by Judy Troy
“Why would you say something like that?” his mother said.
“Look,” Tom said. “If I wanted a movie career, I’d go to Hollywood. It’s not like I haven’t had offers.” When neither Mike nor Carolyn laughed, he said, “I’m kidding. It’s a joke.”
He led them into the living room and brought them beers. “I assume it’s all right for Mike to have one?” he asked, and handed it to Mike before his mother had a chance to answer.
“I want to look around outside,” Mike said abruptly. He walked out on the porch, then down past the cars into the cool, dark shadows of the pines. Behind him, he heard the door open.
“Mike?” his mother said.
He didn’t speak or move. After a minute she went inside, and he walked down the hill and along Elk Creek, which was wide and shallow, though its banks were steep. He stood in the gathering dusk, drinking the beer he didn’t want much, tired of his mother, tired of whatever attempts Tom DeWitt would make tonight to manipulate him or whatever it was he always did. His mother was a fool where DeWitt was concerned. Mike’s father used to say, “Your mother wants to believe that people are better than they are,” and he also had been right about how controlling she was, and what it did to you after a while.
Mike watched the creek for muskrats or beaver. The temperature was lower here, as it always was in the Hills. Before long, Mike thought, there would be the first frost—maybe not right here but farther south and higher up, toward Harney Peak. It would snow there then, and you could go from fall to winter just by driving out of Wheatley up to Hill City. It wasn’t far, though the roads were twisting and narrow, and coming back down into Wheatley you’d have long views again of long grass, which would seem almost liquid, put in motion by the wind blowing through them.
Those were just his thoughts, and all at once he was overcome with homesickness and uncertainty. He felt lost somehow, even from himself, and it was hard for him to take a breath. The ground under him seemed unsubstantial, and the way he felt was nothing he could find words for; maybe it was like dying, he thought, and for a second he almost believed that he was, though he didn’t know of what, or what had made it happen. It was like being caught high in the air, like in a flying dream, except that you couldn’t fly. You couldn’t even fall. And there were no stars or planets above you, or earth beneath you.
Then, as suddenly as the fears had come, they faded, and within a few minutes Mike found himself paying attention again to the creek, and to the night sounds in the growing darkness. The tightness inside him went away. It went below ground, somehow. Mike stood in the dusk, listening to the creek, and didn’t turn around and walk back until he started feeling angry again—at his mother, particularly, for causing him to feel so bad.
When he entered the house, Tom said, “There’s more beer in the refrigerator. Help yourself.”
“One is plenty,” Carolyn said, which was the only reason Mike helped himself to a second one. He stood near the wood burner, while his mother and Tom DeWitt sat at opposite ends of the couch.
“Are you ready for school to start?” Tom asked Carolyn.
“Yes,” she said at first. Then, “I don’t know. I suppose so.”
“You teachers should get paid more,” he said. “I don’t know how you do it, spending every day with kids who’d rather be someplace else.”
“Some of the students want to be there,” Carolyn said.
“No, they don’t,” Mike said. “Not in a class, anyway.”
“So now I’m a bad teacher.”
“He didn’t say that,” Tom said.
Carolyn put down her beer and stood up. “Excuse me,” she said, and walked down the dark hall to the bathroom.
“You don’t have to defend me,” Mike said to Tom.
“Sit down.”
“Why?”
“Because it hurts my neck to look up. And I want to tell you something.” He got a card out of his pocket and handed it to Mike. There were three phone numbers on it. “When your father contacts you at school,” he said, “I want you to call me.”
Mike’s head began to hurt. “How do you know he will?” he said.
“I don’t. I just think it’s going to happen.”
“Then where is he now?” Mike said.
“I’m not sure.”
The bathroom door opened, and Tom stood up when Carolyn walked into the room. “I spoke out of turn,” he told her. “I’m sorry. I have a tendency to do that.”
“That makes two of us,” she said. She turned to Mike. “I didn’t mean to jump on you, either.”
Mike was too distracted to reply. He was thinking about how he’d get rid of Tom’s card later, throwing it away someplace his mother wouldn’t find it. Meanwhile, he put it in his pocket.
THEY had dinner at the small kitchen table. Tom had made chili, which Carolyn made a fuss over. “Don’t give me too much credit,” he told her. “It’s mostly out of a can. But I’m glad you like it.”
