Doubles (4 page)

On the shoulder she put one hand on her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun. She was still in her bathing suit, a large, red towel wrapped high around her hips. She looked stunning and out of place, like a marble sculpture placed on the moon.

“She is into you,” the guy said. “I’m serious. Let me help you out. She was watching you the whole time you were at the lake.”

“How’d you know we were at the lake?”

“I told you,” he said, and pointed at his temple. “Seriously, play it cool with this girl. I’ll help you out.”

We sat in silence for several long seconds. A surprising calm came over the stopped cars. There were no horns, no shouting, just the quiet rumble of the Dart’s low idle.

“You really just get out of jail?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“What for?”

“Mortgage fraud.”

The girl returned to the car and opened the door.

“I couldn’t see anything,” she said, sitting back down. “It’s backed up for a ways.” She turned on the radio. “I love music in the car.” “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper squeezed out of my mono speaker. She turned up the volume until it hurt. “It’s the only place I can ever really hear it!”

In the rearview the man raised his eyebrows and reached for the door. He stepped into the road and stretched his arms towards the sky. He was extremely short and thin, like a greasy matador in black jeans. As soon as the door closed behind him, the girl said, “We’ve got to get rid of him.”

“Shhh,” I said, but it was too late. She had basically yelled it. The man looked back at us with a wide smile.

I would drop him off at a gas station in Chapel Hill. We’d be fine. I wanted to be dangerous and calm. I didn’t want her to know how scared I actually was.

Behind her, on the shoulder, I saw the man call out something to the car in front of us. It was a champagne Grand Marquis, the driver’s head low and gray. The man grimaced and turned his ear as if listening to a response. Then he picked up a small rock and threw it into the side of the car. At an exaggerated slow pace he began his return to the Dart. The gray hair in front of us turned. I could just barely see the face of an old man. It was filled with terror and confusion. The girl hadn’t seen any of it though, and when she finally turned to see what I was looking at, the man was already opening the door.

“It’s moving up ahead,” he said.

Traffic began to creep. Fifty yards ahead, a young man stood beside a yellow Jeep Wrangler on the side of the road speaking into his cell phone. As we passed, I saw a red smear across the pavement leading to a deer crumpled on the side of the road, antlers twisting its neck at a sharp angle, horn tangled into the wavering heat. We passed three dilapidated tobacco hangers overgrown with kudzu. A pickup truck filled with young Mexican children drove by us, the boys all facing towards the center of the truck bed, where the head of a German shepherd emerged. The boys all reached for it, petting it, rubbing it, like the dog were some highway celebrity. They pushed and laughed, one reaching over the other trying to get to the animal.

“Your dad runs that art museum,” the man said.

The girl cocked her head, like she had heard some distant sound.

“How’d you know that?”

“Five for five.”

“And you . . .” He pointed at me, his long, boney finger wavering in the air behind my seat. He then circled the finger, as if winding a long string around it, and flung his hand upward. “Your daddy is a lawyer.”

As he said it, the dog leapt from that pickup truck. I watched in the rearview as it landed hard on the pavement, rolled onto the shoulder, and, in one smooth motion, popped up and started to run. Within
seconds it disappeared into the kudzu. The children banged on the truck’s back windshield, trying to make the driver stop. I thought to myself,
If I fell from a truck bed, I would surely crumple into a ball and stay that way. How does anything alive just pop back?

“You guys see that?” I said.

“I right?” the man said.

“He right?” the girl said.

“See what?”

“Am I right?”

“About what?”

“Father esquire.”

I returned to my own car, reacquainting myself with the fact that I was sitting beside a strange, beautiful woman and an ex-con with tattooed fingers who claimed to be a mind reader. It was the only time I could think of I had been in my own car with two people whose names I didn’t know, let alone one I thought might kill me, and one I felt like I might fall in love with if I looked at her one more time.

“Six for six,” the man said.

“How’d you know that?” the girl said.

