SWEET RIDE by Scott Nadelson
The van shows up while Noah’s in school. He spots it when the bus drops him off one afternoon in early fall, a rusty hump in the strip of woods separating his family’s driveway from the Weiners’. Whether someone has driven it there or had it towed, he can only guess. It’s at least a decade old, dirty beige with a flaking red stripe around its center, porthole windows on its sides. Its back fender is missing, a corroded tailpipe exposed. Birch leaves soon cover its roof and hood. Snow follows. In spring its tires sink in mud, which the sun then bakes into hard clay. Weeds grow thigh-high in front of its doors. Noah never sees it move.
But he knows its engine turns over, and that Carl Weiner keeps enough gas in its tank to let it idle for an hour at a time. Every evening Carl sits in there with the doors closed, stereo cranked loud enough for Noah to hear drumbeats all the way in his bedroom on the opposite side of the house. From the kitchen he watches smoke seep from the driver’s side window, exhales coming ten or twelve seconds apart. His mother catches him staring, and her face settles into a look of pinched consternation, the same one she turns on him when he comes downstairs for a glass of water late at night to find her and his father snuggled together on the couch, flushed and whispering.
“Give him some privacy,” she says. “If you were out there, would you want someone gawking?”
Not long after he hears her on the phone, and from a few of her muffled phrases – temporary, I’m sure and just needs time to get back on his feet – he knows she’s talking to Carl’s mother, Jackie Weiner. They play bridge once a week and work together on a shared garden that straddles their backyards, but they aren’t really friends. Jackie’s a loudmouth, according to his mother, her husband Bruce a shlub. To Jackie, he’s sure, his mother’s a snob. She probably thinks better of his father, who’s breezily sociable and generally disarming, though that’s never kept her from gloating whenever Bruce, a sales executive at a pharmaceutical firm, gets a bigger bonus or a raise.
“Have you thought about finding him a counselor?” Noah’s mother asks, and then winces while listening to the response. “I’m not suggesting anything, Jackie. I’m just trying to help.”
When she finally puts the phone down, his father makes a dismissive gesture, flicking invisible lint from the front of his shirt. “Not everyone needs a shrink,” he says. “Kid’s just down in the dumps. Who wouldn’t be after getting kicked out of two schools in two years?”
“When people ask me what I think, I tell them,” his mother says. “If she didn’t want my opinion, she should have called someone else.”
Noah’s older sister Judith, rummaging in the refrigerator, rattles jars and clears her throat. “He didn’t get kicked out,” she says. “He dropped out.”
“What’s the difference?” her father asks.
“Free will,” Jude says.
“As opposed to what, divine intervention?”
“He chose his own destiny.”
“Sure,” their father says. “He chose to fail all his classes, throw away his parents’ money, and come crawling home.”
* * *
Whether Carl has dropped out or been kicked, Noah doesn’t know. Only this is certain: After graduating from Union Knoll High School with high honors, class of 1987, he left for college at Vanderbilt. But as a sophomore he transferred across the North Carolina border to Appalachian State. He lasted nine months there before coming home to New Jersey. Now twenty, he rides his bike to a job as checkout clerk at Shop Rite and sits in a disintegrating Chevy G20 in the evenings, smoking and listening to music turned up loud.
Noah has just turned fourteen. He’s a quiet kid who does well enough in school not to get questioned by his parents, though not well enough to get singled out by teachers or by those kids who’d delight in torturing the smarts out of him. He plays passable shortstop on the junior high baseball team. He cleans his room without being asked and calls his grandparents every week. But this version of him has recently come to seem like an easy default, not necessarily the person he has to be. Over the past year he’s discovered that he no longer cares very much about things that have long interested him: baseball, fishing, exploring the woods behind his house. Nothing has yet replaced these interests, except for girls, who remain a mystery far out of reach. He now has the feeling he’s been waiting for the right time to become something else, or something more. He has several close friends but has begun looking around to see if others might prove more exciting. It’s strange to realize he doesn’t know where to direct his attention, what to hope for, and for months a vague, uncertain expectation has been building in him, a sense that he’ll soon be swept up by new and, so far, undetected desires. The appearance of the van speaks to this feeling, though how he’s not yet sure.
He’s known Carl most of his life. Despite their age difference, he can tell that something has happened to Carl while he was away, that he’s been altered in that time. It isn’t just the hair he’s grown out, or the fringed leather jacket he wears over ragged t‑shirts instead of the polos he favored in high school. There’s something uneasy in his smile when he greets Noah the few times he comes upon Carl flat on his back beside the van, sunny afternoons in late spring when the bus drops him off an hour before Jude finishes tennis practice.
