Over the course of the next couple of weeks, as I kept spending time in that hippie caravan, I became a devoted student of one subject: Cliff. Less out of any interest in making Luis happy— all he ever wanted to hear were business figures, he had a one track mind in that regard— more out of my own mistaken assumptions.
Namely, that this entire operation was an excuse to pick up broads, because after a week, I was forced to conclude that he just wasn't that interested. To be honest, I could no more imagine Cliff having sex than I could imagine him taking a shit, or eating something more substantial than frosting. He seemed far removed from those biological urges altogether, on some separate astral plane; he treated all the girls on the bus in the same half-flirtatious, half-protective way, but none of it translated into any kind of advance. Which led me to wonder— if he wasn't after scoring free-love hippie snatch, just what the hell was his motive?
Apparently, it was handing out free drugs on the corner of Market and Sutton, in exchange for listening to Cliff's spiel about the evils of US imperialism in Vietnam. We sure weren't getting a hell of a lot of customers— one lady passing by must've thought we were homeless, because we had to dodge her pulling out a can of wasp spray. I was thinking of how much money Luis owed me for this shit, as sweat drops rolled down my neck and gathered at my collar, and if it'd be enough for at least the down payment for a car.
"Ponyboy says you're pretty sharp." He tapped on a couple of bricks on the wall behind us, like they'd reveal their secrets to him if he did it the right way. I wondered just how much Ponyboy had been telling him about me, and if my cover had been blown from the start. I'd never known him for much of a loudmouth before now. "You ever read anything?"
"Excuse me?" Yeah, sure, I wasn't half as much of a reader as my kid brother, but I'd still cracked open a book before. I liked Valley of the Dolls, Sylvia and I read it before the movie came out; some hard science fiction too, like Clark and Asimov, though I wasn't as willing to cop to that. Darry smuggled a copy of The Carpetbaggers into the house, past our mother's watchful eye, and I'd read that before Ponyboy ever got the chance.
"Theory, I mean, not Tiger Beat. Marx. Engels. Abbie Hoffman, he's a real cool cat." I blinked at him; I might've heard the first two names in passing, but not the last one. "Stuff that'll really tell you about what's goin' on in the world right now."
"Think I should maybe start with the material you're puttin' out?" I was not what you'd call a natural saleswoman, so that left me with plenty of time to flip through an exposé on the use of both Agent Orange and napalm. "Look, our brother's in Nam, did he tell you that? I'm not wavin' an American flag or nothing about the war, but it seems pretty unfair to me to pin the blame on the people who had the least choice in it."
"People who had the least choice in it are the Vietnamese rice farmers, if we're gettin' technical." I glowered at him. "Ponyboy says your brother enlisted, if we're gettin' even more technical."
I wasn't above fistfighting to defend said brother, unlike Ponyboy, whose sense of family honor and loyalty seemed to have flown straight out the window at the prospect of free psychedelic drugs. "Would you blame someone for robbin' a bank with a gun to their head? If he hadn't enlisted, he would've just been drafted, like every other guy in this lousy neighborhood— blame Washington, or the draft board, or somebody who actually makes decisions."
I expected him to push back against me again, but he just lit a joint, right out in the middle of the street. "I'm messin' with you, sister," he said, "you got the right idea, of who to go after 'stead of debating every individual soldier's complicity. A lot of people are making a hell of a lot of money off that war, while boys like your brother come home in coffins, boys who never had any better prospects to begin with." He was generous enough to pass it to me, once he'd worked it down to about an inch in length. "You ever heard of black Wall Street?"
I shook my head.
"They don't teach that shit in the schools, now, do they?" A note of bitterness crept into his voice, where there had been nothing but detached irony before. "Biggest race riot in America happened on the North side; Greenwood used to be as rich as all hell, believe it or not, some families had their own planes. And a buncha white folk got so jealous of that, they bombed the whole neighborhood with kerosene. My granddaddy never got over it. Not that he should've."
