Stop-Time

by Frank Conroy

  Outside I regain my sense of direction and continue south. After a few steps the rhythm of walking takes hold of me again and it’s as if I’d never stopped. For mile after mile my mind is empty. No, not empty exactly. Imagine a symphony orchestra responding to a suddenly paralyzed conductor by holding a single note on and on, forever, without change.

  I look up to see an immense building flooded with light in the near distance. A red neon sign on the roof says State Police. I stop where I am and watch the sign. Then I look around. A path on my left leads away to a dark clapboard house. A shingle on the lawn says Henry Freeman M.D. There are three concrete steps at the foot of the path. I sit down with my back to the house and take out the cigar. The cellophane falls away and I light up. Watching the red neon, I smoke slowly.

  The cigar finished, I see a dark shape across the lawn. Moving closer I can make out a small ornamental tree, no more than six feet tall with broad thick branches very low to the ground. Down on my hands and knees I peer underneath. I can feel a bed of fallen needles. I crawl under carefully, the branches closing after me. There’s just enough room as I curl myself around the thin trunk. No one will see me in the morning. I fall asleep with the scent of pine heavy in my head, thinking of the woods in Florida.

  12

  Nights Away from Home

  ONCE, as a very young boy, I spent the night in Harlem. Sitting next to Madge on the bus, my pajamas in a paper bag on my lap, I looked out at the crowded streets.

  “There aren’t any white people at all, Madge.”

  “I know, honey.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well this is where colored people live. This is Harlem.”

  When we got off the bus I felt like holding her hand but she carried a bag of clothes and some groceries. I walked close beside her, my shoulder brushing against her wide hip. The world was dark—dark streets, dark houses, and dark people, as if the black sky had descended to a level just above the housetops. I kept looking at Madge, nervous that she might change somehow, that in this dark world she might be different from the way she was at home. A few hours before, when my mother had left, she’d been on her knees scrubbing the bathroom floor.

  “Here we are,” she said, turning into a building. “We got to climb the stairs.”

  Inside her small apartment all the lights were off except a single bulb in the kitchen. An old lady with gray hair sat at the table with the Daily News spread out in front of her.

  “This is Frank,” Madge said. “Mrs. Fouchet’s little boy. You remember I told you.”

  I shook hands. “So you gon’ spend the night?” she said. “Well, that’s nice.”

  Madge put down her bundles. “I’ll show you where you sleep.”

  We went to a very small room. I sat on the bed and took my shoes off.

  “Now you get yourself ready. I’ll bring you a glass of milk.”

  I undressed in the darkness and put on my pajamas. I could hear the women’s voices in the kitchen. When Madge came back I was under the covers. I drank the milk slowly, ate half the cookie she’d brought, and slipped the rest under the pillow for later.

  “Goodnight, child.” She brushed my hair back with her warm brown hand.

  “Will you leave the door open?”

  “Course I will. You go to sleep now.”

  In the morning I woke while the house was still quiet. I dressed myself and went into Madge’s room. She lay asleep in her bed, lying on her side, motionless under the blankets. I went to the front window and sat on the sill watching the street below. When she woke up she saw me sitting there and smiled.

  “There’re some children playing in the street,” I said. “Is it all right if I go down?”

  “Big children or little children?” she asked.

  I looked down. “Both, I guess.”

  “Well, you better not, honey,” she said after a moment. “You better stay up here with me.”

  Five years later, in Florida, up a tree, I looked down through the branches at my mother standing in our front yard. She was no more than a stone’s throw away, across the road, but I was safe in the woods. “Frank!” she called. “Frank!”

  In the tree house, I whispered to myself, “Go ahead and yell. Yell your fucking head off. I’m not coming back.”

  “Frank!”

  Her blond hair was faintly iridescent in the twilight. There wasn’t a breath of wind. After a while she turned away and went back in the house. The copper mesh of the screen door took on a wavering glow as someone lighted the kerosene lamp in the kitchen. I rolled over on my back and stared at the moon, sick with rage.

