Читать книгу Temperance Creek - Pamela Royes - Страница 16

When I Ran Away

Mother, Mother, I am ill, call the doctor over the hill.

In came the doctor, in came the nurse,

In came the lady with the alligator purse.

Measles, said the doctor, mumps, said the nurse,

Nothing, said the lady with the alligator purse.

—JUMP ROPE RHYME

The spring I turned seventeen, I ran away from home, bored with the Johnnies and Jimmies of my youth, and (despite the fun I was having) bored with school. How absurd and unnatural it now seemed. I was tired of hassling with my parents over the way I dressed, the music I played, and the kids I hung out with. The privileged kids, who shoplifted clothing and fat bottles of pink Mateus Rosé inside their thrift store ankle-length fur coats and smoked pot in the school parking lot until the buzzer rang. Or the slouching longhaired boys (whom I loved but who would not love me back) and bold-eyed girls from the east side of town. Sitting with their rough and loud families around crowded Formica tables in smoke-filled kitchens I would become embarrassed to be dropped off in front of my parents’ trimmed and immaculate home. I was part of a whole generation engaged in rebellion and looking to escape the confines of their parents’ pretension. Both extremes, privileged and poor, equally confused.

The future for me was southbound on I-29. Somewhere beyond the last grain silo.

I’d talked a girlfriend into hitching with me. Laura. Laura, who’d been first farmer to my second farmer in the fourth-grade production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, when we’d sat on our hay bales and endured every practice together for the sake of delivering one line each. Since then, we’d become part of a revolving group of high school girls who hitched or caught rides to deafening rock concerts across the Midwest and Canada: The Who, Chicago, Leon Russell, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Alice Cooper (who unflinchingly beheaded a doll on stage).

On the night before we left, I didn’t have the stomach to fabricate yet another story about a sleepover with someone outside my parents’ social circle to keep them off my trail. I said good night and lay in bed, searching for simple answers. Some kind of omen, one way or another. All my life I’d lived in the same town, lived on the same street, but I was a stranger to myself. I couldn’t let anyone near me, yet I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to think about myself, but I couldn’t forget or be content. Looking around my darkened room, I saw old family pieces, burnished by time. Matching curtains and bedspread—narrow-striped and bright, but tasteful. A shelf of Breyer horses, books, a stereo, and the heap of yesterday’s clothing on the floor. Little evidence of my occupation. The room of a boarder. Decorated by Mom to remain in compliance with the rest of the house.

I thought of Dad, telling me of the time he jumped a freight car from Chicago to Grand Forks—possibly his single, glorious act of rebellion—when he was in college.

I pictured him, running breathlessly beside the moving train, flinging his father’s leather suitcase through the open door of the railcar, his thudding heart keeping time with the whining wheels, the blasts of the engine’s whistle. Springing clumsily inside, scrambling to the back, alone. I pictured his boyish face, dark, curly hair, and winsome, irrepressible smile as he settled in for the long ride.

I had Dad’s nose and probably his short temper, startling as a firecracker on the first of July. Who were his heroes? Why had I never asked him that question?

In the morning I faced my parents’ neatly made bed, leaving a brief note propped against my mother’s pillow. No omen in sight.

Dear Mom and Dad,

I am leaving to do some traveling with a friend before school is out. Please don’t worry. I will call when I get to where I am going. These last days of school aren’t important. It isn’t anything you have done. I just need to go. There’s nothing to worry about. Dad, Becky will clean the office while I’m gone, I’ve given her a set of keys. Please don’t be hurt, it will be a good experience. Please try to understand.

Love, Pam

P.S. I know what I’m doing

I turned and walked out the door.

Standing beside the southbound freeway on-ramp, Laura gave me that same bucktoothed, thumbs-up grin from childhood, her small frame hunched inside an oversized army jacket scored at the local thrift store. We turned to go. Her curly black hair, caught by the wind, was waving, the golden field stubble sticking through the snowdrifts was waving, and I couldn’t stop grinning. God, I loved my cowboy boots, the toes pointing, moving toward the freeway traffic without me, in spite of me.

“Laura, this is a great day.”

In the cold, thin April light, my wool-lined jacket felt good across my shoulders. The prairie morning fanned in pink, red, and violet rays before us. Pick any color, pick any road, I thought. The frigid embrace of winter was finally breaking. Below us, the noise of the traffic rose and fell like the sound of distant surf . . . or was it applause? I glanced at Laura.

