TIME crawled away with the helpless tempo of a traffic jam. The summer light seemed to last forever. Lingering through dinner, it was one of those never-ending sunsets that delayed drive-in movies—a swollen haze of pollen and air pollution, a glowing gaseous orange with wispy vapors of purple and blue.
I cranked up the volume of my hair, did some overtime in the t-zone, then painted my nails ultraplatinum. It was a night meant for high-beam gleam. I wanted to sparkle like waxed chrome under streetlight. After a couple of preliminary failures I settled on a sliver of metallic mascara and a light dusting of pearly pink iridescent powder. Clothing is never easy and it took several dress rehearsals, but I decided on blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and Tracy’s fuzzy blue sweater: something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.
It was only nine o’clock but I couldn’t wait any longer, so I went downstairs and told Mom I was going over to Tracy’s. I hate to lie but sometimes the truth is just impossible. I took the shortcut through the field, which was not a good idea, because it was dark and the weeds were sparking my fertile imagination. I’m not usually a paranoid person, but lately everything’s been getting a little weird. Whenever I’m alone I feel like I’m waltzing through a crime scene.
I landed at the Chicken Shack and ordered a small Diet Coke, then sat on a stool by the window and watched cars come and go from the gas station across the street. My mechanic went car to car, washing windshields, pumping gas, sometimes disappearing into the garage for a can of oil. He looked so sweet with that little pink rag drooping from the back pocket of his black jeans. Pushing a broom under bright white fluorescent light, he was my own private movie star.
I watched him wheel in the oil can cart, roll up the air hose, and measure the gas in storage below the surface with a long yellow pole until finally, a little after ten, the overhead lights were turned off. The gas station was closed. I coated my lips with a fresh dose of lip gloss, tossed my paper cup in the can, and strolled across the street. I tapped on the garage window and saw my mechanic turn with surprise. He walked over to the door and fumbled with the lock.
“You made it,” he said, then turned his back to me and bent over the sink to scrub his greasy hands. He wore a tight, gray short-sleeve T-shirt and black jeans pegged over steel-toe boots.
“Nice place ya got here.” I leaned against the Coke machine and slid my hands into my front pockets. The garage smelled like old motor oil. Hundreds of crushed cigarette butts littered the greasy black floor like little white bugs.
He turned off the water and dried his hands with a white paper towel. “It’s a job,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, then dropped the towel into the trash. “Where do you work?”
I stumbled on that one, my head swimming with responses. He turned around and pounded some quarters into the cigarette machine. “You got a job or you some kinda psychokiller chick who preys on gas station mechanics?” He picked up his cigarettes and tore open the cellophane wrapper.
“Heard about me, huh?” I gazed at my shoe.
Bobby tapped the cigarette pack against the palm of his hand, then tapped out two cigarettes and offered the first one to me. I pulled it from the pack, slipped it between my lips. He seemed tense under all that cool, his face didn’t seem as sure as his demeanor. I could tell there was some vulnerability under all that swagger. Silence swelled and sucked up all the air. He clicked open his silver lighter and ignited its blue and orange flame. I dipped my cigarette into the fire and inhaled. The lighter fluid was so rich it tasted like I was smoking gasoline.
“So, you still want to go see that big fire?” he asked.
My right leg took on a life all its own, swinging forward and back. I twisted my arms into a pretzel. “Isn’t much else to do,” I said. “You got any other ideas?” I flipped my hair away from my face.
He looked over my body and I returned the compliment. Bobby closed the bottom drawer of the desk with his knee, then turned around and grabbed his black leather jacket from the coatrack. “The fire it is.” He turned off the office light, opened the door for me, then locked it behind us.
The purple-flake paint job on his ’78 Charger glittered like the prizes in a gumball machine. The interior reeked of history—dead smoke and worn leather—somehow it already smelled familiar to me. This was my vehicle into the next chapter. I just wanted to be there, now.
