The noise stopped and I waited. It came again, the prelude to something violent.
From inside the room I heard a man’s voice, “He won’t bite.”
I couldn’t see anything in the direction the voice had come. With the light outside, I knew the man and the beast at my feet could see me clearly, the outline of a stranger testing the door at midnight.
A lamp flicked on inside. In an instant I could see what I could only imagine the second before. At the base of the screen door, sitting on a dirty welcome mat, was a stout, red-faced pit bull with a brown leather collar. In a reclining chair in the corner of the room sat a man with one leg elevated. He wore a short-sleeved gray shirt and a pair of old dark pants, unbuttoned at the waist. We looked at each other.
The man repeated, “He won’t bite,” but the tone of the statement was neither friendly nor unfriendly. The words were tired, spoken out of habit.
“Is Kate here?” I asked, my hand still holding the door between me and the world inside the room.
The man’s foot was swollen and black. I could see crust on the top of the foot, the big toe white against the darker colors. The man’s other foot rested on the floor next to a bottle of clear liquid. It looked like a liquor bottle without a label.
The smell from inside was hard. Old cigarette smoke, dog hair, and sour milk, maybe. There was no ceiling fan or air conditioner running. The wall of hot air started where my nose touched the screen. The man looked to be maybe fifty years old. He’d been sitting in the dark waiting for God knows what. I couldn’t imagine Kate in such a place. I just couldn’t see her walking through that room, passing the man in the chair, stopping to open the screen door, stepping around the pit bull, smelling the smell.
The man kept his stare on me. “Kate ain’t here. She left,” he said, in the same flat voice as before.
“Where’d she go?” I asked, and noticed his eyes drift slowly away to a place on the wall, just an empty place on the wall, no framed picture or even a stain to look at.
“Where does anybody go?” he said.
The man moved slightly in the chair and winced in pain. I looked down at the dog at my feet and when our eyes connected he made his favorite sound again. A deep, slow growl from a place inside his thick chest.
The man took both hands, placed them on either side of his knee, and lifted up the foot high enough to move it a few inches. He settled back in the old chair.
I asked him, “What happened to your foot?”
“I shot a hole in it,” is what he said.
His answer begged more questions, but suddenly I didn’t care. I came for Kate. The old man, whoever he was, didn’t matter. If he wanted to die in that chair in the dark it was his business, not mine, and not Kate’s anymore either.
“When’s she comin’ back?” I asked.
The man reached for the bottle next to his chair. He lifted it to his lips and took a swig. There was no reaction to the clear liquid rolling down his throat, and just by the way he swallowed I knew the man had taken so many swigs like that in his lifetime he couldn’t tell you anymore if it burned or not. He was a dead man, kept alive by inertia and the gravitational pull of millions of years of evolution. He was less alive than dead.
“She ain’t comin’ back, boy. Not this time. She’s gone for good.” From his voice I could tell he believed it was true.
“How do you know?” I asked.
The man smiled, or at least it looked like a smile, mostly on one side of his face, and he said, “You must not know Kate too good, do ya?”
If the dog hadn’t been there I’d’ve flung the screen door open and stood above that old man. I’d’ve told him he didn’t know what I knew, and he never would, and whatever he thought he knew about Kate was bullshit, and he’d never see her again because she’d be with me, and I wouldn’t allow it. But there was a pit bull at the door, and a wall of hot air, and the feeling that if I ever went inside that room I wouldn’t be able to leave. I’d be like the old man in the chair, staring at a place on the wall and hoping to die before the sun came up.
eight
Nobody saw her all summer. I drove past the house late at night, but eventually even the yellow porch light through the trees burned out. Lori heard Kate moved back to her mom’s house in Oklahoma. Jeff Temple told people she always talked about going to California. He also told people Kate gave him a blow job behind the concession stand between innings of the high school baseball playoffs. After I heard him say it, the picture in my mind was like a snapshot. Jeff in his baseball uniform behind the brick wall encircling the air-conditioning unit. He’s peeking over the edge of the wall with his hat backwards and baseball pants to his knees. Kate’s bent over at the waist, her mouth around him, a buzz in her head from the two mixed drinks she had earlier in the car. I have to remind myself I wasn’t there.
