Starcarbon

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Who cares about that?” Olivia began to put the clothes in stacks on the floor. Bobby took the rest of the things and threw them into a corner and straightened up the quilts. He pushed the saddle to the side and set the boots beside it. Then he took Olivia’s hand and they lay down together and began to remember how to love each other. Give in to it, Olivia told herself. It’s only Bobby and he loves me. He has always loved me and he always will. He won’t die or go away or think bad of me. It’s Bobby and he belongs to me.

  No guts, no glory, Bobby told himself. She couldn’t hurt you any more than she already has. You might as well forget it and get laid. “I haven’t been with anybody else,” Olivia said. “I bet I forgot how.”

  “You’ll remember. I love you, baby. I’ll always love you. I’ll love you till I die.”

  “How’d I do without this? How’d I leave you? Have you been all right? Are you okay?” She was stroking him with her hands, exploring every bone and crook and muscle of his body, finding all the places she had known. “Oh, Bobby, I’m so sorry. I’ve been so unhappy. I’ve been so lonely, so far from home.”

  “Hush up, baby. Let me come into you. Let me love you. Just let me love you.”

  “It’s been so long. Oh, God, it’s been so long.” It had been a long time. Once she had done it with an SAE who took her home afterward and never called her up again. And once with a boy who got scared and couldn’t get a hard-on after they took off their clothes in a hotel room. After that second try she gave up on sex and decided to devote herself to school instead. Only she hadn’t been able to devote herself to school. All her passion and nineteen-year-old wonder had turned into jealousy and nervousness and spite.

  “So what do you want old Mack to teach you? How to talk Navajo or how to write it? I know how to talk it. I could talk it with you. Kayo had a hand out at Baron Fork who was Navajo. God, he was a tough bastard. He was a cuttin’ fool. He could back a horse with his knees.” Bobby was sitting on the side of the mattress looking down at her. He was trying to figure out a way to give her the ring but he couldn’t decide what to do. I could wait until tonight, he was thinking. Until it’s dark. Chicken!

  “I want to learn to write it. You should, too. It might really be a high-paying job one of these days. They want to translate scientific ideas into Navajo and hide them in computers.”

  “It sounds pretty stupid to me. There’re thousands of broke Indians who speak Navajo. They could get any one of them to tell them what it says. It’s the biggest tribe. Didn’t you ever go to the powwows in Tulsa? There’re more Navajos than any other tribe.” He pulled a cigarette out of the pocket of a shirt lying on the floor and lit it. The smoke curled up to meet the ceiling of the trailer. “I got my G.E.D. Did I tell you that? I’m going to college. Can you imagine that? Old Bobby signed up to be a college student.”

  “I’m glad. That’s great. That’s wonderful.”

  “Yeah, Tom and Sherrill talked me into it. Hell, I did great on the tests. I was so busy rodeoing when I was young I didn’t pay any attention to school.”

  “Bobby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Put that cigarette out and get back in bed, will you? I’m not through with you.”

  “You aren’t?”

  “No, I’m not. And I don’t want to die from lung cancer if you don’t mind too much. I want to die from making love to you.” Then she pulled him back onto the mattress and began to count his vertebrae with her fingers. “Uno, dos, tres,” she began, “quatro, cinco, seis, siete.”

  “You going Mexican on me?” he said. “You turning into a señorita? First Navajo, and now Mexican.”

  A long time later they woke up in each other’s arms. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. “I have to go by the university and register for my classes,” Olivia said. “Get dressed. I can still make it if I hurry.”

  “Maybe I’ll sign up, too. Hell, I’ve got to start somewhere. You think they’d let me?”

  “Sure they will.” She pulled on her underpants and skirt, then began searching for her bra. She found it, then sank back onto the bed. “Well, I’ve got two more days. Wait until tomorrow morning and we’ll do it then. If you’re serious. We’ll go in the morning and I’ll show you how. Besides, you’ll have to send for the papers. You have to have your birth certificate and all sorts of things.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t do it.”

  “Of course you should. It’s a wonderful idea. Do you have any money?”

  “I’ve got plenty. I need to get a job for the summer, though. If I’m going to stay here. I thought I could get something in construction. They’re finishing the turnpike. It’s going to be great. Have you seen it?”

