Swimming Sweet Arrow (7 page)

Del said, “No,” and kept smoking. When I didn’t even get a goodbye kiss, I knew he was pissed, so I wasn’t really surprised when he didn’t turn up at home that night. I knew I was getting payback. I tried to tell myself it would all work out and just to go to bed and get some sleep, but I slept fitfully, trying to listen for his car. And I thought to myself,
Vangie, you are not going to make it if you can’t sleep when he’s beside you and you can’t sleep when he’s gone.

He came rolling in that night around three. When he sat on the edge of the bed, I could smell the high stink of the barroom on him: alcohol, smoke, the sweat of working eight hours at Traut’s. It shocked me that the smell was that strong, though I didn’t know why it should. He proba
bly smelled like that other nights when he was drinking, but I never noticed before because I was drinking, too.

I didn’t care what he smelled like. When he bent over to unlace his boots, I wrapped myself around the back of him.

“Hey,” I said.

“Wake up, Vangie, I want to tell you something.”

“I’m up,” I said.

“I’m nineteen and faster than most things on this earth. If some kind of trouble is coming, I’ll get out of the way.”

“What if you don’t see it coming?”

“I got out of more scrapes already than the average person.”

“All right,” I said. “It’s your business. But I worry about you.”

“Vangie, they set up the press so you have to put both hands on the controls just to run the thing. Don’t worry.”

He stripped off his clothes and got into bed beside me, and even though his mouth was like a cesspool, I kissed him and kissed him and pulled him to me. He managed to get between my legs, then he passed out. I rolled him over on his back.

That combination of sweat and smoke and alcohol as it got pushed out of the pores—the rank odor brought back more than a few memories. From the smell of Del, you’d have thought I was in bed with my old man. That thought was so strange I refused to think it, and as soon as it came, I pushed it from my mind. I did wonder if I stank that bad when I was drinking. I didn’t think so. In the old days, even
when my mom sat up with my dad, matching him drink for drink, she didn’t get the same smell he did. Maybe because her sweat was different, maybe she was cleaner when she started out drinking—I didn’t know. It just wasn’t a smell a woman could get. Or so I told myself.

EVEN THOUGH
it upset me in some ways, in other ways I liked it when Del came home drunk. If he didn’t just pass out, he was wildest those nights. Sometimes he took a shower because I told him how his smell reminded me of my dad, but other times he could not, or would not, wait to be with me, and I’d lie down in his stinking embrace. I forgot it soon enough, because when he was drunk he’d eat my pussy forever, or roll my nipples on his tongue and teeth until I couldn’t wait to feel him move inside me. His drunkenness sometimes meant he couldn’t keep an erection, but most of the time it meant he was hard for hours and still couldn’t come. So he turned me out.

It was on a night when he was hard and couldn’t come that we figured out a new position. Well, it wasn’t a new position, but what we did with it was new. Del was fucking me and holding my feet up by his chest. He kept trying to reach down to play with my clitoris, but it was hard for him to stay up inside me when he did that.

I said, “Go on, baby. Just enjoy yourself,” but he knew he was a long time from coming, so he kept trying to pluck my flower. Then the idea hit and he said to me, “Vangie, play with your pussy. Make yourself come.”

So I moved my own hand between my legs. Del kept stroking, holding my ankles, turning to kiss my legs, and watching my face the whole time.

If you thought it was crazy that I didn’t come the whole first four years I fucked, you will surely die when I say that night was the first time I ever masturbated and made myself come. But that was me: young and dumb.

It took a while, and I sort of rubbed myself raw, but I came that night on Del’s cock for the first time. I came so hard and shook so much that Del got pulled out of his alcoholic numbness and came right after me. I was still banging my head back on the pillow when I heard him. When he finally lay his head down near mine, I kissed his cheek over and over through the tangle of his hair and I made cool circles on his back with my hands. I was happy, happy, happy.

