What Comes After

by Steve Watkins

  Finally I realized that if I wanted to get us home before morning, I had no choice but to ask for help. I chose two guys who seemed to be stumbling less than most — a couple of football players in Confederate caps and practice jerseys.

  “Hey, baby,” the first one said when I walked up, before I could calm my nerves enough to say anything myself. “I’m Dennis. Like Dennis the Menace.”

  The second one laughed, as if that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Yeah,” he said. “And I’m horny.”

  Now it was Dennis’s turn to laugh. “Nah,” he said. “His real name’s Donny.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said. I pointed to Tiny and Book. “My cousin and his friend are passed out. Could you guys help me lift them into the back of the truck?”

  Dennis and Donny looked down. “Is that Book Allen?” Dennis asked. “And Tiny Tankersley?”

  “Hell, yeah, it is,” said Donny. “Couple of lightweights.” He nudged Tiny’s head with his boot.

  “So can you help?” I asked.

  Dennis shrugged. “Yeah, sure.” They dragged Tiny through the dirt to the back of the truck while I lowered the tailgate. It took all three of us to lift him in. Then we went back for Book and lifted him in, too.

  “OK, then,” Donny said when we finished, and he stumbled off.

  The other one, Dennis the Menace, hesitated. He wasn’t big like Book and Tiny, but he was bigger than me, and drunk. It made me nervous to suddenly be alone with him, but he still caught me off guard when he lurched forward and mashed his face into mine. His hands locked around my waist, and I felt his swollen tongue against my lips, and the raw scrape of his stubble against my chin.

  I tried to pull away but couldn’t, so out of instinct or desperation or fear — or all three — I grabbed both his ears and twisted.

  “Ow,” he whined, breaking his hold to rub them. “That hurt.”

  I held his face away from mine, my palms pressed hard against his cheeks so his lips pooched out. My heart was pounding, and I struggled to keep my voice from quavering. “Hey,” I said. “Hey, Dennis.” I was scrambling to come up with something to distract him.

  He pried my hands off his face and said, “What?” His breath was so bad it made me tear up. He must have eaten manure.

  “Dennis,” I repeated. “Hey, Dennis, can you find me a beer? Can you go over there and get me a beer? I’ll come over there in a second.”

  He grabbed my arms, and my panic rose higher. “Come now, baby,” he said.

  “I will,” I said, my heart jackhammering. “I have to pee first, but I’ll be right there. Give me a second. We need beers. You let me go pee.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Beers.” And he let go. “Beers,” he repeated. He shuffled off toward the keg, and when he did, I jumped into the back of Tiny’s truck and fumbled through his pockets until I found the key. It took me three tries to fit the key into the ignition, my hands were shaking so bad. But once I did, I shoved the truck in gear and hit the gas, tearing up a chunk of field as I spun out of there.

  I never thought I’d be happy to find myself back at Aunt Sue’s, but tonight I was. The yard light shone a dull yellow, the house itself was dark, and Aunt Sue’s truck was the only vehicle in the driveway. Whoever had come over earlier — the company Book wailed about to Tiny — was long gone.

  I left the boys passed out in the open truck bed for what was left of the night, at the mercy of the mosquitoes and the pinecone-throwing squirrels. Gnarly came over and nuzzled my hand but didn’t bark, because Aunt Sue was home.

  I went inside and used the bathroom and got a glass of water, wishing I could take a shower but afraid that would wake Aunt Sue. I was drenched in sweat from lifting Book and Tiny, and from my encounter with Drunk Dennis.

  Just then the phone rang, making me jump. Nobody called that late at Aunt Sue’s. I snatched it up before it could ring a second time. “Hello?” I whispered.

  It was Beatrice.

  “Hey, Iris,” she said. “Hey. Are you awake?”

  She sounded drunk.

  A bedroom door opened in the back of the house. Footsteps padded down the hall. Aunt Sue stepped out of the shadows. She had on her Harley T-shirt and gray sweatpants.

