Finding a Girl in America (6 page)

She cooked all his meals, and she ate with him. She bought fish and fresh vegetables and fruit in town; she never placed an order with the Peters boy, was never in the trailer when he delivered groceries. One night Moissant said he'd smoke with her. He let her roll it for him but he lit it himself, slowly moving the flame's heat up to his mouth. He laughed and wanted a shower and they stood under the spray till the water turned cold, then went to bed without drying and he pressed his face into her long wet hair. Then all the nights after dinner he smoked with her.

Last night she had blood on her clothes when she talked to Scotty. She couldn't even count the houses they had broken into up and down the coast. She didn't want to talk about that. She wanted to talk about stabbing the man and woman. She said she liked it. She had killed a man they robbed in a motel in Colorado. He was a stupid man. He thought they were junkies and if he gave them money they would go away. He was surprised when she stuck her knife in his fat stomach. She would like to stab the chief of police and his two cops. She would save the chief for last. It was nothing personal. She would just like to do it. The other girl was waiting in the van and she and the boy were in the bedroom looking for the money. They were very quiet; they were quieter than the sea. She could hear the waves outside. But the man woke up. She was near the bed when she heard him move. Before he could get his feet on the floor she stabbed him. She stabbed him again while the boy grabbed the woman and put his hand over her mouth. The woman was on her stomach and he was sitting on her back and holding her arms behind her and she was moaning into his hand. He told Linda to look for something to tie her with. Linda said okay and reached across the man and stabbed her in the back. The boy ran out of the house but she kept stabbing till the moaning and jerking stopped.

Lying in the hammock Moissant loved her hands: going down his shirt that first night and combing the hair of his chest while her tongue wet his ear and she whispered; her hands taking off his clothes; her small soft hand stroking slow and patient until she could not close it. In the long nights he kneeled astride her legs and his hands caressed her body, like a child on the beach smoothing a figure made of sand. Under the high sun he was sleepy, was going, a dream starting, pines and fetid marsh breath and seawind in the dream; her smell; her breathing; he was swelling, then erect, and the dream was gone like fog burned away by the sun on his face. Then he slept.

Townies

T
HE CAMPUS SECURITY
guard found her. She wore a parka and she lay on the footbridge over the pond. Her left cheek lay on the frozen snow. The college was a small one, he was the only guard on duty, and in winter he made his rounds in the car. But partly because he was sleepy in the heated car, and mostly because he wanted to get out of the car and walk in the cold dry air, wanted a pleasurable solitude within the imposed solitude of his job, he had gone to the bridge.

He was sixty-one years old, a tall broad man, but his shoulders slumped and he was wide in the hips and he walked with his toes pointed outward, with a long stride which appeared slow. His body, whether at rest or in motion, seemed the result of sixty-one years of erosion, as though all his life he had been acted upon and, with just enough struggle to keep going, he had conceded; fifty years earlier he would have sat quietly at the rear of a classroom, scraped dirt with his shoe on the periphery of a playground. In a way, he was the best man to find her. He was not excitable, he was not given to anger, he was not a man of action: when he realized the girl was dead he did not think immediately of what he ought to do, of what acts and words his uniform and wages required of him. He did not think of phoning the police. He knelt on the snow, so close to her that his knee touched her shoulder, and he stroked her cold cheek, her cold blonde hair.

He did not know her name. He had seen her about the campus. He believed she had died of an overdose of drugs or a mixture of drugs and liquor. This deepened his sorrow. Often when he thought of what young people were doing to themselves, he felt confused and sad, as though in the country he loved there were a civil war whose causes baffled him, whose victims seemed wounded and dead without reason. Especially the girls, and especially these girls. He had lived all his life in this town, a small city in northeastern Massachusetts; once there had been a shoe industry. Now that was over, only three factories were open, and the others sat empty along the bank of the Merrimack. Their closed windows and the dark empty rooms beyond them stared at the street, like the faces of the old and poor who on summer Sundays sat on the stoops of the old houses farther upriver and stared at the street, the river, the air before their eyes. He had worked in a factory, as a stitcher. When the factory closed he got a job driving a truck, delivering fresh loaves of bread to families in time for their breakfast. Then people stopped having their bread delivered. It was a change he did not understand. He had loved the smell of bread in the morning and its warmth in his hands. He did not know why the people he had delivered to would choose to buy bread in a supermarket. He did not believe that the pennies and nickels saved on one expense ever showed up in your pocket.

