“What?” he’d say. This was a demand for an explanation.
“Yeah, what: What do you mean, ‘What?’ ” She would then look to me, or whomever, for an audience, and smile. It was a sweet smile, and almost always resulted in her kissing him afterward. Nuzzling a little. She was a high school girl and this was the first sex she’d known. It drugged her with secrets. It had stolen her away, left her smile deranged, her hair a mess.
“How you doing today?” I asked, petting one of her shoulder blades on the way into the employees’ entrance.
“You still wanna go to the Sands tonight, I hope,” she said. The Sands was a divey shack on the lake, a tavern called Sans Souci, which had gotten corrupted by the local accent into “the Sands,” as if it were some Las Vegas nightclub. We had been going since the previous summer. We could get into all the bars. Though we were minors, we had working papers and hitchhikers’ thumbs and the fake IDs we’d made at the library, which had the only photocopy machine in town. We’d borrowed one of Sils’s brother’s driver’s licenses, photocopied it, then retraced our copies, substituting our own photos and names. We did not think of any of this as a crime. Crimes weren’t crimes; laws weren’t really real; nothing applied. Nothing applied to us. We were set apart by adolescence and geography; the country was in upheaval, there was Vietnam and draft dodging and rock music and people setting themselves on fire. Laws seemed to be the enemy. So we dispensed and dispatched, ceased and desisted: we made up our own rules, and they were loose. We were inventing things, starting over, nothing was wrong. Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. Everything was a ticket out; everything was merging, proceeding, leaving home — all the different forms this took. Love. Peace. Smile on your brother everybody get together.
And we were the sensible girls. We were known as such. We baby-sat. We scored high on Iowa Tests. No matter that sometimes at night we were at the railroad tracks, drunk on 7-Up and whiskey. That we enticed each other out to dance bars by holding the phone next to a stereo playing Deep Purple or Maggie Bell or Grand Funk Railroad until the other said, “OK, OK, let’s go!” The truly wild kids had already left for the pipeline in Alaska or for Boston or Broadway or the med units of Da Nang.
“Oh, yeah. Let’s go,” I said. She had the next day off.
“Oh, good,” she said. “I feel like I never see you anymore.”
Later, as an adult, when I was wonderfully used to long, important conversations in restaurants or bars — books, love, politics, science — talk that licked about like a flame, talk that traveled like roads into the night, guided, or urged, I suppose, by drink and hunger, or some chaos of the heart, it seemed to me strange that I had ever enjoyed spending those nights at the Sans Souci with Sils, because I don’t recall what we ever talked about. I don’t think we had real conversation. We were guitarless, without our music books, we couldn’t sing. But we didn’t really talk, either. We drank and bantered and remarked and gazed around and once in a while when the music got too loud we shouted something at each other and laughed. We smoked cigarettes, the strange brazen dare of it never abating for us, even though it was only one of so many dares we made, over and over. We ordered gin and tonics and held each one up to the black lights on the ceiling to marvel at the spooky blue and then to drink it. We had no idea what life had in store for us; not a clue, not a thoughtful thought. Inevitably a guy — older, drunker — came over to try to pick up Sils. Almost sixteen, she was the sort of fifteen-year-old who looked twenty. I, to my own shame and uncertainty with the bouncer, was the sort who looked twelve.
“How yew girls doin’?” was inevitably how it began, and then usually the guy fussed with the front lock of Sils’s hair, pulling it out of her eyes, or he sat next to her, hip to hip, or he asked what she was drinking or did she want to dance to this song, it was a good song for dancing, it was a good night for dancing, didn’t she think so?
Usually it was a humid night, the boards of the place dank as a river dock. Sometimes I protected her with gruffness or a smirk or a cryptic look to make the guy think we were making fun of him. That he was too old. “It’s only teenage wasteland,” wailed the jukebox during the band’s breaks. I would nudge her.
But sometimes I got up and went to the bathroom, let her deal with him, and sometimes later he would give us a ride home at eleven-thirty, hoping for her, dreaming, waiting for us at the corner while we went to one or the other of our houses, said good night to our mothers, went to our room, stuffed pillows under the covers, making curved and lumpy bodies, then climbed out the window.
They didn’t seem to mind, these men. I swear: often they just didn’t seem to mind. They were half in love already; they were wishing. They wanted servitude to Sils, to get close to her, the prettiness, the breasts, the elegant neck, the long hair fragrant with a girl’s shampoo. We’d dash back to the corner to meet up, and the guy would still be there and we’d climb in, Sils in the front, I in the back, and we’d head up to the lake again and I’d watch the guy’s right arm go slowly up, stealing up behind Sils on the car seat, making its way around her, a cheap stole, and I’d pray there wasn’t a gun. I was a Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now. I prayed for no guns. Once, the year before, there had been a gun, a pistol fetched from the guy’s left boot and waved at us in a wobbly way with his right hand. Our hearts beating and the doors unlocked, when he stopped at a Stop sign, we pushed open the car doors and flew out.
Here he was, a man with spurs and a cowboy hat, wildly pointing a gun at two fourteen-year-old girls, yet stopping, carefully, at all the Stop signs. And so we leaped out and made a dash for it along the road, into some trees, but he got out too, leaving the car running, and chased us with a flashlight, firing his gun once into the air.
Sils froze. I stopped and saw her standing there and so went back, and he burst upon us, crashing through the underbrush, waving the gun. He backed us up against a row of pines and shouted at us to take off our clothes. Sils started to, so then I did too, what else could we have done? I stripped to nothing and stood there in the woods, bare feet on the pine needles and bony roots, one hand behind me clutching the branch of a buckthorn bush, the night sky an eerie, muggy slate, not as dark as it should have been because the moon, though fuzzy from rain, was full as a coin. He looked at me first, shining the light up from my feet, along my scrawny legs and hips and chest to my face and then he laughed coarse and bemused and moved away to flash on Sils, starting from her face, moving down along her shoulders and woman’s breasts and girl’s tight stomach and legs. “That’s right,” he said, moving toward her, and then he put the gun down, “that’s right,” and in the light of the flashlight he still awkwardly held, the beam zigging and zagging, he began to take off his own clothes, not just his pants and spurred boots, but his shirt and his watch and hat, and that’s when I looked at Sils and cried out, and then we both twisted and ran, bolted, naked, tearing our already tough feet, bruising the arches on stones, going fast and blind the three miles it took to get us through the woods, making our way toward one group of trees and then another and another, until we were out the other side, over the new highway overpass and down the Bay Road to Dix, then home, back in through the window before dawn. We sank down, catching our breaths. We lay in bed, next to the pillow bodies, not knowing what we felt; we reminisced our lost outfits.