He had picked her up in a rest area near Sacramento and she had jumped in, abubble with false conviviality, saying, Hi, I’m Tracy, where you heading? Seattle? Me, too! She talked a mile a minute about her travels in Europe, the ex-boyfriend who had become a rock star, an affair with an older man. If she had done half what she claimed, she would have been older than he was, and he figured her for seven or eight years younger. Seventeen, maybe. He had told similar lies during his days on the streets and knew her story was not designed to be believed; it was like a prostitute’s makeup, both a statement of availability and a cheap disguise. She was frightened, probably broke, hoping to hook up with somebody who would take care of her. He wondered if he would let himself be hooked. It would be the stupid thing to do, the careless, impractical thing. The allure might be too much to resist.
“I might not go all the way to Seattle,” he said after driving for an hour through the empty golden afternoon. “I might head east. Hell, I might even head back to LA.”
He thought about Charlie. One kiss, he said to himself. A pathetic little kiss, that’s all it had been. Charlie wasn’t trying to seduce you, he was just fucking up the same as he did with everything else. Punishing himself for playing in a different key. And it’s not as if you were cherry, un-uh, yet here you go running through the world, fuming with outrage and clutching your torn bodice like a goddamn nineteenth-century virgin.
“This car really yours?” the girl asked.
“You think I stole it? I’m not the kind of guy who can afford a Caddy?”
“Naw, I . . .”
“You got me. I stole it from this old fag I lived with in LA.”
A pause. “Yeah. Right.”
“No joke,” he said. “He was like my perv uncle, you know. My pretend daddy. Don’t sweat it. He’ll be too twisted up by me leaving to call the cops. Time he gets around to thinking about the car . . . The guy owns a dealership. He’ll find a way to put it on his insurance.”
She stared at him, horrified.
“I told you it’s cool,” he said.
Her voice quavered as though from strong emotion. “You’re gay?”
He restrained a laugh. “I like girls, but I’ve done a few tricks. You know how it is.”
He looked sharply at her, forcing her to acknowledge the comment—she lowered her head and responded with a frail-as-sugar noise. Satisfied, he swerved around a slow-moving piece of Jap trash and leaned on the horn.
He could still turn back, he thought. Things could be mended. Charlie would fall all over himself trying to apologize, and life at home might be better than ever.
Too realistic, he decided; too humiliating, too logical and kind.
The sky grayed, rinsing the girl’s hair of its sheen—it showed the old yellow of flat ginger ale. Her breasts looked tiny, juiceless. Mouse breasts. She caught his eye and flashed one of her Runaway Poster Child smiles, rife with daffy trust and precocious sexuality. He was offended by her presumption that he would be taken in by it.
“We going to drive straight through?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Might be better to stop somewhere, you know, than hitting Seattle all wore out.”
She said this with studied indifference, fishing in the glove compartment for the coke, making a production of unearthing the vial from among road maps and candy wrappers, as if that, and not the idea of cementing the relationship, were foremost on her mind.
He said, “I’ll see how the driving goes.”
“Well, if I got a vote it’d be great to catch a shower.”
As if in sympathy with her, his skin began to feel oily, itchy, in need of a wash.
She sat sulking, toying with the vial; after a mile or two she began to sing, a frail, wordless tune, something the Lady Ophelia might have essayed during the last stages of distraction. Suddenly vivacious, she waved the vial under his nose and said, “Want to hurt yourself?”
After they had done the coke, she fiddled with the radio, trying to bring in a rock station from the background static, and Michael settled back to enjoy the Cadillac feeling in his head, the Cadillac richness of the afternoon, the richness of a stolen car, cocaine, another man’s money in his pocket and a strange woman at his side.
“You look sick,” said the girl. “Want me to drive?”
“I’m okay.”
“Know what’s the best thing when you’re sick from coke? Milk. And not just milk. Cheese, ice cream. Dairy products, you know. Maybe you should stop somewheres and get some milk.” She crossed her legs, jiggled her foot. “I could go for an ice cream myself. I mean I ain’t sick, you know. I got a thing for ice cream is all. Especially the kind with the polar bears on the wrapper. Ever had one of them?”
“Oh, yeah! They’re terrific.” His grin tightened the packs of muscle at the corners of his mouth.
“I could eat ’em all night long,” she said with immense satisfaction. “Course I wouldn’t want to lose my shape.” She twisted about to face him. “I do a hunnerd sit-ups every morning and every night. I jog, too. You like to jog?”
“You bet.”
“I’m serious. You should take care of yourself.”
“Why?”
“You just should,” she said defensively.
“I’d need a better reason than that to waste my time.”
“It ain’t a waste. It makes good sense.”
“Why?”
“Because . . .” Flustered, she shifted away from him, plucked at the hem of her cutoffs. “You want to live a long time, don’tcha?”
“I’m fucking with you,” he said. “Okay?”
She tried another tack, working hard to establish what a fine traveling companion she’d make, but he tuned her out. Mount Shasta loomed against a twilight sky; the huge white cone with a single golden star sparkling off to the side had the graphic simplicity of a banner. In his mind he pushed ahead to Seattle, imagining whale worshipers and lumberjack sex cults, but those thoughts found no traction and he found himself thinking about LA. He was back on Sunset with the mutant carbon breathers and death’s-head bikers and tweaking whores and the little black kids with their little guns and little crack rocks, with the runaways he had lived among before Charlie took him in. Kids who came on with a mixture of paranoia and hard-boiled defiance, yet proved by their deaths to have been innocents with a few sly tricks. Most of them dead now, the rest just swallowed up. His memories of them were as oppressive as family memories, which was what they had been—a screwed-up family with no parents, no home, no future, no visible means of support, cooking stolen hamburger over oil-drum fires and selling bad dope and getting infections. He tried to escape the memories, to find a place in his head where they hadn’t established squatter’s rights, and wound up in a hotly lit, cluttered space that seemed familiar, but that he couldn’t identify. It must be, he thought, partly a real place and partly some pathological view he’d had of it . . . Oncoming headlights blinded him and he swerved into the left lane, angrily punching on his brights, leaving them on until the other driver dimmed his. He felt wrecked, wired. It had gotten dark and Shasta lay far behind.
The girl made a weak noise; for a second he was not sure how she had come to be there.
“Where are we?” he asked, and she said, “Wha . . . ,” and sat up straight, as if she were in a classroom, trying to give the impression that she had been paying attention.
“We in Oregon yet?” he asked.