My mechanic latched his seat belt and told me to do the same. He started the engine, pushed in a cassette, and the car burst to life. Nine Inch Nails crept out of the stereo. When he pressed the accelerator the first thrust of gasoline exhaust ripped through the tailpipes and the engine’s sweet rumble turned to a fearsome roar. He shifted into gear and peeled out of the lot.
I slipped my hand under the black vinyl seat, feeling for trinkets like lost earrings, bottle caps, or torn condom wrappers, anything that might help me look into the past or predict the future. My mechanic concentrated on the dark road, shifting through the gears, both hands locked on the wheel. Sometimes his eyes squinted or his head tilted, as if he saw something lurking in the black perimeter. He looked so intense driving. I was speechless.
Bobby’s face was dominated by large lips and long sideburns. His nose was twisted as if it had once been broken and never reset. A thick purple vein bulged from his slender neck, his flat chin balanced the twitching muscles of his jaw. He looked powerful and reckless, like somebody who’s already tasted the pavement.
I rolled down the window, folded my arms over the windowsill, and let the warm wind blow through my hair. The scenery slid by like an ambient movie, a zillion frames a minute; white lines disappeared under the car, warped reflections peeled over the windshield. I saw the pink eyes of an opposum hunched over a dead raven in the gravel shoulder of the road. It stared into the headlights, then scampered behind the guardrail and into the weeds.
We passed the Johnsons’ abandoned farmhouse. The windows were broken, the weathered gray boards buckling. A large white billboard stood out front announcing the new development. The entire farm was mapped into tiny green squares with a black line snaking around the land in S-shaped curlicues. Mr. Johnson died last year and his farm was instantly swallowed up by some big-time developer. The cornfield already had sewer lines and streetlights in place. It all happened so fast, it seemed like they were waiting for him to die.
“So where are you from?” I asked.
“How do you know I’m not from here?”
“’Cause I’ve been here long enough to know.”
He turned and checked me out but didn’t say anything. I tipped my head back out the window, crossed my legs, and stared at his reflection in the windshield. The curve of his lips reminded me of the bending hills of a roller coaster. I closed my eyes and felt myself sliding down the first hill.
“I’m from Southern Illinois.”
“What brings you up here?”
“Work.”
“They don’t have any gas stations down there?”
“Yeah, but they already have mechanics. Everybody down there is a mechanic. Up here everybody is a businessman. Businessmen don’t know shit about cars. They bring them to me and I charge whatever the hell I want.”
“You came up here to take advantage of us?”
“It’s called the redistribution of wealth.”
“Are you a Marxist?”
“Are you a spy? You sure ask a lot of questions. What do you know about this fire?”
“Saw it on TV,” I said. “Biggest celebrity in the area, I guess.”
We came over a ridge, and the fire everybody’s been talking about came into view. A huge petrochemical storage tank was on fire, and its plume of thick black smoke had burned a hole in the sky for about two days now. From across the canal it looked like the earth had cracked open and the entrance to hell was slithering from its hideaway. Fireboats projected lazy streams of water onto the steel casings of the nearby tanks. Old tires and half-sunk houseboats floated beside a rotting pier that sloped down under the oil-slick water.
“That fire is bigger than I expected. It looks so greedy and wild, like an angry ghost or something.”
“You believe in ghosts?” he asked.
“Sure, why not?” I looked over at him.
“You believe in UFOs too?”
“There wouldn’t be UFOs if UFOs didn’t exist,” I explained.
Bluff Road was clogged with double-parked vehicles. People were slouched on the hoods of their cars drinking beer. Everyone’s face was shaded with an orange glow, reflecting the fire’s leaping light. Bobby couldn’t find a parking spot and ended up being detoured into a long snaking line of sight-seers rambling over the canal bridge. A few people stood outside the lawn mower repair shop, one of them pointing up into the sky.
“Do you suppose that stuff’s dangerous?” I asked, sorta hallucinating in the swirling whirlwind of red, white, and blue emergency lights.
“If it was, somebody would of said so by now.”
