Liberty Street (29 page)

“Huh,” she said. “You're a bit of an antique.”

She was nineteen. She told him that Dave's girl—Izzy was her name—was only sixteen and had run away from home. Dooley wondered why he hadn't thought of doing that when he was sixteen. The way Angela was sitting with her legs crossed, he could see she had an old scar that started above her ankle and ran up her leg. He couldn't see where it ended.

“What happened to your leg?” he asked her.

“I used to be an ice dancer,” she said. “You know, figure skater. Then my partner ran over me with his skate. He didn't mean to. We were trying too hard to do something spectacular, which in a way we did. You should have seen the blood on the ice. It was like a massacre.”

If she noticed his limp, she didn't say anything, at least not then.

They all went downstairs to the cantina and had
huevos rancheros
and beans and
cerveza
for breakfast, and then they said goodbye to their new friend Karl and found the bus station and a battered blue bus with “San José” written on the front window in white paint and the Virgin Mary hanging from a mirror (Our Lady of Guadalupe, he found
out later). They weren't sure where San José was, but it was in the right direction. They threw their backpacks on top—not Dooley, he kept his close—and got in with the Mexicans and headed south. He and Angela were sitting together, Dooley in the window seat. She was carrying an embroidered baby blue suede jacket lined with some kind of fur, rabbit maybe. It looked expensive. Once they were on their way, Angela picked up her jacket and reached across Dooley and waved it outside the bus window, and then she let it go. The jacket was immediately grabbed by a cactus and hung there like a coat on a hook, as though waiting for someone to come along and pluck it off. She stayed in the window for a minute, watching her jacket disappear, stretched across Dooley's body. He put his hand on her ass. Her hair blew into his face. Then she moved away and settled back on her side of the seat.

“Won't need that where we're going, will I?” she said, about the jacket. She used the word “we.” Dooley couldn't help noticing.

They got off the bus at a fishing village somewhere along the Baja peninsula. Dooley hoped it was the right place, the one Karl had told him about, where you could live on the beach without being told to move on. They walked south from the village and found a dozen cement huts a hundred yards back from the water, a former compound of some kind, now occupied by the stream of travelling young people moving in and out of them. Dooley and Angela and her friends moved into one that was vacant, spreading out their sleeping bags on the sand floor and claiming wooden boxes and makeshift shelving for their backpacks and the few belongings they'd carried with them. Dooley hadn't stopped thinking
about Angela's body draped across his on the bus, and neither, apparently, had she. They made out in a hidden spot in the sand dunes before the sun was barely down, Angela making it clear that she didn't believe in exclusivity, Dooley saying he didn't either, both of them trying to avoid the cactus that was everywhere and trying to remember what they'd been told about snakes and scorpions. Dooley thought about the word she'd used—“exclusivity”—and was happy to have met someone who seemed to think the way he did. He wondered why it had taken him so long to discover a life like this.

“I never want to go back,” Angela said.

“You won't have to if you stick with me,” Dooley said. “I have a nest egg.”

She started to laugh.

“What?” he asked. “Why is that funny?”

“I come from a bottomless pit of money,” she said. “There's nothing as modest as a nest egg in my family.”

He should have known. The expensive jacket she'd thrown out the bus window as easily as if it were an empty cigarette pack.

He saw she was looking at the scar on his leg.

“I drove into a bridge,” he told her.

“Don't you hate it when that happens?”

Without words being exchanged, without commitment being spoken of, they became exclusive.

D
OOLEY DIDN
'
T HAVE
much interest in the people coming and going on the beach. He'd spent most of his childhood hanging around with kids who were older than him, driving all over the countryside when he was only eleven or twelve years old. Now he was with people who were barely out of their
teens, if that. Most days he ignored the band of dreamers and walked into the village and struck up conversations with the more interesting fishermen and the vendors in the market, and he kicked the soccer ball around with the Mexican kids in the plaza, not caring if they laughed at his limp, his complete lack of skill with both soccer and Spanish, his gesturing and mistakes and bad pronunciations. He learned. He could soon speak Spanish better than anyone else on the beach, even the Americans who'd studied it in school. The others began to look to him to take care of things, to talk them out of trouble when it appeared, to deal with the
policía
when they occasionally stopped for payment, some pesos or cigarettes. They began to count on Dooley to make decisions. Once he'd accepted that role, there was no arguing with him. It was Dooley who asked people to move on if they weren't pulling their weight or following the few unspoken rules that kept things copacetic.

