Hearts (17 page)

It was worse than when she had told her about Wright’s dying, because it was so much easier now to gauge her pain. “Listen,” Linda said. “You don’t have to go. We’ll figure something else out if we have to …”

“No!”
Robin shrieked that one syllable. Then she said, more calmly, “I want to.”

“You do?”

“Where is she?” Robin asked.

“Arizona. Glendale. It’s near Phoenix. At least I think that’s where she is.”

“How do you know? How did you find …?”

Linda contemplated the details of her discovery among Wright’s things: the private investigation itself, the B-movie prose of the detective’s report. It all made Wright seem mean-spirited and vindictive instead of the way he probably was—tortured and lonely. Robin wouldn’t want to know all that junk, anyway. It would be like altering her history.

“Just by chance,” Linda said. “I found a slip of paper with an old address. But I’ll call first and be sure.”

“Don’t!” Robin said.

“What?”

“Don’t tell her about me.”

“Robin, I don’t understand. A minute ago you said—”

The girl was pulling at her fingertips as if they were gloves she was having difficulty removing. “I—I want to surprise her,” she said.

“It would be more like a shock than a surprise,” Linda said. “She could have a heart atta—”

“Please,”
Robin begged, with more passion than Linda would have believed possible. “Linda,
please!
You have to swear!”

And Linda had given her foolish promise.

19
“There’s Wolfie!” Robin yelled, and Linda’s heart lunged. She applied the brakes so swiftly and hard that at least three cars traveling at a safe distance behind them had to do the same. And it wasn’t Wolfie at all, of course. Just a couple of wild-haired teenagers who ran up eagerly for the ride. One of them wore a lavender satin jacket with the word
Killer
embroidered across the right breast.

“Oh,
great
,” Linda said, but she had to let them in, and then endure the curses of the other drivers as they went past in a fury of exhaust. “You two-headed cock-sucking moron!” the last one yelled, as the teenagers jumped into the back, slamming both doors.

“There’s no need for that language!” Linda called out her window.

“Home, James,” one of the hitchhikers said, and the other one jerked around, cackling with laughter.

Linda, after she’d suffered the first moments of utter disappointment, thought of Bonnie and Clyde and those other two, those men who murdered a whole family in Kansas.
This
was Kansas.

She signaled cautiously before she reentered the highway. “I hope you guys aren’t going too far,” she told them. “We’ll be stopping for the night pretty soon ourselves.”

Robin gaped at her. It was not even one o’clock in the afternoon, and they’d overslept and gotten a late start that morning, besides.

The backseat passengers merely giggled. They were high on something; Linda could see that right away. They laughed at everything, even when she asked a civil question about their ultimate destination. “Oh-ul-ultimate!” one of them cried, and his partner sounded as if
he had swallowed his tongue and was choking to death. He finally stopped long enough to say, “We’re going to Florida, man.”

“Florida!” Linda said. “Why, that’s the other w—,” before she caught on and stopped herself. But it was too late. They were off again, and pummeling each other hard while they laughed.

Linda glared at Robin, who turned the other way. Linda took one hand from the wheel and pinched Robin’s sleeve. “
Now
see what you’ve done,” she whispered, hardly moving her lips.

Robin was outraged with innocence. “One of them looked like him,” she said, not bothering to lower her voice. “It’s not my fault. He even has the same kind of shirt.”

How did she have the nerve to say that? Linda observed her passengers in the rearview mirror. They were nothing like Wolfie. They were only adolescents, at that strange midpoint of formation when boys becoming men appear strikingly awkward, when their hands, feet, noses, and ears develop suddenly, before the rest of them. Maybe, Linda thought, it should all take place in darkness and secrecy, like the transformation of caterpillars inside cocoons.

Robin had obviously wanted one of them to be Wolfie, and she’d bestowed his likeness on a mere kid. Linda understood the lure of such magical thinking, but knew they could have been killed, stopping like that. “We could have been killed,” she said. “And look what we—” She had glanced again at Robin and saw the familiar eye-narrowing and jaw-clenching that usually preceded hostilities between them. The last thing she
needed was a quarrel with Robin in the confinement of the car, with these two maniacs behind them.

