Further Out Than You Thought (22 page)

“Oh, oh, I want, I want!” Valiant chanted. He was a child, clapping his hands. “I want a chocolate banana bullet.”

Leo got out of the car. Gwen saw the driver stiffen and look from Leo to Valiant, askance. Leo must have mentioned Gwen—figuring the girl factor would win them points—because the driver glanced at her and when she waved and smiled he waved and smiled back. He was missing a tooth. He was Latino, older, with the sort of dark, soft, wrinkled skin her grandmother had in her later years. The light turned green and a car behind them honked and Leo dashed into the backseat with five different ice creams wrapped in plastic.

“My lady,” he said, offering her the bouquet of ice creams.

“This one's mine,” said Valiant, and took the bullet.

Gwen chose the strawberry shortcake and the Fudgesicle, leaving Leo with the mint-chip ice cream sandwich and Tweety. She tore the plastic from the strawberry shortcake with her teeth and took a bite. She could feel Leo's eyes on her, his disbelief.

“It's good to see you eat, Tink,” he said.

“We can share,” she said. “If you want a bite of these.”

“You want bites of these?”

She grinned. “You know, I just might.”

They took the 405 South. La Cienega was out of the question, and the freeway was a holy, beautiful sight—empty, with only a smattering of cars. It was a shining river and they were in it, floating in their little rowboat downstream, floating away. When the roads were jammed and she was headed out of the city, she'd feel a bright urgency with its dull undertone of panic clawing at her stomach. As if she might not make it out before the city folded closed like a game of Monopoly and she'd be stuck inside, condemned to move her little silver car past Go, to circle the board for eternity, bounced about by Chance and the roll of the dice. Or else, she'd fear an earthquake, the big one, in which the city would shake and collapse and be swallowed up by the hungry earth below it, the earth that demanded payment, retribution. There was something about the latter fantasy that she liked—justice, she supposed. Only she didn't want to be here for it. She wanted to be elsewhere, wanted to read about it in the papers—the same way she felt about the riots.

But now their leaving was so easy, it seemed to her like some kind of a trick they were falling for. The witch's house of gingerbread and candy—that false sense of relief that came too soon in the story, and signaled trouble. If things weren't hard, something was wrong. Or maybe—she took a breath, tried to feel it, to believe—maybe this was how it worked. Life. There were openings, sometimes, unexpected fissures in the architecture of the known, and if you stepped inside them, things happened. You didn't have to force them. She told herself she could let go, trust the open road taking them with it.

They passed Sepulveda. She could see the sign—
LIVE NUDES.
They were sure to be closed today. But tomorrow? She was supposed to work a night shift.

Her stomach churned—like in the old days, before she'd worked there, before she'd stripped at all, when the club, as she'd passed it, had called to her, had pulled at her body as a magnet pulls at metal. She'd been scared then, and because she was scared, she knew it was something she had to do.

The fear she felt now was different. It wasn't about going there, but about being able to leave. To leave the club, the city. The cash and the weed, the girls and Tony. Dancing. To leave it all for good.

She handed Leo the rest of the strawberry ice cream on the stick.

“Really,” he said. “I thought you'd finish it for sure.”

“My eyes were bigger than my stomach, I guess.”

“I'll take it if you don't want it,” the Count said. He was licking the last of the chocolate bullet.

“There isn't much, really,” Leo said, and sucked the ice cream down.

She gave the unopened Fudgesicle to Valiant and stuck her head out the window. The wind helped. And the smoke-smell was gone.

The time had come for music. She took the cassette tape of Bing from the player, slid Billie into the socket. Her grandmother's favorite.
God bless the child that's got his own.
It was the song she'd taught her to dance to. Gwen had been seven, and she'd spent the night at her grandparents', woken up to the smell of flapjacks and maple syrup, her grandfather in the kitchen in his plaid flannel pajamas, and her Nana Lotta in the living room in her long black silk nightgown and her brown, bare feet, dancing to Billie Holiday with her eyes closed. The long silver hair that she wore in a bun when she went out hung in smooth waves down her back. She'd taken Gwen in her arms, picked her right up, and swayed with her. Feel the beat, she'd said. In your heart, in your blood.
Mama may have, Papa may have, but God bless the child that's got his own, that's got his own.
That's you, she'd said. What you have,
tu corazón, tu espíritu, todo.
It's all you.

