The Driver - Part One
Trey says it makes him feel like he's a man when he puts a spike into his vein. He draws up the hit and says things aren't quite the same. To Chick he sounds just like Lou Reed, just as strange and lonely and sad. Billy and his girlfriend, Sam, make mild noises of assent, sprawled on the beat-up couch, enveloped in cigarette smoke and the fuzzy aura of their own high.
Chick sits crosslegged next to the stereo, frozen in the act of putting in a new disc. She watches Trey as he lays the needle on the card table, bites his lower lip, and leans his chair back, face half shadowed by the single floor lamp. He sighs, locks eyes with her -- it is this instant of contact, a hot streak that shoots down her spine and spreads across the backs of her thighs, between her legs, that she has waited for, that she would never miss.
"It's my life, and it's my wife," he croons. His eyes roll closed, spring open again, he takes a half step from the table and vomits thinly into the Chock Full O' Nuts can they use as an ashtray.
"Hey," groans Billy, pointing at the can, "Hey, man." Sam rolls on top of him, whispers in his ear, and they dissolve into laughter.
"Chickie chick, where's that music?" Trey draws the back of his hand across his mouth. "You're supposed to take care of these things."
Chick remembers the disc in her hand and places it in the cradle. It's one of her father's Doors CDs; she stole it from a box in the garage, one of many boxes of his belongings that her mother has forbidden her to touch.
"Strange days have found us," he sings, flashing his eyes at her, his face dark with stubble. In her dreams that face hovers above her own; she wakes with aching arms, reaching to draw it closer. "Strange days have tracked us down."
"Turn it down," Billy says. "Shit." He glances through the small window with a view of his house. Fresh snow reflects the moonlight, the outside world infused with silver. This cramped room over the garage won't hold them for long -- soon they'll want air. They'll want the music louder, the feel of the road, they'll want speed. That's why she's here.
Trey flops onto the couch, on top of Billy and Sam. Sam grumbles, slips out from under him, crawls across the room and lays her head in Chick's lap. Arcs of smoke hang in the air like ghosts.
"You're so pretty," Sam's blue eyes skate across Chick's face. "I think you're the prettiest girl ever." Billy and Trey mumble along with the music, heads tilted against the wall.
"I bet all the boys at Eisenhower are after you," Sam says. Chick pushes a strand of hair out of Sam's eyes. Trey's Adam's apple slides up and down. As far as she knows, none of the boys in her high school thinks she's pretty. But she doesn't care -- they're just children. Since her best friend, Susie, left for college in the fall she hasn't wanted to go to any of their dumb parties, to steal from parents' liquor cabinets and smoke cigarettes in cul-de-sacs. She'd rather be with Trey and his friends, even if he only wants her there to drive them from place to place. Racing along icy back roads, sitting in this claustrophobic room, even shivering in the old barn behind Lundgren's Field, she feels different with them, more awake and solid, as though what came before had been only a rehearsal. As though, through Trey, she can see the whole adult world yawning open, offering itself to her.
"I wish you were with us, Chick," Sam murmurs, wiping her nose on Chick's blue jeans. The music has quieted. "I wish you could try it, don't you? You know we'd take care of you."
Trey is on his feet. "Shut the fuck up," he roars. Sam covers her face and giggles. He turns to Billy. "Can't you tell her to keep her mouth shut?"
Billy seems stuck to the couch as though he'd fallen there from a great height. Chick watches Trey's jaw muscles working, his wild stare.
"Chick isn't like that," he says. He pours himself into the chair, picks his cigarette out of the ashtray and stares at it. "She's a little girl. She's pure."
When the next song begins, he raises his eyes to her. "You're lost, little girl," he sings. He leans forward, blows her a kiss. Chick bites the tip of her tongue, her face flushing hot. Everything about her suddenly feels childish -- her clothes, her lip gloss, her short haircut. She reaches for the cigarettes and lights one, blows a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. The ghosts stretch and twist and come apart. Trey closes his eyes and smiles.
