Road to Paradise Page 20

  “You bet, baby,” he said, and laughed. “But even if I wuzn’t, you’d still look pretty to me.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet,” I said, pushing him off my shoulder, but gently, because he looked like he might topple over any minute, and also because he was adorable, with his stubbly face, slick short hair, and gleaming eyes. “But riddle me this,” I asked, remembering what Candy had said the night before. “Are you broke?”

  “I’m a sophomore at Iowa State. All college students are broke. Aren’t you broke?”

  I wasn’t a student this summer and actually, I was a hundred bucks flush. I said nothing. Deciding I didn’t mind his drunkenness and brokenness, I went outside with him and we made out under the poplars for a while. It was late, yet still warm and humid, the crickets were out, like we were out, and he was insistent and drunk, but we were in such a public place, on a bench just off from the valet parking, the cars still coming and going. He smelled good, he was sweet. I didn’t know what to do with him. He asked if I had a room here. I said both my friends were there sleeping, and asked if he had a room. He said, no, he still lived at home, but he had his “carrrrrr.”

  “You’re going to drive in your condition?”

  “Who said I’m going to drive, baby?” he drawled, grinning widely.

  I had nothing better to do. So I went to his car. It was his parents’ car, I could tell, because it was cavernous, like a Caddy or a Pontiac. The backseat was as big as my bed upstairs. We fumbled and sweated up all the windows, breathed hot and heavy, and got partially disrobed, me almost entirely disrobed, but unfortunately Shakespeare was right about my friend. Though the will was certainly there.

  In the end, after fumbling and failing, he fell asleep on me. I sat with him for a while, too long a while, I think, and then shook him awake. He barely stirred, just enough to let me move away. I got dressed. “Bye, Todd,” I said, and he mumbled, “I’m not Todd, I’m Jason.”

  “I know,” I said. “Just checking if you’re paying attention. Careful going home.”

  But he was unconscious, slumped over the backseat. I left him there, and locked him in, in case someone decided to steal him. In the three hours we’d been together, he did not ask for my name.

  Upstairs, Candy and Gina were on the bed counting their money. “Good morning,” said Gina.

  “Shut up.”

  “That boy, I know he was drunk,” said Candy, not looking up from her stash, “but tell me, was he broke, too?”

  “Shut up.”

  Candy and Gina shook their heads and laughed. “It’s okay,” said Candy. “You’ll learn.”

  “Learn what?” I took off my shoes, dropped the contents of my purse on the bed.

  “That it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich boy as it is with a poor boy.”

  “Who said anything about love?” I said, pulling out my chips and cursing. In the midst of my little rendezvous I forgot to cash in.

  “I’m just saying,” said Candy. “There. Another 170 dollars. We’re flush, girls.”

  “I can’t believe the money you made,” said Gina. “I don’t know how you do it. I thought I did okay, and I made eighty.”

  “You did great. Eighty is great. What about you, Shel?”

  “I have eighteen five-dollar chips,” I said, letting them fall on the bed from my hands.

  Candy nodded. “Ninety bucks. Not bad.”

  “Ah, so you can count some things, Candycane?”

  She smiled at me. “Some things, yes. And don’t worry. You must be lucky in love.”

  “Not very lucky,” I said, thinking of my one failed love affair, the only one I ever had, the various Todds and Jasons and Tony Bergaminos notwithstanding. “But you must be unlucky.”

  “So unlucky,” agreed Candy. “But lucky in other ways.” She threw her money up into the air, and it floated down, landing on the bed with her.

  “We’re checking out tomorrow,” I said. “No matter what time it is, we’re going.”

  “Don’t be so hasty,” said Gina. “What’s the rush?”

  “Let me put it another way. I’m checking out tomorrow. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  They groaned and teased but ignoring them, I got out my maps and planned my course from the Quad Cities, down I-80, across the entire state of Iowa, to Omaha, Nebraska, right on the border. I calculated the distance to be about 300 miles. Even with getting out late, and stopping six times to pee and get a drink, we could do 300 miles in one day, couldn’t we? Then the next day we’d be in Wyoming, the next in Utah, the next in Nevada, and then California. Just a few days, and this would all be over.

