Durable Goods (12 page)

I never went any farther than the rock. I would sit for a while and then go home. My mother would
give me peaches from the can and then together we would put away my underwear. “I’m so glad you’re home,” she would say. “Shall we read a little?” I knew not to let my father catch me running away, even if it was pretend.

And now it is not pretend. It is so real we have a truck and the driver is drinking coffee. Later I might get scared about what will happen when my father finds out. But now there is wide-open night outside the rolled-up windows, the road passing under the two front tires of the truck and out from under the two rear ones. Imagine if I fell out, I think suddenly, and had to watch the taillights get smaller in the dark. Imagine if I had to be all alone somewhere far from anywhere—Texas is scary vast. But I am in the middle, where I couldn’t fall out without someone taking notice. I close my eyes, listen to the drone of the tires on the pavement. It is a high song, and it can hypnotize you in that way where you just can’t move your eyeballs even though you know you are awake. I like when you know you’re going to fall asleep any second. That is the time for the last thoughts of the day to come into your brain like the
tail end of a long parade. It’s colors I think of tonight: the corals you see on seashells, the swirls of white through pink on Cherylanne’s lipstick holder, the shy blue of the sky when the day is coming new.

I
wake up to the crunch of gravel. Dickie has pulled into the parking lot of The Welcome Inn. Well, the “W” is off the “Welcome,” but what else could it be? It is light outside, but gray, the clouds hanging low and swollen above us. The motel looks like a shoe box, long and narrow with about twelve doors leading to different rooms. The doors are painted yellow, red, green; yellow, red, green. I hope we get a red one. Diane is sound asleep, her head resting against her window. Dickie smiles at me, whispers, “I’ll be right back,” and heads for the room on the end with a sign saying
OFFICE
leaning against its window. A motel room! For all of us! In the daytime! Already we are making up our own rules for whatever we want. After we get going again, I’ll bet if I want to stop and look at something, Dickie
and Diane will say, “Why certainly. Go ahead.” We could never do that before. My father drove and drove and we couldn’t look at anything even if my mother asked. Once she begged him to let us see a cave only one mile off the road. He was quiet for one terrible moment and then he turned to her and said between his teeth, “I am trying to
get
there. Could you please make some effort to understand that? I am not interested in side trips. I am interested in getting there.” Her earring jiggled a little from her starting to turn toward him. But then she stopped, just looked down, I’m sorry.

She packed a freezer chest with food for us. We ate ham sandwiches and slices of pie and potato chips and apples. We fought noiselessly, and every time we slept it was like a miracle, because we weren’t tired at all, we were ready to bust out of our skins from plain boredom. But we couldn’t stop, except for every four hours to pee and fill up the gas tank.

I hear the rumble of thunder and think how perfect it will be to sleep now, while it rains. Then I remember how my father never uses an umbrella. “Customs of the service,” he once told me, and
showed me in
The Officer’s Guide
where it said, “There is a long-standing Army taboo against an officer in uniform carrying an umbrella.” I thought that was so queer I learned it by heart right then. My father doesn’t have a single question about it. He never uses an umbrella out of uniform, either. He stands straight up in the rain and lets it have him. Little streams of water slide down his face, into his eyes, down his neck, and under his shirt. Remembering this, something inside me takes an elevator to the next floor down. I don’t know why I get sorry for him this way. All of a sudden, I just do.

Of course he will be all right without us. Nancy Simon can cook him dinner in her own aprons, which probably look stupid. Maybe he will get truly sad sometimes, drop his face in his hands, and say, “Oh, I have gone and lost my children.” But Nancy will lay his roast beef on his plate, saying, “Now, now. What’s done is done,” and kiss him with her greasy lips. She will not do anything right, and I only hope he will notice.

I
cannot sleep. For one thing, I am on the floor. It is the fair place; there is only one bed. Dickie volunteered to let Diane and me sleep there, but Diane said no. She said, “You don’t mind the floor, do you?” but it wasn’t really a question. She was a little sorry, but she is shaping her new life and she figured she might as well get going.

