“There might be some meteors this week,” she said. “Come and watch them with me.” She touched the little star and clasped my hand. Everything was right again, so easily after all. And yet, as she and Noreen walked away without me, the feeling returned, that she had not really forgiven me for seeing her father drunk. I was stained by it, as I was by the episode of the dog.

  “Who’s the chink?” Dwayne said, as we started for home.

  “She’s not a chink.”

  “What is she then?”

  “A girl I know.”

  “Even if you like her, she’s still a chink.”

  “You better stop saying that.” I made as if to hit him, and he flinched. The word “chink” had applied itself to Marsha several times in my mind, with a secret harshness I enjoyed, but it was equally pleasant to put it aside, and let her off.

  “She’s not a chink,” I said. “But her mother is.”

  The school receded behind us, and so did the perspective it imposed. Dwayne was my friend again; we could talk as usual, and I began to look forward to whatever snack his mother might have ready for us.

  We got within view of the mountain and saw a shopping cart abandoned on the grass. We both broke into a run.

  “Let’s do Wild Mouse!” Dwayne shouted.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a roller coaster at the exhibition. It twists and turns like crazy.” He shook the cart and gave me the frenzied grin he used whenever he wanted to do something crazy. Then he sprang over the side, hunched down on his runners, and shook the cart some more. I grabbed the handle and ran the cart over the uneven ground, with hard turns every few steps. Dwayne flung his head from side to side and yelled over the cart’s metallic rattling. I wrestled it around the mountain till my wrists ached too much to go on.

  “Go, go!” Dwayne shouted, shaking the cart again. “It’s not crazy yet!”

  That sounded like a dare. We took off again, and the Wild Mouse became a crazed rat. I ran hard and veered harder. On the third turn, one of the forward wheels struck a hole. Dwayne lurched hard against the front of the cart, and the whole thing toppled over sideways with a crash. The handle’s edge raked my ribs on the way down.

  “Holy crumbs!” Dwayne wailed. He slid from the cart with his hand clamped to his face. Blood ran out between the fingers, and down the inside of his forearm. I had to pry the hand away to see his pulpy nose, and the jagged cut across his cheek. His white shirt was already spattered with blood, so I got it off him and pressed it to his face like a pillow. We jogged like that along the lane to his backyard. His mother saw us coming from the kitchen window and was already out the door by the time Dwayne rushed up, crying, and pressed his bloody, half-naked body into her arms.

  She got the shirt away from his face and felt his nose with the tip of her finger. She asked what happened, and Dwayne blubbed out the story in a few muffled statements. It was damningly simple: I had run wild and crashed the cart.

  Dwayne’s mother had always liked me, or at least given me the benefit of every doubt. But now she showed me a much harder look than the vague smile she wore when I ate her cookies.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t always do what Jasper tells you,” she said.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” I said. I pulled up my shirt to show her the painful scrape across my ribs, but there was only a red mark, and no blood.

  “We’ll have to take a cab to the hospital,” she told Dwayne. He wailed again and flung his treacherous self at her bosom. She held him close and shot me a searing glance that assigned me the full blame, for this and probably other things too. They went inside to phone for a taxi and let the screen door swing shut in my face.

  I crossed back to the Bel Air full of fury and vengeance. It was Dwayne’s idea, my ribs hurt too, and I wouldn’t take the rap. But when I rehearsed the whole incident in my head, and others related to Dwayne, I found that the blame had stuck to me after all. It had seeped through to me somehow, through my clothes and my skin, and I couldn’t see how to get rid of it.

  CHAPTER

  42

  i tapped at nick’s door, then quietly opened it. He was sprawled on the sofa, flipping his lighter open and shut. He had his houndstooth jacket on, and one tasselled loafer.

  “Do you still want to go to the Sahara?” I said.

  “Sure.” But he made no move to get up, and continued flipping the lighter.

  “It starts in ten minutes.”

  “I’m all ready. As you can see.”

  “You still need a shoe.”

  “Yes, Mom.” He lurched up and groped for the other loafer.

  We walked to the Sahara in silence. Nick hadn’t combed his hair, and his shirt looked like he’d pulled it from the hamper. I thought maybe he had been drinking, but I didn’t smell anything on him. We waited behind three other people for tickets, but when we got to the window, Nick just stood there.

  “One adult,” I said, more as a cue to him than to the ticket girl, who knew us and already had his ticket halfway under the window.

  Nick sank down lower in his seat than usual. His jacket lapels crowded up towards his chin, as if he were shrivelling into his clothes.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  “A-okay. Now start the damn movie.”

  The feature began with a man talking behind a desk, about how the movie had no story and no script, but lots of Jerry Lewis. It was all shot in a big hotel surrounded by palm trees.

  “The bellboys are lined up,” I said. “The manager’s inspecting them. They’re all walking off in different directions, except Jerry Lewis. He’s turning this way and that. He doesn’t know which way to go.”

  “Christ,” Nick said.

  I tried to describe the pranks that happened one after another. “He’s handing the woman a car engine. He’s putting a bra on a hanger. He’s throwing room keys at little shelves.”

