by Adam Johnson
I lift my drink, too, but the sight of her lipstick, dark and smudged on the rim, makes me pause. I cup my mouth around it, get a shiver in the hot parking lot.
Back inside, we are broken into groups to play unusual board games that seem designed to teach us how to have fun without controlled substances, which is supposed to be the point of this class. In reality, however, all the games are rigged so that everyone loses, and there’s something weirdly churchy about them. There’s “High Times” and “One for the Road,” which uses hazardous highway signs to convey its message. Loren and I join a group playing a Monopoly-style game named “Last Call.” You start with plenty of money, but it quickly goes to pay the bartenders, dealers, and bookies. Once poor, you have to draw from a stack of cards called Sobering Realities. I keep landing on Make Mine a Double. Loren wraps her Corvette around a tree. I go blind and my pregnancy ends in stillbirth.
After class, I walk with Loren in the parking lot. “Sorry we went Bottoms Up at the end,” I tell her. “Those dice had to be loaded.”
“Look,” she says. “You want to go for a drive? I want to go for a drive.”
“A drive where to?”
Loren glances up, shrugs. “I don’t want to go home just yet.”
She hands me the keys to the Chevelle, and the chain weighs a ton with all sorts of trinkets attached to it, but I head for the driver’s door and the ’Velle fires up with authority. The interior is mint: three-speed on the column, amber gauges, and a black vinyl bench seat that is an ad for Armor All. Out on the hood is a red-faced tachometer that glows brighter the more I rev. I don’t know why they put them out there, but it’s universal for tough.
On the dash is a statue of Jesus. It’s not the one of him being crucified, but from before, on the way to the cross with his crown and blood and bad back. The statue’s arms are uplifted, and the cheap plastic molding makes the fingers look webbed.
“Don’t worry about that,” Loren says and pops the statue out of the little base that holds its feet and reclamps it upside-down, so that Jesus is doing a handstand.
Somehow, when I see her do this, I’m not as nervous about driving Loren in a muscle car custom-built by her husband, a man so without fear that he’s removed the seat belts.
“Let’s go to the tower,” I say, which is the big water tank on the side of Hayden Mountain that looks down on the university.
I ease through the parking lot, but I can’t help goosing the ’Velle on the first left out of City Hall, a move that sends me sliding across the slick seat into Loren’s lap, leaving the car idling, driverless, sideways in the street.
“Why don’t we try that one again?” she says.
The car runs hot as we wander the backstreets of Tempe’s college scene, past bars and taquerias, even the open-air cantina where I pissed on the horse, but I don’t point that out. Near the old Hayden Mill, we hit a bump and there’s a wild jangle in the trunk. “Christ,” Loren says, “Jack and his crowbars.”
Up the winding road, we park in front of the storm-wire fence that surrounds the massive tank. Loren and I sit on the hood with the last of our drinks. Under us, the cooling motor hisses and seethes to run again, and out there is the orange wash of the south valley: to the east is the floodlighted Sun Devil stadium, and south, beyond Tempe, Chandler, and the Heights, are the Maricopa Mountains, while west sit the Papagos, circling the dark Phoenix Zoo.
Around us is a rocky shelf of beer cans and cigarette butts, and then a steep drop-off down to the lights of the university, whose cement walkways and hard-angled courtyards tremble in the heat.
“Have you ever been to Mexico?” Loren asks, and I realize she’s looking a lot farther south than I am.
“A few times,” I say, but she wants to hear more, I can tell. “It’s not so different, really. You can go twenty minutes outside of Tempe and you’d think you were in the desert outside Guymas or Hermasillo.”
Loren begins running her hand over my thigh, tracing her fingers along the muscle, absently pulling out bits of mortar that have hardened in the hair. The little pricks of pain give me an erection so fast and sure I get light-headed. I describe the smell of Mexican creosote after rain, the wicked look to a yucca plantation, the taste of prickly pear meat.
“When you said things were complicated,” I say. “Complicated how?”
