Slide - Kyle Beachy [101]
“My dad's in the back working on something. You should go. I told him about you taking me to Tower Tee and he got real mad. Hurry and go before he comes back inside.”
“Your dad is at work. His car isn't here.”
“He had to leave for a minute, but he'll be right back any second now.”
“Wait. Is that true? Are you saying to me what you're supposed to say to a stranger?”
“Just ‘cause they took away your van doesn't mean you're not a kidnapper.”
“Come see the car I'm driving. It's a 1978 Datsun 280Z. It's before your time. Nissan used to be Datsun. Istanbul was Constantinople.”
I heard the television come back to life. I turned and saw the hyena kids emerge from their home and begin playing in the yard up the street. Their mother sat in a lawn chair in the shade of the house. I knew I had role models growing up—I must have. I needed to think who they were. My father, of course, and an old instructional VHS tape of Ozzie Smith saying stay down, don't let the ball play you.
I called back into the house over the volume of the TV: “I don't see the problem here.”
“That's because you're crazy! It's like you think I can't tell!”
“Hold on a second. Sometimes we say things we don't fully believe.” The lock was a thin metal rod extending from the frame, hooking into a loop in the door. “It's easy sometimes to get carried away. The heat doesn't help. But we don't want to say anything that could ruin our friendship.”
“If anyone's ruined anything,” he said, “it's you. And it's everything.”
Like tossing unsharpened darts into an endless black void. How many times did I tell her love? Her name spoken in my sleep, unconsciously, chanted like some reenactment of an ancient tribal rite, actors in face paint. Skeptics all of us, there were times we all needed proof.
I yelled through the door that I would be right back.
My feet and hands could have belonged to somebody else; they worked clutch and gas and steered and shifted in reflexive concert. Passing and merging, decelerating off Highway 40, turning onto the thinner, curvier country road and going south. It was Saturday, early afternoon, and the Datsun on 94 was like a warm razor through butter. In Defiance, the two bars with outdoor decks were packed with people in red hats. Families: goddamn miraculous and fragile and absurd.
I took comfort in having a plan. Back under the canopy now, the road was dense with winery-bound traffic. Gradually the pack broke apart, until finally I was beyond Mount Pleasant, and alone, me and my spear and this landlocked beach, ocean of countryside stretching straight and endless in front of me. Reaching the sign for Irenia Winery.
The plan was to find Ian's mom. The plan was to locate Ian Worpley's mother and convince her to return to her family. To isolate the semi-former Mrs. Worpley sit her down, palpate and find the pulse of motherhood thumping beneath whatever was keeping her from her family, stare fiercely into her eyes and say you are being selfish. Whatever she was doing out here, working or living or both or whatever it was, Ian was locked inside that dark house with only a television to raise him, and motherhood has no expiration date. I was going to find her, sit her down, and speak words that appealed to her most human ingredients. Hope my words might still have meaning.
At the door to the main building, a thin hairless man whom I did not recognize from my last visit examined my driver's license. He wore the pale-blue collared shirt tucked into flat-front khakis.
“Hello there. Welcome. It's good to have you.”
Inside the front door was typical retail outlet built around a central, circular counter. A few customers sat at stools as men and women wearing pale-blue collared shirts poured tastes of wine. The plan was to scope the place out, case the joint, and form a general feeling, then get busy finding Mrs. Worpley. I moved nonchalantly through the store, stopping occasionally to pick up an item and examine it. In this manner I would infiltrate the winery without arousing even the slightest fractional