Boys of Life
Page 27
“This Edsel’s not the cheapest thing in the world,” Estachio was telling Monica. “You want cheap, I can show you cheap. But not every car’s an Edsel. All those dreams that went into it.”
It was funny—I could tell he really wanted to be talking to me instead of her, but she was the one who seemed to know something about cars. I think he was confused. He kept looking at me like he wanted me to be in this conversation too.
I asked him if there was anything cheaper than six hundred.
He looked disappointed. I guess everybody always asked him that.
He put his hands in his pockets. The wind was blowing all of us around like crazy. Verbena was hanging onto her hat with one hand and her skirt with the other—still, it seemed like acres of maroon skirt were billowing out like a sail.
“Woo,” she said every time another gust of wind would lift up first her hat and then her skirt. She was flapping in the wind like some flag.
Monica didn’t really notice the wind. That always impressed me about her—when she started concentrating on something, she totally concentrated on it. This afternoon she was concentrating on cars.
“We want an automatic,” she said. “It doesn’t have to have an air conditioner, but it has to have a radio. And four doors. And American made.”
“Where’d you learn so much about cars?” I asked her.
“I keep my ears open,” she said. “How come you don’t know anything about them?”
“I live in New York,” I told her.
“You didn’t grow up in New York. You’re a Southerner like me. We got cars in our blood.”
I remembered how much I used to like Wallace’s pickup when I was a kid. It made me think maybe Monica was right—if I’d never left Kentucky, I’d probably be crazy about cars. There were a lot of things that would’ve been different if I’d never left Kentucky. I had to start wondering, right there in that used-car lot in Jersey City, about all the things that would’ve been different. I’d probably be settled down and married if I’d kept on living in Kentucky. I’d have kids. I’d be working as a penitentiary guard.
Verbena’d found this lime green Cadillac parked over in the corner of the lot. “Check this girl out,” she called to me, stroking one of the fins with her hand. “Picture taking this shark down the highway.”
“You should buy a car too,” I told her. “We could drag race.”
“Drag my butt,” she said. “What’re you thinking about getting a car for anyway? Don’t tell me you’re going to up and leave us now?”
“Leave?” I said. “Where’s there to go?”
With Monica talking to Estachio, Verbena and I could say whatever we wanted. The wind would blow all our words away anyway.
“So what’s up with you and this Monica girl?” she said.
I’d been wondering when she was going to ask me.
“Does it bother you?” I asked. I’d never brought any of the guys I was seeing around, probably because usually I never saw them for more than a night or two and so we didn’t have to think of other things to do with our time than have sex.
“It’s not like somebody blowing cigar smoke in my face,” Verbena said. “Anyway, I’m not your momma, thank the lord. But surprised—yes. I’m a little surprised.”
“Maybe I’m a little surprised too,” I admitted. “But it’s nice to be surprised, right?”
“It’s nice to be surprised,” she said. “Some of us done went and built our whole careers around it. And I’m happy for you. You’ve done your work here. You don’t want to stick around forever. You got your own life to live now.”
“I haven’t said anything to Carlos,” I told her. Not that he’d have minded—I would’ve been the one who minded, not him.
“You’re still stuck on that man, aren’t you?” Verbena asked me. A gust of wind rocked us. Dust and newspapers were swirling around in an empty part of the lot.
“I’ll always be stuck on him,” I had to say. “He’s still got me.”
The wind was carrying those newspapers higher and higher, like birds, like T.J.’s pigeons.
Verbena looked sad. Where she was standing she couldn’t see that little cyclone of wind. I could tell she didn’t want to hear what I just told her.
“I tell you what,” she said. “This is your old Verbena talking, but you can trust me, right? What I say is, buy the cheapest car you can find here today, and take that nice girl Monica and head for as far away from here as you can get. Keep driving till you think Carlos’ll never find you, and then drive some more after that. It’s what you got to do.”
“He found me in Owen, Kentucky,” I said. “Remember that? If he could find me in Owen, he’ll find me anywhere.”
“The man casts a mean shadow,” she admitted. “He’s a total eclipse you’re never going to get out from under. But you need to get to where you can at least see it. See around it. And shy girl, you can’t do that here. You ain’t ever going to be able to.”
“Hey,” Monica was calling to us. “Hey, come here.”
She was standing by the ugliest car in the world.
“Two hundred dollars,” she said. “1976 Buick Century. King of the highway. Built to last.”
“It’s half rusted through,” I told her.
“Half rusted through,” she said, “it’s still solider than any other car you’ll find.” Estachio was nodding—he was very enthusiastic, even though he looked kind of disturbed that Monica instead of him was the one making me a sales pitch.
“I would describe the color,” Verbena said, “as shit brown. If I was asked to do so.”
“Nobody’s asking,” Monica said. “What about it, Tony? Do we got the two hundred? Can we do it?”
It looked like the kind of car people back in Owen drove. I’d never seen an uglier car.
“A mean shadow,” was all Verbena said.
Monica looked at me. “A little joke,” I told her. “It’s nothing.” I felt sick in my stomach. I reached in my pocket and pulled out my cash. “Look,” I said, “I got twenty dollars. That’s everything. What’ve you got on you?”
