Backseat Saints (25 page)

“Okay, Arlene. I guess you never were one for social graces. That’s fine,” I said. “It’s kind of a long story, but if you
want the short, standing-in-a-stairwell version, I can do that. I got in a fight with my therapist, and now I’m on a spiritual
journey. Congratulations, you’re my next stop.”

She didn’t rise to my shrink bait. She held up one hand to stop me talking and said, “If this is some sort of Twelve Step
thing, making amends or whatever, fine. I forgive you. Now I need to go catch Burr.”

“Forgive me for what?” I said, dumbfounded. I wasn’t the one who’d stalked her all over school. I hadn’t gone up on Lipsmack
to have a mysterious and likely horizontal powwow with her boyfriend. We did a three-step dance in the hallway as she tried
to get around me again.

I altered my tack slightly. I’d heard her fella pitch her into a door, so maybe she was a romantic now, Ro Grandee style.
“Wait, Arlene, one minute. I’m sorry I sounded snippy. I really do need your help. I’m only doing what you’re trying to do,
too. Going after the one that got away.”

She paused then, and her eyes got cagey. “Whatever this is, it can’t have anything to do with me.”

This was the first time she’d stood still and truly listened to me since the door flew open. I kept going, winging it. “But
it does, indirectly. See, my therapist said I get crappy men because I go looking for them, not because men are mostly crappy.
She thinks I choose assholes because that’s what I think I deserve, blah blah, masochism, blah blah, low self-esteem. You
know how shrinks talk.”

“No,” Arlene said pointedly. “I don’t.”

“With your mother? Come on.” That hit her low, and she took a step back. I followed. “Anyway, she’s wrong. I’ve been thinking
through my romantic history, looking for a guy I picked who wasn’t an asshole. If I can find just one, then my shrink is wrong
and it isn’t me, it’s the men. And there is one, I know it. I remember. But I need you to help me find him.”

“Find him?” she said. Now she was truly edging backwards, and I followed her, because that caginess in her eyes had deepened,
and she knew where this conversation was going. I hadn’t been all wrong. She knew something. I followed her step for step
in a backwards dance that I was leading, even though her feet shuffled first. I got in close, kissing close, predator close,
nailing her down and holding her with sheer animal will.

“I have to find Jim Beverly,” I said.

His name rolled out into the stairwell, and its presence changed her. She became in the space between those two words the
ugly weasel I’d known, the one who had followed me all over Fruiton High, scrutinizing my every sneeze and shuffle as she
tried to catch me stealing. Her shoulders folded in and her face went white as
poached chicken. Her throat clicked, like she was trying to dry-swallow a mouthful of mini-ball shot. Her eyes went wide.
She was afraid, as if she was so allergic to his name, its very syllables could swell her throat closed and stop her breathing.

Two seconds at most passed, then she went leaping wildly backwards into her apartment and slammed the door. I heard the bolt
slam home and the rattle of a chain.

I stood panting in her stairwell. “Arlene?” I called. I tapped at the door.

Nothing. I knocked again, harder.

“Arlene? This is ridiculous. I need maybe five minutes of your time,” I called. My new steel toe shot out and kicked the door
as hard as I could. It made a satisfying clap of angry sound.

The only response I got was a barrage of obnoxious music coming through the wood.

Arlene Fleet knew. She knew where Jim had gone and why, but that information was locked up inside with her.

I was powerless to get it out.

T
HE NEXT MORNING, I lay for Arlene outside of the classroom where she was teaching. Ambush time. Her job offered no easy door
that she could lock between us. She wouldn’t want a scene, and I was willing to stage an entire opera on the campus green,
complete with hair rending and the wailings of the damned, if that was what it took.

I leaned up against the wall with my new boots crossed, trying to look relaxed and in control. By the time she came out of
the room, head down, deep in thought, my shoulders were aching and my knees were trembling with the effort it took to hold
the pose.

“Hey, Arlene,” I said.

She did a double take that ended in a recoil. “How did you find me?” Her voice came out in a mousy scratch.

