Now Is the Hour (27 page)

Somewhere in my body, maybe not
in,
maybe
all
of my body, felt something familiar, yet I did not know what.

Another flash of lightning. A roll of thunder.

Moments of gesture.

We were a Frankenstein movie, the part in the laboratory, when all the townspeople are safe because the monster is sleeping.

Dr. Overturf and the nurses kept telling me I was such a brave boy. After they wheeled George out in his bed, Nurse Karen brought me some cherry Jell-O and a 7UP.

In the morning, the sun was shining through the silver maples. Shadows and light on the shiny waxed floor.

A peaceful world.

But the peace did not last long.

My madras shirt was not on the hanger. Inside the blue overnight case, my wallet and my change were gone. And something else gone. My pair of jockey shorts. Not the clean ones, the dirty ones I'd worn into the hospital.

George Serano was out of his straps, out of his bed, out of his room, out of the hospital.

I heard the two nurses talking.

No one in the hospital had seen him leave.

Nobody told Mom what had happened the night before. Not even Sister Angelica had the nerve.

I said nothing. I loved that I had a secret.

At the checkout window, Mom's eyes were neon green, and her hair
was a wild girl's. Man, was she pissed. Her voice got high and her chin was up.

I'm here to report a theft, Mom said.

On the other side of the checkout window, the nurse was young and her cheeks were red.

My son's new madras shirt, Mom said, his wallet, and his change have been stolen.

I didn't tell her about the jockey shorts.

I paid five dollars and ninety-five cents for that shirt, Mom said. And his driver's license was in the wallet. Took him three years to get that license.

In no time at all, Sister Angelica was white flowing robes and veils around the corner.

Mrs. Klusener, Sister Angelica said, I'm so sorry about your son's belongings.

We try to run a tight ship around here, Sister Angelica said.

Sister Angelica took a deep breath. Her eyes went to my eyes, and her eyes were tears and had the holy look, the way she'd looked at George Serano.

Sister Angelica put her hand on my mother's shoulder.

Mom didn't know what the hell to do. A nun was touching her. There was lipstick on her teeth when Mom smiled.

I can assure you, Sister Angelica said, as soon as we find the culprit, we will contact you.

We walked that way down the hall to the bright outside the hospital doors, Sister Angelica next to Mom, her hand on Mom's shoulder.

I held the door open for Sister Angelica and Mom.

You take care, Rigby John, Sister Angelica said.

I turned to look Sister Angelica in the eyes, but the sun shined hard against the glass door. Sister Angelica blurred like a photograph with too much sun.

Thank you, Sister, I said.

On the stairway, the sidewalk, in the parking lot, in the street, big tree branches lying all over. Leaves on everything. I was carrying the square blue overnight case. Billie Cody and her mom were getting into her mom's white Pontiac Bonneville. I quick walked behind a car so Billie wouldn't see me carrying a purse again. Billie's face was real white, and her hair was sticking up. Her eyes were red. I don't think she saw me.

The Buick was a blue and white streak flying low over the Tyhee
Flats. Under Mom's new big plastic glasses, her eyes were still green. The ripple up the side of her face. She was grinding her teeth. The speedometer hit eighty-five miles an hour.

Gott im Himmel!
Mom said, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Where can you be safe if you can't even be safe in a Catholic hospital?

Weird what a secret can do. It separates you from the rest of the world, insulates you because you're the only who knows. It's like you're finally somebody because you have something nobody else has. A place where nobody else is.

At first, my secret was pretty simple. I had a wild night fighting with a crazy Indian in the hospital and came out the hero. People had slapped me on the back and smiled at me special. The doctor had told me I was brave.

Something real, something tangible, something big, had happened in my life, and my mother didn't know a thing about it.

It was a great pleasure, my secret.

Always before what had kept me from my parents was some faraway unreachable place in them, in her. A place I wasn't allowed.

She was the one who decided. For whatever reason, when she decided to come back, when the light came back in her eyes and she looked at me — like in the hospital that day when she told me about Grandpa — it never failed, I was always there, the place for her eyes to land.

