Throw Like A Girl (6 page)

The boat was moving again. Or else the ocean itself was moving and carrying the boat along with it. R.B. was calling her. She raised her head and the shoreline was close enough to tell one light from another.

“Come on over here,” he said. He was in the wheelhouse. “I need you to watch and tell me if you see another boat coming. You can do that, right? Am I asking you to do something hard?” R.B. cut the engine and swung down the ladder and stayed out of sight for a long time.

She had left her old life behind her and this new one was like the ocean. It took you places without your knowing. When they got back to the dock R.B. said, “If you see anybody, don't look at them.” He was wearing a leather jacket she hadn't seen before, and carrying a duffel bag. She wondered if Pat's hair was in it.

They got in the car and drove. R.B. said they weren't going back to the motel, in case somebody saw them. They drove and drove. Jessie felt sleepy. She curled up in the front seat with her head resting on the leather coat.

“R.B.?”

“What, baby.”

“Didn't you like them?”

He wouldn't answer right away. Then he said, “I don't think of it that way. I just think, they're somebody who isn't you or me.”

The car was a boat, the night was the ocean. She would fall asleep in one place and wake up in another. The only thing that stayed the same was R.B., the only one she would know by sight or skin or anything else was him.

J
ack
Pardee signed his enlistment papers in May, right after graduation. The Army recruiter had been working on him for most of a year. His report date to Fort Sill wasn't until mid-September. In June he and Kelly Ann got married in the Methodist church, with the reception at the Laborers' Hall the next town over. They had already been living as man and wife in the upstairs apartment of Jack's parents' house. Their daughter, Tara, had been born that February. In Leota and places like it, people paired off young and got their lives settled quickly.

Kelly Ann hadn't wanted Jack to go to the Army, not when there was a shooting war. But Jack said he was going to put in for transportation and get trained as a mechanic. He'd be safe as houses. He probably wouldn't get any closer to the war than a base in Kuwait, he'd probably sleep in air conditioning and eat at a Pizza Hut. Secretly they both looked forward to his first trip home when he'd be wearing his uniform and have his new shaved haircut. A soldier was someone to be taken seriously.

At first it seemed like a long time until September, like any other summer. Jack did sit-ups and push-ups and ran to get ready for his PFT. He picked up some shifts at American Dowel. The afternoons he was at work Kelly Ann lay out in the back yard on a blanket while the baby napped in her stroller in the shade. The suntan oil made Kelly Ann's wedding and engagement rings slide around on her knuckle. So far, being married didn't feel all that different to her.

Most nights they left the baby with Jack's mother and went driving, usually to somebody's house out in the country where there was a perpetual low-grade party, beer and cards and music. Kelly Ann fell asleep on the couch until Jack was ready to leave. On the way home he drove too fast, like he always had, like everybody did, the fine old tradition of getting liquored up and roaring up and down the county roads. Sometimes there were crashes, and stupid deaths of the sort that everyone vowed wouldn't happen again, until the next time when they did. More often the cars banged around in the ditch, and then the etiquette was to stop your own car and holler down, “Are you kilt yet?” and the answer would come back, “Naw, just messed up.”

When Kelly Ann asked Jack to slow down because didn't they have the baby to think about, he said she had to quit worrying about every blessed thing.

Some weekends they dressed the baby up and took her to see Kelly Ann's parents at their big house on Bayles Lake. Even with a baby to fuss over, the visits didn't go that well. Kelly Ann's father never had anything good to say about Jack and thought she'd made a bad bargain with the marriage, gone down in the world. The Army didn't impress him because he'd been a Marine. The four of them sat around in lawn chairs drinking Cokes in foam holders, waiting for the baby to do something remarkable so they could talk about it. After enough time had passed to count as a polite effort, they headed home. Kelly Ann wished they could just quit being her parents, if they thought she did everything wrong.

Sometimes they drove out past the consolidated high school, sitting like a prison complex in a cleared space among the cornfields. They found it hard to believe they were no longer students and no longer had any purpose there. Because of the baby, Kelly Ann was making up coursework at home; she'd get her diploma in the mail in August. Jack said he'd seen old Jonesy, the English teacher, filling up her car at the Clark station. “I told her I enlisted and she started in with some poem. One of the patriot ones.”