He was smiling at her, helping her to more, and for the first time Mike thought that Tom seemed less sure of himself—maybe even nervous. He did most of the talking. He told them about seeing a mountain lion a few weeks earlier, and about how many more coyotes there were around than people thought, and how much more Mike’s mother must know about science than he did, given that she taught biology. Then the phone rang, and he went into the bedroom to answer it.
“That’s why he keeps it in the bedroom,” Mike said to his mother. “So that he can talk in private.”
“Don’t be paranoid. How much company do you think he gets?”
“What I’m saying is, he’s always working. Even when you think he’s not.”
“Mike,” his mother said hesitantly. “Are you jealous that he seems to like me?”
No, he started to say. Then he realized how useless it could be to tell the truth, to think that you weren’t alone, on your own, in every situation. “Maybe I am,” he told her. “Maybe that’s right.”
She smiled at him for the first time in a week. “That’s only natural,” she said gently.
When Tom DeWitt came back to the table, they finished their chili. They ate the coffee cake.
FIFTEEN
MIKE wasn’t sure where to take Donetta for their last night together. If they went to Crow Lake, she’d know he wanted to have sex with her. If he didn’t take her there, she might think he didn’t care about having sex with her. He was overly preoccupied with it, and with other things as well, especially saying good-bye to Lee-Ann. He wanted to make exactly the right impression—confident but not arrogant, easygoing but not immature. Whatever he was like today would be what she would remember, he thought. He didn’t always realize that there was latitude with people, built-up stock, that most people didn’t think you were only what you were on any one day.
He drove to the Schofields’ early in the morning, the day before he was to leave. The sun had just risen, and there were antelope in the low hills above the Schofields’ property. Near the barn, next to the old lean-to Neil had bought, Neil and Ed were at work on a new project: an old jailhouse they had bought and moved there from Montana. “So we can arrest each other,” Neil joked to Mike. Then he said, “Shit,” and hit himself in the forehead.
“It’s okay,” Mike said. “I wish everybody would forget about it like that.”
Neil and Ed admired his new truck—it was the first time they had seen it—and gave him advice about college.
“Wear condoms,” Ed said.
“Only go to class if there’s nothing better to do,” Neil told him. “I mean it. Have fun sometimes.” He put an arm over Mike’s shoulders. “Say good-bye to Lee-Ann, or she’ll never forgive you. She has something for you.”
Lee-Ann was waiting for him at the open kitchen door. Behind her, Janna was in her high chair, eating Cheerios; Mike sat next to her. On the table in front of him were five stamped envelopes, addressed to Lee-Ann. “So you won’t have an excuse not to write,” she told him. She was barefoot,
dressed in shorts and a loose shirt, her soft hair uncombed. She handed him a greeting card, which said, “Good luck in your new life from your friends in your old life.” Inside was a check for five hundred dollars.
“I can’t take this,” Mike said.
“Force yourself. It’s for extras, like movies and pizza. Or maybe a trip home some weekend.” She got coffee for herself and Mike. “Are you excited about going?” she asked him. “Or are you nervous?”
“Neither. It’s just school.”
“Four hundred miles away, though.”
“It’s only a day’s drive.”
Lee-Ann looked at him thoughtfully.
“What?” Mike said.
“Going away to college is a big deal,” she told him.
“Not to me.”
“Well, it should be,” Lee-Ann said.
“It doesn’t seem important,” Mike said, “compared to everything else.”
“You have to make it important.”
“I’d rather stay here,” Mike said, and when Lee-Ann looked startled, he explained, “I mean in Wheatley.”
They sat silently in the sunny kitchen, Janna smiling between them. Mike looked at the white-tiled floor and the shiny appliances, and the hallway leading to the living room. He could see in his mind exactly how Lee-Ann had looked, naked, on the couch, but equally vivid was the afternoon in the barn when he’d held her. That had grown in significance. He knew that neither of those things would happen again.
“It’s going to be lonely, not seeing you,” Lee-Ann said.
“I know. It will be for me, too.” Mike turned to Janna so that Lee-Ann couldn’t see how sad he was. “What about you?” he said. “Are you going to miss me?” Janna took a Cheerio out of her mouth and offered it to Mike. “That’s what I thought,” he said.
Before he left, he and Lee-Ann hugged, as friends, without kissing and without intensity, and Mike felt fine until Lee-Ann hugged him longer than he’d expected her to. He didn’t know why that affected him so strongly, why that, more than anything else, seemed to divide his life in Wheatley so definitively and permanently from the life he would have from tomorrow on.
