Swimming Sweet Arrow (11 page)

DEL TOLD
me he huffed the
PAM
because he didn’t want to drink and we didn’t have any weed.

“I didn’t know you’d be home so soon, Vangie. I heard about it, and I wanted to try it.”

“Yeah, well I heard about it, too,” I said. “But I hear a lot of things I’d never do.”

“It was a onetime thing. I didn’t want to drink. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“Don’t you think it’s a pretty funny way not to hurt me? Sniffing
PAM?”

“I guess. I don’t know.”

That was how he worked it out in his mind: he bruised and bit me when he was drunk, so if he didn’t get drunk again, he knew he couldn’t do the same thing. Smoking dope didn’t fall into the same category, and neither did huffing.

I had to hand it to him. That was the idea he stuck to: he was not going to hurt me again as a result of alcohol. But because he could not or would not stop getting drunk, by the next weekend he had to add a new element to his plan: if he did decide to drink, he had to stay away from me completely. So he didn’t come home Friday after work, and I didn’t get a call from him. Nothing. He just disappeared. All that night I kept waiting to hear him come up the stairs and say, “Vangie,” but he didn’t. Part of me was scared he would never come back, and part of me was mad that he would.

On Saturday when I heard him come in, I was lying in our bed, listening to a cardinal call, over and over. I was lying on my side in the bed, facing the doorway, and I didn’t move when Del came to the doorway of the room. I let him look at me a long time, and I let myself look at him a long time.

He said, “You look surprised to see me.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Don’t ever think I’m not coming back, Vangie.”

“No?”

“No. Don’t ever think that.”

“I can’t promise what I’ll think,” I said.

“Well, don’t think I’m not coming back.”

“All I think is I don’t know you anymore,” I said. “That’s all.” I turned away from him then.

He could still see my back, though, and he could read that just like he could read any other part of me, so in a little while he said, “You know me, Vangie. No one knows me better than you.”

I did not say anything but went on listening to the cardinal’s call.

“Can I come lay with you?”

When I didn’t answer, he said, “Vangie, please. Can I come lay down with you?”

“I don’t care,” I told him. “It’s your bed, too.”

When he got into bed with me, I did not turn to kiss him and I did not move my hand over his hand when he put his arm over my belly. I lay there, and I let him lie at my back. That was all. In the end, though, it was the same as taking him back into my heart. A short trip through muscle and bone.

15

W
HEN
Del started staying away one or two nights a week, I had lots of time alone. Because I did not want to think about Del, I made myself think about other things and other people. Sometimes I thought of my mom, who had sent me a picture of her and her ex-Mormon. Even though my mom was smiling in the picture and wearing a turquoise ring on almost every finger, the picture worried me. I thought the ex-Mormon looked skinny and mean, and it made me sad to think of my mom being with him. It didn’t make me feel much better to think of June, but those nights when Del was gone, I mostly
ended up thinking of her out there in that house with Luke and Ray.

I thought I understood some of June’s motivation. She wanted to be loved, and she wanted to be the center of attention. But I wondered what it meant to her to sleep with two brothers. What did it serve in her? Maybe she wanted cock from one brother who was full and thick in her arms and one who was thin enough to have the face of a hawk. Or maybe she really could talk to Luke. Maybe a hundred things. I knew enough about June to understand that the key for her was
brothers,
but there had to be something she needed from each and something she got from each. As for Luke—well, I knew from Del how two brothers could grow up together and keep hate in a trundle bed between them, pulling it out when it was needed, when there was no one else to hate.

It all made me think of the stories I heard about Kevin Keel. Everyone knew the who-what-where-when of Kevin Keel, but they never knew the why. Why did he become what he was? Nobody could tell me that story, just like they couldn’t tell me why he stayed in a place where everyone knew him as a hell-raiser, a user, and a killer. Maybe he did not know how to be anything else, and it served his fear to stay, or maybe he figured that whatever his story was, it was his, and he might as well stay no matter what people thought of him.

