Earthly Possessions, Page 4

  I rode home in the pickup, on the slippery seat between my mother and father. My mother kept stroking my hair, talking on and on, sometimes losing her thread. “You see first we thought you were just … oh, and they hardly bothered, I mean ordinary people don’t care really, do they? ‘Now, getting excited never helped a thing,’ was all they’d say. ‘Excited?’ I said. ‘She’s been kidnapped! You tell me not to get excited?’ ”

  But I wasn’t listening, at least not with both ears. I was letting a thought start to form in my mind. A plan. A picture of my future. How was I to know this picture would stay with me forever after, never go away, haunt me even when I was grown and married and supposedly sensible, occupy all nights I couldn’t sleep and all empty moments every day of my life?

  In this picture, I am walking down a dusty road that I have been walking for months. The sky is deep gray, almost black. The air is greenish. From time to time a warm and watery wind blows up. I am carrying nothing, not even a bite to eat or a change of clothes. The soles of my feet hurt and I am stringy-haired, worn down to bone and muscle. There is no house or landmark in sight, no sign of life. Though sometimes I have an impression of other, anonymous people traveling in the same direction.

  Since October 16, 1948, I have been trying to get rid of all belongings that would weigh me down on a long foot-march. I loved, in 1948, a woolly gray doll, once blue, with a plastic face—a Sleepy Doll, it was called, because its eyes were eternally shut, two painted crescents of lashes—and I planned to take it with me, but as I grew older I gave up on that idea. Later I was going to take my charm bracelet, with its tiny silver hourglass containing real sand, but the bracelet got lost during a school trip to Washington. In a way, I was relieved. It would only have been a burden.

  My life has been a history of casting off encumbrances, paring down to the bare essentials, stripping for the journey. Possessions make me anxious. When Saul gave me my engagement ring, I worried for months. How would I hide it? For surely I should take it with me; I could sell it for food. But wouldn’t it tempt bandits as I lay sleeping by the roadside? In their haste they might cut off my finger, and I carried no medical supplies. I was glad when times got hard and we had to sell the ring back to Arkin’s Jewelers.

  A husband was another encumbrance; I often thought that. And children even more so. (Not to mention their equipment: their sweaters, Band-Aids, stuffed animals, vitamins.) How did I end up with so much, when I had thrown so much away? I looked at my children with the same mixture of love and resentment that I used to feel for my Sleepy Doll. I would have liked to strip myself of people, too. I was pleased when I lost any friends.

  My only important belonging since I have grown up is a pair of excellent walking shoes.

  Nobody, of course, knew anything about this trip of mine, but often when I was thinking of it my mother complained that my eyes had turned flat. “I don’t understand you,” she used to say. “What makes you get that expression? It seems you’ve … folded up your looks, Charlotte. What’s happened? You weren’t always like this. Why, ever since, I don’t know …”

  Ever since my kidnapping, was what she meant. Except she didn’t call it a kidnapping. She confused me. Sometimes she said I’d wandered to the midway out of contrariness; sometimes she said the fair people had maliciously lost me. Till I didn’t really know any more: what had happened? What did it mean?

  I had been kidnapped, I was almost certain, but when I tried to remember I was not so sure who had done it. I’d been kidnapped and placed on a dining room table, imprisoned in an eyelet dress; set on a splintery gold-painted throne; rushed through a field by a man in a leather jacket; hurried into a pickup truck by a fat lady who talked on and on: “I never had such a fright in my life. I thought we had lost you. Our only, single child, our little girl. I thought, ‘How will we ever …’ I thought you were dead, smothered maybe or strangled. You’re so thin, it wouldn’t take much to … you were thin even as a baby and I worried night and day over you. Thin as a stick. Thin as a wire. When they brought you to me I said, ‘She’s so thin!’ You had this very straight dark hair, I had never seen so much hair on a baby. You had a forceps mark on your temple that stayed there till you were two years old. Remember, Murray? I said, ‘What is that mark? My baby didn’t have forceps, she slipped right out. The doctor told me so himself.’ Oh, why don’t they answer your questions?”

