Going Places Page 14

  “My life is a disaster,” Alana finally said after we’d been driving for nearly thirty minutes.

  I wasn’t about to be the first one to speak. To try and summarize the catastrophe of the past two days. Disaster seemed a pretty good word for it, though.

  “Don’t be silly. You have brains. You have talent. Half the girls in the world would give anything to trade places with you.”

  “Nice try.”

  “I mean it.” I didn’t. “Don’t talk like that. You have to look at the good things in your life. Feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to help.”

  Why do people always say things like that?

  “Hudson. Please. I don’t mean any offense, but spare me the pep talk, will you? Just be real. I know what my life is, and it sucks.”

  That made me mad. I wasn’t exactly the happiest camper by then. I was pretty down on myself for the people I’d disappointed or pissed off the past few days. Why did I have to give her a pep talk? I could have used one myself. But I didn’t say anything. I still loved her. I forgave her.

  “My mom knows exactly how to insert the knife and twist. She goes for the kill every time.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, like that whole thing of ‘why are you here with Hudson and not Bryce?’ She’s either clueless or cruel. And I know she’s not clueless.”

  We had just returned to civilization, marked by the presence of asphalt roads beneath the tires. The bumpy dirt road, which had provided some distraction—at least somewhat dulled the sharp edge of emotion—was behind us. We hummed along the blacktop allowing everything to come into sharp focus. The anger and pain were tangible. They were like things that traveled with us, riding in the backseat of the car.

  “Let me ask you a question and don’t get mad at me for asking,” I said.

  I was feeling brave. Anger and pain egged me on from behind.

  “What?”

  “If we’re leaving right after graduation . . . if we’re going to travel to Europe and everywhere else and maybe never come back . . . why do you care what Bryce thinks? Why are you even with him anymore?”

  There. I’d said it. I’d been wanting to say it ever since the day she asked me to travel with her. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. Her mouth dropped open and then she closed it. Then it dropped open again and closed again.

  “Do you love him?” I asked at last. “Are you in love with him?”

  “I’m not in love with him,” she shook her tousled head. “But yes, I love him.”

  Why did I give her the choice of loving and being in love? One and the same. A cop out.

  “I guess I just don’t understand that. I mean . . . what does he give you? What do you get out of the relationship? He goes off with his friends and family and doesn’t invite you to come along. He doesn’t offer to take you to see your mother. You don’t have any of the same interests. He doesn’t want the same future as you. What’s the attraction?”

  “The way things are between me and him, it’s not what I want. If I could change him I would. But it doesn’t work that way, Hudson. You don’t understand because you’ve never been in love before.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t in love with him.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t. I’m sorry, but I really don’t know what you mean.”

  We were at the entrance to the highway where I could bump up my speed. Instead I pulled off to the shoulder. The car behind us honked and swerved to avoid me. As he passed us, the driver raised his middle finger just in case we didn’t get the message. Anger and hurt were still there. Laughing at me. Throwing wadded-up paper balls at the back of my head. They were making me crazy.

  “What’re you doing?” Alana’s voice was pitched with alarm. “You can’t stop on a freeway on-ramp.”

  “You think I’ve never been in love?” I dared her. “Well, I have. I’m in love with you, Alana. How have you not seen it? How could you possibly not know? You, who are supposed to be so insightful and caring.”

  This wasn’t the way I wanted it to happen. I had visions of holding hands in the moonlight. A first kiss, where she pressed her lips to mine, greedy for my love. Staying up all night, declaring ourselves to each other. Not this. Not hurling my declaration of love at her like some kind of deadly weapon intended to inflict pain.

  “Maybe I did know, okay, Hudson? I did know.”

  “Then why didn’t you do something?” I stared furiously at the steering wheel as if it were the source of all my pain and anguish instead of the girl beside me.

  “Because, as long as you didn’t say it, it wasn’t real.”

  I glanced in my rearview mirror. Anger and pain were gone. Hurt and desperation had taken their place.

  “So now that I’ve said it?” I asked hopefully.

  “I care for you, Hudson. Deeply.”

  “But you aren’t in love with me?”

  “I’m not in love with you.”

  “And you don’t even love me.”

  “I do love you. I thought I made that clear. I care for you deeply.”

  Another car pulled up behind us and honked. After a few seconds, it honked again before squeezing by us on the left.

  “Alana, it doesn’t matter if you’re in love with me or not. I can love enough for both of us. I can take care of you and make sure you’ll never be unhappy again if you’ll just give me a chance. Maybe you’ll change when it’s just the two of us and we’re away from everything familiar.”

  “Let’s not talk about this now,” she said. “I’m just worried we might say something we’ll regret, and it’ll ruin what we do have, which is a beautiful friendship.”

  Her mother’s daughter. But things had already been said that could never be taken back. Our beautiful friendship was a joke. A disaster.

  Who had I become, devoid of dignity and pride? I begged for any crumb she might throw my way. But to her credit, she didn’t throw crumbs or anything else. Not even an offer of gas money for the trip.