By then Carl has been home seven or eight months, but the van looks no different than when Noah first saw it. Carl pulls his head from the chassis, says, “Noah Gottlieb. The little prophet. Ready to help me build my ark?” and then touches his hand to his cheek as if to make sure his mouth is behaving as he expects. He pretends to work for a few minutes and then pushes himself off the ground with a grunt, flexing his arms. There’s a smudge of grease on his chin, so precise Noah can’t help thinking Carl has wiped it there for his benefit. “How long will it take?” he asks, meaning to fix the van, but Carl only glances at him oddly, and answers in the voice that has gone raspy in the two years he’s been away, making Noah lean forward to hear him. “If I knew that, man, I’d have the key to the kingdom.”
As far as Noah can tell, he’s made only one improvement. The new stereo fits its compartment awkwardly, the deck poking out an extra inch past the dashboard, wires dangling below. Carl fishes a key from a hiding place under the front fender, revs the engine a few times, and pulls a box of tapes from beneath the passenger’s seat. The only music worth listening to, he says, was played by bands you would have seen in Golden Gate Park in 1967: Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, The Grateful Dead. “But only the early stuff,” he adds. “When they didn’t waste everyone’s time with twenty-minute drum solos.”
His favorite, though, is Moby Grape. Hands down. Ever heard of them? Noah gives a half-shrug, half-nod to signal that of course he’s heard of them, who hasn’t? But Carl doesn’t acknowledge the gesture. Best band in the world, he says, but hardly anyone even knows the name. In his voice is a mixture of indignation and pride, suggesting, Noah knows, that only a select few, the rare and worthy, can appreciate true genius. He pops in a tape, lights a cigarette, and closes his eyes. Noah doesn’t mind the music, which is bluesy and raw, with jangling harmonies, but it doesn’t make him bob his head in the dreamy way Carl does, shaggy hair fanning his eyes and swirling clouds of smoke that blow out of his nose. Instead he drums one hand against the van and keeps the other in his pocket. It’s the first time he’s heard a bootleg, and there’s something unhinged about the live recording, sudden changes of volume or bursts of static, people shouting in the background even during the ballads. At any moment he expects to hear one of the amplifiers blow, or the musicians to throw down their instruments and run into the crowd.
“If I could go back in time and see them at the Fillmore,” Carl says between songs, “I’d quit this place in a second. Never give it another thought.”
But the Haight isn’t the Haight anymore, he adds. The closest thing is what he’s found in North Carolina, up in the mountains. He’s going back as soon as he’s saved some cash, fixed up the van, dealt with some lingering hang‑ups. Then he’ll stay down there for good. It’s a chance for him to become part of a family, a real one, not like these people who believe they can control his thoughts just because they fed and clothed him for eighteen years. He flicks a hand in the direction of his house, and Noah considers relating his mother’s assessment of Carl’s parents: loudmouth, shlub. But by then another song has started, and Carl disappears behind his mask of hair and smoke.
Noah doesn’t know what the Haight is and hears it instead as “the Hate.” Why anyone would want to go there he has no idea. And when Carl mentions hang‑ups, Noah thinks he’s talking about the telephone. In general, he doesn’t understand what Carl’s looking for, what sort of family he wants. But he recognizes the longing in Carl’s voice, one he’s experienced often enough, staring out his bedroom window at the bland curve of Crescent Ridge Road, the silent house across the street occupied by a couple whose kids have grown up and moved away, an old basketball hoop on the garage missing its net, the door of their mailbox always left open like a slack tongue. He doesn’t know what to dream about but dreaming for its own sake makes all the sense he needs.
When Carl flips the tape over, Noah asks him to turn up the volume.
“Hell yes,” Carl says, and twists the knob.
* * *
The days Jude doesn’t have practice, the high school bus drops her off twenty minutes before Noah’s. He shouldn’t be surprised to find her sitting on the hood of the van one afternoon, but the sight of her leaning back on her elbows, heels on the fender, knees sticking through ripped denim, makes him hesitate on the sidewalk. Carl hunches on a rock nearby, smoking and bobbing, face hidden in waves of dark hair. It’s a warm day, and he has his shirt off, the top button of his jeans undone, and this time a grease smudge mars his chest, just as carefully placed, Noah thinks, as the previous one on his chin.