“What the fuck?” whined one such evictee when Dooley informed him he wasn't welcome anymore because he was suspected of helping himself to the pesos in someone's wallet and he kept referring to Mexicans as
bandidos.

“They are
bandidos,
” the boy whined.

Dooley gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder and said, “
Vamos. Ahora.
”

The boy left.

Angela told Dooley he had some kind of weird power over people, the way they listened to him and didn't argue.

“You're like the king or something,” she said.

It reminded Dooley of the school principal who'd tried to save him from truancy and called him cock of the walk.

After the boy left, sulking his way up the road to town
and the bus station, Dooley sat in the sand with an unopened bottle of tequila. Angela sat next to him and said, “You do have a nest egg, don't you?”

He was tempted then to tell her about his grandfather dying and Basie Moon's solution to the trouble Dooley found himself in, the look on Basie's face as he handed him the cheque. The look that said it was money well spent if it would get Dooley out of Elliot.

Instead he said, “I have my resources.”

Angela said, “I like a man of mystery. Are you Howard Hughes? I think you might be.”

He didn't know who Howard Hughes was. For the first time ever, he wondered if he'd missed something by disregarding school. When it came to facts, there seemed to be a lot he didn't know.

He opened the bottle of tequila and passed it to Angela.

T
HE WORST THING
that happened was when one of the beach inhabitants drowned. The boy—a twenty-year-old American—hadn't been listening when he was told about the currents, and he went swimming and found himself being sucked out into the surf, and he wasn't a strong enough swimmer to last until help reached him. A fisherman with a boat tried. It was too late, but at least he was able to retrieve the boy's body. No one on the beach knew who he was, but they found his driver's licence in his things and gave it to the authorities. A few weeks later his father showed up from Nebraska, grief-stricken, wanting to know about his son's life in Mexico, wanting affirmation that his life had not been wasted and that he'd been doing something useful—learning something, at least—but no one had known the boy well enough to tell
him much. Angela stepped up then and asked the man, the father, if he wanted to go for a walk with her along the beach, and she pointed out the spot where his son had gone into the water and made up some things about how he—Alec?—was teaching English to poor children in the village, and in return one of the parents had given him a guitar and taught him to play Mexican folk songs and he was very talented, they all thought so. Alec spoke sometimes of his family, Angela told the man, and he was planning a trip home before too long and considering a return to school to become a teacher.

“Really?” the father said when Angela told him these good things about his son. Disbelieving but wanting to believe, choosing to do so, and then asking Angela if she knew where his son's guitar was, he would like to have it, and Angela had to think quickly and asked the man to wait while she went to find it. There were lots of guitars around, and she walked into the huts, searching, and took the first one she came to, with a plan to purchase a better one for its owner, a girl who sang mournful English ballads. She gave the girl's guitar to the man. He thanked her for spending the time with him, and then he left with the guitar to take his son's body home.

“Did you see he was crying?” Angela asked Dooley afterward. “It was incredibly sad. What was his name, anyway? The boy who drowned. I hope it was Alec.”

Dooley thought it was Allen, but he didn't say so. He was flabbergasted by Angela's kindness. He had never before met anyone like her. How, he wondered, had he, Dooley Sullivan, had the good fortune to walk into Fernando's Hideaway Cantina and find Angela there waiting for him? Dooley Sullivan, who had been raised by a grandfather he couldn't seem to please and carried with him, always, a feeling of disappointment,
even though he lived in one of the nicest houses in Elliot and there was plenty of food on the table. Always a feeling that his grandfather wanted to punish him just for being there, disappointment morphing into an anger that almost killed him in a flaming wreck. As he and Angela walked along the beach after the grieving father left, he wanted to ask her about her past, why she was here, what so-called advantages she had run away from. The thing he didn't understand was how she could have grown up with all the privilege of wealth—obviously more privilege than even he had had—and be the person she was.