The floor is hard, of course, but that is not the problem. One problem is that there is a chemical smell to the carpet, mixed with cigarette smoke, and the combination is about to kill me. I am breathing through my fist over my nose. Also, the air conditioner is leaking. I can hear drops of water, see a fat stain spreading out on the wall. Another problem is that Dickie is snoring so loud that at first I thought he was just kidding around, trying to make me laugh. But he’s not kidding; he’s sound asleep and I guess Diane is, too. I’ve been watching her and she hasn’t moved even to turn over. I guess she stayed awake with him until the end. But I fell asleep almost as soon as we left, and I am done sleeping. Every time I close my eyes my body gets nervous,
like I’m making a big mistake and it had better let me know. My eyelids jerk right back open like a Laurel and Hardy windowshade. The day is trying to get around the pulled-shut drapes; the world is in the go position.

I get up and quietly open the desk drawer. If there is some paper, I’ll write a letter to Cherylanne. “Guess where I am!” it will begin. But then I realize I don’t know where I am. There is no paper, anyway. There is only a brown book, with
Holy Bible
written in gold across the front.

I flip open to a page where Jesus is giving another speech. Everything He says is in red. I used to like Jesus. I thought He knew me. When I took communion, I believed that as long as the wafer was in my mouth, Jesus was in my heart. He was in my heart miniature but whole, with His own heart lit up and exposed and circled with roses and thorns. His arms were outstretched and His eyes were raised upward, which meant he was paying serious attention to me. I could speak with Him one-on-One, for as long as I could make the wafer last. The fact that other people had wafers made no difference: they had other arrangements. I was careful not to move
my tongue against the wafer, which was lodged against the roof of my mouth, except for rare times when I really didn’t have much to say. Then I would release Him early. After all, He was busy. People everywhere were calling Him in languages you never heard of, night and day. But I asked Him to let me keep my mother, and He said no, and so I had no more interest in Him.

I put the Bible back, shut the drawer, take an eyeball tour of the room. A double bed, brown-and-orange-striped bedspread, and iron-smell sheets. Two pillows, no extra—I used Dickie’s jacket for my pillow. A high, narrow rectangle of a window. A small desk below it. An orange chair in the corner, wooden arms. A nightstand and there you are, that is it. Oh, and a closet, small, with a few lonely hangers, not new.

I tiptoe into the bathroom. Here is a tub and a sink and a toilet that comes with a break-away paper band that makes you feel like the Queen of Sheba, even if the toilet is five hundred years old. There are white towels and little bars of soap stacked up, enough so we can each have our own. Well, I could wash. I open a soap, smell it, turn on the water slow
and quiet. I wash my face and hands, dry off, fold up the towel, wrap up the soap. Then I tiptoe to my suitcase, get my pen, and go back to the bathroom to write my name on my soap wrapper. I will use the soap here, then bring along what’s left. We will need soap. I look into the mirror for a while. I wish I’d brought a nail file. Cherylanne always carries one in her purse. In a nothing-to-do emergency, she will pull it out and get to work.

I go out into the room and sit in the orange chair, watch them sleep. I am a little hungry. Where will we eat? I wonder. Probably at a restaurant with booths, and place mats with stars for cities. Who has money? I think only Dickie does.

I get out my poetry notebook, close my eyes, and wait for an idea. Sometimes they are swirled around in there deep, and I have to tell them they can come out. But nothing comes to me.
A
, I think. Nothing.
B. C
. Nothing.
D. E. Eternity. Eternity
. I write:

I hate eternity.

Really, friend, don’t you?

What could stay good so long?

Not even a great zoo.

Well, this is silly.

I write:

Think of how long

Eternity can last

Nothing. I take in a breath, sigh, then worry that it is too loud. I’ll go outside. I don’t like to think about eternity. It scares me. It’s like a too-tight winter muffler, acting like it’s there to help you when all it’s doing is cutting off your breathing. What
could
you do for so long? Sometimes when I think of heaven, I think all it is is people looking down and missing things. And if God came walking through and said, “Anybody want to go down there again?” everybody would raise their hand yes, even if their time here had been hard.

I open the door. The rain has stopped, the sun is out, and the slice of day that leaks in falls directly on Diane’s face. She opens her eyes, crabby. Well, there is nothing to do about it now. “I’m going out,”
I say, and she frowns, nods, turns over on her other side.

I guess I have messed up. I will make it up to her later. But who could sit in a small dark room that is not your own, with nothing but two people sleeping, and you don’t know for how long?

