As I Die Lying (4 page)

She pouted like Angel Baby, only Sally's
lips weren't as red. I looked out the window. The sun had gone all
the way down and a couple of dots of dirty starlight pricked the
black sky. Shadows grew fat in the corners of the room. I scooted
closer to Sally.

She said, "I can tell you lots of
things."

"Things?"

Her voice fell. "Things that you do when
you're in love."

Curiosity and fear struggled in my chest,
and fear lost for once. "What kinds of things, besides telling
secrets? I watch television. I already know about...kissing."

She laughed, her mouth a flash of metal. Her
eyes shone in the dim light, as glittering and piercing as a
doll's.

"You're not that dumb, are you?"

Love's first hurt. My ears burned. My throat
was a dry desert. My voice was lost somewhere in its sands. This
love stuff was probably best kept in your own head or buried in the
Sahara or the Mojave or some lesser-known but still-inhospitable
geographic region.

Sally said, "Kissing is just the beginning.
When you show me the secret place, then I'll tell you more."

More? Love wasn't scary enough already? Love
had to have its own secrets, its own special set of fears?

I whispered hoarsely,
"There's
more
?"

"I'll tell you about bedsprings and the
things between people's legs."

Like our mothers talked about? Did Sally
know those kinds of secrets? Were girls born knowing them, and boys
had to love a girl to unlock the mystery? Would love always be this
confusing? Or was getting started the hardest part?

She leaned over in the darkness and I felt
her warm bubble-gum breath on my cheek. Her lips touched there,
briefly, and then pulled away, her saliva already cooling on my
skin in the night air. My cheek was still tingling when my parents
called to take me home.

I lay under the blankets in my bed,
restless, listening to the night. Crickets chirped and an
occasional car passed on the highway. Somewhere in the street,
music played on a tinny radio. From down the hall, inside my
parents' bedroom, came faint, rusty squeaking sounds. Questions
circled around in my head like spun stars, burning brightly before
dying and turning black, then falling one by one into the void of
sleep.

CHAPTER FOUR

The next afternoon, still dizzy from
promises of love, I showed Sally the nest. I led the way through
the weeds and branches, and then held the vegetation aside so she
could see the secret, sacred place.

"Any bugs in there?" She gave me a silver
grimace.

"No, it smells a little like wet dog hair,
but you get used to it after a while."

She crawled through the tunnel, brushing a
prairie rose vine away from her face and sending a pink snow of
petals to the ground. She dragged Angel Baby by one arm, and the
doll's yellow hair tangled in thorns, causing Sally to whimper
until I tore it free. Once inside, she sat up and blinked as her
eyes adjusted to the dimness.

"Look at my stockings. My mother's going to
kill me." She brushed at the dirt and grass stains on the knees of
her white hose.

"Tell her you fell, then she'll feel sorry
for you instead of yelling at you."

Sally looked around at the wooden walls that
were brown with rot, then squinted up at the hole in the roof.
"What do you do when it rains?"

"Usually get wet."

Her eyes grew dark, as if threatening clouds
had passed over them. "You promised not to be mean, remember?"

I touched my heart, the one
I had crossed with a promise the day before, afraid it would stop
beating. "I wasn't trying to be smart-alecky. Sometimes I'd rather
sit here and get soaked than to be out
there
." I motioned to the world
outside.

She thought I must have meant the junkyard.
"Why don't you play in the cars instead?"

"Because cars have windows. People can see
into them. Plus I think mice live in them. I've played in them
before, pretended they were jets and spaceships and even cars I was
driving. But I don't anymore, because of what happened."

"What happened?" Sally sat Indian-style with
Angel Baby in her lap. I thought for a moment, then decided to
trust her. I could tell the story because she loved me. I'd never
told anyone else. Love makes you do dumb things.

I wanted to leave this part out, because
it’s sort of embarrassing. But that one–you know, the one trying to
steal my byline–believes this type of veracity just shows how
foolish and untrustworthy I am. He's been revising this book,
thinking it will get better over time, but he doesn't even notice
if the structure is flawed.

