Cherry (11 page)

“Thank God they caught him,” Mother said. “Sheesh.” She wore the abstract half smile of somebody who’d just checked out. (Looking back, I’d wonder if Mother wasn’t in some state of shock, though this kind of blunt affect was part of her standard repertoire.)

“Now little titless can sleep at night,” Lecia said. She never missed a shot at my sissydom, or the chickenlike nature of my chest. I told her to shut up. “Could he see you in the lineup?” she asked, for we’d watched many an episode of
Dragnet
where the suspects line up before blinding lights while the tearful victim, slouched low in a puddle of dark, lifts a finger at the guilty party.

“It wasn’t like on TV,” Mother said. “They didn’t hold what you’d call a proper lineup.” She was just sitting around some guy’s spearmint-colored office drinking instant coffee out of styrofoam cups. A deputy led Dutch in uncuffed.

“He was awful beat up,” Mother said. “They must have worked him over with a tire iron. Weird thing was him trying the whole time to look bored. Like he was somewhere else.” Her mouth winced down, a pair of parentheses at the corners. “I swear to God, he looked embarrassed,” Mother said, “like a kid somebody just asked to dance.”

“Daddy would have done him way worse,” Lecia said. And it’s true that I’ve never seen Daddy walk out of a barroom fight with worse damage than knuckles he cut on some poor fellow’s busted dentures.

“God, if Pete had gotten a hold of him,” Mother said. Her head wagged, then cocked at an angle like a new thought tumbling inside her skull had rolled it over. She said, “If it had been one of you girls, even the law couldn’t have saved him.”

This last comment seemed odd, for while Lecia’s body always garnered looks in public, the thought that I might warrant sexual attention—even in the warped form Dutch’s took—was new. That possibility invited me deeper into the mysterious fellowship between Lecia and Mother. In that way, being worth raping came as a deformed sort of flattery and an actual promotion to womanhood. It carried a twisted kind of thrill.

But something else followed in a backwash. My scary long-dead grandma had once dropped me off at the Saturday movie matinee with a warning not to let any strange man feel under my dress.
Now why would anybody do that?
I’d wondered. I was just six or seven at the time. The idea of some scruffy-handed grown-up taking that liberty in the region of my underpants scared me. I watched all of
The Tingler
with my skirt tucked in hard under my butt. I did not get up once, even to pee, even when the popcorn hitting the back of my head came regular.

Mother picked up her pack of Salems. Thunder hit again, and the lights fluttered. She stood for a moment in that flickering then said we
needed to be more careful running around town. Then she walked away from the episode, down her hallway toward her bed, where, I figured, she’d lay up all day washing down valium with Fresca. That was okay by me. So long as I could plot her location within the vectors of our house, I was fine.

PART
TWO
Midway

—Michael Herr
Dispatches

—Miroslav Holub O
de to Joy

    
Translated by George Theiner

I’
VE BEEN SITTING IN THE
crotch of this itchy damn tree with my feet dangling down so long they both feel like concrete. I shinnied up here to find John Cleary in the park’s spread out fireworks crowd where folks have been gathering since dusk. They’ve come on foot toting stripey lawn chairs and knitting bags and metal coolers. There are quilts spread out over the stiff grass so babies can lay down without taking in cockleburrs and starting to bellow. My eyes glide over the mess and seem to latch down on everybody in town who’s not John Cleary.

Eventually from the swarm of bobbing heads, I find his crew-cut stubble, bleached white into a jagged, low-flying halo. He’s astride his banana-seat bike, one foot on the ground while he waits for the mosquito truck to show up so he can pedal behind it with his buddies. There’s a cowboy song about ghost riders galloping across the clouds with their faces blurred by dust. That’s what I think when I see the truck and John Cleary riding off behind it, leaned over his motorcycle handlebars, his thighs pumping.

John Cleary is what Daddy would call my huckleberry (not that John’s agreed to that position yet). So sometimes I get so engrossed watching him, I forget myself entirely. That’s how it got dark around me. That’s how I wound up with these heavy throbbing feet hung out of the tree, like the elephant feet in the
Textbook of Medical Anomalies
I like to sneak peeks at in the library section marked ADULTS ONLY when the librarian goes onto the steps to smoke.

Meanwhile, John Cleary managed to vanish into the crowd, as did Clarice, who’s sleeping over tonight.

Not until the last sparks go out when folks start folding their blankets and collapsing their beach chairs do I finally make them out over by the tilted merry-go-round with Bobbie Stuart and Davie Ray Hawks. They’re all squatting over a patch of dirt with their arms dangling inside their knees like something out of
National Geographic.
Maybe somebody’s lit one of those caterpillars of ash you can buy at Moak’s fireworks stand out on Hogaboom Road. I never purchase fireworks myself, but I often find myself repeating the phrase Hogaboom Road at night to see how fast I can say it without slipping up:
hogaboom road hogaboom road hogaboom road.

Clarice never does anything like this, and if she’s spending the night and hears me prattling like this, she’ll roll over and prop up on one elbow and tell me flat out that’s why everybody thinks you’re weird. It’s not your mother or Pete, or the neked ladies painted on your walls or the fact that your parents divorced then got back later. It’s you chattering to yourself like a gerbil instead of just going to sleep. But Clarice doesn’t give a big rat’s ass if I say Hogaboom Road till the kitchen kettle whistles for coffee. “You are a marvel,” she likes to say, shaking her head and drawing one side of her mouth down in a half frown. But she watches me as if I warrant pondering, and she never doesn’t laugh at my jokes.