  She let her hands fall into her lap. My father sighed. The two of them stared out at the night while the pickup rattled on, stealing me away.

  5

  We came to one of those city-type service stations, all fluorescent lights, scroungy blue-jeaned boy pumping gas, German shepherd in the plate glass window. Jake Simms walked slowly and kept looking it over, I didn’t know what for. Then he said, “This’ll do.” He cut in across the concrete, pushing me ahead of him. “I got to go to the john,” he said. “Got some other things to do besides. Ask the boy for the keys.”

  “What?”

  “The keys, keys. Ask him for the keys to the john.”

  I asked. The boy was washing a windshield now and he stopped and listened, as if he couldn’t do more than one thing at a time. His ruffled yellow head tilted toward me; his knuckles were soiled and leathery. “I want the key,” I told him.

  “Keys!” Jake hissed behind me.

  “Both keys. One for him too.”

  The boy set his cloth aside and dug down in his jeans, which were so tight he had to suck in his breath before he could get a hand in his pocket. One key was attached to a huge metal washer, the other to a wooden disc. “Don’t forget to give them back,” the boy said.

  “Sure thing,” Jake told him.

  We went around to the restrooms, where the doors were chained and padlocked, and he opened up the Ladies’ and shoved me in. I was uncertain what was going on. Was this the end of the road? Was he planning to leave for good now? Till he said, “Don’t go away,” and shut the door on me. I heard the key turning, then his footsteps growing fainter. For a long time after he was gone the chain went on swinging against the door like a handful of marbles being thrown down, over and over again.

  Well, of course I was glad to see the inside of a bathroom. I peed ten gallons, washed my hands, looked at my face in the speckled mirror. My hair was a little stringy but other than that I seemed the same as usual. Evidently these things don’t show on a person the way you’d think they would.

  But then I glanced up and saw how dim and tiny the ceiling was, hung with cobwebs—oh, this was a closed-in space, all right. One little window high up the cinderblock wall, chicken wire and milky glass, slanted partway open. I climbed onto the toilet seat. Standing on tiptoe, I could press my face to the window and see what little there was to see: a strip of blackness and the gleaming roofs of a few cars left overnight for repairs. Not a single human being, no one to get me out of there. Anybody would have been welcome, even Jake Simms. I was ready to rattle the windowpane like a prison grate and call his name. But then I saw him. He turned out to be a bent shape by one of the parked cars; he straightened and started toward me. I hopped down and slung my purse over my shoulder. When he opened the door I was just standing there, calm as you please. I didn’t give a sign how nervous I had been.

  “Over this way,” he said.

  He led me into the dark, toward the clump of cars I’d seen from the window. One car was long, humped—I didn’t get a good look at it. On the passenger side the front door handle and the back door handle were looped through with a chain and padlocked. We edged between cars to get to the driver’s side. Jake opened the door and pushed me onto the seat. “Slide over,” he said.

  I looked at him.

  “Don’t try no funny stuff, I got it locked with the men’s room chain.”

  I slid over. Cars are closed-in spaces too, even without locked doors, and this one could smother a person, I thought, with its fuzzy, dusty-smelling seat covers and slit-eyed windows. There were no headrests. A pair of giant fur dominoes
hung from the rear-view mirror. “What kind of car is this?” I asked.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” said Jake. “None of them others had their keys left in.”

  He settled into the driver’s seat and inched the door shut, so it barely clicked when it latched. Then he let his breath out and sat still a minute. “Question is, does it work,” he told me.

