Criss Cross (2 page)

Their eyes were blue-gray, behind almost identical wire-rimmed glasses resting on very similar slender noses. But Rowanne’s eyes-glasses-nose constellation somehow conveyed intelligence and warmth. Hector’s conveyed friendly and goofy. Why? What was the difference? Maybe it was his eyes, he was thinking. Maybe they were too close together. Maybe they would move farther apart as he matured, like a flounder’s. Although when he thought about it, he seemed to remember that both the flounder’s eyes ended up on the same side of its face. He tried to remember what made that happen, if it was something the flounder did, and if maybe he could do the opposite. Perhaps it would help that he wasn’t lying on the bottom of the ocean watching for food to float by.

He definitely felt unfinished, still in process. He felt that there was still time, that by the time three years had passed and he was seventeen, as Rowanne was now, he, too, might coalesce into something. Maybe not something as remarkable as Rowanne, but something. It was possible, he felt.

Hector took off his glasses to see if his eyes looked better without them. He looked blurrier, which seemed to heighten the cinematic, enigmatic quality lent by the falling sun’s sideways glance. His clumpy hair dissolved softly into the shadows, and the effort he had to make to see gave an intense, piercing quality to his gaze. Maybe corrected vision wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Maybe in ancient times, when distinct edges were unknown to many people, he would have been considered handsome. Though he might have had a lot of headaches.

The sun dropped a degree and the golden disembodied moment passed. Hector put his glasses back on and was about to turn away when a sharp jab of weight on his shoulder made him jump. It was Rowanne’s chin. She had sneaked up behind him, and her face appeared next to his in the mirror. So much like his, but more. There was just no explaining it.

Rowanne smiled, and they both turned and headed for the kitchen. Rowanne was ahead of him, and Hector noticed she had a piece of the newspaper in her hand.

“Do you want to go somewhere with me?” she asked.

“Where?” asked Hector. Their parents had already gone out for the evening. He didn’t know what Rowanne’s plans were, but his were to call out for pizza and watch movies on TV.

“A coffeehouse thing,” she said. “It’s at Arland Community College. In Arland.”

She unfolded the newspaper on the kitchen table and pointed to a small advertisement.

“See?” she said. “Do you want to go?”

Hector looked at the ad. A couple of questions came to mind. The main one was, why was she asking him to go along, why didn’t she just call one of her bezillion friends? But he didn’t bring it up because she didn’t often invite him along and he didn’t want her to change her mind. He thought he might like to go. He had never been to a coffeehouse thing or, for that matter, a college. It sounded kind of interesting.

“I really, really think we should go,” said Rowanne. As if it had just occurred to her.

“Okay,” he said. “Sure. Why not?”

The parking lot they pulled into at dusk was half empty. Or half full, Hector was thinking. As if to welcome them, a half-dozen lights on tall poles flickered to life. In the thirty minutes it had taken them to drive there, the air had slipped from almost-spring back to still-winter. Stepping out of the overheated car, Hector found himself shivering. He zipped up his flimsy nylon windbreaker and pulled the drawstring of the small hood snugly around his face, although he knew this made him look like a turtle without its shell. He alternated between warming his hands in his armpits and forcing them down into the pockets of his jeans.

A few more cars pulled in and released noisy gusts of people into the chilly air. Car doors slammed. Hector noticed that the newcomers were braving the cold without headgear, and he pulled the skimpy hood back off. It was colder this way, but he felt it made him look older. Colder but older. Older but colder. Colder and colder, older and older.

The edge of night moved visibly across the sky.

The other people swarmed from the parking lot up onto a sidewalk and down a trail of evenly spaced pools of light. Minutes passed. Hector bounced up and down on his heels to keep warm. Finally Rowanne got out of the car (what was she doing in there, anyway?) and they, too, headed down the trail of bright, softly buzzing circles.

The sidewalk led to a courtyard set between several buildings, the chief distinguishing feature of which was that you couldn’t tell them apart. They were concrete and modern, but followed the medieval practice of having small, recessed slits of windows that arrows could be shot out of but which would be difficult to shoot arrows into. They seemed to have been designed for easy cleaning with a hose and a giant squeegee, like the concrete stalls at the Humane Society.

