Swim Back to Me (9 page)

We met at seven, rode to the meeting place, and locked up. She didn’t say much, and I wondered what was going through her mind, whether yesterday was all she could think of or the furthest thing from her mind. At last a car pulled up, an aging dark orange Mustang with all the windows open. There was a place on one fender where someone had tried to conceal damage with flat paint, and the car looked as if it had a long, thick scab. Cal smiled at us from the driver’s seat, and Sasha got in next to him. I sat in back.

She said to him, “I brought food.”

He said, “Right on.”

“Fritos, your favorite.”

“You know how to take care of me.”

I studied him as he pulled away from the curb. His hair was loose tonight, a little greasy. I stared at his hands, surprised to find that his fingernails were well trimmed and clean. At a stop sign, he reached over and with his forefinger turned Sasha’s chin so she was facing him. Immediately she scooted close, and he put his arm around her and drove with just his left hand.

I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. But of course it was—what had I expected? That our kiss yesterday would change things? I felt in my pocket for my pipe and clenched it in my hand, so hard that the metal ridges on the bowl dug into my skin.

After a while Cal turned onto a narrow one-lane road. He took his arm off Sasha and held the wheel with both hands. We drove up a steep tree-thick hill, over potholes, past a run-down house with several old cars parked in a clearing. It was close to seven-thirty, still plenty light out but dimmer, the sky holding on to its last bit of blue. The road turned and got narrower, and a few branches broke as we scraped past some overgrown shrubs.

“Where are we going?” I said. Sasha had told me we’d go to our usual place, smoke, take in the fireworks, head home.

“Little Richard,” Cal said, and he turned and gave me a quick grin. “Heh. I like that. Little Richard.”

“Where
are
we going?” Sasha asked him.

“Stopping at a friend’s house. That OK?”

“Who?”

“Jeremy.”

She stiffened. After a moment she got onto her knees and turned to face me. She said, “We can stay in the car.”

“What?”

She put a knee up on the seatback and without warning launched herself into the back. She landed with her head on my thigh, one of her knees down in the leg well. She righted herself quickly, scooted over, and sat near the window, behind Cal.

“What was that, babe?” he said.

“I want to sit back here.”

She had a stricken look on her face, but though I looked and looked at her, trying to get her to look back at me, she stared straight ahead.

We approached another clearing, another house. This one had a porch, with an old rocking chair right next to the front door, and in the yard a clothesline hung with faded towels. We kept going. Cal flipped the radio on, moved the dial through static and voices. There was a guitar playing what sounded like Spanish music, and then he turned it off.

Now I saw a pair of mailboxes, one with its arm raised. Cal turned onto an unpaved road, and the car bounced as we made our way through a tunnel of wild, branchy shrubs. It was suddenly almost dusk, the sky the color of cheap binder paper, that thin grayish white. I heard a dog bark, glanced at Sasha, saw that her hands were clasped together so tightly that her biceps strained against her skin.

“Here we go,” Cal said, and he made another turn, down a pitted drive and into a clearing, where three guys were sitting on old aluminum lawn chairs in front of a rusted RV with no tires. Two Dobermans were tied to a tree, and they stood at alert as our car came into view. They had that tight Doberman look, short black hair and brown muzzles and stand-up ears.

Cal shut the car off, and one of the guys came over and leaned in the window. He was bare-chested and smelled of wine. He shook hands with Cal and then grinned into the backseat, revealing a gap between his front teeth.

“Hello, Sash,” he said to Sasha. “Hello, boy,” he said to me.

“Jeremy, meet Richard,” Cal said. He sat still for a moment and then got out of the car, shook hands with Jeremy, and stretched from side to side. His jeans were so old they were worn through at the butt, and I saw pinkish skin between the last fuzzy white threads of the denim.

He turned around and leaned in the window. “Climb on out, kids,” he said, but Sasha shook her head, and I didn’t move either.

Cal and Jeremy walked over to the other men. One was about Cal’s age, with blond hair to his shoulders, but the other looked old, maybe sixty: he was mostly bald, with gray wisps above his ears and a scraggly gray-white beard.

“Who’s Jeremy?” I said.

“Cal’s friend.”

“Where did you meet him?”

“That party,” she said. “In the mountains.”

“Is he a dealer?”

“No, Richard. Just be quiet, OK?”

