Piper (19 page)

I wasn't exactly sure what John Carlisle was doing while Mom struggled at the bottom of his Jacuzzi—that part of the story was still in gestation—but it couldn't have taken more than a minute because I'd tried a hundred times since to see how long I could hold my breath and never gotten past about fifty-five seconds.

Initially, I had entertained the idea he'd drowned her because she threatened to tell my dad about their affair, but that didn't make sense. Why would she tell on herself? Then I decided his crime wasn't homicide as much as trespass. He'd wandered into someone else's pasture, not just Dad's, but Mom's and mine as well. He'd already taken one of my parents with his newspaper; it wasn't fair that he should have both of them.

The new truth, the one that Dirk had admitted to, however, was like an icicle driven through my brain. But it offered relief from the alternative I'd imagined. The same man couldn't have done both.

On the last day of school before Christmas vacation, I headed downtown to find a present for Dad at the Star Center Mall, a cavernous red brick building that used to be the Stampede Armory. Because of the job at the paper, it was the first year in my life I had money, so I knew I had to get something nice, maybe a brimmed hat (he was developing a bald spot on the back of his head) or one of those juicers (so he could make his own V-8). A brown Corolla pulled up next to the curb. At first, I thought it had stopped for the mailbox. The horn piped lightly and I looked over to see Rozene Raymond rolling down the passenger window.

“Need a lift?”

I didn't
need
the ride anymore than my dad needed the juicer, but
want
was a different proposition. “Sure,” I said, already moving toward the door she'd swung open.

She took the bridge over the river and drove out Highway 9. I didn't protest. The heater was cranked up and she had a Kate Bush tape in the cassette. She seemed so comfortable, as if we did this every Friday afternoon. I rested my left arm on the top of the seat and turned so that I could watch her drive. She'd pulled a ligament in a girls' intramural basketball game and the cast on her right foot kept the speedometer needle just over the limit. I was there when it happened and had to resist the urge to run out on the court and comfort her. Two teammates put her arms over their necks and helped her limp off the court to the nurse's station.

As she turned into the road for Harvey Field the aluminum crutches standing up in the backseat slid over and banged against the window. “Oops,” she said. We took a service road past a row of galvanized metal hangars and past a fleet of single engine planes secured to the ground with guy wires. The road ran parallel to the runway until it petered out and turned to gravel. She looped over to a place about a hundred yards past the ground lights and directly under the flight path, pointed us back toward the runway, and put the car in “Park.”

“How's that?” she said.

“Are we supposed to be here?”

“Nobody's ever kicked me out.”

“You do this a lot?”

She laughed. “I come out here alone. Something about flying turns me on.” Then she picked up her leg and started maneuvering it out of the driver's compartment. “Do you mind? This thing's a killer if I don't stretch it out.” She held her leg in the air while I tried to scoot over far enough so that she could set her cast on my seat, but my legs were too long and I couldn't get out of the way.

“That's all right.” The weight of her felt nice on my thigh and I cautiously touched the plaster that entombed her foot. It was hard and coarse and I could smell the gauze in the mold. She reached over to adjust her cords so the ribs of the corduroy lined up with the extension of her leg. There was a lone salutation on her cast in a language I couldn't understand, signed “Mom.”

“It's Wakashan,” she said. “May the river flow through your veins.”

“Does your mom speak it?”

“God, no. She assimilated and that's what she wants me to do. But she can't help herself.” I'd heard from Mom the story of how Rozene's father was white, a Russian fisherman who'd become a boozer and physically abused Mrs. Raymond until she became fed up and fled to Stampede. “Do you know where Condon Bagmore's brother came down?” she said.

Bagmore was on my mind too, but it wasn't just because we were at Harvey Field. In some eerie way, being confined with her in the Corolla reminded me of the supply shed with him under the grandstands. It was intimate. It was sexual. Instead of not trusting Bagmore though, I didn't trust me.

“Hey, what's the matter? You're spacing on me.”

“Sorry. Bad subject, I guess.”

“Okay, let's talk about the Mile High Club.”

“The Mile High Club?”

