Pulse Points

by Jennifer Down

  ‘Do you want to stop?’ he called, a few steps ahead. ‘You look like you’re fading a bit.’

  ‘No, let’s just keep going.’

  His strong, spidery legs took the stairs two at a time. I was slower. First there were four steps between us, then ten, and suddenly he was rushing ahead the only way he knew how, pulling away like an untamed horse, upward into the wide sky. He was a hands-in-pockets kind of walker, and there was something almost comical about his skinny figure, all in black, loping away from me. But the higher he got, the more enfeebled was I. He grinned and mouthed something at me, exhilarated, from the top. I pushed on, but crippled; I had the impression that I could topple back. Lewis was looking down on me. He’d stopped smiling. It’s all right, I wanted to say before he could ask it. I made a silly joke. He laughed unsteadily. I set one foot in front of the other.

  And when I reached the top at last, he held me very tightly. The view I had was of his coat, a sliver of the apricot-coloured afternoon past his shoulder. We might have stood like that for ages, clenched and petrified, but after a time we unfolded. He put an arm around me and we stood in the shadow of the basilica. The clouds had lifted and the city spread its legs for us; all the factories, all the rooftops, the square where the abattoir once was, the cathedrals and hospitals and spires and stations, all steeped in gold.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ he said without looking at me. ‘We’re almost there.’

  We stood there, shoulder to shoulder. We were Marie and Pierre in Zola’s Paris, looking out over the city at the novel’s end. Du blé, du blé partout, un infini de blé…

  All this beauty, all this gold. I turned to him, I wanted to tell him. There’s this priest, I wanted to explain, who has a complete loss of faith, une crise de foi totale, and so he leaves the monastery and meets this girl, Marie, and…

  It was too hard.

  ‘What?’ he asked. He dropped his head. ‘What did you say?’

  So much beauty, so much gold. It was pornographic.

  ‘I said,’ I answered, ‘I said, “this is too hard.”’

  VASELINE

  Delaney’s mom has bought tampons for me since I was twelve because I’ve always been too embarrassed to ask Pop or Luther. Delaney brings them to school for me in the drugstore paper bag. Last time she gave me a jar of Vaseline, too, and told me it’d make it hurt less next time Ray tried to stick it in me. The Vaseline had a blue strip on its lid to show that it hadn’t been opened. It snapped apart easy enough. The surface of the jelly inside was smooth, calling out for me to plug my finger in it. It smelled like glue or something else you might use around the house. I put it in my bedside drawer. Luther wasn’t around to find it and ask me about it. He was in Colorado.

  In the summer, before he left, we hung out almost every day.

  We drove to Angel Peak, parked in the campground. Up there it was always noisier than I expected. The wind was loud. Depending which way it blew, you could hear the compressors down below, thumping away like an irregular heartbeat. We stood there while it got dark and I said, I hope I never get used to this and he looked at me all embarrassed.

  We went to visit Mom, which we hadn’t done together for a long time. The cemetery is tiny. It almost got eaten up by the gas plant, but somehow survived. It’s closed in with a chainlink fence, edged by road on two sides and by the plant on the other two. There’s a sign that reads ST MARYS CEMETERY in skinny iron letters, no apostrophe. Maybe someone didn’t think it was worth it, or maybe the small things are hard to make. The main Bloomfield cemetery has one identical.

  It was a concession for Pop to have her buried at St Mary’s, and not in the big cemetery on the hill. He was raised Episcopal. In the end he said, ‘It’s not about me or what I want,’ and that was all. He works at the ConocoPhillips plant next door. He visits Mom every afternoon when he leaves. They’re mostly Latino names on the graves, with shrines to saints on top. Mom’s is smaller. She liked things plain. Anyway, Luther had suggested it and we went together. It was the middle of the week, late afternoon. We were the only ones there. I laid the plastic flowers I’d brought. I left Luther to say what he wanted. I walked between the graves. The white and silver of the tanks was almost blinding. I didn’t think I was scared of heights, but when I saw the stairs winding up those tall towers, I got a bad feeling at the tops of my legs. I bent to wipe dust off of my anklet and to check, from a distance, if Luther was still going.

  We were walking back to the car when I saw a grave that read

  TROY J “PEANUT” DEJESUS,

  AUGUST 4 1979–NOVEMBER 27 1980.

