That Was Then, This Is Now

A block beyond the shopping center, under the bypass, the Ribbon ended as suddenly as it began at a movie theater two miles back. Abrupt and unexplainable. There was another shopping center beyond the bypass but for some reason it was not considered part of the Ribbon, so it wasn't full of cops. We turned around there to head back, which is against the unwritten rules of the Ribbon, but I didn't feel like messing around, sitting in the left-turn lane for half an hour waiting to turn.

"Drive by the hot-dog stand," M&M said, so I pulled in to drive through the parking lot, which was filled with kids sitting on their cars. We got tied up in a long line of cars driving through the hot-dog-stand lot. M&M suddenly got out of the car.

"Where are you going?" Cathy asked.

"I got some friends around here," M&M said. He should have. At least three quarters of the guys out there had hair to their shoulders.

"Well, when can we pick you up?"

"Not ever. I'm not going home," M&M said and walked off toward a group of kids sitting on a station wagon.

There were cars honking behind me so I had to drive on, even though Cathy was yelling, "Stop, we can't just let him walk off like this."

"I'll drive back through," I said, trying to hush her up, because I don't like hysterical chicks. She calmed down right away.

"That little mess. Wait till I get a hold of him."

She didn't though. When we came back through he was gone, and nobody seemed to know where. I parked the car and Cathy and me ran around asking different kids. We drove up and down the Ribbon until one o'clock in the morning looking for him. I found Mark sitting on Terry's car--Terry had gone somewhere with a couple of girls. We picked him up and drove home in silence.

Cathy was crying without making any noise, and, for the first time in my life, I wasn't annoyed with a girl for crying.

Instead, I felt really bad. It was the first time I'd ever felt bad for anyone except Mark.

7

I went with Cathy to break the news about M&M to her parents and to explain why we were so late. Her father was sitting up waiting for us, and when I saw his face I was glad that I had a real good excuse, even though I was quite a bit bigger than him. Her mother got up and came into the front room in her housecoat. She got real upset when we told her what had happened, but her father said, "He'll be home tomorrow--that kid's been going through this stage for months now."

"It's not just a stage!" Cathy cried. "You can't say, 'This is just a stage,' when it's important to people what they're feeling. Maybe he will outgrow it someday, but right now it's important. If he never comes home it'll be your fault--always picking on him about silly, goofy things like his hair and flunking gym!" She sat down and began to cry again. Her father just looked at her and said, "Honey, I know it's because you're worried that you're talking like this. M&M'll be home tomorrow. He's a sensible kid."

"Then why didn't you ever tell him so?" Cathy sobbed irrationally. "I don't think he's coming home tomorrow. He doesn't do things on the spur of the moment; he thinks things out. He's not going to come home!"

By now two or three younger kids had wandered in, dressed in their underwear or not dressed at all. They got enough out of the conversation to gather that M&M was gone and they began crying too. It was a big mess and I felt really uncomfortable. Mark was waiting out in the car, and, as it was two in morning and I had to go to school in a few hours, I wanted to leave; only I just didn't want to leave Cathy. I wished I could take her home with me. Her father said, "Bryon, thank you for your help. I think you'd better be going home, your mother is probably worried."

I could have told him that Mom never worried about Mark and me--she loved us but let us run our own lives--but I only said, "Yes, sir." I suddenly noticed that where he wasn't bald his hair was charcoal-colored too and that his eyes, though smaller with age, were the same as Cathy's and M&M's. I wondered if it was strange, seeing your eyes in someone else's face. I was tired and thinking funny.

"Everyone uptight?" asked Mark when I got back into the car.

"Yep," I said. "I don't blame them."

"They don't have nothin' to worry about," Mark said. "Half the kids on the Ribbon are living in someone else's car or house or garage. Shoot, I remember last summer, you and me sometimes didn't come home for weeks--we were bumming around the lake or somebody's house. Remember when Williamson rented that apartment for a couple of months with two other guys? I bet half the kids in town stopped there overnight."

"Yeah, but M&M is just a kid."

"So are we. Nothing bad happens to you when you're a kid. Or haven't you realized that?"

"Youth is free from worry," I said sarcastically. "You've been listenin' to too many adults."