  >>>

  We got home after dark on Saturday, barely speaking a word to each other for hours. It was a beautiful, clear night with hot white stars punctuating the black sky. The kind of night that promised to lead to a day filled with sunshine. I dropped Alana off at her house, and we mumbled things to each other about getting together sometime soon. When I got home Mom’s car was gone, which was a good thing because I didn’t feel like explaining my early and unexpected homecoming. I went in my room and dialed Fritzy’s number.

  “I’m back.”

  “How was your weekend?”

  “Shitty.”

  “Told ya.”

  “Don’t start. Are you still going to the retreat tomorrow?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Am I still invited?”

  “Of course.”

  “See you tomorrow morning then.”

  Do dreams really serve a function . . .

  . . . or are they just a waste product? Your brain taking a dump. Because that night I eliminated a lot of crap from my brain. But it didn’t exactly make me feel any better, like waking up and discovering you’d shit your pants wouldn’t make you feel better even though the crap needed to come out.

  In my dream, Heather was yelling at me. At me! And then Mom walked in and let her have it before she started laying into me herself. I was chasing Alana down an alley that looked a lot like the alley near her house, the one where Jennifer got his paws muddy. And then Alana disappeared, but all of a sudden there was Mr. Pirkle walking Jennifer. And I knew they were lost, but when he asked me how to get home, I couldn’t explain it even though I knew the way home. It started raining and my clothes clung to me, freezing cold and dripping wet. I ran to get home before Pirkle got there. When I woke, I was breathing hard, my heart pounding, dre
nched in sweat as if I’d been running in real life. It was nearly dawn by then, so I laid in bed and waited for the sun to come up.

  >>>

  The retreat was nice since I was spending time with Fritzy. It was a church event, and I wasn’t a church person, but I envied her community. The ability to focus on something bigger than yourself. To believe in a greater purpose, because I couldn’t be sure everything wasn’t just one crazy accident. Fritzy wasn’t looking for a convert, she just wanted my company. And after two days with Alana, that was enough for me.

  When I dropped Fritzy off at her house, I knew I had a boat load of homework waiting for me, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off Pirkle’s house. Even though I’d gotten no calls that weekend, part of me felt I’d abandoned him. And my day at the retreat was still speaking to the nobler part of myself, so I decided to check up on him.

  “Want me to go with you?” Fritzy asked. “He knows me now. Even said Hi, to me the other day and asked how you were doing.”

  “Nah, I’m not staying. I’ll just knock on the door and let him know I’m around if he needs anything. It’s smart business to check in with your clients every once in a while. Otherwise they might wonder why they’re paying you.”

  “Thanks for the tip, Uncle Pennybags.”

  “Uncle Pennybags?”

  “You know…the Monopoly dude.”

  I didn’t tell Fritzy about the dream I had where Pirkle was wandering around with Jennifer, the two of them hopelessly lost.

  >>>

  Pirkle was happy to see me. “Hudson!” he bellowed. “Come in. Good to see you, son.”

  I don’t think I’d ever seen him in such a good mood.

  “I was just in the neighborhood . . .”

  “Of course you were. Calling on your lady.” He stepped aside to let me in, closing the door behind us.

  “Well, she’s not really . . .” I trailed off. What was the point of denial? He was convinced Fritzy and I were having a thing (I was “sweet on her,” he had once said). Let him think what he wants.

  “She’s quite a gal,” he went on. “Very nice. We’ve spoken a few times out front.”

  Even though it was as far as possible from the truth, I admit to a thrill from his assumption Fritzy was my girlfriend. I’d never had a girlfriend, so no one had ever talked to me that way before. I was waiting for the wink, thump on the back, and congratulations for a job well done.

  “I admire a man who’s not afraid of a little height differential,” he said. “You’ll catch up with her one day. I can tell from the size of your hands and feet.”

  That was the nicest thing anyone had said to me all weekend, and I wondered if there was any truth to it. I stretched out the fingers of my right hand and did a quick, non-scientific comparison between my hand and Pirkle’s.

  “Did you have a nice Thanksgiving, Mr. Pirkle?”

  “It was nice enough. At my age these things don’t matter as much anymore. One day’s the same as the next.”

  But I didn’t think that was true. My grandparents loved Thanksgiving. And all the other holidays too.

  “I went to the Senior Center,” he added as if to appease me. “They did it up real nice.”

  “Mrs. Dickinson’s been asking about you. Says she never sees you there anymore.”

  “I don’t go often. Sometimes, when I’m in the mood. But enough about me. What brings you here today, Hudson? Am I behind on a payment?” he chuckled.

  “No, nothing like that.” I was going to say something about checking up on him but he seemed so . . . normal. And so grandfatherly. Who was I to be checking up on him?

  “I was wondering when you might have some free time to finish our interview. The one for my government class.”

  “Ah, yes, the interview.” He ducked his head and stared into my skull. “You sure they’d be interested in what I have to say? There are so many books written about it. People who’ve said it much better than I ever could.”

