Читать книгу Winged Shoes and a Shield - Don Bajema - Страница 7

It’s about noon, and already over 100 degrees. The novelty of this kind of heat has the energy level climbing all over this Southern California town.

The bad girl from Texas must be making a ragged terry­cloth robe very happy as it clings tightly around her body. She is fifteen. She hasn’t been to bed yet. One hand clasps the robe in a knot under her throat. The other hand holds a garden hose; its mouth is open, and a clear cylinder splash-splatters a torrent into the mud that surrounds some geraniums.

Eddie Burnett is tall, thin, and thirteen. Moments ago he woke up startled, kicked off his semen-stained sheets, pulled the oversize white T-shirt over his head, yanked on the Levi’s that lay on his bedroom floor, and walked barefooted into the street.

Eddie is approaching her from a few houses up the street, watching her profile bent over at the waist, the robe contouring her hips. She knows he knows who she is and she’s not in the slightest ashamed of it: his friends’ bad sister, who had to be sent out of town because the boys up the canyon fought and screamed like cats all night long under her window.

Eddie likes the length of her black hair, which has grown from a short bob to shoulder length in the months since he’s seen her. Her voice becomes audible as he gets a few yards closer in a studied nonchalant stroll. She is singing under her breath in a whispering deep register. . . . “Saddest thing in the whole wide world, is to see your baby with another girl. . . .”

The sound of her voice draws a feeling from between his legs, not in his dick, but under his balls, inside. It comes as a jolt that nearly lifts him on his toes. His heart begins pounding as he realizes he cannot stop his stride and must pass within a few feet of her to enter his friends’ house.

At times like this, Eddie usually looks to some sort of omen. He believes in magic. The moment he sees a smooth brown stone, about the size of his palm, lying near the gutter, he knows exactly what he will do with it. The girl does not see him picking it up. He looks four houses down the street where the cop, who doesn’t like Eddie much, lives. The ex-Marine, Sgt. Johnson, loves his Chevy Bel Air. Although he is nowhere to be seen, he has set out his plastic pail, the Turtle Wax, the chamois. In direct line with the shining pride of Sgt. Johnson, and Eddie, is a wooden telephone pole. Eddie knows that if he can hit that pole with the hot stone in his hand, from this distance, then the gods of jasmine, heat-wave nights and bad girls will smile on him. If he dents Sgt. Johnson’s Chevy, he can expect no mercy.

Eddie calculated all of this the instant he saw the stone, felt its smooth hot curves fit perfectly against the heel of his hand and his forefinger. He focuses on the pole with the intensity of a cat under a mockingbird. His arm is already drawn back. In a flash his whole body whips outward, and the stone is launched in the final instant of the whirl. Eddie watches the stone climbing in a wide arc, promising all the velocity needed to reach the Chevy, or the telephone pole. As his heart stops in sheer terror, he sees Sgt. Johnson happily swinging open his screen door, heading toward the object of his affection. The stone begins to lose altitude, dropping with a line up on the pole that is deliciously close. Eddie is walking as though he had nothing on his mind. The girl has stood up to her full height and he notes she is a little taller than he is. Sgt. Johnson hears the stone thunk into the wooden pole. He sees that Burnett kid twisted in a moment of ecstasy, pumping his arm like a hometown umpire calling a strike to end a no-hitter.

Eddie regains his composure. The girl looks up toward the source of the sound of the impact. She locks eyes with Sgt. Johnson for an instant, noting the confused and suspicious stare on his face. She turns to see Eddie Burnett stepping onto her lawn. He passes without a nod. She shrugs and returns to the search for snails in the geraniums. Sgt. Johnson watches the brown stone bounce along the grass of his sweet-smelling, just-mowed lawn.

Eddie walks to the side of the flat-roofed stucco house, putting a hand on the top slat of the redwood fence as he disappears over it into the bad girl’s back yard. She hears the exchange of greetings between Eddie and her little brothers. “Say, Grant, Robert.” “Hey, Eddie.” “Hot.” “Yeah, hotter’n snot.” “Play catch?” “Yeah.” She walks into the house thinking that Eddie has grown since last summer.

Ten minutes later she’s in bed, dreaming about canyons with fire running along their ridges, and boys from the demolition derby driving out of tunnels, cars’ back seats in flames, trailing a plume of black smoke.

Late that afternoon she drags herself down the hall. Eddie had it timed by the sun reaching her bedroom window. He told her brothers he was going inside for a glass of water. Grant looked at Robert and shook his head. “Sure,” he muttered in contempt. They knew he always drank from a hose outside. There was no reason to go inside unless it was to see their sister.

As he leaned over the sink, with the faucet turned on and pouring water directly into his upturned mouth, he caught a glimpse of her walking to the refrigerator. She was beautiful with a sleep-swollen face, wearing a huge T-shirt. The smell of Noxzema filled the kitchen. She disappeared into the front room carrying a popsicle and a transistor radio, singing along and harmonizing pretty well with Ronnie Spector. The phone rang and she flew into a rocking chair. One leg crossed over her knee, her bare foot nodding in the air with the song’s bass line, she sprawled there until her mother started calling her lazy names. Phone under her chin, she was in the process of making the night’s selection. She laughed an intimate laugh and sighed with approval. She hung up the phone and stood on her toes, arms reaching for the ceiling, back arched, T-shirt climbing up her thighs.

Eddie backed out the kitchen door into the dark garage, and into the back yard. Five minutes later the patio screen door swung open and she walked into the full glare of the heat wave, black wrap-around sunglasses, hair hiding most of her face. She answered her mother’s calls coming from inside the house.

“In a minute.” “I will.” “I did.” “Oh, I forgot.”

Eddie wanted to tell her he’d do anything for her. Steal, lie, leave home, take her anywhere. Instead he played catch with her brother. Without showing the least effort, he threw electric blue lines that smacked into her brother’s glove the instant they left his fingers. He knew she could hear the ball hissing from where she slouched against the doorjamb. Eddie threw harder. Her brother showed his bravery, standing in front of an eighty-mile-an-hour fastball with a casual blank expression on his face, his eyes as big as saucers. Eddie spoke to her as Grant’s return throw popped into his own glove. “Hey, Sis.”

She let his words hang in the air, timing her response to the moment before he’d think she was ignoring him. “Eddie, don’t throw so hard.”

To show her who was king of this street, who ruled her brothers and the other boys around those canyons, Eddie jerked his chin over the back yard fence and he and the brothers vanished in silence for those canyons, and the shore breaks, and the ballparks, and the matinees, and the girls Eddie’s age. Girls he lured out at night into the canyons and behind the bushes, or into unlocked cars. Girls who removed his hands from their breasts. Girls who pressed their knees together, or crossed their legs as Eddie felt their sweating faces, and heard their strange throaty whispers telling him, “No. No. No, Eddie.” Girls he had been pretending were the bad girl from Texas, ever since she had left town.