Piper

by John E. Keegan

  His touch was sweet and softened me instantly. I reached out my hand, but couldn’t manage to do anything better than a swat on the sleeve of his jacket. “We should’ve kept better track of each other.”

  “Tell me about it.” He squatted down on the platform, sideways to me, and took another drag.

  This was Dirk’s meeting so I had no intention of going into all of the crap that was happening at my house. I just wanted to prime the pump, show him that whatever it was he had to say wouldn’t shock me. In my experience, people told you as much as you told them. Once when I lied to a woman on the Greyhound bus saying that I was going to Seattle for an abortion, she told me how she had to shoot bullets into the floor the last time her ex-husband came around drunk, looking for a warm place to stick his dick. “I hope you cream Carlisle’s ass.”

  He slapped the cross-piece so hard in front of him that the fire broke off the end of his cigarette and he threw the rest of it down in disgust. “Pisser!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  He straightened up so he could get his hand inside his pocket for another cigarette, lit up, and then held the first drag with his teeth bit into his upper lip. “You remember that picture Bagmore taped to the blackboard?”

  “Of course.”

  “My dad went apeshit when he found out.”

  “I know.”

  “He kept calling me a homo, and I didn’t know how to answer him, so I just blurted it out. I said he was right.” Dirk was trembling, his body heat exiting with the words he was spitting out. “I thought if me being a faggot was the worst thing that could happen to him, I wanted to be a faggot. I told him Carlisle and I had been sucking each other’s dicks for months. ‘How do you like that, Colonel?’ I told him. He slapped me around and called me a liar. That’s why I decided to go to the police with it. To shame him.” Dirk pushed his palms into his eye sockets, with a cigarette still caught in the fingers of one hand. “But it’s a lie, Piper. I made it up.”

  I stood up on my knees and wrapped my arms around him. He started sobbing, nuzzling his head against my chest. I was in six states of shock. I’d believed Dirk. Except for Dad, the whole town had believed it happened. I could feel the wetness through my shirt. Dirk was always such a softie, scared at the sight of his own blood, spooked by spiders, queasy in confined spaces, but I’d never seen him cry. He was the doughboy you could tease and poke and he’d just sag and give and rise again. But what he was doing to his dad was the stuff of young Shiite boys who strapped bombs around their rib cages and rode busses with the Israelis knowing that in their moment of glory they’d be as dead as their enemies.

  “It’s all right,” I said, patting him awkwardly on the back. “Nothing’s irreversible.” Except suicide, I thought, because that’s what was going through my head. I could almost imagine the headlines in the Herald. Dirk would be revealed as a public liar. What further jiggling would it take to detonate the bomb?

  “I wanna go through with it,” he mumbled into my shirt.

  “What are you talking about? You can’t.”

  “I’m not going to let you down.”

  “Me?”

  “It’ll clear your mother.” His hands were locked onto the back of my jacket like the pinchers of a lobster. “If he was doing me, nobody would believe he had anything going with her.”

  “That’s stupid.” The going-nowhere circles I was making on his back replicated the thought processes in my head.

  “I can’t not do it now. It’s not like the guy’s a saint.”

  I cradled him until the sobbing stopped and then he curled into a fetal ball between my legs and I stretched out my shirt and wiped the tears away from his eyes. It was as if Dirk had put a power in my hands I didn’t deserve. Like with the woman on the Greyhound, it was my turn to tell him something. Rozene Raymond would have been a good place to start. I could have told him about the aching I felt for her, the touches that had become milestones, how I was the Jezebel stalking his Rozene. As I looked down on this lump of a man in front of me, I couldn’t help but feel a profound welling of affection.

  He fell asleep with his face against the jeans on the inside of my thigh, his mouth and nose contorted so that it made him snore. I moved my legs in closer to cover his bare knees and calves. There was nothing to lean back against so I alternated between leaning forward and sheltering him like the hood of a car and then sitting up and supporting myself with my palms stiff-armed against the plank behind me. Dirk’s revelation had pushed me back to a precipice I thought I’d already navigated. If Dirk was lying, that meant Dad was right and something was happening between Mom and Carlisle.