  My reverie was ended by Candy pulling the map from the bed and throwing it on the floor. Grabbing my spiral notebook from me, she dodged and weaved around the room, squealing, “Let me read, let me read, come on, I want to know how far you went with that drunk boy.” She raised her voice to mimic me. “Dear Diary, I think I’m in loooove. His name is Sal, and he’s sooo cute, dear Diary, I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight, thinking of him as I do, oooooh.”

  “Candy, give it here!”

  Raising her arm away from me, she opened my notebook. She was quiet a moment as her eyes scanned the page. “What is this?”

  Gina was rolling on the bed, laughing. “This is her diary, Candy,” she said, barely able to get the words out. “Dear Diary, today, I want to do some planning. Here are my charts, schedules, flows, summaries, and miles for the next forty years of my life. I think I finally figured out a way to plan, monitor, and control—everything. I hope you’re pleased with me. Tomorrow we will be on our way. We will sleep exactly seven hours and forty-two minutes, and then after fifty-one minutes of getting ready and packing, we will go eat breakfast for thirty-seven minutes. After that we will take Road 10 five miles and Road 5 ten miles. Then we’ll switch for exactly thirty minutes.”

  Candy was holding her stomach. “Stop, Gina, stop. I can’t take any more.”

  Snatching my journal from her, I closed it up and put the pen away. “Are you two happy now? You’re enjoying yourselves?”

  “Shelby, why are you so funny?” asked Candy. “Aside from the subject matter of your so-called journal . . .”

  “It’s not a journal, it’s a planner,” I said, extremely defensively.

  “Oh. Right. Well, aside from the subject matter of your so-called planner, one thing in it struck me as funny.” She paused a moment for emphasis. “You know we can’t go on I-80. So what the heck are you wasting your ink on?”

  We weren’t despicable. What these two days of sleep and revelry had allowed us was an escape from the important things, an escape, a denial of decisions, a refusal to make choices, to decide to take a different road, to plan Candy, to discuss. I clung on to my earlier positions like a vine out of quicksand. All pointless and pointed disquisition ended at the blackjack table. Time stopped. And even now, when we knew we needed to decide one thing, one day, one morning, one turn in the right direction, we were too tired to talk. Barely undressing, we climbed into bed; Candy lay next to Gina for a while, then got up and crawled into bed with me. “I figure it’s only fair,” she said, giving me a little nudge in the ribs. “You don’t want Gina having me all to herself, do you?”

  I said nothing. The curtains were open. Gina was already in twilight, sleep-muttering. Candy and I stretched out with our arms above our heads and stared at the ceiling.

  “Forget the interstate, Shel,” Candy said. “No more interstate for us.”

  For us. “Okay.” I lay next to her thinking regretfully of the twenty minutes of hard planning I had just done. “Does luck sometimes run out?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Other people’s luck certainly does.”

  “Does yours?”

  “Sometimes. But you know, I don’t believe much in luck, except at the gambling tables, and I don’t have much to lose. I’m not afraid,” she said. “That’s the only difference. You’re afraid.”

  “Sometim
es you can be plenty brave and lose anyway.”

  “Sure. But I don’t care. That’s the beauty of it.”

  We lay.

  “You must care about some things,” I said.

  “Desperately,” said Candy, turning on her side to me. “The things I’m afraid to lose.”

  “That man . . . Erv . . . Candy, you didn’t really mean what you said about him, did you?” The night was too quiet to say the awful words out loud. That he wanted to kill her. She took something of mine that I need back. I lived in suburban Larchmont, not the Beirut war zone. I didn’t know about these things.

  “Tomorrow,” Candy said, by way of answer, “we should drive up to Dubuque.”

  “Why? More casinos?” I said nothing about her coming with us, as if, of all the things to decide, that was no longer even on the table. What happened to I’m going to let you off at the next interstate junction? Once interstate was removed from the equation, easing her out of my car was also removed from the equation.

