by William Gay
He was silent a time. Finally he said: Just what is it you want to do?
You never know what I’m thinking about. I’m just a body to you. I think we might as well break up.
Why Jesus Christ, Robert Earl said.
♦ ♦ ♦
HER FATHER SAT on the front porch and passed the time of day with Bonedaddy. Bonedaddy had a graceful easy charm, it didn’t matter to whom he was talking. Old ladies confided in him and children trusted him with their secrets and dogs had been known to follow him home. Quincy Nell’s father was not even a suitable challenge and Bonedaddy was humming along on half power.
Quincy Nell’s father was an English teacher at the high school and though they lived in a veritable warren of Republicans he was of a liberal bent of mind and he liked to think that guidance rather than discipline was what he should be dispensing. He liked to say, Well, I’m of a liberal bent of mind myself and I can’t say that the position you’re taking is very compassionate. He was fond of saying that blood would tell, that he’d let Candace decide things for herself and things had turned out fine.
The upshot of it was that he let her go. He said Quincy Nell was a lot younger but that she had a good head on her shoulders and a mind of her own. Quincy Nell’s mother had reservations but she ultimately deferred to the father. Quincy Nell’s father privately felt that he could see down the road a lot farther than Quincy Nell could and he foresaw a day of enlightenment when the revelation that she had been wasting her time on Bonedaddy would hit her and she would get on to other things. Privately her mother thought that Bonedaddy would make a good-looking son-in-law.
That evening she rode in the off-white Toyota for the first time. They drove down to Clifton and had cheeseburgers and cherry Cokes at the Sonic and drove around the sleepy-looking town for a while. He took her home early. His behavior was exemplary. She was slightly disappointed.
That night she took down a pristine notebook and opened it to the first page. She licked the tip of her pencil and wrote the word OBJECTIVES. She wrote: Marry Bonedaddy Bowers and then she underlined it. She thought awhile and then made two subheadings, one, two. Beneath one she wrote: Become whatever he wants me to be. Then she wrote and underlined, Take the place of everyone he knows.
Came then hot honeysuckle nights of eros. Whispers in the dark by the river. They’d take blankets and lie beneath the trailing fronds of mimosa, scented blossoms falling on their bodies in the moonlight. Urgent entreaties and urgent denials and engagements fought over millimeters of bare sweating flesh. Every calculated liberty she permitted just drove him wilder until his entire body seemed tumescent with desire and night by night he was getting more difficult to handle. Candace had told her once, It’s funny the way he does it. He just goes along assuming you’re going to and before you know it you have. Forewarned is forearmed and that wasn’t working this time and there were nights they fought their private war until the world seemed to have fallen asleep and forgotten them, the lights of the town folding one by one and the last drunken carouser home in bed and even the insects hushed and the moon about to set, tracking palely above the surface of the river like the luminescent husk of a dead world.
Some afternoons he would sit about the Quallses’ porch after he got off work at the pallet mill or he’d lounge about the living room watching a football game. He had quit drinking he told her and as summer drew on he drank vast quantities of a beverage called Sharps, brown bottles of it that looked and tasted like beer but were supposed to have the alcohol removed. But all this was mere preamble. Just necessary overture for the hot sweaty darkness when she wanted to as much as he did but fought him bitterly until she cried with frustration.
By the middle of June she was still a virgin she guessed but even she had to admit it was territory she claimed by the sheerest of technicalities.
She heard about the appliances on a radio show called Trade-time and she called the number they’d given immediately. The man said he had a washer and a dryer and a refrigerator and a fifteen thousand BTU air conditioner and that his wife had left him and that he would take five hundred dollars for the lot.
Consider them sold, she told him. And don’t sell them to anybody else until you hear from me.
Are you crazy, Bonedaddy said that afternoon. I don’t need that shit.
We may not now, Quincy Nell said. We will when we’re married. We’ll need all that stuffand this’ll save us a lot of money.
I got nowhere to keep all that crap, he said. I live in a house trailer, you know.
