The last thing I remember h-1 Page 9

  What I mean is: that rear area wasn’t a great place to be, especially after dark. But on a busy day like today, when the parking lot was practically full, it was easier to find a space back there because the shopping moms avoided it. Anyway, I knew I’d be out of karate before dark, and I wasn’t worried. I went down the narrow lane next to Paulson’s and came around the back. I reached my car. Opened the hatch. Threw in my karate bag.

  Then I stopped. Stopped with my hand on the hatch door, about to push it down.

  I had lifted my eyes to scan the area, make sure nothing threatening was going on. As I was turning away, I spotted a group of kids slouching against a brick wall near the Dumpsters. There were three of them. They all had paper bags in their hands. They were lifting the paper bags to their mouths and lowering them again. I knew there were beer bottles in the bags.

  One of the kids was Alex Hauser. He was glaring at me. He lifted his paper bag to his lips and lowered it again. I waved to him. He didn’t smile or wave back. He just tapped one of his friends on the shoulder. He pointed me out to him.

  With that, the three kids pushed their way off the wall. They tossed their paper bags into one of the Dumpsters. They started coming my way, with Alex in the lead.

  They didn’t look friendly.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Alex Alex had changed a lot since our best-friend days. He almost looked like a different person now. He used to be a kind of happy, open-faced, round-faced guy, but now his face looked narrow and hungry; sullen too. His mouth was set in a permanent frown, like the mouths of those bass I caught in Lake Wyatt sometimes. His eyes seemed to flash with anger. He was wearing a watch cap and a blue tracksuit. His two friends were also in tracksuits. One, a dark-skinned guy, had a red bandana on. The other had his blond hair cut to the nub. I guessed they were from Alex’s new school. I didn’t know them, anyway. Frankly, I wasn’t looking forward to an introduction.

  I shut the hatch door as Alex reached me. He stuck out his fist. I touched it with mine by way of hello. Alex smiled with one corner of his mouth. It wasn’t a friendly smile, not really. It was that nasty smile guys wear when they’re planning to start trouble but they don’t want to give you an excuse to say so.

  “Hey, Charlie,” he said. “How’s it working for you?”

  “Pretty good, pretty good. How you doing, Alex?”

  “Excellent, excellent. Guess you’re still doing your karate, huh?” And then suddenly, he let out a loud karate shout and jumped into a sort of mock fighting position. It was meant to startle me, meant to make me jump and look stupid. Which I guess I did a little. Not much, but enough so Alex could laugh at me and the two punks with him could laugh too. “Charlie here is a black belt,” Alex said to the others.

  The crew-cut guy said, “Pretty tough guy, huh,” as if he thought that was funny.

  I didn’t like the feel of this at all. I hadn’t seen Alex in a long time. I could tell he’d changed a lot. But I didn’t think he’d do anything crazy like start a fight with me or anything. I mean, why would he?

  Then Alex said: “Hey. I heard something funny today.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said warily.

  “Yeah. Really funny. You wanna hear?”

  I shrugged. “Sure. What’s so funny?”

  “It’s just a funny rumor I heard about you.”

  “About me?”

  Crew-cut Guy snickered nastily. I was beginning not to like Crew-cut Guy.

  “About me?” Alex echoed. He made a face-a sort of stupid face to suggest I was acting stupid, pretending not to know something I really did know. “Yeah,” he said then in a friendly voice that was not very friendly, “about you,” and he poked me in the shoulder hard enough so it hurt. I stared at him. It really was as if he was a totally different person. Not the Alex I knew at all. “I heard a story about you that was really hilarious. That you were going out with Beth Summers.”

  I felt something inside me then. It was like an icy hand had taken hold of a piece of me and twisted it. Was it possible Alex had been waiting for me out here? He probably knew when my karate lesson was. I hadn’t changed my schedule in years. Was it possible he’d brought his friends here so he could confront me about Beth? Could he have already heard about my conversation with her in the cafeteria? Sure he could. Alex still knew people in my school. They could’ve seen me with Beth and called him. Had it made him angry enough to come out here with a couple of punks to try to start a fight with me?

