PART TWO The Grass 3 страница

When we sat down, Lacey started reading “Song of Myself,” and she agreed that none of it sounded like anything and certainly none of it sounded like Margo. We still had no idea what, if anything, Margo was trying to say. She gave the book back to me, and they started talking about prom again.

All afternoon, I kept feeling like it wasn’t doing any good to look at the highlighted quotes, but then I would get bored and reach into my backpack and put the book on my lap and go back to it. I had English at the end of the day, seventh period, and we were just starting to read Moby Dick, so Dr. Holden was talking quite a lot about fishing in the nineteenth century. I kept Moby Dick on the desk and Whitman in my lap, but even being in English class couldn’t help. For once, I went a few minutes without looking at the clock, so I was surprised by the bell ringing, and took longer than everyone else to get my backpack packed. As I slung it over one shoulder and started to leave, Dr. Holden smiled at me and said, “Walt Whitman, huh?”

I nodded sheepishly.

“Good stuff,” she said. “So good that I’m almost okay with you reading it in class. But not quite.” I mumbled sorry and then walked out to the senior parking lot.

While Ben and Radar banded, I sat in RHAPAW with the doors open, a slow husky breeze blowing through. I read from The Federalist Papers to prepare for a quiz I had the next day in government, but my mind kept returning to its continuous loop: Guthrie and Whitman and New York and Margo. Had she gone to New York to immerse herself in folk music? Was there some secret folk music-loving Margo I’d never known? Was she maybe staying in an apartment where one of them had once lived? And why did she want to tell me about it?

I saw Ben and Radar approaching in the sideview mirror, Radar swinging his sax case as he walked quickly toward RHAPAW. They hustled in through the already-open door, and Ben turned the key and RHAPAW sputtered, and then we hoped, and then she sputtered again, and then we hoped some more, and finally she gurgled to life. Ben raced out of the parking lot and turned off campus before saying to me, “CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS SHIT!” He could hardly contain his glee.

He started hitting the car’s horn, but of course the horn didn’t work, so every time he hit it, he just yelled, “BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! HONK IF YOU’RE GOING TO PROM WITH TRUE-BLUE HONEYBUNNY LACEY PEMBERTON! HONK, BABY, HONK!”

Ben could hardly shut up the whole way home. “You know what did it? Aside from desperation? I guess she and Becca Arrington are fighting because Becca’s, you know, a cheater, and I think she started to feel bad about the whole Bloody Ben thing. She didn’t say that, but she sort of acted it. So in the end, Bloody Ben is going to get me some puh-lay-hey.” I was happy for him and everything, but I wanted to focus on the game of getting to Margo.

“Do you guys have any ideas at all?”

It was quiet for a moment, and then Radar looked at me through the rearview mirror and said, “That doors thing is the only one marked different from the others, and it’s also the most random; I really think that’s the one with the clue. What is it again?”

“‘Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!’” I replied.

“Admittedly, Jefferson Park is not really the best place to unscrew the doors of closed-mindedness from their jambs,” Radar allowed. “Maybe that’s what she’s saying. Like the paper town thing she said about Orlando? Maybe she’s saying that’s why she left.”

Ben slowed for a stoplight and then turned around to look at Radar. “Bro,” he said, “I think you guys are giving Margo Honey-bunny way too much credit.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Unscrew the locks from the doors,” he said. “Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs.”

“Yeah,” I said. The light turned green and Ben hit the gas. RHAPAW shuddered like she might disintegrate but then began to move.

“It’s not poetry. It’s not metaphor. It’s instructions. We are supposed to go to Margo’s room and unscrew the lock from the door and unscrew the door itself from its jamb.”

Radar looked at me in the rearview mirror, and I looked back at him. “Sometimes,” Radar said to me, “he’s so retarded that he becomes kind of brilliant.”

After parking in my driveway, we walked across the strip of grass that separated Margo’s house from mine, just as we had Saturday. Ruthie answered the door and said her parents wouldn’t be home until six; Myrna Mountweazel ran excited circles around us; we went upstairs. Ruthie brought us a toolbox from the garage, and then we all stared at the door leading to Margo’s bedroom for a while. We were not handy people.

