From the Black Hills

by Judy Troy

  “I figured that,” Josh said. He was quiet again. Mike knew that Josh’s mother had had an affair; that was why his parents had split up. Josh had told Mike later who it was—Duane King, who owned King Trucking Company. She was still with him.

  “Anyway,” Mike said, “we’re being listened to. The police are tapping the phone in case he calls.”

  “Which he won’t.”

  “I don’t think so, either.”

  “Well, shit,” Josh said. “Now I feel like saying more about Watkins and Coach.”

  Mike laughed. It felt good, but unfamiliar, to do it.

  AT four o’clock that afternoon, as Mike was wishing he could find an excuse to see Lee-Ann Schofield, or to call her at least, Tom DeWitt came over again. He said that the district attorney would try to go before a grand jury to get an indictment. “You can bypass a preliminary hearing if there’s enough evidence,” he said.

  Mike didn’t really know what that meant. The three of them stood in the stuffy living room, his mother not responding either. Earlier, when she’d come home from church, she’d just sat on her bed for almost an hour. Mike had gone upstairs twice and walked past her open door; he’d been afraid to ask if she was all right for fear that she wasn’t. Finally, he’d just stood in the hallway between her room and his. He’d told himself that he really wasn’t all that frightened. But when she came out of her room he found that his back hurt from standing so rigidly.

  Now, in their living room, Tom DeWitt said, “There’s the gun with Glenn’s fingerprints on it. In addition, the clerk at the motel identified him from a photograph. There are the money transfers, his fingerprints on the phone, and so on.” He sat down on the couch without being invited to. “I wouldn’t typically tell the suspect’s family any of this.”

  “We want to know,” Carolyn said. “Glenn should have to pay for what he did.” She turned to Mike for confirmation, but he kept his eye on the window behind her.

  “Not all families would feel that way,” Tom said.

  No one spoke. After a moment Carolyn politely asked, “Would you like coffee?”

  “I would,” he said. “Thanks.” After she left the room he unbuttoned and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The day had been dry and hot; the temperature had reached a hundred. The windows were open, but there was almost no breeze. “Your mom’s a nice person,” Tom told Mike.

  “What do you think is nice about her?”

  “She has dignity.”

  Mike looked out the window at Mr. Hyler, across the street, watering the geraniums on his front porch. “She always does what she’s supposed to,” he said. “That’s not hard to do.”

  “Some people find it impossible.” On Tom’s face was that pleasant expression Mike didn’t trust. He seemed relaxed, as if their house had become a familiar place to him.

  Mike waited impatiently for his mother to come back in. She shouldn’t have left him alone with Tom DeWitt. How did she think he’d feel, sitting there? He concentrated on Lee-Ann and how her breasts had felt against him that Saturday afternoon in the barn, when he’d held her, finally. He needed more moments like that with her. They gave him a way to feel sexual that nobody else knew about. They made the life inside his head count for more than the life outside it.

  When his mother did come in, bringing coffee, she and Tom DeWitt talked about ordinary things—about Tom’s brother, who taught at the elementary school, and about Tom’s nephew, Kyle, who’d wrestled with Mike. In the fall Kyle was going to attend Black Hills State University, in Spearfish. “It’s the only place he got accepted,” Tom said.

  “Maybe he just applied too late,” Mike said.

  “No. He didn’t get the grades you did.”

  “How do you know what grades I got?”

  “Mike,” his mother said warningly.

  “Kyle told me. He was envious of you, I think.”

  “Not anymore, probably.”

  Mike ignored the look his mother gave him and went upstairs to his room. He couldn’t stand that his mother and Tom DeWitt were talking as if they’d become friends. Mike’s mother was liable to say anything. Like what, he thought then. What did she know? Whose side was she on? That was stupid, he knew. Taking sides was what you did in junior high school, when your friends got pissed-off at each other and you had to make a choice.

