Wild Child (12 page)

Tannenbaum,” she said. “We’ll hear now from the Reverend Doctor Micah Stiller, of the First Baptist Church. Reverend Stiller?”

I was transfixed. I’d had no idea. Here I’d taken the train into the city every day and slogged on back every night, lingered at the Granite, hiked the trails and rocketed my way up the river to feel the wind in my face and impress whatever woman I’d managed to cajole along with me, and all the while this Manichean struggle had been going on right up the street. The reverend (beard, off-the-rack suit, big black shoes the size of andirons) invoked God, Jesus and the Bible as the ultimate authorities on matters of creation, and then a whole snaking line of people trooped up to the microphone one after another to voice their opinions on everything from the Great Flood to the age of the earth (Ten thousand years! Are you out of your mind? the biology teacher shouted as he slammed out the side exit to a contrapuntal chorus of cheers and jeers), to recent advancements in space travel and the unraveling of the human genome and how close it was to the chimpanzee’s. And the garden slug’s.

At one point, Dave even got into the act. He stood abruptly, his face frozen in outrage, stalked up to the microphone and blurted, “If there’s no evolution, how come we all have to get a new flu shot each year?” Before anyone could answer him he was back in his seat and the chairwoman was clapping her hands for order. How much time had gone by I couldn’t say—an hour, an hour at least. My left leg seemed to have gone dead at the hip. I breathed perfume. Stole a look at the woman beside me and saw that she had beautiful hands and feet and a smile that sought out my own. She was thirty-five or so, blond, no hat, no coat, in a blue flocked dress cut just above her knees, and we were complicit. Or so I thought.

Finally, when things seemed to be winding down, a girl dressed in a white sweater and plaid skirt, with her hair cut close and her arms folded palm to elbow, came down the aisle as if she were walking a bed of hot coals and took hold of the microphone. Her hands trembled as she tried to adjust it to her height, but she couldn’t seem to loosen the catch. She stood there a moment, working at it, and when she saw that no one was going to help her, she went up on her tiptoes. “I just wanted to say,” she breathed, clutching the mike as if it were a wall she was trying to climb, “that my name is Mary-Louise Mohler and I’m a freshman at Smithstown High—”

Hoots, catcalls, two raw-faced kids in baseball hats leering from the far side of the auditorium, adult faces swiveling angrily, the clatter of the rain beyond the windows.

She stood there patiently till the noise died down and the sour-faced woman, attempting a smile, gestured for her to go ahead.

“I want everyone to know that the theory of evolution is only a theory, just like the sticker says—”

“What about Intelligent Design?” someone called out, and I was startled to see that it was Dave, half-risen from his seat. “I suppose that’s fact?” I couldn’t help laughing, but softly, softly, and turned to the woman beside me—the blonde. “To all the Jesus freaks, maybe,”

I whispered, and gave her an unequivocal grin. Which she ignored.

Her gaze was fixed on the girl. The auditorium had grown quiet. I raised my hand to my mouth to suppress an imaginary cough, shifted my weight and looked back down the aisle.

“It is,” the girl said quietly, dropping her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look Dave in the face. “It is fact and I’m the one to know it.”

She clenched her hands in front of her, rocked back on her heels and then rose up once more on point to let her soft feathery voice inhabit the microphone: “I know it because Jesus lives in my heart.”

The Weak

I was the first one out the door. The rain had let up, nothing more than a persistent drizzle now, the shrubs along the walk black with moisture and the air dense with the smell of it—the smell of nature, that is, wet, fungal, chaotic. And sweet. Infinitely sweet after the reek of that auditorium. I hurried down the walk and across the lot, thinking to get out ahead of the traffic. I was meeting Dave and Katie at the Granite for burgers and a drink or two and I could hardly wait for the postmortem, because I’d wanted to flag my hand and put a question to the girl in the plaid skirt, wanted to ask her just how provable her contention was. Could we thread one of those surgical mini-cameras up through the vein in her thigh and into her left ventricle just to see if we could find the Redeemer there? And what would He be doing? Sitting down to dinner? Frying up fish in a pan? At least Jonah had some elbow room. But then I guessed Jesus was capable of making himself very, very small—sub-microscopic even.