  Ten miles south of London at four in the morning the fog starts. Long, wispy tendrils float above the road, horizontal ghosts vanishing at the touch of the car’s powerful headlight beams. Inside, I’m warm, cozy, and drunk. The instrument panel glows. The heater-fan whirs. The scent of leather wraps me round and a pint of Scotch lies beside me on the seat. In total communion with the car, I come down from overdrive to fourth and touch the brakes, watching the speedometer needle sink from eighty to fifty with the same detachment I might feel were it recording the temperature in Bangor, Maine. I am a completely rhythmic being. I shift down to third as fog mounts the hood. My arm moves the wheel in constant adjustment, my heart beats, I breathe in and out, my eyes move in my head—all of it a subtle counterpoint of rhythms, infinitely syncopated, and in my drunkenness, endlessly beautiful.

  I pull over to the side of the road and stop the car. I shut off the engine and listen to the faint tick of the cooling manifolds. Suddenly the lights in the car go on, showing me my own body. I feel something cold against the back of my left hand. Looking down I realize I’ve opened the door. Fog curls around the edges of the doorway. I roll out of the seat and stand up beside the car, steadying myself by holding the top of the door. My body burns like an angel’s. I exist in the center of a corona of invisible fire. In one orchestrated movement I pull the door shut and launch myself out into the fog. When the momentum ends I plant my feet wide in the ground and open my fly. My urine steams and splits the air, it flows out of me like flame from a flame-thrower.

  Going back, the car is barely visible in the thickening fog. The windows are beaded. I open the door and climb into the back seat. I arrange my six-foot body across the four-foot seat and close my eyes. The drunken noise of my mind suddenly stops as an extraordinary feeling comes over me. I’m not in the car at all! I’m under the tree in Delaware! I can even smell the pine needles. Frightened, I open my eyes and sit up. It’s so dark I can barely make out the windows.

  Under the tree on the doctor’s lawn, I woke early. Crawling out carefully, I stood up and brushed the pine needles from my clothes and hair. Everything was utterly still—the road, the houses, the damp air itself. I looked around at the town in the colorless dawn light, seeing it for the first time. It was smaller than I’d thought in the darkness. Not even a town, really, just a few houses strung along either side of the highway. I crossed the road and started south. As I approached the police station the red neon sign went out. I went by quickly, without turning my head.

  My first ride of the day was a milk truck. The driver, a teenaged boy, seemed to be standing behind the wheel in the tall, open cab. Then I realized there was a very high seat so he could jump in and out with a minimum of effort. I sat down on the corrugated steel floor and lifted my face to the wind. Behind us the bottles rattled in their wire cages.

  “Go ahead, kid,” he yelled over the wind and the rattling glass. “Take a quart. I’ll chalk it up to breakage.”

  I opened a bottle and drank in long, deep swallows. The milk was ice cold and delicious. Five or six miles up the road the boy had to turn off to begin his rounds. At the corner I jumped out the open door with a wave, absurdly pleased that he didn’t have to stop. The sun was out and I took off my jacket, slinging it over my shoulder as I walked.

  It was too early for traffic. When a car passed I’d turn around and walk backward, my t
humb in the air, whipping my head as it went by to see the license plate. By never losing my forward momentum I felt less dependent on the cars.

  Plowed fields stretched away on either side of the road. I measured my progress by sighting something far ahead—a a group of mailboxes, a road sign, or a line of telephone poles—and making it my goal. Passing a huge girl drinking Coca-Cola (the sudden awareness of silence as I walked under her immense eyes, one of them bulging slightly where the paper had blistered), I’d already picked my next target, an isolated gas station on the horizon.

  I was sweating as I crossed the asphalt driveway and approached the office. Through the wide plate-glass window I could see an old man sitting with his feet up staring out at the pumps. His head came around slowly as he caught sight of me. I pushed open the door. Hillbilly music blasted from a radio on the desk beside his feet.