One day we’re watching Disney and Bonanza together, the next we’re merging with the interstate traffic, high on LSD. My grasp on the consequences of our actions paled as the psychedelics, a parting gift from one of our high school friends, kicked in. Someone honked, and Laura and I turned to wave, our arms lengthening into long ribbons of flowing movement. We stopped and danced a celebratory do-si-do in honor of our grand appointment with the universe. Then we worked to compose ourselves.

“Did you see how your fingers looked when you waved?” Laura said.

My grip on the suitcase felt like a good shop weld, and I was afraid if I let go it wouldn’t come off. Laura’s wire-rimmed granny glasses fogged up, and we started laughing and couldn’t stop. We spent ten minutes at the edge of the barrow pit, pulling our act together.

“How much money did you bring?” I asked. “I’ve got almost fifty bucks. I’m really starting to hallucinate. Let’s have a smoke.”

When I was six, I’d packed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a paper sack and slipped down to Lincoln Park, where I’d hid in the woods, nursing some imagined grievance. When I’d finished eating, I’d gone home to see if anyone had missed me yet. I’d found Mom in the basement pressing damp sheets on the hissing, belching mangle iron and sat quietly on the floor watching her fold the starched white sheets into neat squares. Perspiring, she’d worked the big iron, the steam rising in great puffs, unaware of my duplicity.

“Ready, Laura?” She nodded. We got to our feet and stuck out our thumbs. Somewhere out there were geodesic domes, black lights, Woodstock, and the mad passion of life, love, sin, and creativity. The future.

Three days later, around midnight, Laura and I reached the outskirts of Denver, Colorado, looking all the while over our shoulders. We’d expected to be set upon and apprehended, and with the passing of each small hour, we began to wish that the expected hour would arrive, so we could get on with the consequences.

“Pam, do you think they’ve put out an APB on us?”

“Maybe they don’t even know we’re gone yet.”

“I’m so hungry.”

“Yeah, me too. Let’s keep walking and find an exit.”

“It’s so cold. Wonder what everyone’s doing at home.”

Reaching into my jacket I pulled out two Marlboros and a book of matches. We lit up and started walking again.

“Would you have gone without me?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Thought so.”

A day later, we ended up in Aspen, Colorado. Staring up at those rocky, snow-covered, ten-thousand-foot mountains, I was enthralled, entranced, and absolutely certain that destiny had played a part in guiding us there. Laura found work cleaning rooms; I was hired on at an heiress’s horse ranch, cleaning stalls. I got a furnished apartment to live in. And the keys to her spare Porsche.

When I called home, I was slightly surprised at how easily my parents capitulated.

“What good would it do if we said no?” Mom said in her I-don’t-know-what-we’re-going-to-do-about-you voice. I knew she thought I’d thrown my life away, my opportunities, my reputation, and the possibility of ever attracting a wealthy husband.

“I’m sorry.” Maybe deep down, part of me hoped they’d drive to Aspen and make me (albeit a more contrite version of me) come home. But for some reason, they didn’t.

Two weeks later, Laura got homesick and bought a one-way bus ticket back to North Dakota. I stayed, but I missed Laura. The bare-bones apartment now too big, too quiet, and too melancholy. I saw myself. Transfixed by the tick of the clock, the quiet traffic, and muffled movement from adjoining apartments.

I worked long hours at the ranch, six, seven days a week, cleaning stalls, schooling horses. When I wasn’t working, I read, explored, hiked, or swam in the public pool. On Sundays, I called home, collect. Eventually, I discovered a new kind of freedom. I adopted a puppy. A malamute husky, fuzzy gray and white, smart, loyal, independent. I adored him. I named him Jack. He was the first dog, the first anything I was totally responsible for, and together we settled into a decisive rhythm and confidence.

Separated from my hometown juvenile delinquent friends, and well under the legal drinking age, I set aside alcohol and drugs. I got a library card. I learned to drink coffee and hold down a job, taught my dog to sit, stay, and heel, paid the rent, and made new friends. Rita and her boyfriend Kris owned a home recording studio outside Old Snowmass. I was discovering myself. I craved exposure to beauty, to nature, to art, to words, to music, to people—ordinary, intelligent, amusing, and loud—anything outside convention or expectation.