When they stopped eating fresh bread in the morning he was out of work for a while, but his children were grown and his wife did not worry, and then he got his last and strangest job. He was not an authorized constable, he carried no weapons, and he needed only one qualification other than the usual ones of punctuality and subservience: a willingness to work for very little money. He was so accustomed to all three that none of them required an act of will, not even a moment's pause while he made the decision to take and do the job. When he worked a daylight shift he spent some time ordering possible vandals off the campus: they were usually children on bicycles; sometimes they made him chase them away, and he did this in his long stride, watching the distance lengthen between him and the children, the bicycles. Mostly during the day he chatted with the maintenance men and students and some of the teachers; and he walked the campus, which was contained by an iron fence and four streets, and he looked at the trees. There were trees he recognized, and more that he did not. One of the maintenance men had told him that every kind of New England tree grew here. There was one with thick, low, spreading branches and, in the fall, dark red leaves; sometimes students sat on the branches.

The time he saw three girls in the tree he was fooled: they were pretty and they wore sweaters in the warm autumn afternoon. They looked like the girls he had grown up knowing about: the rich girls who came from all parts of the country to the school, and who were rarely seen in town. From time to time some of them walked the three blocks from the campus to the first row of stores where the commercial part of the town began. But most of them only walked the one block, to the corner where they waited for the bus to Boston. He had smelled them once, as a young man. It was a winter day. When he saw them waiting for the bus he crossed the street so he could walk near them. There were perhaps six of them. As he approached, he looked at their faces, their hair. They did not look at him. He walked by them. He could smell them and he could feel their eyes seeing him and not seeing him. Their smells were of perfume, cold fur, leather gloves, leather suitcases. Their voices had no accents he could recognize. They seemed the voices of mansions, resorts, travel. He was too conscious of himself to hear what they were saying. He knew it was idle talk; but its tone seemed peremptory; he would not have been surprised if one of them had suddenly given him a command. Then he was away from them. He smelled only the cold air now; he longed for their smells again: erotic, unattainable, a world that would never be open to him. But he did not think about its availability, any more than he would wish for an African safari. He knew people who hated them because they were rich. But he did not. In the late sixties more of them began appearing in town and they wore blue jeans and smoked on the street. In the early seventies, when the drinking age was lowered, he heard they were going to the bars at night, and some of them got into trouble with the local boys. Also, the college started accepting boys, and they lived in the dormitories with the girls. He wished all this were not so; but by then he wished much that was happening was not so.

When he saw the three girls in the tree with low spreading branches and red leaves, he stopped and looked across the lawn at them, stood for a moment that was redolent of his past, of the way he had always seen the college girls, and still tried to see them: lovely and nubile, existing in an ambience of benign royalty. Their sweaters and hair seemed bright as the autumn sky. He walked toward them, his hands in his back pockets. They watched him. Then he stood under the tree, his eyes level with their legs. They were all biting silenced giggles. He said it was a pretty day. Then the giggles came, shrill and relentless; they could have been monkeys in the tree. There was an impunity about the giggling that was different from the other graceful impunity they carried with them as they carried the checkbooks that were its source. He was accustomed to that. He looked at their faces, at their vacant eyes and flushed cheeks; then his own cheeks flushed with shame. It was marijuana. He lifted a hand in goodbye.

