Never Let You Go

by Lowry Pei

1.One thing you can't help learning about life is that most of the time it puts up a lot of resistance, as if you were trying to write a passionate love letter with a pen dipped in molasses. And yet every once in a while the resistance decreases. It did that from one day to the next during the January of my senior year in high school - the stuff things were made of softened and began to flow in unpredictable directions.

At the time, I was listening to Ray Charles and John Coltrane every chance I got, I liked to read Dostoyevsky late at night, and I felt as though my balls might crack from internal pressure. The girls I knew at school seemed to think that getting good grades meant I shouldn't want what their boyfriends wanted - but I made a hell of a confidant. If I couldn't have a love life with them, at least they could tell me the truth about the ones they had. I had years of practice at that, with Toni Anastos, Claire Joseph - who once was my girlfriend, not for long enough - and more recently with Becca Shulman. I spent at least half an hour every evening on the phone with one or another of them; we squeezed the day ruthlessly for every drop of meaning. It would have thrilled Mr. Kearns, the AP English teacher, if only we'd been doing it to Shakespeare. Those were conversations I couldn't have with boys, other than my best friend Dal, because if I tried to have them, all I got were variations on "Didja get to second base?"

Dal's real name was Darryl, but that had last been heard some time in grade school. Even his parents called him Dal. He was a terrific ballplayer - when Dal was in Babe Ruth League he made the all-star team - and when you saw him playing baseball you seemed to see exactly who he was. He was a center fielder, responsible for an expanse of open grass that he could somehow cover without seeming to make an effort. He never looked bored out there; he looked as intensely involved as the shortstop, but in a different way, as if the real game were one nine-inning-long thought, from the first pitch to the last out. At times it seemed as though everyone else played inside Dal's idea of ball. He looked pure to me - not just on the field. Maybe that was making too much of him, but maybe it wasn't. There's something in some people, like Dal, that puts ugliness to shame. And he played life the riskiest way; he just was. Whereas my other friends had plenty of defenses, that let you know they thought they were living in a difficult world. Well, didn't all of us? All except Dal.

In the seventh grade I was four foot eleven, which made me the shortest kid, boy or girl, not just in my home room but in the entire seventh grade. It was typical of Dal that he didn't care about that. Other kids made jokes about stuffing me into lockers or even wastebaskets and now and then some giant eighth-grader would try to do it, laughing as if he were the very first dipshit ever to think it up. Of course those guys had about as much electrical activity in their brain as my cat, so it was a red-letter day when they had any kind of an idea at all. The only things I had going for me were I could run fast, I could talk fast (though talk is useless with your average thirteen-year-old hood), and if I could just manage to stay calm I had a certain talent for making myself invisible. It's one of the things I learned as a little kid that came in handy later on.

They didn't try stunts like that when Dal was around. Not that he was my bodyguard; it was just that even those clowns would have felt stupid doing something like that in front of him. I'm not sure they actually knew where the influence was coming from, but I did.