I’ve got very little recollection of my entire senior year of high school. Blurred images of classrooms, waiting tables in the evening, skinny dipping with the wonderful sixteen-year-old girl that night on the coast and feeling guilty about it the next day like I’d cheated on Kate, even though Kate had gone away.
I stayed to myself, mostly. My mother and I passed each other in the house. I wondered why she didn’t date. Christine wasn’t the type of person to mourn her husband’s untimely death by remaining a widow, but outwardly she seemed to have no interest in men, or anyone else for that matter. She was a complicated person. Creative and driven, yet off to the side, lonely for a particular unseen reason.
I thought about my father often. Right after he died I found a photograph of him in a bottom drawer. As my memory of my father slowly eroded, the photograph took the place of real memories. It was the way I’d remember him my entire life. Smiling, his head turned a bit to the side like he was considering something mischievous, wearing a t-shirt, extremely alive. When I thought of him, I thought of him this way, and it always made me feel good.
“What happened to that girl?” my mother asked. I was sitting at the kitchen table in my underwear, eating a bowl of cereal. It was the first time my mother ever asked about Kate or any other girl.
“What girl?” I asked, looking down into the bowl.
“Wasn’t her name Kate?” Christine asked.
I turned and looked at my mother where she stood by the refrigerator. It was the first time I’d looked at her, really looked at her, in an awfully long time. She seemed older.
“You wouldn’t like her,” I said.
My mother answered, “It doesn’t matter whether I’d like her. It only matters whether you like her. That’s kinda the point, isn’t it?”
It seemed like a very profound thing to say. I was a week away from driving off to college and my mother decided to say something profound in the kitchen.
“Aren’t you worried I’ll fail out of college?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
Between words, the kitchen was quiet. There were no bellowing televisions or radios in the house. No sounds of traffic in the neighborhood.
“Aren’t you worried I’ll piss away my money on beer and road trips?”
“No,” my mother said.
“I mean, I’m eighteen years old. I’m driving away to college in a few days. Into the den of temptation. Aren’t you worried I’ll do something stupid?”
“Not really,” Christine said. “Why would you start now? You’ve always worked hard. You’re a smart kid, good with your money, you’ll find your way around.”
She was standing, leaning against the refrigerator, her arms crossed over a long faded blue night shirt, no bra.
“Do you ever think of Dad?” I asked.
She seemed to study me, and then smiled just a little bit. It was almost like she didn’t want to do it. Didn’t want the smile to get the best of her, and when it did she waited for it to come and go, her mouth slowly melting back to the way it was until there was no smile left.
“Sometimes,” she said, and I knew it was true. I knew he
slipped around the corners of her mind like he did with me, and I wondered what he looked like to her. What pictures she held in her memory of my father.
“Dad told me a story once,” I said. “A story about two brothers robbing a motel, and one of them gets shot outside our bedroom window.”
Christine didn’t answer. I could see her mind had drifted free to someplace I couldn’t go, a place only she and my father were allowed to go, and now it was her place alone.
I interrupted, “What are you gonna do here by yourself when I leave?”
“Same things I do now,” she said.
A week later I loaded up the car to go to college. Christine left earlier that morning for some important appointment, probably scheduled just to avoid saying goodbye, and so I sat in the car in the driveway alone. I backed out, looking at the house where I grew up. Looking at my bedroom window.
In just a few minutes the car was on the highway. I rolled down the windows, turned up the radio, and started to get a certain feeling. It was the entrance into my time of selfishness, a time of free flight, between the dependence of childhood and the responsibility of age. At the moment, I didn’t have the understanding to describe the feeling in words. Like so many things in this life, freedom can’t be appreciated until later, after it’s gone.
