Ghosts of Tom Joad

by Peter Van Buren

Which I did not fully understand, but Angel kept on holding my hand, so I guess nodding along was the right move.

  I said, “Sometimes I feel awkward when I talk, I don’t always know what to say.”

  “So why talk?” was the way Angie replied.

  Then I said to her, “You’re beautiful,” and she said, “What?” She laughed and told me she heard me clear enough, but just wanted to make me say it again. When I first wanted to kiss her, I was scared, not sure, so I asked if it was okay. She said I shouldn’t have asked, I should have just done it. That’s how things were with Angie. I mean, we were still kids, and I tasted Dentyne when we kissed. But we told each other we were in love, and I’m pretty sure we were. It was a new thing to me, but you don’t always need to know a thing, to have seen a thing before, to know it. Some things just are. I understood there was so much I didn’t know, but those nights Angie made me believe what I felt. We’d go out under the black umbrella of night and sit as close to the Baltimore and Ohio line as we dared, and when the diesel coalers came past she’d pull me down on her so’s I could feel her breasts and she’d scream as loud as she could as the train carried past, saying she could feel my heart even then, pounding, and I’d kiss her like I was trying to pull her heart into me with the generosity of all that moment and I’d hold her like mine were the arms of God themselves. After those nights I’d feel tired way past sleep, but I never wanted to sleep, not ’cause I wasn’t exhausted, but because being awake was so good. Lying by the railroad tracks, looking up at the sky, I said, “It all seems so big,” and Angie said, “Ain’t big enough.”

  One time she said, “I want to count all your freckles. Can we spend the afternoon doing that?” We did.

  I am a little shy to admit I was an educated virgin. There wasn’t much to do in Reeve and so we had to make our own fun, and in that respect virginity wasn’t innocence as much as simple lack of experience. You had to be flexible in a small town, however, ’cause it was always that you liked the pretty ones and the less pretty ones liked you. My first, second, and several subsequent times were with girls from school, rude jabs in someone’s car or after church outside in the woods fooling we were Adam and Eve, but the good part, us all sticky with apple juice, summer’s a messy collection of drips, explosions and squirts like I was a hyperactive Irish Setter, my tongue foraging inside some girl’s mouth. Most sex then was more of a struggle than a pleasure of its own, as teenage boys and patience do not fit. Looking back, I think the first time I ever had sex inside, not counting cars and vans, I was already twenty-five years old. Our version of an STD was poison ivy. I ended up with a lot of terrible songs burned into the part of my brain that memorized everything around some big event, so the opening chords of “Smoke on the Water” and Debbie Radnick’s tube top are forever paired, God bless them both.

  One time I forgot to throw out the rubber, the old kind too, the ones that smelled like a new shower curtain, and my dad found it the next day on the car floor like a skin some snake shed. “Don’t get no one pregnant or you’ll have to get married,” he told me, ignoring the obvious thing that I’d used a condom. Me and those girls were certainly never in love, but there was always a little affection as we snorted and rutted, a kinda desperate fun at worst, me laying on ’em like I was protecting them from flying shrapnel, so full of teenage hard up some days I’m embarrassed to say I would’ve fucked mud, and I kissed a lot of girls.

  With Angie it was different. Hell, it was always different. We did a lot of what the health education books in gym class called “heavy petting.” This was sincere lust, but it was also a kind of testing. With other girls the testing was more like taking her temperature, seeing if she was willing, trying first base not because it felt like melted chocolate electricity to tongue kiss but mostly to see if you thought she’d let you get under her Peter Frampton t-shirt later. The girls knew it, knew their role in the game, and must’ve talked among themselves about who to let do what when, ’cause when we boys talked amongst ourselves it all seemed that what we was getting was the same as everyone else. Except James, who was going steady with Evelyn I think since when we still took naps in school. Evelyn unsnapped her bra just to change her mind, and James got her pregnant junior year and his dad had to pay for them to get an apartment and then find him a job at the factory.

