Angela Sloan (19 page)

Only then did I remember the brown envelope. And the picture. So stupid! I bent to get it. The knapsack was at the bottom, flap side down, and my arms were shaking. Betty was screaming something. There wasn't time.

“Marilyn will see you!” Betty said.

I had to let something go, so I gave up the envelope. I pushed down on the rock. The engine raced.

Marilyn's headlights bounced. From the driver's-side door, I jerked the gearshift lever. The car jumped, veering toward me. I pushed the steering wheel to straighten it. Betty had my arm. She tore me free of the car, and we bolted, me in my one shoe.

The Caprice's headlights lit the Scamp as the Scamp cruised over the edge of the bridge deck. It didn't go straight off. It hit the edge at an angle, bottomed out, scraped, and tipped and went over, out of sight. The engine ran away and whined. There was a long, slow crash when the car hit the water.

Marilyn stopped. She walked up ahead of the Caprice and stood in her headlights in her men's pajamas. Betty and I lay flat behind a bundle of steel bars. Marilyn wasn't looking for us, though. She thought she knew where we were.

Pretty soon she left. Betty and I ran off into the darkness, and that was when something hit me in the face.

B
etty ran on some ways until she noticed I wasn't with her anymore. Upon coming back to me, she claims, she found me lying stone dead with my hair full of warm blood under the scoop of a front-end loader. She pounded on my chest until my heart began to “walk” again, as she put it. She placed my limp body over her shoulder and carried me several miles along the side of a rocky hill in the dark.

She washed my face and hair in a hole of dirty water. I revived. She then persuaded a garbage man to drive us to North Carolina in his garbage truck.

I have no memory of any of that, so I can't vouch for how she got us to North Carolina. She did it somehow. As for my having died and come back, I would say that she imagined or made that part up, except for one thing. When I finally did come to—I mean when I was able to look around myself and see that I was in the woods, barefooted now and wearing someone else's dress—there was one thing missing from my head, and that was my usually reliable sense of how long I had been asleep. It was not like waking up. It was more like starting from Go.

I was thirsty and confused. When I closed my eyes, my mother's plain, kind face seemed to hover in my brain, and I remembered her singing and gently scolding me.

Then I thought of the picture of Ray with his daughter and wife that I had lost, and I sat up. Everything came back to me now, and I couldn't believe I had been so stupid. All my money was gone as well.

The loss of the money was serious, and yet it was the loss of those people in the picture that discouraged me more. How could I ever tell Ray what I'd done? I had no right to lose the last trace of them.

I recalled the family set of stolen driver's licenses that I had seen at Lucky Bus Tour. Those sad, smiling faces. It made me feel bleak.
Names can float off one way, faces another. People can just get lost. Most people will be remembered a little while, not long.

I lay like a rug in the dappled, humid spot in the woods where Betty had put me.

A creek muttered nearby. At my side I had a hump of mossy limestone. Below the leaves, the black soil had cottony white tendrils in it, tiny red mites, and bits of sparkling mica. A blotch of sunlight crept up my leg. I watched it go.

There was nothing to do but slowly eat the time. I thought of Ray Sloan on surveillance and surveillance detection drills in Newport News and Williamsburg. In a parked car with his elbow out the window and a cigarette burning in his fingers, he remained still for so long that he sometimes resembled a mannequin.

The use of being still, he told me once, is that there is a range of things you will never see, until the rustle of your most recent movement has completely dissipated. “The first half hour doesn't count,” he said.

It was true. I was staring at a mound of violets by my leg when I saw that the thing just behind them was a box turtle. It had a yellow rim around its eye.

Another hour went.

A dark bird the size of a duck or a little bigger swooped in and took a short, clumsy walk along the creek. Its bill was sharp, and its curving neck was as long as its body. A black crest pointed backward from its head. I have since looked it up: it was the
Butorides striatus
or green heron.

To avoid confusion it is better to learn a creature's Latin name when you can. For example, the bird called a redstart in England is the
Phoenicurus phoenicurus,
but the bird we call a redstart over here is a
Setophaga ruticilla.
Two different birds.

