Patsy slipped over by him. “It’s a tradition. A joke. The set people put out those caramels, and then they wait for one of the actors to have a mouthful when he’s called on stage. It always works eventually. You’re caught so off guard you can’t think. Derek could have just spit it out, but look at him, trying to get it down.” David shook his head and tried to look amused. Mr. T. called out, “Remember the caramels go when we start dress week, you clowns!” He was an easy guy. Derek took a big gulp and waved his arms. “Ready,” he said, and laughed loudly.
“Ho, ho,” Patsy said.
Sissy caught up with him in the alley after school. He slowed down for her. At the back of her house they leaned against the rickety fence and talked a few minutes. She said she had checked out Tess of the D’Urbervilles from the school library. She said she could see things would have to get bad for Tess, because she was a sinner. David did not try to argue the point. Sissy was perfectly serious. He thought it might do her good to plow through someone else’s sad story.
Another afternoon they took a long way around, it was such a perfect, balmy fall day. In a yard not far from her house they saw an abandoned project, a fall-out shelter. He said, “Someone started into that with a lot of trouble, they might as well finish it.” He was thinking, in case of tornadoes, although Basin was never in the path. Sissy said, “You can’t hide from Armagedon, can you? Besides, who’d be left if everybody else was dead?” She could give him the willies. When he told Leland about Armagedon, Leland said, “Whooey, that girl needs cheering up.” David suggested that Leland ask her out. Leland hooted at the notion. “Don’t you know she adores you, Fuckett? Because you’re so understanding.” David wrote some notes so he wouldn’t forget her strange remarks. He tried to imagine Leland and Sissy making love. He was sure they were both virgins. He would have liked to write a story about them. He thought it would be comic.
One night at rehearsal, waiting for a scene, he sat down two rows behind Patsy with his civics book. She was reading a textbook. He noticed how pale the skin on her neck was. She laid down the book and picked up a library book. He could see that it was Robinson Jeffers,’ Roan Stallion. He had checked the very same book out the year before, from county. They did not have Jeffers at school. He remembered that after he read it, he walked for miles in the dark, he simply could not recover from the drama of the long narrative poem.
There was a scene in progress on the stage. He moved quietly down to Patsy, sat, and leaned close to whisper. “I’ll give you a ride home if you want, and you can tell me what you think of a woman who falls in love with a horse.” He did not think she could fail to be surprised, maybe as excited as he felt; he had not known there was another human being in this county who knew Jeffers, let alone a high school girl. Patsy held her finger in the book, and whispered back. “I don’t want to talk about it. It would ruin it to try to understand it, like school.”
He felt humiliated. He popped up and jumped over the seat, making a racket, and went back to his civics book, his face burning. Patsy turned around in a few moments and hissed at him. He looked up. She put her fist to her chest and pounded over her heart, smiling at him. It was all very stagy, and too late. Jeffers did not make his heart pound; he made his head thick with ideas.
As rehearsal was breaking up, she touched his arm and asked if she could still have the ride. He did not know how to refuse. It was gusty and cold. In the car she said she walked everywhere, a mile and a half back and forth to school. She was relaxed and friendly, as if she had not just put him down and then made fun of him. He just drove, but it stirred him when she said, right after she told him where to turn, “I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t think of that line of Jeffers’, ‘I would sooner be a worm in a rotten apple than a son of man.’”
David remembered the line. It was in a poem about men stoning a mammal in a pit. “I read he lives in a tower. He climbs the steps every morning and sits above the ocean to write.”
“I guess that proves you don’t have to live a dramatic life to write,” she said.
“Oh, but wouldn’t it be more fun to have things happen!” he said earnestly.
“Maybe reflection is for old poets.”
He liked her better now.
