Riding The Bullet

I thought of all the years she and I had spent together, Alan and Jean Parker against the world. A lot of good times and more than a few really bad ones.

Patches on my pants and casserole suppers. Most of

the other kids took a quarter a week to buy the hot

lunch; I always got a peanut-butter sandwich or a

piece of bologna rolled up in day-old bread, like a kid

in one of those dopey rags-to-riches stories. Her work-ing

in God knew how many different restaurants and

cocktail lounges to support us. The time she took the

day off work to talk to the ADC man, her dressed in

her best pants suit, him sitting in our kitchen rocker

in a suit of his own, one even a nine-year-old kid like

me could tell was a lot better than hers, with a clip-board

in his lap and a fat, shiny pen in his fingers. Her

answering the insulting, embarrassing questions he

asked with a fixed smile on her mouth, even offering

him more coffee, because if he turned in the right

report she'd get an extra fifty dollars a month, a lousy

fifty bucks. Lying on her bed after he'd gone, crying,

and when I came in to sit beside her she had tried to

smile and said ADC didn't stand for Aid to Dependent

Children but Awful Damn Crapheads. I had laughed

and then she laughed, too, because you had to laugh,

we'd found that out. When it was just you and your

fat chain-smoking ma against the world, laughing was quite often the only way you could get through with-out going insane and beating your fists on the walls. But there was more to it than that, you know. For peo-ple like us, little people who went scurrying through the world like mice in a cartoon, sometimes laughing at the assholes was the only revenge you could ever get. Her working all those jobs and taking the over-time and taping her ankles when they swelled and putting her tips away in a jar marked alan's college fund-just like one of those dopey rags-to-riches stories, yeah, yeah-and telling me again and again that I had to work hard, other kids could maybe afford to play Freddy Fuckaround at school but I couldn't because she could put away her tips until doomsday cracked and there still wouldn't be enough; in the end it was going to come down to scholarships and loans if I was going to go to college and I had to go to college because it was the only way out for me . . . and for her. So I had worked hard, you want to believe I did, because I wasn't blind-I saw how heavy she was, I saw how much she smoked (it was her only private pleasure . . . her only vice, if you're one of those who must take that view), and I knew that some day our positions would reverse and I'd be the one taking care of her. With a college education and a good job, maybe I could do that. I wanted to do that. I loved her. She had a fierce temper and an ugly mouth on her-

that day we waited for the Bullet and then I chickened out wasn't the only time she ever yelled at me and then swatted me-but I loved her in spite of it. Partly even because of it. I loved her when she hit me as much as when she kissed me. Do you understand that? Me either. And that's all right. I don't think you can sum up lives or explain families, and we were a family, she and I, the smallest family there is, a tight little family of two, a shared secret. If you had asked, I would have said I'd do anything for her. And now that was exactly what I was being asked to do. I was being asked to die for her, to die in her place, even though she had lived half her life, probably a lot more. I had hardly begun mine.

"What say, Al?" George Staub asked. "Time's wast-ing."

"I can't decide something like that," I said hoarsely.

The moon sailed above the road, swift and brilliant.

"It's not fair to ask me."

"I know, and believe me, that's what they all say." Then he lowered his voice. "But I gotta tell you some-thing-if you don't decide by the time we get back to the first house lights, I'll have to take you both." He frowned, then brightened again, as if remembering there was good news as well as bad. "You could ride together in the backseat if I took you both, talk over old times, there's that."