Read Paradise for Free Online Page B

to her plate and she was looking at me. They all was.”
    Neither woman spoke about it again, because Birdie told Mavis she could stay if and only if she never talked that way again. That she wouldn’t tell Frank, if he called back, or anybody else that she was there, but if she said one more word about killing she would call him right away.
    In a week Mavis was on the road, but this time she had a plan. Days before she heard her mother talking low into the mouthpiece of the telephone, saying, “You better get up here fast and I mean pronto,” Mavis had walked around the house, while Birdie was at the Play-Skool, thinking: money, aspirin, paint, underwear; money, aspirin, paint, underwear. She took all she could find of the first two, the checks in two brown government envelopes propped against the photograph of one of her killed-in-action brothers, and both bottles of Bayer. She took a pair of rhinestone clips from Birdie’s jewelry box and stole back the car keys her mother thought she had hidden so well; poured two gallons of lawn mower gasoline into the Cadillac’s tank and drove away for more. In Newark she found an Earl Scheib paint shop and waited two days in the Y dormitory until it was sprayed magenta. The twenty-nine dollars advertised turned out to be for a standard-size car only. Sixty-nine dollars is what they made her pay for the Cadillac. The underwear and thong sandals she bought at Wool-worth’s. At a Goodwill she bought a light-blue pantsuit, drip dry, and a white cotton turtleneck. Just right, she thought, for California. Just right.
    With a crisp new Mobil map beside her on the seat, she sped out of Newark heading for route 70. As more and more of the East was behind her, the happier she became. Only once had she felt this kind of happiness. On the Rocket ride she took as a kid. When the rocket zoomed on the downward swing, the rush made her giddy with pleasure; when it slowed just before turning her upside down through the high arc of its circle, the thrill was intense but calm. She squealed with the other passengers, but inside was the stable excitement of facing danger while safely strapped in strong metal. Sal hated it; so did the boys when, later on, she took them to the amusement park. Now, in flight to California, the memory of the Rocket ride and its rush were with her at will.
    According to the map the way was straight. All she had to do was find 70, stay on it until Utah, make a left on down to Los Angeles. Later she remembered traveling like that—straight. One state, then the next, just as the map promised. When her funds dwindled to coins, she was forced to look for hitchhikers. But other than the first and the last, she could not remember the order of the girls. Picking up girls was easiest. They were safe company, she hoped, and they helped with gas and food and sometimes invited her to a place where they could crash. They graced primary routes, intersections, ramps to bridges, the verges of gas stations and motels, in jeans belted low on the hips and flared at the bottom. Flat hair swinging or hair picked out in Afros. The white ones were the friendliest; the colored girls slow to melt. But all of them told her about the world before California. Underneath the knowing talk, the bell-chime laughter, the pointed silences, the world they described was just like her own pre-California existence—sad, scary, all wrong. High schools were dumps, parents stupid, Johnson a creep, cops pigs, men rats, boys assholes.
    The first girl was outside Zanesville. That’s where sitting in a roadside diner, counting her money, the runaway appeared. Mavis had noticed her going into the ladies’ room, then, quite a bit later, coming out dressed in different clothes: a long skirt this time, and a flowing blouse that touched her thighs. Outside in the parking lot, the girl ran to the Cadillac’s passenger window and asked for a lift. Smiling happily, she jerked open the door when Mavis nodded. The girl