Ceremony

Chapter 2

"He better not go out during the Thanksgiving season," I said. We were driving in Susan's big red Ford Bronco. It had oversize tires and a low-range option in four-wheel drive. Susan claimed it went through snowstorms and over mountains and gave her a sense that she could conquer winter. "He is a terrible turkey, isn't he?" Susan said. "After we find the girl, can I beat him up?" Susan shook her head. "Slash his tires?" I said. "No." "Soap his windows?"

Susan turned down her street.

"I'm not surprised she's tricking," Susan said.

"The kid?"

"Yes, April. I've been trying to salvage… no, that's not the right word… prevent the wreck she's been heading for since she was in the tenth grade."

"She a senior now?"

"Yes, she's scheduled to graduate in June."

"Besides being the daughter of a major league dildo, what is her problem?"

Susan swung the Bronco into her driveway. "I don't know, exactly. I only get her end of it. I've had a couple of conferences with her parents, but you can imagine how productive that was." She killed the headlights and shut off the engine. It dieseled once and was still. We sat in the car in the dark. "You may have heard it rumored that adolescent children have to reject their parents in order to establish an identity of their own."

"I've heard that," I said.

"I imagine you have," Susan said. "You're still doing it."

"I thought it was just boyish high spirits," I said.

Susan snorted; somehow she made it sound elegant. "Anyway," she said, "in a case like this, where there's a fixed parental expectation and an inflexible parental stance, the rebellion can get to be extreme."

"Jeez, I thought all guidance counselors did was hand out college catalogs and army recruiting pamphlets."

Susan laughed quietly in the dark car. "Actually, what we do most is approve schedules."

"Old Harry doesn't strike me as a flexible and understanding guy," I said.

"No," Susan said, "he's not. In many ways he's typical of this town. A bit more extreme, a bit more unloving, but essentially he's left a very much different kind of social circumstance, maybe the first generation to go to college or wear a suit to work. They've moved away, people like Harry Kyle. Moved away from the old neighborhood both literally and figuratively. The old rules from that neighborhood don't apply here. Or people like Harry Kyle don't think they do. They don't know the new rules, so they latch on to the conventions of the media and the assumptions of the magazine ads and the situation comedies. They try to be like everyone else, and what makes it so hard is that everyone else is trying to be like them."

We got out of the car and walked in the dark evening to Susan's back door. It was ten days till Thanksgiving, and the air was cold.

Susan's kitchen was warm and smelled faintly of apples.

She snapped the overhead light on from a switch by the back door. "Want some supper?"

I was rummaging for beer in the refrigerator. "Yes," I said. "Want me to make it?"

"No," she said. "I've got to learn sometime."

I sat at the kitchen table and drank beer from the bottle. "Pilsner Urquell," I said. "Do you have a rich lover?"

"I thought you'd like to try it."

I drank some more. "Yum, yum," I said.

Susan took some potatoes from a drawer and began peeling them at the sink.

"So," she said, "what's wrong with April Kyle, you ask?"

"She doesn't get on with her parents, you answer."

"Yes," Susan said. "Lucky I've got all that Harvard training." She put the point of her paring knife into a peeled potato and spun it, gouging out the remnant of an eye. "It's not that what they wanted for her was so bad -it was that it was so inflexible, and she wasn't consulted. They wanted her to be a cheerleader, to work on the yearbook staff, to get good grades, to go out with football captains, to attract a husband they could be proud of."

I finished my beer and went to the refrigerator and got another. I noticed with a sense of fast enlarging contentment that there were ten more bottles after this one.

"Shouldn't you drink good beer like that from a glass?" Susan said.

"Absolutely," I said.

Susan finished peeling potatoes. She sliced them and went to the refrigerator and got out a bundle of scallions. "Where was I?" she said.

"You were telling me how the Kyles wanted their kid to be Doris Day."

