Swimming Sweet Arrow (8 page)

“You going to party with us?” I asked.

He leaned back against the kitchen counter, slouching against the wood, his arms crossed over his chest. He mostly looked down instead of looking at us, but when he did look up, when he did meet my eyes, I learned two things about him: that he wanted to be there talking to us or listening to us talk, and that he was nothing like Ray.

“Naw,” he said. “If I have one, I’ll want another.”

“Why can’t you have one and another if you want it?” I said.

“Got to work.”

“He’s working eleven to seven this week,” June said for him. When she spoke for him, he looked over at her, not turning his head but tilting it, pointing to her with his chin and lifting his eyes to her. That fast, I knew he spent a lot of time looking at June and listening to her. I knew that because—I don’t know how to say this another way—when he looked at her and listened to her, he used his mouth as well as his eyes.

“Have the rest of mine,” I said, and swirled my own glass. “I promise I won’t let you have any more.”

“All right,” he said. And I watched him unfold himself from against the counter, and I watched him bring the glass up to his mouth, his fingers over the top edge of the glass. He didn’t look at June again, but by then it didn’t matter. I’d already seen.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Listen to him. It’s his whiskey,” June said, and he smiled at that.

Luke left by the back door—way too early to go to work, but maybe he didn’t want to be seen by me any longer. I waited a little while, but I knew better than anybody what I’d seen. I said to June, “What, are you fucking the brother, too?”

I listened to the clock tick and watched June stare at the Jim Beam. Then I listened to her say, of all things, “Not yet. But I will.”

“June,” I said, and made her name about three syllables long.

“Now you know who I love.”

That shut me up for a good long moment. Instead of trying to say anything, I let myself look at her in the kitchen of that run-down house on the mountain. I was surprised that she said she loved Luke, because in my mind, I thought it was just fucking. Ray was the one who gave her a ring, and Ray was the one she was supposed to be living with. I figured if she was wanting to fuck Luke, it was for the same reason I’d wanted to fuck Frank Pardee: curiosity, danger.

“You’re the only one who knows,” she said.

“You and Luke know.”

“I mean Ray doesn’t know. That’s what I’m asking you, not to say.”

That was the first time I thought about my role in all of it. If I knew about Luke and didn’t tell Ray, I would be lying, and if I told Del none of it, I would also be lying. Ray was his friend.

“What the fuck,” I said. “I can’t even believe it. What about Ray?”

“I love him. I love them both.”

Her voice sounded sweet. I didn’t know if it was the whiskey talking or if she really thought it was that simple.

“You just got done telling me you had to get used to how much Ray liked you,” I said. “Now you say you love him.”

“I do love him. He’s the reason I met Luke.”

“Oh, Jesus. You just mean you can’t have one without the other.”

“Something like that. Don’t be mad at me, Vangie. I wanted to tell you the truth.”

We sat there not talking. I knew I had no right to say anything to her, not given what I had done with Frank Pardee. I tried to separate June’s actions from my own, though, because it was her life she was speaking about, and not mine at all.

“When did it start?” I said. “When did you start up with him?”

“I don’t know. Almost as soon as I moved in. It took us a long time to even kiss.”

“How long is a long time?”

“Weeks. More than a month. All we did at first was talk. It’s almost as easy to talk to him as to you. I even told him things about Kevin. I didn’t think I ever would, but I did.”

She said she told Luke how, when she was eight and Kevin had just gotten his license, he used to put a sleeping bag in the back of his old El Camino so she could lie down and look up at the sky while he drove. It used to
make her dizzy to look up into the blue, but she loved it, too. She couldn’t reconcile, ever, how the brother who did that for her was the same person who drove so blindly and wildly that he hadn’t even known the man he hit was a person and not a pole on the side of the road. June told that much to Luke, but no more, and Luke didn’t ask her to say more.

“I never told you those things about Kevin. I hardly ever talk about him.”

“I know,” I said. I did not ask her if she told Luke the one story she had told me about Kevin: that it was one of his friends who fucked her when she was just a kid.