“Yeah, but what if they didn’t? Maybe there’s something in those clouds?” I leaned closer to the glass to get a better look. “I don’t trust anyone these days, especially the government.”
“How do you know you can trust me?”
“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
“So you’re in a car with a complete stranger, but you’re worried about some little puffs of smoke drifting off into outer space.”
“Hey, it’s not as illogical as you make it seem, and those aren’t little puffs, they’re big black balls, thank you.” But then I had to think about it for a second. “You have to trust your instincts. What’s right is right,” I added. “You’re flesh and blood, who knows what that stuff is.” The cassette tape ended and it felt like a bell announcing the end of round one.
“Isn’t it weird how everyone seems so drawn to death and destruction,” I said, peering through the glass, trying to trace the trail of smoke. “Look at all those people!”
“It’s sort of religious actually, if you think about it, like passing in front of an altar”—he wiggled the gearshift—“people suddenly feel lucky to be alive.” My mechanic stared into the oncoming headlights as if he had a long line of thoughts racing to a finish line.
“This is way better than religon,” I said. “Church is so boring. And who’d want to go to heaven anyway? I can’t think of a worse party.”
“Who said you were invited?”
I looked at him with a strange sense of amusement, something I never felt with anyone else. He had the weirdest point of view and I can’t believe he mentioned religion; what a trip. Staring at him in this light he carried a warm alienish glow, and I wanted to believe he was an angel.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked.
“If there wasn’t a God, God wouldn’t exist.” He looked over at me and smiled.
Touché. What could I say? My mechanic was a spiritual Meisterbrau, a greasy white prince, a minister of machine parts. I felt myself twisting into a chain-link mesh.
The music blended with the wind and the roar of the Charger. The interior was colored by the oncoming blur of passing cars bending through the wide curves of the two-lane road. We drove past the UNOCAL petroleum refineries. Tiny white bulbs traced its skeleton of black and silver pipes. Three musty pill-shaped train cars were parked behind the chain-link fence. Power lines looped over the tree line, disappearing into the Black Partridge Woods.
A thick toxic scent filled the car. My breath was shortened and my face started burning. I tried to rationalize the concept that we had just driven through an industrial accident, that I might be the victim of toxic agencies already chewing through the fibers of my internal organs, that this was probably the beginning of the end. I rolled up the window, checked my reflection in the glass and the huge black plume of smoke pushing farther into the heavens.
“This must be the biggest thing to happen around here since the night they fried John Wayne Gacy,” I said, shifting on the bucket seat and trying to imagine myself in the electric chair: the first surge of electricity; my hair frying; my fingernails turning black and peeling back; my eyeballs popping out of my head.
“Did you go to that too?”
“No. That was a long time ago. Where are we going?” I asked him.
“My garage.” He coasted through a yellow light. “I gotta check in with some friends before we go anywhere else.” He looked over at me. “It’ll only take a minute.”
“Where’s your garage?”
“A few more lights,” he said, pointing ahead.
We sped through Lockport. Old brick bungalows and tar papered shacks lined Archer Avenue. The waterfront became a faint glow and then a shadow behind us. I saw a cigar tree, remembered smoking the long finger-shaped seeds when I was in grade school and getting sick as a dog.
Bobby accelerated through another yellow and I felt myself getting too comfortable in the seat, worried this date was going nowhere. We turned off Archer Avenue and wound through a thicket of trees and empty lots across the river from Stateville Penitentiary. In a hollow of trees stood a two-story wood building with the garage door open. A couple of guys were inside working on a dented-up race car. The car had big wide tires and was painted black and orange with a large white number 89 on the door. Behind the garage was a junkyard full of mashed cars. Two large German shepherds paced behind a fence, barking madly, their white teeth snapping, their paws pushing against the wilting chain-link.
“What’s that?” I pointed into the garage.
“My ticket out of here,” he said.
“You a race car driver?” I asked.
“Sometimes.” He shut off the engine. The car sputtered to a choking death.