Instead of asking her this, he asked if her parents had had pretentious fucking international dinner parties when she was growing up.

She looked up at him, studying him, until he wished he hadn't asked. Then she said, “Exactly. How did you know?”

He had a homemade clay pipe in his pocket and he took it out and lit it, and they passed it back and forth. He felt himself seething just thinking about the dinner parties, and how he had been well aware of his grandfather's wish that Dooley be absent while the guests were in the house, pretending. Pretending to be richer than they were. Pretending to know the right people. Pretending to live somewhere other than Elliot. His grandfather hadn't wanted Dooley, the boy who seemed always to be in trouble, ruining his epicurean charade.

What no one had understood was that Dooley didn't want to be in trouble. He wanted to please people. He tried to be smart, but he wasn't, at least not in the way his grandfather wanted him to be. He was funny, he knew that, but teachers didn't appreciate funny. They told him to stop being
clever, and then they turned around and told him to smarten up. When he tried to be good, he got in trouble for that too. He'd had a teacher he liked in second grade—they called her a practice teacher, and
she'd
thought he was funny and spent extra time with him on arithmetic—and he'd wanted to give her a present when she left, so he took a pair of bookends from his grandfather's house, two praying hands, and wrapped them up himself in gift paper he'd found in a drawer. It was red and green for Christmas, but he didn't think that would matter. The practice teacher's face fell when she opened the present; he saw that, recognized the look, and knew he was in trouble again.

Sure enough, someone called his grandfather, and he accused Dooley of stealing the bookends.
Stealing
, of all things, when his grandfather was always giving away books to people, books by novelists and poets—classics, he called them. He'd take them right off the shelves and say, “Take this one, please. You'll like it.” Now Dooley was not only in trouble for stealing—which he didn't think he'd done, or not intentionally—but also embarrassed in front of the teacher he liked, who gave the bookends back to him. She tried to be nice and said they were too much of a gift, she couldn't accept them. “But thank you, Dooley,” she said. “I appreciate the thought, that was really nice of you.” And he knew she'd been told by the principal what Dooley had done, that he'd stolen them. “You're a good boy, Dooley,” she said, and that was the worst, because she hadn't had to say that to anyone else, no other child in the class. Dooley wanted to hang his head, ashamed, but instead he threw a rock at the school and broke a window. That was the first time he'd had his after-school playtime taken away. Grade two and he was already grounded.

After that, Dooley didn't try very hard to be good. He didn't seem to know how, and it turned out he was better at being bad. He could make the other students laugh when he was bad, and sometimes even the teachers, as though they couldn't believe what he had just done. It was as though he could please them—or at least give them a way to understand him—by being bad. He started smoking in grade four, as soon as he found a way to buy cigarettes from the older boys. Not long after, one of them asked Dooley if he wanted liquor to go with his cigarettes and he said sure, and he went with them in a car, out into the country, and he got drunk for the first time. Then he was stealing his grandfather's liquor—he hid his thefts by topping up the bottles with water—and he lied when his grandfather confronted him. He started skipping school, and the principal would drive around Elliot until he found him and hauled him back, calling him a truant. Once he said to him, on the way to the school after one of Dooley's attempts to skip, “You're lucky your grandfather isn't still principal. He wasn't as lenient as I am,” and Dooley thought,
You don't have to tell me that.
The principal had delivered him to his classroom and Dooley swaggered in like a hero, and the other students clapped until the teacher said, “Don't encourage him.” When the principal saw him in the hallway after school that day, he said, “You're just the cock of the walk, aren't you, Dooley?”