  I started to bawl. It came on so sudden. I couldn’t say to Luther that I was crying about some stranger’s dead baby. Mom had been gone for years. I think he was embarrassed. He walked ahead of me some, to give me a few moments extra to calm myself down before I got into the truck beside him. It was that New Mexico sky, electric blue. It looks the same every summer.

  We drove to Morgan Lake, where we used to go fishing for carp and catfish, where the scenery was the coal power station. Of course you couldn’t eat what you caught there, but that never was the point. I didn’t like fish anyway. Mom used to fry catfish and serve it with cornbread and slaw. The small ones had dark flesh. They tasted muddy. Mom said that was because they came from the lake bed.

  Luther and I stopped fishing there years ago, but we still drove out sometimes. The smog from the Four Corners plant hung so thick it was hard to see the mountains beyond. At dusk the sky was a sick pinkish colour. The lake was man-made. Its water was used to cool the power plant. It was on a Navajo reservation. Once I said to Luther, It’s sort of a shame for the Indians. I meant the smoke spewing from the station. I meant the lake you couldn’t swim in.

  ‘They could’ve stopped it if they wanted to.’

  ‘Actually they couldn’t,’ I said, but he wasn’t interested. He was talking about how to break it off with his girl, since it was that time of summer when all the couples do that, since they’d all had a good hot two months of fucking and now they were going off to college so they had to practise saying my high-school boyfriend or my high-school girlfriend. If Ray goes off next year, maybe even if he doesn’t, I’ll be his high-school girlfriend. Names change, anyway. I’m Jessamyn when I’m at school, and Minnie when it comes out of Pop or Luther’s mouth. Luther means ‘soldier of the people’. It was Mom who liked it.

  If someone had asked me I wouldn’t have said we were especially close. But he was my brother. He taught me to drive. We ate dinner together every night of our lives. One winter, when we were little, we’d had chicken pox. We spent hours in an oatmeal bath, bored and irritable. We even watched porn together once. When I told Delaney that she shrieked, but it hadn’t seemed weird at the time.

  When Luther started talking about college, first Pop said, What the fuck is in Denver, then he said, Okay. By the time Luther got the scholarship he’d already come around to the idea. He started telling people, Be a good thing for him to get out of this shithole town anyhow, talking like Luther. I tried to close my ears when he got to talking like that. Mr Murphy my English teacher was always telling me to keep my grades up, but there’s no football scholarship if you’re a girl. Actually there’s no Colorado, either, just endless hamburger dinners.

  Pop and I stayed the night at a motel after we left Luther and all his things. It was on the outskirts of Boulder. I could tell Pop was tired. He lay on the bed watching Jeopardy. Earlier he’d talked about finding a Denny’s for dinner but now it was looking unlikely. In the bathroom there was a strip of paper across the toilet seat like the seal on my jar of Vaseline, and a plastic tray of little soaps and bottles of shampoos. I washed my face at the basin. Pop stood behind me. He blocked out the light from the halogen in the hall. He said, Don’t you ever leave me like that, Minnie. I mean it, and goddamn I knew he did. I said I wouldn’t.

  In the fall some crazy started going round attacking girls. One in the parking lot of the Economy Inn
on East Main Street in Farmington, one a couple of streets back from the Greyhound station. A cheerleader walking home from Piedra Vista High. I don’t think any of us paid any attention. It was almost Homecoming, and we weren’t talking about much else. Delaney’s mom had said she’d drive us to Albuquerque to go shopping one weekend, only I was beginning to think she’d forgotten, and since she wasn’t my mom I didn’t like to ask.

  Delaney lives in a trailer in Halliburton. When we were nine there was a spill that caused an acidic cloud. It wasn’t as bad as everyone first thought, but she had to evacuate with her mom and her sisters. They stayed with her mom’s boyfriend. He didn’t like kids. Delaney said it was three days and he didn’t look at her.

  I don’t remember that fluid spill at all. A few weeks after that my mom died. It was a stroke, an evil usually reserved for old people. Mom wasn’t old. She was thirty-six. She hadn’t smoked since college. Hers was from a blockage caused by loose brain tissue. Anyway, that was my fuel spill, that summer. When Pop tells the story he says, She was dead before she hit the floor. This is supposed to be comforting. What he means is, she felt no pain. What he leaves out is the blinding shock of it. It happened faster than a second. In this way, she forgot us.