  “My teacher wants a personal perspective.”

  “In that case, let’s go out back. We still have another hour of daylight, and it’s a nice day.”

  I followed him out to the small cement patio. We sat in plastic molded lawn chairs, a beer bottle on the table in front of him, a glass of water for me.

  “Where did we leave off?” he asked.

  I scrambled to remember.

  “You had a friend named Chuck who persuaded you to join the Marines. You fought in the Pacific.” I glanced at the round second-story window of the neighboring house. Mr. Scolari’s house.

  “How old were you when you lost your father, Hudson?”

  “I was ten.”

  “That’s rough,” he shook his head. “War is rough. It’s a nasty business.”

  “How bad is it?” I asked. “Were you . . . were you scared?”

  “Of course I was scared.”

  “All the time?” I thought about my father. It was a question that still haunted me.

  “In the beginning, all the time. Towards the middle I was sure I was going to die, so I wasn’t scared anymore. But when they told me I’d be going home, I got scared again. I had something to lose at that point, you understand.”

  “I think so.”

  “No, you don’t. That was a rhetorical question.”

  “Oh,” I said meekly.

  “In Iwo Jima. That’s when I knew I was a dead man. A ghost soldier. That’s what protected me, I think. I had no fear so I made no false moves. When you want to live, that’s when you do stupid things. Does that make sense?”

  “Sort of.”

  “No. How could it? You’d have to be there. You’d have to experience it for yourself, otherwise it makes no sense at all.”

  He took a swallow of beer that must have gone down the wrong way because he went into a spasm of coughing that turned his face as pink as the sky had turned with the setting sun. When he was done, he set the bottle down and looked at me.

  “Fear made me vulnerable,” he said. “Life made me vulnerable.”

  “Is that a bad thing, sir?”

  “You tell me, Hudson. What do you think? You’re . . . seventeen years old?”

  “Eighteen,” I corrected him.

  “Eighteen. I was two years older than you back then. Is there something you’d be willing to die for? Someone? Someone you’d be willing to fight for?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You never know until you’re in that situation. For me . . . I lived for the friends fighting next to me. And I lived to get back to my family. That’s what I lived for. I died for nothing. Because I did die, you know. A part of me did die over there. For nothing.”

  I didn’t know how you could die and live. How you could die and still continue to fight on. How you became a ghost soldier. A profound sadness came over me.

  “Your friend, Chuck. What happened to him?”

  “He didn’t make it back. He died in my arms on that rotten little island, Iwo Jima. You’ve heard people say the ones who don’t make it back are the heroes? Well that’s the truth, Hudson. Your dad. Chuck. They’re the real heroes.”

  I felt a lump swell in my throat.

  “What was it really like? The fighting.”

  “You sure you want to hear all this?”

  I nodded my head.

  “Well, you’re old enough. Old enough to fight in a war, so you’re old enough to know. When people say war is hell, it’s more than a cliché. It’s a shabby attempt to describe something that can’t be described to anyone who hasn’t been through it. People ask what it’s like, but they don’t really want to know. It’s an unspoken pact. Those of us who’ve been through it protect the rest of you from the reality of war. You don’t want to hear about it, son. It’s not all this Hollywood stuff you see in the movies. You smell the blood. The smo
ke. Death. That horrible stench of death you can’t get out of your head. But your training takes over, and you do what you have to. Only when it’s over do you stop to think about it. And if you’re lucky enough, you learn to stop thinking about it so you can go on living.”

  Without meaning to, I glanced up at the round window again. Pirkle looked curiously at me for a moment before gazing at the window himself.

  “What’s it like to get old, Mr. Pirkle?”

  “It’s not too bad, Hudson. You get used to it. Slowly, over time.”

  “Are you scared of dying?”

  He picked up the nearly empty bottle of beer and swallowed its remaining contents in two gulps.

  “A little. But none of us own our time on earth. We’re all just renters.”

  “Where’s your daughter now?”

  He gave me a look that told me I’d pushed too far.

  “She grew up,” he said quietly.

  He rose from his chair and looked up at the darkening sky. He glanced at the circular window again before speaking.

  “It’s getting late, and I’m a little cold. You think you have enough material for your government project?” I knew he was annoyed with me for my last question. I could hear it in his voice.

  “Thanks, Mr. Pirkle. I really appreciate it.”

  “You didn’t take any notes. Think you’ll remember everything?”

  Stupid! Why didn’t I ask for a paper and pen?

  “I’m going to go home and write everything down before I forget.” I picked up my empty glass and followed him inside the house.

  “Thanks for stopping by,” he said after showing me to the door.

  His happy mood had slipped away.

  What had I just done?

  >>>

  When Fritzy called that night, I wasn’t surprised.

  “Listen, Wheeler. My dad was just outside and heard a bunch of yelling coming from Pirkle’s house. He was going to call the police, but I told him not to call before talking to you.”