by Trey Holt
“Yeah, her. Lucky and me met with these people last night that i.d.’d her. It was that man that they’d found his name on her…in the paper. You remember.”
“Lucky and I,”she told me.“And I do remember.”
“You think you’ll be out today?”
“Who knows,”she said.“I guess we ought to turn on the radio.”
The station she switched on was WAGG, Franklin’s oldest and now only radio station. There had been another one make a run at it a few years before, but now had faded so far from memory that its call letters were no longer present to me. For the most part, WAGG played the same kind of music that WSM did out of Nashville. The popular country music of the day. Had local and national news, the former every fifteen minutes, the latter on the hour. Since Hank Williams had died, it seemed like every other song was one of his. It was hard for me to hear his voice without imagining Lucky singing along with him, the only time I’d ever heard him sing.
“Good ole WAGG.” I tried to pull cool on the cigarette, look as little like George Preston as possible.
She broke her wrist back and drew on hers the way girls and he did. I watched her eyes as she stared at the dashboard dial for the radio, a homemade job I was sure, one of Bobby’s creations. Probably hot. The brown flecks danced against the green background of her irises as the rain broke the daylight just coming.
“Good old WAGG,”she repeated. She drew in a sigh long and hard, then blew it out with the smoke she had harbored.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
She laughed a little. Showed her teeth between her painted lips again.“Turning the radio on WAGG made me think of the other day…on that show. You’ve heard that show, Trade Time?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard it. Percy thought they were sendin’out signals to get him right around the end of World War II,”I laughed. It was the first time I could remember speaking of him spontaneously, without weighing out whether or not to say it…whether the memory was worth the feeling connected to it.
“Well, what I heard on there the other day…when I was listening…was that someone…I can’t even remember who…was trying to sell a trailer. You know, a small house trailer that you could actually pull behind a car.”
“You mean a pile a’tin on wheels,”I said.
“Some of them are pretty nice. Anyway, that’s not my point.” She crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray.“My point is that the man who was selling it must not have needed the money right away, because he was willing to do what they called‘owner financing.’He said somebody could get it for twenty-five dollars a month.”
“Probably for ten years,”I told her.“Then you’d end up with a three thousand dollar pile a’tin on wheels.” I remembered how Lucky had always bragged that he paid eighteen hundred dollars for the house we lived in; had watched the builders so close he’d driven one set of them off before the place was finished. I also remembered that he was sure no one worth continuing to live lived in a goddam house trailer, or a“mobile home”as I had heard them called.“If he needed the money right away, as you say, then wouldn’t he be not so likely to finance it? Wouldn’t he want all of his money up front?”
My questions brought a silence to her that I couldn’t stand. Tore at my guts like her physical body might leave next, go wherever her soul was visiting.
“Wouldn’t that make sense to you?”
She shrugged. By this point, I was learning rapidly what I perceived as facts no longer made a difference. The crux of the situation had become the way the facts were presented. I reached to kiss her. She pulled her face away, turned her eyes out the driver’s side window, water flowing so heavily down it the view took on a milky blurr..
“Wouldn’t it? I didn’t mean to hurt your feelin’s.”
Her eyes cut through me, holding grief and joy together.“I just thought it sounded good. If a person had something like that, they could go anywhere…live anywhere.”
“That’s true,”I told her. I knocked out another cigarette and tried to act like I’d forgotten I thought it was a stupid idea.
“I know it is,”she said. She nuzzled her head into my shoulder, careful not to mess up her hair.
“Have you got to work today?” I asked her. In the background, WAGG had started going through a list of the closed schools in the area, hers being one of them.
“I guess,”she said.“I knew we wouldn’t go to school though.”
“You’re dressed for work, though. If you thought you wouldn’t go to school, then why’d you already get dressed for work?”
“I can always go in and get more hours at work. We can always use the money and they usually find something for me to do.”
That goddam Mr. Smith, I thought, but didn’t say it.
As had often been the case, silence and simply allowing our bodies to blend into one another took us. Me, in the passenger seat, without a car except the one my father would loan me and then kick my ass for using, and her, with one, because her father had met his death in her uncle’s and no longer had use for the jalopy he drove when he was alive. It arose in me again, that I was certain that Mr. Smith wanted to fuck her…like Van had....
“We’re doin’it twice a day,”I heard him say, that smirk written across his face like a fancy signature.“I think she might be the best piece of ass I’ve ever had. I’ll let you have her back after I get through. No, you know I wouldn’t have fooled with her a bit if I’d thought you had wanted to keep goin’with her. I just thought you went to the dance because she wanted you to go.”
I could feel my body stiffen then soften as the surges of anger flowed through me like lightning across a darkening sky. As it usually was, a part of me simply wanted to melt into her arms, move so deeply and so closely to her that there was no more me and no more her, only us.
She moved her hands through my close-cropped hair and sighed again.“Wouldn’t it be nice to leave everything here behind? I mean, can you even imagine for a minute doing that?”
For a few moments I tried to imagine no more Lucky, no more Jean, no more
Mama. What it’d be like to call them once a week, filling them in on what was happening.
