Wolf in White Van (16 page)

I expected he’d just leave then, because it always seems to me like nothing ever happens, but something did happen: he began to back up. Monte Vista’s a busy street during the daytime, but it was too early for traffic and there wasn’t anybody parked in front of him, so I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. He checked the rearview very intently, his neck rigid, head still like a hawk, and then I realized, quickly, that he was accelerating in reverse, that there was another car parked behind his with enough gap between them to allow him to build up some speed.

The next minute—it couldn’t have been longer than a minute—went predictably: the gunning motor, the artificial thunder-crack of the crashing fenders, and then the fallout: things dropping from the cars’ frames to the asphalt, making
ping
sounds when they hit. In a movie version of this scene the driver wheels his glance abruptly to the window where a misshapen man stands watching it all unfold, and fixes me with a threatening look. That didn’t happen. He braced himself hard just before the collision, and after it he spent maybe fifteen seconds looking over his shoulder, surveying the damage as best he could from his restricted vantage point. Then he looked back into the rearview to check for cars. There weren’t any, so he shifted into drive and headed north, at a clip but not speeding away, eyes forward, his hands at ten and two.

Once he was gone you would have had to’ve stopped and looked around to know anything had happened. There was a
good chance that the driver of the car he’d rammed wouldn’t notice he’d been hit for a day or two: if he came up to the driver’s side door from behind, he might not see anything. I thought about the guy in the truck, the focus in his expression, and I felt like I already knew enough of the story to tell it to somebody else maybe better than either of its major players could. But I didn’t call the police, even though I know you’re supposed to. And I hadn’t taken any notice of the guy’s license plate, or written down any of the details. I’d answer questions about what I’d seen if anybody asked me, but I know what I know. Nobody was going to ask. So I just stood there at the window for a minute more, and I heard a bird singing; and while I am a person who, for reasons I consider good, am reluctant to assign specific meaning to anything I see or hear going on out there in the natural world, I couldn’t get out of the way of a sort of prophetic feeling I assume everyone gets from time to time. I couldn’t see the bird, I didn’t know where it was; I told myself a few stories about it, how it was a migratory bird I’d happened to catch on just the right morning, separated from its company en route to cooler days; or again how it was dying, singing some cheerful dying song. Kids’ stuff, old stuff. And then I had a memory from childhood, not childhood really but a while afterward, but what felt, in that moment, like childhood.

17
It was JJ; Teague; Tara, who was JJ’s girlfriend; Kimmy, who was Tara’s friend; and then me. It was the middle of the week. We were bored, sitting around on the aluminum bleachers up by the practice baseball diamond on the other side of the high school parking lot, waiting for something to happen. Tara had her boom box and we were listening to
Relayer.
I was looking hard at the tape shell and thinking the thoughts I get looking at tape shells. Am I the only person who gets the hard creeps from this guy’s face? was what I was thinking specifically. I was looking at the singer from Yes. His mouth looked like it was from somebody else’s head. I couldn’t make all the pieces fit.

Teague was teaching himself to dungeon master; he’d gotten
The Dungeon Master’s Guide
from his parents for Christmas. It was May now. You could see from the book he’d already read it a million times. The front was like a wrinkled old map, and half the pages were bent in at the corners. He was hunched over it with his index finger pointing at the middle of a page
and his eyebrows scrunched down. When Teague is irritated it’s really obvious.

“Can we listen to some Rush?” he said without looking up.

The Yes tape was Kimmy’s but she had all kinds of different music so she started digging through her gigantic purse to try to find something else to play. In her purse, tape shells clacked against one another while she dug; you could hear them scraping against each other, against keys, against pens and compacts, the sounds muffled in the purse’s puffy vinyl folds. To me it sounded like somebody shaking up dry bones. I closed my eyes and thought about those old bones in some girl’s purse and then I let my mind go: if you wanted to fit bones into your purse they’d have to be broken into pieces; you couldn’t fit a whole arm bone or a leg bone or a skull in there, just teeth, toes, and fingers; maybe kneecaps; but my imagination told me teeth would make a high sound, like pieces of glass, and toes would sound dull, like old crushed cans. That left fingers. I remembered biology class when we did anatomy. Distal phalanges, proximal phalanges, metacarpals. To walk around with a bag full of bones in the normal world would require a stone constitution. You could be a thief. You could be an actor, probably. Actors die young in ancient Rome, though. If it’s the present day and you’re Kimmy, and you’re carrying someone’s bones around in your purse, then I have a lot of questions for you, and I’ll probably never ask them, and you’ll have a secret that only I have guessed.

When I snapped out of it Kimmy’d popped out Yes and put in
2112.
She has everything. JJ and Tara were halfway making out. She had her hand on his pants, moving up the thigh. He was two years older than her, already out of high school.
Nobody really knew what he was doing with his life, because we only ever saw him at the park when he wanted to hang out with Tara. He had a mustache.

