Road Noise

1

My father can sing you the name of every bone in your body. That’s not bragging; that’s true. He shoots x-rays over at St. Francis Hospital, and he made up this song with the doctor names, the Latin names, of all those bones. He used to put me to bed with his bone song. Now and again he hums it to himself when he’s patching the roof or when he’s driving. I know only a part of it, the part that names the hand.

2

I catch myself singing and I stop. My father’s bone song is not what I want to hum at the Wawa gas pump before I go in to buy three packs of Tic-Tacs on my way to pick up Cindy Van Doren for our date — our first without Jimbo and Merle. I always feel more secure with a full tank. Before buying the Tic-Tacs I’d like to comb my hair in the bathroom, but it’s for employees only, so I pretend to eye the HoHos while I casually stoop and squint at my reflection in the door of the freezer case. I look good, I think. The bleary-eyed cashier does not seem to agree.

In the mix of dying sun and floodlight under the gas pump canopy the car takes on a ridiculous, expectant green ‑- the uncanny April green the grass has surrendered to the dusk. I swing myself behind the wheel and send the Tic-Tacs clattering into the plastic tray between the seats.

3

I was ten the day my father and I brought this car home from Glen Oakly Buick and he interrupted his song to explain sex. He kept his eyes to the road and drove with both hands on the wheel. The new bucket seat was stiff and tan and vinyl and the engine whined earnestly in the lee of the swarming trucks. He said the procedure was a matter of putting this or that part one place or another. I shuffled through the booklets in the glove compartment. My father spoke like someone who got stuck on the bones in medical school, someone who failed out because of the softer organs.

4

Guys on the soccer team call me bone man or, more frequently, boner, because I broke a guy’s leg in a game. Kenny Sizeman was his name. Kenny Sizeman had pushed-down socks, blond hair and moves that left me steps behind him all the slow afternoon.

I was late, too, with the tackle that broke his leg. I suppose the thought was timely but, in horrible slow motion, I watched Kenny Sizeman push the ball out of reach, saw that my slide would miss. And I slid anyway.

Our legs twisted together as we fell. At bottom a sound, inconsequential — the pop of chewed ice in your cheek, a single grandfather clock tick — made me jump to my feet. I held out my hand but it was too late to fix the screaming of the referee’s whistle and the blond kid’s foot twisted comically, finally in the grass.

They threw me out of the game, of course. From the bench I watched while my father, ordered around by some doctor-parent on the other team, took his pulse and tied the blond kid to a backboard. I had slipped out of my cleats and was feeling the ground against my stocking feet when my father stood in front of me. They were loading Kenny Sizeman into the ambulance. “I have to shoot the x-rays,” he said. “Can you get yourself home?”

5

“I’ve never broken anybody’s bones before. Black eye’s my limit.” She leaned against the car door. Wispy bangs, a thin brow, and the finest nose I’d ever seen.

“I’m Cindy.”

“Gus.”

“Sometimes a black eye’s like the simple truth, the lightning strike that rearranges everything. Don’t you think?”

“Never tried. Breaking that leg wasn’t so simple as I’d expect.”

“The black eye, though,” she said. “That was worthwhile. A punk goes on about what you, he, the sheriff and the cosmonauts will do to the world. He’s so full of plans, talking on and on, he has no idea what he’s spelling on about might not suit who he’s spelling to. And wham your fist closing down on his eye, a roundhouse and your thumbnail gouging nose skin and his look priceless almost as your swing. Was that a no? And then he sees it: in one arc of your fist you’ve won. He’s opened his eyes; he’s swallowed his gum. He’s finished.”

I looked down at the square of rubber in my hand — a piece I had pulled off the steering wheel.

“I don’t know,” I said. “That black eye, could you hear it?”

“Hear it? No. Not a thing. Nothing.”

6

Cindy Van Doren watched a few soccer games. She asked me to the Sadie Hawkens dance. We went out other times, too, on double dates with Jimbo and Cindy’s friend Merle. After a movie or a dance we’d ride over to Smith’s Bridge to watch the reservoir. Cindy and me would kiss while Merle and Jimbo flipped bottle caps into the water and talked food.

But even when he drove, Jimbo wasn’t getting any. He’d look me in the eye Monday mornings and shake his head. I wasn’t getting much either, but I had hope. Cindy was so forward the day we met, I figured it was just a matter of time.

Jimbo thought Merle was another story. “Dammit Gus, I feel like I’m pissing my burrito away. This Saturday you’re on your own.”

7

“So where ya taking me, Cowboy?”

“To the drive-in.”

“To the drive-in. Let’s see. Would that be the Blue Hen Drive-in?”

“The very one.”

“Well let’s go go go.”

