Small Axe Books

It’s hard to know exactly why Christa snapped. It might have been that heat spell back in June, when you could roast eggs on the sidewalk and little dogs and homeless people slumped in doorways, gasping the way fish do as they die on the bottoms of steel canoes. It could have been the glint of summer sunlight in the pocket watch her father sent her in his place as a birthday present, a gaudy reminder of his broken promise to visit. It could have been her mother’s threat to send her back to that psych ward at Our Lady of Souls for the summer, this time indefinitely.

Yeah, any of those could have caused it. I remember hearing an answering machine message with her voice all spacey, yet queerly resolved, saying it was over. Exactly what was over was never clear, but the next day she was gone. No note, no forwarding address, just an empty bedroom and a sink full of black, crusty hair. Her Dead Kennedys poster was missing, a memento of their last Chicago gig where Awol and his cousin got assaulted by ten skinheads in an alley for wearing Chais, and an alligator purse stuffed beyond capacity with the contents of three drawers and a medicine cabinet. She left her clothes, records, pictures, even a quarter bag of pot which her mother flushed down the toilet before any of us could smoke it in her memory.

I was seventeen, a black-clad pretty boy into eye-liner years after the North Shore punks thought it passe. Of course, none of us were in fashion then, “alternative” or otherwise. Christa called us all posers, and we were proud of the term. It meant that no one liked us–not the preppy Reaganist jockophiles we went to school with, nor the overprivileged denizens of the industrial concerts we went to semi-religiously. We were Christians–followers of Christa, the spiky haired Siouxsie Sioux look-alike who burst into St. Anthony’s High School with a confident disdain for the wealth-machismo based social order that hadn’t changed since June Cleaver’s kids went there in the ’50s. She didn’t care if she sat by herself in the cafeteria, thinking rejection by assholes the highest of compliments. Soon her lone table crowded with similar rejects, some self-styled as she, others (like myself) rejects plain and simple. Friendship with her was a blessing in the colossal curse that was high school, an island of truth in a vast sea of shit. Acceptance by her friends meant something to do on weekends besides watching PBS documentaries or tagging along to the drunken vomit-and-date-rape parties thrown by the St. Anthony’s social elite.

But she was gone now.

“Tristan! Tristan! Pick up man! I know you’re there!”

Dingo screamed at the answering machine a few seconds more before I got there, calling me more names than I care to remember for sadistically listening to him scream. I picked up with my calmest “hello” to piss him off further.

“About fuckin’ time! You heard from Christa? I’ve been calling all fuckin’ day. Now her number’s disconnected!”

“She’s gone, man.”

“Whadya mean, gone?!”

“I mean, she’s gone man. I got a message from her yesterday saying `it’s over.’ So I stopped by and her Mumsy wouldn’t let me in.”

“The bitch!”

“Yeah. So I climbed in through her window.”

“Use the rope I gave ya?”

“Yeah. And the grapple, too.”

“Good deal. I knew I’d teach ya something. Did she leave a note or anything?”

“Not that I saw. I had to book pretty quick, though, coz her mom started walking up the stairs. She only took a few things–some clothes, some make-up, her jacket, that DK poster Awol gave her. She left lots of shit behind–even her hair.”

“She cut her hair off?”

“Well, she left a lot of it in the sink. Guess she wanted to look different. A spiky-haired sixteen year old’s pretty easy to spot out here.”

“Yeah? So’s a bald one.”

Dingo calmed a little.

“I knew she’d run away,” he said softly. “Eventually. I wish she woulda called me. . . Hey! Did she take her pot?!”

“No.”

“Did you get it?”

“I didn’t have time.”

“You suck!”

“Yeah, fuck you too.”

“I’m sorry, man. I don’t wanna be morbid, just I’d really like to get stoned right now. No, what I’d really like to do is ice that bitch of a mom she’s got!”

“I know what you mean.”

“Hey! You busy? Let’s go over to Awol’s place. He’ll probably have some weed and we can tell him about Christa. Maybe he’ll know where she is. . . “

My dad was terminally depressed. He was out of work the whole past year and spent most of his time sleeping. I found him stretched out, as usual, on his bed all dark with late afternoon. He lay there on his back naked with his arms stretched out like Jesus, snoring and breathing painfully, his mountainous stomach rising and falling in fitful tremors.

“Dad?” I called.

His voice was deliriously distant. It was as if some other voices were occupying him and mine was a confusing interruption.

“What?” he managed to say.

“Dad, can I borrow the car?”

I was reasonably assured of a yes. If the old man said no, I could always wait a few minutes and ask again. He was so drugged up on the Haldol and Elavil the VA had given him that he would completely forget that I asked him before as well as his refusal. If worse came to worse, I’d just take the car. He’d never notice.

This time, though, he said “sure” right away. I always felt better when he approved and I didn’t have to fool him. He was a good guy, really, too fucked up to hold anything against. He usually let me do what I wanted to do, and I respected him for that. He also hated the government, and I respected him for that, too. He kept track of every crooked politician and every CIA plot. He was sure our phone was tapped, and there were times I believed him. I especially believed him when I was high, which made me debate whether the world was really some 1984 nightmare or whether I had inherited my dad’s paranoid schizophrenia. It also made me wonder why I got high in the first place, but with my young face, pot was easier to come by than alcohol.

The car was a steel-grey escort, the kind of car that screamed of the ’80s, a decade in which we were all trapped even after the fact. My dad paid some shyster car dealer three thousand dollars more than it was worth, and shit started going wrong with it about a week and a half after the warranty expired. Despite this, the old man lauded his decision to buy the car, as it helped him re-establish credit after his bankruptcy. To me, it was just a car, a means to an end. And my end was the far south suburbs, to rich white man land.

Most of Christa’s circle lived in the rich white man suburbs, myself an exception. I was from the trashy white man suburb of Calumet City, though increasingly it was just trashy. This made me despise it a little less, but it still sucked. All suburbs suck. The benevolent powers that be wonder why we young people are into drugs and drinking so much, and yet they insist on closing everything by 9 pm. Maybe if there was something to do, we’d stay straight.

But they would never let us have things to do. That would be as illogical to them as making high school classes interesting. Or mall jobs well-paying. Christa once said that the whole system is designed to make people fail so we could be bored little minimum wage-slaves for the rest of our lives. The few who do “succeed” in life are so brainwashed by the time they get any power that they forget where they came from. Then they become the assholes who oppress the next generation.

Dingo waited outside his parents’ house, perched on the hood of the Brown Hornet. That’s what he called the ’83 Buick Skylark his older brother got third hand from his parents. The brother, Detox, was a beer-swilling metal-head who crashed the last car his parents got him a month after he got it. But he never challenged the old man, a vindictive 40-something with boots full of jungle-rot and a heart of the same. The old man liked Detox, even if he was a fuck-up, mainly because he wasn’t Dingo. Dingo had made enemies with the old man about the time he was born, or maybe a little afterwards. His mother told him stories of how the old man would hold the little one year old Dingo (they called him Dean then), softly calling him his “grey-eyed man of destiny.”

