Songs in Ordinary Time (43 page)

“That’s a curious nature you got there, kid,” he said, squinting with his first glimpse of her hurrying along Main Street.

“Yah, well, I can tell, Blue. You look mad.”

“Is that right?” he murmured, getting up to stand by the dusty window.

He patted his wave flat and hiked his sleeves higher on his biceps. She was almost running. He checked his watch, ten minutes late. Girls like her always made him feel this way, nervous and unsure of himself. They were the kind of girl that needed to be cut down to size. But there was something different about Alice. She was pretty, but in a quiet way. That was it, he thought. It was the quiet, the softness of her.

Perry was counting the money from his last sale. He put it into the register.

“When’s your leave up?” Perry asked.

“Not for a while,” he said.

“You been home—what, since April, right? Ain’t that a pretty long leave?”

Mooney looked at him. “Commandos get long leaves before special assignments.”

“What’s the special assignment?” Perry asked.

He shook his head with a rueful snort. “Be serious, will you? You really think I’m gonna give some hick-town grease monkey that kind of high-clearance, top-secret, national-security information?”

“Yah, well, maybe I was just testing you.” Perry grinned. “Maybe I’m a double agent. Maybe these are all Commies coming in here for gas.”

“Hey!” he said, grabbing Perry’s arm. “Don’t even kid, okay? I mean this is a fine line we’re walking here, if you know what I mean.”

“Sorry! I didn’t know you were gonna take it so personal. I’m sorry, all right?” Perry squealed.

208 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

He let him go. “Hey, it’s the training, that’s all, so let’s just forget it,” he said, rubbing his temples. He had to be careful. The simplest things seemed to be getting out of hand lately. It was this constant panic, this festering sense of his own fraudulence. Of all people, Blue Mooney, who loved freedom and hated fakery more than anyone, was now trapped in a lie he could not make right.

“What kinda training?” Perry asked. “In your head? You mean brainwash-ing?”

“Just forget it. Forget I said anything. Hey, so how do you like it here?”

he said to change the subject. “Bonifante still a bitch?”

Eunice was okay, Perry said. But the pay was lousy. Some guy said the tire company was hiring, so he was thinking of trying there.

“J. C. Colter?” he asked, and Perry said yes. Mooney cracked his knuckles.

He was desperate for money, but he couldn’t very well go looking for steady work when everybody thought he was home on leave. He glanced out the window. She was only two blocks away. The service bell rang as a red Thunderbird convertible with its radio blasting pulled up to the high-test pump. Perry ran outside.

He looked at the register. He didn’t have to move from the window, just reach over and hit the right key. Apron in hand, Alice crossed East Center Street, then stepped onto the curb and raced along. The register drawer popped out. Loaded with cash. Easy money, and the way Eunice Bonifante ran this place she wouldn’t even know the difference. Alice was crossing Terrill Street. Her ponytail flipped up and down as she neared the station.

His fingers closed over the bills. Perry was propping up the Thunderbird’s hood when the driver called to him. Perry ran around to look at the map she’d been studying. Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five dollars. Sweat trickled down the small of Mooney’s back. Alice started past the station. Just then the corner light turned green and a pickup truck suddenly swung out of the traffic into the station. He couldn’t believe what was happening. The truck was veering in Alice’s direction. In a moment, a second more, she would be directly in its deadly path. There wasn’t even enough time to get to the door. All he could do was bang on the plate glass with his fists. Perry and the women in the convertible looked at him. “Look out! Oh Jesus, please don’t! Please don’t!” he was bellowing as the truck turned, just barely missing her. It pulled up to the other side of the pump. He was shaking.

His fingers were locked over the crumpled bills. Opening his hand, he let the money fall into the cash drawer. Images kept popping in his head with flashbulb intensity: the truck, her bouncing ponytail, Perry studying the map. She was safe. He closed the register, certain it had been a test, a sign that she was part of some mysterious transaction he did not yet understand.

She was already a block away.

He hurried outside, chasing after her, careful not to call her name or say a word or make any sound loud enough to startle her, because she was running fast and he was so close now that even the sound of his boots on the pavement might terrify her, so he ran on the grass strip between the SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 209

sidewalk and the street, calling softly, “Alice! Alice! Alice!” until she finally looked back.