  “Can I use the bathroom?”

  “What say?”

  “Can I use the bathroom please?”

  “Around back.” He waved his arm to indicate the direction.

  I let the door fall shut and went around the corner of the building. The ground was littered with old oil cans, paper cartons, and fragments of auto bodies. Inside the men’s room I looked at myself in the mirror over the washstand, mildly surprised that except for a layer of dirt and messy hair I looked the same as usual. I ran hot water into the basin and pulled my shirt over my head. There wasn’t any soap, only a can of Grease-Off, a gray powder that felt like sand between my palms. I scoured myself thoroughly, face, neck, shoulders, and arms, and bent over the small basin to rinse off when the paste began to sting too much.

  Back out in front I gathered my courage. I ran my fingers through my hair and went into the office. The old man was cleaning his nails with a penknife.

  “Have you got any odd jobs you want done?” I asked, having rehearsed the question in the bathroom mirror. “Cleaning up or washing windows or something?”

  He attacked his index finger with exquisite care. “Nope.”

  “I could clean up that junk around back.”

  He answered without raising his head. “This ain’t my place. I’m just watching it.”

  “Will the boss be back soon?”

  “Nope.” He raised the knife to his mouth and blew something off the tip.

  I stood by the door, reluctant to leave. “Well, thanks anyway,” I said after a minute, and backed out. I knelt down for a drink from the water tap between the gas pumps, wiping my mouth and glancing back at the office as I finished. The old man hadn’t moved. I turned away and crossed the black asphalt back to the highway.

  Every hour or so I would take a break. I was resting by the side of the road, my back up against a fence post, when a yellow school bus came around the bend and stopped directly in front of me. The folding doors crashed open and the driver stared down his extended arm at me. “Well, come on,” he yelled, his hand opening and closing over the handle of the door lever.

  I got up and advanced a step. “I’m not ...” I began, unsure of how to explain.

  “What?” he yelled. He squinted his eyes and, peering down at me, raised his upper lip in an expression of annoyance, exposing a quarter-inch of red gums.

  “I don’t go to your school,” I said, stepping back. “I don’t ride the bus.”

  His mouth fell shut and he pulled the lever to close the doors, his whole body straightening with the effort. “God damn kids.”

  The children had crowded over to my side to see what was happening. They watched me from behind the glass, their mouths moving silently as they shouted. The bus began to move and they slipped away, pale faces turning into a white blur. I started walking.

  As the morning sun rose higher in the sky, traffic picked up, but there were no trucks. It occurred to me that I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. I was on Route One, but there might have been an alternate, a truck route, that I’d missed. In any event I knew the thing to do was keep heading south. Eventually the roads would rejoin. I wiggled my thumb at a big DeSoto. It went by at a good seventy miles an hour, rocking slightly on the poor road surface. About to turn away, I caught sight of another car in the distance. A flash of sunlight caught something on its roof and I froze in my tracks. A red beacon. The police. It was too late to hide. I turned my back on them and continued walking, my mind spinning in a frantic effort to prepare myself should they stop. Could Jean have notified the police in New York? No, that was out of the question. I realized I should have prepared a story—something from a book I’d read, or a movie. I should have had a false personality and background at my fingertips so they wouldn’t be able to trace me back. No matter what happened, I couldn’t let them send me back. Forcing myself not to turn around for a quick glance, I kept walking.

  At first a faint sighing, like wind in the tops of distant trees. Then the birth of another sound within the sigh, a sharper sound, very faint but growing steadily, a kind of whine, first heard as a pinpoint in the higher registers, building rapidly to a full hum across the spectrum, growing louder and louder, and then (at the very instant a shock wave of air slammed softly across my shoulders) overtaking the sigh, reversing itself, and plunging down the scale to a steady hum. I watched the black car racing away ahead of me. The taillights came on, a bright, burning red. The entire rear end lifted almost imperceptibly.