Dingo’s eyes were blue now, an icy Aryan blue that shot defiant arrows into anything they surveyed. His close-cropped hair was a shade too blonde to be natural, and stuck out unevenly. He wore a threadbare denim jacket, just thin enough for summer, its pockets bulging with a mysterious assortment of objects he considered useful. The most useful, his Swiss Army knife, was in his hand picking the nails of the other.

“Hey, doc,” he said as I pulled up.

“Hey.”

Dingo approached the car, made a turn to the back, then spun forward and opened my door. He wrapped his arm around my neck as I fell against him, his knife to my throat. I saw him upside down, an amused smile on his face.

“You finished yet?” I asked dryly.

“Ya gotta watch yourself, doc,” he smiled.

“Maybe. You know, it’s a long walk to Awol’s.”

He laughed and withdrew his knife. I pulled myself back into the car as he got in the other side.

“You know, Dingo, if you had any balls, you’d be pulling shit like that with your enemies instead of your friends.”

“I’m just tryin’ to teach ya something, doc.”

“Oh, yeah? What?”

“Watch your back.”

“You attacked me from the side.”

“Gotta watch that, too.”

“Hmmm. Well, thanks a bunch for the lesson. I feel very enlightened now.”

What Dingo wanted more than anything else was for me to get angry enough to be physically violent. This would never happen. My skinny 5’8″ body necessitated pacificism. To confront Dingo’s wiry 6’2″ brown-belted frame would be worse than pointless. The only way to maintain my dignity was to act as unimpressed as possible, something I developed into an artform.

Awol had his own apartment. No one really knew how he paid for it. The place was one of those pseudo-’70s pads you only find in the suburbs, the carpeted floors all orange and gold and Chinese red. His few bits of furniture hailed from the same period, the relics of some hippie-turned-yuppie’s garage sale. He had three lava lamps, and wore a mood ring (albeit on a chain around his neck). He even had a smoked mirror inlaid into one of his walls. His poster-print of Charles Manson made the ’60s quaintness fall apart, though, like bits of a shredded tie-dye.

He was playing the Velvet Underground, the album with the banana on it, I think. He ignored us as we walked in, seated at a little card table near his balcony in his black and red anarchy shirt, his orange mohawk hair falling loosely in dread-like strands. Across from him stood two guys I didn’t know. They smiled, watching him measure out little mushroom stalks into a plastic baggie. Nyota lounged on the wrap-around sofa, her natural dread-locks flowing down to her shoulders. She sipped a cup of tea.

“How are you guys?” she asked without expression. “Heard from Christa?”

“Yeah, yesterday,” I answered, my tone matching hers. “She’s gone now. Anybody know where she is?”

“Awol seems to. He’s a bit busy now, though.”

Awol pushed a few strands of hair back behind his triple-pierced ear. He adjusted his glasses.

“That should be it,” he said, weighing the baggie. “I picked an even number of caps so it’s easier to split.”

“Thanks, man,” said the shorter guy. He pocketed the bag and produced some green bills which he laid on the table. Awol glanced at them a second, then away again. He rose to see them to the door. Before they hit the stairs I was already in Awol’s fridge to steal a swallow or three from the bottle of Stolie he perennially kept there.

The door slammed shut. “Put that away,” Awol said with unusual clarity.

“Oh, man,” I begged. “Can I have just one pull?”

“Take it with you then.”

Awol grabbed his jacket and told everyone else to do the same. I grabbed my trenchcoat in one hand and the bottle of vodka in the other. Nyota threw on her oversized baja and shouldered her hemp-fiber purse.

The questions came in waves. “Have you heard from Christa?” “Do you know where she is?” “Why’d she take off?” “Is she coming back?”

But Awol said only that he had heard from her, and that we all had to go now, and so we followed dumbly to his van hoping he would explain as we went.

My sense of direction has never been very good. I’ve been known to get lost ten blocks from my own house. But after a few minutes in Awol’s van, I knew it wasn’t just my directional incompetence that made me feel lost. Awol was taking us far out of the way of our normal paths. He weaved in and out of the fast lanes of main thoroughfares, breezing past the endless stripmalls and glassy office buildings of suburbia, then onto obscure side roads lit only by intermittent starlight. We seemed more and more remote with each passing mile, and Awol remained annoyingly vague about our destination.

Half way through, I realized Nyota had been talking to me as I was zoning. She had the incessant, giddy babble of someone who had smoked far too much. I found myself unconsciously granting assent when a string of words stopped, and wondered suddenly what I’d been agreeing to for the past five minutes.

“. . . So you see what I mean, Tris, right? I mean, you could hardly expect me to say no.”

“Uh, right.”

“I mean, it’s not every day you get a chance to do that. Y’know?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever done that, Tris?”

I was caught. Either I had to make some half-ass attempt at an answer (no I haven’t, maybe), or I would have to ask her to explain the last five or ten minutes over again, which even if it would not have been rude would have been far too taxing on my vodka-soaked brain.

“Actually, Nyota, I’ve been kinda zoning. I’m worried about Christa.”

I heard myself say it, like my voice in a movie, without forethought. Nyota nodded solemnly.

“Me too.”

No one thought to ask Awol, whose eyes fixed on the patch of buckled road in his headlights. Actually, everyone thought to ask him, but we realized how useless it was. We would find out when we were meant to, when and if Awol arrived at his destination.

The great hulking mass of an abandoned factory came at last into view, its shadows more ominous for the feeble headlights. Awol slowed to a stop, parking behind a rusty dumpster near the factory gates.

“This it, doc?” Dingo spat.

“Yeah,” Awol said. “This is it.”

“Why all the secrecy, then? I’ve been here before.”

“Yeah, me too,” Nyota added.

I said nothing, though I dimly recognized the place.

“There’s no secrecy,” Awol scoffed, opening the door and beckoning us to follow. “I just didn’t feel like talking about it then.”

“How ’bout now?” Dingo pressed.

“Just follow me.”

We walked with Awol to the side gate and watched him lug his hefty form over the top with some difficulty. Nyota and I followed, our lighter bodies making the climb and jump easier. Dingo insisted on using a rope he fished from his backpack that latched to the top with a grapple hook. When he got there, he clipped the barbed wire with a pair of pliers. The three of us disappeared into the building before we could admire Dingo’s ingenuity, crossing the crumbling blacktop all overgrown with weeds and bathed in the light of a florescent bulb twenty feet above, one of those buzzing things that stay lit years after they should have burnt out.

The inside of the factory was a dark contrast, a cavernous place thick with the smell of dust and machine oil, lit only by the moonlight that managed to filter in through the filthy windows near the roof. Our eyes adjusted slowly, and even when we could see our hands in front of our faces, the piles of rusty barrels and mangled machinery assumed ominous shapes in the darkness. Shadows in the corners seemed to have form, almost breathing. Distant scurries along the pipes added to an uncanny feeling of being watched, most certainly by hundreds of pairs of tiny rodent eyes, and perhaps by something more. A crackle resonated from the far corner, and a flickering glow grew brighter as our eyes adjusted.

“There’s a fire,” I whispered.

