A bubble of nervous laughter erupted from Sissy. “Oh, I couldn’t write a story! When I finish a notebook, I tear it up out at the trash barrel and start a new one. I wouldn’t want anyone to read it.”
He felt jerked back to her. “But, how can you? After you’ve written it all down!”
“You save yours? You write stories?”
“Sure. I mean—I haven’t really finished one yet, but I write down ideas.”
“I wouldn’t know how to do that. I don’t know anything about writing stories.”
“You have to read a lot,” he said. “I could lend you a book, or tell you some to read. Did you ever read Tess of the D’Urbervilles? By Thomas Hardy? Oh, it’s a wonderful long book. They have it in the school library.”
“I have to read something for English,” she said. “I could read that.” She put her notebook away. He got up and said he needed to get home. “Is it sad?” she asked. “I’d want it to be sad.”
“Sure, it’s sad,” he said. “Of course it’s just a story. It’s nothing that really happened.” He thought he ought to reassure her, so she wouldn’t overreact.
As he was leaving the house, Sissy’s father came up the steps in long stride, his jeans and boots filthy with dust. He had a toothpick in his mouth. Mr. Basin Low Life, David thought. What did he ever do to her? That’s what he wanted to ask her. He wondered if his sister had told Pete Kelton all the ways Saul had mistreated her. He was sarcastic, she could say. Would that rouse sympathy from Kelton?
He ran the last block home as fast as he could, wanting his chest to feel the sprint. He burst into the house and found his father in the kitchen stirring something at the stove. That might mean Saul was in a good mood.
“Hey Dad!” he shouted. “I’m in a play! I got the best part!”
His father turned and licked the spoon before he spoke. He said, “Now won’t you be good at that?”
14.
He ate dinner—a stew, with tough undercooked chunks of beef and soggy carrots—and excused himself. His father said David had to go around the house and close all the windows before he “took off somewhere;” it was going to rain. David banged each window shut, satisfied at the sharp sounds. The window in the unused bedroom had been left open for a long while, and dust was piled like a dune on the sill. The whole room had a musty smell. He felt like he would explode if he did not get out of the house. As soon as he stepped out, in shorts and a sweatshirt, he saw that the weather was changing fast. The crackly air made the hair on his arms stand up. He felt a wave of moodiness surge through him. He set off at a steady lope out of his neighborhood, across the main street, and off to the east part of town that had sprung up with the oil boom. Houses and trailers seemed to have been tossed on the caliche plain like dice on a table. The ground was so hard, so soil-less, they had only to pave it with a huge sheet of asphalt that ran up against the curbs, gutterless. For dozens and dozens of blocks in any direction, houses sat on a wasteland. There were no trees, only the scruffiest of bushes, sometimes a sad attempt at a yard, usually gone to stickers. Here and there, semis and oilfield equipment were parked on the residential streets. He passed a yard closed in with cyclone fencing; several Dobermans flung themselves at him, clanging against the fence, growling and barking ferociously.
The wind was gusting and the sky was full of dark clouds. The air had a funny electric smell, something besides the dust that was picked up and blasted in his face at intervals. He ran harder. He ran to dare his chest to hold his heart.
Glee was having a slumber party for the pep squad girls. He turned and ran back across town to her house, slowing down the last couple of blocks, until, as he approached, he was walking heavily, his hands on his hips, bending over to gulp air. He stopped under a sycamore across the street, standing where the sidewalk would have been if there had been one. There were lights on in every room of her house, and he could hear the McGuire Sisters singing “Sugartime.” The curtains had not been drawn, and he saw girls moving around in the living room. Two of them were dancing together. A gust of wind came up and blew leaves around his feet; he saw the curtains shudder in the big living room picture window.
Suddenly the front door opened and girls poured onto the walk. He realized they had come out to look at the sky, which was black and dramatic. What had been on the ground—leaves, dust, bits of paper—was now in the air, caught in the odd sporadic gusting, and the air itself had a quality of it, a smell and a feeling, that made him sense danger in the offing, the air you expected in certain scenes of very dramatic movies, just before the heroine’s lover’s plane was downed over the Atlantic. It was a condition of the plains that came in the fall, and even more frequently, more dramatically, in the gusty spring, when it was not so cold as to drive you inside. Sometimes it was like this before a great dust storm, sometimes before a rain.
The girls were dancing around in the yard like witches, waving their arms and twirling. He was startled by huge drops falling on his face and arms, and he saw that that was what had brought them out, the beginning of rain, that and the wind. They had heard it, or smelled it, before he saw what was happening, although he was out in it.
One of the girls was pointing at him, and then they all turned his way, one by one, laughing and peering out, their heads stuck forward like geese. Glee was one of the last to turn; girls gathered around her. She broke from them and started walking across the yard and into the street, holding her hair back from her forehead with her hand. She was in shorty pajamas. They were all in pajamas or long tee-shirts. “Davy?” she called. “Is that you, Davey?”
He ran, hard as he could, straight into the wet wind. He had just turned onto his own street when the sky seemed to open and great sheets of water cascaded onto the street and onto and over him.
