Eddie is especially happy tonight, though. Earlier today Sherry passed her Coke bottle to him. When he passed it back, she just finished it off without a second glance. Right in front of her friends. Didn’t check for backwash or anything. Didn’t even wipe the lip of the bottle. To Eddie and to the other kids, this gesture spoke of intimacy.
Sherry’s hair is summer blond, her eyes are gray. She smells stunningly innocent. She’s ripe and it’s all operating, pulsating just under the surface. Eddie is in full-throttle, aching adolescent love.
Mornings they meet at the beach. She rides with a girlfriend’s mother or older brother. Eddie thumbs out with a couple of the guys, making a heroic beach entrance from the far reaches of thirty miles of inland freeway.
Sherry knows she drives them all crazy. She sees it as their problem and has zero patience with any boy who brings it up. The boys her own age can speak of almost nothing else in the minutes that follow seeing her. Men pull over in their cars to holler their promises to her. She sends them off stammering insults in her general direction, with about the same effect on Sherry as if they were bouncing off a nearby lamppost. Nothing disturbs her self-possession. For this quality Eddie adores her. Her beauty is only secondary.
He is fascinated to discover that her self-possession is not the result of insensitivity or a callous stupidity, but is fueled by her tremendous intelligence and fierce courage.
Tonight, as Eddie finishes off the last piss ring, he hears Sherry’s voice from the phone call that afternoon. Minutes earlier he had been in her front room keeping her company as she ironed clothes for the entire family. He hears her soft, trusting voice as she sobs tearful-hateful-father misunderstandings. Sherry is being punished for being out too late the night before with Eddie, and for coming home with grass stains on her white shorts.
Eddie had walked her home. They were only a few minutes late. He made her laugh at something. There was an intoxicating jasmine bush hovering over their heads. Suddenly a wrestling match exploded. Sherry and Eddie struggled against each other on the warm, wet lawn. A blue light shone out of the window of some stranger’s house as they sat inside watching Ed Sullivan on T.V.
When Sherry’s father inevitably forbade her to see Eddie, he spent his nights, wings clipped, perched on the rims of the canyons of his childhood, looking down into an expanse of darkness.
He had already lost his direction. That summer he didn’t go to movies, or hang out with his friends. He didn’t go to the beach, or read, or learn to do anything new. He was overwhelmed. He needed Sherry.
He dragged around the streets at night, trying to dodge the ultraconservative, ultramilitary San Diego police department. Eddie had already been introduced to the San Diego police. It had occurred on a sidewalk two summers earlier.
Cops pull up in their cruiser. Cops jump out. Cops tell Eddie to stand still. Cops throw him facedown, pin his arms, shove his face into the concrete, twist his wrists, ratchet on the cuffs. Cops throw him in the cruiser, banging his head into the doorjamb as they toss him into the back seat. They drive him someplace, and tell him to get out. They walk him to a screen door, where a woman with a purple swollen face and a bloody cloth held over her mouth says, “No, that’s not him.”
Cops take off the handcuffs. They try to tell Eddie they’re sorry, but add that he “answered the lady’s description.” Eddie looks at the short redheaded one, with stubble like rust on his chin. Immediately Eddie understands something about the genetics of outlaws. He senses something that is not in his favor, in fact quite the opposite. It’s as though from that moment on, he saw the line drawn in front of his feet. Something they think makes him wrong, and he knows makes him right. He looks at the cop and smiles, “That’s alright, I’ll always answer the description.” The rusty face contorts at an equation, the face cannot find the sum. The cop takes his stand behind authority: his weight settles on his spread feet, his pelvis shifts forward and this conversation is over. The other cop offers Eddie a ride home. He looks like his feelings are hurt when Eddie replies, “No, thanks.”
After that initial meeting, it seemed the cops felt that they should find something he had done to justify their mistake. They picked him up and drove him home a lot. Parked squad car rumbling in front of his house, neighbors opening curtains watching his parents’ place.
In response, Eddie committed as much malicious mischief as he possibly could for the next year and a half. Specifically motivated in his contest with the cops, generally motivated by the silent, stucco, lawn-sprinkler existence of San Diego. The contest was a tie. Eddie didn’t get caught, but he remained stuck within the quiet, soulless, white-pebbled roofs, all contained by the cops. But by the time he met, and lost, Sherry, he was leaving the community alone, and wasting his time by himself.
Sherry was in a car with her big brother and one of his friends. Eddie was on foot carrying a couple bags of groceries home. He felt something was wrong before he turned around to see the smirking faces on the boys, and heard the enthusiastic shouting of his name called out of the car window. He managed an awkward acknowledging jerk of his head above the bags in the general direction of Sherry as she passed out of sight, sitting in the front seat between two football heroes.
He finally dropped the bags on the kitchen table and said, “I’m taking a walk” to his mother, who tried to stop him but gave up as the screen door swung closed.
She may have only wondered why Eddie would want to take a walk in 102-degree heat immediately after carrying two full bags of groceries a half mile. Maybe she wanted to offer him an iced coffee, or ask him why he got in so late last night, or would Sherry like to come to dinner some night, and she hadn’t seen much of Sherry lately . . . was anything wrong?
Eddie was walking in the dehydrating, asphalt-melting, cornea-frying, lip-cracking summer weather of interior San Diego. His head ached, it buzzed with fatigue. He made himself go look at the tire tracks on the shoulder of the road leading from Food Basket. He was slouched more than ever, his face parallel to the mushy black road. He was not moving across the busy intersection fast enough for the man driving the station wagon.
Eddie is in the middle of the crosswalk, directly in front of the station wagon’s two-tone baby-shit-brown hood. He can smell the suffering fan belt’s burning skin. He hears the wheezing radiator.The windshield reflects a blinding glare. HONK! HONK! HOOOONNNNKKK! Eddie is stunned. He stands there, then turns and faces the guy driving, who emanates a tremendous amount of loathing. He starts to walk again. HOOOOONNNNNNKKKKK!
Eddie gets to the far right headlight and turns an about-face, crossing the front of the hood again. The man starts yelling shit at Eddie. He sticks his American-man war-hero head out of his car and spews more shit at him. Eddie makes another about-face and crosses in front of the car again. The door swings open. The man clomps his backache out of the seat. His hard soles hit the pavement; his sweaty shirt is stuck to his pear-shaped body. He swaggers toward Eddie with balled fists.
Eddie is supposed to run. But he is pissed. The man grabs for the boy’s T-shirt and tries to stretch it within the grasp of his other hand. Eddie cannot believe that this fat fuck thinks he is going to treat him like a child. It seems almost funny that the man thinks he can yell and try to overpower him with his adult-size bulk. Eddie jerks loose of the man’s awkward grabbing. The man’s fingernails tear into Eddie’s arm. In an instant, Eddie has hit him — hard. The shot is planted on the side of the man’s crew-cut. The man is already tilted downward, from just that one quick pop. Disgusted, Eddie belts him again. The man hits the pavement.