“Where do you race?”
“Wherever they’ll let me.” He punched open his door. “Stay here, I’ll be right back.”
He got out and pointed at the dogs. “Jonesie, Maxie, down.” He snapped his fingers and the dogs dropped to all fours, then trailed him along the fence line, their tails wagging softly behind them. Bobby said something as he approached his two friends and they all started laughing. One of them looked back at me in the car, then they all disappeared into a doorway. I leaned against the window and stared at the prison across the water. At night, the complex looked like the dark side of Disneyland. All I could think about was all the creepy-crawlies locked inside.
When David and I were kids Mom took us to a prisoner art show. It turned out one of the painters was one of Mom’s classmates from high school. I had never seen a murderer before and remember being very excited. He was wearing leg chains and what looked like blue pajamas. He reminded me of those handsome Nazis in old war movies, so that even his good looks seemed sinister. At the time, Mom said he was a basketball player who suffocated a cheerleader with a pillow. We found out several years later that he was gay and that this girl had laughed at him when he couldn’t get it up, that she threatened to tell the whole school about it. The weird thing is, I can’t remember anything about his painting.
A rusting BEWARE OF DOG sign dangled from the barbed-wire fence surrounding the junkyard. The sharp white teeth and shiny black eyes of the dogs cruising the yard were giving me the creeps. I turned up the Nine Inch Nails tape, closed my eyes, and tried to sink into Trent’s melodrama.
My mechanic turned out to be more complex and glamorous than I expected. I knew he seemed out of place pumping gas on the corner of Sixty-third and Main. The way he talked, his body language, almost everything he did seemed to hold a hidden agenda. Even now he has to have some secret meeting with his pals.
Whatever they were doing, it seemed to take forever. My stomach was practicing flip-flops. The car was getting cold. The dogs kept pacing, occasionally barking at a bird or some other critter crawling through the weeds. I locked my door as a precaution, then leaned over and locked Bobby’s too. The place reaked of urban legends.
Finally, mystery date popped out of the clubhouse and made his way back to the car. When the door burst open, the interior light and car buzzer set the dogs off in another barking frenzy. Bobby clicked himself into the seat belt, started the engine, and backed out of the driveway onto the narrow road. He shifted into first and squealed the tires. My head whipped back against the black vinyl seat.
“What kind of car was that?”
“An ’eighty-four Chevelle with a four-fifty-four engine. It’s a beater, but it always starts.” He laughed to himself.
“I can’t believe you race cars,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?
“I didn’t know you were into cars,” he said.
“You never asked. Can I come see you race sometime?”
“I don’t see why not. It’s a free country last time I checked.”
“How long have you been racing?” I asked.
“Since ninth grade.”
“How old are you now?”
“Twenty-six.”
He didn’t ask me how old I was. In fact, he didn’t ask many questions at all. It was like a long game of truth or dare, only he kept responding “truth.” We crossed over the tracks and rode along Industrial Drive, a semideserted stretch of land bordering the petrochemical plants. Across the street stood a trailer park of bread box homes haphazardly spread among patches of waist-high weeds. We passed an old red barn that was tilted sideways with its roof sagging in the center. THE TIME IS NEAR was painted on the roadside wall in fading white letters.
“So how’d you learn to be a mechanic?” I asked.
“I had a beater in high school; a ’sixty-eight Fairlane. One day it started bleeding oil all over the driveway. I didn’t have any money so I got the bright idea to take the engine apart and try to fix the leak. The first thing I learned is that it’s a lot easier taking apart than putting back together.” He laughed to himself.
“So being a mechanic is sorta like solving a crossword puzzle, right?”
Unsure of the comparison, he looked at me like I was interpreting too fast. “Every car is different. They all have their own personalities.”
“Your friends, are they mechanics too?”
