“Okay, turn around.”
“I don’t want to now.”
“Great.” The dust cleared and she continued on to the stop sign with exaggerated precaution, drove like that until we were on Sixth, about four blocks from the house and on a straightaway, and then hit the gas again hard.
I said, “Jesus, slow down.”
We squealed into the driveway and sat there, arguing loudly. I spotted the old man next door, approaching the fence to investigate.
“This is a neighborhood,” I said, “you could have hit someone.”
“There was no one around,” she said.
“Shut up,” I said.
“Don’t you tell me to shut up.”
I followed her in the back door, casting a short dour nod from the steps to the man in the garden. I watched her get a glass and open the refrigerator for the pitcher of ice water. I went and tried to take the glass from her but she wouldn’t let me. I tried to kiss her and she resisted, standing against the refrigerator. I held the wrist of the hand in which she held the glass.
“C’mon,” I said.
“No.”
I pushed the hair from her face and kissed her neck. I pulled the tails of her shirt from her pants.
“You don’t love me,” she said.
“Wanna bet?”
I pulled open the snaps of her shirt, put my arm around her waist, lifting her as she raised her legs, and I carried her into the bedroom.
We kissed and got off our jeans, and as soon as our clothes were gone the tone changed, we grabbed and pulled and held onto each other hard and were fucking almost immediately, but kept changing positions like we wanted to do everything at once. We didn’t bother to turn on the fan, so were soon slick and then dripping with sweat, our skin everywhere sliding against each other. She sat up and pushed me back on the bed and fell across me but I got her turned over again and with my arms under her back, holding her up, looking into her face I said, “Now.” She put her hands against my chest pushing me away and then grabbed my arms, straining higher against me with her hips, and in a minute we were lying flat on the bed, soaked.
“Can you get the fan,” I heard her say.
Somehow I got up and dragged the chair with the fan to the foot of the bed and clicked it on; then lay back down beside her and closed my eyes as the cool air poured across us. In a little while I turned my head and looked at her and she looked at me, and I kissed her, ran my tongue across her teeth. I could feel twenty different things about her at the same time and still want her, or twenty different things consecutively in twenty seconds and still want her, everything I had thought last night didn’t matter, and I realized I was shaken by her anger. “Are you cooler?” I asked.
“Yes.”
We took a shower together and put the sheets in the washing machine and went to the market for lunch, and even though she was very affectionate I thought her strange, as if she were still angry with me or had felt my unease more than I knew.
Back at the house we were startled by an explosion of sound—filling the neighborhood, coming near. The house rattled and shook and at last, when the source of the sound stopped in the driveway, I recognized it as a motorcyle. “Who’s that?” I asked Irene, jumping up from the table.
“Oh, shoot,” she said. “Billy Wayne. I forgot he gets off early on Fridays.”
Without thinking I dashed to the bathroom, where there was a window over the bathtub that faced the driveway. He rode a Harley hog, naturally, and of course he didn’t wear a helmet, he’d been to Vietnam, for Christ’s sake.
“What are you doing?” Irene said.
I was standing in the bathtub was what I was doing.
“This is really embarrassing,” I said, though I hadn’t even thought to be embarrassed.
“Well, the sheets aren’t dry,” she said, “there’s nothing we can do.” I peeked out the window again and he opened the garage; he was wheeling it in.
“Robert, he has sex too, you know, obviously.” I turned and looked at her. “And anyway, their sheets are so clean every day they must have suspected.”
“I have to use the bathroom. Go out and close the door.”
She rolled her eyes and left. I got out of the bathtub and went, just to kill time, washed my hands knowing I was acting stupid, part of me cognizant of the entire situation as comical, but the rest of me was deflated, illogically angry.
He offered us beer and pretended not to notice when Irene took the sheets from the dryer and went to remake the bed, while he and I sat at the table and talked about something.
“What is wrong with you?” she asked, driving home.
“What?”
“What’s wrong?” To my “nothing” she rolled her eyes again, but dropped it.
