Roadside Bodhisattva (10 page)

She dropped my iPod into a dock she had brought Soon the music was filling the trailer. I bet Sid would’ve had a fit if he had to listen to our music, him and his geezer tastes. So much for his surface coolness.

We talked a little, mostly about school and stuff. Around seven-thirty, I began to get hungry. Last night I had been too tired to think about my stomach, but tonight was different.

“What do you guys do for supper around here, with the diner closed?”

“Oh, sometimes I whip up some mac and cheese, or nuke some fried chicken. Why, you hungry?”

“I could eat something.”

“Let’s go then.”

We carried my iPod and the dock back to Sue’s rooms. She fixed the food while I sat at the tiny table in the kitchenette. When she was done, we both chowed down.

“Man, that was great. Can I give your aunt some money to buy some more groceries for us?”

Sue had lit a cigarette. She kept looking at the clock on the wall. It was nearing eight-thirty. “She wouldn’t mind.” Sue got up abruptly. “Kid, would you mind cleaning up? I’ve gotta be someplace.”

“Uh, no. I mean, sure, go ahead.”

Sue ran out. I wanted to look where she was going. Was someone picking her up, or was she taking Ann’s car again? But I held back. Her business was her own.

I pumped up the volume as I cleaned the dirty dishes and pans. It must’ve been pretty loud, because soon Sid stuck his head in from the office and yelled, “Kid A! Turn that shit down!” Didn’t I predict he’d hate my music this loud?

Ann counted out the money into my hand, which was kinda puckery from hours in dishwater. “Thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, sixty-five. That seem fair, Kid?”

I did some quick addition in my head. When you figured in my share of Yasmine’s tips, my pay for the past week came to about a hundred bucks. No taxes taken out either, since Ann was doing everything under the table. Even back home, when I had an after-school job for a few months at the mall stocking shelves at a Sam Goody’s, I had never made that much. I felt rich.

“Yeah, that’s cool.”

I gave Ann a big smile, but the one she gave back was kinda lame. I got worried.

“Anything the matter? Is it the money? Can you really afford to pay me and Sid?”

Ann tucked some loose hair behind her ear. I noticed a streak of gray mixed in with the brown. “Well, more or less. You two have been invaluable around here the last week. Deer Park is looking better than ever. Yasmine’s not bitching so much about being overworked. Even Angie smiles once in a while. But business is flat, and I was basically just scraping by even before I added you and Sid to the payroll. I don’t mind though, because the difference between paying you guys and not paying you doesn’t really represent much of a margin. If I ever decide to close this place, my decision won’t hinge on what I spend on the help. It’s the costs like electricity and propane and food and gasoline, unavoidable stuff that keeps going up and up, that are going to kill me.”

This was more information than I really wanted. I wondered if this was the kind of boring thing Ann and Sid talked about each night, when Sid hung out with Ann on the couch in the front office of the lodge, with a crappy old black-and-white Radio Shack tv filling the time between guests showing up. After that first night, when Sid came back to the trailer so late and a little grumpy, and I had thought he was maybe screwing Ann, I had changed my mind about what they were up to. Sid didn’t seem boastful enough to be getting any. I figured he’d be grinning all day like a happy idiot if he had gotten into Ann’s pants, and would’ve let something slip to me. But he hadn’t. And besides, Sue also felt that there was nothing nasty going on between her aunt and Sid. And she should know, since she shared her bedroom with Ann.

But even if the adults had to waste their time on this business shit, it didn’t apply to me. I wasn’t the owner of Deer Park, and I didn’t feel like I should have to worry about the survival of the business. On the other hand, I had made the mistake of asking Ann how things stood, and I figured I should at least sound like I was taking her problems seriously.

“That’s tough, Ann. Maybe things will turn around for this place. The whole country’s hurting right now, I guess, but if things pick up—”

Ann smiled bigger then. “You’re sweet, Kid.” Without any warning, she grabbed me and hugged me. She felt pretty sexy for a geezer babe, and I got kinda nervous that maybe I’d embarrass her with a woody, so I pulled away as quick as I could without seeming like I was trying to escape. My face felt hot. I remembered something I had meant to do, and doing that thing meant a welcome change of subject.

