Breaking Clean

by Judy Blunt

  If Mom held the big guns in making law and maintaining order, Dad was the parental version of a loose cannon, given to unpredictable explosions of great force and random fancy. He had not the first clue about town life or about high school, I fumed, having neither lived in the one nor attended the other.

  He'd gone to work on his father's ranch right out of eighth grade, and regardless of his success at raising grain and cattle, he remained sensitive about his lack of formal schooling. Having no experience in these matters did not mean he was without strong opinions, however. Quite the contrary. But I considered them ill informed and somewhat irritating. "Going to school is a privilege," he would begin, waving one of our less than perfect report cards—usually Gary's or mine. His voice would rise and deepen at the same time, hard as wire and strung with barbs of righteous conviction as he nailed home points, one thick finger thumping the other palm.

  The complexity of what we actually had to accomplish our first few months of high school escaped him. We all started young, beginning with Margaret, who was only twelve when she boarded with a very kind, very old, profoundly deaf widow for the first year of high school. And all of us entered the city limits with only those skills acquired at the ranch. We all coped differently—Kenny with the confidence of a firstborn son, Gail with indomitable optimism—and with differing degrees of success. Gail's leap into the social whirl eventually paved the way for her more backward twin, but Gary's early grades, like mine, were those of a thirteen-year-old struggling to find balance on unfamiliar terrain. In those days, a country boy's initiation to town life included fistfights, and those unwilling to swing back were hazed and prodded until they did. Too young not to cry in his rage and frustration, Gary would eventually muster the grit to walk the four blocks home pantless and dry-eyed, pull on his spare jeans, and wade back to school to fight for his good pair. Of course he learned quickly, as all of us did, but it took a multitude of lessons that had nothing to do with books.

  Today's lecture was no different. Getting an education was the most important thing a person could do in this life, and lest I forget—a pause here, for emphasis—that was the only reason I was in town. The only thing of any concern to me in Malta was schoolwork. My days of running wild were over. I was to go to school and work the way I'd been taught to work. Then I was to come home where I belonged. I sat through the lecture, stifling the backwash of bitterness. My punishment pretty much described my life, anyway. Go to school, go to work, come home. Compared with my little sister, I had no social life.

  I saw Guy one more time. I remember the song that was playing on the car radio, "Gypsy Woman," and the way it seemed to stay on the charts for months after, and how my white uniform smelled of hamburgers and fried onions, the nylon skirt speckled with a history of grease spots. I remember the interior of his car, the air freshener dangling, maroon paint, yellow-tinted windows. I remember concentrating on one tiny detail at a time, unable to take in the whole picture.

  A week or more had passed since I'd last seen Guy, palms up, talking with Ray Cummings. He'd stopped at the cafe for supper, but instead of the usual booth, he picked a stool at the crowded counter, ignoring my overtures as I took his order and filled his coffee cup. My shift ended before he finished his meal. I lingered until he paid, then followed him out the door to his car. I wanted to apologize for getting him in trouble, I reasoned, though my motives were far more self-centered than that. Who better to sympathize with my sad plight, my persecution by such rigid, unfeeling parents, than a fellow victim? We stood with the car between us, his hand poised over the door handle, my mind scrambling for the right thing to say. "Can we talk for a minute?" I blurted.

  Seconds passed, cars passed, people walked by, glancing our way.

  His lips tightened. "Well, are you going to get in?" Without another word, I opened the door and we backed away from the curb. My first mention of the big bust dropped like a stone, disappearing with nary a ripple. Guy never shifted his eyes from the street as we circled the block. He didn't want to talk about it, had no intention of wading any deeper into my situation than bare politeness demanded. Embarrassed, I fell silent, saving face on our second and final pass down the main drag, a loop I expected to end with him pulling up to drop me off at the cafe. We were two blocks away when the DJ announced the song, one of his favorites. He must have glanced in the rearview mirror at the same time he reached to turn up the volume because his hand remained frozen to the knob, then withdrew in slow motion. As he sat back, his wide shoulders seemed to shrink toward his spine.