But this isn’t what bothers him. It’s that the driver’s side door is open, and out of it churns the same bluesy riffs, the same loose beats and rough harmonies. Isn’t he the one who agreed the Grape is the best band in the world, though he first heard of them only a week ago? Hasn’t he proven himself worthy? He hates the idea that anyone else in the neighborhood, much less his own sister, might be among the chosen.
Only then does he really take Carl in – this new permutation, so unlike the one he knew he can’t quite believe they’re the same person. The former Carl had fluffy hair, combed straight back from his forehead, a Star of David on a silver chain around his neck, a narrow chest that seemed to swim in oversized shirts, a studious squint that made his features look too big for his face. Now he’s straightened his posture, and his shoulders turn out to be broader than Noah realized. Framed by long hair, the sizeable nose and ears are imposing rather than ungainly. More hair grows in a triangle on his chest and circles each nipple, and on his right shoulder is a black tattoo of what appears to be a figure eight toppled onto its side.
He knows Jude is also taking Carl in, sneaking glances as he sucks long drags from his cigarette. She doesn’t move to the beat, just chews the fingernails of her left hand and spits whatever she’s loosened into the weeds. Do the tapes make her nervous, too? She doesn’t wave to him when he approaches, or even look up as he sits in the grass a few yards away, trying to bob his head in rhythm with Carl’s. Carl doesn’t greet him, either, not even when the song ends and he surfaces from what seems less trance than a state of forced bliss, painful because it’s so fleeting. He raises his head slowly and forms that odd, closed-lip smile that doesn’t quite settle into comfortable shape, instead rising and slipping and rising again into something closer to a grimace. “So?” he asks. “What do you think?”
Noah wants to be the one to answer. It’s his chance to show Carl he’s chosen wisely in playing the music for him first. But he struggles to find any words. The right words, the ones Carl wants to hear. How are you supposed to talk about a song? He can imagine describing the way it makes him want to jump up and kick at the weeds or at the van’s tires, the bouncy frenetic energy that seems to have nothing to do with Carl’s languid head-bobbing. Is it possible they’re hearing two different songs? Or that Carl is hearing it wrong?
“Subliminal,” Jude says, before Noah can come with anything. She, too, has her eyes closed now, and instead of chewing nails she presses a finger to the bridge of her nose. The word doesn’t sound appropriate, no closer to the music than Carl’s movement. In fact, it sounds like gibberish, and though he knows he’s heard it plenty of times before, now he can’t call up its meaning. He makes a noise of disapproval, halfway between a cough and a chuckle, to let her know she’s full of shit.
But it doesn’t matter what he thinks. She has Carl’s full attention now. The labored smile fades, and he peers at her with surprise, as if he’s only just noticed her sitting on the hood of a beat‑up van no one ever drives. And seeing him scrutinize her that way releases Noah from his jealousy. He wants her to open her eyes and realize she’s being assessed, maybe admired. She doesn’t get a lot of glances from boys, and though she never confides in him, Noah always knows by her extended silences, her sudden irritability, when she’s suffering from an unrequited crush. It’s been a regular feature of his childhood to wish Jude happier than she is.
Few people would call her attractive, and certainly no one would use the word “pretty” to describe her. She has unruly black hair, more bushy than curly, made stiff by too much hairspray and cut with bangs that tumble in a tight wave over dense eyebrows. Her nose is long, her mouth set in a downward curve that makes her seem more stern than she really is. Altogether her look is severe, unapproachable. He tries to guess at its appeal, especially when she plays it up as she does sitting on Carl’s van, wearing dark eyeliner to match her hair, tight jeans with strings hanging from holes in the knees, chunky silver rings on slender fingers with unpolished nails. Carl might notice the long legs muscled from tennis, the prominent collarbones, the lips waxy with ChapStick. Whatever he sees, Noah wants Jude to know about it, and he clears his throat to say something about the music and make her look up. He still has nothing in mind and has no idea what will come out if he gets the chance. But he’s hesitated too long.
“You got a good ear,” Carl says, and looks away.
Jude keeps her eyes closed and waits for the next song.
* * *
Noah doesn’t find it strange for a twenty-year-old college drop-out to take an interest in his sixteen-year-old sister. It doesn’t occur to him to think of it as inappropriate or creepy or illegal. If anything, the prospect of a romance excites him. He wants kids to see him around with Carl, to wonder and envy. He imagines the three of them riding to Lenape Lake once summer starts, pulling up to the little beach in the freshly painted G20, catching looks from the jocky delinquent types who always claim the sunbathing dock floating thirty yards out in the brown water shimmering with oil slicks. He wonders if Jude has a similar vision in mind, but when they leave Carl’s yard, she doesn’t mention him, not even tangentially, except to say, “Don’t tell Mom we’ve been hanging out over there.”