  After a momentary pause the cruiser began to back up. I stood fascinated, rabbit-like, drinking in the image of the approaching car. When it arrived in front of me. so close I could have touched it, the image was unreal, like something from a dream. The window came down and a pair of blue eyes watched me calmly.

  “What you doin’ out here, boy?”

  “I’m on my way to school. I missed the bus.” A certain tranquillity spread like oil over the surface of my mind as I plunged into the lie.

  “We saw you hitching. Hitching rides is against the law,” he said, his voice neither threatening nor reassuring, leaving me plenty of room to answer. He scratched his nose and watched me.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” I said, looking down. “I was getting awfully late.” He turned and stared out the windshield. A speck of shaving soap had dried just under his ear, very white against the red skin. “Where’re your books?”

  “In my locker,” I said. “We didn’t have any homework so I left them.”

  He turned away and spoke to his partner at the wheel. I couldn’t hear the short exchange.

  “Okay. Get in,” he said, staring straight ahead.

  “What?” I felt the beginning of panic, like a giant hand squeezing my heart.

  “Get in back. We go by the high school.”

  “Oh, that’s great,” I said, talking quickly to conceal my relief. “Thanks a lot. I sure appreciate it.” I opened the back door and hesitated with one foot inside. The rear of the car was separated from the front by heavy wire mesh and the handles had been stripped off the inside of the doors. I entered after a split second, dazed, overwhelmed by that particular breathless, lightheaded sensation that comes with the sense of having lost control of events, surrendering myself to fate with the same delirious passivity the awkward diver feels as he springs off the board. My body fell back as the car pulled away and I covered my mouth in a convulsive yawn. Through the black mesh I could see the wide bristled necks of the two cops ramrod stiff above their neat gray shirt collars.

  “You drive like an old lady, George.”

  “Uh-huh. Tell the Governor.”

  “I might do that.”

  I slid forward on the seat and reached out to hold the wire mesh. Suddenly I wanted to tell them the truth. I opened my mouth to speak but stopped as I felt tears starting in my eyes. My fingers tightened in the mesh and I waited for the emotion to pass.

  The radio crackled and the driver reached down for the microphone, pressing it against the side of his mouth. “Twelve. Twelve,” he said. “An assist. We got a kid who missed the school bus. It’s on our way. Twelve out.” A voice responded, talking in num
bers. The driver leaned forward and replaced the microphone.

  I ran over his words and decided that despite the mysterious word “assist” they were in fact going to do nothing more than drop me off at the local high school.

  “I sure appreciate it,” I said again. The urge to confess had disappeared. I watched the countryside go by.

  That night I came upon a truck depot in Maryland. Hundreds of trucks spaced out in long lines on the hard-packed earth like the vertebrae of some immense animal. A quarter-mile down the line I could see the faint neon haze of the diner. The air was filled with a continuous rumbling as trucks pulled in and out in the distance, air brakes gasping, headlights flashing against the sky. I walked among the tall wheels, staring up at the gargantuan trailers, big as houses, admiring the shiny cabs with their chunky radiator grilles and fanciful decorations. Most of the rigs were dark, but every now and then one had been parked with the running lights left burning-small pinpoints of red, green, or amber light describing the huge mass of the trailers high in the air like enlarged examples from a geometry book. I stopped behind each truck to check the banks of license plates. I ran through the eastern seaboard states in my mind, constructing a model of the selection of plates most likely to indicate a truck going to Florida. I found what I was looking for at the edge of the parking area—a sixtyfoot semi with plates from Massachusetts to Florida. The barn-sized rear doors were locked. I went around to the front and examined the empty cab. Lettered on the red door were the words “Favario Trucking, North South Express Shipping, Boston, Mass.,” followed by a series of numbers and specifications. I stepped into the deeper darkness between the cab and trailer, in among the tanks, hoses, and hydraulic lines, and urinated invisibly.