Dal wasn't crazy about talking on the phone, or I might have spent another hour talking to him every night, after I quit talking to Toni or Becca or Claire. We had something else we did instead. Every once in a while, at one in the morning, I would get dressed and sneak out of my house, go down the block to my car which I would purposely have parked far away so my parents wouldn't hear it when I started it up, and drive to Dal's. Maybe they wouldn't have been waked up by the grinding starter of that old three-hundred-dollar Ford, but I wasn't taking any chances. I'd park on a side street by his house, facing downhill; then I'd try to do my invisibility thing as I crossed his back yard, hoping not to see a light in the upstairs windows, and not to be reported by some neighbor as a prowler. Dal's room was like an afterthought to their house - a little room off the kitchen, far away from the rest of the family who were sleeping upstairs. I tapped on his window. No light went on, but he would wave his hand, and in a minute he would raise the window and silently climb out. We didn't speak until we were across the yard again and inside my car; even then we whispered as if someone might still hear us, and I let the car roll down the hill a block or two, without headlights, making just a faint sound of tires on asphalt, before I started it. Then we would drive all night. We listened to soul music on KATZ, we drove out into the suburbs and kept on until they became country, where the rank plant smell in marshy places reminded me of skunk. We had to be in motion; it was a need like the need to breathe. I felt I was suffocating in the humid wait to get out of St. Louis, out of the whole Midwest - to go East (somehow that was always the direction) and begin what I thought of as another life. Dal seemed to have more patience than I did, but he was ready to leave too. If we didn't talk about that, then we'd talk about girls, about love. We actually used the word. But then Dal and I had known each other a long time. We drove till we were on the verge of getting lost, and then we turned around and hoped we'd make it back before dawn. On the way back, if there was time and we had any money, we ate hamburgers at some 24-hour diner at five in the morning, and then we sneaked back home into our beds to sleep a couple of hours before we'd meet again at school. Somehow I wasn't tired the mornings after those nights.

Dal and I didn't know much about going East, except what we read in books. I'd been to New York just once to visit a cousin, and Dal had never been east of Zanesville, Ohio, but we knew we were going there somehow or other. We knew it was an older part of the world, a place of shrieking subways and even lower, scarier depths. When I thought of New York I thought of a bar over on Delmar Boulevard where there was blue neon over the door and if somebody came out as you were walking by, you'd catch a glimpse of a stairway going down and hear blue music pumping away from below. The opposite of the yellow light in the window at home. I think we wanted to go East to be uncomfortable. At least I did, not for its own sake, but because we believed that a certain kind of discomfort was a sign that you were somewhere near the truth.

Dal and I didn't know much about love, either, but we knew this much: the authorities were not to be trusted. Whoever said they knew, didn't; and whoever volunteered to tell us how we should feel, and what we should or shouldn't do about it, was cordially invited to stick their head in a bucket three times and pull it out twice. Our experience of love was too tentative to bear any impartial scrutiny; I never willingly discussed it with an adult. Anyway, from my point of view it was mostly unrequited, and Claire, my one real girlfriend, had dropped me for someone else. What I dreamed about, it seemed to me Dal could have without even trying; he was surrounded by girls who were waiting for him to notice them. Not that he was aware of it, necessarily. But he could never seem to find what he wanted either. Dal had one thing in mind, true love, which he guarded the same way he guarded his vision of true baseball through an entire game.

Dal pointed out to me more than once that I was always falling in love with unattainable girls, and he, it seemed, was exactly the reverse: he was the unattainable, for various girls who wanted him to ask them out, and even for most of the ones he went out with. I knew. Sometimes more than I wanted to, when Toni or Claire would make it my job to tell Dal about some girl's crush on him. In the heat of the moment it never seemed to occur to them that the messenger might have feelings about the transaction.

I was pretty much bound to tell him whether they wanted me to or not. Not much could be hidden between me and Dal; it was too late for that. I'd known him since grade school, and we had been inseparable the whole time except for a period when I was his bitter enemy in the fourth grade. I was jealous over something that happened at recess. Dal invented a game called Chaser that he played with a group of kids who were destined to become athletes; they wouldn't teach it to the rest of us because it was clear we'd never be fast or tricky enough to compete. All we saw was that they darted and bolted from place to place after one another in a bewildering way, their allegiances seeming to shift from second to second, pursuing some strategy I never understood. It was like trying to pick up a tune by watching someone's fingers play it on the guitar. Dal left me behind, and I hated him. If I could have caught him, I would have jumped up and down on his stomach. But he got bored with Chaser when Little League started up again, and after a while our friendship went back to normal.