  "Shit," he said. Then, "You've got to be kidding," his voice so hushed and dead that I felt my scalp prickle before I even swiveled around to look. The grill of my father's pickup filled the rear window like the teeth of a great chrome shark.

  Somewhere out there, a gypsy woman danced in the firelight. Sparks danced in my brain. Everything roared. Engines. Fires. Silence. With effort I cleared my throat.

  "Can you outrun him?"

  Guy shook his head once as if clearing his ears, a wry smile twisting one corner of his mouth. "I ain't even going to try."

  Instead of turning the corner toward the cafe, we floated evenly up Central Avenue, dipped beneath the railroad overpass and turned left on Highway 2 with Dad's pickup stuck to our bumper like roadlall. Where the houses and businesses ended, a graveled lot marked the city limits, a place where kids in cars turned around or pulled up window to window for private conversations before cruising back the way they had come. Tires crunched. The radio crooned. Guy stopped the car and started to open his door. Dad got a hand on the front of his shirt and helped him out. I felt the car rock, once, twice, Dad's voice low, Guy's back slamming against the side like punctuation, then a spray of words against my cheek. Dog orders: "Get in the pickup."

  We had all arrived at a point far beyond lectures, though we pulled our chairs to the same table. Mom spoke first. I was forbidden to ever see Guy again. "It's not like that—," I started. They leaned into their anger, Mom's voice rising to override me. If I gave my word, if I swore I would never see him again, they had agreed not to press charges against him. A bolt of fear left the long muscles of my arms and legs quivering in their effort to be still. Charges?

  "Charges for what?" I choked out. "We ... he didn't do anything!" I think I had assumed at some level that my mother would simply know this because it was true. She might use suspicion, accusation even, to regain the upper hand, but did she really believe it? Her face was unreadable. Charges for statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I was flabbergasted. How could they think that? Mom sat back, impassive, as I defended my innocence, Guy's innocence, agreeing to whatever punishment they thought up as long as they left him out of it. When Dad finally spoke, his face was chiseled steel. They'd raised me better than to run with trash. Maybe what I needed was time off from high school, say a year at the ranch to think things over.

  I shook my head and swallowed. "No." I flushed at the sound of my own voice, the word spoken too quickly, their eyes registering the creak of panic with grim satisfaction. The threat was not an idle one. They never were. "No," I whispered again, lowering my gaze to my clenched hands. The trump card lay on the table between us—my call, play or fold. We left it at that.

  I had a lot of time to think in the days that followed.

  Christmas vacation drew near. I made good grades, worked my shifts and came home, a full-blown revolt contained only by the tension of my skin. The smallest shake—a teacher's question, my mother's voice, a brother's teasing—set me trembling. In spare moments, I daydreamed of revenge. If older guys were a problem, I decided, the next would blow parental head gaskets. I didn't have far to look for the perfect candidate. Better yet, he had had his eyes on me for some time.

  His dad's ranch sprawled along the northern edge of the Missouri River Breaks fifteen miles south of ours, a place we seldom visited except to dig for fossils or hunt a Christmas tree in the stand of scrub pine. He was an only son, an ROTC
college graduate back from the war, and the year before my family had been one of several invited to his slide show of Vietnam. The war was a distant event to most of us, as were the protests against it. But the county shared a long history of sons called to military service, and no matter where they served, there was no lack of patriotic support for those who returned. That evening John had stood at the end of a narrow room punching the button on his slide reel, narrating each scene as it flashed on the screen—water buffalo wading through rice paddies, women squatting along the riverbanks, villages of straw-capped huts—none of it more foreign to our eyes than the backdrop of dense, vibrant green. I had leaned against a doorway that opened to the kitchen, watching him.