“They gave me your course schedule up in the English Department.”

“No,” she said. “I mean how did you know I worked here, or my address? How did you even know to look in Chicago?” She was
clutching a soft leather satchel like a briefcase, and now she shifted it in front of her so it was between us.

“Oh, that,” I said. “I talked to Bud.”

“Bud Freeman?” Arlene sounded incredulous now. “My cousin Clarice’s husband?”

I nodded, and she turned away from me without another word and walked off at a good clip, heading out the front doors and
across the quad.

I boosted myself off the wall and came after her. She wasn’t running, exactly, but it was close. I trotted to keep up, relentless.
With the whole green lawn of the quad in front of us, where could she go?

“Hold up, Arlene. I just need to ask you a couple of questions and then I swear I won’t bother you anymore.”

Then she did start running, actually running away from me, like I was some sort of vampirous animal that had crawled out from
under her bed to make a God’s honest try for a daytime chew on her vitals. I broke into a lope, too, raising my voice.

“I called your cousin Clarice, but she wasn’t home and I ended up talking to Bud. He told me you talked to Jim Beverly, the
night Jim wrecked his Jeep.”

Arlene stopped so fast that I barreled into her. His name had retained its magical effect on her. It was like she’d been hypnotized
at a party once, and now the words
Jim Beverly
made her body jerk and panic. We stood facing each other, exactly eye to eye. She was breathing hard, as if we’d run a marathon
together instead of dogtrotting halfway across a quad.

“I didn’t talk to him,” Arlene said, but she came down hard on the word
talk
, and I stepped in a little closer, pressing my advantage.

“But you saw him?” I asked. I grabbed her arm, trying to make her look at me. “Where was he? What was he doing?”

She pulled away so hard, I almost overbalanced. “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s nothing I can tell you about this.”

Then I did make her meet my eyes. I willed it fierce, and I thought his name like a talisman, thought it so hard that it was
like she heard it and her mouth trembled and her unwilling eyes met mine. When I had her, I said, “I don’t believe you. I
know you saw him.”

She wet her lips with her tongue, as if she was about to speak.
Her gaze darted away and then back to me, away and then back. She made a throat-clearing noise, and then all at once she wheeled
and bounded away again, tearing her arm out of my grasp. She went so quick that she ran right out of her shoes. She left them
lying in the grass by a stand of four oak trees, and then she dropped her briefcase, too, like she was shedding.

I watched with my mouth hanging open as Arlene Fleet bounced and grabbed a low branch. She went shimmying up one of the trees,
barefoot monkey style.

“Arlene?” I called. “What are you doing?”

She didn’t answer, picking her way from branch to branch, climbing so high that if she lost her balance and fell, her bones
would snap and crackle against the earth like kiddie breakfast cereal.

“Arlene, this is ridiculous,” I yelled up at her. “Get down here.”

A crowd of students was gathering, smelling drama, but Arlene ignored us all. She crammed her tiny butt into a fork, sitting
way up in the tree as stoic as Tiger Lily, her long dark hair blowing back from her face as she pointed her nose into the
wind and stared out across campus.

I hollered, “You can’t stay up there in that tree forever. You have to come and talk to me.” No response. I cast about wildly
for an idea, and my gaze landed on her loafers. “If you don’t get down here, I am going to take your shoes!”

One of the kids who was watching gave me a poisonous look and said, “You are not taking her shoes.” The kid snatched up the
loafers before I could, and then her friend grabbed Arlene’s briefcase for good measure. They marched indignantly to the side
with their prizes, standing over them like a pair of pimply avenging angels.

Arlene stayed where she was, as still and absent as a catatonic. She had somehow made the world go away and me with it.

“Oh, that’s so fucking Zen, Arlene,” I hollered. “You get your ass down here and you tell me where he is!”

Behind me, I heard one girl say to another in wise tones, “Oh! Boyfriend trouble.”

The other said, “Are they twins? Was he screwing twins?”

I wheeled around and snapped at them, “I don’t look like her.” I almost screamed it, really.

