The Times Are Never So Bad (16 page)

‘Wait. We can use that.'

He stopped and looked at Mark, then down at the cars.

‘You think I'm going to squat on that little fence and shit over the highway?'

Near the bridge the woods ended at a small clearing before the slope going steeply down to the highway. Among beer bottles and cans Mark found a paper bag.

‘It won't do anything,' Walter said. ‘When it hits the car.
If
it hits it.'

‘You have any matches?'

‘No.'

‘We'll get some. Go on.'

He started to go into the woods, but Mark turned and walked back to the bridge, so he squatted in the clearing and looked at bottles and tire tracks in the grass that was high enough to tickle his shins, and wondered when the teenagers parked here; he had seen them: once there were three or four cars and boys and girls sitting on fenders or standing, but the other times it was only one car nestled in the shadows of the woods, dully and for an instant reflecting his mother's headlights as she drove off the bridge. Always he had seen them from his mother's car, when they had been to a movie or dinner and were coming home late. Carrying the bag away from his body, he went onto the bridge, his face turned to the breeze.

‘If we wait, we can get some parkers,' he said.

‘Get our asses whipped too.'

‘We could sneak through the woods. Let the air out of the back tires, then throw this in the front window.'

'What do you think he'll be doing while all that hissing is going on?'

‘Getting out and beating our asses. We could get close enough to listen, though. Maybe even look in.'

‘Now you're talking. Maybe we can think up a trap. Something he'd drive into and couldn't get out of. Let's go find a front porch to burn your dinner on.

With headlights on, they rode fast over the winding road past the woods and then open country where the lighted houses were separated by low ridges and shallow draws and trees planted in lines and orchards, and up Walter's driveway, onto the terrace, where he placed the bag beside his kickstand. In the kitchen they looked on counters and in drawers and behind the bar.

‘They use lighters.'

He went upstairs with Mark following, into his mother's room, and switched on the ceiling light, standing a moment looking at her wide bed covered with light blue, and felt behind him Mark breathing the air of the room while his eyes probed it. He moved to the dresser, and when Mark pulled open a drawer of the chest at another wall, he raised his face and looked at himself in the mirror. Then he looked down, and between a hairbrush and an ashtray saw a glossy black matchbook bearing a name in gold script.

Let's go,' he said, and crossed the room and closed the drawer as Mark's hand, dropping a stack of silk pants, withdrew.

He did not know any of the neighbors well enough to choose a target, so with lights off they rode to the last house before the woods and walked their bicycles up the long driveway between tall trees, and lay them on the ground where the pavement curved and rose through open lawn to the garage beside the house. Upstairs one room was lighted, and light came through the two high windows on either side of the small front porch with a low narrow roof and two columns. At the base of a tree they lay on their bellies and watched the windows, and Mark whispered: ‘Don't ever think your shit doesn't stink,' and they pressed hands against their mouths and laughed through their noses. Then, crouching, they ran to the front porch and listened and heard nothing. Walter set the bag near the screen door and unfolded its top and listened again, then struck the match and held the flame to one corner of the opening and then another, and stood, and when fire was moving down the sides, Mark pressed the doorbell and held it chiming inside the house, then they ran to the tree, and Walter dived beside it and rolled behind it next to Mark. The door swung inward, a short, wide man stepped into its frame, then said something fast and low, and pushed open the screen and with one foot stomped the flames smaller and smaller to embers and smoke, then he cursed, and Mark was running and Walter was too, hearing cursing and heavy running steps coming as he ran beside his bicycle down the driveway and jumped onto the seat, passing Mark before the road, where he turned and pumped for the woods.

Across the glass table Mark's wet hair was sleek in the sunlight. He sat beside Julie; the sun, nearing the trees across the lake, was behind and just above him, so that Walter squinted at him. Walter's mother had thawed chicken, then when she came home early from the boutique she had bought after going to court with his father, she said she had decided on hamburgers because some people were clumsy about eating barbecued chicken with a knife and fork and she didn't want to make it hard on him. Walter had said Mark could eat chicken with his hands, and she said she knew he could and Walter would like to, and that's what she meant about making it hard on Mark.

