Piper

by John E. Keegan

  “It’s Wakashan,” she said. “May the river flow through your veins.”

  “Does your mom speak it?”

  “God, no. She assimilated and that’s what she wants me to do. But she can’t help herself.” I’d heard from Mom the story of how Rozene’s father was white, a Russian fisherman who’d become a boozer and physically abused Mrs. Raymond until she became fed up and fled to Stampede. “Do you know where Condon Bagmore’s brother came down?” she said.

  Bagmore was on my mind too, but it wasn’t just because we were at Harvey Field. In some eerie way, being confined with her in the Corolla reminded me of the supply shed with him under the grandstands. It was intimate. It was sexual. Instead of not trusting Bagmore though, I didn’t trust me.

  “Hey, what’s the matter? You’re spacing on me.”

  “Sorry. Bad subject, I guess.”

  “Okay, let’s talk about the Mile High Club.”

  “The Mile High Club?”

  A smile broke out on her face and she flopped her elbows, accidentally honking the horn. We both laughed and looked around to see if anyone had heard us.

  “You know Nick Oster,” she said. “Clete’s dad? He runs a crop dusting business. One of his planes is supposed to have a featherbed that covers the entire tail section.” She was gripping the top of the steering wheel and trying to contain herself. “People pay him to take them up while they have sex.” She raised her eyebrows and waited for my response.

  I was stunned, first because I prided myself on knowing what was going on in Stampede, and second, because of the way I’d always thought of Rozene. Her glee at the prospect of folks fornicating on Nick Oster’s featherbed as they cruised over the homes and churches of Stampede surprised me. I didn’t want her that assimilated. “Do you know anyone who’s done it?”

  “The Morrisons have,” she said, biting her lip to keep from laughing.

  “The Minister Morrisons?” I pinched one of her toes and laughed with her. Gordon Morrison was the Presbyterian minister in Stampede, a fairly young guy with a British accent, who coached the boys’ select soccer team. It was his wife, Twyla, whom Mom had slapped across the face when she said something derogatory about Ashley Carlisle.

  “They wanted to conceive and they’d tried everything else.”

  “She’s so mousy.” I tried to imagine this floating featherbed in the sky, with portals so you could count the church spires as you were going down on your partner. Was there a divider between the lovers and the pilot? Did Nick Oster change sheets between customers? Were there seatbelts for takeoffs and landings? Did Nick do loops to help the sperm reach Twyla’s uterus? There seemed to be a growing chasm between appearance and reality. Ministers prayed to the heavens and did it in the clouds. And Rozene Raymond was sitting with the weight of her broken leg on me.

  A single engine plane painted with a purple and orange Federal Express logo on its fuselage circled the field. The drone of its engine grew louder as it reached our end of the runway, then faded as it went past. If I continued to play with the toes that stuck up through the plaster boot in my lap I was afraid the hum of my own engine would drown out the plane. When I brushed the underside of her index and middle toe, she curled them around my little finger and held on. The plane had aligned itself with the runway and was returning. I could hear it cutting through the wind, idled down, as it glided over the top of the Corolla and then dropped like a falcon onto the concrete runway. I squeezed her toes as the plane bounced and finally settled on all three wheels and shrunk its way to the other end of the field.

  “Wasn’t that beautiful?” she asked.

  My scruples were breaking down. She was making this too easy. There was none of the pushiness involved with boys, none of the differences like whiskers and sports and the aperture between the legs. “I better go home.”

  “Boo.”

  Maybe it was an excess of Catholicism, but I let her take her leg back and start the car. I knew this outing meant something different to me than it meant to her and, if I didn’t let her go, that difference was going to become painfully obvious. I kept thinking she must have an ulterior motive—she wanted me to help reinstate her mom at the paper—but there’d been no such request.

  The light was on in the kitchen when Rozene pulled the car up in front of my house. Willard liked to eat early with the dogs so he could digest things before bedtime. He said undigested food gave him nightmares about Freeway. There was no light in the living room, which meant Dad wasn’t home yet.

