Angela Sloan (14 page)

Mrs. Gandy watched us go, straight in her white robe, holding Estevan by his collar.

S
ometimes it is better not to think the big thoughts. You want to focus on
what's in front of you.
And yet the inside of a car at night seems like it was made for brooding, and there are places in West Virginia where, because of the mountains, you can't get anything on the radio but static and weird electric whines. Weird popping strings and deep elastic hums. The world is dark like a box you're inside of. Maybe you can sit through an hour of it without thinking, but to not think for a second hour is difficult with only the snapping electric sounds and nothing else to distract you from whatever's in your head.

I kept seeing those three awful children with the bows around their necks. I imagined the bows coming loose and the heads dropping off those rigid bodies in their starched old-fashioned outfits. Doll heads rolling in grass. The night mind is different from the daytime mind.

My fists held the hard plastic wheel, and I thought of Ray's big-knuckled fists pulling the wet sheet tightly around him during the time when he was sickest and didn't understand where he was. So he'd had a real daughter. I could have guessed it, and maybe I'd known. That passport. I had studied it many times, wondering. The picture hardly mattered—babies look so much alike, and seldom resemble the people they grow up to be. That the year of birth was so far off had never been a problem. It was like Betty said—people don't look and are easy to fool.

There were numerous reasons for Ray and me never to have talked about that real daughter. I understood. It is a principle in clandestine work that you only tell a person what she needs to know in order to do her part, and there was no need—no operational need—for me to know about Ray's wife and child. The thing that did upset me rather badly was the thought of what it had cost Ray to keep it all to himself. Perhaps it had cost him heavily. I thought about all those nights when
I'd been upstairs with my shortwave listening to those goofy English lessons, while Ray was downstairs cracking the ice tray against the countertop and emptying glasses of bourbon into his body. A person never knows what's in another person's mind. I wondered whether Ray had not allowed himself to suffer too much. He could have told me about that daughter safely, because I am better at keeping a secret than almost anyone. To keep it by himself was too hard! I could hardly bear to think about it now. I choked back my sniveling so as not to wake Betty.

Red and blue lights flashed behind me, and I jumped. Colored shadows crawled over the dashboard. I pulled the Scamp over to the soft edge of the road. All right: so this was it. But the police car only swerved and went by, its siren like a spade on my chest. Betty had sat up in the back seat. She lay down again.

I felt completely lost. And then, all at once, I knew what I had to do. Ray wouldn't like it, but I intended to bring this up with him. I would tell him that I knew about this daughter. That's all. And if he wanted to tell me about her—well, I doubted he would. But at least she would have been spoken of, and her existence revived in this way.

I felt a little lighter inside. Ray was my friend, and I was his. The hours to go before daylight didn't seem so long anymore. From time to time I saw a pair of eyes like dimes looking into my headlights from close to the ground—small creatures at their business of breaking acorns. Ray and I were that way, too: busy animals put on earth to crack things open and eat what was inside them.

I was sleepy and let my outside tires go off the road. Betty shouted. It did me some good. There was no point in killing us both in a car wreck out here in the mountains.

Some color came into the sky. My eyes felt filmed over, and I can't say how badly I desired to brush my teeth. Betty climbed up front.

“Where are we?” she said.

“Kentucky. We're going out West for a while.”

“Sign says we are going out South.”

I explained to her that even on a trip out West, one is bound to go north or south from time to time, because of the nature of roads. “Also, signs can be wrong.”

Folded on the seat was an Esso map of Kentucky. I switched on the interior
light and told Betty the number of the expressway to look for. Betty was surprised to learn that the Scamp had a light that could be turned on inside. She studied the map without comment, then folded it wrong.

I pulled over to study it myself. I had expected us to be on the expressway by now. For hours we'd threaded through the terrain as a creek would do. But my head was murky, and I couldn't make out where we were.

