Didi and I had survived our senior year. It was the last day of school. As seniors, we had the week off, but most of us, like animals set loose into the wild who keep coming back to the cage even though they’re free, returned to Pueblo Heights.
The main hallway was jammed. Didi skipped away from me, jumped up, grabbed a big banner reading SENIORS RULE!!, ripped it from the wall, and ran outside with a pack of outraged Abercrombies trailing behind her. I started to follow, but someone behind me called out, “Cyndi Rae. Cyndi Rae?” No one called me Cyndi Rae anymore. Not since my mother had left.
It was Nita Carabajal, the girl who’d been assigned to be my lab partner when I first started at Pueblo Heights. Because we had absolutely no other friends, I had clumped with Nita in those lonely weeks before I met Didi. I say “clumped” because we sat next to each other at lunch and shared physics notes but were never actually friends. Nita was a Jehovah’s Witness so she didn’t do many “things of this world” like Christmas or pledging allegiance to the flag or shaving her legs or pits. She seemed to be a natural to hang with the Christians, but Nita alienated even them by informing anyone who wore a cross that Jesus had died on a stake.
She held her yearbook and a pen out to me. “Sign it, okay?”
I’d managed to avoid Nita since Didi entered my life, so of course she didn’t know that my mom had gone off to live at HeartLand HomeTown, and I’d moved in with Didi.
I took the yearbook Nita offered to me. “How’s your father doing?” Her eyes were two pits of gooey sympathy. She didn’t know about Daddy either.
“Same. About the same,” I mumbled as I scribbled Have a great summer!!!! My fingers had gone icy cold. I shoved the book back the instant I was done without even asking her if she’d like to sign mine. Nita darted away and was immediately swallowed up by the crowd, just another floater, one of the invisible ones who pass through high school as unnoticed as possible, bent beneath an overloaded Target backpack, hurrying to catch the bus, slipping through the halls like a wraith, scanning the cafeteria for a friendly or at least a tolerant face. Nita Carabajal was who I would have been if Didi hadn’t saved me. I caught my breath and ran outside to find her.
Since Didi declared the few graduation parties we were invited to “major dorkfests,” we had our own celebration that evening at Puppy Taco, where we spent most of our shift giving away tater tots to anyone who would yell, “Whore-nuts suck!” Between customers, Didi read the apartment-for-rent ads. Catwoman had sold most of Mr. Steinberg’s albums and all of his memorabilia and Didi figured the house wouldn’t be far behind. Didi’s mom still didn’t exactly speak to me. I wasn’t even certain that she realized I was living in her house, but, like a cat, she’d gotten used to my presence.
“I mean,” Didi asked me, “what does she have to stay in Albuquerque for?”
It was an odd gift that Didi never held any delusions about how important she was in her mother’s life. It was harder for me. I actually missed my mom and, in spite of everything, was hurt that, in the few letters she wrote, she sounded so happy with her new 1890s life. That bothered me more than her little reminders that I’d be burning in hell for all eternity unless I renounced Satan. She did send small checks, enough for clothes and makeup and to contribute to groceries at Didi’s house. She always ended her letters saying that whenever I put the Devil behind me, I would be welcome at HomeTown. She didn’t make any other effort to convince me to come. Not that I ever would have.
To celebrate our last day of high school, Alejandro gave us two quarts of his mother’s red chile and a short shift so I was Cloroxing Puppy Taco’s counters by quarter of five when an old Econoline van pulled up to the closed take-out window and honked. I held up the yellow latex gloves to show Didi that I was occupied and she roused herself enough to shuffle to the window and shove it open. “When the light that says DRIVE-UP OPEN goes out, boys, that means it’s closed. Okay, I know it’s pretty complicated, but you all got that?”
I smiled at Didi’s sarcasm imagining the carload of horny boys she was deflating. I waited for a high-pitched, honking answer from whatever puberty-ridden boy she was talking to. Instead an accent came over the loudspeaker that was the odd blend of English and hillbilly that people from places like North Carolina have.
