TIME TO LEAVE

TIME TO LEAVE

“Time to leave, time to, time to. . . .”  He was sitting in the shade of three ancient cottonwoods, casting a worm lure into the pond.  There was a swift-running creek along the railroad tracks which pooled into ponds when the water ran high in the spring and early summer.  These ponds were now algae-clogged mosquito breeding grounds and home to catbirds and red-wing blackbirds and were visited now and then by herons and egrets.  But they also held fish—trout, bass, crappies, bluegills—which was his game.  All morning he had walked along the tracks, brushing through the tall heat-browned grass, and fished a pond for a while and then moved on to the next.  “Time to leave,” he thought again, wiping sweat off his forehead with his arm.  It was hot and humid, and the cottonwoods he was now sitting under made a shade thick with gnats. 

     It was a question of why.  Why stay?  Why not leave?  Why not?  Why live?  Why not die?  Why die?  Why?  His life over the course of this summer was no different from his life last year, nor from what he expected it to be, nor was it different from what it might have been, he thought.  That was the problem.  David Hillyer wondered why he lived, why his name was David Hillyer, whether his parents really wanted him to live, whether they cared, really, at all or whether it was all a pretense, something they found themselves having to do because it was expected of them.  If he left, would it make a difference to them?  Should he care?  Why?  But most of all he wanted to leave because he dreamed and because he was impatient to live. 

“Bye, bye, Miss American Pie,” he sang softly, as he rose for what he imagined was the last time from under these trees, walked back to the tracks and started the long trek home.  He kept suspended in his mind for a long time the image of himself on a city street.  He could see details of that street.  Cars and taxis and buses and people and buildings with glass fronts and flags swaying on rows of poles in front of them.  It was a composite image made from hundreds of movies and television programs.  Hardly aware of where he was, he turned by habit into the road that led to the long gravel driveway of his father’s farm.  He carried a string of bluegills and crappies, and when he reached the barn, he tossed them onto the gravel in front of its open doors, and within a minute, six cats were tearing at them.

“I’m home, mom,” he shouted, but she didn’t answer, so he went to his room.  He stood in the middle of it, thinking hard about the driveway beside the house.  He couldn’t remember seeing his mother’s car.  “She must be gone,” he thought, “into town, or taking Laura-Jean somewhere.”  He didn’t really care where she was.  She wasn’t home, that’s what he cared about.  He pivoted on his right heel, stepped through the door, paced into the living room, leaned over the couch with its yellow, brown, and green flower-print upholstery and surveyed the yard through the window.  He saw the satellite dish in front of the white fence, the two tall elms marking the entrance to the house’s drive, the tractor-tire flower pot, the wheelbarrow he left turned on its side when he finished hauling manure from the barn, and the rows of corn on the far east side that marked the beginning of his father’s fields.  No car.  She was gone.  Chance had brought the moment to him, and he was ready.

“Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry,” he continued singing.  He stood up, pivoted again, and went back to his room.  He looked around, testing the familiarity of everything in it on his sense of time, his feeling that time was pushing him.  “Time to leave,” he thought, feeling nothing as he glanced at his bed and dresser, the open closet, the chair, the large PC monitor and ergonomic keyboard on his desk, the D&D posters on the walls, the worn and rumpled carpet on the floor.  He felt like the whole roomful of stuff was old and alien to him, like it came from some kind of museum and was plopped down here to be used for a while before being gathered up and returned to glass cases in the museum. 

     He went into his parents’ bedroom and rummaged through their closet looking for a suitcase but came up empty.  “Where would they keep suitcases?” he thought aloud.  He ran to the basement and looked around but didn’t see any.  Then he went up into the attic, and there he found half a dozen dusty old suitcases of all sizes and types, no two of them matching.  One had a strap on it and a zipper across its top and opened wide like a grocery bag.  It was made of leather, and he thought it was cool, so he took it down.  But looking at it, he thought, “Why carry this thing, leather and all, slung on my shoulder.  Better if I took my backpack, just that.  It’s not that big, but who cares?  What am I going to take, anyway?  My bed?  My dresser?  Can’t take anything but a few things, little things.  Money in my pocket, socks and underwear in my backpack, a shirt or two, maybe something to eat and drink.  That’ll do.”  So he left the leather bag in the middle of his bedroom floor, stuffed his backpack with what he wanted, walked out the back door after grabbing some things on the counter, and was gone.