“What the hell are you supposed to do?” asked Ben.

“Don’t curse in front of Ruthie,” I said.

“Ruthie, do you mind if I say hell?”

“We don’t believe in hell,” she said, by way of answering.

Radar interrupted. “People,” he said. “People. The door.” Radar dug out a Phillips-head screwdriver from the mess of a toolbox and knelt down, unscrewing the locking doorknob. I grabbed a bigger screwdriver and tried to unscrew the hinges, but there didn’t seem to be any screws involved. I looked at the door some more. Eventually, Ruthie got bored and went downstairs to watch TV.

Radar got the doorknob loose, and we each, in turn, peered inside at the unpainted, unfinished wood around the knob. No message. No note. Nothing. Annoyed, I moved onto the hinges, wondering how to open them. I swung the door open and shut, trying to understand its mechanics. “That poem is so damned long,” I said. “You’d think old Walt could have taken a line or two to tell us how to unscrew the door itself from its jamb.”

Only when he responded did I realize Radar was sitting at Margo’s computer. “According to Omnictionary,” he said, “we’re looking at a butt hinge. And you just use the screwdriver as a lever to pop out the pin. Incidentally, some vandal has added that butt hinges function well because they are powered by farts. Oh, Omnictionary. Wilt thou ever be accurate?”

Once Omnictionary had told us what to do, doing it proved surprisingly easy. I got the pin off each of the three hinges and then Ben pulled the door away. I examined the hinges, and the unfinished wood of the doorway. Nothing.

“Nothing on the door,” Ben said. Ben and I placed the door back in place, and Radar pounded in the pins with the screwdriver’s handle.

Radar and I went over to Ben’s house, which was architecturally identical to mine, to play a game called Arctic Fury. We were playing this game-within-a-game where you shoot each other with paintballs on a glacier. You received extra points for shooting your opponents in the balls. It was very sophisticated. “Bro, she’s definitely in New York City,” Ben said. I saw the muzzle of his rifle around a corner, but before I could move, he shot me between the legs. “Shit,” I mumbled.

Radar said, “In the past, it seems like her clues have pointed to a place. She tells Jase; she leaves us clues involving two people who both lived in New York City most of their lives. It does make sense.”

Ben said, “Dude, that’s what she wants.” Just as I was creeping up on Ben, he paused the game. “She wants you to go to New York. What if she arranged to make that the only way to find her? To actually go?”

“What? It’s a city of like twelve million people.”

“She could have a mole here,” Radar said. “Who will tell her if you go.”

“Lacey!” Ben said. “It’s totally Lacey. Yes! You gotta get on a plane and go to New York City right now. And when Lacey finds out, Margo will pick you up at the airport. Yes. Bro, I am going to take you to your house, and you’re gonna pack, and then I’m driving your ass to the airport, and you’re gonna put a plane ticket on your emergencies-only credit card, and then when Margo finds out what a badass you are, the kind of badass Jase Worthington only dreams about being, all three of us will be taking hotties to prom.”

I didn’t doubt there was a flight to New York City leaving shortly. From Orlando, there’s a flight to everywhere leaving shortly. But I doubted everything else. “If you call Lacey.. ” I said.

“She’s not going to confess!” Ben said. “Think of all the misdirection they used — they probably only acted like they were fighting so you wouldn’t suspect she was the mole.”

Radar said, “I don’t know, that doesn’t really add up.” He kept talking, but I was only half listening. Staring at the paused screen, I thought it over. If Margo and Lacey were fake-fighting, did Lacey fake-break-up with her boyfriend? Had she faked her concern? Lacey had been fielding dozens of emails — none with real information — from the flyers her cousin had put in record stores in New York. She was no mole, and Ben’s plan was idiotic. Still, the mere idea of a plan appealed to me. But there were only two and a half weeks left of school, and I’d miss at least two days if I went to New York — not to mention my parents would kill me for putting a plane ticket on my credit card. The more I thought about it, the dumber it was. Still, if I could see her tomorrow.. But no. “I can’t miss school,” I finally said. I unpaused the game.

