The Reconstructionist

She did it again.

Dad slouched, and when she stopped he said, ‘Christopher’s sixteen.’

She took a breath, but then Christopher opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat. Mom said, ‘You’re not driving that.’

Christopher closed the door and stared at her. After a second Dad said quietly, ‘Sure, you can go for a drive.’

Mom shook her head, but hopelessly. Then she moved, at a run, around the car to the passenger door and opened it, as if to get inside. But she turned to Ellis. ‘Go with him.’ She leaned to peer at Christopher. ‘Take him.’

While Ellis climbed in Christopher started the car and adjusted the rear-view mirror. Cigarette burns scarred the dash and from somewhere flowed a nauseating odour of turned milk. Mom closed the passenger door, and Christopher glanced at Ellis, in the thinnest possible acknowledgement, then put the car into reverse and backed into the street, and they went away into the big streets.

They bore west. ‘Where are we going?’ Ellis asked. Christopher already had his left arm in the open window and his right hand draped at the bottom of the steering wheel, as if he has been driving this car for years. He said nothing.

‘Do you like it?’ Ellis asked.

Christopher frowned.

Ellis put a hand out the window to cup the invisible torrents of air, and after some minutes he reclined his seat a little. He said, ‘Even with the windows open, it stinks.’

Christopher’s eyes never left the road. His hair licked around in the wind. They travelled over two-lane roads past open fields, past barns and silos, past houses with lawns polka-dotted by dandelions. For miles they moved among trees, then broke suddenly into expanses of empty furrowed fields wafting the odour of manure. Christopher slowed entering the towns and accelerated out of them. Some of these towns had names that Ellis recognised although he was certain that he had never driven through them before. Then, eventually, they began to encounter towns with names that he had never even heard of. They only drove, not speaking, but Ellis felt happy. They spanned distance without any intention that Ellis could discern, and to drive without purpose struck him as original and exciting.

When they arrived home hours later the sky was a lavender field spread with small rough tatters of shining gold, as if some thing had been broken across the firmament and set afire. Christopher took the keys from the ignition and went into the house without looking back. Ellis stood a minute looking the car over. It was big for a two-door, painted black with pits of rust on the doors and fenders and a broken nameplate on the right side that said airlane. Soon everyone called it the airlane. Ellis never again rode in it.

* * *

During the course of their affair Ellis had agonised over it, had strained his memory, had lain sleepless, but he could not recall when he had first met her. Instead it seemed as if she had appeared among Christopher’s vague and various friends from nowhere, had come into Ellis’s life without entering and instead, like a ghost, had been revealed by slow degrees, in an accumulation of signs. Perhaps, inasmuch as he had initially seen her at all, he had only seen her through the distortions of his own relationship with Christopher.

He did recall one late evening when he had drifted downstairs to the living room where the television emitted the only light, a flickering greenish ambiance, and in this gloom he slowly discerned that Christopher was sitting on the sofa, that beside him an additional pair of eyes glinted, and that those eyes were female.

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘Hi,’ Ellis said. She gazed at him for a second before turning again to the television. She sat a small distance from Christopher, one hand interlinked with his. Ellis recognised her but didn’t know her anymore than he knew any of Christopher’s friends. Christopher had obtained a job that summer mowing lawns at the golf course just outside of town, so his arms were tanned brown and covered with fine shining brass hairs, and he exuded odours of cut grass and gasoline. Turning his attention just far enough to include Ellis, he puffed his lips – perhaps in a sort of snicker, perhaps as if to blow him away. For a minute no one said anything. But Ellis was excruciatingly aware that he was wearing his pyjamas. He made himself stand for a few seconds longer, as if casually, just checking out the TV show, then returned to his bedroom. His pyjamas were three years old, or more, and he had never really spent much thought on them, but he noticed now their deficiencies – too short for his arms and legs, and printed with cartoon cowboys wrangling cartoon giraffes. He didn’t know why these facts had not struck him before. Giraffes!

His mother mentioned that Christopher’s girlfriend’s name was Heather Gibson. And even before he knew her name, Ellis knew – it seemed the kind of knowledge that simply hung in the air of a high school – that she was a favourite of the school’s art teacher. Ellis also had the impression that she was a little aloof, but nearly every upperclassman seemed that way to him.

Everyone also knew that Heather’s father was a cop. One evening he arrived at the house in his squad car and came inside to introduce himself, crushing fingers with his handshake. No, he did not want to sit. Yes, he would accept a glass of water. He drank, and under his heavy moustache his mouth clamped and winced as if he had a tack in his shoe. Grunted and waited until all of Ellis’s parents’ attempts at conversation had suffered and died, and then he turned and sauntered out again.

Heather hung out with Christopher on the sofa, or in his room, or rode with him in the airlane. To talk with her in Christopher’s presence seemed impossible, and Ellis’s internal default position held that he didn’t want to anyway. He might have never known any more about her, except that every once in a while she walked to their house from school, and one evening as he was walking out of the subdivision he met her alone in the early darkness. His mother had sent him to buy double-A batteries at the gas station. He saw her from a long way off, and watched, and watched.

Approaching, she said hello.

‘Christopher isn’t home,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ she said. Then, ‘My dad’s working the night shift tonight.’

‘That sucks.’

‘I don’t want to go home.’

He nodded.

‘It’s your neighbourhood,’ she said. ‘Let’s not stand here.’

He stared at her until he realised what he was doing and grew embarrassed. He looked around – the park lay across the street. He said, ‘The park.’

They crossed the street and passed under a row of poplars. They threaded through trees and picnic tables to a small playground – swings, a merry-go-round, a set of monkey bars. He hesitated here, and Heather stopped beside him. A little further on the land sloped downhill to the creek, and Ellis could hear its burble. ‘That’s a good swing set,’ he said. Below the vertical parallel lines of the chains and the U’s of the seats connecting the chains lay a series of scalloped holes where the earth had been eroded by the passing of feet. Growing up, it had been his favourite because the swings hung from an unusually tall frame and he could fling himself to alarming heights.

Heather sat in one and began twisting side to side. A minute passed in silence.

‘Do you think that Christopher and I are a good match?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Ellis said.

She swayed forward and back. ‘Guys never tell you what they really think.’

He spent some seconds considering this. He asked, ‘Do girls?’

‘I try.’

‘Do you think that you and Christopher are a good match?’

She pulled her legs back, kicked forward. Soon Ellis had to step out of her way. She flew by, receded. At the furthest point of her motion, Ellis could hardly see her, then she appeared from nothing to rush up, passed upward, returned backward, slipped away, vanishing. ‘I like him,’ she said loudly, to be heard, and her voice changed pitch with her motion, and Ellis recalled a word: Doppler.

He edged forward and held himself as near to her path as he dared. Her hair collapsed around her face and hid