FROM WHERE they were squatting among the trees they could see a man loading suitcases into his car. He kept twitching up the cuffs of his dark-blue suit to look at his shoes. He was angry because he was getting mud on them.
“This is really ridiculous, you know,” said the boy. “We’re never going to get away with it.”
“Shut up. We’re not sleeping in the woods unless we have to. You’re sick, anyway.”
That was true. It was just a cold, but it was getting worse. He shouldn’t have gone roaming around the cabins the night before. He wiped his nose on his sleeve when he thought she wasn’t looking. It was disgusting, but he couldn’t go around with snot hanging
out of his nose. He wondered if they could use part of the money that Tiwanda had lent them to buy some Kleenex.
When the man had finished loading his car, he went back inside the motel room and turned off the light. He appeared again, leaning against the doorjamb and wiping his shoes off with a towel. He wadded the towel up and threw it back in the room and closed the door. He was dressed very neatly to be doing things like that. He got in his car and drove away.
“There. You see?” said the girl. “He didn’t stop at the office. It’s one of those places where you pay when you check in. You just leave your key in your room when you leave.”
The boy cocked his head thoughtfully. “They always close the door,” he said. “They leave the key inside, but they always close the door.”
“Yeah. Well. The next one?”
The boy gave a little shiver. “Okay,” he said, and started to stand up.
The girl pushed him down again. “You wait here. I’ll do it. I look innocent.”
He watched her slide off through the trees. Didn’t he look innocent anymore? He thought he must look pretty innocent. Still, she was not as grubby. He sighed and settled back on his haunches among the shadowy green leaves. He felt very content. In no hurry. No hurry at all.
A tiny green bird fluttered close to his head. It knew he was there, but it wasn’t afraid. It must be because
he was sitting so quietly. Or maybe he was losing his human smell. That was an interesting idea. He thought if he sat long enough there among the trees he might just become a part of the woods. He would not mind that. He would like simply to sit and watch for a long time. The bird, the green leaves, even the back of the motel. It was all very absorbing.
Along the balcony which gave access to the second story of the motel a short fat woman appeared, pushing a laundry cart. She was old, with thin, pinkish hair. Her dress was too short, and she was wearing yellow tennis shoes. They must be careful about her, he thought, and promptly forgot.
Another door on the ground floor opened and a woman and a little girl came out. They walked together toward the passage which led to the front of the complex. The little girl was carrying a Cabbage Patch doll, and her mother was smiling at her.
At the entrance to the passage was a Coke machine and an ice dispenser. They stopped in front of the Coke machine, and the mother held the doll while the little girl stood on tiptoe to put some coins in the slot. Her mother dangled the doll by one leg until the little girl looked at her, and then she cradled it in her arms.
A man came out of their motel room carrying a stroller. He unlocked the rear door of a station wagon and put the stroller inside.
The woman and the little girl were walking back to the car now. The little girl was carrying a bright-red
can of soda. She held it up for her father to see, and he made a face as if he’d never seen anything so wonderful.
They never looked up toward the woods. They might have seen him if they had looked, but he knew they never would. They didn’t care, probably. There might be all kinds of things watching from the woods, but they wouldn’t know because they didn’t care.
The girl came around the corner of the building. She had put on her pink sweater and was swinging a plastic trash-can liner. He wondered where she had found it and what she was going to do. She walked directly toward the man, who was now putting two suitcases into the car. The boy sniffed, tilted his head back so that his eyes were almost closed, and settled down to watch.
“Mr. Carlson?”
The man closed the tailgate of the station wagon and looked at her blankly.
“Hendricks,” he said.
“Oh. Wrong party, I’m afraid. Are you just leaving? I hope you had a pleasant stay.” The girl stood in the open doorway of their room, smiling as brightly as she could. She smiled at the man and at the woman, who was strapping the little girl into a safety seat in the rear of the car.
“Oh yeah. Very nice,” said the man. “Thanks.”
The girl went into the room. It smelled of cigarette
smoke and damp plaster. She became aware that the man had returned and was standing in the doorway behind her. She emptied the wastepaper basket beside the television set into her plastic bag and then looked at him.
“Just checking to see if we forgot anything,” he said apologetically.
“Sure. Have a safe trip.”