  Dirk woke up and rubbed his eyes when a semi coming down Horse Heaven Highway pumped its air brakes and shuddered to a stop at the intersection.

  “Hey, cowboy,” I said, “we’ve never slept together.”

  He managed a smile. “How was it for you?”

  On the way home, we took the shortcut through the asphalt playfield next to St. Augustine’s, which was pitch dark. He kept putting his arm around me and squeezing me.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Piper.” As if somehow I’d put a dent in his problem.

  He kicked a stick, sending it shuffling across the hopscotch courts painted on the pavement. “Does Rozene ever ask about me?”

  His question startled me and I almost walked into the pole that tethered the girls’ volleyball, even though I would have sworn I could find that pole blindfolded under a minus moon. My first instinct was to lie, but I couldn’t lie after I’d just begged him to come clean about the Carlisle thing, so I equivocated. “Everyone’s worried about you.”

  He probably knew it was a crock, but he didn’t say anything more until we were at Commercial Street. “I guess we better go our own way, huh?”

  I was feeling pretty low-down and decided to make one last try at being a friend. I bunched his sweatshirt into my fists. “Look, Dirk. Nobody’s ever risked their ass for me like you’re doing, but life’s not that long and I don’t want you to spend the next twenty years of it in jail for perjury.”

  He put his stubby hands over mine. “Don’t take this one away from me, Piper. Okay?” His voice was firm. The trembling was over.

  “You can drop the whole thing and come clean.”

  “Don’t squeal on me, okay?”

  I let go, leaving the protrusion of little tents where I’d twisted his sweatshirt. “Only if I have to.”

  He shook me playfully by the shoulders, which were limp. “I know you won’t. You’re one of us.” As if we were a whole gang. But I knew what he meant, even if I still didn’t know what I was going to do with what he’d told me.

  He headed east and I headed west, but after about twenty uncertain steps I turned around to watch him cut across the street toward the Comet Tavern. Before his dad went into seclusion and put the house up for sale, he might have been there with his handball buddies. The streetlight cast a shadow in front of Dirk that he was walking into. His shoulders were stooped like he was carrying a cross on each of them and his scarecrow arms drooped lifeless at his side. I was editing a story about the Payton Miller family reunion when someone knocked on my door.

  It was John Carlisle, in his loafers and tights with leg warmers bunched around the ankles and a teal-colored silk ascot looped under his chin and tucked into the V of his shirt. A week ago I would have told him I didn’t want to talk to him, but Dirk’s revelation had undercut me. “How’re you doing?” he asked.

  When I made a nervous exhalation, a little snot shot onto my upper lip. I wiped a sleeve under my nose and fluffed up the pages on my desk, wishing I’d come to work earlier and avoided this little tête-à-tête. “Fine, I guess. My dad would probably be a better judge of that.”

  “He’s a good teacher, isn’t he?” He smiled and rested one buttock on the two-drawer filing cabinet. “Do you mind?”

  “No, fine.”

  “I think it’s special when a father and daught
er work together.”

  “Beats mowing lawns, I guess.”

  “I always thought my sister Ashley and I would end up working together.” He reached down and evened up his leg-warmers.

  “That’s nice.”

  “When Dad didn’t come home from Vietnam, Mother started drinking. Then she developed Parkinson’s. That was on top of the neurosis.” He laughed to himself and I evened up the papers on my desk, wondering why he was telling me this. “It got so bad she was ashamed to go out of the house. Of course, I would have been ashamed if she had.”

  “The house where you live now?” I could at least comment on the logistics.