  After that guy grabbed the fourth girl our school made us all do self-defence classes. Just the girls, and just the sophomores up. I guess they either ran out of money for the freshmen, or else they didn’t think he liked them real young. We stood in the gym in our sweatpants and snickered at the instructor. He told us about eye-gouging; swift heel of the palm to the nose; fingers to the throat, that hollow under the Adam’s apple. He looked right at Delaney and said, Do you walk home listening to your Walkman? and she pushed her gum to the side of her mouth with her tongue and said, Sir, I got no money for any of that shit, but she said shit real quietly so he was embarrassed more than angry. He put us in pairs. He made us attack each other. He even brought a couple pairs of swimming goggles so we could practise eye-gouging. He showed us different positions someone might attack us from. I kept forgetting the sequence of movements I needed to escape.

  ‘I’d never remember any of this,’ I said to Delaney.

  ‘See how he hasn’t mentioned the nuts yet,’ she said. ‘You think that’s ’cause he’s embarrassed to say balls to girls?’ We were slapping at each other and laughing. The whole gym looked green through the goggles.

  ‘Double dare you to raise your hand and ask him about it,’ I said, and we clutched at each other.

  The instructor told us to go limp if someone attacked us.

  ‘Going dead-weight, that’ll get him off guard,’ he said. ‘It’s the limp noodle. It’s all you have to remember. Drop to the ground.’

  Delaney put her arms loose around my neck and leaned in close.

  ‘Let’s see if it works,’ she whispered in my ear. Her breath made me shiver. I dropped to the gym mat. Her arms tightened around my neck. ‘This is dumb,’ she said. ‘I could drag you off anywhere. It’d skin your knees is all.’

  After school I waited for Ray by his truck. I looked at my face in his side mirror and tried to frown less. I lifted my chin. I leaned against the passenger door. He arrived with his buddies. They joked about me sitting in the front seat, but I jammed my backpack at my feet.

  I said, ‘Don’t give me that shit. You all love sitting close back there. I heard about the locker rooms.’

  Ray looked at me like he could have killed me, and the others were howling in the backseat, and Ray said, You rather walk home? and I said, You bet I would. Mostly because I knew he wouldn’t pull over and make me get out with the guys in the back, but I was also that mad I would have walked the six miles if he’d let me out of the car. I had rage in my veins. If I were a boy I might’ve run around shooting things up.

  He dropped off his buddies, but instead of turning off for my house, he doubled back to West Broadway and kept driving. When I asked where we were going he said, I thought we could go up to Angel Peak, which maybe sounds romantic the way I’m saying it, but actually meant he wanted to fuck. His hand was on my thigh.

  We parked at the end of the lot. It was just us and a few RVs, but I couldn’t see anyone around. Almost right away he got on top of me. He pulled my panties to one side in the way that meant he was in a hurry. I was bleeding so I thought maybe he wouldn’t want to, but he did. It was the fourth day and all that was left was brown and I hardly think he noticed, anyhow. I wished he’d left the air on.

  Afterwards we sat with our doors open. He rolled a blunt. I didn’t feel like smoking but my hands smelled like his dick so I did it anyway. We talked about the creep who’d been attacking girls. I told him how they’d made us do self-defence at school. He looked at me surprised, like he couldn’t imagine anyone ever doing that to girls like me.

  ‘You know what I’d do if he tried a thing,’ Ray said. When I didn’t answer, he pointed his thumb and forefinger like a pistol.

  ‘Ray, when you say shit like that it is so boring.’

  ‘Shit like what? What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘What I said. I am so bored.’ I yelled at the mountains. ‘I—am—so—bored!’

  ‘The fuck is wrong with you,’ he said. He sounded disgusted. I got out of the truck. I climbed to stand on one of the picnic tables. I had a feeling Ray might drive off and leave me there, and I’d have to walk the fifteen miles home, but it was only fleeting. Ray could be a deadbeat, but he wasn’t really mean. Actually he followed me. He sat down on the bench and held up the blunt. It was soggy between my fingers so I just held it a while and passed it back to him.

  ‘I used to come here with Luther,’ I said. ‘Actually we used to go hunting for dinosaur bones but we never found any. Not even small ones.’

  ‘You are so weird.’