A smile broke out on her face and she flopped her elbows, accidentally honking the horn. We both laughed and looked around to see if anyone had heard us.

“You know Nick Oster,” she said. “Clete's dad? He runs a crop dusting business. One of his planes is supposed to have a featherbed that covers the entire tail section.” She was gripping the top of the steering wheel and trying to contain herself. “People pay him to take them up while they have sex.” She raised her eyebrows and waited for my response.

I was stunned, first because I prided myself on knowing what was going on in Stampede, and second, because of the way I'd always thought of Rozene. Her glee at the prospect of folks fornicating on Nick Oster's featherbed as they cruised over the homes and churches of Stampede surprised me. I didn't want her that assimilated. “Do you know anyone who's done it?”

“The Morrisons have,” she said, biting her lip to keep from laughing.

“The Minister Morrisons?” I pinched one of her toes and laughed with her. Gordon Morrison was the Presbyterian minister in Stampede, a fairly young guy with a British accent, who coached the boys' select soccer team. It was his wife, Twyla, whom Mom had slapped across the face when she said something derogatory about Ashley Carlisle.

“They wanted to conceive and they'd tried everything else.”

“She's so mousy.” I tried to imagine this floating featherbed in the sky, with portals so you could count the church spires as you were going down on your partner. Was there a divider between the lovers and the pilot? Did Nick Oster change sheets between customers? Were there seatbelts for takeoffs and landings? Did Nick do loops to help the sperm reach Twyla's uterus? There seemed to be a growing chasm between appearance and reality. Ministers prayed to the heavens and did it in the clouds. And Rozene Raymond was sitting with the weight of her broken leg on me.

A single engine plane painted with a purple and orange Federal Express logo on its fuselage circled the field. The drone of its engine grew louder as it reached our end of the runway, then faded as it went past. If I continued to play with the toes that stuck up through the plaster boot in my lap I was afraid the hum of my own engine would drown out the plane. When I brushed the underside of her index and middle toe, she curled them around my little finger and held on. The plane had aligned itself with the runway and was returning. I could hear it cutting through the wind, idled down, as it glided over the top of the Corolla and then dropped like a falcon onto the concrete runway. I squeezed her toes as the plane bounced and finally settled on all three wheels and shrunk its way to the other end of the field.

“Wasn't that beautiful?” she asked.

My scruples were breaking down. She was making this too easy. There was none of the pushiness involved with boys, none of the differences like whiskers and sports and the aperture between the legs. “I better go home.”

“Boo.”

Maybe it was an excess of Catholicism, but I let her take her leg back and start the car. I knew this outing meant something different to me than it meant to her and, if I didn't let her go, that difference was going to become painfully obvious. I kept thinking she must have an ulterior motive—she wanted me to help reinstate her mom at the paper—but there'd been no such request.

The light was on in the kitchen when Rozene pulled the car up in front of my house. Willard liked to eat early with the dogs so he could digest things before bedtime. He said undigested food gave him nightmares about Freeway. There was no light in the living room, which meant Dad wasn't home yet.

“Do you want to come in a minute?”

“I better go,” she said.

“I can give your book back.” I sounded desperate.

“Sure.”

As I walked ahead of her toward the porch, I experienced shortness of breath. Her crutches creaked and the rubber caps plucked each time she lifted them off the sidewalk. I was trying to remember what my room looked like, whether I'd managed to flop the blankets up over the pillows. It was okay to look casual, but I didn't want to seem sloppy. I glanced into the kitchen and smelled the Spam. There was a frying pan on the stove with a tired spatula resting in it and the counter had open jars of mayonnaise, horseradish, Dijon mustard, and grape jelly.

“All clear,” I said, screening the doorway so she wouldn't be able to see into the kitchen.

She hesitated at the bottom of the stairs.

“Oh, God, I forgot.”

“No big deal,” she said.

Just in case she stumbled backwards, I let her go first and she stumped her way up: good foot, crutches, good foot, crutches. Her cords fit snugly around her buttocks and there was a flash of brown just above her belt each time she lifted the crutches to the next step. Part way up she stopped for a breath and teetered until I steadied her with my hand in the hollow of her back, which was warm.