"I don't worry. I'm never scared of nothing, and I never will be," Mark said, "as long as I'm a kid."

"You can get away with anything," I said, because that phrase came through my head whenever I really thought about Mark.

"Yeah, I can." He was quiet. "You used to be able to."

I looked at him, and suddenly it was like seeing someone across a deep pit, someone you couldn't ever reach. It was like the car had widened into the Gulf of Mexico and I was seeing Mark through a telescope.

"What's happening?" I said, half out loud, but Mark was asleep.

*

M&M didn't come home the next day like his father thought he would. Cathy and I ran up and down the Ribbon every night for a week, but it wasn't fun any more because we were looking out for M&M. We never did find him. We must have stopped sixty million little long-haired kids, thinking they were M&M, but none of them was. I began watching for him everywhere.

I got a job in a supermarket and I did a pretty good job of changing my attitude, outwardly at least. I couldn't help thinking smart-aleck things, but I could help saying them. Sacking groceries wasn't the most fun job in the world, but I was bringing in money. Mark was bringing in money, too, more than he ever had before. I couldn't imagine him stealing all of it, so I figured he must have gone in serious for poker. I never asked him where he got it, and Mom didn't either. Of course, she would never think Mark was getting it dishonestly. Besides, none of us was in any position to turn away extra money.

One night a couple of weeks after M&M disappeared, Mark and me went goofing around by ourselves again. It was almost as if we had never felt a gulf between us, never been separated by something we couldn't see. We drove up and down the Ribbon, trying to pick up chicks and get into drag races, even though our car wasn't all that fast. I was kind of halfhearted about picking up chicks, too, as I was more serious about Cathy than I let on, even to Cathy herself.

"Hey," Mark said suddenly. "Lookit who's over there in the parking lot."

It was Angela and a bunch of other chicks--her type, by the way they dressed and the way they were acting. You can always tell when a girl wants to be picked up.

"Let's pull in," Mark said. He was smiling.

"Sure," I said, feeling, with the old sense of thrill, that something was up, something was going to happen. We pulled into the parking lot, and immediately we were surrounded by girls.

"Outa the way,"

I said superiorly. "I want to see Angela."

"Bryon!" she yelled, and jumped for me the minute I got out of the car. "Bryon, I'm so glad to see you!"

She was pretty drunk. I let her hug me though, catching Mark's wink. "Where ya been keeping yourself, Angel?" I said. "How's married life?"

She let go with a string of swear words which told me pretty well what she thought of married life, her in-laws, and her husband.

"I never cared about him anyway. I thought I was having--I mean, I thought I was, but I wasn't--and that's the only reason I married him, the louse." She was half-crying now, between obscenities. "You're the only boy I ever cared about, Bryon."

"Sure," I said. I still hated the sight of her. She was as beautiful as ever, so striking that she could have been a movie star, but I remembered all the trouble she had caused, compared her to Cathy, and hated her. I let her hug me and bawl into my shirt front because Mark was winking at me.

"Angel, let's go for a ride," Mark said. "You and Bryon can talk over old times and maybe I can get some more booze for you."

"Sure," Angela said, always eager for free booze. I couldn't believe she was that glad to see me.

We drove around for a while, Angela telling us all of her problems--her husband didn't have a job, her brothers were both in jail, her old man was drunk all the time, and her father-in-law was always slapping her bottom. I had always taken her family for granted--they weren't so different from most of the families in our neighborhood. But now that I had seen Cathy's home--not rich, not much more than poor, but where everybody cared about each other and tried to act like decent people--the picture Angela was painting was making me sick. I could hardly stand for her to be hanging onto my arm.

At Mark's request I pulled into a parking lot across the street from a liquor store. Mark got out and disappeared. He was looking for somebody to buy the booze. You can't legally buy booze until you're twenty-one in this state, so we always have to get some old guy to buy it for us, usually somebody's big brother. If you can't come up with one of them, there was bound to be some rummy hanging around who was willing to buy it if you gave him a little extra to buy something for himself. I sat in the car and talked to Angela, who had completely given up to tears--it was the first time since I had known her that I had seen her cry. She was a tough little chick. Her eye makeup was running all over my shirt front, but that didn't bother me as much as the way it was running down her face in dark streaks. She almost looked like she was behind bars.