“You know what he said, Vangie? When I told him I wouldn’t tell him anything else, ever, about my brothers?”

“What?”

“He said,
Everybody has some story they don’t need to tell.
And that was that.”

I knew then from the way her voice sounded that she couldn’t explain what she was feeling, or stop it. I didn’t say anything then. I just sat at the table, watching her face.

“He and I haven’t even screwed yet. If that’s all it was, I wouldn’t be doing it. I wouldn’t put myself in this position. I wouldn’t put Ray in it.”

I didn’t say anything, but I nodded.

“I can’t tell you anything else, Vangie. I don’t want to jinx it.”

We did not have any more drinks after that, because Ray was due home at eleven, and because she had wanted the talk more than anything, not Jim Beam at all. And when I
was leaving, because I didn’t know what else to say, I said, “Well, I’m around.”

“We didn’t even talk about you.”

I said, “It’ll keep.”

Even if we’d gone on talking that night, I wouldn’t have told her what I’d done with Del’s brother. She probably would have understood—certainly she would have understood now, if not before—but I did not want her to know. When I fucked Frank, I got a brand and a mark and a knowledge, but I did not want to go on fucking him. The brand was enough. It was my scar, the sign of an accident or an illness or an adventure gone wrong.

June didn’t want a scar. She wasn’t going to fuck Luke just for the feeling of it. She did not want to do the thing once and then keep it secret inside her. She wanted to go on living it. I did not know how a person could do that, if it could be done. But I guessed it could be done, because there she was living in the house with the two of them and talking about love. Love.

When I went out to my truck that night, I walked by Luke’s pickup, and that’s how I knew he hadn’t gone into town. I figured he was probably up on the mountain—or maybe just out behind the house, waiting for me to leave. When I saw his truck, it made me think about the way men held themselves and the way they talked and moved, and I knew it was a foreign world June was in. After I moved in with Del, I felt like I was in a foreign land as well, but it had to be even more true for June, living out there with the two of them. But June was probably like smoke finding her way
about that world, because she was nothing if not smart, and smoke always finds a way in and out.

I didn’t say
shouldn’t
or
can’t
to her. Maybe as a friend I should have, but to me, whatever was happening between her and Luke, between her and Ray, had already started. She was in the current of it.

10

A
FTER
Del had been working awhile, he started hanging out with the guys he crewed with at Traut’s. They were all older—in their twenties and thirties and forties—and I think they saw Del as a little brother. They usually went out for a beer after work, and for some, the thing turned into a binge that lasted the whole evening. I worked night shift and didn’t get home until midnight or one, so it didn’t really affect the time I had to spend with Del, but I did know what was going on. A lot of nights, he and I got home around the same time—me from work and him from the bars. I listened to his drunken stories
as we ate a late meal, and then we showered, screwed, and slept. Or, in my case, lay waiting for sleep.

Along with all the other wives and girlfriends, at times I got invited to the crew parties. While I came to know the other women, I never really became friends with any of them. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the difference in ages, maybe it was something else, but I never really let loose around those people. That made the other women think I was a snob, when all I really felt was shy. I did become kind of friendly with one woman, named Vicki, the wife of a guy named Len. She was in her late twenties and she was unlike anyone I had ever seen around Mahanaqua. She had this different way of dressing, and she gave me an idea of what I wanted to look like when I got older. The main thing about her look was she wore jackets—blazers, I guess you’d call them —with no shirt under them. The blazers looked normal at first, but when Vicki moved her hand to sweep back her hair or reach for a glass, the neckline shifted and plunged. The look showed off her chest and her lace bras and the pretty gold chains she wore. I figured when I got a few years older, I’d put away my tight jeans and lace-up shirts and go for Vicki’s look.

Del knew how shy I felt around those women, but he still could not understand why I couldn’t get along with them. The night of one particular kegger, I told him, “Go and have a good time without me.”

“Come on. Vicki is going to be there. You can talk to her and get deep.”

