The Sharp Time (22 page)

I take the all-too-familiar right-hand turn, and I drive down Ponderosa Lane until I get to Catherine Bennett’s house.

Bradley, without asking, knows where we are.

“So this is the teacher’s house,” he says. He turtles his head across the dark front seat for a better look. The nutcracker is still displayed in her front yard.

“Yes. I thought I’d drop by and see if she wants to go for a cup of hot cocoa with us.”

Bradley nods. “I do a lot of drive-bys too.”

I think of Bradley driving through the parking lot of Our Lady of Mercedes in his parents’ car, of seeing Father Bob’s car parked in front of his charming carriage house, a regular car made dazzling by its godly loneliness. But in the parking lot, way in the back next to the Dumpsters behind the church, there is another car, of course. Or perhaps Miles has a moped or maybe a mountain bike. In any case, Bradley is left with the image of the new boy racing through the parking lot, his breath a cold cloud, his unzipped jacket beating against his back. When Bradley looks up at the church, he doesn’t experience the comfort of the saints gazing down at him with their exquisite heartaches and unusual martyrdoms; he only sees the impenetrable, well-insured gray windows.

“I don’t think she’s home,” I say, looking at Catherine Bennett’s unlit house. “Okay,” he says.

“I’m going to circle around the back, just to check.”

And Bradley says, “Oh, okay,” with über-cheerfulness, as if my house-stalking is just the thing to do, a perfectly reasonable and legitimate errand, and so despite all my innate despair, I’m feeling pretty happy to have such a nice friend, pretty happy not to be driving down these icy streets alone.

My mind goes hazy and honeyed for a second, but then there is the voice of Catherine Bennett in my ear:
Are you … Are you … Are you …

And forever is the dead feeling of life being so massively fucked up and everyone going along with all the bullshit. Where is our motherfucking pioneer spirit? What would the saints say, those nutty iconoclasts who gouged out their eyes and jammed swords into their own human hearts?

Navy blue moonlight shines through the trees, and I think of Alecia Hardaway screwing up her face, trying
so
hard to find just the right answer, and a deep, spreading anger blooms in me, a goth-black garden rose with charred and cancerous petals and splashed with pale yellow Pollyanna surprise at the unringing phone. And then there are the thorns of Catherine Bennett’s paisley slip, the sight of which was never a victory, only a flag of grotesquerie that forms behind my eyelids like a blood blister, and I take the corner too fast.

There is the dark, stomach-flip thrill of my car fishtailing across the snowy street, the streetlights peering down like brontosaurus heads on their beanpole bodies.

There is the close-up image of my mom dancing around the kitchen in an orange poncho and jeans, and off in the hazy-snow distance there she is again, my mother standing on the street corner, my mother daydreaming and drinking her cappuccino and
Oh, Mom, where
are
you? I love you I love you I do
and then there is the half second of slick wild
ahhhhh
, before Bradley ruins my bliss of black ice by yelling, “Pump the brakes!”

I lean back and brace my arms to the steering wheel—my body seems to know to do this—but I forget to pump the brakes, even with Bradley imploring me to
pump the brakes
. What I do is slam my foot on the brake, and the car carnival spins, wild and thrilling, before it slides sideways across the street. I lose my grip entirely. My arms give way and my forehead smacks the side window. There is both the chaos of movement and total stillness as pain radiates down my temple. Bradley says, “Jesus!” And it’s more a panicked plea than curse, and next comes the slam-danced icy stop before the lurching and crunching.

My glove box pops open, showering the floor with insurance information, cough drops, lipsticks and hair ties, and the box of bullets. My pink gun sails out and lands on the front seat between us. We are at an odd angle; the car has risen up in front like an obese person standing on her heels, struggling for equilibrium.

“Honey,” Bradley says. Sometimes my mother called me that, and I think of the honey in a jar my mother bought at the farmers’ market, the fat waxy honeycomb planted in the middle. It is my mother’s voice I hear when Bradley says it again, her far-off, star-dazzled sweetness.

As he looks over at me from behind his puffy air bag. I feel a thud of pain where my head struck the window and my mouth is warm and salted, filling up fast.

Bradley says, “Hang on.”

And here he has
his
miracle moment.