“Uh, Ann, Sue’s been feeding me supper almost every night in your apartment. I wanna give you some money for groceries.”

I dug a twenty out and handed it to her. “Is that enough?”

“Kid, you don’t have to bother.”

“No, no, I really want to. It’s only fair.”

She tucked the money into her pocket. “Okay. Anything special you want me to lay in?”

“Uh, how about some of those frozen pocket things, with the cheese inside?”

Ann laughed. “I’ll get a stack of them, and any other horrible junk food I can possibly bring myself to purchase.”

“Neat. Uh, Ann, I’m gonna go help Sid with the painting now.”

“Go, go.”

I took off my apron and left the empty diner. It was four in the afternoon, and Yasmine and Sonny had gone home. I didn’t know where Sue was.

As I walked across the lawn toward the cottages, I felt kinda mixed up inside. The money in my pocket made me happy. And I didn’t feel guilty for taking it, despite Ann’s tight finances. After all, the Prophet says, “Before you leave the market place, see that no one has gone his way with empty hands.” But being tied down to this steady job, postponing my travels on the road. Well, that still sucked, no matter how hard and how often I tried to pretend it didn’t. I felt like Jack when he had signed up for the fire ranger school. “I wasn’t a free bhikku any more.” The tug-of-war between the two feelings, and between the two books, left me confused.

I wondered if maybe Sid hadn’t been right when he said Kerouac and Gibran just didn’t belong together.

And then there was the way things were going with Sue. Or not going.

I figured I’d talk to Sid about my problems with Sue, but not about my changed feelings about the two books I tried to live by. I didn’t want to give him any cause to say, “Ha-ha, I told you so!” That seemed to be one of the things that adults liked to say best.

Sid was working on the front side of the cabin we had started scraping first, a week ago. We had gone like robots down the line of cottages, prepping them all before we could ever even crack open a single can of paint, just like Sid insisted we should. The constant scraping had been pretty boring, but I had to admit that somehow doing it day after day sharpened your focus, made you more of an expert, at least in that one crummy area of work. Today was the first shot I was going to get at using a brush, which seemed a lot more interesting to me.

Standing on a low ladder, Sid worked at the eaves, laying on broad lines of dark green paint in a slow, steady way that seemed to cover a lot of square feet of boards almost before you realized it.

“Hey, Sid, do we have to paint all the fronts first? Or am I actually going to be allowed to work on a different wall from you at the same time?”

Sid turned half around without getting down. His face and arms were sunburned even darker than when I had first met him, from so much outdoor work. The dark tan made his old zit scars disappear somewhat. Maybe one day soon he’d finally look good enough to Ann to score with her.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the budding Michelangelo. I don’t know if you’re gonna be allowed to paint anything yet This is too much fun. Maybe I’ll just keep you around for stirring the paint and washing the brushes.”

“Yeah, right, I read
Tom Sawyer
too, you know. Just give me a brush and let me get busy.”

“Oh-ho, a literary man! I should’ve known, what with your consorting with ol’ Jack and that other joker. All right, you can join in. But let me give you a few pointers first.”

I stood as patiently as I could while Sid told me about not overloading my brush with paint, and how to make a proper stroke, and shit like that He finished up by saying, “You see these dropcloths I’ve laid down? Well, a dropcloth is not an excuse to be sloppy. Look at ’em this way. They’re like a safety net for a trapeze artist. You never want to use it, but you’re glad it’s there when you need it. But the dropcloth of the perfect painter would be completely spotless.”

Something about this part of Sid’s speech got my attention. It reminded me of lessons I had heard at the Zen temple. “Why would a perfect painter even need to lay down his dropcloths then?”

Sid grinned. “He wouldn’t be perfect if he didn’t bother.”