“My room's on the main floor,” she said. She didn't need any excuses; she was in better shape than I was.

“I like it upstairs.”
Please, Willard, don't pick tonight to come to my room
.

At the top of the stairs, I passed her and made an advance sweep through my room, kicking shoes under the bed, gathering up the dirty underwear and socks in a wad, and pulling the bedspread over the top of the tangle of blankets and sheets. It wasn't everything, but hopefully it would put me over the sleazeball threshold. She appeared in the doorway just as I snapped on the light.

“Wow, who does your room?”

“Sorry for the mess.”

“Clean room, dirty mind,” she said, and we both laughed.

Like a hummingbird to honey, she went straight for my bookshelf, which I considered a good sign, and pulled out one of my Anais Nins. She tilted her head and studied the titles on the spines. I could feel myself blushing at how many I'd accumulated. She'd think I was a nymphomaniac. Maybe we should have just stayed in the living room. I could have offered her carbonated mineral water. As I looked around my room through her eyes, I realized how loaded it was with revelations—the Vaseline on the nightstand, the training bra that hung from the hook on the back of the closet door, the lump in the middle of the bed from the pillows I squeezed between my knees when I slept, and the sappy (“When your heart speaks, take good notes”) and not so sappy (“A woman is a foreign land”) notes I'd taped onto the wall over my desk, not to mention the button collection (“I'm a castrating bitch”). I didn't have to ask her in, I didn't have to bring her to my room. I must have wanted to run the risk of her knowing how twisted I really was.

“Weren't she and Henry Miller lovers?”

I smiled. Maybe I'd found a soulmate. My copies of
Tropic of Cancer
and
Tropic of Capricorn
were safely stored in the drawer of my nightstand, hidden from Dad the same way Mom had hidden them.

“Can I borrow her?” I liked the way she said
her
, as if the books had hearts and kidneys.

“As long as you promise to tell me what you think.”

I took off my shoes and made a short stack of pillows on the bed to sit on. While Rozene studied the quotes over my desk, I put the lid on the Vaseline and crammed it and two used flossing strings into the top drawer of my nightstand. When she'd worked her way around to the bed, she balanced on one leg like a stork and set her crutches on the floor, then sat down on the bed with her back to me.

“One more week of these and I'm going to look like a linebacker,” she said, rolling her shoulders.

I rested my hands on her and pushed my thumbs against the muscles between the shoulder blades. Suddenly I was aware of how stale my breath was, like each exhalation had been inside me for a month. “You're tight.”

She folded her shoulders back and groaned. Her hair brushed against the tops of my hands. “I'll give you a million dollars to keep doing that.”

Mom used to massage me, making me lie face down on the bed while she sat on my butt and straddled me. I loved it when she slid her hands under my shirt and pressed me into the mattress with all her weight; it was how I imagined lovemaking must be, when your partner practically joins you. The pads of my thumbs tiptoed up Rozene's vertebrae to the nape of her neck and she let herself go limp as I explored each curve and bump of her skull, rubbing in penny circles. She was taking deep breaths and with each inhalation I could feel her rise, then collapse again. I ventured over the crest of her shoulders until I could feel the ridges of her collar bones, which made little lakes that I dipped into with my thumbs and scrubbed the shorelines. With my hands under her shirt, I rubbed the smooth beach between her throat and her breasts and my face was so close to her hair that I could smell peaches. On the upstroke, my fingernails brushed under her bra straps.

“I'm melting,” she said, and her words were like fingers across my nipples.

If I'd mapped it out on paper, I would have said it couldn't have happened, not this soon, not with me, but when she stretched herself out on the bed in front of me her breasts were right about where the dough would be if I were kneading bread. Extending my right arm as far as it would go, I managed to advance the switch on the three-way lamp to the lowest setting. Her eyes were closed and there was a residue of moisture on her lids which I grazed with my finger, feeling the heat of her eyeballs. Without saying anything, she unbuttoned the top of her shirt, far enough that I could see the little ribbon bow where the white satin cups of her bra connected. It was my turn to take a deep breath and the air that came out must have been hot against her skin.