You Only Get Letters from Jail Read online

  The horn went off again and this time I stepped off the sidewalk toward the car and reached out to touch the long front fender to make sure that it was real. I wasn’t convinced until I felt hot fiberglass under my hand.

  “C’mon,” Nadine said. “Let’s go.”

  I leaned in through the open T-top. “Why do you have my dad’s car?”

  “He took off with some couple and an ugly brown car, so I thought I’d take my own test-drive, you know? I washed all the cars.”

  I opened the passenger door and slid onto the seat. I had on jeans but even so I could feel the hot leather through my pants and I wondered if Nadine’s thighs were burning since they didn’t have much cover.

  “Why’d you leave?” she asked.

  I pushed the button on my window so that it rolled down and I caught a quick puff of exhaust and breeze. “I got bored,” I said.

  “You want me to take you home or do you want to take a test-drive with me?”

  I thought about Nadine’s duffel bag upstairs and the hot house or the cool car and her driving, and I hooked the seat belt across my lap.

  Nadine drove fast, and she ran through the gears like they were water and she had been driving the car all of her life. The car was dark blue with wide tires and it had enough layers of wax on it to make it look brand-new. My dad had it in the Fourth of July parade a few times, with Darlene Mason driving and him in the gorilla suit and a big banner wrapped around the car advertising the car lot and the deal of the day—in-house financing, zero down, buy now pay later, Ford LTD blue book $2,250—yours for $1,999—but one year it got really hot early and both my dad and the car overheated and there is nothing worse than seeing a sweating man dressed like a gorilla holding his monkey head in his hands, sitting on the nose of a car that is blowing antifreeze all over the pavement. He stuck to TV ads after that.

  Nadine pulled in at a 7-Eleven and told me to sit tight. There was a bunch of guys in dirty orange construction T-shirts sitting in a big truck and Nadine walked over and they were all smiling at her and when she got to the truck one of them opened the door and she leaned against it and looked up at the group while they talked about something that I couldn’t hear. The one in the passenger seat shrugged and the rest of them started laughing and he jumped down from the cab and spit a line of chew into the dirt and followed Nadine into the store, and when they came out again he walked her over to the car and handed her a bag and asked if thank you was all he got, and she laughed and said yes, that’s it, and he waited a minute and then shrugged and walked back to the truck, where they all watched us back out and leave.

  “Here,” she said. She put the bag in my lap and shifted into third and hit the turn signal.

  I opened the bag and looked in and there was a six-pack of beer, something in green bottles. “Whoa,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but I’d been thinking about Lay’s potato chips and maybe some Gatorade.

  “Is there someplace we can go?” Nadine asked. “Someplace with grass and stuff. And shade?” The sun pinned us through the open top and there was no break and I was burning.

  “The park,” I said. “If you go in through the north entrance and stay on the road it curves around to some trees and a little creek.”

  “Get me there,” Nadine said.

  When my mom and dad started dividing up the contents of the old house, they divided up the kids, too, put their names on us like they did with the books and the records so that they could mark their territory and take their ownership. I didn’t want to go with my mom. It had all started with a group she joined, and she stopped doing our laundry, and then she went on weekend retreats with these other women who smelled like the Indian mini-mart around the corner from the car lot, and then she stopped cooking. She bought a pottery wheel and took over the garage and she started displaying lopsided vases that didn’t hold water and then she took a class at the rec center and figured out that she didn’t want to do this anymore and left us all to figure out what exactly this was and my dad started sleeping on the sofa bed downstairs. Then he got the house across from Comanche Park and she kept the old house and my brother, Jerry, and we all just divided like a cell.

  We took the road that went deep into the park, and Nadine parked at the curb, cut the motor, and the engine ticked and cooled. She took the bag of beers off my lap and dug through her front pockets until she found a quarter. “Watch this,” she said. She fitted the edge of the quarter under the bottle cap and tipped the quarter up just a hair so that it pried into the groove, then she pressed it down against the index finger of her right hand, which was wrapped around the neck. There was a pop and the cap flipped off the lip of the bottle and onto the seat.