  “She made my sister do all the cooking and cleaning and blew up at her if she caught me helping. At night, Mother would get buzzed on her sherry and lecture Ashley about how she was too sloppy and too bitchy to find a husband.” I wanted to ask him why they didn’t just cut off her liquor supply if she never left the house, but then it occurred to me how easy it would have been for a Carlisle to phone out for deliveries. Gray Cab still worked the territory between Stampede and Machias. “Mother was the sloppy one. We had to put a bib on her. One night, Ashley became fed up and dumped a Tapioca pudding in her lap and Mother started throwing dishes at us. She banished Ashley to the attic and made me take away the ladder.”

  “That’s child abuse.”

  “Not in those days, not here. I snuck her bread and Velveeta cheese and bottles of 7-Up, then crawled up there and slept on the floor with her at night.” I had trouble picturing anyone named Carlisle eating Velveeta and drinking soda pop. The rest of what he was saying totally eluded me. “We told each other stories, how Dad would come back and storm into the house and break all her bottles in the fireplace and make her wait on Ashley.”

  “What ever happened to Ashley?”

  “I hired an investigator to comb the east coast for her. She probably thought it was Mother looking for her. Anyway, she never surfaced.” He rubbed his thumb along the front edge of the filing cabinet, then turned the corner and rubbed it down the other side. “My fear is she got as addicted and pathetic as Mother.”

  “I wouldn’t give up.”

  He lowered his head. “No, she’s gone. Mother chased her away.” I turned and fidgeted with the hard copy on my desk. “You know you remind me of Ashley. The last time I saw her she wasn’t much older than you are.” He crossed his ankles and braced his palm under his chin as if he were trying to keep his head from flopping. “Sorry to run on like this.”

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “There was one important difference.”

  “Between me and your sister?”

  He stroked the ascot under his throat. “Ashley wanted her mother dead.”

  He was on the verge of weeping and turned to leave. My eyes followed the back of his green leggings. The legs that used to pirouette on hardwood floors in a New York dance studio quivered.

  I was immobilized and unable to manage a goodbye. I didn’t understand why he’d told me this any more than I understood why he would dress like a danseur in the middle of a town where boots and Levis were the standard. I was still angry at Dad for trying to save him, and astonished at Dirk for setting him up.

  But, for the first time in my life, I’d seen something from inside his skin.

  16

  The next day after school, Mr. Wendall asked me to stop by and see him, probably about my mid-term grades, which except for American Lit. had gone into the toilet. In fact, I was pretty sure Dad had already called school to ask what was going on. A call from Tom Scanlon would be taken seriously. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Dad was in Mr. Wendall’s office when I got there, maybe Willard too, and Marge, and the people from the paper, in one of those interventions they do for alcoholics. Come on, Piper, you’re only hurting yourself. We love you, but you’ve got to pull a three-point-O.

  When I entered his office, Mr. Wendall was alone, chewing gum, his sleeves rolled up, working on a stack of folders with clear plastic covers. The one in his hand was entitled “Mick Jagger and Richard Nixon,” by Jesse Little. The assignment was to compare two personalities in Modern American history. Mr. Wendall looked at his watch the way teachers always looked at their watches, moved a jacket off the chair next to his desk, and angled the chair so I’d be facing him. I sat down and crossed my legs, noticing the mud on my cuffs where the boots had rubbed. He put his pen into the trough of Jesse Little’s paper and closed it, as if the contents were confidential. Every idea in there had probably been cribbed from some book in the library. At the high school level, accurate plagiarism was what the teachers wanted.

  “Piper, you seem distracted lately.” He looked deeply into my eyes. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you mean you don’t think you’re distracted or you don’t want to tell me about it?”

  “Both.”

  “I didn’t go into teaching just to talk about the American Revolution and the Civil War.” He paused to let it sink in. “We’re your confidants. Whether it’s trouble at home or personal growth issues, we’re here for you.” He was speaking in code. Personal growth issues meant my sex life, which I wasn’t going to talk about with any teacher, but I wondered if I’d been that obvious. “I know how hard it must have been losing your mom.”

  “I thought this was about school.”

  “Well, it is. Indirectly.”

  “Do I have to stay?”

  “You don’t have to, but …”

  “Then I gotta meet someone. Thanks for your time, Mr. Wendall. I’ll pick up the pace.”