Dingo slapped my arm to shut me up. Awol advanced toward the glow, shaking his arm free of Dingo’s grasp. We all followed, at a distance.

Rounding what was once part of an assembly line, we saw the source of the light. A small campfire burned in a circle of rusty metal, a severed section of an oil drum. A long pipe lay behind it, with rocks and cinderblock bricks running along the length. Wooden planks lay between them, forming a bunk above the filthy floor. An army blanket covered a form which rose and fell, breathing. Awol smiled.

“Christa?” he called.

The form stirred. He called again. The form stirred again and at length an unfamiliar face peered out from the covers. A woman in her thirties, though she looked older, her face the color of sun-dulled leather, stared at us through bloodshot green eyes. She held something small to her breast that coughed weakly. She spoke, flashing crooked teeth as yellow as her matted hair.

“Who are ya?” she asked harshly. “Whadya want?”

Awol’s smile faded.

“We’re looking for someone,” he said.

“Ain’t nobody here ‘cept me and Obi and the kid here. Go ‘way now, else she’ll wake up.”

She turned away and fell back to sleep.

“What now?” Nyota whispered.

“I don’t know,” Awol said slowly. “Christa said she’d be here.”

“When she tell ya that?” I asked.

“She left an answering machine message yesterday.”

“Well that was yesterday, doc,” Dingo said needlessly. “She’s obviously not here today.”

“But she said she would be.”

“Lookin’ for Christa?”

The voice came from behind, a deep male voice. We spun around to see a tall, fortyish man in Army fatigues. He smiled at us, amused at how startled we all were.

“Well?” he asked. “Ain’t that who you’re all looking for?”

“How do you know her name?” Awol asked suspiciously.

“You kids got a bad memory. Christa said you wouldn’t remember me. Got a tendency to edit your brain cells, I guess. Or maybe you just lost some. People like me don’t stick in your mind too long. People like me are statistics.”

He was familiar, something about his bony, sallow mahogany face, his dark gentle bulging eyes, the black triangle pin on his floppy hat. That pin . . .

“Fuck it,” he said without malice, and shrugged his shoulders. He walked to the plank bed and sat down beside sleeping woman. He pulled out a bunch of hotdogs wrapt in plastic from his jacket and offered us some. When we refused, he shrugged again and stuck one on the end of a car antenna, putting it into the fire to roast.

Awol glared at him. “Look! You still haven’t explained how you know Christa.”

“Fuck it, man! I know her, that’s all! If you can’t do me the common courtesy of remembering who I am, why should I tell you anything?!”

“Do you know where she is?” Nyota asked gently.

He softened a little. “Naw,” he said. “She left a few hours ago. ‘Fraid the cops’d get her. She said people might come lookin’ for her, though. She left a message on the wall over there.”

He went back to his hotdog. We walked over to the wall he had indicated. It was a mess of graffiti, mostly gang shit claiming this rat infested pile of rocks and metal the property of the Vicelords or the Kings or the Folks or refuting those claims. The fight had gone back and forth for years, the oldest symbols fading into the stone in an endless succession of crowns and pitchforks right-side up and then upside-down and then right-side-up again. There, scrawled in black over all of it, was the single word ANARRES.

It was typical Christa. One word with anarchy A’s and a backwards S. One word, no context, cryptically suspended in limbo.

“What the hell does that mean?!” Awol shouted, frustrated to the point of losing it. Everyone drew a blank.

Then I remembered.

“Anarres,” Christa said over lunch one day, “is a planet in the Tau Ceti system. Actually it’s a moon of a planet, Urras.”

Someone had made the mistake of asking Christa what she was reading. Once on a roll, Christa could talk for hours, especially if she got a chance to preach about something. The little paperback atop her ignored required reading bore the title The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. “Philosophy,” she said, “thinly disguised as science fiction.” It related a story about an anarchist society founded by exiles from Urras, a planet of many nations much like Earth.

“There was this revolution, right? All these anarchists who followed a woman called Odo. They got strong enough to threaten the governments, so the governments said to ‘em `You wanna build a new society? Fine. Go build it on the moon!’ So that’s what they did.”

Even though the moon Anarres was a desert and Urras was this lush, green planet, the Anarresti were happier because they shared everything, good and bad, and answered to no one and nothing besides their common beliefs. The Urrasti had to deal with poverty, war, and authority, the richest among them squandering their wealth while others starved.

“Kinda like this place,” she said, pointing at the tables around her. “This place is like Urras on a bad day. If we had our own place, away from all this shit, it wouldn’t matter if it were in a sewer. It would be ours together, without all this `consume or die’ bullshit these people are addicted to.”

“So how was their sex lives?” Dingo asked flatly, his eyes on his pizza, watching it lose half its mass as he sopped the grease off with a napkin.

“The Anarresti? They could do whatever they wanted. No laws. People tended to form partnerships, though.”

“Monogamous?”

“Sometimes.”

“That’s useless.” Dingo bit into his pizza and felt the rubbery cheese in his teeth more than he tasted it.

“Well maybe,” Christa said in stride. “They didn’t go into it as much as you’d probably like.”

“It sounds cool,” said a black-clad pretty boy who just started sitting at Christa’s table the week before.

Christa smiled at him, grateful for the support. “Yeah, I think so. It’s a cool book, too, because there’s trouble in paradise. Like, there’s no government on Anarres, but there’s traditions. People felt guilty about doing stuff for themselves, or having opinions that differed radically from those around them. `Egoizing’ they called it. They got so worried about egoizing that they doubted their right to question how things are. It’s easy on Urras to question things, when they’re so obviously stupid. It’s harder on Anarres. That’s kinda the `problem’ of the book.”

“Does it get resolved?” the pretty boy asked.

“Yeah,” she smiled coyly and said nothing more.

The pretty boy smiled back. “But you’re not gonna tell me or I–”

“–won’t read the book. Exactly.”

“An ideal society,” Dingo said with authority, “would be anarchist. But it would also have to have explored its feeling about sex. If ya wanna read a book, doc, ya oughtta check out Time Enough For Love.”

“Who’s that by?”

“Robert A. Heinlein. It’s philosophy thinly disguised as science fiction, too. That’s an expression Christa ripped off from me, by the way.”

“Oh bullshit, Dingo! Like I need to borrow your stupid lines!”

“Whatever. Anyway, Heinlein advocates open relationships and free love and living independent of society. He has proverbs like `Thou art god’ and `Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.’ He views jealousy as wrong and death as every one’s privilege.”

“Poor Tristan,” Nyota laughed. “We’re all converting him to our religions! As long as you’re reading books, I’ll give you some straight-edge stuff to listen to. That’ll be interesting background music for Heinlein.”

“Oh, don’t give him that!” Dingo chided, thinking of all the work he had done with Tristan in the past week since he had met him in detention. “Tristan’s asexual enough without some skinheads and Morrissey encouraging him.”

“Oh, leave him alone, Dingo. You’ve just been screwing people so long, you can’t remember how peaceful it was to be celibate.”

“Listen to you! You sound like a fuckin’ priest! Why don’tcha join a convent, Nyota? Then you could teach here.”

