One Shot Away (9 page)

Jane hops off the bleachers and crosses the wrestling mat in shredded jeans and a tight wrestling T-shirt. “Studying?” She has one of those gargantuan smiles with lots of teeth and gums.

“More like procrastinating.”

Guys say Jane's doable, not dateable. According to one story, she snuck into an away wrestling camp and blew half the team. His brother was there but said don't believe everything you hear.

She leans against the padded wall, then slowly slides to the floor next to him. Her tan thighs show through holes in her jeans. “How's your mouth?”

He pulls down his lip and shows her the gash.

She winces.

“Crow wants my weight class,” he says. “Trevor
no es mi amigo
.” They watch the practice. Trevor is matched up with a kid named Turkburger, who's about as coordinated as a penguin. Trevor executes a ball and chain move and has Turkburger on his back.

“Crow's weird,” says Jane. “Walks around like he's tripping on something. You ever notice that?”

“I guess it's an Indian thing,” says Diggy. “You know he sleeps in a teepee?”

“He does?”

Diggy laughs. “Yeah, and he shoots buffalo from the school bus.” They watch Trevor tie Turkburger in a human knot.

“Trevor got jacked over the summer,” she says.

“Oh, really? I didn't notice.” He looks at her cross-eyed.

“You better stop being such a wiseass know-it-all.” She squeezes his thigh a few inches above his knee and it tingles all the way up his leg.

Across the mat, Trevor gets in a takedown on Turkburger. It's clean, completely awesome. Trevor never apologized, never said the collision was an accident. Diggy wonders if Trevor will have the balls to challenge him to a wrestle-off.

“So how's living in the Hills?” she asks.

“What?”

“Gateway Hills, what's that like?”

“It sucks, it's great, who cares. It's a place to live.”

“It's got to be better than our old neighborhood.”

“Better? Maybe quieter, more spacious, but not better.”

“You have a pool and a hot tub, right?”

Diggy shrugs. “You know what, no one ever goes in them. All we do is pay all these people to take care of the chemicals, vacuum the pool, cover the pool. Right now there's a sycamore branch sticking out of the pool. Went right through the pool cover. My old man saw it, and do you think he cares? You know what he cares about?”

She shrugs a shoulder.

“Coach Randy has this idea that I can be half as good as my brother.”

“I've seen your father at practices. He looks intense.”

“Coach Randy thinks he's my ‘real' coach. He's not doing it because he's trying to win father of the year. He wants his last name on the Wall again.” They look up at the names. Last season, Jimmy O'Shea's name was added as a District and Region winner. Diggy was relieved when Jimmy lost at the State tournament. He didn't need Randy ragging on him about that.

“I wish we could go back to when we were kids just, like, for a week. You ever think about that, when we used to live on the same block?”

“I think about it.” Diggy used to ride minibikes with her brothers. They reduced their front lawn to bare earth from circling the house. He considers sneaking out of the gym with her. He watches the wrestlers, waiting for the right moment.

I
N THE SUMMER, CUSTOMERS LINE THE PARKING LOT FOR
M
R.
Freeze's ice cream and Italian ices. Tonight the outdoor ice cream window is shuttered and locked. Diggy follows Jane's firm little butt through the side door under a plywood cutout of a giant French fry with a long nose and a stupid grin. The restaurant has no customers, which is fine with him. He should take her home now, before he spends any more time and effort, but he has to admit, he wants a girlfriend. He's tired of beating off to his brother's porn stash and more tired of beating off to his father's vintage Penthouse mags in the basement. He even crashed his laptop looking for porn.

Everyone in school thinks he's the master of poon, the Molly Pitcher babe magnet. He's got the face. He's got the attitude. No one would believe he only did it one time with a chubby girl on a pile of coats in an upstairs bedroom at his cousin's engagement party. By the time he lifted her dress and pulled down her panties, he was already half over. He rolled off her and wiped himself on a mink coat. A few weeks later, at his cousin's wedding, the girl approached him on the church's walk and said, “Scope out your aunt Dotty.” His aunt was wearing the mink.

Diggy chooses a corner table. A waitress with vampire eyes and poufy hair falling to the side like a ruined soufflé appears from behind the counter. Her turquoise uniform is splattered with mustard. “We're closing soon.” She slides menus on the table and fills their water glasses. “You know what you want?”

“A turkey burger, no roll, and a diet Sprite,” he says.

“So just the patty?” she asks, squinting.

“Right.”

The waitress writes on a small pad. “It comes with fries, you want fries?”

“No.”

“Onion rings?”

He shakes his head. He hasn't had an onion ring in this century.

“I'll have his French fries and a vanilla soda,” says Jane.

The waitress collects the menus. “Be right back.”

“This is cool,” says Jane. “I like it when it's quiet.”

“You eat here a lot?”

“Sometimes with my sister. They have specials.”

“I never come here,” he says. “I can't eat anything greasy, so what's the point?” In the stark light, her birthmark reminds him of a violet-colored balloon floating across her face.

“I think you're a good wrestler.” She places her elbows on the table and folds her fists under her chin.

“My brother was a lot better than me.”

“How's he doing?”

“He hurt his back. He had to quit.”

“I know that—the whole town knows that.”

“He left Iowa State and transferred to Springfield College in Massachusetts. He's a computer science major. He never opened a book and now he's always in the library studying. It's got Randy crazy. He had plans for Nick to go to the Nationals, and then the Olympics.” Diggy closes his eyes and sees his father in the dark family room drinking scotch, playing Nick's wrestling tapes over and over. They have stacks of them, marked and categorized. Every match ends the same way: Nick's arm raised in victory.

