Age of Consent (6 page)

“What's what?”

He jiggled his fingers, pinching the roll of bills tighter, his voice even. “In your pocket,” he said.

She said, “Nothing.”

“You better show me.”

“It's nothing.”

“Nothing is nothing.
That,
” he said, pointing, “looks like a dime bag.”

“Is that what you think it is? Drugs?”

“Pot, not
drugs
! All this anti-marijuana from you, Miss Mouth, and meanwhile you've got a dime bag in your jeans!”

“It's not a dime bag!”

“Then what is it?”

“Nothing!”

Sudden commotion, her whole head in a spin. She saw the glass in front of her, then away; her vision bouncing. He stopped the car fast, swerving right as he did so, and she flew forward, her head banging the windshield, then thwacking the seat back. The car came to rest on the side of the road—dust rising, the tires cooling, the engine making its ticking noise—the whole thing settling like a big fish hauled onto shore after a long ocean chase.

He said, “You should have been wearing your seat belt.”

There had been no need to stop like that. No other car or giant pothole or blown-out tire. They were off the road now, parked squarely in a bus turnout. The only reason for him jamming to a sudden halt was his temper, that old grizzly that caused him to do this kind of thing, break a bottle, hit a wall, pick a fight with some stranger in a car.

“Why did you do that?” she said.

“Do what? I only stopped the car.”

She touched her legs, her face, her arms, smoothing down the goose bumps, the knots of muscles, the galloping pulse. Her nose was running but there was no blood. No blood she could see. She was about to turn on the inside light and look in the visor mirror to make sure, but he scratched up a flame on a matchbook and the fire lit his face so she could see his eyes, and that stopped her dead.

“Give me the pipe,” he said. His words, their tone, and the way his eyes focused on her, made it sound like he was accusing her of stealing it.

She didn't know where the pipe was. She started to panic a little, or maybe she was already panicking. Her head felt light; she was floating. This same feeling had visited her some months back when Craig had found her talking to a boy at a public swimming pool, a boy her age. The boy and she stood waist deep in the water, leaning against the wall of the pool. They'd been laughing. She looked up and there was Craig, standing like a lion behind a little chain-link fence. He'd called her over, and just by the sound of her name in his mouth, she'd known she was in trouble. She'd been scared. She climbed out of the pool, not even taking the time to find a towel, and went to where Craig waited. She stood with her bare feet on the hot sharp grass, her face squinting into the sun, her arms together at the elbows, hands cupped on one shoulder, dripping water. He looked down on her as though he had never seen anyone so disgusting. Insects swarmed, mosquitoes, gnats, while he whispered every imaginable threat in a low voice so that others could not hear. She'd felt helpless and stupid; she'd felt she'd done something very wrong. It was the same feeling she had now, like she was in trouble, like all hell was breaking loose and somehow it was her fault. All her fault. Her head hurt. She felt a bubble of tears, but she swallowed them back and held on.

He sighed, cleared his throat, lit another match, holding it in the air. “The pipe,” he said.

She willed herself to remain calm. Calm and smart—when was she going to learn that? He was about to say something more. He was about to make his point and she needed to say nothing—nothing at all—even though she wanted to run and kick out and scream. Outside, a willow leaned its tangled branches over the hood of the car and tapped in the breeze. She could climb out and shimmy up its leafy fronds. She could throw the door open and tear down the road. But she couldn't, and she knew it. She felt her blouse wet down the length of her back, and a headache blooming between her eyes, and the pain in her face, right in the middle of her face, was like a target. She thought of all the times she'd found herself saying,
I want to kill myself
, found herself recently saying exactly these words, and she hadn't known why. But this had been why.

“Barbara,” he said, drawing out her name. “I want that pipe.”

