Yeah, so, I just took her out for food. I know, I know, not the most thrilling thing in the world, but it was all I could afford that night. I had a grand total of 23 dollars and 64 cents in my pants. It was my earthly total. I kept bringing out the same bills and shuffling them around so it looked like a lot though. Maybe I'll tell her I had a rich, dead uncle or something. I don't want her to think I'm a drug dealer. I guess the whole "shuffling the money" thing won't last forever anyway.
She seemed disappointed for some reason. She hardly ate any of her food. And when we got back to the hotel, it was just...I don't know. Anticlimatic? Fuck, I wished I knew what was going on.
Things were definetly coming up daises though! On the way into the hotel, I noticed that Mecca, that Mother Lode, that Blessing From Above- the Help Wanted sign. This, and my story to the desk clerk of my involvement in the "Get An Orphan Child A Job" program, led to the greatest four days of my life.
For the next four days, I was a REAL bellboy. It was fantastic. What's more, I got to spend time with Emma like there was no tomorrow. We tore the place apart from top to bottom. Nothing too bad, of course. But we constantly scammed our way into events held in the Main Ballroom, or would go rifling through people's personal belongings, or would just subtly change the labels for ingredients in the kitchen. We even stuffed one person's minibar completely full of mud (well, that one was my idea. Emma didn't seem that keen on it). It was great fun.
Great fun that is until The Man showed up looking for one Randy Ketchum, suspected car theif. I heard about it from another bellboy. Good thing little innocent bellyboy Horatio A. Prosper didn't know a thing about it.
My mother has stopped speaking to me. What's more, she's told my father in no uncertain terms that we're changing hotels first thing in the morning and my "stalker" isn't going to follow us this time.
It all started when Randy and I were walking up to the hotel, when I'd been accompanying him on his lunch break. Since we weren't that close to the beach any longer (about a mile), my family didn't have that much to do. I'd developed an "allergy" to the sun so I was excused from any family-related beach excursions, which left me free to spend my days with Randy. Yesterday, however, my mother had driven back to the hotel (you didn't think they walked to the beach, did you?) because she'd forgotten her sunglasses, and had about near blown her top.
At first she thought that I had just met a local bellboy, which was bad but wasn't that bad. Then she had the dawning realization that said bellboy was none other than the rude employee at Beachside Bliss. And oh man did she lose it. She hauled me up to our room and proceeded to scream at me for at least twenty minutes about "tarnishing our family name," among other things. It was all I could do not to laugh at her. When I finally informed her that I didn't think they would care much who I associated with on our family vacation back at the office, she just stormed out of the room without saying anything. I haven't gotten a word out of her since, although she has been doing the 'will you tell Emma that...' thing that four-year-olds do when they're giving someone the silent treatment.
So we were leaving the next day. At least my family was. I had no desire to leave. I was planning on telling them the next day. I figured that Randy might not mind. I wasn't sure what was going on with Randy, on a couple of levels. First of all, he wasn't exactly being the model son. He refused to talk about his family (all I could get out of him was that he had one or more brothers), and hadn't left the hotel or even called his family to my knowledge. I caught him talking with men in suits, and they definitely called him 'Horatio.' Plus, his behavior was all skittery and nervous. I figured that was just how he was, but it didn't really add up.
And, then, of course, there was the neverending question of what was going on with me and Randy. Who knew. I certaintly couldn't tell. Part of me knew that he liked me, because really, what kind of a guy is going to follow a girl and get a job at her hotel if he doesn't like her? But then the other, larger part is telling me that it's all in my head and who was that Lolly anyway? Was she really a deluded ex-girlfriend, or was something rotten in the state of Oregon? I couldn't tell, I really couldn't. What was going on was anyone's guess. Did he like me or not? Was something going on or not? Would Randy run away with me or not? These were the questions I needed answers to...hopefully quickly because my family was packing their bags.
I wouldn't have been caught if I'd been more careful in my choice of gainful employment. You see, the fine establishment which Emma's mom deemed to stay in was owned by no other Abraham Zapruder- yes, THAT Zapruder. And so, understandably, Mr. Zapruder had quite a problem with suits and feds. They made him predictably nervous. And so, just like at the Warren Commission, he was more than happy to spill his guts, this time about the questionable nature of recently hired bellboy Horatio A. Prosper.