  He sat at his desk, then stood restlessly in front of the window. After he saw Tom leave, he went downstairs and outside, changed the oil in his motorcycle, and rode around the block. He thought about riding out to the Schofields’, then realized that he’d forgotten his helmet. That was something his mother got furious with him about. His father did too, but his father had been unpredictable—like if Mike had driven the car and left it only a quarter full of gas, sometimes his father had gotten mad and sometimes he hadn’t. Sometimes he’d even laughed—as if, since he was in a good mood, what difference did it make what Mike did? But it worked the other way, too. There’d never been a way to change his father’s mood from bad to good.

  Mike, depressed now, put his motorcycle in the carport. He sat in the backyard and looked at the oak tree in the Pates’ yard, next door. He remembered the times he’d climbed it—falling, once, fifteen feet, and how even though he’d been all right his father had taken him to the emergency room and woken him up several times that night, to make sure that he wasn’t unconscious. It was painful for Mike to think about that. It was easier to think of his father as a bad or fucked-up person.

  His mother came to the kitchen door. “Why didn’t you wear your helmet?” she asked.

  “I forgot it. So I came back.”

  Reluctantly, he sat with her in the kitchen while she cooked, and they ate without mentioning his father or Tom DeWitt. His mother didn’t eat much, not that she’d ever eaten all that much. She was thin by nature, but also she didn’t overdo anything. She didn’t drink, she never went over the speed limit, and she didn’t spend too much money. It seemed to Mike that she turned not overdoing things into a fault.

  What she talked about now was that financially they’d be all right. The money they’d saved for his college tuition was safe; his father hadn’t touched that. At some point Mike might have to work part-time, but didn’t a lot of students work these days? She talked as if his father and whatever happened to him was irrelevant.

  Outside, a sparrow perched on the clothesline and a squirrel ran past the shed. The light was gentler, almost golden, and across the grass were long evening shadows.

  “What do you think will happen?” Mike said, and felt odd, asking that. He wasn’t used to talking to his mother as if they were allies—on the same side of things.

  “I don’t know. I can’t even guess. I didn’t know him, apparently.”

  She carried their plates to the sink. Mike usually washed the dinner dishes—the house had been built before dishwashers were installed, and they’d never bought one—but his mother was already doing them. The kitchen was large and square, with yellow linoleum and white curtains. It was homey, his mother always said. Her parents—Mike’s grandparents, who lived upstate in Mobridge—had a house that wasn’t homey. It was as upright as they were. They had wanted to come to Wheatley when Mike’s mother had told them what happened, but his mother had said no, thank you for offering. To Mike she had said, “As if I could stand for them to see me like this.” She was an only child, just as he was.

  Mike wiped off the table and told his mother that he didn’t want dessert; maybe he’d have pie at Andell’s Diner. He was going there to meet Donetta. He would have gone even if his mother had asked him not to. But Noleen Watkins and another teacher were coming over, to keep his mother company, and he left her standing in the kitchen, making sure that he remembered his helmet.

  IN the fading light, Mike rode his motorcycle through town and out on the highway to the diner that had been there since before he was born. He sat alone at a back booth, waiting for Donetta to finish her shift. He drank a Coke and ate a piece of cherry pie. It wa
s painful for him to sit there, even though the diner was half empty and he didn’t recognize anyone. In fact he thought it might be easier if he did know people; then they’d at least have to keep quiet or treat him the way Mr. Andell had when Mike first walked in—as if Mike had knives stuck in him and Mr. Andell were afraid to mention them or pull them out. As it was, though, Mike overheard a man say, “What I don’t understand is why, if he was trying to kill her, the son of a bitch called an ambulance.”

  Donetta’s shift was over at eight. Mike left his motorcycle in the parking lot, and they took her Geo out to Crow Lake, the violet sky in front of them darkening. Mike drove, and once they were on the two-lane county road she changed clothes, taking off her dirty uniform and her underwear, and putting on a pair of cutoff jeans and a tank top.

  Mike was almost used to seeing Donetta naked. She was the second girl he had slept with—when he was in the tenth grade and she was in the ninth. Over the past three years they’d broken up twice, seen other people, and come back together. They became a more permanent couple after Donetta’s father died, when she was fifteen and a half. Her parents had gotten divorced six years earlier; her father, the manager of a hardware store, had lived in Hot Springs with a woman who was an alcoholic.

