World Gone Water (7 page)

There's common knowledge between us: I think Holly's a slut, so she can't help but not like me. The first time I was hauled out in the middle of the night, my sophomore year (there was a guy who had Talie's shirt off in the backseat of Holly's car), Holly didn't say anything to me. Instead she stayed in her room while Talie explained very rationally about the four maybe five tequila shots that had poured her into the backseat of Holly's car.

Now I'm listening to what Holly's saying, marking her words, “innocent,” “charming,” “seemed,” “drunk,” “outside.” The last word I hear makes me wish I
were
outside, listening to the little sounds the night makes when everything is where it should be in the world.

Holly can't force the narrative together and she breaks up, crying to the point of heaving, but I know no matter how bad it is in here, behind that door, inside her bedroom, it's much, much worse.

Talie's on the bed in the dark and I go to her.

When I wrap myself around her, she smells of alcohol and says it feels like she's hurt for real. She doesn't say anything else, doesn't cry. I don't either.

“It's okay,” I tell her.

She says my name with a weak voice.

“Yes?”

She's silent, whimpering a little, and I let up on my grip, gathering her around me, waiting for what's next.

It's the first time we involve the police.

I love that Talie isn't embarrassed by the questioning, the photography. Talie answers the questions as they're asked. I listen to the description of the perpetrator, hear his name, how it happened.
I hear the words “not my fault” and I wonder about them, keep hearing them over and over.

I'm asked some questions too. Being in the police station creeps me out.

The officer seems to suspect everything, what we've said, how his desk is arranged, the way the sun starts coming up outside his window, people he works with saying hello.

They want to talk to Holly too.

I give my answers, saying things like “I can't say” or “I don't remember.”

I remember coming close to being here once before but don't tell the officer. A friend of Talie's, in from out of town, some guy she knew once from somewhere. He left town before I got a chance to confront him. Talie didn't spare me anything. The way she told it, he was all over her, but not at first. At first, always, everyone is innocent.

We are finally released into the early morning and I drive us home in silence. Talie leans her head against the cold window but doesn't close her eyes. I wish we were on our way to dinner, or to a movie, or to anywhere but Arrowhead.

Thankfully, JSB has left for the office before we get back.

“How can you sit there and take it?” Talie asks, standing in the kitchen.

I ask her what choice I have.

“You can stand up and do something,” Talie says. “Are you going to let this happen to me again?”

“I'm not letting anything happen,” I tell her. I want to get out of the kitchen and into the living room, but Talie has me trapped. “Why didn't Holly try and stop it?” I ask.

“She did try,” Talie says, yells. “She climbed on his fucking back, but he knocked her out.” She starts to cry but won't let me comfort her.

“I don't want you to hang out with Holly anymore,” I say, half saying it, floating a test balloon.

“What?” she asks.

I don't let her scare me off my point.

“Everything bad happens when you're with Holly,” I point out. “I just would rather you didn't—”

“She's my friend,” Talie says. “She tried to
help
me.”

“I don't believe you,” I say, a statement that confuses her, and she backs down.

“I can't believe you won't do something about this,” she says. The phone rings and it's Holly, my argument over. Talie recounts our early-morning activity and I'm forgotten in the kitchen. I'm planning my escape when I hear Talie in the other room, “Oh, really?” loud enough to know that it somehow involves me.

“Well,
someone's
going to do
something
,” she tells me, hanging up the phone.

“Who? Holly? She's done enough.”

Talie shakes her head. “Dale.”

“What's he going to do?” I ask.

Talie just shrugs. “He's going to do what any
man
would do,” she says.

“Not a
rational
man,” I say, getting mine in too.

“Whatever,” she says, her key to many victories in our past. The phone rings again but I don't wait to hear who it is, imagining it's Dale, calling to detail his plan of action.