  “No.” Olivia sank back into a pile of pillows. Inside them was an old brown shirt of Bobby’s. It was so soft and old and dear, so much a part of him. She pulled it onto her chest. The heart was going out of the day. Fear was beating on the windows. Fear was seeping in. “Bobby, what’s going to happen now? What’s going to happen to us?”

  The fear slid around the room, curled up around the ceiling, traced the faint smell of cigarette smoke, doused the light. “I guess we’ll be together for a while and then you’ll break my heart.” He was dressing now. Pulling on his pants and then his socks and boots. He bent over to undo the spurs and remove them.

  “I don’t want to break your heart. I want to love you.” Olivia put her face down into her hands and began to cry. He sat back down on the bed and patted her on the shoulder. Then he pulled her into his arms and lay down upon the mattress and held her while she cried.

  “There’s nothing to cry about. You got me, baby. Anything you want I’ll do it. I’ll go to school or work. Anything you want. I told Tom when I was leaving. She’s got me, Tom. I’ll do anything for her. I’ll let her call the shots.”

  “Just love me.” She wept into his shoulder, but it was subsiding. “The world is a terrible scary place. People lie and cheat and steal and shoot each other and blow each other up. This psychiatrist I had for a while last fall. She’s this wonderful lady. I shouldn’t have quit going to her but I was worried about Dad spending all that money. She’s like the best mother you could ever imagine having. I would just walk into her office and sit down on the floor and start bawling. Well, I still call her up. I might call her up this afternoon. Anyway, I told her about you and she said it sounded like a healthy relationship. She was surprised I’d leave it to come to Charlotte and try to get Dad to love me. She said it was terrible not to have a boyfriend or ever get laid. She thinks people ought to have love. No matter how hard it is to get or how much trouble it is to keep it. I don’t want to leave you ever again. I don’t want to leave you now. I’m afraid to even leave this trailer.”

  “Well, we better go over to the house and call your Aunt Lily. I don’t want her getting mad at me the first day we’re together.”

  “Are we together?” She sat up now, still holding on to him, pulling him up with her. “Are we together, Bobby? Is that what this means?”

  “I’m yours, baby. If you want me, you can have me.” If I can get her in the house I can get out the ring, he was thinking. If I can ever get her out of this trailer. He moved to disengage himself from her, but very very carefully and slowly. He had seen Olivia get sad before and it scared him. He had spent too much time on horses not to take it seriously when an animal got frightened.

  They left the trailer and went into the house and Olivia called Mary Lily and told her she was with Bobby and that she would be home by dark. “I guess I better go back and spend some time with them,” she said. “You can come eat supper with us if you like.”

  “You want me to?”

  “Yes, if you want to. They like you, Bobby. My folks think you’re great.”

  “You think they’d let you sleep here with me? We could tell them we have to go to college in the morning.” He laughed. He was putting a piece of sliced cheese between two pieces of white bread. He added mustard and mayonnaise and held it
out to her. “Eat this. You haven’t had anything to eat all day.”

  “I guess I better stay out there tonight. But listen. Tomorrow night I probably can. I’ll tell Crow and Little Sun I’m staying with a girlfriend. Mary Lily doesn’t care, but they do.”

  “I hate for you to lie to them. Don’t go lying to them, Olivia.”

  “Well, it’s not really a lie. I mean, they know I’m lying. It’s just to be polite.”

  “Whatever you say. They’re your folks. Go on, eat that sandwich. I’ll make myself another one.” They took the sandwiches and two Cokes and went out and got into Olivia’s car and she drove back downtown and left Bobby at his pickup and he followed her out to the farm. Every few minutes he would look inside the glove compartment at the sack that held the box that held the ring but he couldn’t get up the nerve to touch it. Tomorrow, he decided. I’ll give it to her tomorrow night.