She lived in a seedy tourist court on the edge of town, a rundown motel that rented studios by the month to oilfield workers. She invited him inside, where there was a small room, combining kitchen and sitting room, with a sofa covered in a faded yellow chenille spread, a broken down arm chair, and a card table with two straight-back chairs. He saw a tiny hall with two doors. The room had a shabby air, but it was clean. Patsy opened a window a few inches and told him to sit down. “I’ll see if I have some pop.” She opened the fridge. “Aha. Want to split the last beer?” He said he wouldn’t mind. She poured the beer into two glasses as he watched from a chair. He rubbed the prickly fat arms of the chair with his thumbs. He liked it that she poured the same amount into both glasses; Glee would have given him two-thirds of the beer.
Patsy curled up on the sofa, her legs tucked, a couple of pillows behind her back. She pulled the rubber band out of her hair, wincing, and her hair flew out around her face. She stretched one arm up high above her head until something popped. “It gets me in the neck, all that concentrating,” she said.
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” he said. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Is it just you and your dad?” She had already said, coming home, that her dad was a night watchman for a cement company, and did maintenance for the motel. She did lots of chores, cleaning up the rooms weekly, or when somebody moved out.
“I have to make him supper before he goes,” she said. “If I didn’t, he’d eat sardines and crackers. I don’t know what he’ll do when I leave.”
He took his glass over and set it in the sink. It made a sharp sound, though he was careful. He turned and leaned against the counter. “Where is it you’re going, Patsy?” He noticed the room’s odd neutral air. There were no photographs, no personal items lying around, except for her books and purse on the floor near the sofa.
“I’m going to be an actress,” she said calmly. She had turned on a lamp and as the light struck her face, it darkened the hollows under her cheekbones. “I’ll have to move somewhere I can work and go to night school. We’ve talked and talked about it. There’s nothing in Basin. Daddy understands.”
“There’s nothing here,” David said. He realized there were many things he wanted to tell her, or ask her, but they were jumbled up in hot tension, he did not know where to begin.
“That’s why my mother left,” she said. “I didn’t understand for a long time, but now I do. She couldn’t say, This is it, my life, this is enough. She had dreams. Maybe she didn’t know when she married Daddy, when she had me. She wasn’t grown up yet.” She sighed. “That’s my story, David. My mother left, when I was thirteen.” She spoke flatly, staring at him, almost like there was a dare in the telling.
David sat back down in the chair. He leaned into the sprung cushion and stretched his legs out in front of him. He thought if he had another beer, and then a long nap on the couch where Patsy was sitting, he could get up and tell her everything. He did not care about her mother, but he wanted to hear her voice. “Where did she go?”
“She went to LA with her dentist.”
He shifted in his chair. A lump was digging into his right hip. LA.
Patsy’s mother said she would send for her. For a year, into a second year, Patsy received postcards: orange groves, Hollywood hotels, movie stars’ homes. Then, nothing.
“That’s tough,” David said.
“I worry she’s a waitress, living in a crummy room.” She smiled and tossed her hair. “Who knows? She picked it.”
“You want to go out there?”
“LA?”
“The movies.”
“No, I want to work on the stage. I want live theatre.” She was wearing jeans and a navy sweatshirt chopped off at the elbows.
> He thought he’d like to hear her read from Roan Stallion.
She got up and washed the glasses and some other dishes at the sink. She spoke over running water. “Next time you tell me what you want to be, David. Right now, I’m feeling foolish. Like I said too much.”
“You didn’t.”
“I hope I’m not kidding myself. I’d rather be dead than stay in Basin.”
David moved across the room. He stood a few feet from her. She turned the water off. “Nobody’s a fool for wanting to be somebody!” he said. The hairs were standing up on his arms. “You’re not counting on a fairy godmother. You’re counting on working hard.”
She turned around, her hands dripping suds, and smiled at him. “Don’t forget luck. That’s what I’m counting on. That’s the part you pray for. In the end, that’s all poor people can count on. One-third work, and two-thirds luck. And that’s scary, ’cause if you were lucky, wouldn’t you be one of the rich ones?”
16.
