Going Native (7 page)

"You ever do any moon rock?" she asked.

"Moon rock? What's that?"

"It's new."

"I've seen everything that ever came down the street. Never heard of no moon rock."

"That's 'cause it's new, it's happening."

"Yeah?"

"It's what the astronauts use. It's NASA-approved."

"Get some."

Then the unidentifiable strangeness that had been creeping moldlike across the windows resolved itself and it was night. Again.

"Whoa." She struggled to her feet, unable to manage the responsibilities of upright posture beyond a simian crouch, in which attitude she contemplated the wonders of planetary motion. "Went right past that day. Going faster than days now."

"What?"

She collapsed like a deflating balloon back onto the mattress.

"What'd you say?"

"When I was a little girl," she began, her huge eyes still full of whatever she had seen outside that black window.

"Oh holy Christ."

"When I was a little girl, I wanted, more than anything, to run away with the carnival."

"Please. Don't give me a heart attack."

"You know those sleazy carnivals that come every summer to the parking lot behind the mall? The same nothing rides, the same crummy prizes year after year, but every summer we couldn't wait to get out there the first night they opened. And every night those girls working the booths, man, couldn't get enough of 'em. Beanbag. Darts. Air rifle. Ping-Pong ball in the goldfish bowl. I studied them. Their moves, their faces. We're talking major cosmetics here and kinda glass eyes that looked right at you without looking. Their bodies were always hard and skinny and count on at least one to have red hair and everyone had a pack of Marlboros sticking out of their jeans and they didn't take orders from nobody and they certainly didn't think much of you, shuffling past with a ball of cotton candy in your face. I wanted so bad to be one of those girls, wear a greasy change apron around my hips and grow a hard face under those yellow lights and carnival stink and yell insults at all the straights."

"Yeah," said Mister CD, "you just wanted to sit on a corn dog."

She didn't sleep that night, either.

"We're on a mission," he reminded her.

In the morning, when the light came monstrously round again, it found her poised ballerinalike at the window thinking, it's a beautiful, it's a pink cake day. She dressed herself from the nearest pile and said, "Time to get out, campers. Let's go, we gotta go. Movies, we go movies, Daddy." Daddy had spent much of the night positioned out in the living room, watching the trees twitch.

"In a minute."

Hours later, Latisha and Mister CD emerged from the shadowy house into the hot bedazzlement of high noon, outfitted as if for a mountain hike in layered clothing not usually seen until late autumn, sober faces shielded from painful rays and close inspection by matching pairs of expensive Italian sunglasses. Covering the sparse growth on Mister CD's head a neon blue baseball cap with a gold
showtime
patch sewn across the crown. The car, an unwashed, unwaxed, decidedly unnew green Ford Galaxie, sat baking in the driveway.

Noncommittal eyes beneath a lowered brow observed all from next door, where Mr. Hugo, a retired classics professor with a nasty fungoid blemish bleaching out one ruddy cheek, was down on his knees in the crabgrass pouring a kettle of boiling water into the widening cracks of his cement walk, a silent spectator, having early learned there was little point in addressing neighbors who responded with icy stares or, on one disagreeable occasion, an obscenely long, extended tongue. He had pretty much concluded that these characters were a couple of drug addicts from the city, especially the dirty-blond gal with the bony rump. His wife, Philippa, believed they might be mafia, professional killers perhaps, "mechanics," lying low from the FBI and other mob types. But Philippa, he contended, absorbed entirely too much television, was too quick to embrace the extremities of human behavior: last winter, for instance, pleading like a teenager for a snowmobile -- unsuccessfully, of course. So you tended your garden, you eliminated your pests the safe, organic way and you did not meddle, at least not until the show had completed its undeniably entertaining run.

Latisha occupied the front seat fiercely, a ride-loving dog, head erect, nails digging into the warm Leatherette, blown pupils locked on the types and tints flying at her. Mister CD simply drove, guided the car through a defined succession of right angles, the formal labyrinth of suburban geometry, to the giddy loops, curls, and straights of interstate improvisation. Latisha rolled down the window, shook her head, the torn flag of her hair whipping freely behind her; she shouted into the wind, she slapped a dangling palm against the door. Mister CD laughed; she amused him, her and her nonsense; he looked at her and he laughed. "Look at all these assholes!" she cried, scattering words into the polluted howl. "I hate 'em all!"