“I’m not an idiot,” he answers.
“Fooled me.”
“I’ll tell Dad instead.”
“He never pays attention to what we do.”
“He would if he saw Carl checking you out.”
“No one checked me out.”
“He must need glasses.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You had your eyes closed. Too busy dreaming about his chest hair.” He runs a hand down his own chest, hairless beneath his shirt, and lets his voice go high, though Jude’s is deep, close to husky. “So soft, but manly.”
“Idiot,” she says.
After that, nothing. She doesn’t deny the attraction any more than she admits it. But her silence undermines Noah’s attempts to needle her, and after trying a couple more times, he quits. Instead he watches the way she runs the ends of her hair through her fingers whenever she speaks to Carl, eyes flitting up as soon as he turns his back. When they aren’t listening to music, Carl rants about how much he hates it here, how terrible it is for the soul, how they should get out the first chance they have. “This place, man,” he says. “It chews you up and spits you out, and you just go along with it because you don’t know any better. And if you stick around until you’re an adult, then you’re just this walking gob of chewed up . . . I mean, you’re a fucking spitball.”
Noah doesn’t know what he objects to, exactly, what he wants to warn them away from. Is it their neighborhood, their town, New Jersey? Or being twenty and stuck living with your parents after an aborted attempt to escape? He’s heard his mother use the word “depressed” when talking about Carl, but the term doesn’t mean much to him. Whatever failures or disappointments have sent him home after a year and a half of college seem part of an important reckoning. If he sounds a little lost or lonely or desperate, isn’t that only because he’s trapped in a house with people who have no vision for their lives beyond going to work and playing golf and saving up for a vacation to Bermuda?
“My folks are pissed off all the time for no reason,” he says. “Yours, too, I bet. Because they’re bored out of their minds. But they go around pretending this is exactly what they want. It’s a simmering pot of repression. One day the lid’s gonna blow right the fuck off.”
If Jude sees him any differently, she keeps it to herself. Maybe she’s too flattered by his attention to question what prompts it, or maybe she thinks she can help him, ease the loneliness and lend new purpose to his days. In either case, she doesn’t shy away. When her tennis season ends, every day Noah comes home to find her sitting on the hood of the van, listening to music while Carl works – or pretends to work – underneath. The days grow hotter, and she exchanges jeans for shorts, t‑shirts for tank tops. She paints her fingernails and works hard to keep from chewing them. Instead of ChapStick, she wears dark red lipstick. She smiles dreamy smiles. In the evening, she snaps at her parents when they ask innocuous questions about her day. In turn, their parents speak to each other tersely. Noah senses something momentous coming. Even trouble he’ll welcome as a balm to the tense anticipation that now makes nights in the stagnant house unbearable.
Enough, he thinks. Just get it over with.
* * *
One afternoon, Carl says, “I’m riding into Chatwin. There’s a place there . . . Better see it for yourselves. Wanna come?”
He doesn’t look at either of them as he speaks, and his voice is even more hushed than usual, caught, it seems, halfway up his chest. Jude hops off the van without a word and heads toward their garage to get her bike. Noah expects her to give some sign that she doesn’t want him to tag along. But when he doesn’t follow, she calls over her shoulder, “We’re on our own tonight,” which means their parents will be out to dinner and not home before eight. Then he expects Carl to object, or at least make a show of disappointment. Doesn’t he want to be alone with her? But instead his voice returns to ordinary: relaxed and raspy, confident and secretive. “You got to be cool about this. Can’t tell anyone.”
Downtown Chatwin is only a four-mile ride from their quiet street in Union Knoll, with its brick-fronted colonials and sloping lawns, but the world changes along the route. Past Lenape Lake, sprawling waterfront homes give way to turn-of‑the-century bungalows with sagging front porches and flaking paint. Then, where Lakeview Road widens and turns into Russell Avenue, come tilting rowhouses followed by sooty apartment buildings with rusted fire escapes. At its end is Victory Park, the old town square. The neighborhood around it was once a shopping district, but most foot traffic has been siphoned away by the Heritage Mall, built a few miles farther south. The square still vibrates with the aftershocks of recent collapse. Sheets of plywood cover the plate glass of the appliance store and the Woolworth’s. The old brick library has been abandoned for a new building beside the mall, and the marquee of the once-grand movie theater advertises only second-run horror flicks like Puppet Master and Psycho Cop and Halloween 5. The pedestrians who used to stroll through the park have since left it to groups of men who pass wine bottles and sleep on benches when the weather turns warm.