  Poised and confident, John played the officer and gentleman, suffering naive questions and the forced camaraderie of old war veterans with easy humor. I started the game of eye tag. He glanced my way, I shifted to the screen. He turned to the screen, I looked at him, a dance of tiny movements, barely restrained smiles. When the lights came on, our eyes met for a long moment. He lifted his chin, a high sign lobbed over the heads of a dozen oblivious neighbors. Being coy, I paused a second before I lifted my chin in return. I was fifteen, though he would always say I seemed older. He was twenty-seven.

  John was a novelty to me, a man both familiar and new. He was a son we always knew existed but had never seen, raised by his mother in another county. Nearing retirement age, his father had set about luring John to Phillips County, offering him a place on the ranch. That winter, John divided his time between Bozeman and the ranch as he finished his industrial arts degree and considered his father's offer. We met again in the summer when I hired out to a ranch bordering their land, and our flirtation continued despite the difference in our ages. I had received a card in the mail, a phone call or two. Whispers stirred the benches at the First Creek Community Hall when we took the floor at a Saturday-night dance. The stage was set long before that November day in 1970 when Guy and I took our last ride to the strains of "Gypsy Woman."

  John called me during Christmas vacation, and this time I was ready. Bored by what passed for social life in a country winter, he had decided to host another slide show, this one a chronicle of the first Milk River Wagon Train. This time I narrowed the distance, taking a place behind him, facing the screen. When he stepped back to change slide reels, he remained in the narrow doorway beside me, working the remote control, narrating the rodeos and runaways. I did not step away. The last were a series of night shots around the campfire. He eased closer in the near dark and slipped an arm around my waist, his touch surprising, soft as the stroke of a feather. I shot a glance toward my father, the back of his head almost indistinguishable in a row of heads. My mother sat in profile on the couch. I raised my arm in an answering squeeze. We stood touching, hip to shoulder, until the last cowboy sang, until the final scene shuffled to a new slot and the screen burst into white light.

  We dated country style. On winter weekends, he'd pick me up in the battered four-wheel-drive and we'd spotlight for rabbits, driving for hours over the rough frozen prairie with a flask of whiskey between us. In summer, we took the shale ridge road overlooking the Missouri River, edging the truck around washouts and through creek crossings, stopping to explore long-abandoned homesteads. We went to the community dances at the First Creek Community Hall, rode together to neighborhood baseball games and brandings. On rare occasions he came to Malta during the school week. I pushed every limit of curfew and behavior to the very edge, making little secret of my fondness for cigarettes and sloe gin. But the battle I expected never arrived. Instead, I found myself basking in something close to approval, with resulting adult privileges, as if attracting this sensible, practical man caused my parents to look at me with newfound respect. Often I spent the first hour of our date drumming my fingers as John and my father swapped stories and talked cattle. My parents swapped supper invitations with his father and stepmother for the first time in my memory. A year after we began dating, John dug through a box of memorabilia and came up with his old class ring. We exchanged '61 for '72, a difference of age most succinctly measured by the music we listened to—his Kingston Trio and Hank Snow, my Rolling Stones and Three Dog Night.

  By the week of my graduation from high school, I'd found a roommate old enough to sign for phone and utility service and together we rented a narrow, two-bedroom mobile home. I bought a used car with my savings, and as I stepped forward to receive my diploma it sat outside the gymnasium loaded to the roof with all my belongings. As the principal worked his way down the alphabet of names, I watched with a sense of detachment. I fancied myself older than my classmates, now, in all the ways that counted. An old seventeen. For the past two years I had divided my life into three neat and distinct compartments:'work, school and John. I'd managed a succession of jobs, shoehorning a work schedule around classes and weekend travel back and forth to the ranch. I'd waited tables, cooked, pressed clothes at the dry cleaners and operated the switchboard and night desk at the local hospital. Friday night, I shifted gears on the way back to the ranch, looking ahead to a weekend of passionate, though chaste, embraces. Sunday, I left John without a backward glance, plotting the week's schedule to keep each part of me in safe, separate and secure orbit. Hard work paid off better on the job than it ever had at school. I'd drawn my circle of friends from the ranks of fellow employees, most of them older than I was. That last year, I spent four hours a day in class, then worked a full shift, double-shifting whenever the opportunity arose and banking every second paycheck.