But it didn’t take a mind reader to make an educated guess that someone who played tennis came from a family with money. And families with money, lots of them had a lawyer in the fold. Like mine. The guy was smart, but he was no mystic.

“And I’ll tell you something else, since I’m on such a roll. You didn’t think you were going to be the one driving this girl home.” I let my eyes rise to the rearview. The pickup had stopped far back on the shoulder. In the backseat, the man leaned forward. “Yeah. Your buddies are the ones with the girlie luck. But look at you now.”

“It’s not like that,” she said.

“Ah, but it is. Who was it that was supposed to be with her? Another tennis player. You play doubles?”

I couldn’t believe he knew what doubles was.

“Hit a nerve, huh?” Then he pointed his thumb at me and in a loud stage whisper said to the girl, “Still a virgin, too.”

I frowned as if what he was saying were so ridiculous it didn’t even require comment. But this guy was picking up on things. He was hitting too many of these shots. I could explain the lawyer guess for the most part but not the one that her father ran the museum. The day seemed hotter, the air through our open windows thicker. The girl pulled her towel tightly around her shoulders. I looked in the rearview, watching for the dog to reemerge.

“Know my trick?” the man said.

“What trick?” the girl said.

“How I read minds? Take my pretty picture. I’ll tell you the truth.”

The girl lifted a Polaroid camera from her bag.

“They make those in digital now,” the man said.

She pushed a lever on the side of the metal case, and the enclosed device opened its old accordion skin. Then she turned. “OK. Tell me.”

“First I’ll read one more piece of your sweet little brain. You. Want. Me. Out of this car.”

“Yeah. I. Do,” she said.

“I know. And I’ll tell you how I know. One, two”—he leaned forward, and the girl tensed, finger on the button—“because I’m a
mind
reader.”

The man yelped in high laughter, and the flash filled the car, its power diffused by the sunlight, a small, white blink followed by a whir. Film emerged from the camera’s mouth. Without reaction, the girl carefully plucked the photo and produced a ballpoint pen from her bag. I watched her write onto the white space at the bottom: I AM A MIND READER.

A Sinclair gas station appeared on my right, just off the exit. I came off the ramp and passed a concrete dinosaur in the lot, where tall, thin weeds rose from cracks like we had rolled onto the plane of a mangy asphalt scalp. There was one pump and no cars. The pump was so
old, it read the price in plastic digits that spun behind a glass façade. I stopped in the small parallelogram of shade from the hanger and pulled a lever beneath the dash. The cover on the gas tank released with a metallic
boing
.

“Mind reader alert: You’re thinking you’re going to get rid of me and then go home and make out,” he said. “You’re both thinking that exact thing.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” I said, laughing awkwardly as I got out of the car. He’d said exactly what I had been thinking. I took the hose from the antique pump and started to fill the Dart. The man stepped out of the car and started across the lot. He swung open the door to the convenience store so hard that it hit the side of the building. The glass shattered, falling into countless shards at his feet. He kept his arm high above his head, as if he had just thrown a handful of confetti into the breeze. I turned to the girl. She was playing air drums to the radio. The holster at the end of the hose jumped in my hand, a trickle overflowing the tank. “Hey!” I said.

She leaned out the window and said, “What?”

“Turn the car off!”

She waved her hand at the dash as if it should be forgotten. “Let’s go.”

The pump predated any technology that allowed you to pay. I turned towards the store. Inside, the man stood on his toes at the counter, leaning across it. He held the teenage teller’s hair in his fist and slammed her face onto the counter. He raised her head and did it again. I turned. The girl in my car had turned back to her bag, where she was searching for something. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I felt isolated by my senses. I got back into the car.

“You pay?” she said, putting on a pair of large sunglasses from the bag. She turned to look back as we rolled into the street. Already we had gone too far for her to see anything.

“Hey, you pay back there?”

“We needed to go.”

Out of the corner of my eye, one foot, its toenails painted in chipped red, settled into the sun on my dash. I was afraid that if I told her what had just happened, it would ruin whatever good thing we had going on. Again we let the wind take over the car. It was soothing, knowing that not only did we not need to speak, but that she could not, in fact, even really hear me if I tried.