I could tell that Cliff didn't mind that I hadn't known; he was the kind of man who liked teaching things to women. "I'm sorry," I still said awkwardly, my mouth gummy and thick, and not all from the weed. I felt like it was something I should've known, all the same.
"Wasn't your fault," he said, with a reassuring wave of his hand, staring forward like he was sleeping with his eyes open. "It's just that this entire city's rotten to the core, is all. Entire country, even. And the people who start it are never the ones who end up payin' for it."
Well, what he was saying didn't sound all that wild to me, anyone from the East side could've told you as much. I started looking at the pamphlet again, which was probably how I missed Curly approaching us.
"What are you doin' here?" One of my nails had broken; I filed it up against the brick wall, just for something to do with my hands as I saw him. "Curly—"
"I live here, I was pickin' up a new pack of smokes," he said indignantly, which was when I remembered that Tim had moved out last year, taking Curly along for the ride. His neighborhood was a few blocks down, on the borderline between North and East Tulsa. It wasn't so surprising after all. "What are you doin' here, 's more the question. Who's this?" Ain't you already got a new boyfriend, doll? hung in the air, unasked, unexpressed.
"I'm Cliff," Cliff said. "You interested in learnin' more about American imperialism in Indochina?"
"I ain't, man, don't fuss yourself none tryna teach me, neither. I don't even know where that is," he said. Remained the same amount of unenticed when Cliff tried to dangle a joint under his nose. He looked me up and down, and he wasn't too subtle about it, either— parked his gaze right around my tits, in fact. I was wearing a bandana as a shirt and no bra, an outfit Blossom had scavenged for me from the corners of the bus, a pair of my kid brother's jeans hanging low on my hips, so I couldn't really blame him, but it still got on my nerves. I didn't know if we could get past what had gone down between the two of us, move closer to something resembling a friendship, or if every conversation we ever had would be full of sexual tension. Judging by the way this was going, we were cruising straight towards the latter with the same energy as a car heading for the highway divider.
"You and Tim need to do something about Angela," I said to him, instead of anything else at all. "I saw her the other night, and she's in a real bad way... she's y'all's sister, what, is it that you haven't noticed? You just don't care?"
"You sure have got a lot of concern for Angela, for a chick who damn near cracked her skull open like an egg a few months ago."
"Girls are a little more complicated than that." I was tired, whatever Cliff had passed along to me was strong, and even holding myself up against the wall was taking a lot of energy. I didn't want to betray Angela's confidence, tell him secrets I strongly suspected she'd told me and couldn't bring herself to tell her brothers. "She lost the baby—"
"She didn't want the baby to begin with—"
"I told you, girls are a little more complicated than that."
Curly sighed at me, in the dramatic, manipulative way I suspected we'd both picked up from our religious mothers. "Come back to my place," he said. I raised an eyebrow. "Not like that," he added, a faint pink blush like children's stomach medicine spreading over his cheeks, "Jesus, I'm not tryna hit on another guy's girl." He'd learned a lot, in the way of morals and ethics, in the past couple of years. "But yeah, I wanna hear about what's goin' on with Angel. Maybe you think we're the worst brothers in the world, but it's not like we ever hear from her no more unless we're beatin' her door down."
"You gonna be okay here by yourself?" I made a show out of asking Cliff, though he sure as shit wasn't my keeper, and I wasn't on his payroll. "If I head on out?"
He gave me an amused look from underneath the brim of his sunhat. "Hey, far be it from me to stand in the way of young love," he said as cool as you please. I tried to fight back a blush and ended up having to cover the bridge of my nose with my hand. "You have fun, Jasmine. But take the pamphlet," he insisted, pressing it into my closing palm.
"We hoofin' it?" I asked as we stepped out of the alley and further into the street, the brightness of the midday sun striking even hotter— some mother was scolding her young daughter for dripping her orange popsicle all over the front of her white organdy dress, and it reminded me so much of my own childhood I had to look away. There was no way in hell I should've been going to Curly's place alone, that Bryon wouldn't have something to say about it if he found out. I didn't have a good answer for why I was still doing it.