“You’re young. You’ll get older, you’ll see.” She rattles the ice in the bottom of her cup, then she chews a piece, her voice throaty through the plastic. “There’s a point of overconnection in life. Everything’s suddenly strung together, like with fishing wires you can’t see.”
I don’t really get what Loren’s talking about, and she sees it on my face.
“Earlier tonight I got a glass of water,” she says. “Plain water. But from somewhere in the house, Cheryl hears the ice crusher go off in the fridge door. Maybe the ice crusher makes her think of the cold packs for Jack’s tendons, my vodka martinis, or the fishing bait coolers Jack fills whenever he feels a ‘relapse’ coming on. Either way, Cheryl deals with things by blasting the Christian rock. And then here comes Jack, all red and worked up, concentration shot, stomping in from the garage where he’s been shadowboxing Jesus. The wires go a thousand places from there.”
An El Camino pulls up a couple car lengths away, and I give it a good look over while I try to wrap my brain around what Loren’s saying. The car’s seen some rough trade. Its panels have been blasted and primered, and there’s a pattern of Bondo rings consistent with the repair of damage from automatic gunfire. There is a homemade hood scoop large enough to funnel every bad idea in town into the motor’s smoky maw.
“Forget about all that stuff, though,” she says. “You don’t have to worry about that for a while. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to you. That and your hands. Soon as I saw your hands, I had a feeling about you.”
She takes my palm, touches all the little nicks from my trowel. She rubs the patches of red on my wrists. “My daughter has this,” she says, “on her neck, though hers is a softer red. I think it’s beautiful. Jack hates it. He thinks everything’s a sign.”
“This is just dye,” I tell Loren. “I lay block for my father. We buy colored block and then dye the mortar. It saves the cost of painting the wall later.”
“I still like it.”
Loren cups my hand, working her thumbs deep between the bones. Her breath is sweet with alcohol and Sprite, and over her shoulder I absently watch a man and woman exit the El Camino, come round to the front bumper, and unbutton each other’s jeans.
I touch her neck, running the back of my hand along that tendon there. I trace the underside of her jaw, smooth her brow with my thumb. She closes her eyes a moment, the outlines of her pupils roaming beneath the lids, and looking at her features, it hits me all of a sudden who her daughter might be: Cheryl, a girl I sometimes sit near in my Civic Responsibility class at Tempe Community College, a girl with a red mark on her neck, a locket-shaped pocket of red.
Behind Loren, the man and woman start going at it on the grill of the El Camino, humping with the bland monotony of a sump pump, while the hollow throat of the hood scoop exhales waves of heat from the motor. The guy’s around my dad’s age, fifty maybe, and though I’ve done the nasty at least three different times, I guess it kind of weirds me out to see older people doing it. I mean, they don’t even take their clothes off.
“Let’s sit in the car,” I suggest.
As soon as we’re in, Loren’s like a gymnast the way she sidles on top of me, straddling my lap, despite the close quarters.
Up close, the light coming in sideways, I notice the faint lines around her eyes, her mouth, a few gray strands in the hair that clings to my arm. But something seems to radiate from her, too, and it’s like I can see those fine wires she was talking about, extending out, connecting to a maze of things, like all those objects on her key chain. And now one wire strings to me, which makes me feel mature somehow, adultlike for once.
I kiss her,
and we begin making out with enough fury to froth up a sweaty milk of Armor All from the vinyl seat. We finger gums, ears, cheek hollows, let our teeth run zippery down neck ridges, across clavicles. We revel in friction, fabric, hair, and then I discover something dangling from the key chain in the ignition that I hadn’t noticed before: a laminated photo of young Cheryl, the Goody Two-shoes in Civic Responsibility who gave her oral presentation on “Loving Thy Neighbor.”
I reach for the belt buckle of Loren’s shorts.
“Easy, tiger,” she says. She pulls back and grabs my shoulders, holding me at arm’s length.
I lift my eyebrows. “The night is young,” I tell her.
“Oh, that’s precious. A line from a movie.” She laughs. “You’re dangerous. You could really cause some problems.”