  I heard the rustle of nylon, a key turning. The engine came on with a grudging sound. Jake slipped into reverse, and I saw the car ahead of us sliding away. Since I’m not a driver myself, I went on facing forward. So it came as a shock when wham!—we hit something. I spun around but I couldn’t see what it was. A mailbox, it sounded like. Something clattery. “Oh, hell,” Jake said, and shifted gears and roared into the street. But even that didn’t bring anybody out after us. At least, I was still looking backward and I didn’t notice anyone.

  “See, I didn’t want to brake,” Jake said. “Didn’t want the brake lights lit.”

  But now that we were out of there and into the ordinary, evening-time traffic, he switched on the headlights and settled back. I couldn’t believe it. Was that it? Simple as that? “Well. My goodness,” I said. “I never knew a life of crime could be so easy.”

  He looked at me sideways. He said, “A what? Life of what?”

  I didn’t answer (not wanting to get in any trouble). We rode along a ways. Turned right. Passed a line of people in front of a restaurant. Then, “Ha,” he said. “Bet you think I’m some kind of a criminal, don’t you.”

  “Um …”

  “Think I’m a crook or something.”

  I decided it was best not to mention the bank robbery. I smoothed my skirt down and settled my purse on my lap. We turned left. Buildings grew sparser.

  “That what you think?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know what you are and I don’t care,” I said.

  He stopped for a traffic light. He was chewing on his lower lip; no wonder it got so chapped. When the light turned green the car started off with a jerk, as if suddenly reminded of something. The tires screamed, the dominoes bounced. “Fact is, I ride demolition derbies,” said Jake.

  I thought he was making a joke about his driving, but his face stayed serious. “I do a lot of them out roundabout,” he said. “Hagerstown, Potomac … Maryland’s just full of them.”

  “Full of … demolition derbies?”

  “Last year, I won three. But generally I do a whole lot better.”

  “Well, I thought that was just a weekend thing, demolition derbies. You make your living doing that?”

  “What I make is my affair,” he said.

  “I mean—”

  “If I have to I’ll hire on a few days in a body shop or something, but I don’t really like doing nothing but them derbies. I am a demolition fool, I tell you. I like that better than eating. I never could go for that soft life, sitting around in some house, no way out, wife, kids, goldfish … I like to get my hands on, say, a good solid Ford, sixty-two or three or long about there, and just mow all them others flat. Run that thing into the ground. Finest feeling I know of.”

  He swerved for an animal carcass, not braking at all.

  “Bet you thought I was some type of criminal,” he told me.

  “Well …”

  “Want to know the truth?”

  I waited. He shot his eyes over at me, shot them back. In the dark his face was hard to read. “Whole trouble is this: I’m a victim of impulse,” he said.

  “Of—?”

  “Impulse.”

  “Oh.”

  “Buddy of mine told me that,” he said. “Guy name of Oliver. Oliver Jamison. This real smart character I hooked up with in the training school when him and me was teenagers. See, he didn’t care. If they was to lock him up, why, he’d just pull out a book and commence to reading, that was the type of a guy he was. Me, I like to go crazy if I am locked up. I mean it. I like to go crazy. I’ll do anything I must to get away. You take that training school, I busted an ankle jumping out the chaplain’s bathroom window there. I ran clear to the woods on a busted ankle. Only had a month left to go, too. That’s when this Oliver says what he says. When they brung me back he says, ‘Jake,’ he says, ‘you’re a victim of impulse.’ Thing stuck in my mind. ‘You’re a victim of impulse,’ he says to me.”

  He turned onto a highway, some little two-lane thing leaving the city. The engine made a snarling sound. “People who hold the power are the ones that don’t mind locks,” Jake said. “Now, Oliver, he was pretty cool. I liked that Oliver. I would call him O.J. He had this interest in blowing things up. I mean kid stuff—bombs in mailboxes. He would make the bombs by hand. He sure was smart. After they taken a look at the damage this chemical company offered him a scholarship, but he turned it down. Well, I get his point. See, mailboxes, there’s a real satisfaction to a mailbox. But you don’t want to go to work for no chemical company.”