“You’re Dirty Deeds, right?” the voice asked. “The Black Crowes told us you were cool.” The Crowes were some band Didi had groupied a few months back. “We’re here with the Whatevs.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Wanna come to a party?”
“What kind of party?”
“An after party after the concert.”
Didi joined the mechanical laughter that came over the loudspeaker. “Where’s this party going to be?”
“Right across the street at the Ace High Motel.”
“Ohmigod! I love the Ace High!” Didi said.
“So the Crowes told us.”
Didi laughed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll think about it. But only if my friend will come.”
A chorus of male voices implored me, “Friend, whoever you are! Come, okay? Come to the concert. Didi, we’ll leave a plus one for you at will call.”
“Whatev, Whatevs.” Didi laughed and shut the window. The Whatevs honked wildly and roared off.
“Why did you say I had to come to their party? I never go with you to after parties. Besides, they’re not even with a band you want to meet.”
“I don’t know. It’s our last night of high school. We should stay together.”
“Yeah, but—”
Didi cut off my objections with a quick, “Let’s think about it over a trip to Le DAV.”
I snapped off the gloves even though I wasn’t completely finished with the counters. Most of our major great clothes scores had been made at the Disabled Veterans Store. At the thrift store, I always followed in Didi’s wake since she could scan a twenty-foot rack of castoffs in hardly more than that many seconds, dismissing bales of career separates and zeroing in on the one garment with potential.
Le DAV was housed in a huge building that had once been a roller-skating rink. Still, some days it didn’t hold a single garment worth looking at. But that day, our last as Whore-nuts, was a lucky one.
“Here, take this,” Didi said, handing me what was clearly the prize find of the expedition: a scarlet, fitted ladies’ Western shirt with collar points.
“Are you sure?” I asked, already putting it on over my clothes.
“It was made for you.”
“But you saw it first.”
“I always do,” she said, moving on to a fabulous Mexican skirt with a matador swirling a red cape in front of a panting bull painted on it.
We each filled a large shopping bag, handed over a twenty for our combined finds, and got change back.
In the parking lot, we threw our bags into the trunk of the Skankmobile, paused to flip fingers in the general direction of what was now our alma mater, Pueblo Heights High School, then headed north. We took a left, and the instant the tires hit Central Avenue, Route 66, we started singing about getting our kicks on Route 66.
No matter how we goofed on the song, on the road’s tackiness, we loved our stretch of Route 66 stretching out toward all the infinite possibilities our lives held. Though we pretended to believe that Central Avenue embodied everything that was most tacky about our hometown, we loved to drive it at the exact moment right after the sunset finished its warm-up act when the Sandias were fading from pink to granite and the neon started to vibrate against a darkening desert sky. That was when the tires of the Skankmobile soaked up every dream of every traveler who’d ever headed west to start a new life out where the slate was clean. For that moment, it was us, Didi and me, who were going to drive through the night and see the sun come up over the Pacific Ocean and do things so amazing that future generations of Whore-nuts would talk about them.
Didi sang words she made up and set to the irresistible “Route 66” beat. “Now you go through Puppy Taco. Get your Big Red and your nachos!”
I joined in. And AlbuKooKay is mighty pretty.”
“Don’t forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow...” Didi started before segueing into a musical inventory of every cheesy store and flophouse motel we passed. “Round-up Motel. Pussycat Video. Winchester Ammunition. And, ohmigod!” Didi stopped singing. “The Ace High Motel!”
It was too early for the band to be back at the motel. I thought Didi would drive to the Journal Pavilion so we could watch the Whatevs’ concert for free. But the only reason Didi ever went to concerts was to meet the bands and since she had already done that, she skipped the concert and we drove up Nine Mile Hill. Graduating seniors from every high school in town were there partying, stumbling around the West Mesa, bobbing in and out of the glare of headlights. When it was late enough to arrive in style, we drove back into town.
As we passed the Palms Trading Post, I asked, “Could you just drop me off at the Lair, please?”
