The Other Way Around (18 page)

The park is already filling up with people when we arrive. Mothers with sticky little kids are spreading out blankets, and a lot of older people are showing up with lawn chairs. There's a bandstand in the middle, and a trio of musicians is tuning up and tapping their microphones. There's a man on guitar, another on banjo, and a woman with a big stand-up bass. G and I stake out a spot underneath a big spreading oak that's just beginning to brown. After about twenty minutes the music starts. It's not really anything I'd choose to listen to on my own, but it's undeniably catchy, and pretty soon I'm tapping along and admiring the soulful voice of the female bass player. All the songs sound vaguely familiar. I'm sure they're classics in this part of the country, because a lot of the audience members are singing or humming along. A few kids are dancing up front the way that little kids dance; just bending their knees a lot and running in circles.

After about half an hour they finish their set, and after a few announcements advertising their performances during the festival, they are replaced by a foursome of young guys in tall cowboy hats and jeans. These guys play a faster, more countrified version of the music we just heard, and it really gets the audience going. There's a lot of hooting and calling out to the band for special requests. The music is so fast that the fingers of the banjo player and guitarist are a whirling blur and the lead singer's lips seem to be moving a beat ahead of the sound that's reaching my ears. I stare up into the trees and let the sound wash over me.

Suddenly everything goes dark as a pair of hands covers my eyes from behind. “Guess who?” Just the smell of her makes my heart move up toward my throat and my crotch twitch.

“Hillary Clinton,” I say. She snorts and giggles and shakes my head to indicate no.

“Lady Gaga,” I guess again, and again she shakes my head. I reach up and pull her hands away. My head is just underneath her chin. I expect her to pull away, but instead she scooches forward with one leg on either side of me, and I lean back so my head is resting against her chest. I can feel the movements of her chest with every breath, and the collar of her soft flannel shirt is tickling my cheek.

***

The Freegans perform their show that afternoon, and afterwards we all show up at Gene's to wash dishes and get fed. The smoked tofu is pretty good, but I still prefer chicken. There's something about the way tofu is always pretending to be some other food—that and the texture gets to me. But Emily loves it;
she sits next to me at dinner and is practically bouncing out her seat with joy. She begs Gene to give her the recipe, and he tells her she can help him make it the following night.

As we walk back to the van, Lyle, who's been pretty quiet all day, coughs a little before speaking. “I just wanted to say, I'm sorry for lying to you guys about my family. It was a dumb thing to do, and I'm sorry.”

I really want to dislike Lyle. He's been pretty cold and snobby towards me from the start, but even I can't ignore the humble and heartfelt nature of this apology. “Don't worry about it, man,” Jesse says.

“Water under the bridge,” Tim adds poetically.

“It's not important to me,” G says. I don't say anything. I never asked Lyle about his family, and he never offered any information. Emily is also quiet, though her expression is sort of sad and pensive. Selfishly, I hope she doesn't forgive him.

The next day, when we're setting up for the show, Lyle approaches me with fifty feet of nylon rope coiled around his shoulders. “It seems like you're going to be with us for a while,” he says.

“Yeah?” I say, thinking he's about to be confrontational.

“Well, I just thought you might like to learn the knots we use to hang this stuff. You know, in case you wanted to help out ever.” He seems flustered, and I can tell it's not exactly how he meant it to come out. “I mean, you asked me once if you could help out, and I didn't really have time to show you then, but if you wanted to learn now. I mean, I could show you now if you want.”

“Sure,” I say and follow him over to the light post where he and G have been hanging their trapeze. He shows me how they use a smaller rope with a rock tied around one end to bring
the rest of the rope up over the streetlight, or tree branch, or whatever they're hanging from. He shows me how to join the smaller rope to the thicker piece using a sheet bend and how to tie the whole thing off using a clove hitch followed by a series of half hitches. I'm a good pupil, following directions diligently and waiting until he's done talking to ask questions. It helps that learning how to tie a knot seems infinitely more useful than learning to structure a five-paragraph essay. As if to reward me for my attention, he shows me a few more knots: a bowline and a monkey's fist, which makes this little ball of rope.