I was ditching P.E. to come up and hang out with everybody. I started to worry that if I missed two classes the school might call my house, and I’d get in trouble, and when I start to worry I can’t stop, so I told everybody “Later.” I felt sad to leave even though there was nothing going on. The sun was out and it was really bright; I wished I had some sunglasses. I walked across the parking lot toward the school, and then somebody honked at me. I never look up when people honk at me because I don’t want any trouble. People gave me trouble back then because of the way I dressed and because they didn’t like my friends. Inside I hated anybody who honked at me and wished I could cause their car to crash using only the powers of my mind. I could see what the crashes would look like from the outside and what they would feel like inside the car. It was awesome.

I once heard in a science class that you don’t start remembering things until you’re three, or maybe five. When I remember this day and most things before it, it’s like trying to remember being four years old, or two. I can see it, and I know it happened, and I have enough information about it to reconstruct the whole scene to my own satisfaction, but the person to whom it happened is somewhere so far off that I only know it’s me because I can see his face, and because I’m the one remembering.

Later that day I walked home in the bright sun. I remember seeing the bottlebrush bushes that lined the street for the last
four blocks, how they looked ancient, or maybe Martian. Alien. Home from school was a straight shot through four different neighborhoods, and by the time I got home, I always felt like a traveler returning from a great journey, relearning what home was like, acclimating to newly unfamiliar waters. Two packages were waiting for me on the front porch; I was glad to get to them first, because sometimes my parents teased me about how much time I spent with my books and tapes and magazines. Or they tried to start conversations about what I was into. I hated that. It wasn’t like with some of my other friends, whose parents were Christians; my parents weren’t Christian like that. But they did say they “wondered about where I was headed.” That was how they put it. It got on my nerves. So if I sent off for something cool, I avoided opening it in front of them. I didn’t want to have to answer any questions.

I went back to my room and spread the mail out on my bed. One of the packages was from Brazil: it was a sword catalog. I’d seen an ad for it in one of the little magazines I got at the game store. It cost three dollars, but mail from far away was worth a little extra, so I hid three ones inside a folded piece of newspaper and sent it off to São Paulo.
Catalog of Rare and Unknown Swords from Around the World, Send Three Dollars and Two International Reply Coupons.
It was like a treasure to me, weird alphabet letters in the return address and a strange slick sheen to the envelope. Sometimes when you send off for something without knowing what it is, what you get back looks like a third-generation copy somebody found somewhere, but this was nice: glossy paper, clean staples. Some of the swords
had hilts with designs, like dragons or horses, and some had what looked like jewels.
Smooth semi-precious stones inlaid afford textured grip.
The prices were listed in a currency I’d never heard of; it had a little symbol that set my mind racing to the good places.

The other package was from up north in Oregon, some town I’d never heard of before, Grants Pass. It was a membership patch from Inter-Hyborea, a Conan fan club; it came with a tape of songs based on Conan stories. The patch was high quality and was going to look very cool on my backpack if I could just get it on there without getting caught. This was going to involve a needle and thread and working on the patch in secret, or asking a girl to do it for me. If I asked Tara, JJ would be mad, but Kimmy was a possibility so I called her. I had my own phone in the room ever since Christmas, because if they didn’t give me my own phone I’d always be in the living room talking and no one would be able to hear the TV. It was a good deal.

Kimmy either didn’t believe I couldn’t sew the patch on myself or she just wanted to tease me; she pretended she didn’t understand what I was asking, and then either she pretended she thought the patch was an excuse for me to come over to her place or she actually believed that. It made me mad, and I felt embarrassed, and the conversation gradually evaporated until neither one of us was saying anything. Then her voice got softer and friendlier, and she said everybody knew how to sew. But actually I didn’t know any guys who took sewing. It was the least popular elective class for guys, below even accounting. So I made a joke out of it, and said during registration I tried to
sign up for sewing but all the jocks beat me to it. That was a joke for us to share, because I hated all sports, and she hated guys on the football team specifically; I didn’t know why specifically the football team. I didn’t care. I hated them, too.

Then she said when did I want to get the patch sewn on, and I felt so good, because our group of friends was so tight. We helped each other. It was like we had a code, a way of doing things. A way we treated each other. I’d known when I’d picked up the phone to call her that she would eventually say yes to sewing on my patch, but she’d give me a hard time first, and if I stuck with it and stayed cool, it would all turn out nice. And that was exactly how it happened. There was for me in that time a real comfort in feeling a sort of casual ability to predict the future.

I said I could probably come over later that evening, and she said: “You’re so lucky you have cool parents,” and I pictured my parents: how they looked at me now that my hair was long, how they looked at each other a lot when they were talking to me. How obvious it seemed to me that somewhere along the line our paths had forked, and now we were on different tracks looking at each other across a distance that would soon be infinite. Cool parents, I thought, are the ones who know nothing. It made me feel a little sad for mine, but I didn’t say any of this. I had a funny feeling that day, all day: something about how much I liked my life and where I was with it.

