by Ann Pancake
He treaded water, a little too far away for her to clearly see his face. He called, “You better not get in here. It’s nasty. I always shower soon as I get home.”
Then he was pulling his sleek, filth-rimed body back up on the boards. Janie’s fingers already stumbling to rebutton the blouse. She wondered if the tugboat captains had seen. And at first, along with that embarrassment, a sting that Nathan hadn’t wanted her in the water with him. But right after that she told herself he’d warned her not to come in because he cared.
After two weeks of motorcycle rides and one week of sex, she guessed they were a couple, but she didn’t know how to find out for sure. Uncle Bobby seemed to think they were a couple, too. “Nathan came over and asked me, he asked me, ‘Bobby, do you think I should ask her out?’ But I didn’t tell you.” He nodded to himself, solemn. “Because I know how to keep a secret. I know how to keep a secret, Janie. Did you know that?”
She knew that. The story of Nathan’s consulting Uncle Bobby became an immediate favorite in Uncle Bobby’s anecdote repertoire, and after he’d told it three or four times, Janie realized he interpreted it as Nathan asking his permission for her, much like a suitor asking a father for his daughter’s hand in “one of these old movies.”
Now she lived listening always for the comings and goings of the Yamaha, of the Scout. Her life a hover of anticipation of the next journey through those mysterious backways, not country, not city. Her grandfather muttered his displeasure, but mostly kept it to himself, while her grandmother, who carried indestructible, if unfounded, faith in Janie, found the romance charming. When Janie and Nathan thundered through the metal canyon, Janie couldn’t help but think of her grandparents. A few of the factories still operated, at least parts of them did, and in shot-spattered signs, Janie, even stoned, recognized some names from her grandfather’s tales.
Her grandfather’s narratives were more résumés than stories. Recitations of his jobs since age thirteen, when he delivered on his bicycle empty bottles from a drugstore to a bootlegging apartment on Third Avenue. The bootlegging was the first step in his bootstrap chronology, through the glass factory, Owens Illinois, the nickel plant (how Janie’d always pictured this as a child, a flower blooming nickels), the job teaching welding, all arduous rungs in his hand-over-hand pull to the American Dream. Which he did attain, in his late forties: a real-estate appraisal business he finally established after Janie’s own mother had left home. And she thought of her grandfather, too, as she and Nathan stormed past the rows of neat and grime-inlaid little houses behind their chain-link fences and their FOR SALE signs, her grandfather at the supper table lamenting all the lost homes, large and small, shabby and stately, in this city where he’d lived and worked all his life. The city that had rewarded that hand-over-hand climb, now on the verge of losing its station as largest in the state as people and money drained out. She could hear the hurt in his voice and the humiliation, too, in both of her grandparents, while Janie could not understand. The contrast, still, with McCloud County. McCloud County, now that was humiliation.
Gradually she learned that Nathan’s parents, a university professor and a high school teacher, were mortified that Nathan had dropped out of community college. He confided in her that they’d bribed him to go back, but he couldn’t be bought. Janie suspected that they’d pulled strings to land him the bank teller’s job, where, she also gradually understood, Nathan didn’t want Janie to see him. Nathan behind the bank counter was very hard for her to visualize, and the softness of Nathan’s hands always surprised her, especially given all the work he did on the Harley. The hands of boys in McCloud County, even if it was basketballs they handled more than tools, had all been harder than Nathan’s.
Once, she and Nathan were saying good night after parking the Yamaha in the basement. Janie’s back against the cinder block wall, Nathan’s face tucked under her jaw and into her shoulder, their hands entwined where they hung at their sides. Lulled by the tenderness of the moment, and pot, and arousal, Janie, who almost never spoke without thinking the words first, heard herself whisper, “A banker’s hands.”
Nathan jerked the hands away. He stepped back. His shoulders cocked, the compact body engorged, and Janie, even startled, marveled at how he could amplify himself at will. And right then, more than any other moment in her life except with her mother, Janie thought she was going to be hit. Then she wasn’t.