  “Hah. No. But U.S. 20 runs through there.”

  “Is that north or south of here?”

  “North.”

  “Candy, why would I be going north? I have to head west!”

  “U.S. 20 runs through Dubuque.”

  “Um, is that somewhere we want to be?”

  “Oh, yes. U.S. 20 isn’t the interstate, but runs near clear across the country. I think it will bring us to Reno.”

  “Reno?” I lowered my voice. “Reno, Nevada? Are you crazy? Candy, what does Reno have to do with California? And do you expect me to take you to Reno?”

  “If you get me to Reno,” she said, “I’ll be fine from there. There’s a chick there, a friend of mine, who owes me a solid. She’ll help me.”

  “She owes you a solid? How would you know anybody in Reno?”

  “I know people all over.”

  “No kidding. But come on, why can’t we just stay on I-80?”

  She sighed. “Shel, up near Dubuque, maybe sixty miles from here, lives my old man. I’d really like to go visit him.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Please help me out. I haven’t seen him in years.”

  I still didn’t say anything. I wanted to ask and didn’t know how to: are we visiting or are we . . . dropping off? But what’s worse, I didn’t know which answer I wanted. I stared at her in the dark, her peculiar punky hair, her slowly blinking brown gaze, her bare shoulder sticking up from the sheet.

  “There’s something I need to leave with him,” she said.

  “Is it the something you took from Erv?” I whispered.

  She sucked in her breath. “What do you know about that?”

  “Nothing. Just what he told me.” I waited. “Well?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  Oh no. Score two for Erv. Was this worrying, his record of accuracy? Yes. Yes, it was. What if everything he had told me was true? What if this girl had run away and left her mother broken? What if he would not stop until he found her? The pit in my stomach got darker.

  “Does your dad have money?” I asked. “Maybe you can borrow some.”

  “Dad’s broker than me,” said Candy. “So no. Besides, we have a little money.” She smiled in the night. “A few hundred bucks.”

  “Well, all right,” I said. “We’ll go. He is your father.” I would’ve liked to visit my father. I would’ve come to Iowa to see him. I wondered if he had been like Emma, being her brother and all. Jed Sloane. Had he been stalwart? Had he been true? “What’s your dad’s name?”

  “Estevan,” Candy replied. “Estevan Rio.”

  “Huh. Not Cane?”

  “No, not Cane.”

  We lay quiet.

  “You think I’m going to find my mom, Candy?” I whispered. I don’t know why I was asking her these things, and worse, I didn’t know why I expected her to have any answers. Say hi to Shelby. Mendocino, California.

  “No, sweetie-girl,” she whispered back. “I don’t.”

  She took my hand in the dark, and her mouth moved silently, as if in prayer, and we lay there on our sides, our hands under our cheeks, until we fell asleep.

  3

  A Race Not to the Swift

  The next morning Candy was up before us. Washed and dressed, she sat quietly in the chair, waiting for us to stir. She wasn’t completely ready: her makeup wasn’t on. When we were ready to check out, I looked at her still motionless in the chair. “You gonna put your face on?”

  “Not today,” she replied. Her piercings were out, even the tongue ring; she had on no jewelry, no hair gel. I’d never seen her eyes so bare, without heavy liner, thick mascara. She looked like a different person. Her hair was clean, streaks of pink sad and down; her cheeks pale, her skin opalescent, blemished only by wearing too much makeup and never washing it off.

  When Gina found out we were going to visit Candy’s father, she laughed. “Nice face, Cand, but what are you going to do about the tattoos?”

  “Hide them.”

  And to me, in the hallway, Gina said, expectantly, “We’re dropping her off at her old man’s, I hope?”

  “Dunno.” I didn’t want to say more, which was: don’t think so. Or even: hope not.

  Candy was unusually subdued during breakfast, not chirpy at all. I wanted to believe that the events between St. Louis and Isle of Capri would take the chirp out of white-throated sparrows, but she had just spent two days on the gambling boat feistier than a single gal on ladies night.