The Taurus is banged up against a tree, two feet off the ground in the front. I am blinded by the air bag in front of me, but when I look out the side window, the unnatural elevation makes me even queasier. But then there is Superman, ungloved hands on the grille, pushing the car off the tree. With a little rocking, with a snow-filtered
“Fuck!”
from Bradley, the car bounces and aligns. I am back on solid ground.

Bradley opens my door, his cold, labored breath in my face. “Are you okay? I should have gotten you out of the car before I did that. I’m not thinking straight.”

Squashed beneath my deflated air bag, I look up at him and smile. I try to say “Superman,” but my tongue goes slushy.

“Oh, God,” Bradley says. He squints down at me, the wind stirring his bangs. “Can you get out of the car?” And so I do, I stagger out, dizzy and stumbling in my cumbersome platforms. My body is ringing and ringing, the feeling of Catherine Bennett kicking my desk, that vibration amped up and shooting through my limbs, radiating my heart and organs, that part of my body known in the obtuse lingo of yoga classes as my
core
, and it’s all
Fuck you fuck you fuck you
and
Wow, so wearing a seat belt is a practice I should probably look into
.

Bradley puts his hands on my shoulders. I blink up at him, at the telephone wires and snowy tree branches, all the refreshing cold after the hot chemical smell of the air bags, the lit-up houses in the distances, sweet as cottages in the Black Forest. It is suddenly very, very important for me to tell him:
The world is brutal but beautiful
, but I can’t get the words out.

“Can you spit?” Bradley turns into a bossy dental hygienist and says sternly: “You need to spit, Sandinista.” And so I hang open my mouth and lean over. A fat Rorschach of blood stains the snow around my shoes.

Bradley looks down at me, his face so kind and full of worry that I feel a wintry jolt of happiness, and smile.

“Your teeth look a little bloody. Are they okay?”

I run my tongue over my teeth. I wipe my mouth with my hand.

Like a magician, like Cary Grant, Bradley whips a handkerchief from his back pocket and blots my face with it. I think of church—the cloth swiped over the goblet.

“My teeth are fine!” I say triumphantly. I lean over and spit into the snow again. “I think I just bit my tongue or my lip or something.” I run my tongue over my teeth again. “My teeth are exactly the same!”

“Okay,” Bradley says. “We better get out of here.”

He takes me gently by the shoulder and helps me back into the car, where the air bags are already deflating, drooping like ancient breasts. He walks around to the driver’s side, pausing to look at the grill and saying, “Shit,” under his breath.

He pulls open the door and gives me the news: “The front of your car is pretty messed up. But I think it’s still drivable.” He shuts his car door. “Jesus.”

“Yeah,” I say, as if blaming the so-called savior or pleading with him like some imperiled Bible-beater. “Jesus Christ.”

Bradley runs his hand over his neck and says, “I don’t know if we should call your insurance company, or do we need to file an accident report with the police—”

“Let’s just go,” I say. “Let’s just move.”

Bradley nods and pulls the spent air bag to the middle of the front seat. It has sprouted from the center of the steering wheel that hangs open like a stunned mouth; there’s no honking my horn now.

The gun falls from the front seat to the floor.

“Whoops-a-daisy!” I say, my voice saccharine and strained.

Bradley reaches to the floorboards with a wince, giving up a little
ugh
of pain as he grabs the gun. It gleams in his hand, pink and white as Easter. He chuckles under his breath, before he says, slowly and instructionally, “Of course, we should probably get rid of the
gun
if we are considering calling the police to report the accident.”

“Probably,” I agree.

“Where did you get it?” he asks, frowning at the candied handle.

“It’s a bit of a long story, but I got it at Second Chance?”

“Arne sold you a gun?” Bradley snorts. “Jesus, that guy’s a stone-cold freak.”

“No. I mean, he didn’t sell it to me. He gave it to me. It was a gift. A donation. And he’s not a freak, either.”

“Guess what?” Bradley says quietly. “That’s even weirder: that he
gave
you a gun. Do you have a license for it?”

“Well, you know, not as yet. To tell you the truth, Bradley, I didn’t know that you needed a license for a gun.” I try to downplay the weirdness of this postcrash talk with humor. “Now that I think about it, that policy strikes me as highly un-American.”

“Well, aren’t you quite the patriot.” He reaches down and takes the box of bullets off the car floor. “These flew out and hit my knee like a boulder.”

