Original Sins (29 page)

The initiates pranced and strutted. Emily slouched out blushing, her head hanging. There was a brief silence. Then the room erupted in cheers.

“Pose for us, Em!” someone shouted. As Emily dutifully turned sideways and backward, she glanced at Mo, who sat cross-legged on the couch, her eyes gravely inspecting Emily's nipples. Emily felt a rush of—what? Her nipples began to stiffen. She raced toward the bedroom. The old members began stamping on the floor. “We want Emily! We want Emily!” She was pushed toward the living room. She stumbled into the smoky room and stood before the smirking Ingenues, one of them at last.

In the locker room Coach Clancy was critiquing the first half.

“Yall run like your shoes is cast in concrete. Why, I believe yall is slower than the Second Coming. Yall bout as much use as tits on a jaybird. Lord God, I ain't never seed such a sorry bunch of ball players in my whole entire career!”

Jed sat with his elbows on his knees, his hands and head hanging. He knew scouts from some Southeastern Conference teams were in the stands tonight, and he'd played miserable so far.

“That fumble on the twenty-five, Tatro, that was the most pathetic feat of ball handling I've ever witnessed. Why, you looked like a one-armed paper-hanger with crabs. I do believe a girl could do better! And you, Osborne, you just stood there like a spare prick on a honeymoon. I declare, if yall keep this up second half, we got less chance than a fart in a windstorm. And Miller, the line's opening up them holes. How come you can't get yourself into them? You want me to put some hair around them for you?”

Jed tossed down half a Coke in one swallow.

“Coach,” Hank asked, “how come you to punt there on their thirty-eight with one to go? We coulda made that easy.”

“You so full of shit your eyes are brown! Yall ain't making
nothing
easy tonight.”

Jed ran back out on the field through the gauntlet of cheerleaders, feeling confident they'd pull this game out of the bag. They'd been in tighter spots before. Like Coach Clancy always said, when the going got tough, the tough got going. He could count on these guys for anything. Every man had their particular job. You opened up that hole, you faked that hand-off. From old Slocombe, through the JayVees, to the varsity starters, to Coach Clancy himself. No doubt as to where you stood, or what you was supposed to be doing. And when you all done it right, the team moved down that field like a Continental Mark IV car. They were a team and they functioned best under fire. Wasn't no way they weren't going to stage a comeback this evening. You
had
to win the homecoming game.

After the game, as the dejected crowd poured from the bleachers and headed for the parking lot, the driver of Sally's Cadillac, an embalmer at Creech's Funeral Home, stopped the car outside the stadium for her to move to the front seat for the drive to the homecoming dance at the gym.

Sally sat in front waving and smiling at the throngs on the sidewalks. They waved back and called congratulations.

Sally discovered the driver's free hand working its way up her skirt. Continuing to smile and wave, she used her free hand to push his away. Their hands waged a grim and silent struggle, as he looked intently at the road and she waved resolutely to her fans.

“Stop it!”

“Love me a little, baby,” he said without moving his lips.

“No!” she growled, smiling at the crowd.

“You like it. You know you do,” he ventriloquized, stroking her thigh.

She began feeling the familiar nausea. “Stop the car. I'm going to throw up,” she ordered, bending back one of his fingers.

“Not a chance.”

“I mean it!”

The car turned on to the highway and picked up speed. His hand fought its way to her crotch. She grabbed it with both hers, the adoring crowds falling away behind them.

“I said stop it!” She threw up all over him. “Jesus Christ!”

She was too busy heaving to point out that she'd warned him.

“Oh Christ,” he muttered, inspecting the mess she'd made of his white dinner jacket.

When she emerged from the Cadillac at the gym, her tiara hung over one eye and her hooped skirt was bent into a figure eight. She stumbled up the sidewalk.