“It's not that useful,” Lyle says. “But it looks cool. And if you didn't have a rock, you could use it to weight the end of your rope.”

The monkey's fist
is
cool, and I sit down with a piece of rope to practice. I'm trying to ignore the part of me that's thinking about how that was a pretty decent interaction with Lyle, and maybe he's not so bad when he's not feeling threatened. Even harder to ignore is the voice that's saying maybe I should forget about Emily for a while if it's going to cause all this drama among the Freegans. Even though it's been a few days since that night at the Hot Springs, if I think about it I can still conjure up the softness of Emily's mouth. That's all it really takes to get me to forget about Lyle and his feelings.

Ignoring other people's feelings seems to come pretty easily to me, though it's not a trait I like to admit to. I was eleven or twelve the first and only time I saw my dad cry. It was one of my weekend visits in the city. I could never sleep that well in Dad's apartment. I guess some people find the city noises to be soothing, but the orange streetlight glow and rumbling of car engines that pervaded the apartment made me feel like
I was sleeping in the middle of the day. I slept lightly, waking again and again throughout the night. It was during one of those nighttime wakings that I found my father sitting at his kitchen table, his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking. At first I thought he was laughing. In my day/night confusion I remember thinking he had beat me to the Sunday comics—being annoyed because it was the only part of the paper I really liked. When I realized what I was witnessing I stepped back and stood in the doorway, just watching. Instead of trying to comfort him or even asking him what was wrong, I found myself thinking about the book I had just read about a kid with cancer. I was really impressed with all the stuff his parents did to try and make his life better. I wondered how my parents would act if I had cancer, and I stood there in the threshold, half-pretending that Dad had just gotten some terrible news about my condition. I went back to bed before he could see me watching him.

***

Our days in Hot Springs fall into a kind of rhythm. We're all on our own after breakfast until around noon, when we meet up at the van and prepare for the first show. I get a map of the parks and trails at the visitor's center and usually head to one and find a spot to read or go for a walk. It's the kind of thing I never would have done at home, but here it just feels right. I've gotten to the point in the book where it's just the gritty details of his starvation leading up to his death. It's not like I don't know what happens, but sometimes I think if I read closely enough I can change the outcome. Something about the book is bothering me lately. I think it's his journal entries—the parts where Krakauer quotes his writing directly. McCandless writes
in the third person, something that never bothered me when I read the book before. But this time it strikes me as contrived, especially for someone so intent on the importance of having experiences. How can you really experience something if you're always observing it from the outside? Maybe it just hits a little too close to home.

A lot of my mood depends on how Emily's treating me that day. I give her plenty of opportunities to spend time with me alone, but she always manages to worm out of it—or to invite Tim to come with us. Just when I'm ready to write her off completely, she'll plunk herself down in my lap or wrap an arm around my waist. Beyond those occasional touches there's been nothing else physical between us. I'm beginning to wonder if I imagined that whole night in the bathhouse. I certainly imagine it enough when I'm drifting off to sleep at night.

There are darker things that come to me at night too. I dream of Mima—which is usually a good thing. I remember how safe and secure I felt when I was at her house; how I trusted her to take care of me. That's not the dark part. The dark part is that when I wake up I think about Emily and my parents in equal but very separate parts. I pretty much wrote Dad off a while ago. But I wonder when I stopped trusting Mom and when, and if, I'll ever be able to trust Emily.

It's after one of these strange dream sleeps that I come up with a plan to take Emily out on the closest thing to a date that our situation allows. I know it's kind of a test I'm setting up, even though I'm not willing to fully admit it. The biggest hurdle is getting her to agree to go. I wait all day until I'm sure it will just be the two of us alone. When I ask her if she wants to join me for a secret mission that night, I'm surprised at how easily she agrees, given the way she's been avoiding time alone with me. My plan is almost thwarted by another free concert in the park, but luckily it's Lyle who asks if anyone wants to go. They're back on speaking terms, but things are still a bit tense.