We took 54 into Chapel Hill, passing the tennis center to our left as we came to the bottom of the hill. She directed me to Rogerson Drive, a small road of cottages built in the 1940s for GI Bill students. We stopped at a small, yellow house with a red Nissan pickup truck in the driveway. She invited me in to dry off. One wall in her living room featured a series of Polaroids of her face in different expressions, the emotions written onto the white space. JOY (AT CHRISTMAS PRESENT). REGRET (DRUNK EMAIL TO JOEL). PAIN (ACTUAL PHYSICAL PAIN—INGROWN TOENAIL). REALLY FUNNY (
AMERICA’S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS
). NOT FUNNY AT ALL (BUT NICE PERSON TOLD THE JOKE—ALLISON). Another had a photo of the same dogwood in different shades of light and weather. In one photo snow hung heavy on its narrow branches, miniature icicles frozen in mid-drip hanging off of buds. In another, a colorful HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign hung draped across the branches. The sun rose through blossoms in one. Another was almost completely dark. Each had the date written on it. The television flickered silent on the evening news. Closed captions ran across the bottom.

She said, “I leave this on for Chewy.”

“You really hard of hearing?” I said, looking for a pet.

“I’m deaf in one ear, part of the way in the other.”

“How’d it happen?”

She shrugged, wiping the dust off the top of the TV with her fingertip. I thought about what the man had said about her being into me.
In the past, very few times in the past, girls had told me that friends of theirs liked me, that someone had a crush, that I should talk to so-and-so more. I know that part of it was self-defense, that I would rather not set myself up for failure, but I always thought,
Let them come to me
. If they like me, they’ll talk. They never did, though. But this time, even though the words were from the mouth of a violent ex-con mind reader who was surely now running through some field, trailing dollar bills and Funyuns wrappers, fleeing the law and convenience store destruction in his wake, there was something there that I believed. I decided to act, whatever the chance. This one I wouldn’t let get away.

“Take a photo of my teeth,” I said.

“You gonna tell me the truth?”

“About what?”

“Tell me who sent you to talk to me.”

“You’re the one who spoke to me.”

“Was it the Asian guy?”

“You believe that stuff?”

“Or was it the naked fool?”

I put my hands into the air like what she had said was ridiculous.

“That Chewy?” I said.

“Don’t try to change the subject.”

A dog door in the kitchen took up a good third of the regular door itself. The plastic flap was dirty and worn, and the edges of the opening were rough and widened by use. Through the back window I saw a sheepdog standing in the middle of the lawn, growling at a dirty German shepherd.

The girl followed my gaze and said, “Shit.”

“That’s the dog from the highway.”

She opened the door. “Chewy, come here.”

“Hey,” I said, passing the girl and stepping into the lawn. “Hey!”

The German shepherd turned to me, teeth bared, and took a step
back. It was like he had followed me there. Maybe my presence was enough. Animals sometimes responded to me in ways unusual to other humans. I thought it was my height. They must have thought I was a subspecies, an unknown quantity.

“Get!”

But the dog lunged. His lips curled enough that the damp, hidden flesh on their underside popped out, glistening with viscous goo. He snapped, like some lever had been thrown, a mechanical function meant to break and tear. His fans from the pickup truck would have run, screaming in terror. I swung away with the towel that I had been drying myself off with, and his teeth closed on the white terry cloth. It was the same motion as a swinging backhand volley. I was trained to respond to this. The towel lifted into the air on my follow-through, and the dog rose with it, growling and dangling below. I let the whole dog-towel unit swing full to my other side, then let go. The beast and towel flew over the low picket fence. The dog landed on his side in the grass and, just like he had on the shoulder of the highway, popped back up and ran.

Inside, Chewy lapped water from a bowl in the kitchen, splashing it across the fur on his face. His eyes were completely covered by wet hair. The girl lifted her camera from the table and tucked a red ballpoint pen into her ponytail. It stood erect like a plastic horn.