  “The guy never talks,” Nick said. “I’m a blind man at a movie full of sight gags.” He stood up and started moving out of the row. We went to the manager’s office, where Nick tried to get his money back.

  “Look, mister,” the manager said. “I’d like to help you. But you were in there over thirty minutes. That’s our cut-off. Thirty minutes, you don’t get no refund. Plus, the boy’s in for free. Like we always do for you.”

  “Nobody told me it was a silent film!”

  “It isn’t. There’s talking and music and everything.”

  Nick argued for a few more minutes, then tore up his ticket stub and threw the bits on the Xoor. The manager stooped and picked them up.

  “This place stinks tonight!” Nick said. He stormed through the empty lobby, nearly colliding with a standing ashtray, and banged through the front door. He was ready to plunge into the road without pausing, till an eighteen-wheeler barked its horn at him.

  His pace slowed by the time we got to the Bel Air’s front door, but then he ran up the stairs, instead of down to his place. He was at our door before I caught up with him, tapping his nails on the wood. I turned the handle, but the door was locked.

  “Corinne’s probably in the bath,” I said. But when we got inside, the place was empty. The clothes she had been wearing when I left were flung on the bed.

  “Did she say she was going out?” Nick said.

  “No.”

  He sat on the sofa and crossed his arms. I thought he would say something more, but he stayed silent.

  “Do you want anything?” I said.

  “No.” He hugged himself and rocked back and forth. “Thanks, but I decline. Tell me something, Jasper. Listen, I’ve been wondering. What I want to know is … how’s school?”

  “Okay. Kind of boring.” It was the same answer I gave any adult faking an interest in my education.

  “I guess it would be,” he said. “How about your teacher? Is she any good?”

  He had his lighter out again, and since he was leaning over, he looked as if he were directing his fake question to the shiny thing in his palm. He might as well have been. He had never shown the smallest interest in what I thought or how I was doing — in any part of my life. I only realized how complete his indifference had been at this moment when he pretended to care.

  Several seconds passed without an answer from me. I didn’t intend to say nothing, but as the nothing went on, it became the right answer. Nick had dragged me from the theatre before the movie was done, and made an embarrassing fuss with the manager, and he wasn’t going to get a single word from me to help him stay on our sofa till Corinne got back.

  On that point, we understood each other completely. After another minute, he got up and left the apartment without a word.

  Corinne returned while I was watching Danger Man pull himself out of a plane wreck. She was wearing a flashy blue dress, her cheeks were flushed, and her hair was mussed.

  “How was your movie?”

  “We left before the end. Where’d you go?”

  “For a walk.”

  “Who with?”

  “Nobody. You should be in bed.”

  A little later, she came into my room, and sat on the bed, and stroked my hair back from my forehead.

  “Why did you change to go for a walk?” I said.

  “I usually change when I go out, haven’t you noticed? You should change more often. Your shirt was smelly today.” She gazed at me with a look of complete happiness, as she did at unexpected times, but this time I felt she was looking right through me. And something else was missing.

  “You didn’t put on your lipstick.”

  “I did too,” she said, and a look of confusion briefly disturbed her blissful expression. “Oh, I already took it off — before I came in here.”

  She smiled, and tucked me in, and kissed my forehead with her naked lips. She blew me another kiss from the doorway, and went away as if everything were completely normal, though we both knew she didn’t go on walks by herself, and never took off only part of her makeup.

  CHAPTER

  43

  it was surprisingly easy to convince Corinne to let me go to the Suans’ house in the middle of the night to see the meteor shower. I lay down in my clothes at my usual bedtime and sprang up as soon as she touched my arm. We left the dark apartment without speaking. The Corvair coughed into life, its exhaust note sounding newly abrasive in the hush, and we drove under the pale, regular sunbursts cast by street lamps that lit the way for us alone.

  Dr. Suan was on his front steps when we arrived, and came towards us as I got out. Corinne hadn’t put on makeup or brushed her hair; she drove off with a wave before he reached the car door.

  “Come,” he said, and led me up the drive to the rear of the house. The backdoor light shone feebly on Marsha, who was spreading an unzipped sleeping bag on the grass.

  “I’m getting bitten,” she said.

  “Then you didn’t put enough on,” said Dr. Suan. Marsha squirted some bug repellent onto her hand, and mine, and we wiped it on our faces and arms till all I could smell was its lemony chemical odour. On the patio, Dr. Suan extended the squeaking legs of his tripod.

  “Don’t touch this once I open the shutter.”

  “I know, Daddy, I know,” Marsha said.

  The feet of the tripod scraped the patio stones as he searched for a stable spot. Marsha picked the heavy camera off the table and trained it on me.

  “Don’t waste a shot, there’s not enough light,” said Dr. Suan.

  “I know, Daddy! I was only looking.” She sighed with exasperation.

  “Are you going to watch too?” I said.

  “No, I’ll get it with this,” said Dr. Suan, “if no one bumps the camera.” He fastened it to the tripod. “Do you understand about long exposures, Jasper?”

