Criss Cross (19 page)

Despite his mood, he couldn’t help noticing a catchy rhythm going through his brain. When he paid attention, he heard the words that ran through it:

The faint voice in his head was singing with a Caribbean accent. The rhythm had maracas, it might be calypso. Or a samba. Something Latin, he really didn’t know. He tried to hear the melody, to guess what the chords might be. He was thinking A—D—A.

A—D—A—something.

W
hat they decided was to go to the bus station, get on the first bus that came through, and get off at the next place it stopped, no matter where it was. They would spend a few hours there, then come back. It was an experiment.

They thought of it while they were excavating last autumn’s rotting dead leaves and maybe the rotting dead leaves from the year before that from Mrs. Bruning’s deep window wells so there would be room for this year’s dead leaves. They were talking about Seldem versus California. Debbie thought California had to be better. More interesting.

“It has to be,” she said, raking the leaves over to join the ivy they had pulled away from the downstairs windows.

“Not necessarily,” said Peter. “You can be bored or interested anywhere. I get bored in California. But it
is
interesting to go someplace else. I really like how when you go somewhere for the first time, everything seems unusual. Should we do the gutters next?”

“We probably should,” said Debbie. “Hold on a second and I’ll help you with the ladder.”

She finished herding her pile up to the growing biomass and set down her rake.

“There’s nothing unusual here,” she said. “It’s very usual.”

“Not to me,” said Peter.

“Name one thing,” said Debbie. “One unusual thing.”

“Okay,” said Peter. He thought for a minute. “People here say ‘yinz.’ ”

“That’s not how you say it,” said Debbie. “It’s ‘y’ns.’ Almost like there’s no vowel. Or it can be like in ‘book.’ Not everyone says it, though. I don’t. You think that’s interesting?”

“Kind of,” said Peter. “I’ve never heard people say it anywhere else. There are other things that are probably more interesting. That’s just an easy one to point out.”

They had propped the ladder against the old house, and he climbed up to empty the gutters. Fistfuls of decomposing vegetable matter started dropping to the ground like slime bombs. Debbie stepped out of the way. She could rake them up when Peter moved on to the next section.

A few minutes later he said, “Okay, I have one. People here build houses on hillsides that are practically vertical. They’re like cliff dwellers. And there’s this gas station between my aunt’s house and here that’s sort of built into the base of a hill that was cut away for the road to go through. It’s made of stone, too, so it looks like it’s part of the cliff, and it looks old, like an archaeological ruin. But there’s a Sinclair sign on it, and pumps out front, and it has windows, and tires piled up on the side. It’s like you’re filling up your tanks at Stonehenge, or Machu Picchu.”

Debbie knew exactly what kind of places he was talking about, and she thought they were interesting, too. But they weren’t in Seldem. They were still Somewhere Else.

“I wonder how far from where you live you have to go,” she said, “before it gets interesting.”

“I don’t think you have to go very far at all,” said Peter. “I mean, think about it. You just go to someone’s house for the first time, and it’s different. Not always, but it can be.”

“So, if you went to another town, even nearby, it might be even more different.”

“Maybe the same amount of difference,” said Peter. “It could be interesting, though. It could be fun.”

“You could go on the bus,” said Debbie.

“Where?” asked Peter. He was climbing back up now.

“I don’t know,” said Debbie. “Anywhere. You could just get on a bus, the first bus that shows up, and get off somewhere. The first stop.”

She said it hypothetically. She said hypothetical things all the time. In theory, she was the adventurous type.

Peter didn’t know about the hypotheticalness of Debbie’s life. He thought it was a brilliant idea that should be acted on. And he was ready for a break from his grandmother’s rotting house.

“Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s do it tomorrow.”

So they did.

As they studied the bus schedule taped to the window of Jim’s Bargain Store, which also happened to be the bus station, Debbie noticed that all of the buses heading north stopped to pick up passengers in Birdvale, and that the ones going south stopped in Hesmont.

“I think we need to go farther than one stop,” she said. “I go to those places all the time.”

They decided that half an hour would be about the right amount of time to spend on the bus and, checking the timetable again, they picked the town of New Bridge.

“Have you been there?” asked Peter.

“We drive through it on our way to other places,” said Debbie. “But I’ve never walked around in it.”

“Let’s go there, then,” said Peter.

Even Birdvale looked different when you were passing through it on a bus. Before there was time to think about why, it was gone, and other scenes went flashing by the window. The close-up scenes flashed by; the backgrounds moved more slowly. Fast and close included John and Jerry’s Fruit Market, River Sand and Supply, the row of company houses just before the Blentz Bridge. Slower: the islands in the river. The rooftops and smokestacks of the air brake factory on the other side. The sky.

In New Bridge they stepped from the bus and found themselves standing in front of a bakery. Warm, sweet bakery aromas filled the morning air; the window under the striped awning was stacked with golden brown loaves and rolls and cakes on pedestals.

