Roadside Bodhisattva (13 page)

“Seems to me like I got no choice, Kid. I don’t turn my back on anyone until they actually bar the door on me.”

Sid went out front and in a little while came back with two bag lunches.

“Wish me luck.”

He was only gone about ninety seconds. When he came back in, he was still holding both lunches.

“He told you to fuck off, right?”

Sid looked stunned. “No. He said he was coming over when the diner closed to eat with the rest of us.”

Sid went to give the lunches back to Sonny. Sid must’ve told Ann too, because for the rest of the lunch shift she looked kinda confused and even a little worried.

Finally the last customer was booted out, and Sonny got busy with our lunch orders. The five of us—Sue, Sid, Ann, Yasmine and me—were all served before Angie showed up.

He wasn’t wearing his mechanic’s clothes. He had changed into clean pants and shirt, a checked shirt buttoned to the top and a pair of Dockers. That must’ve been what delayed him. He looked as uncomfortable as a kid on his first day at a new school. His face seemed like it was the thick ice on a pond where a million hot springs had suddenly erupted, all ready to dissolve in a million separate places.

“Meatball sandwich,” Angie called out to Sonny. His voice was kinda low but squeaky somehow.

For lunch we usually pushed two tables up against each other and all sat together. That arrangment was good for six seats. Five of us were already sitting, and Sonny was gonna be the sixth. Angie made seven. Sizing up the seating arrangment, Angie took a chair at a third table right next to our setup.

Sid immediately said, “Room here at the end, Ange.”

Angie didn’t move or say anything. He looked frozen. But when his meatball sandwich was ready in the next minute, Sonny came out and set it at the end of the twin tables. Angie got up like his legs were wood and pulled his chair over.

Ann seemed caught between a smile and tears. Sue had her eyes fixed on her aunt. Yasmine was staring at the ceiling, bored. Sid was grinning like an idiot. Sonny wore a smile like Christmas morning. I was devoting a lot of attention to my cole slaw. Nobody said anything until Ann spoke.

“Good to have you with us, Angie.”

It was like someone cut a puppet’s strings, or like somebody shined a heat lamp on a candle. All the stiffness went out of Angie, and he almost smiled.

“Good to be here,” he said.

Sid said, “All this talk, and our meals are going cold! That’s a goddamn insult to the chef. Let’s eat!

* * *

Since the day almost a week ago, when Sonny socked Yasmine with the sponge, she had been on her best behavior with the Deer Park’s cook. She was chilly toward him, sure, but not insulting. No more crap about his sister, Evelyn. I pictured Evelyn, by the way, as Sonny in drag.

But that didn’t mean Yasmine wasn’t still a bitch with the rest of us, from time to time. I tried to cut her some slack, figuring that she was stressed out about her mother and all. I could imagine how crummy I’d feel if my spacey zen-head mother was sick with aids. But knowing all about Yasmine’s troubles didn’t make it any easier to take her sassmouth.

And it turned out that the favorite thing Yasmine liked to harp on was “wasteful behavior.” She had been brought up in California, she kept reminding us, where people had real respect for nature and the land and society and knew their responsibilities to the earth and how to conserve resources, and all that other shit. For every activity a human being could possibly do, especially the fun ones, Yasmine had some advice on how to do it better and less “wastefully.” I should’ve known she was gonna be a jerk about this kind of thing from the very first day she warned me to compost and not to run the dishwasher with a partial load. But until you had endured one of Yasmine’s constant lectures on the benefits of recycling and the horrors of pollution, you couldn’t really anticipate how boring and annoying this kind of talk could be.

Mostly I learned to tune her out, just like Ann and Sue mostly did. And I figured that if she was bothering Sid with her “environment” talk, he was ignoring her the same way. After all, he was even more “mature” than me, right?

Apparently not.