Linda turned her attention back to the road. She would have liked to stop and let them out, but she had fallen into traffic again. The boys were so spacey they were liable to go tripping across the divider into the path of a trailer truck and get flattened like those poor dogs and chipmunks she kept passing. And they had to be
some
mothers’ children. The moment Linda picked them up, responsibility for their safety had been subtly transferred to her hands, almost as if she’d agreed to adopt them.

She looked at the next green sign. There wasn’t going to be another exit for eight miles. Maybe if she ignored them, they’d stop carrying on. How could anyone laugh like that, anyway, especially when nothing was actually funny? It occurred to her that she and Robin had not laughed together once during this entire trip. The closest was when Wolfie was with them and there had been a few rounds of smiling. But he had been the instigator, the ambassador of all that good will. How could Robin have mistaken these hopheaded babies for him?

Linda decided she wasn’t going to say another word to set them off, but she didn’t have to; there was plenty of other stimulation. Through the mirror she saw them point helplessly at something out the window—what? there were only road signs, cars, a few trees—and then collapse against each other in another seizure of hysterics.

Once in a while, gasping, slobbering spittle, they’d interject things like, “Oh, man. Oh, my side. Oh, oh!”

You could go crazy listening to them. She put on
the radio, hoping to drown them out with music. But it was exactly one o’clock and the news was on every station she tried. It was mostly bad news, as usual. And it seemed familiar, as if it was also
old
bad news being replayed. They were still talking about that leaking nuclear plant. It wasn’t very far from Slatesville. Linda wondered if the Piners had been contaminated and were sitting now, glowing, in front of their glowing Zenith. That is, if the asbestos dust hadn’t gotten them yet, or ordinary death. Mideast, blah, blah, blah, Rhodesia, Canada, gasoline supply, blah, blah, blah. An elephant had escaped from the zoo in Wichita and had not yet been located. More rain was predicted for the Central Plains area. Even the sports news was bad; all the local teams had been disgraced.

Linda shut off the radio and listened to the laughter behind her, which had not stopped for any of those bulletins of world crisis. She wondered what they were on.

She had smoked marijuana a few times with Iola and had had too much beer once or twice with Wright. But she hadn’t ever been this way. Stimulants never brought her past a certain edge of promise. She
almost
relaxed fully, almost became giddy, but didn’t quite cross the threshold to that other place. After alcohol, she slept, and usually woke later with a headache. Once, after smoking pot, she threw up, and then felt anxious for hours.

They’ll probably be miserable later, she told herself, but without much conviction. She hoped their false gaiety would not influence Robin and give her any ideas about drugs, make her think you had to depend on artificial means to have a good time.

She glanced at Robin furtively to see how she was taking all this. The girl’s silvery profile was as cool as a queen’s struck onto a coin. “What’s the matter with them?” Linda said. When Robin didn’t answer, Linda raised her voice. “What’s so funny back there?” she asked. “How can you laugh like that after hearing the news?” She was rewarded with stifled sputters, a few squeals. “Oh, boy,” Linda told Robin. “They must be really stoned, or crazy. I mean, there’s probably radiation everywhere, not just in Pennsylvania. We’d probably be better off if we just breathed
out
all the time. And who knows what’s coming next? Tidal waves, maybe. Or killer bees!”

“Zzzzzzzz,” buzzed one of the madmen in the backseat.

“Raid! Raid!” his partner screamed in a Looney Tunes soprano. In the mirror, Linda saw them shrivel and die in each other’s arms.

“Well, the Mideast crisis is no joke!” she shouted. Then she turned to Robin again, for confirmation, and was astonished. The girl’s face was crumpled, like a glove, and her shoulders were shaking violently. A few tiny, anguished sounds escaped her distorted mouth. Why, she was crying! Those white lashes were spilling tears and her face was pink with emotion.

“Robin!” Linda said. “What is it?”

Robin’s hands flew up like demented birds, and more noises escaped her. “
Hee
,” she said.
“Hee-hee!”
And Linda finally understood that she was laughing.

It was the strangest sound, one that she would never have associated with Robin. Linda could not have been more surprised if she had heard a cat barking.

The boys were still at it, too, and the three of them formed a rude chorus of whoops and howls and titters.

