Stranded (13 page)

“ME?” I ASKED. “YOU.”

Instead of wearing his anarchy T-shirt, he was sporting one that said “Murder.” The red letters dripped realistic-looking blood.

“You turning over a new leaf?” He tweaked a button on my shirt, fastened one higher than usual.

I glanced at my navy blue cardigan and skirt, a definite fashion deviation, as if I had been co-opted and reprogrammed, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I had to look credible if I was going to face the police that afternoon.

“Listen Kenny—” I started to try to explain what I hoped to do, how it meant he probably wouldn’t want to see me anymore because my talking to the police would mean more questions about his involvement.
Or maybe being a baby killer’s cousin was part of my attraction. It was hard to tell with Kenny.

“So cute,” Kenny said, playing with a gold necklace I had borrowed from Natalie.

Thank God it wasn’t a cross. I had been tempted. Kenny tickled me under the chin like a puppy. Most of our Earth Science classmates had lockers on the east side of the building, and a number of other classes had finished early. Students milled and buzzed around us. Conversation filled the air, maybe news about the party or speculation that I had joined Kenny’s cult and we were on the lookout for more babies.

“Let’s say we get together for a repeat sometime,” Kenny said.

“Louder,” I told him, because our audience was growing.

“Are you ashamed?” he asked.

I folded my arms across my chest. I didn’t want our night together to be just about the sex.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“Oh yeah, no talk,” Kenny responded.

Mr. Gruber called Kenny’s name. He was striding toward us from the office. Maybe he was curious to know what Kenny was doing in school without a pass, or whether it was Kenny who had flooded the water
fountains and caused the puddle in the hallway. Mr. Gruber was marching quickly. Mr. Guilty Conscience himself backed away.

“No, no, no talk,” Kenny said as we parted. “No little chitchats. No ‘I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.’”

He raced down the hall, turned, and raised his hands up to give me a double point with his index fingers.

“Action is what I’m about, baby!” he yelled.

He tried to high-five Steve Allen as he dipped into the stairwell, but Steve was too stunned to respond. I lingered alone on the stage, the spotlight trailing me, the audience unsure whether to boo, clap, or catcall. If there was anybody at Carrie Nation who had not figured out that Kenny and I had done the dirty deed over the weekend, then maybe we would try internet advertising next. Why had I thought that changing my virginal status would help my social status? Why had I believed that Kenny would handle my problems when he could barely manage his own? I shrugged my way around a crowd of people and left the school through the portico where buses idled. I couldn’t even tell Mr. Gruber about my decision to report Natalie, since he was hell-bent on chasing Kenny.

Maybe I would wait to go to the police.

Ernie dozed in the driver’s seat of bus six, indifferently gassing the planet so he could run the heat. He slid a hand across his mouth, roused himself, and opened the glass doors at my knock.

“How are you this afternoon, princess?” he asked.

“Fine,” I assured him. My life might not be too bad if I crawled into a fetal position and let it roll over me.

Ernie started a conversation about how classes were going, the weather, and where my pretty cousin was keeping herself, gregarious-old-man questions if they ever existed and likely to wear even a committed princess out, but instead of disengaging, I let him prattle. He made a joke about how much shorter I looked without my monkey stilts. He meant my beautiful boots.

I tried to laugh.

I found a seat near the middle of the bus and tugged a book I had borrowed from Nana—
Island Love
—from my backpack. Ernie greeted the Amish girl, who boarded after me and whose name I had somehow discovered was Valerie something.

Valerie said hello to him and didn’t smile at Ernie half as princessy as I had, and yet Ernie let her off with a wink, a gesture he found OK to use but wasn’t comfortable having employed on him, I guess. As Valerie made her way toward the seats at the back, she stared
at me from under her uneven bangs. I knew she found me interesting, had liked my beret. I liked her, too. She was a useful source of information and I found her intriguing—especially her skin. She held her backpack close to her plaid jumper and glanced at
Island Love
as if she was trying to read the cover. The book was pretty smutty. The plotline followed a modestly beautiful and honest daughter who was sent off to be a governess for the child of the lord of a tropical island. One tempestuous night, against her better nature, the governess left her room and collided with the lord in the hallway of his dark mansion.