I was in a foul mood at supper, though, and didn’t try to hide it. Consequently, Irene’s conversational steam petered out and she grew quiet. Never one to smooth anything over, Mr. Walpers opened the paper.
Later that night as she watched Johnny Carson, I sat down on the couch and she made a display of closing her posture, crossing her legs, hunching toward the TV as if she didn’t want to miss a syllable of Joan Rivers. Fuck it, I thought, and waited for the commercial.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
A tremor of anger unsettled her brow. “Yes.”
“Did you ever sleep with Billy Wayne?”
“Why?”
“I’d just like to know.”
“It’s none of your business,” she said, and then left the room.
The back door was open; she sat on the steps. She’d gotten a pack of her father’s Chesterfields and smoked, held a glass of bourbon. I wouldn’t apologize. I wasn’t the only one being unreasonable. I wouldn’t ask why she’d said what she had at the fairgrounds, but I refused to apologize. I wouldn’t mention the dress with the four buttons, her mother’s dress. I didn’t like it, this link to death and to longing and to me, lifting the dress over her head—this blending of loss and the past with the erotic. Who was I in the empty arena, what would it have meant to her, taking her under the bleachers, making love to her in the dirt?
She stubbed out her cigarette in the dry grass as I sat down beside her, and drained what was left of her drink. There was that keen relief night brings after hot days, and the light was beautiful and strange. Though the moon wasn’t visible, light filled the sky, plunging the sloping ground and the small weathered barn into one soft plane. “Tomorrow Becca has off,” she said. “We’re driving out to some stables, a friend from high school boards horses I wanted to see. You don’t have to come.”
“I’ll come.”
“Beau is his name. Beauregard Dwight Eisenhower Gray,” she shook her head in a mildly sarcastic commentary. I could tell she was discomfited, didn’t know what to say.
14 Mercury Dying
Going to Rebecca’s the next day she smoked, dragging deeply à la Bette Davis, and I knew we were in the middle of a struggle that wouldn’t be quickly or easily resolved.
Becca came out to the car at the cue of the horn and as she got in I saw Billy Wayne behind the screen door.
“I wanna ride,” Irene said.
“You ride?” Becca asked me.
“Not often,” I answered. Twice in my life.
“You can ride if you want to,” Irene said.
I didn’t reply. Her tone said, “I dare you.”
“First time I tried racing the barrels I fell and got kicked in the head,” said Becca. “Scared the shit out of me and I never rode again.”
The stables were down a dirt road at the edge of a ranch; cattle grazed off in a wider field past the immediate grounds. There were several small shelters, a pasture, a wired-off area where a few horses stood in the sun, and two corrals. In one a young girl with black braids held a lead, guiding a stocky brown pony around her in a circle. The larger corral opened on one side to the pasture. Everything had a rundown, unprosperous look, but that may have been the dust and the heat. Ire
ne had told me the rancher, the uncle of Beauregard Dwight, was one of the richest in Montgomery County.
“Well, haidy hi haidy ho,” he said as we got out of the car. I knew I’d have to be really far gone to feel jealous of this one, rail skinny, bright yellow hair. In an orange Western shirt sporting green pockets, he resembled an exotic parrot.
“Hey, Beau,” Irene said, grinning and slapping him on the arm like a guy. “This is Robert.”
“Haidy hi. You woulda told me you was comin’ today,” he said to Becca, “I’d a had somethin’ to ride. Pret’ near everybody’s out.” Becca said nobody wanted to ride but Irene. “Got a boy for Irene,” and he winked at me and Becca and beckoned with his bright head for us to follow him to a young Appaloosa.
“Getcher butt over here, P,” he said to the horse, and seeming thoroughly bored and put out, the horse advanced, his great head nodding slowly up and down. He stopped before Beau, working his jaws, observing us out of one eye.
“This is Poker Chip,” said Beau, taking hold of the halter and turning to us the mottled gray face. “Girl down in Caney’s been teaching him the barrels, but she ain’t coming today.”
Irene petted the horse’s muzzle and he lifted his head and backed off a few paces. Beau yanked him back, laughing what was almost a cackle.
“He’s feisty, you can ride eem, Irene.”