My parents phoned one night toward the end of summer with the startling news that they were selling our house in Grand Forks, buying a place in Medford, Oregon, and wanted me to think about coming home. Without Jack. They followed up with a letter and enough money for a bus ticket.

Dear Pam,

You really shook me up last night with your news about the dog. Honestly, I just don’t think you realize what problems you will make if you bring that dog home. Your dad is stressed enough as it is. I’m really sorry about this but I woke up in the middle of the night and it hit me, what you had said. I guess I was relieved when you said “dog” instead of “pregnant,” “married,” or “in jail.” I just didn’t take it in all at once . . .

I pocketed the money Dad sent because, well, they left me no choice really. Leave my dog? I quit work, said goodbye to my Rocky Mountain friends, dropped off the Porsche and apartment keys, and slipped away. Slipped because I knew how. Same as I’d slipped in and out my parents’ front door at any and all hours, slipped through the woods and the alleys. Slipped, learning to move with the pack when necessary, not allowing anyone to single me out.

Then I hitched back to North Dakota.

With a couple good rides behind us, Jack and I dozed in the back seat of a beat-up Rambler, and I thought about Mom’s last letter, how stressed Dad was. It had to be hard, leaving his Dakota roots, his work, his friends. I still couldn’t believe it was happening. It must have been Mom’s idea to move to Oregon, nearer her side of the family. Since the accident, she hadn’t been happy. Good or bad, the accident had become a catalyst, uprooting our family to another state. Oddly, I didn’t mind we were leaving the summer before my senior year. I’d miss my friends, but there would be mountains, and I felt ready for anything. Only a few more rides and I’d be home.

Somewhere outside Omaha, in the numbing ether of Nebraska, a Ford sedan stopped to pick me up. Behind the wheel, a salesman, wearing a navy blue business suit.

“I can get you as far as Sioux City,” he’d said.

I threw my pack in the back seat and jumped up front, Jack curling on the floorboards between my legs. We’d reached cruising speed, eighty-five miles per hour, before the driver spoke again, asking in a conversational tone, “Are you wearing any panties?”

There was a sudden weightlessness to my up-until-then routine mission to find a ride home. Inexplicably we’d come unmoored and were hurtling, spinning, through space. The past seemed unfinished and the future unlived and out of control, and there was no air. Every thought, every thread, fiber, and nerve were shrieking, Mayday! Desperate, I slid, crushing myself against the passenger door, and risked a glance at the driver. Saw his darting looks, his hands, one on the steering wheel, and one coiled on the seat between us. What had he seen when he saw me standing beside the road with my thumb out? A victim? I swiveled, frantic to know where the next exit was, searching for another car, calculating what would happen if I opened my door. And then Jack growled, fracturing the stillness, bringing air into the space, and I screamed, “Stop the car!”

In the drumming, ragged heartbeats that followed, pulsing through the thin fabric of my shirt, there was a shift. And though it seemed time couldn’t possibly move forward in its former careless way, the salesman stepped on the brakes, throwing me forward, arms splayed. He swerved off the freeway, and I battered against the door and threw it wide before the car had stopped, leapt out without shutting it, wrenched open the back and grabbed my stuff as he sped away, black marks scorching the pavement behind him.

On the shoulder of the highway I stroked Jack’s head over and over, droning, “He’s gone, you saved me, he’s gone,” waiting for the tremor in my legs to stop and thinking briefly of the bus money—cashed, pocketed, and spent so righteously on cigarettes, dog food, and a collar and leash for Jack. It wasn’t easy to stick out my thumb again on those wide Nebraska flats, still a thousand miles between me and 418 Campbell Drive. I thought I knew what was safe and what wasn’t. That I could read people. I looked up and down the freeway, wretched and without option. But eventually, I realized I had everything I needed. North was still north. I had my thumb. I had Jack.

Shortly after my safe arrival, Jack proceeded to lay waste to Mom’s flower beds and give my dad fits. Not wanting to add to their already-overflowing list of worries, I ran an ad, and when an interested farmer called, Laura and I hitched out together for old times’ sake. I took a last picture of Jack, straining against the leash held by a stranger, and sobbed all the way to Crookston, where a passing tornado, dark and apocalyptic, forced us from the side of the road into a ditch, swirling in a great whirl of wind and debris.