I found a niche in college. The stupid high school categories didn’t exist. There were people from all over the world, and they seemed self-contained, more interested in standing out than fitting in. The lines between independence, fear of the future, and loneliness faded slowly, until I began to see myself in the mix.
My grades improved. In the evenings I worked at a barbeque restaurant. My clothes smelled like hickory smoke and sauce. I had a roommate who failed out after the first semester, and then another roommate who just disappeared one morning. He was there in the bed when I went to class, but when I got back he was gone. He left behind a can of Pork N Beans and one sky-blue sock. I never saw the guy again. I threw the sock in the trash and waited two weeks to eat the beans, in case he came back. His name was Barrett, Barrett Kinard I think, or something like that. I remember he wore a pair of strange rubber booties in the shower and over explained a toe fungus problem he’d had since childhood.
After the first few weeks of newness, I felt like I belonged in college. The library was vast and quiet. Between the circle of buildings, long sidewalks cut through patches of bright green grass, girls sat cross-legged on wooden benches, and towering oak trees spread shade. It was really a beautiful place to be, and I stayed there my freshman summer and into my sophomore year.
When I went home, Christine seemed happy to see me, but after a day it usually wore away and then it was like I’d never left. My room was exactly the same, which seemed strange to me. I’d changed, but my room, the place I’d fallen asleep so many nights, had the same posters on the walls, the same baseball pillowcases, and the same smell. I wondered if my mom ever sat on the edge of my bed and thought about me. Probably so, but we couldn’t talk about it, and who’d want to anyway.
Eddie Miller was a year younger. At the beginning of my sophomore year, Eddie became my new roommate. He was lazy and funny and mostly unfocused. When I went to work, he went to sleep. When I went to the library, he went to the bar down the street.
“You’re gonna fail, Eddie.”
“Naw,” he said, and smiled, lying on the couch in the middle of the day watching a soap opera. He wore shorts and a pair of white socks.
“Hey, remember that girl you used to like in high school?” he said, out of nowhere.
I still carried her with me. I hadn’t seen Kate for almost two years, since the night of the party. I hadn’t heard her voice. Sometimes, when I walked across campus, I’d see a girl up ahead and I’d think it was Kate Shepherd, and I’d follow her and it wouldn’t be. It would be another girl instead, a girl who didn’t even really look like Kate, but it would get me thinking about her and wondering where she might be.
I pretended not to remember who he was talking about. “Who?”
“That girl, Kate, the one who got drunk at David Ansley’s party and disappeared.”
Sitting at the old, beat-up dining room table, I flicked a piece of french fry across the wooden tabletop. It spun to the far edge and came to a stop hanging on the cliff, half-on, half-off.
“What about her?” I asked.
“I saw her last night,” Eddie said, his mouth covered by the brown square couch pillow.
“What?” I asked.
“I saw her last night at the bar next door to Nicky’s, up the street. She was fucked up. Could barely walk. Whatever happened to her anyway?”
I teetered on the edge. To ask another question would pull me into the reality of finding Kate Shepherd, maybe saving Kate Shepherd. Or I could just let it go. Go to work. Spend a few hours at the library. Get up tomorrow and make it to class on time as always.
“I think she had a black eye,” Eddie said, watching TV as he spoke.
I had always wanted to touch her face. To hold it in my hands.
“A black eye,” I repeated.
“Yeah. She looked pretty bad. Whatever happened to her anyway?” he asked again, not really expecting an answer.
I thought about it for a little while. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what happened to her.”
Eddie’s eyes slowly shut like cat’s eyes, and then opened up again as he floated between sleep. The show he was watching had something to do with rich people living in a very exclusive town, and a serial killer who stalked only women with red dresses.
“How can you watch that stupid shit?” I asked.