  “I have to go, B.,” I said nervously. “It’s too late for you to be calling. You woke up my aunt.”

  Aunt Sue glared at me with bloodshot eyes.

  “Just tell her you’ll get off in a minute,” Beatrice said. “You have a right to talk on the phone.”

  “I can’t, B.,” I said. “I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Aunt Sue grabbed my wrist and twisted until it burned. She said, “No, hell, you won’t.” Then she slammed the phone down so hard that something cracked.

  I sat on my bed in the dark for a long time after that, not able to sleep, not wanting to lie down — afraid that if I did, I’d never get back up. My stomach hurt, and I realized I’d hardly eaten in days, so once I felt certain Aunt Sue must be asleep again, I slipped downstairs and rummaged through the cupboards until I found the bread and some peanut butter and honey. I brought the sandwich back up to my room, but chewing it seemed impossible. My mouth was dry, and I could barely swallow. Each bite I did manage to get down felt like a stone dropping inside me. I quit halfway through and pulled out my notebook.

  Dear Dad,

  Today sucked. Tonight sucked worse.

  I crossed that out and started again.

  Dear Dad,

  It’s quiet here tonight. Gnarly’s not barking, because Aunt Sue is home and he never barks when she’s home. Everybody is asleep except me. I went to a field party. You don’t want to know about that. I had a conversation with Aunt Sue about vegetarianism, which was very interesting. I let Gnarly loose and he killed some chickens, so that didn’t turn out so great. I realize this is coming out garbled, and I’m sorry. I’m tired and I should probably just go to bed. But I’m kind of afraid of what might happen once I close my eyes.

  P.S. I’m ready to come home.

  Aunt Sue banged on my door first thing the next morning. I felt as if I’d just fallen asleep.

  She shoved the stainless-steel bucket in my hands and said, “Goats.” Then she went back downstairs to her bedroom.

  Tiny and Book still lay in the back of the truck, though Aunt Sue must have brought out a blanket, because they had one tangled around their legs, roping them together. Book lay on his side behind Tiny, who lay on his side, too. Book snored on the back of Tiny’s neck. They were practically spooning.

  Gnarly jumped on me as soon as I got to the bottom step and knocked me down, but I didn’t care. I was hungry for any kind of affection, even the rough kind. I let him lick my face until he tired of it, then I scratched his belly and his ears for a while, and then we went in together to milk the goats.

  The chickens flapped their wings and hopped up on the fence in the barn to stay clear of Gnarly. I never let him in there, but today I didn’t care. I wanted to be around whoever liked me, and Gnarly liked me. I let the pregnant goats in first so I could hug them and mother them. I poured grain in a couple of buckets so they could eat and wouldn’t get in the way, and I sang a Joni Mitchell song: “Both Sides Now.” Dad told me Mom used to sing Joni Mitchell songs to me when I was a baby, and I had a vague memory of her doing that when I was a little kid, too, before she left. I hated that I didn’t remember much more than that.

  Patsy ignored me when I held out a handful of grain to her. She shifted her gaze over to Reba and Jo Dee, and I caught on right away. “Sorry,” I said. “I know I should have fed you first, but they’re pregnant. And they’re nicer to me than you are, to be honest about it. I just needed somebody to be nice to me this morning.”

  I reached closer to Patsy with the feed. “Want this? You still get to be first on the milking stand.” She licked my hand clean, acting as if she were doing me a favor, and took her time stepping onto the stand. She gave me a long look, just to make sure I’d gotten her
point, before lowering her head into the feed trough.

  I aimed the first squirt from each of the goats at Gnarly, and he did somersaults trying to lick the milk off his face. One by one, once I was done with the goats, I scratched them under their chins, and hugged them, and let them out in their field.

