Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

16 R EBECCA July 25, 1990

  When I see myself in the reflection of the truck’s window, I understand why nobody has stopped to pick me up. I’ve been in the rain for three hours, and I haven’t even reached the highway yet. My hair is plastered against my head, and my features remind me of a soft-boiled egg. Mud is caked on my arms and legs in paisley shapes: I don’t look like a hitchhiker; I look like a Vietnam vet.

  “Thank God,” I say under my breath, and I blow a cloud of frost between my teeth. Massachusetts is not California. It can’t be more than fifty degrees out here, although it’s July, and the sun’s barely set.

  I am not put off by truckers anymore, not since coming crosscountry. They look worse than they are, for the most part, like the so-called tough guys in school who refuse to throw the first punch. The man in the cab of this truck is shaved bald, with a tattoo of a snake running from the crown of his head down his neck. So I smile at him. “I’m trying to get to New Hampshire.”

  The trucker stares at me blankly, as if I have mentioned a state he’s never heard of. He says something out loud, and it’s not directed to me, and suddenly I see another person appear in the passenger seat. I cannot tell if it is a boy or a girl but it seems this person had just woken up. She-no, he-runs a hand through his hair and sniffs in to clear his nose. My shoulders begin to shiver again; I can see there isn’t room for me.

  “Listen,” the driver says, “You ain’t running away from home.”

  “Okay. I’m not.”

  “Is she thick, or what.” He squints at me. “We can’t stow away minors.”

  “Minors? I’m eighteen. I just don’t look it right now. I’ve been on the road for hours.”

  The boy in the passenger seat, who is wearing a White Snake shirt with cut-off sleeves, turns my way. He grins. He is missing his two front teeth. “Eighteen, hey?” For the first time I understand what it is like to be undressed by someone’s eyes. I cross my hands in front of me. “Let her get in the back, Spud. She can ride with the rest of the meat.” The two of them start to laugh hysterically.

  “The back?”

  The White Snake boy points with his thumb. “Lift the hatch and make sure you lock it from the inside. And,” he leans out the window so that I can smell the chocolate curdles of his breath. “We’ll stop for a little rest, baby. Real soon.” He slaps the driver high five, rolls up his window.

  It is an unmarked white truck so I don’t know what to expect from its contents. I have to swing myself up on the steel frame to unhook the latch, then swing down and pull the handle with me. I know they are in a hurry so I climb back inside and pull the doors shut with the strings someone has attached to the padded inside.

  There are no windows. It is pitch dark, and freezing. I reach around me like I am blind and feel the shapes of chickens shrinkwrapped in plastic, the T-bones in steaks. The truck begins to bounce. Through a wall of raw flesh I can hear the boy with the White Snake shirt, singing along to a tape of Guns ‘n’ Roses.

  I am going to die, I think, and I am much more terrified than I was walking along the road at night. I am going to freeze to death and when they open this hatch two hours from now I’ll be blue and curled like an embryo. Think, I tell myself. Think. How in God’s name do the Eskimos live?

  Then I remember. Way back, in fifth grade we studied them-the Inuit-and I had asked Miss Cleary how they stay warm in a home made of ice. Well, they have fires, she said. But believe it or not the ice is a house. Astrange house but a house indeed. It traps their body heat.

  There is not much room to move in here but it is enough. I squat, wary of standing in a moving truck. Little by little I move meat away from the wall of the truck and pile it back up, leaving a tiny enclosure for my own body. It gets easier as my eyes adjust to the dark. I find that if I layer chicken with tenderloins, the walls don’t come tumbling down.

  “What you doing back there, baby,” I hear. “You getting yourself-ready for me?”

  And then the rough voice of the driver: “You gonna shut up Earl, or I’ll have to throw you back there to cool down.”

  I curl into the small space I’ve created and wrap my arms tight around myself. Soon, I think, there’ll be someone else to do this for me. I don’t know that it is any warmer, but in my head I think it is and that really makes a difference.

  I know it was her. I know that she was the one who told Sam to get rid of Hadley, or else why would Hadley go? He was happy there, Sam was happy with him there, there weren’t any problems. It was my mother; she gets in her head an idea that she can run the world for everyone and she actually thinks she’s right.

  It’s okay for her to run around giggling like an idiot with Sam, right? But if I fall in love-real love, you know-it’s the end of the world. Hadley and I really have something. I know what I’m talking about, too. I’ve had boyfriends for a week or so in school, and this is nothing like it. Hadley’s told me about the way his father died working in front of him; about the time he almost drowned in a frozen pond. He’s told me about the time he stole a pack of Twinkies from the Wal-Mart, and couldn’t sleep till he gave it back. He’s cried, sometimes, telling me these things. He’s said there’s no one quite like me.

  We’ll get married-isn’t it Mississippi or someplace like that where fifteen is legal?-and we’ll live on a farm of our own. We’ll have strawberries and wax beans and cherry tomatoes and apples, I suppose, and absolutely no rhubarb. We’ll have five kids, and if they all look like Hadley that’s fine with me, as long as I have one little girl to myself. I’ve always wanted someone like me.

  I’ll invite my father for the weekend-that’ll drive my mother crazy. And when she and Sam come to visit we won’t let them in. We’ll post Dobermans trained for her scent. And when she stands outside her car and calls to us, begging forgiveness, we’ll turn on the outside stereo speakers and flood away her voice with Tracy Chapman, Buffalo Springfield and those other ballads Hadley likes.

  He came to me before he left. He sneaked into my room and pressed his hand against my mouth before I could speak. He told me he had to leave and then he slipped off his boots and got under the covers. He put his hands up my nightgown. I told him they were cold, but he just laughed and pressed them against my belly until he caught my heat. “I don’t understand,” he whispered. “Sam and me have been together for almost fifteen years. He’s more my brother than my brother. This is more my home.” I thought he might be crying and that was something I did not want to see, so I didn’t turn to face him. He said, “I’ll be back to get you, Rebecca, I mean that. I’ve never been with anyone like you.” Those, I think, were the exact words.

  But I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for him, watching my mother coring Macs with Sam in the kitchen or rubbing his feet after dinner. I wasn’t going to watch that and pretend like nothing had happened. Obviously, she doesn’t care about me, or she wouldn’t have pushed Hadley away.

  Once I said to Hadley, “You know you’re almost old enough to be my father.” I mean, ten years is some difference. And he told me I was no ordinary fifteen-year-old. Fifteen-year-olds in Stow read Tiger Beat and go to the Boston malls to see visiting soap opera stars. I told him that Stow was about three years behind, then-in San Diego that’s what twelve-year-olds do. And Hadley said, “Well, maybe these kids are twelve after all.”

  I believe in love. I think it just hits you and pulls the rug out from underneath you and, like a baby, demands your attention every minute of the day. When I get close to Hadley I breathe faster. My knees shake. If I rub my eyes hard, I can see his image in the corners. We’ve been together one whole week.

  We haven’t done it yet. We’ve come awfully close-like that time in the hay on the horse blankets. But he’s the one who keeps pushing me away, what do you make of that? I thought all guys wanted was sex-which is another reason I’m crazy about him. He said to me, “Don’t you want to be a kid for a couple of days longer?”

  My mother told me about sex when I was four. She started by saying, “When a man and a woman love each other very much . . .” and then she stopped herself and said, “When a man and a woman are married and love each other very much