They passed the oil refinery, Long Beach, and the cities with names that belonged to another time—Garden Grove and Orange and Cypress—belonged to a time when they were small towns separated by citrus groves, when they weren't all part of one smoggy city that went on and on without apparent end.

They passed Anaheim. Home to the giant mouse in the diaper. And Dumbo, and Goofy. Home to Peter Pan and Wendy and Tinker Bell. It was Leo's favorite place. As a kid, he'd loved it so much, he'd wanted to live there. On a second-grade field trip he snuck away and hid in a cave on Tom Sawyer's Island. The class had gone back to school without him. They hadn't even realized he was missing, and by the time his mother had returned from her job as a nurse, it was too late. Disneyland had closed. When he told Gwen the story, he said he'd lived there a week before they found him—which was probably how long a night felt to a seven-year-old. His mother told her the real story later. She said that night was the longest of her life, and, after that, she didn't let him out of her sight. She kept him as close as she could.

In the rearview mirror, Gwen watched him watch the Disneyland exit go by.

“Don't even think about it,” Valiant said.

“But . . .”

The Count narrowed his eyes, his mouth set.

“Okay, okay, Tijuana it is,” Leo said. “But roll up the window, will you? I have a little something.”

“How stupid are you?” Gwen said. “We're going to Mexico.”

“God, Gwen, relax. It's just one joint. We'll smoke it now. Roll your window up.”

“Yes.” Valiant smiled, nailed her with his stare. “Roll up the window, darling, will you? I want to light a cigarette.”

Damn him. She wasn't going to let him smoke her out because
he
couldn't wait. She wouldn't be pushed. She'd tell Leo when she was ready to tell him. She glared at Valiant and rolled her window up. “Light up,” she said. “By all means.”

No sooner had the car filled with smoke than she rolled her window back down. All the way.

“Turn the music off, would you, Gwen, dear? I have the chorus to a new song. It should round out my next album. Leo, maybe you could write the verses?” She shut off Billie, and Valiant sang.

Leo hummed along, improvised lyrics.

The freeway curved and she felt the air cool. The sky was cloudy. No, it was a mist, blowing inland. She smelled ocean, saw fields of mustard flowers, and beyond them, through the low cloud, she could feel the Pacific like a cool giant hand on her forehead.

To the left of the freeway, on a west-facing hill up ahead, lay a cemetery, acres of green littered with white headstones. A sign read
SUNSET VIEW
.

“We picked out our plots—my parents and I,” Valiant said. “My brother said he'd want to be with his wife. Somewhere with more room, in case their own kids want to join them. But we're going to be here. Close to home.”

Valiant seemed fine with this fact, almost wistful. But to Gwen it was oddly unsettling, this sort of knowledge—the precise location of one's body for years, decades, centuries to come, until the collapse of the good old U.S. of A., or the extinction of the humans, and maybe even after that, until the sun got so close the earth itself burned up. That was a long time for one's bones to be in a box, a box sealed off from even the soil, and the thought terrified her.

Her mother had known she'd wanted to be cremated. Sipping her wine, she'd talked about it. As if her death were imminent, she'd said how, when she left, she wanted her ashes to be thrown into the sea. She wanted to not leave a trace. So Gwen's father had rented a boat and they'd set off from Long Beach Harbor toward Catalina. They'd divided her ashes in half, said a prayer, and watched what was left of her body billow and sift into the ocean.

“It looks nice,” Gwen said as they passed the cemetery.

“It has an ocean view,” said Leo. “What more could you want?” The ache in his voice caught her by surprise. In the mirror, she saw he was looking at the ocean, his eyes full of tears.

