Chuck Logan - Vapor Trail

Angel folded her arms protectively across her chest but couldn’t quite manage to stifle a grin. “You keep your teeth to yourself.”

“So what’s up?” Aubrey asked, the voice more reasonable. Curious. And distancing. “Do you always talk to total strangers on a beach?”

Angel shrugged. “Just thought I’d tell you. . that stuff you’re loading into the Camels. I can smell it clear down the beach. So can they.” She jerked her head at the lifeguards. “I wouldn’t be doing it in plain view if I was you.”

Aubrey studied her. “What’s your name, honey?”

“Angela.”

He reached up and patted her calf. “Thanks for the heads up. Now, why don’t you run along.”

Feigning a vast indifference, Angel shrugged, turned, and walked back to her towel. Okay, now don’t look over there. Nothing obvious. Let him think. Let him look up and down the beach. Is he bright enough to realize that he’s just talked to the nicest little piece of chicken at Square Lake today?

Angel watched Aubrey stand up, dust off sand, and pull on a pair of baggy shorts. Then a T-shirt, flip-flops, and a long-billed cap. She almost approved of the way he folded his towel, taut square corners. He tucked the towel away, shouldered his bag, and started up the beach to her left and disappeared from the corner of her peripheral vision.

She was careful not to turn and follow him with her eyes. There were always other days. Maybe she’d come on too forward, walking over there and striking up a conversation. Maybe the dope angle wasn’t the most effective gambit. Too overt.

Wrong.

A thick shadow fell across her legs.

“So Angela, what’s your story?” Aubrey asked. He had circled around in back of her and come up on her right.

Angel lowered her eyes. With more clothes on, he doesn’t look half bad. In fact he has this cleft chin in his deeply tanned face that bears a resemblance to. . what’s his name? The actor who’d been married to Bo Derek. Or maybe it’s his manner, which is less intense and is, well, curious. “My story?” she repeated, working to make her voice self-conscious.

He laughed. “I mean, who are you and where are you from, you know. .”

“Oh.” Angel managed to raise a blush to her cheeks. “I’m a teacher; I teach in an elementary school up in Thief River Falls. It’s summer vacation, so I’m down here visiting my sister in Stillwater and” — Angel raised a hand to her lips as if to stifle a giggle- “well, actually, she’s pretty straight.”

“How straight is straight?” he asked.

“Born-again, Evangelical washed-in-the-blood, baptized-in-the-Holy-Ghost straight.” Angel arched her eyebrows and showed the whites of her eyes.

Aubrey squatted down on his haunches, his forearms braced on his quads. “So you’re not exactly picking up on any dope smoke wafting through your sister’s house?”

“You got that right,” Angel said.

“Do you come down here much?”

“Not much. We’re originally from South Dakota.”

Aubrey nodded. “Where about?”

“Rapid City.”

“Sure, Interstate Ninety. Mount Rushmore. I did a shoot at the Sturgis rally and in Wall, you know, tracing the famous bumper sticker back to the source: Wall Drug, South Dakota.”

Angel nodded. “The Badlands. I find the Badlands distinctly creepy.”

Aubrey bobbed his head in agreement. “Theodore Roosevelt said the Badlands look like Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry sounds.”

Looking impressed, Angel said, “That’s sort of nice.”

“Actually, I heard David McCullough say that on C-SPAN, he wrote a book about TR.”

Suddenly Angel blurted, “John Derek.”

“Huh?”

Angel became animated. “The actor. He’s who you look like, I mean your face, here.” Her finger drifted out and up and hovered, almost touching the cleft in his chin. It was very difficult for Angel to actually touch a man’s body anywhere. The funny thing was, in her other life she had to contend with physical cravings that went in the exact opposite direction.

Aubrey grinned and slapped his stomach. “I should drop a few pounds, I know.” He squirmed closer on his sandals and extended his hand. “Aubrey Jackson Scott. But they call me A. J.”

“Howdy, A. J.,” Angel said. She managed the handshake without grimacing, but just beneath her skin she imagined all the capillaries writhing like blue maggots.

“So. . life’s pretty dull around the old sister’s house, huh?” A. J. mused.

In a self-conscious reflex, Angel let one of her hands wander up and fluff her hair, then she toyed with a curl near her forehead. And she thought how things had never been exactly dull around her sister’s house. Actually, things at her sister’s house had been terrifying, and very very sad.

His voice brought her back to the present. “So, ah, do you like to get high, Angela?”

“I’ve been known to imbibe,” Angel said.

Encouraged, he sidled a little closer. “Tell you what. How about we go someplace and smoke a joint, then go to a nice dark air-conditioned sports bar and get a burger?”

“I saw you taking pictures of the scuba divers. Are you really a photographer?” Angel knit her brow and put a wary lilt in her voice.

“Hey, absolutely. I string for the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune. And I do a lot of stuff for the weeklies in the valley.”

“And you have, like, a studio and equipment and everything?”

“Of course.” He reached in his bag and withdrew the heavy Nikon D1. “This is not exactly kid’s stuff I have here.”

And Angel thought, Oh, I bet it is exactly kid’s stuff, you greasy fat fuck. But she smiled, lowered her eyelids, and said, “And so? What. .you’re going to invite me over to your studio under the pretense of taking my picture and get me stoned, huh?”

A. J. shook his head and held out his hands in a genial protest. “Hey. No pressure on this end. Don’t believe in it. You want to hang for a while and smoke a number, fine. If you don’t, that’s fine, too.”

“Well, I guess you don’t look too much like Charles Manson,” Angel said.

A. J. stood up and held his hand out to help her to her feet. “Okay, c’mon.”

Angel put her hand out to him and shut her eyes tight when she felt his grip on her fingers. As he hoisted her up, she repeated to herself, Just remember, kiddo, you’re not here.

She folded her towel around her sun lotion. She’d left her beach bag in the car for obvious reasons. He asked where she’d parked, and she pointed up the grassy slope in back of the beach. So they walked side by side through the picnic tables and barbecue grates and up the stairs made of green treated timbers.

Near the top of the steps he smoothly cupped her elbow, to steady her balance, and she did not recoil because she was almost totally invisible now.

Angel had seriously, desperately asked God to help her when she was eleven years old. She had called on God-she’d never say Him again, not ever-with all her heart. And God must have been somewhere else, or maybe God was deaf or asleep, because God had not done a single thing to help her.

So she had learned to make herself invisible, lying rigid with her wrists crossed over her heart like thin iron bars.

Sometimes she’d pretended she was the wall next to the bed.

As they walked to the parking lot and he continued to steer her with his hand on her arm, she moved smoothly with his touch. Hold up a mirror, you wouldn’t see her . Uh-uh.

Gone girl gone.

Angel disliked being closed in, so she drove with the windows open, and the air slicked her skin like hot oil. She caught herself drifting, involved in the fact that A. J. owned a blue 1995 Honda Accord. Not exactly a flashy car but a dependable performer. The Accord had rated high on Consumer Reports ’ reliability chart, and also held its resale value.