I looked through the windshield at the four men. Cal and Jeremy were talking, but too quietly for the sound to reach us. I was about to say something about Harry Henry, something about what he and Hillary might be doing tonight, when Sasha gasped.

I looked out her window. The dogs were moseying toward the car, sniffing the ground, raising their heads as they came closer. One of them had a spiked collar around its neck.

“You’re in the car,” I said. “Nothing can happen.”

“Shut up.”

I stared at her. She wore hip-hugger shorts and a plaid shirt with the tails tied in a knot several inches above her belly button. As I looked at her pale skin, and the outlines of her ribs, and the faint roundness of her abdomen, I felt a twinge, and then my dick was like a rock. This had never happened in her company before, not even yesterday, when we kissed. Something possessed me then, and I leaned across her and whistled out the open window, and the dogs came trotting forward.

“No,” she whimpered, and she pushed me back and dropped into the space behind Cal’s seat, pulling herself into a ball and putting her arms over her head.

I moved over to her window, keeping my knees on the seat so I wouldn’t bump into her. I leaned out the window, and the dog with the spiked collar came closer. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed he didn’t have enough rope to reach the car.

“Boris!” the bald man called, suddenly looking over.

The spike-collar dog growled.

Now all the men turned. “Boris,” Jeremy said in a harsh voice. “Candy.”

Suddenly I saw a loop of rope lying at the base of the tree, a good ten feet of rope I hadn’t figured on. I heard a sniffing sound, and I looked down and saw that Sasha’s shoulders were shaking. Slowly, I pulled my upper body back into the car. Candy had turned and was walking back to the tree, but Boris was tense with readiness.

“Down and stay,” Jeremy yelled, and Boris trotted back to the tree, where both dogs lay down.

I turned toward Sasha. “It’s OK, they’re gone.”

She didn’t move, and I leaned down, my head near hers. I put a hand on her back, and immediately she pushed my hand away.

“Don’t. Stop it. I never should’ve invited you.”

“Sasha.”

She raised her head enough to look me in the eye, her face wet with tears. “I can’t stand you. Get away from me.”

I straightened up and looked at the men, but Cal and Jeremy had disappeared. The door to the RV was open, and I wondered what they were doing in there. Cal was buying drugs from Jeremy, but what kind? I didn’t want to drive home in a car full of drugs. Highway patrolmen would be out tonight, looking for kids with illegal firecrackers; they might pull Cal over just because his car looked crappy.

Cal came out of the RV empty-handed. He saw me looking and gestured at me with his chin, then he shook hands with the bald guy and gave the blond one a thumbs-up. Getting back in the car, he said, “You guys missed out. They had blueberry pie in there.” Then he laughed and started the engine, and because there wasn’t room to turn the car around he backed all the way up to the road, and the men and the dogs slid away.

We bumped down through the tunnel of shrubs, turned onto the paved road, and drove past the house with the rocking chair and the clothesline. Sasha was sitting up again, her face streaked and dirty. “What’s the matter, little one?” Cal said, but she didn’t respond.

We came to the main road. “No, go right,” she said, and Cal shrugged and turned toward home.

He said, “Don’t you want to watch the fireworks?”

“No.” She slumped down, putting her shins against the back of his seat. I saw him adjust the mirror to look at her, and it was just like Dan on the morning of the Walk for Mankind, checking in on Sasha, trying to understand Sasha. Spoiled brat, I thought. I looked out my window. It had been a mistake, kissing her. I’d really been kissing Hillary, anyway.

Back on campus, I got out of the car. Sasha got out, too, then circled it and got in again next to Cal. I unlocked my bike, sat on the seat, and toed myself over to her window. It wasn’t fully dark yet.

She stared at me. “What are you waiting for?” she said in a nasty voice. “Go home.”

I avoided her for several days. I spent a weekend in Oakland, and when I got back I called Malcolm and Bob, for the first time all summer. Bob was away, but I got Malcolm to meet me at Lake Lagunita, where I initiated him into the mysteries of smoking weed, thanks to a small supply of pot Sasha had given me. There were Stanford students hanging around the lake, too, and a couple of girls came and sat with us, told us we were cute, and mooched several hits each from my pipe.

We did it all over again the next day, and then I was out. Money to buy more wasn’t a problem—my father handed me cash whenever I asked for it, and sometimes when I didn’t—but I had no source.

And so I biked to Cal’s, aware Sasha might be there but feeling I had no choice, nowhere else to go, and I needed some pot. If I saw her, I saw her. It had to happen sometime.