"All right," warned Mister CD in his deep daddy voice. His big hands and thick arms (the gold watch tightly fastened to his wrist looked to have been implanted there) held the rattling car to the inconspicuous middle lane; he drove, in fact, with a trucker's assurance, an indisputable presumption of mind over matter executed with the same practiced grace involved in the swift ignition of one thumb-worn Bic and the tendering of its flame to the seasoned lip of the glass bowl being sucked so enthusiastically on the seat beside him. "Hey!" He grabbed for the hastily withdrawn pipe. "What in the fucking hell are you doing? What's the matter with you? Are you that stupid?"

"Watch the road," she muttered, inhaling, inhaling, inhaling.

"What do you think, we're in the fucking woods, for Christ's sake, we can't be --" He took the pipe she handed him. "Oh no" puff "who's gonna notice" puff "a couple of outrageous crackheads" puff "chasing the dragon" puff "through eight lanes of midday traffic?" puff "Who's gonna notice a sight common as that?" puff.

Suddenly they were surrounded by cop cars, great big cop cars, cop cars big as dinosaurs whizzing past, looming in the mirrors, rearing up ahead, no one had ever seen so many cop cars. Mister CD watched the speedometer, he watched the mirrors, he watched the road, all at once. The engine had begun making a bad sound, the crazy rattle of a roulette ball dropping into the slot. Or was that his heart?

Latisha, blind as usual to the crisis, was stretching her arms, pressing flattened palms into the yielding dinginess of the vinyl roof. "Wish we had a convertible," she was saying. "That's our kind of car, don't you think? People like us. I want to feel the speed." She clicked on the radio (Global Truss: "Y U B So F*cken Sic?") and in the half second it took him to turn the thing off the cops vanished. And was that a stray cruiser lurking several cars up ahead in an adjoining lane, or, yes, just the electric company. He was sweating and he didn't like to sweat; it stunk, it drew bugs.

"Look at that dumb shit. His face is fucked. He's got a fucked face. Hey, fuck you!" A middle finger was offered her from a passing Mercedes at sixty per. "These people must all die," she told him, and, glimpsing yet another vehicular outrage, "Hey, lady, got any hair on your fucking twat!" She was hanging halfway out of the car, his hand gripping the waistband of her jeans. Mister CD smiled, coughed up a laugh or two. "My heart," he groaned. What a woman.

A white torpedo shot from the corner of his left eye, exploded into a full-size Trans Am careening around him in high-gear shriek, apparently out of control, then cutting abruptly back into an impossible pocket a horn's blast off their speckled grill, one slim multibraceleted arm wagging indifferently from the driver's window. The Galaxie shook, squealing under the brakes. A forgotten Clock slid out from under the seat, kicked back once, twice by his pedaling feet to slide out again. It was fully loaded.

"Fucking whore!" shrieked Latisha, falling hard against Mister CD's shoulder. "Run her off the road!" She made a grab for the wheel, instantly the back of his hand cracked across her nose and cheek. A clumsy grappling commenced in the front seat of the Galaxie, alert vehicles in the immediate vicinity opening a discreet cushion of space around the rollicking car. "Enough!" he commanded, the voice emanating from the same cold well as pale frogs with blind embryonic eyes and hairless rats and nights of no return.

"You bastard," she hissed. "I saw how you looked at her. I'm not stupid." And she lunged at him, attempting to slide her hand into his pants. He pushed her away, raising a cocked elbow at her head. "If I have to pull over, you'll wish you wasn't even ever you." She didn't have to look twice at his face. She sat in place, stationary and mute, her mind a hopeless turmoil of unsortable forms, until the car stopped moving and they were staring at one another in the parking lot of the mall. She held his arm, she wouldn't let him out of the car. She wanted to screw on the backseat. He looked at her. "Your brains are goo," he said. "Fucking goo. I could probably use 'em to wax the fucking car."

He caught her slap in midair, held her by the wrist, and, looking directly into her eyes, twisted it until she winced. "Now, let's go inside," he said, "and let's be good."

A representative of normal society with normal clothes and normal features and a wad of dense curly hair seemingly balanced atop his head like a wool cap drifted past their windshield engrossed in the tricky consumption of a melting ice cream cone. Noticing their stares, he quickened his pace.

"Look at that jerk," said Latisha. "He's got a damn woody in his pants."

"Going in," said Mister CD. "Being good." He gripped her firmly by the arm, a gentleman escorting his lady up the blazing walk to the ticket window, where lingered a few bored kids in luridly dyed beach clothes. There were a dozen screens, the same movie playing at half of them.

"I wanna see
Batman,"
she said.

"No."

"Batman,"
she demanded.

