Sex & Violence (20 page)

“
You. Did. Not.”

“Of course not. I may have only had one girlfriend my entire life, but I’m not that stupid.”

“Mom was the only girl you ever went out with?”

“Being into math isn’t exactly an aphrodisiac, Evan.”

True enough. Neither was baldness. I kind of felt sorry for him, then. For missing out on so much. Although, at least he had his spleen still. Though it was possible Soren might have had a go at him at one point. I couldn’t imagine my dad in a fight.

“Baker doesn’t believe in girls asking guys out, anyway.”

“Well, I don’t see how that makes sense. She practically grew up in The House That Feminism Built.”

“She didn’t explain all her weird rules?”

“Bailey’s milk shakes don’t make people terribly articulate.”

He picked up a horrible sandal that had so much Velcro on it that I grabbed it out of his hand and forcibly set it down.

“Those are awful, and if you buy them, you will look like an old man,” I said. “And do me a favor and stop going over there drinking if you can’t keep your mouth shut about my sex life.”

“I didn’t realize we were discussing your sex life,” he said, very entertained. “Does Baker factor into your sex life?”

“As much as Brenda factors into yours.”

My father turned away. Like he was suddenly very interested in basketball jerseys. Take that, nosy fucker, I thought.

I found some clothes at the sports store. Things with actual colors, even. My father looked at the baseball bats and soccer cleats and hockey sticks like things in some kind of museum or zoo set up for his amusement. Sports had never interested him before, but now he was asking me all sorts of questions about things he assumed I knew about, being that I wasn’t allergic to physical competition.

“I don’t know shit about football, Dad,” I said, when he asked about the helmets. “I’m not really one for team sports.”

“At least you like athletics in some fashion,” he said. “I should buy some running shoes. Maybe I should start running with you? You still run, right?”

“I’m kind of getting into boxing, lately,” I said.

While he tried on running shoes, I explained about Layne and Tim and the heavy bag at the tow shop. (Everything except how Lana and I sometimes did it on the foldout sofa, of course.)

“I would love to see that,” my dad said.

I thought of my nerdy math and computer genius father with the Beauchant brothers—Tim’s prison tattoos and Layne’s mouth full of chew—and the whole thing made me want to die a little.

***

We went to Mackinanny’s for lunch, and by then, though I was feeling okay, I was also tense. Aware that we hadn’t done anything like this in … ever. Obviously, we had gone to stores and restaurants and everything. But it was different that day. Not that he was telling me all his feelings or asking me to explain all my secret desires, either, but we were hanging out as if we did it all the time, as if it was normal for us to shoot the shit and laugh at each other’s jokes. To steal french fries off the other’s plate. For him to ask the waitress, without even blinking, to bring two glasses with the pitcher of beer.

As we sat there with our guts stuffed, me finishing off the pitcher of beer, he asked, “You boxing for any particular reason?”

There.
That was why I was tense. I’d been waiting for him to bring up something like that. Say that he was worried. Or that we’d be moving.

But what could I say?
Dad, I’m learning to box so I can fuck
my boss’s half sister?
Which wasn’t really true, though it wasn’t all false, either.

“I told Layne what happened in North Carolina,” I said, trying to act casual. “He asked about it because of my medical form at work. It was kind of his idea.”

“It’s a good idea,” he said, sipping his beer. “I wish … I guess I’ve always been pretty passive in my approach to con-flict.”

“The Beauchant brothers know their way around a street fight.”

“Really?”

“You can’t meet them for one of your sociological experi-ments.”

“My father used to beat us,” he said.

I set my glass down with a loud thump. “What? Grandpa Carter?”

“Random and for no reason.” He was solemn, staring at the greasy paper in the onion ring basket we’d demolished earlier.

“He was a volatile, angry son of a bitch. You never knew what might provoke him. Soren and me. Our mother too. She tried to get between us, protect us, but that usually made it worse.”

“I didn’t know that.” I suddenly felt a little shitty for thinking this whole day was about me. That everything was about me, actually.