“What? No. Rae-rae, you have to come. It’s the night of our last day as Whore-nuts.” Didi shifted gears and the panther bracelet on her wrist gleamed in the dim light reflected from the dashboard. She hadn’t taken it off since the blood sister ceremony. I’d never taken the turquoise cross off either.
“Naw, I don’t think I’m up for it tonight.”
“Please, please, please.”
“Since when did you ever need me?”
“Since when didn’t I need you? Of course I need you. You take care of the details.”
“Yeah, but why do you even want to go?”
“Uh, let’s see? Number one, better than going home. Number two, better than going home. And number three, did I mention? Better than going home.”
“Could I just go to your house and eat margs with Catwoman and you go without me like we always do?”
“No. Come on, Hunker. Come on, you wiener-happy woman, you.”
There she’d done it, hit the fiction that I was a hot number always up for a good time.
I didn’t actually agree, just stopped arguing. We stopped at Wendy’s on Central, ordered Diet Cokes, and took our drinks and everything we’d bought at Le DAV into the ladies’ room for a try-on party. Didi sorted through our bags and hauled out the prima vintage fiesta skirt painted with a bullfighting scene in fiery reds and blacks. The black tummy tee she already had on went perfectly with it. The skirt rode low on her hips and the tee stopped somewhere above her bottom ribs, showing Didi’s navel ring and the perfectly flat stomach it was attached to. She painted on some red vinyl lipstick from her purse and looked like a stylist had spent hours on her.
“Now you,” she said, rooting around in the bags.
“What about this?” I asked, tugging on the rockabilly shirt I was wearing. I felt safe in it, covered up.
“Oh, yeah, that’s perfect.” One beat. Two. “For a remake of Deliverance. Here, try this.” She pushed a pair of late-eighties stone-washed jeans into my hands. I put them on. Didi circled her finger indicating that I should twirl around. I did and she shook her head. “No, definitely not. Serious case of No Assatall.”
I peeked over my shoulder and saw that the jeans did indeed flatten my butt down like a sack of feed.
“This! This! This!” Didi shoved a flimsy skirt into my hands.
I held it up. “Uh, are you sure?” The skirt, a froth of lace and some slinky, slippery fabric, was one of those homemade creations you can find only in a thrift store, a flight of fancy that had found no place in its maker’s real life.
“Uh, I don’t think so. I didn’t shave my legs.”
“You need to shave your legs about as much as an albino. You have virtually no visible body hair.”
“I’m not really a skirt person.” I handed it back and started to put my jeans on.
Didi ripped the jeans out of my hands. “Cyndi Rae Hrncir, you are too young to be saying what kind of person you are and way too young to be saying what kind of person you are not. Put this on!” She held the skirt out and stared at me, not saying what was in both our minds: I could either put the skirt on or keep following a path that was starting out too narrow and would only get narrower.
I took the skirt. “Okay, but just to try on.” The garment might not have worked for its creator, but it settled onto my hips as if made for me. A fantasy me who wore skirts that revealed her midriff.
“Don’t say anything!” Didi ordered as I eyed myself dubiously. She tugged the skirt down until first my belly button, then the very top of my pubic hair showed.
“No way!” I yanked the skirt back up.
“You’re right. Pubes are too hoochie mama. But you have to wear this.” She plucked a cream silk camisole out of the bag.
“But that’s underwear.”
“Uh, yeah. Put it on! Put it on!”
I was surprised by how good the pale camisole looked against my skin, which had turned a rosy pink from all the hours we’d spent cruising with the top of the Skankmobile down.
Didi fluffed up my hair and painted my face as if I were her favorite doll. Then she spun me back around to face the mirror. “See how great I made you look!”
I studied not myself but Didi’s handiwork, amazed at what she had done. My lips were plump, my eyes sparkled, my face was a palette of delicious creams and pinks and blues. Even in the buzzing fluorescent lights of Wendy’s bathroom, I looked good. Didi had made me look good. “You’re a genius,” I whispered.