She sat on the stage in a throne to the right of the queen, surveying her boogalooing classmates. Jed hadn't arrived yet, probably wouldn't since he hated losing so much. Between records the gym buzzed. From time to time people glanced up at the stage. She saw Marsha Roller laughing. Last year Marsha had swelled up to weather-balloon size. One week she was absent. She returned restored to her original shape. Her best friend announced she'd had malnutrition, which caused her to swell up. She'd gone to the hospital to get cured. Dede Black whispered that she bet Marsha had been pregnant. Soon it was all over school that Marsha Roller had had twins and had put them in an orphanage. Marsha Roller was a whore. The boys had flocked around her ever since.

Sally imagined the room falling silent. Heads would swivel in her direction. Everyone would know: Sally Prince was pregnant. Sally Prince was not a virgin. Just like Betty French and Marsha Roller and Sandy Willis, Sally Prince was a whore.

She stood up and ran from the stage.

Outside she took deep gulps of cool air. Her hands shook as she blotted her tears. She walked aimlessly. Then she ran. She ran through the night down unfamiliar sidewalks until her breathing was staccato gasps. She fell to her knees. Clasping her hands, she bowed her head and prayed to God to make the baby growing inside her give up its grip. She had sinned and known she was sinning, and this was punishment. But she begged her Creator to be merciful.

For the next week she took scalding baths. Her skin became the color of cooked lobster. Alone in the house, she ran time after time up and down the three flights of stairs from the cellar to attic, like a squirrel on an exercise wheel. She jumped off high tables. Then she sat on the toilet and waited for the embryo to come out. By raising her arms she could make thousands of people leap to their feet and yell. By granting or withholding her smile, she could make teachers raise her grades. By giving or denying parts of her anatomy, she had Jed wrapped around her little finger. But this growth in her womb was unimpressed.

She searched her mind for someone to talk to. Her parents would be so disappointed. She couldn't face telling them. There would be no scene, no yelling or weeping, only stunned silence as their good opinion of her crumbled. Probably lots of girls at school were going all the way, but no one talked about it. It was like a lottery, and if your number came up, you endured the consequences alone.

If only she had never heard of Jed Tatro. She promised God that if He would get her out of this, she would never go all the way again ever.

Failing that, she wanted to be dead. She would kill herself. She straightened out a coat hanger and poked around inside herself, drawing blood. She sat with her legs spread, holding the vacuum cleaner hose to her vagina. Nothing happened.

“All right,” Jed said one night when she wouldn't let him touch her because she was trying to figure out how to tell him he was going to be a father, “if you ain't interested, they is plenty of girls who is.”

“Fine. Good. Go ahead,” she snarled. “Only you don't need a girl. You just need a mud bank to shove that thing in.”

Chapter Ten
Touch Your Woman

“Whew, boys, hit's cold in here, ain't it?” purred Honey Sweet into the microphone, wrapping her arms around herself and shivering so that her enormous, half-bare bosom shook.

Her lead guitarist, in a lime-green Western-cut suit, strode forward, put his arm around her and said in a low voice, leering, “Darlin, you'd be awright if you didn't go running around half dressed.” The audience in the gym howled.

Feigning indignation and shoving him away, Honey pouted, “You stick to your gui-tar playing, Slim, and you'll do just fine. You ain't got no sense of fashion. In fact, I reckon you ain't got no sense at all.”

Slim leaned over and announced into his mike, “Any yall pretty women out there who's cold, yall come on over at the Howard Johnson Mo-tel after the show, and ole Slim'll warm you up real good!”

The women in the audience giggled, while Honey Sweet pushed cascades of blonde hair out of her face, cocked a hip, and rested a fist on it. “Anytime you feel like playing some music for the folks, Slim, we'll do it.”

“Room 153,” he added into his mike.

Honey gave a long-suffering sigh. “Hit's a shame he plays such a mean guitar,” she confided. “Otherwise we could just do without him altogether.” She laughed and signaled to the band to introduce her next song.

Sally's one regret was that now she'd never be Miss Newland. She'd never have her a singing career like Honey Sweet's. But never mind. She had the man she loved, and they'd have them a beautiful baby soon.

