Half Wild (7 page)

The party was down Auger Hole Road at a house with red asphalt shingles and balsam-green trim, tucked into the far end of a field. Old hatchback Saabs and Volkswagen Bugs filled the driveway; a motorcycle perched near the door. Annie tugged at my coat sleeve. “Jack's kind of people,” she whispered. “Far out.” Ski bums and college dropouts and remnants from the communes near Brattleboro had started moving into places like this in the woods; the selectboard and my mother were worried about it.

Inside, people sat on couches and crammed into the small kitchen. The room smelled like beer and wet dog and pot. Trevor went over to a corner and started talking to a woman I recognized from behind the register at the IGA. I recognized a couple of other people too, people I had seen with Jack at baseball games or the Northfield Drive-In. One wheezed into a Jew's harp; one plucked a banjo. The song appeared to have no tune.

Annie squeezed my hand and went to the gas fridge, where people were getting beers. She pulled two out, handed me one, and nodded toward a guy with blond hair pulled back into a greasy ponytail who I hadn't seen before. He looked about thirty. “Come,” Annie said, looping her finger under my belt and pulling me over to where he stood leaning against a door.

“Hi,” she said. The guy passed a joint to the friend he was talking to, looked us up and down, grinned.

“Hi,” he said. “Who are you?”

“Annie. Jack's sister. This is Clare.”

“Oh,” the guy said. “Jack. Yeah. I can see him in you.” That grin was still smeared across his face. He handed Annie the joint. “Hit?”

“Sure,” Annie said. She took a hit, then another. She started nodding her head and moving her shoulders to the music. “Thanks,” she said. “That's good.”

“Laced,” the guy said, winking at Annie and passing the joint to me. I shook my head. He shrugged and told the friend he was talking to that he rode an Indian, said something about spark plugs in winter. Above our heads a clock in the shape of a dog stuck its tongue out and made a licking motion every time the second hand hit 12. Annie watched the guy, sipped her beer, smiled. I didn't want to stand there; I hated the guy with the ponytail. He was nothing like Jack. He was lacking joy.

I went across the room and sat down on a yellow couch near a wood stove that puffed little bursts of smoke. Paintings of wolves and deer looked out from the pine-paneled walls. A guy with a red bandana tied around his head put Otis Redding's “Love Man” on, and two women started dancing. I leaned back against the couch and watched the way they shook their knees and elbows, the way they tossed their heads back and made their bodies loose. I thought of Jack dancing: those shaking skinny hips, his sad, buttery grin, how if he were here, I would get up and
dance too. I would shake my small breasts and my big butt. I would close my eyes and wouldn't think a thing.

The last time I'd seen him was in April, a few days after he'd blown Karmann's engine. He stood bent over the open hood with a socket wrench in his hand. He banged at something and swore and kicked a tire of the car. I had come to see Annie, but I stopped there in the driveway behind him. The air was damp; little white snowflakes came down every now and then and melted as soon as they hit the ground.

“Hi,” I said.

Jack straightened up and turned. “Clare,” he said, smiling a beam of light right at me. “What's up?” It wasn't a question. A woodpecker made a racket on the roof of the barn.

“Here to see Annie.” I pulled my jacket up around my ears and squeezed my arms against my chest. I knew he was leaving soon but wasn't sure when.

Jack looked at the woodpecker on the barn and then at the line of trees near the creek and then at Karmann. “She's a goner,” he said, nodding toward the car.

I nodded.

He shrugged and glanced up at the tarnished silver sky above us. “Goddamn,” he said, quiet, then looked down at his boots and rubbed the toe of his left one into the ground. I thought of that night in that moonlit snow-covered field and the word he might have said:
beautiful
.

Then he looked at me. His voice was little more than a whisper. “It's terrifying, you know?”

“I can imagine,” I said. I felt like I might cry, but kept it down there in my throat.

“I never really thought it would be me.” The woodpecker made a racket again. “I just never thought.”

I nodded and looked at the ground. More flurries came down. One landed on my hand, and in the split second before it melted I could see its crazy symmetrical flower design.

“Hey, Clare, you know something?” I looked up. His eyes were Annie's silver-blue color and wet. I started to shiver and couldn't stop.

“What?”

He smiled. “You're a cool girl. Real cool. I've always thought that.”

I felt my cheeks go hot, and then the heat went all the way through my body. It settled in my feet, where it turned cold.

“All right,” he said, nodding once, then picked up his wrench again and bent back over the car.

I started for the door. “And so you know,” he called out. I turned around. “I'm not gonna die.” He grinned then, and I believed him. He couldn't die. I waved once and turned and went through that kitchen door. A few days later he left on a bus from Nelson.

Annie and the ponytailed guy were alone now, passing a bottle of whiskey back and forth. A strand of her dark
hair had caught in one of the buttons of his leather vest, and she was trying, halfheartedly, to tug it loose with her fingers. He put his hand on her shirt over her breast, then put the joint between her lips, grinning.

A skinny guy with acne sat down next to me and started talking about farming. He said it was the wave of the future. I nodded and sipped my beer and looked away. The guy in the red bandana put a Led Zeppelin record on, and half a dozen people started dancing. I thought about California—sunshine and ocean and wildflowers and white sand beaches. Not this closed-in dark room that smelled like wood smoke and the damp, mildew odor of wool and sweat.

