Swimming Sweet Arrow: A Novel

by Gibbon, Maureen

  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

  ONE 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 af
ter 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.”

  I knew then that I didn’t want him to touch me, but I didn’t stop him. I let him go on feeling me sideways, then I let him pull me up against him. He opened the zipper on my uniform and took my breasts in his hands, squeezing them through my bra.

  “So, you need a good dicking down,” Kevin said.

  I knew then that whatever kind of fantasy I had cooked up in my mind wasn’t going to come true. I made the movement to kiss him, because I thought if we could kiss, if we could at least have good kisses between us, maybe it would be all right.

  His kisses were dull and wet, and the taste of his mouth sickened me. But by then I did not know how to stop. He had taken off my bra, and my uniform was down around my waist. It seemed easiest to go through with it then, since I was the one who started it. I still did not know—it was not clear in my mind—that I should have done anything to get away from him: get down on my hands and knees, crawl naked through the woods.

  Kevin Keel started by eating me, but what he did was more like ripping. Maybe that was when my skin began to tear—later I wasn’t sure. What I did know was that after he got done snarling into my cunt, he fucked me so hard I thought I could feel my skin pulling and breaking. I was so scared I wasn’t wet at all except from his spit. I tried not to move, tried to let him up my dry cunt.

  He pumped into me awhile, then he said, “Good pussy doesn’t just lie there.”

  So I pushed back against him and made noise. I thought if he came, it could all be over.

  Instead it lasted a long time. When I started to cry, he said, “Is it sore?”

  “Yes,” I said, but I would not look at him when I said it.

  “I’m almost done,” he told me.

  At the end, as he came, he slapped my face once, hard. Then he jerked out of me.

  “Nice set of tits,” he said when he climbed off me.

  I didn’t say anything. I was shaking and had trouble pulling on my clothes. I didn’t even try to put my nylons back on, because of the burning between my legs.

  Keel took me back into town, to Dreisbach’s, where I was parked. When I went to get out of his truck, he pulled me to him and kissed me.

  “Sweet dreams,” he said after he wiped his mouth on my mouth.

  I walked away without looking back. When I got into my truck, I couldn’t believe everything in it looked just the way it had when I left it that afternoon: the box of tissues, the crumpled napkins, my sweater. I sat a long time with my arms wrapped over the steering wheel, but stuff started seeping out of me and it burned, and I thought I better get on home.

  I stood a long time on the back porch of the house before I could go in. I didn’t know why. Del still wasn’t home and there was no one to see me, but I just couldn’t bring myself to put my hand on the doorknob and turn it and go inside. But I made myself do it, just like I made myself wash between my legs, over and over, even though the soap burned and it hurt to pass the washcloth over myself. I washed my hair three times, not to cut through the grease of the kitchen like I usually did, but to get Keel’s whispers out of my hair. When I was finished, I could not smell him, but there was nothing left of me, either.

  I did two more things before I went to bed that night. I washed my blood out of the skirt of my uniform, because it was already turning dark. There was not a lot of blood, and it wasn’t in blots like when my period began. This blood stained the fabric in thin, red streaks. Then I ran the water until it was icy cold, and I soaked a washcloth in it. I took that washcloth back to the bed with me, and I lay with it between my legs until the heat from my body warmed it. When I was lying there I knew for the first time that June had told me only half the truth about Kevin. It wasn’t one of his friends who fucked her when she was ten—it was Kevin. It all fit. I didn’t let myself think anything else about it.

  For the first time in days, I hoped Del would not come home. I didn’t hate him anymore. I just hoped he would stay away.

  17

  I needn’t have worried about Del coming home. His mother called me the next morning to tell me he was in detox at the hospital in Deer Run. He had overdosed on alcohol and quaaludes, and had almost stopped breathing. The police had picked him up. As he wasn’t allowed any phone calls from the hospital, she was calling.

  “I don’t approve of you two living together,” she said. “But I know you care for him.”

  “I do care for him,” I said.

  “Did you know any of this was going on?”

  “I knew he was drinking,” I said. I didn’t think there was any point in telling her about the huffing.

  “He has a lot of lessons to learn,” she said, and then she told me it was God’s will he didn’t die.

  When I asked her what I could do, she told me I couldn’t do anything. He wasn’t allowed any visitors, not even her or his old man. She told me I could pray, and that she and Del’s dad were praying. I didn’t know how all the praying fit into the way Dels old man used to beat Del, but I didn’t get into it on the phone.

  And though I did not believe in any of it, I did pray for Del to be all right. I didn’t pray for the one thing I really wanted —to take back everything that had happened with Kevin Keel. I knew I couldn’t have it, so I didn’t bother to ask for it.

  BY THE next afternoon it hurt so much I could barely walk or pee. I took down the small mirror we had nailed to the bathroom wall, sat on the bed, and held the mirro
r between my legs. It took me only a few seconds to find the tears that burned. One was on the small lip leading up to my clitoris. The place was swollen with black blood. The other tear was right at the bottom of my clitoris. Keel had split the bottom of that round button. They were small rips, but they ached and burned when I moved or when my urine hit the open skin. Who knew what was torn inside my vagina where I couldn’t see.

  I took myself to the hospital in Ontelaunee. The nurse thought I was another VD patient and asked me to name my partners.

  “He wasn’t a partner,” I said. “I don’t know his name.”

  She left me alone after that, but before she left the room she did a funny thing. I’d left my panties on top of my jeans on the chair, and yellow and red streaks were showing. The nurse folded them in a way that all the mess wouldn’t show. I didn’t know who she was hiding them from.

  The doctor gave me antibiotics and some cream for my vagina. He wanted to know how it happened.

  “Things got carried away,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “Do you want to see the police?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. I didn’t think he would have believed me if I told him I was the one who started it, that I was the one who chose Keel.

  It was the truth. I had chosen him. I knew all the stories about him, and he was the one I went to. I knew he’d help me start any fire I wanted to start. At the time I thought I just wanted to hurt Del, but that was not all the truth. I wanted something for myself, too. What it was I couldn’t name. I kept wanting to call it love, but it was more like obliteration.

  I knew that even then.

  IT HURT so bad to go to the bathroom that I hardly drank anything for the next few days. When I did pee, my urine burned the open places, and it was so sharp and hot that I could barely make myself stay on the toilet seat. I closed my eyes and pressed against the bathroom wall with my shoulder. As soon as I was done, I wiped everything away with a wet washcloth.