  I worked the afternoon they held the awards ceremony. I'd been a mostly honor roll student, excelling in English classes when I cared to, passing algebra because I had to, graduating in the top third of my class. But I was not scholarship material. At my senior interview, Mr. Moran, our guidance counselor, spoke vaguely of the careers most women chose because they worked best around a family life—secretarial, teaching, nursing, home economics—things you could drop for a while and pick up again when the kids were grown. Swiveled sideways in his chair, one argyle ankle resting on a knee, hands clasped behind his head, he fixed his eyes on the wall and spoke as if reciting some difficult passage from memory. These skills benefited a lot of women because they had a practical application as well as a professional one. You could work as a secretary, say, then keep books for your husband's business, or apply your home economics field directly to your general homemaking and child rearing. Teacher, nurse, secretary. We did not discuss aptitude, entrance exams, application deadlines or financial aid. All that hinged on an if and a shrug. If I decided to go on to college. Shrug. Margaret had managed to get her degree and was teaching elementary school. Kenny was wrapping up his second year of a range management program at Montana State University. College just happened for them, but how it got started, I hadn't a clue. My parents and I still circled each other like strangers, wary and polite, avoiding confrontation. I did not ask them for money, advice or approval, and they volunteered nothing.

  A disciplined group, the Class of 72 queued up by height to march back through the double doors of the gymnasium, step-sliding as we'd been taught in order to create an oceanic illusion, waves of us pulled by the grand tide of "Pomp and Circumstance." The audience rose to its feet. John stood beside my parents in a row of family, all of them smiling. John remained the last enduring link to my old community, a man who'd been willing to wait for me through three years of high school, but who waited with less and less patience as my emancipation day drew near. In his pocket lay a flawless diamond solitaire in a web of tiny stars, a ring I refused to wear until after graduation. Pressed to set a wedding date, I had picked one more than a year distant.

  Ahead of me the line began exploding by pairs as it passed through the doorway, like a string of firecrackers feeding itself to an open flame. Royal blue caps flew up with a roar. Boys pounded shoulders, shouting. Girls clung to each other and cried. I threw my hat as high as anyone and pushed toward the front doors of Malta High,
returning a backslap here, a handclasp there, grinning at their excitement, laughing all the way to my car. I remember pausing on the dark street and deliberately looking around, intent on remembering the feel of these first steps as a free woman. Behind me, two stories of red brick seemed to squat and extrude people, squeezing them through lighted doorways in long, slow streams. The air was drenched with the smell of late spring, the musk of damp earth, of lilacs and new grass, the first whisper of heat still rising from the pavement. My wedding day barely glimmered on the horizon, but it was a secure feeling, knowing I had a man waiting on the land in case—in case what? I pushed away the thought. I had gotten the first two jobs I'd applied for, and was already working them both. The summer opened before me like a gift. John was comfortable and familiar, and I loved him dearly. Still, anything could happen in a year's time. Anything.

  Humans are born with the fear of falling, the instinct to fling our arms wide when we lose our footing and claw the air for some solid purchase. Through that long, sweet summer I never once doubted the foundation I had built for myself. I held in my hands the ability to do for myself, the key to independence, and I neither looked to the past nor imagined a future beyond it. When the props gave way on September 16, 1972, I was sitting on a case of peaches in the back room of Ken's Thriftway, a mom-and-pop grocery store where I earned my major paycheck. When the owner called me back for a conference, I was more irritated by the interruption than concerned. Over the years, I'd gotten used to being a star employee, and as I perched on the stack of canned goods listening to the man ramble on about the grocery business and serving customers, it took me several minutes to understand that I was being fired. Me? The girl who hefted fifty-pound bags of flour and dog food off the truck? Who candled the farm eggs because everyone else hated that job? Who fearlessly dispatched the huge fuzzy-legged beasts in the banana crates when the produce woman came bawling through the swinging doors of the cooler? Me.