Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (4 page)

She knelt like he said, lowering her hips to her heels, looking down at her bare knees and the short hair at the back of his head. “Now hold it there,” he whispered. “Oh, God.”

Then he didn’t say anything. The right side of her body was warm from the fire, the left side was cold. It was too cold at night to be wearing shorts. She heard her father roll over in his sleeping bag inside the tent, nylon against nylon.

Layton’s hand came back, and touched her hip. “You’re tilted to this side,” he said. She straightened. “There,” he said, but his hand stayed on her hip. She thought about what to do. His eyes were closed and he seemed to have forgotten the hand. After a minute it slipped under the back of her thigh, touching her skin. She took his wrist and moved it away. The hand paused in the air, then slipped back under her thigh, over her shorts, touching between her legs with a shock like the jolt of the gun firing in her hands. She started to stand up, awkwardly, but he found her calf and pulled her back down. “Stay,” he whispered.

She was on one knee, half-straddling his back in the dust, and he rolled over, facing her. His hand slid up her leg to the small of her back and held tight. His eyes were cloudy and intent, focused and unfocused, and she’d never seen a man look that way before.

She pulled away then, and he let her go, and she left the fire and climbed, trembling, into her burrow. She lay awake long after the moon rose, listening to the sounds in the camp: to her father snoring, and Layton finally putting out the fire, and the unzipping of his tent, and the rustle of his going to bed. She kept her hands between her thighs for warmth and the feeling there was sharp and aching, but she didn’t know what to do about it except lie awake, breathing, until it went away.

WHEN SHE WOKE UP
, Layton was out in the river again, walking downstream and casting at the banks. It was the brightest day yet, and a mayfly hatch hovered over the water, the current dimpled with the open mouths of rising trout. Her father poured the last of the hot water into the oatmeal in her cup, and she ate standing. In her shadow on the ground, she could see her hair, three days uncombed, sticking out on one side. She smoothed it down with her hand.

On the long flat stretch to the takeout, Sam rowed for a while. Her father pointed out a kingfisher in the brush along the banks, an osprey nest perched on the top of a tall tree. When she got the boat stuck on a rock, her father didn’t say anything, but took the oars backward and pried it off. Layton and Harry stayed well ahead. It got hot, and she slipped off the raft and dropped under, feeling the cold current in her hair and clothes.

Layton didn’t look at her at the takeout. They deflated the rafts and packed up the truck with the drained-energy feeling of a trip being over, and she changed into dry shorts in the trees. Her father drove and Harry had the other window, so she was squished with Layton in the middle, his left leg pressed against her right.

They dropped her uncle and Layton at the put-in with Harry’s truck, and drove home in silence. Sam tried to keep her eyes open, but fell asleep. At the house, they unpacked the truck and hosed out the coolers, and when she gathered up her book and her river shorts, the hollow-point fell out of the pocket onto the grass.

Her father picked up the bullet, rolled it in his hand, held it between his fingers. It was copper-cased, splayed out in a blossom of dull lead where the tip had been.

“Where’d you find this?” he asked.

“I shot it.” She waited for the next question.

He said nothing, but held out the slug to her, and she took it.

He picked up one of the dry-boxes and carried it into the shed. For a while she listened to him unpacking, putting pots where they belonged, not noisily or angrily, just putting them away. Then she went into the house and filled out the final form for the scholarship to boarding school, and in the morning she put it in the mail.

She said nothing at first, and life went on as usual: she finished
The Thorn Birds
and saw her friends and ate dinners with her father. They talked about the weather and the cases he’d heard, and then after a week she told him that she’d accepted the scholarship.

He frowned at the table. “Oh,” he said. “Good. That’s great.”

She wanted to ask why he had left her by the campfire, but instead she said, “Orientation is the last week of August. I should get a ticket.”

“Sure,” he said. “Right.” He looked straight at her, and his eyebrows knit together. “I’ll miss you here.”

She felt a flood of warmth for him, an overwhelming feeling that it was a mistake to go away. He hadn’t meant to leave her there. He hadn’t known what would happen. He definitely hadn’t meant for it to happen.  Again she wanted to ask, to make sure, but instead she took her dishes to the sink, and the moment was over.

