The Talk-Funny Girl

by Roland Merullo

  But Sands wouldn’t let the subject drop. “Do the teachers bother you about it? The way you talk, I mean?”

  “Just today one had bother for it.”

  “But that doesn’t matter to you?”

  “No,” I said, not looking at him. “I can to work fair without it.”

  “The reading helps you?”

  “A lot it does help.”

  “I could give you some books if you want.”

  “Thanks. But at home I have already.”

  He watched me a minute, and I could feel he was getting ready to ask what had happened to my face, so I walked off toward the next sill ribbon without saying anything.

  After work that day and on Wednesday (the bruises were faded to a dull yellow by then and my right eye was nearly open) Sands drove me to the 112 Store as always. I liked it that there was no cigarette smoke in the cab and that he sometimes played music or listened to the news on the radio. My hands and arms were tired from the work, but no longer sore, and a strange new kind of pleasure filled me up on those rides, something left over from the few minutes we spent at the end of the day, looking at what we’d accomplished. I kept waiting, half-afraid, half-hopeful, for Sands to ask me a second time to go to Boston. “It’s coming along beautifully now,” he said, which wasn’t the way anyone else I knew talked.

  I thought of making a joke about it, telling him that he was the one who talked funny, that he might be a man after all but didn’t sound like it, but as the words were coming up I diverted them and tried something safer. “A lot of people now put their eyes on going by. One of them came with his camera and took. You were at for work near the back part.”

  “Just wait until the windows go in. I have a guy in Hensonville making them. Stained glass. One day we’ll take a ride over there and you’ll meet him.”

  I’d heard of Hensonville. It was a hill town across the big river where the most recent disappearance had taken place, the girl on her bicycle. I felt the familiar tickle of fear run up along my back but made myself ignore it. “Who can be in at the window then? Jesus?”

  “No,” Sands said, but, though I waited, he didn’t offer anything more about it, and I didn’t ask again.

  He turned in to the store parking lot and kept his truck engine running. I took some extra time zipping up my backpack and wrestling it onto my lap, thinking he might ask about Boston again if I waited long enough. But he didn’t. I thanked him, as I did every day, then got out and started off along the highway toward Waldrup Road and home.

  On Friday my bruises were nearly gone. At school, Aaron Patanauk asked again if he could come to the church and drive me home after I finished work. I said that he could. I look back at that and I don’t know why I agreed. I didn’t like him much, and I knew, on some level at least, why he was interested in me. But in my life that kind of interest was almost nonexistent, and I had a teenage girl’s normal curiosity and desire. There was more to it, though, and while it might seem overly simple, I know it’s true: A small part of me resisted Sands and Aunt Elaine because they were telling me, in different ways, that I was good or attractive or intelligent. I had never felt like a good or attractive or intelligent person, and so I think now that I was drawn to someone like Aaron because he confirmed my own opinion of myself. He saw me as something to be manipulated, to be used, perhaps even to be hurt. A large part of me saw myself that way, too.

  Aaron arrived early but parked at a little distance and stayed slumped down behind the wheel of his ugly truck, listening to the radio, waiting.

  “A friend come today now and is for taking me home,” I told Sands when we’d finished for the day and put the tools away in the rectory basement. I pointed at the pickup.

  Sands glanced at the truck and I tried to read his face. “Nine o’clock tomorrow then,” was all he said.

  “I will to.”

  Just beyond the 112 Store on the right there is a dirt road that angles up into the hills and still has no houses on it. Old Quarry Road it’s called. Aaron turned his truck there. He drove up a ways then turned left onto a logging road, pulled into the trees, and killed the motor. “You can be a few minutes late getting home, right?” he said. They were the first words he’d spoken. I felt it wasn’t really a question so I didn’t answer.

  My backpack was on the seat between us. Aaron pushed it forward near the shift, then reached across with one of his puppet’s arms and pulled me closer. He kissed me, once, fast, and then his hand crawled up under my sweatshirt and felt around there in a way that was a bit rough but not unpleasant. I was worried I smelled from the day of work. He took my hand and put it in his lap.

  “Unzip me,” he said, and after a minute I did that. “Put your mouth there now,” he said, and I did that, too, because there was something strange and new about doing it, like going to Boston in my mind.

  That night in my room I thought about it and slid my hands down into my underwear. That was something I’d done many times before, a dependable pleasure in my life, but now it was almost as if there was another person with me, and I pretended the other person was happy after it was over, and that he even said a few words on the ride back to the corner of the road.

  Fifteen

  On Saturday mornings my parents slept late. I had cleaning chores to do first thing, and lunch to prepare for myself, but I finished my work and was out the door while they were still in bed. I carried a paper bag with a can of Coke and a peanut butter and raisin sandwich in it, and I walked to the end of Waldrup Road and then all the way west on Route 112 as far as the town. Altogether, that walk took an hour and ten minutes. After crossing the metal bridge, I turned left at the end of Route 112 and went along Main Street, past the food smells coming from Art and Pat’s, where adults and children sat at tables near the big windows eating from plates—eggs and waffles and toast and pancakes and sausages—and then past the pharmacy and the Boxing Club and the bank, and then a block of offices in redbrick buildings—insurance, real estate, a vacant storefront—and then there was another block of brick row houses where the factory workers had lived when the factories were busy, and then, at last, the ruins of St. Mark’s.

