Whitechurch (3 page)

He blinks away some of the glaze.

Slowly, gingerly, I back off.
Remove
myself from the gun.

He points it into the dirt and uncocks it.

“You’re my friend, Oakley,” he says.

“I am,” I say.

He raises the Colt again, points it in my face. “If I tell you to put this back in your mouth once more, are you still my friend?”

I open my mouth as wide as I can.

Pauly puts the gun in my hand and closes his eyes.

“I’m going to write you a poem,” he says. “‘Oakley #1.’”

I tug on his jacket and start him down the hill.

“You do and I’ll shoot ya,” I say, and this brightens his mood considerably.

I
LOVED HER FIRST.

She showed up in town about one month before the end of the school year, plunked down into the seat next to me after spending the previous eight months in a seat somewhere else next to someone else.

His loss, I figured, and I still remember that, thinking that, right that first day. His loss, whoever he was. I never considered that maybe she hadn’t even sat next to a boy at all, because that would have lessened my victory. His loss, my gain. I would think those kinds of thoughts endlessly, my unearned triumphs over life, watching the constellation of dust particles floating before my face while the lessons of the day would float past my ears. By the next September they’d bumped her up a year ahead of me where she belonged, but I did have that one sweet month.

“Kind of late in the year for a move, isn’t it?” I said instead of learning why humans could stand on their heads and still swallow food into their stomachs. “Or early. Must’ve been pretty important, for your family to move you right in the—”

“Must’ve been,” Lilly said, and smiled at me. Then she did this thing, this sort of snake charmer maneuver that I don’t think she did on purpose exactly, but that she did very well all the same. She leaned a little closer to me and stared into my eyes with this look that was like bits and pieces of question and sympathy, of asking forgiveness and offering it at the same time. A slight tilting of the head, a narrowing of the eyes, down turned the corners of her mouth as up went the center. It was the look that defined, and defines, our interactions.

“If I ask you not to ask me about that, will you not?”

Something in there, and the way she said it, gave me a little shake. I still think about that sometimes. How tidy and useful a motto that is. If I ask you not … will you not?

“Okay,” I said, even though of course she only made me ten times as curious.

She shook my hand then. And we were friends.

Her grip was firm, like a man’s is supposed to be, and honest. Like she wasn’t selling me something or showing me how strong she was, or picking my pocket with her free hand. Her grip was firm and warm. Not all girl, was what I thought when Lilly first gripped me like that. Not all girl, and not at all guy.

That’s how it started, believe it or not. Lilly and Pauly. Lilly and me and Pauly.

We were thirteen and fourteen. Not that we were both at the same time. Lilly was fourteen and Pauly and I were thirteen and, as a bona fide legal working-age teenager, she got a summer job, making money and listening to music and eating ice cream.

The actual job of ice-cream man’s assistant belonged to her, but she brought me along because we were already doing our thing of doing things together. She was still pretty new, and after that promising start in buddying up to me, she sort of stalled out and was never surrounded by tons of friends. I liked to think that she figured I was enough. But then I’d come down and think no, I was the best she could do. Whatever, I was happy enough with the situation, and didn’t care whether or not I got paid while hanging around Lil.

Stan the ice-cream man didn’t care much either. He was about six foot two, with long superfine white hair and pink eyes and purple tattoos. Half a smile, too. Right side. The right side of his smile could smile but the left couldn’t because he fell off his bike and onto his face during his previous career as a stoned paperboy.

“Who are you?” he said as Lilly led me by the hand up into the truck that first morning.

“He’s my buddy,” Lilly said, standing in front of me protectively.

Stan started the truck. “Well buddy don’t get paid. But what the hell …” He shrugged and flipped a switch, and we hit the road to the tinkly tune of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.”

“You are so lucky,” I said after an hour of doing not much of anything. “I mean, this is it. You have it all. Died and gone to heaven. This is, like, the most perfect thing I ever saw, like, you should just do this for the rest of your life, Lilly, ’cause it’s never gonna get any better than this.”

She looked at me with The Look. “Oakley, you are just messing with me, right? I mean, like, you have bigger dreams than
this
, don’t you?”

You know how, after you’ve said something, you know the rightness or wrongness of it by what you hear in somebody else’s voice? I had to scramble then, because the truth was I’d meant what I said. I thought this ice-cream truck was the living end. I had already settled into my groove of “Think small, or not at all.”