“Got a saddle?” she asked.
“Shit, you wanna saddle?” He let go of the horse and headed off to one of the wooden structures with unexpected fluidity and speed, his gait consisting as it did of a short limp and compensating hop.
“Got barrels, you want to give him some turns,” he called back.
“Just get me the saddle, Beau, I’m not messing with this girl’s horse.” She was not having any of Beau’s faintly inciting banter, but I saw pleasure in her eyes, and a measured excitement.
“What are you and Beau trying to do,” she asked Becca, “set me up?” She ducked under the wire and approached the horse, talking soothingly to him, this time reaching out and grasping the halter and holding it firmly, and stroking him again. “Good boy, good boy.”
Beau came back and saddled him, and Irene lifted a leg and put her foot in a stirrup, and in one agile motion swung herself over and was seated. The saddle creaked and he took a little leap forward. Irene pulled on the reins, caressing his neck. Beau opened an aluminum gate at the other side of the pen and Irene walked Poker Chip out and off to the pasture.
They trotted back and forth, testing each other, and when I noticed Beau again he was rolling this barrel the size of an oil drum out to the connecting corral. Irene caught sight of him and yelled, “Wasting your energy, Beau!” She swung Poker Chip around in an arc and took him into a canter, rode past the corral and out of the pasture and beyond another dirt road. Way out in the next field she opened him up, and they flew across the horizon.
“Nice to see Irene ride again,” Becca said. “She had the prettiest sorrel horse, Mercury. Oh Irene, she was always wild.”
“Wild, how?” I asked.
“Oh, you just always knew she’d do something different, you could always tell….”
Beau had rolled out another barrel and set them both upright at the center of the corral, leaving eight or ten feet of space between them.
“He wanted to be a rodeo clown,” Becca said, “but his uncle said he was too dumb,” and she laughed, hiding her mouth with one hand. “Beau’s a clown, but a rodeo clown’s not a clown—they’re brave. Anyway, he’s got that one leg shorter than the other. But he kept on about it and his uncle couldn’t stand hearing it anymore and sent him to rodeo school. First day there he grabbed hold of a bronc and got thrown in the weeds.
“Where is she?” Becca shielded her eyes against the sun and scanned the horizon. It didn’t seem possible in all that flatness, but Irene was gone.
“You wanna go sit in those chairs?” Becca asked me. She went to get a cigarette from the car and I took a seat in one of the two chairs set up between where we’d been standing and where Beau was exhorting the young girl to make the pony go faster, faster. Beau’s role in life seemed to be that of instigator.
“Whew, that feels good,” Becca said, sinking into the chair beside me. She smoked, holding her hair off her neck with her other hand. “You want to talk about Irene, don’t you?” she said.
“We don’t have to.”
“It’s okay, me and Irene go way back.” She dropped her hair and yelled, “You, Beau! Leave that girl alone!” Beau threw up his arms asking for mercy, then resumed his place at the fence, quieter, for now anyway. “You asked how she was wild,” Becca said, “Why, when we were just kids, ten years old, we were having an overnight at my house and she got mad at me and left in the middle of the night, three o’clock in the morning! Slammed the front door and woke everybody up and my dad had to go find her in the car. She was already ten blocks toward home, and Dad said it took him forever to convince her to come back with him, this little kid!” Becca laughed at the memory, and sobered, put out her cigarette gravely by rubbing it on the heel of her sandal. “We’ve had our hard times. I was glad when she moved to New York. I was.” She glanced at me. “She hadn’t of gone I might not have had a husband. Oh, isn’t so. Wasn’t like it was serious, she was on the rebound from Hank, she tell you about Hank? But I already liked him and she knew it, and I was hurt.”
So I hadn’t invented it. I’d detected the leftover essence of a sexual history. I was too busy feeling smug to consider why Becca told me or whether she was wrong or lying, although she was clearly insecure and, on the evidence of their own shared history, conceivably jealous of Irene. Who knew to what heights of glamour Irene’s life in New York had ascended in Becca’s imagination?