Later, when we did come to the expressway, we found that it was under construction. In the early weak daylight we saw clean notches cut through the mountain and two rows of concrete pilings, partly spanned. Sheets of plastic hung ragged at the raw end of a bridge deck. Steel bars jutted from it like fish bones.

B
y daylight I was a severe kind of tired. A white barn with red mud around it floated near the road. Some starlings had lined up on the silver roof, and their feet were stuck in the new paint, I imagined. I was consulting the Kentucky map while cresting a hill and holding the steering wheel with my left knee when Betty said, “Uh-oh. Cow in road!”

I stood on the brake, and the Scamp slid sideways. One wheel dropped off the pavement. We rocked once and were still.

The cow was black. It pulled its big head out of the ditch grass and rolled an eye.

“You should not look at the map when you drive!” Betty said.

“This free map was no bargain!” I said. “We're not even on it! This so-called ‘
Happy Motoring
Guide.'” I wadded it up.

“If a car will come over the hill behind us now, we are going to die,” Betty said.

I tried to reverse the Scamp uphill, but the tire that had come off the road only spun. In front of us, the cow blocked the way. When I honked at her, she showed me her square hindquarters.

“No more setting out without a plan!” I said.

Evidently this cow had been honked at before. My honking didn't alarm her in any way. She had never had shrill Communist slogans shouted at her by an arm-waving Chinese, however. That was new. Away she jogged, with Betty jogging after her. Betty looked different, chasing a cow down the road. Sitting in the car with her for hour upon hour it was easy to forget how small she was.

I put the Scamp in drive and touched the gas, nudging it downhill and back onto the road. Around the bend, I caught Betty waving goodbye to the cow. The cow had gone back into her pasture at a spot where the fence was down.

My stomach felt as though it had some air in it. The lesson I was learning, not for the first time, was that you can go without food and you can go without sleep, but you can't go without food
and
without sleep. Betty, having napped and been for a jog, now bounced on the front seat and sang a Red Chinese grade school song, which she translated as she went. “All the flowers love him, baby goats also love him, people in field love him,” etc. She did not explain who
him
was. The song had hand movements to go with it. Politely I asked her to be quiet and stop bouncing or else I would certainly lose my mind, and she crossed her arms and went into one of her funks.

W
e passed a sign saying
KNOXVILLE CITY LIMITS
. I could not find it on our Kentucky map. Yet the town was of some size, judging by the vastness of its GM dealership. We stopped at a café called Roby's, I believe, and Betty cursed me for a long time in Chinese while we waited for some menus. I startled her by cursing back in imitation Chinese.

“Don't this one speak English?” the waitress said.

“Count your blessings.”

“Where's she from?”

“Formosa,” I said. It just came out.

“Tell her I said,
Hello and welcome to Tennessee.
”

“Excuse me, what?”

“Hello and welcome to Tennessee.”

I studied the waitress, confused. She appeared to be wearing white eye shadow. You only saw it when she turned a certain way.

“Go on, tell her,” the waitress said. “I know you speak her language. I heard you talking when I come over here.”

Feeling that it would be the simplest way, I spoke some more of my imitation Chinese.

Betty sat up straight. Syllables came out of her mouth.

“She don't sound happy!”

“Their language always sounds grumpy like that,” I said. “She asks me to thank you and to tell you she would like to try your American-style bacon and two fried eggs. I'll have the biscuits and gravy, please.”

Later the waitress brought the cook out to see us, I mean only to look. He stood in the kitchen doorway.

So this was Tennessee.

As we were eating, a girl in a brown leotard and bell-bottom jeans
came to speak with the cook. “I have to give you back that money for the orphans in Palookadong,” she said.

I eavesdropped. Some boys at college had signed her up for a coin drive to buy record players for the blind orphans at Palookadong, so the orphans could listen to
Time
magazine. The girl collected almost twenty dollars in an oatmeal canister. Then she found out that Palookadong was not a real place. She asked the cook to remember how much money he had contributed.

“A dollar.”

“He never give you any dollar,” the waitress with the white eyelids said. “Look in that can and see have you got a dirty nickel that was run over by a train. He might've give you that.”