“Well, Lil, y’know, a lot of kids would kill for this. You get free ice cream, listen to music all day, get paid, and—”

“Hey, Lilly, you wanna drive?” Stan hollered back over his shoulder.

All I could do was point at him. He had said it all for me.

“Okay,” Lilly said, laughing, “it’s a pretty good job.” Then she put her hand on my shoulder and spoke close to my face and way down deep into me. Like she does still. “But there is lots more, Oak. You know there is. And if I thought you meant what you were saying, I might cry right here in front of the ice creams and everything.”

I looked at her. I looked at Stan.

“And bring us some strawberry shortcakes and Mountain Dews,” he sang.

I shook my head at her. “Okay. How ’bout if I wanted to
own
the ice-cream truck, would that be better?”

“You are very funny, Oakley,” she said.

I was quite unaware of being funny. I’d say that most people were unaware of my being funny. Lilly found me funny.

I stood with my back against the windshield, in the big empty space up front, while Stan and Lilly shared the large driver’s seat and the driving. Lilly was beaming. The steering wheel was oversized, big even for a full-grown man and almost silly on Lilly, like she was captaining a ship. She was completely confident, though, and game. They took turns controlling the steering, while Stan did the pedals. When Lilly’s ice cream started to melt down her arm, she took a break.

I stood there and watched Lilly, while Lilly sat there, licked her ice cream, and watched Stan and his footwork. She was preparing to work the pedals.

“Is this a good living, Stan?” Lilly wanted to know.

Stan laughed loudly. “It’s crap.” He took a long pull on his Mountain Dew, beeped the horn, and waved as he drove right past a five-year-old waving a dollar. “Here’s some business wisdom, kids. Never waste your time stopping for singles unless they are stoned teenagers. Little kid like that is under orders to buy one damn Popsicle and bring back the change. I’ll waste more in gas slowing down and starting up again than I’ll make on the sale. But if you got a stoned teenager … hell, they’ll buy up half the truck and likely as not forget about their change. One of them can make your whole day.”

“Thanks, Stan,” I said.

“So you’re really like a serious businessman,” Lilly said, and right about now this was starting to bother me.

Stan appeared to give this some thought. Tooling down the road, gripping the wheel. Then smiling. This was the thing, I thought, that made up for the halfness of his smile. The intensity, and the frequency. He seemed to find a lot of stuff grinworthy. “Serious? Businessman? Well I tell you what. I’ll do any damn thing I can get paid for, so I guess the answer is yes.”

A flock of young boys came barreling off a baseball diamond screaming and waving at the sound of the truck’s music.

“
Now
we’re talkin’,” Stan said as he yanked us to the curb.

Lilly and I sprang into action, manning the window as Stan put his feet up on the dash and lit a cigarette.

“He’s cool,” she said, handing out a snow cone.

“Ya,” I said. “I suppose he is. A little. Cool.” I did my job, handling the money.

“Come on, Oak. You have to admire the guy some.”

I was a little too busy being jealous of him to admire him. “Some,” I allowed.

“I said root beer,” one angry young baseball player said, shoving a Dr Pepper back across the stainless-steel counter.

Lilly fixed him up. Got back to important matters. “I mean he’s a go-getter. Doing what it takes, making his way. Even though he hasn’t gotten all the breaks, like with falling on his face and stuff.”

“Ya,” I said, trying to ho-hum her into submission. “I guess he’s a decent ice-cream man.”

“Yup. A go-getter. I’m gonna be like that, Oakley.” She paused, then spoke more directly to me, like I needed remedial pep-talking. “I’m going to be go-get. You wanna be go with me?”

“I’m having enough trouble trying to be understand you, Lilly.”

She laughed. “You’re the funniest guy, Oakley.”

The baseball players had all been served when one straggler came on up.

“No he’s not. I’m the funniest guy,” Pauly said.

“She doesn’t mean that kind of funny. Scram, Pauly.”

He wasn’t even looking at me. He knew her from school, but only by sight. They never spoke.

“Do I know you?” he said. He was looking at Lilly, so he could have meant it either way. The straight way, where you ask a person—Lilly—if you’ve met before. Or the jerky way, where you ask a person—me—to please buzz off. Coulda been both, now that I think of it.