Noah has passed through this part of town before, plenty of times, on the way to Temple Emek Shalom, where he had his bar mitzvah just over a year earlier. But rolling through on a bike is nothing like being in a car, with glass separating him from those crumbling buildings and boarded‑up stores. His mother isn’t there to quietly reach behind and push down door locks. There’s nothing between him and the ancient trees of the park, which cast deep shadows across the paths, a rotting picnic table visible beside a statue covered in pigeons. The men drinking on the lawn watch them as they pass, and he pedals hard to keep up with Carl, who stops at the southeast corner of the square. Jude pulls up a few seconds later. Noah hops off his bike and starts to chain it to a lamppost, but Carl says, “Leave it there, and you’ll have a long walk home.”
He leads them to a squat brick building, old but intact, and then to a blank steel door between a shuttered storefront and a still-operating pawn shop, with stacks of stereos behind barred windows. The door is painted black, no sign to mark it, not even a street number, only a button that makes no sound when Carl presses it. Then he gives Noah a wink, an awkward one because it isn’t accompanied by a smile. Is it supposed to be reassuring? He’s dismounted from his bike, but Jude stays on hers, one foot still on a pedal, both hands on the handlebars. They wait thirty seconds, maybe longer, but nothing happens. Carl cups his hands around Jude’s ear and whispers something that makes her squint and pick at her lower lip. Then one of his hands slips around to her back, fingers spread between shoulder blades.
The park’s trees have just finished leafing out, their green impossibly bright against the backdrop of filthy brick and stone. One of the men has broken away from the group and started toward them, cutting straight across the overgrown lawn, skirting another statue, this one of a Revolutionary War hero in a tricorn hat. He wears a knit cap and a heavy camouflage jacket, though it’s hot enough for Noah to sweat in short sleeves, and he has a mustache that cuts all the way across his face to connect with bushy sideburns. Out of a nearby storm drain comes a funky smell, rotting leaves, maybe, or the last whiff of an animal that died a week earlier.
From across the street the guy calls, “It’s your lucky day.”
“Don’t answer,” Carl says, and presses the button again.
“I said it’s your lucky day. Don’t you want to know why?”
When he’s halfway across the street, he pushes up the cap and locks eyes with Noah. And then Noah can’t help himself. He wants to know what the guy considers lucky. He calls back, “Why?”
Then something buzzes and clicks. Carl yanks the door open, and they roll their bikes inside. The guy’s face appears in the gap, closing in on them, but the door swings shut before he reaches it. In front of them a narrow set of stairs leads to a hallway lit by a single tube in a fixture with no cover. Noah’s shirt is smudged with chain grease by the time they make it up and lean their bikes against the wall. At the end of the hall a dark curtain fills a doorway with no door, bluish light seeping around its edges, along with a kind of music he doesn’t recognize, a jumble of reverberating hums. Carl’s hand is on Jude’s back again. Noah has the feeling that he’s pushing her forward, though maybe she passes through the curtain on her own. Carl goes in after her. Noah hesitates a moment, standing alone in the empty hallway, listening to the strange music, and then follows.
The feeling that accompanies him through the doorway is a strange mixture of elation and letdown. He’s never seen anything like it, and yet it’s exactly as he’s expected, exotic but ordinary. Tie-dyed tapestries with vaguely Indian patterns – elephants parading in a circle around a feminine figure with too many arms – cover the walls and windows, and drifts of pungent smoke graze the low ceiling. Elsewhere, skulls and roses and dancing bears. Shelves display hand-blown glass pipes, and knitted ponchos hang from clothes racks.
The only astonishing thing is that a place like this has been here all along, just a few miles from Union Knoll. For some reason he thinks of his father taking the train into Manhattan every day for work, the disappointment he must feel every evening when he returns. Noah wanders through the warren of narrow rooms expecting to hear someone tell him he isn’t allowed to be here, breathing in the incense and ogling the pipes, browsing racks crammed with import records and bootleg tapes, most of which can’t be legal. The latter are arranged not by band name, it seems, but by quality: those with typed or photocopied covers at the top, those handwritten in the middle, those without covers at the bottom. Some of the tapes have no writing on them at all, nothing to identify their contents, and they sell for a dollar each. “Mystery selections,” Carl says when Noah crouches down to examine them. “Most of it’s crap, but you’ll occasionally pull out a diamond.” Carl scans the cassettes quickly, slipping a few out to read song titles, giving a whistle when he comes across something that entices him.