I was in the process of giving the collision scene my third read. I pictured myself saying, “O my master, what is that searching look in your eyes?” to Kenny.

“Fuck off,” he would respond.

That’s the difference between life and books.

I set the novel on my lap. I wanted a friend in Heaven who wasn’t a boy I might accidentally make out with. Valerie, because she had once been so enthusiastic, seemed a likely candidate, but the problem with getting close to her was that I didn’t know how Amish people felt about dead babies.

Big Smelly’s door shrieked and a boy named Pete trod up the aisle, blowing and slapping his hands
together, carrying a waft of cold and something else from the bottoms of his boots. He lugged his backpack to the second to last row of seats. The straps of the pack were ripped and the pockets torn at the seams and repaired with duct tape. His backpack
thunk
ed as he dropped it on the wheel well.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Connigan,” Pete greeted Ernie.

Ernie gave him the thumbs-up.

Pete and his friend Bill (who arrived next) were wholesome Iowan teenage boys who didn’t seem to have much social experience between them. I had listened to their conversations and they almost always drifted to 4-H and football. Bill had a pink-cheeked quality and was what I imagined kids looked like in the fifties or the sixties before they discovered rock and roll and belly button piercings. They were what Nana felt the world had been robbed of when Satan invented computer games. The four of us were the only high school kids aboard Big Smelly. The rest, including Natalie, were at a youth group meeting, or walking or driving home. Ernie kicked the bus into gear and we rumbled five hundred feet up the road to the elementary school.

When the roar of the engine subsided, Valerie turned to Pete and said, “I think Mr. Fisher’s wife has the flu.”

“She’s fat,” Pete responded.

“Gross.” Valerie ran her hand under her nose.

I was unsure whether she was referring to Mr. Fisher’s wife or what had been carried onto the bus on Pete’s boots. He must have spent time in a barn that morning.

“She yurked in the locker room before she stopped by to visit Mr. Fisher in the teachers’ lounge,” Valerie said. “I saw it in the toilet.”

While I listened, I looked through my window into the elementary school to a classroom of second or third graders.

“It was so chunky.” Valerie described the vomit.

“Do you know we have a sow who had sixteen piglets in her last rotation?” Pete brushed a frond of his blond hair with his palm. “So, like, if Mrs. Fisher was a pig, she would have a hundred and fourteen children by now.”

“Really?” I leaped into the discussion.

“Crappers,” said Bill, who had not ever before heard me talk.

“So a pig can have a hundred babies in a year?” I asked.

“At least.” Pete beamed.

And then maybe the expression on my face scared him. People in Heaven, I discovered, didn’t like it
when they thought you were making jokes about farming practices. I had always thought Des Moines was a superior place, but people in Heaven felt exactly the same way about where they lived.

“Do you remember that Quonset hut party after the Iowa–Iowa State game last summer?” Pete asked Bill as kids from the elementary school began to board the bus.

He veered into a tale of a night when his 4-H buddies attended an after-football party. Iowa State had beaten the Hawkeyes—a thing that made Pete look delirious as he described it. The high point of the evening was when he and his friends dropped Styrofoam cups into the fire and ran from them as they flamed and rose into the air. I listened to Pete go on and imagined him in the darkness behind the Quonset huts, dropping white cups into the fire, scattering sparks over an inebriated crowd.

The kids from the elementary school jostled for seats. I moved my backpack in case one of them wanted to sit with me. A girl, about seven years old, arrived carrying a large feathered art project that shed buttons and pieces of glued macaroni. She had a bruise on her lip, and she crept up the aisle until she reached me. Every year, I had placed my own hand on a piece
of construction paper and traced around it to make a turkey like the one she held. There was something satisfying in cutting the dark line and adding a beak, applying a single set of rules to creativity. The girl stared at me as I looked at her art projects: the turkey, the thing with macaroni, and a Pilgrim lady to celebrate Thanksgiving only a week away. The noise of the other children, the young ones in front and the large obnoxious ones in back, bore down on us. I think I scared her. Three loose pages fell out of the girl’s folder.