“Stop that!” Linda said. “Will you all just stop it! You’re encouraging them!” she accused Robin.

But Linda knew she could hardly be heard now over the uproar. And not only that—a current of silliness was charging through her own chest. Oh, no. She tried to suppress it, tried to focus on personal problems, all the bizarre and awful things that had happened. Think of the abortion, she ordered herself, the firebombs. Think about Wright, his lost goodness, his poor homeless ashes sliding around in the trunk of the car. But she couldn’t concentrate on anything serious. All that commotion. Robin’s
face
. The escaped elephant lumbering madly across Wichita. “The elephant!” she cried, and there were answering trumpets from the backseat, jungle birdcalls, the shrieking of monkeys.

The craziness spread quickly through her, erupting in her throat like contained sneezes. What am I doing, she thought, and gave in to it wildly and all at once. The others were winding down by then, capable of only brief convulsions. Linda had just begun. Her nose ran, her eyes streamed. She could hardly see the road and had to steer off it finally, and roll onto the graveled shoulder.

Having started last, she kept at it longest. Robin and the two boys became more and more sober, wiped their eyes, let out a few irregular neighs and bleats, and grew still. Only Linda was laughing now, and wishing that she could stop, too. It was tiring, enervating. Maybe they really would have to look for a place for the night in the heart of the afternoon. And it was different when she was laughing by herself. The giddiness was rapidly evaporating.
She felt her mood alter sharply even as she continued giggling and hiccuping like a fool. When she was able to gain some control, she wiped her eyes, too, and pulled slowly out onto the road again. She drove in fits and starts to the next exit, where she stopped to discharge her passengers.

By then everyone was quiet, each one drawn into private and reflective silence. All the familiar phrases about laughter came into Linda’s head. Laugh and the world laughs with you. He who laughs last laughs best. Laugh, clown, laugh. The laughter of angels. They died laughing.

The boys walked away from the car, listing toward one another, and without looking back. Robin rested her cheek on the window ledge and watched them go. Linda let the motor idle until it failed. “Well,” she said, feeling immeasurably saddened, “that was a good laugh, wasn’t it?”

20
Linda woke, dreaming of Wolfie, an erotic dream that made waking a frustration. She had probably been stimulated by Robin’s wrong identification of yesterday’s hitchhikers. The undeniable power of suggestion. Linda looked at the other bed, where Robin, in sleep, managed to look powerless. The promise of the dream and the seeming reality of its pleasures were fading fast.

They were still in Kansas. Some mornings it was hard to get her bearings. If she slept deeply enough, she might be convinced she was anywhere upon waking: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana. That garage mechanic back in Bayonne had warned that much of the country would look like Jersey. It didn’t, really. There was a distinct geographical quality to each state, and even to separate areas within the state. Iowa, for instance, was not as flat as she had supposed. The flourishing cornfields were stretched over a beautiful rolling terrain. Kansas
was
flat, a place where it was possible to believe the earth isn’t round, after all, and that you could fall right off it if you walked far enough into the horizon.

The highway’s ribbon was the same, though, and the motels and the fast-food shops and the diners. Linda suspected that the same waitress had stood at their table, pencil poised for their order while she dreamed her own escape, in the last three successive states. Linda wondered why she was dumb enough to expect something
new
all the time, not just during this trip, but in every aspect of her daily life. Why did something like a snowfall out of season or a benevolent glance from a stranger on a bus make her feel unreasonably hopeful? And why, when that stranger, Wolfie, was only the star of an
X-rated dream, did she imagine he’d be very different from Wright, or from Barry King, the lover she’d had before Wright?

Linda met Barry shortly after moving to Bayonne. She had taken a bedroom in a walk-up apartment that was a short bus ride from the dance studio. It was convenient and very cheap, and although she valued privacy, Linda thought it might be cozier and safer to share a place. Gayleen Hayes, the other woman who lived there, was not consumed by a compulsion to be tidy. She bathed first in the morning, and when it was Linda’s turn she found the floor puddled and all the towels drenched. Gayleen didn’t bother to wash hair off the soap or from the basin and she often left a magazine on the edge of the tub, its colors running over the side.