  “Is that right?” he said. “You going out with Beth?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I might sometime, maybe. Why? You have a problem with that?”

  Alex made an elaborate gesture of indifference. “No. I don’t have a problem with that. Why would I have a problem? Hey-” He gave an ugly laugh and sort of backhanded my shoulder in the same spot where he’d poked me. “Hey, I hope you get more out of her than I did. I mean, she’s kind of an uptight little stick, if you ask me.”

  Now the Bible says you’re not supposed to keep anger in your heart, and I hoped I wouldn’t keep it, but it was there now, all right. In fact, so much anger flared up in me when he said that about Beth that I almost felt my fist was going to shoot up and knock Alex across the parking lot before I could stop it. But I did stop it. You can’t hit a guy for what he says, even if it stinks. So I just answered him-quietly, you know-working hard to keep my voice steady.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess I didn’t ask you, did I? And now I’m going home.”

  I started to move away. Crew-cut Guy reached out to grab me. The way I was feeling just then, this was not a good idea on the part of Crew-cut Guy.

  “Hey, where you going…?” he said-or started to say. Because before he could finish, I took a step back away from him, turning as I did. At the same time, I put my hands up on guard. I didn’t exactly slap his hand away. I just sort of gently deflected it with the back of my hand at the same time I slipped out of his reach. Crew-cut Guy’s grabbing fingers went right past me and caught hold of nothing but empty air.

  It was a good move. With that one turning step I’d maneuvered myself past all three of them. I’d gotten away from the back of the Explorer so they couldn’t corner me against it.

  I lowered my hands now. I didn’t want them up in fighting position. I didn’t want to provoke Crew-cut Guy to take a swing at me because if he did, I might have to hurt him, and I didn’t want to hurt him-well, all right, I did want to hurt him, but I wasn’t going to. Anyway, I could get my hands up fast enough if I needed them.

  “You guys have a good night,” I said quietly.

  For a second it looked like Crew-cut Guy was going to come after me. The anger was raging in his eyes, and he made a move. But Alex held him back, pressing the back of his hand against his chest. He was looking at me, Alex was, and kind of half-smiling, a strange smile, almost as if he admired me.

  “Don’t be stupid,” he told Crew-cut Guy, holding him there without taking his eyes off me. “He’d put you in the hospital.”

  I could see Crew-cut Guy was angry about that, but he held back. I was grateful to Alex for stopping him. I saluted him with one finger to my head.

  “Why don’t you give me a call sometime?” I said. “We could talk. Privately.”

  I walked around the side of the car. I yanked the driver’s door open while Alex’s two friends glared at me. I slid in behind the wheel and shut the door.

  The anger was still hot in me. In fact, it was worse now-now that I was away from them and didn’t have to worry about doing something violent and stupid. Now the anger closed my throat and made my stomach clutch. It was a rotten feeling.

  I jammed my key into the ignition and twisted it hard, turning the engine over. I grabbed hold of the gearshift, ready to throw the big car into reverse.

  Just then, the passenger door opened and Alex slid into the seat beside me.

  “All right,” he said. “You wanna talk? Let’s talk. Drive somewhere.”

  C
HAPTER FIFTEEN

  Argument With Alex in the car beside me, I drove out of the parking lot, the Explorer’s tires bouncing hard over the exit ramp and out onto the road. I guess-being as angry as I was-I was driving a little too fast. I had to ease down on the brake, bring the big car under control-and bring myself under control too. I took a deep breath and forced myself to loosen my jaw, which was clenched together like a bear trap.

  Alex didn’t say anything as I drove out over Route

  109, past the other big mall in town. The silence hung there between us. I was the one who broke it.

  “I like your friends,” I said. Only the way I said it, it meant the opposite.