“And tits out!” Didi drilled a knuckle into my spine and I jerked my shoulders back. “Sexy mama,” Didi said.
It was as if I had still been carrying a heavy backpack and had just dropped it. For that moment, that night, I was light, and free, and sexy.
The skirt felt like a cloud barely floating around my body as we walked outside. The parking lot was bathed in silver all the places where the gaudy neon colors didn’t reach. Didi stopped dead and pointed up. “Hey, look. Have you ever seen a moon that full?”
I hadn’t. It was as if the moon had graduated that day too and was shining more brightly than it ever had before. I tilted my head up to let the silvery light stream over me.
“Wow, I wish you could see yourself. Someone is going to fall in love with you tonight, sexy mama. Probably me.”
I laughed along with Didi. The joke wasn’t Didi falling in love with me. It was her falling in love with anyone.
The Whatevs’ party had started by the time we pulled into the parking lot of the Ace High. The motel’s sign, an ace of hearts, flipped over and over in blinking red neon. As soon as we stepped out of the car, we could hear the old ZZ Top song about how she’s got legs and she knows how to use ’em blaring from an upstairs room. Didi was already bobbing her head to the music as we followed it upstairs. The matador on her Mexican skirt swung his red cape from side to side as we climbed the concrete stairs to the third, the top, floor. The music led us to the door of room 312. We pounded, but no one heard, so we walked into the front room of the suite. It was dark and felt tropical, the air overheated and dense. The only illumination came from a black light that turned Didi’s smile into a phosphorescent zombie grin. We stumbled over a quilt of grease-ringed pizza boxes. The black light made a pyramid of Foster’s beer cans stacked in one dark corner appear to be floating in midair.
The door to the back room where the real party was going on opened and a blast of ZZ Top and smoke poured out. A guy wearing a straw hat that drooped down in front and back, and a black T-shirt with tour dates printed on it, stumbled out, fixed his gaze blearily on Didi and me, and yelled, “New recruits! New recruits!” He could have been any of a hundred roadies or soundmen who’d waved Didi past security guards and welcomed her into hotel rooms. Didi beamed. She was home.
“Hey, come on back.” He waved toward the open door. “Party’s in here.”
Didi turned to me and gave the shrug that guided most of her actions, the shrug that asked, Why not?
“Go on.” I flagged her a wave of permission, wishing again that I was back at Didi’s house spooning margaritas with Catwoman.
“I’ll just hang out here for a while,” I told Didi. Without any discussion, we’d reverted to our usual groupie MO where I left after the reconnaissance work was over. Didi danced away and I yelled after her, “I might walk home!”
“Yee-HAW!” The guy in the droopy hat led Didi away.
I flopped down on an abused couch covered in the brown tweed Herculon favored by low-end motel chains. The boom from a throbbing bass pulsed along my spine. I could barely make out the sound of a laugh that was Didi’s before it was lost in the thundering music.
I had decided to leave when, drifting above the roar of the party, I heard another sound, a sound so pure and crystalline that even though it was barely audible, it cut through the cacophony with diamond-sharp clarity. As my eyes and ears adjusted, I realized that there was an alcove beside the Foster’s pyramid and someone was sitting in it, playing guitar.
For a second, he was nothing but blurred streaks of ghostly white where the black light caught his nails rippling over the strings of his guitar. His head was bent down, resting on the neck of his guitar so that he could hear himself play, the sound resonating directly into his skull. The music was unearthly, like stumbling upon a fallen angel playing his harp on the floor of a steel mill. The party noise fell away and suddenly all I could hear was the cascade of notes pouring from his fingers. I didn’t know enough about music to identify the style. It was too raw to be classical, too rarefied to be rock. Then I stopped trying to figure out what it was and just listened.
I’d read a theory in Newsweek once about why crack cocaine is so addictive. It said that some people have receptors in their brains like keyholes. That if you have such a keyhole in your head, the drug will slide into it, the drug will be the key that unlocks you. It is this unlocking of a true and essential self that dooms a person with this chemical quirk to addiction from the first pipe. I had a keyhole in my brain for the music this stranger was playing. From the first notes I heard, it seeped into me, filling an empty spot I hadn’t known existed.