"Not again. We'll rent it. I'll buy you the fucking tape."

"It's not on tape yet, you bastard."

The solemn girl behind the glass watched unblinking through exaggerated cartoon eyes, her mind blanking mercifully out in anticipation of her first holdup, and since her life had been relatively brief, a complete rerun still left plenty of time for Coming Attractions and none of the scenes were pretty. Then the man was tugging on the girl and whispering angrily into her ear. Then the girl whispered angrily back. Then the man was speaking to her.

"Batman,"
said Mister CD. "Two." He paid and, without understanding why, blew the ticket girl a kiss.

The crimson lobby looked like a whorehouse and smelled like a locker room. At the refreshment counter Miss Ticket Booth's identical twin could not accept Mister CD's crisp hundred-dollar note without consulting the manager, a weedy officious boy in a bow tie who certainly wasn't legal in any sense. Then, halfway down the aisle, Latisha dropped the tub of popcorn, and after they had settled into their usual seats, on the end four rows back, she refused to move, so Mister CD, complaining but compliant, went back for a refill. The sloping floor was sticky and ankle-deep in trash. Her hard comfortless seat seemed to have been crudely upholstered in unwashed laundry. Nervously, she eyed the ghostly shiftings of the great red curtain; the sense of anticipation, of any magnitude, had always been, even in childhood, personally difficult to bear, and in the enclosed dark of a theater, unwelcome awarenesses incubated freely. Whatever mysteries the curtain contained, the act of revelation was always a shock of some degree. (And though she had already seen this movie twice before, she was quite capable of being surprised by the familiar; she invited it.) She could feel the multitude of glowing minds that shared this space with her, convinced that each strange and separate soul was fixed in complicit concentration upon the back of her unprotected head. "Assholes," she muttered. "Cunts. Dicks." She was preparing to leave when Mister CD arrived, fresh popcorn spilling from a bucket twice the size of the original. "What'd I miss?" he joked. The house lights were still up. "Fuck!" Leaning forward, he spat a mouthful of partially chewed corn between his legs. "What is this shit?" She thought he was having a heart attack.

"Goddamn bad butter. Tastes like WD-40."

She sampled a few kernels. "Seems all right to me."

"It's all yours, babe."

Ten minutes into the picture, a not wholly unpleasant unreeling of swollen events in shades of black and blue, she excused herself to go to the bathroom. The second time she got up, twenty minutes later, Mister CD, without a word, followed. In a locked stall of the women's room they burned down the remaining rock secreted in clever locales about their persons. Back at their seats they discovered the screen's dimensions had undergone alteration. Mister CD cackled irrepressibly whenever anyone got shot; Latisha was Batman, she ruled. But near the end, the narrative having dutifully chugged on rails of big budget bombast into a gratifyingly musty station, the theater reverberating with all the nuances of the special effects department, the squeals of thrilled patrons, Latisha was seized by an unaccountable sense of desolation and she began to cry, and though Mister CD held her in his arms, patted her quaking back, she couldn't stop, and when the movie noise was no longer able to mask her noise, he helped her up the aisle as behind them the Joker wiggled a gleeful butt in the Gaped Crusader's face.

She staggered likp a wino in the open nakedness of rude daylight, halfway to the car tripping on her own feet, hitting the pavement with a sickening sound. "My knee," she cried, rolling around like a wounded animal, hand clamped over the tear in her jeans, "I broke my fucking knee."

Mister CD looked down at her small vulnerable body, the drowned world of her eyes, the nostrils leaking rillets of snot she licked with her tongue. "God," he said, "your favorite movie, too."

She was inspecting the damage with a child's curious horror. "Aaaaaw, I'm bleeding," she moaned.

Two women in jogging costume had paused at a wary distance. Cars cruising for spaces in the lot were slowing as they passed. "Get up," he said. The temperature was climbing out here in the sun, the glaze melting off the shoppers' faces. He was experiencing an awareness of accumulating eyes. Disturbance in the field, outlanders in Sector E6. "Get up," he ordered, nudging her with his shoe, "get up or I'll break your fucking head, too." She knuckle-punched him in the leg. "Okay," he said calmly and reached down and hauled her to her feet and hustled her expertly away, as if he were a cop and she a dangerous someone under arrest. The Bic was in one hand, the glove compartment being impatiently rummaged by the other before he had shifted out of reverse. When she could find nothing and realized there was nothing around her to stanch the tears, to string Christmas lights through her soul, she started to cry again. She accused him of not loving her, of not even caring about her. Mister CD drove.