The bar at the County Line is two deep all the way around, and I have to wait a half an hour for a small table in the corner. Several at the bar fit the description Talie gave the police, any or all of them looking capable. The one on the dance floor, some honkytonk with a halo of sweat from his hatband, becomes the focus of
my investigation. For a moment, I fear for the woman he is dancing with, but then he turns, faces me straight on, and his weak jawline and sloping nose exonerate him.

The two women behind the bar, older, late forties and all sex, are making the drinks so efficiently the drinking at the bar seems to increase, heated talk rising up toward the ceiling fans, where it's spun around and forgotten. Two cowboys at the table next to mine rise up suddenly and one's on the other, knocking over their chairs. I'm ready for the riot, the beer and the bad energy flowing through me, when the jukebox quits midway through a Hank Williams tune.

“God damn it,” someone yells, a body moving through the crowd. The jukebox is plugged back in and then the brawlers are shown out. I'm ready to leave, satisfied with having made an effort, hoping it brings redemption in Talie's eyes, when I spot the suspect sitting at a table in the opposite corner, quiet and alone.

First off, he's smaller than I pictured. Talie's description made him out to be large and bulky, yet he's nicely wedged in the corner, out of sight. He doesn't seem to be looking around and doesn't look up when someone backs into an empty chair at his table. Someone else asks if they can take it, and he lets them.

I forget what he's done for a moment and understand why he did it. In this place, Talie and Holly very easily would have been the most attractive—if not the only—women around. If I were this guy, and those two let me buy them a drink, let me dance close with them, twirling in the cake-clumped sawdust, I wouldn't have expected them to say no, and I probably wouldn't have believed them when they did.

Keeping an eye on his table, I call the police, who tell me to stay where I am, which is what I plan to do. I'm going to wait ten minutes, giving the police some travel time, and then approach him,
maybe push him around some. The other option is to charge at him with a broken bottle, a move I've never made, unsure if I'd be able to actually stab someone, something I'm pretty sure you'd have to be sure about before breaking the end off of a beer bottle.

I'm admiring the different-shaped bottles at the bar, sizing each up for grip, and when I look back at the table in the corner, Dale is leaning into the guy. No one seems to notice, none of the backs at the bar swivel around with interest. Dale hoists the guy out of his seat and drags him toward me.

I'm not happy to see either one of them.

“Charlie, meet Shane,” he says. Shane is struggling in Dale's grip and doesn't look at me. It strikes me that Dale isn't surprised to see me.

Shane is dragged to the parking lot, more by Dale than by me, but I get a hand on him too. What exactly Dale has in mind isn't known by me, but whatever it is, it's going to take place in the darkened end of the blue-and-yellow-neoned pavement. Shane is forced to hug a telephone pole while Dale ropes his hands together.

“Do you know this guy?” Dale yells at Shane, pointing at me. Shane sees me for the first time and doesn't recognize me. “Do you?”

“No,” Shane says. “Fuck no, I don't.”

“You raped his sister,” Dale reminds him.

“I didn't rape her,” Shane says, which sends Dale off, a few kicks landing in Shane's stomach, landing him on the ground.

I'm bothered that Dale refers to Talie as my sister, which she obviously isn't, instead of as my girlfriend, and it's definitely something to ask him about later, but I'm too impressed by his heroics, and the old feeling of admiration I had for him from Talie's letters returns.

“Charlie, get what's on my seat,” Dale says.

I walk slowly to Dale's truck, hoping the police will show up before this goes into real violence. I pick up the baseball bat on Dale's front seat. The aluminum is cold and round and I heft it over my shoulder. I hit a piece of asphalt from the parking lot into the trees. The bat lets out a
ping
when I connect, and the sound travels to distances beyond where we're standing.

Shane cries out as I slam the door. A few guys stumble out of the County Line but make so much noise they don't hear anything.

Shane's in bad shape now, his pants thrown up on the car next to us, a beer bottle wedged mouth-first up his ass. The thought occurs to me that whoever was drinking from that bottle earlier had no idea how it would be repurposed.

“It won't be as bad if you say you're sorry,” Dale is telling Shane.

I don't think Shane buys it. I don't.