“I have a French quiz tomorrow.”

“You know,” Ben said, “your romanticism is a real inspiration.”

I played for a few more minutes and then walked across Jefferson Park back home.

My mom told me once about this crazy kid she worked with. He was a completely normal kid until he was nine, when his dad died. And even though obviously a lot of nine-year-olds have had a lot of dead fathers and most of the time the kids don’t go crazy, I guess this kid was an exception.

So what he did was he took a pencil and one of those steel compass things, and he started drawing circles onto a piece of paper. All the circles exactly two inches in diameter. And he would draw the circles until the entire piece of paper was completely black, and then he would get another piece of paper and draw more circles, and he did this every day, all day, and didn’t pay attention in school and drew circles all over all of his tests and shit, and my mom said that this kid’s problem was that he had created a routine to cope with his loss, only the routine became destructive. So anyway, then my mom made him cry about his dad or whatever and the kid stopped drawing circles and presumably lived happily ever after. But I think about the circles kid sometimes, because I can sort of understand him. I always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring. I doubted I could explain it to someone like Margo, but drawing circles through life struck me as a kind of reasonable insanity.

So I should have felt fine about not going to New York — it was a dumb idea, anyway. But as I went about my routine that night and the next day at school, it ate away at me, as if the routine itself was taking me farther from reuniting with her.

Tuesday evening, when she had been gone six days, I talked to my parents. It wasn’t a big decision or anything; I just did. I was sitting at the kitchen counter while Dad chopped vegetables and Mom browned some beef in a skillet. Dad was razzing me about how much time I’d spent reading such a short book, and I said, “Actually, it’s not for English; it seems like maybe Margo left it for me to find.” They got quiet, and then I told them about Woody Guthrie and the Whitman.

“She clearly likes to play these games of incomplete information,” my dad said.

“I don’t blame her for wanting attention,” my mom said, and then to me added, “but that doesn’t make her well-being your responsibility.”

Dad scraped the carrots and onions into the skillet. “Yeah, true. Not that either of us could diagnose her without seeing her, but I suspect she’ll be home soon.”

“We shouldn’t speculate,” my mom said to him quietly, as if I couldn’t hear or something. Dad was about to respond but I interrupted.

“What should I do?”

“Graduate,” my mom said. “And trust that Margo can take of herself, for which she has shown a great talent.”

“Agreed,” my dad said, but after dinner, when I went back to my room and played Resurrection on mute, I could hear them talking quietly back and forth. I could not hear the words, but I could hear the worry.

Later that night, Ben called my cell.

“Hey,” I said.

“Bro,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered.

“I’m about to go shoe shopping with Lacey.”

“ Shoe shopping?”

“Yeah. Everything’s thirty percent off from ten to midnight. She wants me to help her pick out her prom shoes. I mean, she had some, but I was over at her house yesterday and we agreed that they weren’t.. you know, you want the perfect shoes for prom. So she’s going to return them and then we’re going to Burdines and we’re going to like pi—”

“Ben,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Dude, I don’t want to talk about Lacey’s prom shoes. And I’ll tell you why: I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It’s called a penis.”

“I’m really nervous and I can’t stop thinking that I actually kinda really like her not just in the she’s-a-hot-prom-date way but in the she’s-actually-really-cool-and-I-like-hanging-out-with-her kinda way. And, like, maybe we’re going to go to prom and we’ll be, like, kissing in the middle of the dance floor and everyone will be like, holy shit and, you know, everything they ever thought about me will just go out the window—”

“Ben,” I said, “stop the dork babble and you’ll be fine.” He kept talking for a while, but I finally got off the phone with him.