“She is so out of it,” Kelly Ann agreed.

“She said to tell you hi.”

“I thought she was mad at me because I dropped out.”

“You didn't drop all the way out.”

“You know what I mean,” Kelly Ann said. She'd always gotten good grades, teachers liked her. She probably would have been voted Least Likely to Get Knocked Up.

Then, like any other summer, it was over. There was a series of rowdy parties for Jack. His mother exhausted herself with cooking for him, and Jack and Kelly Ann did their best to wear the bed out. On the morning that Jack's father drove him to Saint Louis, so he could catch his bus, there was a lot of crying and carrying on, especially from the mother. It was almost a relief to Kelly Ann to have that part over with, even if her chest felt hollow, her heart like a drum banged over and over, beating out the word “gone.”

Jack could only phone once a week during basic. He always said he was fine, things were going fine, but it was hard to tell because the phone got in the way, and he mostly talked about the crazy guys in the barracks and the stunts they pulled. He said to send more pictures of her and of Tara, all the guys thought Tara was a cutie and that Kelly Ann was hot. “I love you,” Kelly Ann said when it was time to go, and Jack said, “Love you too,” and then he hung up.

Most of her girlfriends were still single and they called Kelly Ann to try and get her to go out. Jack's mother was always happy to take the baby. She said it was a good idea for Kelly Ann not to coop herself up. The town was so small that everybody knew everybody else's business, which meant she couldn't get into any real trouble even if she had a mind to. She didn't, but she didn't like the feeling of being left behind either. Her life had started off in one direction and then switched course, as if she'd traded Jack for a baby, her parents for his, and she hadn't seen any of it coming.

So she went out with her girlfriends on weekends, four or five of them together in one car, driving forty miles down the highway to the state university. They headed for the campus strip, debating which places were hottest and which were the easiest to get into. Once they settled on a bar, they ordered Long Island Iced Teas and flirted with the college boys. They always pretended they were in school too. It was a big game to see how many drinks they could get the boys to buy them, how long they could keep the joke up. Kelly Ann sat with her left hand in her lap so nobody could see her rings. She thought it was all kind of a dumb stunt but she went along with it for the others' sake.

One night a dark-haired boy in a pink polo shirt sat down next to her, singling her out. “My name's Matt,” he bawled. The bar was full of thundering noise.

“I'm Kelly Ann.”

“Yeah? That's pretty.” He bobbed his head and grinned, as if he'd said something winning. One of Kelly Ann's girlfriends raised her eyebrows, meaning,
He's hot
. They thought it was hilarious when guys came on to her. She decided he was good-looking in an unexceptional way, that is, when you surveyed his face there was nothing wrong with any particular part of it. She never trusted the really gorgeous guys who were so totally full of themselves. She always thought that Jack was just good-looking enough, without giving you cause for concern.

“So, Kelly Ann, you having a good time tonight?”

He leaned in a little, as if to hear her better, but mostly so he could look down her shirt. She said sure, she was. She recognized this as a kind of trick, like a salesman asking questions you had to say yes to. Matt said it looked like her friends were having an even better time. They were drinking a round of shots that somebody'd bought for them and collapsing with laughter, laughing at nothing with their loose smeared mouths.

Matt asked if she wanted to do shots too and Kelly Ann said, “No, not really.” She wasn't that into drinking since the baby. There was no chance now to sleep in and enjoy the fuzzy edges of the next day. “That's cool,” Matt said, and then he turned to look out over the room, as if he might be missing something. Kelly Ann studied him. She didn't know one guy back home who would wear a pink shirt.

He turned back to her again, stretching his smile wider. She felt a little sorry for him, since she knew how things would end up, and he wasn't going to get what he wanted. “Are you guys freshmen?”

She said that they were. She wished they hadn't decided to do this stupid pretending thing. It had something to do with looking down on the college kids because they were rich and spoiled and deserved to be treated like the assholes they were. But of course here they were, trying to look and act just like them.

Kelly Ann asked Matt if he was a freshman and he said, “Sophomore. I'm in Finance. But you have to have junior standing to take Finance courses, so right now I'm just doing intros and some gen ed requirements. I've got Triple E, Anthro, and an Afro-Am survey that doesn't suck too bad.”