I like to keep things straight like that, though I suppose it doesn't matter to the bird what you call it, no more than it matters to the dead person when at last his name has floated away. It doesn't matter, does it? I'll remember while I'm alive. The world will carry on. I don't really think I died this time, but if so, dying was not so awfully bad.

D
ays passed. Betty fed me from cans of deviled ham, tuna, and fruit cocktail. When I asked for something different, she left and came back with a can of potato sticks and a fresh pear. She also brought me some jeans, a Western-style shirt with snaps, and tennis shoes. I asked Betty how much cash she had left.

“Hundred dollar.”

“That can't be right,” I said. “I took back that hundred at the motel the other night, so it's gone now. How did you get all the food and these clothes?”

“Stole.”

“Wait a minute. Are you talking about the hundred I gave you at the lake? I thought you broke it buying clothes at the Sears in Knoxville.”

“I stole!”

“You walked out of Sears without paying?”

“Mm.”

I contemplated her. As I've said, there wasn't much to her—just a wiry brown Chinese girl who looked like she wouldn't mind fighting. Some people are that way, and it has nothing to do with being Oriental or not. Her hands were black because she'd been scraping mud off an enamel pot that she'd pulled from the creek. It made me sad and frustrated to think she would salvage a dirty chipped pot when there were a hundred U.S. dollars tucked away in one of those secret pockets.

“I worry about you stealing things, Betty,” I said. “That's not how we do it here! Get caught, and it causes me all kinds of problems. Now you're stealing potato sticks. The whole can costs twenty-seven cents! You're an illegal alien. Just pay for the can!”

“I never will be bother by police. Only have to be a little smart.”

“I know you are a little smart. I'm talking about best practices.”

“You do not trust me,” she said. “You are bad to me. I am very angry now. Maybe I will leave you alone in this wilderness.” She threw some leaves on me.

“Don't do that. I'm sorry,” I said.

“Not enough! Not enough.”

“What do you want me to do?”

She barked something, climbed over a fallen tree trunk, and stomped away.

It was time for us to move along. I knew something about Betty that Betty didn't know: namely, a meal in a restaurant would do her a world of good. At her best she was no Mary Poppins, but the grouchiness had hit a new extreme here in the woods. I also had begun to form a notion in my mind about heading south to Florida. Why not? My next idea was a change in our appearances.

I got on my feet. I could walk okay. That afternoon, Betty and I walked into the town of Singleton, North Carolina. It wasn't much, just a couple dozen storefronts along Main Street. You could take the whole place in with a turn of your head. A man with a beard like a dirty hand towel winked at me on the sidewalk.

I checked a paper in the door of a newspaper machine. It was the third of July, a Monday, and the hairstylist's shop was closed. An establishment called Beauty's Light Touch Grooming was open for business, however. I told the lady what I wanted.

“This is a dog-grooming establishment,” the lady said. “I don't do girls' hair.”

“But you could.”

“It doesn't work that way, dear.”

The drugstore next door had a delightful smell coming out of it. “Let's go in here and break that hundred,” I said. We took a pair of stools at the counter. “I am getting a grilled cheese with onions on it, and I want you to order whatever you like,” I told Betty. She chose a ham sandwich.

If you have ever watched a cat enjoy a ham sandwich, that was how Betty ate hers, too. She flipped the bread over and devoured the ham from inside, then picked at the lettuce and the tomato slice. I saw her forehead become smooth again. I noted, too, that she was one of these
people who raise their eyebrows when taking a bite. I was getting to know old Betty pretty well.

The onions on my grilled cheese sandwich were finely minced. The bread had been grilled rather dark, per my request. I was so pleased with my sandwich and with myself for thinking of it that I hardly noticed the tall boy sliding his sandals over the dusty tile until, by accident, our eyes met. It was Eeyore! He looked away shyly, giving no sign of having recognized me. He slouched away to the register, where he paid for a wind-up alarm clock and carried it out of the drugstore in a paper bag.