  “That was cool,” I said.

  “This trucker in Fresno taught me about fulcrums,” she said. She passed the bottle to me and then she opened one for herself. “Cheers,” she said. We clicked bottle necks and both of us stretched out in our seats. There were tree branches tangled above us and we were circled with shade. I could hear birds moving around in the leaves, but there was no one else parked. Everybody was across the field at the pool.

  “Drink up,” she said. I watched her tip her bottle and swallow fast over and over again until the bottle was pointed straight at the sky and I could see thin foam slip down the green neck and then nothing at all. She wiped the back of her hand across her lips and closed her mouth on a burp. “Sorry,” she said, “but warm beer is no good.”

  I copied what Nadine had done, and the first few swallows were easy, but then the beer started flowing in faster than down and I thought I was going to choke it up before I could get the bottle drained.

  “Good one,” Nadine said. She took the empty bottle from me and handed me a full one. I was trying to hear the creek, but there was no sound except for the birds and the traffic on the other side of the park and I wondered if the creek had finally dried up and quit. Jerry and I used to hunt for turtles in the shallow water. Somebody had told us that there were baby red-eared sliders in the creek, and we would spend half the summer trying to track them down. All we ever found was a giant pollywog with two legs and a dead snake.

  “Fulcrums and what truckers meant when they offered me twenty to punch the ape,” Nadine said. “That’s what I learned in Fresno.” She laughed but it sounded like a reflex without anything being funny at all.

  I took a drink of my beer. In my mind I saw my dad in his gorilla suit jumping out from behind a wall of balloons and Darlene on the hood of the Vette and Nadine dressed in Rocky Balboa trunks and a pair of red Everlast gloves, throwing jabs at my dad. I wanted to ask Nadine if she’d seen my dad’s commercials and if maybe she had this vision, too, but I didn’t. There were probably other apes and my dad’s commercials didn’t reach all the way to Fresno.

  Nadine was staring out the window, but other than a picnic table under the trees there was nothing to look at for so long. “You have a girlfriend, Floyd?”

  April’s yearbook picture jumped into my head, and I saw the page and her in the second row on the left side, between Tiffany Small and Aaron Smith. April Smiley. It was the worst name ever. “Sort of,” I said.

  Nadine nodded and I could see the stray hairs behind her ear where sweat had plastered them to her skin. She had a small beauty mark on her neck just behind her jaw-line. “You like her?”

  We had done an English project together and eaten lunches at the same table for a couple of weeks and then there had been a note passed from April to me, something she had given me between classes when I was on my way to chemistry and it was still cold out and there was a lot of wind blowing garbage against the fences. Do you like me?

  I had carried the note in my back pocket through the rest of the day, and I took it home with me and spread it out on my desk, unfolded the college-ruled binder paper that still had jagged edges from the spiral binding, and I took my yearbook off the bookcase and opened it to the sophomore S pages. April Smiley. The picture was okay. She was a good essa
y writer. I wrote yes on the note, under her question—wrote it in pencil so I could erase it later if I needed to.

  “I haven’t been home in weeks,” Nadine said. “I can’t remember anybody there.”

  “Don’t you miss your family?”

  Nadine was quiet for a minute but I could see her fingers gripping and releasing around the steering wheel so that her knuckles turned white and went pink and then white again. “Family is kind of a funny thing, don’t you think? You don’t really know who you are until there’s nobody there to make you somebody that you’re not.”

  The engine was still ticking and the six-pack had been reduced to two bottles. I wondered if the water in the swimming pool across the field was cold, so that you had to stretch your towel out on the hot cement in order to warm up after you swam for a while and then your towel never got completely dry—just a tepid damp, and flat, and stuck with pebbles.

  Cars started coming into the shade and a family claimed the picnic table, spread it with a cloth and started unpacking bags of food. Out in the grass a guy and a girl were throwing a Frisbee for a white dog. Nadine and I watched the sun spread itself thin through the pollution and turn the sky bright orange and pink and yellow and purple, watched it turn the reflections on the car windows red, and then slip over the edge and pull the colors with it. We didn’t leave until the crickets told us to.