  Later that night, after they had gone out to the farm and eaten with Olivia’s folks and then sat out in the yard talking to Crow and Little Sun while Mary Lily did the dishes. After they had kissed goodnight a dozen times and Bobby had driven away and left her. After he was gone, promising to come back at nine in the morning to drive her to the college, after he was gone and she was alone with the night and the stars and her sleeping grandparents and Mary Lily reading a New Woman magazine she had bought at IGA. After all of that, the fear returned and Olivia picked up the phone and called the psychiatrist at Chapel Hill. “I hate to call you at home,” she began. “But something important has happened. Something happened I have to talk about. You told me if I ever got the idea in my head that I wanted to be dead to call you up. Well, I’ve got it. I was so happy today that when I stopped being happy I was so unhappy. I’m at home, in Oklahoma. I saw Bobby. I spent the afternoon with him. Now it’s night. I don’t know what to do, Doctor Carlyn. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.”

  “Keep talking to me. I’m glad to hear from you. I was sorry you stopped coming, Olivia. I was hoping you’d come back.”

  “I couldn’t. It cost too much. Dad’s so worried about money, Doctor Carlyn. He won’t admit it, but it worries him to death.”

  “Start at the beginning. Start talking. Where are you exactly? Tell me where you are.”

  Then Olivia talked for sixty minutes, telling the doctor about her year in school and Jessie’s baby and coming to Tahlequah and what it had felt like to enter the house where she had lived and seeing Bobby and making love to him and crying afterward and how terrible it was when they were eating dinner with her grandparents and how she kept knowing he was about to leave. “Ever since we woke up this afternoon, I kept thinking, Now he’s leaving. Now he’ll die in a car crash. Now he’ll go back to Montana. I bet he’ll never get into college and he’ll get mad at me for that. It’s starting to rain,” she said at last. It was eleven-thirty. They had been on the phone for an hour. Three times Mary Lily had come into the kitchen to see if Olivia was all right. Go away, Olivia had said to her. This is an important call. Leave me alone. Go away. “It’s probably going to rain all night. I can hear it on the trees. I hear the raindrops hitting every leaf. I used to believe trees were alive. These trees around this house. These trees know me. They were here when I was born.”

  “Does the rain bother you?”

  “Sometimes. When I’m alone. I think it hurts the horses to be out in it. I think they will be cold.”

  “Your mother died, Olivia. You think you will be cold and disappear and die. When you get upset or when it gets cold or wet, you think you are alone. You think you will be absorbed back into nothingness because your mother wasn’t there to hold you when you were born. But you aren’t alone. You have me and you have Bobby and your family there and your folks in North Carolina and your sister. You’re talking on the phone to me and you’re in that house where you were kept safe for sixteen years. Listen to me, honey. You’re okay. It’s only raining. Rain is fine. We’re made of water. Olivia.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I want you to call me back in the morning. Go get a pencil and write down some numbers I’m going to give you. I’m going to find you someone to see up there. I have a friend in Tulsa you can see. A good man.”

  “Okay. I got a pencil. Tell them to me.” Doctor Carlyn gave her the phone numbers, then she spoke in a very quiet voice.

  “Is your aunt Mary Lily there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she still awake?”

  “I think so.”

  “Go tell her that you love her. Thank her for loving you. You can learn how to love, Olivia. You can learn to be in charge of love. When you’re the one who gives it, you have an unlimited supply. Could you believe that, honey? Just for tonight.”

  “If you say so. If you want me to. Only I can’t see how I can stay with Bobby. It seems like so many things can happen. How can we figure all this out?”

  “That’s what time is for, Olivia. This is only the beginning. Go tell your aunt you love her. Sleep with her again if you like. You have my permission to be twelve years old tonight.”

  “Okay. I will, that’s good. Thanks an awful lot, Doctor Carlyn. Thanks for talking to me.” Then Olivia hung up the phone and went into Mary Lily’s room. Mary Lily was curled up on her side with her face toward the door, wide awake and worrying about her. “Scoot over,” Olivia said. “I don’t want to be alone tonight. I don’t ever want to sleep alone again until I die. I’m sick and tired of being all alone.” Mary Lily rolled over and Olivia got in beside her and put her arms around her and kissed her on the forehead and mouth and cheeks and then curled up beside her and fell asleep. Outside the rain was falling harder. A long wet front had moved in from the west and was pouring rain down upon the part of Oklahoma called Green Country. The parched earth and rocky soil and moss and tree roots and rusty-colored fields and creeks and gardens and rivers began to fill with water. Behind the clouds the moon moved ever eastward through the sky.

