Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll get a ride. There’s a whole bunch of people going.” “I don’t know.”

But there wasn’t much else to do that evening, and I didn’t want to be alone, so I sat in the backseat of somebody’s car and listened to the tires humming on the freeway. The club was in a basement, very dark, and the music was loud, violent, the usual stuff. I bought a beer and walked around, scraping against the wall. I leaned on a round pillar and watched the band for a while, but then Tom found me and crooked his arm around my neck.

“Let’s slam, Abs,” he said.

“Isn’t that passé?” I said.

“But it feels good,” he said, and dragged me through the crowd, to where a circle of people, men and women, boys and girls, spun in a circle, bouncing off each other, impacting.

“Come on.”

“Slam-dancing is passé.”

“Come on, shithead.” He pulled me into the circle, and instantly I was almost knocked off my feet. In a few moments I began to feel the rhythm of it and soon I was ricocheting from body to body, my eyes half-shut. It looked harsh, but it did feel good, and you could lose yourself in it. When I finally staggered out, my head spinning, my body was already starting to ache, but I could feel a smile on my face.

“Hello,” she said.

She was dressed in black again, a skirt this time, with the ubiquitous T-shirt. The red hair was pulled back tightly into a braid, leaving her face exposed. She looked very young.

“Amanda.”

“How are you?”

“Good,” I said. “Good. And you?”

“Okay. The people I came with left.”

“The girls from the hall?”

“They thought this place was gross.” She shook her head. “Gross. Assholes.”

“It is pretty seedy.”

“Pretty seedy?”

“Something like that.”

“You have a funny way of talking.”

“I come from a funny place.”

“Funny?”

Behind her, a bald head moved in the yellow light, perfectly spherical, with a curving scar caterpillaring up the lower hemisphere.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“You like this?”

“Do you?”

I shrugged. “Do they do this in Texas?”

“Everywhere.”

I got another beer, and one for her, and we sat at a round metal table at the back, where it was so dark that all I could see was a flash when her eyes moved. There were black shapes around us, almost motionless. Listening to her voice in the darkness reminded me, for some reason, of being very young, of my friends and myself when we were at school together, of sitting up in bed, wrapped in blankets and telling each other ghost stories. I told her this and she laughed, and said that when she was very young she would lie alone in bed, eggs in both armpits, waiting for them to hatch.

“You what?”

“I thought I could make eggs hatch, so I took eggs out of the fridge and put them in my armpits when I slept, thinking maybe I’d wake and there’d be chickens. But they never did, and I guess after a while they would start to rot or something, my father would come and take them away, throw them away I guess. But I always thought I could make them hatch so I would get some more.”

“That’s a sad story.”

“They never broke though.”

“What does your father do?”

“He’s a judge. He has white hair.”

Tom came listing through the tables, leaning over bottles of beer and glasses and cigarettes, peering at the mannequin-still shapes.

“Tom.” I raised my voice over the music. “Tom.”

He slid into a chair, tilting to get a good view of Amanda’s face.

“Amanda,” he said. “Hey.”

“Hi.”

“Abhay, they’re leaving. We have to go.”

“Already?” I said, and saw the soft white of his teeth.

“You don’t have to,” Amanda said. “You can come with me later.”

“You have a car?” Tom said.

“Yes.”

“Perfect,” he said, his head turning toward me, and I picked up a butt from the table and flicked it at him. It hit him somewhere around the chest and fell to the ground.

“Asshole,” I said.

“Abhay doesn’t drive,” he said. “He wants to live in L.A. but he doesn’t want to drive.”

“Why?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t like it. It’s not like I can’t. I learnt. But I don’t like it.”

“You’re weird, boy,” Tom said.

“Tom’s a redneck from Ohio. His parents put him on one of those three-wheel motorcycle things before he could walk. Went tearing over the countryside chewing tobacco and drinking Jack Daniel’s and chasing gals.”

“Damn proud of it,” he said. “Good ol’ ‘merican stuff, little Indian boy. What did you do?”

“Rode in horse-carriages, I guess. I don’t know.” A bubble, a little hard place of pain expanded in my chest then, and my voice changed, and I didn’t want to talk anymore. I suppose they sensed it, because they began to talk about bands they had seen, in other cities and states.

We came up out of the club into the smell of piss. A black man with a speckled beard sat in a doorway, staring down at his feet, splayed before him on the sidewalk. He looked at us as we passed, then down again. Tom veered off to the left and staggered into the middle of the street. I ran after him and put an arm over his shoulders, pulling him back.

“What now?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Home?”

“Maybe.”

“We’ll think of something,” Amanda said.

“It’s early,” Tom said.

A neon tube at the entrance to a parking lot buzzed and flashed as we passed under it. In the lot, Amanda dug in a pocket as we squeezed between vehicles. Tom ran his hand, on the side away from me, over windshields and roofs. Amanda stopped by a low-slung black car and put the key into the door.

“This is yours?” Tom said.

“Yes.”

“This is yours?” he said again, pulling away from me and putting his hands on the car, leaning over it, stretching out on it.

“Uh-huh.”

“This is yours?”

“She just said so, bonehead,” I said.

“This,” he said, turning to me, “is a Jaguar, bonehead.”

“Oh,” I said.

He bent and clambered into the car, uttering little sighs of ecstasy: “Smell that leather. Sweet. Sweet. I can’t believe you drive this thing.” Amanda shrugged: a nervous, awkward movement. I got into the front seat and buckled myself in, and then we were all quiet until we were on the freeway. Amanda pressed a button and the cabin — that’s what it felt like, flying above the hunkering houses, separate — filled with music. I could feel the power of the machine in the way it kissed the road, lightly, smoothly, and in the way that Amanda drove, one hand on the stick shift, confident, veering from lane to lane.

“You’re a good driver,” I said.

“This is a good car to drive,” she said. “You can really feel the road through it.”

“You must learn young in Texas. I’d like to go there some day, just to see.”

“What do you do?”

“What do I do?”

“What’s your major?”

I smiled, realizing she hadn’t wanted to ask the question in a way that would make her seem like a freshman.

“Anthropology,” I said. “But I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

“Who does?”

“Where are we going? — that is the question,” Tom said.

“Go to sleep,” I said. “We’ll wake you up when we get there.”

“Surprise me, surprise,” he said. He twisted around for a moment or two, knocking knees against the back of my seat, and then was still. We drove on toward Claremont. Amanda and I talked now and then, but mostly there was just the music, and metal tearing at the wind.