That was the first time the temper was directed at her. But seconds after he flared, he folded. He slumped against a tool bench, his arms crossed, shaking his head, and Janie saw how badly he hurt. She felt guilty for having been mean, even if she hadn’t intended that.
His eruptions cast his sweet parts into brighter relief. The way he always checked to be sure she was dressed safely for the bike. The soft way he held her hand in the movies and didn’t go farther. His acceptance of Uncle Bobby. Probably because like she had, Nathan had been around Uncle Bobby his whole life, he took Uncle Bobby’s peculiarities for granted and usually handled Uncle Bobby like her family did. Not with kindness, exactly—it was impossible to be always kind to him—but with stoicism on good days, suppressed irritation on others, and mild teasing regularly to vent some of the pressure. Uncle Bobby didn’t confuse or scare Nathan, didn’t make him uncomfortable like he did most non-family members, who either avoided Uncle Bobby or overtried. Janie knew there was not another person in Remington who could hang out with her and Uncle Bobby without her feeling embarrassed. She and Uncle Bobby and Nathan together felt irresistibly familiar.
One long drawn-out twilight she and Nathan were sitting with their backs against the flood wall, the gravel and ground rubble under them, the grass right beyond their knees almost as high as their faces. Two motorboats gashed the river. The bleared sun stifled itself behind the lowish Ohio hills. The joint was moving between her and Nathan when he murmured, “You know, if we’re ever going to be close, you have to talk to me more.”
Janie’s head knocked softly back into the cement. Her body flushed a strange and pleasant warmth that dissipated into confusion. No one, lover or friend, had ever said anything like that to her before. But now she saw that she hadn’t even realized she and Nathan rarely talked, and also she saw the stark truth of what he said. She didn’t know what to say back.
THOSE EVENINGS WHEN she didn’t work or ride with Nathan or when they rode very late, she and Uncle Bobby would return around 9:30 from Ramella’s or Gino’s or a six-pack shared in the Chevette at the riverfront park and head straight to the pantry, where they’d gulp a gob of peanut butter. Uncle Bobby had taught her this technique for eluding alcohol detection, and Janie had to admit it was more effective, not to mention more imaginative, than her own strategy of chewing Freshen-Up gum. After, they’d pause in the doorway of the TV room to greet her grandparents, their empty ice cream bowls beside them. When she and Uncle Bobby escaped to the front porch, where their breath was less likely to be noticed, Janie always felt herself darken and narrow with shame, which she never felt in front of her parents, whom she believed deserved whatever they got.
As she passed through the dining room and living room of the small house, straitjacketed in the concentration of the moderately drunk person trying to appear sober, objects came into focus that were ordinarily blurred. The house brimmed with precious things, worked-hard-for things, each one cherished by her grandmother. Ceramic Swiss children in petrified lederhosen. China plates with pastoral scenes. A chiming wooden mantel clock, blown Blenko glass, an elegant rolltop desk, needlepoints by her grandmother, roosters and flowers gilt-framed and hung. On the footrest before her grandfather’s chair lay the day’s newspaper divided into sections, the white pages to be thrown away, the sales circulars and coupons—Big Bear, Foodland—carefully sorted out.
Outside, the heat was finally receding though the humidity was not. Uncle Bobby dropped into his webbed rocker lawn chair and worked it energetically. Janie stretched full-length on the porch swing, reached one hand over her
head for the chain, and began her own languid rock. Out of habit, part of her ear pricked for Nathan even though she knew he’d stayed in tonight because his parents were having his older sister and her husband for dinner.
The front door cracked. “Can you all please turn out the lights and lock the door before you go to bed?” her grandmother called. “And sleep tight.”
Shame geysered through Janie again, as deep and shuddery as grief. And then, it was grief. Because her grandparents were among the very few people in the world who loved her, she knew this, and they were the only ones who saw her not as she was, but as she could be, yet she could not stop being as she was.
To douse her guilt, she started to talk. Tonight, Uncle Bobby would listen to her first. As she usually did, she spoke to the ceiling her plans for after college. At some point during her freshman year, her ambitions had leapfrogged Remington, and now real life, if she could reach it, lay in an unidentified place out of state. Most of her post-college plans hinged on her becoming famous because leaving West Virginia seemed so outlandish, fame was for Janie the only imaginable route out. The problem was, famous for what? She couldn’t do anything well but read.
