A Stranger in This World (19 page)

“Pretty much what you see,” Jim said. “Occasional dancing and livestock trading.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just what I said.” He fished in his pocket for change, ambled over to the jukebox, fed his quarters in and stood there glowing in the pink light, trying to decide. What did it mean when a man took his vices so seriously? Candy tried to think of her little apartment in Washington, D.C., tried to imagine that it was a safe place, but really it was no more meant for her than this. There was no place left for her. This seemed like such an evident thing that she couldn’t see why the idea hadn’t come to her before. Maybe she was sleepwalking, Candy thought. Maybe she was just going through the motions. She watched the man who was not her husband poking the buttons of the jukebox with a rough finger.

A record came on, scratched and rough, while he picked out a half-dozen more:
Sometimes I feel like crying, but the tears won’t come down
 … Then Jim ambled back over to Candy, everything slow, like underwater.

“I hope I didn’t mislead you,” he said, keeping his voice soft, down under the level of the jukebox so only she could hear. She could feel his breath on her neck. “I’m not the kindly one in this family,” he said. “I’m sort of the black sheep, I guess.”

He grinned at Candy and she smelled the whiskey on his breath, and the complicated stench of the bar, and it was like being on the back of a motorcycle, not even driving, and feeling the push of the big motor and knowing that it didn’t matter, somebody else was driving, too late for her desires to make a difference …

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish …”

“What’s that?” he asked.

But she didn’t know how she was going to end that sentence,
and so she improvised: “It’s just so close in here, you know? I don’t know. Maybe if we went outside.”

Jim looked at her, and maybe Candy would have seen something if she’d been a little more front-and-center. But she was thinking, dreaming: if wishes were horses … This one fall day when they were down in Virginia riding through the mountains on Greg’s bike, down to look at the leaves. It was cold in the shadows and warm in the sun, riding down miles of white board fences, with the horses scattered across the grass and the hills in all the shades of brown and orange and yellow, like a beggar’s coat. Candy clung to Greg’s back as they swung through the corners, faster and faster, not even scared after a while—no helmets, not then, just the wind in her face and the whine of the beat-up Kawasaki 500 and the kick when they came around a corner and Greg hit the throttle and the roadside weeds melted into a blur of speed, the tire trembling underneath her. And then leaning through one corner she saw the slick of wet leaves at the same time Greg did, too late, and she felt the rear tire slip out from under her and then the front and they were going for the guardrail and she hung on tight like he could save her, the bike fishtailing back through center and off the wrong way and then back through, by some accident, so the bike was at the right angle when it hit the gravel shoulder and they slid sideways and they didn’t even fall down, not all the way. Greg didn’t bother to shut the engine down. He just sat there on the bike staring down the road, with Candy on his back like a limpet, and then after a minute he started to laugh. He turned his head so Candy could kiss his cheek and she did. She was still too afraid to move and he was laughing, gunning the engine back to life. Even then it didn’t make any sense. It was just love in the pure form, there wasn’t any reasonability
to it but just the pure longing in the belly and in the throat. They almost died and he was laughing, and Candy wept as they rode away, partly from the wind, partly out of pure love. The ride and then the warm apartment at the end of it and the leaves and horses.

There was something in there, something Candy wanted to think about, couldn’t quite get hold of, about women and men and adventures: how it seemed as if women always got smaller in adventure, how they gave themselves away, while men only got bigger … There was something else missing, too, some piece of the puzzle. If only she had a minute she could make sense out of it, but Jim was leading her back out into the night. This was where things started to move too fast. She started to want a break, just to sit down somewhere and untangle things, even just to tell how drunk she was, which wasn’t clear.

Outside was the same pink light and stink, and the music was echoing through the cypress trees from speakers out of sight. Jim led her along the water on an old cracked concrete walkway, with a railing made of plumbing. Decayed amusement: broken Christmas lights strung from the trees, jagged in their bases. Candy wondered, Why do red and green and blue and yellow all together add up to pink? Behind the roadhouse stood a wall of pine trees. Jim led her toward a lattice-work gate and inside.

“The whispering pines,” he said. The trees made a dark circle all around them, and then there was a circle of lights, strung from pole to pole and most of them still working, and then in the center of everything was the dance floor. It was made out of wood, raised three or four feet off the ground, with railing around the outside and a pavilion in the middle.

Once it had been painted white but the paint was chipping or mildew-stained or mossy green. The sound of the jukebox was louder here, coming out of cone-shaped PA speakers like the kind in junior high school or prison, as if the sound were being squeezed through some kind of metal tube, Candy thought. Eventual headache, loud as it was. Jim said, “Let’s dance, you want to?”

“I don’t usually,” Candy said.

“Make an exception for me, just this time. Come on.”

He took her wrist and led her up the stairs, out onto the plywood floor. It was treacherous footing. Nails had come up through the edges, and rain had warped the plywood so the individual sheets no longer fit together right: there were gaps, and little steps. The framework underneath her creaked and groaned as she walked, and her heels made a drumming sound against the hollow space below, so that it was like walking across a large musical instrument. Out of the speaker cones she heard the tick and pop of a new record, and then the hiss gave way to an easy, loping beat, to Al Green’s—but this time not the Reverend, this time it was the old, sexy Al Green singing,
I don’t know why I love you like I do …

Jim started to sway his hips in time to the music, an awkward, stilted white-boy dance, but he didn’t seem to care. He grinned at her. “Come on,” he said. “Come on, baby.”