The only names Noah recognizes are Led Zeppelin and The Who. He guesses Carl won’t approve of either. Since he doesn’t know what else to look for, he grabs a couple of mystery tapes, along with one from the typed bunch whose name appeals to him. On the spine it reads, QUICKSILVER WINTERLAND 1968, and on the cover is a blurry photocopy of four skinny, long-haired boys leaning against a brick wall, one with a big belt buckle and a top hat too small for him squeezed down onto his forehead. “You got a good eye,” Carl says. It sounds too rehearsed, too much like what he’s said to Jude, for Noah to take it as genuine praise. He has twelve bucks in his pocket, most of three weeks’ allowance, and the tape costs eight. He puts the mystery selections away. Jude, who has a weekend job at a bakery in Lenape, spends three times as much on an ankle-length skirt made out of the same material as one of the tapestries. She holds it to her waist, twirls, and lets out an uncharacteristic giggle too girlish for her and altogether phony.
“Made for you,” Carl says.
Back on the street, Noah expects to find the guy in the knit cap waiting to confront them or to hit them up for money. But he’s nowhere in sight. The sidewalk outside the pawn shop is empty, though the square itself, with a convergence of one-way streets and stoplights on every corner, is choked with traffic and honking horns. Their bikes beat it out of there much faster than the cars. When they make it back to Carl’s yard, Jude unfolds the skirt and reveals what’s hidden inside: a glass pipe, purple and blue like the fabric, blown in the shape of a butterfly.
“You bought that?” Noah asks, though he already knows the answer.
“Who’d pay twenty-five bucks for a hunk of glass?” Jude says.
Carl gives her that naked stare again, no smile, no softness around the eyes. For a moment he says nothing. Then: “Goddamn.” Jude shrugs and chews her nails. To Noah, he says, “Did you know you had an outlaw in the family?”
“Too bad we don’t have anything to put in here,” Jude says. She holds the pipe up to the sun, still high above the horizon, and a blue shadow falls across her cheek and jaw.
“I might have a little something,” Carl says.
Then they both look to Noah, as if he’s the one who should decide what will happen next. He can’t tell if they want him to stick around, to stand in the way of what’s coming, or if they’re waiting for his blessing. He studies the tape he’s bought, the unfamiliar song titles. Then he mutters something about heading home to listen to it while doing algebra homework. They seem more nervous than relieved when he stands up, Jude playing with her hair, Carl brushing leaves from the van’s roof.
“There’s lasagna in the fridge,” Jude says. “Stick it in the oven for forty-five minutes. Three-fifty. Or eat it cold. It’s not bad that way.”
“Algebra won’t ever be the same after you listen to that,” Carl says.
Noah wheels his bike across the wooden strip to his driveway, puts it away in the garage, and looks out the kitchen window. The back door of the van hangs open, and Jude crawls in. He cuts a piece of cold lasagna and brings it to his room, where he won’t be able to see what’s happening. He puts his headphones on, too, so he won’t hear anything but the Quicksilver cassette, which is badly recorded, guitar fuzz hardly distinguishable from tape noise and applause. Without Carl listening along with him, the music sounds muddy and amateurish, and it distracts him too much to do any homework. So he just lies on his bed, picturing the elephant tapestries and the butterfly pipe, the guy in the knit cap and army jacket who told him it’s his lucky day. Is it?
Jude comes home a few minutes before their parents pull into the driveway. Her face is pale, her lips swollen. She isn’t carrying the patterned skirt. Though the tape has come to an end, Noah keeps his headphones on as she passes his bedroom and pretends not to notice the red mark on her neck.
“Who left the lasagna sitting out?” their mother calls up the stairs.
“Who knows where the time goes?” their father calls out in response.
A couple of hours later, when he takes off the headphones and gets into bed, drumbeats pulse through the screens of his open windows.
* * *
The next morning he wakes to find Jude sitting on the end of his bed. The red mark on her neck has purpled into a bruise, and her face is drawn and dark but calm. “I don’t want him to leave,” she says.
He pushes himself up and blinks away a dream he can’t remember. The back of his throat immediately begins to burn. “Is he going to? Now?”
