The Mall (65 page)

Claudia reached up and actually grasped a lock of Trudy’s blond hair.
 
“Y’see, this silky hair will fall out and your tanned flesh will rot, so you better enjoy it while you can.”

Claudia and her mother, Pat, had originally left Haven for greener pastures and a better job.
 
Mrs. Wicke had been a counselor for a school up in Dallas/Fort Worth, four hours away from the tiny forgettable town that is Haven, population 475 or so.

Haven, Texas.
 
The town where I was raised.
 
I’ve never spent any significant amount of time anywhere else.
 
It’s been sixteen years since I was born, and as Mom is fond of telling me, very little has changed.
 
While the rest of the world advances, Haven had always seemed to be frozen in time.

The old saying—if you stay in a place long enough, you become that place—seems to have been created for our town of Haven.
 
Visitors come and go, but the anchor families formed the hard nickel-iron alloy which is the central core of our community.
 
Their hearty material composition seems to be mostly French and Irish stock, with names like Richard, Bertrand, Thomas (or Thompson), Murphy, Kelly, Sullivan commonly heard at our school and the Rotary Club and Knights of Columbus meetings.

The main reason Haven has managed to stay so small: Location.

Haven is a two hour drive from the nearest big city, Austin, and not close enough to any major highway to attract any capitalist interest from the likes of McDonalds or WalMart.
 
But that was exactly the intention of Haven’s founders.

When given the opportunity to host a train depot back in 1865, the founders said, “Much obliged, but no thank you.”
 
When asked if they would permit a minimum-security prison to be built in Haven around 1946, the founders said, “No thanks.
 
We’ve got enough scoundrels already.”

As a result, the town became like a ship in a bottle.
 
While the rest of the world sailed out to meet the future, Haven stayed stubbornly on shore, arms folded.
 
A model of good old-fashioned 1950’s horse sense with a touch of technophobia.

Yet more and more lately, Mom has begun to change her tune, adding that more has changed in Haven since the days of hanging out at the Lucas Park and Eat (Broward County’s answer to the Dairy Queen) in “bobby-socks” than has changed in the century and half since the town’s creation.
 
Cable television arrived in 1990, about 20 years after the rest of the world.
 
We have only recently gotten a decent Internet service.

Like Old man Barrett, proud owner of Anderson’s Parts and Feed Store, is fond of saying: “Progress s’fine, long as it don’t go too far.”

So, surely you would think that every year the median age of Haven must rise due to the exodus of the youngsters who can’t bare living in such a “prehistoric” community.
 
But the fact of the matter is for every two teenagers who flee to college, a young couple returns to have their children here.
 
As a result, the population of Haven, Texas tends to stay stable, hovering just shy of the five-century mark.

And as surely as a cork bobber shooting back to the surface of a lake, Claudia and her mother Pat followed this formula and returned to town in late August, just before school started again.

Pat (or Mrs. Wicke as I know her) was “released” from her counseling job, because of a “difference of vision” according to the vice-principal.
 
What it came down to was that she was fired for talking to a student about faith in a higher power.
 
“Apparently, teaching fourth graders natural selection or how to put on a condom is completely acceptable, but mentioning the word
abstinence
or even insinuating that there might be an intelligent guiding force to the universe is crossing the line,” Mrs. Wicke told us the weekend after she got back into town.

After my initial shock of seeing Claudia again, Mrs. Wicke and my mom had had several hours of conversation over coffee.
 
I don’t recall hearing that much laughter in our house in years.

Next Monday I decided to finish lunch early and make a pass by the bleachers before practice.
 
On the way down Junior Hall, I happened to see a small group of senior girls giggling around one of the lockers.
 
After they dispersed and went their separate ways, I realized that they’d been standing in front of Claudia’s locker door.

I knew this only because of the graffiti written across the front:
 
“Hallow,” it read in large letters of bright red lipstick.

When I reached the bleachers, Claudia was already there, wearing a shapeless black blouse and jeans, almost identical in color, and scrutinizing a worn ringed notebook in her lap.
 
A plastic baggy filled with what looked like Crunch Berries cereal and a can of Coke sat with an empty brown bag atop a black backpack upon which had been drawn a spiked ball and chain in silver.
 
Some black noise leaked through the buds in her ears.
 