Here’s what I think: he’s jealous. He may be
this ancient, soul-hopping, omniscient entity, but he can’t write
worth a damn. He doesn’t have the patience for it. When you have
the whole world at your fingertips and unlimited evil to unleash,
who cares about a stupid page?

For example, he doesn’t even realize drawing
attention to the author is a bad idea. Look, here is a flashback
told through dialogue. That’s a no-no in big-time New
York-published autobiographies, even unauthorized ones. He’s the
reason this book has been rejected so many times. Not me.

So let us get by with it just this one time
and I swear we’ll never do it again. Otherwise we’d be here arguing
about it until hell freezes over. Which, by the way, comes up near
the end of the book, assuming he lets me get there in one
piece.

"It happened before you moved here,” I told
Sally. “This was back in March when it was just getting warm enough
to play outside. The ground thawed out and the world was one big
mud puddle. Mother told me not to get dirty, so I went through
those trees into the junkyard, careful so I didn't get scraped on
torn-up metal. I scratched my leg there once, and it stayed red for
about a month and all this yellowy juice kept coming out of the
cut."

Sally put the back of her hand to her mouth,
revealing the pale flash of her open palm.

"I was in that old black Ford, the one
that's all rounded at the corners and missing all its wheels. It
smells old, like a basement full of clothes that nobody wears
anymore. My father said he had wanted a car like it when he was
teen-ager, but never had the money because he had so many goddamned
mouths to feed. Anyway, I was just playing with the steering wheel
and pulling down all those gearshifts, going in for a landing on
Mars, when this big old man runs over, wiping his hands on an oily
rag. He must have worked there at the garage.

"I slid down to the floorboard, trying to
hide, but I couldn't fit under the seats. He opened the door and it
creaked, just like those doors do in the movies when the monsters
are coming to get somebody. He smelled like gasoline and his eyes
were as dark as the stains on his clothes. I put my hands over my
head, afraid he was going to kick me."

"Why did you think that?" Sally said, half
horrified and half disbelieving.

"Because he had boots on."

Confusion crossed her face. "Did he kick
you?"

"No, he squatted down and just said, 'What
are you doing here, boy?', except he wasn't real mad. I told him I
was flying the car like a spaceship. He said he used to do that
when he was a boy, except he pretended they were boats. I couldn't
picture him as a boy because he had gray stubble on his chin and
creases around his eyes, like he'd started out old and had never
gotten a chance to play.

"Then he said the car was an antique, plus
there were a lot of ways to get hurt playing around all this glass
and metal and then their insurance would go all to hell. He said
we'd both get in trouble if I hurt myself. I was afraid to look at
him, and the gasoline made my eyes sting.

"He asked if my mother knew I was playing
out back here. I told him my mother never knew where I was, unless
I was tucked into bed. Then he got a strange look on his face, like
he'd just thought of a secret of his own. His voice got kind of
quiet, and he said he wouldn't tell anybody if I wouldn't. Then he
asked if he could play spaceship with me."

Sally hugged Angel Baby to her bosom, that
flat chest inside her cotton top where mysterious little bumps had
started to swell over the long hot weeks of summer.

"Is this a secret?" she whispered.

"No, the garage man knows it, so it's not a
secret. I was scared to tell him I didn't want to play with him,
that what I really wanted to do was run into the woods, where there
were shadows. So I told him okay. He stood up and looked around,
still wiping his hands, and licked the corners of his mouth, sort
of like a dog does when you feed it peanut butter. Then he bent
down and said, in a real low scary voice, 'Move over and I'll
drive. You can be the captain.' So I did, and as soon as he got in,
the whole car smelled like gasoline."

I was surprised at myself for telling so
much. I guess I had kept my stories inside so long that they had
built up and spilled over, like the bathtub did when I filled it
full so I could pretend to be a deep-sea diver. Besides, you were
supposed to share secrets with the person you had to love. Sally
nodded, her pigtails bobbing, wanting me to go on with the
story.