After that night, though, I made it my business to learn everything I could about my own climaxes. I learned where to make the small circles, how to start and then stop and then start, and how, for some reason, the orgasm felt better if I hung on to the back of the bed frame with my left hand, squeezing the wood as hard as I could. As glad and as grateful as I was that I had orgasms when Del went down on me, I didn’t want him to be in charge of them anymore. I didn’t want anyone to have to give me my own body.

Del was into it. It turned him on to see me touch myself. I did it every time we screwed, but I’d also do it sometimes when we were sitting on the sofa watching TV, or just sitting there at the dinner table. And Del watched everything I
did and dropped whatever he was doing when I spread my legs. I think I was probably like a skin flick for him, except that I was right there and real.

“Do you think you could suck my cock while you did that?” he asked one night when I was lying on the sofa, watching TV with him, playing with myself.

“I don’t know. Bring it on over here.”

He knelt on the floor beside me, and the sofa was just the right height for me to get him easily inside my mouth. It took a little more coordination on my part to keep everything going, but it was exciting, too. I didn’t use all my terrific cock-sucking techniques, because I was concentrating on the tightness and pitch in my own body, but it didn’t seem to matter to Del.

I met Del’s eyes a couple of times while he was in my mouth. I had to look up over his belly and chest to see his face, and it was intense to see him from that angle. I felt like I was seeing the whole of his body. What I felt for him then had nothing to do with words.

After I made myself come, and after I made Del come, he stayed kneeling on the floor beside me. He played with my hair, moving it back from my face, running his hand from my temple to my neck, moving his fingers through the length. He played with my hair and kept touching my face and lips for the longest time, and then he said,
Vangie.

When he said my name, I knew that he felt the thing without words, too.

9

W
ITH
working and people’s different work schedules, it was almost the end of the summer before I saw June alone. Del and I had gone out to party with her and Ray a few times, and when we finally moved into our place in August, they had come over to our house a time or two. But June and I had not had a chance to talk, just the two of us, for a long time, and one night she called and said I had to come over.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing, really. I just feel like talking.”

So I drove all the winding roads from Mennonite Town
to Church’s Mountain, passing all the houses where, when it was daylight, I’d see wash lines with white net caps and blue shirts twisting in the breeze. When I got to June’s place, before I even got out of the car, two dogs came tearing up to see who I was. I was trying to keep them off of me, and then I heard June’s voice, calling them.

“They’re Luke’s,” she said when I got to her front door. “I should have warned you.”

“Where were they every other time?”

“They have a kennel out back. They’re mostly friendly, but there’s no way for you to know that.”

Because of all the commotion with the dogs, it was the first time I really looked at her face. She seemed the same as always. That surprised me, though I didn’t know why.

“Come on in. I’ll tie them up while you’re visiting.”

When I walked in the door, I saw the Jim Beam was already on the table. It seemed strange to me only for a second. Jim Beam was not the sort of thing June and I would ever drink on our own—we were the ones who always used to want something sweet to drink when we went parking with Ray and Del. Jim Beam was the kind of thing Ray would drink, and he would want June to be able to drink it, too. I knew because Del thought I should at least be able to drink a shot of Southern Comfort, even if I didn’t like it, just to show people I wasn’t a candy-ass.

I had to work breakfast shift the next day, but I poured a shot anyway. I didn’t want to give in to the feeling that I was getting mature about my drinking, and I wanted to keep June company.

When June came in from tying up the dogs, I said, “So, how’s it going out here?”

She looked around at the old cabinets and the linoleum that was a design of baskets, and back to me at the kitchen table, and she said, “All right, it’s all right.”

We laughed, and I thought I knew what she meant: that nothing but nothing was what it was cracked up to be. Living with a guy wasn’t all romance and sex—it was also cleaning and cooking and paying bills. At least that’s what I thought her look signified, and it was my feeling that whatever made her get the Jim Beam out wasn’t going to go away anytime soon.

“No, really, it’s all right,” she said, and she shook her head a little when she said it, because I think she knew how her face must have looked. I was expecting bad news, and I was still expecting it when she said, “Well, Ray’s gone and done it.”