"Yes, and April decided against it. By the time she got to high school and I began to deal with her she was already in among the burnouts. She was smoking grass, forging absentee excuses. According to her file she had her period every two or three days. Grades were bad, she was inattentive and somewhat defiant in class. I assume that all of this caused lots of yelling, and maybe some slapping, at home. She'd be grounded for weeks at a time, and as soon as she got out of the house she'd do it worse."

"How'd you do with her?"

“I could talk to her."

"You could talk to Yasir Arafat," I said, "and he'd think he was having a nice time."

"But that's all. I think she liked to come talk with me.

It was better than being in class, and it was better than being picked up and driven home after school and made to stay in your room and not watch TV. She seemed to enjoy talking with me. But I don't think I had any influence on her behavior at all." She was chopping the scallions. "Then two weeks ago she dropped out of school and yesterday her mother came to me for help."

"Who do I talk to?" I said.

"I'll take you over and introduce you to the local police." Susan put the chopped scallions in another bowl. "They can give you some information, I suppose. And the burnouts-there's a kid named Hummer… real name is Carl Hummel, but no one calls him that. He went with her, sort of, and he's… leader is too strong a word, but he's the most important kid in her circle."

Susan broke six eggs into a bowl and whipped them up with a fork. She put one dash of Tabasco sauce into the eggs, and two tablespoons-she measured-of my beer.

"Hummer a bad kid?" I said.

She poured a little oil in a fry pan and put the potatoes and scallions in. "Depends on your definition," she said. "By the standards you and Hawk are used to, he's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. But for Smithfield, he's pretty bad." The potatoes began to sizzle in the pan. "Would you pour me a little wine, please, cutie pie?"

"Sure," I said. "You shouldn't add the scallions at the same time you do the potatoes. By the time the potatoes are done the scallions will be burned." Susan smiled at me. "Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling donut," she said.

I handed her the wine. "Do I hear you saying you can get on okay without my instruction?" I said. She stirred the potatoes and scallions around with a spatula.

"Only your body," she said, "is indispensable."

"Everyone tells me that," I said.

"I assume you can find April," Susan said.

"Does a cat have an ass?" I said.

"Ah, the poetry of it," Susan said, "the pure pleasure of your discourse."

"But," I said.

"Yes," Susan said, "I know. But once you find her, then what?"

"I would guess that if she'll come home with me, she won't stay."

"I don't know," Susan said. "It depends on too many things. On what her options are, how bad it has been in Boston. How bad it is at home. Perhaps if you bring her back she'll run away to someplace better."

"There are a lot of places better," I said, "than Harry Kyle's house." Susan and I ate her potato and scallion omelet and drank two bottles of Great Western champagne with it. The scallions were a little overcooked, but I managed to down two portions and four hot biscuits that Susan had made from a package.

"Domestic champagne," I said.

"I don't use Dom P6rignon as a table wine," she said.

"The sparkle from your eyes is all I need, honey bunny," I said.

"How much trouble is she in," Susan said, "if she really is a streetwalker?"

"In terms of whores," I said, "it's unskilled labor, the pay is lousy, the clientele is not top drawer. You gotta turn a lot of tricks to make any money, and a pimp usually takes most of it."

"Is she in physical danger?"

"Sure." I buttered another biscuit and put on a small dab of boysenberry jam. "It's not inevitable, but some of your clients could be uncivilized."

Susan sipped at her champagne. We were eating in the kitchen, but Susan had put candles on the table, and the moving light from them made her face seem animated even in repose. It was the most interesting face I'd ever seen. It never looked quite the same, as if the planes of it shifted minutely after each expression—-even when she slept she seemed to radiate force.

"However gratifying it may be to flaunt at her parents," Susan said, "ultimately it must make you feel like somebody's rag toy."

"I imagine," I said.

"The best we can do is find her," Susan said. "Once we've done that, we'll worry about what to do with her."

"Okay."

"You shouldn't do it for nothing."

I shrugged. "Maybe she can split her earnings with me," I said.