  A driver heading toward us flashed his lights, no doubt so Jake would lower his beams, but Jake didn’t seem to notice.

  “What I told him was, ‘It’s circumstances somewhat too. It ain’t entirely impulse,’ I’d say. I mean you take this afternoon, for instance. Take a while back. Accidents, bad timing, dumb guy pulling a piece … you get what I mean? I lack good luck. I am not a lucky man.”

  “Well, I don’t understand how you can say that,” I told him.

  “Huh?”

  “What if this car hadn’t started, for instance? Back at the service station. It was in for repairs, remember. What if it hadn’t started after you’d gone and chained the … and what if there’d been no key? Lots of places take better care than that, they keep the keys in the cash register or something. Or if the boy had been standing outside, what then?”

  “Why, I would get a car from somewheres else,” Jake said.

  “But—”

  “Like, you could go to a snorkel box. Ever hear of that? Snorkel mailbox. Jam the slot so a letter don’t properly fall inside it. Guy drives up in his car, tries to stuff a letter through, gets out to see what went wrong. Leaving his key in of course and engine running, door wide open. All you got to do is hop in. Simple. See?”

  “But then he would know right away,” I said. “He could be after you so fast.”

  “Now, there you got it,” Jake said. He snapped his fingers. “You caught it straight off. I wouldn’t never choose that method if I had other ways open to me.”

  “Right,” I said, and then remembered. “Yes, but what I mean is, how can you say you’re not lucky when it all went off so well?”

  He turned. I could feel him staring at me. He said, “Lucky? Is that what you call it? When some fool turns up armed and a camera flips on and you get this lady on your hands you never bargained for, it’s lucky?”

  “Well …”

  “It’s circumstances, working against me,” said Jake. “Like I told Oliver: I surely don’t plan it like this. Events get out of my control. But Oliver, oh, he could be such a smart-ass. ‘Your whole life is out of your control,’ that’s what Oliver said. ‘Your whole life.’ Smart-ass.”

  I don’t know what time it was when we stopped. Around ten, maybe. We had been traveling through that deep, country dark that makes you feel too thin. The road was so raspy and patched, with so many curves, crossroads, stop signs—I kept nodding off to sleep, but every bump jarred my mind up to the surface again and I never really forgot where I was. So when we stopped I was awake in an instant, on guard. “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Durn motor quit.”

  He flicked on the inside light, which made my eyes squinch up. “I knew from the start something like this was bound to happen,” he told me.

  “Maybe it’s out of gas.”

  He peered at the gas meter. He tapped it.

  “Is that what it is?”

  I could tell it was; he wouldn’t look at me. He got out of the car and said, “You steer, I’m going to push her to the side of the road.”

  “But I
don’t drive,” I told him.

  “What’s that got to do with it? Just steer, is all I ask. Move over and steer.”

  He slammed the door shut. I moved over. A second later I felt his weight against the back of the car, inching it forward, and I steered as best I could though it was hard to see much with the inside light on. I guided it a few feet down the road, wondering what I would do if the engine roared up and took off. Freedom! I would leave him far behind, head for the nearest highway. Except that I really couldn’t drive at all and had just the vaguest notion where the brake pedal was. So I steered to the right, finally, onto a strip of dirt so narrow that some kind of scratchy bushes tore at the side of the car. I heard Jake give a yell. The car stopped. When he came around and opened the door he said, “Now there was no call whatsoever to run her on into the woods.”

  “Well, I told you I couldn’t drive.”

  He sighed. He reached in to turn off the lights; then he said, “Okay, come on.”

  “What are we doing now?”

  “Going to head for that service station we passed a ways back.”

  “Maybe I could just sit here and wait for you,” I said.

  “Ha.”

  I climbed out of the car. My legs felt stiff, and it seemed my shoes had hardened into some shape that didn’t fit me. “Is it far?” I asked.