The Count tossed his lit cigarette butt out the window. “Yeah,” he said. “I need to pee.” Not take a piss, what guys say. But pee. “I need to pee,” he said. “Pull over?”

SHE VEERED INTO the right lane and took the exit.

Just beside the road was a wooden stand with a painted sign that said
FRESH STRAWBERRIES THREE DOLLARS
. She pulled to the curb, took cash from her purse, and stepped from the car into the sea-fresh air. The strawberries called to her. They were in the normal green plastic baskets in which she was used to buying them, but these berries were small—the size of raspberries. The woman selling them smiled. There was something about her. Something quiet and easy. She was like no one Gwen knew—except, maybe, Brett, were she to place her here, in the open air.

The woman told her to taste a berry. They were grown without pesticides, she said. In a sling over her shoulders, against her chest, a baby slept. It made a mewing sound, barely audible, and Gwen tried not to stare. She couldn't tell if it was a girl or a boy. It had hair that made her think of shucking corn, of those shiny strands that clung to the corn and, when you yanked them off, to your hands. Corn silk, wasn't that what you called them? The baby had a tiny nose, and now she thought it was a boy, his little red lips sucking at the air as he dreamed of what must have been his mother's breast, as big as his own head, of her nipple in his mouth, and milk filling his body with the warmth for which he'd search the rest of his life and not find.

Gwen bit into a strawberry. It was the best fruit she'd tasted in years. Sweeter, more intense than any store-bought berry. It tasted like it had grown in actual soil, had ripened in the sun.

“Chew the seeds,” the woman said. “The vitamins are in the seeds.”

She said she would and paid the woman for a basket. Leo was walking Fifi—she could see him by the car—and Valiant was off somewhere peeing. Without a word to them, Gwen strode past a
NO TRESPASSING
sign and into the fields of yellow flowers. She wanted the strawberries for herself—every single berry, every single seed. She took her time eating one and then another, crunching the seeds between her front teeth, tasting the soil and the sun.

The mustard plants were as tall as she was and she walked down a dirt path that wound through them. Swallows dove and rose, darted and sang. The world was alive. The berries, the flowers, the mist from the ocean. She was a kid again. A kid on a road trip with her parents. They'd gone up the coast to Oregon. And her mother had insisted they stop at every fruit stand. Gwen ate so many strawberries, they'd had to pull over so she could puke. Even coming back up they were good.

She could hear Leo calling, “Gwen! Gwendolyn!”

What did he want?

She ran away from the freeway, toward the distant ocean, her hand over the berries so she wouldn't lose any. Fifi was barking, and she and Leo were running after Gwen. It was a chase, a game of hide-and-seek. She ran until the mustard plants gave way to a bald brim of land, and she looked down. They were on a cliff, a bluff. The outskirts of San Clemente spread below them. And she could see the ocean just past the empty road.

Behind her Leo was panting. She could hear his slow approach as he got closer, put his arms around her waist and rested his chin on her head.

“Hey, Tink. Since when do you just take off? We're in this together.”

She stiffened. What did he mean by that? Had Valiant told him?

Down below, she could see into a school yard. It looked to be a preschool. And the kids were taking part in a ceremony, a procession. Was she seeing it right? She looked closer. They were holding the ends of long, wide pieces of ribbon. They were walking clockwise around a pole—an ordinary flagpole, it looked like—and ribbons of every color were fastened to the top of it.

“Leo,” she said. “Look.”

From up here, the boys and girls were mere specks, the colors of their clothes so bright they looked like confetti. And as they circled, the pole turned from top to bottom into a great rainbow wand, a colossal magic phallus.

“May Day,” she said out loud.

“What is it,” Leo said, squeezing her tighter, “you need me to rescue you?”

“I didn't think they did that anymore,” she said.

“Oh yes. The knight always rescues the maiden.” She had to laugh. “Oh,” he said, “the kids. You know, I think they still go to school.”

“The maypole,” she said. “The dance.”