“Yeah. Thanks again.”
When he was gone she looked around for the key. She couldn’t see it. It was possible, she supposed, that he had left it in the office, but she couldn’t think when he might have done that. She went back outside. The man had just started the car. He rolled down the window as she approached. He looked a little annoyed.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Hendricks. Did you forget to leave your key?”
“Clifford!” said the man’s wife. She leaned forward so the girl could see her roll her eyes at her husband. The girl tried to smile. She didn’t like standing there in the open. She had seen the cleaning lady but didn’t know where she was now.
The man was fumbling in his pockets. His seat belt was in the way, and it seemed to take forever. Finally he flushed and passed out through the window a key with a heavy plastic tab.
“Sorry about that,” he said, and winked at her. “I bet you came around just to make sure I didn’t forget.”
“That’s right, Mr. Hendricks,” said the girl, and winked back. She was proud of doing that. She had never been able to wink before.
“Have a nice day.”
From the woods the boy watched her wave to the couple with the little girl and then go into the room. As she closed the door she looked up into the woods where he was hiding. He couldn’t tell whether she had seen him. He stayed where he was until the car had driven out of the parking lot. Then he went quietly down from the woods.
She opened the door as soon as he tapped.
“Come in, come in.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him into the room. “I’m afraid the cleaning lady will see.” Her eyes looked very bright.
“Shall we just grab some blankets and run?” he asked. That had been the original plan. It was what he still wanted to do in a way. He didn’t like the motel room. It smelled of other people and felt small and enclosed.
“No. I want to try it. Here.” She pushed a plastic DO NOT DISTURB sign into his hands. “Put this on the door. I have to think a minute.”
She was studying the telephone when he closed the door again. She was holding the tip of her tongue between her teeth and her stomach was sticking out a little. She looked very serious.
“You don’t have to do this, you know. We can just run,” he said again.
She grimaced and bounced up and down on her heels.
“Yeah, I know. It probably won’t work anyway, but I want to try. Don’t look at me. Go stand someplace else.”
He turned away. The couple had left the room in a mess. Did everyone do that? Both beds had been torn up, and a wet towel was hanging on one of the chairs.
He went into the bathroom. It was still warm and steamy. He blew his nose with some tissue and dropped the tissue in the toilet.
The mirror over the sink was cloudy with steam, and he wiped it off and looked at himself. His hair was very bushy and curling down around his ears. There was a small sticky green leaf caught in it. That pleased him and he left it where it was. He wished he didn’t have to wear glasses. He took them off and smiled at the foggy reflection. Perhaps if he stayed in the woods long enough, his eyes would get better. His ophthalmologist had told him that they would just get worse and worse until he was about twenty, but perhaps he didn’t know about the woods.
When he heard the girl pick up the telephone, he leaned his head against the doorjamb and listened.
“This is Mrs. Hendricks in room 47,” she said with authority. “We would like to stay on for another night. Is that possible? Yes. Our car broke down. My husband has to leave it at the garage.”
The boy felt himself going jittery. She was talking in her regular voice, not trying to make it deep or anything. This is never going to work, he thought. He went over to one of the beds and started freeing one of the blankets from the tangle. They would have to run for it, after all.
“Yes,” she was saying. “That would be fine. Goodbye. Thank you very much.”
He started to turn around, but she was already on top of him, knocking him over on the bed.
“Hey! What are you doing?”
She grabbed his wrists and tried to pin his arms back.
“Beating you up,” she said through her teeth.
He tried to push her off, but she was too strong and heavy. He was surprised at how strong she was.
“Cut it out. You’re making me cough. What did they say, anyway?” He could hardly talk, she was squishing him so.
“‘Just stop by the office before you leave.’”
He was so astounded that he stopped struggling. “Really? Is that really what they said?”
“Really. I’m brilliant, don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
Her face was close to his. He could smell her breath. It didn’t smell like flowers or anything familiar. It was a new kind of smell, and it was both pleasant and alarming. He decided he liked it. He
was surprised, too, at how warm she was. When you don’t touch people very often you forget that they are really warm.
“You’re brilliant.”
They looked at each other for a moment, and then she rolled off him. “We better get out of here before the cleaning lady shows up,” she said.