Then came the wild night in the storm of '66 fighting for dear life with George Serano.

After that night, what kept me from my parents, what kept me far away from Mom, wasn't something she decided anymore.

Now it was my turn. I was differnt.

I had a secret, and the secret was real.

Mostly, I kept the secret to protect her from what happened to me.

But that was only part of the truth.

The whole truth. It was the place I went to instead of her.

The whole truth I kept even from myself most of the time.

What I knew for sure was I started seeing Indians everywhere, and every time the wind blew, I thought of Thunderbird.

SAINT FRANCIS DE
Sales is the patron saint of teenagers, so that's why Sis and I got to drive the pickup into town one night a week on Wednesday. Supposedly De Sales Club provides the Catholic teenager with a social life. You know, teenagers getting together to talk about what it was like being a teenager and maybe find a boyfriend or a girlfriend. But don't be fooled. De Sales Club doesn't have anything to do with help growing up and a social life, or any life at all. Unless you call kneeling on the cement floor praying the rosary a life. And as far as boyfriend or girlfriend goes, forget it.

In fact, the only thing differnt about De Sales Club from religion class was in De Sales Club instead of the other nine commandments, what got beat into your head was the sixth commandment.

Everybody knew it, even the nuns.
Especially
the nuns. We were all in the sex years now.

The only good thing about De Sales Club was Joe Scardino never showed up.

Father Dominic Arana, a new young priest at Saint Joseph's who was a Basque, was the priest in charge of De Sales. He lectured to us about what a venial sin was and what a mortal sin was when you were making out.

As far as I could tell, kissing without tongue and hugging were venial. Everything else was a mortal sin.

Same old thing, we studied
The Lives of the Saints,
but hip saints like Saint Dominic Savio, and Saint Theresa of Ávila, and Saint Sebastian, who was tied naked to a tree and pierced with arrows. There was even homework sometimes, but nobody ever did the homework, which was a discouragement to Father Arana because he was trying to be a good influence.

What a sorry sight he was standing in the sophomore classroom at the blackboard under the bright fluorescent lights, a heavyset man, sweating hard, smelling of garlic and incense and altar wine, with his white handkerchief in his big, black, hairy hand, wiping the sweat off his forehead and around his neck, his thick neck bulging out over his tight Roman collar, the pointer in his hand pointing at the words
venial
and
mortal
he'd chalked onto the blackboard.

You had to hand it to him. Father Arana tried hard to reach us. He used words like
cool
and
what's happening
and
can you dig it,
but really we couldn't help it, none of us, no matter how hard we tried, none of us could give a shit.

He lasted only one year. Right after Christmas, Father Arana ran off with
some woman. Some woman,
Mom said, who he was giving marriage counseling to.

Mom and us must have prayed a thousand rosaries for that guy. And the
bitch
who led him astray.

Father Dominic Arana. One big Basque, sweaty, hairy example of walking, talking mortal sin.

As it turned out, though, in the end, Father Arana helped me out a lot. I figured if he could run off, so could I.

Wednesday nights. There was no better feeling than Wednesday night after supper, Sis at the wheel of Dad's '63 Chevy Apache pickup, cranking the wheel and spitting gravel out of the driveway, KWIK on the radio, the windows rolled down. The first Wednesday of De Sales was hot, late September and warm air blowing all around us, the sun-baked soft, gold world speeding by, Sis still in her off-white spaghetti-strapped summer dress and tanned legs, me in my clean Levi's and blue T-shirt, a fresh pack of Marlboros on the seat between us, Sis and I smoking away, the twelve miles to town ahead of us, twelve miles of top-ten rock-and-roll hits blaring freedom, freedom, all the way to town.

Those twelve miles of freedom got us hooked on freedom, Sis and I. We got so free during those twelve miles, the second Wednesday of De Sales we didn't show up at De Sales Club at all. As soon as we pulled off Main Street and headed down Hayes, soon as we saw the cross on the steeple of Saint Joseph's Church, we just couldn't help it. Sis and I had to have another cigarette, we had to listen to more top-ten hits, we had to drive around some more.