  “They’re okay.”

  “Oh yeah, they’re great. The kind of guys who’ll always be around when you need them.”

  “Hey, they’re my friends, all right?”

  That almost set me off. I almost started yelling at him right then and there: about Beth, about the punks he hung out with, about everything. But somehow I managed to swallow it all and keep my mouth shut. I mean, Alex had gotten into the car. He wanted to talk to me. That had to be a good sign, right? It wouldn’t do any good if I just got on his case.

  “Yeah, fine,” was all I said finally.

  Alex jammed a hand into his tracksuit pocket. He brought out a pack of cigarettes.

  “Hey, look…” I said.

  “Oh, what?” he snapped back. “Are you my mother now or something?”

  “It’s my mom’s car, all right? No smoking. You want a cigarette, we’ll park somewhere, you can shove the whole pack in your mouth and set your face on fire for all I care.”

  There was more silence as Alex reluctantly stuffed the cigarettes back in his tracksuit. Then, a second later, I heard him give kind of a snort. The sound surprised me. I glanced over at him. Unbelievably, he was cracking up: laughing, laughing hard, his smile broad and happy just like it used to be back in the days when we hung out together.

  He shook his head, wiping his eyes, laughing. “‘Set your face on fire,’” he said. “You are such an idiot.”

  I had to laugh at that too. “It does make a pretty funny picture…”

  “Whoosh!” he said, imitating the noise his face might make if it went up in flames.

  That made me laugh some more.

  After a while, our laughter died away. I turned the car off the big road and headed down Oak Street. It’s a nice long quiet lane of houses set back behind rows of trees. The trees’ branches form a canopy over the road. It made it pretty dark with the sun so low and the yellowing September leaves shading the pavement. I turned the headlights on. We drove another few seconds without talking.

  “Listen,” I said, “if you don’t want me to ask Beth out…”

  I left that hanging there, hoping he’d tell me to forget the whole thing. But he didn’t. He said, “Yeah? What then? What if I don’t want you to ask Beth out?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll probably ask her out anyway. But I’ll feel bad about it for a few minutes, if that’ll help you any.”

  I heard Alex let out a long breath next to me. “Nah,” he said. “Why shouldn’t you go out with her? She’s not going out with me. In fact, you guys’d probably have a good time together. I mean, she’s the coolest girl I ever met.” I felt him glance at me as I drove. “That stuff I said about her back at the mall: that was just me mouthing off. I didn’t mean it.”

  That passed for an apology as far as I was concerned, and it was good to hear-really good. It made the anger go out of my heart completely. And let me tell you, it was nice to get rid of it.

  “Things are just tough right now,” Alex said in a soft voice.

  “Sure, I get it,” I said. I was glad I was driving. Glad it was getting dark. Glad Alex and I didn’t have to look at each other and could just talk. “You mean with your folks and everything.”

  “Yeah,” said Alex. “It’s the ‘everything’ that gets you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He was quiet a long time. The shadows of the trees passed steadily over the windshield. Behind the trees, the lights of houses began to come on, yellow and warm in the deepening evening. The lights made you think of good things: people having dinner together or watching some show on TV and laughing together. That’s what they made me think of, anyway.

  “Aw, nothing,” Alex said then. “You wouldn’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “The whole thing. It’s like… forget it.” There was anger in his voice-anger and a kind of weariness.

  “Well, try me,” I told him. “I mean, whatever it is, I can’t get it if you don’t explain it to me.”

  “It’s not that, it’s… It’s you, Charlie. It’s the way you are. You think everything’s so simple. You know? You walk around all sure of yourself. You think good is good and bad is bad. You think, Work hard, pray to God, respect your parents, love America, and everything’ll be great.”

  “I never said everything’d be great. I just feel better about myself when I try to do what’s right, that’s all.”

  “See, that’s what I mean. Everything’s so straight and narrow for you. It’s like you were brainwashed by your parents or something, and now you believe all that goody-good-guy garbage. Things would look a lot different to you if everything weren’t so easy. I mean, nothing’s ever gone bad for you. Not really bad.”