  I was standing with my arms stretched out. Ray smiled up at me, sun-sleepy. I knew then, really, that he would never drive away from me.

  ‘Fuck it, baby,’ he said. He held out his arms and I climbed into them, sat on his lap a second to kiss him.

  I missed Luther more than I’d imagined. He called occasionally, but it wasn’t the same. Things felt awkward when I couldn’t see his face. Pop and I didn’t have much to say to each other at dinner.

  Luther had to keep up his grades to stay at CU. He was no scholar. He was no idiot, either, but I knew he worked slowly and gave up early. Seemed to me that stuff had trouble going in his ears. Once it got there, he never forgot shit.

  For a while he had a girl who gave him pills to help him stay awake, get more done. They were really for kids with ADHD. He said everyone took them. I thought it was dumb, with his football, but when I said that he cut me down. The next time we spoke he wasn’t going with that girl anymore and he didn’t mention any magic pills. I didn’t ask.

  Meanwhile, it was almost Homecoming and I guess I’d talked about it enough that Pop realised he should give me some money to buy a dress, which he did, but it was fifteen dollars. I felt too bad to say anything. It wasn’t his fault. How would he know how much a nice dress cost. I put the money in my underwear drawer and figured I’d borrow something from Delaney’s mom.

  In English we had to present our book reports. We’d been allowed to choose our books, but Mr Murphy had suggested one to me. Actually it was short stories, which I didn’t know until I started it. It was mostly about unhappy couples who drank too much and argued. The fathers were all mean. I hadn’t liked it, and I couldn’t think of much I wanted to say except, I wish they’d all quit bitching at one another, but probably Mr Murphy had told me to read it because he liked it, so I pretended I enjoyed it. After class he stopped me and said my book report was very good, and would I like to try writing an essay for extra credit.

  ‘No offence, sir,’ I said, and then felt embarrassed about it. ‘I mean, I don’t want to sound rude, but I don’t see the point.’

  Mr Murphy said, ‘Jessamyn, you’ve got to get out of here.’ Then he put his hand on my ass.

 
; When he saw my face he said, ‘I’m sorry, that was my fault, I misread things. Please don’t—please don’t think I’m some dirty old creep.’

  I looked at him carefully. I said, ‘Mr Murphy. Don’t worry.’

  The way he was looking at me, I couldn’t decide if he understood, or if he was about to kiss me. Then Mrs Vasquez knocked on the door.

  ‘You ought to see Jessamyn’s report on Carver,’ Mr Murphy said. I felt like I’d imagined him touching my ass.

  ‘Carver, that’s advanced,’ Mrs Vasquez said.

  I looked at the picture of President Clinton behind her head.

  ‘I’m trying to convince her to take AP English,’ Mr Murphy said.

  I was halfway to my locker before I realised I had my book report in my hand, which he was supposed to be grading. I stuffed it in my backpack. I already knew he’d never ask about it.

  On my way home I stopped at the grocer. I stole a pack of Big Red, some hair elastics and an orange. Then I kept on down the street. I peeled my orange by cutting into it with my fingernails. The skin came away easy. I thought about my brother, jamming an orange quarter into his mouth, tropical wedge between his teeth like a cartoon smile.

  I threw the peel into the gutter and went into the gas station and asked for a job.

  Mom’s things were still in our basement, mostly in zippered bags or those sturdy boxes. Some of them I remembered, but like from a dream—her blue swimsuit, or the ratty T-shirt with tropical fish on it, worn so thin you used to be able to see her nipples through it. Some of the things seemed like they belonged to a different mother, though. I didn’t often have occasion to go looking through it all. Pop wouldn’t have liked it.

  Under a trash bag of her books from community college was a box of fancy shoes, then another filled with clothes. She was shy, and so were her dresses. My favourite was one that looked kind of olden-days, white cotton with long sleeves and lace teardrops hanging from the hem. It was soft with age. The waist was real low and loose. It came to my knees. It wasn’t fashionable, but I hardly think it could have been fashionable when Mom wore it in the seventies. I stood in front of the mirror and made witch hands at myself. Wearing that dress made me dance in a jerky way. If Ray were here, he’s say something like, You’re real fucking weird, you know that? in that disgusted way of his, as if I’d shit on the floor of his truck. Actually I knew he’d hate the dress so I wanted to wear it.