Now, see, if you'd been paying close attention, at this point you'd be scratching your head, and wondering, "But, Randy- you only stole a car! Grand theft auto isn't a felony!" But therein lies the rub that I guess I should finally take the time to explain.You see, truth be told, I didn't really steal the car in the moral Christian sense of the word. Taking the car out was more like second-hand smoke.
Every town has its criminal, and Myrtle Point, true to point, is every town. In Myrtle Point, our resident criminal was a man named Hans Lurden. Hans, being the only well-known criminal in town, was sort of a jack-of-all-trades. Need speed? Han's your man. Want a robbin' job? Pan to han. I can't think of anything that rhymes with credit card fraud, but if you needed that, Hans's your god (ooh, guess I lied!). But, and perhaps most infamously, Hans Lurden possessed the only chop shop in a thirty mile radius. Hans had everything- including the wheels I needed. Stolen cars came at a predictably lower price too- a price I still couldn't afford, however. So stealing the Crown Victoria from Hans was no big moral qualm for me.
What I didn't know at the time was that Hans saw me pull away with his car- and ratted on me (probably to look better on his next appeal; I don't hold it against him). What I also didn't know is that it wasn't just any stolen car- it was a car reported stolen by an FBI agent last October. And so here I was, driving merrily down the Oregon coast, in a felony-inducing stolen car. Good times, indeed!
Until the whole getting caught thing, anyway. The officers were pretty nice about it, really. Didn't cuff me, even offered to take me out the back. But I insisted we go out front. I had a message to convey.
I leaned over to Emma as Agents Harlond and Waites led me out the front door.
"Leaving so soon? I heard Portland is rather nice this time of year. The trees are all in bloom and it has the nicest federal courthouse in miles."
As the agents manuvered me into their paddywagon, I couldn't help but grin. She'd winked back at me.
I whistled to myself as I drove our LandRover down I-5. I figured I had a good three hours before my parents set the local authorities on me. Ok, so it took fifteen minutes to "go out for coffee," which had been my excuse du jour. My parents would give it thirty without thinking about it. After thirty they'd start to wonder idly. After an hour they would start to worry, for real, but they wouldn't do anything. My mother hated bringing other people in on "family business," so she would put off calling the police for as long as possible. After an hour-and-a-half they'd start looking for me, irritatedly. My mom would probably send my father out while she stayed with the brats. Then, after he had exhausted the coffeeshops in the Coquille area, he would go back to the hotel, defeated. Then they would call the cops. That would take about three hours. I'd already spent a sixth of that...hopefully in two and a half hours I would have sprung Randy from the slammer and be on our way to the freedom of the Canadian border. Luck, it seemed, was on my side. As I cruised by a cop at eighty, he pulled over the person behind me. I found the Portland Federal Courthouse, an old, distinguished building in the heart of downtown, with one hour and forty-two minutes to go before my anticipated fugitivedom. Randy was sitting on a bench immediately inside the courthouse, swinging his legs.
"What's the deal?" I asked him, slightly confused. I'd been envisioning a jailbreak worthy of Sunday afternoon cop movies. This was somewhat anticlimactic.
Randy shrugged. "A couple minutes after I left the hotel in shame, the feds got a call about Hans, dying of an OD. They found that he'd had a huge drug ring stretching up and down the West Coast. They questioned me for hours last night, and I kept telling them the same story. Eventually they ascertained that I was just a dumb kid 'borrowing' a car he didn't know was stolen. They let me go with a slap on the wrists and a promise never to do anything like it again. The FBI has bigger fish to fry than me, I'm sure." Randy grinned at me.
"Thank god for that. I'm glad you left me a message." I told him. And I was, really. I'd really grown a very strong attachment to Randy. Very strong attachment. I supposed that I might as well bite the bullet and admit that I was in love with him. I was certaintly displaying all the classic symptoms of infatuation. My heart sped up like I was on copious amounts of caffeine whenever he was around. I thought about him constantly. I'd stolen my parents car to break him out of jail. Yep, I was definitely in love.
We walked out into the sunshine. I had no idea where we were going. I had no idea what was going to happen to us, where we would end up, and if our families would disown us. And for once, Emma Ramaley didn't care at all.
