“I better drive,” Larry said. “Do you even have your license?”
“Listen,” she said, “you got to do me a favor.”
“Okay,” he said.
She drove without looking at him, sipping the beer. “I need to get someplace else tonight,” she said. “Other than the movie.”
“What you mean? Where?”
She glanced at him, smoke from her lips pulled out the window. “That bastard’ll only let me out of the house with you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. He thinks I’m safe with you.”
“You are,” Larry said.
“I know. That’s why I need to go to Fulsom. I got to go see him.”
“Who?”
“My boyfriend.”
He moved his legs carefully, his balls still tender. “But-”
“Listen,” she said. “You have to help me. Nobody else will. That Cecil’s after me, and if I can’t go see my boyfriend, I’ll never get away from him.”
“But,” he said.
She slowed as they approached the highway and turned without looking or using her blinker. She was going the opposite way from the drive-in.
He didn’t know what to say. The nausea was subsiding but another thing was taking its place.
“Cindy,” he said. “Can’t we just have our date?”
“I’m gonna tell you something,” she said. “Something nobody else knows.”
“Okay.”
“Something you got to swear to God you won’t ever tell nobody. Okay?”
“Swear.”
“I swear.”
“To God.”
“To God.”
She threw her cigarette out the window.
“I’m gonna have a baby,” she said, drinking more beer.
He didn’t know what to say. “A what?”
“Baby. An itty-bitty baby. And if Cecil finds out, he’ll kill me.”
“Who’s the, you know, daddy?” he asked. “Your boyfriend?”
She looked at him. “I can’t say. If Cecil finds that out, he’ll kill him, too.”
“What you need me to do?”
“I’m going to meet him so we can talk. We got to make us a plan. You just ride around awhile, but don’t let nobody see you. Go on to the movie, but not till the second one starts. They stop taking admission then and you can drive on in and won’t nobody see I ain’t in the car with you. Park in the back. My boyfriend’ll drop me off at the road to my house. You can pick me up there at eleven and drive me home. That way Cecil won’t never know.”
He’d imagined their date dozens of times. Pulling into the drive-in, paying five dollars for the car, rolling over the grounds, past the other people in their cars and trucks, past the posts where the speakers hung. David had told him you drove to the back two rows where you had the most privacy and detached your speaker and hung it on your window and climbed over the seat with your girl and got under a blanket-his brother had one, hidden under the seat with the beer-and you began to make out. When the time was right, when the girl was hot, her legs opening, you put your rubber on and…
Now that was all flying away, passing him by at sixty miles an hour on the highway toward Fulsom. She threw her empty can out the window and said, “You got the other one?”
“Cindy,” he said, giving her the beer. “I don’t want to do this. Can’t we just go to the movie?”
“Didn’t you hear me? Shit-” The beer exploded when she opened it. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”
“Yeah.”
Wiping her hand on the car seat. “Fuck a movie. You the only person in the world who can help me, Larry. God damn it. Please?”
“CAN YOU FIND your way back?” she asked, out of the car, bent to see him through the passenger window.
She’d driven past Fulsom, the four-lane back to a two, then turned down an unmarked county road and then onto a dirt road. A blacksnake had been crossing the gravel and she veered to run over it. He didn’t even try to stop her. She’d parked by another dirt road, no houses in sight. The trees high and green and filled with birds.
“I said, ‘Can you find your way back?’ ”
“Yeah.” Not looking at her.
“Just be at the road to my house at eleven o’clock, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Will you come?”
He nodded.
“Swear?”
“Yeah.”
“Swear to God, Larry.”
The steering wheel was still warm from her hands and the car stank of cigarette smoke and the seat was wet with beer. He’d have to leave the windows down so his mother wouldn’t smell it.
“I swear to God,” he said.
He pulled the car up and she stepped out of the way as he backed into the dirt road and turned around. She waved at him but he didn’t wave back, just clenched the steering wheel and nudged the gas pedal, the Buick bumping over the road, passing the blacksnake where it lay, leaving her in the woods in the gathering dark, watching her in the mirror as he drove away, watching her turn and begin to run-
LATER HE WOULD do as she told him. Ride around alone. Take the Buick to the drive-in, park out of sight, and watch through tree limbs as the first feature ended, the movie family fleeing the house in Amityville and its devils, wait through the intermission, food advertisements, coming attractions, the radio playing songs he didn’t hear and describing weather he didn’t feel. He waited until the second feature began and then pulled with his lights off past the ticket booth, which, as she’d said, was empty. With the screen flickering over him, he eased the Buick past cars and trucks filled with men and women and boys and girls and past the metal poles with their speakers blaring and squawking, past popcorn boxes pushed by the wind, empty Coke cups rolling in his wake. He parked on the row second from the back, near the corner, shadowed from the moon by trees, lowered his window and unhooked his speaker and watched the people move on the screen.
The movie was half an hour in when a car backed out a row up and several slots down. In the light from the movie, he watched it become Ken’s father’s Ford Fairmont and realized they must have seen him drive in. Its parking lights on, the car rode to the end of the row and turned and began coming back toward him. As it neared the Buick, it slowed, then stopped and backed into the spot behind Larry. Its parking lights snapped off. From there, Ken and David, or Ken and his date, would be able to see that Larry was alone.
He reached beneath the seat for the blanket he’d brought. Quickly, he covered his open hand with it and held it up beside his shoulder as if it were a girl’s head, Cindy sitting very close. He watched his rearview mirror, unable to see the Ford’s interior. Maybe it wasn’t even them. But he knew it was. He sat, hoping they wouldn’t get out, even bent his arm as if she were leaning to whisper something in his ear. Maybe kiss him. When his biceps began to tire a few minutes later, he reached and pulled the armrest from the seat and rested his elbow there, barely aware of the movement on the screen.
In his mirror the Ford’s interior lit Ken and David’s faces as Ken opened the driver’s side door. He got out and stood. Maybe he was just going for popcorn. Still, Larry reached around, under the steering column, his wrist at a painful angle, and started the car. Ken was coming forward now, getting close, angling his head to see. Larry pulled the shifter down to drive and lurched away, steering with his left hand, straining to keep his right up, the blanket