* * *
I drop by my father’s place on the way home. He only lives two blocks from my house, and I try to hang out with him when he gets down on himself. He refuses to have a phone, and after a running argument with the Postal Service, they stopped delivering his mail. So you deal with my father in person. He also doesn’t believe in things like licenses, bonding, registration, or insurance, which is why they impounded his four-ton flatbed truck last week, the reason I have to haul so much block by hand.
In the driveway, I park next to his Dodge, and our trucks are like twins with beds full of sand and pink block. Crossing the lawn, I move through the weepy branches of eucalyptus trees I climbed as a kid. I grew up in this house, and it’s always strange to see my old home as a bachelor’s place—bare couch, blank walls, a crate of motorcycle parts in the corner.
Mom got this place in the settlement, and then she and I moved to a new, “memory-free” house down the street so I could go to the same school. She kept the old house as an investment, and then, in a twist of fate, leased it to my father. Mom took some psychology courses in college, and she believes a male influence is important for me to have around. Providing this, in her opinion, is a good investment.
Before I’m through the gate that leads to the backyard and the kitchen’s sliding door, I hear my father’s rip saw and smell hot sap and green pine. Inside, I find him sawing lumber, which is generally a bad sign. In the dining room where we all once ate our meals together, he has positioned a lone table saw, and he smokes a little Mexican cigar called a rojo as he feeds the pitched blade. He is shirtless, and the sawdust frosts the hair on his chest and arms, obscuring his old navy tattoos.
“What’cha building?” I ask, and the board he’s mitering bucks back.
“Jesus,” he says. “Give me a heart attack.”
He kills the saw and gives me a big smile, even though I know he’s been real negative on himself lately. He’s gotten to a strange place these days, and I don’t even know what to call it. He’s a worker, however, and whenever he gets like this, he remodels something, though I don’t tell my mother about the skylights he cut into her roof or the bunks he built so he could sleep the way he did on the navy boats.
He grabs us two beers and explains his plan. “I’ve been thinking about building a breakfast bar,” he says, sweeping his arm. “Over here, so it catches the sunlight when I eat cereal and check out the paper. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right?”
There’s some sarcasm in his voice, but the gesture is sincere—a blue-panthered bicep, coated with sawdust, shows me the only way it knows to fix things.
“I think they’re calling them nooks these days—breakfast nooks,” I tell him. “Because of how a bar makes you think of alcohol.”
Dad grabs two folding chairs and considers this. We open the chairs and sit with our beers on either side of a masking tape outline on the floor, which is in the general shape of the future breakfast nook.
We both sit quiet a minute and imagine, I guess, that it’s morning, sun shining and some birds chirping maybe, as if Dad and I are reading the paper with coffee in a house we used to share. But it’s beer we’re drinking, and when I was living here, I was the kind of kid who mostly ate by myself, in front of the TV.
“I don’t know,” he says, smoking. “I don’t think I’m a nook kind of guy. What about a breakfast bench. We could call it that.”
“What about this idea,” I tell him. “How about we get the flatbed truck out of the impound yard? We could scrape up the money to make it legal and get it back on the road.”
“Forget about the flatbed,” he says, shaking his head. “The flatbed was an experiment. The flatbed’s over.”
I take a sip of beer and a memory comes to me from when I was eight, and my father came through this door, home from a naval tour to announce that he hated the smell of metal, of insulation, and paint. He hated galvanized grating, he said, and red light bulbs and he was never going to take another order again as long as he lived. Even as a kid, I knew his heart was never really in the navy—we lived in the middle of a desert, and it didn’t seem like serious sailors would commute to the ocean. But my father became serious about being an ex-sailor and serious about his hatred of authority.
I try a different angle. “Are we going to let them get away with taking our truck?” I ask him.
He puts his rojo in his teeth and hunches sideways so he can dig in his pocket, where he finds his keys. He twists a key off the chain and tosses it to me. “Here,” he says. “It’s your truck now. You take care of it. Treat it like a baby.”
When I leave, I set the key on the edge of the table saw. I don’t want anything to do with it.