Everyone laughed at the thought of Nyota in one of those black veils and white habits the nuns at St. Anthony’s wore. Nyota recovered quickly.

“I wouldn’t be celibate for them!” she said in disgust. “But you have to admit they’ve got an advantage over us by clearing their minds. They’re not thinking about desires and relationships. They’re thinking about how better to control us. And you have to admit what a good job they’ve been doing.”

“Aw, they have sex,” Christa scoffed. “Half of ‘em with boyfriends on the outside, half of ‘em with each other.”

“I think an ideal society,” an uncannily quiet kid named Phil said, addressing an old subject, “wouldn’t have priests and nuns.”

“Yeah,” Sarah, a tall gaunt transfer senior, agreed. “They’d either convert to reality or we’d kill ‘em.”

“That’s friendly,” Tristan said.

Sarah glared at him. “No, it’s not. But neither are they.”

“Hey guys,” Phil said, his eyes rising from his books in revelation. “We should kill people.”

“Yeah!” Christa laughed. “We can start with Dan Parker and Terry Fields and Heather Delaney.”

“That’s a good list,” Nyota agreed.

“But by no means complete,” Dingo added.

“Okay,” Christa laughed. “We’ll kill the whole student council. Then the football team, then the cheerleading squad. It’ll be like Heathers. ‘Cept we won’t get caught.”

Everyone laughed except Phil. He had a look of profound earnestness on his face, and seemed a little offended that his suggestion had been taken so lightly.

“I’m serious, guys,” he said. “We could really kill people.”

A round of nods and a change of conversation. Phil continued to reverie, staring down at the Fear sticker on his folder with the double F logo and the words I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU FUCK YOU written around it. Sarah watched him stare, then snatched the folder away. He pulled back and a few seconds later they were embroiled in a vicious slapping match. Dingo preached again about Heinlein, to whomever would listen, talking about some proverb that said if people around you smear blue mud in their belly buttons, you should too. Nyota debated the ethics of such “conformity” and the two of them became locked in a more theoretical form of what Phil and Sarah were doing. Christa smiled from the head of the table at the chaos, then turned to Tristan.

“You’ll get used to us,” she said.

Tristan never did get used to Christa. Barely a week went by when she wasn’t wearing some new outfit, talking about some new band or book she was reading, or just coming up with some new theory about society and the universe. The new alone had appeal for her, viewing constancy as death. “Boredom,” she would say, “is a form of control. Every time work or school imposes a routine on you it’s trying to kill you inside. By the time you’re in your twenties, you’re hardly better than a zombie. You’ve already been condemned–and condemned yourself–to living death and corporate slavery. Scientists call the disorder `suburbia. . . .’”

Her words rang in Tristan’s ears months after she said them, pounding like his headache as he lay hungover on Awol’s sofa. The sun had risen too early, streaks of it criss-crossing his face like white hot prison bars, filtering through the Venetian blinds. He turned his face to the wall, but ten minutes of restless fidgeting and nausea convinced him how useless it was to attempt falling back to sleep.

Awol’s apartment hurt his eyes. The Chinese reds and golds and oranges were disgustingly vivid. The smoked mirror doubled the piercing sunlight. The angular, sticky furniture reminded him of some dentist’s office drowning in elevator music. He shot up to a sitting position and felt his entire upper body collapse into his stomach.

Nyota slept peacefully on the other wing of the sofa, her arm dangling off the edge. Phil slept on the floor under the Charles Manson poster, his head atop his crumpled leather jacket, a girl Tristan didn’t know in his arms, a guy he didn’t know in hers. Tristan didn’t remember coming in, but focusing on the night’s events, hazy scenes of car chases and graffiti and Awol’s bathroom, made him too sick to bother trying.

Awol slumped on the floor against a beat up lazy-boy, a television flickering before his half-moon eyes early morning cartoons. A pint of tequila lay half finished on a pile of papers and address books beside him, the telephone not far away, off the hook. Dingo perched at the edge of the sofa, slowly flipping through a comic book (he called them “graphic novels”).

“Whatcha readin’?” Tristan asked with an uncomfortable stretch.

“Vampire Lestat,” he said without looking away.

“What time is it?”

“Early. About six.”

“Been up long?”

“Haven’t slept. Dozed a little. Didn’t dream or nothin’.”

Tristan staggered to the bathroom, avoiding the dried pinkish puddle which just missed the toilet. He looked in the mirror and strained hard to recognize his face. A bottle of Advil sat on a shelf behind the mirror, and Tristan downed about five, cupping his hands to the faucet.

“When’s everybody waking up?” he called.

“Real soon if ya don’t shut up.”

He staggered back into the living room, keeping his voice low. “Why’s the phone off the hook?”

“Probably coz someone was using it, doc.”

Tristan sighed and sat down, rubbing his temples and cursing the empty fifth of vodka on the table.

“Y’know Dingo, nobody’s up in the whole world besides me and you.”

“It’s `you and me,’ not `me and you.’ They probably don’t wanna wake up. Then they’d hafta figure out what to do.”

“You think it really was Christa who wrote that word on the wall last night?”

“Who the hell else would? Only trick is finding out what she meant by it.”

“Well, that’s pretty obvious, I’d think. She meant leaving society behind. That must be what she meant when she said `it’s over’ on my machine.”

“Okay, Sherlock. If she left society, where did she go? The moon?”

“It can’t be that hard, man. She either went to some commune somewhere, or into the city. Maybe she went to her brother’s. . . Wait, wasn’t she into that Zendik farm ‘zine?”

“That’s not her scene, doc. Too many hippies. Old hippies, at that.”

“What about the city?”

“That’s more likely. But the city’s a big place.”

Nyota stirred. Dingo and Tristan hushed their rising volume and continued their conversation, meandering between where Christa might have gone and how she might have gotten there. They didn’t speculate as to why she left. They both knew the many answers to that.

Their strained whispers grew louder again, and Nyota’s eyes opened. She pushed herself into a sitting position and stared blankly for a moment. Then she smiled drowsily and stretched her arms wide, her underarm hair black and shaggy against her honey brown skin.

“Hey guys,” she yawned.

“Hey,” they said.

“How are you?”

Dingo answered a terse “okay;” Tristan complained of his hangover. Nyota preached to him about the evils of alcohol and for the thirty-seventh time since he met her exhorted him to ditch the stuff forever in favor of the sweet leaf. “Be clean,” she said all singsong. “Be green.”

A buzzer went off, a piercing high-pitched alarm which woke them up all over again. Phil and his friends stirred uncomfortably. Awol didn’t move.

“Awol!” Nyota called. “Awol!”

Awol’s half-moon lids flickered open. He sprang up and slammed the alarm off, then hovered there a moment, weighing the comfort of the lazyboy with his forgotten reason for setting the alarm. Resolved, he waddled to the bathroom, stepping over Phil and the others who gratefully sunk back into their comas.