  I got up and scooted the chair back to where it belonged. I didn’t know if this was supposed to be a coming on chat or a coming out one, but I wasn’t going to stick around to find out. It would probably cost me on the grade for my paper, but “FDR and Eleanor: Who Wore the Pants?” was hardly destined for publication anyway.

  My face was still hot as I walked toward the parking lot on my way to the paper. It was Two DTP (“Days To Publication” in Dad’s lexicon), which meant that we’d be finishing the galleys for the back pages today. Dad always saved page one until the last minute in case something big broke, which in Stampede was not often, unless you counted the School Board’s decision to cut band and drill team expenses or the City Council’s directive expanding recycling to cover plastics. I knew there would be hot copy waiting on my desk when I arrived.

  There was a big huddle in the second aisle of the parking lot, which usually meant a fight. This was where the grudges that developed in the hallways or lunchroom were settled, as in, Meet me in the parking lot after school, you chickenshit. This one wasn’t a fight or at least not yet. Rozene Raymond was in the middle of the circle in her brown Corolla, with the engine idling. Condon Bagmore was sitting on the hood, leaning back against the windshield. The car was trapped in a web of restless high-schoolers, mostly guys, but also some girls, punkers with rainbow hair and tattoos on their ankles.

  “I’ll move when you tell me I can sit inside,” Bagmore said. The heels of his boots were braced against the top of the hood and I was sure he was going to scratch the paint.

  Every time Bagmore issued a challenge, people in the crowd whispered “Oohs” and “Hey mans” in support. Someone yelled, “Scalp her pussy!”

  The window on the driver’s side was rolled down and Rozene was hugging the outside of the door with her arm. “Honestly, Condon. I’m going to ask you one more time and then I’m going to leave it to centrifugal force.”

  “Did you say cunnilingus?”

  People laughed.

  I cut my way through to the front. “She told you to get your butt off her car, Bagmore. What part of that don’t you understand?”

  “The harlot’s daughter,” he said.

  If I had a bat I would have swung it at him. If I carried a switchblade I would have pulled it. All I had was my rage. I ran at him and jumped, thrusting my shoulder, but my legs banged into the fender, sap
ping the energy from my charge, so that instead of cold cocking him all I delivered was a spank. The windshield wiper came off in Bagmore’s hand and he speared it into the air, laughing.

  “Ole!”

  As I was rubbing my kneecaps, Martin Miller, the veterinarian’s colossal son whom everyone called Lenny because of his resemblance to the Steinbeck character, stepped out of the crowd. “You okay, Piper?” he said, ignoring Bagmore.

  “Yeah, fine.” God, was I glad to see him. I didn’t have a follow-up to my futile charge.

  Lenny stooped over to speak to Rozene. “Did I hear you say you want to go?”

  Rozene nodded her head and put both hands on the top of the steering wheel.

  “You guys in front clear out,” Lenny said. He didn’t yell. He said it about the same as if he’d asked what time the bus was coming, but people started backing away.

  Bagmore hugged the broken wiper against his chest. He didn’t have a good record against Lenny. Bagmore had once challenged him to fisticuffs because Lenny had the audacity to ask Bagmore to lighten up when he had a red-headed freshman kid named Ed Mooney cornered in the phone booth next to the bookstore. The fight was a non-event. Lenny palmed Bagmore’s head with one hand like it was a basketball and held him far enough away so that Bagmore’s swings landed harmlessly against his arm.

  “You just drive out of here,” Lenny said.

  Rozene was trembling and seemed uncertain.

  “Do what he says,” I told her.

  “Come with me.”

  “I’ve got to work.”

  “Please, I need to talk. I’ll drop you off.”

  As I walked around the car under Lenny’s protective gaze, people cleared an aisle for me. Rozene leaned over and unlocked the door. Bagmore glared at me through the windshield like a monkey from his cage. I thought his face was going to break out in zits as I took the seat he’d been vying for. Rozene patted me on the leg. “Thanks.”