The two girls exchanged a nervous glance, then they turned away and started walking. The first one said to her friend, “Jeez,
what did he
do
to them?”

“He didn’t do a single fucking thing to me,” I yelled after them. They sped up, the first one peeking back over her shoulder
at me with wide eyes. I realized that if someone asked her to find the crazy lady in this picture, she’d have to flip a coin
to choose between me and Arlene Fleet.

They were out of range, but I said it anyway. “He didn’t do a single thing to her, either.”

Even as I said it, I found that I did not believe it.

I turned back and stared up at Arlene on her perch. I’d thought to ambush her at work and threaten to make a crazy scene,
but she’d out-crazy-scened me. Her reaction to his very name was immediate, and the only word for it was terrified. She knew
about Jim Beverly all right, more than I did.

Something had happened between Jim and Arlene, and now his very name put Arlene three baby steps from prancing naked off a
building singing the “Gloria.” Only now, with her body trembling up in the treetops and her mind gone to a happy place, with
me baying up at her like a foaming mad hound dog, was it occurring to me that those two things had to be related.

“What
did
he do to you?” I asked, too quiet for Arlene to hear me, even if she had chosen that moment to come back inside her body.
All at once, I felt so light-headed that I had to put out a hand and steady myself on the oak’s broad trunk. I’d puked up
everything I’d eaten in the last two days. I was exhausted, too. I hadn’t gotten much sleep last night. This close to finals,
the school’s library was open twenty-four hours. I’d camped out there, sharing a crackly vinyl sofa with a blond girl who
was trying to absorb her engineering text by pillowing her head upon its cover.

I pushed off the tree and started walking, leaving Arlene Fleet to sit up there until the Second Coming if she wanted. I could
stay in Chicago and pop out at her from under bushes and out of dark alleys, but she wasn’t going to tell me where Jim was
or what ugly thing had happened between them.

I left the campus, retracing my path down the same indifferent Chicago streets I’d walked yesterday. Then it had felt as free
as swimming naked. Now, being so unknown and unmoored was frightening enough to put me close to tears. These were not my streets.
The only person I knew in this city was building herself a marriage much like mine, and she hated me.

Whatever Jim had done to her, it was very, very bad. I knew he was capable of very, very badness. He was capable of anything.
There had been something in Jim that had spoken to me, monster to monster. The reverent way he’d touched my bruised belly.
The calico cat with her head on backwards. I’d only seen glimpses, had guesses, but it was real and there, or else I would
not have come to Chicago to retrieve him. I’d been looking for a weapon, and I’d thought of guns first and then Jim Beverly.
That should have told me something.

My body was too achy with tired to keep on walking. I crossed the street and caught a bus that was heading east, back toward
Arlene’s crappy neighborhood. I sat up front, in the handicapped seats that faced sideways, resting my face against the cool
silver pole.

Jim had always been so sweet with me. But I’d known then and I knew now that I’d been held separate from the darker pieces
of his life. Hell, I’d been held separate from most of his life. On Friday nights, after the football game, we’d go off alone.
The “Hot Donuts Now” sign would be flashing at the Krispy Kreme. I’d have coffee and a doughnut, and he’d have coffee and
six doughnuts, just the two of us. His hair would still be damp from the showers, and I’d put one hand on his neck and run
it up and down the back of his head. The velveteen and springy wheatgrass feel of his buzz cut was a pleasure.

No other football boys would be there. None of their steady girls came, ever. It was a rathole in Fruiton’s small and seedy
downtown, with bright blue-green Formica counters and pumpkin-colored vinyl on all the stools and booths. It looked like a
demented and slightly color-blind Auburn fan had been cut loose in there to decorate. Our fellow customers were bums, drifters
from the Greyhound station, and Fruiton High’s small population of stoner kids. The stoners liked to stare through the huge
plateglass window behind the counter, watching the big doughnut machine crank out the good stuff. We sat, a closed unit of
two, and watched them watching. We were the only two sober kids in the building, on the block, maybe in the whole damn town.
Everyone we knew was grunt pumping cheap beer over at Missy Carver’s house.