  “Of course he does!” Marsha stamped her runner on the patio stones.

  “Why don’t you settle down, young lady, and offer your guest some lemonade.”

  “Do you want a drink?” Marsha removed a tea towel from a pitcher on the table and poured two glasses.

  “Do you know what you’re seeing tonight, Jasper?” said Dr. Suan.

  “Meteors, I guess.”

  “Rubbish from a comet. Dust and grit we see only when it burns up in our atmosphere. But this shower isn’t very reliable. You might not see much. You should have been here a few weeks ago.”

  He was still fussing with his camera, whose lens now pointed straight up from the tripod. Marsha sat down on the sleeping bag. I joined her, and we waited for Dr. Suan to finish.

  “Don’t mind me,” he said.

  At that, Marsha stretched out full length, and I beside her did the same. The cotton-stuffed flannel smelled faintly of charcoal and pine needles. The star-filled sky above seemed more deep and impressive than any I’d seen before, even at Chokecherry Bush, where Lily often tried to make me admire God’s heavenly home. But that display had seemed static, while the sky over Dr. Suan’s backyard was filling up with new stars and planets every second. Those specks of light had rained down their life-giving dust, which after a long evolution had become two beings on a sleeping bag, looking up.

  The yard light went out. “Shutter’s open now,” Dr. Suan said. “Have fun.” The screen door wheezed on its pneumatic arm, and we were alone, lying together in the dark. Marsha’s scent stole up to me from under the bug lotion, seeming to carry the warmth of her body with it, like a blanket spread between me and the cool air. I turned my head towards her, but she kept her eyes up, waiting for something to dart across the sky.

  “He forgot to say it was a bit cloudy last time,” she said, as if trying to make up for not inviting me to the better meteor shower.

  “Did you watch anyway?”

  “Of course.” Her elbow jerked against me. “There.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s gone now. They only last a second. There, again.”

  I saw nothing, and nothing the next time she jabbed me, though I was really looking by then, letting my eye rove over the whole sky, determined to catch something.

  “Don’t try to spot them,” she said. “They’re always somewhere else. Just keep your eyes open and they’ll appear.”

  A hair-thin streak flashed at the edge of my vision, and I called it out to her, more excited by the telling than the seeing. A few more happened in quick succession, so subtly that I was only sure they had happened because of the little grunts of pleasure coming from Marsha.

  “Isn’t this exciting?” she sighed.

  “Yes.”

  Marsha patted my open hand on the sleeping bag, and I closed my fingers on hers. She drew them out as carefully as if she were extracting a splinter, and curled her hair behind her ear. A few strands moved from under my cheek.

  More meteors streaked by, and then they trailed off. For a long time we lay there waiting for more, with the universe spread wide above us. My eyelids burned from so much staring and too little sleep, yet it had all finished so soon. I waited in dread for the moment when Marsha would sit up and declare the evening over and I would have to go home. But then a ghostly green light rippled and Xexed over the back fence.

  “Look, the aurora,” she said.

  The light slimmed down to a glowing vertical fold and flared out again, this time arching quickly across the sky. Marsha groaned and gripped my fingers on the sleeping bag. The green became lighter and spread into a hazy band, like a much smaller Milky Way.

  I knew a little about the Northern Lights, so with a sense of making a small payment against a lopsided debt, I propped myself on one elbow and explained to Marsha how they were caused by sunlight reflecting off the Arctic snows.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said, releasing my fingers. “It’s nothing to do with snow. It’s photons firing out of an excess flow of radiation.”

  “Sunlight is radiation.”

  “Yes, and this comes from the sun too, but it’s plasma, slopping over at the pole. Didn’t you read about the solar wind, and the Van Allen belts? You forget everything so easily.”

  I wanted to say I forgot nothing that really mattered, nothing about every moment I had spent with her. But instead I waited out the silence that had to pass for her bruising comment to fade. I was still turned half towards her on one elbow, teetering on my hip.

  “What are you doing?” she said. “You’re going to miss it all.”

  I leaned over awkwardly and kissed her in the lapping, slobbery style I had learned from Ginette. For a moment, her mouth lay under mine, soft and full and unresisting, and it seemed that she accepted me after all, that my errors and stupidities were all forgiven, and the whole world was happiness. Then she squirmed out from under me and sat bolt upright.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed.

  I sat up too, more slowly. My pulse thumped in my throat.

  “Why did you have to do that?” She no longer sounded merely shocked or angry, but sorrowful, which was worse. “Don’t you know you’re the only one I can have over like this?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, with a buzzing heaviness in my head, like the feeling that sometimes came when I awoke in a motel room I couldn’t recognize.

  “How could I be so dumb?” Marsha said.

  “You’re not dumb.” I should have said more, but no words came. She seemed to be waiting for some further explanation. Her hand moved to her face, which I could scarcely make out in the dark.

  “It’s just …” I said, and stalled again, blocked by the gathering heaviness in my chest. My eyes drifted up towards the colours bunching and rippling in the sky like ribbons slowly dancing around a knot. “I mean, what’s wrong if I like you a little?”

 

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