She was right, but neither of them felt like moving.
“Where did you get the plastic bag?” he asked after a moment, staring at the ceiling.
“Out of a trash can. I thought I would look like a cleaning lady.”
He thought of the old woman with pink hair and smiled.
“I wonder if she’ll change the sheets,” he said. “I mean the real cleaning lady.”
He wished he hadn’t said that, because the girl sat up abruptly, wrinkling her nose at the bedclothes with distaste.
“Boy, I hope so. Isn’t she supposed to? Even if you stay more than one day?”
“I don’t know. We could always sleep in the kid’s bed. That wouldn’t be so bad.”
“How would you know? Which one was hers, I mean.”
“Smell them, I guess.”
“Oh, my God. You are really very very gross. Come on. Let’s get out of here. If we don’t leave she won’t even get a chance to change the sheets.”
At the door the boy paused, stuffing the key with its lumpy tag into his pocket and looking around the darkened room.
“Have you got your bag?” he asked.
The girl showed him the paper bag with her underwear and toothbrush. The bag was getting soft and fuzzy from being carried around.
“Let’s go,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I keep thinking that we’re forgetting something.”
“How could we forget anything? We don’t have anything to forget.”
That was true. There was nothing left in the room that might be associated with them. And yet he had a strong sense that something had been overlooked. It must be simply nerves, he decided.
They closed the door behind them and walked boldly together down the row of empty rooms and out through the passage toward the highway.
Barnesville was small and empty, with a main street too wide for the traffic. The sidewalks were cracked and littered with chips of concrete and dust from the road. It didn’t look as if anyone ever walked on them. Most of the old brick storefronts were empty. There was a photography studio that someone had opened beneath a granite façade that said FIRST NATIONAL BANK, and they stopped and looked in the windows.
Behind the dusty glass were highly colored photographs
of people getting married and high-school students with flat caps on their heads. The girls had round shiny faces, and the boys too much hair. In the center of the display was a large photograph of a young man in a Marine uniform. He had small, sly eyes and was smiling. Underneath was a sign with a black border that said FOR GOD AND COUNTRY. The boy thought it meant he was dead.
At the end of the main street was a new shopping center. Cars and pickups were parked outside a Jewel supermarket and a Firestone tire store.
The girl stepped in front of the boy so abruptly that he almost ran into her.
“You wait here,” she said. “I have to buy something.”
“What?”
“A comb and some stuff.”
He didn’t understand what she was talking about. “But we’ve only got about four dollars.” It was all that was left from the five dollars that Tiwanda had lent them. They had had to break it so that they could leave a message for the girl’s mother. “We need it for food.”
The girl twisted around impatiently and stared out over the parking lot.
“This is more important,” she said.
“I don’t get it. What are you talking about?”
“Listen. Give me the money. I don’t have to tell you everything.” She was frowning and trying to sound angry, but she wasn’t succeeding.
“It’s for girls,” she said, and turned dark red under her tan.
He thought he understood then. Not exactly. It had to do with that business that Miss Crandell had talked about in health class. He hadn’t paid much attention. It had all seemed so unlikely and, well, awesome. He hadn’t been able to connect it in his head with the girls he knew.
“Oh. Yeah,” he said, and gave her the money. While she went inside, he sat down on a mechanical rocking horse by the door. He wondered if Indians had had this problem before there was civilization and everything. They were people, so they must have had to do something. But when they were living in the woods they couldn’t just run down to the Jewel. It was an interesting question and he would like to discuss it, but he didn’t think she would want to right now.
When she came out she had a package in a brown paper bag, but she didn’t offer to show it to him.
“I bought some bananas, too,” she said.
“Oh, that’s great. I’m getting hungry. Are you?”
She nodded. “Starving. There’s a gas station over there. I have to go there now.”
This time he didn’t ask why.
While the girl was in the ladies’ room, he studied a map that someone had pinned up over the cash register. A mechanic who was working underneath a car on a hoist leaned over so that he could watch him through the door, but the boy pretended not to notice.
After a minute the mechanic put down his wrench and came into the office.
“You want something?” he asked.
“I just wanted to see where Ahlburg is,” said the boy.
“Here,” said the man. He pointed with a blackened finger at a spot on the map. It was hard for the boy to look at it with the man watching him.