As the steel guitar whined, Honey Sweet threw back her head and closed her eyes and wailed, “
A woman needs a man to hold, Who'll protect her from the cold
…”

Jed glanced at Sally, who smiled up at him. He slipped his arm around her. He had to admit he was glad now at how things had turned out. He'd spent a couple of weeks driving around smoking pack after pack of cigarettes, had missed several practices, and was benched during the Cold Gap game. Other than in the halls and from a distance at pep rallies, he saw Sally only once. They went to the Wilderness Trail one Saturday night.

“Isn't there something we can do?” Jed asked.

“I've tried everything I can think of,” she replied sullenly. “Except eating rat poison. Maybe I'll try that.”

It seemed like a real good idea. “Don't talk like that, darlin. We going to figure something out.”

“Oh Jed, what are we going to do?”

He started to say, “What you mean ‘we'?” His fists clenched, and he knew he was close to burying them in her stomach time after time. He wanted to murder that little bastard in there. He threw open his door and stalked to the refreshment stand.

After he let her off at her house, he tried to figure out what she would do if he didn't do nothing. Probably go to her old man, and he'd send her away. The whole town would know anyway. Girls didn't just leave in the middle of the school year unless they was that way. It was so embarrassing, like being caught in a spotlight with your pants down.

He could cut and run. Hop in the Chevy and go … where? Do what? Never come back to Newland? Never see his parents again?

Besides, he loved Sally. He couldn't just abandon her. He wished there was someone to talk to. His parents would be horrified. The guidance counselor at school was a seventy-year-old old maid with a lobster claw for a cunt. Bobby and Hank … they claimed they was humping the honeys all across town. But he doubted it. And even if they was, they probably managed to keep their rubbers on.

Finally Jed dragged himself to the minister's house in the mill village. Mr. Marsh took him into the living room and shut out his wife and kids. As Jed explained, Mr. Marsh pressed the fingertips of both hands together like starfish screwing.

“Son, you've committed the sin of fornication.”

“Yes sir, I know that. I'm sorry I ever did. But now that I have, I don't know what to do.”

“You're being punished for your sins, you and your girl.”

“Yes sir.”

“Well son, I don't see that you have no choice. You can't continue to heap sin upon sin. You must marry the girl and raise the child up to be a clean-living Christian.”

“Yes sir, but see, I ain't through school yet. She ain't neither.”

“Well, she won't be able to go to school no more once hit's known she's pregnant.”

“No sir.”

“And you won't be able to neither, cause you'd most likely want to leave town if you wasn't to marry her.”

“Yes sir.”

“So you'd best marry her.”

“Yes sir, but I had me some plans … college … pro ball … all like that.”

“No doubt the young lady had her some plans, too. But I reckon you'll both have to change em. Cause the Lord has his own plans, and they override whatever piddling little notions we get into our heads. You should have thought of your plans before you went and give in to the indulgence of your fleshly lusts.”

“Yes sir.”

“Good luck to you, son,” he called as Jed stumbled down the sidewalk, his cheeks wet with tears. “And God bless you and forgive you of your sins.”

They were married by a Justice of the Peace in Virginia. The town rocked with the news that they'd been secretly married since summer and were dropping out of school to have a baby. Mr. Prince, polite and grim, offered Jed a job on the loading platform at the mill. Jed, standing at attention in front of his desk, stammered out that he would love Sally forever, and take good care of her and their children.

Mr. Prince said nothing, just looked at him. Finally he said in a low voice, “You'd better.”

Jed was covered with a cold sweat as he walked out. Never had any words sounded so ominous.

A few days later Mr. Prince called him in again and offered to give them the down payment on a house so that they could move out of Jed's parents' house.

As Jed expressed gratitude, Mr. Prince said, “Get this straight, Jed: I'm not doing this for you.”

Sally was a good little wife, just like he knew she'd be. She kept their house spotless, tried to cook everything he liked. She'd make a good little mother, too. Now that things had settled down, Jed was starting to look forward to being a father.

“You're just a hero, Jed,” she'd whisper in bed at night. “What would I have done without you, sweetheart? You saved me. I aim to spend the rest of my life making you glad you did.”

“I already am, darlin,” he'd murmur …

Honey was moaning,
“A woman needs a man to hold, Who'll protect her from the cold
…”