  But with Angie it was all fun; lust born from love instead of the opposite. She always seemed to indicate she’d go all the way right then and there, but wouldn’t it be more fun to look around some. I never felt dirty, never felt that I was taking something or being given something like with them other girls. Even when another girl would signal it was okay, she’d still offer up a hand job so she could appear, you know, reluctant and not seem like some tramp. I never saw the way things could be something other than some kinda job until much later.

  So with Angie it felt natural and good and warm when we went to a place in the woods together. I had known the place since I was a kid, a worn spot next to a field, surrounded by blackberry bushes except for one small space you could crawl through like a tunnel. Blackberry bushes have tiny thorns, but lots of them, and pull at clothes and pinch your skin, so you don’t want to try and bull through them. When I was littler we caught grasshoppers there in the field, holding them in our cupped hands ’til they spit what we called tobacco juice, all brown and sticky and we had to let them go.

  The ground was hard underneath us, Ohio clay baked into rock through a dry June, mingling just a little dust with our sweat into an odor I can summon up on this bus and make myself smile. Heat piled up in that time in Ohio like snow accumulated in December. As kids I played soldiers in there, looked at Tim’s dad’s Playboys in there and on a lot of nights I took Angie there. I remember every kiss, every time I touched her, the way her hair smelled up close in the sun when I pressed my nose into it, the way her tongue was bright orange from the Cheetos we ate.

  Bras in my youth were complex, heavy elastic and nylon evil things with hooks and clasps and wires to struggle against while the girl waited to see if you could, but Angie just that night reached back with one hand and changed all that too in my mind. Looking at the faint red lines left on her, I never got to second base faster or easier, and I never felt stupider again for thinking of it as second base. She had shoulders, soft curves I was pretty sure I never noticed on girls before. Boys is all about parts, boobs and butts and legs and hips like a bucket of fried chicken being divided up, but Angie changed my eyes. She taught me to trace the outline of her with my hands like a whisper, a breeze, one finger, my tongue, always saying slower, softer, let’s enjoy the trip. God, I could drink a whole bottle of her.

  I thought I knew what to do, indeed had had some significant practice alone (99 percent of people do and the other one percent lie about not doing it) and with girls by that point, but the more I pressed with the urgency of having 99 percent testosterone in my bloodstream the more Angie would move slower, press back softer, remind me we had hours until curfew and that we were sixteen and naked and alone together, slowly and perfectly. Her skin was so warm it scalded me. She held out the rubber in her cupped hands, like we used to do with the grasshoppers. I lost the push-pull and melted into her, and as quickly started to apologize for how I was over and she just smiled and said, “Well, you sweet boy, we’ll just have to do it again. It’s not fattening.” I have no more powerful image not messed up by a photograph available to me after fifty-two years and nor would I want one. I couldn’t help thinking this was as close to Heaven as I was ever gonna get, things so warm I hadn’t yet dreamed of them.

  I wasn’t sure what it was that I smelled, but it was familiar growing up around Mom at home, them things in the bathroom waste can, a little sweet and a little coppery, not typical among blackberry bushes but not entirely out of place or something worth slowing down because of. I found her. I heard a song in my head, So, play on, I’ll dance for you. Angie took my finger in her mouth, I felt her tongue, warm, and she whispered to me that she wanted
to curl around it until it’s all inside of her.

  I wondered if there was yet something else I did not know that could cause sex to be even more messy. Well, indeed there was and for Angie it was just another part of her, her naturalness, her liquidity. I felt dirty but she didn’t, I felt unsure in her confidence, but with her saying it felt best really around the same time each month and finding some tissues in her twisted up pants to end the matter softly as she reached up to touch my ear, then near my lips. I felt her nails trace up the back of my neck, a path miles long that seemed to just go on and on until I was dizzy for it. Her happiness became essential to my own.

  “That felt different that time Earl, like something happened.”

  “A’course something happened Angie.”

  “No, I mean different than just that. I don’t know, felt like something. Something special between us.”

  “SOMETIMES WHEN I was sad I cried to myself,” Angie told me, “and I wished I had a twin sister. The boy next door would hit me, and I’d hit him back and I’d tell my mom and she’d just only say ‘be nice.’ That’s when I knew I wanted more boyfriends and fewer husbands.”