Sid and I had finished painting the cabins. They looked a thousand times better than before. The lawn had gotten its second mowing since we had arrived at the Park, and we had spread seed over the bare patches. On deck were some repairs to the office-slash-apartment building, reshingling the roof and such. But as his very next improvement, Sid had planted flowers everywhere. Sue and Sid had taken Anns car to a nursery out on Route 1 and returned with dozens of plastic flats full of plants. Baby geraniums and petunias and other stuff I didn’t recognize. Sid set these baby plants with lots of care into the prepared ground around the cabins, around the office, around the diner, around our trailer. Even the garage now featured some flowers in pots between the pumps and on either side of the bay door. Naturally, all these plants needed watering, especially when it hadn’t rained in several days, which it hadn’t.

It was four in the afternoon. Everyone was heading out the door of the diner, except Sid. He was already gone. He had excused himself a little earlier, saying he wanted to tend to his flowers.

Sonny pedaled off on his clunky bike. Sue followed Ann back to the rental office. Ann was trying to convince Sue to get back into school for about the hundredth time, but Sue wasn’t any more agreeable to the idea than ever. Angie headed off to the garage. He was still dressing special for lunch, changing back to his work clothes for the rest of his afternoon duties. He never said much while we ate, but I could tell that he was happy to be there with us. Ann seemed pleased too, to have her ex-brother-in-law acting halfway normal again.

Yasmine and I were standing next to her car, while she counted out my share of her tips for the day. Sid came around from behind the diner.

He was trailing a hose, hooked up to the spigot near the back door of the diner. He was obviously aiming to water the flowers in front of the diner. But he hadn’t bothered to shut off the hose at the nozzle. So while he walked across the lawn and the gravel, his hose was spraying water uselessly everywhere.

Yasmine freaked. “What the hell are you doing, you moron! You’re killing the planet!”

Sid stopped. But he didn’t make any move to twist the nozzle to stop the undirected flow of water that was pissing Yasmine off. He got a grim look on his face, and I flinched. Yasmine didn’t know about Sid’s tit-for-tat philosophy.

“I’m a moron killing the planet, huh? How do you figure that?”

Yasmine pointed at the gushing hose. “All that water! Its being wasted!”

Sid looked down at the hose like he had forgotten he was carrying it. “Oh, you mean this water that’s going back into the soil and on down to the water table?”

“It doesn’t matter where it’s going! You’re still drawing down the reservoir for nothing. What if we have a drought later this summer?”

“A drought? Yasmine, this state just had one of its snowiest winters in history. The reservoirs are full.”

“That’s all besides the point. Back in California—”

“Forget your fucking California! California’s a fucking desert! People couldn’t even live there until they stole all the water of their neighbors. And even now they don’t have enough. That’s why you all have to walk around unwashed and stinking, with corks up your asses. But this is the fucking Northeast! We’ve got more water than we know what to do with. We’ll wash our cars twice a day if we want to. We’ll change the water in our swimming pools every fucking week. We’ll have water-balloon fights as big as the goddamn Gulf War and more wet t-shirt contests than a million spring breaks. And if anyone starts to worry, we’ll just point up to the skies. You know what’s happening up there in the stratosphere? A regular goddamn rain of icy micrometeorites is bringing fresh water to the whole planet every minute of every goddamn day.”

Yasmine just stood there with her jaw hanging down, until Sid flicked the hose at her, nailing her with a few drops. Her pretty face got all bug-eyed. She shrieked in frustration, dove into her car and peeled out.

Sid yelled out one parting shot. “And that heap you drive pollutes the air more than your mouth!”

I looked away from the speeding car and back to Sid. He was grinning like a happy fool. I felt irritated with him, and kinda sad for Yasmine.

“Did you have to come down so hard on her?”

Now that Yasmine was gone, Sid twisted off the flow of water from the hose. “Listen, Kid, I don’t have anything against Yasmine. She’s got a tough row to hoe, what with getting jerked up by her roots out west, dragged back east, then getting stuck with all the responsibility for her sick mother. But I hate being preached at, especially by someone who doesn’t have their own act together. That girl is too used to getting by on her looks. And she’s got an inflated notion of her own opinions. She’s grown up smug and superior, with nobody daring to contradict her. She’s got to get down off her high horse and realize that she doesn’t have all the answers, and that other people deserve some respect.”