Nyota rose and walked to the phone. She clicked it back to life and dialed her father’s voice mail. As she made up an appropriate lie as to her whereabouts, she flipped through the pile of papers and address books under Awol’s tequila. She came across a list in Awol’s scrawl of numbers and addresses marked CHRISTA–LEADS. Most were crossed out.

Awol emerged from the bathroom.

“Who puked on the floor?!” he demanded.

“Who didn’t puke on the floor?” Nyota laughed. “You guys had quite a party last night.”

“Yeah, well it’s over now.”

He took the phone and the list out of Nyota’s hands and began dialing the remainder of the numbers. Nyota shrugged and returned to the sofa, exchanging small talk with Tristan, both discussing their planless summer, their shitty mall jobs, and Christa. Dingo read his book.

The girl who was with Phil and the other guy woke up. She untangled herself from their arms and staggered to the bathroom. Her stirring woke Phil, who sat up and blinked for a minute or two, then fell back to the floor, fluffing his jacket-made-pillow. Awol asked the phone to hang on while he nudged Phil with his foot.

“Wake up, man,” he commanded. “We gotta get going. There’s coffee in the kitchen.”

The thought of caffeine persuaded Phil to sit again, much more effectively than Awol’s foot. Tristan and Nyota also perked up at the word “coffee,” feeling a little cheated that Awol had neglected to mention it sooner. In a minute and a half, everyone in the apartment saved Dingo was huddled around the coffee maker filled to capacity with coffee luke warm after sitting the night. They shoved mugs of it in the microwave, downing the piping hot results and burning their tongues.

“We’re gonna have to go,” Awol said, reiterating his cryptic urgency.

“Where to?” Tristan asked.

“I’ll explain as we go.”

“Look,” the girl who was with Phil said, “We’ll have to stop by my aunt’s house. I need to get clothes.”

The immediate destination thus decided, though the ultimate one still shrouded behind Awol’s inscrutable eyes, they grabbed their things and left the apartment, piling into Awol’s van parked in the tow zone outside his building.

Awol remembered when he first met Sarah, years before she transfered to St. Anthony’s. She leaned against the wall of his high school, in the courtyard near the lunchroom doors, one combat-booted foot in the dust, the other halfway up the bricks. Her knee pointed white and naked through a hole in her jeans (not the pre-ripped pre-faded kind so fashionably worn but the dark patchy blue of old hand me downs) clinging tightly to chicken-scrawny legs. She wore a leather jacket that looked like it had been stitched from the upholstery of an abandoned car from the 70s, with tears and holes and spraypainted symbols, red and green, cryptic messages and bandnames scrawled in white out. It hung loose and open in the December wind, despite her near bare torso scarred by many small cuts, many resembling characters or words. She drew a cigarette to her lips with two skull-ringed fingers, turning to the side to exhale, her bleach-blonde mohawk striking against the bricks.

Awol, a fellow freshman at the time, approached her and asked her why she looked like that. She took a deep drag on her cigarette and shot him a piercing look through grey, mascara-smeared eyes.

“All my life, people told me I was ugly,” she said. “So I decided to make myself ugly.”

That image hung in Awol’s mind and dominated it, superimposing itself on that of Phil and his girlfriend for the day in the rearview. He watched her kiss Phil, then turn to kiss the other guy, then back again, and he thought of Sarah in the psych ward of that awful hospital, a million miles away. Would she mind? he asked himself, then chastised himself for meddling in affairs not his business.

Phil’s friend lived in one of those ancient, onefloor houses dating back before the stripmall sprawl of suburbia existed, back when the whole area was farmland. The farms had long since been sold to contractors to make subdivisions of ticky tacky two-floor boxes, differing only in color and number. This house remained, a relic of rustic poverty, all white-washed brick and peeling black shingles, laying just off the main road in the foresty frontier between towns, unclaimed by either. Awol parked in the lawn.

“Is your aunt home, Keri?” Phil asked the girl.

“Jackie? Yeah, probably. She don’t leave much.”

They went around the side as there was no front door. Jackie, a fortyish woman with long greying black hair falling loose and split ended on bone thin shoulders, sat on the cement step by a screen door that swung open and closed in the breeze. A man in a Harley shirt and old jeans sat beside her. They had been up all night, by the look of them, their eyes glazed and heavy. They passed a beer between them and slowly added cigarette butts to a pile on the ground. Jackie looked up and smiled, offering a cigarette to Keri, who took it without a word and walked past, the others following.

The house was warm and still, a radio blaring classic rock somewhere distant, a black and white TV turned low to a weather report. The worn wood floors were a mess of old newspapers and cat-toys. The cats themselves were not far away, two litters of them easily, a few dogs here and there obsessed with bones and the heat.

“Where can we talk?” Awol asked in a hushed voice.

“Here’s fine,” Keri said collapsing on a sofa. “Jackie’s cool.”

“Yeah,” Phil agreed and went to the washroom. Tristan sat on the sofa beside Keri, who was already enmeshed in the other guy. Dingo sat on some pillows in the corner and played with one of the dogs, hissing cat-like as he pulled a bone out of its mouth. Nyota sat on the wicker chair and crossed her legs in a half-lotus.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I was gonna wait for Phil,” Awol said, “But I guess he’ll catch up.”

He eyed the porch warily, the thought of someone unknown adult listening making him nervous. He doubted he would get most of the room’s attention again, though, so he spoke on in a voice still hushed.

“Christa could only be in one of a few places. Either she went up to her brother’s place in the city, or she’s just hanging around up there, maybe around Belmont. She might also be at her Grandma’s place, down in Central Illinois.”

“What about Anarres?” Tristan cut in. “That’s what she said on the wall last night. If she meant a place away from everything, that’s not gonna be her grandma’s house.”

“Or the city,” Nyota said. “You think she might’ve gone to a commune or something?”

“That’s what Tris was saying before,” Dingo shook his head. “Christa’s not gonna go live on some farm with a bunch of old hippies.”

“Hey man,” Keri said, pulling away from the guy, “Lay off the hippies. Some of ‘em are cool.”

“Jackie’s cool. She’s the only one. Besides her, name one hippie who’s not some drugged out pacifist loser.”

“Look,” Awol said, “let’s have our counterculture arguments later, okay? It happens that Christa might’ve gone to a number of places like that. She talked about it a lot. I’ve narrowed it down to a possible five places, judging by distance and the ‘zines she read.”

He pulled out a map from his jacket and unfolded it. A red marker line meandered the highways of the Tri-state area, leading north, then south, then trailing off to the west.

“Looks like a road trip,” Nyota said.

“Yeah,” Awol said flatly. “Who’s with me?”

A silence fell on the room, the distant classic rock station louder somehow. Everyone missed Christa. Everyone wanted to know where she was. But trekking out for god-knew-how-long in Awol’s van to god-knew-where . . .

“Well I can’t do it,” the guy who hung on Keri said. “I mean, I like Christa and all, but it’s not like I know her all that well. Besides, my parents would freak if I just took off for weeks lookin’ for some girl who could be anywhere.”

“Yeah,” Keri agreed. “I couldn’t go either. Not for weeks and shit. Sorry man.”

Keri and the guy went back to kissing, and Awol felt suddenly sick looking at them. He turned away.