When we were in the spring of the sixth grade, Dal and I went to a week-long camp that the school district put on every year for sixth-graders, someplace off in the woods not too far from St. Louis. I suppose they thought of it as a special treat to mark the end of grade school. I don't know what the girls were up to, but for the boys the real function of this camp, it seemed, was to learn to masturbate and swear. The education took place in the cabins when the organized activities were over. By the time I left I knew every dirty word there was, I'd seen Mark Upton jerk off for a circle of admiring boys who were awed by the size of his penis (and hastily pull up his underpants to hide it when he came, but I didn't understand that at the time), and a few boys I didn't know from some other school had even tried to bugger each other, which looked more like a very humiliating form of wrestling than anything else. My own penis was small, like the rest of me, but I found I could do the same thing Mark Upton did, and enjoy it, a discovery that gave a whole new dimension to life.

I wasn't in a cabin with Dal at camp, so I didn't get to see how he reacted to all this. I have a feeling he didn't join in much, but none of it escaped him. He knew what was important to learn.

We had our own private version of that experience, later on; they say all boys do, but no one ever talks about it, that I know of. We must have been in the seventh or eighth grade; at any rate, Dal's penis was starting to grow and he had sprouted a few pubic hairs, by which I was very impressed. I remember we were at my house alone, looking at an art book full of nudes, and somehow ended up naked ourselves. That's the part I can't recall - how we got there, what excuse we made, what game we invented to get our clothes off. But I'm sure that when we were naked, Dal's erect penis fascinated us both; it was big, and a pearly drop trembled on the tip of it. He lay down on the couch and closed his eyes and said, "Pretend you're a girl and you're touching it," and I did. I still remember the strangeness of the experience and the tentative pleasure it gave me, which, perhaps, was not too different from what I would have felt if I had been an actual girl, and I remember Dal with his eyes closed, absorbed in the power of his sensations, off into a world I couldn't share yet, only envy and try to imagine.

But we would never have mentioned that even to each other. Having been that innocent, that unselfconscious, was something no one could admit to at seventeen.

2.It was a Sunday afternoon, I was working on a physics problem set, and Dal called me and said, "Andy. Meet me by the tracks." I thought he was going to ask me about a problem, since we were both taking physics and we both spent Sundays wrestling with the homework, usually together.

"Why not come over?" It would give me a few more minutes to work if he did. Not that I wasn't ready to give in to distraction, but I had to finish the homework and every time I tried to figure out the escape velocity of a rocket leaving the moon's gravitational field, I got a number I knew was about fifty times too large.

"It isn't physics. I don't want to talk about this at your house. Ten minutes. I mean it." This was not the way Dal sounded; for once there was nothing relaxed about him.

"Okay, okay, I'll be there." What could be so important that we had to talk about it instantly?

I pulled on a jacket and went out into the late-January afternoon. It was one of the almost-spring days that somehow pop up in January or February in St. Louis as if they've lost their place in the year, a day when no one should be inside plugging numbers into formulas. I knew that the day after tomorrow it might be three degrees again, but at the moment it must have been fifty; the sky was full of restless clouds blowing quickly past, with gaps between them where the sun tempted me to take my jacket off. My dad was out in the front yard, wearing baggy corduroy pants and an old cardigan, poking under the bushes with a rake. No wonder students at Washington U. always assumed he was a professor - all that was missing was a pipe clenched in his teeth. "What's up, Dad?"

"Hm?" he said distractedly. "Remarkable day, isn't it?" There was a wistful note in his voice that instantly made me impatient.

"I guess."

"You could always help. They're the same leaves you didn't rake up last fall." But he said it without conviction. "You never know, it might snow tomorrow."

"If I rake them now, you won't have an excuse to stand around the yard."

He gave a wry little smirk. "I could still supervise."

"Right, Dad. Look, I gotta go talk to Dal, have fun."

"See if you can make it back for dinner, okay?" he said, as if I never did.

"Okay, okay, don't worry."