It didn’t fit Hector’s idea of what a college should be like. He realized that his ideas about colleges came mostly from movies. He knew the difference between movies and real life, but he thought that at least some of the movies must have been filmed on location, or be based on real places. The movie colleges tended to have ivy-covered brick walls and massive old oaks. They had big grassy lawns, and they seemed like places where a human might like to spend some time. He looked at the concrete planters that held only dirt and stray wads of paper, bordered by concrete benches and installed at equal intervals across the concrete plaza. Maybe it looked better in the daytime, in sunlight. Or blanketed by snow. Or in total darkness. The only humanizing influence was the humans, crisscrossing the court in chattering bunches. They seemed to be in pretty high spirits, though. Controlled substances, he was guessing.

He heard Rowanne calling his name and realized that he had stopped walking. She hurried back and led him by his elbow to a glass door.

“How do you know where you’re going?” he asked. “Have you been here before?”

“Maybe once or twice,” said Rowanne.

The room they entered was dimly lit and crowded. Candles in red glass globes lit circles of faces at each table. Voices bounced around the painted concrete block walls before being sucked into the acoustical ceiling tile. Dark brown beams and worn orange carpeting had been glued on here and there to suggest warmth and atmosphere.

Hector and Rowanne paused. A flurry of waving hands and a couple of shouts drew them toward a table on the far side of the room. They waded through hip-high thickets of occupied plastic chairs, some of which inched apart to make a passageway while others remained unmoved, leaving narrow canyons only a wasp could thread. Hector tried to psychically compress his girth since, compared to a wasp, he was more like a camel.

The table, when they got there, was filled with Rowanne’s friends. A single empty chair waited for Rowanne, and a thought whispered from the back of Hector’s mind, but it was drowned out by the sounds of scraping, shifting chairs.

There wasn’t quite enough room for Hector’s chair. His chair was a peninsula, jutting out into the nonexistent space between tables, in the position where a dog might sit to wait patiently for scraps. At least he had a chair, though. Unlike the dog.

His right knee touched the southwest corner of Rowanne’s chair, and his left knee touched the southeast edge of the chair of Rowanne’s best friend, Liz. A dark, trapezoidal chasm yawned between his knees and the table where, next to the red candle, there was a plastic basket filled with peanuts. Hector had to stand up and lean over to grab some. He grabbed with both hands to cut down on how often he would have to do it. He had a feeling this might be his main entertainment for the evening. He emptied the peanuts into his lap and cracked one open, then wondered what he should do with the shells. He looked around to see what other people were doing with theirs, and settled on piling them neatly on the edge of the table.

Eating the peanuts made him thirsty.

Someone carrying two cups of hot coffee squeezed behind Hector’s chair in a series of forceful sideways thrusts. The hot coffee tended, because of the principle of inertia, to remain where it was even when the cups moved on, so that with each thrust, splats of hot, homeless coffee fell (gravity) onto Hector’s shoulder, his head, his other shoulder.

His good humor began to waver a little. He found himself thinking fondly of home: the couch. The television. The front door that you opened to receive the fragrant pizza.

But then a friend of Rowanne’s named Chip or Skip (or was it Flip?) set a paper cup of brown pop down in front of Hector. Rowanne’s friend Liz scooted her chair back so that Hector could pull forward and sit almost next to her. A guy with a guitar climbed onto the stage and started plunking out chords that dropped softly into the noise of the room, making pockets of quiet wherever they fell. Hector was drawn gently back into the evening.

“So,” he said to Liz, relaxing slightly in his chair, “do you come here often?”

He was just asking for information, but she laughed and Hector realized it sounded like something different, like something a man would say to a woman in a movie. A pickup line. He flushed a little, but it was okay. It was dark, and it was just Liz.