“There she is,” Becca said. Irene saw us and Beau and the barrels and came riding over in a flashy trot.
“Good horse, Beau.” Her hair was messy and her color high; she looked down at me with an expression I recognized from bed.
“Nice boy,” she told Poker Chip, and to Beau, “I’m not racing those barrels.” She tugged at the reins and turned.
“How come she doesn’t want to try the barrels?” I asked Becca.
“Oh, she will,” Becca said. We watched as Beau talked Irene into checking out the corral. “You can try eem, Irene,” he was saying, “this boy’s been practicing barrels all summer, why would I lie? I got the gate open, you get your start in the pasture, there’s plenty of room.”
“Well, I’ll see how he goes,” she said finally and took off for the pasture. “Show yer boyfriend!” Beau called. He turned to me. “Irene, she’s good.”
“She’ll want to ride out to those barrels fast as she can,” Becca said, “and get that horse around ’em. For speed you go close and turn sharp.”
“I’ll time her,” Beau said.
“What’s a good time?” I asked Becca.
“Oh, twenty seconds is not bad.”
Irene appraised the corral then headed in, holding Poker Chip back, and went wide around the barrels in a clean S shape: “See there!” yelled Beau. Irene flipped her hair as she turned the horse back to the pasture, warming to the feel of her audience.
This time she charged the first barrel, cutting the horse to turn only in the moment it looked like they’d plow into it—but as she recovered from the turn and pulled the curve for the second barrel she reined him in again, and the side of his body passed maybe two feet by that second barrel as he went around it, much more of a cushion than there’d been on the first. Beau called as she rode by us, “Twenty-four! New York ain’t helped your riding none, has it, Irene?”
She leaned in on the horse and tore out to the pasture and came back so fast that when they hit the dirt of the corral there was nothing but dust and the beating of hoofs on the ground. She took the first turn and coming out of it the horse almost went to his knees, I thought they would fall, but then he was up and turned to the left, and then back to the right again around the second b
arrel close enough it shook, dust pouring out after them in a shower.
“Twenty-one, twenty-one!” yelled Beau. She nearly crashed the far end of the fence.
“You can do twenty, Irene, c’mon!” But she’d stopped.
“What’s a matter?” Beau said. Poker Chip’s neck was dark with sweat. “That’s enough,” she said, and got down.
“You was just warmin’ up,” Beau said.
“Thanks for letting me ride him,” said Irene. “Good boy, good horse.”
Beau looked mad, “He’s hot now, Irene, c’mon!”
Her eyes were glittering, she was elated, but said, “I don’t want to. Y’know, Beau, it isn’t good for the animals, really.”
“Nothin’ wrong with this boy,” he said.
“I mean all of the animals, this—rodeo.”
She stroked Poker Chip’s mane and neck, and said, “They’re so beautiful and so helpless, really, which gives us a responsibility, doesn’t it?” To Beau, she may as well have been speaking a foreign language.
He took the reins, huffily, “C’mon, P.”
“Oh, Beau,” Becca said. He acted finished with us, and it wasn’t until we were walking to the car and Irene yelled, “Bye, Beau!” that he forgave us and did a funny little show-off dance, spinning and wrapping himself in the reins, and climbed up on the horse, waving and calling “Bye, bye!”
“Deranged,” Irene said to Becca.
At the car I caught Irene’s eye and said, “Wow.” She smiled and looked away. “The bozo,” said Becca disgustedly as we pulled onto the road—still waving, his bright hair and shirt dabs of color against the dried landscape.
Irene and Becca made plans for the night, a sort of double farewell date.
When Becca was gone I said, “We have to see him again?”
“Christ,” said Irene, through her teeth. She backed out of the driveway. “Don’t come if you don’t want to. That’s fine with me.” The car smelled of cigarettes, horses, dirt.
“I’m not fighting with you, Irene. Don’t do this.”
“Do what? What am I doing?” At her father’s she parked and didn’t get out, sat staring down at the steering wheel. I put my hand under her hair and held her neck, which was damp, leaned over and kissed her, felt her respond—except Billy Wayne was still there in my head.
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