Lava Falls Page 7

  “True, that,” Justin said.

  “He’s a little, little boy. And you’re a blind old man. This isn’t Pinedale, Dad. This is a big city. No one’s looking out for you.”

  “Apparently Ashley is.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Just walking,” Justin piped up. “We just walked.”

  “Go sit down in the front room,” Leon said to his daughter. “We’re making dinner tonight. Everyone is safe. Food soon.”

  “You haven’t changed one iota,” she said as she left the kitchen. Meg clicked on the TV news. A few minutes later, Leon and Justin brought in a dinner of spaghetti and salad on big plates. Meg turned up the volume.

  When the anchor and reporters finished with the wars and economy, she hit the mute button and turned to her son. “You have to eat more than that.” The little boy got up and sat next to his grandpa, taking the old man’s hand.

  “Great,” Meg said. “This is just great.”

  “Turn it on!” Justin shrieked and grabbed the remote. He clicked up the volume in time to hear, “—just before dawn this morning. They treed the cougar here on Middlefield Road, where they attempted to tranquilize him with a dart. However, the cat was too fast for Fish and Wildlife. It crouched, poised for a leap from the tree, and an officer was forced to kill the cougar. No longer will this predator terrorize the residents in the homes adjacent to the wildlands.”

  Leon heard Justin catch his breath. The boy snuggled close, his knees bumping into Leon’s thigh, his fists against his ribs. The reporter went on to interview a neighbor who expressed his outrage at this encroachment of the wild.

  Meg burst into tears. Her plate and fork clanked as she dropped them on the coffee table. She ran to her room.

  Leon put an arm around the boy and pulled him closer. Gloria liked to explain any rush of feeling by saying that it was her hormones acting up. Leon wasn’t sure men had hormones, but if they did, his were acting up. He thought, I’ll protect this child. He thought, I’m sorry it took me sixty-six years to get here. He thought, I want to alleviate my daughter’s stress. He felt the bright awareness of love in his chest.

  That night the boy slipped into bed next to Leon. Bird bones under satiny skin. Leon heard a muffled chirp-like sob.

  “Yep,” Leon said. “I can smell that cat again tonight.”

  The little boy stilled. Tensed. Sat up and said, “But they shot him this morning!”

  “Nah. They just had to pretend they caught him to calm the public. Didn’t we see him ourselves, at midday, alive and thriving?”

  A long pause of discomfort. Justin didn’t want to correct his grandfather. “But Grandpa, they showed the dead cougar on TV.”

  The sky, the trail, the fireball. This bowed bed and the night air. The pressure on his chest. The goddamn welling behind his eyes.

  “On the other hand,” Justin said cautiously, somberly. “You can’t believe everything you see.”

  “True, that,” Leon said as everything eased once again. “Good man.”

  Skylark

  At three o’clock one morning in October of her senior year, Corey shoved open her bedroom window. The half-rotted wooden sash shuddered on its upward journey, making plenty of noise. She jumped out, landing in the crackly autumn leaves no one had raked, making even more noise. Any minute her mom would throw open the front door and drag her back inside. She paused at the front gate, looked back at the house, and then walked down the street. Five minutes later she arrived in front of the café where the Greyhound bus stopped two mornings a week. She was the only waiting passenger.

  Corey heard the rumble of the approaching bus long before it rolled into view. Its brakes screeched to a stop, the exhaust pipe belching stink, and the doors sucked open. The street with its darkened storefronts was deserted. Not a soul came after her.

  That wasn’t surprising, given how hard her mom and stepdad had been partying last night. They probably didn’t hit the sack until a couple of hours ago. But by the time she reached Little Rock, the school would call home, letting her mom know she hadn’t shown up. The police would be waiting in the bus station, on the lookout for a seventeen-year-old girl with dark blond hair, straight and thick as a horse’s mane, the ends of the bangs brushing her eyelashes, eczema reddening her hands, and a cellular level impatience. She twitched so much teachers thought she did meth. They were wrong. She didn’t even smoke cigarettes.

  Corey climbed the bus steps, gave the driver her ticket, and found a seat near the back. The behemoth vehicle coughed and farted out of town. She had no plan. She never dreamed she’d get this far. No one but herself now. She hugged her rucksack and concentrated her mind, the way she did when she was singing, the way that gave her intensity and swagger.

