“He’s got texture,” said Sils. “You’ve just got to beat it out of him.” She lit up another cigarette. “Which, I realize, you shouldn’t have to do with texture.”
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
Sils’s eldest brother, Skip, the band’s drummer, pulled up in the driveway, noisy and elegant in his way. Just back from Canada, too, he was in and out of the band; he also popped pills in the kitchen, looking at the clock, glugging white and red tablets down with beer. He had his girlfriend Diane with him. When the girlfriends were there, they and Sils’s brothers took over the house, lying on top of one another on the living room sofas, kissing and rubbing and napping.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Sils, hearing Skip downstairs. She was working a late shift and didn’t have to leave for an hour. Mike was picking her up. “Let’s go for a walk.” So we did. We left her house and walked around in the park, looking for arrowheads and puffballs, until it was time for her to go.
The next day at Storyland was slow — a warm drizzle keeping people away — and at about five o’clock Mike Suprenante drove up on his Harley. He took off his helmet and glided his motorcycle up to my register.
“Would you like a ticket, monsieur?” I tried to be funny, friendly, but I sounded full of hate, even to my own ears.
“I want to see you alone to talk about Sils.”
I looked at him, trying to let nothing show. I felt secretly pleased. He had, with this request, acknowledged I was her guardian, her confidante, closer to her than he.
“When can we do that?” he asked sternly.
I felt powerful. “I don’t know. Tonight, maybe.”
Herb, the manager, came up and stood behind the ticket tearer’s gate. “Get that thing outta here,” he said angrily, in the direction of the motorcycle.
Mike started to back it up, slowly.
“You’d better move faster than that,” said Herb. “We can’t have vehicles in the main entrance of the park.”
Mike looked at me. “Ten o’clock. Out front here,” he called out. “Ça va?”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice hickish and tough.
Mike glided backward, then turned, started up his bike, and left. Herb came through the gate, then just stood next to me, frowning. I stood there, saying nothing, shifting my weight from one hip to the other.
“What?” I said finally, impudently.
“No more pals” is all he said. “No more.” And then he smiled falsely, a grimacing stack of teeth, and walked pompously away.
“Do you want to go have a drink?” Mike asked me at closing time in front of the main gate to Storyland. It had stopped raining and the night sky had cleared. There was a bar down the road called Fort Ress, owned by a guy named Dickie Ress, and Mike liked to go there. Or there was the Sans Souci.
“All right,” I said.
“Wanna go to the Ress?”
“OK.”
“Wanna hop on?”
“No. I’ll walk.” It was a five-minute walk past the public beach to the Ress.
“Whatever,” said Mike. He grinned. “I’ll get us a good table out on the patio. The one with the least bird turd.” He grinned again.
I narrowed my eyes. “Promises, promises,” I said. No matter what the situation, a sarcastic tone was a Horsehearts girl’s best response.
Mike winked and roared off ahead. “The vroom-vroom gene,” Sils had said the day the exhaust pipe on Mike’s Harley burned a scar into her leg. “All boys are born with it. Vroom-vroom.”
I trudged up the road. It was after ten o’clock at night, and the sky was still a bluish color and peepers sang from the trees in the park. A frog chorus. The frogs sing for no reason and so do we went a line from a poem I had learned in school, and I imagined these frogs now scattered through the woods, their tiny eyes lit like chips of emerald, while their pumping whistle-chant — part summons, part yearning lullaby — piped through the night. Whoops, wope, who-wopes. I felt accompanied, guarded, by the throb and thrum of it, as I hiked along the beach road up toward the lights of Marvy’s Miniature Golf, where, when I got there, I could no longer hear the peeping — only bar noise and golfers in wide-lipped hats.
The frogs. Years later, I would read in the paper that frogs were disappearing from the earth, that even in the most pristine of places, scientists were looking and could not find them. It was a warning, said the article. A plague of no frogs. And I thought of those walks up the beach road I’d made any number of times in the sexual evening hum of summer, how called and lovely and desired you felt, how possible, even when you weren’t at all. It was the frogs doing that. Later it seemed true, that I rarely heard frogs anymore. Once in a while a cricket would get trapped on the porch, but that was all. That was different. We would find it with a broom and sweep it off.
At the Ress, I sat outside with Mike on the patio. He’d already brought beers to the table in large waxed cups. Plus two shots of whiskey for himself.
“I know,” he said. He threw back one of the whiskeys.
“Know what?” I asked.
“Sils told me. About the baby.” At the word “baby” he threw back the second shot. It was very dramatic.
“What baby?”
“The one you went to Vermont with. Sils told me. She told me she’d been pregnant. She told me everything.”
“There was no baby,” I said finally.
The whiskey was doing its work. Mike leaned forward, hunched over the empty shot glasses, maudlin and drunk, unrolling the waxy rim of his beer cup with his thick fingers. “I would have taken care of it. I would have brought up that kid.” He began to blubber. I was only fifteen, and he was nineteen. But he seemed mawkish and ridiculous to me. Why had Sils told him? I’d thought the whole point had been not to tell him.
“Get off it,” I said. “Get on with things.” Get a life, I might have said, but it wasn’t an expression yet. Instead I repeated the words of my sixth-grade teacher the day she’d spied my lipstick. “You’re too young,” I said, getting it down, slowly, like a chant.
“Ha!” he cried out. But his teariness subsided a bit, and he began to smile a little awkwardly and try to flirt with me. He rubbed my head with one of his big hands like a paw. “You’ve got a lot on the ball,” he said. “Plus, you know what? My friend Arnie thinks you’re cute.” He grinned again, with this hot, funny news. “What do you think?”
I couldn’t even remember who Arnie was. “I’ve gotta get going,” I said, finishing my beer. I didn’t want to remember who Arnie was. I didn’t want to meet Arnie, or talk to him, or have him try to touch me. I didn’t want anyone to touch me. There was nothing to touch.
“You’re a good friend,” he said. “You’re Sils’s best friend. So, in a way, I’ve always considered you mine as well.”
I felt revulsed.
“Can I give you a ride home?” His speech was slurred and his grin now snaked across his face in a demented way that someone somewhere had probably told him was fetching.
It was ten miles back to Horsehearts.
“I’m calling a cab,” I said.
“Oh, the cab guy?” Mike piped up gleefully, to let me know he knew. “With your little moola?” He held his hand in the air and rubbed his thumb against his fingers. God, had Sils told him everything?
“Sure, sure.”
I went inside the Ress and used the phone.
“Oh, you again,” said Humphrey. “How the heck are you?”
“I’m up at the lake, corner of Beach and Quaker is how I am.”