“Would it really be for weeks?” Nyota asked.

“Hard to say,” Awol said. “It could be only a couple of days. Of course, it could be a week or two. It could take all summer.”

Nyota looked down at the floor, catching two kittens wrestling over a piece of string. She pictured her father and mother, both lawyers and both already disapproving of her dread-locks and her hippie clothes and her white boyfriends and her “uncollegiate attitude.” She pictured their reaction to her trekking out in an unstable vehicle with a bunch of kids they quite rightly thought were on drugs. “They’d never let me back in,” she thought, seeing an ivory door slam shut in her face.

Tristan saw his dad, sprawled out in his bed in the afternoon, screaming and crying in his sleep at a hundred mob hit men and CIA agents in his nightmares. Then he saw Christa’s face, pictured it without the mane of hair that framed it, saw her hitching rides with monstrous men who saw twisted opportunities in her helplessness.

“Fuck yeah! I’ll go!”

Phil stood in the doorframe, having heard most of the conversation from the john. Awol looked at Phil relieved, but changed his expression when he saw Phil’s. He looked nervous, more than usual, and seemed like he regretted just yelling assent. He thought about Christa and he thought about leaving. Then he thought about Sarah in the hospital, who he was barred from seeing. What if she got out when he was gone? What about their plans to run away together and go out west?

Awol breathed hard, his face tense and his eyes a little glossy. “Fuck you all!” he felt like shouting. Instead, he spoke softly, in a tone more harsh than any screaming.

“I’ll go by myself if I have to. If I catch up with Christa, I’ll be sure to say you all had really good excuses for not coming along.”

He turned and walked out. Jackie and her friend still sat on the stoop, the pile of cigarette butts on the ground having grown a little since they went in.

“Nice jacket, man,” the guy called after Awol, eying his motorcycle leather draping one shoulder. “You ride?”

Awol stopped. “No. I drive.”

“Is that your van out there, honey?” Jackie asked, offering him a cigarette.

“Yeah.”

“It’s big! Must be great for road trips.”

Awol took the cigarette and smiled bitterly.

“I hope so.”

Tristan and Dingo fell in love with Christa the same day. It was in Religion class, the dreaded sophomore second semester morality sequence, five months of the same long, long lecture about the history of Catholicism’s quest for self-abuse. Tristan, a quiet nobody in K-Mart’s best attempt at the prevailing preppy fashions, spent most of that semester earnestly answering journal questions on topics ranging from pre-marital sex to abortion, all dissenting in the respectful cafeteria Catholic way from the Church’s official teachings. Dingo sat in back, trading blasphemies with Skippy the Satanist, who sat beside him and spent the classes drawing inspired caricatures of the pope, Jesus, and Sr. Mary Catherine.

Christa had early gotten on Sr. Mary Catherine’s list of lost souls. From the second week of the semester she kept Christa after class to “talk” and referred her often to the guidance office. Christa found such attention amusing; it allowed her to leave the class as much as three times a week, spending the hour making up stories about her life and watching the counselors gape and gawk at her. Along with the bi-monthly “mental reservation” days she gave herself to hang out in second lunch, these trips to the guidance office cut down her attendance to once or twice a week.

She chanced to be there one Tuesday, sitting in the front row, second desk from the door where she had been assigned. Sr. Mary Catherine spoke in earnest about whatever she was talking about, writing key words on the board to emphasize concepts. “Abortion,” the nun was saying, “has been condemned from the Church since its beginnings. Why, one of the oldest pronouncements about any moral matter was a treatise condemning abortion in 150 A.D. . . .” Christa was not paying attention. Few people were, other than to jot down the date mechanically for their list of things to memorize and then forget for the upcoming quiz. Instead, Christa’s attention fixed on a note filled with lurid reminiscences of the previous weekend, and she had long given up trying not to smile at it.

The nun realized her lecture was passing on deaf ears. Years spent in hopeless attempts to teach hormonal teenagers in sticky September classrooms the finer points of Aquinas had calloused her attentions, shrinking her periphery so that she missed the sleeping kid in the corner, the casual conversations across the aisle, and so long as the sleeper’s snoring and the whispers remained respectfully subdued, she was likely to carry on as if they weren’t there. But the sight of a student reading a note was something with which she had no tolerance; it broke through years of protective self-delusion and reopened the primordial wound, the one left by the searing discovery that the children weren’t listening to her, that they were in fact mocking her sincerest efforts toward their salvation. So much the worse when she saw a student actually enjoying reading the note, laughing at it, without even attempting to hide the treason; for then, the laughter was real, audible, not just some metaphor she had invented in desperation. To save the face that only she knew she had lost, the nun prepared her attack.

“Miss Leyden?” she asked in her best I’m-surprised-at-you voice, “Is that a note you’re reading?”

Christa raised her eyes from the paper, staring vacantly ahead.

“I think so, sister,” she said.

“Are you writing it, or reading it?”

“I believe I’m reading it sister.”

“Would you care to read it to the class?”

It was a classic line, one crossing the lips of all bad teachers at least once a quarter. You could tell a cool teacher, Christa thought, because they never had to stoop to outright humiliation to feel that they were in control. They had more confidence than that. Really cool teachers wouldn’t care if you were reading a note, or daydreaming, or drawing a picture on your notebook, because they had confidence that the lag of attention would be temporary. Less cool teachers, who were still cool in their way, would take the note from the student and throw it away. Only true assholes were interested in voyeuristically peering into a person’s private life and encouraging others to do so, and they were almost always lousy at their jobs because they knew the only way they could get kids to pay attention to them was to mock one of their own.

Christa broke her vague stare at the black board and met the nun’s eye.

“No,” she said flatly. “But I’ll summarize it for ya. Actually, it’s about this class.”

“Oh really? A discussion of Church history perhaps? Or morality?” The nun’s smile was wide and condescending.

“Both actually. You know how you were saying that the first church statement against abortion was in 150 A.D.?”

“Yes. I was just saying that.”

“And that’s, like, supposed to prove something?”

“Yes. If you were paying attention, Miss Leyden, you’d realize that it’s in keeping with the righteousness of the Church’s present position on the subject. It shows how consistent and long standing the Church’s opposition to abortion is.”

“And this was at a time when the central authority of the church wasn’t established yet. Like, not every Christian believed the pope in Rome could talk to God.”

Sr. Mary Catherine seemed a bit taken aback. Her smile faded. “Well no,” she admitted. “The Petrine theory wasn’t universally accepted for several centuries. There were variations from community to community on matters of doctrine and dogma, but–”

“So what you’re quoting there is just the opinion of one particular community. Not the `church’ as a whole.”

“Yes, but that has since become the accepted doctrine of the Church as a whole.”

“But it could have gone other ways, right? I mean, Gnostic stuff could have been the `official’ doctrine of the church now, if history had gone a different course.”

“Well, I suppose it could have, but–”

“So, basically, this particular community forced their beliefs on the others. Just like the Gnostics who used to have orgies for masses got crushed by the chastity crowd. Just like there were really twelve Gospels, but some guy in Egypt decided only four would be `official’ because he didn’t wanna deal with a gospel saying God was a woman or that Jesus was gay!”