A FEW DAYS BEFORE
she went away, there was a legal brief on the kitchen counter, with the names of her uncle’s other plaintiffs but without Layton’s. When she asked about it, her father said Layton had left for a job in Reno, and had taken himself off the case. He’d decided his symptoms weren’t so bad and it wasn’t worth it. He got little rashes under his eyes and he couldn’t drink—so what? He’d needed to stop drinking anyway, he said. There wasn’t anything keeping him in Montana, and it was too much of a hassle to stay involved from Reno.

Her father drove her to the airport, and carried her bag right up to the gate before saying, for the first time, that he didn’t really want her to go. She cried all the way down the jetway, and the man in the seat beside her gave her a packet of Kleenex to stop her nose from running, and patted her shoulder when they landed in Salt Lake.

Someone from the airline told her where to change planes, and from Boston she took the bus she’d been told to take, though it seemed impossible that it could be the right one. She was red-eyed and nervous, but had decided that she didn’t know anything, and the idea of going away was to learn.

Her dorm was in a cluster of stately brick buildings surrounded by trees, set apart from the little town, and the walls of her room had been painted over and over, for generations. She read
The Portrait of a Lady
there, and also
The Beach House
and
Candy
. Fifteen was old at boarding school. Most of the kids’ parents didn’t want them at home, and, knowing that, the kids seemed to know everything. A girl down the hall had done Ecstasy with her boyfriend back in Maryland, and had sex for three hours straight. Sam’s roommate, Gabriela—whose last roommate got the Latin teacher fired—was surprised and impressed that Sam was a virgin.

There was a phone in the hall, and when Sam’s friends from home asked for her, Gabriela said, “They sound so
western
.” One of them, Kelley Timmens, had just sent Sam a letter about a boy they knew:
“We didn’t have sex,”
she wrote,
“but imagine as sick as you can imagine—without having sex.”

Gabriela had laughed, reading the letter, and asked, “What does she mean?” Sam called home every week or two, and her father reported on people who’d asked about her, and she told him what she was doing in school. When she told him she was going to New York with Gabriela for Thanksgiving, he sounded startled. He said, “I’d get you a ticket home,” though they hadn’t talked about it before.

“I know,” she said. “But it’s two days of flying, for two days there.”  That had been Gabriela’s argument.

“Where will you stay?”

“With her mom.”

There was a silence on the line, and she imagined the quiet empty house around him.

“What happened to Harry’s chemical case?” she asked.

“It got dismissed,” her father said. “They needed that guy. What was his name? On the river.”

“Layton,” she said.

“Layton,” he said. “You can’t blame him. He wasn’t really that sick.”

“And the other people?”

“They can’t work,” her father said. “They have these awful headaches, all the time, and they can’t go out.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was a tough case,” he said.

He asked a few questions about school, and then they said goodbye and Sam hung up, thinking about the woman who couldn’t drive because the chemicals in everything made her forget which light meant stop and which go. She lay back on her bed under Gabriela’s Charlie Parker poster and stretched her leg up to her face so her nose touched her knee, which was something Gabriela did. She brought the leg down and stretched the other one up.

She thought about the parties there were supposed to be in New York, and the boy from Exeter Gabriela was thinking about sleeping with, and the dime bag Gabriela was trying to get. She thought about her father eating dinner alone on the dark winter nights, with no one to talk to. And her friends—Kelley Timmens and the others—laughing in the hallway of her old high school, with its rows of lockers and the fluorescent lights reflected in the shiny floors. She thought about the pink cleaning stuff the janitors used, the smell of it in the mornings when she got to school, and the shampoo dispensers on the walls of the girls’ gym showers that said “Montana Broom and Brush.” She thought about her father nodding to her, after saying goodnight by the campfire, and about the aching feeling later as she lay in her sleeping bag, and how she hadn’t understood what it meant. She smelled Gabriela’s honey soap on the back of her wrist, and then her roommate walked in.

“Where are you?” Gabriela asked. “You’re doing that spacey thing again.”

Sam smiled. “No, I’m here.”

“You’re not. You’re off in Montana or something. Do you have any letters from sick Kelley?”

