Swimming Sweet Arrow (6 page)
“Well, you look just like her,” he said. “She wore her hair long, and it kind of hung down over one eye.”
He left me a dollar tip that night and every time after, even if all he had was a twenty-five-cent cup of coffee. It was all right. If men wanted to see my long hair or my legs or the flowers on my underpants, I’d let them.
Once I convinced myself nothing mattered but getting tips, the job got better. I became a different, harder person at
Dreisbach’s, and I knew that hard person stayed with me at other times, but I told myself it was good for me. Whenever I found myself thinking of certain things that I did not want to think of, I pushed them away and concentrated on the task at hand. It was not a bad skill to have, and it was the price I had to pay if I wanted to go on working. Since I did not have a choice, I decided to pay.
A
s
it turned out, June moved in with Ray before I got my second paycheck from Dreisbach’s. The two of them moved in with Ray’s older brother. The brother, Luke, was renting a house on the road to Church’s Mountain, and he invited Ray and June to go in on it with him so they could all save money on bills.
I couldn’t believe it. I asked her, “Don’t you and Ray want to be alone?”
“It was Ray’s idea. He needs a new car.”
When I told Del about it, he said, “Their bedroom has a door on it, doesn’t it? Then it’ll be all right.”
He was right. No one was handing June or Ray a truck,
even if it did have 87,000 miles on it, and they were at least going to be together instead of just talking about it, the way Del and I did. I was probably just thinking of how I behaved with Del’s brother anyway, and that had nothing at all to do with June.
In truth, I envied June living in that house. Church’s Mountain was her backyard, and south of the house, private property turned to state game lands where tall pine let no sun to the forest floor. Almost every time I drove out there, I saw a hawk flying above the road or wheeling far out. And of course she was living with Ray. She got to sleep beside him all night and push back against him when she half woke from a dream or just wanted to feel his skin. As much as I loved to fuck Del in a car or on the sly at his mom and dad’s house, what I really wanted was for the two of us to live together.
But June needed something to go her way. After we graduated, she went around town putting in her applications for a secretarial or typing job. Even though she’d taken the business curriculum the whole four years we were in school, and I knew from being in Miss Leader’s typing class with her that she could type sixty words per minute, she didn’t get one call for an interview.
“You’re going to get a job sooner or later just because you have that bun on your head,” I said to make her feel better, because she was even doing that: pulling all her hair, which covered her shoulder blades, into a brown donut on the top of her head.
“It’s called a shin-yon,” she said, and I later found out
she was saying the word
chignon,
which I never heard pronounced before. From the donut/chignon she let a few pieces sneak out so they strayed prettily around her face and the nape of her neck. I could have told her I knew those pieces were called
tendrils,
but I didn’t want her to think I was teasing her about the way she talked. Even if we were country girls who fucked in cornfields, we knew how to read, and we knew words like
chignon
and
tendril.
Even though June looked for almost a month, she could not get a job at any of the businesses in Mahanaqua. They all told her the same thing: that she should go on for more schooling, over to the business institute in Mingo County.—“Well, you could do that,” I said. “You always did get good grades.”
“Like I have money for it, Vangie.”
She ended up doing what a lot of girls from our school did: sewing piecework in the factory: It was the one job I told myself I’d never take. I knew I’d rather listen to Neil Roy talk about me sucking his dick than sit hunched over a sewing machine every day. My mom had done it for thirteen years, and she told me it was a killing thing. So if June did have to sit sewing shirt collars all day, I was glad she at least got to go home to Ray, even if there was another person in the house with them.
I never said this to June, but I thought that if she hadn’t been a Keel, if her father and brothers hadn’t made the name so bad, she might have had a better chance of getting hired. But I think people in Mahanaqua heard the name Keel and figured she was one and the same with Dean and
Kevin, and no fancy hairdo was going to change their minds.