She knelt on the mat of carpet in front of the seat, keeping her eyes on him as she did so. The floor mats were full of grit and twigs and dust. There was no air that wasn't tainted with a bitter dampness, with spilled bong water, stale beer, soured milk, puke. She didn't care. She scrambled on the floor in the dark. It was time to find the pipe, find it now. She groped around on the floor, her hands moving across the carpet like little windup toys, jerky and erratic. She squeezed her hands into fists and then released them again, trying to steady herself.

She worried maybe there was a time limit for finding the pipe, like he had her on a timer and she'd taken too long already. She was in trouble. She felt it deeply, as though she'd already heard a
ding!
But then—thank holy Jesus—her palm moved over a bump in the carpet. It was the bowl, like a little marble of gold, and for the first time in what felt like a long while she let out her breath.

“Don't get angry,” she said, bringing the pipe up to him.

“I ask you a question! A simple question, like ‘What is in your pocket?,' and you give me all this shit, then tell
me
not to get angry!” He was exploding; he was orbital. But there was her friend, the clock on his dashboard, moving toward midnight when he had to be at the radio station, sitting in the big swivel chair in the center of the studio. Midnight to five a.m., he was on the air. He didn't have much time to go crazy. His crazy time was confined as she was confined.

“What do I have to do to get a straight answer out of you, Barbara?”

She rubbed the pipe clean, tried to get him to take it from her, but he acted like he didn't want it now. She pressed it toward him and he pushed it away. Finally she gave up, placing the pipe on the seat between them.

“If I ask you a question, answer the question.”

“Okay,” she said, patting the air. “No reason to get us killed.”

She regretted saying this. Right away, she regretted it. His anger ignited freshly, and she felt his grip as he grabbed the top of her belt, hauling her up like a bucket, then tunneling his hand deep into her pocket for the money before shoving her back onto the seat again. She felt a scrape on her hip from his wristwatch. She felt her pocket empty of its treasure.

Now he turned on the light. She stayed as he had dropped her, curled like a shrimp, her limbs pulled toward her center. She watched his face unfasten its anger, then bloom with surprise, even wonder. For a moment it was like seeing a boy with a magnifying glass examining the complicated wings of a flying insect, enthralled and amazed, as though he could not believe his luck to live on this earth with such a thing as he held in his hand.

“What the hell?” He leafed through the fifties. Taking one, he flipped it over and back again, holding it up to the yellow bulb in the car's roof. “Jesus,” he said, inhaling carefully, counting the bills in time with his breath. He turned them over, counted them again. For a long minute, he stared at the money, as though searching for a message in the stout face of Ulysses S. Grant. In a low, serious voice, he said, “Where did you get this?”

She couldn't speak.

“It is a simple question.”

She heard her words—silly, girlish—as she tried to explain that she hadn't been looking for anything, certainly not for money, and how the bills were dusty and had clearly been there for a long while. “So I took it. That was the wrong thing to do, but I took it.”

“From the motel room? Money was just sitting there in the room?”

“Yes, and I should have told you, okay? But I was worried. I mean, who leaves a thousand dollars in a motel except maybe a drug dealer? I should have told you. I'm sorry. But I didn't know what you'd think—”

He didn't register her apology. He was looking at the money, counting all over again. He pinched the wad in his hand, squinted at it as though measuring its thickness. Then he said, “You say a
thousand
.” He spoke very slowly, and far more seriously than she had ever before heard. “So where's the other five hundred?”

HE WAS ON
the air in just over an hour, but they were heading away from the station. He had to get back to the motel, find the rest of the money, then get out again. The car burned through seventy, eighty, ninety on the straightaways, him screaming at her, asking why in hell's name had she left five hundred dollars behind? He could not be late to his midnight spot. Could
not
! She had fucked everything up, fucked it clean up, and why was he always making up for her incompetence?