“Is that far?”
“About eight miles. Highway 41. That’s this road right here. Okay?” The man was waiting for him to go away, so he went outside to stand in the road. He looked down the highway in the direction he thought Ahlburg must be. Eight miles wasn’t that far. If they woke up early they could walk it and be in the camp parking lot before noon. This time tomorrow they might be driving in the girl’s mother’s car back to the city. It seemed so simple that it made him uneasy.
They ate their bananas in a park behind the supermarket. It was small and dusty, with a large cottonwood in the middle and a rickety swing set in one corner. They sat on a picnic table and watched three little boys race around a dusty track on BMX bicycles. Someone had piled up a mound of dirt in the center of the track, and when the boys hit it, they jerked their bicycles high into the air. They seemed to want to fly away, right out of Barnesville.
The bananas were greenish and bitter, but they ate them slowly to make them last. When they had finished,
it was still too early to go back to the motel, so the boy got out the small brown notebook that he had found in his pants and they made a list of the things they would have to come back and pay for.
The girl had memorized Tiwanda’s address in the city, but the boy wrote it down just to be sure. The five dollars was a loan, and they would have to pay it back. They weren’t sure at first what to do about the other stuff the kids at the camp had given them. There was underwear for both of them; Lydia’s red shirt, which was probably expensive; and the toothbrush. They decided finally that it would be rude to try to pay them back for these things. Instead they should get them something nice as a present. Maybe even a portable radio to take with them when they went camping again. It would be great if they could do that.
Then they listed the things they had borrowed without asking. It was surprising how much there was. There was first of all the cans of soup and fruit cocktail from the cottage. And the clothes: two T-shirts, a sweat shirt, and a pair of pants. They would also have to pay for the damage to the shutter on the window. They didn’t think they should have to pay for the saltines and the ginger ale. Nobody would have eaten them if they hadn’t. Still, they decided that they wouldn’t act as if it was a big deal if someone asked them to pay.
Thinking about the clothes they had taken from the bathhouse made them both nervous. The blond
boy and his girlfriend probably wouldn’t want them back now, even if they were washed. It would be embarrassing to have to meet them, anyway. They decided they would just send a money order if they could find out their names. Perhaps the guy at the concession stand would know.
It didn’t seem likely that they would ever find the people who owned the pickup with the roll bar, where the girl had taken the change, but they wrote it down anyway because it seemed right. “Pickup: $1.40.”
The motel room was going to be expensive. The boy thought it might cost over fifty dollars. The girl looked stunned when he told her.
“Boy,” she said. “My mom’s going to have kittens.”
“That’s okay. My dad will pay for it, I think. I mean, when I tell them what happened.”
“Really? They won’t be mad because we didn’t go back to camp?”
The boy thought about it. No, they wouldn’t be mad, exactly. His father would be baffled and upset. It would be like when he failed algebra. He could remember his father standing in the kitchen doorway, watching him while he pretended that he knew what he was doing with his homework. His father had looked so upset and, well, helpless. He had felt awful.
It would interfere with his father’s work. That was the bad part. Everyone would be miserable, and his mother would sigh and look at her hands in that funny way that meant he had let them down again.
“No,” he said. “They’ll just feel bad. I always make them feel bad.”
The girl was puzzled. She thought of her own mother, who cried a lot and sometimes said things she didn’t really mean. She supposed her mother was feeling bad when that happened. But she didn’t think that was what he meant.
“Why?” she asked.
“I don’t know. They’re kind of old. I think it was a shock when I got born. I was an accident, maybe.”
He had never told anyone this before, but he believed it. It would explain why he never seemed to fit into his parents’ life. They loved him, and they wanted him to be happy, but they didn’t know what to do with him. He had to be careful not to get in the way. It had made him watchful.
The girl leaned forward so she could turn and look up at his face.
“Does that make you sad?”
It was an embarrassing thing to be asked. He wanted to giggle and shiver at the same time. He didn’t know what to say.
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
She folded up her banana peel neatly in her hand. “Well,” she said, “I think it means we have luck. I mean, you might not have been born, but here you are. That’s lucky, isn’t it?”
He looked at her dark eyes and her wide mouth with the turned-up corners.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s lucky.”