Different Seasons(119)
A half-hour later Chico shakes her out of a light doze. “We gotta move,” he says. “Dad and Virginia will be home pretty quick.”
She looks at her wristwatch and sits up. This time she makes no attempt to shield herself. Her whole tone—her body Engtish—has changed. She has not matured (although she probably believes she has) or learned anything more complex than tying a shoe, but her tone has changed just the same. He nods and she smiles tentatively at him. He reaches for the cigarettes on the bedtable. As she draws on her panties, he thinks of a line from an old novelty song: Keep playin till I shoot through, Blue . . . play your digeree, do. “Tie Me Kangaroo Down,” by Rolf Harris. He grins. That was a song Johnny used to sing. It ended: So we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde, and that’s it hanging on the shed.
She hooks her bra and begins buttoning her blouse. “What are you smiling about, Chico?”
“Nothing,” he says.
“Zip me up?”
He goes to her, still naked, and zips her up. He kisses her cheek. “Go on in the bathroom and do your face if you want,” he says. “Just don’t take too long, okay?”
She goes up the hall gracefully, and Chico watches her, smoking. She is a tall girt—tatter than he—and she has to duck her head a little going through the bathroom door. Chico finds his underpants under the bed. He puts them in the dirty clothes bag hanging just inside the closet door, and gets another pair from the bureau. He puts them on, and then, while walking back to the bed, he slips and almost falls in a patch of wetness the square of cardboard has let in.
“Goddam,” he whispers resentfully.
He looks around at the room, which had been Johnny’s until Johnny died (why did I tell her he was in the Army, for Christ’s sake? he wonders ... a little uneasily). Fiberboard walls, so thin he can hear Dad and Virginia going at it at night, that don’t quite make it all the way to the ceiling. The floor has a slightly crazy hipshot angle so that the room’s door will only stay open if you block it open—if you forget, it swings stealthily closed as soon as your back is turned. On the far wall is a movie poster from Easy Rider—TwoMen Went Looking for America and Couldn’t Find It Anywhere. The room had more life when Johnny lived here. Chico doesn’t know how or why; only that it’s true. And he knows something else, as well. He knows that sometimes the room spooks him at night. Sometimes he thinks that the closet door will swing open and Johnny will be standing there, his body charred and twisted and blackened, his teeth yellow dentures poking out of wax that has partially melted and re-hardened; and Johnny will be whispering: Get out of my room, Chico. And if you lay a hand on my Dodge, I’ll f**kin kill you. Got it?
Got it, bro, Chico thinks.
For a moment he stands still, looking at the rumpled sheet spotted with the girl’s blood, and then he spreads the blankets up in one quick gesture. Here. Right here. How do you like that, Virginia? How does that grab your snatch? He puts on his pants, his engineer boots, finds a sweater.
He’s dry-combing his hair in front of the mirror when she comes out of the john. She looks classy. Her too-soft stomach doesn’t show in the jumper. She looks at the bed, does a couple of things to it, and it comes out looking made instead of just spread up.
“Good,” Chico says.
She laughs a little self-consciously and pushes a lock of hair behind her ear. It is an evocative, poignant gesture.
“Let’s go,” he says.
They go out through the hall and the living room. Jane pauses in front of the tinted studio photograph on top of the TV. It shows his father and Virginia, a high-school-age Johnny, a grammar-school-age Chico, and an infant Bitty—in the picture, Johnny is holding Billy. All of them have fixed, stone grins . . . all except Virginia, whose face is its sleepy, indecipherable self. That picture, Chico remembers, was taken less than a month after his dad married the bitch.
“That your mother and father?”
“It’s my father,” Chico says. “She’s my stepmother, Virginia. Come on.”
“Is she still that pretty?” Jane asks, picking up her coat and handing Chico his windbreaker.
“I guess my old man thinks so,” Chico says.
They step out into the shed. It’s a damp and drafty place—the wind hoots through the cracks in its slapstick walls. There is a pile of old bald tires, Johnny’s old bike that Chico inherited when he was ten and which he promptly wrecked, a pile of detective magazines, returnable Pepsi bottles, a greasy monolithic engine block, an orange crate full of paperback books, an old paint-by-numbers of a horse standing on dusty green grass.
Chico helps her pick her way outside. The rain is falling with disheartening steadiness. Chico’s old sedan stands in a driveway puddle, looking downhearted. Even up on blocks and with a piece of plastic covering the place where the windshield should go, Johnny’s Dodge has more class. Chico’s car is a Buick. The paint is dull and flowered with spots of rust. The front seat upholstery has been covered with a brown Army blanket. A large button pinned to the sun visor on the passenger side says: I WANT IT EVERY DAY. There is a rusty starter assembly on the back seat; if it ever stops raining he will clean it, he thinks, and maybe put it into the Dodge. Or maybe not.
The Buick smells musty and his own starter grinds a long time before the Buick starts up.
“Is it your battery?” she asks.