I didn’t know the older of June’s brothers at all, but I often saw the younger one in Dreisbach’s. Kevin. He was the one who served time for vehicular manslaughter after striking down an old man on a county road. He came into Dreisbach’s a few times a week for dinner. He did not let on that he knew I was June’s friend, and I was sure he didn’t know. He had no reason to know anything about his sister’s life, judging from the distance June kept from him now. Yet that one time she talked about him, when she told me it was one of his friends that screwed her, I got the feeling things hadn’t always been like that between them, and I wondered what it all meant to Kevin. Did he miss her at all? Was he sorry about letting one of his friends fuck her when she was ten? Was it why June didn’t want to talk about him now?
Kevin Keel acted toward me like many of the men who came into Dreisbach’s acted: he flirted with me, but he never crossed over the line. In turn, for my tip, I flirted back, but I never crossed over the line either. With all those men, what I mostly did was make a big show of taking care of their needs. When I brought their dessert or coffee, I’d set it down with a flourish and sometimes touch them—on the hand or arm, nothing more. When one of them ordered a Yuengling with his meal, I’d pour the beer for him from the long-necked brown bottle, careful to tilt the glass. It was a thing men seemed to like: someone pouring their beer for them.
“I can do that,” Kevin said the first time I did it for him. “I know you’re busy.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. I tried to smile a real smile, not one of the fake kind like I gave everyone else, but it was hard because of what I knew about him.
“Working hard?”
“Hardly working,” I said.
“Now that I don’t believe. I seen you in here enough to know that.”
I felt uncomfortable around him not only because of June, but also because I’d heard so much about the manslaughter conviction. The stories about that were rife. I heard Kevin was so drunk the night it happened, he thought the old man he ran down was a pole on the side of the road. I heard that a piece of jawbone from the old man had somehow worked its way onto the dashboard of Kevin’s car. I heard that Kevin’s skinny girlfriend, Sherry, was happy when he got locked up, because she could finally leave him without getting a black eye for trying. I heard that other inmates at the prison had feared him because he was always lifting weights and working out.
Still, something in me wanted to talk to Kevin Keel, and one night when I got up the courage, I sat down at his table and introduced myself.
“Your sister and I went to school together,” I said. “I’m Vangie Raybuck and June’s my best friend.”
“Is that right? Good friends are hard to come by.”
I thought I could tell by the way he held himself and looked at me that he did not want me to go on talking. So I stood up and was about to leave his table when he put out his hand to shake mine. He said,
Pleased to meet you, Vangie Raybuck.
When I was looking at him, I could see June in his face, in the eyebrows and the shape of his mouth. He knew I was looking at him, and he let me. I imagine I wasn’t the first person to study him.
I knew some of the stories about Kevin had to be lies, but I knew that some of them were probably true. Still, it was hard for me to put all those stories together with the man who sat at my tables and ate dinner quietly, who never drank more than one beer, who had my best friend’s eyes and nose and mouth. But that is the nature of people, how they can surprise you with their ordinariness, and all the while a deep, powerful river is flowing through them, carrying them in whatever direction they choose to let it take them.
W
HEN
Del and I finally rented an old farmhouse out in Mennonite Town, it was a green time. I say that because it took us a good part of the summer to earn the money for first and last month’s rent, plus a deposit, and because I felt like everything in my piece of the world was green and new. Del and I could fill the whole bottom of our refrigerator with beer if we wanted, we could play our stereo as loud as it would go, and we had a big bed that was always waiting for us to lie down on it. All I had to do was bump up against Del in the kitchen, or kiss his back when he was working shirtless over his car, and to the bedroom we’d go. One or two kisses and we were
ready—he’d pull my lips apart with one hand and slip, in he’d go. It seemed like I was wet all the time, like the tissues down there were always swollen. In the morning Del was rock solid at my ass, and we’d say good morning by screwing, or by putting our mouths on each other. He even liked the taste of my morning cunt. We didn’t speak those mornings, and sometimes we hardly looked at the other’s face. I’d glimpse a brown eye when he lowered his body to mine, and because I saw it through the tangle of his hair, I sometimes felt like I was with a brown-eyed animal. I liked the feeling, because it meant I could be like an animal, too. Grunting when it felt good between my legs, running my hands over skin, pulling on the black hair that fell over the brown eye to bring the mouth down to mine.