“All them good ol’ boys drinking whiskey and rye,” he sang out loud, “Singin’, this will be the day that I diiie.”  It took him twenty minutes to reach the county road that ran into town, and once there the first car that came along stopped to pick him up.  Its driver was Minney Mulroney.  She was a year older than him and would be a senior when school started in the fall.  When he got in the car, he said, “Miss American Pie, I’m goin’ to the levee, take me there.”

And she said, “What are you talking about, David?  There’s no levee around here.  What’s buzzing around your head?”

“Nothin’.  Just nothin’.  Goin’ to town?”

“Yea.  I’m going to Westernwear to buy me some new boots.  I need new boots for the rodeo.  The heel’s come off my old ones, the left boot.  Dad said I could just buy some new ones instead of getting the old ones fixed.”

Minney was a barrel racer and former rodeo queen.  She trained her own horse from when she was thirteen and was now a recognized competitor and winner of two trophies and two beltbuckles.  David had nothing to do with the rodeo and even disliked going as a spectator, which made him something of a misfit among his peers, especially the girls, who made no bones about admiring macho guys.  He didn’t play basketball or football either, which put him even further on the peripheries of life.  

“Where are you going, David?” Minney asked.

“Don’t know.  I’m leaving, that’s all I know.  I don’t want to live here anymore.”

She was silent for a moment, absorbing what he said. 

“Leaving?” she almost whined.  “You mean leaving town?  Leaving home?”

“That’s what ‘leaving’ means.”

“That’s stupid!  You’re running away?”  She looked at him and at the back pack beside him, and he looked at her and smiled at her astonishment. 

“You’ll be back, before school starts, I’ll bet. . . .  Why?  But why?” she added after a moment’s thought, intrigued, excited by the idea, almost against her will.  “You’re going to worry the hell out of your mom and dad.  I guess I’ll have to tell them.  Did you leave a note or something, David?”

“No.”

“That’s even dumber.  I guess you just want them to get sick over your disappearing.  You’re a sicko, David.”  She regretted saying that.  What he was doing, if he really did it, was something she had never imagined as a possibility, and he suddenly became for her a template against which she could measure the shape of her own life, which, though successful in some ways, was not a life that conformed to her wishes.  For one thing, she had been more or less “chosen” by Bradford Smith as his permanent date.  This was a problem for Minney because while she didn’t dislike him, she didn’t particularly like him either.  Though everyone expected her to feel honored, his values in life consisted not in his relationship with her but in football and the training that went along with it.  She was nothing more to him, she felt, than a reliable and pliable distraction from those ardors.  More than she cared to admit, his very existence oppressed her.

“Think what you want.”

“That’s what you always say when people criticize you.”

“So, what’s your point?”

“Why didn’t you leave a note?  Tell me that, David.”  This idea of running away without leaving a note bewildered her, and she couldn’t get passed it.  It made her angry, as well, but it added to the mystique and wonder of what he was doing.

“I didn’t think of it, that’s why,” he blurted out, leaning woundedly against the leather door panel of Minney’s old Mercury, which swayed and heaved down the road on bad shocks, making him feel a little seasick.  Minney looked at him with a frown and a sense of utter queerness, realizing that he meant what he was saying. 

“All I could think of was getting away before mom came home,” he continued, abstractedly, recalling the moment of decision.  “I guess I just thought I’d call them when I got to where I was going.  Or where I found myself after I got there.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Bye, bye, Miss American Pie,” he sang out loud, cheerfully, but she swung her right hand across the seat and belted him in the chest.

“What are you going to do?”

“When?”

“When you get to wherever.”

“How do I know?  I’ll look for a job.  There are things I can do,” he said, making keyboarding motions with his fingers.  “So’s I can pay my bills and eat, that’s all.”

“What about school?”

“Forget it.”

“That’s smart.”

“That’s cool.”

“What about your future?”

“We make our future by what we do today, what we do now.  Yours will contain new boots.  Mine a new place to live.  Mine’s the more interesting.”