I can say one nice thing about the feds- they sure like to feed you. So I was more than full, but being the gentlemen I was and seeing as Emma had just put in many long hours in an SUV that smelled like steak, I suggested we have a quick sit-down in an open-air cafe across from the Federal Building. I bought Emma a deli sandwich and got both of us a cup of joe. It came to 4 dollars and 53 cents. I now had 4 dollars to my name. But no matter. I was counting on Divine Intervention by then.
Em and I made small talk for about an hour and a half or so. I think I was groggy and grumpy, but I did my best to show how appreciative I was for being rescued. I asked her what the deal with the rest of her family was, but she kept downplaying it. Said they were across town. I didn't push it.
Emma looked over at me over her coffee. "What do you think we should do now?" She smiled sweetly.
I panicked and looked down at my coffee. That's the sort of question I'm horrible at! She should know that by now. Luckily, I was saved by a distraction in the street- some kind of altercation in the street. We both craned our necks to look over the hedgerow.
It wasn't as thrilling as I'd hoped. Something about a kid, blah blah blah, just his fault, blah blah, just a kid, not worth the time. Just a lot of yelling and posturing between Lower East Side types. I returned to my staredown with Emma.
She smiled again. "Well. What do you think?" She was persistent if anything!
Luckily, I was spared yet again. A chair had come flying through the air and hit me square on the head.
Yep. That was a chair. And it had knocked Randy's coffee mug out of his hand. It was shattered on the ground next to us. The chair sat on the table between us. Following the chair through the broken window were three, extrememly tough-looking, hick guys. They were converging on Randy.
I wasn't panicked yet but getting there. I figured they were henchmen of everyone's favorite drug smuggler Hans. I also figured that they were there to either rough up or kill Randy, and I wasn't about to let either one happen.
They were towering over Randy. They had completely ignored me. "So, whatcha think? Should we have him suffer the consequences of ratting Hans out?" one asked the other, smiling vilely and reaching for his pocket.
"I don't know, let's ask the kid." the other one replied. They looked expectantly at Randy.
"I didn't rat anyone out!" Randy exclaimed. He had turned white. He was shaking. I knew that something had to be done. I quickly grabbed my sweatshirt off the back of my chair and stuffed it up my shirt. Suddenly, I moaned loudly.
"Randy, oh god, Randy!" I cried. The three 'gangsters' and Randy turned to look at me.
"You have a problem, little lady?" the most disgusting one asked me, leering in an extremely disgusting suggestive manner.
"Yeah, see I, oh god, my water just broke." I explained. They all took a step back.
"Um, we have to get to the hospital!" Randy exclaimed. The three men looked at each other. I could tell that they weren't as tough as they were pretending to be.
After some discussion among them, and after my moans (and a quickthinking cup of water spilled all over the floor), they eventually let us go and took the contents of our wallets. It was pretty amusing. They did, tell Randy, however, that he was "getting off easy" and that if there was any more trouble "they'd be back."
We ran to my Landrover, and I asked, for the third time, "What do you think we should do now, Randy?"
Well, there was the million-dollar question. What did Randy want to do? You might think I was being a chauvinst pigdog for avoiding it, but truth be told, Randy's problem in answering a seemingly simple question- but therein lies the rub!
No, hang on, don't run away yet. Make it through my belabored analogies first. Some questions are like a brick- they're just there. There's one simple answer- it's a brick. What's the wall made of? A brick. What came through the window? A brick. But other questions are like a cake- multilayered cake that is. They've got multiple parts. What's on the floor? A brick and a hand grenade. What's the house made of? Brick and thatch. You can't answer the whole question without answering the sum parts. If you just say "a brick", you're a filthy liar. I've noticed the types of girls who populate the halls of Kennedy High (back in far-gone Myrtle Point!) love this sort of question. It's not just like a cake though- it's like a booby-trap laced game of pick-up-sticks. You can't take out one part without risking total collapse. There's plenty of examples. "What'd you think of the book?" "What are you doing this weekend?" "Was it good for you too?" You go diving for the yummy raspberry filling and you come back with a turnip. Any possible answer you can give is the wrong one- it's the ultimate Catch-22. It'd be better just to shrivel up and stop existing when one runs into a question like that. The question was a river, and it could flow you away at any moment.
I blinked. I was incorporating things from outside the window into my nonsense monologue. I looked around. We were crossing a bridge over a wide river and heading north. I looked over at Emma. She looked angry. I cleared my throat.