“It just seems like to me that you can leave things that surround you. I mean, I’ve always heard that you can’t really leave your troubles behind, that they follow you. But I’m just not so sure of that. Sometimes…I know I’ve said this before…after what happened with Daddy and Sheila…I just feel like if I could get somewhere else, it might help me forget it. And even if that went with me, I don’t believe that Mama or Bobby would. I guess I worry about what would happen with Suzy…but then I think that maybe if I wasn’t around it might make Mama where she might take care of Suzy and maybe she’d know that she had to go on. I think right now I almost make it where she doesn’t have to.”
I watched as the rain continued to throw itself without reservation at the windshield and then collapse and roll down and away. In the time that it had fallen, it had washed away completely the snow that had found a temporary home over night. Even from the distance we sat from the river, I could tell that it was beginning to rise, swell out of its usual containments. Just over the bank’s first good fall, I could see hints of the water starting to gather itself together. The last time I could remember being here was that weekend. I could recall sitting near the same place with Sharon, talking about how everything had happened that night, unable to even lift my goddam arm, shielded by the lack of knowledge of what had occurred. Time had yet to bear it out.
“Why Van?” I asked out of nowhere. Surprised myself.
Her, too, by her reaction. She jumped almost like I had pinched her.“What?”
I decided fairly quickly that it would be too hard to steer away from what I’d said. I could be stubborn and obstinate and even vengeful as hell, but I wasn’t worth a damn as a liar. I knew that.
“Why’d you fuck Van?” I said. I had given her hell for it for months. I would ride her about it as long as I cou
ld, until she would get mad and quit taking my shit.
Now she watched the rain as it fell softer on the windshield. Her eyes didn’t leave the drops as they flattened and then rolled their way to the drain at the base of the hood, the metal unpainted and rusted at its edges. She withdrew her head from my shoulder and rubbed her face and eyes hard enough to smear her mascara. She took in the breath for another sigh, shorter and more shallow this time. The first few times I’d brought it up, she’d sworn she didn’t, but then admitted it to me later. He’d told me, or told Tully who’d told me, that he’d fucked her almost everywhere in Franklin. At the Willow Plunge, in the dressing room, at the picture show in the balcony when there was nobody else around. In that old, abandoned house, in the car in the driveway of her house, because her mother was so out of it and her daddy so old they’d never notice. In the parking lot of her work after she got off. There had been more than one night I had lain awake in bed, especially when Percy was absent at Central State, thinking of how I might go about doing him in. Poison. Tampering with the brakes on Scoot’s car. Stealing Lucky’s gun one night after he fell asleep and sneaking in the upstairs window and shooting him right between the eyes. But I knew I’d never get away with it…and that I hated myself enough already.
“Why does anybody do anything?” she said.
I didn’t think the response deserved an answer. I didn’t give her one.
“Because he wanted to, I guess. I made him use something…you know, so we—“
“That makes it a hell of a lot better. Didn’t you realize he was my best friend?” I asked. I laid my hands on the dash so they’d steady. My legs had finally warmed enough that they’d stopped shaking.
“I thought he loved me. He said he did.”
I turned my eyes to her. She looked somehow loosened, her head hanging from her neck almost resting on her small breasts. It seemed in this moment that everything had flattened about her. Her hair, her smile, her posture. She slumped like I’d seen Tully do when he got drunk enough to forget he was a badass.
“And you believed him?”
“Yeah,”she sighed.
I laughed, a sound I partly hoped would be like a knife in her belly.“Wrong guy to believe,”I said, making out in my own mind that I was miles above him. Years later, I would realize our sins were just a different brand. Same product.
“He seemed sweet enough in the beginning. No, as a matter of fact, he seemed really sweet.”
“Fuckin’asshole,”I said.“He’s sweet to himself. That’s really all.”
“You know,”she said,“you can say about him what you want. He really does love you.”
“He’s got a hell of a way to show it,”I retorted. The impulse came to tell her that she was no better, like I’d done many times before. Each time, she endured the tongue lashing, the dragging through events past, because she hoped, probably against hope, that I would indulge myself in it so fully that I would have no desire for it ever again. The impulse also passed through me to place the back of my hand across her nose and mouth for defending his stupid, arrogant ass. I’d been close one of the former times we talked about it, had my hand wrapped up in a sweater she’d had on, the other drawn back. And she’d told me to go ahead, do it. That she deserved it. I’d let her go and dropped my other hand, then sworn I’d give her the money to have the buttons I’d torn off fixed. I never did. She told me I did enough for her when I tried.
Once again, it seemed as if we’d run out of words. Her head resting at least partially at the top of her seat and myself, still sitting half naked in the middle of the goddam front-seat bench, we stared out the windshield together. The rain fell in opaque sheets now, covering the windshield with its thick invisibility.
“Didn’t you see he preys on people like you…girls like you?”
“Like who? Girls like who?”
I never knew the right word…or words. Girls who never had. Virgins. I always hated that word, for some reason. Possibly because it would have been what I was called if I hadn’t always lied good enough to cover it up.