"Yeah, Tim took his truck down to Juárez with him," he groused, "and he won't lend me no dough to buy my own, neither. He's such an asshole."
"You ever tried gettin' a job, maybe, 'stead of mooching? There's a real bright idea."
"Hell, whose side are you on, anyway, huh? Thought we was a united front against them big brothers of ours, you traitor." His tone was light and teasing, though, and I smiled in spite of myself— I hadn't realized it'd be so easy to fall back into our earlier camaraderie, after just a few minutes spent together again. It was always easy to spend time with Curly, for the most part. The issue was letting myself forget why it hadn't worked out, and why it wouldn't, ever. He deserved better than that.
We were in the school library, and fixing to get kicked out, because we sure weren't looking at any books. Curly had a hand up my sweater, under the bra, his mouth open and sloppy against mine as he pressed me up to the shelf. "I'm gonna be late to English," I protested teasingly against his lips, "you even remember what class you're supposed to be in right now?"
(I'd started helping Curly out with some of his work, which was about the only reason he'd managed to make it to his sophomore year. I didn't want him dropping out, even though he'd already turned sixteen that June and could've. Tim asked me how the hell I managed to get through to him, when he'd been trying for years with no success; I suggested maybe slapping him upside the head and calling him a little moron wasn't the best teaching method in the world, which landed me right back onto his shit list.)
"Did you expect me to?" he said with a shrug of his left shoulder, a smile of his own, and pressed his lips to the hollow behind my ear now, my neck. And an unwanted but familiar cold chill started snaking down my spine as he touched me, cupped my ass with the other hand— one I couldn't shake even as I grabbed hold of the front of his flannel to pull him closer to me. The taste of stale beer in my mouth. Being bent into different positions like the world's least flexible acrobat. A pistol tilting my chin up, in a cold kiss—
I didn't know what the hell was wrong with me, why I couldn't get a grip. Curly was harmless, at least when it came to broads— I'd had to show him where to find my nipple through the blouse, and he forgot where he was supposed to go looking, for Chrissakes. I was only getting better on the outside, in all the ways other people could see. Inside, I was still drowning.
"What's wrong?" Curly pulled away and tried to look me in the eye, scrutinizing me, and I averted my gaze. Already, I got the sense that he perceived more than he wanted to admit.
"Nothin'," I said hurriedly, trying to channel the good actress I knew how to be. That never worked on Curly, though. He was too skilled an actor himself. "Think Miz Nelson's starin' at us," I added, pointing at the pinch-faced librarian at the desk, who'd started to pull her glasses down her nose to give us a glare. "We better get out of here before we end up with Saturday detention."
That was the reason things between us hadn't worked out, the real one, though I was reluctant to admit it to myself. Not that I'd jumped too fast into another relationship, before Dally's body had time to cool. Not that Curly was hurtling deeper and deeper into gangbanging, in a way that frightened me, after all the trouble I'd been in last year. Not even Angela glassing Ponyboy, and Curly taking her side in it. I just liked him too much, was the trouble. I couldn't leave my body behind when he touched me.
Curly and Tim's bachelor pad was a walkup, in a building with one side covered in elaborate graffiti, a second-floor window I could see had been nailed shut— whether because the residents couldn't afford to replace the glass, or because they'd rather be safe than sorry, I couldn't even say. "Ma didn't want me movin' out," Curly said as I narrowly avoided driving a hypodermic needle through my heel. "Still better here than bein' caught between her and the old man, though, when they're going at each other."
I would've pressed him on that more, gotten the whole story on how he'd decided to leave, if we hadn't found Tim sprawled out on their threadbare couch once Curly pushed his key into the lock— in his boxers, scratching his chest hair, too. That was about the exact moment any last shred of a crush on him died inside me. He looked like one of my brothers right before Mom told them to put a shirt on at the breakfast table. "Long time, no see," he said with a slight smile as he stubbed his cigarette out on the arm, which might as well have been a cheerful whoop, from him. "Y'all miss me?"