“I met those guys from towing in wrecks off the highway. One night we sat down and killed a twelve-pack and they started telling stories about racing up in Wisconsin. They built that car out of used parts from the yard.” He made a left turn and was quiet while glancing into his rearview mirror. “The original driver kissed the wall and cracked his ribs. They needed a replacement and I needed the bread, so I volunteered.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Driving that shitbox is like square-dancing with a chain saw.” Bobby stared forward with the determination of a mailman pushing a cart of letters, sucking down one cigarette after another, riding a nicotine wire. From time to time he would space out, and you could tell he was watching his own movie, that he had a multiplex in his mind with never-ending showtimes. My brother was the same way. What is it with men and their glamorous brooding monster within? Bobby’s face launched a thousand words but it was still Scrabble as far as I was concerned. Staring, waiting, I wallowed in his silences.
“Your family, they live around here?” I asked. “They all crazy as you?”
“You think I’m crazy?” He turned the music down a hair.
“I think you’re unusual. Tell me about your grandfather. My mom says men are always like their grandfathers.”
“My grandfather?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, his name was Charley and he lived right near the Kentucky border. Neighbors used to call him Batman because bats would fly around his house at sunset. The big walnut tree in back was full of them.” He turned and looked over at me in a kinda boyish excitable way. “He was an ambulance driver and a bootlegger, made most of his money running moonshine into East St. Louis and up north through college towns.”
“No way. Your grandfather?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Was he in the Mafia?”
“No.”
“Was he a good guy or a bad guy?”
“Depends on whose side you’re on.”
“Did he ever kill anybody?”
“Just himself.” Bobby shifted, and the car sped faster. “He was racing in a cow field at some county fair. I guess that’s all there was in those days. His brakes failed and he kissed the wall. The car went airborne and flipped upside down. The fuel tank burst.” He stared out the window. “That car had the aerodynamics of a yellow pig.”
“Oh my God, that’s horrible.”
Bobby lit a cigarette. I leaned against the door and watched him smoke, wondering if he was aware of his own mythology. His body language said he’d visited that novel a million times before.
“Don’t you ever get scared?” I asked.
“Driving makes me feel like what’s behind me is always getting farther and farther away.”
I wanted to ask him what he was driving away from but was intimidated by the thought of old girlfriends, so I avoided the issue. “Does your dad race cars too?” I asked.
“My dad disappeared over in Vietnam.” He looked out the window, as if Vietnam was just beyond the next patch of trees. “He’s MIA. They never found him.”
My endless questioning had just driven the wrong way down a one-way street. I stared at my fingers, kept crossing and uncrossing them, rubbed my palms together, traced the heart line with my finger. “Do you think he’s still alive?”
“Sometimes I like to think he just drifted off from the war and made himself invisible, but I doubt it. I don’t have much to go on, just some photographs really.”
I didn’t know what to say. Bobby was suddenly distracted by a rush of memories. I could tell by his blank stare that they were pouring in. “My dad was in the army too,” I said. “He came back, but then he left again.”
“Where’d he go?” Bobby looked over at me again.
“I don’t know. He said he was leaving. Mom said okay, and that was that.”
Bobby’s head tilted back and forth, as though he disagreed with what I just said. More silence chased our flowering friendship, but at least we finally had something slightly in common. I wanted to ask him about his mom, but I was worried I was asking too many questions, but then went on asking anyway. Silence=death.
“So how do I learn to race cars?”
“By driving. You’ll have to get behind the wheel and scrape a few walls to find out what it’s all about. There’s no textbook.”
“Can’t you give me a few tips or something?”
“Every driver has their own style, their own way of holding the steering wheel.” He shifted in his seat. “On a small track you gotta work the walls, everything gets congested down low, too many inexperienced Joes trading paint and getting stuck in the infield mud. Sometimes I spend half the night joyriding under yellow flags. There’s no fast way through the corners, you just throw the car sideways and try to keep it from sliding out of control. It’s a gut feeling, you have to chase your instincts. Maybe it seems sort of risky, but right now it’s the only hope I’ve got,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
He gunned the car forward. “I don’t want to be pumping gas when I’m twenty-nine.”