That made me laugh, because that’s how Del described
any conversation I had with a woman, yet he was right, too, because when Vicki and I got talking, it was about when we got our first periods, and how Vicki got together with her husband, and all that kind of thing. For as good a time as I had talking to Vicki, though, it was never like talking to June, and all those “deep” conversations made me miss my friend.

“All right, I’ll go,” I said. “But I don’t want to stay long.”

“We’ll leave whenever you want.”

Of course Del headed off to the keg as soon as we got to the party, and I looked around for Vicki. It turned out she wasn’t there, and I got stuck standing on the edges of a lot of conversations, smoking and nursing my beer. I did that for about an hour and a half, but then I couldn’t take any more conversations about kids and who was getting divorced, and I went looking for Del. I felt like a dog sniffing for its owner.

He was drinking shots of Southern Comfort there at the keg. When I came near, I heard one of his friends, a guy named Kutz, say, “Here comes your woman, Pardee. Drink up.”

When I got up to the keg, Kutz said to me, “What, don’t you drink?”

“I drink.”

“You look stone-cold sober to me.”

“I’m fine.”

“You ought to loosen up. Good-looking woman like you ought to have a good time.”

“I’m having a good time. I have to work tomorrow.”

“Hell, you’ll be working your whole life! You don’t see that stopping us, do you?”

I saw Del stick one finger in the air at Kutz, and as soon as I saw that, I knew Del was drunk. He speechified a lot when he was drunk, and a lot of times it started with a finger pointed in the air.

“Kutz,” he said. “My woman’s the hardest-working bitch you’ll ever meet.”

I let that one wash over me for a few seconds, and then I turned to Del and said, “Come get me when you’re ready.” And I went back to where some of the women were, and I sat down on the edge of a conversation and I made myself listen and smile.

In a little while Del came over and handed me his keys, and I took the both of us home.

I knew Del had to be a different kind of person at work, too. I knew he had to act tough, and I also think he had to act crazy because he was the young one. But I couldn’t believe he would use a word like that to talk about me.

I never told him I was hurt. I probably should have, but I didn’t want him to know. If he could hurt me with words, it meant the smallest things could injure me, and I didn’t want to be that vulnerable, not even with him.

I pretended everything was normal between Del and me, and in a little while, it was. Three weekends later, though, when there was going to be a party at Laban Wolfe’s house, I told Del I wasn’t going. He thought I was bullshitting, though, because around nine he said, “Come on, I want to be leaving soon.”

“I told you I didn’t want to go.”

“You’ll go,” he said, smiling. “Smoke a joint and you’ll be fine.”

“No, I deal with rude people all day. I don’t need to deal with them at night.”

Del looked at me for a long second after I said that, but he didn’t say anything. He stood there in the living room, watching me, and at first I did not want to meet his eyes, but then I thought, why shouldn’t I meet his eyes? I thought about the way he headed for the keg as soon as he got to a party, and the way I got ditched off to spend time with the “girls”—and of course that line of thinking led me right back to bitch night. I just didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

“Go have fun by yourself,” I said, looking straight at him. “Leave your dog at home.”

I gave him credit. He waited awhile, trying to figure out my words, and when he couldn’t, he gave up.

“Suit yourself,” he said, and he walked out the back door.

THAT NIGHT
when Del came home, he laid into me. I don’t mean he hit me—I mean he laid me open. We fucked in about four positions, and he slammed into me in each one. He didn’t talk at all, just pulled at my hips when he wanted me to move. In the end I was on top so he could have my breasts in his mouth and hands, and I was working hard to make him come so it all could stop. Then—and the two things happened almost together—he slapped me hard on my ass, and squeezed and bit my right breast so hard I thought he’d gone through skin.

The slap surprised me more than it hurt, but my breast felt like a knife had gone through it. I cried out. And I don’t know if he thought it was a sound of pleasure or what, but a little bit after that he came.

When I climbed off him, I said, “Jesus Christ, Del, that hurt.”

“Sorry,” he said, but I heard the way he said it and knew from his voice he was still drunk. I didn’t say anything else.