“No,” the cook said, “I give her several quarters to help those blond orphans.”

“They was blind, you idiot.”

“It was raining that day,” the cook said. “I remember you come in here with your hair dripping. Isn't that right?”

The girl's hair was long, straight, and reddish gold in color. “Maybe it was raining,” she said.

“Either that or you had washed it,” he said. “But it was sure dripping!” He jabbed his finger at a pin on her leotard. “Why would you waste a vote on McGovern?”

“George speaks to my generation,” the girl said. “Bobby Kennedy called George the most decent man in the Senate.”

“That's like calling him a clean turd.”

“Those two over there speak Formosan,” the waitress mentioned.

The girl in the brown leotard eyed us shyly and smiled at Betty. I worried she might come over, but then the cook announced that he did not want his quarters back, and to my relief the girl skipped out the door.

It was my first time eating biscuits with sausage gravy. They made an excellent inexpensive breakfast. Betty ate her eggs with a spoon.

B
etty asked me whether gum-chewing would be healthy for her teeth. It couldn't have hurt them any. I encouraged her to give it a second try. I showed her how to put a penny in the Lions Club gum machine and slide the lever to get a gumball out. On the way out of Roby's we got her several gumballs. Then, in the parking lot, the right rear tire of the Scamp was flat.

With the biscuits and sausage gravy in me, I took it in my stride. “This is why we carry a spare,” I said.

I was at the trunk when someone spoke behind me. It was the girl in the brown leotard, accompanied by a long, slouching fellow with a fringe of mustache and bangs in his eyes.

“They told us your friend is from Formosa,” she said.

“That's right.”

“Eeyore can help you change your tire.”

The boy lifted the spare out and dropped it. It rolled away. Off he went after it, Roman sandals slapping the pavement. His pants had colored stripes down the length of them, and the sandals looked as though they had not come off his feet for several weeks.

As he rolled the tire back across the parking lot he appeared sad and embarrassed. Even the feet with their long, groping toes expressed melancholy. The girl, however, was just as bright and cheery as you could ever want. I had the jack in my hands, and she said, “Eeyore, you can do that.” Eeyore puzzled over how to fit the handle on.

“I never met anyone from Formosa before,” the girl said.

Betty stayed in the Scamp during all this, working on her gum-balls. She added them to her mouth one by one, with long, attentive intervals between. In an effort to dominate the situation, I led the girl to Betty's window and said, “This is my friend who is visiting from Formosa and does not speak a word of English.”

“What is her name?” the girl said.

“Ding Lo.”

“Hello, Ding. My name is Renee.” Renee shook Betty's hand through the window then asked me my name. I told her something which I immediately forgot.

The boy dropped the jack handle on his sandaled foot and began to softly moan. Renee hustled over, cooing. There was a lengthy fuss during which I tried to remember what I had said my name was. Renee had Eeyore limp over to some grass and sit. He had sustained a short laceration on his pointer toe.

I levered up the jack in the spot where Eeyore had placed it. Next I was interrupted by a woman with a scarf around her neck whistling at me from a white Chevy Caprice.

The woman left her car. She studied the jack for only a moment, then took the handle away from me and used it to knock the jack out from under the Scamp. Where Eeyore had placed it, she said, it would only have crumpled the sheet metal. “You need to get your friend out of the car as well,” she added.

I pulled Betty out. The woman raised the jack under the rear bumper. “Look how I'm doing this,” she said. “You want to loosen the lug nuts before you get the tire all the way off the ground.” In her blouse, scarf, tailored skirt, and tall zipper boots she applied herself to the task while the injured hippie boy lay vaporing, attended by his cheerful Renee. Inside of ten minutes my Good Samaritan had the spare on and had showed me the bright head of a nail in the tread of my tire. “Have that patched at your first opportunity,” she said. “Not plugged, but patched.” She had on large, green-framed sunglasses. She frowned at her wristwatch and left.