Songs in Ordinary Time (49 page)

They were going to leave at sunset. Benjy had agreed to go to Weeb’s, but he’d promised to wait in the car. For that favor, Norm said he’d tell their mother that Benjy had done well swimming in the lake.

They ate with a startling urgency. “I was so hungry!” Benjy cried. “Let’s have some more!”

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 237

Norm paused. He was ready to go now, but one more hotdog sounded good. “I’ll get it,” he said. He started to get up, then sank back onto his knees. “How come Duvall gave you that money?”

“I don’t know. To be nice, I guess.” Benjy shrugged.

Norm leaned close now. “Why do you think he’s so nice to you? Because he knows Alice and I are on to him, so he’s after you. He needs you on his side. I see him, the way he looks at you. The way he’s always trying to make you laugh or get you to do things with him. Like last night, saying it’s okay to quit swimming lessons. Why do you think he did that? He doesn’t care about you. Benjy, he doesn’t even like you. Can’t you tell? To him, you’re just…just Mom’s, you know, her weak spot. Don’t you get it? Don’t you see how he’s using you to get to her? I mean, tonight, right now, this very moment he’s probably fucking the—”

“Shut up, Norm! You just shut up!” Benjy cried with a shove that reeled him back on his heels.

Norm got up and stalked off toward the hotdog stand. It’s a good thing there were so many people around or else he might have beaten the shit out of the goddamn little creep, pushing him like that in front of all these people, the goddamn little bastard, forget the fucking hotdogs, he’d go back and drag him into the woods and beat the fucking living shit out of the goddamn little prick and teach him once and for all what the fuck loyalty was all about, the little—

“Norman!” came a familiar voice, a sweet, sweet voice. “Norman Fermoyle! Oh am I glad to see you!” Weeb’s sister, Janice Miller, ran toward him with a cigarette in her hand.

I
t didn’t matter if Omar liked him or not. The important thing was that Omar loved his mother, Benjy thought as he watched a boy and a girl on the blanket in front of him. The girl had short black hair and a deep tan.

She lay on her side, squirming against the boy’s thigh. She drew her fingers down his bony chest and up again to his chin. The boy grabbed her arm then and rolled her onto her back. He lay across her chest and kissed her mouth. Benjy forced his gaze into the hole he had been digging in the sand.

For one so much alone, so accustomed to hours without speaking and days untouched, this intimacy so near was alarming. Now the girl gave a little whoop and tried to wrestle free. The boy laughed and pinned her down.

Closing his eyes, Benjy tensed, waiting for the moment to turn. The boy would hit her. She would scream. She would cry and then she would not be able to stop crying.

All at once he remembered being a small boy perched on his father’s shoulders as he ran out of a thicket where dark vines had snagged his hair.

A troubled voice had trailed them through the night. “Benjy…Benjy…Where is he taking you?” He remembered the whisk of the trees passing, passing between him and his mother’s voice, until all he could hear was the deep groan in his father’s labored breathing below him as he ran. He didn’t know where they had gone that night or why his father had taken him. He only 238 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

remembered waking the next morning in a car behind a gray building. There were open garbage barrels and trash-filled cartons piled high against the wall. He remembered being afraid to move or speak under the weight of his father’s stale damp head on his stomach. He remembered his father snoring, and then how suddenly his stubbly face had loomed over him. He remembered his raw puffy eyes streaked with blood and confusion and then the terrible grinding of his teeth as he peered suspiciously at his son, as if Benjy had lured him there. He remembered being slapped hard and not knowing why. He remembered seeing his father weep and knowing then that it was all right, that it wasn’t anything he had done, or that anyone had done, that sometimes it just had to be that way.

The boy and girl sat up now, facing the beach, with their arms around each other’s waist. It was taking Norm a long time to get hotdogs. It would be even darker than this in the woods, he thought, deep in the woods where Earlie lay. Maybe Klubocks’ dog thought Earlie was alive. Maybe he had ripped Earlie’s shirt and pants in an effort to drag Earlie back to Benjy. He sat up and hugged his legs. Maybe one of these days he’d open the door to find Earlie’s body on the back steps, staring up at him. And what would he do then? What would Omar do?

“M
y roommate’s down there.” Janice Miller pointed toward the bathhouse on the far corner of the beach. The woods behind the bathhouse were where everyone went to make out or drink. “She met some guy and she hasn’t been back since,” Janice said, then took a long, deep drag on her cigarette.