  As I came closer to the work site I could see that Sands was standing next to his truck. For some reason, he’d parked it on the street, rather than pulling it up into the grassy lot the way he usually did. I noticed immediately that he hadn’t taken out the wheelbarrows, extension cords, and hand tools we would need for that day’s work. He was looking at me, waiting for me, and I wondered if I’d gotten the time wrong and was late.

  “Good morning,” he said when I was still thirty feet away. As I had done from earliest childhood, whenever someone spoke to me I listened for messages hidden in the words. It seemed to me that Sands was even more nervous than usual that morning, and I felt a terrible thought come pushing against me like a freezing wind in February: He had run out of money for the project, or I’d done something to displease him (maybe it was asking if Jesus would be in the windows being made by the man in Hensonville), and now he was going to say the work was finished for us, or for me, and try to be nice about it, and leave me with a spring and summer of staying home with my mother and father, stacking wood, cooking, cleaning, receiving penances, riding around with Aaron in his truck and trying to keep anyone from finding out what kinds of things I did with him there.

  “No work today,” Sands said. I was still some distance from him. He wasn’t wearing work clothes.

  He was such a big, strong man, and yet when it came to saying things he didn’t want to say, he seemed to shrink down inside his body and become small and shy and young. It was that shrinking that gave me courage to speak to him in a way I never spoke to anyone else, but that wasn’t the feeling I had that morning. He pushed the glasses back against his nose, he moved his feet—shoes there instead of boots—he stopped leaning against the truck and stood up straight, facing me.

  I hadn’t even said hello. The paper bag with the sandwich and Coke in it ma
de me feel as foolish as if I’d taken my sweatshirt, T-shirt, and bra off right there on the sidewalk. Now the kids at school would know I’d been fired, or that the fancy church project had ended up being a failure, and my parents would know there was no more money coming in, and I’d have to go by the church and see Sands working alone, or with someone else, or just see the walls standing there half-built, like a naked person sitting in the middle of the street calling my name.

  I moved the paper bag so I was holding it behind me with both hands. Sands looked into my face. He leaned one shoe against the other as if he was scratching his ankle.

  “I’m going to Boston for the day.”

  I waited.

  “I’ll make sure you get back at the same time we would have finished … or maybe just half an hour later. And I’ll pay you the same for the time … as if you had worked … because it’s partly kind of related to work, what I’m going to do there.”

  I hadn’t moved and couldn’t seem to speak.

  “Will you come?”

  Before I answered I looked at the building Sands called a cathedral. Nobody else would ever call it that. It was a chapel. Maybe when he finished the other sections it might look like a church, but even I knew it could never truly be called a cathedral. The piece of it we were building at that point was only a little larger than a small-sized house. The light from the morning sun fell on it at a flat angle, and it seemed to me almost as if the stones had eyes in them, and the eyes were looking back at me. I had come to believe there were spirits inside the stones, just the way there was a spirit inside a person or a tree, and it felt to me that I would be accused of abandoning those spirits if I didn’t keep to my regular schedule. The day before, Sands and I had worked very well together. We’d built the north wall up another two courses so I could see the shape of the three windows that would be there. Today was Saturday, a long workday, and Sands had told me we might be able to get the front wall up as high as the arch at the top of the door, and I wanted to do that. I would feel bad not doing it. I ran my eyes around the work site—in my imagination it was like someone who’d been beaten and broken up and burned and then chopped up in pieces and thrown into piles, and Sands and I were putting that person, that damaged spirit, back together again, making something beautiful out of the ruin, making a place in that town where people could sit and be at peace and not have to spend any money and not be praying to a God who wanted to hurt them. I supposed it was a superstition, and that Sands would laugh at me if he found out, but I’d formed a belief that if I didn’t care for the cathedral with all my heart and didn’t work on it with all my strength, then it wouldn’t care for me, wouldn’t give me the year, or even two years, of work I’d been dreaming about since the first time I’d stood there with Sands and heard him talk about my apprenticeship.

  “Can’t I not to work on here while you go off?”

  “There will be plenty of good weather now, Laney. The stones won’t go anywhere.” He pushed at his glasses.

  At that moment I was bumped by a memory of the way Aunt Elaine had spoken to my parents on the Sunday I’d been faced. It was something I wouldn’t have thought possible, ever. Completely impossible that they would sit and listen to someone lecture them that way. I knew that my mother, probably, and my father, especially, had been hearing those words again and again since it had happened. I knew something bad was coming toward me from them, and I wondered if they were going to try to take me to Pastor Schect’s the next day, and if there was a special punishment being made ready.

  “Laney?”

  I turned my eyes to Sands and in the few seconds before I knew I had to speak I examined his face and saw the muscles of his shoulders and his strong neck, the short ragged ponytail, and I wondered if he had any idea at all what might happen to me if I went to Boston with him and got caught. Did he know about things like that? Would he try to help me if that happened?

