Suicide's Girlfriend (15 page)

That car was big, with plenty of weight; still, it fishtailed, and when it finally came to a stop, it blocked the narrow road, front end touching one snowbank, rear end the other.

Right away, I began to apologize: “I'm sorry, I was just fooling around, come on, Heather,” but she was already out the door, taking off at a run.

Few things in my life have frightened me more than the way my face frightened Heather Pierce that night: To be the cause of such terror! Nothing on earth seemed so pressing as to stop Heather's being afraid of me,
now
, so I could stop being afraid of
myself.

“Please!” I scrambled from the car and shouted to her over the hood, “It's just me! Come back!”

Heather was already a way up the road, but she stopped. She didn't actually look my way, but shouted in a voice both angry and impatient, “I know it's you, dummy! But you're
bleeding!
You're bleeding out of your mouth!”

The words scared me right up to the edge of tears. Blood? Out of my mouth? I hesitated, then swiped my fingers across my chin. They came away wet and dark in the moonlight.

“I
told
you I was a witch!” Heather shouted. “And you didn't believe me, did you?”

Once I understood that she was implying she had cursed me, I stopped being afraid of myself and, out of some dim sense of self-preservation, made myself laugh. What a laugh—big and absolutely phony. Still, the fact that I was able to produce it at all gave me hope and cleared my head.

“Hey.” I spit out the lemon drops in my mouth. Roped with blood and saliva, they landed in the snow at my feet. “It's just the
candy
. The candy . . . it's like it sanded my tongue.”

Heather didn't come any closer. I shrugged and laughed as if it were all the same to me, the whole matter was just funny. Then I walked over to one of the banks and took a handful of snow into my bloody mouth.

From where I stood, the moonlit fields looked much the way the lake had from Heather's kitchen—the smooth expanse, the margins suggested by trees—but not twenty yards away, the snow had been disturbed. A tangle of lumpy furrows in the snow ran down into the ditch and across a broken section of barbed wire fencing, and I realized that these were the marks left behind by the vehicles that had retrieved Kevin Hammersmith and his car.

Death, I thought, as if I might summon it a little closer, learn a secret or two; but, then, immediately, I felt uneasy and called out, “Here, Heather, I think this is what you wanted to see.”

After a moment, I heard the creak of Heather treading on the snow, then the tapping of her shoes on the Buick's bumper as she made her way between the snowdrift and the hood of the car to my side of the road.

I didn't want to look at her any more than she wanted to look at me and, side by side, neither of us talking, we stood staring out at the tracks as if we imagined they might arrange themselves into some pattern, spell out a message we could carry away.

“I should have worn boots,” Heather said finally. Very matter-of-fact. Like one of our mothers. “How am I supposed to go out there without boots?”

We both started to shiver; it was not so cold, really, but there seemed no point in staying longer. I opened the door on my side of the car and signaled for her to crawl across the seat .

“One thing,” she said, after I'd started the engine, “just because
you
think you're a witch doesn't mean
I'm
not one, too.”

I nodded. “I know that. And I'm sorry about scaring you, Heather.”

A stupid thing for me to say, I realize now, and no doubt infuriating: my forgetting so fast that what had scared her had been her belief in some curse she had laid on me, and not my pretending to be a lunatic.

“Also,” she said, “don't humor me. I know a few things: I know if Andy had called tonight, you wouldn't be with me at all.”

I made no more response to this than to release an exasperated breath of air; then I busied myself with the tedious process of straightening out the car, inching it back and forth between the banks. She was right, of course. I had shown her my very own poems. I had sung old Broadway scores with her. I had never felt as easy and happy in the company of anyone as I had with Heather, and—barring my own children—I never have since; yet, I would
have abandoned her, again and again, for another night of being reflected in Andy Rainier's eyes.

With almost theatrical caution, I drove us back to Heather's house. We didn't speak of anything, let alone of delivering the voodoo doll to Mike Lichtenberg, and while I was in the Pierces' kitchen, calling home to tell my mother that I wouldn't be staying overnight, after all, I saw Heather stuff the doll into the trash basket beneath the sink.

Not long afterward, Mike Lichtenberg went to Vietnam. He didn't get injured, at least not physically. I saw him at a Christmas party once, a couple of years later, when I was home from college. He insisted on telling a story about how he'd cut off the head of a Vietcong and stuck it on a spike outside his tent as a combination trophy/good luck charm. The crowd at the Christmas party seemed to be about equally divided between those who laughed at the gesture, those who found it appalling, those who thought it made good sense.

Mike Lichtenberg. Andy Rainier. I hardly ever think of the boys I knew back then, but Heather Pierce I think of often. Heather Pierce appears in my dreams with distressing regularity and there she greets me without enthusiasm. She torments me by pretending—in my dreams, I
know
she is pretending—that we never really were such good friends, or if we were, all of that happened far too long ago to really matter to anyone.