We veered past the QuickMart, the bus stopping and starting every two hundred feet and kicking out clouds of exhaust. A few of the kids in the back sang “One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” and I leaned my head on the window and tuned them out. We reached the girl’s stop at bottle seventy-seven. The girl’s mother waited for her at the end of the drive. Some of her papers still sat in the seat next to me, but by the time I noticed, the little daisy was hopping toward her house, bobbing off her mother’s hand, and the bus was pulling forward. At the next stop, other kids shot toward their houses as if nothing was better than returning home. I was too Big Smelly–sick to read so I fiddled with my phone. I dialed Natalie
and listened through four rings before I got her chirpy, singsong message.

“Hello, you’ve reached Natalie, I’m not here right now, but remember”—her voice mail message became high-pitched—“Jesus loves you.”

The good news was punctuated with a beep. I flipped the phone shut. She could be a blazing idiot with her Jesus business.

I considered Mom and Harvey and how Mom seemed to want to interject him into our life to take over the pieces we couldn’t handle ourselves as damsels in distress. The bus accelerated on County Road 14. A line of white dust fluttered at the edge of the road, salt or seared pollen or old fertilizer and seed. The brakes shrieked and the tailpipe released a cloud of exhaust that billowed around the windows as we slowed down to let Pete off at his mailbox. I stared at the outbuildings of his farm, painted yellow instead of the nearly regulation red and white.

The rebel.

We huffed forward again and the Quonset huts appeared over the horizon. Four elementary school kids who hadn’t gotten off yet hit each other with their mittens and started a commotion in the front of the bus. The view I had from my window was obscured by
prairie grass along the ditch and shoulder, dry and pale brown, with big black buds that looked like spiders. A strand of yellow tape blocked the road. The Quonset huts glinted like a pair of silver-clad orbs.

I flicked Kenny’s lighter and noticed the abandoned Pilgrim lady constructed from paper and cotton balls sitting next to me on the seat. I picked her up and brushed some of the extra glue off her. Because I was still playing with the lighter, she began to flame. Pieces of her floated into the next seat and burned the plastic. Once the cotton balls engulfed, something in the cotton that wasn’t cotton became combustible. I fanned her with my hand, but she got hot so I pushed her to the floor and kicked her under the seat in front of me. The flame began to rise. Ernie smelled the smoke and stopped the bus.

He limped up the aisle staring between each of the rows, looking into everyone’s eyes, a spry old man now that he sensed danger. He found the fire, reached under the seat, and dragged the Pilgrim lady out. He stomped on her three times with his boot.

The cotton balls didn’t give up easily. The flames caught hold of the cuff of Ernie’s pants, but another two stomps and a flap of his arms allowed him to smother the blaze. A boy in a pair of green corduroys
arrived with a fire extinguisher from the front. Ernie doused everything in a five-foot radius. Afterward, he herded us out onto the side of the road.

“Who is responsible?” he asked

The afternoon air was cold. We shivered, but it was clear he wasn’t going to let us return until one of us confessed.

Ernie extended his hand, I placed the lighter in it. He told me I was a safety risk to the young children, disrespectful, rude, a poor influence, and an abomination of young girlhood.

All fact.

And yet, when he stranded me a quarter mile from home, I didn’t think it was something he could have gotten away with in Des Moines, where they had rules and regulations to keep drivers from pitching people out to face the elements. It was not a nice day. It was deeply, deeply freezing and I risked frostbite. County Road 14 had no sidewalks which meant I had to jump in the ditch every time a car passed. Thank God I had given up kittenish heels, because they wouldn’t have survived my unexpected hiking expedition.

The homes on either side of the road were the same, some cared for, some not. The views at each point of the compass mirrored one another down
to the battered garage doors and too-cheerful lawn ornaments. If there was anyone peeking from their window, they would have seen me and wondered where I was headed.

A Chrysler sedan pulled alongside me—Mr. Gruber. He rolled down his passenger-side window. I knew it was him and not his brother because of his suit jacket and Snoopy tie, and because only high school principals drive K-cars.