Glee called, whispering into the phone. “Why did you run away? Why were you there? What were you doing?”
He held the phone and could not think how to answer. He saw himself as she had seen him, a stranger looking onto her party, a voyeur, or worse. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told her.
“Everybody SAW you!”
“Tomorrow, Glee,” he said wearily. The rain was pounding on the roof, he could hardly hear her. He wanted to crawl into bed and pull a quilt over his head. So he did.
It rained all night without letting up, and through the next morning. It was early afternoon when it eased to a lighter rain, and late afternoon before it stopped.
Around three o’clock, Leland came in his father’s pickup with the big wheels, splashing through water inches deep. They went by Glee’s. The water had covered her lawn and lapped against her first step. David waded up to her door. The other girls were gone; her stepfather had taken them all home the night before, soon after the rain had begun. David carried her out to the truck. She was delighted. She was still puzzled; when she said, “I still want to know—” he put his hand lightly on her mouth and said, “Shush,” and she did. As soon as they were in the truck—he scooted to the middle, himself—he turned to put his hands on her neck, and kissed her tenderly. “I am flooded with love for you, my sweet,” he said in a throaty, melodramatic voice. She stared at him for an instant, then burst into giddy laughter. “You’re so silly!” she said, “You’re so silly!”
All over town, cars and trucks were cruising through the shallow water. Drivers leaned out and yelled at one another cheerily. There was a festive air, as if the cars were heading somewhere for a parade or a rodeo. Some cars were stranded, unable to push through. People’s yards lay under water. Little kids were everywhere, splashing and yelling in the light rain; some had climbed up on car hoods, stretching themselves tall for a better look, as if they stood on a high knoll. David saw a big red collie swimming down a stretch of low culvert. It was warm. When they crossed the county road and headed east, into the newer, stark section of town, the flooding worsened. There was no place for the water to go, and so it had simply risen, on many streets, right into people’s
houses. Leland parked and asked if they wanted to get out and go see worse.
“What does that mean?” Glee asked in a squeamish little-girl voice.
“The next block over is Chesterfield, where my cousin lives. He says neighbors have boats out.”
Glee made a face, but crawled down out of the truck. They sloshed across someone’s yard and around the block. Glee’s bangs flattened on her forehead in the misty rain. The street where Leland’s cousin lived converged with another street in a low-lying intersection. The water had filled the space, making a considerable pool that lapped up over the four corner lots, toward the houses themselves. There were people standing knee deep in water, gesticulating and shouting at one another, and children splashing. There were several little fishing boats out in the middle.
David went back to Glee’s house with her and spent the rest of the afternoon lying on her bed while she played records and jabbered about school and her friends and the games that were coming up. Of course Saturday’s home game against Amarillo was cancelled because of the flooding. “So what should we do?” Glee asked him. “With the evening?”
He crooked his finger to beckon her to the bed. She glanced at the door, which was closed but did not lock. Her face flickered with a smile; she tiptoed across to him and sat on the edge of the bed. He pulled her arm so that she fell across him. “They won’t come in, will they?” he asked.
“I don’t think so, but we can’t do anything here, Davy, I couldn’t!”
He laughed at her and rubbed her breast. “Just kissing, Hewett,” he said. She was warm and soft and uncomplicated. He felt grateful for the flood and the long quiet evening. “Until something comes on TV.”
“I’ll tell Mom you’re staying for supper, okay?” she said happily. She brushed his hair with her fingers. “You look lazy, David, didn’t you sleep in all that horrid rain?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was thinking about you.”
Her mother insisted that he stay the night. She put quilts and pillows out for him on the couch, and she and her husband went to bed early. Glee and David sat bundled on the couch and watched an old movie about mummies escaped from an Egyptian tomb. Very stealthily, they made love. He did everything in slow motion, murmuring in her ear. “Do you think I’m different?” he asked. “You’re the best,” she whispered back. “Ohhh,” she said softly. He didn’t know when she left him. By then the movie was over, and he had fallen asleep.
When he got home Sunday, his mother was in the kitchen in her wrap, drinking coffee and reading the Sunday paper. “Leland called,” she said. “He wants you to call him. It’s about this drowning—” She tapped the paper. He sat down and read the article. A three-year-old boy had drowned on Chesterfield, about five in the afternoon on Saturday. He had waded into the pool the flood had created at the intersection of Chesterfield and Clermont, right where they had been in their sightseeing.
“Oh man, we missed it!” Leland said when David called.
“I don’t see how it happened,” David said. “There were people standing all over the place.”
“I know, I know. My cousin was there, too. This little kid, he just walks right to the middle, to the deepest part, and without a splash, he disappears!”
“Didn’t they see him going in?”
“Sure, they saw him, but they thought when he got to the deep part he’d turn around and come back out.”
“He was three years old!”
“I know. They didn’t know how deep it was, maybe. They didn’t think that a little kid like that could get—lost under water, on a city street!”
“Somebody should have seen. Somebody should have gone in. Jesus Christ, they all stood around and watched him drown! A little kid!”
