Nebraska, or the Implications of a Gift of Duran Duran: Chapter 4

Nebraska, or the Implications of a Gift
of Duran Duran: Chapter 4
by Dileep Rao

It was after this weekend that he began to take a different route home. He would eschew the long worn path of the shortcut over the Henderson farm that crossed Dewhurst park and brought him out near his home, all in twenty minutes flat, ten if he ran. Now, he walked out the front of the school, down past the elementary school and past Oak, Hickory, Chestnut and Elm streets. He would hesitate sometimes as he past Chestnut, knowing Elm was next. As he crossed Elm, a small strand of excitement would begin to rattle through him, some tense piano wire ringing a single note.

He was sentenced, due to tardiness in English class, to a half hour’s detention for a week in the spring. He had seen Shelby in the halls and in passing periods between classes. They still had none of the same classes. He was leaving the hell of Mrs. Asensio’s English class when he spotted her tacking something up on the wall.

He walked towards her. She smiled at him.

"Hey there. What’re you still doing here?"

"Detention."

"Detention? You? You’re Mr. A, right?"

"Yeah, but I’m late a lot from, well I have Mr. Klamp’s science
class and it’s in that—"

"Trailer, and you’re late, yeah, that happens to me from Mr.
Klamp’s to Mrs. Asensio’s."

"I have both those classes."

"I just told her and she doesn’t mark me late."

"I told her and she said that was my problem."

He shook his head then looked at the bulletin board. Amid the many PTA informative dittos and puffy cut out letters for ‘Redbird Pride!’, he spotted a small typed page. Freshmen baseball tryouts, next Saturday. Bring a mitt and cleats.

"Are you going home now?"

"Yeah."

"Well I just have to go to my locker, but if you wait we can walk
out together, or—wait, that’s totally out of your way, right?"

"Naw, I can cut past all the tree streets and down past the park. It’s not too far. I have to go to my locker too."

"Okay, meet you in front in five minutes."

She disappeared and he ran back to his locker to collect his books.

They walked slowly, at her pace, down the avenue toward the elementary school. They discussed the vagaries of Mrs. Asensio’s English class, the uselessness of sentence diagramming, and Mr. Klamp’s abject disinterest in the class.

" Your mom’s a nice teacher."

He stiffened. This possibility had not even struck him. Was she looking for something inside? His mind conjured a bizarre fantasy wherein he was doctoring grades in his mother’s green gradebook by stealth late at night. Whatever the odds of that request, he set his mind firmly against it.

"I like that class because it’s really just about learning math and it goes pretty fast."

He walked on, not saying anything to dispel the image she had of his
mother.

"What does that dot she wears mean?"

His heart jumped.

"It means she’s married, it’s like a wedding ring or something. But when the Muslim rulers came to India, some of the kings started rounding up all these single women to put in their harems, so all the women started wearing it, like a fake, so they wouldn’t be rounded up. Now it’s like makeup."

"Yeah, it’s so cool because she changes it to match her…um, sari right?"

"Right, yeah." His stomach tightened.

"I think they’re so pretty."

They walked, talking quietly. Her manner was transparent and exquisitely ethereal. A single small cloud hovered in the spent afternoon sky.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"What’s your last name?"

He knew it already, of course. He had learned it soon after that first weekend of constructing the red bird. But he wanted to have the right to know, not just by the fruits of espionage.

"Oh, it’s Morrow. You’re A-jay, right?"

She said his name the way everyone here did, as if it were a pair of initials.

"Yeah, that’s right. Morrow, like to-morrow."

"Yeah…" Her voice trailed off, a touch of the obvious in it.

"Sorry, it just came out, I couldn’t stop it."

"Most people can’t. What’s yours?"

"Mine? Oh, my last name...it’s, well, it’s long and it’s
spelled phonetically, but—"

"What is it, just say it."

"Bhuradwaj."

He looked at her. She smiled and then he laughed.

"I told you—"

"No, it’s cool. It is."

She stopped.

"This is me."

She stopped, fishing a length of clothesline from under her shirt that dangled around her neck. Hung at its end was a single brass key. She smiled at him, a tawny wonder under the serene afternoon sun.

A sentence formulated itself, for the first time on this walk, clear as a fire engine in his brain. Some source of ambition and terror had constructed it. If you ever want to study for Mr. Klamp’s or Mrs. Asensio’s class, even though we don’t have the same class, we can. Say it.

He looked at her. Something about the way she was standing or the clear outlines of her green eyes caused the total failure of his mouth. He produced, instead, an awkward grin, waved and turned on his heel. He took a last look back to watch her disappear into the brick house with the slate blue roof.

As he walked home, he thought of how he would have said that line, how she would have responded. The extra ten minutes of this route gave him barely enough time to get through his benign intentions.

_________________

The next day, as he stood in the miserable cafeteria line to buy his lunch, he looked up at Mrs. Lumpkin and shook his head.

"Just the cookie and the milk."

He fished out a dollar from his pocket and snugly pushed the dollar twenty-five the sandwich he normally bought would have cost back into his pocket.

By Friday, he had saved up seven dollars. He took the fifteen-minute walk downtown, cutting through Mason Currant park. Five minutes later, he found himself in Boss Joe’s Music Emporium. Boss Joe had a great love of country music, one that he imposed with due rigor on anyone who passed his door and its rattling bell.

Ajay walked through the dozen long shelves marked “Country—Red, White and Blue,” past a lonely, undusted rack marked “Jazz” to a long bin at the back marked “Rock.”

He went through the D’s and couldn’t find the record he came for. He looked to the desk where Boss Joe looked away. Nonetheless, Ajay approached him.

"Do you have the Duran Duran album?"

Hank Williams pleasantly broke his heart in the background, extolling the fact that he was nobody’s sugar daddy now.

Boss Joe looked up from his book.

"Believe we do. Hang on."

And in back he went. He emerged not thirty seconds later and slapped the album down on his desk.

"You want to give it a listen before you buy it?"

"That’ll rip the plastic though."

"Naw we got a promotional copy here, hang on."

He pulled a white sleeved album stamped “For Promotional Use Only”, slipped the large licorice-colored disc from the sleeve and set it spinning on his turntable.

The first pulse of the music was loud, louder than Joe had expected. He quickly dialed down the volume and stood listening intently.

"Just the one song."

Ajay nodded. It was the most alive, bizarre music he had ever heard. The beat was clear but all of the instruments pulsed in and out too quickly for his mind to fix the hooks and melodies. The song ended and Joe snapped the record up and stowed it in its sleeve as if he had re-caged a pest.

"I’ll take it."

Walking home, the record under his arm, he thought of how brittle it was. He could put his foot on it and break it in half, never to be heard. He remembered a trivia question he had reasoned correctly: How many grooves are there on a standard LP record? One.

He turned up Sutter toward the tree streets. His body suddenly fell into civil war; his mind and feet were determined but his stomach had other ideas and was quickly conspiring with his esophagus. He dashed off a note on a torn piece of notebook paper and slid the record behind the milk box. He rang the bell, turned, darted from the steps and made his way up toward Sutter.

As he crested the hill that led to his small house, he chanced a glance back. He hoped to see her arm reach for the record, her hair fall around her mouth. His stomach pulsed a primitive patter. But there was no one there. He turned and walked on, framed against the sky which was now varnished red and vermillion, a few trace clouds like bruises high against the darkening heaven.

Dileep can be reached at dileep@babblog.com.