At the Snatch Out, around the corner from the Dead Steer Drive-In, across Pole Line Road and from the Portland Cement Company and the Kraft cheese factory, is where we ended up. Parked in the Snac Out Drive-In everybody called the Snatch Out or the Red Steer Drive-In everybody called the Dead Steer, watching everybody else drive by.

I mean to say,
I
sat and watched everybody drive by.

It was just too queer, Sis said, a brother and a sister sitting together at the Snatch Out.

I couldn't have agreed with her more.

Sis took off with Gene Kelso, going from venial to more and more mortal sin in the back seat of his red '56 Mercury.

And I sat, just sat, sat and smoked, and even though I'd had my nighttime driver's license for a whole week, I didn't drive. To tell the truth, I was afraid to drive but wasn't about to let myself know it.

It wasn't so bad being alone. Scardino wasn't around, and I had enough money for French fries, and I sat behind the wheel so it looked like I was driving. I got to listen to the radio. Plus Gene Kelso gave me a Budweiser.

For holding down the fort
is the way he put it.

Somewhere in there, as I was sitting and smoking, drinking my beer, listening to the radio, watching the cars go by, a '67 green and white Cadillac with wire wheels pulled in. When I looked to see who was driving, what I saw was a car full of Indian kids my age.

Jeez, even in the Snatch Out, Indians.

It was that night, the last Wednesday night in September, parked at the Snatch Out holding down the fort, right after the Cadillac full of Indians, that I met,
really
met, Billie Cody.

“Cast Your Fate to the Wind” by Sounds Orchestral was on the radio. It was my favorite song.

Maybe it was fate, I don't know. Billie says so. Billie always says,
As fate would have it.

Anyway, out of the blue, the pickup door opened, and up stepped a girl with dark red ratted hair. Pink lipstick. White plastic sunglasses, dark green glass. When she got her butt on the seat, she reached back and slammed the pickup door behind her. A white shirt, a man's oxford shirt with a buttoned collar. Around her neck, a tiny gold necklace that looked like a hand, an open palm facing out. The hand hung down between what looked like two cantaloupes underneath her white shirt. Black pants with stirrups around the feet. Her bare feet barely touched the pickup floor. She pulled one foot up, cupped her foot in her hand, turned and leaned against the door. Her tiny toenails were painted dark blue.

Outside all around us, kids lined up parked in cars. The kids in the parked cars looking out at the cars passing by, a slow idle through the Snatch Out. Across from me in the cab, Billie's eyes were dark behind the green glass of her white plastic sunglasses. The sun was setting in through the back window of the pickup. The whole inside of the cab was Technicolor, how gold and pink can be sky blue. All the sunset colors on Billie's skin. Wind, just a little for a moment, just enough wind to feel on your skin.

Billie pointed her tiny blue toenails at me, then pulled her legs under her, knelt on the seat. She reached up, pulled off her white plastic sunglasses, folded them, put the glasses in her white oxford shirt pocket. The white oxford shirt at that moment a Technicolor illumination out of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Something about her eyes. She looked like she'd been crying, but she wasn't crying, she was smiling. Like a little kid, the way she was smiling. In all that Technicolor, those sad bloodshot Billie Cody eyes looked close at me for the first time. Jesus.

Tear duct cancer, she said. You got a cigarette?

What? I said.

My eyes, she said. I have a condition. The tear ducts get plugged up. The tonsillectomy didn't do shit. Do you have a cigarette?

It's cancer? I said.

No, silly, she said. I'm being affected.

Sis had taken the Marlboros with her and left me with four cigarettes. I had two left. I reached in my shirt pocket, pulled out a cigarette, handed it over to Billie, then pulled out the other cigarette for me. I pushed in the cigarette lighter.

Billie and I sat looking down at the cigarette lighter, waiting for it to pop out, both of us with cigarettes in our mouths looking, waiting. For some reason I had forgotten my native language. I couldn't even remember if it was English.

Besides the cigarette lighter, the only other thing in the pickup was a beautiful smell. Really clean like soap but not Mom's White King or Sis's White Shoulders. Some smell so fresh and differnt, it smelled French. This girl smelled French.