She went to a dish on the countertop, near the sink, and picked up a ring and slipped it on her finger.

“Garnet with a diamond chip on each side,” she said, and showed me the ring.

I took her fingers in mine and studied the deep red stone. It wasn’t some chintzy, pre-engagement job but a real, full-fledged ring.

“It’s pretty,” I said, and meant it. The garnet wasn’t small, and the way the ring suited June’s hand made me think that Ray had spent time not only finding the ring, but also thinking about how it would look against June’s skin. Or so it seemed to me.

“It is pretty.”

She looked at the ring again on her hand, then she took it off and put it back in the dish on the counter.

I said, “What, don’t you like it?”

“I like it.”

“Why aren’t you wearing it, then?”

“I do wear it. I guess I’m getting used to it.”

“Is it an engagement ring?” I said. “Is that what he wants?”

“It’s not an engagement ring.”

“What, it’s just a gift?”

“Just a gift.”

But it didn’t make any sense. If the ring was just a gift, she wouldn’t have to get used to it, and if June liked it, she would be wearing it on her hand and would have showed it to me first thing I walked in the door.

“What are you getting used to?” I said.

“I don’t know. I guess I have to get used to how much he loves me.”

The way she said it, I knew she was lying. About what piece of it, I couldn’t say. Maybe she and Ray were fighting and she wasn’t saying, or maybe it was something else. I didn’t know. But June knew I could tell she was lying, and I figured over the course of our conversation or over the Jim Beam, she’d spill the deal.

“I hemmed up all my skirts again,” I said, to change the subject for a while and give the conversation room to breathe.

“Weren’t they already short?”

“Well, they’re shorter now,” I said. “I did it for tips.”

“Yeah, ‘cause you really get the big tippers at Dreisbach’s.”

Of course, it was the whiskey kicking in, but we laughed about that, and it felt good to laugh with her. I was glad we were not talking about rings and the like.

“Naw, really I did it for me,” I said. “I wanted to see my own legs. You know?”

“I know.”

And I knew she did understand. The kind of jobs we had, you couldn’t ever really dress up, because the work would tear apart any kind of outfit, but you had to take some kind of care of yourself, because if you didn’t, you got to feeling bad about yourself. After an eight-hour shift, my hair was coated with grease from the kitchen and smelled of french fries and cigarette smoke, but at least I could look down and see the shape of my legs. With all the lifting and walking I was doing, muscles in my thighs were getting hard. Right beside the long muscle in my thigh was a little hollow. I liked seeing the shadow and shape, and I liked being at work and being able to think of the way Del’s face looked when he kissed me there.

June poured me another three fingers of Jim Beam and asked how everything was going with Del, but before I had a chance to say, “He’s smoking and drinking every penny he earns,” the dogs started howling and she went out to quiet them.

When she came back, she seemed to forget that she had asked me about Del.

“You want to know Ray’s theory about the ring?” she said.

“Go.”

“He says it’s all in my hands. He says he’ll marry me whenever I say.”

“Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what do you say when he asks you about it?”

“He doesn’t ever ask me. He says it’s like a puppy. He says if you squeeze a puppy, the puppy runs away. If you let the puppy alone, it comes.”

“And you’re the puppy.”

“I’m the one he’s trying not to squeeze.”

I thought giving a girl a ring was a pretty hard squeeze, but worse was Ray trying to use dog mentality on her. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t say anything, though. It wasn’t mine to say. Besides, I still felt like there was something she wasn’t being honest about.

“What are you going to do about the ring?” I asked.

Before she could answer, Ray’s brother, Luke, walked in the room. I knew he lived there, too, but it was still a surprise to see him. He was never around those times when Del and I parried with Ray and June, and in my mind I blocked him out. I knew nothing about Luke—he had graduated before June and I even got to high school. He was an animal I knew by sight only in that corral of a town. He looked a lot like Ray—light skin and the almost-black hair—but he was thinner and his face was hawklike. Guys I
went to school with got that look when they grew too fast, or when they wrestled and always had to make weight.