“No.”

Gabriela looked disappointed, but then she brightened. “I have to tell you what just happened in the library,” she said. “You know that reading room you can lock?”

Sam nodded and rolled over to listen, tucking her pillow under her arms and her chin. The detergent on the pillowcase was Mountain Fresh. Gabriela flopped down on the new rug, and tossed back her long, conditioned hair. The rug was cream colored and Gabriela ran her hand across it, smoothing the fibers down. She looked a little flushed. “Okay, here’s how it started,” she said, and the story, full of longing and intrigue, began.

IN 1975,
Steven Kelly was twenty-three and newly orphaned. His father had died of pancreatic cancer two years earlier, and Steven had quit a construction job to move home and take care of his mother. She had relied on her husband so absolutely, all her adult life, that she had never filled a gas tank on her own, or looked at a tax form. In her grief, after his death, she shifted her dependence to Steven. She told him it was lucky she’d had a son, as if no daughter of hers would be able to master a gas pump, either. When she died of the same cancer as his father—one of the doctors described it as mercifully quick, but there was nothing merciful about it—Steven felt like a boxer losing a fight, not knocked out but dizzy from the blows.

His mother showed him pictures when she was sure she was dying, of herself as a grave little girl in a white First Communion dress, with hollow-eyed Italian relatives in suits. She told him stories: her father had tried to start an ice cream business as a young man, but the unsold, unrefrigerated ice cream would melt by the end of the day, and he would end up eating it himself, dejected. Her mother had once won a beauty contest, scandalizing the family, in a bathing costume that came down to her knees. It was as if his mother was trying to make a safe place for her family in his brain. She died as she was becoming a real person to Steven, not just the more helpless of his ever-present parents, and so she was frozen in mid-transformation, neither one thing nor the other.

They left him the house he’d grown up in, but no money, once the taxes were paid. Their small Connecticut town, where he had spent a happy, bike-riding, bait-fishing childhood, was being transformed by the building of a nuclear power plant. When finished, the plant would pull in water to cool the reactors, which would raise the temperature of the river and kill all the fish he had grown up fishing. There were angry, impotent protests, and there were jobs for anyone who could wield a hammer. Steven hated the plant—-everyone did—but he couldn’t sell his childhood house, so he took one of the jobs.

The plant was two miles long and a mile wide, and still being laid with pipes. Steven was hired to build scaffolding for the pipefitters, then take it down and build it somewhere else. It was a union job, and they’d been told to make it last, so they worked in threes: while one worked below, the other two would climb to the top of the scaffolding and sleep. Someone usually duct-taped a transistor radio to the mouthpiece of one of the paging telephones, so music blasted through the plant. When the security guards got close to finding the radio, it would be rescued, and the music would stop, until the guards went back to their usual stations. Then the radio would move to another phone and the music would start again:  “Born to Run” blaring over the clanging and drilling and sawing and hammering.

Steven’s best friend from high school, Acey Rawlings, also worked at the plant. Acey had joined the Coast Guard for a while, but lost interest, and was home living with his mother. Any social status Steven had in school came from Acey’s reflected cool, and now Acey had mythologized their teenage years, believing them to be as perfect as high school years could be. They had missed the Vietnam draft by the skin of their teeth, and Acey considered luck to be something they had rights to, and could count on.

Most nights after work, they went to the bar, to drink beer until the hammering in their heads subsided enough for sleep. So in some ways nothing had changed since Steven was sixteen: he was still drinking beer with Acey, except now it was legal, and less exciting. It was on one of those nights that a girl showed up, hanging around. She was too skinny, with small tits and narrow hips, and she leaned on the bar next to Steven in jeans and a tank top and ordered a gin and tonic. He reflected that it was difficult not to talk to a girl standing next to you in a tank top, no matter how tired you were.

“Are you old enough to drink that?” he asked her.

She showed him her license. It said she was twenty-three, five-foot-six, 110 pounds. He could have lifted her right into his lap. Eyes: green; hair: brown. Her eyes were oversized, and ringed with green eyeliner and black mascara. He showed the license to Acey at the next barstool, because he could already feel that Acey’s interest in the girl trumped his. He was going to have to get out of the way.  Then he noticed the name on the card: Rita Hillier.