  Aunt Sue had already laid out the strainer and thermometer and timer in the kitchen. I pulled out the big pots and set them on the stove to pasteurize the new milk and start the cheese process all over again. After that, I went back out to the barn to collect the eggs, feed the chickens, and look for anything else to do to keep me distracted. When I finally emerged from the barn, Book and Tiny were staggering toward the house. Their faces had been chewed raw by mosquitoes. The next time I saw them, their skin was entirely pink, as though they’d poured a whole bottle of calamine lotion on their heads.

  I spent the day in the barn cleaning everything I could find to clean that I hadn’t gotten to before. The goats all crowded around to watch me, or more likely to see if I’d brought them anything to eat. Once it was clear that I hadn’t, they wandered back off into the field. They needed their hooves trimmed, but I figured it would be a battle with Tammy, and maybe all of them, so I’d wait awhile before taking that on. I’d helped Dad trim the hooves of plenty of horses and cows over the years, but they were usually docile, especially compared to goats. Plus Dad was Dad — he could handle any animal, no matter how frightened or hostile. He always knew how to talk to them, how to calm them, how to get them to cooperate. I was just the helper. The sidekick. The daughter who everybody thought was so cute to be tagging along with her dad on his vet rounds. I wished I was still that girl.

  Aunt Sue went into town that afternoon — it was Sunday — and she was in a good mood when she came home.

  She’d bought a new flat-screen TV. I watched her as she carried it in from the truck.

  “They had one of those employee discount sales at the Walmart,” she said, though I hadn’t asked.

  She and Book spent the rest of the afternoon hooking it up, while I stayed outside with the goats and Gnarly.

  That evening Aunt Sue cooked greens. Someone had given them to her at the farmers’ market the day before. She also heated leftover chicken potpie for herself and Book. It was the second night in a row we didn’t have sandwiches, but she hadn’t forgotten about my being a vegetarian, because after I ate all my greens, she said, “Ha! I cooked them with fatback. That’s what you get for not eating what you’re served. And for leaving your cousin out there in the truck like you did last night to get chewed up by mosquitoes.”

  I pushed myself away from the table and walked quickly to the bathroom, where I brushed my teeth for ten minutes before I felt like I got the taste out.

  Aunt Sue kept at it the next couple of nights, too. She made canned vegetable soup to go with our sandwiches. She said it was vegetarian, but I didn’t believe her. I tasted it, then put down my spoon.

  Aunt Sue cackled.

  “Oh, wait. I didn’t mention there was chicken broth in there?”

  Then she served some nasty gray stuff. “That’s called wheat gluten,” she said. “It’s for vegetarians. It’s like a meat substitute. Honest. I got it at the health store. They got one in town.”

  Book grinned, and I knew something was up.

  I poked at it with my fork and smelled it. I shoved my plate away and stood up from the table. It was fried liver.

  So I stopped sitting down to dinner with Aunt Sue and Book altogether after that and pretty much lived on peanut-butter sandwiches, which I fixed when Aunt Sue wasn’t around, and on whatever canned vegetables and fruit they served at school.

  Meanwhile Aunt Sue kept buying stuff. She bought a new CD player, and a microwave oven, and had a satellite dish installed for the big-screen TV.

  “How’d we get all this?” Book asked as they pored over the operation manual.

  Aunt Sue shrugged. “Raise at work.”

  I fumed about the tricks Aunt Sue had played on me with the food, and I fumed about the purchases. I knew she had to be using money from Dad’s estate — money meant for me. But I kept quiet and kept my head down and just tried to get through each day. I did my homework and went quietly to school. I listened to Shirelle and the others discuss Huckleberry Finn, and I kept my mouth shut no matter how much I wanted to join in. I did my chores. I went for long walks in the woods with Gnarly. I petted him until even Gnarly, who needed love as badly as any dog I’d ever known, decided he’d had enough. I wrestled with the goats until half my body felt bruised from their butting and their horns. I caught myself talking to them — Patsy most of all. I wrote letters to Dad. I told him about the Devil’s Stomping Ground, Reba’s growing pregnancy, how well I’d cleaned up the barn — anything positive I could think of.