She’d listened for his reaction when she mentioned the word marriage. This was a subject that had come up during the hot sweaty nights but this was its first mention when they were, as it were, cold sober. He didn’t deny it.
We’ll put it in Daddy’s shed, she said. I’ll keep it there and when we’re married we’ll get one of those apartments out on Cisco Pike. The one I looked at had kind of lime-green walls. They’re real nice.
They are? he asked. There was the first trace of disquiet in his voice.
Yeah. You get to decorate them any way you want to.
You don’t have any idea of the time it’s took me to save up five hundred dollars. I ought to have kept my mouth shut about it, too.
It’s for us, she said. Our money, you said. Didn’t you say that?
Sure I did, he said, thinking of the river, the scent of her flesh.
I’ll talk to Daddy about putting it in the shed.
I’d be careful about what I talked to Daddy about, Bonedaddy said. We’re trying to keep this quiet, right?
Sure. I’d just feel better about what we’ve been doing if there was some kind of a definite commitment. Five hundred dollars is a big commitment and I’d know you haven’t been just lying to me. See?
I see all right, Bonedaddy said.
WE JUST NEED A PLACE to keep it until we get married, Quincy Nell said.
Her father was reading a copy of Harper’s and he glanced at the page number he was on and laid the magazine aside with some reluctance.
Married?
Well, not right now. When I’m eighteen. We’re going to save our money until then. I’m going to get a part-time job at the Sonic and Bonedaddy’s got his job at the pallet mill. It doesn’t take much for him to live.
Her father looked indulgent. That had always been his way. He would listen carefully to every word she said as if weighing each word separately and when she was finished he would take off his glasses and wipe them with a tissue studying her thoughtfully with his soft aesthete’s eyes and then he would tell her how full of shit she was. His way had been to warn her and let her go, he’d warned her about older men, younger men, sex, drugs, life itself.
I believe I’ve heard all this before from Candace, he said. This is like a summer rerun.
Candace turned out all right.
Candace hasn’t turned out yet. Candace is in the process of turning out.
Whatever.
Two years from now you’ll be admitting that you were every bit as foolish as you sound to me right this minute.
Maybe so. But what do you have to lose? At the very worst you’ll gain a shedful of appliances. They’re mine. Ours. He’s buying them for me.
I need my shed.
For what? All there is in there are spiderwebs and old fruit jars.
All right all right, he said. Just don’t bother me with it. Do what you want.
BONEDADDY COUNTED THE MONEY out carefully. You sure you won’t come off that five hundred a little?
But the little bespectacled man had already divined more of the way of things than even Bonedaddy had and he wasn’t about to come off. He hooked his thumbs in his suspenders. He winked at Quincy Nell.
That’s about the least dollar I could take, he said regretfully.
All right, here then, Bonedaddy said, shoving the money at him. He looked at his Toyota loaded to the tailgate with five hundred dollars’ worth of used coppertone appliances. Let’s get the hell out of her
e, he said.
The shed was a converted storm cellar dug out of a hillside and faced with poplar logs. It had a heavy door framed up out of sawmill oak and a hasp and lock. They tore out the shelves and boxed the fruit jars and unloaded the appliances with a dolly Bonedaddy had borrowed from his friend Clarence, who lived just down the road and made deliveries for a furniture store. When the appliances were stored inside and the lock secured through the hasp they were hot and sweaty.
Let’s go swimming, Bonedaddy said. I aim to buy me a Budweiser about waist high and just wallow around in it.
You quit drinking, remember?
I reckon a five-hundred-dollar commitment entitles me to drink a goddamned beer, Bonedaddy said. Right?
I guess so, Quincy Nell said.
I would reckon that it entitles me to a lot of things.
NIGHT ON THE RIVER. Boats passed below unseen in the sweet floral darkness. Laughter floated by sourceless, laughter from nowhere, all these lovers faceless in the dark. The Toyota was parked on the point with the radio tuned to a country station. Earl Thomas Conley. Quincy Nell? Bonedaddy said. She clung to him with a stricken urgency. She started to say something. He put himself inside her. She knotted her fingers in his long black hair. On the radio Earl Thomas Conley sang, Love don’t care whose heart it breaks, it don’t care who gets blown away.