"Turn the music back up," he says, far away again. "Fuck Billy's mom."
Of course Chick's not her real name, but if that's what he wants to call her that's fine with her. In the months since she became their driver she's gotten used to the name, even come to like it -- it's something he has given her, something that separates her from the other girls in town. When she hasn't seen him in a few days she misses it, misses the drawn-out way he says it. She sits in her bedroom in the light of the television, adorning her notebooks with swirly, psychedelic graffiti: Chick. Chick. Chick.
Her mother doesn't like it one bit. "It's inappropriate," she says, in the swift voice she reserves for discussions of her daughter's reputation. "Next thing you know this whole rinky-dink town will be calling you that." She doesn't tell her mother that most of the "rinky-dink town" -- her father's expression - already calls her that. Outside of school, in the pizza parlor, the convenience store, the Iron Horse Tavern, she is, simply, Chick.
"What about college interviews?" her mother goes on, painting her nails at the kitchen table while Chick does the dishes. "Who's looking for a student named 'Chick'? 'Hi, I'm Chick,'" she says in a babyish voice. "'I want to study nuclear physics.'"
"I hate physics," she says over the running water.
"And what about boys? What will they think of a girl named Chick?" Her mother fans her fingers under the light, plucked eyebrows arched in a way that makes Chick want to throw a plate at her. It's been nearly three years since Chick's father flew to California to try to be an actor. Her mother insists he's coming back, and often threatens her by saying, "When I tell your father about this..." But it's clear he isn't coming back, just as it's clear that her mother's obsession with Chick's reputation is some weird way of ignoring this fact.
"Maybe they'll think I'm a slut and they'll want to go out with me," she says.
"Don't be a foul-mouth," her mother says, slumping in exhaustion. She squeezes her eyes shut, hands flat on the table, her customary expression of long suffering. Chick turns to hide a smile. "Your father and I aren't raising a foul-mouth. Now go do your homework. You'll be lucky if you ever see those car keys again."
But the next day, Friday, she'll walk to the beauty parlor after school as always. She'll spend an hour sweeping the floor, opening cartons of conditioner; when they lock up, her mother will hand Chick the car keys. After a dinner of frozen pizzas, her mother will fall onto the couch, flip through the TV channels, and when Chick opens the front door she'll call out, drowsily, "Try to be quiet when you come in."
She makes sure the car always smells like smoke, though she herself is not allowed to smoke. Better that than the sour stink they make, cooking in the backseat, pulled off in the woods by the old barn. Better that than the smell of puke, accidents that leave crusty patches on the upholstery, faint stains on the windows. In the trunk, they keep a sack of sawdust from Billy's job at the Home Depot, to soak up the mess.
Trey calls on Saturday, needing a ride to work. When she pulls up to his mother's house, he's standing in the street, only a flannel shirt for a coat, eyes red and downcast. As they pull away, he rolls down his window, shakes his middle finger at the house.
"We have to make a stop," he says, lighting a cigarette. Brown slush hisses under the tires, a sky empty of motion, tire swings and rusted tractors stand close to the road.
"It's almost quarter after," she says. "Your father's going to kill you." Trey works at the Iron Horse, his father's tavern, though he's been fired twice since summer. A run-down building in the center of town, the Iron Horse has been in his family since the Depression; Trey's father lives upstairs with his girlfriend. Most Friday nights involve a stop there -- Trey loves going into the bar when he's high, sometimes setting up scores in the bathroom. He says it serves his father right.
"I've got things to take care of," he says. "Claude will have to wait." Chick, too, is late for work; when she arrives at the salon her mother will look away, scissors snipping furiously.
On the state road, another bright and biting afternoon, Chick holds the wheel tightly, wind knife-sharp through the open window, windshield mapped with a fine lattice of frost. Winter came early this year, the Hudson Valley frozen solid all the way down to New Paltz. Her mother says the cost of heating oil will be the end of them. "You don't understand, Ted," she hears her mother whisper into the phone. "This isn't eff-ing Burbank."