High comedy—Dave and I would have a real laugh over this one. My feet sailed on down the walk, across the lot and through the drizzle of the world, and I was thinking cold beer, medium-rare burger with extra cheese and two slices of Bermuda onion, until I reached my car and saw that I wasn’t going anywhere. The rear tires had sunk maybe half an inch into the grass-turned-to-mud, but that wasn’t the problem, or not the immediate problem. The immediate problem was the Mini Cooper (two-tone, red and black) backed up against my bumper and blocking me as effectively as if a wall had been erected round my car while the meeting was going down.

I was wearing a tan leather three-quarter-length overcoat that had caught my eye in the window of a shop on Fifth Avenue a month back and for which I’d paid too much, and it was on its way to being ruined. I didn’t have an umbrella. And I’d ignored the salesgirl, who’d given me a four-ounce plastic bottle of some waterproofing agent and made me swear to spray the coat with it the minute I got home. I could feel the coat drinking up the wet. A thin trickle, smelling of mango-pineapple, began to drip from the tip of my nose. I looked round me, thinking of the blond woman—this was her car, I was sure of it, and where in hell was she and how could she just block me in like that?—and then I opened the door of my car and slid in to wait.

Twenty of the longest minutes of my life crumbled round me as I sat there in the dark, smoking one of the cigarettes I’d promised myself to give up while the radio whispered and the windshield fogged over. Headlights illuminated me as one car after another backed out, swung round and rolled on out of the lot to freedom. I reminded myself, not for the first time, that patience, far from being a virtue, was just weakness in disguise. A mosquito beat itself up out of nowhere to settle on the back of my neck so I could put an end to its existence before it had its opportunity to produce more mosquitoes to send out into a world of exposed necks, arms and midriffs. Midriffs. I began to think about midriffs and then the blond woman and what hers might look like if she were wearing something less formal than a flocked blue dress that buttoned all the way up to the collar and I pulled on my cigarette and drummed my fingers on the dash and felt my lids grow heavy.

Finally—and it was my bad luck that the last two cars left in the whole place were the ones blocking me in—I heard voices and glanced in the rearview mirror to see three figures emerging from the gloom. Women. “All right, then,” one of them called out, and here she was—the chairwoman, her big white block of a face looming up on the passenger side of my car like a calving glacier as the Suburban flashed its lights and gurgled in appreciation of her—“you have a good night. And feel good. You did real well tonight, honey.”

The door slammed. The Suburban roared. Red brake lights, a great powerful churning of tires and the song of the steering mechanism, and then she was gone. I shifted my eyes to the other side, and there she was, the blonde, framed in the driver’s side mirror. Right next to her daughter, in the plaid skirt and damp white sweater.

I froze. Absolutely. I was motionless. I didn’t draw breath. The girl and her mother climbed into the Mini Cooper and I wanted to shrink down in my seat, crawl into the well under the steering wheel, vanish altogether, but I couldn’t do a thing. I heard the engine start up—they were on their way; in a second they’d be gone—and for all I’d been through, for all the rumbling of my stomach and the craving for alcohol that was almost like a need and the strangeness of that overstuffed auditorium and the testimony I’d witnessed, I felt a yearning so powerful it took me out of myself till I didn’t know where I was. And then I heard the harsh message of the wheels slipping and then an accelerating whine as they fought for purchase in the mud. She had no idea, this woman—not the faintest notion—of how to rock a car out of a hole in a yielding surface. She accelerated. The wheels spun. Then she did it again. And again.

I watched the door swing open, watched her legs emerge from the car as she reached down to remove her shoes and step out onto the grass to assess the situation while her daughter’s torso faded in soft focus behind the fogged-over windshield. And because I was weak, because I hadn’t dated anybody in a month and more and couldn’t stand to see those shining bare legs and glistening feet stained with mud and didn’t care whether Jesus and all the saints in heaven were involved in the equation or not, I got out of my car, looked her full in the face over the glare of the headlights and said,

“Can I help?”

The Fit

I never did get to the Granite that night. I called Dave on my cell and he sounded annoyed—wound up from the meeting and eager to take it out on somebody—but the Mini Cooper was in deeper than it looked and by the time we were able to free it I was in no shape for anything but bed. My coat was ruined. Ditto my shoes. Both pantlegs were greased with mud, my hands dense with it, my fingernails blackened. I should have given up, the term lost cause hammered like a spike into the back of my brain, but I was feeling demonstrative—and maybe just a little bit ashamed of myself over the Jesus freak comment. We were ten minutes into it, the drizzle thickening to rain, the miniature wheels digging deeper and the daughter and I straining against the rear bumper, when the woman behind the wheel—the blonde, the mother—stuck her head out the window and gave me my out. “You know,” she called over the ticking of the engine and the soft beat of the rain, “maybe I should just call Triple A?”