There is a small swimming pool in front of the motel. No one is in it. I wish I’d brought a suit, but of course I didn’t know you could go swimming when you are running away. I open the gate, go sit by the edge of the pool to hang my feet in. The water feels cool and fine, like liquid silk. I close my eyes, spread out my toes, make the pool bigger in my mind to feel more luxurious.

I won’t get to go to the pool anymore with Cherylanne. The last time, I didn’t know it was the last time. I should have paid more attention. The best was our diving, how good we got at back dives. Of course, I never did learn the high dive. I see Cherylanne coming off it, one smooth letting go. She often smiled when she dived; I wonder if she knew it. I see myself back up on that high board, and hairs on the back of my neck rise up to remember it too.

My father must know by now. He must have
seen our empty rooms. Maybe he looked for me at Cherylanne’s. “I don’t know!” Cherylanne would say and he would not quite believe her, probably. Belle would have to come, put her arm on Cherylanne’s shoulder, say, “She was here last night, and then this morning she was gone. We don’t know anything more about it than that.”

He would go home, mad. He would sit in his chair, think, I’m going to let them both have it this time. I shiver, pull my feet out of the water. They shouldn’t sleep too long. Only enough to be able to drive again. We can sleep in Mexico for a thousand hours.

I get up, take a walk around the parking lot. There is a restaurant across the highway. I’ll have cereal. Maybe some eggs if they’re cheap. I’ll walk around the building slow fifteen times. If they’re not up, I’ll go make some noise in there.

On my tenth time around, a man comes out of the office and asks if can he help me. “Oh, no,” I say. “I’m just getting some exercise.”

He nods, looks at me like maybe I am crazy. But then he just goes back inside the office. I follow him. “Do you need any help?” I ask.

“Pardon me?”

“Is there anything I can help you with?”

He waits, opens his mouth, closes it. Then, “What unit are you in?”

“Seven,” I say. “A green one.”

“I think you’d better go back there,” he says.

Well, now I have messed up twice. He could get suspicious. I could wreck everything. I will go back inside, sit quiet until they get up. I can play checkers in my head.

I open the door and Diane rolls over again. “Close it!” she whispers, hard. I close it and she gets up, points to the bathroom. I go in and she follows me. “What the hell are you doing?” she says. “We’ve been up all night! You need to be quiet.”

I nod, look away from her at my soap. That was from when everything was going fine.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asks.

I shrug. “I don’t know. I’m not tired.”

She sighs, looks away, then back at me. “I’ll give you some money,” she says. “You can get something to eat. There’s a restaurant across the highway.”

“I know,” I say. And I want to add all the other
things I know are here: many varieties of weeds. Wildflowers, purple and pink and yellow. All the same kind of yellowish rock. One horny toad, at least. It takes forty steps to walk along the front and the back of the building, ten to get past the side. I guess I know there is a restaurant across the highway. I guess I don’t need Diane to tell me.

She goes out of the bathroom, comes back with her purse, hands me a fiver. “Be careful crossing,” she says.

“Do you want anything?” I ask.

“Yes. Sleep.”

“Okay.”

I go outside, sit by our door. I don’t want to eat alone. I’ll wait until I’m too hungry to be scared of it. And then I’ll eat slow. For now, I’ll just watch whatever happens. Or doesn’t.

W
e are on the road again, and I am sitting in the back of the truck. There’s some privacy here. Nobody is la-de-dah minding you. I can’t wait for
this day to be over because it is nothing but bad. I ate a candy bar for breakfast, because I sure wasn’t going to sit in that restaurant alone. All the tables full of people sitting together, kids playing with their straws and talking a mile a minute, adults drinking coffee and smiling at them,
Aren’t
you
cute?
The hostess dressed in her puffy sleeves and little hat asking me, “Can I help you?” her eyes squinty with suspicion. Well, I just said no thank you, and went over to the vending machine. I got some change and bought a Nestle’s Crunch. I ate it by the pool and then I sat outside the motel room until they were ready to go. Dickie came out first, smiling and sleepy, and I was not in the mood to try to come up with something, so I didn’t say anything. He and Diane went to get coffee and I said, “Oh, no, I just ate,” and then I had to wait some more. I might as well have been Chinese-tortured. I made the bed in the motel room. I opened the drapes all the way. I dusted the tabletops with some toilet paper. And then they came back, Diane put the suitcases in the truck, and Dickie spread the map across the hood. Here was the dangerous part, with all of us thinking, Can he find us?