I
T WAS
D
AVIS
who saw the car first. Later, for a little while, I'd say, “I looked down in the ditch and thought I saw something in the snow,” which of course gave the impression I was the one, but Davis saw the car first.

If Bailey and I had gone out alone that night, we'd have driven by. I thought about that a lot in the years after, how the littlest thing could make all the difference, turning your head this way instead of that at one moment in your life could decide who you married or whether you lost control on a curve and so on.

That night, we'd been celebrating. Bailey had drawn a low number in the lottery, but just that morning he'd found out his deferment for med school had gone through. None of us was stinking drunk, but we were feeling good, driving back from the city to the little town where our college sat.

In winter, I always counted the last stoplight out of the city as a landmark because, once we got there, I could switch on the heater and we'd finally get warm air. I drove a VW back then. The heater cooked your feet but this was Iowa in January. The windchill could hit fifty below, so we felt grateful for anything.

Just past that stoplight, you came upon some acreages with nice houses, and it was about there that Davis started telling us a story about how his uncle shot a ceramic lawn deer once. He sat forward in the backseat so his chin dug into my shoulder. Davis always had to be doing something like that to me, just to drive me a little crazy.

“The deer shattered, so my uncle knew pretty fast what he'd done. Before he could get away, though, the lady who owned the thing came out, screaming.” Davis hooted and kicked at the back of my seat. “All she had on was a bra and panties, man!”

I thought Davis would go on to tell how the lady decided she wasn't mad after all and invited his uncle in to screw. Most of Davis's stories went down that path. Bailey had warned me not to room with him, but, second semester, I was trying to start my life over. I'd been ditched by this girl, and Davis looked like a guy in an underwear ad; he had a big jaw and he stood around a lot with his arms folded so his biceps popped out. I thought, Hey, a good-looking guy like Davis, maybe he'd bring me luck.

Anyway, the story about the lawn deer: it turned out the lady tackled Davis's uncle so hard she rattled his pacemaker. The uncle almost died, she had to call an ambulance, and so on.

Davis told a lot of lies, but I believed that story about his uncle. I remembered it, maybe because of what happened that night, or maybe because—it seems this way to me now—it really did say something about the way people's lives get tangled up with each other.

Outside the city, the road turned curvy and nice. There were lots of trees on the right, up where the houses sat, and snowy fields to the left in long, clean stretches that made me feel whatever had gone wrong in my life could be fixed because life was big and great. I let the car make a little slide, and thought about the girl who'd thrown me over. Elaine Sellen. Black hair. Pale, perfect skin. I was crazy about her. All of first semester, we did everything together: movies and parties
and Sunday breakfast at the truck stop after making love most of Saturday night. Sometimes I even let her drag me to hear people read poems or into the city for an opera. Then one night, just before Christmas break, we're sitting in the dining hall, finishing our coffee, and she tells me she's not going to see me anymore. She smiled while she talked. I guessed she didn't want people to know what went on, so I smiled, too. Maybe that was a mistake. I was twenty-one. What did I know? I backed away from the table, mumbled something, “Hey, that's cool, Elaine.”

I couldn't remember anything ever hurting me that way—and I felt like a little kid, like when my dad used to beat me up: hurt and afraid, and not just because the beating hurt. Afraid because I wanted to hit back.

That night in January, though, driving along with Bailey and Davis, I started imagining how glad I'd be if Elaine came into the dining hall and sat down with me at breakfast. It'd all been a mistake, she'd say, and we'd spend the whole day making love. She'd have on some opera, and if we got hungry she'd get this box of chocolates from her desk. She was the only girl I ever knew who bought herself boxes of fancy candy. As soon as she finished one, she went out and bought another, like somebody giving herself a gift, you see? She had all kinds of things she did that nobody else at the school did. She took long walks back before that sort of thing caught on. And her room was always freezing because she kept her windows open. She said it was good for us. “Isn't this wonderful?” she'd say. About the cold room, the walks, some lecture we'd been to. “Isn't this wonderful, Todd?”

Anyway, at about that point in Bailey and Davis and my drive, the road curved hard. You had to be careful because the road hugged a bluff—ice built up there, and you could only guess at what lay ahead. If someone came around the bend in your lane, you might end up going off what was a pretty steep bank for that part of the world.

“
Oye
, Todd!” Bailey said, and while I slowed us down, he went into this pretend-Spanish act. Bailey was a great guy. Not bad-looking, but he wore these transparent pink glasses that were really meant for athletics.
Bailey thought everybody should wear glasses like that since the plastic was almost unbreakable. This pretend-Spanish thing Bailey did drove Davis wild, mostly because Davis couldn't tell if we knew the language or not. Bailey'd say something like: “Hota con lavaba roota, Todd?” Basically, I'd just work at not laughing.