More than just Mennonites lived in the area of Mahanaqua called Mennonite Town, but certainly Del and I were the last people you’d expect to fit in. We were as foreign as tropical birds out there, what with our drinking and drugs, Del’s long hair, and the waitress uniforms I wore that just barely covered my ass. Still, that farmhouse gave us a kind of freedom we couldn’t have had in an apartment in town, and I liked the place. I liked the old blue asphalt tile that covered the outside, and I liked the two old metal chairs with backs like seashells that sat on our porch. I was content.
While I liked all the sex and partying Del and I got to do once we moved in together, I also appreciated the everydayness of living with Del: being able to walk around the house in my nightgown—a comfortable cotton one, not the sexy one my mom gave me—and having someone to talk to
every night before I fell asleep. Sometimes I remembered old things that happened with my mom and dad, and it often made me fretful and sick, and I was glad Del was there. Some things about my mom and dad were half funny to remember, like how we mostly ate off paper plates after they’d broken a couple sets of dishes in their fights, but most of the memories just made me sad. I wondered how the two of them got to the point where they screamed and threw things at each other. How did that much anger happen in a person? I blamed some of it on my dad’s drinking, but my mom did not drink often, and she sometimes met my dad blow for blow in those fights. She was the one who split his scalp open when she threw a candy dish at him. My dad mostly used words to hurt.
“Can’t you just forget about it?” Del asked me the first time I made myself sick with remembering. “You know, just push it to the back of your mind?”
“I don’t set out to think about the two of them,” I said. “Sometimes it just happens. You don’t have to be around me if you don’t want to.” ‘
“I want to be around you,” he said. “I just think you should put it out of your mind. That’s what I do.”
But he didn’t bug me about it, and sometimes when he could tell I was feeling sad, he sat with me and brushed my hair, or played cards with me until the feelings passed. Other times, if it was what I wanted, he let me be—because of course it wasn’t just old memories of my mom and dad that made me fret. Sometimes I thought of what I’d done with Frank Pardee, and it goes without saying that I did not tell
Del what was on my mind then. It was my secret and I had to carry it alone.
Still, no matter how hard Del and I tried to understand each other in those first weeks of living together, it was a strange time, because everything real about life—stupid, little, everyday details of life—seemed to disappear or get complicated. We ate hamburgers, spaghetti, or bacon and eggs almost every night, because that was all I really knew how to cook. I had trouble shitting if I knew Del was in the house. And night after night, after all our screwing, I could not relax enough to let myself sleep and dream beside Del. I’d lie wakeful until three or four in the morning, when I finally would let myself drift off. Some days, depending on the shifts we were working, I stayed in bed long after Del left for work so I could catch up on the sleep I missed beside him. I told myself it was natural. I knew you could not learn everything about living with someone in a month, or get comfortable around another person in a couple weeks, even if you’d been screwing them a long time.
There were plenty of things I had to learn about Del. We kept our dope and our drugs in one drawer in the kitchen, and one of the first things I noticed about him after we started living together was that he went to work high. I used to go to school stoned or doing speed, but having to wait tables made me clean up my act. It was just too hard to weave together all the pieces of waitressing if I was stoned. If I did speed, I was great for the first part of my shift, but by the end of the eight hours, I was crashing and ready to snap. And if I went in with a hangover, I wanted to die, because
the job took so much from me physically, what with standing and walking and serving food and bussing tables and washing dishes. So I became a weekend partyer, or I’d get my buzz on right after I got home so that I could enjoy the dope and still straighten up in time for work.
Not Del. Del parried hardy seven days a week, and he made a special point of leaving time to get stoned when he was getting ready for work. He was working a brake press at Traut’s, and I knew that job was hard: working with the heavy sheet metal, all of it covered with oil, punching out circuit breaker boxes all day long. I knew he hated the work, and I knew that a lot of people on his crew parried, but I worried about him working around heavy machinery. One morning when he was tooking up, I said, “Honey, don’t you worry you’re going to fuck up at work if you’re stoned?”