So everyone else heads over to the park after we finish at Gene's, and Emily and I go our own way. “So what's this all about?” she asks as I lead her down an alley between an art gallery and a restaurant.

“Secret mission,” I say, and I hold my finger up to my lips. The forced silence is good. I don't want to talk about what we're doing or even think too much about it. I just want to know how she's going to react. The alley leads us behind another set of buildings. There's a big blue dumpster, and naturally Emily
assumes that's why we're here. She lifts the lid, but its only occupants are the flies that come buzzing out. She raises an eyebrow in my direction.

I push on an unmarked door next to the dumpster and boldly take her hand in mine. We're in a dark room. I wait a minute for my eyes to adjust. Then the bright green sign for coming attractions illuminates the faces and open seats in the darkened theater. I grin as I hear her let out a tiny gasp of excitement. I pull Emily behind me into two seats at the end of a row and turn nervously to see her reaction.

“Oh my gosh,” she gushes. “This is perfect. How did you know about that door?”

“I was scouting the dumpster a couple days ago and someone had left the door open just a crack,” I whisper. “So I rigged it so it would stay open, just a crack.”

“Awesome.”

“Yeah, sorry I couldn't get us some popcorn too.”

“Oh, I can handle that,” Emily says. Before I can ask, she's out of her seat and moving quietly through the darkened theater. A preview for some action movie that came out last month in New York is flashing across the screen. She comes back a few minutes later with a bag of warm, buttery popcorn and a two courtesy cups of water.

“Don't tell me Curtis works here too?”

Emily snorts and laughs, attracting a glare from the people in front of us. “No, dummy, I just got all teary and told them I dropped mine inside. Works every time.”

I timed it so we would enter during the darkness of the previews, but not miss any of the movie. My movie choice seems perfect given Emily's self-proclaimed cheesy taste in cinema.
It's a romantic comedy about a guy who dies but prearranges to have his girlfriend receive a series of letters designed to help her move on with her life. I'm not really paying attention to the plot. I'm too busy paying attention to Emily. Little things, like the way her breath catches during the really sappy parts or her fingers, which have drifted over to my knee and are absent-mindedly rubbing the ribs of my corduroy pants.

When the lights come up, I see her face is red and tear-streaked. For a second I wonder if this was a terrible idea and she hates me for picking such a cornball movie. But then she sighs loudly and says, “That was wonderful. Totally cathartic. I'm like a new person!” The middle-aged woman sitting in front of us turns around and smiles at her.

Outside the movie theater, she wraps her arms around me in a huge friendly hug. It's not exactly what I had in mind, but it's a start. “You picked that out for me, didn't you?” she asks as we walk back towards the van.

“Yeah.”

“You remembered what I said about movies?”

“Yup.”

“Oh, Drew,” she sighs. “What am I going to do with you?” I have some answers, but none of them are anything I dare say out loud. “Oh, look at the moon!” Emily shouts before I can try any of my terrible one-liners.

***

I study the moon that night through the camper window. I'm not sure what I expected to learn about Emily's feelings or my own. I had a good time. I like being with her. But I already knew that. My eyelids are heavy, but I'm reluctant to fall
asleep—afraid my dreams will reveal something I don't really want to know.

***

Jesse and G spend some time scratching their heads and staring at a local events calendar taped to the pharmacy window before determining that it's time to move on. Jesse wants to spend at least a week at this farm he keeps talking about before making the final push to the festival in New Mexico. On our last night in Hot Springs Gene promises to cook us a feast of “his food,” as he calls it. It turns out he's from Haiti. He made a boat crossing about fifteen years ago and ended up in Florida before making his way north to meet up with some cousins who were living here in Hot Springs.