  “Do you want to come in a minute?”

  “I better go,” she said.

  “I can give your book back.” I sounded desperate.

  “Sure.”

  As I walked ahead of her toward the porch, I experienced shortness of breath. Her crutches creaked and the rubber caps plucked each time she lifted them off the sidewalk. I was trying to remember what my room looked like, whether I’d managed to flop the blankets up over the pillows. It was okay to look casual, but I didn’t want to seem sloppy. I glanced into the kitchen and smelled the Spam. There was a frying pan on the stove with a tired spatula resting in it and the counter had open jars of mayonnaise, horseradish, Dijon mustard, and grape jelly.

  “All clear,” I said, screening the doorway so she wouldn’t be able to see into the kitchen.

  She hesitated at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Oh, God, I forgot.”

  “No big deal,” she said.

  Just in case she stumbled backwards, I let her go first and she stumped her way up: good foot, crutches, good foot, crutches. Her cords fit snugly around her buttocks and there was a flash of brown just above her belt each time she lifted the crutches to the next step. Part way up she stopped for a breath and teetered until I steadied her with my hand in the hollow of her back, which was warm.

  “My room’s on the main floor,” she said. She didn’t need any excuses; she was in better shape than I was.

  “I like it upstairs.” Please, Willard, don’t pick tonight to come to my room.

  At the top of the stairs, I passed her and made an advance sweep through my room, kicking shoes under the bed, gathering up the dirty underwear and socks in a wad, and pulling the bedspread over the top of the tangle of blankets and sheets. It wasn’t everything, but hopefully it would put me over the sleazeball threshold. She appeared in the doorway just as I snapped on the light.

  “Wow, who does your room?”

  “Sorry for the mess.”

  “Clean room, dirty mind,” she said, and we both laughed.

  Like a hummingbird to honey, she went straight for my bookshelf, which I considered a good sign, and pulled out one of my Anais Nins. She tilted her head and studied the titles on the spines. I could feel myself blushing at how many I’d accumulated. She’d think I was a nymphomaniac. Maybe we should have just stayed in the living room. I could have offered her carbonated mineral water. As I looked around my room through her eyes, I realized how loaded it was with revelations—the Vaseline on the nightstand, the training bra that hung from the hook on the back of the closet door, the lump in the middle of the bed from the pillows I squeezed between my knees when I slept, and the sappy (“When your heart speaks, take good notes”) and not so sappy (“A woman is a foreign land”) notes I’d taped onto the wall over my desk, not to mention the button collection (“I’m a castrating bitch”). I didn’t have to ask her in, I didn’t have to bring her to my room. I must have wanted to run the risk of her knowing how twisted I really was.

  “Weren’t she and Henry Miller lovers?”

  I smiled. Maybe I’d found a soulmate. My copies of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn were safely stored in the drawer of my nightstand, hidden from Dad the same way Mom had hidden them.

  “Can I borrow her?” I liked the way she said her, as if the books had hearts and kidneys.

  “As long as you promise to tell me what you think.”

  I took off my shoes and made a short stack of pillows on the bed to
sit on. While Rozene studied the quotes over my desk, I put the lid on the Vaseline and crammed it and two used flossing strings into the top drawer of my nightstand. When she’d worked her way around to the bed, she balanced on one leg like a stork and set her crutches on the floor, then sat down on the bed with her back to me.

  “One more week of these and I’m going to look like a linebacker,” she said, rolling her shoulders.

  I rested my hands on her and pushed my thumbs against the muscles between the shoulder blades. Suddenly I was aware of how stale my breath was, like each exhalation had been inside me for a month. “You’re tight.”

  She folded her shoulders back and groaned. Her hair brushed against the tops of my hands. “I’ll give you a million dollars to keep doing that.”