“Man, I'm telling you, I didn't rape her,” Shane says, crying, I think.

Dale whips the bat out of my hand, swinging it again and again in the air, warming up. A car pulls up behind us, the headlights shining so that I can see a few swallows of beer left in Shane's glass tail.

Holly and Talie get out and Talie gasps when she sees Shane.

“Dale, don't,” Holly says. “Don't do it.”

“Why not?” he asks.

“Tell them what happened,” Shane pleads, then angrily, “Tell this psychopath what happened.”

Before Holly can say anything, Dale brings the bat straight across. I kick the bottle away a moment before Dale connects, but he doesn't seem to notice or care. Shane screams, the only one not afraid to speak. Holly and Talie are silent; Dale just grunts as he hammers away. Shane's shrieks get softer and softer and less insistent as he slumps and slides to the ground.

“I'm going to be good from now on,” Talie promises, whispering
it in my ear. She reaches for my hand, locking her fingers into mine. Her grip on me tightens. She smiles as the yellow and blue neon gives way to flashing red and blue and we all scramble into vehicles, not turning our headlights on until we're blocks away from the County Line.

My relationship with Jenny began to feel like a separate life, one with a separate set of friends and venues (church dances, cards and board games at her house, or the occasional date now that she was sixteen). The serenity the relationship bred when I was with Jenny convinced me that we belonged together. But the fact that I hardly talked about her when I was with Talie, who still didn't know much about her, or with my friends, who knew her about as well and saw her even less, or with anyone at Buckley Cosmetics—Jenny's mother thought JSB a crook and forbade me to mention his name—drove a wedge in that serenity and I began to be aware of a split personality I had inadvertently developed: the caring and loving husband type I exhibited when I spent time with Jenny, and the adventurous nighthawk that combed the streets late at night with my friends, looking for something interesting to do, like the rave at the Icehouse, an abandoned meatpacking plant in downtown Phoenix, hosted by a former porn star who was embarking on a new career as a DJ. As Jason and I twirled with the crowd of drugged-out teenagers, I wondered what Jenny would say if she could see me.

Or if she could've seen me at the warehouse party Jason and I crashed after a fruitless night of asking adults in 7-Eleven parking
lots to buy us beer. The warehouse was in a notoriously bad part of town. A homeless shelter was nearby and even the police seemed to ignore the war zone. The only parking spot I could find for my beloved Pulsar NX, purchased with the help of the Chandlers, who had all but adopted me, was on a dark street around the corner, and so midway through the keg party in the unlit, windowless warehouse I stepped out to move my car closer to the front of the building, skipping quickly through the deserted streets. Upon my return, I noticed a large man standing in the center of the floor without his pants. As my eyes dilated, readjusting to the darkness, I noticed that the woman standing next to him was naked too, and that other guests were in the throes of removing their clothing.

“Time to go,” Jason said, grabbing me as we launched out into the night.

I tortured myself over what to do about Jenny. I knew I loved her, and I loved how we complemented each other. I couldn't imagine anyone with finer qualities and I knew it would be a waste and a shame if we didn't end up getting married. Marriage to Jenny was my only road to salvation and redemption, I knew. But the universe was unattuned and just saw us as kids. I allowed myself to indulge in self-pity about having met the perfect mate too soon, the self-pity inducing the feeling that I was the victim of cruel fate. A breakup seemed inevitable, an idea that reduced me to tears when I considered it. I had no idea how to undertake something as emotionally devastating as ending a great relationship without cause. I knew it would come out of the blue, shocking Jenny and our mutual friends, dynamiting a cornerstone of my otherwise fly-by-night life. The best I could do was write Jenny a letter, cowardly sending it to her through the mail, asking her not to contact me for a month but to meet me thirty days later in the courtyard of the Biltmore Fashion Park, an upscale outdoor shopping center where Jenny and
I sometimes had lunch. I hoped the month off would prove to Jenny that she could get on with her life without me, a wish I wanted for myself, too.