All I knew for certain was that none of us did anything for long unless we wanted to. June and Luke wanted the lies
and danger and hurtfulness, at least in part. They might not have known they wanted those things, but something pulled them to that water and they did not draw back.

I pictured the two of them in my mind like they were in a movie, and I ran the movie over and over in my head those nights I was alone. I pictured June waiting until Ray’s car pulled away in the morning, and then crossing the hall soundlessly to stand beside Luke’s bed. He was the first one to speak.

Why so quiet? He’s long gone.

Aren’t you afraid, ever?

Of him? No, I’m not afraid of him.

Are you afraid of me? That I’ll get tired of it?

Never. You’re here because you want to be.

They’d kiss, and sometimes she’d steal just that much and hurry on in to work. Other times she’d have to move the sheets back from Luke’s body so she could see. His narrow hips and cock would be so pretty they’d make something ache inside her, and she’d have to bend to kiss his hipbones and the small paths of veins running down to his cock. Those mornings she would not go to work at all, but it didn’t matter—they were always looking for women to pay minimum wage to, and what was a job anyway, except a way to keep food on the table. What she did with Luke was the only living.

Did he give it to you last night?

You know he did. You heard it.

Then what do you want from me?

This. And this. Everything.

I knew they were my words and my fucking—because I couldn’t know what it was like between them. But I wanted to picture them so I could understand, so I could feel close. So I could have something to think about other than my own life in that house with Del. If what passed between June and Luke all happened a different way, different from the one I imagined, then it did, and my picturing did no good. Did no good.

16

O
NE
Friday at the end of June, Del disappeared again, but he did not come home at the end of the weekend, he did not come home on Monday, and he did not come home on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. On the seventh day running, I couldn’t stand it anymore, so about ten o’clock at night, I took one of my tip dimes and called Del’s job from the pay phone at Dreisbach’s. When I talked to the supervisor, I found out that he’d made it in to Traut’s to work all of his shifts that week. That meant that the only place he wasn’t making it was home to me.

When I found that out, something inside me just broke.

I usually liked the late part of my shift because I had a little time to myself. I could pee, play a song or two on the jukebox, think my own thoughts. Some nights I’d bring a cup of coffee to a back booth so I could sit down and fold napkins. After working on my feet all day, it was sweet just to sit down for a while. But that night I did none of those things. I did not want to sit at a back booth folding napkins, and I did not want to think my own thoughts.

When I saw Kevin Keel at one of my tables, I knew he would help me pass the time. I thought that if I could just hear a friendly voice in that dining room, I’d be all right. So I took his order for a rib eye steak and I got him a Yuengling from the bar and I talked about anything and nothing, just to fill up the air. I told him how ungodly hot it was getting in the back room where we had to do our dishes, now that the weather was turning. I told him how I spilled water that night when I was serving my old high school principal and his wife. I told him how you could always tell it was Friday night, because the farmers came in wearing black dress shoes with their overalls and white socks. Kevin was kind and listened to me fill up the air with all of that.

He was finishing his dessert when I went up to his table with his green guest check. I believe he thought I was going to sit down and tell him some more about my vision of the world and the dinner crowd, but I didn’t.

“I’m going to play you a song on the jukebox,” I said instead. “Is that all right with you?”

“Sure it’s all right. Are you going to sit with me and listen?”

“No, I’m going to do dishes. You listen and tell me if you like the song or not.”

I took a quarter from my tip bowl, went to the jukebox, and punched in the numbers for “Would You Lay with Me (In a Field of Stone)” by Tanya Tucker. I didn’t think twice about it. I did not know I was going to do it, yet something in me must have known, because I did the thing without thinking.

In the back room I did exactly one load of cups and glasses: I put the plastic tray in the dishwasher, let it cycle through, pulled cups and glasses out, put them lip down on the drying table. I felt bad then for some reason, panicky and sick that Kevin Keel was sitting out there listening to a song I played for him, but I thought,
You started it, Vangie, you finish it.