  As always Sands insisted I wear a seat belt. I pulled the belt across my middle and tried to push it into the clip, but my hands weren’t moving exactly right. Except for my sneakers, I was wearing work clothes—old jeans, a T-shirt, and a sweatshirt. How could I go to a place like Boston in clothes like that? The seat belt clicked. It was there, I decided, to keep my insides from flying out and bouncing against the windshield. I looked through the passenger-side window, away from him. He didn’t have the radio on. He had smiled when I said I’d go to Boston.

  Sands drove across the Honey River on the smaller bridge and went along Route 112, due east, away from town, just as if he was driving me home. Before we reached Warners’ and the store and Patanauk’s and Waldrup Road, we came to Weedon’s Bar on the right-hand side, and I saw my father’s truck in the gravel lot there—red, dented, rusted, the drooping tailpipe held up with coat-hanger wire. Never once had I known my father to go to Weedon’s that early in the morning on a sunny day. I realized then that he might drive into town afterward—something else he never did—and that he’d see no one was working at the cathedral, and I’d have to lie to him, say that Sands and I had gone to Rochester for sill ribbons, or to Ober for iron headers, or to Hensonville to meet the window-making man, or to Second Construction in Balfour to look at slate tiles for the roof. My father would know I was lying: He could smell things like that the way a fox can smell human scent on a trap.

  But I let the truck take me. All the way east on 112 we went, past the end of Waldrup Road, past a long stretch of woods and then the closed-up and shuttered Bakery Wholesale where I’d gone with my parents years before, every Thursday, to buy day-old bread and cupcakes. Past the road to Cindy’s house. In the lowlands, still part of the floor of the valley where the river ran, the air was warmer and the trees were into leaf. To one side and the other the woods lit themselves up in the sunlight. But as the road lifted into higher terrain I saw that there were still some dark branches, the ash and oak—they came into leaf last in spring and lost their leaves last in fall—with only buds on them. The buds and the first leaves in spring were always a lighter green than the leaves would turn out to be later in summer. I thought of it as a new green, and the summer color as real green, and the early fall color as old green, and I could almost have told the month by the way the woods looked. I wondered if Sands saw those kinds of things, if he knew the trees—their names, the quirks of their bark and branches, the things each species was good for and not good for: ash for tool handles, fir for outdoor steps, maple for firewood and sugaring, oak for flooring—and where he went in his life when he wasn’t working or traveling to Boston, and how he knew Aunt Elaine, and how he knew the men in Warners’, and why he seemed so badly to want to take a girl he barely knew to Boston and pay her for working at the same time.

  But I kept myself quiet, and he was quiet, too, watching the road. In a little under an hour we reached an interstate I’d never seen before. I remembered my father’s fear of the big raised highway, his belief that state troopers were lying in wait just for him. I thought about what Aaron had said, and though I was fairly sure my father had never killed anyone, still, whenever someone said something like that it made a kind of spot on your mind. And when a person did the kinds of things I had done with Aaron, those things made spots on your mind, too.

  Sands steered the truck up onto the interstate, putting on his turn signal, something else my father didn’t believe in doing. In another minute we seemed to be flying along the clean black tar. The truck swooped down through the hills as though it was skimming on a black river that tilted first one way then the other. The steady drone of the tires was comforting, a kind of music to occupy the mind. There were more tractor-trailer trucks in the first mile than I saw in town in a month. More cars, some with license plates from Canada, Florida, Ohio, Missouri. There was a green sign almost half the height of the cathedral walls and it said BOSTON 104.

  “We’re going to a museum,” Sands said, after a long silence. “Have you ever been?”

  “Oncet,” I said. “To Darmuth the c
ollege. They have one of it there, and in fourth grade, we were all everyone going. My parents let me on to go then for the one time.”

  I didn’t tell him that my mother had allowed me to go because she was drinking when she signed the permission slip and did it as a kind of joke. I didn’t say that when my father found out I’d been to see a museum, and been to see a college, he conferred with Pastor Schect about it and they decided I needed to receive a special penance, and that was the first time I’d been hungered.

  “Have you seen other colleges?”

  “I never.”

  “How many times have you been to Boston?”

  “No times.”

  “Montreal?”

  I shook my head.

  “Maine?”

  “No places,” I said. “We go, we used to go up West Ober at church there. We go at Watsonboro when for Thanksgiving with Aunt Elaine in her house. We go acrost on the river too in Westminster for when my dad needs a fix for his truck because a man knows that work there and goes to church at where we do.”

  “You mostly stay around home then.”

  “Most.”

  “Are you curious about Boston?”

  “Afraid.”

  “Of the city?”

  “Sure. All those animals they have at there. Bears. Moose. Cougar.”

  He didn’t laugh. Again. If I could have controlled the urge in me I would have stopped trying to make jokes with him. I never made a joke at school. At home, there wasn’t much in the way of lightheartedness. With Sands, with his serious face, his thick glasses, his big muscles, his shy way, his mysterious intentions … I made jokes.

  “Tell me, really,” he said.