She tried to read him, to figure out where the flying ball of his rant would land. She had to appear not too casual but not too wary, either. Whatever else, not scared, because that always made him worse. Slanted on the bench seat of the Buick, shoulder against the window, she stayed as far from him as she could without being accused of sulking, holding on to the seat with one hand, the door with the other. She didn't want him to know she was worried by how fast he was driving so she held on lightly, as though her hands just happened to rest there. Meanwhile she watched the short distance between the car bumper and everything else in front of them. She tried to look up at the moon, a tonic of white stillness in the slate sky, to set all her thoughts there and ignore the speed of the trees and bushes and telephone poles flying past.

Out on the highway, he skirted the traffic. “You better hope we don't meet a cop!” he said. Always her fault, always. He glared hard at her, as though she were the reason for all his ills and every trouble in his otherwise tidy life.

They skimmed the bed of a big semi, so close to its wheels she felt the suck of a vacuum pulling the side of the Buick. The shadow of the truck bed fell over them, the darkness covering her lap. A weight of gravity pushed against her shoulder, and she thought for one clear moment that her life was done now, that she would be taken by the truck as a field mouse is taken by an eagle.

Craig jerked the Buick into the next lane. She breathed out hard as he pressed down the accelerator. She felt her stomach burn as he swerved into a third lane, then skirted up two cars and over once more.

Now the highway dipped downward, with a long tongue of road ahead. The car rolled faster and faster. It was exactly as though they had no brakes because he did not use brakes. His response to everything—bends and bumps in the road, other cars—was
forward, forward
.

“What made you think I didn't need the whole grand?” he said. As though the money—all of it—was already his.

After a moment she said, “I didn't want to draw suspicion.”

“
What?
”

Louder this time, so that her voice carried over the road noise, “I said I didn't want to draw suspicion!”

He slapped the steering wheel in exasperation, then punched the accelerator at the belly of the highway's slope, and she swore they went airborne. He said, “Who was
watching you
? How can it be ‘suspicious' when there is nobody to
see
?”

With the word
suspicious
he took both hands off the wheel to draw little quotation marks in the air. Air quotes while topping a hundred. He said, “That's just
retarded
! You find money, it's
yours
! That's how it is with money. And other stuff, besides. Not car keys, okay. You can't take someone's fucking keys!” He spoke angrily, as though she'd done just that, taken a whole ring of keys off an innocent bystander. “Only a pussy takes someone's keys!” he shouted.

She tried to think of a way of distracting herself. She started counting in threes: three, six, nine, twelve…

“And not clothes, either—that's personal! And not even money once it's in someone's pocket—
that
would be stealing. But loose money is like air. It's for whoever happens along. Do I ask if it is okay to breathe the air near you? Do I say, ‘Barbara, mind if I have a little whiff of your air?' Well,
do I
?”

Thirty-six, thirty-nine
. She opened her eyes to see the cars beside them becoming dangerously close as he teetered toward the next lane. She heard the sound of a car horn over the music and Craig's bellowing voice.

“Come on! Answer me when I ask you a question, Barbara! Do I or do I
not
ask if it is okay to breathe the air near you?”

She hadn't realized he expected an answer. “No,” she muttered.
Forty-two, forty-five…

“No, I fucking well don't and why
should
I? Same with loose money.” He glanced at her from across the car, a low, sorrowful look as though he was concerned about her intellect. “You need to understand some things,” he said. He checked the road briefly, then whipped his head back to her once again. “Would you agree that you need to understand some things?”

“Yes,” she offered.
Fifty-one, fifty-four…

“Quite a few things?”

She nodded.

“Because you don't know anything yet. Tell me one goddamn thing that you think you know.”

She had no idea what he was talking about, or why she had to answer, or how. “Fifty-one isn't a prime number,” she said. “You'd think it would be. It sounds prime.”

He shook his head. “You're completely insane. A total nutbucket,” he said.

“It's true. If you had five and one together it's six and therefore divisible by three,” she said.

He glared at her. “That's the kind of stupid shit nobody cares about.”

“Three times seventeen.” She knew he didn't care. That nobody cared. She was talking nonsense. She was scared to death.