I lay down and started to feel a little depressed about prom. I refused to feel any kind of sadness over the fact that I wasn’t going to prom, but I had — stupidly, embarrassingly — thought of finding Margo, and getting her to come home with me just in time for prom, like late on Saturday night, and we’d walk into the Hilton ballroom wearing jeans and ratty T-shirts, and we’d be just in time for the last dance, and we’d dance while everyone pointed at us and marveled at the return of Margo, and then we’d fox-trot the hell out of there and go get ice cream at Friendly’s. So yes, like Ben, I harbored ridiculous prom fantasies. But at least I didn’t say mine out loud.

Ben was such a self-absorbed idiot sometimes, and I had to remind myself why I still liked him. If nothing else, he sometimes got surprisingly bright ideas. The door thing was a good idea. It didn’t work, but it was a good idea. But obviously Margo had intended it to mean something else to me.

To me.

The clue was mine. The doors were mine!

On my way to the garage, I had to walk through the living room, where Mom and Dad were watching TV. “Want to watch?” my mom asked. “They’re about to crack the case.” It was one of those solve-the-murder crime shows.

“No, thanks,” I said, and breezed past them through the kitchen and into the garage. I found the widest flathead screwdriver and then stuck it in the waistband of my khaki shorts, cinching my belt tight. I grabbed a cookie out of the kitchen and then walked back through the living room, my gait only slightly awkward, and while they watched the televised mystery unfold, I removed the three pins from my bedroom door. When the last one came off, the door creaked and started to fall, so I swung it all the way open against the wall with one hand, and as I swung it, I saw a tiny piece of paper — about the size of my thumbnail — flutter down from the door’s top hinge. Typical Margo. Why hide something in her own room when she could hide it in mine? I wondered when she’d done it, how she’d gotten in. I couldn’t help but smile.

It was a sliver of the Orlando Sentinel, half straight edges and half ripped. I could tell it was the Sentinel because one ripped edge read “ do Sentinel May 6, 2.” The day she’d left. The message was clearly from her. I recognized her handwriting:

8328 bartlesville Avenue

I couldn’t put the door back on without beating the pins back into place with the screwdriver, which would have definitely alerted my parents, so I just propped the door on its hinges and kept it all the way open. I pocketed the pins and then went to my computer and looked up a map of 8328 Bartlesville Avenue. I’d never heard of the street.

It was 34.6 miles away, way the hell out Colonial Drive almost to the town of Christmas, Florida. When I zoomed in on the satellite image of the building, it looked like a black rectangle fronted by dull silver and then grass behind. A mobile home, maybe? It was hard to get a sense of scale, because it was surrounded by so much green.

I called Ben and told him. “So I was right!” he said. “I can’t wait to tell Lacey, because she totally thought it was a good idea, too!”

I ignored the Lacey comment. “I think I’m gonna go,” I said.

“Well, yeah, of course you’ve gotta go. I’m coming. Let’s go on Sunday morning. I’ll be tired from all-night prom partying, but whatever.”

“No, I mean I’m going tonight,” I said.

“Bro, it’s dark. You can’t go to a strange building with a mysterious address in the dark. Haven’t you ever seen a horror movie?”

“She could be there,” I said.

“Yeah, and a demon who can only be nourished by the pancreases of young boys could also be there,” he said. “Christ, at least wait till tomorrow, although I’ve got to order her corsage after band, and then I want to be home in case Lacey IM’s, because we’ve been IM’ing a lot—”

I cut him off. “No, tonight. I want to see her.” I could feel the circle closing. In an hour, if I hurried, I could be looking at her.

“Bro, I am not letting you go to some sketchy address in the middle of the night. I will Tase your ass if necessary.”

“Tomorrow morning,” I said, mostly to myself. “I’ll just go tomorrow morning.” I was tired of having perfect attendance anyway. Ben was quiet. I heard him blowing air between his front teeth.

“I do feel a little something coming on,” he said. “Fever. Cough. Aches. Pains.” I smiled. After I hung up, I called Radar.

“I’m on the other line with Ben,” he said. “Let me call you back.”

He called back a minute later. Before I could even say hello, Radar said, “Q, I’ve got this terrible migraine. There’s no way I can go to school tomorrow.” I laughed.

