For a second it looked like Crew-cut Guy was going to come after me. The anger was raging in his eyes, and he made a move. But Alex held him back, pressing the back of his hand against his chest. He was looking at me, Alex was, and kind of half-smiling, a strange smile, almost as if he admired me.
“Don’t be stupid,” he told Crew-cut Guy, holding him there without taking his eyes off me. “He’d put you in the hospital.”
I could see Crew-cut Guy was angry about that, but he held back. I was grateful to Alex for stopping him. I saluted him with one finger to my head.
“Why don’t you give me a call sometime?” I said. “We could talk. Privately.”
I walked around the side of the car. I yanked the driver’s door open while Alex’s two friends glared at me. I slid in behind the wheel and shut the door.
The anger was still hot in me. In fact, it was worse now-now that I was away from them and didn’t have to worry about doing something violent and stupid. Now the anger closed my throat and made my stomach clutch. It was a rotten feeling.
I jammed my key into the ignition and twisted it hard, turning the engine over. I grabbed hold of the gearshift, ready to throw the big car into reverse.
Just then, the passenger door opened and Alex slid into the seat beside me.
“All right,” he said. “You wanna talk? Let’s talk. Drive somewhere.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Argument With Alex in the car beside me, I drove out of the parking lot, the Explorer’s tires bouncing hard over the exit ramp and out onto the road. I guess-being as angry as I was-I was driving a little too fast. I had to ease down on the brake, bring the big car under control-and bring myself under control too. I took a deep breath and forced myself to loosen my jaw, which was clenched together like a bear trap.
Alex didn’t say anything as I drove out over Route
109, past the other big mall in town. The silence hung there between us. I was the one who broke it.
“I like your friends,” I said. Only the way I said it, it meant the opposite.
“They’re okay.”
“Oh yeah, they’re great. The kind of guys who’ll always be around when you need them.”
“Hey, they’re my friends, all right?”
That almost set me off. I almost started yelling at him right then and there: about Beth, about the punks he hung out with, about everything. But somehow I managed to swallow it all and keep my mouth shut. I mean, Alex had gotten into the car. He wanted to talk to me. That had to be a good sign, right? It wouldn’t do any good if I just got on his case.
“Yeah, fine,” was all I said finally.
Alex jammed a hand into his tracksuit pocket. He brought out a pack of cigarettes.
“Hey, look…” I said.
“Oh, what?” he snapped back. “Are you my mother now or something?”
“It’s my mom’s car, all right? No smoking. You want a cigarette, we’ll park somewhere, you can shove the whole pack in your mouth and set your face on fire for all I care.”
There was more silence as Alex reluctantly stuffed the cigarettes back in his tracksuit. Then, a second later, I heard him give kind of a snort. The sound surprised me. I glanced over at him. Unbelievably, he was cracking up: laughing, laughing hard, his smile broad and happy just like it used to be back in the days when we hung out together.
He shook his head, wiping his eyes, laughing. “‘Set your face on fire,’” he said. “You are such an idiot.”
I had to laugh at that too. “It does make a pretty funny picture…”
“Whoosh!” he said, imitating the noise his face might make if it went up in flames.
That made me laugh some more.
After a while, our laughter died away. I turned the car off the big road and headed down Oak Street. It’s a nice long quiet lane of houses set back behind rows of trees. The trees’ branches form a canopy over the road. It made it pretty dark with the sun so low and the yellowing September leaves shading the pavement. I turned the headlights on. We drove another few seconds without talking.
“Listen,” I said, “if you don’t want me to ask Beth out…”
I left that hanging there, hoping he’d tell me to forget the whole thing. But he didn’t. He said, “Yeah? What then? What if I don’t want you to ask Beth out?”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll probably ask her out anyway. But I’ll feel bad about it for a few minutes, if that’ll help you any.”
I heard Alex let out a long breath next to me. “Nah,” he said. “Why shouldn’t you go out with her? She’s not going out with me. In fact, you guys’d probably have a good time together. I mean, she’s the coolest girl I ever met.” I felt him glance at me as I drove. “That stuff I said about her back at the malclass="underline" that was just me mouthing off. I didn’t mean it.”
That passed for an apology as far as I was concerned, and it was good to hear-really good. It made the anger go out of my heart completely. And let me tell you, it was nice to get rid of it.
“Things are just tough right now,” Alex said in a soft voice.
“Sure, I get it,” I said. I was glad I was driving. Glad it was getting dark. Glad Alex and I didn’t have to look at each other and could just talk. “You mean with your folks and everything.”
“Yeah,” said Alex. “It’s the ‘everything’ that gets you.”
“What do you mean?”
He was quiet a long time. The shadows of the trees passed steadily over the windshield. Behind the trees, the lights of houses began to come on, yellow and warm in the deepening evening. The lights made you think of good things: people having dinner together or watching some show on TV and laughing together. That’s what they made me think of, anyway.
“Aw, nothing,” Alex said then. “You wouldn’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“The whole thing. It’s like… forget it.” There was anger in his voice-anger and a kind of weariness.
“Well, try me,” I told him. “I mean, whatever it is, I can’t get it if you don’t explain it to me.”
“It’s not that, it’s… It’s you, Charlie. It’s the way you are. You think everything’s so simple. You know? You walk around all sure of yourself. You think good is good and bad is bad. You think, Work hard, pray to God, respect your parents, love America, and everything’ll be great.”
“I never said everything’d be great. I just feel better about myself when I try to do what’s right, that’s all.”
“See, that’s what I mean. Everything’s so straight and narrow for you. It’s like you were brainwashed by your parents or something, and now you believe all that goody-good-guy garbage. Things would look a lot different to you if everything weren’t so easy. I mean, nothing’s ever gone bad for you. Not really bad.”
It made me feel kind of insulted, him saying that. I could feel myself getting angry all over again. My first impulse was to argue with him. To tell him things weren’t easy for me all the time. I wanted to tell him about how my mom sometimes nagged me to death and my sister drove me crazy and my dad worked too much and how sometimes I worried about… oh, all kinds of stuff, a lot of stuff. Sometimes things weren’t easy at all. Luckily, though, I managed to pull off my now-famous keep-the-old-mouth-shut routine yet again. I had to eat my pride to do it this time, but I figured if I started arguing about me, then we’d never get around to talking about him. And I figured, the way things were going in his life, it was probably more important for us to talk about him. So I just said, “Okay,” and waited, driving under the trees and past the warm lights of the houses.
It worked. Alex went on, talking faster now, as if the words were just pouring out of him almost before he could think of them. “I mean, it’s easy to believe in things when everything’s going right, when you go home and your folks are there, and you don’t have to worry about where you’re gonna live or what you’re gonna eat or anything. Then it’s easy to say, Oh, work hard and pray to God and everything’ll be great. In this wonderful free country of ours, blah, blah, blah. But, I mean, what if all that stuff’s a lie, Charlie? You ever consider that? I mean, what if you come home one day and your dad’s gone-I mean, just gone, like he never even existed-or like being your dad didn’t mean anything to him? And you gotta listen to your mother crying in her bedroom all the time because she’s alone and she doesn’t have enough money and you don’t even know whether you’re gonna be able to stay in your crummy house. What good is working hard then, Charlie? What good is ‘America the Beautiful’? And where’s God-what’s he doing about it?”