  No, she couldn’t even think of her song. Not now. She was still too close to home for that.

  She’d do the girlfriends instead. If she did them all, did them thoroughly, it’d take her almost all the way to Little Rock. Kaylie, Emma, Angeline, Maggie, Tilda, and Lili. Their features were like musical notes—eyelashes, freckles, gestures, voices—that she’d memorized. Prisoners, she’d once read, recited poems in their cells. Instead, she had her girlfriends, every scrap of conversation she’d overheard, or in some cases even had with the girl herself, and the way they walked, talked, smiled. What made them blush or cringe. It would be creepy, if someone could read her mind. Like she was a stalker. But it was all in her head. No one got hurt or even embarrassed by undue attention. It was just a game that kept her close to her own heart. Tilda first.

  Corey closed her eyes and brought up Tilda’s fierce eyebrows. Her extra red lips. Her long, tangled black hair. Corey ran her fingers through the hair and let them get caught, the texture, both soft and coarse. She fell asleep before even starting the next girl.

  In Little Rock, as she stepped off the bus, Corey felt her wrists tingle in anticipation of the handcuffs. Then she had to smile at her silliness; no one cuffed runaways. They’d just grasp her upper arm and guide her to the squad car. She waited just to the side of the bus door, looking around for the policewoman. She’d be both brusque and kind. “Come with me,” she’d say and maybe they’d stop for a meal on the way to the station.

  No one intercepted Corey in the Little Rock bus station, even though she had a full two-hour layover. She ate chips and drank a soda, which did little to mute her hunger, and then boarded her connecting ride. This bus was nearly full, but she found two seats to herself in the back.

  As the bus lumbered westward, she had the strange feeling that she was acting against her own will. A crazy vim in her bloodstream had launched her out of the bedroom window, and she was still answering to it, riding the surge. She’d meant to stay and graduate. She had good grades. Prospects, Mrs. Sweeney the school counselor had said. Maybe a chance at a scholarship. As recently as yesterday, her silent chant had been just hold out, hold out, hold out.

  But she’d bought the bus ticket, hadn’t she? She’d gotten the tattoo.

  She’d meant it. She still meant it.

  All through Arkansas and Oklahoma, Corey stared out the window, willed the ache in her stomach to morph into something useable, like hunger-strike strength. As they motored across the Texan panhandle she slumped low in her seat, as if the haters would see her escaping, drag her from the bus and down their dust-choked streets. She’d seen the stories on TV. New Mexico briefly brightened the view of her prospects, the strings of deep red chilis hanging from eaves and carports, anywhere they might dry in the clarifying sunshine. Then came the desert of Arizona, and Corey began to comprehend the gravity of what she’d done. She reached into the neck of her dress and touched her tattoo. Skylark, have you anything to say to me? She quickly withdrew her fingers. She couldn’t awaken the song now. The music would shatter. Arizona was barren and dry, a long highway of ache.

  Then, California: palm trees and farmland and big cities on the edge of the continent. Ha! Though she’d eaten too many pepperoni sticks an
d donuts, felt like a grime magnet, and her neck cricked audibly from sleeping in the bus seats, she’d done this ass-kicking thing: she came here.

  They’d have found her phone by now. She left it on top of her bed, as clear and decisive as any written note. If she’d kept her phone, they’d be able to track her. Call her. Convince her. She’d meant it all right: the bus ticket, the tattoo, the left phone.

  Corey disembarked in downtown Oakland, the early morning air fresh and sweet, with a hint of salt and rotted fruit, and thought maybe she was smelling the Pacific Ocean. She no longer expected police or social workers to nab her, but she waited on the street for a few minutes anyway. Nobody at all. Corey cleared her throat of the tears, shouldered her rucksack, and began walking toward the university campus, toward Mrs. Sweeney’s stories. Telegraph Avenue was jammed with cafés, art galleries, convenience stores, bars, beauty shops, churches, and bail bond joints, each stacked right against the next, and she wanted to stop and look at everything. She did like being free. She liked the wide openness of her prospects. Movement felt like safety, especially with so many men checking her out.