This caused a shuffle of seats in the classroom. The class, unused to Sr. Mary Catherine’s being challenged, woke out of their sentence dictation coma and began whispering things. A blonde crewcut football player looked at Sister Mary Catherine pleadingly.

“Jesus wasn’t gay,” he said emphatically. “Was he?”

“Of course not,” said the nun.

“One of the gospels says he was,” Christa maintained. “I saw it on Channel 11.”

“Those gospels weren’t included because they were heretical,” said Sr. Mary Catherine decisively.

“They are only heretical because some guy decided they were. Some guy in Egypt, in the fifth century. And some churches agreed with him, so they killed anyone who disagreed and burned their books. All the beliefs we have today come from whoever got to write the history books. From whoever won the battles. Why are they always right, sister? Unless you think it’s Catholic to think might makes right.”

All eyes were on Christa. She stared defiantly at the nun, having cornered her perfectly. Sr. Mary Catherine looked flustered, desperately thinking how to change the subject.

“Well? Does might make right, sister?” Christa repeated.

“No. No, of course not.”

“Then why should any of us have to believe anything that not everyone back then believed?”

“There’s evidence in the Old Testament,” the nun said, recovering, “of the immorality of abortion, too. In Leviticus–”

“Sister?”

It was a voice from the back. Dingo sat up in his chair, his demeanor suddenly thoughtful.

“Yes, Mr. Mulcrone?”

“Most of the Old Testament was written thousands of years ago, right?”

“Yes.”

“By nomads in the desert, right?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“People who would slaughter goats and stuff, right?” (Skippy chuckled at this).

“Yes, Mr. Mulcrone. What is your point?!”

“I’m just saying that the beliefs of a group of people who would slaughter a cow, cut it in half, and then walk between the bloody halves to seal a covenant can’t possibly be all that relevant to our lives today.”

The class burst out laughing. Sr. Mary Catherine was completely disoriented. She started to say something when the bell rang for third lunch. As the class cleared the room, the nun regained her composure enough to tell Christa and Dingo to stay after class. Tristan lingered to overhear, stacking his books slowly on top of each other. The nun lectured them about shouting “fire” in a crowded theater and issued them detentions, both for “disrupting class” and an extra one for Christa for dress code. Although her outfit violated no official rule, Sr. Mary Catherine deemed it an “unusual outfit,” and that was enough to make it stick.

Dingo asked for Christa’s phone number and called her later that week, but they spent the whole time talking about the hypocrisy of Catholicism and the rise of the Religious Right and never did get on the subject of a date. They met at the Warsaw Ghetto the next Friday and sat with mutual friends, and repeated the ritual for the next few Fridays until it was more or less decided that they, too, were friends.

“Friends are better than lovers,” Christa said casually one Friday night, letting it drop like a nonsequitur on the Formica table among the ashes and cigarette butts. Dingo said he didn’t think there had to be a difference, necessarily, and Christa agreed, though she maintained that sometimes the two were very separate entities. The others at the table continued their conversation without heed to the tangent, and the moment was lost.

Tristan would not speak a word to Christa till months later, the next year in fact, when he decided to wear all black because he only had enough money for two pairs of pants and three shirts and he wanted everything to match.

Dingo was the first to call Awol. He had sat in his room the entire day after leaving Jackie’s house, taking his radio apart and putting it back together again in interesting ways. His mother had come in three times an hour, on average, to tell him off for various neglected household chores and for being “introverted.” It was a word she learned from a Reader’s Digest list of signs-to-watch-out-for in your “teen.” He went to the washroom and finding no toilet paper reached for one of the periodicals in the little pink-and-skyblue rack that matched exactly the shower curtain. Three back issues of the Digest sat there, near the Newsweek and a host of Pro-family newsletters. “So much to choose from,” he thought aloud, and ripped a corner off Parent Power, whose front page with a silhouette of a Mom and Dad flexing arms and its black, red, and white trim made look a little like a Nazi flag.

Dingo emerged from the washroom to find his brother drinking a beer in the living room, his eyes gaping emptily at the TV. He passed him without a word and rounded the corner to the kitchen.

“When ya washing those dishes?”

The old man (Dingo never called him father) sat at his computer desk in the far room which had been a living room until he had commandeered the place, colonizing it with mountains of computer paper and schematic drawings that comprised his small business. The dishes lay in the sink, beside the unused dishwasher, the product of a weekend’s neglect. Dingo hadn’t been there at all that weekend, but he opened the dishwasher and proceeded to throw a few dishes in the racks anyway.

“Hand wash ‘em.”

Dingo stopped mid-throw, the fake china plate teetering at his fingertips.

“What’s wrong with the dishwasher?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then why do I have to hand wash ‘em?”

“Because you do.”

The old man’s eyes fixed on the monochrome screen, as they had for hours. His peripheral vision was notoriously acute, the kind that could pick out snipers in dense foliage. He watched Dingo glare at him, then turn to see his brother drinking a beer.

“Jack’s already done with his chores,” the old man said dryly.

“What was his chore? Not pissing on the rug?”

“Fuck you,” Detox slurred, flipping to the sports channel.

Dingo stared at the old man. The old man ignored him, typing something into a flow chart. Dingo dropped the fake china dish in the sink and turned the faucet on. He went to his room, found a duffel bag half full of supplies from the last time he used it, stuffed it with the half that wasn’t there, and climbed out the window.

The nearest payphone was a long trek, but Dingo made it in under ten minutes and called Awol.

Awol was already happy when Dingo called. He was pleasantly stoned, as he had been all day, and talking to a skinbird named Lara who had showed up on his doorstep a few hours after he left Jackie’s with “so I hear you’re goin’ trekkin’” on her lips.

“I’m always the last to know,” Lara said, laughing out her hit.

“I said I was sorry,” Awol said.

“Sure you are. It’s just like you to think none of Christa’s friends give a shit about her when you haven’t even called half of ‘em.”

“Look,” he smiled. “If you wanna organize this thing, then you’re welcome to make the calls.”

“That’s fine. I bet I could fill that van by tonight. Shit, man, we might hafta rent a bus!”

“Or steal one.”

“That won’t be too obvious. Say, who just called?”

“Dingo. He’s over at the Amoco on Western.”

“Is he comin’ with us?”

“I think so.”

“Cool. You pickin’ him up?”

“In a bit. I wanna come down a little first.”

It was Tristan, not Awol, who actually picked Dingo up, responding to his call from a gas station somewhere. He said he had called Awol and wanted to go there, but Awol was too fucked up to drive.

“So, you comin’ with after all?” he asked, almost screaming into the staticky receiver.

“Dunno yet,” Tristan returned, speaking more softly than he needed to. “Gotta talk to my dad.”

“Jeezus, doc! Just take off! That’s what I did.”

“We’ve got different situations, man.”

“No we don’t. We just handle the same one differently. I don’t tell the people I live with anything. You tell yours everything.”

“No, man. Your parents are assholes.”

“Agreed.”