  We were alone, snuck off in the daytime into the woods. Being out there without darkness as a blanket was electricity between us.

  “We’ll whisper to make it more romantic,” said Angie. “Now Earl, let me see it.”

  “No, it’s embarrassing,” I answered her, looking away like something so fascinating was over there, I wanted her to look too.

  “Over here, Earl. Now, c’mon, you’re willing to put it in me, so at least let me see it up close.”

  Most Reeve girls had learned somewhere that they were supposed to at least pretend it was embarrassing, ’cause it was over quicker usually I guess, like getting something done, eating when you’re really hungry and not tasting the food.

  “I like the top here, right here, this mushroom part. Soft, like a rose petal. What’s that feel like when I touch there?”

  Well, it felt goddamn amazing, and I shiver a bit to recall it now on this bus in front of people, what, some forty years later? That’s a long time for a feeling to last.

  “Now you look at me,” Angie said, smiling with a secret. I was feeling the sweat start around the edges of my hair when she pressed my head into a place I am pretty sure the last time I had been they said “it’s a boy, ma’am” to my mom.

  I might as well have journeyed to Mars, as it would have seemed more familiar. After seventeen years of imagining it, then thinking about it, then poking into it, here she was. It is easy now to forget that in 1977 there was no Internet porn, no magazines that you could get in Reeve, at least, showing such things, and even the human biology book with the drawings in it was on the restricted shelf at school and you needed Mrs. Coughlin’s permission, which would be like asking Muley to see his mom naked. Actually, that’d be less embarrassing.

  “So now you’re gonna kiss me down there Earl. It’s only fair, give and take, you know.”

  This I thought I knew about. Muley had told us, having learned the mysteries of such things from an older brother who had been in the Marine Corps in Japan and thus knew. We didn’t believe him, like we didn’t believe him when he said people there ate uncooked sushi fish. Why would anyone do that? It made no sense.

  Angie was pretty insistent, I guess having learned something about these kinds of things herself from a source more reliable than Muley’s older brother in the Marines. She held my head and kind of directed me. Pink, soft, a little bitter, maybe astringent after I learned that word, oh, wetter now, starting to understand, faster, faster, no no, slower now, there, right there, easy now, put your tongue right there, there oh, oh oh—

  Oh.

  “Did I hurt you Angie?”

  “No, no Earl. Shhh now, no more talking.”

  I understood fully why people would do that.

  Angie got to use her dead dad’s old work car all the time. Her mom worked of course, but her being a widow, she also felt that desperate loneliness that pulled at her. She took up with a man from Monroe that involved her spending much time out of the house. So me and Angie would drive around, talking, listening to the radio. She kept liking to ask me what I was gonna do next. I thought I knew the answer and even trying to show off a bit, would tell her how expensive college was, and how pointless it was, and talked up the job at the factory I believed I would be starting the week after graduation. Hourly wage, health plan (whatever that was), retirement plan (whatever that was, we were seventeen years old) and paid holidays. Against the required calculus class and Freshman Writing Workshop Ohio State was going to make her get through, my job prospects seemed attractive, but to her college was gonna be about expanding her boundaries, whatever that was, maybe even dating a colored guy, she said while we were driving.

  “What about running away?” she asked. “We got a tank of gas and my mom don’t care if I’m home or not. We could drive somewhere, right now, go to Pittsburgh or New York. It’d be just us Earl, we’d get an apartment and we’d cook together and find jobs and we could sleep together in a bed every night. What do you say?”

  I probably was thinking more about the together in a bed part than anything else, but I reached over, turned the radio up and pushed my foot past hers to kick the accelerator closer to the floor. “Let’s drive,” I shouted, and I leaned out the window so I could feel the wind wash Reeve off of me. We pretended we had a top to put down, and as we crossed the Reeve city line Angie leaned way out her side, hair flying behind her like a kite tail, and shouted “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck YOOOOOOOOOOOOOU I ain’t never comin’ baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!”