He picked up a mat of damp leaves that crumbled as he carried it toward the bushel basket he was filling. Something about him bothered me that I didn't want to think about. As if I was supposed to fix it. The air smelled like distant rain and moist dirt; it was on the move, messing up my hair, blowing the dead oak and sycamore leaves that had escaped the leaf-burning of the fall, making them dance in circles on the sidewalk and in back yards, piling them up against the steps of brick front porches. I had lived in the neighborhood my whole life and knew its geography without having to think, even though some of the streets were cul-de-sacs and plain dead ends and some doubled back on themselves. Now, going to meet Dal, I crossed over an island in the middle of the street with a couple of big trees on it and a clump of bushes where smaller kids could hide in the course of their games. On the other side, I cut through a vacant lot to a street that dead-ended at a sudden slope, thick with trees and undergrowth; at the bottom of that were two tracks where the trolley cars ran.

Long ago, the trolley-car right-of-way had been fenced off with five-foot-high walls of pebbly biscuit-colored concrete on either side, but the concrete had long since begun to crack and come to pieces, and now there wasn't much to stop anyone from climbing down to the tracks. Dal and I had discovered them at the age of eight or nine, and had been forbidden to play there; it was said that a child had been hit by a trolley car and killed, not far from our neighborhood, years ago. That only made the place more attractive. There was no resisting the temptation to go there and put pennies on the tracks to be squashed twice their normal size - or crossed pins, artfully bent in a way Dal showed me, which a passing trolley would, with luck, turn into something resembing miniature scissors.

As I came down the street to where Dal would be waiting, I remembered an expedition he and I took down the trolley-car tracks when we were ten years old; along the way, Dal and I were telling a story of a magical region inhabited by trolls who lived in culverts, and wizards, some evil and some good, who drove their armored chariots swiftly down the tracks, propelled by a mysterious invisible power. They were bent on secret errands that could change the lives of everyone in the land between the crumbling walls, and our mission was to learn the mystery of their ways, to decipher the messages that were encoded in the ordinary-looking sticks and stones around us, and to save the inhabitants from the dark powers by working magic of our own. It was a long, heroic day, filled with feats of cunning, narrow escapes, sudden reverses, miraculous triumphs. Dal, as ever, took the part of the fearless one, while I was the schemer, the reader of omens and signs, who saw behind the veil of the ordinary; together we were invincible. Whenever Dal's imagination stopped for a rest, mine kept the story unbroken, and there were times when minutes passed without a word, so far into the land of story together that we knew the secret meanings of what we saw and did without having to say a thing. It was our pride never to check, afterwards, to see if we had been thinking the same thoughts. When we finally headed home, the world we had come from seemed so petty and small that I wondered how our families could bear it.

I was half in that world as I approached the dead end, where we had helped the walls to crumble by hitting them with rocks. Not far down the tracks I had held onto Dal's ankle with one hand and clung to a tree with the other as he dangled head-down over the entrance to a culvert, enticing a troll to come out where we could roll rocks down on his head. I had read heiroglyphics in twigs that said we were surrounded by invisible powers, some of which were secretly on our side; I had laid a piece of leather, cut from a found glove, on the tracks to be run over by the wizard's chariot and turned into a map that would guide our journey. Would I still know how to read it? But Dal hadn't called me up to play a game anyway. I knew where he wanted me to meet him. He was squatting on his heels in the undergrowth wearing an old baseball jacket and blue jeans, picking up acorns and throwing them at a pole across the tracks which held up the trolley wires; being Dal, he hit it. "Hi," I said, sitting down beside him in the crumbled remnants of last summer's weeds.

"Hi." He picked up another acorn and threw it, missed the pole and made a face, before he looked at me. Even then he only threw me a glance. "Dja finish the problem you were on?"

"Unh-uh. This is the toughest homework we've had. You'd better get to work on it, it's an S.O.B."

"Look at this," Dal said, and took a folded piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me.

"What is it?"

"I found it in the garage when I was looking for some screws to fix my bike."

