Beautiful Kate (16 page)

Breaking the surface, I sucked in the sweet if raucous air, gasping, laughing at my own stupidity. And then I saw her. She was just standing there on the dock in her bathrobe, with her arms folded and her head cocked, in playful derision.

“Ah, there you are,” she said. “I thought you’d drowned.”

The cold water and her sudden appearance had left me feeling almost sober as I treaded water in the center of the pond.

“What’re you doing here?” I asked.

“I heard Tim’s truck. Then I saw you out the window. I saw you coming here.”

“You go on home,” I told her. “I’m drunk. I don’t want you here.”

In the faint light from the farmyard, I saw her smile flash. “Well, that’s just too bad. I happen to live here, dear brother. It’s my pond too, you know.”

“Please, Kate. Don’t—”

But I was already too late. With a twist of her shoulders she had shed her robe, and now she stepped to the edge of the platform, her body lined by the distant light.

“Don’t be frightened,” she mocked. “I just want to take a dip. I won’t come near you.”

With that, she dove into the water and came up about five feet in front of me, laughing, tossing her head to get the hair out of her face.

“Oh, this is great!” she cried. “This is the only time to swim!”

I quickly swam around her, back to the dock. But because I was naked, I did not climb out of the water, not yet. I just wanted to be able to leave quickly if I had to. But she made no move to come toward me. Instead she made a surface dive, which alternately put on display her buttocks and then her breasts as she broke the surface, smiling now, having a great time. Treading water, she came closer.

“I wanted to tell you,” she said. “I think I’ve figured it out—what happened that night.”

I said nothing.

“Don’t you want to know?” She had reached a point where she could stand on the bottom with her head above water. I still did not answer, and she went on.

“Well, I figure it’s because I’m queer and normal both. Queer in that I seem to dislike other people so much. The idea of having some boy at school touch me—it makes my flesh crawl. And yet the sex itself—that I’m not against. It’s just that you and Cliff are the only boys—the only males—I can stand.”

She said all this as if she were discussing muscles and tendons, a recent limp she had acquired. Somehow her inclusion of Cliff went right past my head, to be recalled only later, much later.

“It’s still wrong, Kate,” I told her. “And it’s illegal too.”

“The pharaohs didn’t think so. Or the Romans. It was common then.”

“But we’re living now. In the twentieth century.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s all past now, isn’t it? It’ll never happen again, will it?”

“No, it won’t.”

“Just that once.”

“Yes.”

She gradually had come closer, until finally she was standing only hip deep in the water, her arms crossed over her breasts, whether in sudden modesty or for warmth I could not tell. And only then did I see the tears brim her eyes and begin to spill over. And somehow they ran not just down her face but through my heart as well and I could not find the will to move as she continued toward me. At the end she unfolded her arms and reached out for me and I gathered her in. I crushed her glistening body to mine as we stood there in the waist-deep water. Her arms and legs curled wetly around me and locked, and I carried her that way to the grassy bank, already in her, already plunging. She pulled her mouth from mine just long enough to cry out.

“Oh love me. Please love me.”

I have been on the wagon the last few days, with Toni cheering me every miserable step of the way. Since she herself has just about kicked the marijuana habit, albeit involuntarily (Junior’s stash having finally run dry), the two of us have become a regular Mr. and Mrs. Clean. The opiate industry need not panic, however, for Junior magnanimously has rushed into the breach, expanding his daily six-pack of Bud habit into two and three packs, to the point now where some of the younger Congo Lords are scrounging his empty cans and selling them. Ironically, I get the feeling from things Junior has let slip that it is the Lords themselves who are contributing to this big new thirst of his, possibly in that there has been some sort of change in the protection agreement he had with them—the use of the barn in return for our not being burned out. Whatever the change, I gather that it doesn’t enhance our security, though I can’t be sure of this, since my little brother will not talk about the matter, evidently feeling that his dealings with the Lords are his business and his alone. But of course it
is
our business too, especially if this old tinderbox of a house happens to go up in flames one of these nights.

Now, you may wonder why we simply don’t call the police and have the Lords tossed out and put on warning against any acts of retaliation. If you do, then I can only surmise that you dwell in Butte or Fargo or some other quaint place like that, for here the police are powerless against the gangs. The Congo Lords, as I understand it, have protection arrangements of one kind or another with virtually every business in the area, as well as with many families—especially white families—that might conceivably have something of value to exchange for the privilege of not being burned out or worse. Such is the lovely state of affairs in the good old U.S. of A. in this ninth decade of the twentieth century.

By now, one would think that a man would have adapted to this sorry state. But not old Jason Kendall’s boy Greg. No sir, no way. He was born free, white, and entitled, and that’s the way he’s going to stay if he has any say in the matter. So yesterday—a Saturday—I put on my coat and went out to the barn and into the lower-level room that once had served as a shop for repairing and servicing everything from tractors to birdhouses but which now was a clubroom, a large garishly painted affair crowded with two pool tables, a Foos Ball game, a number of pinball machines, and a classic Wurlitzer jukebox from whose neon splendor roared a soul number with indecipherable lyrics. The walls were covered with posters, many of them pornographic blow-ups (no pun intended) of black men being fellated by white girls, while others were handlettered recitations of what the Congo Lords were all about, pleasant little messages such as THE LORDS KILL…THE LORDS BURN…and the ever-popular THE LORDS RULE.

The Lords themselves—the half-dozen I could see—were spread out over an orange velvet pit group, some smoking grass, others fondling a couple of black girls who appeared to be about ten years old. Seeing me, most of the boys reacted as if a police raid were in progress. One of them even pulled a knife as he came toward me.