"Where, uh, where are we?"
Emma didn't take her eyes off the road. "This is the Columbia River. We're driving north into Vancouver, Washington."
I paused a second. "What's there?"
"Nothing. You just hadn't responded to my question. You got all pensive and looked out the window. And so I just kept driving in the direction we were going."
I made a mental note to slap myself later. I spent all my time thinking about cakes and bricks and explosive pick-up-sticks. No small wonder Emma was so angry. This is the small town mentality trick though- being able to become completely absorbed in the stupidest of things. I sighed. "Emma?"
"What?"
"I think we should have some fun."
Her demeanor instantly changed. It was like the vernal equinox. She smiled over at me. "That's all I needed to hear!"
The next couple days were a complete blur. Randy and I made it to the Canadian border a scant seven hours after I had left my family carless in Coquille. Randy tried to question me on the subject a couple of times--if I planned on returning our car, if I planned on calling my family, etc. etc. I managed to change the subject every time. The one time he called me on it, I pointed out that he hadn't exactly given me all the gory details of his life, and I would tell him when I was ready.
When I was ready. That was kind of a joke. I was ready then, I would have told Randy anything without the slightest hesitation. The problem wasn't that I didn't trust him, or that I thought he would pass judgement on me, it was that I had no idea what I was doing. Stripped of my mature demeanor, nice clothes, and wealthy background, I was just a scared kid. A scared kid that, if caught, would most certaintly be accused of grand theft auto, among a number of other things. Yes, my mother was that heartless. And so the question was, what did I do with the Land Rover? Ditch it somewhere, and I'd have gotten rid of the only transportation Randy and I had, as well as putting up a red flag as to our location. Keeping it, however, was like sitting on a time bomb. I wondered whether the Canada authorities would be looking for us and the car. It seemed somewhat unlikely. We were in a completely different country. As long as we didn't get pulled over or got in trouble for something else, in Canada it seemed like we were relatively safe. Plus, the car doubled as a bed.
Which brought us to the next problem--poverty. The hick gangstas had made off with the meager amount of cash we had in our pockets (Randy fessed up to having four dollars, I had a grand total of thirty), and we were left penniless. Not a good idea for a runaway in a foreign country. The only immediate solution that I was, short of robbing a back, was to pawn the Land Rover...but that put us back into the first quandary, of what Randy and I would do without a car in Canada.
We drove around Vancouver for a long time, thinking in silence. I pretended not to notice the gas gauge slowly ticking down...but when it got below a quarter tank I was forced to take notice. I pulled over to the side of the road, and we sat there for a moment.
"Emma, what are we going to do?" Randy asked me helplessly. I really had no idea. I couldn't even fathom the situation that we were in. I was living in the moment simply because, had I stepped out and looked at the big picture, I might have gone insane. Three days before I had been at school, taking notes, changing classes, doing the horribly mundane things I did from day to day. There I would have never imagined that, three days later, I would be sitting in the stolen family car in an foreign country with some boy I barely knew.
I shrugged in response to Randy's question. I then sighed. "I don't know. I have no idea. I probably have less grasp on this sitation than you do." All I really wanted was to be comforted by someone, preferably Randy. It was the old feeling of needing someone to tell you it was going to be okay. But, I didn't know Randy well enough to fall into his arms, and I was so unsure about what his feelings towards me were that I didn't dare even try.
"That might be hard. What are we going to do?" He repeated, looking so helpless that I wanted to...well, you know. I wished I had an answer for him.
Then, suddenly, it hit me. It was the best possible time for me to remember the extra cash my mother stored in the glove compartment, for "emergencies." She'd once been caught out in the middle of nowhere with a busted engine. She realized that she didn't have her wallet, and therefore could not get help from any of the local mechanic (they didn't trust city girls). She had to have a friend wire her money and it was a big hassle and so from that day on she always kept money in the glove compartment. When I was little, I used to steal it, little by little, to go buy candy and stuff. I couldn't believe that I could have forgotten such an obvious solution.
I reached over Randy and opened the glove compartment. There, at the very bottom under the registration and so on, was a coin purse. Inside the coin purse was a wad of bills. It was a wad of hundred dollar bills. Randy and I were saved, at least for the time being.