I came up alongside the car so I could see the pale node of her face wrapped in her shining hair and her eyes like liquid fire. The interior of the car sank away into the shadows beyond her. I couldn’t see her shoulders or her torso or her legs. Just her face, like a picture in a frame. “No,” I said, “no need. We can get it out.”

The daughter chimed in then—Mary-Louise. She was standing on the far side of the car, hands on hips. There was a spatter of mud on her sweater. “Come on, Mom,” she said with an edge of exasperation. “Try it again.” She looked to me, then bent to brace herself against the bumper. “Come on,” she said, “one more time.”

I watched the mother’s face. She squeezed her eyes shut a moment so that a little hieroglyph of flesh appeared over the bridge of her nose, then she gave me the full benefit of her gaze and it came to me that she hadn’t heard what I’d said back in the auditorium, that there was no animosity, none at all. I wasn’t on trial. I was just a helpful stranger, the Good Samaritan himself. “I’m Lynnese Mohler,”

she said, and here was her hand, the nails done in a metallic shade of blue or lavender, slipping free of the darkness to take hold of my own. “And this is my daughter, Mary-Louise.”

“Calvin Jessup.” I leaned toward her, toward the smell of her, her perfume and what lay beneath it. “But people call me Cal. My friends, anyway.” I was smiling. Broadly. Stupidly. The rain quickened.

“Come on, Mom.”

“I want to thank you for your help—you’re really sweet. I mean it. But are you sure I shouldn’t call Triple A? It’s nothing. I mean, they don’t even charge—”

I straightened up and gave her an elaborate shrug, feeling the accumulated weight of every cell and fiber of my one hundred and eighty-seven pounds. I didn’t need alcohol. Didn’t need a burger. All I needed was to push this car out of the ditch. “If you want to wait here in the dark,” I said. “But I really think we can get you out if you just—”

“You have to rock the car, Mom.” The girl—what was she, fourteen, fifteen? Was that ninth grade? I couldn’t remember

—slapped the side of the car with her open palm. “We almost had it there that last time, so just, come on, start it up and then you go back and forth—you know, the way Dad showed us.”

Lynnese glanced up at me, then ducked her head and shook it side to side so that her hair, dense with moisture, fell loose to screen her face. “I’m divorced,” she said.

Behind us, across the lot, the lights of the auditorium faded briefly and then blinked out. “Yeah,” I said. “So am I.”

The Fittest

A week later I was sitting with Dave at the Granite, enjoying my second Sidecar of the evening and watching the first round of the playoffs that wouldn’t feature the Mets (this year, anyway), thinking about Lynnese while Dave went on about the lawsuit he and twelve of the other parents were filing against the school district. I liked Dave. He was one of my oldest friends. And I agreed with him both in principle and fact, but when he got on his high horse, when he got Serious with a capital S, he tended to repeat himself to the point of stupefaction. I was listening to him, feeding him the appropriate responses (“Uh-huh, uh-huh—really?”) at the appropriate junctures, yet I was tuning him out too.

I wanted to talk about Lynnese and what had happened between us in the past week, but I couldn’t. I’d never been comfortable exposing my feelings, which was why people like Dave accused me of making a joke of everything, and I couldn’t even mention her—not to Dave—without feeling like a traitor to the cause. “I’m a Christian,” she told me on the occasion of our first date, before I’d even had a chance to ice the beer or rev up the engines or ask her if she’d like to release the stern line and help cast us off (which was a simple way to involve anybody in the process of what we were about to do, because there’s no pretense in boating and the thrill of being out on the water takes you right back to your childhood, automatically—boom—just like that). The sun was high, Indian summer, a Saturday delivered from the heavens, and I was planning to take her up the river to a floating restaurant-cum-club where we could have cocktails on the deck, listen to reggae (and dance, maybe dance, if she was up for it) and get dinner too. She was wearing shorts. Her hair was its own kind of rapture. “Hi,” I said. “Hi,” she said back.