She told Uncle Bobby she was going to write books, and she told him what would happen after that. “Mmm-hmm. Mmmm-hmm,” Uncle Bobby agreed in tune to the thud of his rockers, and she knew he was nodding despite it being too dark to see, “Uh-huh, Janie. Uh-huh,” brightly, Uncle Bobby taking for granted that of course Janie would do such a thing. She left out the part about how “running herself down” had affected more than her health. How if she didn’t pull up her grades next semester she’d be on academic probation. She didn’t mention how she’d taken a creative writing course the semester before, how the teacher had written throughout the margins of her story in green ink the single word “unclear” and finished with a sentence about lack of dramatic tension—Janie wasn’t sure what that was—and a tepid note of encouragement that brought alive to Janie for the first time the saying to “damn with faint praise.” She’d dropped the class because, she’d told herself, it gave her more hours at her grocery store deli job. Janie not only left all that out, but by the time she’d finished talking about her plans to the confident accompaniment of Uncle Bobby’s “uh-hmms,” she’d forgotten all of it, too. Talking to Uncle Bobby made her brilliant and brave and even obliterated her greatest fear: even if she managed to get through college at all, she’d likely end up back in McCloud County as a junior high English teacher.
“Why don’t you write a story about the time I took you and Ben to Black Beauty and Ben lost his mittens?” Uncle Bobby asked when she finally finished. “Why don’t you write a story about that, Janie?”
“Well,” Janie said. “Maybe one of these days I will.”
Then it was Uncle Bobby’s turn. Tonight he was in his righteous argumentative mode, operating from the know-it-all part of his brain. The people he’d quarrel with were always absent, sometimes actual individuals who’d told him something he didn’t want to do or believe, sometimes straw antagonists—their nonexistence didn’t dampen his passion—who represented abstract somethings he considered offensive or ridiculous. Now he was recalling the time he took the Greyhound to McCloud County to visit Janie’s family, but the bus driver had forgotten to stop in their town because, Uncle Bobby claimed, he was distracted by a woman with “dimensions”—dementia, Janie translated—who wouldn’t stop talking about her false teeth. Uncle Bobby had ridden another hour to Winchester, Virginia, before the driver caught the oversight. Strumming her thumb along the links of the swing chain, the tang of rust sharp against the night scents of the junipers around the porch, Janie returned the Uncle Bobby favor, confirming, regardless of what he said, “Mmm-hmmm. Mmm-hmm.”
He fulminated on to the rhythm of his rockers, the indignity of having been forgotten on the bus, the stupidity and insensitivity of the driver and the false teeth lady, while Janie, the swing jangling end-to-end under her hand, imagined Nathan in his single bed, his room barren—she’d seen that room now—as though he’d stripped out everything from childhood and not known what to put back. “What I should of done, Janie, was tell him off. Next time, I’m just gonna tell him. Would you? Would you tell him, Janie?” The alcohol lowered her gently tonight. She remembered an incident as a preschooler when she’d brought Uncle Bobby a book and asked him to read to her. Her confusion when he couldn’t. That was one of several early times she’d noticed something different about him—his turtle phobia, for instance, or the way he said animules for animals and legotards for leotards—but he was the youngest of her mother’s four siblings, and Janie attributed his inability to read, along with other young things he did and young ways he was treated with his being the family baby.
Now Janie could tell from his volume and tone that he was winding down. Like he did for her, she joined him for the landing—“Yep, I hear ya. I hear ya”—while Uncle Bobby petered out, “And so forth and so on. And what have you,” Janie agreeing, “Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmmm,” until he went silent except for his rockers on the floor, and Janie giving a final commiseration, “It’s awful, Uncle Bobby. It’s just awful.” And then, both of them finished, Janie nearly sober, she asked, “Where’d you go this afternoon after work?”
