Fast Lanes (15 page)

Afterward, in the car, everyone was more relaxed. We were through Wierton quickly and on the way home.

“Kato,” Jean asked, “how’s your dad?”

Kato looked up. “He’s fine.” There was a little silence after her quick answer.

“Your dad and I were friends in high school, you know.” Now that we were on the highway, Jean tried to clean the dust from the windshield. Water covered the glass as the wipers beat, clearing liquid runnels.

“I know,” Kato answered. “I think my dad has pictures of you. You and him and another guy.”

“Probably Tom Harwin.”

“Yes, that’s right. In the office, Dad has a picture in a frame. They’re wearing football uniforms, and you have on, like, a fur coat?”

Jean nodded. “Chinchilla. I saved for that coat for a year, working at the soda fountain.” She laughed. “I thought it was something.”

“And the football helmets are funny-looking, different, smaller,” Kato said. “Dad has another picture too, over the file cabinet.”

“Yes, he would. They were best friends.”

“You ought to take a look, Mom.” Billy put his arm lazily over the seat and touched our mother’s shoulder with his hand. “Shinner’s got all kinds of stuff in that office. Newspaper headlines from World War II.”

“Mrs. Hampson,” Kato asked, “did you know my mother?”

“No, I didn’t. She wasn’t from around here.”

We were crossing railroad tracks and our bodies were subtly shaken by the movement of the car. Gravel crunched under the wheels. The tall caution lights, their arms crisscrossed, blinked an orange warning as we moved on.

Billy had bought a used car with money he’d saved cutting brush for the State Road Commission along the two-lanes. He picked Kato up every morning before school until my mother told him gently, “I don’t think it’s necessary to pick her up every day, as though she were family.”

Sometimes I rode to school with him. The old school, where Shinner Black and Jean and Mitch had all gone, was still in operation. Country kids rode buses in from the hollows, and town kids walked or picked each other up in cars. Billy and I often passed the school bus, yellow and mottled with dust, full to overflowing, seeming to lean a bit with the grade of the pavement.

“Billy, do you and Mom ever talk about Kato?”

“No. Mom just complains to you.” He grinned.

“I guess she has to complain to someone. She doesn’t seem to talk to Dad much.”

“No, they’re not big talkers.”

Town landscape flowed by. The expansive frame houses were weathered relics, their generous porches sagging. Now the outskirts of Bellington were dotted with ranch houses whose backyards melded with the long cold grasses of empty fields.

“Dad talked to me once about her, over a year ago, just a while before she and I got around to anything that needed talking about.”

“He did?” I suppose my surprise showed in my voice.

Billy raised one eyebrow, his voice mischievous. “Mitch instructed me in methods of contraception. He said, ‘No sense getting into a hell of a mess.’ ”

“That’s the truth.” I had to laugh at his rendition of
Mitch’s tone, but the story made me a little sad. I noticed my father more lately, maybe because no one else seemed to. Since he’d left his job selling cars, he spent time in the office he’d set up in the basement. He was selling aluminum buildings on commission, equipment sheds, and he was home a lot more than Jean now. I asked Billy, “Do you think Dad likes Kato?”

“Yeah, I’m sure he does. She told me he comes into the pool hall, and he always starts a conversation.”

“How often does he go there?”

Billy shrugged. “Once or twice a week, in the late afternoons.”

“I guess he has some time on his hands.”

My brother looked over at me. “Probably so.”

“What does he say about Brandenburg?”

“He doesn’t say. It’s Mom’s money, and he’s staying out of it.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Will you go?” He didn’t answer, and I touched the cold vinyl of the car door. I could feel the vibration of the motor through it. “Don’t you ever wish you could get away, anywhere, as long as it’s somewhere different?”

“Not really,” Billy said, “not yet. But if I went, Kato could come down and see me. I could get a part-time job down there and send her the bus fare.”

“How would you have time for a job if you joined the gymnastics team?”

“I don’t know. Play poker, or pool, for money. I’ve gotten pretty good, hanging around Shinner’s.” He smiled. “Don’t boarding schools all have special weekends? Kato still has that white dress of yours. She could throw it in a suitcase and show up, if she could stop laughing at me in a uniform and crew cut.”

“I don’t think she’s laughing.”

We were in sight of the school and Billy slowed for the
turn into the lot. “There isn’t anyone like Kato,” he said seriously. “I’d want to see her, no matter where I was.”

