Swimming Sweet Arrow (3 page)

“I had to,” I said. “I didn’t have a free hand to punch.”

“Don’t worry. They’re fucking birds.”

Still, I thought a lot about the chickens as I carried them. Their legs felt skinny through my gloves, and I knew it would be easy to break their bones with just my hands. The whole bird was a thing people could break apart and eat. Not for me, though. From the time I started working at Noecker’s, I stopped eating chicken. I couldn’t bring myself to have anything to do with eating chicken meat off chicken bones.

The jobs at Noecker’s were fashionable. A lot of kids from school worked there, and going to work was almost like going to a party. It didn’t matter that we all smelled like chicken shit or that we looked foolish with bandannas on our heads. No one could escape the smell, and we wore the bandannas to keep the specks of dried shit floating in the coops from settling in our hair. We didn’t think about the flecks of shit we breathed into our lungs—people didn’t worry about things like that back then.

Noecker’s was such a social thing I even had a special outfit picked out for work: Lee jeans with straight legs, an old pair of cowboy boots, and a flannel work shirt with a few buttons open so the scoopy muscle T-shirt I stole out of my dad’s drawer showed. The T-shirt was low-cut, thin, and clingy, and I knew Del could see my bra through it. My breasts were 36D, up from 34B in the last year, and I thought they were my best shot at being pretty. I still hated when people called them tits, and I left the room when my old man called me a cow, but I wanted Del to look at them. I loved the way his hands and mouth felt when he was kneading me and sucking on my nipples, and I wanted him to think of that when he was working. Because no matter how much I worried about the chickens, it wasn’t birds that I thought about when I was working, it wasn’t the three-fifty an hour that I was earning, and it wasn’t the ever present stench and shit of the coop. It was skin.

When Del squatted to tighten the belts holding down the wooden crates, I liked to watch his jeans pull tight over his legs. When he took the chickens from me, I liked to watch his forearms twitch with the effort. Below his cuffed-up shirt, veins crisscrossed over the muscle, under the smooth skin. Only guys had forearms with thick, raised veins showing like that. Something about seeing those veins carrying the blood to and from his hands made me wild.

One night I got so aware of Del’s arms and hands it seemed like he was touching me every time I came out to the truck, even though he wasn’t. When we finally got a
break and went out back of the coop—where you went if you wanted to make out or smoke some weed—I pulled Del’s cuffs further up his arms and put my mouth over one of the raised, blue veins. I could feel its soft shape when I pushed at it with my tongue.

“Vangie,” Del said after a bit and pulled me up so he could kiss me.

“I can’t help it.”

“You don’t have to help it. I like it.”

Usually when we stood against that wall, we did what all the other couples back there were doing: we’d kiss and Del would rub my nipples through my shirt and I’d stand hard between his legs so I could feel his cock through his jeans. That night those things weren’t enough. When he moved his hand to one of my breasts, I sighed into our kiss.

“You like that?”

“It’s like being at a party,” I said, because that’s how dizzy and breathless I felt.

We kissed some more, then he moved his hands to my jeans. When his fingers found the little tab on my zipper, I said, “Del, wait.”

I think he thought I was going to say no, but all I did was lean back against the wall at a different angle so he could get at me. When he slipped his hand inside the elastic band of my bikinis, I tried to move further up the wall. I could feel the concrete scraping my shoulders through my shirt.

“Can I come to your party?” Del asked.

I thought it was the best thing to say, and I knew I’d have to tell June about it. For a second I thought of his chicken
hands going inside me. Then I didn’t care, didn’t care, didn’t care.

IN MAY,
after we got rid of the old flock, we had to bring in a new one, and the whole procedure for moving chickens was reversed. June and I picked up chickens from Del and Ray, carried them into the coop, and handed them off to a stuffer, who put them in the cages. Since the new chickens were young and light, we had to carry four birds in each hand instead of three. It was hard to get a handle on the extra legs and control eight birds, but I still liked unloading better than loading. The new chickens were clean and tidy. They didn’t have missing eyes and broken wings, and their feathers were still white instead of being soiled with the shit of the coop.