  “He took care of her,” Donetta had explained to Mike. Her father had died suddenly, of a heart attack, and Donetta had said that his heart had always been a problem; he’d always had too many emotions.

  Crow Lake was six miles southwest of Wheatley, a large manmade lake on land that once had been a family-owned ranch; now it was owned by the government. There were cottonwood trees along the western edge and an outcropping of limestone on the southern side. To the north and east were fields of prairie grass long enough to disappear in.

  Mike parked the Geo under the trees, and he and Donetta spread a blanket next to the water. They were the only people there, on that side; across the lake some teenagers were swimming. They could just barely see them. High school kids often swam there. Every once in a while, maybe once every three or four years, somebody drank too much and drowned.

  “I had a sex dream about us last night,” Donetta said. “I woke up thinking, you don’t know where your father is, or if you’ll ever see him again, and all that’s on my mind is fucking you.”

  She lay back on the blanket and pulled up her tank top so that Mike could see her smooth, tan stomach—her mother’s beauty school had a tanning booth. “Tell me if I’m getting fat,” she said. “I eat french fries at work, and sometimes coconut cream pie.”

  “You’re nowhere near fat,” Mike told her.

  “Well, I’ve been running farther,” Donetta said. “I wanted to surprise you when I got up to six miles, and it happened this morning. I ran out of town all the way to Lame Johnny Creek, to that tree that leans down over the water.”

  “You shouldn’t run alone that far out of Wheatley,” Mike said. “Most people who use that road don’t even live around here.”

  Donetta opened her mouth to speak, then didn’t. She put her hand on Mike’s hair. “You know what I almost said? That strangers are probably not more dangerous than people you know. I feel like I can’t say anything anymore without having it mean too many things.”

  They lay close to each other and watched the stars appear, with the Milky Way just above them, and no moon. They heard the teenagers drive away.

  “I don’t care about your father, or what he did,” Donetta whispered. “I really don’t. I just care about us.” She sat up halfway, leaned over Mike, and unbuttoned his shirt. Her long hair was loose, and the ends of it brushed across his neck and chest. She undid his belt and unzipped his jeans. “What do you think?” she said softly. “Don’t you think this will feel good?”

  He closed his eyes and put his hands on her hair, then under her tank top and under the waistband of her shorts. She didn’t wear underwear any more than she had to; she’d said that once to Mike’s mother. It was true that she liked to shock people, but at the same time she was honest and almost naïve. For example, she couldn’t believe that his mother had later said to him, “A girl like that has no intention of being faithful to anyone.”

  “What does that have to do with underwear?” Donetta had said. And she was right, because she was completely and sometimes ridiculously loyal. She’d once gone around for months with frizzy, orange hair—and not the stylish kind—because her sister, Margo, had colored and permed it.

  She was ten times more faithful than Mike was. Now, for example, with his hands on her hair and skin, he was thinking about Lee-Ann Schofield. And before he’d become so attracted to Lee-Ann, he’d thought of a dark-haired girl who sat in front of him in eleventh-grade homeroom. It was almost second nature to him, to be thinking of another girl when he was with Donetta, and to sometimes think of Donetta when he was with someone else. He did it so automatically that he didn’t question or judge it, but he knew that it influenced what he thought about himself.

  “I’m good at being analytical and objective,” he wrote in his college application essay. “I think that, more than most people, I’m capable of standing outside a situation. One thing I could improve on, though, is knowing when it might help to do the opposite, and take more part in things.”

  “What did you mean by that?” his mother had asked him when she proofread it. “I don’t know,” he’d said. “It was just what I was thinking.”

  “Did you bring condoms?” Donetta whispered to him. She was sitting up now, taking off her shorts and tank top. It was too dark to see anything except the stars reflected on the water and, up close, Donetta’s tan skin, pale in the darkness.