John and Bobbie sword-fight with sparklers, joist and parry, while dumbass Davie Ray Hawks tries to get his sparkler going with what they call a punk—a little brown straw with a coal on the end that’ll light
a cherry bomb fuse but is useless on a sparkler. Finally, I get so tired of holding back unspoken opinions like this that I holler over to her, and they all come running from the edge of the field in a quick herd.

Clarice looks up at me with her hands on her hips like I’m in trouble. “That’s where you’ve been hiding,” she says.

“Ya’ll get me down from here,” I say. “My feet fell asleep hanging.”

“Why should we?” Davie Ray Hawks says.

“Because we’ll let you in our club if you do,” I say.

“What kind of club?” Bobbie wants to know. His sparkler’s hit a wet spot and sizzled out, so he’s holding a bent silver wire in a way that seems forlorn, like a flower with all its petals stripped off.

Clarice pops out with, “A sex club.” Which sends the boys into a fit of giggling and punching each other on the shoulder.

Only Davie Ray Hawks is unconvinced. “Y’all don’t have any sex club.”

“We didn’t start it,” Clarice says, “but we’re in it. It’s a junior high thing.” To me, she seems to be holding down laughs, but the boys doubtless think she’s serious as a heart attack.

John fakes being wholly engrossed in his sparkler, but if he were a dog, his ears would be pricked forward. He says, “Who all’s in this club?”

Clarice names Larry Miller, the lifeguard at the pool, whose bathing suit we spend a lot of time trying to look up the leghole of. I shush her, for I spend whole hours hung on the side of his lifeguard stand and don’t want these peckerheads to shoo him off talking to me by dragging his name through the mud.

“Uh-uh!” Davie Ray says, with more force than seems necessary. “He’s in a fraternity in college. My cousin Janie’s gone to dances with him.”

“He’s not having sex with y’all,” Bobbie says.

“We never said he was,” Clarice says. “It’s all broken up by grade.”

“Get me down outa here,” I finally say, for Clarice is leading us down a path I no way want to miss by being stuck up a tree. John and
Bobbie come to the tree’s base and hold up their arms. I put the heels of my hands where my butt’s been in the tree crotch and lower myself till they can each grab a leg. First, it’s like a princess being helped down from a carriage by two pages. But when their hands clamp on my thighs, I get a powerful jolt from them grabbing hold. The feeling slides clear up to my middle and lodges just under my rib cage where it presses against my hard-thumping heart.

It’s strange. We’ve known each other our whole entire lives, since we were babies splashing bare assed in the same wading pool. We have hauled each other up on tree house ropes and built human pyramids on each other’s backs and red-rovered through each other’s joined arms. But this touch is different. Feeling those strong hands on my legs suddenly startles me. Suddenly and deeply, these two boys are not like me.

They must feel it too, because they practically let go at the same time like they grabbed an electric wire or something. They back off and start looking in opposite directions like nothing happened.

Clarice goes into detail about the different levels of the sex club. How at our level you get to practice French kissing and slow dancing. Davie Ray Hawks claims he already knows how to tongue-kiss, a phrase I’ve never heard that makes the whole thing way too overt sounding. In my head flashes a drawing I had to label and fill in with map colors—the esophagus and sinuses and tonsils floating in some hollow man, whose whole existence is devoted to demonstrating body parts to kids who want to hork looking at them. That said, I lately like watching Clarice’s brother French-kiss his girlfriend Peg on the couch when they think we’re asleep. By TV sign-off time, it’s fairly clear their mouths are open. What I can’t figure is if their tongues are slipping around in there the whole time, lapping on each other, or if they just lip-lock and every now and again touch tongues.

The sex club notion causes initiation rites to pop up, and it’s an idea we all glom onto. Me and Clarice put our heads together and conjure some pretty good ones too, tests that if you pass, you get to practice kissing with me and Clarice. Here’s what we gin up:

1. Pour lighter fluid on your hand and set a match to it.
   
2. Roll a cherry bomb in peanut butter, then mash a bunch of BBs on it, then drop it lit in the mailbox on Main to see if the whole thing explodes.
   
3. Take a shit-bomb (paper sack filled with somebody’s doo) to the home of the junior high principal, Lead-Head Briggs. Light the sack on fire, then hide in the ditch while he stomps it out.
   
4. Blindfold Davie Ray Hawks and tell him he’s putting his finger up somebody’s butt, but really it’s just wet bread wadded up in a soup can.
   

We stand on the edge of the field swatting mosquitoes, not sure where else to go. All around in other fields and neighborhoods, you can hear the sharp pop of fireworks, and Huey Ladette’s mama calls him in because goddamn it, it’s late, and she’s gonna tear him a new asshole.

Somehow we get to my garage by meandering, nothing on purpose. I find the key to Mother’s padlocked studio, where we’re scared to turn on the light in case my parents look out back and wonder. Something’s about to start, and we stand on the brink of it, still pretending to be shadows to one another amid the paint fumes. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel the mountain pines that give off this smell. The air hangs heavy as gauze between us all. Outside, about a zillion crickets have gone into
chirrup, chirrup,
each in a different soprano voice. The toads come back in alto. The firecrackers go
pop pop pop,
and the bottle rockets whish out sparks then burst.

After my eyes get used to the dark, I make out John’s crew cut. He’s walked over to a canvas propped in a puddle of moonlight, an old nude Mother never framed. “Lookit this!” he says. There’s a slow foot-shuffle in the dark as Bobbie and Davie Ray and Clarice congregate in front of it.

“Get a load of those knockers,” Davie Ray says, and there’s hissed whispers to shut the fuck up.

“Boy she got some headlights, don’t she,” Bobbie says.