  My dad’s Ford was in the driveway and the lights were on in the house and I remembered that Nadine had taken the Vette and he hadn’t really lent it to her. My stomach clenched a little and I got ready to get in trouble. Nadine saw me slump in the seat when she rolled to a stop next to the Ford and she knew what I was ready for without me having to say anything.

  “I’ll handle this,” she said, and then she was out of the car and walking up the steps and pulling the screen door open and there was no rod in her back holding her straight. She was genuinely not afraid at all.

  My dad was sitting on the couch with his work shirt on and his tie loosened, and the television was on but there was no sound. He was just staring at the screen.

  “Where’d you go?” he asked. His voice was quiet and low and I didn’t know if he was talking to me or Nadine. “Darlene said you came into the office, said you wanted to look at the Vette and she gave you the keys to open it up and the next thing she knows you’re gone with the car.”

  Nadine walked over to the couch and stood behind him. She put her hands on his shoulders and started squeezing the muscles to either side of his neck. “It was just a little test-drive, Eddie. Maybe I’m thinking about buying it—it’s worth what, about a hundred washed cars? Two hundred?” The only person who ever called my dad Eddie was my mother, and that was only when she was happy with him and I couldn’t remember the last time I had heard her say it.

  My dad turned around and looked at both of us. “Nadine, that is a 1979 Corvette Stingray L82 with a glass T-top and a 5.7-liter 350 V8 tuned to 220 horsepower. That is a fourteen-thousand-dollar car.” His voice was winding tight like an engine, but he downshifted and dropped back to the quiet tone again. “It’s my signature car. It’s not meant for driving.”

  Nadine gripped her hands into my dad’s shoulders. “It’s just a car, Eddie. It’s a nice car, but it’s not everything.” She rubbed his shoulders so that his shirt bunched up under her hands and I was waiting for him to turn on me for being an accomplice, but he didn’t. Nadine rubbed the fight out of him.

  “Okay,” my dad said. He stretched his neck back and stood. “Okay.” He picked his glass up off the coffee table and there was a lime rind inside and the glass was full to the brim and I knew he was on vodka and tonics and maybe that was part of the reason he had been soft on our crime. “I sold the Buick,” he said. He raised his glass in a toast but me and Nadine were empty-handed. “You need drinks,” he said, and Nadine went into the kitchen and came back with beers—one for her and one for me—and I took it and held the bottle like it was a live snake. “Here’s to five hundred over blue book,” he said, and we all knocked glass together and when my dad didn’t say anything more, I drank.

  I had never drank beer in front of my dad—had never really had beers before at all unless I counted the two I shared with Ronnie when his dad left his fishing ice chest in the garage and forgot to unpack it and we sat behind his house drinking them and then pretended to be wasted. My dad took out his Who records—all thirteen of them—and he stacked the turntable and turned up the music and the house was hot, so we opened the front windows and I wondered what our house looked like from the sidewalk, if somebody walking by would look in through the window and see the dining room light shining over the table and hear the music and see us laughing and if that person would envy us and our good time.

  “I coulda been the drummer,” my dad shouted over the music. “I should have pushed my way to the front of the stage. I keep thinking that—why didn’t I just get closer and force my way?”

  “I wish you could play for us, Eddie,” Nadine said. “I bet you were good.”

  “I was brilliant,” he said.

  “I have an idea,” she said. Nadine disappeared into the kitchen and when she came out again she had three pots and two wooden spoons and she turned the pots upside down on the table and handed my dad the spoons like they were sticks.

  My dad looked down at the kit that most kids start on. “I can’t,” he said. “This is ridiculous.”

  But he was smiling like he wanted to and all he needed was a push, so Nadine said, “Please, Eddie,” and the next thing I knew he was pounding along to the A-side of the record that was playing.