“Are you all right?” he asked before she could say anything. “I saw what happened back there. I tried to tell you. I was inside, banging on the window.

The truck was coming right at you,” he said, taking a step closer.

She glanced warily back then, out at the street.

“I couldn’t believe it was happening,” he said. “I kept banging. Did you hear me banging and banging like that?”

She looked at him. Her eyes were a deep blue, the lashes dark and thick.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“Back at the station, the truck, it was going to hit you. It was awful. I thought something was going to happen to you.”

“Why are you doing this?” she said, her face reddening.

“What? Doing what?” The panic in his own voice stunned him. The last thing he wanted was to make her mad.

“Why are you following me?”

“I’m not. I was out, you know, walking. I’m always walking. I love walking,” he said, trying to be careful that his wobbling boots did not stumble on the frost-heaved sidewalk as he hurried alongside. “Sometimes our platoon, we used to march twenty or thirty miles a day.” He looked down at her. “You ever been in Texas?”

She didn’t answer.

“Real wild country, lemme tell you. Tough men, real tough.” He wasn’t making sense, but all he had were words to tether what was slipping away.

“My sergeant’s from there, his name’s John Henry Nickerson. He’s almost seven feet tall, with a tattoo of a horse galloping across his back, most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen on a human being and that’s the truth, more beautiful than some paintings, even. The horse has this long, streaming mane, and Nickerson can make the haunches ripple if he flexes a certain way.”

Her eyes widened, and he could tell she was regarding him in a new light.

He told her about his own tattoo, a full blue moon on his right shoulder blade.

Something in her quick glance made the tattoo prickle like sore flesh rubbing against his shirt.

“Yah, well, I wanted something original, you know. Not like hearts and roses and snakes. Especially snakes. Everybody’s got snakes, you know, circling up poles or twisted around hearts.”

The sharpness of her gaze saddened him. The truth was that it had been bad chemistry between him and Nickerson right from the start, which still mystified him, because Nickerson had seemed like such a badass regular guy that he’d really thought all he had to do the first time Nickerson barked that ridiculous name, Travis Mooney, was to step forward and explain how really his name was Blue, which was what he’d been called all his life. “I hear Travis and I start looking all around, wondering where’s the idiot with a name like that,” he had said, still rigid at attention.

210 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“Is that a fact?” Nickerson had sighed through a hard smile.

“Yes sir, that’s a fact. Sure is,” he’d said, flashing his most eager grin.

“Well, I’ll be damned. In fact, I’ll be damned, hog-tied, and do-si-do’d now, Travis, but that’s your name now, don’t you see. That is your legal, U.S. government-issue, Marine Corps official and documented name. See?

Right here, TRAVIS T. MOONEY. Travis T.” His hooded eyes rose over the clipboard. “Travesty, kinda says so much now, don’t it? For instance, it tells me that you are every bit a travesty of a man as you are of a soldier.”

He’d had one week of soldiering, one week of Nickerson’s constant harassment, one fist-clenching, tongue-biting week of insult and humiliation, until that moment with the fly-buzzing noonday sun on his back and the salty sweat stinging his eyes when he had Nickerson pinned under him as he pummeled the sergeant’s face to raw flesh. For that he had served his nine months, and now here he was, not on leave at all, but dishonorably discharged and sent home in shame.

She walked even faster now, as they got closer to the A+X.

“Hey, what’s the big rush? You’ll be rid of me in a few minutes,” he said, noticing how she turned her head every time a car went by. She didn’t want to be seen with him.

“It’s just that I hate it when he yells at me,” she said. “The other night he even pushed one of the girls.”

She seemed so small, so fragile.
If Coughlin touches her
, he kept thinking.

If he so much as brushes against her
…He stopped and stared at her. “Look, if that…that”—he caught himself—“friggin’ creep ever so much as looks at you the wrong way, just let me know,” he said, pointing at her. “’Cause I’ll break him in two, I mean it. You just let me know,” he said, his voice cracking with the same wild surge of emotion he’d felt at the gas station.