“Who you, motherfucker?” he demanded. “What you want here?”

I raised my hands in a gesture of peace and tried to ease into the argot. “Hey, cool it, man—I’m from the house. Kendall’s brother. I want to see the man in charge.”

“Charge of what?”

I shrugged. “In charge of you, I guess. Your boss. Your leader.”

“How you know I ain’t the boss?”

“Well, are you?”

He sniffed with contempt and pointed beyond me with his knife. Turning, I saw the youth Junior had described as “Sandman” emerging from the room that once had been a storage place for grain and feed. Despite the cold weather he was barechested except for an open sheepskin vest and a necklace of what appeared to be dog fangs. As before, his head was shaved.

“You the man to see?” I asked.

A thespian, he took his time answering, first picking up a pool cue and chalking it. He began to rack the balls.

“Didn’t your brother tell you this place off-limits?”

“It’s him I wanted to talk about.”

Sandman slammed the cue ball into the rack so hard the six ball leaped the cushion and fell to the floor. “So talk,” he said.

I took my time lighting a cigarette, figuring I knew as much about dramatic pauses as he did. “You two have some sort of protection agreement, as I understand it. You get the use of the barn and we don’t burn—something like that.”

He stroked in the two ball, but scratched in the process. Shaking his head in disbelief, he took out the cue ball and started over. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Something like that.”

“Well, I was just wondering—he’s acting kind of strange lately. Like maybe the deal between you two has changed. And he’s worried about it.”

Sandman looked at the others and laughed. They immediately laughed too. “That ain’t what got you brother shook,” he told me. “That ain’t his problem.”

“What is, then?”

He stroked again, and missed. “Motherfuckin’ pole! It’s bent!” He angrily exchanged the cue for another one.

I repeated my question.

“His problem,” he said, “is Willy’s old man.”

“Who’s Willy?”

Again Sandman laughed. “Sheeit, man—you don’t I know Willy? Willy’s the little kid you brother fuck, that’s who. Which is why Willy’s mama kick you brother’s ass.” He glanced at the other Lords and they promptly joined again in the laughter.

“But now,” he went on, “now the old man—the old nigger—he come home from somewheres and find out about it and he say he ain’t just gonna kick ass—he gonna
kill
someone. And that someone is you brother. You dig?”

I nodded stupidly. “I dig, yeah. But is he serious? The old man, I mean.”

Sandman was still trying to get a ball in clean. He gave me a pitying look. “Serious? Well sheeit yes, he serious. All us niggers is serious, man—didn’t you know that?”

I mumbled my thanks and started for the door.

“But if I was you brother,” Sandman said, “I wouldn’t sweat too much. Willy’s old man’s a fuckin’ wino. He ain’t got half the balls the old lady got. Week from now he won’t even remember who
Willy
is.”

“Okay, I’ll tell him. Thanks again.”

But Sandman had more for me. “One other thing, man—this place, it
is
off-limits. You dig?”

I nodded as if I were grateful for the information. “Sure, I’ll remember that.”

Outside, the sky was whiter than the snow. The old house looked cold and uninhabited. Yet I returned to it with a lighter step than when I had left twenty minutes before, thanks to Sandman, for now at least I felt that we could all go to bed at night with some reasonable expectation of not being incinerated before morning. At the same time, I recognized that I was the only one who had gained any sense of reprieve, since I hadn’t shared my recent concerns about the matter with Jason and Toni, and since Junior naturally would have been only too keenly aware of the source of his anxiety—the danger not of fire but of being shot, by his youthful sex victim’s wino daddy. So, having no one to share the good news with, I simply trudged back into the house and made a cup of instant coffee. Turning on the kitchen TV, I got a rerun of
The Rockford Files
, which as usual had my psyche zipping back to the Coast within seconds, overdosing on Malibu and sunshine and acres of tanned female flesh. What in the name of pathological nostalgia was I doing here, I wondered, immured in snow and useless memories when I could have been out there in the sun breathing fresh smog instead of the stale air of a Midwestern past?

I got the bottle out and laced the coffee just as Junior came down the stairs.

“Caught you,” he said. “At it again, huh?”

“Yeah. Just can’t help myself.”

“Sometimes it’s only in jest that we speak the truth.”

“Is that a fact?”

He got a beer out of the refrigerator and joined me at the table. “That’s a fact. And you want to know another fact?”

“Sure.”

“Your Toni. She’s leaving you.”

“Really?”

“Yep. She’s fleeing the coop. She’s absconding.”

I affected an indifference I did not feel. “Is she now?”

“So I’m told.”

“By the lady herself?”

“You could say that.”

“What did you do—give her a stake?”

“
Me?
What the hell kind of stake could I give I anybody? No—she called her agent in Hollywood. What’s his name—Dandy? Something like that.”

By now my indifference was such that I could feel my face flushing and I had to resist a powerful urge to sweep my coffee cup off the table and go raging up the stairs to find Toni, for I knew what a bloodsucking lowlife her agent was, knew that the man would call the police and give them my whereabouts just for the pleasure of it, as well as to get me out of Toni’s life. If he could not have her for himself, at least without me around he might be able to slip her into a few more porno flicks, out of spite as much as for the few bucks involved.

“She called him from here?” I said.

“Yessir. Called him collect, she did. And the gent’s wiring her the air fare. She asked me to take her down to Western Union.”

“Beautiful,” I said. “Ain’t that just beautiful.”

“Well, it isn’t my goddamn fault, you know. I don’t want her to leave either. She livens up this tomb.”

“Yeah, doesn’t she.” I finished my coffee and went on upstairs, warning myself every step of the way not to lose my temper and especially not to hit her again. That had never been my style.