Slow Dance in Purgatory

“I can’t really imagine it,” Maggie offered truthfully.

“I thought I was gonna go crazy, and I kind of did for a while…I got to the point, though, that I could shut my mind off – I would just clear my head completely, focus on the energy that buzzed around me all the time, and I would check out.”

“It sounds like meditation.”

“I guess it kind of is. I call it floating. The more I practiced, the better I got, and I kept escaping for longer and longer periods of time. It was such a relief to just be unaware for a while. One time, I resurfaced and the seasons had changed from spring to summer while I was gone. The kids were in school, wearing heavy jackets and carrying the rain and sleet in on their coats and boots, when I started. When I stopped floating they were gone, and the school was empty for a while. Summer had come, and I’d lost months.”

“So what makes you come back? Couldn’t you just… fade away?” Maggie had to ask, but she dreaded the answer.

“I don’t always choose to come back; I just do. And the instinct to live, even a half-life like this, is very strong. It’s not easy to turn your back on this world. I don’t know how to let go, even if I could. The school keeps pulling me back, too. The school lives on, I live on, I guess.”

“So if I come to the school one day, and I call you and call you, and you never come….I’ll know that’s where you are?”

Johnny had removed the car’s right front tire and began removing the left, and for several long moments he turned lug nuts without speaking.

“The first time I saw you, I’d been floating…and something…. pulled at me. I resurfaced, and there you were… dancing. You had no music, but you still danced. And you were crying.” Johnny’s eyes met Maggie’s briefly. “Somehow I don’t think you would have to call too long before I would hear you.”

It was Maggie’s turn to be silent. She wished she had something to occupy her hands. She knew the time he referred to. It had been her first day of school. She had been scared and lonely, and after everyone had cleared out after dance class, she tried to comfort herself by doing a jig her father had taught her years before. She hadn’t been able to remember it all, and somehow that had been the last straw, and the tears had come. She had no Irish music to match her steps to, and so she’d just moved through the motions she could remember, over and over, until she thought she almost had it. She had kept dancing until the tears stopped falling.

“I remember that day,” Maggie whispered then, and she told him everything. Johnny listened intently while she talked, stopping periodically to drink in her expressions or admire her graceful gestures. He also noticed her attempts to gloss over the details that pained her. She told him about the foster homes and the frequent moves, and finally about Irene and how happy she was to be with her at last.

“That Roger Carlton was a real piece of work,” Johnny said when she told him how Roger had denied her a home until his death. “It’s been a long time, and he’s really not worth the trouble, but I’d still like to pound him.”

“I’d like to help,” Maggie added with a huff.

“I wonder what ever happened to my car,” Johnny mused after a long silence. “Roger took a bat to the windows and creamed the doors in, too. I wonder if my momma sold it, or maybe Gene came through for her and fixed it up again. I spent half of my senior year putting that car to rights.

“What kind of car was it?”

“It was a 1957 Chevy Bel Air.”

Maggie calculated for a second. “Wait a second…You had a brand new car? How did you manage that? I mean, I know you had a job and everything, but that’s kind of a big purchase for a high school kid.”

“That car didn’t cost me a single, solitary, thin one. See, it used to be that everybody around here would park their cars out by the reservoir…sometimes with their girls, sometimes alone, and sometimes just to have a couple of beers with their friends. There was a rich oil man from a couple of towns over who’d had a fight with his old lady. He seemed to think that she was having a fling with a younger guy. He thought they had been meeting at the reservoir; so he took his brand new Bel Air up to the rez thinking she was there. I’d seen him drive through town. Gene had a couple of pumps out front, and the oil man gassed up there on his way out. That’s when I got a close-up look at his car. It was solid black, but the grille, the front fender chevrons, and the script on the hood and trunk were all done in gold trim. It had fourteen inch wheels, which made it sit lower to the ground, a wide grille on the front, tailfins on the back, and chrome headlights.” Johnny rattled off the details and shook his head like he still couldn’t believe it.

“So this Daddy-O heads up to the rez, cruisin’ for a bruisin,’ and he sees a couple playin’ back seat bingo in what looks like his wife’s car.

“Back seat bingo?” Maggie interrupted