The second night we were unloading the new flock, they were short of stuffers and Old Man Noecker asked June and me if we wanted to move into one of the rows and stuff the cages.

“Want to, Vangie?” June asked, and I knew what she was saying: if we were stuck in a row, we wouldn’t get to see as much of Del and Ray. But I’d never done that part of the job, and I wanted to try, so I said, “Sure. We’ll see them at break.”

Stuffing was a hundred times better than carrying. With one hand you held a bunch of four chickens, and with your other hand you took each chicken by its legs, pointed its head at the cage opening, and slipped it in. The whole thing
was so easy that I started feeling like I was tucking little white pillows into little wire houses.

Because the new chickens didn’t fuss, it was easy for June and me to work at the same pace and talk as we worked. We started gossiping about a girl we went to school with who’d refused to have sex until her boyfriend put a preengagement ring on her finger. This week she’d finally shown up at school with a ring, and now she was driving us all crazy with her declarations of what a good lay she was.

“Oh God,” I said. “He slipped that cheap little thing on her finger and boom! She’s fucking like a rabbit.”

“I didn’t need a ring to tell me when to fuck,” June said.

I knew from other talks we had that June was more experienced than I was. She’d gone on birth control pills in the eighth grade. That was before I really knew her and before we were friends, but she told me about it. What she hadn’t ever told me about was when she first had sex, so that night I asked, “When did you first do it?”

“Fool around or fuck?”

“Fuck.”

“When I was ten.”

She didn’t look up from the chickens when she said it, and I let myself look at her for a while, and then I looked away. After a bit I said, “Who with?”

“Just someone,” June said. “One of my brother Kevin’s friends.”

I kept my eyes on the chickens, because I did not want her to see the look on my face. I did not want her to think I
judged her. All the same, I knew that when I was ten, I was a little girl in the fifth grade and about a thousand miles away from the she-cat I became by the seventh grade.

“Did it hurt?” I said. “Did he hurt you?”

“He didn’t mean to. That person didn’t mean to hurt me.”

“What are you saying?”

“Oh Vangie. It always hurts the first time. I already had my period anyway.”

I didn’t say anything—I knew my voice would sound funny if I did—I just went on tucking chickens into cages and so did June. My mind was working, though. Kevin Keel was seven or eight years older than June, and his friends would have been, too. What would they have wanted with a little girl?

The whole thing was a shock to me, but it wasn’t really a surprise. The stories June told me about her family made mine seem like a dream. Her older brothers were forever getting arrested for DUI, possession, and disorderly, and Kevin, the younger of the two, had served time for vehicular manslaughter. June’s dad, Ty, used to lock June and her brothers out of the house when he wanted to be alone with her mom, Jeanette, and he threatened to kill them if they tried to come in. He would not let Jeanette drive or go anyplace alone, and sometimes he made her take Spanish fly.

When June told me that, she’d said, “My mom says it doesn’t make you horny, it just makes you pee.”

“Why does she take it, then?”

“My dad wants her to.”

“Where did you go when you got locked out of the house?”

“To my grandma’s. Or out in the woods.”

After hearing those stories, it was no wonder to me why June always kept to herself at school. She was maybe the prettiest girl in our grade—long walnut hair with that one blond piece, eyes slanting just a bit at the corners, cheek-bones so high it looked like she had sickles carved into her cheeks—but you would never notice, because she did not have good clothes and she never raised her hand to talk in class, but sat instead at a desk in back and read. She was shy at school out of plain shyness, but also because of her name. A name like that had come from years of a certain kind of living, and if her father and her brothers had made the name wild and bad, there was nothing June could do about it.

That night in the coop, I wanted to ask June more about her brother’s friend, but when I turned to look at her, I decided not to. If she wanted me to know more, she would tell me. But she didn’t say any more that night at Noecker’s. We kept on working silently for a while, then talked about other things at school. I never heard her talk about her brother’s friend again.