“He didn’t say when. Soon, I guess.”
“Are you going with him?” he asks, and feels ridiculous for the next question, which he can’t stop himself from asking. “Can I come, too?”
“He has a girlfriend down there.”
He knows he should feel anger on her behalf, betrayal, but it stirs only distantly, something he might reach for if he can get rid of the burning that has now crept into his nose. He wipes a hand across his eyes in case they’ve started to leak.
“He shouldn’t have messed with me,” Jude says.
“Is the van ready? He said he won’t leave until he can drive it.”
“We’ll find out,” Jude says. “Get dressed.”
Their parents have already left for work. Clouds have formed overnight, and by the time they make it outside, backpacks on as if they’re going to the bus stop, it’s begun to drizzle. All the shades at the Weiners’ are lowered, and they creep beneath the birches, crunching leaves as quietly as they can. Jude finds the key under the van’s front fender. Without turning the ignition, she eases off the emergency brake and rolls it backward out of the yard. To keep from making extra noise, they leave the doors open until they reach the street. Then Jude turns the key. The engine sputters and rumbles. They slam the doors hard, Jude presses the gas, and the van jerks forward.
Raindrops patter the scummy windshield, but the cracked wipers only mix water with dirt and decomposing leaves to make a brown film on the glass. Where the window cranks should be, rusty bolts poke out of ragged holes. The driver’s window is stuck open less than an inch, the passenger’s not at all. Jude’s hair, still damp from the shower, clings to her neck, and Noah’s back has begun to sweat. The inside of the car steams. Before they make it to the end of the street, he leans forward to clear away condensation with a forearm.
Because Jude doesn’t yet have her driver’s license – she’s had her learner’s permit for all of a month – they stay off busy Lakeview Drive, which often has speed traps at the top of Crescent Ridge. Instead they snake a circuitous route of back streets and then down the long stretch of Lenape Road, which skirts the far edge of the lake, a steep bank to the water on one side, a rock wall on the other. The road is narrow, and the van keeps pulling to the left. Whenever a car approaches from the opposite direction, Jude jerks the wheel, and they swerve toward the guard rail and the brown water, pocked by raindrops, lapping at the rocky shore below. Before they’re halfway along the bank, a big black pickup catches up to them and rides their tail. Their back window is too dirty to see the driver’s face clearly, but Noah thinks he can make out a baseball cap and sunglasses, though the clouds have darkened further, and a row of lights blare on top of the truck’s cab.
The speed limit is twenty miles an hour, and Jude holds steady between twenty-five and thirty. But when the truck won’t back off, she taps the brake once, twice, and then speeds up. It does back off then, but only for a moment. When it charges, it comes with horn sounding, silver grille suddenly filling the side mirror. Noah thinks for sure it will hit them, and not just a nudge, either. If they’re lucky, they’ll skid into the guard rail and slide to stop, but that isn’t how he pictures it, envisioning instead the van plunging nose-first into the lake, water seeping through the stuck window, the dim light growing dimmer as they sink. And all he can think is that in either case, this will be over before it has gone very far. He doesn’t know how to feel about that. A part of him is disappointed. He still wants something big and new and transformative, something to carry him forward into the rest of his life. But another part has been trying to get up the nerve to tell Jude they should turn around and go back, return the van and pretend they’ve never touched it. He closes his eyes and waits.
But there’s no impact. When he opens them, Jude still has control of the van, that sharp face of hers – jutting nose and chin, chapped lips, four pimples on her forehead torn open and scabbed over – set perfectly still above the steering wheel, frozen not with fear but furious concentration. The pickup has jumped into the eastbound lane, horn louder as it comes even with them. Hit us, asshole, he thinks, and reaches over Jude’s arm to punch their own horn, which only squawks a little, hardly audible over the grind of the engine. Jude bats his hand away. When the truck makes a move to pass, she jams her foot on the accelerator. She holds it there even when she sees another car coming toward them, a little red compact, small as a rodent, Noah thinks, roadkill. The truck edges forward, and through the window slit he can see the passenger, also in a baseball cap but backwards, fat red cheeks, mouth opening and closing, fingers jabbing. Jude half-stands to keep the gas pedal down. “Hell are you doing?” he asks, but he already knows. Too many people have been fucking with her. The whole world fucking with her. She’s had enough.