“I didn’t see a reason to tell you,” he said. “He died before you were born, anyway. The only reason I bring it up now is that when he was sixteen, Soren fought back. Our father, the bastard, never expected it. Because Soren was calculated.

Had waited and planned. Figured he had nature on his side, of course. It was all another cycle for him. He was growing, our father declining. So, one day, when something set him off, Soren hit him back. Put your grandfather in the hospital.”

“Whoa. That’s crazy.”

“You’re absolutely right,” my father said. “Crazy. And effective. My father didn’t stop hitting us, but he definitely thought twice about it when Soren was around.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was like looking at a new person. A person who annoyed me and never said anything most of the time but who let women paint his toenails and bought clothes in colors and bent the rules so I could drink beer with him. Who grew up in violence, was saved by his brother. And then stole that brother’s girl, the only girl he’d ever had, and then she died. You’d think knowing such information would make me more sympathetic to him, more understanding of how he’d come to be the way he was. But as we drove home and I tried to reimagine him, a younger man, not bald, not nerdy, someone picked by my beautiful mother, and instead of some lightning bolt of clarity, the whole thing just gave me a splitting headache.

Dear Collette,

I’m supposed to imagine giving up my coping mechanisms and
what would happen if I did. I don’t have to write this in a letter,
but I’m used to doing that. Plus, I don’t want you to think that I am
neglecting you.

I don’t really think I have coping mechanisms or that they are bad
or that they need to be given up. So, I take baths in the lake. Because
showers bother me. Especially ones in bathrooms without locks on the
doors. Dr. Penny thinks I need to come to terms with this because
you cannot bathe in a Minnesota lake during winter. But I told her
we would probably be gone somewhere else by then, anyway, and it
wouldn’t be her problem anymore, to which she said, Yes, Evan, but it
would still be your problem.

I try to shower. Every morning. Just the noise of the water beating on the tile scares the shit out of me. And don’t even ask about
putting a lock on the door. Let’s just say I had to pay my dad back to
replace the entire door, and the replacement didn’t have a lock, either.

Then there’s my haircutting. I keep my hair cut really short,
since it freaks me out to think it could be used against me, like it was
that night in Connison. Did you know that this is why Alexander the
Great prohibited beards for his soldiers, thus ushering in the modern concept of the clean-shaven, jarhead marine? Facial hair could be
pulled or grabbed, making it a point of vulnerability. Which I tried to
explain to Dr. Penny, but she wasn’t having it.

They shaved my head in the hospital, to deal with some of the con-tusions and stitches. And I liked it. Because it’s like being in disguise.

So I still cut it. Every morning. Sometimes I cut it again at night. It’s
kind of uneven, and little spots are always growing out.

If I quit cutting it, I would have approximately five minutes
back each day. Which doesn’t seem like a lot. I could yank it a couple
more times a week, which is not something I need to be doing more of,
trust me. Or run a couple more miles. Though I run about ten miles
a week, so that’s not really necessary, either.

The thing is, with longer hair, my elf ears wouldn’t be noticeable.

And I wouldn’t look like a cancer patient. I realize I don’t look good.

The demented-peach-fuzz pointy-ears look is pretty much the opposite
of badass. But even if I grew my hair out again, I will never look or be
as badass as my friend Layne or his brother, Tim. (You know, the ones
who are teaching me to box.) Tim and Layne were probably taught to
uppercut and jab in nursery school, while I was learning that Hands
Are Not for Hitting. You should see the Beauchant brothers. They
would have never let anyone touch you.

Later, Evan

A week later, Tom and Kelly dropped Baker and me off at Story Island. Kelly, pointing out all the No Trespassing signs, was confused, but Tom told her he would take her to Northwood for lunch if she didn’t bug him about it. Northwood was the fancy steak place that my father had shown me our first weeks in Pearl Lake. As they boated away, we could hear Kelly asking Tom if she should go back and change her outfit.

“Poor Tom,” Baker said, as we started toward the Archardt House.

