Mr. Doyle talks on and on about why he teaches these classes, how it’s his duty, after enduring the kind of tragedy most are spared, to save as many of us as he can. He tells the story of his daughter, booze, pain, drugs, whatever. I’m checking out this woman beside me, who takes long pulls from the ribbed straw of an insulated cup, when it finally hits me. I stand up and say, “I remember now — I had you for traffic school last month. Didn’t you tell us a totally different story about your daughter in traffic class, about how she died in a car crash, like from a drunk driver or something?”
Mr. Doyle closes his eyes in frustration and then glares at me like he’s going to blow his top, but I look him in the eye. All the magazines I’ve read say that if you start looking at your opponent’s strike zones — like the collarbone or solar plexus — then you lose the edge of surprise.
“She was the drunk driver,” Mr. Doyle says.
“Oh,” I say.
At break time, I walk outside to bask in the dark heat. Down the street is the Mill Avenue bar scene, where “real” college students party, and across the way, past the sorority dorms, is the Arizona State University Aquatic Center — the blue-tang of its pool chlorine mixing with the waxy smell of City Hall’s citrus trees.
I find the woman in white sitting on the tail of a ’69 Chevelle, trunk up.
“That air-conditioning was killing me,” I say.
“I was about out of vodka.”
Her name is Loren, it turns out, and the Chevelle is so cherry it’s obviously a man’s life passion. Its paint job is a custom glitter-green, deep and flashy as raw mica, giving the swept Chevy the night-shine of a desert beetle. The license plate says POWER.
She sits in white shorts on the chrome bumper, the black trunk open behind her, pouring Sprite and Popov into the sport cup between her knees. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“I got a daughter who’s nineteen,” she says, adding a final top-off of vodka, some of which splashes on her thigh. She wipes it off with her hand, then licks her palm.
“I don’t act my age, though,” I say. “I’m an underachiever with difficulties facing maturity because of early instability in the home. I also need to learn I won’t get far in life on charm alone.”
“Consider yourself lucky,” she says. “My daughter’s a nymphomaniac.”
“There’s worse fates,” I say, trying to be smart or something.
Loren offers me her vodka cocktail. “Like recovering alcoholic?”
My eyes sweep back to the drink in her hand.
She smiles. “That’s kind of a joke.”
“I’ve also been told I have problems with decision making,” I say and take the vodka.
She reclines a moment, resting her elbows on the black rubber seal of the trunk well, stretching her legs wide across the pavement. From down the street, snatches of salsa music reach us off and on.
“Everybody finds their own way to deal with a tricky setup,” she says.
“Tricky, like bad?”
“Tricky, like complicated,” she says. “Labyrinthine.”
From the all-Greek parking lot beyond the hedgerow come the sounds of girls talking, though I can’t make out what they say. When they laugh, it gives me a small thrill and kind of needles me, too. Loren doesn’t seem to hear them.
“Do you believe in God?” she asks and begins fixing another cocktail, using the same method, right down to the little spill and lick.
“Jacob wrestled the angel,” I say, “and the angel was overcome.” This is a song lyric from U2 that pops into my head.
“Amen,” she says as she stirs the drink with a finger. She tests it, approves, then sets the vodka bottle back in the trunk, next to a stack of chrome crowbars.
“Like they say,” Loren lifts her drink. “Rain falls equally on saint and sinner.”
I lift my drink, too, but the sight of her lipstick, dark and smudged on the rim, makes me pause. I cup my mouth around it, get a shiver in the hot parking lot.
Back inside, we are broken into groups to play unusual board games that seem designed to teach us how to have fun without controlled substances, which is supposed to be the point of this class. In reality, however, all the games are rigged so that everyone loses, and there’s something weirdly churchy about them. There’s “High Times” and “One for the Road,” which uses hazardous highway signs to convey its message. Loren and I join a group playing a Monopoly-style game named “Last Call.” You start with plenty of money, but it quickly goes to pay the bartenders, dealers, and bookies. Once poor, you have to draw from a stack of cards called Sobering Realities. I keep landing on Make Mine a Double. Loren wraps her Corvette around a tree. I go blind and my pregnancy ends in stillbirth.
After class, I walk with Loren in the parking lot. “Sorry we went Bottoms Up at the end,” I tell her. “Those dice had to be loaded.”
“Look,” she says. “You want to go for a drive? I want to go for a drive.”
“A drive where to?”
Loren glances up, shrugs. “I don’t want to go home just yet.”
She hands me the keys to the Chevelle, and the chain weighs a ton with all sorts of trinkets attached to it, but I head for the driver’s door and the ’Velle fires up with authority. The interior is mint: three-speed on the column, amber gauges, and a black vinyl bench seat that is an ad for Armor All. Out on the hood is a red-faced tachometer that glows brighter the more I rev. I don’t know why they put them out there, but it’s universal for tough.
On the dash is a statue of Jesus. It’s not the one of him being crucified, but from before, on the way to the cross with his crown and blood and bad back. The statue’s arms are uplifted, and the cheap plastic molding makes the fingers look webbed.
“Don’t worry about that,” Loren says and pops the statue out of the little base that holds its feet and reclamps it upside-down, so that Jesus is doing a handstand.
Somehow, when I see her do this, I’m not as nervous about driving Loren in a muscle car custom-built by her husband, a man so without fear that he’s removed the seat belts.
“Let’s go to the tower,” I say, which is the big water tank on the side of Hayden Mountain that looks down on the university.
I ease through the parking lot, but I can’t help goosing the ’Velle on the first left out of City Hall, a move that sends me sliding across the slick seat into Loren’s lap, leaving the car idling, driverless, sideways in the street.
“Why don’t we try that one again?” she says.
The car runs hot as we wander the backstreets of Tempe’s college scene, past bars and taquerias, even the open-air cantina where I pissed on the horse, but I don’t point that out. Near the old Hayden Mill, we hit a bump and there’s a wild jangle in the trunk. “Christ,” Loren says, “Jack and his crowbars.”
Up the winding road, we park in front of the storm-wire fence that surrounds the massive tank. Loren and I sit on the hood with the last of our drinks. Under us, the cooling motor hisses and seethes to run again, and out there is the orange wash of the south valley: to the east is the floodlighted Sun Devil stadium, and south, beyond Tempe, Chandler, and the Heights, are the Maricopa Mountains, while west sit the Papagos, circling the dark Phoenix Zoo.
Around us is a rocky shelf of beer cans and cigarette butts, and then a steep drop-off down to the lights of the university, whose cement walkways and hard-angled courtyards tremble in the heat.
“Have you ever been to Mexico?” Loren asks, and I realize she’s looking a lot farther south than I am.
“A few times,” I say, but she wants to hear more, I can tell. “It’s not so different, really. You can go twenty minutes outside of Tempe and you’d think you were in the desert outside Guymas or Hermasillo.”