The dance floor drummed and shook like it was about to shake itself to pieces and Candy saw the headline,
NORTHERN STRANGER DIES IN DANCE FLOOR CATASTROPHE
, but he was dancing and she wanted to. She stepped carefully over, so they’d be on the same sheet of plywood and wouldn’t trip, and she started to do the only dances she knew, the ones from high school, the Frug
and the Philly Jerk and the James Brown. Candy waved her arms in the air like a crazy woman. Jim saw her. He shook his hips and he waved his arms and he looked up at the lights, so the pink and yellow hit him full in the face, and he closed his eyes, still dancing, and in that moment the time got strange and Candy got lost, spinning back through the years to high school and nothing was real, nothing existed but this, this boy in her arms, Greg waving his arms in the air …

Candy collapsed against Jim’s chest, crying. The record went on playing. He let her stay there for a second, but then he extricated himself and stood at arm’s length.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked her. “Everything was going along just fine and then all of a sudden …”

Jim was angry, but this was just one more fact she couldn’t understand then. She’d seen her husband, the way he showed himself in dreams, her lover, her boy, and in his eyes she saw the girl she once used to be, and that girl was just as dead as Greg was. Poor Candy, she thought, Candy’s dead, poor Candy. It was like a jingle or a nursery rhyme and she couldn’t get it out of her head. There was life between them and love and then sorrow when he died, but Candy saw, standing on the dance floor, that sorrow had turned into nothing more than a habit. She was just a shell, an empty place where something had once happened, like a battlefield—the miles of empty lawns, well kept. There was nowhere to go from here. She could walk off in the woods and just lie down, one of those unsolved cases. Candy thought of what that would be like—she thought of what the rain would sound like, the first drops filtering through the trees, hitting the leaves by her ears. She saw herself lying there. If she stayed unfound the leaves would
grow up through her chest, through her ribs, a little empty cave of bones. Candy imagined that she could feel them. Poor Candy, she thought. Candy’s dead.

She barely noticed when Jim led her off the dance floor, into the darkness of the little pavilion. When he started kissing her it was like something in a dream, the inevitable surprise. Here in the dark it was easy to pretend. She let her mind go out of focus, let go, let it slip past her. But when she felt the stranger’s tongue in her mouth, he was suddenly real, and all wrong.

“Hold on a minute,” she said, and tried to edge away.

But he only held her tighter with the arm that was around her waist, his other hand up the front of her blouse now. She felt his size and his strength against her and she was afraid. A cold sweat broke out on her back, and she shivered under his hand, seeing what a fool she had been. At the same time, the beginnings of anger: why was she always the one who had to pay?

“Look, I know,” she said, “I may have said something or done something …”

“That isn’t how it works,” he said.

“What?”

“You may tease somebody but you aren’t going to tease me,” he said. He was standing back from her and she could just see the side of his face in the pink light and he seemed entirely calm, as if he were explaining some elementary fact to a young child. “There’s different kinds of people in this world, and I’m one of them,” he said. “You can fuck around with Walter all you want to.”

“Fred C. Dobbs,” she said. “1948.”

“What?”

“You just remind me of somebody,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I think we ought to go.”

“That isn’t how it works,” he said again, and this time he took her hand and pressed it to the front of his chinos so she could feel his erection through the thin material. It was a long, skinny thing, like a dog’s, Candy thought, and a little shiver ran through her. He pressed her down with his hand until she knelt in front of him. Childhood prayers raced stupidly through her thoughts: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee … She opened his belt and then the zipper and worked his pants down over his knees, stopping to take his shoes off, one after the other.

“You don’t have to do that,” Jim said.

“No, but I want to,” Candy said, and slipped his pants off over his stockinged feet. Her hands went to his waist, and she slowly slid his underwear down his thighs, little-boy underwear, white Jockey shorts with the little stripe around the waistband, nothing to fear from his underwear. His penis was ridiculous, too, standing up like a crooked mushroom, a little off to one side. When his shorts were down around his ankles, Candy grabbed his pants and took off running.

“What the fuck?” Jim shouted. “Get the fuck over here.”

The jukebox was playing loud as ever as Candy wobbled across the dance floor, not wanting to look back: if he was going to catch her she didn’t want to know. As she ran she fumbled in the pockets, and found his keys at the same time she left the circle of pines, running along the stagnant creek on the broken walkway. The fear was all on the surface of her mind but underneath was calm, like she knew what to do. She threw the pants over the rail into the water and ran through the pink light past the bar, escaping. Not until she was in the
car with the motor going did she look behind her: nothing, and then she saw him at the edge of the lights, his white legs shining. “Bitch!” he was shouting. “Bitch!”

She lowered the shifter into Drive and sprayed gravel out of the parking lot, trailing one arm out the window with the middle finger up. She knew it was bad luck but she didn’t care. She was out of bad luck anyway. The calm was on her again, and then the thing that she had been trying to remember, or maybe trying to forget, came back to her: an evening in her apartment, two or three months after the funeral, and coming home to find it empty and cold as always and standing alone in her good wool coat in the living room, before she turned the lights on, and wondering, What do I do now? What do I want to do? And now, escaping—this is really a stolen car, she thought, I’ve never done this before—she remembered the strange taste it left in her mouth, the power of it, the witchy woman. She was past love and past death and they couldn’t touch her. Candy shivered in the hot night, remembering. Something she wanted. What did she want now? This was the hidden thing. I don’t want anything, really, none for me, the polite nonentity. Fuck it, Candy thought. She reached into the back for one of Greg’s cold beers and opened it and pointed the big soft car toward Sarasota and took off, fast.