She could clean the bones of a chicken with knife and fork as daintily as if she were eating lima beans, so he liked watching her with a hamburger: it was thick and it dripped catsup and juice from the meat and tomatoes and pickles; she leaned over the plate and opened her mouth wide enough to close on both buns, yet with that width of jaws she took only a small bite from the edge and lowered the hamburger, then sat straight to chew with her lips closed. Julie's and Stephanie's bites were larger but still small, and neither had to use a napkin. He and Mark had stayed in the pool until now, so his mother was asking questions between eating: Where he was from and what his father did and did his mother work, how many brothers and sisters and where had he gone to school. Some of this was new to Walter; the rest of it he had learned in the woods, during the heat of afternoons as they lay on cool shadowed grass and spoke to avoid silence. His mother's questions ended before her hamburger did; she held her wineglass toward Walter and he filled it, then she said: ‘And your sisters,' and he reached to their places and poured, then held the bottle over Mark's glass of milk, and Mark said: ‘Go ahead.'

‘Just two more years,'his mother said, and she leaned toward him and tousled his wet hair.‘This boy of mine,' she said to Mark, and dried her hand with her napkin.

‘He'll be doing more than wine in two more years,'; Julie said.

‘A lot more,' Stephanie said, and smiled at Mark.

‘Like what? ' Walter said.

‘You'll have a girl,' Julie said.

‘Maybe not.'

‘You will. Some girl will take care of that.'

‘Wow,' he said to Mark. ‘I'll have a
date
.'

‘In the
car
'Mark said.

‘With a
girl
,'

‘And you'll love it,' his mother said. ‘You two guys will beg for the car and start looking in the mirror. We have blueberry pie and ice cream.'

‘Tell me you didn't,' Stephanie said. ‘Not
blueberry
. I'm going to be very fat tonight.'

‘You might get an older man,' his mother said. '‘Dessert is for these boys who swim and ride bikes all day.'

‘I swam this morning,' Stephanie said, and stood, and then Julie and his mother did, and when he pushed back his chair she said: ‘stay with your guest. We 'll do it,' and they were all in motion, clearing and wiping the table and setting it again with ashtrays and cigarette packs and plates and three demitasses and a silver coffeepot, and pie and ice cream for everyone, though he and Mark had the biggest slices and scoops. When his mother reached for her cigarettes, he stood and said: ‘Let's go down to the lake.'

He rolled his napkin and pushed it into the ring, and when Mark started to, he told him to leave it, the guest napkin gets washed.

Near the bank of the lake he found a small flat rock and skimmed it hitting once on the sunlit surface and three times in the shadows before it sank. He paced up and down, looking for another rock, and Mark lay on the grass in the sun, and said: 'they're pretty.'

He sat beside Mark and looked at the flowers of purple loosestrife and then at a crow rising from the trees.

‘Sometimes I wish I lived with my father.'

‘Can you?'

‘They never asked me to.'

He did not like the sound of his voice; in its softening he heard tears coming, and for a long time he had not cried about anything. He sat up and plucked a blade of grass and chewed it. Julie did not like the monthly visits to his father because she missed her boy friend, and Stephanie did not like them because she could not smoke there and she missed her boy friend, and neither one of them had forgiven his father. He would like to spend the school year with his father and Jenny and the summer here, and he knew now that for a long time he had made himself believe his father had never asked or even hinted because the apartment was too small.

‘Do they fuck?' Mark said.

Who?

He pointed a thumb over his shoulder, and Walter turned and looked up the hill; sunlight splashed bronze on their hair.

‘How would / know?' he said, and looked at his bare toes in the grass.'

‘Lots of ways, if you wanted to.'

‘I never thought about it.'

‘You're weird.'

‘Sometimes I think about it. When they go out.'