I smiled back. “She’s dedicated.”

My brother parked his car. A necklace he’d given Kato, a gold chain, dangled from the rearview mirror. Billy turned off the ignition and sat with his hand on the keys. “I told Mom I’d go down to look at the school with her, the week after the gym show, just for three days. If I really don’t like it, I’ll say so, and the thing will be over. If I do, well, I think Kato will wait for me.”

“When will you tell her you’re going?”

“This morning.”

“Be careful how you tell her.”

Those last days before the gym show, the girls phys. ed. department made scenery for the requisite last number, candling to music. Entire classes of girls would move lighted candles in choreographed routines, standing, sitting, kneeling, while music played in the darkened gymnasium—easy, inclusive even of the least coordinated, impressive in simulated night. We’d practiced the movements for weeks as a simple warmup, holding the flat glass candleholders, twisting our arms like Mata Hari’s. This year we were making scenery to be spotlit to an instrumental version of “Blue Moon.” “Blue moon,” someone always spoofed, “I saw you hanging around.…” The moon was a pale blue sheet stretched over a frame; silver foil clouds would drift across on wires. Kato and I helped cut fleecy shapes from heavy cardboard. The matte knives loaned us by the art department were dull and we had to saw through the stiff board. Kato didn’t meet my eyes; I knew she wouldn’t mention Billy in front of the others. I was relieved when I was asked to set up folding chairs for the audience—I knew I’d finish late, after the period was over. Kato would have helped put away art supplies and gone on to another class.

Setting up stacks of metal chairs, I tried to imagine Kato
next year, her senior year, without Billy. I’d be gone too, presumably to college—the thought of that unknown seemed clean and limitless, like floating in space. And Brandenburg, in the brochure Jean had shown me, seemed a universe controlled by a benevolent, all-mighty authority: the uniformed boys, the ivy-covered bell tower on the cover, couples walking under crossed sabers into a formal dance. And the gymnasts, who’d sent a member of their team to the Olympic trials, looked godly in their leotards—they were valued and privileged, they were protected. Maybe Jean was right. Walking down to the showers, I realized Billy would get away before I would. Just last night I’d noticed one of his library texts on trampolines, open on his desk to a chapter titled “Values: More Than in Any Other Activity, Trampolining Develops a Sense of Relocation.”

The girls’ gym facilities were identical to the boys’, only smaller and painted less often. The lockers were older, battered and olive green, their catches and undependable locks installed thirty years ago. The rooms themselves were thick-walled, always damp to the touch. Painted dark green to shoulder height, they took on the pale color of the ceiling, a sour yellow reminiscent of sickness. Slanted cement floors drained into metal drains. Along the walls were the green benches where girls had sat to pull on their stockings in the forties and fifties; now we wore bright wool knee socks to match our sweaters, or fuchsia tights. The room was long and narrow, barely lit by ceiling bulbs and basement windows of dappled, frosted glass, barred with black iron. We liked to put on our skirted, dark blue gym suits and refer to ourselves as maniacs: pretense of snarls and drools as we bent to lace our tennis shoes. Empty now, the space resembled a neglected dungeon.

I walked naked into the shower room, a narrow
cul-de-sac
that smelled of mildew. The lights were badly wired and flickered. Incongruously beautiful, the shower stalls were
floor-to-ceiling marble slabs, the marble a pearl white veined with gray. Their heavy doors banged, the dark paint peeling. One long horizontal mirror faced the showers over small sinks; the mirror was always cloudy, sweating, flecks of the glass gone so the surface seemed pocked with minute brown snowflakes. At the end under the windows were two toilets in wooden stalls. On their green doors someone had scratched with a nail file long ago: “No shits during showers.” Just above this communication hung a more recent, official note printed by hand:
DO NOT FLUSH TOILETS WHILE SHOWERS ARE RUNNING.
To the right of the sign, another scrawled message: “Piss in the shower, Shit elsewhere, Good luck.”

Just as I got inside and the water gurgled, bursting violently down in a hard spray, the yellow light dimmed and went out. I heard Kato come into the room, saying my name, feeling her way along the shower doors.

“Danner,” she said, “is that you?”

“Yes,” I answered. “Why are you still here?”

“I had to take the art supplies back upstairs.”