The guitarist on the stage, tuning his guitar, let pure drops of sound fall into the noisy room, making the pockets of quiet. The drops fell into the middle of conversations and hushed them. The drops of sound fell on an unmoistened sponge that was waiting somewhere inside Hector. In his heart or his mind or his soul. He didn’t realize that he was in a sponge state but, having been separated from his moorings—couch, TV, pizza—and led into unfamiliar territory, there was a spongy piece of him left open and receptive to the universe in whatever form it might take, and the form it took was a guitar.

Hector’s first thought about the guitar was how good it sounded. It sounded great. There was something different about it than a radio or a record. There was more darkness and more brightness to it. And the guy who was playing it was amazing. He had finished tuning by now and was picking out a jumpy, catchy little tune.

He didn’t look like a person who would be an amazing guitar player. Or an amazing anything. Not at first. His apparent ordinariness helped a second thought to sprout on Hector’s moistened sponge, which was that it didn’t look that hard. Or maybe it was hard, but it looked like fun. It looked like the guy was having a blast.

The guitarist started to sing. The song was about his little chicken, whose name is Marie and who don’t like no one but him—"me” in the song, so it could rhyme with “Marie.” It was a different kind of music than Hector ever listened to. Sort of hillbilly, he thought, but sort of something else, too. He liked it. There was something about it that he really liked.

He glanced over to see if Rowanne was paying attention. She was. She was paying so much attention you could cut it with a knife. She was rapt. He looked at Liz. She was rapt, too. He looked at the musician again, who didn’t look so ordinary anymore. His music had transformed him, or revealed a part of him that was plugged into the cosmic life force. A life force that seeped in, through, and under the music, like God in the Communion wafer. An everyday kind of life force, though, that could do this in a song about a chicken. More about earth than heaven. Also, girls really liked it.

These aren’t words that Hector thought. He wasn’t even thinking in words. He was having a satori, a mystical, wordless moment of understanding about Music and Life, including the subcategory of the look on Rowanne’s and Liz’s faces, that passed through him and altered the shape of his thoughts like water through a sandstone cavern. Like water on a dry sponge.

It’s hard to say how long the moment lasted, but when it was gone, Hector knew that he wanted to learn to play the guitar.

He said so to Liz, during a pause between songs. She smiled and said, “That’s a great idea. You should do it.”

Liz was a nice person who said nice things. She had a way of making them sound true.

With each performer who followed, even the ones Hector didn’t think were that good, the idea grew stronger in his mind. By the time the fluorescent lights flickered on overhead, it was a fact to him. A fact that made the world more alive and more interesting. More promising.

People were standing up and putting coats on, there was a lot of chatter, and with all the dragging and colliding of chairs it was hardly even noticeable when Hector stood up and his lapful of forgotten peanuts cascaded to the floor. He had to walk on them to get around to the back of his chair. As he made his treacherous way over the rolling, crunching shells, he heard Chip/Skip/Flip say that everyone was going (somewhere, Hector didn’t catch that part), and was Rowanne coming? And he heard Rowanne say, “I can’t, I promised my parents I’d bring Hector home right afterward.” Inwardly, Hector snorted. Outwardly, he tried to look like someone who needed to be taken home.

In the car on the way home, Hector and Rowanne were quiet for a while, waiting for the heater to kick in. Hector positioned his feet over the two holes in the floor, to keep the heat from whooshing directly from the vent to the outside. It was a dark night, and Rowanne was a tentative driver. Being in a car with her as she felt her way over the winding back roads was like being inside a flashlight held by someone searching for a contact lens.

“So,” she said, after a while, “did you like it?”

“Yeah,” said Hector. “I did. I liked it a lot. I think I liked the first guy the best.”

“Yeah,” said Rowanne. “He’s really good.”

“How long do you think it takes to learn to play like that?” asked Hector.

Rowanne allowed her eyes to leave the road for a microsecond to glance at him.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Years, probably. You better get started right away.”

She relaxed as they moved into the streetlight-lit streets of Birdvale, then under the railway trestle into Seldem.

Hector said, “So, I’m not mad or anything, I’m glad I went, but why didn’t you just tell me you needed me for an excuse not to go out with Chip-Dip?”

“Skip,” said Rowanne. “I’m sorry. That was stupid. But would you have come?”