“A hundred,” she said. “How about selling it to us for a hundred twenty?” she asked Estachio.
“A hundred seventy-five,” he said.
“We only have a hundred twenty.” She took my twenty and put it with her money and waved it in Estachio’s face. He looked away, across the street at another car lot. He tapped on his cheek with his finger.
“A hundred fifty,” he said.
“Listen to what I’m saying,” Monica told him. She kept waving her wad of cash in his face. “A hundred twenty dollars. Count it.”
“A hundred fifty,” he said.
“This is making me weary,” said Verbena. A flip of wind took her dress clean over her head. But she didn’t even pay attention. She rummaged around in her pocketbook. “Why do I have a jar of pimentos in here?” she asked us all, holding it up. Then she dropped it back in her pocketbook and pulled out some dollar bills. “Ten, twenty, thirty,” she said, counting them out to Monica.
“Verbena,” I said. “What’re you doing?”
She snapped her pocketbook shut, and reached up behind her with one hand and pulled her dress down. “There used to be this thing,” she said, “called the Underground Railroad. You ever heard of that? The Underground Railroad?”
None of us ever had.
“Well, it don’t matter,” she said. “This here’s been a whistle stop on the Underground Railroad. If you ever want to know.”
“Verbena,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but thank you for the money. I’ll pay you back.”
“You’ll get that car on the highway,” she said. “If you want to pay me back, you’ll drive like a demon till you hit the Mason-Dixon line, and then you’ll just keep on going.”
I GUESS IT SAYS SOMETHING ABOUT ME HOW I’VE never left anywhere normally—I’ve always just slipped off, so when you turn around I’m gone. Maybe it’s the best
way, though I’ll never know since I never tried anything different. Anyway, that’s the way I left New York—I just slipped off. I told Monica I’d meet her at six in the morning at her place. That whole night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed even more excited than if this was some new movie I was about to start. When five o’clock dragged around, I slipped into my jeans and T-shirt, and the snakeskin boots I’ve told you about already—that was all I took with me.
Carlos was sound asleep in the so-called back room, the one Sammy and Netta used to share. There was somebody with him in there, probably some kid—I didn’t look in to find out. Our schedules were so totally different these days, we didn’t see each other that much. I didn’t really even know what he was up to half the time anymore.
I’d have thought I might’ve taken one last look around the place I’d called home for the last four years, but I didn’t. I guess I sort of nodded my respect to Carlos asleep in the other room, and I remember thinking that I hoped whoever he was with had made him happy last night, and also thinking how the poor kid probably hadn’t, because who could? But I wasn’t feeling sentimental—I was just out of there, out on the street at dawn—just about the only time I ever saw dawn on Avenue C from the sleep side of it. There was a streetsweeper truck moving along with its brushes whirring. Streetsweepers never came in that neighborhood—it must’ve been lost, or maybe the driver was in the neighborhood to buy drugs. Probably from Rafe or Nicky or somebody like that—money that’d end up going for another of Carlos’s movies.
Monica’d overslept, which was a little disappointing. I waited around her apartment while she took a shower. She’d packed everything she wanted to take in four big duffel bags, plus her guitar.
“So where’s your stuff?” she asked me. She was letting me dry her hair with a towel—something I always liked to do.
“I’m not taking any.”
“What d’you mean, you’re not taking any?”
“Like I said—I got all I need.” I spread my arms out wide to show her, but she wasn’t too impressed. I think for the first time since she met me, she thought I was maybe a little too weird. I think she was wondering whether she should have second thoughts, even though it was sort of her idea in the first place and I was just going along with it because what else could you do?
“You’re sure?” she said. “We can stop off and pick stuff up.”
“Completely sure,” I told her. “I’m free as a bird.”
“You’re crazy as a loon,” she told me. “I love you. You’re completely insane.”
And we were off. It was so long since I’d driven I could hardly remember how, but it was early, and we were going against the rush hour traffic pouring in from New Jersey.
“Bye bye, suckers,” Monica called out the open window as we dived into the Lincoln Tunnel. In four years I hadn’t been out of the city except twice, that time we went to Montreal for the film festival, and when we were shooting Creeping Bent on that estate up the Hudson—and both those times I was with Carlos, so in a way they didn’t count. Carlos somehow managed to carry the city with him wherever he went. No matter where you were, if you were with him then in some way you weren’t out of the city. Even I suppose if you were in Owen, Kentucky. He’d lived in the city there so long something had rubbed off—some kind of hectic nervous energy, this power line talking craziness that’ll always be different from country craziness, which is slow and deep and hardly ever says a thing.
We drove down through New Jersey, cut across Pennsylvania and West Virginia—WILD, WONDERFUL WEST VIRGINIA said the sign at the border—and by night we were in eastern Kentucky. We stopped at some little motel in the middle of nowhere. I think the fat old country woman behind the counter thought we’d just gotten married or something, the way she was all friendly to us—and we might as well have, the way we went at each other that night. It was the best sex I ever had with Monica—I guess because we both wanted so bad for it to work out. I know I was really trying hard, and I think it did work out, I think it was probably just great.
