The Blues & Billie Armstrong 22
KEY TO THE HIGHWAY
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
“After I left her and ran away like that, how could I tell them?”
“I don’t blame you, man. I might’ve done the same,” she said, but I didn’t believe her.
Early in the morning, Billie came through the window again and shook me awake.
I opened one eye and she raised a finger to her lips, signaling me to be quiet. She sat on the bed kind of side-saddle and close enough that I scooched away at the press of her round hip against the outside of my thigh. She dangled the envelope in her hand.
“So, are you afraid to open it and read it or what?” she said.
“No. Yes. I don’t know,” I said. All the suspicions raised by the pink lipstick had already been confirmed by the letters in the hatbox, but opening a sealed envelope to leer at the private words of my mother still struck me as a betrayal too far.
“I have an idea,” she said. And I was afraid of that.
Of course, her idea involved the risk of serious parental consternation. She suggested I give an encore performance of the Electric Heater Fever Simulation Method and skip school again. I argued that wouldn’t fly because I’d already assured the parents of my quick rebound. But Billie had a Plan B, and her Plan B would risk not only the wrath of the parents but also the Lupoyoma School District.
It was Billie who’d first taken to calling them “the parents” rather than “Mom and Dad” or “my mom and your father” or “Mike and Darlene” or anything else, because every other configuration we tried seemed to stumble awkwardly out of our tentative mouths. There was a part of me that resisted this acceptance of my father and Billie’s mother as a single entity, a part that still hoped a child’s hope that both Darlene Beverly and her daughter would magically disappear from my life—actually un-appear as if time could be rewound like a spool of film on the school projector.
Another part of me wanted to know more about my mother, and yet another part simply wanted to spend time in the charged aura of Billie Armstrong. I couldn’t define or itemize what it was that drew me to her, but it was undeniable. So I got out of bed, dressed for school and made an appearance in the kitchen—sat at the table with a bowl of Frosted Flakes but avoided my father’s probing eyes as the parents went out the door headed for work.
As soon as the Plymouth pulled away from the curb, Billie called the school office on the yellow phone and did a perfect impersonation of Darlene. “Hello, this is Archer King’s mom, I mean stepmom. I’m afraid Archer won’t be able to attend class today. Yes, he’s still a little under the weather. The poor boy’s positively beside himself to miss another day, but we don’t want to chance it with this fever.” All in a high sugary voice like her mom’s, and complete with a few trills of Darlene’s trademark nervous laughter. I was in danger of cracking up out loud the entire time.
“And now—the envelope,” she said after hanging up the phone. She crooked a finger for me to follow, and I followed. In the dayroom, she made me turn around so she could change out of the Woodstock t-shirt. I faced the wall, and she went over her analysis of the situation.
“You know, we could just mail it, after all that’s what your mom was gonna do, but we don’t even know if J.R. Cole is still in Vietnam, it’s almost a year later, he could be out of the service by now, he could be anywhere, besides, who wants to get a love letter from a dead woman? And what if it’s a Dear John letter? I mean, who wants to get the kiss-off from a dead woman! Then again, he might not even know she’s dead, right?” And Billie went on and on like that, and apparently forgot I was turned around. “Oh I’m dressed now,” she finally said.
I wheeled around to see her standing with her arms out in a theatrical pose as if to say, “ta-da, what do you think of me now?” It was a look that demanded attention, pleaded for approval and defied criticism all at once. Look at me. Love me. Don’t dare judge me.
She wore Oshkosh overalls with the legs cut off high as hot pants and the edges frayed just-so to create a stringy decorative fringe. She was braless again, with one strap of her overalls undone in a way that exposed the curve of her left breast under a thin tank top that was tie-dyed in swirls of red, pink and purple. That wild red hair framed her rose-tinted, wire-rimmed sunglasses, round and oversized like the ones Janis Joplin wore on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Three inches of bangles jangling on each wrist, and on her feet tan leather work boots with bright red shoelaces. I didn’t even know red shoelaces existed.
She was a magnificent alien, wondrous and unsettling at the same time. I thought of how my friends and I used to build coasters out of backyard wood and spare hardware, with wheels snatched from broken tricycles or wagons and bristly old lengths of boatyard rope for steering reins and only our tennis shoes for brakes. You’d sit in this wobbly creation at the top of Gunderman Street, the steepest hill in Lupoyoma City, a forty-foot drop-off on one side. If you could stand the shame, you might chicken out right then—I was tempted more than once. But that was your last chance to back out. Then your friends shoved you off, and there was nothing to do but ride it out to save your young trembling life.
Billie finally laughed at the blank look on my face and dropped her pose. She held the envelope in one hand and began to jab the air with it like my blowhard science teacher strutting around the classroom with his wooden pointer. “So—today we’re going to play mailman,” she said. “We can’t deliver this thing to Vietnam but we can return to sender. We can deliver this letter to the Rawson Road address your mom was using, I mean, obviously they were using that address to keep their letters from falling into the wrong hands so maybe this Mrs. Watkins is a friend or maybe Cole’s mother or something and who knows, maybe Cole is there right now and we might even meet him and he could tell us the truth about your mother and the hatbox and Vietnam and the blues, the whole kit and caboodle.”
I wondered why the caboodle never gets mentioned without the kit, but what I said was, “That address is twenty-some miles from here. And we’re not even sure how to get there.”
She held up her hitchhiking thumb. “I got the key to the highway right here,” she said, a nod to one of our favorite cuts from the stack of 45s on the Grundig. And with a grin, she added, “Archer, you are a pessimist, a cynic, a killjoy,”
“I prefer skeptic,” I said.
The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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