  We drove that car way too fast, and it was only a couple of hours when we had to stop for more gas, at a highway place along Interstate 70 halfway into Pennsylvania. Even being in another state felt sexy and tingly and exotic.

  “Let’s pretend we’re married,” she said, laughing as we went into the service plaza fast-food place to see we were the youngest there by two or three lifetimes. “Gimme your jacket over my shoulders.”

  “Honey, did you remember the milk?”

  “Oh no dear, sorry. I thought I’d get it after my bowling night.”

  “What time is the mortgage due, dearest love?”

  “Perhaps, my darling, we should travel again soon.”

  “Oh sweetheart, darling, I love it when you take me out!”

  Starting a life-changing adventure spontaneously with only $27 in loose bills is not necessarily the smartest plan. Filling up burned through half of that money and after two burgers and some Dr. Peppers, me and Angie were sitting too quietly.

  “Maybe we should head back now,” I told her. “This was fun and all, but my folks’ll be expecting me before midnight or I’ll get grounded and I got football practice starting soon.”

  “What’re you talking about? New York’s still hours away. We’re gonna have to drive all night just to get there by sunrise. I wanna see the sun come up there.”

  “You’re serious about this? C’mon, like when you tried to convince me you got a real tattoo, it was all fun playing at it, but when it got boring you just wiped it away with spit. Let’s go home.”

  “Earl, I’m going. I meant it, and I meant for you to come along. Nothing to go back to in Reeve.”

  “Your mom—”

  “My mom won’t be home for days and until she gets around to doing laundry and don’t see my clothes in the hamper, probably won’t even notice me gone. Kids run away all the time, it ain’t that big a deal. You ain’t gonna learn nothing more in high school anyway, and then what, work in that factory? That what you living for, to turn into your dad? You wanna marry me, get drunk on Saturday, slap me around a little and throw me on the bed before you pass out sweaty on top of me? Hell Earl, even that ain’t likely. The factory laid off men for the first time ever, and when James got Evelyn pregnant and went for his job, he only got one ’cause his daddy begged the foreman. You wanna die in Reeve alongside the
whole goddamn town? This is about doing something, getting off your ass, saying something, seeing what a shitty place this is and what a jam place we could move to. I don’t want to be living in Reeve at age sixty in my mom’s house with her books and cats. Let’s go.”

  “Angie, I thought you were kidding about New York, like you do. I’m seventeen. My mom still makes my bed. What I gave you for gas was allowance money. I ain’t never been more than five miles from Reeve alone before. I can’t live in New York, get a job, or move in with you. I mean, I’m on the football team.”

  “Let’s go.”

  The words hung up high enough that I couldn’t reach them.

  “I can’t.”

  It sounded like a fight, but a fight was where one side is trying to win over the other. Sitting there alongside Interstate 70, we were just saying goodbye in a really crummy way. I know now that I simply did not know how to love her. Interstate 70 runs practically anywhere. But not me, not that night. I was scared and I had too much of the small town in me. I didn’t see—couldn’t see—that the road went both ways. Angie did kiss me, did thank me for the gas money, and made me again scribble down my address so she could write from New York. She took my jacket off her shoulders and folded it, handing it back to me. I stood alone in that fast-food parking lot, and I watched the tail lights of her car merge into traffic, into the night, the wind, the new rain until I could not distinguish her ride from any of the others heading away. It was chilly, and I unfolded my jacket, smelling the last of her fade off as the wind came up and took even that from me. I struggled with women for a long time, trying out different things, learning to repeat things I read in Hallmark cards to make them feel I cared, often to good results. But it was hard, and I could remember when, once, it had been effortless.

  Angie wrote me a postcard like I heard tourists buy ten for a dollar in Times Square that said GREETINGS FROM NEW YORK, but I otherwise never heard from her again. Kept the postcard though, for a long time, kept that instead of her, I guess. There were never two days in a row that I did not think of her, never a time when I watched cars on a highway that I didn’t wonder why I didn’t have the courage for Angie.