  Two hours later, Telegraph Avenue dead-ended at the university. Corey walked into Sproul Plaza and stopped at a fountain. Right here, on this very pavement, Mrs. Sweeney had been a part of the Free Speech Movement. That had happened a thousand years ago, but Corey liked the old woman’s stories, the idea that every voice mattered. She touched her tattoo. Skylark, have you seen a valley green with spring, where my heart can go a journeying?

  Three years ago, Corey won the statewide junior high school singing contest and a solo with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra in Little Rock. The lead-up to the event was the happiest time in her life. Sure, her mom and stepdad argued nonstop about whether she should be on American Idol or America’s Got Talent, how exactly they could cash in on her gift, but they agreed on her value. Her worth. Her beauty. They’d gone to Memphis to buy the blue satin gown and matching heels. They visited a doctor who prescribed a lotion to relieve the eczema on her cracked hands. On the day of the concert, her mom made her hot tea and buttered cinnamon toast in the morning, took her for a manicure and pedicure, and then to the beauty parlor to have her hair highlighted and curled into long ringlets. Hideous, in retrospect, but at the time Corey thought the springs of bright blond hair helped seal her future. Right before the concert, a fresh argument broke out between her mom and stepdad as they stood in front of Robinson Center Music Hall. The grand architecture, the six stone pillars, terrified the adults. Her mother gripped Corey’s shoulders too hard and brought her face too close, told her to sing as if she were in the shower or the backyard, that was all, just sing. But Corey wasn’t afraid. Not in the least. She felt bolstered by the muscular building, its stone gray beauty, and when she stepped out on stage, by the hot bright lights, the symphony seated behind her and the audience seated before her, everyone waiting for her to sing.

  Oh, Skylark, my heart is riding on your wings.

  “You look like you’re fresh off the bus.” The tall skinny boy who spoke to Corey sat four feet away on the rim of the fountain, shirtless. His clavicle spanned his shoulders, straining the skin, like some prehistoric musical instrument. A short upper lip kept his mouth open, even when he wasn’t speaking, and the gap between his two front teeth made him look sweet. His Afro had a diameter of about a foot, radiating out around his head like a black halo. At his feet sat a grubby backpack. “What’s your name?”

  “Corinne.” They’d put her full name on the program at Robinson Center Music Hall.

  “Where you from?”

  “Arkansas.”

  He laughed, like the whole state was a joke. “You a long way from home.”

  “This is home.” Corey tapped the left side of her chest, her skylark. Oh, won’t you lead me there?

  “You seem pretty green. My advice is you find Michelle.”

  “I have plans.” Who was Michelle?

  “Sure. I can tell.” He laughed again. “I like your getup.”

  She’d taken scissors to the blue satin dress, cut it short, let out the back seam and sewn in a panel of blue fabric she bought in Dottie’s Sewing Corner. The frayed, uneven bottom of the dress, which used to hang to her ankles, now barely covered her upper thighs. The combat boots were supposed to be ironic with the dress, as was the green and black lumberjack jacket. The navy beanie held her bangs in place.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He smiled, that tooth gap so innocent. She had to trust someone.

  After an hour of random conversation, Corey walked with Leonard to his camp. He had food, he said, and she was starving. Anyway, she couldn’t sleep on the street.

  On the ridge above the city of Berkeley, they took a trail into a forest of eucalyptus and redwood trees. Leonard said there were mountain lions and coyotes. She said she wasn’t afraid of wild animals. “Or anything at all, for that matter,” she added. The trail was dark and she had no weapon. She tried not to think of Mrs. Sweeney and her prospects, nor did she touch her tattoo. These woods would haunt the song right out of her.

  Leonard stepped off the trail and she followed him for another twenty yards, heading straight into the chaos of wilderness. Corey had expected a clearing, a picnic table, a fire ring, but he stopped at a place that looked more like a nest, just a bowl of thick forest duff surrounded by soaring tree trunks.

  “Home,” he said. “For tonight, anyway.” He opened his backpack and pulled out a jar of peanut butter and half a loaf of bread. “Are you hungry?” She lunged for the food, and he laughed as he dug a folding knife out of his pocket and tossed it to her. Corey made sandwiches while he put up his tent. They climbed inside to eat.

