Free Truants by Ron Carlson

through the door and was gone.
    “Where are you going?” I called from the trailer steps as if I were her mother.
    She did not answer; I ran to catch up.
    “Where are you going?” She looked at me as if I had requested the procedure for drawing the next breath. Her eyes still looked spacey.
    “Away!” That was all. When I bugged her, skipping sideways to keep up, she added, “This is my chance.”
    I interpreted this to mean she was not going to the hospital to visit her ailing father. I paused and thought: fine. Let it go. People seem capable of a variety of actions . I, myself, was leaving for California tonight.
    Louisa Holz walked toward the grandstand, her dark figure cut out by those lights, her shadow stretching on the rainy street. It was exactly like the end of a movie.
    Then she fell down. The figure was on its knees, bent, one hand held the head. I ran to her and lifted her up. Her face was slack, the broad buttons of her eyes vacant. She tried to look at me. “What?” she said.
    “You’re hurt.” We were in front of an attraction known as “THE DEATH CAR: the freakiest accident ever!!!”
    “I’ve got to go.”
    “There’s blood on your neck.” It was true; a thin line of blood ran down in the old place. As she turned around so I could look at it, a set of headlights turned onto the lane. Louisa jumped and ran behind the billboard fence for THE DEATH CAR. The carlights passed. I resumed the replacement of Band-Aids, and then we moved under a little light by The Death Car shack, and Louisa stopped intoning “Hurry, hurry …” and instead read the newspaper accounts of how The Death Car had missed a curve and been impaled on a guardrail, and how the guardrail had sliced some guy’s girlfriend in half without touching him and how it now remained a grisly reminder as a permanent part of The Death Car.
    Louisa’s hair was wet, and I could not find the spot as I blinked in the rain, and finally I wrecked the extra Band-Aid by sticking it exactly together. I tapped her on her shoulder and showed it to her.
    “Oh shit!” she said. She looked wicked and fatigued; she looked like a seventeen-year-old girl who had flown into the chickenwire at thirty miles an hour and wanted no more of it. “Oh, just shit!” And she started crying. I held her and she cried and bled on me. Then we leaned against THE DEATH CAR STORIES, and her face rose to my own. It was an advanced kiss, reserved for members of the inner circle, and yet she didn’t know me at all. It awed and inspired, scared me. It made me, like so many things in my life, feel too young.
    “Let’s get out of this goddamned rain!” she said against my face. I lifted her satchel over the turnstile into the shack and helped her over. The Death Car turned out to be a ’64 Chevy Supersport, with a genuine steel guardrail knifing right through the engine block, radio, and front seat. We looked at it for a minute, then I opened the back door for Louisa and she slid inside.
    As I closed the door she was against me, her mouth wet, her clothes damp and warm, her neck salty with the little blood. This is an overture, I thought. I’d read it in some pamphlet on petting at the Home: this must be an overture.
    One night out at the Home as we watched dawn bring up the mountains, Steele had told me about the overtures of women in distress. “Women in distress are prone,” he’d said. “Move on them.” And as Louisa arched and I leaned, my intentions magnified themselves into that blind urgency which came calling from time to time. She was clearly in distress, and I was moving on her. “The violent distractions of puberty,” a phrase from that pamphlet, came to mind in waves, as we raced around corners in The Death Car. My pressing vigor erased the fact that I liked her , and wrote in that I wanted to do something to her . My hand dove up under her sweater and cupped the round mug of her breast, and thereupon I was shaking hands with her. She’d found