  Every living thing begins with water, Olivia was thinking. Perhaps water is like time—it’s our metaphor for time—only time isn’t real and water is—water carries the earth and serves it—makes the earth live.

  She fell asleep thinking things she had learned in this house—things she had forgotten in the schools of North Carolina.

  Chapter 19

  GO over this again,” Bobby said. It was the next afternoon. The ring was still in the glove compartment. Bobby and Olivia were barreling down the highway in the truck. They had given up on Flaming Rainbow and gone on and registered at Northeastern. Olivia had signed up for classes in Navajo and anthropology and they had started the wheels in motion to have Bobby registered as a freshman. Tom Macalpin had been on the phone all morning to the registrar and the chairman of the English Department and Bobby was going to be able to start on Monday as a special student until the paperwork was done.

  Olivia had called Dr. Carlyn again and had the name of a psychiatrist in Tulsa. “Be sure and call him,” Dr. Carlyn said. “It won’t be easy to get an appointment, so go on and make the call. You’ll like this man, Olivia. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “Okay. I will. I really will. As soon as I have time.”

  “Do it today. Call and get an appointment set up.”

  “Can I call you too? Can I talk to you again?”

  “Of course. But make an appointment with Charlie.”

  “I will. I really will.” Olivia hung up the phone and felt for a moment strangely dissatisfied, as though she should not have hung up, as though there were things yet to say. Charlie, she decided. Charlie Coder. Charlie. Well, I will call him. It isn’t far to Tulsa. We could go and see the Drillers play and get some ice cream in those little hats.

  “Come on,” Bobby called. “Come on, baby, let’s get out in the country. I got to break into this school business easy. Let’s get out to some fresh air.”

  Then they had eaten sub sandwiches for lunch and gone out to Olivia’s farm and dug her old boots and jeans o
ut of a storage chest. Now it was three in the afternoon and they were on their way to Baron Fork to go riding. “Go over that again,” Bobby was saying. “This doctor told you because your mother died you’re afraid to sleep by yourself? That’s good luck for me, isn’t it?” His hand was on her thigh. She was sitting so close to him he could hardly drive. The glove compartment was twelve inches from his hand. All he had to do was open it and reach inside. No, he decided, you better wait. “You got the softest skin in the world,” he said. “I love you, baby. I been missing you so much. It’s like part of me was cut away. You know what Tom said? He said I was the most in love of any man he’d ever seen. I told you he knew your aunt, didn’t I? A long time before he married Sherrill.”

  “Do you think he was her boyfriend? There’s a cowboy in one of her books that has an affair with the main character. He sounds like that guy.”

  “I don’t think so. He wouldn’t have been talking about her in front of Sherrill. Sherrill’s the most jealous woman you ever saw in your life.” Bobby patted Olivia’s thigh. Olivia leaned her face into his shirt sleeve. If happiness had a smell, she decided, it would smell like this, soap powder and ironed starch and the sweet smell of Bobby’s skin. “I want you so much it hurts,” she said. “Stop this truck and let’s do it on the highway.”

  “On the four-lane?”

  “Yes.” He pulled the truck over to the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition. He pulled her body into his and kissed her on the mouth. For several minutes he kissed her as hard as he could. Then they both started giggling.

  “It’s probably against the law,” Olivia said. “We might get arrested.”

  “I can just see it in the paper. ‘Ex-fullback and cheerleader caught on the highway in the middle of the afternoon. Olivia and Bobby are at it again.’”

  “Her psychiatrist said it was okay. Listen, Bobby, you can go on now. You can start driving.” She slipped back over to her side of the seat and adjusted her blouse. She rolled down the window and stuck her arm out into the soft June air. “We’re spinning through space,” she began. “Oh, God, I saw this movie in Carolina. Called The Meaning of Life. It’s hilarious. This English guy climbs out of a refrigerator. He’s trying to get this lady to donate her kidneys. They’ve already killed her husband taking his. It’s called ‘Live Donor Transplant.’ It’s hilarious. Anyway, he climbs out of the refrigerator and starts singing this song. Jessie and I memorized it last year. It goes, ‘Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving and revolving at ten thousand miles an hour. It’s orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it’s reckoned, the sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see, are moving at a billion miles an hour.’” Olivia was singing at the top of her lungs, so happy she could barely contain it.