“This is a good omen,” said Peter.

As the bus pulled away behind them, it exhaled a hot, choking blast of exhaust that temporarily overpowered the bakery smells. But the noxious cloud didn’t last. The bakery smells won out.

Inside they chose an unsliced loaf of Italian bread and a quart of chocolate milk. It was Peter’s idea. On her own Debbie would have picked out a cookie or a doughnut, maybe a cream puff or an eclair, some individual serving type of treat. But she immediately saw the appeal of ripping hunks of bread from a shared, still-warm loaf.

The street outside the bakery didn’t look promising for picnic spots. Until, in the space between two buildings, Debbie saw a section of a bridge.

“Look,” she said, “I wonder if it’s the New Bridge.”

Peter’s eyes followed hers, and he said, “Hey, should we see if we can go down by the water?”

Debbie thought they should.

So they started off in that direction, making left turns and right turns down narrow, tilting streets in hopes that they would average out to a diagonal. They walked through an old neighborhood of densely built houses. Some of them were separated only by inches.

“I wonder how they did that,” said Debbie. “They must have built the second one from the inside.”

Peter pointed out a series of mysterious arrows, circles, and numbers spray painted onto the sidewalk.

Debbie thought that the bike chain around the bottom of a tree looked like an ankle bracelet.

They heard a woman’s voice yelling from deep inside a house, asking if anyone wanted pancakes and sausages.

Two dogs appeared on the sidewalk ahead of them, silhouetted on the crest of a hill.

The dogs, who looked huge and threatening from a distance, and who still looked huge and threatening from up close, parted around them like the Red Sea.

All along the way, ordinary things became unordinary. The day was full of signs and wonders.

They had almost forgotten that they were headed for the bridge, when there it was. They clambered down over the huge boulders around the piling, then took off their shoes to try to dangle their feet in the water. It was too far down.

Peter turned so that he was facing the rock and lowered himself to his elbows.

“My feet are in, but it’s not very relaxing,” he said through clenched teeth. He hoisted himself back up and they sat on the rock in the sun, with the crusty bread and the chocolate milk, watching the river go by.

“There’s the moon,” said Debbie. “It’s full.”

The moon was a white disc in the daytime sky.

“I wonder,” she said, “if you looked at the sky, in summer and in winter, and if you couldn’t feel the temperature, and both days were clear-sky days, if you could tell which was which somehow, just by looking. Or if they would look exactly the same. Or instead of the sky, maybe at a rock, in the sunshine. Or the river.”

“I bet animals could tell,” said Peter. “Certain animals. Or birds. They probably have internal sundials or something, that can register the angle of the sun’s rays. But I bet people couldn’t.”

When they had watched the river for a long enough while, they walked back downtown. Everything was still being interesting.

At some point Peter took Debbie’s hand, and held it. Lightly and easily, as if it were no big deal. It was the most interesting thing yet.

Debbie waited for the black hole to take over her brain. When she didn’t feel that happening, she stole a peek at Peter’s face. Only to find he was looking at hers. Was this possible?

Later, on the bus again, Peter wanted to tell her about a theory he was making up.

“I think,” he said, “that it’s a good thing to get out of your usual, you know, surroundings. Because you find things out about yourself that you didn’t know, or you forgot. And then you go back to your regular life and you’re changed, you’re a little bit different because you take those new things with you. Like a Hindu, except all in one life: you sort of get reincarnated depending on what happened and what you figure out. And any one place can make you go forward, or backward, or neither, but gradually you find all your pieces, your important pieces, and they stay with you, so that you’re your whole self no matter where you go. Your Buddha self. That’s my theory, anyway.”

He had been reading
Siddhartha
, which he found in his brother’s room. He probably wouldn’t have said all of this to anyone he knew at home, and he wondered if he sounded too weird. He didn’t need to worry. Debbie had been separated from her moorings and there was a spongy piece of her left open to the universe in whatever form it might take. The form it was taking was him. She thought it was an amazing theory, even though she didn’t quite know what he was talking about. But it was the main thing she believed in right now, along with buses and chocolate milk and Italian bread.

Peter was holding her hand again. The bus was moving much too quickly through the afternoon landscape.

“Do you have a theory?” he asked.

Debbie’s theory at the moment was that everything was perfect. This day was perfect. The bus was perfect and the world outside was perfect. She had a place in the perfect world, a perfect place, and she was in it. This didn’t sound very substantial next to Buddha and Hinduism, so she said, “Not exactly.”

“Yes, you do,” said Peter. “You have a lot of theories. I can tell. You have theories about everything.”

Nothing happened, everything happened. It was a perfect day.

Except that two days later, Peter got on an airplane with his parents. And then he was just gone. Back to California.

Debbie had an address on a scrap of paper in the drawer of her desk. She had an invisible cloud of new feelings that went around with her. Two souvenirs from Somewhere Else. Two pieces of her Buddha puzzle. She didn’t have the first idea where to put them.

dead worm song