Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

She went on watching as the car disappeared from view.

Texas license plates. All the way from Texas that car had come, and a girl walking home from school had caught the driver’s eye, and now they were riding off together. He would take her off and make love to her and they would never see each other again. Or he would drive her home to Texas to meet his parents, stopping en route at a Justice of the Peace to marry her, and he would present her to his mother and father and they would embrace her and welcome her into the family, and—

And the girls who had giggled and shook their heads would have made a decision that would change their lives forever, and never know what they had missed.

She knew, suddenly, that she was not going home. She was going to see that movie.

She walked quickly to the theater. It was never crowded on weekday afternoons. She would be able to sit surrounded by empty seats, entirely unaware of the dozen or so other people who would be in the audience, wholly wrapped up in the movie itself.

And then she would emerge from the theater when the film ended, unless it was good enough to justify sitting through a second showing. In any event, she would sooner or later leave the theater, and she would then go directly to the bus station and buy a ticket for as far away as she could afford. She would not need a return ticket because she would not be returning. Ever.

Except that she wouldn’t do it. She knew that much before she even reached the theater. She would want to, and it was fun to think about it and plan it, but she would not be able to do it. Instead she would eat a box of popcorn, and maybe a couple of candy bars and a Coke, and she would watch one showing of the movie and go straight home.

By then she’d have a story worked out. If it was just her mother at home she might have a chance. If her father was there, well, she was going to be in trouble.

She bought her ticket and went inside.

NOW living next door to them, of course it’s a strange feeling. Something like this happens and you look back on it and try to see all the reasons why it would be them and not somebody else.

I’d see him a lot because he’d spend a good amount of time out front working on his cars. Sometimes I might have a beer with him to be sociable. Just a man like everyone else as far as I could see.

She kept to herself pretty much, but then so did he, except that he’d be outside more. Far as the daughter, I recollect seeing her walking to and from school but aside from that I haven’t any real impression of her.

The other daughter, she was gone before we moved here. We lived over on Monroe Avenue up until three years ago. Never knew there was another daughter.

You look for reasons and you could make some up, but like as not they’d be no closer than wild guesses. Far as I knew they were people like anybody else on the block. Good people, I would say, but they could as easily have been bad people and I’d not likely have known the difference.

My wife’s people are religious, and they’ll have an explanation for everything, but to me it’s like one person gets struck by lightning and the one standing next to him doesn’t and you’re wasting your time figuring it out.

He awakened very abruptly that morning. He sensed there had been a dream shortly before waking but remembered none of it. He got quickly out of bed, showered, shaved, combed his hair. He was packing the flight bag when the nausea hit him like a fist.

At first he fought it, but not for long; he had learned the futility of that course. He forced himself to drink water and forced himself to throw it up. He drank a second glass of water and leaned against the beige sink until he knew it was going to stay down. Then he dropped a bennie and finished packing.

Good weather outside, and a fresh clean taste to the air. He felt like running. At fourteen he had tried out for the school’s cross-country team. At first he had liked it — jockstrap and sneakers and little white cotton shorts and T-shirt, running for an hour or two over red dirt trails, pitting himself as much against the distance as against the boys he ran with. And the good ache afterward, the tiredness that went beyond the muscles and into the bones. The fierce appetite for dinner on days when he had trained. The deep sleep he fell so easily into on such nights.

He hadn’t made the team. You never did, not your first year.

Five boys ran for the school, and he was about eighth on the list, and sure to be selected the following fall.

In the spring he went out for track, but it was not the same. They didn’t even run the mile at his school. The longest race was the 880, half a mile, and he had no real speed at short distances. The training itself bored him. It didn’t extend you like distance running. Instead you just did the same fool thing over and over again, fighting a clock instead of a distance. He dropped the whole thing after a couple of weeks.

And when fall came around he was into other things and never even showed up for the first training session, and that was the end of that. It was later that year that he’d dropped out of school and never gone back, and by the following autumn he didn’t even live in that town anymore.

But he would still think about running once in awhile. He might be in a car and pass a passel of runners strung out along the shoulder of the road, and the feeling of that earlier autumn came back flashing. Sometimes he wanted to urge those runners on, and sometimes he envied them, and sometimes he wondered why in hell a man would want to run when he could ride.

There were no great bonanzas in Walker P. Ferris’ suitcase. Of the clothing, only the socks fit, and he had no powerful urge to wear another man’s socks. He found two pairs of cuff links which might be worth pawning, although he doubted it, and a bottle of after-shave lotion he found he preferred to his own brand. He thought of discarding the clothes but decided it would be easier for the time being to leave them in the trunk.

Before he drove off, he took two towels from the motel room, soaking one of them in the sink. A mile down the road he pulled onto the shoulder and gave the car a quick wash and dry. He tossed the towels into the brush and drove off.

North through Waynoka and Hopeton and Alva and across the

Kansas line. A stop for breakfast just over the state line, a hamburger and home fries and a cup of coffee with three packets of sugar stirred into it. The food was greasy and the smell of years of frying hung in the air, but this time he didn’t mind it. Sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t.

When he left the diner a guy and a girl were admiring his car. He flashed on punching the guy out and riding off with the girl, imagined her scared but excited at the same time, sitting next to him with her eyes darting around like a little rabbit, while he just kept driving and didn’t say a word. The picture appealed, and his hand moved involuntarily toward his back pocket. Then the girl turned a little and he saw she had buckteeth and a chin full of acne.

He walked to the car and opened the door. The girl smiled over the hood at him. He returned the smile, then gave the same smile to her boyfriend, a long drink of water wearing paint-spattered jeans and a homemade haircut.

The guy said, “Some car.”

“Gets me where I’m going.”

“From Texas?”

“Galveston. Well, just outside of Galveston.”

“Long way from home.”

“Long way to go.”

“Where you headed?”

“Oh, a lot of places.” He got into the car and the guy came around and stood by the window before he had time to zip it up.

“This the baby with the front-wheel drive? How do you like it?”