My Tiki Girl (10 page)

10

Dahlia and I
follow Jonah across town. We take Canal Street to South Street, then go right on Main, where we walk past Ferraro’s Market, the 5 & 10, and Lucky’s House of Spirits, where an old man with one arm sells booze. Jonah leads us down the sidewalk, and he’s waving his wand in the air like he’s conducting all the action on the street: the women stopping for groceries on the way home, the dog sniffing the potted chrysanthemums in front of the 5 & 10, one-armed Lucky staring out the plate-glass window and seeming to give Dahlia a quick wink.

We pass by Tip of the Cone, and I see Sukie and Heather sitting at a table inside. My first thought is
God, please don’t let them see us.
My second is that I know exactly what Sukie’s having: a caramel sundae with French vanilla ice cream and no nuts. It’s what she always gets. But when I chance a second glance through the window, I see I’m wrong. Milk shakes. They’re each drinking a milk shake—something Sukie would never even think of ordering.

We cross Main Street without being spotted and go through Atkins Memorial Park, which is really just some scraggly flowers planted around a peeling white gazebo—a pretty pitiful gesture for poor old Mr. Atkins, whoever he was. On the other side of the park is School Street, and once we cross it, we’re at the low brick prison where Jonah spends his days. We cut across the playground, over the blacktop colored with bright lines of chalk from games of hopscotch and hangman, until we reach the chain-link fence at the edge of the schoolyard. Jonah shows us the break in the fence, hidden by the high shrubs in front of it. We crawl behind the shrubs, pull back the woven metal, and squeeze through to the railroad tracks. Jonah says that fifth graders sneak through the fence to smoke at recess, which is just what they did back when I went to school here. This is also where they drag kids to beat them up. Jonah knows from experience.

The three of us walk along the tracks for a while, Jonah in the lead bouncing from tie to tie, Dahlia balancing on the rail in her clunky combat boots, and me watching my feet, crunching gravel and stumbling.

We’ve been walking about ten minutes when we come to the Elff Soda factory, down the steep bank on our left. We can see men in blue uniforms walking around the trucks pulled into the loading dock, but can’t make out any details. I scan the parking lot of matchbox cars, looking for my father’s gray Saab. I think I spot it parked near the front entrance, and I’m sure he got a spot so close because he went in early. He goes in early and stays late. He’s what you would call a company man, my father, eager to impress. I stare at the massive single-story cement building, at the rows of tiny windows, and wonder if he can see me. If he could, I would just look like any kid from this distance, not a kid even, just a person walking with two other people, we’re that far off. Would my limp give me away?

Does my dad’s office even have a window with a view of the tracks? In all the years he’s worked there, I’ve never been inside. My father doesn’t say much to me about his job at Elff, which could be because I’ve never asked. I make a mental note to bring it up at our next pizza night.

Jonah believes my father is like a god, even though he has never met him. See, my father knows the elves who make the soda, which, Jonah informs me, is not just ordinary soda but magic elixir, each flavor its own potion. Black cherry, for instance, gives you the power to fly. Cola wards off evil spirits, even trolls. Grape heals you when you are sick or injured. And orange, Jonah’s favorite flavor, increases psychic abilities, which is how, he explains, he was led to the String Man’s cave.

We’re climbing down the left bank now, not far beyond the soda plant but before we get to the green metal bridge that takes the tracks over a stream.

“There aren’t any elves in the factory, Jonah,” I tell him. “Just regular people like my dad.”

“That’s just what they want you to believe,” Jonah says. “Why do you think it’s called
Elff
if there aren’t any
elves
?”

“It’s named after a guy. Ronald Elff. He started the company a long time ago.”

Jonah snorts. “And I suppose you’re gonna tell me he was really a normal guy, too?”

“He wasn’t a little creature with pointed ears, if that’s what you mean,” I say, then Dahlia shoots me a look to tell me to leave it alone, to let him believe what he wants, so I don’t argue. It’s a free country. We’re all entitled to our own little delusions.

As we clamber down the bank, we can hear a truck pulling out, can faintly smell the diesel of the engine. I wonder if Jonah thinks there are little pointy-eared men working the foot pedals of the truck, pulling the cable that sounds the horn.

Jonah moves quickly but carefully along in front of us, his wand in one hand, the other making magic signs in the air. He’s drawing symbols with his pointer finger, letters maybe, then he uses his whole hand to wipe away what he’s written like he’s erasing a blackboard.

We stumble down the hill, blue-robed magician in the lead because he knows the way. Dahlia is second, breaking twigs and branches that threaten to jab her. She’s the one who makes all the noise and leaves signs that we were here. Dahlia leaves traces of herself wherever she goes, the way a shooting star leaves a streak of light behind it.

The ground is thick with thorny raspberry bushes and skinny maples that whip at my face. It’s steep and rocky and only Jonah seems sure-footed, Dahlia and I stumbling down behind him, slipping, causing little avalanches as we make our way along what seems to be a seldom-used path. My leg is throbbing, and I know my father would kill me if he could see what I’m doing. The doctors and physical therapist said to take it easy, that if I don’t give it time to heal, the bone could reshatter.

“You okay, LaSamba?” Dahlia’s beside me, looking vaguely concerned.

“Fine,” I lie, cold pain-sweat gathering between my shoulder blades. “Come on, we’ll lose Jonah.”

The boy wizard has trotted off ahead of us like some kind of hound on a String Man hunt.

I hear running water in the distance, the sound of the stream that gets closer as we keep going down.