“I know you,” Steven said.

“You do?”

“We went to grade school together.  You moved away.”

She narrowed her made-up eyes at him. “Did you have a lot of cavities?” she asked.

“No. I mean, not more than normal,” he said.

“Did I ever kiss you?”

“No.”

She shook her head. “Then I don’t remember.”

He could have told her that her father was the first person he had ever seen falling down drunk, but that seemed unfriendly. “You sat in front of me in Mrs. Wilson’s class,” he said. “You showed me how to cheat on spelling tests by keeping the practice list inside your desk, and pretending to look for an eraser.”

“I did not.”

“You think I don’t know who corrupted me?”

“I remember cheating on math, later,” she said. “Not spelling.”

“Your dad used to walk you home from school.”

Her eyes lost their gleam, and she looked at her drink. “That was me,” she said. “They took his driver’s license away.”

“Is he all right?”

“I think so.”

“Do you see him much?”

She frowned sideways at him. “You ask a lot of questions.”

Acey kicked him under the bar.

“This is my friend Acey,” Steven said. “We went to high school together, but not grade school. He doesn’t ask so many questions.”

Acey smiled his handsome smile at her, leaning forward over his beer.

Steven withdrew to the men’s room to let Acey move in. Behind the closed door, he stood looking at the filthy urinal, feeling disoriented by his brief return to third grade. Mrs. Wilson had caught him cheating on the spelling test, but he hadn’t turned Rita in. It was his first and maybe only major act of chivalry. He got a zero on the test, and a C in spelling, but his parents had never asked about the sudden drop in his grade. He guessed that Mrs. Wilson had told them about the cheating and they were too embarrassed to mention it. Rita’s dad wouldn’t have cared if she cheated—the old drunk might even have applauded it, as wily—but it had seemed important to protect her from the disgrace.

When he went back out to the bar, Rita had her head bent close to Acey’s, the deal sealed, and Steven put his arms around their shoulders.

“Let’s go out for a midnight nuclear protest,” Steven said, and Acey whooped with eagerness.

They drove down to the marina, stole a Sunfish from a slip, and sailed it across the river. Acey manned the tiller and Rita stood precariously in the bow and danced in the wind. When they got to the new plant, they yelled until the lights came on and the security guards came running down to the water to see what was going on. It was a pointless thing, hassling the security guards who were just local guys like them, getting a paycheck. But it felt good to yell on a warm night. Rita was surprisingly loud. When the guards threatened them, fat and breathless in their tight uniforms, there wasn’t any wind left to sail the Sunfish, so they laughed and paddled back for the marina with their hands. They could see a few stars through the haze. When they got back to the slip, Steven was starting to sober up. Acey left them to go pee off the end of the dock, and Rita said, “I’m sorry I got mad when you asked if I see my dad.”

“That’s okay,” Steven said.

“I don’t see him at all,” she said. “I don’t know where he is.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you remember him?”

“A little.”

“What do you remember?”

“Not that much, really,” he said. “I just remember him picking you up at school. He seemed like a nice man.”

She looked at him skeptically, and he pretended he was telling the truth. Then Acey came back, buttoning his jeans. He bear-hugged Rita, kissed her hair, and took her home.

AFTER THAT
, Acey was in love, and he couldn’t shut up about it. He talked about Rita all the time, how amazing she was, how unlike other girls. He did it at the plant, where people weren’t used to such happiness, and he made himself unwelcome. The married men only smiled and made jaded little jokes—
Wait until the blowjobs run out
—but the lonely ones found it intolerable. A raffle was held for a car someone needed to unload, with two packs of playing cards cut in half on the bandsaw, and Acey made a big show of buying a lot of tickets, and asking specifically for the heart face cards, so he could give the car and the winning card to Rita. There was open glee in the plant when he didn’t win.

Even though Steven knew Acey was driving everyone nuts, and guessed there would be some attempt to take the Romeo down a notch, it still took him a minute to realize what was happening when a high, spooky voice came over the PA system one afternoon, filling the whole plant, calling, “Riii-ta, lovely Riii-ta!” Then it made a kissing noise and hung up.

