Blond head nodded at blond head. One said something to the other, too low for me to catch. They were no doubt thinking that in helping to annihilate my mother’s car they’d committed a fairly rash act, and thinking too that there were three bad characters connected with that very car watching them from the woods. Perhaps other possibilities occurred to them as well — police, jail cells, justices of the peace, reparations, lawyers, irate parents, fraternal censure. Whatever they were thinking, they suddenly dropped branches, bottles, and rocks and sprang for their car in unison, as if they’d choreographed it. Five seconds. That’s all it took. The engine shrieked, the tires squealed, a cloud of dust rose from the rutted lot and then settled back on darkness.
I don’t know how long I lay there, the bad breath of decay all around me, my jacket heavy as a bear, the primordial ooze subtly reconstituting itself to accommodate my upper thighs and testicles. My jaws ached, my knee throbbed, my coccyx was on fire. I contemplated suicide, wondered if I’d need bridgework, scraped the recesses of my brain for some sort of excuse to give my parents — a tree had fallen on the car, I was blindsided by a bread truck, hit and run, vandals had got to it while we were playing chess at Digby’s. Then I thought of the dead man. He was probably the only person on the planet worse off than I was. I thought about him, fog on the lake, insects chirring eerily, and felt the tug of fear, felt the darkness opening up inside me like a set of jaws. Who was he, I wondered, this victim of time and circumstance bobbing sorrowfully in the lake at my back. The owner of the chopper, no doubt, a bad older character come to this. Shot during a murky drug deal, drowned while drunkenly frolicking in the lake. Another headline. My car was wrecked; he was dead.
When the eastern half of the sky went from black to cobalt and the trees began to separate themselves from the shadows, I pushed myself up from the mud and stepped out into the open. By now the birds had begun to take over for the crickets, and dew lay slick on the leaves. There was a smell in the air, raw and sweet at the same time, the smell of the sun firing buds and opening blossoms. I contemplated the car. It lay there like a wreck along the highway, like a steel sculpture left over from a vanished civilization. Everything was still. This was nature.
I was circling the car, as dazed and bedraggled as the sole survivor of an air blitz, when Digby and Jeff emerged from the trees behind me. Digby’s face was crosshatched with smears of dirt; Jeffs jacket was gone and his shirt was torn across the shoulder. They slouched across the lot, looking sheepish, and silently came up beside me to gape at the ravaged automobile. No one said a word. After a while Jeff swung open the driver’s door and began to scoop the broken glass and garbage off the seat. I looked at Digby. He shrugged. “At least they didn’t slash the tires,” he said.
It was true: the tires were intact. There was no windshield, the headlights were staved in, and the body looked as if it had been sledge-hammered for a quarter a shot at the county fair, but the tires were inflated to regulation pressure. The car was drivable. In silence, all three of us bent to scrape the mud and shattered glass from the interior. I said nothing about the biker. When we were finished, I reached in my pocket for the keys, experienced a nasty stab of recollection, cursed myself, and turned to search the grass. I spotted them almost immediately, no more than five feet from the open door, glinting like jewels in the first tapering shaft of sunlight. There was no reason to get philosophical about it: I eased into the seat and turned the engine over.
It was at that precise moment that the silver Mustang with the flame decals rumbled into the lot. All three of us froze; then Digby and Jeff slid into the car and slammed the door. We watched as the Mustang rocked and bobbed across the ruts and finally jerked to a halt beside the forlorn chopper at the far end of the lot. “Let’s go,” Digby said. I hesitated, the Bel Air wheezing beneath me.
Two girls emerged from the Mustang. Tight jeans, stiletto heels, hair like frozen fur. They bent over the motorcycle, paced back and forth aimlessly, glanced once or twice at us, and then ambled over to where the reeds sprang up in a green fence round the perimeter of the lake. One of them cupped her hands to her mouth. “Al,” she called. “Hey, Al!”
“Come on,” Digby hissed. “Let’s get out of here.”
But it was too late. The second girl was picking her way across the lot, unsteady on her heels, looking up at us and then away. She was older — twenty-five or — six — and as she came closer we could see there was something wrong with her: she was stoned or drunk, lurching now and waving her arms for balance. I gripped the steering wheel as if it were the ejection lever of a flaming jet, and Digby spat out my name, twice, terse and impatient.
“Hi,” the girl said.
We looked at her like zombies, like war veterans, like deaf-and-dumb pencil peddlers.
She smiled, her lips cracked and dry. “Listen,” she said, bending from the waist to look in the window, “you guys seen Al?” Her pupils were pinpoints, her eyes glass. She jerked her neck. “That’s his bike over there — Al’s. You seen him?”
Al. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to get out of the car and retch, I wanted to go home to my parents’ house and crawl into bed. Digby poked me in the ribs. “We haven’t seen anybody,” I said.
The girl seemed to consider this, reaching out a slim veiny arm to brace herself against the car. “No matter,” she said, slurring the t’s, “he’ll turn up.” And then, as if she’d just taken stock of the whole scene — the ravaged car and our battered faces, the desolation of the place — she said: “Hey, you guys look like some pretty bad characters — been fightin’, huh?” We stared straight ahead, rigid as catatonics. She was fumbling in her pocket and muttering something. Finally she held out a handful of tablets in glassine wrappers: “Hey, you want to party, you want to do some of these with me and Sarah?”
I just looked at her. I thought I was going to cry. Digby broke the silence. “No, thanks,” he said, leaning over me. “Some other time.”
I put the car in gear and it inched forward with a groan, shaking off pellets of glass like an old dog shedding water after a bath, heaving over the ruts on its worn springs, creeping toward the highway. There was a sheen of sun on the lake. I looked back. The girl was still standing there, watching us, her shoulders slumped, hand outstretched.
Caviar
I ought to tell you right off I didn’t go to college. I was on the wrong rung of the socioeconomic ladder, if you know what I mean. My father was a commercial fisherman on the Hudson, till the PCBs got to him, my mother did typing and filing down’at the lumberyard, and my grandmother crocheted doilies and comforters for sale to rich people. Me, I took over my father’s trade. I inherited the shack at the end of the pier, the leaky fourteen-foot runabout with the thirty-five-horse Evinrude motor and the seine that’s been in the family for three generations. Also, I got to move into the old man’s house when he passed on, and he left me his stamp collection and the keys to his ‘62 Rambler, rusted through till it looked like a gill net hung out to dry.
Anyway, it’s a living. Almost. And if I didn’t go to college I do read a lot, magazines mostly, but books on ecology and science too. Maybe it was the science part that did me in. You see, I’m the first one around here — I mean, me and Marie are the first ones — to have a baby this new way, where you can’t have it on your own. Dr. Ziss said not to worry about it, a little experiment, think of it as a gift from heaven.