“Sorry,” I mutter.

He looks at the box. “You know, these are not bullets for a handgun. This is deer-hunting ammo. These bullets wouldn’t fit in your gun.” He chuckles. “God bless Arne. He probably wanted you to have the gun so you would feel safe, but not actually be able to harm anyone. Yourself included. You never tried to put the bullets in?”

“Well, no,” I say, a little testy, ever the duped and dumb girl. “For safety reasons I didn’t want to load it before I needed to use it.”

Bradley frowns.

So. How could I have known those bullets wouldn’t work in my gun? The culture of violence is new to me; my mother would not kill a bug. If she found a daddy longlegs in the house, she would pick it up and cup it in her bare hands; she would giggle and scold it. “You stop! That tickles!” I would stand at the kitchen window and watch my mother crouch down in the backyard, the sun in her hair, and open her hands for the spider.
Wow
, I would think,
what a freaking nutjob
.

Bradley switches on the dome light, examines the gun with his eyes squinted in concentration, like a jeweler. “The serial number has been sanded off. This is nobody’s gun. But it’s highly illegal.”

He puts the gun on the seat and drums his fingers along the top of the steering wheel before he starts up the car, and I’m thinking that the stress of this night will make him hit the ganja pretty hard. He smokes way too much; I see that it affects his decision making, though probably I shouldn’t judge.

“You know, in any case, a gun isn’t the smartest item to be toting around in your car.”

This from someone never without a bag of weed!

“I
know
. But thanks for the tip.”

He looks into the rearview mirror, and then opens the car door. He flings my gun into the banked snow; he heaves the box of bullets out with a wince.

“Hey! What—”

“Sorry. Just an impulse.”

“But Jesus, it’s mine. The gun was a
gift
,” I say, as if I’m wearing a pink frilly dress and have fluffy curls. I notice that my whole trunk hurts, not just my rib.

“The last thing you need is a gun,” Bradley says.

As if we are so different, as if he’s suddenly a bearded sage sitting cross-legged on a hilltop, meditating and eating unsweetened yogurt whereas I’m a random meth head swilling Dr Pepper for my sugar jones, having sex with strangers for quick cash.

“Well, Bradley, what’s the first thing I need?” My face is sleeved in pain. I touch my hand to my forehead and feel the Cro-Magnon bump. “Could you perchance tell me the
seventeenth
thing I need?”

Bradley ignores me. As we drive off, the Taurus pulls to the left, so Bradley has to constantly correct it with sharp little turns to the right, but it drives. It will get us home.

* * *

So it’s good-bye to my gun-girl self. But say I really
wanted
to get a gun. Say I sought out bullets that worked, that were the right fit. How hard would that be? Given that I didn’t even know I wanted a gun in the first place? Given that I learned I have the gift of good aim?

* * *

Bradley takes the interstate downtown, the car miraculously chug-chug-chugging away in the slow lane, the little midsized economy car that could. He drives us to Thirty-Eighth Street, where the Pale Circus glows with its warm lit windows, with the headless mannequin and her implicit scarecrow’s lament:
If I only had a brain
.

“Back to work?” I say.

Bradley tries for a bit of levity. He sings the
Snow White
song: “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s back to work we go!”

But with the spent air bag brushing my sore legs, with no gun amping up my badass self, I think of Snow White in her agony, Walt Disney’s poisoned princess laid out in her clear coffin, wearing her yellow dress with the starched collar, awaiting a kiss. And of course Catherine Bennett appears in my mind, holding up her teacher’s textbook like a poisoned apple, smiling at Alecia Hardaway, at me.

Bradley parks, gets out of the car and walks over to my side, gallant and limping. He motions for me to unroll the window.

“I’m going to try out my neighborhood connections,” he says with a wink.

I roll up my window and watch him lope across the snowy street, my sore head pressed to the glass. He goes into the liquor store; through the front windows it looks like a blurred carnival of boozy light and moving bodies, as if in the midst of a late-night clearance sale. There is just enough light to see a monk coming out of Erika’s Erotic Confections. He has his head lowered, his hood up. He waits on the sidewalk next to Erika’s car. And out comes Erika: jeans tucked into storm-trooper snow boots and a leather jacket with the collar flipped up. She has her purse on her shoulder, but it slips to the crook of her arm when she turns and locks the metal door of her shop.