Josie and Jack (6 page)

“I think it would be more hassle than it’s worth,” Kevin said. “I mean, you guys don’t seem to have any trouble getting pot. If you want something else, can’t you get it from whoever you go to?”

“Who
do
you go to for pot, Jack?” I asked.

“My sources are somewhat limited in that area,” Jack said, ignoring me. “Highly unsatisfactory. Look, just think about it. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I’ll think about it,” Kevin said, “but things are what they are, man.”

Jack nodded as if he’d already stopped caring. A few minutes later he asked me to come into the kitchen with him, to help him look for the other lighter. When we were alone, he opened a bottle of whiskey and poured himself a shot. He didn’t look at me.

“Get him to change his mind,” he said in a low voice.

“You heard what he said. Things are what they are.”

Jack turned on me. “What the fuck are you, some sort of Greek chorus? Make things change.”

He grabbed the bottle and went upstairs. Leaving me alone.

For a moment I stood there, waiting until I felt that I could muster a pleasant expression. Then I went back out onto the porch. Kevin was still sitting on the porch swing; as I sat down next to him, I heard Jack’s window slide open high above us, and music started to play, faintly.

Kevin was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “That isn’t jazz.”

“What?”

“The music. I thought Jack was a jazz fan.”

I listened. It was Wagner. Jack liked Wagner.

“Just because a person likes one kind of music,” I said, “that doesn’t mean they don’t like another.”

Kevin shrugged. “I guess so. My God, you’re beautiful in moonlight,” he said.

“You mean in the dark?”

“You know what I mean,” Kevin said and kissed me. When he kissed me, I felt like I was letting a thirsty man drink me. He told me that he’d been dating a girl named Kathy before he met me. He hadn’t seen her since the first night he’d come to the Hill. So he had options, even; but he still wanted
me.

He made me feel like an active participant in the life lived by the rest of the world, and I liked kissing him. All the same, there were snatches of music from Jack’s room drifting through the cooling night air and I couldn’t help but picture him sitting alone on his bed, smoking and taking long pulls from his bottle with his eyes closed and the music thrumming and soaring around him, while downstairs Kevin slid an awkward hand underneath my clothes to touch my breast.

“Stop,” I said, pulling away. I crossed my arms.

Kevin looked confused and terribly young. His hair was beginning to clump with sweat and his collar was askew. “What’s the matter?”

“I can’t do this.”

His face grew cautious. “Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

We sat in silence for an impossibly long time.

Finally Kevin said, “Josie, I really like you.”

“I said no.”

“Jesus, Josie. I said I liked you, that’s all.”

“Sure it is.”

He let out a long, controlled breath. “Give me a break, Josie. I said I liked you and that was what I meant. That was
all
that I meant.”

“You don’t like me,” I said. “You don’t know me. You only met me two weeks ago.”

“So what? How long does it take to know you like someone?”

“I’m not even sure you do like me. You might like the package, but you don’t like me.”

Kevin shook his head wearily. “I’m sorry, Josie, but I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“You like us,” I said, gesturing around me. “You like the way we live. But you don’t have to actually live the way we live, do you? You drop in and have some fun and leave, and we’re the ones who have to clean up afterward.” I pushed my hair—it was as sweaty as Kevin’s—back out of my face. “It doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

Kevin stared out into the trees. His face was blank and unhappy. His father’s station wagon was parked out there. I wondered if he was thinking that he should get in it and drive away.

“I’m right,” I said. “I know I am.”

“Yes and no,” he said.

“Yes and no.” I heard the chill in my own voice and stood up to leave. Forget the drugs, I thought. Jack will get over it.

But Kevin grabbed my hands and pulled me back down onto the porch swing.

“Josie. Yes,” he said, “you’re right. I didn’t grow up here. I don’t have to live here all the time. But I wish I did.” There was envy in his voice. “You have no idea the bullshit you don’t have to put up with here. Yeah, maybe your old man’s a son of a bitch. But so is mine. So are a lot of people’s. You only get yours three days a week and the rest of the time you can do whatever you want. It’s like
Pippi Longstocking
or something.”

I stared blankly at him.

“The kids’ book,” he said.

“When I was a kid I read Euclid. In Greek.”