  Yesterday she had asked to borrow a pair of my jeans and one of my T-shirts. She herself, I guess, had nothing to wear for a visit with her father. My jeans were too big on her, my T-shirt too long. She was a little shorter than me and thinner. I didn’t realize how much thinner until I saw her in my clothes. I began to reconsider my bagel with cream cheese and my second helping of eggs and bacon. And I’m a runner—was a runner. It’s not like, in the words of Woody Allen, I had fat dripping off my body like hot fudge off a sundae. Thinking about running made me feel bad, as if the different parts of my life that had been most important to me, had defined who I was for many years, were being washed away with the tide like seashells.

  This morning I tried to interpret her quiet face. I liked Candy’s eyes without makeup. They were real. She had something going on beyond the façade of her usually madly black-lined eyes. I’ll admit it disconcerted me to see her in my running shirt. “NY STATE CHAMPION, 1981, 2-MILE.” The waitress came to pour us a little more coffee and said to Candy, “You were the New York State Champion in the two-mile?”

  “Huh?” said Candy, who had obviously put on the T-shirt without so much as glancing at it. “Not my shirt.” She pointed to me. “Her shirt.”

  The waitress looked at me questioningly. I shrugged. “9:52.”

  “Is that fast? I don’t know.”

  “Good enough for a record,” said Candy, which I found amusing—her defending me when two seconds earlier she didn’t even know I had ever run, or won.

  Now it was the waitress’s turn to shrug. “Are you really the state champ?” asked Candy after the server ambled away.

  I nodded.

  “How come you’re so casual about it?”

  “You have to put the thing in perspective,” I said. “The running is the thing. That’s everything. The winning is . . . I can’t explain. Nice. But temporary. And ultimately, meaningless.”

  “Why do you say meaningless?” asked Gina. “You were the pride of our whole high school. I’ve never won anything in my life.”

  I wanted to say that Gina had won some things in her life, but didn’t. “Well, you don’t run,” I said. “But if you played the piano, it’d be the piano playing that was the important thing. Look,” I said when I saw Candy and Gina’s uncomprehending faces. “It’s like this. The year before, in 1980, the girl who won ran the two-mile in 9:42. In 1981 she had an appendectomy.”

  “And didn’t run?”

  “Oh, no, she ran. Just ran it in 9:58. And that’s with
fifteen stitches in her stomach. I got lucky, that’s all.”

  “Come on, Sloane,” said Gina. “You’re going to a very good college because of that championship.”

  “Well, that’s true,” I agreed, looking sheepishly into my cup.

  “That’s not so meaningless,” said Candy. “You go to college, get a degree, a good job, all because you ran that one race. That’s not temporary. Nine minutes and fifty-two seconds equals all future roads.”

  “Well, that could be true,” I admitted.

  “Is it a good college?”

  I demurred. “Pretty good.”

  “You could say, pretty good,” said Gina, poking at her cold bacon. “She’s going to Harvard.” She said it without looking at me, but then looked up with a tight smile. “It’s really great.” She had been accepted to State University of New York in Geneseo for teaching.

  “On a track scholarship,” I said apologetically, in four words demeaning myself, Harvard, track, scholarships, and prepositions.

  I don’t think Gina deemed it fair I got a full scholarship just because I moved my feet quickly from point A to point B. Now, if I had counted some numbers at sonic speed, or combined gold and nickel and made a new alloy, or perhaps created a paramecium out of nitrogen gas, or wrote a poem, that might be fair. But moving fast didn’t seem to fall into the same category of stellar achievement. I don’t know for sure that Gina felt this way. But I know I felt this way. Therefore, slightly ashamed of my own good luck because of someone’s ruptured appendix, I kept mostly quiet about my college choice. Though I will admit, I was going to find my mother so I could tell her these things about me, including what college I was going to, because I thought she might be proud. Thinking about my mother made me think about what Candy had said to me last night, and I started to feel bad, and pushed my coffee away.