  Mom used to massage me, making me lie face down on the bed while she sat on my butt and straddled me. I loved it when she slid her hands under my shirt and pressed me into the mattress with all her weight; it was how I imagined lovemaking must be, when your partner practically joins you. The pads of my thumbs tiptoed up Rozene’s vertebrae to the nape of her neck and she let herself go limp as I explored each curve and bump of her skull, rubbing in penny circles. She was taking deep breaths and with each inhalation I could feel her rise, then collapse again. I ventured over the crest of her shoulders until I could feel the ridges of her collar bones, which made little lakes that I dipped into with my thumbs and scrubbed the shorelines. With my hands under her shirt, I rubbed the smooth beach between her throat and her breasts and my face was so close to her hair that I could smell peaches. On the upstroke, my fingernails brushed under her bra straps.

  “I’m melting,” she said, and her words were like fingers across my nipples.

  If I’d mapped it out on paper, I would have said it couldn’t have happened, not this soon, not with me, but when she stretched herself out on the bed in front of me her breasts were right about where the dough would be if I were kneading bread. Extending my right arm as far as it would go, I managed to advance the switch on the three-way lamp to the lowest setting. Her eyes were closed and there was a residue of moisture on her lids which I grazed with my finger, feeling the heat of her eyeballs. Without saying anything, she unbuttoned the top of her shirt, far enough that I could see the little ribbon bow where the white satin cups of her bra connected. It was my turn to take a deep breath and the air that came out must have been hot against her skin.

  With her eyes closed, she found my hands and placed them on her bosom and I was afraid to move. Then she whispered something as tender as anything I could have imagined. “I’m glad your mother will finally be vindicated, Piper.”

  It was in answer to nothing we’d talked about at the airport. We hadn’t even mentioned my mom, but with those words my fingers moved again and I traced the soft furrow where the edge of her bra met skin. Her arms lay open, palms heavenward at her side, and she made no effort to stop me.

  As I devoured her chest with my eyes, I dreamed of Rozene and me in the Mile High Club, reading Anais Nin out loud to each other as Nick soared above the clouds in swoops as long and graceful as an eagle’s. We’d take turns rubbing almond oil into each other’s skin, and I’d straddle her the way Mom straddled me, and as the plane climbed out of a dive I’d press against her as hard as I could until she could feel us disappearing as one into the featherbed. And when we were tired, we’d ask Nick to take the long way home while we wrapped ourselves in the comforter like two larvae in a cocoon waiting to become butterflies.

  It would have been the perfect afternoon, except for the fact of Dad sticking his head in my door.

  “Excuse me,” he said. It was dark so I didn’t know how much he saw, but I pulled my hands out of Rozene’s shirt.

  “He must have noticed the car,” Rozene said, after he closed the door.

  Later that night, Dad and I nearly collided in the hallway on my way to bed. “I haven’t seen the Raymond girl for a while,” he said. It was an invitation for an explanation.

  I felt myself blushing and stepped back to make sure I was out of the light coming from the kitchen. “She gave me a ride home.”

  “The greatest human organ is free will, you know. It runs everything else.” I knew I was being reproached.

  “I’m not gay, Dad, if that’s what you’re implying. I don’t even like the word.”

  There was a stern look on his face and I wanted to say something about seeing him necking under the Carlisle Bridge, but I wasn’t sure enough of myself to force him into any comparisons.

  13

  Willard had the bright idea of bathing the dogs in the basement shower stall to get them ready for Christmas. He didn’t really ask me to help, but when I saw how hard the pug was fighting him I knew he’d have no chance with the bigger dogs. Besides, I needed something to ground me.

  I was bouncing between coal-black guilt and a giddiness so light it threatened to vaporize me. I could hardly wait to see Rozene again. I was composing letters to her in my journal. I was practicing out loud what to say in the lunchroom or passing in the hall. I made a list of Christmas presents for her. I separated the clothes in my closet, shoving to the right side of the bar everything I thought she’d consider dull. An hour later, I was afraid to see her again. I was in a spiraling free-fall into the darkness Catholics recognized as original sin, unwashed man and woman. From portholes in the darkness, I caught glimpses of Mom and Dad staring aghast as I spun past them.

