Don't Make Me Stop Now (4 page)

Clay spotted Ruth Crosby making her way to the front of the store and for the first time, too late, Clay thought of what to do if Marshburn didn't wait on him. Clay had gone out with Ruth years ago when they were both too young to know what to do but did it anyway without looking or saying much. He sometimes hung out with her husband who moved pot for Peterson, too.

“Just looking,” Clay told Ruth when she said hello and asked him if he needed help. She just looked away from him, out the plate glass at the afternoon beyond the store, beyond the salaried hours ticking away too slowly. Clay felt bad for her, for everyone with a boring job, for everyone with a job. Except Marshburn, a rich college kid who didn't need to work
in the first place. Remembering Marshburn, Clay felt the hate that made his marrow turn to mist. Slack hate he called it, the worst of his various flavors and shades.

Ruth was making small talk, something about her husband off on a fishing trip. Be nice to her, something in Clay said. Not neccessarily a voice of his; something from somebody else's life maybe, somebody in this store passing close enough to cross wires with, like those faint voices that sometimes lace phone calls.

“Let him know when you decide,” Ruth said, and when she walked toward the back of the store Clay made his move on Marshburn, who was leaning against the counter, drinking a Coke. When Clay tapped a dime on the counter, Marshburn smiled stiffly and nodded.

“How ya doing, man?” He seemed embarrassed. He knows, thought Clay, but how could he? Or maybe he's ashamed to be seen working behind the soda fountain.

“Half a pound of cashews,” said Clay. Marshburn went off to scoop and weigh. Clay was glad to be alone, as next to Marshburn he felt grungy, dressed in a black T-shirt and army fatigues he'd pinched from a clothesline one night, which he'd wrenched tight with a belt so they wouldn't hang off his ass. He was sweaty from the bus ride and his hair hung lank and oily to his shoulders; he'd wrecked the apartment earlier, searching for something to put his hair back with, but
Linda had claimed to be out of elastic bands again and the butcher had already snagged his newspaper from the lawn so Clay couldn't swipe the rubber band like he usually did. Maybe they sold hair supplies here, Clay thought as Marshburn appeared with a bag already oil-dappled, folding the top down and ringing up the sale.

Marshburn set the bag down. Clay laid a dime beside it and stared at the clock above Marshburn's head. Marshburn grinned at the dime, as if he thought Clay could not count.

“Dollar twenty-five,” he said.

“You know Linda Grimes?”

“Linda Grimes? Yeah, maybe,” said Marshburn. “She go to Central with us?”

“She didn't finish,” said Clay.

“Knew her in ninth grade, I guess it was,” said Marshburn. “She told me.”

“I think I had, like, English with her or something,” said Marshburn.

“Mrs. Saul. Fourth period. You borrowed a book from her once.”

“You were in there, too?” Marshburn grinned again: What a horrible memory I have, his grin suggested. College knowledge had replaced all this sophomoric trivia about high school — who was who, what classes they shared.

“
We Have Always Lived in the Castle,
” said Clay.

“Say what?”

Clay repeated the strange title slowly. “That's the name of the book you borrowed.”

“I guess,” said Marshburn, shrugging, looking past him for other customers, but there were none.

“One twenty-five,” he said.

“She sat in front of you.”

“I kind of remember her but not real well.”

“But the desks were real close.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“And your hands were real long.”

“What'd she tell you?”

Clay tapped his dime against the counter.

“How am I supposed to remember what you're talking about?” said Marshburn.

“Same way she did?”

“I don't know what you're trying to say, plus I'm busy . . .”

Clay leaned in close, breathing big to calm himself. “I don't get summers off. You get fucking summers off forever.”

“What do you mean?” Marshburn affected a laugh and turned his palms out, pantomiming innocence. “I'm working. I work here, I get paid for this. This is a business, right? You have to pay for stuff in this store.”

“Thank you,” said Clay.

“I don't even know what you're talking about,” said Marshburn. A group of junior high kids wandered up from the back booths and Marshburn and Clay broke off their conversation so abruptly that someone watching might have thought they were kin.