“Aw shit, Puckett, you can say that, you weren’t there. You can say what you would do and wouldn’t do, you’re so smart.”
“I wouldn’t have just stood by, I can tell you that.”
“You don’t know, you weren’t there. You wait till somebody’s in trouble in front of you and see what you’ll do. That’s the only way you’ll find out. Wait and see how wet you want to get.”
15.
“I’ll never see you!” Glee protested when David told her what his rehearsal schedule would be. It wasn’t really true. The first week they rehearsed after school, and he went over to Glee’s a couple of nights to do homework. When they moved into night rehearsals, it was only Sunday through Thursday, so he had his weekends, just like any other time. It was only at the end that it would take all his time. Besides, when he explained to her what his part was, she changed her tune. She liked the idea that he was the star, “A star,” he corrected her. “Hardly the word anybody would use. There are three of us. You say, ‘lead,’ not ‘star.’” She told everyone. Her friends came up to him in the hall and said they were dying to see him in a play. Glee was only jealous of his time, not of the girls on the set. She knew Patsy Randall was no competition, and the other girls, David told her, were all sad sacks, except for Betsy, the Student Council girl who was stage manager. He thought Betsy was keeping tabs on him, but there wasn’t anything to tell.
He didn’t have time to go up to the hospital, and his mother complained, but if he borrowed her car he could spend the last hour of her shift up there, and if he was home, he put a kettle on for tea, or heated a can of tomato soup when she was due. One night he brought home a caramel from the prop table and sliced it into six pieces and arranged them artfully on a saucer. He set the saucer on a paper napkin on the table. Marge loved it. “Silly boy,” she said. She played with the pieces of candy, moving them slightly on the saucer. “Go on, eat one,” he told her. She never did anything for a lark. She never did anything for herself. She laughed and flipped a tiny slice over, like an egg on a skillet. “You know I don’t eat sweets,” she said.
“Just this once,” he told her. He talked her into it. She put a slice on her tongue and sat while it melted, looking off in the direction of the stove. She sucked at the juices the candy made, smiled at him, and got up to get her whiskey.
He wondered why there were caramels on the prop table. Every once in a while he would see someone carefully peeling a piece. Some kids popped caramels into their mouths whole and chewed furiously. Some nibbled like rats. He never took one; they were too sticky for his taste.
He sat on a chair in the wings with his English text on his lap, telling himself he ought to use the time to study. But the scene on stage was between Catherine and Dr. Sloper, and he could not stop watching Patsy as Catherine. She was wearing a long muslin practice skirt with a dirty ruffled hem, and her hair was caught up in a rubber band, pieces escaping at the neckline. When Mr. Turnbow stopped the scene to talk something over, she chewed on her lip, or sucked her cheek in. She wore no makeup, and under the stage lights she looked pale. Her shoulders were like slats under the man’s tee-shirt she wore, but he could not stop watching her. She stood very still—when she moved, there was some reason—but her face was so expressive. Her cheekbones seemed to tremble as her father rebuked her. Once she looked over and saw David watching her. Their eyes fixed, quite clearly, for an instant. She did not acknowledge him at all, she went back to her business, but he felt as if she had touched him inside his shirt, or on the back of his neck. That was what she did on stage, she got to you.
Mr. T. called a five-minute break. David went outside. He walked briskly away from the auditorium, to the edge of the schoolyard light, breathing deeply. He put his hands on his hips and threw his head back. The next scene was between him and the father. He had to defend himself with just the right blend of confidence, deference, and, somewhere, a quiver of doubt. This man could take away what he wanted, his bulk and authority could be a wall Morris could not get around. David did not know where the doubt ought to show. He didn’t know how to ask Mr. T. about it, maybe not in the scene, maybe at the end, privately. He did not want to seem too cerebral; he did not want to seem to think himself too important.
He stood in the shadow and practiced raising his eyebrow, practiced smiling so that anyone would say he was being respectful, but so Sloper would still hate him for his cockiness. Oh, it was subtle, all right, and you had to use all you had to project subtlety from the stage. The trick was to be honest and true, while all the time using the smooth speech and the careful gesture of the deliberate gentleman. The play was a world of artifice, he had to be a master of it. Each movement, each inflection of his character, he believed, came out of deliberation or carefully built habit. He had never realized how much power there was in really knowing yourself. He thought there were certain boys who had an instinct for creating themselves—he thought of his friend Burt Lasky, who was handsome and insouciant—but in the end, those who produced themselves deliberately would have more control. That was what he was learning from drama. He wished he could discuss it with someone. He told Glee the play was fun, he told her little anecdotes about rehearsals, but he could not say, “I’m discovering myself, little by little.”
When he walked back in the stage door he was met by a great blast of laughter. He heard Betsy’s silly giggle, Don Witham’s snorty laugh. For one terrible moment he thought they were all laughing at him, but it was only an accident of timing. They were laughing at Derek, who played Sloper. Derek was chewing as fast and hard as he could while everyone stood around and watched him. David was baffled.
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