He was sorry to be where he was, in the back seat of Burt Lasky’s father’s Olds. There were four of them, parked somewhere out of town, staring off into a black sky with the tiniest sliver of moon. Burt was in the front seat with Glenda Faye Budge, David was in the back with Glee. The car smelled of whiskey. Burt had a silver flask, and they had talked the girls into taking a couple of sips.
He knew Glee was happy to double-date with Burt and Glenda Faye. Burt belonged to nothing, did nobody favors, but he was tall and well-built (he played tennis, and swam), and rich. He never went with one girl for very many times, without interspersing other girls, but it didn’t seem to matter. The girls who went out with him were good-looking, popular girls. They liked Burt to escort them to dances and other public events. He always looked good next to their pretty dresses.
Glenda Faye’s father was a lawyer, the kind that made the contracts between oil companies and everyone else. She usually dated football players, or went out with rich boys who were friends, the way rich kids were, from hanging out at the club together since they were little. Glenda Faye had that air of inaccessibility that bordered on snobbery but was too courteous, too gracious, to be downright hateful. David could not think of a time she had ever spoken to him. She was like Beth Kimbrough. She was one of those girls. They were probably girlfriends.
Now, though, she was in the front seat with her pale pink cashmere cardigan unbuttoned and barely hanging off her shoulders, and her matching pink straight skirt hiked up around her hips. She was rustling and shifting and occasionally making odd noises, while Burt, silent and careful, moved his hands wherever he wanted them to be.
Glee cast flurtive glances to the front, but tried to keep her eyes on David. She was growing uneasy at his lack of enthusiasm. David thought she wanted to be distracted. It seemed increasingly likely that the couple in the front seat would soon be lying on that seat, and David, though initially surprised, was now fairly certain that Glenda Faye was not turning out to be a cool and classy girl after all. Maybe that made Glee feel better. Didn’t a girl want to be two things at once, two impossible things, a virgin who never had, who was saving it as the supreme gift, and at the same time, a girl who could twirl a boy around her finger, because she was so sexy, because she knew what she was doing?
He reached across Glee and opened the door. If she had not had her legs up on the seat, and his hand firmly on her arm, she would have fallen straight out. “What?” she protested. He told her to get out. He slid out and leaned back in the half-opened door. “Ten minutes, Lasky,” he said. “I mean, ten minutes, that’s it.”
“You’re crazy!” Glee said. He steered her away from the back of the car. She stumbled in the weeds. It was a dark night. In a moment, when he stopped, she wrapped her arms around his chest. “What’s going on?”
“I’m not going to sit in there and listen to Lasky fuck Glenda Faye,” he said curtly.
“Oh stop,” she said. “They weren’t. Glenda Faye wouldn’t.” She didn’t sound convinced. She ran her hands down his body. “This is weird,” she said, like she was deciding to enjoy it. “Nobody can hear us, that’s for sure.”
He pulled away. “I’m not in the mood.”
“You are such a big grouch!” she cried.
He jammed his hands into his pockets. “Be quiet,” he said. “Listen to the night.”
“Oh yea, now there’s an exciting adventure. Listen to the oilwells.”
“Pump jacks.”
“Whatever.” She moved close to him again, but kept her hands to herself. “It’s really spooky, Davy, what if he drove off and left us?”
“I’d kill him.”
They both stared back at the car, but it was only a vague shape in the dark. He was thinking about the afternoon. Burt came by to take him for a ride in his new car, a little red Triumph. They killed a six-pack, maybe not far from where they were right now. They sat in the gusting wind and Lasky told him how he was going to go to the University of Texas and find a Jewish girl.
“You care about that shit?” David asked.