I turned to my right, peered out the window in the direction south of the rising daylight, where the river was closest to us. Close to the spot I always imagined. Close to the road. Oh yeah, as a matter of fact, there it is. I think I’ll go in. I wondered if that’s what he’d said, or even thought. Back over my left shoulder, she was drawing some design on the windshield with her fingertip. She took the moisture from its end and put it on my neck, cold and wet.
“Like who?” she said again.
I could feel my body starting to change. Soften, harden. Made me mad all over again.
“Girls that hadn’t ever been fucked,”I blurted out, truly crude.
She didn’t take the hand away from my neck that she’d placed there. She nodded her head up and down, gave a kind of wry smile I saw out of the corner of my eye. I’d always found it impossible to look at her when we talked about something like this.
“Is that what he told you?” she said. Then she laughed. Not a fake laugh, but neither one from the belly. Somewhere from in between, perhaps where irony takes its rise, has its power.
“Yeah,”I said.“That’s what the son of a bitch told me…oh…probably two or three weeks after I came down there to see you and we went out to the park on the motorcycle. He said that he’d…well…I don’t know any better word for it…I’m sorry…that he’d fucked you the night before in your driveway. I remember it plain because he said that your father had come to the window and looked out and then turned off the light and that he had inched Scoot’s car close up behind your daddy’s…I guess, this one…and that you all had…in the front seat. Isn’t that the truth? I mean, I guess if that wasn’t true, maybe he was lyin’about all the other times, too.”
I couldn’t believe of all the times we’d gone over and over this information like directions for a bad trip, we had never discussed the specifics. Perhaps I’d never been able to push the emotions aside long enough to talk about the facts underlying them.
“No,”she said,“he’s telling the truth.”
“About the first time…or the rest?” I asked.
“Probably all of them,”she said.“I mean, I didn’t keep a log or anything. But we…you know.”
“Yeah, I know,”I told her, still a bit confused.
“I don’t know whether to tell you this or not,”she said.“But I guess I will. If somebody doesn’t know the truth about you…I guess…then what good is it for them to know anything about you?” She began once again to draw whatever design she had on the condensation on the inside of the windshield. She traced the same lines she had outlined a few moments before.
I waited, not having much if any idea about the information getting ready to come my way. Whether it would comfort me or kick me in the ass. Give me a reason to get up tomorrow, or stay in bed and pull the fucking over my head. I felt like I’d had enough of the latter.
“I don’t know if I’m followin’ya,”I finally told her.
She didn’t comment on my admission. Only stared through the rain at the same rising water I was, drawing whatever the hell the shape was on the windshield, over and over and over.“Van is a liar,”she said, matter of factly.
As she withdrew her hand from the windshield, I noticed that the shape she’d been tracing resembled a crude heart. I couldn’t say for sure, though.
“Or maybe I lied to him. I really couldn’t tell you. I don’t think I told him he was the first. I think he just wanted to believe it. All I can tell you is that he’s not the first. I wonder if it’s as much a lie if you don’t tell somebody different when they assume something....”
The smile that I tried to hold back soon turned itself to laughter. She looked at me, startled, I think, that I, like the dozen times before, wasn’t mad. At first I tried to keep the laughter from breaking into sound. But then I allowed it to take on a life of its own, making my chest rise and fall, my stomach belch the sounds out my mouth involuntarily.
>
“What?” she said.
I didn’t answer her quickly when I quit laughing. First it went through my head just how damn strange life is. How every situation as it changes is both better and worse than it was previously, time seeming to flush out the opposite of what’s initially apparent.
“What?” she said again.
“I don’t mean this to sound bad,”I told her, letting my eyes drift to her finger-painting on the windshield again, now mostly distorted by new condensation,“but it’s just not very often…never has been very often that I get one up on him. A’course, I wouldn’t ever tell him…or maybe I might if you didn’t care—“
“It’s not something that I want floating around,”she said.“I think most people would think badly of me.”
“I’m not sure they would,”I tried to convince her.
She reached and searched my pocket for another cigarette. This time, her hands were shaking like my legs had been a few minutes before. I reached and felt for my pants in the floor. Almost dry. She knocked the cigarette from my pack and then got me one. She handed me the book of matches and waited for me to light hers, which I did. She looked ten years older than she had few moments before. Her face. Its hardness. Something.
“I know…they would. It’s not something you know much of anything about. I know you don’t think you’ve got it made,”she said, drawing on the cigarette, for the first time reminding me of someone who might be a waitress, a barmaid,“but you don’t have to always worry about the way somebody looks at you. I know you may have problems with Lucky, as you call him, and you think a lot of people in this town might not like him, but everybody still looks at you as his son…the Police Chief’s son…and him as the Police Chief.”
I wanted to tell her to put the this new person away. Run her off back where she came from. The Sharon I knew was young and innocent, full of smiles and strangely correct English. She was soft and open and believing. Not the this narrow-eyed person who had now gotten in the car without my knowledge and spokein a voice like she smoked constantly as a cigarette danced on her lips. Nevertheless, as soon as this look had come and overtaken her countenance, another replaced it: her eyes draped with the weight of sadness pulling at their corners.