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “My grandma lives in Oakland. She raised me.”

  Corey understood. Leonard was too beautiful with his long limbs and sweet smile, the gap and full lips. He’d had to leave. Corey couldn’t help wondering about the details: Who was the man, when and where and how many times? Did his grandma know?

  With her stepdad, it was all eyes for the year after her Little Rock debut, and she’d misunderstood the looks. The lust, she’d thought, was all about her voice. His belief that it would bring him money.

  “If I were a girl,” Leonard said, his mouth full of peanut butter and bread, “I’d go stay with Michelle.”

  His tone, the way he said her name, made Michelle sound like a compromise.

  “She killed her husband,” he added.

  That sentence, those four words, thudded in Corey’s eardrums. She tucked it away to think about later.

  “Some say she’s a sergeant at lesbian boot camp.”

  Corey kept her poker face.

  “But a nicer way to put it, she’s a girl scout den mother.”

  “If she’s so great, why aren’t you staying with her?”

  “I don’t like rules and she’s got a lot. Anyway, the first one is no cisgender males.” Leonard reached out a hand, his fingers curled, and brushed Corey’s cheek with his knuckles. She didn’t know what cisgender male meant, but apparently Leonard was one. Best to just get this part over with. Corey shucked off her lumberjack jacket, crossed her arms, grabbed the hem of her blue satin dress, and lifted it over her head. Her bra was the same royal blue as the dress. Both of her skylark’s feet and most of the right wing were tucked inside the bra, but its left wing and head flew above the lace trim.

  Leonard touched the skylark, so gently it tickled, and then he kissed the bird. Those plum lips on the small swell of her breast.

  She swallowed back her voice, the way it rose in her throat: not now, not now.

  “This means something,” Leonard said. He used the light on his phone to look at her tattoo more carefully. He was the third person, counting the artist who’d made the bird but not herself, to see her skylark. “Taking flight,” he said. “I like the streaky browns. It’s beautiful.”

  She couldn’t quite bear the way his touch
ing the skylark made her need to sing, not here and with this boy, not in these dark woods, so she held his ears and pulled his head to hers, kissed his mouth, scooted her hips under his. He reared up, quizzical, and she tried to sound playful, even experienced, when she said, “Oh, I’m on the pill.” But her voice hissed a bit and he looked doubtful. She batted his muscled arm and said, “Seriously! Jeez!” Leonard shook his head and found a condom in his backpack. She clutched the balled up blue satin dress in her left hand as he entered her. Tears welled and flowed down her cheeks; she turned her head so he wouldn’t see. The song she held back snarled into a sob. She didn’t know if she could control it, the pressure growing in her chest, right under the skylark, and pushing up her throat.

  Leonard rolled off of her and saw the tears, the scrunched face. “What. I thought. You okay?”

  She nodded. “Yeah.” Added, “Absolutely.”

  Leonard flipped onto his back and stared up at the taffeta.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not very good at that.”

  “You’re fine.”

  “I like girls.”

  He turned his head so fast that she braced herself to be hit.

  No one had stopped her from leaving the house in the middle of the night, taking the Greyhound out of town, rolling across two-thirds of the country, disembarking in Oakland, walking to Berkeley. She wasn’t a missing person. She was lying in the dark woods with a boy she’d met a few hours ago, no one within earshot, even if she screamed.

  “You didn’t say. I thought—”

  She bit her bottom lip hard to cut off the tears, to hold in the sobs, and tasted blood as the skin broke between her teeth. She tried to populate her mind, the tent, with Tilda, Lili, Angeline, an army of girlfriends, none of whom she’d ever touched, all of whom she’d thought, at one time or another, that she loved.

  Leonard propped himself up on an elbow, his head in his hand, and used his other hand to brush the bangs out of her face. Then he combed his fingers through her hair, his fingertips running lightly along her scalp. She bawled then, cried hard for a long time, and thought, when she finally quieted, that she could go straight for Leonard, give up girls, girls she’d never even had yet. Maybe that’s what she’d do. The thought caused her tears to morph into laughter. That would be more ironic than combat boots with a blue satin dress: run away to California to go straight.