He was seated on a straight-backed chair. Invisible in the darkness, mesmerized by this angelic music, I was freed from self-consciousness. I sank to the ground beside him, hoping to keep that sound pouring into my head. He tilted his face toward me so that the black light picked up the whites of his eyes turning them into flashes of phosphorescence. His only acknowledgment of my presence was a small nod as if he’d been waiting for me to take my place at his feet. I was invisible in the black light, lost in darkness, nothing but a hopeful smile glowing in the dark above a lacy camisole floating disembodied as a cloud in the phosphorescent light.
My pulse fell into time with his playing as if it were the moon capturing my blood in a tide that surged, then fell away.
In the dim light I saw that he was as different from any of the guys I’d ever been this close to as a human could be and still belong to the same species. Where other guys were pink and embryonic, he was brown and fully formed. His black hair, brows, the black lashes shadowing his cheeks had an etched certainty missing in the tentative pastel fuzziness of the boys I knew. Those boys were poised to take everything about themselves back, to change it all if a better idea came along; this stranger was a finished product. He was a full-grown man in a way that the boys I knew never would be no matter how old they grew to be.
He didn’t stop playing, barely looked up from the guitar, and asked, “What are you doing here?” A seam of white opened in his dark face as his lips formed the words, hiding then revealing his teeth so that they almost seemed to blink on and off like the neon sign that buzzed outside the window. He had a slight accent. Spanish, but not like the homeboys at Pueblo with their shorts that drooped to midcalf and wallets on chains. His accent made his words sound oddly formal and important.
“I came with—” I pointed toward the back room, then realized that he couldn’t see my hand in the darkness and couldn’t hear my soft voice over the deafening music. But I had heard my voice and what I heard was wrong. The sound of my words didn’t fit this music, this room, this night. They didn’t fit the person I suddenly wanted to be. In my head I heard Didi’s voice, teasing, flirty, funny, nasty, challenging. That was who I wanted to be, so I echoed the memory of Didi’s voice and said in a bold voice, “I came to hear you, of course.”
The seam of white widened into a full smile. He stared at me, ignoring his hands flowing over the strings. A trail of white followed his nails as he took his left hand from the neck of the guitar and patted the side of his leg. “Come here.” His right hand kept plucking music.
I edged closer until my shoulder nuzzled against his thigh.
“Escuches. Listen.” He pressed my head against the polished body of the guitar, then stroked the strings with the tips of his nails, showing me how he coaxed the sound out. As the rush of soft notes resonated inside my brain, I studied the insect scurry of his fingertips across the strings. Each note was a minute collision of wire-wrapped string and the tender pad of finger flesh that launched an upward tug of nail on string. I focused on his right hand so intently that it became a creature separate from the body it was attached to. His knuckles rolled like marbles beneath the skin as fingers pulleyed up and down, floating over the strings, gently drawing sounds that made my head fill with stained-glass colors: cobalt blue, Prussian blue, emerald, ruby, colors so deep and saturated it hurt to even imagine them.
When he stopped playing and leaned over to pick up a can of beer, the colors shattered and I was dumped back into a seedy motel room that had, for a few seconds, been transformed into a cathedral.
I had to ask, “What are you doing here?”
He shrugged and nodded toward the din coming from the back bedroom. “I was hitching down from Santa Fe and they, those Whatevers, picked me up.” He put the beer can down and started playing again as if the words he’d spoken had depleted him in some way and he needed to fill himself up with music in order to speak again. And then he sang so softly I was barely able to hear the Spanish words that stretched themselves out, rising and falling on the waves of rhythm rolling effortlessly from his guitar. The chords he plucked, the words he sang were both sadder and more thrilling than anything I’d ever heard in my life. They translated the state of gloom and exhilaration I lived in. I saw my father’s bony shoulders heaving up toward his ears as he struggled to suck oxygen into his wrecked lungs. I saw my face golden in a setting sun, laughing until tears ran down my cheeks. I saw myself kissing the guitarist. He finished with a hail of notes and one quick, dismissive thump of his ring finger on the face of the guitar.