Eddie mumbled something I couldn’t understand. Somewhere in the world, in a foxhole, a soldier was glad Eddie Miller wasn’t watching his back. He was a good-hearted guy, but fourteen hours of sleep a day is just too much for anyone.
It was dark outside. I threw the book bag over my shoulder and headed in the direction of the library. I knew I wouldn’t stop there. I walked past the library steps, turned left down the side street, and ended up at the front door of the bar next to Nicky’s. It was just a hole-in-the-wall. A long wooden bar with fifteen or twenty stools. There were two pool tables in the back and a side area with tables and chairs. The smoke from a million cigarettes soaked into the walls. Beer and urine, perfume and onion rings. It was a college bar, the early crowd already in their seats. I found a small table in the far corner and sat with my back against the wall.
At the bar sat a guy and his girlfriend. They talked about people they knew and drank beer out of big, cold mugs. He didn’t look at her as she spoke, but she almost always looked at him, like he might get away if she didn’t pay enough attention. As she drank down the beer in front of her and ordered another, the girl’s voice got progressively louder and louder and the guy joined the conversation less and less. He stared off into the distance.
Two big white guys and one skinny black man shot pool to my left. The black man was older, maybe fifty, and leaned over the table to line up his shot, a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth. The smoke caused his eyes to narrow until it looked like he was closing his eyes on purpose to shoot a blind shot. He wasn’t as good as the white guys thought he was, but I sat in my chair and watched him win game after game anyway. Money changed hands.
I recognized a few people in the bar. Just enough to nod my head. Whenever a figure would appear at the door, my head would swing around to look. But Kate wasn’t there. Maybe Eddie was wrong. Maybe it was somebody who looked like Kate. What would she be doing there anyway?
It was dark outside. I’d had all I could stand of the drunk girl at the bar telling a story about the day she almost drowned at the beach. By the end of the story I wished she had drowned. Maybe her boyfriend could find some peace. I grabbed up my book bag off the table and left the barroom.
Outside the door, to my right, were a few restaurants and other bars. It was fairly well lit, with people roaming around outside. To the l
eft, the street headed into a more residential area. I went left and planned to cut across the railroad tracks back to campus and then to my apartment on the other side.
A police car passed and the red-headed officer eyed me. I walked down the sidewalk, cracked and broken with roots pushing up from underneath, and thought about the old saying, “Step on a crack, break your mama’s back.” What a terrible thing to tell a child.
Up ahead I saw the dark figure of a person sitting on the curb of the street. She was huddled over, her arms wrapped around her bent knees, her face turned to the side, resting cheek-down on the top of one knee.
It was a girl, or a woman, with dark hair and some kind of dark, flowing dress. As I got closer I could hear her humming, more like a lyric mumble, and she rocked her body forward and back slowly.
I got behind her, only a few yards away, and stopped. Was it Kate? It looked like her from the back. But I couldn’t see her face and I couldn’t make out the words she hummed. Next to her was a small bottle, and next to the bottle, in the light from a passing car, I saw a glass pipe.
She said in a low voice, “It’s the only color I know.”
Was it Kate’s voice? It sounded like it. I moved closer and leaned my body over hers. A car passed, and I could see part of her cheek and the edge of her chin. The rest was covered by brown hair hanging down.
There was a part of me that wanted badly to walk away and not know. The part that never missed a class, and showed up early at work, and knew Eddie would fail. The part that balanced my checkbook, and looked forward to my time in the library, and secretly liked the way my boyhood room never changed. But Kate had been with me all along, and I couldn’t make myself walk away without knowing.
She said, “He held it in his hand. I saw it.” And it sounded less like Kate because she said it drawn-out and slurred. I wasn’t sure how to feel about wishing it was Kate, or wishing it wasn’t, or hoping it was someone else lost in this big world. And I wasn’t sure if I was still a savior, but I remembered the man in Kate’s house that night, sitting in the darkness, his foot propped up and rotten, waiting for something to happen. He was probably dead by now.
The Wait Page 6