I thought we were okay. Betty fed with her face two inches from the plate, so maybe he hadn't noticed her. My own face was nothing memorable, I supposed. Then someone cried out, “Ding!”

It was Renee. She ran toward us, hurling a smile ahead of her.

I
was very suspicious, and I nearly came right out and asked Renee, “Who has sent you after us?” But before I could get the question out she clapped both her arms around me.

“I've got friends everywhere!” she proclaimed.

We were on the sidewalk now—Renee, old long Eeyore in his sandal shoon, Betty/Ding, and me, whom Renee kept calling Lucy, since that was the name I had told her back in Knoxville, evidently.

“Why are you here?” I said.

“I don't know!” she said. She laughed in her high-spirited way, and even Eeyore couldn't help smiling, though he tried not to. Then Renee spun and gave her hair a great flick so that it flew out in a platter shape with the sun pouring over it. Honestly, she was quite a specimen. She caught the eye of the man with the hand-towel beard.

“You're pretty,” he said.

“
Thanks,
” Renee answered politely.

He worked his hands rapidly one against the other, as though he were knitting. He was dressed in crusty jeans and four flannel shirts. “You sure are pretty,” he said.

Eeyore squirmed. He was a foot and a half taller than the other man but lacked his intensity. “We better go,” Eeyore said.

“Will you and Ding come meet our friends?” Renee asked me.

“Yes,” the man with the beard said.

I asked her who her friends were.

“Dirk and Wilhelmina.”

Confused, I agreed. We climbed into a white van, all of us but the “You're pretty” man. “I'm sorry you can't come with us,” Renee told him.

“Why can't I come with you, pretty girl?”

“Eeyore doesn't want you to.”

It caused Renee real pain to disappoint this fellow. He called, “Goodbye, goodbye!” and she blew him kisses out the front passenger window as Eeyore drove us away.

It was a Ford cargo van. The interior had been furnished in the style of a hippie sitting room, with shell beads in the windows, a short daybed, and a fan-backed wicker garden chair that slid freely over the steel deck. It smelled like old laundry and leaf smoke in there.

“Nice van,” I said.

“It's Dirk and Wilhelmina's,” Renee said. “But Dirk doesn't like to drive. He and Wilhelmina live
an ascetic lifestyle.
”

“Is that right?”

“You will like Wilhelmina. Everything she says is super gassy.”

“Where am I going?” Betty said.

That was the first she had spoken since we'd left the drugstore. Renee turned in her seat to look, and only then did the whole business come back to me about Ding not knowing English.

“
Bless you!
” I said to Betty.

Renee blinked at me.

“
Gesundheit,
” Eeyore said.

F
ive or six miles out of town, Eeyore stopped to let Renee open a gate. We struggled another half mile in first gear along two uneven ruts between drooping hemlock branches. The track opened into a clearing with a funny cottage made of salvage in the middle of it.

One end of the cottage was covered in clapboard with the bark still on, the other clad in roof metal. The covered porch was built of sticks. The whole thing had been painted red like a barn.

The roof was tiled with overlapping squares of green and white linoleum. A porcelain bathtub had caught some rainwater under the gutterless eaves. In the yard a two-seater bicycle lay on its side with grass growing up through the spokes.

Somewhere out of sight, a shrill male voice complained. A second voice answered, cool, sharp, and female. Renee popped her eyes at me. “Sometimes they get pretty cross with each other,” she whispered.

As we came around the corner of the cottage we saw a woman in muddy fatigue pants and a muddy black turtleneck. She stood facing a bush. Perhaps it wasn't so much a bush as a hump of leaves and brush, like when a fence post has grown over with honeysuckle. “Your elbows are sticking out,” she said to the bush or hump. She kicked it with her boot, and the hump of brush bounced before it was still again.

Renee called out hello, and the woman turned suddenly. She looked hard at Betty, then at me.

Renee had grabbed our hands. “Wilhelmina, this is Lucy! And this is Ding. We met them last week in Knoxville, and then we ran into them again! Isn't it funny?”