“I remember Nick's one-hundredth win,” says Jane. “There had to be two thousand people in the gym.”

The match was moved to Rutgers University. The high school provided bus transportation. “Sometimes I think my brother's better off now. At Iowa State, he was majoring in basket weaving and bowling.”

“None of my brothers were into sports. Frank plays guitar. He's in a hillbilly rock band. They call themselves Whiskey Tango. You ever hear of them?”

Diggy shakes his head.

“Whiskey Tango is what the police call the white trash people in this town.” She puts her hand to her mouth as if holding a radio head. “I've got a Whiskey Tango pushing a shopping cart on Main Street.” They laugh. “I know, it's so lame, right?”

“And your other two brothers?” he asks.

“Willy's into cars. He fixes them and sells them. My oldest brother, Hank, well, you heard about that, right?”

“He got in trouble?” Diggy guesses.

“He's in prison for drugs. It was in the paper.”

“For how long?”

“You ever hear of the Federal guidelines? They suck. He has four years left.” She looks at the table. “At home, it's me and my little sister, Gloria. She's in the ninth grade.”

Gloria's a mini-version of Jane, slim, tall, long neck, pissed-off facial expression, proof that without the birthmark, Jane would have been as pretty as any of the popular girls, even Jimmy's girlfriend.

The food comes. Diggy pokes the small gray burger with his fork. It reminds him of something he's seen on the Discovery Channel. He douses the meat with ketchup. The smell of her French fries drifts across the table. “Have one,” she says.

“I can't. Those things are fat bombs.”

She smiles and munches another fry. “I went on my mother's diet once. Cigarettes and desserts. I lost ten pounds in a week.”

“What desserts did you eat?”

“That was a joke,” she says. “I heard it on Comedy Central. It was a lot funnier.”

He's hungry and tastes the burger.

She pokes at her fries. “How is it?”

“Tastes like ass,” he says, and she laughs.

“Don't eat it then.”

“You don't know how hungry I am.”

“Some girls in the school, they think you're, like, totally stuck-up,” she says.

“Do you think I care?”

“Absolutely not.” She reaches and takes his hand.

“You ever hear anything about me?” she asks.

“Nothing that big.” Diggy thinks of the wrestling camp gossip. He tries to picture her taking on half the team and wonders if she would put out for him. She could be his “friend with benefits.” Hookups only. He smiles and wipes a spot of ketchup off her chin with his napkin.

J
ANE'S COMPLEX IS BEHIND THE WEEKEND FLEA MARKET, A QUARTER
mile of crooked wooden tables and corrugated iron buildings. In grammar school, she worked at a stand behind the gray building selling umbrellas and cheap toys from China. Diggy bought yo-yos and invisible-ink pens as an excuse to say hello to her. Talking to her now reminds him that he always felt Comfortable with her. They drive past a group of Mexican teenagers hunched over stingray bikes, wearing bandanas around ball caps that are tugged so low, they bend their ears.

“Don't worry,” she says. “They're all a bunch of wanksters.” She waves to one of them and he waves back. They yell something in Spanish, and she yells something back in Spanish.

“What's a wankster?”

“You know, a wannabe gangster.”

He finds a spot, gets out, and follows her to the concrete walkway that runs along the front of the apartments. Each steel door has black peel-and-stick numbers. The apartment windows have metal mesh cages over them. In front of apartment 16, a hoodless Saturn's hoses and wires dangle from the engine compartment like an aborted surgery. “My brother's leftover project,” she says. “They thought they could make that old four-banger into something.” A dead poinsettia, decorated with a red bow, is tipped over on the doorstep. Its branches are stiff and dry. She sets it upright. “It's like a private joke. My mother told me to get rid of it, and I told her to do it herself.” She turns her key in the lock and opens the door. He doesn't know what to expect, but he already has a hard-on.

Jane's sister sits cross-legged on the living room carpet playing Xbox.

“That's Gloria,” says Jane.

Gloria glances at Diggy. On the television screen a cartoon man in a blue leisure suit with black button eyes approaches a car and drags a driver into a 3-D street.

“Grand Theft Auto?” he asks.

“No, it's Ms. Pac-Man.” She smiles.

“She's an annoying little wiseass,” says Jane.

“And you suck,” says Gloria.

Dishes are piled in the kitchen sink. An unidentified cooking odor hangs in the air. A black cat stretches across the stovetop, his head resting near the handle of a frying pan. “This is Ezra. He was my brother's. He named him after the guitar player in Leftover Smack. They're totally, like, amped, off the hook.” She pets the cat. Ezra purrs.

They enter a short wallpapered hall, pass a bathroom, then enter her bedroom. “Sorry, it's a mess.” She removes a pile of folded clothes off a chair and places them on her dresser. “My mother doesn't like boys in my room, but she's working tonight and Gloria's cool.” Clothes bulge from the closet. A pair of pink pajamas with a cat-paw print is tangled in her rumpled blankets. “Mom gets off at eleven.” She raises her thin eyebrows at Diggy. “So, chill.”

She unzips her jacket and tosses it on a pile of clothes. Heat is pumping from somewhere. She places her hand on Diggy's jaw, eases him gently toward her, and kisses him. Her mouth is soft and warm and tastes like French fries, which isn't a bad thing. He's sweating and crazy excited. They lean back on the bed. Her hair falls away from her face. The birthmark is the color of a plum, a light plum. Not so bad. He slips his hand between her thighs. He rubs the denim, wondering if he's at the spot he read about in his mother's Cosmopolitan magazine.

She pulls away from him and he's ready to apologize, but she lifts her sweatshirt over her head. She wears a black bra with foam cups. He unsnaps the top button on her jeans. Strings of a red thong ride her hipbones.