“I’m not a cantaor, not a singer. But I like that one.”
“What does it mean? The song?”
“Mean? I’m not sure. Let me see.” He nodded his head as he whispered the Spanish words to himself. “Okay, this isn’t an exact translation but something like this.”
By the light of a candle
I wept without shame;
The candle went out.
The tear is greater than the flame.
I couldn’t be Didi, couldn’t be cool. “It’s beautiful,” I whispered. “So beautiful. And so sad.”
“Tragedy in the first person,” he said, studying his hands. “That’s the best definition I’ve ever come across for flamenco.”
Flamenco. I’d heard the word before, but it hadn’t had anything to do with me. Now, here it was, inside my head, presented to me by an angel prince enthroned next to a pyramid of beer cans.
He kept playing, not looking up. “This”—he pointed at the dried curls of pizza in greasy boxes, at the pile of beer cans, the noise bludgeoning us from the back room—“this is my tragedy.” He played some more, each chord sadder, more wistful than the last. “Sorry, I’m not usually like this. Okay, I’m not always like this. You caught me on a bad night. A really bad night. Possibly the worst night of my life.”
“What’s wrong? What happened?” What I meant was What can I do? Tell me. Anything. I will do anything for you. I will spend my life fixing whatever is wrong. Tell me what the problem is. I’m good with details. Just ask Didi. Tell me.
“It’s complicated,” he answered.
“I’m good with complications. I got an A in calculus.” For the first time, he smiled a real smile and stared at me for a long time. The smile and the stare were gone in the next instant when a blinding light filled the room. It bounced crazily off all the walls, exploding in flashes of blue and white. Before I could even figure out what the light meant, he was on his feet. An amplified bullet of static crackled, then a voice on a bullhorn in the fake country drawl of an airline pilot boomed out from the parking lot three floors below, “Come on down, boys. Party’s over?”
“Of course,” he said, shaking his head wearily as if he’d been expecting the party to get busted.
The music was silenced and a barrage of voices coming from the other room followed. “Hey! What the fuck you—?”
“The fucking cops are outside, fuckhead!”
“Fuck! No!”
“Shit!”
“Get rid of the shit!”
The door to the back room burst open. The guy in the floppy straw hat ran out, emptied a ziplock bag of pot and a handful of pink, red, and blue pills into the toilet, then flushed. Band members, groupies, roadies followed him stampeding out of the bedroom heading for the bathroom. A fog of smoke enveloped the suite.
“Didi!” I screamed, but could barely make myself heard above the panicked voices. I tried to get back to the other room, but the fleeing revelers pushed me aside. “Didi!” I screamed again.
Suddenly, a hand grabbed me and I was dragged away from the back room, away from the frenzy of bodies. The stranger, his guitar slung over his shoulder by its strap, pulled me to the far corner of the room where mustard-colored thermal curtains hungover a set of sliding glass doors.
I pointed frantically to the bedroom. “My friend, Didi, is back there.”
He jerked me away. “We’ve got to get out of here. Now.” I hesitated and looked back at the door where pierced and tattooed heads churned through the smoke. He caught my eye and asked with a glance if I was coming or not. When I didn’t move, he released my arm and, moving with the assurance of a cat burglar, flipped up the lock on the glass door.
“Move it on out, boys,” the cop downstairs said in his amplified shit-kicker accent. “Don’t make us come up there and drag you out. That’ll put us in a real bad mood.”
The stranger paused at the glass door and held out his hand to me. The gold-colored motel curtain was pushed back over his shoulders like a cape. The clang of heavy shoes pounding up the metal staircase rang through the room. “Now!”
“Didi! I have to find Didi!”