“My dad’s not an asshole. He’s sick.”

“Maybe . . . Look, how long you gonna be?”

“An hour maybe. If you’re not there, I’ll assume you got another ride to Awol’s.”

“I’ll be here, doc.”

Tristan’s dad was up late for him–it was around seven–slumping in a broken swivel chair in the kitchen, his distant eyes resting on the TV screen. He was watching Gone With the Wind on video for the second time that day. He would sit for hours watching that flick, sometimes for nine hours straight, three or four times in a row. He never got sick of it. Tristan’s mother would tell him terrible stories of how he would come home drunk and listen to a 45 of “Those Were the Days” over and over and how she could never hear that song without thinking about the misery of their marriage.

Tristan’s dad was only watching the movie one more time tonight, though, as indicated by the plastic cup of his bedtime pills sitting on the table beside him. Most were tranquilizers, some anti-hallucinogens, and some stuff for his blood pressure and heart arrhythmia. A colorful collection of tablets and capsules, a collection which Tristan feared and avoided no matter how desperate he was for a buzz.

“Hey dad,” Tristan said.

“Hiya kid.”

“How’s your movie?”

“Oh, it’s great! Scarlet’s about to make her speech that was so sacrilegious back then. `As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again. If I gotta lie, cheat, steal’–you know how it goes. It’s right after she shoots that union soldier. Y’know, in the original, the blood was all in Technicolor. But then they tried to brush up the scene later–in the sixties, I think–and they fucked it all up. It’s never been the same.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah, son.”

“I gotta go outta town.”

Tristan’s dad looked perplexed. He was quiet for a while, then the movie drew his attention again. Scarlet stood silhouetted against a setting sun in the ruins of her plantation, having just gagged on a raw turnip [the sound was actually Olivia de Haviland, not Vivian Leigh, Tristan was told], and swore to God that she would never be hungry again if she had to commit any sin to ensure it.

The video ended, and part two was put in. Tristan’s statement had evidently been forgotten. He felt a sudden need to jet from the room, pack his bags and get out. The old man would hardly notice his absence, not for days probably. But he couldn’t do that.

He tried to think of who would take care of his dad if he left. His mother lived miles away, having left years before with Tristan’s sister and the dog and the good car. She would certainly have nothing to do with the old man, nor would the rest of her side of the family, who hated him. Tristan’s dad had no relatives of his own, saved for a senile mother in a nursing home, his father having walked out on them both when he was four. He had a few cousins, but they all lived in Florida, and none of them wanted much to do with him anymore. No matter how Tristan weighed it, his father was his responsibility.

But so was Christa.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, kid.”

“I’m gonna try to be back soon.”

“Back from where?”

“I told you. I’m goin’ outta town.”

“Where?”

“I dunno. Up around Michigan, I think.”

“Why?”

“We’re lookin’ for a friend.”

“Who?”

“Look, I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to tell people.”

“What? I’m just `people’ to you?”

“No, dad. It’s just not my secret to tell.”

“But–”

The old man trailed off, looking away, then down at the floor. His face gradually shifted from a confused grimace to one of shocked understanding.

“You’re leavin’ me,” he said slowly. “I can’t believe you’re leavin’ me . . .”

“I’m not gonna be gone long, dad. It could be as short as a week.”

“Could? It could be? How long else could it be?”

Tristan faltered, his eyes also on the floor.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It could take a few months.”

“A few months! What the hell you gotta be gone a few months for?!”

“I told you dad–it’s not my secret to tell!”

The old man’s voice had grown angry, but Tristan’s own sapped its confidence.

“I need ya, kid,” he said softly. “I don’t got nobody else.”

“That’s not true, dad. You’ve got your AA group, and your support group from the hospital, and you got friends and neighbors and shit. Suzi next door would help ya out around the house. And Geri’s just down the street.”

“You’re leavin’ me,” he repeated slowly. “I can’t believe you’re leavin’ me . . .”

Tristan looked away, at the pile of dishes he had done earlier, drying slowly in the heat.

“Fuck it,” he said under his breath, breaking his promise to Awol to keep silent, and began telling his dad in detail of his plans, swearing him easily to secrecy. He told him of the road trip, the need to find Christa before her mother and the cops did. He told him how much he missed her and wanted to be with her and how they all wanted to know she was safe and not alone. The old man listened patiently, coming by degrees to a strange calm.

“When I was young, I had a friend named Mary Jo,” he said, surprising Tristan with the change of subject. The old man laughed. “Yeah, we were what you might call kissin’ cousins. That’s what they would’ve called us back then. I met her when I was five–she was six. Her mom was a friend of my mother’s.

“Anyway, when I was twelve and she was thirteen, we ran away together. Yeah, just packed up one day and said fuck it, wrapping all our shit up in little bundles like the hobos in the movies, y’know, in little kerchiefs at the end of little sticks. Mine kept falling apart, and she kept laughing at me. Finally just carried the shit in my hands. She helped, I think. Her mom lived in Oak Forest, that’s out west, I think.”

“Yeah,” Tristan said. “I’ve driven out there before.”

“Yeah, it’s a suburb now. Back then, it was like farm country. The back yard went on for miles. And we went with it, through the fallow fields and into the forest, looking for a tree house Mary Jo said her grandpa built. We never found it. I guess she musta made it up.”

The old man looked away now, into a teary distance. Tristan wanted him to clarify, to explain the relevance of his story, and he began to despair the old man was just retreating into another of his schizophrenic reveries and would have to be told all over again about the road trip in a minute. But the old man continued.

“She died,” he said simply, “of cancer. Leukemia, I think. When she was twenty-three–I was twenty-two. I never did get around to visiting her in the hospital. I hadn’t talked to her in years and I thought, well, hell! what am I supposed to say? So instead I stayed away. I never said good-bye.”

He looked at Tristan very directly, causing him to look away. He seemed almost to smile.

“Well, you go then,” he said finally.

Tristan looked at him, finding an expression of cool resolve.

“It might only take a week or two,” Tristan reiterated.

“However long it is. I’ve supported all of ya before, you know. Your sister and your mother and that animal, too. I’ll get along.”

His voice held no grudge, nor did it reassure. A coldness had crept into it, a distance. Tristan nodded silently. He packed and promised to return the car by the next day, a promise he kept.

Nyota called Awol the next morning from Midway Airport, asking Awol to pick her up.

“I’m going to England,” she said over a payphone.

“Why should I pick you up if you’re going to England?” Awol asked, confused.

“Because I’m going to England via the Calumet Expressway. My parents think I’m going by plane, so that’s the story.”

Nyota had cousins in England, both nice guys in their early thirties who had been friends with Nyota since she was seven. They took the precocious child to her first concert, to see a band who would later be Duran Duran at a little club called the Rumrunner in 1979. Now they offered to cover for her, telling her parents that she was with them for the summer while she wandered around with a slowly growing caravan in search of Christa.

“It’s nice to choose your relatives,” she said when Awol picked her up, tossing two fully packed suitcases and a hemp-fiber purse in the back.

Phil left a message on Awol’s machine a few days later, but they were already miles away.