Coming into town, the fields to either side flow sparkling white, black spindled trees in the distance. She drives slowly through the curves, foot light on the gas in case they hit a patch of black ice -- she has nearly mastered the skill of letting the car slide without stabbing the brakes, waiting for the right instant to turn the wheel and glide out of the skid. It feels magical to her -- that suspended moment when your intentions cease to matter, when the firm hand of gravity abandons you to fate. Trey says it feels like dying.
"You're quite the little artiste," he says, examining one of her notebooks, the colorful doodles on the back cover. She tries to grab it, but he holds it beyond her reach. "When we go to Mexico you can sell paintings in the market," he says. "You can be our little sugar mama."
She takes the cigarette from between his fingers. "How do you expect to get to Mexico if you can't even get to work on time?"
He sighs, leans against the door. "Chica, chica, chica. Everything's different down there. None of the hassle. I'll just stay home and drink margaritas and write poetry -- like Burroughs. Like Neil Cassady."
She turns after the gas station, pulls up in front of Pete Cavallaro's trailer. "Things to take care of" means buying his private stash, a new habit since the cold weather set in. The others only shoot up once or twice a week, and always at night, contenting themselves with pot and cheap beer the rest of the time. Chick is the only one who knows about Trey's stash. It's their little secret.
The car idling at the sidewalk, he leans over, whispers in her ear. "Chickie can you help me out?" His voice is low and warm on her skin. Up the street, a young woman carries a baby out of her house, swaying precariously on the slippery sidewalk.
"You still owe me from last week," she says.
He takes a strand of her hair between two fingers, touches it to his lips. "Claude's paying me on Monday," he says, his hand resting next to her leg, veins criss-crossing bone, knuckles chapped red and ragged. "Who loves you, Chick?" he says.
She takes twenty dollars from her purse and he disappears into the trailer. Out the window, the young mother loads her baby into a station wagon, her face stretched and vaguely terrified. As they pull away, the plume of chalk-white exhaust hanging in the air, Chick pictures Trey's face when he's high: something draining out behind his skin, all that sadness fading into the background. Once, he left the needle dangling from his arm; Chick came to his side, trembling as she slid it out of him.
She asked him to describe what it felt like, whether it was really better than anything in the world. "Is it better than sex?" she said, not that she knew what that felt like either. "That's what someone said." They were lying on a mountain of hay bales in the old barn, her hand on his abdomen. He stared at the rafters and chewed a straw.
"You're too smart for that," he said. He pulled his arm from under her and sat up. The barn smelled of damp wood, an explosion of light beyond the door. "One day you'll get the hell out of here. Unlike most of these losers."
"You're smart, too," she said, pulling him back. "You can go anywhere you want." She thought of the places they could go together, imagined them in her mother's car with all the windows down. "What about Mexico?" When she touched the side of his face he drew away.
After fifteen minutes, he has not come out of Pete's trailer. She blows the horn several times, dreading her mother's silent reprimand. Finally the door opens and Trey stands on the step, talking to someone inside. He saunters slowly toward her, eyes bright, a familiar, dreamy smile.
"Don't worry about me," he says when she rolls down the window. "I'll walk." His words slip around one another, sliding over his grin.
"You're late, Trey. It's almost one o'clock." He squints, bites his lip. "I've been sitting here waiting," she says. "It's not fair."
He swats the air in her direction. "I've already got a mother," he says, taking a few steps back toward the trailer.
She guns the engine and U-turns in the street, watching him grow smaller in the rearview. She vows to stay angry at him this time, make him try to win her back. But she can never stay mad for long. She knows this isn't really him, this selfish kid who acts like he doesn't need anyone. Behind all the mystery and cigarette smoke and anger, she knows he's just lonely and sad. Stopping at the corner, she looks for him in the mirror, hoping to see him running after her. But he's just a small patch of color, standing against a monochrome world. That's him, she thinks, that's the boy she wants: the sad one.