* * *
When I’m finally home, there’s a car in the driveway I don’t recognize, one of those slanty-shaped Saabs. The house is dark inside, and I strip naked by the sliding door, before heading out to the backyard, where I masturbate on the lawn. The sprinklers have run, and my bare feet leave dark prints in the misted grass. I have a lot on my mind, so it takes a long time. Above, birds wrestle their wings in the tight nests of a palm tree. The grapefruit leaves are thick, waxy, as I stare up through them.
* * *
In the morning, I come downstairs to find a man in slacks and an unbuttoned dress shirt eating in our kitchen. A loose tie drapes his shoulder. There is a little TV on the counter, and he’s watching “Shark Week” on the Discovery Channel while thumbing through some papers.
“Hey,” I say. His briefcase sits open, and he wears reading glasses, though he looks too young for them. He’s really going at the cereal.
“Hey,” he says. “I’m Greg. We met at your mom’s office party.”
“I remember,” I say and grab a bowl.
“No, wait.” He points at me with a spoon. “Maybe it was at that awards thing.”
“Sure,” I tell him. “That sounds right.”
When I pick up the box of Cap’n Crunch, it’s empty.
“Isn’t this stuff great?” Greg asks. “God, I haven’t had this stuff in years.”
“Yeah, that’s why my mom buys it for me.”
Greg kind of coughs, but it might be a laugh. “Sorry,” he says.
Mom comes downstairs. She’s wearing a black suit with a bright scarf, and she’s in a pretty good mood. She is fumbling with an earring and heading for the coffee when she grabs one of my hands. She turns it back and forth in the light. It’s still a faint pink. “You better graduate college,” she tells me, shaking her head. Then she hands me some pamphlets. “Here, I got these for you.”
The pamphlets are about depression. One’s entitled “Warning Signs,” which features a big, yellow Yield on the cover. The other features a lamb, bright-eyed, gazing out from where it is cradled, in the great paws of a lion. This one’s named “Last Call.” Crucial to my mother’s idea of my father is that there is something really wrong with him, because if there isn’t something wrong with him, then he left us for no reason.
“Where’d you get these?” I ask her.
“City Hall. I filed a petition there yesterday, and they had all these sitting out on a table.”
Mom kisses Greg, grab
s her briefcase, and then kisses me before heading out into the garage, leaving the two of us.
The theme music from Jaws is on the TV.
“So, are you just going to hang out?” I ask.
“Well, I got to finish this report,” he says, “and my show’s not over. Shouldn’t you be in class or somewhere?”
I shrug and take a stool across the counter from Greg, who makes being a county judge look pretty easy. “Shouldn’t you be married or something?”
“I was,” Greg says, “but I got a little condo now.”
When I graduated, my friend Terry Patuni asked me to move in with him, to get our own place, and I said no, like an idiot. Mom was like, “stay at home and live for free,” but she works a lot, and I do all the stuff like mowing the lawn and don’t get shit for it.
I check out the pamphlets to the sounds of thrashing fish. The big warning sign in the depressed person’s behavior, it turns out, is a sudden mood shift to peace and happiness, even elation. This can often mean a final decision has been made, and the weight of all earthly troubles has been lifted.
Sharks have limited feelings, I also learn, and they never sleep.
* * *
In Civic Responsibility class, I sit behind Cheryl. She wears a long dress with thin straps and sunflowers all over it. A fine gold cross has worked its way around the back of her neck, so it faces me, and there are running waves of goosebumps across her shoulders and the backs of her arms. I’ve never really said anything to Cheryl before, but I begin to wonder what she’s thinking to cause them. I lean forward to smell her hair—apples. They use the same shampoo.
We watch a movie on land conservation, and I realize two things. One, by the light of a video, Cheryl’s hair takes on the exact blue my swimming pool casts into the bougainvillea on nights when I lie on the diving board and masturbate toward the stars. Two, my father was born to be a U. S. park ranger. He has a deceivingly breezy manner that would be good with tourists, the military marksmanship to cull herds from the open door of a helicopter, and the disposition to spend weeks on end in solitude.