  He had sex with her. She called it either fucking or making love, depending on the mood she was in; to him it was a more generic thing. But tonight Mary Hise—the way she would have looked naked—came into his mind for just a second and scared Mike so much that he not only concentrated on Donetta, he even said, “I love you” when he had an orgasm. He didn’t usually say that to her unless she said it to him first, and that was what made her cry.

  “I love you, too,” she said. “But you know I do. It’s not like I keep it a secret.”

  She turned away from him and put on her clothes. He dressed, too, and they got in her car and sat with the windows down, listening to the frogs.

  “Don’t think you shouldn’t use that word again,” Donetta said. “My father used to tell me, ‘Tears are just salt water.’ ”

  She moved close to Mike, and he kept one arm around her as they drove back to Andell’s Diner, where Mike got his motorcycle and followed Donetta to her house. Mrs. Rush had a rule: If Donetta was out with a boy, she needed to be brought home by that boy. “That’s civilized behavior,” Mrs. Rush had told Mike a long time ago. “The boy comes in and says a proper good night and thank you. That’s how I should have been raised.”

  The lights were on at Donetta’s house. She lived half a mile east of Wheatley on Flat Rock Road, at the edge of a small crop of new houses. Her house had been the first one built out there. It was a one-story aluminum-sided home with an attached garage. It looked more expensive than it was. Inside, the walls were not nearly as thick as they were in Mike’s house. But there were nice, modern things about it, like a built-in microwave and a bathtub you could turn into a Jacuzzi.

  Donetta lived there with her mother, her twenty-eight-year-old sister, Margo, and Margo’s sometimes husband, Cory Burris—sometimes because he came and went as he pleased, driving up to Montana on the spur of the moment, or riding his Harley into Sturgis in August, for the Black Hills Biker Rally, and not coming back until September. He worked occasionally as a trucker; mainly it was Margo who supported them, working with her mother at the beauty school in Wheatley and helping her open a second one in Rapid City.

  Cory Burris was a weight lifter; he was big and tough-looking but quiet-spoken. He drove Mrs. Rush crazy. Donetta’s favorite story was the night her mother had drunk too much and gone after Cory with the B–C volume of th
e encyclopedia. “Just don’t make me read it,” Cory had said. Lately, Mrs. Rush, Cory, and Margo had been seeing a Christian therapist in Rapid City.

  Tonight they were all in the kitchen, waiting for a pan of brownies to be done. They were sitting at the blue Formica table at the far end of the room, under the dormer window. This was the first time Mike had been over since his father’s crime, and he stood self-consciously in the doorway. They were all looking at him.

  “Mike!” Mrs. Rush said. “Come and sit down. Get him a chair, Cory.”

  “I can’t stay,” Mike told her. “I just wanted to bring Donetta home.”

  “Just stay for a brownie,” Margo said. “We’ve got five minutes left on the timer.”

  Cory was bringing in a chair from the dining room, and Mike took it from him and sat down. Donetta sat beside him. Donetta didn’t look like her mother or her sister—they were both bigger-boned and bigger-hipped, with dark hair and eyes. Donetta took after her father, who had been slight, with light-brown hair and blue eyes. Mike had seen pictures of him. Donetta’s father had had the same interested expression Donetta often had—as if he’d had more questions about life, or himself, than most people had.

  “How’s your bike running?” Cory asked Mike.

  “Okay. A little rough, still.”

  “I’ll take a look at her next time you come over.”

  “Is your mother all right?” Mrs. Rush said. “I wasn’t sure if I should call or not. I knew her teacher friends would be calling.”

  “She’s okay,” Mike said. “I’ll tell her you asked about her.”

  Mrs. Rush was wearing a long pink housecoat that zipped up the front. She had unpinned her hair, which was shoulder-length and wavy; now, down around her face, it made her look older but more attractive, Mike thought—like a reminder that even women older than his mother still had sex, though as far as Mike knew, Mrs. Rush wasn’t having any these days. “Will you tell me if there’s anything I can do?” she asked Mike. “That way I can help without bothering her.”