Norm cleared his throat, wishing he could do the same with his brain.

Here he sat on the beach finally alone with Weeb’s beautiful sister and there was nothing on this earth he could think of to say to her. Damn it…He smiled, praying it wasn’t the fool’s grin it felt like.

“So what am I supposed to do all night while she makes out down there?

Some friend!” she huffed. “Some beach party!”

“Where’s the beach party?” he asked, looking over the various couples, some playing catch, some just talking, some huddled nose to nose, their fingers sifting sand.

“All around you, stupid.” She laughed. “See! That’s Sandy and Fitzie and that’s Billy…Hey, I’m sorry,” she said, realizing that he didn’t know any of them. “They’re all from school. My roommate was supposed to bring a date for me, but her date and mine never showed up, so off she goes with the first thing in…”

“Your date?” His chest ached. “The guy you’re engaged to? The guy from college?”

“Lavaliered, we’re lavaliered! No, not him. He’s working. He couldn’t come up all this way just for a night.” She stubbed out her cigarette, screwing it into the sand.

“Oh!” Norm said, with the faintest hope. She turned over on her stomach, facing him on the blanket. Her white bathing suit glowed in the night. Per-SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 239

spiration glistened between her breasts. She hunched up on her elbows and sighed, looking down at the water. He lifted his head, straining to see more.

Nipple, he wanted to see nipple. She flipped over on her side, one arm under her head. He lay on his side now and refocused.

“Well,” she sighed. “This is a lost cause. If I had a ride, I’d leave now.”

There, there it was, one fat brown nippled breast slung heavily over the other. Oh God!

“Are you here alone?” she asked.

“What’s that?”

“Are you here alone?”

“In a way,” he said quickly.

“Not with my brother, I hope.” She grimaced.

“No…”

“With a date?”

“Not tonight,” he said lamely.

“Would you mind terribly giving me a ride home, Norman? I have a brutal headache.” She pressed her fingertips against both temples.

“Sure.” He shrugged, trying to appear calm. What would he do with Benjy? He could leave him here and come back for him later. No, his mother would kill him. Benjy could ride in the back seat and he’d drop him off at home first. No, too obvious. He’d think of something. Janice was kneeling, putting on her white beach jacket. She wrapped her yellow towel around her waist, and when she stood up, one long dark leg showed through the slit.

“Hey Jan! Jan!” a girl called out. “Where you going?” A stocky girl in a red bathing suit ran up to them, waving her arms. She was out of breath.

“I have a headache,” Janice said coldly.

“Hey! Who is this?” the friend drawled, her grin verifying what he caught glimpses of in every mirror or storefront he passed. Tanned and muscular from his long days laboring in the sun, he now had the body of a man.

“Norman Fermoyle, a friend of—” Janice hesitated, then added, “Mine.”

The friend giggled and rolled her eyes. “Some headache, Jan. I should be in such pain!” she laughed, gesturing limply toward a skinny boy in plaid shorts who was hurrying toward her. “Jan and Norman, this is Peter Slavin from someplace called Dartmouth. Peter—Janice Miller, my roommate with the terrible headache, and this is Norman, her very obvious symptom. And I’m Kit Neal,” she laughed, eagerly grabbing his hand.

“Careful,” he warned. “It might be catching!”

“You mean contagious,” Janice said through a taut smile.

“God, I hope so!” Kit howled.

“Actually I’m the remedy nine out of ten doctors recommend.” He leaned close to Kit with a sly wink. Smooth as smooth could be, this was the big time, and he was on a roll.

“Oh God!” Janice groaned, slapping his arm.

“A blatant case of muddled metaphors,” Slavin said, thumping a fresh pack of Marlboros on his fist.

240 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

He glanced at Slavin. Meta-what? Whores? Spores? Well, the girls certainly didn’t look offended, though it seemed they should be. Janice and Kit whispered a moment, then said they were going down to the bathhouse to dress. Kit told Norm to wait and then they could all go into the hotel together. Before he could say anything, Janice grabbed his arm and pressed it against her chest. “Norman doesn’t have his ID,” she said quickly.

“That’s all right,” Slavin said, lighting his cigarette and Norm’s with an engraved lighter that he stabbed in the air now to punctuate his plan. “He waits out here. We get a pitcher. He comes in, orders ginger ale, chugs it, and voilà! the man’s got himself a glass!”

