The Bewildered. Peter Rock
that mean?” Natalie said, pointing. “I don’t know. My friend did it.” “Are you safe, down here alone, so early?” “Whatever,” the girl said. Natalie smiled as the silence settled between them. She knew it was partially that the girl was intrigued by her, but mostly that she didn’t want to show fear. She wouldn’t run, not right away. The smell of overripe fruit hung thick in the air.
“What were you listening to?” Natalie said. “Japanese.” “What?” “Language tapes,” the girl said. “To learn to speak it.”
The cuffs of her white shirt had holes cut in them, her thumbs hooked there, pulling the sleeves taut. Her body was a boy’s body, almost; it was just beginning to stray, to betray itself, to become what it would be. It was caught in a delicious balance.
“I thought I saw you reading something,” Natalie said. “Before.”
Again, the girl shrugged.
“I thought I saw you looking at Deborah Borkman.”
“Who?”
“She won her first beauty contest, a neighborhood affair, when she was nine. She likes to climb trees, and gardening.”
The girl listened, confused, recognizing the lines from the magazine page.
“If it’s yours,” she said, reaching for her pocket, “you can have it.”
“No,” Natalie said. “No, no. It’s not like that. You can keep her.”
“What?”
“Debbie Borkman.” Natalie reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out another photograph, from the same pictorial; Miss July stood outdoors in a washtub, taking great pleasure from her bath, inviting onlookers to do the same. With her stub of pencil, Natalie wrote her own phone number—copying it from another slip of paper—across Deborah’s lovely stomach. She handed the page across to the girl.
“So what?” the girl said, putting it in her pocket.
“There’s some things I need help with,” Natalie said.
She half-surprised herself with this gesture, these words; they were not premeditated. “Could you help me?” she said. “There would be pay, of course.”
The girl dropped her skateboard down on its wheels, one foot atop the black grip tape. She unhooked her thumb, stretched her arm, checked the watch on her wrist.
“Could my friends do it, too?” she said.
“Call me,” Natalie said. “We’ll figure it out.”
“School.” The girl pointed down the street, kicked her board around. “Dozo yoroshiku,” she said, and began to roll away.
“All right, then,” Natalie called after her. “I’ll see you soon.”
Alone again, she headed back out from under the bridge. Was the rain picking up? She told herself not to care; natives didn’t even notice, they seemed born with gills. She walked, alert, her eyes searching, nose twitching, head jerking from side to side. If they were out here, she would find them.
Another lingerie catalog would be enough—she wasn’t greedy. She did not like the hardcore, however; she preferred some softness, some pride and suggestion. Her favorites were the old Playboys, like the ones she’d first found, twenty-five years ago. She could tell that her memory was not strong, but memories sometimes came all at once, and the important ones repeated, vividly—she had been a girl in Denver when she came upon the magazines; in a city park, under a bush; someone’s stash, some boy her age or slightly older, stolen from some father or uncle (Entertainment for Men—that subtitle deliciously raising the stakes). This was back during the Bicentennial; Natalie was twelve and tender and caught up with the ideas of freedom and possibility, her body testifying, not really developed but hinting toward the promise that the women, the Playmates demonstrated in their poses, their freedom, there in the seventies when it wasn’t ironic. They believed and she believed, a girl holding the rain-stiff, ripped magazines, hoarding the photographs and memorizing the women’s names. She had never felt better, more excited and full of anticipation than then, and as she walked through the rain this morning she sensed some of that same energy.
CHRIS HAD SCRAPED HIS ELBOW. He bent it up so Kayla and Leon could look at it; Leon frowned, and Kayla—the tip of her tongue between her teeth, the jagged part in her hair shining—looked disappointed. The wound was not as serious as they had hoped. It really wasn’t swelling or bleeding the way they would have liked. It hadn’t even been an impressive wipe-out, either—he was simply dropping in off the low wall, and his board went out from under him.
The skatepark beneath the bridge had been crowded, like it always was in the late afternoon, full of older guys with tattoos and stocking caps and pierced eyebrows. Of the three friends, Kayla was the best skater, by far, but she had trouble getting in rides without someone cutting her off. She’d been the only girl at the park; that was why she practiced so early in the morning, hours before school.
“Where is she?” Leon said to Kayla.
“She’s coming.”
“She’s never been late before.”
“And it’s a school night,” Chris said.
The air felt heavy, muggy. This would be the fifth night they’d worked for Natalie in the last month, and still they were anxious. The three of them stood at the curb on East Burnside and MLK, waiting, each with a backpack of books, each with an instrument case in one hand, a skateboard in the other. Leon was taller, bigger, than the other two, but this had not always been the case. They’d met in fourth grade, set apart as gifted students in a program called Horizons; that was more than five years ago, and now all three were fifteen, in high school, inseparable. Over time they’d developed a sharp disdain for their peers, especially as these peers began the slide toward the superficial, pathetic lives of adults. The three believed that there had to be a less desperate way to live one’s life, and this last twist—this Natalie, found by Kayla—felt especially promising.
Kayla sat down on her board, rolling slightly from side to side, her feet on the ground, knees bent up. Leon skated away with his trombone case over his shoulder, up half a block, searching, demonstrating that he wasn’t afraid of the Mexican men who stood there in a group, smoking and speaking Spanish, here in this gathering place like so many others. This was where someone came when they needed illegal, cheap labor, some night work somewhere, off the books. The men didn’t even notice as Leon rolled past, as he skidded the tail of his board, stopped, did a one-eighty, and skated back to Chris and Kayla. He pointed back to the intersection, at the stop light, the rusted-out pickup idling half a block away.
“There,” he said, and already Kayla was standing.
As usual, Natalie drove her broken-down Ford slowly past, as if they had no pre-arranged meeting, as if she were looking for the best possible laborers. A man up the street yelled something in Spanish, stepped off the curb and flexed his arm. Natalie drove past, then stopped, then reversed slowly to where the three stood. She left the engine idling, like every time, as she got out to look them over.
Her long, blond hair hung straight and loose. Her boots were black, heavy. She wore blue coveralls, long sleeved, a zipper up the front.
“You appear to be very hard workers,” she said. “Certainly.” She looked up and down the street and the Mexican men glanced back, interested.
“Yes,” Kayla said.
“Of course,” Natalie said, “you seem very young to me.”
This was all part of it; it was impossible to say if Natalie was kidding at all, or if she forgot, as if it were slightly more than coincidence yet new to her every time. She stood still for a moment, thinking, her old truck—two-tone, brown and white—rattling next to her.
“My