Almost every other day now, he’d been leaving the house without asking her to come along. This didn’t hurt her feelings, but it made her intensely curious because under normal circumstances Uncle Bobby wanted her with him whenever possible. The last two times she’d asked him where he’d gone, instead of saying, “Oh, to see a friend of mine,” he’d said, “Oh, just down to the Coin Castle.”
The Coin Castle was a video arcade across from the Convenient Mart about a half-mile from her grandparents’ house. This answer made her suspicious because Uncle Bobby was terrible at games in general and video games especially. The answer also worried her. She knew that although most of the neighbors loved and looked after Uncle Bobby, who’d passed their papers for years and who raised record levels for the annual American Cancer drive, there had been incidents, always involving teenagers and kids, like the ones who hung out at the Coin Castle. Uncle Bobby giving boys money, no one ever uncovering for what. Uncle Bobby buying beer at the Convenient Mart for underage kids. An episode several years ago when a couple of teenagers had talked Uncle Bobby into buying them an old jeep. After that, her grandfather, a staunch believer that a man should have at least a little control over the money he earned, had to take away Uncle Bobby’s checkbook.
And then there had been an event vaguely sexual, so vaguely sexual that Janie wasn’t sure if she’d overheard her parents talking about it or just made it up. Because eavesdropping was how she’d learned all the stories of the taking advantage of Uncle Bobby. They had never been told to her directly. She had overheard them shared among adults, and when she did overhear the stories, she immediately regretted hearing them: a teenage boy again, again, the boy with the upper hand. A fragile place under her heart drew in on itself and pinched, that snarl of emotions, including hurt and helplessness, also defensiveness and shame, those last two the most confusing and complicated of all. It was like her family’s privacy and their territory were being trespassed upon. Only family should know Uncle Bobby’s vulnerabilities, and if Uncle Bobby was to be teased or told what to do or manipulated, he was theirs to tease and tell and manipulate.
“E.T.! Phone home!” Uncle Bobby tried to change the subject.
“What do you want to go to Coin Castle for?” she asked.
Uncle Bobby snicker-chuckled his you’ve-caught-me-in-something-but-I’m-trying-to-act-like-it’s-nothing laugh. “To see a friend of mine.” He snicker-chuckled again. “Anything wrong with that, Janie? Anything wrong with that?”
AFTER EACH SHOWING, the popcorn girls had to drag garbage bags into the theaters and pick up under the seats. Spilled pop running from theater top to bottom, dirty Pampers in Snow White. The occasional greasy grocery bag from homemade popcorn snuck in. Halfway through
the summer, Psycho II came to one of the side theaters, and the sorority girls decided to get scared. “I’m not going in there this time, I just won’t do it!” A squeal. “I’m petrified!” “My God, I had to go in there Saturday night after the last show, and, I swear, something moved, I’m not making this up, something moved behind the curtain along the wall.” Once when Janie herself was picking up, she pushed behind that curtain and ran into Kimberly. Kimberly shrieked so loud even Betty came running, then all the sorority girls collapsed into the nearest seats in hysterical laughter until Gus busted in and yelled at them.
Everybody said they felt the hauntiness in the Psycho theater, but everyone acted like it was a joke, so Janie did, too. Inside her, though, it didn’t seem funny at all. Just stepping into the dim, empty theater, she’d feel the prickle left over from the screen, the pretend horror having somehow leaked off the film and infected the walls and the seats. But far worse than the Psycho theater, Janie knew although no one else appeared to, were the bathrooms.
Out in the lobby, Tommie Sue continued to tell. The attempted murder on the sidewalk under the marquee, a jealous husband waiting for his cheating wife to show up with her date. The more recent seizure in the bathroom, a lady’s legs thrust rigid out a stall door, her heels tom-tomming the tiles.
“And then that guy who had a stroke during Porky’s, that was just last year, right, Betty? And it happened during a matinee, that’s what the coroner said, and here nobody noticed him until after the last show on a Saturday night. I don’t know who was supposed to be picking up that day.”
Betty shook her head. She didn’t either.
“But there as we were closing down, that usher—I can’t recall his name, I think he was from over in Chesapeake—he tried to shake the guy awake. And a mouse jumped out of his mouth.”