He shrugged, stepped outside, and let the curtain drop. I rushed into the back room. It was empty. A hand hammered at the front door. “Open up!” I ran back to the spot where the curtains had just closed over the open door and stepped through.
Outside, beyond the smoky room, the evening was cool, the air fresh. The balcony was lighted from the tubes of ruby, emerald, and topaz neon glowing on the motel sign. The lights, buzzing and popping, disoriented me. I couldn’t see past them, into the dark night beyond. I was alone on the balcony. He had already left.
Inside the room, a voice, menacing, fake-friendly, asked, “And what do we have here. Not drug paraphernalia!”
It would be only a matter of seconds now before they found me hiding on the balcony. I wondered if the police would be able to track my mom down. If they would call HeartLand to tell her that I’d been arrested. I wondered what I would break if I jumped the three stories down to the asphalt parking lot below.
“Down here.” The words were a strangled hiss.
I shielded my eyes from the neon glare and looked down. The guitarist hiked out from the balcony on the second story and opened his arms.
“Lower yourself down. I’ll grab you.”
“I can’t. I’ll never...”
“Do it. Now! I’m out of here in ten seconds.”
I stepped over the black wrought-iron railing. In the ruby glow from the neon, I noticed puddles of rust stain around each of the iron pickets. As I lowered myself over the edge of the balcony, the concrete scraped against my leg and the railing gave slightly in my hand. I stretched my leg down into the darkness. No hands reached up to receive me. The neon swam around me in flashes, darting in and out like fish fleeing from a shark.
Up above me, the scary-friendly cop barked, “Trujillo, get the bedroom! I’m checking the balcony!”
I reached with my whole body toward the second-story balcony, but my feet found nothing but air. I heard the railing beneath me rattle and knew it was the sound of the stranger swinging easily from the balcony to the ground below. I had made a mistake. I had gone too far. I wasn’t Didi after all.
I didn’t have the strength to pull myself back onto the balcony. My arms quivered. I hoped he was gone, that he wouldn’t see me fall and end up sprawled in a broken heap on the asphalt below. The fingers on my left hand gave way first. Next, the fingers on the right uncoiled. I started to slip. Hands grabbed me. Arms hugged my legs, guided me down, clasped me around the waist and set me down safely on the second-floor balcony.
“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.” My panicked whimper was silenced by his hand pressing against my mouth. The long nails of his right hand dug into my cheek as he drew me into the shadows.
Over our heads, the gold curtain covering the patio doors was pushed aside and light from the motel room spilled down through the railings. It striped the hand he pressed against my mouth. The cop stepped onto the balcony and a rain of rust flakes fell onto our upturned faces. He clamped his hand even more tightly against my mouth. It tasted of sweat and metal and smelled of marijuana.
The cop stood on the metal grating of the patio above us and turned on his flashlight. A beam of light spiked past. The beam wove about, illuminating the alley below, then slashing across the parking lot and up the side of the building until it fell straight down on my face. I was so convinced that the cop standing on the grating above could see us that I would have stepped forward and given myself up, but he held me back.
A second later, the cop turned the flashlight off and went inside. The gold curtain fell back and the light was blacked out. On the floor above our heads, footsteps moved from the bedroom to the living room, then out through the open door. A dozen or more heels clanged as the cops herded their captives down the metal stairs.
A rumble of voices reached us, band members and roadies protesting their arrest.
“Yeah, yeah,” a cop sneered in reply. “We already heard all about your two Grammy nominations. Ah, yes, you did already mention that the governor’s daughter is a ‘giant, giant’ fan. Come on, move it along. We don’t want to have to cuff you.”
I strained to pick out Didi’s voice, but all I heard were harsh male intonations. Then there was a flash of movement at the far end of the alley and Didi appeared at the corner. Her face was in shadow but I recognized her skirt. I started to call out to her, but the guitarist pressed his hand against my lips, the long nails on his right hand furrowing the side of my nose and cheek. Didi clung to the edge of the alley and peeked around at the scene in front of the motel. Bursts of cop-car light strobed the dark alley. More cars pulled up. Radios broadcast static.