“He signs up for it,” I said. Having sex with Lana made me less sympathetic, I guess. I felt guilty about Lana sometimes—how we never kissed or went anywhere, how blatant-ly it was about getting down and nothing else—but at least I didn’t feel like chewing the plaster off the walls as much anymore.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love Kelly,” Baker said. “But I think she assumes Tom’s just going to put up with her shit forever.”

“Well, he might. Maybe they’ll get married.”

“Ugh, that’s so gross,” Baker said.

“I know. But it at least lets me imagine a happy ending for Tom.”

“Oh, he gets plenty of those,” Baker said. “Kelly basically blow jobs her way out of any argument.”

“Jesus. I can’t even imagine.”

“Oh, what
ever
. You’re a
guy
. I bet you can
easily
imagine.”

“All right, fine. But not with Kelly, at least. I mean, what’s with her hair?”

“The blond’s way better, though,” Baker said. “Before it was like she char-grilled it.”

I laughed. Though I was hardly one to criticize people’s hair.

“I wish I didn’t have to leave for college right now,” Baker said. “The Archardt House is so strange. I could write a kick-ass paper about it if I was still in school.”

“Dork,” I said.

“Oh, shut up. Don’t you think it’s weird how well-preserved the house is, though? You’d think there’d be more broken windows. And upstairs, there’s places where I swear the plaster’s been repaired.”

“Maybe the DNR looks after it.”

“But technically the DNR’s job is natural resources, of which the house is not one,” she said. “I mean, why else do you think that we haven’t been caught out here yet? The wildlife people have enough crap to do. Are you even listening?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Dick,” she said, and girl punched me.

Baker and I had been coming to Story Island more regularly in the last few weeks. But we never really planned out our trips there. Sometimes we hiked around. Sometimes we just snooped through the house, me usually in the library, because I got a kick out of all those old books. But Baker got more personal, liked to dig through cabinets and drawers.

Sometimes she’d have weird requests for me, like have me move furniture so she could inspect the wallpaper pattern or hold the measuring tape while she plotted out the dimensions of each room. I didn’t really care what we did, actually. The whole island gave me a weird relaxing feeling that was so good it was almost embarrassing. Of course, if I had to pick my favorite room, it would have been the library. Which was weird, given that most books I had to read for school bored the shit out of me. But these old ones were cool. I even liked how they smelled.

Kind of musty and burnt.

“I’ll be upstairs,” she said, as we stepped into the front entryway. “I want to take a few pictures of the lattice framework on the bed. And the columns on the patio are … Oh, shut up.”

She headed up the stairs. “I know I’m a geek.”

After an hour of paging through books, I got sleepy. I stretched, listening for Baker’s movements. We were so casual, acting like the Archardt House belonged to us. Like we were just going in and out each other’s cabins like people on the east side did all summer long, and not trespassing illegally on a protected island.

I wandered to the piano room. That’s what I called it; Baker called it the drawing room. She had a technical name for everything. Through the window, I could see her in the side yard, crouching down and taking pictures of weeds coming out of the crumbled flagstones. I looked at her for a minute: the muscles in her legs, her ponytails swinging around her shoulders, the way she focused on each shot.

She turned toward the window, and I stepped back, though I doubted she could see me through the grimy glass. I didn’t want to bug her, so I went back to the library and sat on the giant tank of a desk and drank some water. Then, pausing to listen for Baker’s footsteps, I took my Uncle Soren’s blue cloth book from my backpack and started looking through it. Drawings of river otters and different varieties of pondweed. Instructions on weaving a seine to capture minnows for bait. An explanation of the purpose and use of a Secchi disk. A floor plan of the Archardt House, and what looked like dates and notes about it. Stuff like
Sealed hole in master bedroom
and
Replaced broken
window in library.

“Hey, dumbass.”

I jumped, as if Soren himself had appeared. But it was Baker, sweaty from being outside. She pulled herself up on the desk beside me and gulped a bunch of water from my bottle. I leaned away, not wanting her sloppy drinking to get on the pages of the blue cloth book.