“David, you’re dreaming.  You’re doing something that’s both stupid and dangerous.  You’ll end up on the streets, like those kids we hear about on the news.”  She was trying to persuade herself of the danger and stupidity of his running away more than him, not that she would run away, too, she thought.  She’d never do that. 

They were pulling into town and Minney’s first instinct was to head for Main Street where Westernwear was located, but as she turned up First Avenue, she rolled over to the curb, parked the car, and turned off the rumbling engine.  She had never had any use for David, regarding him as a loser and an outsider, since he never did any of the things most people did, being content to be by himself.  He was “different,” a deadly thing to be for sixteen-year-olds, and, worse, he was “nerdy,” “weird,” and “intellectual.” Like that song he just tried to sing.  He’d rather drop dead than listen to “My Heart Will Go On.”  He was stuck up and had too high an opinion of himself and too low an opinion of everyone else.  That’s what everyone else thought of him, anyway, and she knew that that was why she thought those things too.  But what he was doing now made her feel that he was within reach.  The idea made her feel strange and tingly all over.  She didn’t know why.  She glanced at him and saw that he had a serious, mature look on his face, like a person who knew things about life she didn’t and probably would never know.  She had a feeling, too, like something was going to happen, something unthinkable but unexpectedly real—if she could only say the right thing.  The anticipation excited her.  But in the silence that filled the car she didn’t know what to say and was afraid that when she began she would say something that would anger him or cause him to get out of the car or shut him down.  So she just sat there looking out the window.

David was also staring out the window, and he too felt that something was about to happen.  He turned and looked at Minney.  She had dark hair and he felt a powerful pull of desire for her.  He had always thought of her as, being older, more sophisticated and knowledgeable than himself, a person who knew what she wanted and who, unlike himself, went after it with determination.  She was beyond him, he knew, so he never thought of her in a personal way, even though he had known her all his life.  But just now he wanted to reach out and touch her, to touch her hair, to touch her breasts.  But his hand wouldn’t move.  He knew he couldn’t do it.  He fell back into his seat.

Instead, he began to talk.  He painted a picture of the city street he had imagined earlier in the day.  He would begin, he said, by finding a job doing something, anything, with computers, anything they would let a sixteen-year-old do.  But in time, he would learn, and rise, and become something that life here didn’t have the room to let him be.  He didn’t know what that was, but he told her he had faith in it and that it would be great.  He did dream, he said, she was right.  But dreaming is what makes us grow into new life.  Never had he spoken like this to anybody.  What he said about dreaming was something he would have denied if anyone accused him of it.  But saying it now gave him confidence and sealed his decision.  And the way she looked at him filled him with yearning, for her--for her mostly--but also for something new and different. 

She listened, staring through the windshield at first, but after he became involved in the world he was describing, she turned towards him, lifted her knee onto the seat, and faced him squarely.  He was something new, familiar and normal, but strange and provoking.  It wasn’t so much what he was saying that made her feel the strangeness, but his intimacy and the intensity of his feelings, the earnestness in his voice, and the feeling he made her have that it mattered to him what she thought.  They sat like that, he facing her and she him, and they talked to each other.  She admitted that she never thought about what her life would be like after the rodeo, after school, and after she left home for good.  She had no idea where she’d be five years from now.  She’d go to college, she guessed.  But she had no idea what she’d study, leaving those decisions for the future.

It was hot and the car was parked in the sun and it wasn’t long before they both began to run with sweat.  She began to spread dark rings under the arms of her red button-up blouse, and her face dripped.  He, too, became saturated.  She turned the key in the ignition and the car rocked into life as she reved the engine once, twice.  In a moment the air conditioner began to blow cold streams of air from the dust-caked, vinyl dashboard, and in two minutes more, they began to feel uncomfortably cold.

“Let’s go to the lake,” he said.  “We can take our shoes off, put our feet in the water, and sit under the trees.  That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?”

“I’d like that,” she said, and put the car in drive and headed for the south side of town and the lake.  This was the source of the creek David had been walking along earlier in the day, and had he walked in the opposite direction, he would have come upon the southern-most point of the lake at the place where he was now directing her to go.  