  Nadine only had a couple changes of clothes and nothing much for summer, and she asked to borrow a pair of my boxers and one of my shirts, and the thought of her in a pair of my underwear was more than my mind could wrap around, so I started putting my dad’s albums in alphabetical order and tried not to imagine the places in my shorts that Nadine’s bare skin was touching. When she came back downstairs she reached out and took my hand and I was too surprised to jerk back or wipe it on my jeans first, and then she was pressed against me and we were dancing, or at least she was dancing and I was shuffling along and trying not to step on her feet. My dad was sweating and his forehead had gone slick and his hair was sticking in points against his skin and his hands were flying, alternating pots, and he was desperately trying to keep rhythm with a kick drum that wasn’t there. “The Kids Are Alright” came on and I liked that song and my dad started shouting the words so that Nadine laughed and when she spun me around I wasn’t expecting it and I almost fell down, but she pulled me back toward her and kept on taking the lead, and we all decided we liked that song and we let my dad play it over and over again until he got tired of stopping the record and we just let it play through.

  When I woke up I was in my bed and my shoes were off but I was still in my clothes. My sheets were in a ball at my feet and my blanket was on the floor in a lump with my pillow. I sat up and my head spun everything to the left so that I had to put my hand out and touch the wall, and then I realized how thirsty I was and all I wanted was a drink, but the very thought of putting something in my mouth made me want to throw up. I waited for the room to center again and then I stood up and went to the door.

  The house was shut down and quiet and I stood in the hallway until my eyes adjusted to the dark and I thought I could walk to the bathroom. A streetlight spilled smeary white light through the glazed bathroom window and into the hallway. My dad’s bedroom door was shut, but Nadine’s was open a crack and I wondered if she had made it upstairs, and when, and if I hadn’t been able to walk myself, maybe she had been the one walking me. I went to her door and started to look in through the crack, but I could hear them before I could see them, my dad breathing, and Nadine making quiet sounds that came and went in waves. I could see their shadow on the wall, one shape under the blanket and what light there was marking their movements in negative relief, and I stepped back and went to the bathroom and shut the doo
r and stood over the sink for a while before I tried to drink. I stayed in the dark. Then I held my head under the faucet and let the water run off my face and whatever came close to my mouth I sucked in and drank. I stood up and let the tap run full blast into the sink so that I could feel the tiny spray against my hands, which were gripping the edges and holding me up, and I stood shaking for a minute and I thought the water didn’t stand a chance at staying in me, but my head went straight and my thirst retreated and after a few minutes my stomach relaxed and kept the water down. When I left the bathroom Nadine’s door was closed, and even though I stood against it as close as I could with my ear almost to the wood, I couldn’t hear any more sound on the other side.

  I thought I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again, that I was destined to stare at my ceiling, but when I opened my eyes my room was hot and full of light, and I realized it was Sunday and morning. I cranked my window open and a small breeze came in and it was cool and felt good. The neighborhood was quiet except for the sound of a few cars passing through and a lawn mower somewhere down the street. I pulled clothes out of my drawers and went to the bathroom and put my head under the faucet and let the cold water run just like I had during the night, only this time I soaked my hair and drank and washed my face and brushed my teeth. When I was done I almost felt better but there was a taste in my mouth that I couldn’t get rid of, something coppery, but more like pennies than blood.

  My dad’s door was open but the bedroom was empty and I didn’t stop to take inventory of the condition of his bed, whether the covers were kicked back, whether it had been slept in or not. I passed Nadine’s door and it was cracked again and even though I wanted to keep walking, I stopped and tried to look through the gap. I couldn’t hear any noise, so I pushed the door with the palm of my hand and it opened wide and I could see that the curtains were pulled back and the windows were open and the bed had been stripped and the sheets and blanket were folded in a small pile at the foot of the mattress. I looked around the room, and Nadine’s bag was gone. I turned back to the bed and then I saw my boxers sticking out from under the stack of bedding. I lifted up the pillow and the boxers were spread out flat as if she were lying there but invisible.