“There you go.” He sounded angry. “You think my parents would sit down and talk to me long enough to teach me Greek? Hell, no. I don’t know
anyone
who has parents who would do that, except you.”

The summer that Raeburn decided that I needed to read Euclid in the original, I spent eight hours a day, seven days a week, at the kitchen table, doing nothing but Greek: Greek sentences, Greek flash cards, Greek grammar. I didn’t go outside. I didn’t take naps. I took ten minutes for lunch and two bathroom breaks. That was how I learned Greek. I was six at the time.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” I told Kevin.

“Neither do you,” he said. “Yes, I like hanging out here. But you know what else? This is all we ever do. Most couples go to movies. Most couples do things. Most couples see people. We sit in your living room and drink beer with your brother. I mean, I like him and all, don’t get me wrong, but”—his grip on my hands softened—“you’re the coolest girl I’ve ever met. If you’d lived next door to me my entire life, I’d still be crazy about you. Do you think I’d put up with this if I wasn’t?”

I didn’t say anything.

“If you weren’t here, I wouldn’t be here, either,” he said. His voice was quiet. “It’s all you.”

We stared at each other for a minute. The light from the parlor window was reflected on his glasses, so I couldn’t see his eyes.

Upstairs, the music stopped.

On the porch, in the dim light from the windows, Kevin brought my hand up to his mouth and kissed it. Then he pulled on my arm, gently, so that I had to move toward him, and he kissed my mouth.

“You have the most beautiful hair,” he said.

In a matter of minutes we were back where we’d started, as if the whole tortured discussion had never happened. He took my hand and put it on his penis, hard inside his army pants. I moved my hand and his breath caught.

When the front door opened, he was as close as the rickety porch swing would let him get to lying on top of me, one hand fumbling inside my jeans and the other deeply twined in my hair. I saw Jack’s shadow, cast in a square of yellow light on the ground, out of the corner of my eye. Kevin panicked and jerked away from me, but somehow his hand tangled itself in my hair and pulled. It hurt. I was startled. I shrieked.

Jack moved so fast I barely saw him. He was just a silhouette, standing motionless in the doorway, and then he had Kevin by the shirt and bent backward over the porch railing.

“Jack,” I said, and Jack hissed, “Did you hurt her? Did you hurt my sister, you scrawny high school
fuck
?”

“It was an accident!” Kevin cried. He was babbling. “I swear, man! I didn’t mean it!”

“Jack,” I said again, louder. My scalp was throbbing a little, but the shriek had been more surprise than pain. “Let him go. I’m fine. I’m
fine.
”

Jack looked at me for a long moment. His hands were still holding double fistfuls of Kevin’s shirt. Kevin’s face was frozen in a mixture of embarrassment and fear. I was afraid he might cry.

Then Jack let him go.

To Kevin’s credit, he didn’t run, although he looked like he wanted to. His face was pale and his glasses had been knocked crooked. As he straightened his shirt, he said, “I didn’t mean to hurt her. You startled me, that’s all.” His voice was trembling.

But Jack wasn’t even looking at Kevin. He was looking at me.

“Go home,” he said.

“Yeah, okay,” Kevin said, and then, “I’m sorry, man.” He stepped down off the porch, his black T-shirt quickly disappearing as he walked toward his father’s car, parked among the dark trees. The station wagon’s engine roared to life, and for a moment Jack and I were bathed in the brilliant white flash of its headlights. The look on my brother’s face was stony and frightening. Neither of us moved as the engine’s hum faded into the night.

Until, incredibly, Jack began to laugh. “Well, that put the fear of God into him.” He sat down hard next to me. The porch swing bucked wildly.

“I don’t think it’s God he’s worried about.”

“Not my problem.” Jack gave me a critical look. “You could at least button up your shirt, Jo.”

I did as he suggested. My hands were shaking slightly. “You scared him, Jack.”

“A little fear will do him good,” he said. “Did he hurt you? Really?”

“Not much. But he didn’t mean to hurt me at all. Couldn’t you figure that out?”

He reached out and put a finger on the tip of my nose. I tried to ignore it. He kept it there.

“Stop it,” I finally said.

“You need to be careful, smaller sister,” he said. “Don’t give Monkey-boy anything until he gives us something. Too much too soon, and the game’s up.”

