exactly where he wants them to be. “Four-thirty-two . . . four or five hours. . . .” His heart races. He inhales the hot air deeply, blows it out and inhales again, blows it out fast and inhales again.
“Fuck that. Who the fuck cares what time it is or what the fuck time I get there? . . . I got the fucking direction and I don’t need to waste my fucking energy getting all the fuck worked up over fucking nothing. Fuck it. I ain’t scared and I’m not going to start getting fucking scared by wondering what the fuck time it is, or when the fuck I’m getting where the fuck I’m going.” You’d have heard him laughing at himself if you had happened to be in the middle of the Mojave in August 1964. “I’m not scared, I’m OK. Now where was I? Oh, yeah.”
He sees her again. It was the time he came to her house last week. It was really hot that day. Good thing he wasn’t out here then, 106 in San Diego. That’d be somewhere like 120 out here. Anyway, he went into her house in the late afternoon. The house was asleep, everything completely still. He trailed the absence of sound out to the back yard patio, found the woman’s husband and their kids passed out in the heat, lying on mattresses they had dragged outside into the shade.
He could hear pipes and faucets sputter from the bathroom shower inside the house, settling into a high-pressure rain. The woman gasped for breath as she stepped into the shower. He argued with himself as he involuntarily walked back into the house. His silent steps wound from the patio along the corridor between the bedrooms and the bathroom. From the amplified splash and the sound of the spray and the bare feet squeaking against the wet porcelain, he determined that the bathroom door remained wide open. He could hear the water storming over her body and exploding in wet impact on the floor of the tub. Taking a breath, he turned the corner of the corridor and faced the bathroom. Cold steamless water ran over her silhouette, streams of water raced in clear webs on the inside of the shower curtain. The shadow bent at the waist and long arms stretched downward, breasts falling easily under shoulders, head down, hair hanging like a black waterfall.
She stood up, arms pulling the mane of hair up and over her shoulders. Her face was tilted upward, her mouth open. The jet of water blasting against her neck. Cool air swirled from the bathroom door.
She twisted the faucet shut. Eddie slipped out of the doorway and waited. Hearing her yank the shower curtain aside, he timed his voice to say, “Robert? . . .” with perfect innocence, and turned the corner. Her eyes met his. She was mid-stride, one leg suspended over the rim of the tub. She made no effort to cover herself, but froze there like a photograph, her eyes driving into his, betraying a mixture of curiosity and amusement.
She stood there, skin gleaming, holding his eyes prisoner with a magnetic power within her gaze. He could see nothing of her but a terrifying and increasing depth behind her eyes. He felt his body go weightless in panic as he realized he was far beyond his depth.
At that instant she smiled and reached smoothly for a towel and hugged it front of herself. She glanced out of the side of her eye, letting slip for an instant something that felt to Eddie like understanding and forgiveness, unsettling him even more and informing him immediately who held all the power. Her attitude shamed him, as though in these frozen instants he could see the real meaning of his mistake.
It was as though she had expected, even recognized, the inevitability of this contact but was disappointed in what Eddie had done with it. Without a word, she told him he had gone about it entirely wrong, and although she would not use the word, he knew “fool” was the only one appropriate. His face burned, his eyes dropped down, unfocused. Still holding her image, almost but not quite registering his boots on the wooden floor, he said, “Oh, I’m sorry.”
Her voice held a curious tone, coming from deeper in her chest, ironic and more real than it had ever sounded to him before. It made him imagine the way she would sound giving simple directions to a stranger who had lost his way. A matter-of-fact voice that in some way labeled him an equal. It seemed final and strangely welcome, spoken under her breath. A code, a frightening challenge, a whispered riddle. “Oh, yeah, sure, you are.”
SHERRY BABY
Eleven-thirty, a moonless night. Empty streets in suburbia. The tenth day of a heat wave. The Santa Ana gusts hot and dry, ninety-two degrees. Eddie Burnett is urinating under a street lamp on the middle of an asphalt road. It’s a tradition with him this summer. Standing in one spot, he turns a slow circle. His record is four revolutions, he calls them “piss rings.” He does this almost every night on the way home from his girlfriend’s house. The rings stain the road for several days. Each night a new overlapping ring, until he gets five. He’s doing this to commemorate the 1964 Summer Olympic Games.
His girlfriend’s house? Not really. That is, it’s an unrequited love. Sherry likes him, but on the social level he’s considered much too goony for her. Eddie does not quite get it. He gets his hair cut by his mother, and dresses from the Navy PX, with no sense of style, and worse, no interest in it. The social situation means much less to Sherry than the sense that Eddie doesn’t trust something about himself. She puzzles at his obvious feeling of inferiority, despite qualities that should make him confident. She wishes Eddie would find that place that gives most of the other boys the ground they stand on. He seems to have lost that place, or had it stolen. Sherry’s curiosity and attraction comes from the feeling that Eddie knows where that place is, needs it, and thinks it’s worthless at the same time. He speaks in a code, using images that create unwholesome feelings in Sherry. They appeal to something essential inside of herself that she fears most. Just about everything he has to say makes Sherry laugh, or seems faintly intimidating, as though he knew some bitter secret.
Eddie is especially happy tonight, though. Earlier today Sherry passed her Coke bottle to him. When he passed it back, she just finished it off without a second glance. Right in front of her friends. Didn’t check for backwash or anything. Didn’t even wipe the lip of the bottle. To Eddie and to the other kids, this gesture spoke of intimacy.
Sherry’s hair is summer blond, her eyes are gray. She smells stunningly innocent. She’s ripe and it’s all operating, pulsating just under the surface. Eddie is in full-throttle, aching adolescent love.
Mornings they meet at the beach. She rides with a girlfriend’s mother or older brother. Eddie thumbs out with a couple of the guys, making a heroic beach entrance from the far reaches of thirty miles of inland freeway.
Sherry knows she drives them all crazy. She sees it as their problem and has zero patience with any boy who brings it up. The boys her own age can speak of almost nothing else in the minutes that follow seeing her. Men pull over in their cars to holler their promises to her. She sends them off stammering insults in her general direction, with about the same effect on Sherry as if they were bouncing off a nearby lamppost. Nothing disturbs her self-possession. For this quality Eddie adores her. Her beauty is only secondary.
He is fascinated to discover that her self-possession is not the result of insensitivity or a callous stupidity, but is fueled by her tremendous intelligence and fierce courage.
Tonight, as Eddie finishes off the last piss ring, he hears Sherry’s voice from the phone call that afternoon. Minutes earlier he had been in her front room keeping her company as she ironed clothes for the entire family. He hears her soft, trusting voice as she sobs tearful-hateful-father misunderstandings. Sherry is being punished for being out too late the night before with Eddie, and for coming home with grass stains on her white shorts.
Eddie had walked her home. They were only a few minutes late. He made her laugh at something. There was an intoxicating jasmine bush hovering over their heads. Suddenly a wrestling match exploded. Sherry and Eddie struggled against each other on the warm, wet lawn. A blue light shone out of the window of some stranger’s house as they sat inside watching Ed Sullivan on T.V.
When