I didn’t say anything right away. I thought about how maybe what seemed like cruelty on Sid’s part might be something like the hit with the stick that the Roshi would deliver when you were sitting in meditation. Maybe he knew what he was doing with Yasmine. He had been right about Angie, hadn’t he?

“Is that stuff about the micrometeorites true?” I asked.

Sid shrugged. “It’s one theory.” Then he turned to water his flowers.

For a while I watched the bright beads of moisture splatter on the plant leaves, collecting together and running off in little waterfalls. Finally I said, “Sid, you remember that advice you gave me about Sue?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, tonight I’m gonna do it. I’ll ask to go with her into Lumberton.”

“Good. Let me know how it goes.”

“I didn’t do it before now, because she didn’t go into town since you and me discussed things. Well, maybe once, but she took me by surprise—”

“Listen, Kid, I’m not riding your shoulders like some old man of the sea. You do it when you do it. No need to apologize, or to explain anything to me.”

“Okay. That’s cool then.” As long as Sid and I were talking about women, I figured I’d ask him about Ann. Maybe Sid had made some progress with her. “Uh, how are you and Ann getting along?”

Sid fixed me with a stare I couldn’t really interpret. “Me and Ann are not an item, buddy. I just like her company. We spend most of the time together talking about this joint, how to get it running in the black”

“Well, that’s cool. Got any good ideas yet?”

“We’re working on a few. Now, how about mixing me up some of that fertilizer in the shed? You know the blue crystal stuff? You use a quarter cup per watering can. Do me up three of ’em, if you would.”

“Sure, Sid.”

Sid and I made the best use of the afternoon light, working outdoors till about seven, when the sun was finally starting to look weaker, although we had an hour or more before it got really dark. We didn’t have to work these long hours, from early in the morning till almost night time. Ann didn’t demand it. But we wanted to. At least I did. Deer Park had gotten to be more than a job. I had a stake in the place now, and it seemed like Sid did too. Since we hadn’t screwed up with Angie, I had felt more at ease. Anyhow, the work wasn’t really that hard, and we were always taking breaks during the day and goofing around, so it never seemed like a grind.

Sid coiled up the hose and I stored away the watering cans and other tools we had been using. A car pulled into the lot in front of the rental office and a man got out, how old I couldn’t really say. He left a young girl in the car. She looked about Sue’s age, with long blonde hair. When the guy came out, he moved the car to near one of the cabins, and him and the girl went inside. I felt weird. I looked to Sid, to see if he had spotted the action, and maybe had something to say about it. But he hadn’t, or didn’t.

We split up then, Sid going to see Ann and me heading to the apartment’s kitchen.

Sue was nuking some of the food Ann had stocked for me. It smelled good, and I realized I was starving again.

“Hey, Kid. Grab a seat Grub in thirty.”

Sue opened the fridge, got out a liter of Dew and poured two, glasses. The microwave chimed, and she pulled out some Hot Pockets. She slid them onto a plate and set the plate on the table in front of me.

“Thanks, Sue.”

Sue sat down on the other side of the table and lit up a cigarette.

“Aren’t you gonna eat something with me?”

She grabbed a roll of fat through her shirt where her farmer jeans gapped above her waist. “Gotta watch the calories, Kid. I’ve been packing it on since I came to live with Aunt Ann. You might not believe it, but back home I was a size ten. Now my frigging bra straps cut into me like Lil’ Kim’s thong in her ass crack. Here, take a look.”

Sue pivoted on her chair and lifted up the side of her shirt. I got a good look at the side strap of her bra and part of the right cup, straining across her flesh. Then she dropped her shirt back and stuffed it into her pants. She grinned at me and exhaled some smoke.

It took me a while to get my thoughts together and say something. “I, ah, jeez, Sue, I think you look great just the way you are.”