  It made me feel kind of insulted, him saying that. I could feel myself getting angry all over again. My first impulse was to argue with him. To tell him things weren’t easy for me all the time. I wanted to tell him about how my mom sometimes nagged me to death and my sister drove me crazy and my dad worked too much and how sometimes I worried about… oh, all kinds of stuff, a lot of stuff. Sometimes things weren’t easy at all. Luckily, though, I managed to pull off my now-famous keep-the-old-mouth-shut routine yet again. I had to eat my pride to do it this time, but I figured if I started arguing about me, then we’d never get around to talking about him. And I figured, the way things were going in his life, it was probably more important for us to talk about him. So I just said, “Okay,” and waited, driving under the trees and past the warm lights of the houses.

  It worked. Alex went on, talking faster now, as if the words were just pouring out of him almost before he could think of them. “I mean, it’s easy to believe in things when everything’s going right, when you go home and your folks are there, and you don’t have to worry about where you’re gonna live or what you’re gonna eat or anything. Then it’s easy to say, Oh, work hard and pray to God and everything’ll be great. In this wonderful free country of ours, blah, blah, blah. But, I mean, what if all that stuff’s a lie, Charlie? You ever consider that? I mean, what if you come home one day and your dad’s gone-I mean, just gone, like he never even existed-or like being your dad didn’t mean anything to him? And you gotta listen to your mother crying in her bedroom all the time because she’s alone and she doesn’t have enough money and you don’t even know whether you’re gonna be able to stay in your crummy house. What good is working hard then, Charlie? What good is ‘America the Beautiful’? And where’s God-what’s he doing about it?”

  “He’s still there, Alex,” I said quietly. “He’s right with you the whole way.”

  “Oh, thanks a lot!” he snapped angrily. “What good does that do me? Huh? I mean, don’t you ever ask yourself: what if it’s all a lie? I have. Not just me either. A lot of people.”

  “What do you mean? What’s all a lie?”

  “Everything!” Alex was really worked up now. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, waving his hands around as he talked. “I mean, they tell you God is good and they tell you America is good and they tell you this is the way to live, free like this where you can do whatever you want… but what if that’s not true? What if none of it’s true? I mean, my dad did whatever he wanted. What’s so good about that? I mean, what if we need to tear it all down-all the religious stuff and the patriotism stuff and everythin
g-and just start again in a new way, a stronger way?”

  We were coming to the end of Oak Street. There was a park here. Just a small neighborhood place with a ball field and a picnic ground and a couple of tennis courts on the far side. It was empty now, the dark folding down over it. I could see little globes of white light shining where the park’s security lamps had come on.

  I turned the corner and pulled the Explorer over to the curb. I stopped next to the park and turned the engine off. I could hear the quiet of the night falling outside. Crickets chirping out in the grass and the faint whisper of traffic over on 109.

  I turned in my seat and faced Alex. “All right. What are you talking about? I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  Alex’s hands moved around as he tried to explain. Even in the growing dark, I could see the pain in his face.

  “I’m talking about being lied to! I’m talking about… everything you thought was true turning out to be a lie and… and about changing everything so it’s better!”

  “Look, I know things are hard with your folks breaking up, but…”

  “It’s not that! It’s not just that. It’s not just me, Charlie. There’s a lot of people-good people, smart people- who say the same thing.”

  I shook my head a little, confused. “What people? Who? Who are you talking to?”

  “Well…” His mouth moved as if he wanted to say more, but no words came out. “Just people, that’s all. I mean, you listen to people, right? You’re always telling me what your dad says, or what your minister says, or… Sensei Mike-man, you never stop talking about him.”

  “Okay, sure,” I said. “I mean, you gotta find people in the world you trust, right? People who know more than you and will tell it to you straight and help you out. What’s wrong with that?”