by Judy Troy
It was a long ride. The wind was cool and the sun hot, and there was the lightness of not wearing a helmet. He rode through the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, thinking that if he were in a car he could be listening to Indian music broadcast from Pine Ridge or Rosebud. Kids in town made fun of it—not Mike’s friends, but assholes who didn’t understand that you might want to hear something new or different, or that your own life might not be always what it was now.
Because you had to be ready for your life to change, even if you didn’t want it to. The important thing, Mike thought, was being prepared for the next thing that happened—like his mother getting a divorce now that it no longer meant or solved anything, as opposed to a year ago, or six months ago, when it could have saved his father from killing Mary Hise. Mary could have quit work when she’d wanted to. She would not have had to see either one of Mike’s parents again. She’d gotten caught between the two of them. Being unhappy made people do dangerous things.
Mike passed an old red Chevy driven at a crawl by an old man. And suddenly he just felt bleak, even though he could see, finally, the Badlands in the distance, the jagged edges of the jagged rocks, rising from the plains like dinosaurs.
He pulled off the road. He looked at the blank, blue sky, pulled back on the road in the opposite direction, and didn’t stop until he got to the Schofield ranch.
• • •
LEE-ANN was the only one home. As he walked up to the house, she came to the door in jeans and a sweater. “Neil’s out at Ed’s,” she said. “He didn’t say you were working today.”
“I’m not here to work. I was just out riding.”
She watched him from the doorway. It was hard for him to read her expression. “Come on in,” she said.
Mike followed her into the living room, where the shades were drawn. There was an unfolded blanket on the couch.
“Where’s Janna?” he asked.
“With Neil,” she told him. “Sit down. Do you want a Coke?”
“No. I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“It’s okay.” She sat down and looked at him closely. “What’s wrong?” Out of nervousness he picked up the blanket and folded it. “You don’t have to do that,” she said. “You don’t have to be so conscientious all the time.”
Mike dropped it on the carpet.
“That’s a small first step,” she told him.
They sat there without speaking. The house was cold. The last time he’d been inside was when they’d kissed and he’d gotten sick, or whatever it was that had happened to him. He thought about saying, I’m leaving for college in three weeks. He thought about telling her that his mother was getting a divorce. Both things seemed wrong. The house had the same feeling it had had that afternoon in May, when he’d come in alone and gone upstairs. He felt like he’d become less grown-up, over the summer, less sure of himself. He wanted to tell Lee-Ann what he’d done that day, so that she could see how unafraid he used to be. He reached for her hand.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m glad to see you. But one minute it’s like you’re my son, and the next minute you’re like my high school boyfriend or something. It’s creepy.”
“Thanks,” Mike said. “That makes me feel like an asshole.” He got up to leave and tripped over the blanket, falling against the couch. It was too clumsy not to be funny, and they both smiled.
“Sit down,” Lee-Ann said. “It’s my fault, too. It’s probably more my fault than yours.”
“There is no fault.”
“I just want to be a friend to you,” Lee-Ann told him. “I know you think you don’t need it. But I’m a safe person for you.”
“I don’t know what you mean by safe,” Mike said.
“I want what’s best for you. And I’m not in a position to hurt you.”
“I know. That’s why it would be okay.”
“It?” Lee-Ann said.
“You know,” Mike said.
“I don’t think that’s what you need.”
“How do you know what I need?”
“Well, I’m older than you.”
“I forget that you’re so old,” Mike said. “You could be my grandmother, right?”
“Not quite.”
“Listen,” Mike said. “You don’t feel the way you used to, I guess. That’s okay. I mean, I can’t change that.”
Lee-Ann fingered the hem of her sweater. “I didn’t say that exactly.”
“So what are you saying?”
“It’s complicated. I think one thing and feel another.”
“So you should go with your feeling,” Mike said. “Why?”
“Because it’s the same as mine. And because I’m leaving, and I won’t see you for a long time.”
“I’ve thought about that,” Lee-Ann said pensively.
The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed three times. In the stillness afterward, Mike moved close to her, put his arm around her, and kissed her. That was all he anticipated doing, to make up for last time. But when she didn’t pull away, he kept his mouth on hers, and when he put his hand under her sweater she suddenly was responding to him as if she’d been waiting for this as long as he had. She was passionate and in a hurry. She interrupted their kissing only to take off her sweater and undo her bra as Mike pulled off his T-shirt. Her breasts were against his bare chest, and she moved his mouth down to her nipples, to one and then the other. “Take off your jeans,” she whispered then, and took off her own while he removed his. Then they were naked, Mike on top of her on the couch, almost inside of her, when she just stopped.
“Wait,” she said. “I can’t do this.”
“Come on,” Mike whispered. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay.”
“Lee-Ann,” Mike said, but she was disentangling herself, then sitting up, looking for her clothes.
“I’m sorry,” she told him. She put on her underwear and sweater and stood up to pull on her jeans. Mike still had an erection, and he dressed with his back to her. He stood in the middle of the dim living room, barefoot. He hadn’t found his socks.