The truck slows and shimmies back into place. The red compact ticks by, too fast for Noah to see the driver’s face, distorted, he imagines, by the flash of mortality. Eyes wide or squeezed shut? Mouth open in a scream or pulled back in a cringe? Why does he care? He’s sweating harder now, soaked under the armpits and thighs, droplets rolling from his lower back into his underwear. Jude eases her foot off the gas, leans forward to clear the windshield. Her arm comes away wet, the dark hair slicked down over pale skin. The bruise on her neck bends around taut muscle.
“It stinks in here,” she says. “Is that you?”
His smell isn’t worse than any others in the car: mildewed fabric, spilled beer, stale cigarettes. But because he doesn’t want to check to see if the truck is charging again, he pretends to fart and fan it toward her.
“I’m gonna puke,” she says.
“Better breathe through your mouth.”
Here, finally, is the end of the bank, old stone gateposts on either side, the road widening as it curves into a tunnel of trees. Before reaching it, Jude glances in the rearview mirror and slows to twenty miles an hour. “Oh dear,” she says in a lousy British accent. “I believe I may have been driving too fast.”
Noah doesn’t want to laugh but can’t help it. “We shouldn’t like to get a ticket,” he says, his accent even worse.
Jude snorts. “Heavens, no. That would be terribly inconvenient.”
Once they start they can’t stop. “One should always obey the posted signs,” Noah says, busting up before he’s gotten the last word out. They’re laughing hard when the pickup wheels around again into the other lane, clear now for at least half a mile, and comes even with them. In the gap above the window, there are the fat cheeks again, even more flushed, the backwards baseball cap, the enraged mouth shaping words they can’t hear. Jude touches two fingers to her lips and blows a kiss. The pickup roars in front of them, around the curve and out of view.
As soon as it’s gone, their giddiness fades. Jude’s face settles back into a hard scowl. The rain picks up when they come around the ridge and drop toward Chatwin, washing the windshield nearly clear. Noah fishes a tape from the box beneath his seat. Its cover sleeve is creased and dirt-stained, unmarked except for a handwritten note: Decent Sweet Ride. Best Omaha ever! He slides it into the deck, but after only half a song Jude pops it out. For a second her eyes leave the road to study the label, nose wrinkling as if this is the source of the nasty smell. “I meant sublime, not subliminal,” she says, though this new word means no more to Noah than the original. She reaches across her body and shoves the tape out the barely opened window. Noah turns to see where it lands but can’t follow it. “He’s going to leave anyway,” Jude says.
“He should have left you alone.”
“Everything he said was straight out of some bad movie from the sixties.”
“Who gets a tattoo of a figure eight, anyway?”
“It’s an infinity sign.”
“It’s infinitely stupid,” he says, and feels the burning in his throat again. This time he can’t stop himself from crying. He doesn’t know why. The grind of the engine gives him cover as a noise of sorrow, one he can feel more than hear, escapes his mouth. He pulls another tape from the box. Without glancing at its cover, he leans across Jude and tries to toss it out of the van, but it bounces against the glass and lands in her lap. She retrieves it, and this time with her eyes set on the road, slips it out the window. After that, Noah keeps handing her tapes, and she sends them flying, one after another. A few of them he glimpses as they hit the pavement, one plastic casing shattering to let magnetic tape flutter in the middle of Russell Avenue.
By the time they make it to Victory Park, the box is empty. Traffic is light around the square, the drenched lawn beneath the trees deserted. Shallow puddles cover picnic tables and benches, and when they get out of the van the smell of damp moss masks any coming from the sewer drain. Noah hopes to see the guy with the knit cap and mustache, this time tell him it’s his lucky day, but there’s no one in sight. Jude pulls the key out of the ignition and leaves it on the driver’s seat. Noah lets the passenger door hang wide open.
“How do we get to school?” he says, grabbing his backpack. He doesn’t quite mean the question, just has a sense that he’s supposed to test out his voice to see how far they’ve come, to decide whether he’s willing to keep going. “Should have brought our bikes.”
“They can do without us for today,” Jude says. “We’ll hang out in the mall until it stops raining.”
But then she hurries across the street to the unmarked door beside the pawn shop, presses the button that makes no sound. He calls to her, “Haven’t you stolen enough already?”
“Just a second,” she says.
He joins her and waits. When the door clicks, she props it open with a knee and fishes something out of her pocket. The glass pipe. She sets it down on dirty tiles and lets the door close.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Ready,” he agrees, though for what he has no idea.
Scott Nadelson’s most recent story collection is The Fourth Corner of the World (Engine Books, 2018). His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Harvard Review, Glimmer Train, and PRISM International.