“Kato, what happened to the light?” I reached to latch the door and touched instead Kato’s cold stomach as she stepped inside.

“The bulb must be out again. Oh, make it warmer, I’m freezing.”

“This is my shower,” I said, “it’s warm enough.”

She shoved me as though in play directly under the hard warm spray and boxed her fists gently against my hands. I turned away and she moved to stand close behind me. I felt the long cool length of her body. She was laughing, and tense; she put her hands lightly on my waist and hummed a bar of “Blue Moon,” then faked an openmouthed vampire kiss on my shoulder.

“You smell like Billy, do you know that?” She sighed, her voice slowed and changed. “You and Billy smell the same.”

I said nothing.

“Billy’s going away, isn’t he? He’s told you, I know he has.”

“I don’t know, Kato. Maybe he will.”

“Shit,” she whispered, like a plea, and her voice broke. She put her arms around me from behind and leaned into me with all her weight as though holding on for support.

“Kato—”

She was crying. “But he can’t go. You have to tell him.”

“Let go, OK?” In the warm water and the dark, I smelled the flowery musk of her wet hair. I stood still and she held on to me, swaying; I felt her face on the back of my neck, moving back and forth like the face of someone struggling in a dream. Over the running of the water I heard her ragged sobs, long sounds partially breathless, gasping. I twisted to face her and she let me but wouldn’t let go. I could barely see her clenched face and I was frightened.

“Kato, please, calm down. Take a deep breath, try to breathe.”

She held me, sliding down, her face on my stomach, my thighs, until she slid to her knees on the wet cement and crouched at my feet. The lights flickered then, on, off, on. I knelt beside her and she looked up at me, not really seeing me.

“Oh, God,” she said, “no one will help me.” She covered her face with her hands.

“I will, Kato, I will if I can. Stay here, I’ll get some towels. Stay right here.”

I only left her for a minute while I looked through the lockers for dry towels. When I came back she was standing in front of the mirror, the shower still running behind her. Someone had left a matte knife on the sink. Kato had the knife in her hand and she held one arm straight over her head. She watched herself in the mirror and traced a long ragged cut from her wrist to her armpit. She did it incredibly fast, with no expression, as though what she saw in the glass bore no connection to her. The little knife dropped into the
sink as I reached her and she turned to me, her face stony, blood rising along the cut and pooling in the cup of her hand.

“You did the wrong thing,” Billy said.

“Look, I couldn’t tell then that it wasn’t so bad. She was bleeding, I couldn’t tell.”

“You should have helped her get her clothes on and come and found me.”

“Billy, if the cut had been deeper she could have bled to death while I was looking for you.”

“But it wasn’t so deep.” Above him, Jean’s kitchen clock ticked like a mechanical heartbeat. Finally, it was dark and the day was over. Billy shook his head. “Did she mean it to be worse?”

“I don’t know. The knife was dull and she couldn’t press hard, the way she held her arm. But she cut herself. She had thirty stitches. When I found you, Billy, what would you have done? Sewn up her arm? Oh, you have to let other people help now.”

He didn’t answer, his hands flat on the surface of the oak table. They hadn’t let him see her at the hospital, but later, when she went home with her father, he’d been there, waiting, for hours.

“Billy, what did she say to you?”

“She was in her room, lying down. She made light of it, said they gave her free Valium, and she’s going to visit her aunt in Ohio. She said Dayton wasn’t New York City but it’s bigger than Bellington.” His voice dropped. “She said she was sorry.”

“Did you talk to Shinner?”

Billy nodded. “He said not to stay because of Kato, that she’d be with his sister until Christmas, maybe the whole school year. That we could write and talk but there should be distance.”

“Billy,” I said, “maybe he’s right.”

He looked, bewildered, into the air, his eyes wet. “I told her I was just going down to look. That’s all, take a look.”

The gymnastics show occurred on schedule, two days later, on a cold Friday night. Kato had been sent to Ohio to her relatives and Billy had canceled his performance on the trampoline. I went to the show only because I couldn’t face staying home with Jean and Mitch, and Billy in his room in silence, his suitcase packed. My father drove me to the school and I walked through various routines with my classes, but toward the end I couldn’t face the last number, the candling maneuvers to “Blue Moon” in darkness. I didn’t want to see a hundred girls moving flames in patterns, shadows passing over the homemade moon.