The slope levels off, and we’re in a thicket of tall weeds and saplings. It smells rich and loamy here, and all the fallen rotting leaves under our feet are spongy. When we reach the stream, we follow it up a little ways to a clearing. In front of us, the stream opens into a large pool before narrowing again. If we look up to the right, the railroad bridge hovers a good thirty feet above the water. Beside the pool, on its sandy bank, are the remnants of a campfire. There are empty beer cans and bottles scattered around, brown glass smashed against rocks. Cigarette butts are everywhere. A glossy magazine lies open to a naked girl on a motorcycle. The only thing she wears is lipstick and plenty of it.

Dahlia catches me looking at it. My face burns and I turn away.

It’s not like I’ve never seen a magazine like that up close before. Sukie and I used to steal porn magazines from under her brother’s mattress and hide in her closet with them, giggling over the pictures. Our favorite part was the letters people wrote in about their supposedly true experiences. They usually started out something like “I never thought anything like this would happen to me, but . . .” and go on with some totally unrealistic story, involving a hot stewardess or twin sisters. Sukie and I were pretty sure the guys who wrote in probably made it all up, but there, straining to read in the dim light of Sukie’s closet, the stories left us feeling flushed and embarrassed and we just couldn’t get enough of them.

I wonder, was I a lesbo then, too?

“Teenagers, probably,” Dahlia says after assessing the scene, kicking at the glossy magazine. She says it with disgust, like she’s not a teenager herself. Like she’s something else altogether. She spits, then takes a clove cigarette out of her coat pocket and lights it. “Bet this is a great swimming spot in the summer,” she says, blowing the sweet smoke out, walking to the water to put her hand in.

Jonah is jumping from rock to rock to cross the stream. Once across, he walks along the edge of the water to the right, toward the railroad bridge overhead. The embankment is covered with huge masses of broken rock. I want to tell Dahlia that this was done by glaciers, to remind her we learned about this in Earth Science, but I doubt she’d remember or care. She has little interest in things that happened so long ago—in tons of ice that changed the face of everything around us, only to melt away. Thinking about the size and power of the glaciers makes me feel small, insignificant, and dizzy. I’m afraid that if I shut my eyes and let myself really imagine what it was like, I might pass out.

Dahlia’s always telling me I think too much.

Maybe she’s right.

I wish I could turn off my brain sometimes. Especially lately, when it comes to all the thoughts I have about Dahlia. I close my eyes hard, think of the glaciers.

“You okay, LaSamba?” Dahlia asks.

“Fine,” I say.

Jonah struggles up the hill, navigating his way around boulders, stopping now and then to turn and look down at us on the other side.

Dahlia and I share the cigarette and stare at the water flowing past us. I’m putting my mouth on the filter stained with Dahlia’s lipstick, and thinking this is the closest I will ever get to kissing her.

“Come on, you guys!” shouts Jonah.

We look up to see he’s almost to the bridge, just to the left of it, beside the giant concrete blocks it rests on. He’s on his knees in front of three large boulders. Two of the huge rocks are side by side; the third, a flat rock, is balanced on top of them. Jonah’s head is stuck into the crack between the two rocks.

Dahlia leaps from rock to rock across the stream, playing her own kind of hopscotch. I follow carefully, being sure of my footing, even stepping in the cold, shallow water a few times just so I won’t fall. We scramble up the embankment to where we last saw Jonah. He’s gone now, his whole self having disappeared into the crack. The rocks ate him, just gobbled him up. I imagine finding his robe and bones in a pile in the cave. Dahlia gets down on her knees, peers into the crevice, calls to her brother.

“Zamboni, you in there?”

His voice comes back to us, small and echoey. “This is it. This is where the String Man lives.”

Dahlia crawls partway in for a better look, then she’s gone, too, her feet disappearing last.

“Jumping catfish!” she cries. “Come on in, LaSamba, you’re not gonna believe this!”

So I squeeze between the rocks like some kind of animal, following my pack home. The crawling is hell on my leg, but I follow anyway. The ground is soft and mossy, then turns to smooth dirt inside. Once I’m through the opening, the space opens up into a sort of cave, big enough for the three of us to sit and crawl around, but not high enough to stand. There is a narrow beam of light coming through a crack in the cave’s ceiling where the boulder on top doesn’t quite meet.

It’s a cozy den, this place, and instead of bones we find string. Lots of string. There are rolls of it stacked here and there. Thick string. Thin string. Yellow string. Old dirty string. Garden twine. A rough piece of rope is coiled in the corner like a snake.

There is a flat rock used for a table. On it is a half-burned candle, some matches, a glass Elff Soda bottle full of water, some bent screws, bits of glass, pebbles, a blue jay feather, and some loose change.

The cave is full of creatures: figures made from string, sticks, and bits of collected junk—animals, people, houses, birds. There is a mobile hanging from a tree branch stuck in the crevice at the top of the cave. It’s made of sticks lashed together with heavy thread, and dangling from the sticks are small figures—people made from twigs and string. Dahlia pushes on it to make the stick people dance in the air above her head. The sunlight coming through the crack above them makes their shadows whirl in circles across the floor. Dahlia sits among the dancing shadows and smiles like she can’t help it; it’s a whole-hearted
I must be seeing real magic
kind of smile. Jonah is wearing the same grin on his own face as he scuttles across the floor of the cave, picking treasures up and setting them down, running his fingers over each item like he’s petting the string, the sticks, the bottle of water, and the box of wooden matches.