I don’t know why they named it the Blue Hen — it’s actually across the state line near Avondale. Maybe it was momentum from all the other Blue Hen businesses, the last outpost of somebody’s Delaware drive-in empire. Or maybe they thought the state mascot would keep the cow shit from your nose, because the place is wedged between a junkyard and a mushroom farm. When the wind blows west, no matter how fresh the popcorn, all you smell is mushrooms.

“So what’s all the hustle about tonight?” I say.

“What hustle?”

“The go go go and the slamming doors.”

“Oh. Mother had a guy over. Somebody new, with greasy hair — a reporter or something.”

“Oh.”

“Every time she meets somebody I get to play 20 Questions while she fixes drinks in the kitchen. She doesn’t stop talking when she’s in there, mind you, just raises her voice. Meantime, Cheese Reporter is grilling me: ‘How’s school? Thought about college? When’s the prom?’ If she’s going to date cheeseballs, why can’t she bring home shy ones?”

8

There’s two ways to get most places in this part of the state. The highways, like highways everywhere, stretch their ribbons to four-cross intersections. They’ve got slow lanes for the uphills, turn lanes for the corners, and breakdown lanes for just-in-case. A lane for everything. But there are back roads, too — crumbly-edged and snaking around trees and streams and fence posts, veering to take the most unlikely path over the hills. They make you sit up and grip the steering wheel, make you want to drive fast. On school mornings every back road in the county has some guy bouncing his Datsun B210, his ’74 Toyota, his Chevy Citation over the hilltops, pulling those four gears for all the car has (which, for most, aside from bald tires and underbody rust, is just sound, rust-pricked muffler like a pocket comb kazoo.)

9

Cindy grabs the rear-view mirror and squints into it. “You gotta do something about this car, Gus. You don’t even have one of those lighted mirrors on the back of this visor.”

“This car — I like this car. One green hunk of European economy. A German Chevette. But maybe I could chop the visor off a Cadillac next time I’m out to the junkyard.”

“Take one off Mrs. Youngley’s; no way she could reach hers to use it. You know she won that car selling Mary Kaye out of the teacher’s lounge?”

“No.”

“Sure. She sold a ton. Why all the teachers smell the same.”

10

Jimbo claims that you have to get popcorn at a drive-in because licking the butter off your date’s fingers is a great first move. Plus I didn’t eat much supper, so I set out straight away for the concessions. The Blue Hen’s projection and popcorn hut is on a little hill that backs up onto a junkyard. It has one of those red-trimmed flat roofs tilted at a slight “y’all come” angle to the parking lot. From the mushroom farm next door it must look like a swimming pool snack bar.

In ten minutes of waiting in line and buying popcorn I manage to lose the car. So I wander back from the popcorn shack a little slowly, trying not to look lost. I must have passed the car once, because I get closer to the screen than I would ever park, and I still don’t see it. So I turn around, affecting a forgot-the-straws look. And I almost miss the car again because some dude is resting his arm on Cindy’s side of the roof.

11

“Yo Bone Man!”

I turn to see my buddy Jimbo grinning at me from the front seat of his Datsun pickup.

Jimbo is one big boy. His forearm resting against the truck door looks like a pale ham. A lineman’s knobby head blurts straight from his shoulders. Usually, football guys like him don’t have much to do with soccer guys like me, but I know him from Metal Shop. He machined a chess set out of some wrought-iron fence he claimed he took from the school librarian. This year we sit in the back of Ms. Kaye’s health class; he cracks me up.

“Gus my man, good to see you.”

“What are you doing here? I thought you weren’t coming out tonight.”

“Me stay in? I’m pulling what you might call double duty.” He holds up a bottle and a metal cop flashlight. “Number one you can try for yourself.” He hands me the bottle. “And number two,” he shines the flashlight below my belt buckle. “I sure hope there’s some action in front of this titty scope later tonight.”

“I’ll flash you some action all right. You come by the Opel you’ll see something you’ve never seen before.”

“What? Gus getting some? Nobody’s ever seen that.”

I drink. Liquid candy with a nasty turn at the bottom. The bottle pulls at my lip when I bring it down. “What the hell’s this?”

“Peach schnapps.”

12

I finally make it back to the car and hand off the popcorn and the Cokes and ease myself into my seat. Simon and Garfunkel are already playing on the tinny speaker: The Graduate is about to start.

“Who’s the dude in the sunglasses?” I say.

“An ex-boyfriend,” she says. “A real jerk.”

“Ex?”

“Not ex enough. I should have poisoned him.”

During the show I don’t make a move or anything, on account of the bucket seats — nothing’s worse than the feeling in your legs after a girl sits on you for two hours. Cindy seems spellbound, which I take for a good sign. She grips the popcorn so tight I can hardly get to a handful. But even after the movie, after I pull out from the theater lot, she sits staring out the window. Doesn’t say a word. Finally she sits up and turns the rear-view toward her.