“Oh, yah, well, I guess I’d better get in there,” she said, looking confused.

She hurried into the drive-in lot.

“Just tell me,” he called, suddenly feeling foolish. It was a strange sensation to be standing here without his car or his bike, without anyone or anything to make him whole and solid, to keep him from stepping off the edge of the earth. As he headed back to the garage, he set each foot down heavily, as if to spike himself along the sidewalk.

I
t was a hot starry night and even at eleven the lot was still jammed with cars. There hadn’t been any breaks, and now everyone was tired and irritable. Alice hadn’t minded the constant rushing and running, because the night had flown by without once having to consider what her encounter with Blue Mooney meant. She hadn’t understood half of what he said. He almost seemed to be warning her or threatening her. He gave her the creeps the way he stared and stood so close, and now all his talk about snakes and hearts was a lot more weird than she could stand.

At eleven-thirty she had just taken her last order when Mooney’s car squealed into the lot and parked behind the office. She pushed her slip SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 211

through the window at Carper. Mooney swaggered across the lot, nodding over that peculiar gun-fingered salute he made to people he knew.

“Need a ride?” he asked, standing off to the side of the window.

Thinking he was speaking to his cousin, she kept tallying her slip. One more order and she’d be done.

Carper’s blocky head moved close to the glass. “Alice in Wonderland don’t speak to trash,” Carper said in his high thin voice. He laughed.

Mooney touched her arm, and she jumped. “I just thought I’d check and see,” he said softly, hunching away from Carper. “You need a ride home?”

“My brother’s coming,” she said, grateful that he actually was, so she wouldn’t have to be ducking behind trees and telephone poles again all the way home.

Mooney slid something from his hip pocket and held it below the food-streaked steel counter so Carper couldn’t see it. “I got you this,” he said, but she refused to look down. She felt panicky. She was conscious of people watching from their cars. Carper giggled.

“Here,” Mooney said, nudging her with it. “In case you didn’t get a chance to eat.”

The Hershey bar with almonds was soft with the warmth of his pocket, of his body.

“She’s gonna throw up!” Carper snickered.

“Thank you,” she said, her eyes blurring with the heat of her red face.

“Some late-night energy,” Mooney said, his square teeth flashing in a wide white grin.

“That’s right,” she said weakly, “some energy.” She slipped the candy bar into her pocket and headed toward a car that was flashing its light for the bill.

“That’s right, some energy,” Carper mimicked.

“Shut up, blockhead,” Mooney growled. “Just shut up!”

When her last car left, she ran in to use the bathroom before Norm came.

She took the limp candy bar from her pocket and squeezed it, then dropped it into the trash. What was it about her that attracted such weird people?

she wondered.

M
ooney liked this time best, with the floodlights out and all the waitresses gone. While Carper cleaned up the kitchen and bathrooms, he and Coughlin had a beer in the office. The thin frazzled man’s filthy mouth amused him.

“How about you?” Coughlin asked, handing him his latest batch of dirty pictures. “Been getting much lately?”

“Naw. Not really.” He cleared his throat. He didn’t like the way the pictures made him feel. He pretended to look through them, but he was thinking of Alice. Last night he had dreamed about her. They were in the back seat of his car, and his head was in her lap.

“So what’s your problem?” Coughlin snickered.

“I’m just here on leave, so I don’t have all that much time, you know.”

212 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“No!” Coughlin laughed with raised eyebrows. “I don’t know! Not for that, I don’t! Especially for that! Especially on leave. I mean if you can’t get it now, soldier boy, Jesus, you’re never gonna get it.”

He tried to smile. He slid the pictures back into the envelope. “Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m not.”

Coughlin set down his bottle and wet his lips until they glistened like his eyes. “You’re making a move on that Fermoyle chick, aren’t you?”

“Who says?” His foot twisted back and forth on his boot heel. He pushed the pictures back to Coughlin, suddenly repulsed by them.

“I seen the way you look at her. The girls, too, they seen it.”

“I guess you’re all full of shit, then,” he said, getting up quickly before Coughlin’s tittery laugh made him lose his temper.