He was awake when they came home, starting with Stephanie at eighteen minutes past midnight on his luminous digital clock and ending with his mother at three twenty-nine, and if he slept at all he did not know it, for even if he did, he still saw in his mind what he saw awake. Too
much
, Mark had said as Walter's hand rose from Stephanie's drawer with the third plastic case like a clam shell, and he snapped it open and it was empty too.
Everybody's fucking but you. I'll have to jerk off tonight
. But not him: he lay on the warm sheet in the cooling night air and listened for them, and then to them: the downstairs footsteps when the sound of the car was gone—a sound that chilled him with yearning hatred, as though he were bound to the bed by someone he could not hit—then steps climbing the stairs and into their bedrooms that he felt part of now (and was both ashamed and vengeful because Mark was part of them too) and, in there, slower and lighter steps so that for moments he did not hear them and then did again, at another part of the room. He tried to think but could not: tried to focus on each of them, force the other two from his mind, and reasonably say to himself:
Dad has Jenny and she ought to have someone too
or
Julie's eighteen and people when they're eighteen
but he could get no further and did not even try with Stephanie, for as soon as he focused on one, the other two were back in his room, among its shadows and furniture, and they all merged: naked, their legs embracing the cruelly plunging bodies of the two boys and one man he knew, and he saw their three open-mouthed wild-haired faces, and heard sounds he had not known he knew: fast, heavy breath and soft cries and grunts and, between their legs, sloshing thuds; heard these as he waited and as they climbed the stairs and turned on faucets and flushed toilets—Did it drip out of them and drop spreading and slowly sinking like thick sour milk, droplets left on that hair he had never seen, and did they—
wipe
it then with paper, the motion of arm and hand, the expressions on their faces as common as if nothing were there and in the water below their—again: naked—flesh but piss? Or did it stay in the diaphragm that Mark said was shaped like half an orange peel with the fruit gone? He tightened his legs and arms, shook his head on the pillow, shut his eyes to a darker dark; between his legs he felt nothing. When did they take it out? And how did their faces look when they took it out? He saw them frowning, nauseated, wickedly pleased. Once he had a large boil on his leg and the doctor froze it and lanced it, and for weeks he had to fight his memory when he ate. He could not imagine them now in clothes, nor in bathing suits, nor simply eating on the terrace or at the kitchen or dining room table; he tried to remember them in winter, fur-covered, leaving the house and walking with short, careful steps over the icy sidewalk, moving into the vapor of their breath as it wafted about their heads. But he could not, as though all he had known of them clothed was a mask that tonight he had pulled from their faces. When at last his mother's steps ended, he imagined them all settled between sheets, their legs closed now, at rest, and he thought:
They must stink
.

He woke to a bird's shriek and sunlight, and went barefooted down the hall, looking at each door closed on the darkened blind-drawn cool of the room and bed and soft breathing of sleep, and out of the house and onto his bicycle. He rode toward the woods. He was hungry and thirsty and had not brushed his teeth, so the taste of night was still in his mouth, and he opened it to the breeze. Then he was there: the fragrance of pines sharper among the other smells of green life and earth and the old dappled leaves moist and soft under his feet as he walked his bicycle without trail or pattern between and under tall trees and around brush, the sweat from his ride drying now, cooling him in the shade as he moved farther into the woods that had waked while he slept: above him squirrels rustled leaves as they moved higher and birds fluttered from perches, and twice he heard the sudden flight of a rabbit. In a glade lit by the sun he stood up his bicycle and lay on his back with hands clasped behind his head and closed his eyes. The sun warmed his face, and beneath his eyelids he felt the heat and saw specks of red and orange in the darkness, and he tried to see them as he had known them, but he could not dress them, could not cover their nakedness, and could not keep them naked alone: behind his eyes they slowly revolved, coupling with the two boys and the man, and he tried to see nothing at all but the speckled dark, and then tried to see the food his stomach wanted, the juice for his dry throat, and then tried to concentrate his rage only on the two boys and the man whose faces had the glazed look of a dog's above the bitch's back, but he could not do that either, and the sounds from the six writhing bodies were louder than the woods.