiar. They could have come straight out of McCloud County. They were the ones she’d been around all her life.
It was Tommie Sue who told about the people who had died. When all the movies were at least an hour deep, when the counters had been wiped, the cups restocked, the ashtrays cat shit-cleaned under Gus’s military eye, Tommie Sue would lean against the back of the concession stand between the pop dispenser and Betty, crack her back, cross her arms, and start. The sorority girls tended to cluster at the other end of the counter, where they murmured among themselves, what party, what boy, what bar. While Janie shuffled around the middle, not sure what to do with her hands.
“You were here, Betty, weren’t you, when that big chunk of plaster came down off there and on that guy’s head?” She gestured with her first two fingers squeezed together to the rococo molding that ran between the high ceiling and the wall. Betty nodded. “Must have hit him just right. Knocked him dead on the carpet.” Tommie Sue rolled her eyes back in her head a little to remember. The gold-flecked mirror behind her reflected her dark, undyed hair, defiant, the few white strands as fine as cobweb and invisible in the atmospheric lobby light.
From across the room, poised to prop the theater doors the moment the Return of the Jedi credit music rolled, Gus glared at Tommie Sue. Tommie Sue, at least eight inches taller, gazed evenly back. “Worst one was the manager before Gus. Blew his brains out in the office upstairs while he was counting receipts. If that wasn’t a mess.”
“You all get ready for this exit!” Gus yelled. The sorority cluster bustled into place. Janie stood at attention over the candy. After a long minute, Tommie Sue reached under the counter, picked up a big stack of the booklets that had come with that year’s James Bond, Octopussy, and strode out into the lobby. She flagged them in front of the departing movie watchers.
“Pussy programs! Get your pussy programs!” she sang.
THE FIRST WEEK, Nathan asked Janie to ride with him almost every day. She’d only been on a motorcycle a few times before, and soon she understood. The absence of metal, you closer to dying, and how that shouted all the life in you out to your edge. The way you soared into vaults of odors and the tastes that they carried, then left them as rapidly behind, all the layers of real a car kept you from, and the heat of the muffler against the inside of your calves and what happened to your skin if they touched.
They’d cross the 18th Street Bridge and ribbon down some of the straightest roads Janie’d ever seen, along the Ohio River on the Ohio side, her looking back across at West Virginia. She loved that on the bike, she didn’t have to talk, didn’t even have to look at or be looked at by him. Them just hurtling forward, her straddling his hips, the bulk of his jacket against her cheek, the smell of his clean neck, his back to her always. Her riding not just the bike, but his back.
He took her places that she’d been only dimly aware of before, places her grandmother never passed on their childhood excursions to Sunday school, to the Remington art museum, to the Alexander Henry. With Nathan, she traveled under horizons of coal power plants, heaving up out of their own steam and effluvium like daymare mirages, menacing unoccupied castles, the cooling towers monstrous squat beakers, some mutation out of a chemistry set. The oil refineries with their perverse metal trees, overtall, spindly, their flares rippling, biblical, each crown a sterile altar. They ripped past hulks of plants even more mysterious, seeping noxious stenches that gummed the roof of your mouth, many of the buildings painted a color that matched their stink, putrescent chartreuses, vomitous creams.
When they didn’t ride along the river, Nathan favored an east side outskirt of abandoned or almost warehouses and factories, the streets there usually empty, and always of cops. The structures formed a three-story sheet metal ravine, their echo spectacular, the motorcycle a contained and rainless thunderstorm ricocheting between walls. The deserted hulks seeped not just eeriness, but somehow anger, even surprise, but Janie and Nathan were shielded from all that by the speed of the bike. Them rocketing past enigmatic geometries, cylinders and chutes, cupolas and cones, past towering red letters threatening head injury and limb loss, past windows, if not shattered, so spider-infested Janie could make out webs at fifty miles per hour. These were places that used to make things, not chemicals, electricity, gasoline, but things you could actually touch, and now the vegetation rising, the weeds shrouding, pressing, fecund, wanton, “plants”
and “plants” Janie’d think in her alcohol haze, noticing for the first time how the word had been stolen, but ultimately the first plants had won.
The last evening of that week, they pulled over at a spot Nathan knew along the river. They hid the bike in the brush and pushed down the bank through kudzu and briar. The stillness after the bike shocked Janie’s ears, the chung of insect slowly returning, and Nathan, halfway down, remembered to hold back the blackberry vines. At the bottom, they reached a decaying dock over river water the color of dirty tires. Nathan sat cross-legged on the punky boards, pulled out his Baggie and papers, and rolled a joint with ostentatious expertise using a fold in his jeans on the inside of his thigh. He sucked in and held, then passed the joint to Janie, who imitated him, like she’d been imitating pot smokers since she was fifteen. And instantly—reflex, too soon for the drug to have reached blood—her tight places loosened. The pot shortened the distance between Nathan and her, why she smoked, why she drank. It was not, she told herself, escape, but its opposite. To connect her, to make her more there.
Nathan passed the joint again. The opaque river water under them, its slow, invisible poisons. The coal barges silently sliding. And then he was taking off his clothes. The leather jacket, the black T-shirt, his engineer boots, his Levi’s. He stopped at his briefs. They had not had sex yet, and Janie’d never seen him strip down, although the truth was, even after they did begin having sex, she’d never see him completely naked in light. He slipped over the dock edge and into the river before either of them said anything.
Janie stared, his body vanishing under the charcoal-colored water, surfacing, him whipping his bangs out of his eyes with a violent shake of his head. Janie watched, the pot continuing to dissolve the hard holding in her, burning away at her self-doubt. Nathan broke surface again, gulped, and dove, the white briefs soaked translucent, the skin of his buttocks visible through them. And as she watched him, Janie understood she wanted to undress, too, and a part of her was surprised and a little scandalized. But then she was untying her shoes, rolling off her socks. She hesitated, glanced up and down the river, then unbuttoned her blouse. She was standing on the dock in her jeans and her bra, her shirt wadded against her stomach, her hunched a bit forward, when Nathan came up and turned towards her again.