“I’m really sorry,” Lee-Ann said. “You’re never going to forgive me, are you?”
“Not anytime soon.”
Mike sat in a chair, away from her. There was no way to get her body out of his mind. He watched her search under the couch for his socks. She handed them to him. “Are you okay?” she said.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
She sat down, too, her face still flushed. “When I was in the ninth grade,” she told him, “in health class, they warned us about boys and their hormones. They said, ‘Never put your hand in a boy’s pocket.’ I didn’t understand why. I thought the boys would think we were trying to steal their money.”
“You probably were trying to steal their money,” Mike said. He rested his head back against the chair and breathed deeply.
“I’m sorry,” Lee-Ann said.
“I know. Stop saying that.”
“I want to be good for you,” she told him.
“You were doing a great job,” Mike said.
“I mean without that. Because what I thought I could do, I can’t.”
“Okay.”
She straightened out the couch cushions and folded the blanket. “It’s not just Neil,” she told him. “It’s you, too.”
“That’s not a compliment,” Mike said.
“You know what I mean. Your whole life got disrupted overnight. You’ve had this horrible summer.”
“You were making it a lot better.”
“Not in the long run, though. Even though it was really nice,” she added, blushing, which made Mike feel somewhat okay. He tried to stop thinking about her breasts, and how she’d felt underneath him. He’d think about those things later, when he was alone.
They ended up in the kitchen, which was so familiar to Mike, and they sat at the table, looking out at the bright, cool afternoon. “I got pissed off at my mother today,” Mike admitted then. “I just took off.”
&nb
sp; “Without your helmet,” Lee-Ann said. “I noticed that. You should call her, tell her you’re all right.”
“Fuck her,” Mike said, but then he got up and did it. “I’m at the Schofields’,” he told her, and, “Okay. I’ll wear it next time. I’ll see you in a while.”
After that, more openly, he told Lee-Ann about his mother seeing a lawyer, and about Tom DeWitt trying to trip him up. “It’s me he’s always trying to get to. It’s like he thinks I know something, like my father contacts me somehow. I can’t trust him.”
“You don’t trust most people.”
“I’d be stupid to.”
“So you’d be stupid sometimes,” Lee-Ann said. “So what?”
“I don’t want people to see me that way.”
“People are going to see you however they see you,” she told him. “You have to separate people you can trust from people you can’t. I’m in the first category,” she told him. “No matter what.”
It was after five. Outside the sun was illuminating the roof of the barn and the white fence along the road, and Lee-Ann began to make dinner. Mike set the table for her and helped her mash potatoes. Then he said, “I guess I should leave before Neil gets home.”
They looked at each other.
“Either way is okay,” Lee-Ann said. “He won’t think anything of your being here.” Her face flushed. “I’ll remember it, though,” which gave Mike another erection.
He stayed a little longer, and before he left they said good-bye without touching. She waved to him, from the window, as he got on his bike. Riding down the driveway, he didn’t feel anything extreme—just really relieved that he’d shown her what he could be like sexually. That was the important part. Otherwise he’d be feeling awful about himself.
LATE that night, he had a dream that was four months back in time. It was May, school was in session, and Mike had killed Kyle DeWitt in a wrestling match.
Awake, Mike had trouble remembering what month it was now. It took him a full few minutes to figure it out. The divorce thing had put him over the edge, he decided.
He focused on Lee-Ann. The places she wasn’t perfect excited him most—the soft swelling of her stomach, her slightly fallen breasts. And he liked her white skin, which made her seem more naked than naked. Getting an erection made him forget his bad dream. What he liked was to imagine somebody and masturbate, so that how he felt wouldn’t depend on anyone except himself.
FOURTEEN
I remind myself every morning that he’s going,” Donetta said to Mike’s mother one afternoon three days before Mike was to leave for college. He was in his room, packing, and his mother and Donetta were on the stairs, carrying down boxes from the guest room. “If I keep reminding myself, I won’t be so dramatic about it when he leaves.”
“What do you mean?” Mike’s mother asked.
“I’m not sure,” Donetta said. “It’s what my mother says I do.”
Then they were downstairs, and outside, and Mike couldn’t hear them anymore. From his window, he saw them standing in the driveway next to his new used pickup—a 1991 dark blue Ford Ranger Mike and his mother had bought the week before, with money Mike had saved and part of his mother’s summer salary. He was taking his motorcycle, too, against his mother’s wishes. They’d fought about it for a week. “I’m not going without it,” Mike had said finally, that morning. “I don’t care what you say,” and he’d walked out of the room. They’d also fought about whether or not she should go with him to Brookings and help him settle in. She’d wanted to drive there with him, then fly back from Sioux Falls. “Are you kidding?” Mike had said, which had caused more trouble. Later he’d said, “I want to do this on my own.” That was the kind of decision she respected.
A warm wind was coming in through Mike’s window. Low clouds were moving east—toward Brookings, Mike thought, trying to make college seem more real. From his window he watched Donetta, in jeans and a tank top, lean over to tie her shoe. She had a pretty butt; that’s all he was thinking, and suddenly he was looking at her through tears.