W
ALKING INTO THE
hospital lobby Clay let his features go forlorn long, as if he'd just lost a relative or was preparing to sit vigil for such loss. He picked this up from everyone around him, morose-looking country people with wax-paper skin. They wore their Sunday clothes, and their heavy brown shoes spotted the vacuumed-combed carpet like muddy rocks in a freshly disked field. Going gray-faced and sullen was Clay's usual mode while waiting here for Linda, and it did not come totally from the people around him; these trips to the hospital to beg money off of her mother always made him feel impotent and ashamed.

He searched the nooks of the lobby, hoping to see Linda slumped across a couch in one of the tucked-away little living rooms, a
McCall's
or
Southern Living
splayed across her chest. No doubt she was still upstairs stocking up on operating-room horror stories. Another reason he never went up with her was because Linda's mother always went off on him about jobs: Get a job, where's your job at, you still too good to
work? After a couple of visits he waited downstairs, napping on one of the couches in the lobby.

They always took longer than he liked, these visits with Linda's mom, and were never to Clay's thinking cost-effective. Linda'd come down with fifteen bucks grocery money or, worse, a check written out to the landlord, which neither of them could figure out how to convert into ready.

But last time — about a month ago — something had happened that made up for all the times they'd come away with pocket change. They were waiting for the bus at the stop in front of the hospital, slumped away from each other in determined silence. Only twenty bucks to pay the power people and her mom insisted on sealing the check up with the bill Linda'd had to produce to get the cash. All of a sudden Linda had seen Marshburn walk across the street and into the drugstore, and before she even realized what she was doing — she would admit as much later — she'd told Clay about Marshburn.

“See that guy?”

There had been a lot of guys around. Clay was sulking about the power bill, which he'd hoped would be in the form of green instead of one of Mrs. Grimes's hokey checks, pink-topped mountains rising behind her loopy cursive. He could understand why she chose them, of course — they made her
money look casual, an adornment, while those plain blue or green checks revealed the desperation of her finances.

“That guy” would of course turn out to be another there-goes-Joe's-gallbladder. Yeah, Clay said, not bothering to look up.

“Neal Marshburn,” she'd said, and without a noticeable change of tone, she told him the whole story.

How she told her story affected Clay more than the facts. Her tone was flat, but the nitty-gritty seemed to Clay real seventh grade as to terminology. “He felt me up down below,” she said. Clay looked up from passing traffic at Linda, then to the double-glass doors where Marshburn had disappeared. This particular phrase made him pay attention.

“Up down below?” He couldn't resist a little sarcasm in repeating it, though he wanted to be gentle now. Instead he was livid: his slack hate loosened, rendering him invertebrate, a mass of molten anger on the bus bench. Linda stood when their bus rose slow motion over the crest of the hill, but he threw his arm out like a crossing guard.

“We'll take the next one,” he said. “Tell me more now.”

She'd sat and sighed and told him how it started, the book with the weird title Marshburn had borrowed from her in class, more details — information about the room, the subject studied, her blue hip-huggers with red faded stars.

“Tell me exactly what he did to you,” Clay had said. Linda looked up the street in the direction that their bus had disappeared then down the street in the direction of the next one. She appeared tiny beside him, her feet on the bench, arms hugging her shins, chin resting heavily on her knees. He saw how sorry she was that she'd said anything. We missed the bus, the switch and dart of her eyes told him; now we're stuck here for another half hour. He'd been with her long enough to tell when she thought he had given in to his hate.

Or maybe she was over it, had managed to put it out of her mind. After all, six years had passed. That she had pushed it away would be seen by some as a triumph. But how had she been able to do this, and why? Then and there on the bench Clay decided that it had to be unfinished, that it was unfinished.

“Really, Clay. This was ninth grade.”

“You're saying he didn't know better?”

She stared across the street instead of answering. She'd slumped on the bench, her legs far enough apart so that guys passing in cars might be able to get a shot of her underwear. Clay started to tell her to sit up, but he was distracted by the plate glass window of the drugstore touched by the afternoon sun, its glints and twinklings an indecipherable semaphore Clay felt on the verge of interpreting.