"His eyes kept looking around the junkyard,
especially at the row of trees that stood between us and the
apartment buildings. Then he said, 'Where we going, Captain?' I'd
never played with a grownup before, so I wasn’t sure if he knew how
to pretend for real. Plus I didn't feel right giving orders to a
grownup. So I just said, 'Mars,' and he acted like he was driving
while he scooted over toward me. I checked the round dials behind
the steering wheel to make sure we were in the right orbit. He
dropped the rag in his lap and reached over and rubbed my hair.
'Aye-aye, Captain,' he said, and he laughed, but it was kind of
wheezy, like he couldn't breathe or something.

"Then his hand fell down to my shoulder and
he was rubbing it. He took his other hand off the steering wheel
and put it on the rag. He said the Martians might see us so we
better slide down in the seat until we landed. Then he kind of
leaned over on top of me. I told him we might wreck if he didn't
watch where we were going, that we might run into an asteroid or
something, or the Martians might send out fighter rockets. But he
was breathing real funny and he pressed his lap against me. I felt
the ball of the rag, and under that, something kind of hard, like
he had a wrench in his pocket.

"Then he said something that didn't seem to
have anything to do with the Mars mission. He said, 'We keep having
girls. I've always wanted a son,' and for a second, I thought he
meant the sun in the sky, but that was nowhere near Mars. And he
kept on breathing through his nose and I was afraid he was going to
die, and he moved his hand from my shoulder to my leg. His other
hand was on the rag, he was rubbing the wrench in his pocket
against me, and he started moaning and I thought he was pretending
to crash land. And I said, 'Back off the thrusters and we'll pull
through. It's our only hope.'"

Sally was looking at me like I was a hero,
her blue eyes wide. Maybe she thought I was a brave captain, still
able to give commands even while we were crashing. I liked the way
she was looking at me.

"And he kept moaning and
rubbing against me and suddenly his body got all stiff and he
squeezed my leg real hard. I thought he was pretending to be scared
about crashing and doing it so well that I was afraid he was having
a heart attack. His face was all clenched up and his eyes were
shut. Maybe he was so good at pretending that he could
really
see
our
rocket plowing into the red surface of Mars. Except he wasn't
making the crashing sounds in his mouth the way you're supposed
to.

"I told him, 'We survived
the landing, we better get out our rayguns in case the Martians saw
us,' and I was going to tell him that we better leave the ship in
case it caught on fire. Because suddenly I wanted out of the car in
real life because of the way he was looking at me. He was looking
at me like
I
was
the Martian. His eyes were tiny wet lines and his eyebrows were
crunched down and he grabbed my arm and squeezed it, harder than
he'd squeezed my leg."

"Did he hurt you?" Sally
asked, and at that moment I felt I could tell her a hundred
stories, secret or not, lies or the truth. Because she was
listening.

"I didn't feel it too much because I was so
scared. But he put his face close to mine and the gasoline fumes
made me dizzy. For the first time, I noticed his teeth were sharp
and yellow. Then he said, 'If you tell anybody, I'll come and get
you and make you sorry.' He must have been afraid that he'd get in
trouble for letting me play in the junkyard. Then he told me never
to come back. He slid out of the car on the driver's side and
looked around one more time. Then he held the door open so I could
get out.

"He grabbed my arm again and pulled me into
the sunshine, then said, right in my ear, so that his breath
sprayed on my skin, 'I mean it. I'll come get you, and I won't be
playing make-believe.' I was looking at his greasy black boots, but
he grabbed my chin and tilted my head up. I looked into his eyes
and I could have sworn there were things moving around in them,
mean things. And there was something I'd almost forgot about until
yesterday, when you were telling me about the things between
people's legs."

"But that was one of the secrets I was going
to tell," Sally whined. The sun had gotten higher in the sky and
came through the roof, making her red hair shine like copper
fire.