Into the Great Wide Open

H
e met her in a van, in the rain, on his way to the Girl Scout camp at Chincoteague. An afternoon in mid-October. Gray rainy light leaked through the windows. Kenny sat in the last seat of the van, without a thought, without a plan. Wentworth slept on the seat beside him.

Rainwater snaked its way down the window glass: a little shoot or finger, top left to bottom right, dashing along and then stopping, trembling; then leaping forward, darting from drop to drop, safe harbors, running until they were too heavy to stop, off the window and down onto the road. Kenny gave them names, like racehorses. He felt a pleasant sadness when they died on the pavement.

The girls two seats in front of him were talking softly with their heads together. The others read or dozed, stared out the window. They were LRYers, Liberal Religious Youth, and Kenny didn’t know any of them but Wentworth. They looked clean and white and rich to Kenny, untroubled. There was another vanload of them, ahead or behind. They were interchangeable. You could move them from one seat to another, one van to another. What did Kenny’s father call it?
Fungible
, from selling corn to the Germans, maybe: no significant difference between one ear of corn and the next. His father worked in the Department of Agriculture when he was well enough. His father was an economist, which gave him a distant view of the world. He was an expert whistler: “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Cherokee,” “How High the Moon.” Kenny caught himself thinking of his father in the past tense. There was some feeling, anger and shame all mixed together, and Kenny turned his face to the rain and the window so the others wouldn’t see it. Not that any of them were looking.

Empty fields, turnrows of mud. The farmhouses stood alone in
skirts of brown lawn, black skeletons of trees, swing-sets. Self-reliance, Kenny thought. Miles between us. The cool clean smell of the rain, as opposed to the complicated human smell inside the van: coffee, deodorant, farts, gasoline.

Kenny’s father wasn’t doing well. Last seen asleep on the sofa in the living room of the apartment, three in the afternoon. Kenny shut the TV off, covered his father with a chenille bedspread, took the melted highball off the coffee table, out of harm’s way. That was yesterday afternoon. Kenny had been living with Wentworth and his family for a week already. He went home to see if it was safe to return, found his father, covered him with the bedspread like a piece of furniture in one of those big mansions where they covered the furniture with sheets and then left. Why? Kenny only knew about this from TV, but he knew that feeling, leaving things behind. Too much like dying: pulling the sheet up and over the body … You morbid little fucker, Kenny thought. Cut it out.

It was the rain’s fault, he decided, that and the black houses standing off from each other. He was a little stoned, suggestible. He turned his eyes away from the lonesome countryside. What would Kerouac say? But Kerouac would never find himself in a van full of Liberal Religious Youth. Kenny couldn’t remember what religion, even—Unitarian? Your parents would let you go because it said
Religious
in the title, and you got to go on overnight trips with girls, etc., and nobody cared if you got stoned or not. That was the advance publicity, anyway. Kenny had always looked down on the LRY people, even Wentworth a little. Now here he was, not quite through his own choice. There was no way that Wentworth’s parents wanted Kenny around if Wentworth himself was out of the house. Wentworth was the last of five children. Kenny could picture the parents, crossing off the days on the calendar until Wentworth left for college. They were perfectly nice and kindly people, though. Kenny overheard Wentworth’s mom dickering with the LRY leader, trying to
make a place for him. “Well, it’s both his parents,” she was saying. “No … No, the mother’s not in the picture at this point.”

Wentworth’s mom sold real estate, a fast, efficient talker, all business. “If it’s just the insurance,” she said; then a pause. “No, no, I understand … Look, I could sign a release. I mean, if you just needed one.”

Kenny had waited like he was being sentenced, sitting in her kitchen. Mrs. Wentworth was waiting for the other end of the line. Staring blankly into midair, she suddenly noticed Kenny. What was she seeing? A naked orphan. A vulture chick concealed among her own. A voice buzzed through the telephone line and she brightened all at once. “Terrific,” she said into the handset. “I do appreciate it. Thank you so much for your help.” She hung up the phone and looked at Kenny, brightly. “You’re all set,” she said.

Motherless children, Kenny thought. Her kindness had a public, professional face. Nevertheless she kept him, made a place for him at dinner. His own mother was trying her hand at Supported Living, for the second time. They gave her an apartment, sent somebody around to make sure she took her medications.

Nine of them in the gray light, ghostly, including the counselor who was driving and the counselorette riding shotgun, who kept playing the same tape by the Police. Blond collegiate androids. Kenny thought of shaking Wentworth awake, just to get out of his own head. The rain, the light, the black wet dirt. Death by water (drowning), by fire (burning), by air (falling), and by earth: disease, decomposition, rot. Oh yeah, Kenny thought, I sound like a Slayer song, Black Sabbath. I Am Iron Man. Still the memory of his own hands pulling the bedspread over his father, gently, trying not to wake him … Chenille, another mystery. Those little lines and deedlee balls of fuzz didn’t make it warmer, they must be for looks. Which meant that somebody liked it: his mother, who had bought it or kept it. For the second time in five minutes Kenny found himself
confronted with his mother, the lady of Baltimore, stranded for life. He gave up, surrendered to the gray light and the sadness. Sometimes it was easier just to let it go, let events wash over him and drop the struggle. Something pleasant in the gray light. Kenny could do nothing about his mother. God grant me the something to change what I can, the something to accept what I can’t change, the wisdom to know the difference.
Serenity
, Kenny thought.

His eyes came to rest on the girl two benches up: a head, a neck, slender shoulders in grandmotherly black wool. Her hair was black, or almost black, and cropped short as a marine’s, uneven. Brain damage, electroshock therapy. This was interesting, but who was she? He tortured his brain, couldn’t come up with her face. Wentworth had been too stoned to introduce him to anybody before they left, and nobody else had bothered. Kenny wondered if she’d come by herself, too: the way she now sat, alone and upright, not talking, doing something with her hands—what? Reading probably. Knitting. Kenny hoped that she might turn, so he could see her face, but she sat and stayed there, still, unfidgeting, with her back to him. Shoulders set against him. She wasn’t giving him anything.

He would take what he could, then. He didn’t feel any particular obligation to these soft, settled boys and girls. He would take what he was given: whatever his ears could hear and his eyes could see, and all the oxygen they weren’t using.

Her neck was a delicate, fluted … Her skull was a graceful shape, too, which was good: her hair was easily short enough to show the outline of the bone beneath the skin. My little coconut. Kenny thought of how her head might feel in the palm of his hand, the short soft hair and the hard bone. Drawing her down … a little boyish, too, a little masculine, which was scary. A girl with a boy’s head. Kenny felt a little stirring, danger or sex, he couldn’t tell, he didn’t quite care.