“Old people will fuck you up every time,” she says. “Ever go out with somebody old, a Mrs. Robinson?”

“There was this lady at church had a funny way of pinching my cheeks.”

She goes on like she never heard: “My ex-boyfriend Benny Salvo was older — twenty. He was one fucked-up dude. Old people, they all want to own you. Like my father, always preening to his friends: ‘Well last summer when I took Cindy to Barbados,’ or ‘I got that for her in Cancun.’ All very nice and all store-bought loyalty he can use against my mother. But I’ll tell you, you can’t buy this — my shit’s for real.”

She looks out the window for a while, until I say, “So what happened to old Benny?”

“It pumped Benny up to please me. He’d ride me on the back of his motorcycle, show me off to his friends, take me to play pool. After a while though, he didn’t want me to go anywhere without him. When I went down to Tracy Ott’s place for beach week last year, Benny wasn’t happy. But he lightened up O.K. when I gave him that black eye.”

13

There’s nobody parked in Cindy’s driveway when we pull in. A good sign. I shut off the car and unfasten my seat belt. I wonder what time reporters come home. I wonder what Jimbo does once the moment for the popcorn finger move has passed. I stop my hands from fiddling with the horn.

“So what will it be, Cowboy?”

“It’s late. I have to go home.”

Cindy opens her door and slips around the car. She crosses her forearms on the driver-side door. She smiles. Her hair nearly brushes my elbow. I hear her breath, the keyring’s rattle against my fingertips, the ignition. Only when my hand clicks on the headlamps does she stand.

“Gus,” she says, “do you know what Mrs. Robinson wanted?”

I ease the clutch out and, not touching the gas, feel for the mechanical boundary between still and stall. Cindy stands unmoving, stark in the headlamp glare. Then the tires sound on the gravel roadside and my turn swings her into darkness.

14

Failure is the question asked again and again: the closest you come to eternity. I see Cindy’s hair dipping toward my elbow, the hollow at the base of her throat.

My jeans pinch my crotch. I press the seat belt lower, against the welling in my bladder. And I’m pressing through the seat belt when I reach the corner by Jimbo’s house. I can see Monday morning in Ms. Kaye’s class and what am I going to say to him? What is there to tell?

Jimbo knows what Mrs. Robinson wanted and it is not myself driving home to jerk off. I re-settle myself in the seat. Then I turn the car around.

15

My father waltzes. We have home movies of my brother and me, just kids, jumping up and down and shaking our little cans in 4/4 time. He must’ve put on that music, and must have laughed with us and watched us dance, but I remember most another music after our giggling had subsided. My father would put on a different record, a Mozart maybe, and with a solemnity that would leave us breathless take my mother’s hand and begin gliding three-step turns that made unrippling water of our blue shag carpet.

And I remember, too, at a wedding reception for a friend of Mother’s, my father talking at the bar, ordering Shirley Temples whenever we tugged at his hand. A buddy asked about Mother’s polkas with Uncle Frank.

“Polkas come and go,” my father said. “I dance the waltz.”

16

A motorcycle is parked on the shoulder opposite Cindy’s driveway.

I turn around in the gravel cul-de-sac that ends her street and park beyond the bike. I stand beside it and piss into the ditch, glancing from motorcycle to the shards of streetlight that glint from the dampening crabgrass. There should be chrome, but it is impossible to distinguish chrome or color on the squat machine — an obscene excuse for a motorcycle.

The house smirks, windows hollow but for a dim light winking from Cindy’s. The motorcycle’s license plate reads “MAKE ME.”

17

Silence — and guilt too, but here I speak only of silence — amplifies, makes shattering the pin drop, rasps your breath. I stand beside the motorcycle and can reach both handgrips without stretching. The grips are neither warm nor cool to the touch. I listen to my easy breathing, then rock my body and the motorcycle as one, forward on the exhale, backwards on the in, forwards, backwards, patient, unhurried — swinging: forwards, backwards — breathing harder now: forwards, backwards, out breath, in breath, forwards. The kickstand rumbles under the bowels of the bike. As I let go I am swept forward a step, and we freeze, motorcycle and me. Then ditchbrush pop-pop-pops as the motorcycle crashes onto its side.

My heels crunch gravel when I come off my tiptoes. After a long time, I walk to the car.

18

The thing about the Opel, it sounds like it wants to go and it handles fine. It’s no racer, but at nighttime if you shift just right through those backroad curves, the car drives. Half a mile from Jimbo’s house I switch off the headlamps. Yellow parking lights flicker off roadside trees. I snap the headlights back on and turn right.

Tonight I’ll drive the highway.

Indiana Review 21:2 (1999): 46-52.