In the backseat, Davis went on about what fools we were, what jerks, what total nobodies, but then all of a sudden he started in: We had to stop! He'd seen something over the bank!

I slowed down, but not much. Davis loved to tell people—especially girls—stories in which I looked like a fool: Todd walks out of the bathroom attached to the toilet paper roll. Todd screams when a lab rat mysteriously crawls across his mouth at four o'clock in the morning.

“I don't see anything, Davis.”

Davis laughed. “What's the matter, Mr. Wonderful? Don't want to get your penny loafers wet?”

He kept it up the whole fifteen miles back to the college. Bailey was quiet. He could be quiet, but his quiet then was a judgment on me, and I was mad enough at both of them that when I brought the car up in front of the student union, I braked so hard, all three of us flew forward a little.

“Jesus, Todd,” Bailey said.

I found Davis's face grinning in the rearview mirror. “Will you shut up if I go back?”

He set his chin on my shoulder again. “Scout's honor,” he said in what was supposed to sound like some sexy girl's voice.

The car was a dark station wagon, rammed into brambles at the base of the ditch.

Davis got out even before I parked, and he went sliding down the bank. “There's a guy in here!” he shouted.

“Look, Todd,” Bailey whispered, “even if he's lying, it's good you drove back.”

Davis wasn't lying, though. Inside the station wagon, a heavyset man slumped over the wheel.

“What'd I tell you?” Davis danced around in the snow. “Smell the booze!”

I pushed the man down on the seat. His skin was a milky blue, his lips and cheeks cold. I started mouth-to-mouth and, behind me, Davis was going, “I noticed you turned the car around when you parked, Todd. So it'd seem like you stopped the first time, right?”

I didn't know if he was right or wrong. “For Christ sakes, get some help,” I said.

I didn't mean both of them, but both of them took off in the VW. I pounded the guy's chest a couple of times. When I did the breathing, my mouth brushed against a little mustache he wore. I'd never done mouth-to-mouth on a person, just a doll. There's some difference, believe me, in a real old guy with big black pores and whiskers and scotch on his breath. Every once in a while, I spooked and reared away from him, afraid if he came around, he'd be a man returned from the dead, more powerful than anything human, burning to eat me alive. Once I heard a car coming, and I scrambled up to the shoulder, trying to get the driver to stop. I suppose I looked like a maniac. The driver almost spun into the ditch, speeding on ice to get away.

Bailey and Davis ended up driving to what turned out to be the house of the guy from the accident. The woman there wouldn't let Davis and Bailey inside, but she said she'd call an ambulance. Then, when they started giving her information about the station wagon, she fainted. She had the door locked, so they couldn't help her
or
use the phone, and finally Davis had to drive to another house to call.

By the time they got back to me, and the ambulance arrived, I was shaking with cold. The police gave me coffee. They didn't say anything about the fact that we'd been drinking. One cop told us he figured the guy—Mr. Bernard—had been in the ditch since before dark, or else he would have turned on his headlights. If he'd had on lights, somebody would have seen the car down there.

“So maybe we drove by him on our way
into
the city?” I asked. The
cop nodded, which made me feel a little better. He also said he'd picked up Bernard on that stretch before. He figured this time Bernard had passed out and just driven over the bank. There weren't any signs he'd slid, or tried to stop himself.

The next morning, Davis woke me up by rattling the newspaper in my face. I suppose I knew Mr. Bernard wouldn't make it, but, still, it shook me to learn he was dead.

Davis followed me down to the bathroom. Even when I turned the shower on and stepped inside, he stayed, reading me details about the guy. “Served in World War II! Born in England!”

A freshman came in to shave and after showing him the newspaper article and letting him know I'd given Mr. Bernard mouth-to-mouth, Davis brought the guy to my stall and pulled back the curtain: “A man who has tasted death!”

I laughed, then pulled the curtain shut, pumped soap from the dispenser into my washcloth, and scrubbed my mouth.

“So what do you think?” Davis watched me towel off as if I were suddenly a fascinating person. “Was Bernard dead already when you worked on him, Toddy?”

As if I considered him too goofy to deal with, I started down the hall. Bailey stood outside our room, rubbing the bridge of his nose, looking upset.

“That poor lady,” he said as he followed us inside. “We ought to go to the funeral, you know?”

Davis smiled at me. “Todd's going to have to think about that,” he said; then he started doing sit-ups—always the hard way: upper torso dropped down over the side of the bed.

Bailey was a nicer guy than I was, but at the time I imagined something else, and I said how we'd probably be an unpleasant reminder to the widow, blah, blah, blah, and, in the end, Bailey went to the funeral alone.