Kelly Ann nodded. Like she knew what any of that was. She hoped he wasn't going to ask her about her courses but he raised his hand and made a fluttering arc, like a bird flying away. “School,” he said dismissively.

She could have gone on to college if she hadn't had the baby. Maybe not the state university, but somewhere. She didn't think she was any dumber than this Matt guy, who'd probably had everything handed to him all along.

He said, “Yeah, you need a break from it now and then. Some of those profs are such jerks, like their stupid class is supposed to be so important.”

“Then you probably shouldn't bother taking it, if it's not important to you.”

He decided she was being funny. “Right. You should see the Anthro guy, he is classic. Wears his pants practically up to his armpits.”

Kelly Ann didn't say anything. The noise in the room was tremendous. It blotted out hearing and replaced it with white, roaring space. She thought about Jack, about making love to him, the memory so sharp and immediate and unbidden, she wondered if he was thinking about her that very moment, lying on his bunk in the barracks, surrounded by the soldiers' unquiet sleep.

“Hey.” Matt again, working up his smile. “You want to go to a party?”

She shook her head. “I have a boyfriend.”

He made a big show of shading his eyes with his hand, looking around. “So where is he?”

“Oklahoma.”

“That's pretty far away.”

“Uh-huh.” He smelled of whatever cologne he'd put on at the start of the evening, baked in by body heat, and she could tell he was a little drunk, but nothing that was going to cause real trouble.

“Your friends could come too.”

“I don't think so.”

“What if I asked really really nice?”

“I don't even know you,” she said patiently.

“Well I don't know you either, so that makes us even.”

“No.”

“Oh come on.” He stuck his lower lip out in an exaggerated, babyish way, except he really was pissed off because she wasn't going along with things, she could tell, and mad at wasting his time being nice to her. “Why even bother coming out, if you don't want to have any fun?”

“Maybe my idea of fun's different than yours.”

“Yeah, cause yours kind of sucks.”

“Thanks for the opinion,” she said, hoping he'd just go away now, attach himself to one of the sorority girls at the next table. They looked as alike as purebred puppies. But he was just drunk enough to feel his pride deserved a little more mouth directed her way.

“So maybe you should just get yourself to oh-oh-Oklahoma, who is he anyway, this guy, some Okie?”

He was just a boy who knew that life wasn't going to get serious for him for a long time, and who only used his manners when he thought they could do him some good, and she shouldn't let him get to her but he did. She put her left hand on the table, stretching it out so the diamond in her ring flashed. “He's not my boyfriend. We're married. He's in Oklahoma because he's in the Army, doing a man's work. We have a little girl, she's almost seven months old. I don't go to school here, none of us do. The last thing I'd want is to be around the likes of you full-time. I'm from Leota. I bet you never heard of it. I bet there's lots of things you never heard of.”

She waited until he took himself off, then she asked her friend for the keys and sat behind the wheel of the car until they were done for the night.

Jack came home after basic, just in time for Thanksgiving. They all went down to Saint Louis to meet him, Kelly Ann and the father and the mother, who didn't like long trips in the car but didn't want to stay home fretting. They sat in the bus station waiting room until his bus was called, and then they stood up against the windows to catch sight of him, an unfamiliar silhouette in his uniform cap, shouldering through the crowd. He'd lost some weight, you could see it in his face and the loose way his neck moved around inside his shirt collar. But he made a good figure in his Army blues, everything about him signifying solidity and purpose. He kissed the baby and Kelly Ann and his mother and shook hands with his father and said, “Man, I could sleep for a week. That's what the Army does, makes you fall in love with sleep.”

Jack sat in the back seat with Kelly Ann and the baby. Kelly Ann leaned up close to him and he draped his arm around her. It felt like he'd been gone a long long time. The father and the mother asked him questions, how was the food, and had he learned to salute and stand at attention and all the other Army things. Jack said, Oh yeah, he was a regular saluting fool by now. He talked about the sergeant who turned on the barracks lights every morning at 4:30, the explosion of light like the end of the world crashing down on you, how they made you run everywhere, run to chow, run to the head, run to formation, how they were always in your face, screaming at you, you were worthless, scum, lower than a cockroach, and they didn't spare the cuss words. But that was all right. It was meant to break you down and then build you back up again, into a warrior.