After I got off the phone, I stripped down to T-shirt and boxers, emptied my garbage can into a drawer, and put the can next to the bed. I set my alarm for the ungodly hour of six in the morning, and spent the next few hours trying in vain to fall asleep.

Mom came into my room the next morning and said, “You didn’t even close the door last night, sleepyhead,” and I opened my eyes and said, “I think I have a stomach bug.” And then I motioned toward the trash can, which contained puke.

“Quentin! Oh, goodness. When did this happen?”

“About six,” I said, which was true.

“Why didn’t you come get us?”

“Too tired,” I said, which was also true.

“You just woke up feeling ill?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, which was untrue. I woke up because my alarm went off at six, and then I snuck into the kitchen and ate a granola bar and some orange juice. Ten minutes later, I stuck two fingers down my throat. I didn’t want to do it the night before because I didn’t want it stinking the room up all night. The puking sucked, but it was over quickly.

Mom took the bucket, and I could hear her cleaning it out in the kitchen. She returned with a fresh bucket, her lips pouting with worry. “Well, I feel like I should take the day—” she started, but I cut her off.

“I’m honestly fine,” I said. “Just queasy. Something I ate.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ll call if it gets worse,” I said. She kissed my forehead. I could feel her sticky lipstick on my skin. I wasn’t really sick, but still, somehow she’d made me feel better.

“Do you want me to close the door?” she asked, one hand on it. The door clung to its hinges, but only barely.

“No no no,” I said, perhaps too nervously.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll call school on my way to work. You let me know if you need anything. Anything. Or if you want me to come home. And you can always call Dad. And I’ll check up on you this afternoon, okay?”

I nodded, and then pulled the covers back up to my chin. Even though the bucket had been cleaned, I could smell the puke underneath the detergent, and the smell of it reminded me of the act of puking, which for some reason made me want to puke again, but I just took slow, even mouth breaths until I heard the Chrysler backing down the driveway. It was 7:32. For once, I thought, I would be on time. Not to school, admittedly. But still.

I showered and brushed my teeth and put on dark jeans and a plain black T-shirt. I put Margo’s scrap of newspaper in my pocket. I hammered the pins back into their hinges, and then packed. I didn’t really know what to throw into my backpack, but I included the doorjamb-opening screwdriver, a printout of the satellite map, directions, a bottle of water, and in case she was there, the Whitman. I wanted to ask her about it.

Ben and Radar showed up at eight on the dot. I got in the backseat. They were shouting along to a song by the Mountain Goats.

Ben turned around and offered me his fist. I punched it softly, even though I hated that greeting. “Q!” he shouted over the music. “How good does this feel?”

And I knew exactly what Ben meant: he meant listening to the Mountain Goats with your friends in a car that runs on a Wednesday morning in May on the way to Margo and whatever Margotastic prize came with finding her. “It beats calculus,” I answered. The music was too loud for us to talk. Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music.

We drove all the way out Colonial Drive, past the movie theaters and the bookstores that I had been driving to and past my whole life. But this drive was different and better because it occurred during calculus, because it occurred with Ben and Radar, because it occurred on our way to where I believed I would find her. And finally, after twenty miles, Orlando gave way to the last remaining orange tree groves and undeveloped ranches — the endlessly flat land grown over thick with brush, the Spanish moss hanging off the branches of oak trees, still in the windless heat. This was the Florida where I used to spend mosquito-bitten, armadillo-chasing nights as a Boy Scout. The road was dominated now by pickup trucks, and every mile or so you could see a subdivision off the highway — little streets winding for no reason around houses that rose up out of nothing like a volcano of vinyl siding.

Farther out we passed a rotting wooden sign that said GROVE-POINT ACRES. A cracked blacktop road lasted only a couple hundred feet before dead-ending into an expanse of gray dirt, signaling that Grovepoint Acres was what my mom called a pseudovision — a subdivision abandoned before it could be completed. Pseudovisions had been pointed out to me a couple times before on drives with my parents, but I’d never seen one so desolate.

We were about five miles past Grovepoint Acres when Radar turned down the music and said, “Should be in about a mile.”