Wires led to her breast pocket, where I surmised the player must be hidden.

After a minute or two of my staring, she finally lifted her head.
 
Jet black sunglasses covered her pale, unmade up face.
  
With her look taken as a sign of acknowledgment, I started up to her.
 
She seemed to stiffen and grow smaller at the same time, like a cat preparing for flight.
 

“Stay back,” her body language screamed.
 
“I bite.”

She sighed heavily and made no attempt to remove the buds wedged into her ears.

“Yeah?’

“What are you doing up here?”

She must have surmised that I wasn’t the threat she had first perceived and lowered her pen back to her notebook, the charms on the bracelet around her wrist settling with a jingle.
 
A silver ghost, a skull, a bat, a crescent moon, and what looked like a tiny haunted house lay there sparkling in the sunlight, contrasted against the stark white paper.

“You with the thought police or something?”

That one had staggered me a little.
 
Didn’t she recognize me?
 
I figured I’d spur her memory a little.

“Y’know, your mom came by our house Sunday.”

That ought to be enough of a hint.

Her eyes never wavered from the notebook.
 
“So what.”

As I languished in the hot Texas sun for a few moments, I considered how much less awkward this had seemed when I had played it out in my mind.

“So, your mom looked happy.
 
It was good to see her, y’know.”

“What are you doing here, Paul?” she asked in a condescending tone as she pushed a button on the tiny unit in her pocket.

“What are
you
doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Other than skipping class?”

Heavy sigh.
 
She turned back to her notebook.

Okay, I’d had my daily limit of abuse and was just about to leave, when I recognized the shape of stanzas.
 
Thought I’d take one last shot.
 
“You into poetry?”

Claudia grimaced and looked up at me through those jet black lenses covering her eyes.
 
“Yeah, like you’d even recognize a poem if you saw one.”
 
Claudia ripped the page she was working on out of the notebook, wadded the page, and tossed it back over her shoulder.
 
“Okay, what is this?
 
Did the ‘counsinner’ send you over here to talk to me?
 
Draw me out?
 
Is that what this is about?”

I studied her in astonishment.
 
I wasn’t used to open hostility from strangers, and especially not from strangers who I’d once known.
 
I could only stare at this slight wisp of a girl who wrapped herself in a cloak of oppressive darkness so overpowering it was like a physical presence that seemed to weigh even on me.

She removed her glasses and massaged the bridge of her nose.
 
Finally, she looked up with a great pronounced sigh that Atlas himself with the weight of the world on his shoulders would have had problems reproducing.
 
Dark circles exaggerated the intensity of her eyes, the deepest, darkest eyes I have ever seen.
 
Eyes of obsidian glass.
 
Pools of crude oil they were, which seemed to catch fire as she realized I wouldn’t leave peacefully.

Had her eyes always been that color?

I met her fiery stare and countered with one of sympathy.
 
I’d never lost anyone I loved, much less a parent, so I had no idea how it might affect me.
 
“Look, I just wanted to tell you that what you did yesterday outside senior hall...”
 
She glanced up.
 
“That was impressive work.”

She just gave me an undecipherable blank look.

“By the way,” I mentioned as I started away.
 
“They wrote on your locker door.”

“Yeah, I know.”
 
She gave me a shrug that seemed to say, “It’s beyond my ability to care,” before returning to her work.

My time sufficiently wasted, I went back to the band hall, where I waited for practice to start along with the decent humans.
 
During practice, a funny thing happened to me.
 
My mind kept wandering to the wadded page Claudia had tossed over her shoulder and after rehearsal; I did something I never thought I would do.
 
I went under the bleachers and wandered among the trash and mud and found that ball of paper.
 
I felt weird doing it, like I had just copped a look through the door of the girl’s locker room or something.
 
Nonetheless, I unraveled the paper and read the hideous scrawl that was her handwriting.

“Death is a
door
window,

Which
we
 
Where
I stand
on
at the edge.

All alone I am.”

She had written the last line twice.
 
The second one left an impression on the page more heavily than the first, and a long scraggly line had been drawn under the word “alone” all the way down to the bottom of the page, where the pen stroke had ripped through the page.

The words sent a physical chill through me.
 
I wasn’t much on poetry, but I knew healthy artistic expression didn’t look like this.