“I’ve seen you around,” Lilly said.

“You don’t play baseball,” I reminded Pauly.

“I’m just here heckling,” he said. “Can I have a Coke please? And a Hoodsie? But only if you have the real Hoodsies, with the wooden spoons. Don’t waste my time with those plastic spoons.”

Lilly was about to get it when I intervened. “No, you can’t.”

“Oakley,” she snapped, getting the stuff anyway. “Why are you being like that?”

“He’s my best friend. I can be like that.”

“I thought I was your best friend,” Lilly said. A joke that wasn’t.

“I’ll be your best friend,” Pauly said to her.

I had this sudden, mad, sweeping feeling of losing. Of losing big things, of losing everything. Stupid, yes. But very real and very very saddening to me.

Until Lilly started laughing. And my things came right back to me.

“That’s so nuts, isn’t it? The way we do that? Who ever invented that anyway,
best friends
?”

“Barney Rubble,” Pauly said authoritatively.

“Come on, let’s go,” Stan called from the front.

“Oh, your order,” Lilly said to Paul.

“He doesn’t have the money to pay for it,” I said. “I can tell by the way he asked.”

“Stop that now,” she scolded me.

“Ya, stop,” he said. Then he got his refreshments, made sure to open up both very quickly so we couldn’t take them back.

“Buck fifty,” I said.

He leaned over the counter, sad, sweet, repentant. “Jeez, I had no idea you people were so expensive. Can I borrow a buck forty?”

Lilly started laughing.

“Don’t do that, please,” I said to her. My turn to scold. “It’ll just make him worse.”

“It’s fine,” Lilly said to Pauly. “Don’t listen to him, he doesn’t even really work here.”

“Come on,” Stan said, starting up the truck and cranking the radio. “I finished my cigarette. If we’re parked longer than one smoke then we’re wasting time.”

“Yo, Stan,” Pauly called.

“Yo, Pauly,” Stan called back. “Don’t be comin’ around my truck without no money.”

“Got it covered,” Pauly said confidently, winking at Lilly. I whipped my head around to see if she winked back, but I was too late. Her smile said she had, though.

Off we were, and music blasting, Mountain Dew flowing, we started chatting about you-know-who.

“He’s nice,” Lilly said.

“No he isn’t,” I said.

“Really I am, but people don’t understand me,” Stan said.

Lilly laughed, then excused herself. “Sorry, Stan, we were talking about that boy Pauly, not you. But you’re nice too, of course.”

“No he isn’t,” I whispered close by her ear.

It was starting to seem like Lilly found everything I said amusing. She just laughed, shook her head, and slapped my arm.

“Okay, well what about Stan then? You must admit Stan is cool.”

“Hell, Lilly, he ain’t so great.”

“But he is, in his way. He is kind of wild, and at the same time he’s serious about stuff. He seems to enjoy himself, and at the same time he pays his bills.”

“Even if his bills are probably for heroin or something.”

For the moment, she was not amused by me. “What has gotten into you?” she asked.

At which point, I made it worse. “Us,” I said. “I get a little jealous, is all.”

She covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh,” she said softly. “Oh, my …”

Which was not what I wanted to hear.

She reached over, lightly touched both of my cheeks with both of her palms. “You can’t be my boyfriend, Oakley.” She looked desperate, her regular confidence drained away. “I really need you to be more than that. You’re my best friend. You’re already my best friend. Ever.”

And what, I ask, could I say about that? Has it ever happened, that your ears heard one thing and your heart and lungs and fluttery buttery belly heard a whole different story?

Stan must have felt like he had to say something. “I got a bump on my head, shaped like a number two. Wanna feel it?”

“No,” I said.

“Wasn’t asking you.”

“Sure, I’ll feel it,” Lilly said. I glared at her, to very little effect.

“Kids!” I hollered, pointing out the window like I was up in the crow’s nest of the
Nina
.

“
Rich
kids!” Stan yelled, straightening and pulling the truck right up onto the sidewalk. “Great neighborhood. Next to the stoners, this is my biggest bread-and-butter. Every time I pass through here without my truck somebody calls the cops. Now
that’s
a nice neighborhood.”