I tried to imagine where I’d be at that borderline but then stopped in front of a huge billboard that said DON’T GO THERE.
“You got any plans?” he asked.
Most of my plans went no farther than next weekend. I glanced out the window, saw my reflection in the glass, the flaws, the imperfections. “Sometimes I think I want to be an actress,” I said. “A serious actress portraying the heroines of modern literature.”
“Have you ever been onstage?” he asked.
“Not yet.” I tipped my head out the window. “But sometimes I feel like my life is a movie.”
“PG-13,” he said.
“What?”
“Your rating.”
“How do you know? You haven’t seen the whole movie yet!”
Bobby laughed. I could tell he was at ease with me, that we had definitely passed GO.
“So how’d you stumble into such a glamorous occupation?” he asked.
“During Career Day at school I told my counselor that I wanted to be a farmer, maybe take over one of these old cornfields around here. He whipped open some charts and said that in the near future farming would decline by fifty percent, but the need for entertainers would rise by fifty percent. His words of advice were—’Don’t be a farmer, play one on TV.’”
My mechanic pulled onto the fire road that surrounded the limestone quarry and parked beside some overgrown bushes. “I know a place where you can see the fire,” he said.
I got out of the car and followed him under the highway bridge. The creek smelled like sewage and there was garbage everywhere. Rusted drums were scattered along the water’s edge, shredded plastic bags laced the dead tree limbs reaching from the bank. We passed a doorless refrigerator spray-painted 6-6-96 and a shopping cart filled with rain-soaked newspaper flyers.
Bobby carried a green army blanket under his arm. It wasn’t the magical place I always imagined, but it would do. Trudging along the creek bed, ducking under the occasional low-hanging branch, my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. I started feeling a little sweaty and nervous, thinking, Wasn’t this how all young girls died? Following his shadowy frame through the thick black underbrush, I tried to convince myself he wasn’t a mass murderer.
We came to a ridge that overlooked the canal. In the distance was the glowing site of the petrochemical fire. The panic of emergency lights seemed quaint from this viewpoint. My mechanic spread out the blanket, then took my arm and guided me down beside him.
“It’s not beautiful, but it’s something,” he said.
It was beautiful in an end-of-the-world kind of way. Emergency lights swept the perimeter. The bridge was a shimmering wake of headlights that wormed over the canal. It looked like some cheap UFO footage for a low-budget sci-fi movie.
Bobby smelled like grease with a hint of crushed leaves. He blended in perfectly with the environment. He was so quiet at times I felt like he wasn’t even there. We both lay under the stars, watching the planes line up on the horizon, waiting to land at O’Hare.
“Make a wish,” I said.
“I wish I had a real car,” he said.
“You already have two cars.”
“I’m tired of risking my neck in rebuilt wrecks scraped off the highway. That lawn mower might look impressive, but looks don’t win races.”
“Well, if they did, you’d win every night,” I said.
Bobby threw a stone up at the sky. “It won’t be long, you’ll see. I’ll be racing full-time with a sponsor. Once I get a faster car and start racing bigger tracks I’ll be winning bigger prizes. I’m tired of getting my ass kicked at Santa Fe.”
Bobby was totally focused on drowning in his glamorous fate. Racing seemed like a life-or-death situation for him, as if tonight was just another speed bump on his yellow brick road.
“It’s probably just a matter of timing,” I said. “Somebody will need you, just like you need them.” My mechanic was getting melancholy, so I sat on top of his waist and pushed his shoulders down to the ground, then traced the outline of his lips with my fingertips.
“Is this where you bring all your girls?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said nonchalantly. “They’re all buried over there.” He nodded toward the weeds.
I looked into the weeds. “You’re just kidding, right?” His hands crept under the folds of my sweater, over my T-shirt, and traced the outline of my bra. He rubbed me gently, his hands pressing my breasts. I leaned down and kissed him, slow slurpy kisses, running my fingers through his dirty hair. He rolled me over onto my back, pressed his lips to my earlobe. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he whispered, then stood up and started to walk away.