"Hey, man—" Curly's own smile was a little hesitant, but then it lit up his face like the sun rising lit up the night sky, and I figured I must have imagined the whole thing. "It's been a while, huh?" He took a step towards him, extending his hand to shake.
Tim stared at it and blinked twice. "Been so long we shake hands now, manito? You're gonna hurt my feelings." I registered manito for what it was, a deliberate attempt at putting him back in his place— he pulled him into his arms, though, in the next second, and then they were slapping each other's backs like boys always did whenever they hugged. "Missed you too, you little shit," he said fondly into his hair; Curly had muttered something too low to be heard. I took this, as I should've, as their way of expressing deep affection. When he pressed a hard kiss to Curly's temple, I saw that as my cue to look away.
"Your big brother know you're on this side of town unsupervised?" Tim asked once they broke apart. He hovered around me for a second, finally decided to clasp my shoulder and pull me into his side. It was awkward, but not as much as it could've been.
"I'll be sure to tell him I ran into a strange man in his drawers, later tonight."
Tim rolled his eyes, but he stepped away from both of us, into their bedroom. "Y'all came into my goddamned apartment without a word of warning, excuse me for not bein' prepared to entertain— Curly, why does this place look like the Russians dropped a bomb on it?"
I stepped inside the room, Curly hot on my heels. The apartment had two bedrooms, but I guess they psychologically couldn't handle not bunking together, because they slept on two mattresses on opposite ends of this one— without a bedframe in sight— and seemed to use the second one as a landfill. Though this one wasn't in much better shape, either. Tim was sifting through a pile of Curly's t-shirts and trying to find one of his; Curly made a face at his crouched back, all their previous tenderness evaporated away. "Sorry, forgot to hire a maid service to prepare for you comin' in, ain't like you gave us no advance warning either—"
Tim threw a pair of dirty boxers right at his face, with impressive aim. Curly sputtered as he peeled them off, and by that point, he'd managed to put a reasonably clean shirt and a pair of wheat jeans on. "Tell me what's been happening while I've been gone, you wanna run that smart mouth. I ain't even seen Gabi yet."
"Billy Reynolds— y'know, Roy Reynolds's kid brother, the one who didn't get locked up with the rest of the Kings— he's makin' some noise on the East, but I don't think he's a real serious player yet, he ain't ready to pull that outfit back together. Ours, we're doin' pretty good, though. Brumly ain't givin' us no static and I'm keepin' the boys in line—"
"Okay, Machine Gun Kelly," Tim said with a strange expression, "I was wondering about our sister, mostly." Curly deflated, as though he'd been expecting praise instead of the brush-off he got. Tim wandered back into the living room and pulled a half-empty bottle of whiskey out from underneath the couch, took a swig from it and then tipped it at him, in a conciliatory kind of way. "C'mere an' have a drink with me, then, you become such a big man since I've been gone. Keepin' the boys in line, huh? You used to damn near cry whenever I'd do that to them."
I wavered in the doorway, the odd man out in this little reunion. Tim noticed. "It was good to see you and all, but I ain't providin' alcohol to minors I'm not related to, honey, 'specially not female ones," he said. "I don't need the vice squad after me, or your brother fixin' to kick my ass with his size twelve work boot."
"Jasmine and I were gonna talk about Angel," Curly spoke up in my defense, as though drinking on his and Tim's roach-infested couch was the best way I could think of to spend an evening. "She saw her the other night, didn't she?"
I just shrugged. "Bryon and I were gonna get together, later tonight, don't worry about it." I wasn't ready to explain any of this to him, that I was even still in contact with two guys who had tag-teamed putting him in the hospital, but I could try to wade through the mess that was made the last time we'd spoken. "I'll leave y'all to it."