  And I called Beatrice. Late one night after Aunt Sue left for work. I figured it would be a month before Aunt Sue got the phone bill, and I would deal with the fallout then.

  “Hey,” Beatrice said as if she’d been expecting the call. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Same old North Carolina. What about you?”

  “Same old Maine.”

  “Sounds better than here,” I said, keeping my voice low so Book wouldn’t hear — though I doubted he’d wake up. It was nearly eleven. “Look, I’m sorry about the other night, when I had to hang up on you.”

  “Yeah,” Beatrice said. “Whatever. I was kind of drunk.”

  “I wanted to talk,” I said. “It’s just that my aunt was right there, and everything’s been pretty terrible here.”

  “Terrible how?”

  “Well, she hit me, for one thing. She slapped me.”

  “Damn,” Beatrice said, though she didn’t sound as angry as I thought she should. “What did you do?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked sharply. “What did I do when she slapped me?”

  “No, I mean, why’d she slap you in the first place?”

  I started to explain about Gnarly barking, and about the chickens he killed, but Beatrice cut me off. “You shouldn’t have let out their dog.”

  “What?” I said. “Are you kidding me? She slapped me, B. I can’t believe you said that.”

  She sighed into the phone. “I’m not saying she should have slapped you. But she probably did have a right to be mad.”

  “You’re taking her side?” I said, incredulous.

  “Oh, just forget it,” Beatrice snapped. “Can we talk about something else besides your aunt and your farm and your goats? Can we talk about what’s going on up here maybe? You’re so caught up in your own stuff, Iris. Why don’t you ever ask about anything that’s going on with me? You could ask me about my parents, who aren’t even talking at all now, which is worse than when they were fighting all the time. You could ask me about Collie. You could ask me about my stuff.”

  I sat down on the kitchen floor with the phone cord looped around my arm.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, flattened by all she’d just said. “I didn’t know about your mom and dad. I thought maybe things had gotten better with me gone.”

  “Well, they haven’t.”

  I sighed, already letting go of the idea — faint in the first place — that Beatrice could help me with my problems at Aunt Sue’s. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Beatrice said. “Won’t your aunt kick you off the phone again?”

  “Not tonight,” I said. “She just left for work.”

  For the next hour, I let Beatrice talk — about her parents, about Collie, about whatever she wanted. She’d always done most of the talking, anyway, for as long as we’d been friends. Ironically, it even made me feel better to just be listening to her, to be back in my old familiar role — at least for a little while.

  It was after midnight when we finally hung up and I crawled into bed. I was exhausted, my head crusty from lack of sleep — not just tonight, but since I’d been in North Carolina — but I was still wid
e awake. Beatrice’s parents weren’t talking anymore. I couldn’t stop thinking about that and what it meant. The chances of me going back to Maine were more remote than ever, and I felt myself sinking so low that I was in danger of being swallowed by my bed. I finally turned on the light and picked up Huckleberry Finn. I flipped through to a favorite passage I’d marked. Huck and Jim are drifting down the Mississippi River, just the two of them, hiding from the civilized world, which seems less and less civilized every time they go on shore. Off the river there’s only sadness and trouble: bloody feuds and dead children, grieving parents and lynch mobs, slave traders and murderers, the bloody corpse of Huck’s dad, Pap.

  But when they’re on the river, it’s different.

  Soon as it was night out we shoved; when we got her out to about the middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and talked about all kinds of things. . . . Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark — which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two — on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.

  It reminded me of Dad, and Maine, and the life we had when I was little — going on vet rounds, visiting farms, playing with animals, hiking through the Maine woods, climbing Mount Katahdin, watching movies about heroic dogs and horses with great heart. It reminded me of Beatrice, too — the Beatrice from when I was younger: playing softball, riding her horse, laughing about boys, casting off in our sea kayaks to explore hidden coves along the coast.