“Hey wait a minute,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“Ssshhhh!” he disappeared behind some trees into the inky darkness. I could hear him rustling through the bushes, circling the perimeter. If he was trying to be creepy it was working. I heard footsteps approaching, so I grabbed a rock just in case.
My mechanic crouched down beside me. “Close your eyes,” he said.
“No way,” I said.
“Close your eyes!” he insisted.
“Why?”
“Just close them.”
I looked at him and he was smiling. It wasn’t a dangerous smile, it was a fun smile, a smile I was willing to trust. “Okay,” I said and closed my eyes.
He pressed his fingers between my lips and placed a wild raspberry into my mouth. The juice squirted over my lower lip and ran down my chin. We made out fiercely, an all-out face mosh. His hands roamed all over the map. My eyes clenched shut while he fumbled through the buttons of my sweater, one after another, finally pulling it over my shoulders. He reached under my T-shirt and unlatched my bra. It loosened around my shoulders. He kissed my breasts, his warm tongue spinning around my nipples, his lips gently sucking. I was about to die. He shifted farther down south and kissed my tummy, rimming my belly button. He started to unbutton my blue jeans, and that’s where I stopped him. It wasn’t easy. I felt like a field of dry grass caught in a lightning storm.
“Whatsa matter?” he asked.
“I’m not ready for a full-scale invasion.” I pulled his hair, lifted him up to my lips and kissed him. He pressed against me, his hips swaying like a snake, rubbing his crotch against mine. I squeezed my thighs around his leg.
“Do you have any condoms?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I won’t come inside you.” And then he kissed me again.
My passion surfed a tidal wave of emotions. I wanted him desperately, but I started to worry about AIDS and herpes and crabs and all the other nightmares of health class. I started thinking about my mom’s early pregnancy. When Mom and I had our little talk she warned me about this trick. “Guys have about as much control over their sperm as God does with a tornado,” she said.
“Are we or aren’t we?” he asked.
“Let me check my bag.” I cracked open my bottomless purse. Under all the wadded-up dollars and loose change was a stick of gum, my lip gloss, and “I’m not so stupid after all,” one priceless prophylactic. “Here.” I handed it to him.
And then a strange beeping sound started ringing in his pants.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“My beeper.” He pulled it out of his pocket and checked the number. “C’mon,” he said, grabbing my arm. “We gotta go.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the garage … it’s part of my gig. There must be a wreck on the highway.”
His mood changed with the speed of a light switch from red-hot lover boy to distant repairman. He got up and went to pee in the woods. I looked down at myself briefly, then scrambled to pick up the pieces. My eyes slowly refocused, my ears lost their buzz, my heart drained of intensity. Bobby was already somewhere else, but I was still shaking from his first visit.
He took my hand and walked me out of the woods, then drove me home in one of the heaviest emotional silences I’ve ever experienced. I tried to reignite some passion in the car, but that was about as useful as the fire hoses downstream. I lay my head on his shoulder, but our distance could be measured in miles.
“Do you ever see the dead bodies?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he said.
“What do they look like?” I looked over at him.
“Sometimes they look like the morning after in hell.” He stared into the oncoming headlights. “And sometimes they just look like they’re sleeping.”
His cool detachment made me pine for him even more. I wanted to cuddle up into his arms and tell him my life story, to listen to the soft gurgle in his voice explain how a carburetor works, but there was only an unbearable silence.
When he dropped me off in front of my house, he kissed me good-bye and promised to call tomorrow, but his voice already sounded like a long-distance telephone call.
I walked up the driveway, pushed my key into the slot, went into the kitchen, and poured a glass of water, then slithered upstairs to my room. Comforted in the familiar scent of my dirty bedsheets, I burned with the afterthoughts of a dream date, wishing he were pressed against my backside, his arm curled over my tummy, his heartbeat thumping against mine.