Didi backed away and the mercury vapor street light on Central Avenue painted the top of her head with a violet halo. A cop stepped into the alley and grinned as he caught Didi in the beam of his flashlight. “Well, well, well, what do we have here? Snow White. I wondered where you went to. We already got your Seven Dwarfs out front.” The cop clicked off the flashlight and moved toward Didi, singing, “ ‘Hi ho. Hi ho. It’s off to work we go,’ ” in a tuneless voice.
Didi backed away as the cop approached. She glanced around, searching for an escape route. A chain-link fence blocked off the alley behind her.
“So? What about it?” the cop asked, jerking a thumb toward the parking lot. “You wanna go with your little friends out there?”
Sounds of the arrested being loaded into patrol cars echoed back into the alley.
The cop in the alley moved close to Didi. “Or you wanna pay your fine right here? It can be arranged.”
“A statutory rape charge can also be arranged,” Didi shot back.
The cop coughed out a snort of laughter. “We drag you out of a room, one girl and a bunch of dopehead degenerates, and you’re gonna cry statutory? Gotta do better than that, princess.”
“I wasn’t doing anything. Maybe you didn’t notice? I had all my clothes on?”
“Fuck it, you don’t wanna work with me on this, let’s go.”
Didi gave an exasperated gasp, hissed, “Shit,” then followed the cop into the shadows at the end of the alley. As she walked, her skirt floated around her slender legs like wisps of smoke. I heard the scrape of his zipper being pulled down. With one hand, he fumbled inside his fly. With the other, he shoved Didi down until she kneeled in front of him. The matador skirt settled around her in a perfect circle, like a small, round cloth thrown on the grass for a picnic. His hand reached into the violet light above her head, threaded his fingers through her hair, and jerked her mouth toward him. His fingers stretched spastically, then clawed more deeply into Didi’s hair.
The clang of the chain-link fence took on a staccato urgency and I looked away, looked back at the most handsome man I had ever known. He leaned forward so that I breathed in his smell of marijuana and beer, sharpened and made dangerous by lust. The rattling of the chain-link accelerated, then stopped.
Didi got to her feet and the skirt folded back around her like a closing umbrella. She pivoted and vomited on a pile of old roofing shingles. The cop pulled out a handkerchief and, with a surprising delicacy, wiped himself off. “Okay,” he said, folding his handkerchief in half, then fourths, then neat, pocketable eighths. “Let’s go.” He motioned toward the parking lot with his chin.
Didi pivoted slowly. Her body was tense with rage. “You fuck. I blow you and you’re still going to arrest me?”
“You are addressing an officer of the law.”
“I am addressing a child molester with a dick the size of worm.”
The cop sprang forward, bristling.
“Did I mention that? That I’m only fifteen?”
For a second, the muscle beneath the cop’s flab made itself known and the saggy black uniform encased a hard and volatile creature. The cop’s hand clenched spasmodically over the baton slapping his side.
“Yeah,” Didi sneered. “Do it. That’ll look good on the report.”
Even from the second floor, I heard the angry snort of the cop’s breath. My vision vibrated with an image of Didi’s skull cracking open in the violet light.
The cop’s held breath exploded out of him in one grandly, dismissive exhalation. “Get the fuck out of here.” He gestured toward the dark end of the alley.
“No, you get the fuck out of here!”
The cop studied her a moment, started to say something, then laughed, shook his head, and walked away. “Have a good life, princess.”
Didi waited a moment, then darted to the corner of the building, and peeked around. When the strobing light faded away, she left. A moment later, the Mustang throbbed to life and gravel spattered as Didi spun the car around and drove off.
The guitarist took his hand from my mouth, vaulted over the railing, landed on the side of the motel with a crunch, and held his arms up to me. Without a second thought, I dropped into them. He took my hand and led me around behind the motel, where we watched and waited until all the cop cars left and the permanent residents of the Ace High motel came back out to stare at the empty lot and drink from stubby green Mickey’s malt liquor bottles.