There, the lake spread out and shallowed, and then, at its southern-most edge, narrowed to the creekbed, along which cottonwoods and scrub cedars grew, and sumac and thistle.  Along the edges of the lake and mouth of the creek, great bunches of cane grass sprouted.  And grass grew in thick bunches off the banks in the shallowest places, where the water was filmy with a thin brown foam, and tadpoles and Jesus bugs wrinkled its surface and carp flopped over on their sides, making plunking sounds.  There was a steep bank at the bottom of which one old cottonwood had leaned away from the others and out over the lake, its roots lifting and turning out of the water and into it again.  They made their way to this tree, and sat among its roots.  David had opened his pack and took out a bottle of water and a bag of cookies he had pilfered from the counter in the kitchen on his way out the back door.

“This is one of my favorite places,” he said.  “Do you ever come here?”

“I’ve been here, but I don’t come often.  We had a campfire here last year.  Everyone came, except you.  How come, David?”

He didn’t answer.  He took a pull from the bottle of water and handed it to Minney, then kicked off his sneakers, rolled off his socks, and stuck his feet in the water.  She watched him, sipping from the bottle.  Then she took off her own and slipped her feet in beside his.

“This is one place I’ll miss.  I’ll remember it, and I’ll remember you because you’re with me now.”

“You still intend to go?  I don’t understand.  Why must you?  We could be friends.  I’d, I’d like to get to know you better.  We could do things together.”

“You have Brad.  Aren’t you two a ‘thing?’  That’s what I thought.  You wouldn’t have anything to do with me, not after school started.  Why pretend?”

“It’s not correct to say I have Brad.”  She paused, looking into the water, swishing her feet around. 

“What’s correct?”

“The truth is, he has me.  He settled on me.  Once that happened, I didn’t have many choices.  No one else came around.”

“Do you like him?”

“Sometimes I do.  Sometimes I don’t.  If he were you, now, he would’ve been all over me ten times.”

“The reason why I’m not is because I’m afraid you’d laugh.” 

He couldn’t believe he had said it.  It was one of those things we don’t acknowledge to ourselves, no less to others.  No less to the woman.  Minney didn’t respond.  She sat still, swishing her feet, as though he had said the most common and natural of things.  He looked at her, and she showed no signs of laughter or sarcasm in her face.  Instead, she looked sad.

She reached out and took his hand and held it tight.  Then she said, “Leaving home is not wise, David.  There’s a time for it, a time when we can’t stay home anymore.  But that’s a long way off yet.  I’m afraid.  That’s something to be afraid of.  Even Brad wouldn’t do it.  Even if the idea occurred to him.”

“I’ve made up my mind, Minney.  Today, tomorrow, the next day, I’m going.  Maybe I’ll come back.  If I came back, it would be to find you.”  It was a declaration, and she took it as such, for she reddened and looked again into the water. 

“I’d like that,” she said.  “I’d like that a lot.  But, David, I’d like it better if you didn’t go.  Next week I’m competing at the rodeo.  I’d love it if you were there.  I never see you at the rodeo, and this year, if you were there, I’d know what that meant.  I’d believe it.”

“I can’t be there.  I made this commitment, to leave, you know.  I can’t go back on it now.  There are too many things out there, things that mean more to me than anything else I have ever dreamed.”
     “What, what are these things?”

“I don’t know what they are, I only feel them.  You don’t know what I feel, so you can’t say.  You only know what you feel.  I appreciate that, Minney.  I guess that’s what makes you Minney.”

She looked at him long and hard, and her eyes told him what she felt.

When they said goodbye, she said, looking into his eyes, “I wouldn’t have laughed.”  He looked back into hers, and something changed places in them.  He kissed her on the lips, a light touch, almost too light to have been felt.   

They stayed an hour at the lake, then he asked her to take him to the bus depot, and she stayed with him until six that evening, waiting for the bus.  When the bus pulled away, she saw him through the window looking at her, and she felt, “Why does it have to be?”  As the bus headed up the street and turned onto the county road, she knew it was the last time she, or anyone else in town, would see David Hillyer.  She had to carry the news to his parents.  That was one thing she could do for him.  She looked at her car, resisted the impulse to get in and chase the bus, and turned away, walking instead to the seats in the depot, where she sat down, put her face in her hands, closed her eyes, and tried to fall asleep.