"Hell, guess we really do have somethin' to talk about," was the last thing I heard Tim say, before I shut the door behind me.
When I slipped back into the house that night, I figured I was being sneaky enough about it that I wouldn't be caught out. Darry usually went to bed early Tuesday nights, he had to be at work by seven Wednesday morning, and with Soda gone, that left Ponyboy to keep a close eye on my whereabouts— and he couldn't have cared less, as long as I wasn't sticking my nose into his. What I wasn't anticipating, as I breathed a sigh of relief at all of the darkened windows, was for Judy to be seated at the kitchen table with a cherry blossom scented candle lit in front of her crochet baby booties. She didn't exactly look thrilled, and the creepy shadows flitting across her face didn't help my impression.
"Hey, Jude," I said, still a little wobbly on my feet. To be honest, I was trying not to laugh, because I was at the stage of drunkenness where I found everything more funny than I should. "What are you doin' up, huh?"
"I could ask you the same question."
I wasn't on the market for another mother— I'd already had one, who'd flown through a windshield cussing me under her breath, and an aunt, which was a relationship that had somehow managed to go even worse. And in all the months Judy had spent living here, I guess it had never occurred to me that she might start exerting authority over us. She barely seemed capable of getting a firm grip on herself. "I was workin' late—" I tried out for size, which was one of the dumber excuses I'd ever pulled out of my arsenal. Where, on a goddamn stripper pole? I wasn't wearing high enough heels for that.
"No, you weren't," she deflected as easy as I offered it, "and especially not this late. I can read a clock." Wasn't she a regular Sherlock Holmes now, she was just missing the monocle. "Try again."
I stopped in the middle of the living room, still holding onto my purse by the strap— tried to keep my voice down, or Darry might wake up, and then I'd really be in for it. More for having woken him up in the middle of the night than coming home drunk. "Uh, am I grounded, Mom, or..."
"You know what, there's no need to be disrespectful," she said, and I almost bit my tongue off from shock. I'd never heard Judy talk in a voice that didn't sound like what came out of a baby doll when you yanked its string, all high-pitched and breathy. "I just asked you a question, where you've been. You wouldn't be so defensive if you didn't have anything to hide, would you?"
"Are you practicin' your lines for when the baby comes or somethin'?" I could accept Darry's parenting, it went down a lot easier now than it had a couple of years ago, back when he was still trying to get the hang of it and settled for his best impression of Heinrich Himmler in the meantime. I didn't want to admit it out loud, because of just how disloyal it felt to Dad's memory, but he'd started to feel more like a father to me than a brother— someone we could really rely on to take care of us. Darry's new wife, on the other hand? "I'm seventeen, I don't answer to you, or any other broad Darry brings home, let's get that straight. This ain't your house, and you sure as fuck ain't my mother."
Christ, I was being obnoxious even for me, and I wasn't even being clever, just outright rude— to a pregnant woman. Darry was going to have my head on a platter the same way Salomé did to John the Baptist, once he found out how I'd been talking to her; I couldn't say he loved her, and sometimes I wondered how much the word 'like' even applied, but he wasn't likely to stand for me disrespecting her either. In that moment, I didn't care.
Why was I so angry? Over nothing, really, some half-assed scolding she would've dropped if I'd had the good sense to be apologetic. Yet my face was hot. I wanted her to just shut the hell up already.
Worse than if she'd spat something nasty back at me, or gone to shake Darry awake right that second, she looked stunned— and hurt. I wasn't used to that kind of reaction from anyone subjected to the razor edge of my tongue. I felt like a bully; I didn't want to. "Okay, Jasmine," she said slowly, and rose to blow out the candle. "But don't think it's been a walk in the park as your houseguest, either. You aren't exactly subtle, 'bout how much you don't like me, and for the life of me I can't seem to figure out why."
That shouldn't have taken Sherlock Holmes, either.