I took a long breath. The excitement of being somewhere other than school had started to wane. This didn’t seem like a place where Margo would hide, or even visit. It was a far cry from New York City. This was the Florida you fly over, wondering why people ever thought to inhabit this peninsula. I stared at the empty asphalt, the heat distorting my vision. Ahead, I saw a strip mall wavering in the bright distance.

“Is that it?” I asked, leaning forward and pointing.

“Must be,” Radar said.

Ben pushed the power button on the stereo, and we all got very quiet as Ben pulled into a parking lot long since reclaimed by the gray sandy dirt. There had once been a sign for these four storefronts. A rusted pole stood about eight feet high by the side of the road. But the sign was long gone, snapped off by a hurricane or an accumulation of decay. The stores themselves had fared little better: it was a single-story building with a flat roof, and bare cinder block was visible in places. Strips of cracked paint wrinkled away from the walls, like insects clinging to a nest. Water stains formed brown abstract paintings between the store windows. The windows were boarded up with warped sheets of particleboard. I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness: it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.

As soon as the car stopped, my nose and mouth were flooded with the rancid smell of death. I had to swallow back a rush of puke that rose up into the raw soreness in the back of my throat. Only now, after all this lost time, did I realize how terribly I had misunderstood both her game and the prize for winning it.

I get out of the car and Ben is standing next to me, and Radar next to him. And I know all at once that this isn’t funny, that this hasn’t been prove-to-me-you’re-good-enough-to-hang-out-with-me. I can hear Margo that night as we drove around Orlando. I can hear her saying to me, “I don’t want some kids to find me swarmed with flies on a Saturday morning in Jefferson Park.” Not wanting to be found by some kids in Jefferson Park isn’t the same thing as not wanting to die.

There is no evidence that anyone has been here in a long time except for the smell, that sickly sour stench designed to keep the living from the dead. I tell myself she can’t smell like that, but of course she can. We all can. I hold my forearm up to my nose so I can smell sweat and skin and anything but death.

“MARGO?” Radar calls. A mockingbird perched on the rusted gutter of the building spits out two syllables in response. “MARGO!” he shouts again. Nothing. He digs a parabola into the sand with his foot and sighs. “Shit.”

Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington’s house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

The smell leaves me seized by desperate panic — panic not like my lungs are out of air, but like the atmosphere itself is out of air. I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself, to train my body for the real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.

“Bro, we should leave,” Ben says. “We should call the cops or something.” We have not looked at each other yet. We are all still looking at this building, this long-abandoned building that cannot possibly hold anything but corpses.

“No,” Radar says. “No no no no no. We call if there’s something to call about. She left the address for Q. Not for the cops. We have to find a way in there.”

“In there?” Ben says dubiously.

I clap Ben on the back, and for the first time all day, the three of us are looking not forward but at one another. That makes it bearable. Something about seeing them makes me feel as if she is not dead until we find her. “Yeah, in there,” I say.

I don’t know who she is anymore, or who she was, but I need to find her.

We walk around the back of the building and find four locked steel doors and nothing but ranch land, patches of palmettos dotting an expanse of gold-green grass. The stench is worse here, and I feel afraid to keep walking. Ben and Radar are just behind me, to my right and left. We form a triangle together, walking slowly, our eyes scanning the area.

“It’s a raccoon!” Ben shouts. “Oh, thank God. It’s a raccoon. Jesus.” Radar and I walk away from the building to join him near a shallow drainage ditch. A huge, bloated raccoon with matted hair lies dead, no visible trauma, its fur falling off, one of its ribs exposed. Radar turns away and heaves, but nothing comes out. I lean down next to him and put my arm between his shoulder blades, and when he gets his breath back, he says, “I am so fucking glad to see that dead fucking raccoon.”

But even so, I cannot picture her here alive. It occurs to me that the Whitman could be a suicide note. I think about things she highlighted: “To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.” For a moment, I feel a flash of hope when I think about the last line of the poem: “I stop some where waiting for you.” But then I think that the I does not need to be a person. The I can also be a body.

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