4

M
Y
mom left my dad when I was in eleventh grade, not long after Three Mile Island blew. Even though I knew there was no connection between the two events, I kept thinking there was something in the air that made her go. A cloud of recognizing, a big mushroom of knowing my dad wasn’t going to change, ever.

“What did you guys fight about?” I’d asked when I saw her packing. It wasn’t the first time I’d watched her.

But then, instead of saying, “Your father does not believe I deserve a seventy-nine-cent lipstick,” or bitching about what time he came in the night before, my mother said, “It is never just one thing, Vangie.”
When she said that, I knew she was really going and that nothing was going to change her mind. People do not usually wake up of a morning and decide to change the rest of their lives, but my mom did. A hole the size of Pennsylvania almost burned in the earth, and she never came back.

My mom gave me two gifts before she left for New Mexico. One gift was a little red jewelry box with a ballerina that sprang up when you opened the lid. It was the kind of jewelry box you gave a little girl, and my mom said she couldn’t resist getting it for me.

“You’ll always be my baby, Vangie. No matter how big you are or how old you get.”

She even got my name engraved on a gold plate in the front of the jewelry box.
Evangeline Starr Raybuck.

The second gift was harder to figure. In the box was a little black nightgown with spaghetti straps and a band of lace under where my breasts would be. The thing even had matching panties.

“I wanted you to have something nice,” she said.

I couldn’t believe it. “Shouldn’t you be talking to me about being careful and not making the same mistakes you made?” I asked.

“I know you’re smart, honey. Even when you were in ninth grade you were smart.”

Which meant that she had found my birth control pills at some point, though she’d never said anything about them to me.

“So that’s why you never had that talk with me?” I said.

“That’s why. You’d already taken care of the problem.”

And it was true, because I’d known all the way back when I was thirteen that I wanted nothing to do with babies. Now that I was older I felt it even more strongly. I wanted to get my pussy eaten and fucked by Del. There wasn’t shit for my mom to tell me. I knew how not to get pregnant, I knew how to earn a wage, and I knew how to fuck. All my mom could do was give me a black nightie and wish me well.

My mom called a lot when she first moved, but the calls dwindled over time. She met an ex-Mormon in Albuquerque and fell in love with him and his adobe house. I understood. Her own life overtook her. I wanted my own life to overtake me. And it did. I guess I was a little out of control, though, what with smoking weed or drinking every night, speeding to go to school, and the double fucking.

My dad somehow knew something was going on. He showed up at the apartment at funny times—late at night or first thing in the morning—and asked me about four times if I wanted to go live with my mom.

“I’m saving up,” I said. “I’m getting my own place after graduation.”

“You always have family, Vangie. Remember that.”

Yeah right, I thought. After I moved into that kitchenette, Del and June became my family. I could tell June just about anything, and though I was fucking Del almost every day by then, it was more than just sex between us.

In spite of the fact that Del’s old man was as crazy as mine, and even though I knew I did not have to feel bad about my father in front of Del, I was embarrassed to have Del see certain things. One night he and I drove to my dad’s
house after a date. My dad was playing father that week and wanted to know what time I was getting in, so after drinking and fucking in a field for three hours, Del and I went to my dad’s place so I could report in. When Del and I knocked, no one answered. The door was open, though, and when we stepped inside, there was my old man, passed out in a chair, the reek of alcohol strong in the room. It was a common enough sight to me, and I knew there was no waking him.

“Why doesn’t he go to bed?” Del said when we got into the kitchen.

“He’s always like that,” I said.

Del shook his head but did not say anything else. Neither did I. I didn’t bother to tell him about all the times I had found my father dead to the world. There was no point to telling such stories.

I wrote a note to my father that said,
I was here, 12:30 a.m. Your daughter, Vangie,
and made us walk out the back door.

Del did not make me talk about any of it. I did the same for him. I knew Del’s dad was a drinker, too, and that he sometimes beat Del and Del’s brother Frank—punched them hard in the face like he would grown men in a fight. But when I saw Del’s messed-up face, I didn’t ask him to talk about it, I just said, “Baby, can I hold you?”