The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind by David Guterson Read Free Book Online Page B

mine. What’s gross about it?”
    But Wyman just shook his head and started up his Mustang, which always idled steadily and perfectly. “Sick, man,” he said. “You are sick.”
    I gradually became content with merely driving aimlessly, so it was a surprise to me when, one night in March, we actually located two girls. The prospect of this occurring had long since dissipated; it had become little more than an excuse to drive around together, fending off loneliness by sitting on the same seat, watching familiar streets swim past, spending the time with someone basically undemanding—though neither of us would have admitted to all this. In any event here were these girls with their thumbs out, down by the canal near Fremont. It was impossible to know whether or not they were beautiful—whether they were the girls I had imagined finding. They stood in the rain with big purses over their shoulders, dark and wet-looking at eleven-thirty, nothing but shadowy possibility. But Wyman wasn’t slowing down.
    “Hey,” I said. “Pull over.”
    “Jesus,” said Wyman. “Girls.”
    We had to go around the block once. Wyman wasn’t ready and had to compose himself a little. “Girls,” he said again. “Those were girls.”
    “Pull over this time,” I reminded him.
    When we veered in the second time they let their thumbs down. Wyman watched them critically through the windshieldand so did I—two budding connoisseurs. “They look like a couple of dogs ,” Wyman whispered. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
    But then they were piling into the backseat suddenly, reeking of cigarettes and cold Seattle rain. “A Mustang,” said one of them. “Cool.”
    They were both dripping water from their hair and clothes—two soaked and pale girls in blue jeans.
    “You like cars?” I said.
    “Yeah.”
    “Dan here is Mr. Cars,” I said. “I’m serious. Mr. Cars.”
    “Yeah?”
    “No,” Wyman called back over his shoulder. “Not really. Not at all.”
    I glared at him. Why would he take no advantage from this? His neutrality, which I interpreted as a brand of fear, irked me, and I nudged him. Wyman rolled his eyes in reply.
    “You look sort of cold,” he said into the rearview mirror. “I’ll turn the heater on.”
    As we passed through the streetlights I looked them over under the guise of concern for their wet condition. The one who liked cars wore a red poplin jacket and soaked, bell-bottomed Navy jeans. Big-boned, freckled and colorless, she nevertheless had a kind of bovine attraction: somebody you might sink into, and from her white folds and pasty valleys never return. She sat there uncomfortably with her neck twisted to the left, wringing the water from her hair. I smiled at her, but my heart wasn’t in it. She smiled back dreamily and put her hand across her mouth. Her fingers, too, were plump and pale; they worked with nothing akin to grace and watching them I felt the faint beginnings of disgust.
    “I’m Joan,” she said to me. “My stepbrother had a Mustang but he sold it.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What year?” I said.
    “A sixty-seven.”
    “This one’s a sixty-eight,” I said.
    “Sixty-nine,” said Wyman.
    “Yeah,” I said. “A sixty-nine.”
    The other one, though more aloof, appeared more quietly inviting. Her silence suggested certain slim possibilities; her wetness suggested the kind of bathtub sex I’d gathered was adult fare from television. I liked her small head and exaggerated, damp mascara; I liked the idea of dominating her smallness and getting some secret fierceness, some agreeable, energetic acquiescence, in reply. She had red hair, a turned-up nose, brown lips.
    “What’s your name?” I said to her.
    “Carla.”
    “Where do you go to school?”
    “Where do you go, Buster?”
    “Roosevelt,” I said apologetically, since Roosevelt was the school of snobs and rich kids.
    “It figures,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Roosevelt. It figures.”
    She looked out