SHE HAD THOUGHT THAT that would do it. According to such spotty information as she had accumulated and hoarded she should have hooked him like a bad drug, strung him out like an addict with a vicious little monkey clinging to his back. It didn’t seem to change things much. Life went on. Summer turned hot, then hotter. He used the nail gun at the pallet mill. He drank long-necked beers with his friend Clarence when they got off work in the afternoon. He won forty dollars in a pool tournament and with ten dollars of it bought her a ragged panda that already looked secondhand, as if it had come from a yard sale. He became interested in baseball and said that the Atlanta Braves were going to take it right down to the wire.
In the meantime Bonedaddy sang in her blood like electricity. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She thought about where he was and what he was doing every minute of the day, the thought of him going to bed with another woman took her to the point of madness. She couldn’t quit thinking about him. She lived for the sweaty nights under the mimosas when she would cling to him desperately and think she was going to die in his arms and not caring if she did.
Having fought so long and hard and ultimately successfully for something Bonedaddy seemed to dismiss it as a thing of no moment. Goddamn,Quincy Nell, he said. You’re going to wear me right down to the ground. I have to work tomorrow. I can’t lay up and sleep like you do.
She felt her grip on him loosening, her fingers tiring. She clung to him as if she’d absorb him. She dreamed lime-green walls, yellow chintz curtains she’d seen at Wal-Mart, a baby in a highchair saying Daddy for the first time and her telling Bonedaddy about it the minute he came through the door. While Bonedaddy spoke of the Atlanta pitching staff, the merits of Mike Tyson as opposed to Muhammad Ali.
July drew on to August. She prayed and waited. Something was happening to her. One morning she was sick and fear and anticipation mingled like oil and water.
By now Bonedaddy had talked her into drinking a beer now and again. Two beers made her giggly. I’m missing a period, she giggled. And I can’t find it anywhere.
Don’t joke about such shit as that, Bonedaddy said.
I’m not joking. I think I’m pregnant.
You can’t be.
This was so specious an argument she didn’t even pursue it. She didn’t even reply.
Are you serious, Quincy Nell.
Yes I am.
Well. I guess all we can do is wait and see. Likely it’ll come to nothing.
She knew it already had come to something. Over a month ago she had had a prophetic dream. She had dreamt that her life was overseen by two angels. These angels looked rather like middleaged old-maid schoolteachers and they oversaw her life with a system of awards and demerits, checks and balances. All right, she’s done it five times, the first angel said. Let’s give her a baby. The second angel had said, No we’d better wait. That time out by the pallet mill doesn’t count.
We’re going to get married anyway, Quincy Nell said. I guess we can just do it sooner.
I guess, Bonedaddy said.
HE GOT A REAL DEAL on the washer and dryer and refrigerator. Someone at work had offered him five hundred dollars for them. He was going to take it.
No you’re not, she said. They’re ours. For our apartment.
Look, he said. It’s all the money back and the air conditioner free and clear. We can buy another set of appliances.
There’s no use buying something you’ve already got, she said.
They stood arguing in the yard before the shed. Clarence waited in the truck. From time to time he’d take a drink of his beer. There were other beers iced down in a cooler. Bonedaddy argued with vehemence, there was something sinister about him. The parents watched from the porch, vaguely embarrassed. The father looked wan and ineffectual, like a cardboard cutout of a father.
The damn things are mine and I’m getting them and that’s all there is to it, Bonedaddy said. Clarence, get out and help me.
Clarence got out.
THEN THERE WERE DAYS when she walked on the edge of the abyss. Her parents watched her with hooded eyes. Nothing was yet said, everything was left open-ended. Life was a dark torrent moving beneath her feet and everything that was left unsaid moved inaudibly beneath the waters. Pregnant, statutory rape, courts and lawsuits. Her life seemed unending and she couldn’t see anymore the way that it would go. Maybe he thinks it will just go away, she thought viciously.