  I held Paddy with one hand on his collar and the other one under his belly while Willard washed, the soap suds building on his forearms like sheared fleece. With my head in the stall, I could smell the musty aroma of the mold-speckled tile.

  “They’re like cars,” Willard said. “If I don’t baby them, they’re going to break down on me.” Willard still blamed himself for not catching the cancer or whatever it was that had eaten away Freeway’s insides like battery acid.

  “I don’t think a bath’s going to make any difference. Look at the animals living in the wild.”

  He stopped scrubbing and looked over at me like I was a zoological dunce. “They don’t have parents.”

  “Of course, they have parents. You mean they don’t have masters.”

  He ignored me and resumed his work around Paddy’s hindquarters, scrubbing the inside and outside of his legs, his penis, his tail, inside his ears, and between the toes. No body part was off limits. Although Paddy looked betrayed, he made no attempt to bite or bark. He just eyeballed me, wondering if this shivering humiliation would ever end. When Willard was satisfied that he’d babied him enough, he filled the mop bucket with warm water and dumped it over Paddy. Hair filaments swirled around in the bottom of the stall and washed down the drain.

  Willard let me wash Billy, the cross-breed with the lively eyes. “She’s a girl,” he said, “and besides her hair is shorter.” In other words, easy enough even for someone unfamiliar with the ways of the canine species.

  As I sudsed up her underside with long, firm strokes, I kept thinking of Rozene and it made me woozy. I’d awakened with a headache as hard as an anvil realizing that not only had I given free reign to my concupiscence, I’d betrayed Dirk.

  “Keep it away from her face,” Willard said.

  I kept scrubbing and my thoughts drifted. “Willard, do you think Mom liked being a mother?”

  He raised a shoulder to wipe some suds off his chin. “It was all brussel sprouts to her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she knew it was good for her, but she had to work at it.” He cackled to himself. “When she was little, she had more dolls than you could shake a stick at. Long, floppy ragdolls. Little bitty stiff ones. She made ’em beds out of cereal boxes, fed ’em, sang songs to ’em, even married them off. I told Carol, ‘Our Kitty’s going to have a dozen kids some day.’” Then he stopped talking, at least externally; there could well have been another conversation still going on between him and Grandma Carol.

  “So what happe
ned?”

  “What do you mean, what happened? Carol died.”

  We’d disconnected again and I looked at him to make sure he wasn’t just pulling my leg. “I mean why didn’t Mom have more kids?” I had always harbored the notion that life would have been easier if there were more of us in the boat. If I’d had a brother, maybe I would have learned normal responses to boys.

  “Why do some folks dance?” he finally said. “Why is your dad Irish? Why did I live longer than the wife? God only knows.” I knew that wasn’t true. This puzzle had a solution.

  “I must have been a disappointment.” My guess.

  He gave me another one of those unblinking stares, his eyes soap bubbles waiting to burst. “You do her ears?” Sometimes I swore his back wheels weren’t following his front ones.

  I lifted one of Billy’s ear flaps and spoke directly into the drum. “Tell your master he didn’t answer my question.” The vibration of my voice must have tickled Billy because she shook, spraying soapy water all over the bathroom, and rocking Willard back on his heels laughing.

  I didn’t push Willard for more history. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted him to say anyway. If I was brussels sprouts, I could live with that. I wasn’t trying to make Mom and me into the Madonna and child. I was drawn to struggle, the salmon who swam upstream to spawn, the loggerhead songbird who impaled its prey on thorns, the wasp who paralyzed the attacking tarantula, laid eggs on him, and covered him with dirt. I didn’t need sweet. The world gorged on sweet and regretted it afterward. A woman had to look out for herself to survive. Mustard was my built-in protection against the casual cannibal.

  “Willard, were you ever attracted to someone you weren’t supposed to?”

  He folded his legs under himself on the floor. “You mean like Carol?”

  “Some femme fatale you knew you should stay away from?”

  “A what?”

  “Someone so attractive you wanted to be owned by her.”

  A knowing smile broke out from under the specks of soapsuds on his face. “Someone has a boyfriend.”