“I don’t care about the drugs.”

“I just walked in on my little sister with some guy’s hand down her pants.” Jack’s tone was conversational. “I don’t particularly care about the drugs right now, either.”

“Good, because you probably scared him away for good.”

I felt his burning green eyes on me, piercing into me. “I mean it, Josie. Don’t fuck him.”

“That’s up to me.” My voice didn’t sound nearly as brave as I’d intended it to.

“Is it?” Jack said.

We sat in uncomfortable silence. Somewhere an owl hooted, and I could hear distant cars cruising by on the highway.

Jack grabbed my hand and kissed it. Just like Kevin had. “Baby sister,” he said. As quickly as I shook him off, he had my hand again and was stroking my palm. “Poor smaller, weaker sister, with her big mean brother—”

“Who can’t make up his mind about what he wants—”

“Only a promise. That’s all I want. Your most solemn, sacred promise not to deliver until Monkey-boy does. Baby sister can wait that long, can’t she? For her mean old brother?”

“Shut up. You’re being a dork.”

“Dork. That’s very expressive.” He shook his head sadly. “Two weeks with a high school superstud and she drops fifty IQ points.” He moved to tickle me. I squirmed away, and then I was laughing in spite of myself. We were laughing together.

Finally, I said, “I like him.”

“Then you can have him,” Jack said simply. “I want you to have everything you want.”

Kevin didn’t want to come back. Not at first.

“Can’t we do something else?” he said during one of the many phone conversations we had that week. “Can’t I take you out to dinner? Maybe you could come over to my house. My mom’s a good cook.”

The last thing I wanted to do was sit at a table and eat meatloaf with Kevin’s parents, so I kept reassuring him that Jack wasn’t going to kill or maim or otherwise injure him. Jack was always close by during these conversations. He was usually laughing.

“Let him stay gone if he’s so determined,” Jack said after a week of this. “It’s not as if he was doing anything for us, anyway.” Then he smiled wickedly. “Well, I guess he was doing something for you, wasn’t he, little sister? Or was it the other way around?”

“Stop it.” I spoke quietly, with a big smile. We had long since discovered, Jack and I, that the best way to keep your voice low and calm while saying nasty things was to force your words through a smile. Raeburn was home and in a rage. He’d locked himself away in his study, so Jack and I were sitting in the parlor, dressed in our dinner clothes. We had been playing chess but we’d started arguing instead, and now the pieces lay forgotten on the table. “If you hadn’t scared him off, he might have done something for us.”

“You don’t get it.”

“I get that he’s terrified that you’re going to bash his head in.”

Jack shrugged. “Maybe he’s right.”

“You won’t,” I said. “You wouldn’t.”

“The point, dear sister, is that he thinks I will.” Now he was smiling, too. The effect was disconcerting. “He thinks I want to kill him because I caught him in a compromising position with my only and beloved sister. If you ever do get the pathetic little shit back up here, he’s going to bend over backward to make sure that he stays in one piece. Thus, success.”

“What if he doesn’t come back? What if you’ve driven him away for good?”

“Thus, success. But of a different sort.” He picked up one of my rooks, which he’d taken earlier and left lying on its side, and stood it upright.

“You’re jealous.”

“Of Kevin McMonkey?” he said with contempt. “I don’t think so.”

From another part of the house there came a tremendous crash that made us both jump, and we heard Raeburn bellow, “John! Josephine! Come here!”

We instantly forgot that we’d been fighting. I looked at Jack and he looked at me. Neither of us was smiling now.

“For Christ’s sake,” Jack muttered. “What now.”

We found Raeburn sprawled across the carpet in the study. His briefcase lay open and upside down beside him, and the floor was strewn with papers covered in rows of text and equations and Greek letters. There was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s lying on its side next to the mess. One of Raeburn’s shoes lay abandoned near his chair—the foot it had covered looking small and vulnerable in its yellowing cotton sock—and his glasses were missing; his blue plaid shirt hung unbuttoned, exposing his white undershirt. Raeburn was making hysterical gasping noises, like an asthmatic in the middle of an attack. He seemed unable to catch his breath. He was laughing.

“Children. Come in. Come in and have a drink.” With great concentration he managed to lift himself onto his chair. “Josephine, get glasses.”