Kevin was smoking a cigarette when I came up to his table. He had both arms up on the table, and I looked at the skin of his forearms and then through the smoke to his face.

“So that’s what you played for me,” he said.

“That’s what I played.”

“What’s it mean?”

I said, “What do you think it means?”

“Says you want to lay down with me.”

I looked at the little hollow place right at the base of his throat, the place where the skin curved in over the hollow. I thought how I would be able to touch Kevin where the skin pulled over his collarbone, and how I would put my mouth on the hard bone. I liked the words
lay down
and I liked hearing a man say them.

“Well then, that’s what I mean.”

“I thought you had an old man.”

“I did. I do,” I said, because I didn’t know which one was true of Del anymore. “Does it bother you?”

“Don’t bother me, but it ought to bother him.”

Kevin sat a while longer, taking me in, then he said, “All right. How late are you working?”

I didn’t think it would happen that night, but then I thought, why not? I didn’t know what difference it made anymore, and I didn’t want to be alone in that house again.

When I told him midnight, he said, “All right. I’ll be back.”

I told him I’d be ready. Because of course all the while there were currents flowing in other people, there was one flowing in me, too.

AFTER I
finished shift, I washed my face and neck and as much of my chest and arms as I could get to with the soap in the globe dispenser in the ladies. After, I used the rough brown paper towels to dry. The grease from the kitchen clung to my hair and made it heavy and shiny, but I couldn’t do anything about it, or my smell—cigarette smoke, french fries, sweat. I thought I was going to be a pretty smelly date, and I thought of telling Kevin I’d changed my mind, but then I remembered that I did not want to be alone, and I remembered the way Kevin looked at me after I played the song. I decided he wouldn’t care if I reeked of Dreisbach’s.

He was waiting in the side entry hall when I came out of the bathroom, and he smiled at me. I thought how I could
see June’s face someplace in his, and I tried not to feel so scared about what I was doing.

“Are you ready to go out now?”

“I’m ready,” I said.

I wondered if anyone was there watching as we walked out the side door of Dreisbach’s, but it seemed there was no one anywhere, just the stink of the trash cans and the whir of the kitchen fan.

“Been wanting to ask you out a long time, to tell you the truth,” Kevin said, taking my hand.

“Why didn’t you?”

“It seemed like you were happy.”

I kept my hand loose in his. His hand felt funny to me, the skin and bones so different from Del’s, but I was glad to be holding hands. I couldn’t remember the last time Del and I had done that. Fuck, yes, but hold hands? That I couldn’t recall.

“I was happy,” I said. “I’m not now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Kevin Keel said.

We did not talk much in his truck. I watched him drive, and again I wondered what I was doing. But I thought again of the house, and how, if I weren’t with Kevin, I’d be alone there, waiting to hear Del’s car pull up or hear him open the door. I thought anything was better than that.

Kevin took me to Sweet Arrow and parked in a place I’d never been before, there on the south side, down a dirt road I didn’t know. He put on a tape and played it just on his battery.

“You like that?”

“I like it,” I said.

“You like the lake?”

“Yeah, I like it.”

He laughed at me. I was nervous, and he knew it. He lit a joint and passed it to me, and I took a heavy toke.

“Now you’ll relax,” Kevin told me. “You’re thinking too hard.”

“I’m always like that.”

We sat in silence then, listening to the tape. I liked the music okay —Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty.”

“You believe that? ‘You gotta do what you can to keep your love alive”?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought about it.”

I was trying to think of some way to answer the question when he passed his hand over my breasts. He did not turn to face me, he just stuck out the arm that was between us and passed his hand over the front of my uniform. He found each of my nipples, and he pulled at them through the fabric.

“Don’t think so hard,” he said. “It’s just a song.”