On the floor was a suitcase half filled with clothes, and another, empty one. Dust had gathered under his desk and bed; he hadn’t cleaned his room lately, despite his mother asking him to. There was disorder in your life and then disorder in yourself; he’d read that somewhere. Anyway, it reminded him of his father, who probably had never in his life done the same thing in the same way two mornings in a row. He always threw a wrench in it somehow—like dropping his toothbrush in the toilet or knocking spices out of a cupboard in his effort to reach a coffee filter. “Why do you keep these shelves so crowded?” he’d yell at Mike’s mother, and she’d say, “Grow up, Glenn.” Then Mike’s father would realize what a fool he looked like, and get in a worse mood. Meanwhile, Mike, sitting at the kitchen table, would keep eating his breakfast.
Outside now, Donetta was across the street, talking to Mrs. Hyler. The Hylers had eight cats. In the mornings Mrs. Hyler would be out on the porch, feeding them. Some were allowed in the house and some weren’t; Donetta was always trying to learn which cats were the inside ones and which were the outside ones, and what determined which cats were which. “Do you think they can change categories?” Donetta would say to Mike. “Or do you think the outside cats can never be good enough to get inside?”
He watched her walk back to the street, turn around to wave good-bye, and come across the lawn, the wind lifting her hair. He listened to her running up the stairs. She had to leave, he knew; she was working the dinner shift at the diner.
“Mike?” she said, out of breath. “I have to get there early, to change into my uniform. I always hate for you to see me in it.”
“You look good in it,” he said. “You look good in everything.”
“Do you really think that?” She put her arms around his neck. “Not that it matters, how you look. I know it doesn’t.”
She kissed him, and he pulled her close. But then they heard his mother come into the house. “I’ve got to go,” Donetta told Mike. “I wish I didn’t.”
He went with her downstairs and walked her to her car; on the passenger seat of her Geo was a letter addressed to him at his dormitory address in Brookings. “You weren’t supposed to see that,” Donetta said. “It’s so you’ll get mail your first day there.” Then she was in her car, driving off; he stood in the street until she rounded the corner. Then he walked across the yard, stooping under the low branches of the oak tree.
LATE in the afternoon, he and his mother got into his mother’s car, with Mike driving, and left for Tom DeWitt’s cabin in the Black Hills. Agreeing to go was Mike’s way of compensating for the motorcycle argument. His mother was still angry at him. He could feel it in everything she said and did, even in the way she sat—too stiffly straight and close to the door. She had on new jeans and a light blue shirt and had taken a longer time than usual to get ready. She’d brought a dessert, covered with tinfoil, which she was holding on her lap.
“What’s that for?” Mike asked.
“It’s polite to bring something.”
“What is it?”
“Coffee cake.”
Mike stopped trying to make conversation. He took the more interesting way to Lead, through the National Forest, driving through Hill City and Silver City. He and Josh used to come up this way sometimes on Saturdays. They’d go to Deadwood to make fun of the tourists, or else they’d hang out in the cemetery above the town. Josh liked Wild Bill Hickok’s grave. “Pard, we will meet again,” Josh used to say at school, when he’d pass Mike in the hall. That was part of the sentence on Bill Hickok’s gravestone, followed by GOODBYE, in a comma-shaped drawing.
Mike would walk through the highest, steepest section of the cemetery, where children were buried. It seemed spooky to him, how dangerous just being a child used to be. It would make your life a more intense thing, he’d think, as he stood there among the faded headstones, looking down at the strip-mined hills and the town screwed up with small casinos made to
look like old-fashioned saloons. Sometimes you’d see a school bus go down that street, full of ordinary kids trying to grow up in a fucked-up place.
“Don’t forget to give me whatever clothes you need washed,” Mike’s mother said. “I don’t want to be doing laundry at the last minute.”
He nodded, hardly listening.
“Make a list of things you haven’t done yet,” she told him. “That’s the only way you’ll remember.”
As they got closer, she read him directions: left near a ranger station, then past a log cabin. The sun was getting low, and they were on a winding road with pines on one side and Elk Creek on the other. “Turn here,” his mother said at a dirt road that led uphill. A quarter of a mile through the woods was a small frame house with Tom DeWitt’s car parked next to it. The door opened, and he came outside.
“I’m sorry we didn’t get here earlier,” Carolyn said. “We’ve been getting Mike ready for school.”
“That sounds like I’m in the first grade,” Mike said.
“No, it doesn’t.” She turned her back on him, and he heard the way she sucked in her breath. Give it up, Mike wanted to say to her. Stop being an asshole. He walked inside behind her.
“I can show you around in under two minutes,” Tom said, and walked them through the main room, which had a rustic kitchen at one end and a living room at the other, with a wood burner in the middle. The walls were pine, stained dark. Down the hall was a small bathroom and bedroom, the bed made up with a red wool blanket. Also in the bedroom were a phone, an answering machine, and a tiny television. “I don’t completely rough it,” he said, “as you can see.”
“When you find my dad,” Mike told him, “you’ll be able to see yourself on television.”