So I told Kimmy I would come over at seven. She said, “If I sew your patch on you owe me.” And I said, OK, cool, I’ll see you there.

Lying on my bed, I listened to the Conan tape on my tiny cassette radio. There were ten songs by ten different bands or people on it, nobody I’d ever heard of. Some were just guys with acoustic guitars telling stories and some were bands with loud guitars and maybe a violin in there howling and squealing away. One was just a guy playing an organ with no singing at all. Mostly it sounded very cheap, but some of them were trying very hard to make something that sounded majestic and mighty. I loved it; nobody I knew listened to stuff like this. I looked at the tape shell, trying to think about all these people I didn’t know anything about from somewhere way up north, making music for people who cared about Conan. And I picked one of them at random to make a little mini-poster for, a band called Crom.

First I drew a picture of a skull, and then I put a helmet with horns over the skull. Then I put little flames inside the eye sockets. You couldn’t really see the flames unless you were looking for them. I did the whole thing with a mechanical pencil, and when I looked at the flames, they were still too clear; I wanted the eyes sitting way back, so they looked out from somewhere so far inside that looking into them would require real concentration and effort. I tried different shapes for the flames, first rounder and softer and then little pyramids almost, and then I went with little diamonds instead. You could only see the diamonds if you leaned in super close. The sockets were otherwise completely black.

At the table, Mom asked what I’d been drawing when she came to get me for dinner, and I pretended I didn’t know what she
was talking about. It was like walking a tightrope. I’d been lying on my bed with the sketchbook open and several different pencils at hand for different shadings, and she’d knocked once and then opened the door; as soon as I’d heard the knock, reflexively I closed my notebook, just to be safe, I’m not sure from what, but I was still there with a notebook in front of me when she came in.

“The thing you were drawing, just now, when I came to get you.”

“I can’t draw,” I said.

“But you were drawing something, weren’t you? When I came in, just now,” she said.

“Not really,” I said. There are planets so far away from ours that no scientist will ever guess that they exist, let alone know the stories of their civilizations, their beginnings and ends. They’re not being kept secret from us, but they’re secret all the same.

“All right,” said Mom, looking over at my father for support, but he wasn’t paying attention. The TV was on in the living room, and he had a sight line to it from his chair. He was watching the news. I didn’t know why my dad liked to watch the news, because it made him angry, and the angrier he got, the louder he’d have to turn up the volume to hear the news over the things he yelled back at it. It got louder over the space of two hours most nights, and then the news was over. This made the house during dinnertime feel like an insane asylum.

Every night now there was new stuff about Libya. The
CBS Evening News
would show short clips of Gadhafi, who was president of Libya, or king, it was never clear to me. He was usually in sunglasses. Sometimes he’d be wearing a weird scarf
bunched up around his neck, sailing out on the open sea somewhere maybe, or else riding around the streets in a military van. Everyone around him would always be smiling and sometimes yelling. You couldn’t see his eyes through the lenses, so it was hard to say what was going on in his head, but I always imagined he felt good. He looked like a white point in a map of a moving weather system. Cameras pointing at him, people yelling questions constantly, and him just standing amid it all holding his head still, waiting to see what he had to say, and sometimes speaking, subtitles quietly translating on the screen.

My father hated him; a bomb had gone off in the Vienna airport at Christmas, and the story’d been on the news every day for a week. Mom and Dad had gone to Vienna for vacation once before I was born, so for my dad this made the whole thing personal. He’d try to explain the stories to me as they ran, to get me excited about them like he was: and I’d try; I’d nod and pay close attention as his voice rose. But I couldn’t make myself care much about it: it seemed like nothing; I couldn’t keep any of it straight. The jagged, blurry pieces of footage spoke to me a little; there was something in them like a code or a secret message, not for me necessarily but for somebody. Or maybe for nobody, but hidden there all the same. But I didn’t know how to steer the conversation that way, or what I’d say about it if I succeeded.

We were having meat loaf with tomato sauce. I didn’t like meat loaf, but my mother remembered that I’d loved it as a kid. If I ate too slowly she’d say: “You used to love meat loaf!” I never knew what to say back, though that night I tried “It’s good” while stuffing a forkful of peas, potatoes, and meat loaf
all into my mouth at once. I tried to remember liking meat loaf as a kid; for my mother the memory was so vivid she couldn’t forget it, but I couldn’t remember anything about it. At all. I knew we’d eaten it a lot, because you could make a pound of meat last longer by making meat loaf with it, but the only taste I could think of was the one I was trying to mask by eating everything on my plate at once. It was sad. “I like the sauce,” I tried again.