“You can get arrested in ninth grade,” he said. “And do time. Juvenile, but it's still time.”

“I never wanted to get him arrested, I just wanted him to stop sticking his hands down my pants during English class.”

He could tell he was losing her, that if he didn't slow down she'd shut down, probably forever.

“You ever told anybody else?”

“Didn't do any good,” she said.

They sat in silence until the bus arrived. Sitting in the back on the way home, Clay had seen not bus seats but carved desks, aisles of them packed tight in a steamy-windowed classroom. Scaly radiator ticking beneath a windowsill, chalk dust smell; sitting an aisle over from Linda and Marshburn, he'd watched the whole thing in slow motion, while up in front behind the wobbly lectern Mrs. Saul talked transitive verbs.

N
EXT TIME IT WAS CANDY
: assorteds in a box heart-shaped and wrapped in pink lacy paper, gone bad according to the expiration date. Clay searched a half hour for something he wanted. All the merchandise was dusty, the stuff near the front windows sun-dyed, items near the back moldy as if they'd been brought up from a bomb shelter. Marshburn had seen him come in and was ignoring him, herding a thick hill of dirt down the warped floorboards with a push broom.

Air-pillow insoles? Shaving cream? Clay could find nothing he wanted, and getting things he needed — hair bands
for instance — seemed sleazy. As he stood by the candy rack, weighing packages in his hand, cellophane crackling, Marshburn started up the aisle. Good, thought Clay when he discovered the expired box, I can return this later and get my dime back.

When he felt Marshburn approaching he stepped into the aisle, blocking the way. Though the broom and the advancing flank of dirt stopped at Clay's shoes, the cloud of dust preceding it continued, billowing up the aisle.

“Can I get some help here?” asked Clay.

Marshburn nodded to the pharmacy counter, where Ruth Crosby worked a register.

“She's open,” he said, curling the line of dust into a clump and herding it around Clay's feet and up the aisle. Clay waited until Ruth was free, small-talked a minute about her job, husband, parties they'd heard about, Linda.

“Can you call Mr. Marshburn over here?” he said finally.

“Mister Marshburn? You mean Neal? What do you need him for?”

“I need to ask his advice on something. Man to man.”

Ruth laughed so loud that Clay was stunned. Rippling out over the aisles, her laugh caused nearby customers to swivel their heads and smile toward Clay and Ruth.

She looked down at the box of candy Clay held below the
counter. “You need some supplies, right? That's the word guys use when I wait on them that kills me the deadest.”

“I ride bareback, Ruth. You should know that.”

Ruth kept her smile but froze it, stretched out the corners of her mouth until it was the generic eight-to-five smile of a salesclerk. In the space of ten seconds she seemed ten years older. “It's hard to remember these things, Clay. Like, do you remember every meal you ever ate in your life?”

“Just the ones that stood out,” said Clay. Ruth laughed again, as loud as before, but this time her laughter drew no smiles from passersby.

“Obviously you're not embarrassed to buy rubbers from a girl like me.”

“It's not about rubbers, Ruth. Really, girl, get your mind out of the gutter.”

Ruth gave him another insincere smile. “That's the gutter to you, I guess. So what do you want with him? Advice on an athletic support?”

“You ask a lot more questions than I remember.”

“I'm a lot more curious about things than I was when I was hanging around you.”

“You act like his lawyer. Just call him over here.”

Ruth looked over at Marshburn. “Well, he's not doing anything but leaning on his broom.”

Watching Ruth talk to Marshburn, the two of them sneaking glances at him from across the store, Clay wondered if there was something between them he could use.

“I just couldn't bring myself to let anyone else wait on me,” Clay said to Marshburn when he shuffled over to the counter.

“Not even an old friend?”

“Me and you are old friends. We went to the same high school. That makes us fellow alums.”

“I didn't even know your name until Ruth told me,” said Marshburn, staring at the candy.