It was day two of a heat wave, 101 degrees according to the bank I passed, and I pedaled along the streets with a mouth so dry I might as well have been stoned out of my mind. To fortify myself, I bought a Coke at the Old Barrel and drank it inside the cool, dark building. Back outside, I shielded my eyes from the sun, felt the heat lay across my face again, felt it drape over my arms and legs. I left my bicycle where I’d locked it and walked the rest of the way.

The street was quiet, cars gone from the driveways of the little houses, most of the apartment carports empty, too. I saw Cal’s car down at the third building, its scabby fender half in shade. I headed that way, pausing before taking the stairs up to the second story. There was a row of doors on one side of a concrete walkway, a spindly iron railing on the other. Most of the doors were closed, but I made my way past them to the last one, which was open, with just a screen door blocking access. I pressed my face to the screen so I could see in: matching sofa and chair with gold stitching on the cushions, a china lamp on a little table. Not Cal’s, in other words. I turned and headed back. The first door I came to had a “Welcome” sign on it, and at the next, several pairs of little kids’ sandals lay near a mat. This left the door at the end of the row, a solid white door with a tarnished brass knob. I knocked, hoping Sasha wouldn’t answer.

I heard steps, and then there was Cal, in cut-offs and nothing else, a bleary look on his face. He saw me and said, “Little Richard.”

I stood there, unsure how to begin.

“If you’re looking for Sasha,” he said, “I don’t know where she is.”

“I’m not. I want to buy from you.”

He seemed amused, but he said, “How much money do you have?”

“Forty.”

He looked over his shoulder, looked at me again. “Well, come on,” he said, and he stepped back to make room for me to enter.

I’d had such pictures of this place—bare mattress, piles of clothing, a general and all-encompassing mess—that for a moment I couldn’t quite take in what I saw: a tidy striped couch, a pair of bamboo chairs at a small round dining table almost exactly like the one at my mother’s. The kitchen was in the same room, on the other side of a Formica counter, and there were some Chinese food containers and a couple of plates near the sink, but otherwise it was spic-and-span.

“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing at the couch as he went into the kitchen and opened a cabinet. He brought out a large stew pot, set it on the counter, and pulled out a plastic Baggie containing about a half an inch of pot.

He brought the bag over and tossed it on the coffee table. Turning one of the bamboo chairs around, he reached into his pocket for his rolling papers.

“I don’t care,” I said.

“About …”

“If it’s good or not. I’ll just buy it.”

He raised his eyebrows, crossed his arms over his chest, and looked at me hard. “Little Richard,” he said. “Oh, my.”

“Is Jeremy the grower?” I said, nodding at the bag.

Cal chuckled. “Guess you thought that was a drug deal going down the other night, huh?”

“No.”

“A little innocent blueberry pie, and Cal’s a criminal.”

You’re a criminal anyway, I wanted to say. I thought of Jeremy’s bare chest and wine breath, of his harsh voice when he yelled at the dogs. And of the dogs themselves, of Boris’s growl. I felt a wave of dread—intense fear of what might have happened that night, even though the night was long over.

Cal gestured at the pot. “It’s on the house. Take it.”

I reached for the bag, then stopped myself. Was he playing a trick on me?

“Go on, take it. And tell your friend to call me.”

I grabbed the bag and dashed out of there. Stuffing it in my pocket, I ran down the stairs and out into the bright, stinging sunlight. I ran up the street, kept running until I’d reached the Old Barrel and my bike. My fingers shook as I dialed my combination. I was looking at the lock, but in my mind I saw myself pounding the seat with my fist, over and over again.

Once I was on my bike I headed in the direction I’d taken after my first trip to that neighborhood, toward and then across the railroad tracks, and then along the busy road parallel to them. In about five minutes I’d reached the underpass to the Stanford side of the tracks, but I kept going. I was in the older part of Palo Alto now, and the mature trees offered shade, but I was too hot for it to make much difference. Sweat stung my eyes, made my shirt stick to my back. Abruptly, I turned onto a residential street and stopped. I patted my pocket, making sure the bag was still there. I could be home in ten minutes, in time for Gladys to make me a milkshake before she left for the day, but when I set off again I headed deeper into Palo Alto, aiming, I was starting to realize, for the street where the Mile Ten check-in station had been. Where the tall guy lived.