“You only call it that because you’re not really Jewish.” It was one of Lasky’s old themes. It used to be the Laskys tried and tried to get David over to their house for holidays, for Friday nights, but when it became really clear, when the year of bar mitzvahs passed and nothing happened, when they started high school, all that stopped, and Burt had to say, Of course your mother’s not Jewish, you’re not either, really. It was one more way for Burt Lasky to be superior. Saul wouldn’t have anything to do with Lasky. He called him, “that German Jew.” (Only Chasen the junkman was proletarian enough for Saul!) But David and Burt had hung out together off and on in junior high. They had played tennis the first couple years of high school, David had gone over to the Laskys’ to swim. They had something in common, for all their differences. Lasky wasn’t really in. He felt better next to David; that was the whole secret of their friendship.
“I don’t know who I’m going to marry,” David told Burt that afternoon. “I don’t even know where I’m going to go to school, let alone what I’ll be.” Dr. Lasky was an oral surgeon; it was certain Burt would go to dental school, move back home, set up with his father. It was boring as hell, thinking about it, and it wasn’t even David’s life.
When they went back to the car, Glenda Faye was collected again. She and Glee giggled and gossiped all the way to town. Glee told what she knew about poor pregnant Shirlee Ames, and Glenda reviewed Carl Stuckey’s every movement since Shirley left town. David and Burt did not attempt conversation, though once Burt looked back over his shoulders at David, with a smirk.
As they came onto County Road, David leaned up and asked Burt to drop Glee off at her house. He said he didn’t know if he’d have a car, which was a lie, and Glee knew it. She didn’t say anything, only glared at him. Burt and Glenda waited while David walked Glee to her door. “They put me in a bad mood,” he apologized. It wasn’t Glee’s fault, after all.
“I’ll say,” Glee said, and slammed her door in his face. He liked her little fit of spunkiness, but she’d be really pissed if he didn’t call her yet tonight.
“Now me,” he said, when he got back in the car.
As soon as Burt dropped him off, he took his father’s car. There was a lamp on in the living room, his father was probably drinking, his mother would be home any minute. He didn’t even go in first. He drove to Patsy’s, parked a couple of units away from hers, and walked over. There were lights on, a radio playing. What if it was her father’s night off? What would the guy think of him arriving at this hour? What would Patsy think?
He would find out.
He knocked lightly and called out, “It’s David Puckett.”
She opened right away. She was wearing jeans and a man’s baggy cotton sweater. Something by Buddy Holly was playing on the radio. She grinned. “Sorry, the grill’s closed.”
“I know it’s late. I know it’s crazy. I had a date and I took her home because I wanted to see you.” The song
stopped, the DJ started blabbing, there was a screen door between them still. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have.” There was a delicious smell in the air, from inside the room.
“I’m writing. I mean, I just stopped. I was making a bacon sandwich. Are you hungry?”
He dared to reach for the door. “I thought the grill was closed.”
“Come in.”
There were papers all over the card table. She made them sandwiches, spreading the bacon a little thin to make two, and filling up space with layers of lettuce leaves. She took a big metal bowl off the counter and swept her papers into it, then sat down with him. She gave him a Seven-Up, and herself a glass of water.
“You knew I wouldn’t have a date?” she asked.
“I didn’t know. I didn’t think much. I thought I’d see what it looked like over here.”
“I’m not dating anybody now. With the play, and school—I’m taking trig, chemistry—”
“Why?”
“Why not? To prove I can.”
“I hate math and science,” he said. “I like English.”
“I know. Mrs. Schwelthelm’s good, isn’t she?”
“That and speech, that’s all I can stand. My other teachers are brain-dead.”
She laughed, making noises through her nose. They finished their sandwiches in silence. When she had cleared the table, he asked her when she’d been writing.
“Listen, I—” He would swear she was blushing. “Nothing you’d be interested in.”
“But I would. I write.”
“You do?”
“I keep a notebook. More accurately, I want to write. I have these ideas for stories, but I haven’t put any of them together. I can’t seem to make myself sit down and do it.”
“You have to make yourself! It helps if you set a time. You say, like a date, like now. Saturday night, after I do the dishes, I’ll write. It’s that important. You set time aside for it.”
“Show me something?”
Walking Dunes Page 13