That didn't explain much. I unfolded the paper, which was pale blue and looked like letter paper, maybe something for writing thank-you notes. In what looked like a girl's handwriting, it said, "Sweetheart, I'm through with saying we shouldn't. L.," and I knew I was reading something that was never intended for me.

"Weird," I said. I tried to think which girl we knew could be L. "Who the hell leaves notes like this in the garage? Who is L., anyway?"

"I don't know," Dal said.

"You don't know?" What kind of sense did that make?

"It's not for me. I don't know that writing. That note's for somebody else."

"Like who?"

"That's what I'm trying to figure out," he said, throwing another acorn. "Any ideas?"

"A random love note appears in your garage, and you expect me to know who it's for? This is harder than physics." But I had an idea that Dal was only testing me.

"Do you think L.'s a girl or a boy?"

"Girl," I said. The backward slant of the handwriting said that clearly enough.

"Yeah. But it's some girl I don't know." I read it again. Whoever the note was for had been saying "we should," and L. had been saying "we shouldn't," and now she was through saying it. Assuming it was a she.

"You sure it's not for you? Somebody's always in love with you from afar."

"Oh, give me a break. How'd it get in our garage?"

"I don't know."

"Well, nobody but us ever goes in there."

"I know one thing - it's not a note for Katie. Even if a guy did write it after all." Katie was Dal's little sister, age fourteen and scrawny. That almost made Dal smile, but not quite. He looked brooding, which was not a way I was used to seeing him. I had always thought of him as slightly like an Indian, except for his dark-blonde hair, and now that was especially so.

"It's not for my mom either," he said.

"Wait a minute. You're saying it's for your dad?" Dal's father, a guy with gray hair and a gut, getting a note like that from somebody we didn't even know? "You've got to be kidding. You think he's . . . ?" It was too outrageous to say.

Dal ran his hands back through his hair and looked at the ground. "No."

"Dja show it to him?"

"No, he's out somewhere. In the car."

"Where'd he go?"

"I don't know." That proved nothing. Dal threw another acorn.

"Last week they had a fight. I don't know what it was about but I know it was a fight. All of a sudden things got very quiet. I don't know how it works, but you can feel it all over the house even though you can't hear it. Katie noticed it too, I asked her."

Dal and I, too, were quiet for a while. I pulled up a stalk of the tall, weedy grass that grew there - some of it stayed green all winter - and chewed on its tough stem. His mother was English - she and his father had met during the war - and I could well imagine that when she got mad it wouldn't be loud but you'd feel it. I knew better than to try her patience. When my own parents had fights they always pretended nothing happened, as if that sudden, frustrated yelling had come from someone other than the three people who inhabited our house. Who said that? Blame it on the cat.

"Who says it has anything to do with anybody we know?" I said. "Maybe it just blew in there, or something."

"Yeah, and it just so happened to be lying on the floor right where the driver's door is when the car's in the garage."

I lay back, crushing dead stems under me, and looked up at the sky, a position in which we had spent hours since our childhood. The upper layer of clouds were light gray melting into white melting into blue, and you could see from their shape how the whole sky was swirling in a motion too slow to perceive. Dal's dad? Was such a thing really possible?

"So he gets the note," I said, falling into my old role in the game.

"Shit," Dal said. Not what he wanted to hear.

"Sorry."

"How? How could he get it?" Did he want to go on with this, or not?

"I don't know."

"Well, she couldn't very well stick it in our mailbox, so how did he get it?"

"I don't know, but forget that, he gets the note some damn way, he goes out and gets in the car, he's in a hurry and when he reaches in his pocket to get his car keys he doesn't notice that the note falls on the floor. There it is, you find it . . . " I felt the whole thing was falling together too well, I had gotten into deep water before I realized it.

"Shit," Dal said again.

There was a heavy silence. Such an idea had never crossed my mind. "You don't really think he'd do that, do you?"