He was not angry. He walked with lowered eyes away from the giggling tree, walked impuissant and slow across the lawn and around the snack bar, toward the library; then he shifted direction and with raised eyes went toward the ginkgo tree near the chapel. There was no one around. He stood looking at the yellow leaves, then he moved around the tree and stopped to read again the bronze plaque he had first read and marvelled at his second day on the job. It said the tree was a gift of the class of 1941. He stood now as he had stood on that first day, in a reverie which refreshed his bruised heart, then healed it. He imagined the girls of 1941 standing in a circle as one of the maintenance men dug a hole and planted the small tree. The girls were pretty and hopeful and had sweethearts. He thought of them later in that year, in winter; perhaps skiing while the
Arizona
took the bombs. He was certain that some of them lost sweethearts in that war, which at first he had followed in the newspapers as he now followed the Red Sox and Patriots and Celtics and Bruins. Then he was drafted. They made him a truck driver and he saw England while the war was still on, and France when it was over. He was glad that he missed combat and when he returned he did not pretend to his wife and family and friends that he wished he had been shot at. Going over, he had worried about submarines; other than that, he had enjoyed his friends and England and France, and he had saved money. He still remembered it as a pleasurable interlude in his life. Looking at the ginkgo tree and the plaque he happily felt their presence like remembered music: the girls then, standing in a circle around the small tree on that spring day in 1941; those who were in love and would grieve; and he stood in the warmth of the afternoon staring at the yellow leaves strewn on the ground like deciduous sunshine.

So this last one was his strangest job: he was finally among them, not quite their servant like the cleaning women and not their protector either: an unarmed watchman and patrolman whose job consisted mostly of being present, of strolling and chatting in daylight and, when he drew the night shift, of driving or walking, depending on the weather, and of daydreaming and remembering and talking to himself. He enjoyed the job. He would not call it work, but that did not bother him. He had long ago ceased believing in work: the word and its connotation of fulfillment as a man. Life was cluttered with these ideas which he neither believed nor disputed. He merely ignored them. He liked wandering about in this job, as he had liked delivering bread and had liked the Army; only the stitching had been tedious. He liked coming home and drinking coffee in the kitchen with his wife: the daily chatting which seemed eternal. He liked his children and his grandchildren. He accepted the rest of his life as a different man might accept commuting: a tolerable inconvenience. He knew he was not lazy. That was another word he did not believe in.

He kneeled on the snow and with his ungloved hand he touched her cold blonde hair. In sorrow his flesh mingled like death-ash with the pierced serenity of the night air and the trees on the banks of the pond and the stars. He felt her spirit everywhere, fog-like across the pond and the bridge, spreading and rising in silent weeping above him into the black visible night and the invisible space beyond his ken and the cold silver truth of the stars.

On the bridge Mike slipped and cursed, catching himself on the wooden guard rail, but still she did not look back. He was about to speak her name but he did not: he knew if his voice was angry she would not stop and if his voice was pleading she might stop and even turn to wait for him but he could not bear to plead. He walked faster. He had the singular focus that came from being drunk and sad at the same time: he saw nothing but her parka and blonde hair. All evening, as they drank, he had been waiting to lie with her in her bright clean room. Now there would be no room. He caught up with her and grabbed her arm and spun her around; both her feet slipped but he held her up.

‘You asshole,' she said, and he struck her with his fist, saw the surprise and pain in her eyes, and she started to speak but he struck her before she could; and when now she only moaned he swung again and again, holding her up with his left hand, her parka bunched and twisted in his grip; when he released her she fell forward. He kicked her side. He knew he should stop but he could not. Kicking, he saw her naked in the bed in her room. She was slender. She moaned and gasped while they made love; sometimes she came so hard she cried. He stopped kicking. He knew she had died while he was kicking her. Something about the silence of the night, and the way her body yielded to his boot.

He looked around him: the frozen pond, the tall trees, the darkened library. He squatted down and looked at her red-splotched cheek. He lifted her head and turned it and lowered it to the snow. Her right cheek was untouched; now she looked asleep. In the mornings he usually woke first, hung over and hard, listening to students passing in the hall. Now on the snow she looked like that: in bed, on her pillow. Under the blanket he took her hand and put it around him and she woke and they smoked a joint; then she kneeled between his legs and he watched her hair going up and down.