After Sid poured me a plastic handle-bucket full of paint from the can, I moved to the side of the cottage where a second stepladder stood, climbed it and began to paint. The sharp smell of the paint got mixed up with the old weathered smell of the cottage’s boards and the living smell of the nearby trees and the car smells of the highway. I burped and tasted the four chili dogs and Coke I had had for lunch.

After a few minutes I got up my nerve to talk to Sid about Sue. Not being able to see him made the conversation a little easier.

“Sid, uh, what do you think of Sue?”

“She’s a smart girl. Cute as a bug. Seems to have a lot of common sense, and maybe even some big dreams, which are even more important. But I don’t particularly like how she makes her aunt nervous by taking off at night. Christ knows what kind of crowd she’s hanging out with.”

I got a little pissed. “If she has all those good qualities you mentioned, then shouldn’t she be trusted to make her own decisions?“

“Well, yes and no. All the character in the world only goes so far when you factor in lack of experience. A person your age or Sue’s age just hasn’t been through enough crap yet to recognize a lot of life’s traps when they open up under your feet.”

I stabbed the brush at the wall. “I am so sick of that line! Either you can see things the way they are or you can’t, and it doesn’t matter how old you are. What’s right and what’s wrong shows itself to you, and you either have the smarts to tell which is which, or you don’t. You ran into geezers who don’t have a clue, and ten-year-old kids who can spot a phony from a mile away. Age has nothing to do with anything!”

Sid didn’t answer me right away, and I wondered if I had gotten him angry. But when he finally did say something, his voice was calm and maybe even a little sad.

“Kid A, you sound just like me when I was your age. And that’s why I know there’s nothing I can say that will change your mind. And that’s also why I wouldn’t be young again for all the goddamn dope in Mexico. You’re gonna find out that experience matters, matters a lot. And unfortunately, it’s gonna be a painful lesson. But I will say one thing. If right and wrong were as easy to tell apart as you seem to think, then we’d all of us be saints.”

Sid sounded so sincere about me getting hurt somehow that I couldn’t stay pissed at him. Maybe I was a little flattered too at how he had said I reminded him of himself at my age.

“Well, we’re gonna have to agree to disagree then.”

“Agreed,” he said, then laughed. I laughed too.

When we quit laughing, Sid said, “So, you must be pretty taken with Sue if you bothered asking my opinion of her.”

“Well, yeah, of course. I—I like her a lot. I’d like to hook up with her.”

“What’s stopping you?”

“I’m trying my best, but these friends of hers in town are more appealing to her than I am. She’s always ditching me to go see them. How can I compete with some guys I’ve never even met?”

“Have you ever asked Sue to go along with her into town?”

“Uh, no, I haven’t.”

“That doesn’t show much interest in her life.”

“I—I thought I’d be butting in where I wasn’t wanted.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But at this point, what have you got to lose?”

I thought about this idea. It made sense. But then another angle opened up to me. “Hey, you’re not suggesting this because you think I’ll report back to you and Ann about whatever Sue does, are you?”

“Kid A, you’re the one who brought up this whole topic, not me. I’m not the goddamn FBI. Do whatever you wanna do. I’m just saying that unless you can insert yourself deeper into Sue’s world, she’s always going to see you as this vague guy hanging out on the fringes of her life.”

“All right then. I’ll give it a try”

We painted without talking for about half an hour. Then Sid said, “Kid A, maybe you can help me.”

I figured Sid was gonna ask me to talk him up with Ann. But his next words were so far off that mark that they surprised me.

“I’m working on unknotting our pal Angie. It’s gotten to be kind of an obsession with me. At first, I was just hanging around with him to make things go smoother for you and me. I didn’t want him regarding us as competition or some kind of menace to his cozy setup. So I listened to him talk about cars and sports and other impersonal shit, and made all the right sympathetic noises. But the more time I’ve spent with him, the more I’ve gotten really intrigued by his character. There’s something hidden inside him, some sore spot he’s been nursing for a long time. I figure if I can get him to open up about whatever the hell it is, it might be good for him. Good for everybody.”