The room grew louder, blue with smoke and noise. I looked around for Annie but couldn't see her. Another song came on. The guy next to me said farming was the farthest-out thing since the advent of electricity. I looked at my hands. Then the door of the house burst open. Cold air flooded in and a little woman in a parka stood there gasping. “Whoa!” she called out. “Fucked-up girl out there.”

A group of us rushed to the door. Out in the dark field people called out
Where?
And
What happened?
And then someone shouted
UFO!
and suddenly everyone was pointing up at the sky saying,
Cool, man,
and sticking out their thumbs like hitchhikers and laughing
.
I looked up too, but all I saw was a little bit of the Milky Way straight above me. The woman in the parka came toward
me in the dark and grabbed my arm. She was tiny and the parka came down past her knees. “Your friend,” she said.

I stumbled across the dark field after the woman. In the grass at the edge of the field a motorcycle had tipped over and Annie lay sprawled on her back. Her eyes were closed and the guy with the ponytail was bent over her saying, “Wake up, wake up,” and then, “She's breathing. She's breathing.”

The woman in the parka started crying. “She was just sitting on it,” she said. “And then she closed her eyes and fell over.”

I got down on my knees and brushed Annie's face with the back of my hand. From behind me I heard the door of the house slam and felt Trevor next to me. “Oh fuck,” he said, picking her up and carrying her across the field to his truck. “I'm driving. You hold her, 'kay?” So I got into the passenger seat and held her.

Her breath was steady and smelled sweet like marijuana and whiskey. The stars were sharp and bright, and I watched them as we drove and all the other things too that were lit up by the headlights as we passed: rusted train bridges and tipping silos and vacant barns and the cool streak of Silver Creek. He and I didn't talk, just cranked the heat and listened to the sound of the air coming out of the fan and to the gravel under the wheels and to the motor, and for a moment I thought I might fall asleep there with Annie in my arms, the hot air on my face, Trevor next to me, shaking, muttering
Fuck, fuck fuck,
Annie
breathing, and me thinking
Thank God. Thank God
. And also:
Stupid, Annie. Stupid.

March and April were cold that year. Ice storms brought trees down; snow fell into the late part of the month. Annie's mom went to a hospital. Her dad tapped all the sugar maples for the first time in ten years and stayed up till midnight tending the fire and watching steam.

Annie and I didn't talk about that night at the party. She stayed home more, skipped school without me. Mr. Davis moved on to the Korean War, which I didn't care anything about. I got some new records: Neil Young's
Harvest,
Joni Mitchell's
Blue,
and John Lennon's
Plastic Ono Band.
I sat in my room listening to them over and over while filling out college applications. Every time John Lennon's “Love” came on I would close my eyes and breathe deep. There weren't any new letters from Jack. Every now and then Annie and I still missed a class or two together, made our way to Karmann.

Snow had gotten into the car and the driver's-side floor held an inch of standing water. If you weren't careful, your boots got soaked, and if your boots got soaked, your toes froze. Jack's Drum was gone but Annie had new packages of Bali Shag.

She sat in the driver's seat and looked out the window at the field: patches of snow amidst the dead grass, rib
bons of orange fencing flapping in the wind. The trees were still gray, leafless netting beyond which the sky turned colors and crows flew. Annie pulled her knees up to her stomach and wrapped her arms around her legs. “I miss him,” she said, not looking at me. Her voice was from some far-off place.

I nodded.

She rubbed her hands back and forth on her thighs. “And I'm freezing.”

“You want to go inside?”

“No,” she said. “I don't want to go to California anymore either.”

I was quiet. I started to shiver. “Where do you want to go?”

Annie didn't answer. We finished our cigarettes and threw the butts out the windows. She pulled a bottle of Bacardi out of her pocket and took a sip. Giggled. Handed it to me.

I looked at her a long time. It wasn't yet noon. “Sure,” I said, tipping the bottle back and feeling the warmth slide down toward my spine.

“Hey, Annie,” I said after a few minutes. I wasn't looking at her but toward the back side of the barn where the rust from the tin roof had streaked down the weathered pine. The air smelled of mud and last fall's rotten leaves.

“Yeah?”

“Where's the rum from?”

Annie licked the edge of a new cigarette, rolled it tight,
stuck it between her lips. She lit a match and inhaled and the tip burned.

“Annie. Who bought the rum?”

She turned toward the window. “Trevor,” she said. “Trevor. I'm with Trevor, okay?”

I looked at her, but she just stared at the view and put her cigarette to her lips and breathed in.

“No,” I said, quiet.

She flicked her head and looked into my eyes without blinking. “Yes. And guess what else?” She lifted up her flannel shirt and showed me her jeans, which were held closed with a fat safety pin. “I'm going to have a baby.”

Later that day Mr. Davis told us in history class that his cousin had been killed in An Loc. He laid his head on his desk and told us to read whatever we wanted to read. I looked at a page on the Korean War over and over without understanding a thing.

Jack came back. He didn't die. In early August he got off a bus in Nelson with some other local boys. There was no hero's parade, no trumpets or flags, just parents standing on the concrete sidewalk crying and waving their arms and some antiwar protesters holding peace signs, but they all knew Jack and some of them were crying too. I stood at the edge of the small crowd behind Annie and her dad
and Trevor and watched Jack step out into the light. The sun was bright in my face, and I had to squint to see his long legs and broad shoulders coming down the street toward us. I had all sorts of things going through my body; I felt for a moment, standing there in the hot sun, that my life was just beginning.