"No," Dal said, inspecting the ground again. Dal's parents had been a fixture in my life ever since the second grade. His dad worked for Ralston Purina in some way that I didn't understand, smoked Chesterfields, had a pretty noticeable bulge around the middle. On summer weekends sometimes I'd see him with his shirt off mowing the lawn, his stomach out in front of him, hard and tanned, solid like something he'd use to move things out of his way. How anybody could be in love with that I couldn't imagine. There were pictures of him in their house as a young man, in uniform for various sports, with a body more or less like Dal's; since then he had thickened, he seemed to wear his body like a tough hide - the same as most adults.

"He could be anywhere, Dal. He could be at the hardware store, he could have gone to put air in the tires, who knows?"

Dal looked singularly unimpressed. "He could have gone out to buy thirty-seven cases of beer, but I'll bet he hasn't."

I felt disoriented - if Dal's father might have an affair, what couldn't happen? My own parents were not all that happy, I knew it but I wasn't supposed to say it out loud.

"I see what you mean about this being a little more important than physics." Given the known parameters, find the time at which Dal's father would attain escape velocity from the family. No one wanted the answer. But I couldn't help myself. "Is there, you know, anything else?"

"Aah - I don't know. My dad's been going out by himself in the evenings. I didn't really think about it till now. Like once a week, maybe twice. Something about meetings he has to go to for work. But he's never had meetings at night before."

"That could be anything," I said.

"Something doesn't feel right, Andy. I don't like the way they look at each other. I've felt it for weeks but I didn't want to admit it. He's watching her, she's watching him, they're trying to pretend they're not."

"Ugh," I said. I tried to think if I remembered seeing anything like that myself, recently, at Dal's house. No luck. But they were his parents, not mine. "It still doesn't prove a thing."

"I know that, for Christ's sake." Dal took the note back from me, unfolded it and read it over. "So what would you do?"

"If I found that? Watch him, I suppose, try to find out if it was true."

"Really?" Dal gave me a disbelieving look. "If it was your own father?"

That set me back for a moment. "I'd have to know for sure."

"Yeah? And what if it was true?"

"God knows."

"Well, I sure don't," Dal said. "I wish I'd never found this damn thing, it's driving me nuts. I suppose I could just show it to him."

"Do you think he'd tell you the truth about it?"

That made the cloud over Dal's face even darker, and I was afraid my mouth had gotten me in trouble once again, as it periodically did. "I hate this whole thing," he said, not looking at me, and abruptly got to his feet. I scrambled up too, followed him up the bank. "I hate it," he muttered again; I was kicking myself for thinking that Dal's dad would lie to him.

"Where are you going?" I said to his back.

"Home." He didn't look at me, making me feel guiltier still.

"I'll call you later, okay?"

I barely heard him mutter "okay" as he set off at a fast walk, his head down.

I walked back to my house a lot slower than Dal had gone; the day didn't seem half as beautiful as it had. In the time we'd been talking, the afternoon had turned the corner; the clouds were closer together now, and the light only had so much longer to last. The precarious warmth of the sun was lost, and I felt I was going home just in time, before it got too cold for the windbreaker I was wearing, back to January as it was supposed to be. I didn't envy Dal. Would he just ask his dad point-blank about the note? I knew I wouldn't if I were in his place, but it would be like Dal to go at something like that head-on; I was afraid for him. He didn't seem to know he could get hurt. No, that wasn't true. It was already hurting him, but he didn't seem to have any thought that it could get worse.

At six-thirty, when I had finally finished the physics homework and dinner was almost on the table, the phone rang in the hall outside my room and I picked it up. "It's me," Dal said, and I felt that I must not have screwed up too badly.

"What's happening?"

"My dad came home about an hour ago. He says he's been over at a friend's house watching a golf tournament. It doesn't sound much like him." So did that mean Dal hadn't asked him about the note?

"He could have been, though, couldn't he?"

"I suppose," Dal said glumly.

"Did you show him the note?"

"I couldn't. You know something, Andy?"

"Tell me."

"He looks too happy. I think it could really be true."