The guys around them were already laughing, and Steven saw knowledge dawning on Acey’s face. He thought he should have taken Acey aside long before and told him to keep his mouth shut.

The high voice came again, asking, “Rita, where are you?” Then the kissing noise.

Acey stalked to the closest paging phone, holding a wrench like a weapon, the guys still laughing behind him. No one was at the phone, of course. When Acey turned back with the wrench, he nearly bumped into a white hat, a liaison for the client. Normally someone saw the white hats coming soon enough for all the sleepers to get down off the scaffolding, but this one had appeared out of nowhere.

“Who’s doing that voice?” the inspector asked Acey.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Who’s Rita?” the white hat asked.

Acey didn’t say anything. The guys didn’t, either.

“Tell me,” the white hat said.

“It’ll stop,” Acey said.

“It better,” the man said.

It did stop, until the next inspection. As soon as the white hat got there, the voice came over the loudspeaker again. “Riii-ta, darling
Riii
-ta!” And then the kissing noise. But by then it wasn’t really about Acey or Rita. It had turned into a way of baiting the inspector, who went to their foreman, Frank Mantini, to complain. Someone who was standing outside the office heard Mantini tell the inspector it was a harmless prank, the guys letting off steam.

The white hat put a hundred-dollar bill on the foreman’s desk, according to the eavesdropper, and said, “It’s yours if you find out who’s doing this.”

“I don’t want the money,” Frank said.

“Find out anyway,” the white hat said.

Frank Mantini had a family at home, three daughters, and must have felt his job was at stake. But he couldn’t stop the prank. If he caught one guy—which he couldn’t—there would always be another to carry on. They switched tactics and started to torment him specifically. The high, spooky voice would say, “
Frank
-ie, you can’t
catch
me!” and then make the kissing noise and hang up.

It went on for days, third-grade stuff: the occasional “Lovely Rita,” sometimes a line of the Beatles song, badly sung, but mostly taunts for Frank. The white hat came in every day. Frank Mantini started to look ill, and people were saying that whoever was doing the phone stuff should lay off.

At the end of the week, Frank took Acey to the bar for lunch, to pump him for information. Some of the guys at the plant went to the bar at noon every day, and the bartender had their drinks lined up. They were career drinkers, old hands, and they drove back to the plant unimpaired. Frank Mantini and Acey weren’t those guys. Acey came back drunk and decided to take a nap, not up on the scaffolding, but in a quiet corner on the floor. Frank had already gone into his office and shut the door.

Acey’s quiet corner, where he had put his jacket under his head, was behind a parked front-loader, and someone went to use it. The poor guy climbed in, started the engine, and backed up, feeling a bump. He stopped and climbed down again to check what it was, and saw that he’d backed over Acey with one of the front-loader’s heavy back tires, crushing his skull.

Someone tripped the alarm, and the ambulance came, pointlessly, and the white hat showed up. Frank Mantini got dragged out of his office, smelling of whiskey, and fell to his knees at the sight of Acey dead on the floor.

THE DEATH
—the real weight of it—didn’t hit Steven for a long time. He felt as if he was watching everything from behind glass. He got his old rod out and went fishing, and wondered why he and Acey had stopped going, why they stole boats to protest the plant but didn’t take advantage of the last years of cold water and healthy fish. He didn’t catch anything, and thought maybe the fish knew what was coming and had already cleared out.

The funeral was at St. Mary’s, where his parents’ funerals had been, and Steven sat in a pew like someone’s accountant, thinking about what the flowers cost, and the casket. Frank Mantini, who had lost his job, was there without his family. Acey’s little brother, the snotty kid they used to put in a headlock, now a stocky nineteen-year-old with a crewcut, read from notes, his voice shaking, about how he would never have a big brother again. Acey’s mother, who used to cook Steven eggs and muss his hair, tried to speak but couldn’t. Then a big motherly girl with caramel-colored skin, Acey’s first cousin, got up and helped everyone out by saying nice things without breaking down. Rita sat next to Steven, not crying. She had sobbed and screamed when he first told her.