But then after she’d dropped off to sleep it sort of hit me what it was I was doing. I wasn’t freaked out, exactly—but I do remember saying to myself, Tony, you’ve just made a pretty big move. I think sitting there next to her in bed with the light on—she was completely conked out, but then she’d been the one to do most of the driving that day—I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted to be doing. But I knew I was already into it. This was a girl I really liked a lot, she was nice to me and she made me feel like she needed me. Still—I remember doing this crazy thing. I picked up the phone book that was on the nightstand next to the bed, and I stayed up for hours reading that book, all night in fact—all those names of people I didn’t know, all those little eastern Kentucky towns I didn’t even know where they were. Looking, I guess, for somebody, anybody, I could call.
The next day, around the middle of the afternoon, we got to Owen. We’d planned it that way—to stop through there on the way to Memphis. I don’t know what I thought I was going to find—I hadn’t heard from anybody in Owen, not my mom or Ted or anybody, in the nearly five years since I’d been away. To tell the truth, part of me dreaded going back—I felt guilty about all those people I just walked out on. Part of me was still seeing it as a completely selfish thing to’ve done. But I was also nervous—to see Ted again, to see him after five years. It was hard to think of him as being any more than fourteen like he was when I left, and now he’d be nineteen. I had this terrible fear I might see him walking down the street and not even recognize him, he’d look so different.
I don’t think I’d have gone back if it hadn’t been that Monica wanted us to. She was always trying to get me to talk about it, which I never wanted to do. From the very first time we met, she had this big thing about us both being from the South—like it was fate we were meant to be together.
Not much had changed in Owen. There was the brick school, and the playground; and the lumberyard where Wallace and I worked loading pallets; and the Nu-Way Laundromat, which looked even seedier than when I used to go there. The only thing that was different was the one thing I’d known was going to be different, the one thing that had to be. My mom wasn’t living in Owen anymore. Nobody knew where she went. The house trailer was still there—but new people were living in it, this black family that’d gone and turned the front yard into a trash heap with all these bright plastic toys and hubcaps and just plain junk they’d let pile up. The woman who came to the door of the trailer was even fatter than Verbena, if that’s possible. She just barely fit in the door, and not at all into these purple sweatpants she was trying to wear. But she turned out to be nice. She told me she didn’t know my mom, that she’d gotten the trailer from some cousin of hers who’d lived in it for about a year, but then he moved away to Louisville and so she moved in.
She was impressed when we told her we’d driven down from New York. “I’d just love to go to New York City,” she told us. “Broadway, Harlem, the Statue of Liberty. But I’ll never get to go. I’ll be stuck here till the day I die.” She looked like she was about thirty.
“You never know,” Monica told her. “You could always just hop a bus. That’s what I did.”
“I got these four kids,” the woman said. “I got responsibilities. My traveling days are over and I never even traveled. But ya’ll come inside, have a cup of coffee. I never met anybody from New York except my cousin Billy, and he’s a fool.”
I couldn’t stand the thought of going in that trailer. “We’ve got to be pushing on,” I explained. Though Monica went inside—she had to use the bathroom.
“Disgusting,” she reported when we were back in the car. “Worse than a Texaco station.”
I told her I didn’t want to hear about it.
“Well, at least I got to see where you grew up,” she said. “I never believed it when you said you lived in a house trailer. Are you upset your mom wasn’t there?”
I didn’t tell her I was relieved.
When I turn around, there’s Ted lying on the mattress where I left him—only it’s like he’s been burned, his skin is all charred black, and where it’s not black it’s bright pink. It’s like the skin on some swollen-up overcooked hot dog. He’s holding himself by his arms, sort of rocking back and forth and looking at me with these big pleading eyes. I know I have to get him to a hospital right away because something terrible’s wrong with him, but in the dream I also know the hospital’s not going to do any good, and Ted knows it too. This terrible sickness he has is beyond any hospital’s helping it.
I can’t tell you how horrible it looks, his skin all black and blistered up like it’s going to pop open.
The other thing we both know in the dream is—I’m somehow the cause of what’s happened to him.
MONICA’S DAD RAN THIS ADVERTISING AGENCY that’d made lots of money putting these great ugly billboards up all over the city. He was always getting petitions from people who thought that they were eyesores and that he was ruining the city.
That’s what we talked about the first time I met them: billboards. We sat in the living room of their big fancy new house. The part of the city where they lived was called Germantown.
“It’s the only part of Memphis the blacks haven’t gone and ruined,” Monica’s mother told me. That was about her only contribution to the conversation that first time, and even though I never got to know her all that well—I never felt very comfortable around Monica’s parents—what she said that first time always stuck with me. I always thought about her living room, which was done up completely in white—white sofa, white armchairs, white carpet, white curtains. I thought about how the blacks certainly hadn’t managed to ruin that living room yet. I tried to imagine Verbana sitting on one of those sofas, I tried to imagine her rearing back and letting loose with one of her stories about conjure. Or farting some flame out of her butt to catch those curtains on fire.