Nights he didn’t come and he didn’t call. She called the trailer and the telephone rang and he didn’t answer. She cried into her pillow and her body ached for him and her mind replayed the things he’d said when the mimosa blossoms fell in the windless dark and Earl Thomas Conley warned, It don’t care who gets blown away. Someone saw him at the dance across the river with a black-haired girl from Coble and she beheaded the panda with a single-edge razor and set the truncate corpse on the bureau, poor piebald panda with its jaunty air of yard-sale innocence.
The worst was when she slipped out at night and waited on him at his trailer, listening to the radio in the Gremlin and watching the stars pulse and quake in the hot dark.
When he came he was in a black Lexus with a woman older than he was. He leaned to kiss her when he got out. Either he hadn’t noticed the Gremlin or more likely he just hadn’t cared. Quincy Nell was out before he was and she closed on him before he could even shut the door of the Lexus.
You son of a bitch, she said.
What on earth, the woman in the Lexus wanted to know. She looked mildly amused, as if this were some diversion staged for her benefit.
Quincy Nell and Bonedaddy swayed like graceless dancers in the patchy yard of the house trailer. She tried to slap him, but he shoved her hard backward and she fell and cried out.
You’ll hurt the baby, she cried.
Baby? the woman in the Lexus said. The window powered up on the Lexus and the woman vanished behind smoked glass. The motor cranked and the car backed up the driveway.
Goddamn it, Quincy, Bonedaddy said. Do you have to tell everyone you see? You’re going to ruin me in this town.
I’m going to ruin you in every town there is on a map, she said.
A porch light came on next door. The front door of the trailer opened and a man stood on a makeshift stoop of stacked concrete blocks in the harsh light. Insects spiraled in the electric helix. He was a fat man naked to the waist holding a can of beer. His belly looped over the waistband of his slacks.
I ain’t puttin up with no more of this crap, Bonedaddy, the man said. You ain’t beatin up on no little slip of a girl while I’m around to stop it.
Then stop it or call the fucking law, Bonedaddy said.<
br />
I done called them, the fat man said.
A middle-aged deputy sheriff came to put things to rights. An authoritative presence in khaki. She glanced at his holstered pistol. What’s the trouble here, Bonedaddy, he asked.
Bonedaddy was all polite deference. A touch of selfdeprecation in his voice. Well, she just kind of attacked me, he said. Jumped right out of the bushes on me. She seen me with Jewel Seiber and I reckon she’s jealous. Everything’s all right now.
Quincy Nell felt small and far away, so far you couldn’t see her.
Let me drive you home, the cop told her. His voice was curi ously gentle.
I’ve got my car, she said. I have to drive.
I believe we’ll send someone for it, the cop said. Just get in the squad car there.
I have to drive my car.
I believe we’ll send someone for it, he said again. Get in the car, please.
She got in the car.
He drove back through Clifton. He seemed not to know what to say to her. She watched his reflection in the glass. His face looked strangely ambiguous. She thought he might begin to lecture her, or pull over at a roadside table and rape her.
Finally he cleared his throat. I’ve got a daughter myself about your age, he began.
That’s nice, she said, and that was the end of that.
IN AUGUST THE HEAT turned malign. It didn’t rain and it didn’t rain. In the bottomlands corn withered and the blades twisted upon themselves then turned yellow and sere. The thermometer at midday hovered at 110 degrees for ten days in a row. The sky was absolutely cloudless and about the sun it seemed to quake and tremble like molten metal.
Bonedaddy labored shirtless with the nail gun shooting eightpenny nails into oak pallets. He worked in cutoff jeans and a red bandanna tying back his wet black hair and the sun hammered him fiercely as a weapon the God of his childhood had turned against him for his sins.
Nights were no cooler. At night far-off upriver you could see heat lightning flicker soundless and rim-light such clouds as there were with brief flashes of rose and white but it would come to nothing and in the morning the clouds would be gone and the hot bowl of sky as smooth and seamless as a china cup.