N
orm hurried back to the car to put on his pants and sneakers and then he ran down to the beach.

“Where’s my hotdog?” Benjy demanded as Norm snatched his shirt from the blanket.

“Look, Benjy, just shut up and listen,” he panted. “I gotta do something that’s very important. And you wouldn’t understand, so I’m not going to go into details here.” Damn, he’d misbuttoned the shirt, so he started over.

“I won’t be gone that long. I’ll be right back as soon as I figure this out.

Don’t talk—just listen. Here, here’s some money. Go get the hotdog. But don’t leave here! Wait for me! You hear me? Just wait!”

“Where you going?” Benjy tried to grab his arm, but Norm scrambled up the incline.

“Hotel!” he called back over his shoulder.

“What for?” Benjy shouted.

R
obert Haddad hadn’t left the couch all night. Thankfully, the party seemed to be fizzling. Corinne, one of Astrid’s girlfriends from the wire plant, sank down heavily beside him and yawned into her cigarette smoke. She was a skinny woman, heavily made up, with an intricately coiled hairdo. Like the rest of them in their slutty clothes, she drank, smoked, talked too much, and sat too close. “So how’s business?” she gulped at the end of her yawn, and poured more beer into her glass.

Haddad ignored her. He watched Astrid, who stood by the hutch, talking to her manager from the wire plant. “That’s terrible!” she cried, with a poke in his ribs. He was a tall balding man whose wife was divorcing him. He put his hand on the wall over Astrid’s head and leaned toward her. Haddad was sure he was drunk.

Haddad tugged his shirt cuffs down over the tufts of hair on his wrists.

Astrid admired tall, slim, blond men, as well she might, being so fair, so beautiful herself. Before her he had never known happiness. Just the sight of her roused this ache, this pride that all that shimmering scented softness was his. His breath quickened with the dizzying rush of giddiness and fear that was more than sexual. It was mystical, a religious experience. She was the core of his being, the purity and goodness that once had been only words. Because of her he was becoming a moral man. Of course there had SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 241

been a few missteps lately, aberrations so alien, so reproachful they only reinforced his yearning for decency in all things.

Someone turned off a light and lit the candle on the windowsill. Didn’t they see how close to the curtains the flame was burning? Just a gust of wind would turn this place into an inferno. Were insurance men the only ones alert to such dangers? He started to get up, then changed his mind.

She would berate him in front of her friends if he blew it out and turned the light back on. She would say he was trying to spoil everyone’s fun, and she would be right. He was tired. They were getting louder and drunker, and he wanted them to leave. A woman shrieked, then stumbled past him toward the bathroom. Her boyfriend banged on the door. “I gotta pee pee, too,” he whined. Couples danced in the flickering darkness. He leaned forward. Astrid and her manager were dancing. Their swaying shadow loomed across the ceiling.

He tried to swallow. Business was lousy and the main office continued to hound him, and tonight, dressing for the party, she had again mentioned getting a job as a hostess in a cocktail lounge. It wasn’t the money, she had explained when he said he’d sell more policies. No, it was the glamour she missed, having a reason to dress up fancy like this every night. She needed something that forced her to be cheerful and funny. She wanted to hear people laugh. “I miss that, Bobby,” she had said, looking at his reflection in the mirror as she smoothed her yellow brocade dress over her hips. “I need that. I’m a very outgoing person.”

This morning he’d gotten a letter from Sam Fermoyle, who wanted his policy sent to him at Applegate Hospital. There was no policy. He’d never sent that premium or any others in the last six months into the main office.

Thinking that Fermoyle had been too plowed to even remember signing the contracts, he’d given the money to Astrid. She had probably bought that dress with it, the very dress that was glued against the manager’s body.

Corinne shook his arm. She wanted to dance, too, she said, pulling him to his feet. She told him to kiss her and they’d make Astrid jealous, but he just shuffled clumsily to the music. She was kissing his neck. She wanted to give him a hickey. Astrid would love that, she said.

“I can’t stay late, I told Astrid,” she murmured. “I gotta meet this guy first thing in the morning. He’s something. Hey, you’re in business, you know him? Omar Duvall? He’s an antroopeneer. Hey…hey…what’s the matter?”