“You have to come see us whenever you’re home,” Lee-Ann said, and Mike thought: I feel like I’m never going to come back home.
“You know I will,” he said.
She walked him outside into the warm sun. Then he was on his own, waving to Neil and Ed from a distance, starting his truck, and heading down the long driveway. It was when he got to Route 8 that he knew he couldn’t face Wheatley. He needed to be alone someplace.
He drove to Hot Springs, then up into the Black Hills all the way to Custer. His windows were down. The road was crisscrossed with strips of sun and shadow, and the hills were green and dark with pines. He felt better now that he was alone in his truck, concentrating on driving.
Still, returning later to Wheatley, he could not think about Lee-Ann Schofield. It was like having a toothache, or a cut too tender to touch. She got to him somehow. She knew him too well. She didn’t allow him to keep his defenses up.
• • •
LATER in the day he finished packing: his books, his computer, his school supplies. He mowed the yard one last time and had a steak supper with his mother in the dining room—a celebratory supper, she said. “We’re going to leave the past behind,” she told him. “That’s where it belongs, doesn’t it? The past belongs in the past.”
“I guess so,” Mike said. He wasn’t hungry, but he ate to please her.
“If Tom comes by with new information,” his mother said to him, “I’ll let you know only if it’s something significant. I don’t want you distracted from school.”
“He’ll probably let me know himself,” Mike said, to see if she knew more than he thought she did.
“Of course he won’t. He wouldn’t do that without telling me first.”
Mike said nothing. On the wall above where she sat was a square blank space where a picture of their family used to hang: Mike at age ten, with his parents standing behind him. He hadn’t remembered his mother taking it down. He was noticing only now that it was gone.
His mother cleared the table and brought in, as a surprise, a chocolate bakery cake with GOOD LUCK, MIKE written on it. Mike, cutting them each a big piece, tried to act happy.
HE drove through Wheatley just as the streetlights were coming on. It was a windy night, and the streets were empty except for a group of high school kids fooling around in the Taco John parking lot. Mike went out of his way not to drive past his father’s office. He took a route past the hardware store and the community college, and as he turned onto Flat Rock Road the moon, rising behind him over town, looked impossibly big.
When he pulled into Donetta’s driveway, he saw that the front door was wide open. Moreover, there was Cory Burris, walking up to it with a baby goat in his arms.
“It’s okay,” Cory called out. “She’s just unconscious. She’ll come to in a few hours.”
“Not in this house she won’t,” Mrs. Rush said. Mike could see a tearful Margo behind her.
“Why would somebody give Wild Turkey to a baby?” Cory asked Mike. “Party or no party?”
“I have no idea,” Mike said.
“Donetta’s in the kitchen,” Mrs. Rush told him, stepping aside to let Mike in, and Cory ran in right behind him. He lay the goat down in a cardboard box that Donetta was lining with towels. He and Margo hovered over it.
“She doesn’t look good,” Margo said.
“That’s because she’s dead,” Mrs. Rush said from the front hall.
“Being negative is harmful,” Margo told her mother. “How many times has Pastor Kelly said that?”
“Don’t throw Pastor Kelly at me,” Mrs. Rush said. “Dead is dead. Furthermore, the goat isn’t my fault. I wouldn’t attend a party where people gave liquor to an animal.”
“I was just passing by,” Cory said defensively.
Next to Mike, Donetta knelt down, patted the goat’s head, and burst into tears.
“For Pete’s sake,” Mrs. Rush said. She came into the room and put her hands on Donetta’s shoulders. “Just calm down,” she whispered. “Don’t be like this on Mike’s last night home.”
IT was almost nine by the time they left for Crow Lake. It was Donetta’s idea to go there. “I want to go someplace that seems like ours,” she told him. “Someplace really private.”
“We don’t have to have sex,” Mike said. “It’s not like that’s the only reason I see you.”
Donetta had been sitting close to him, but she moved over now and looked out her window. Then she said, “That’s not the only reason you see me? That’s an egotistical thing to say. It’s like you’re doing me a favor. Or else it’s like you see me and then who else do you see? Who else will you see?” she asked, correcting herself. Before Mike had a chance to answer, Donetta said, “I told myself I wouldn’t do this. Pastor Kelly said it was self-destructive.”
“You saw Pastor Kelly?”
“Just once,” Donetta explained. “I went by myself. I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Why didn’t you just talk to me?”
“Because it was about you,” Donetta said. “It was about you with me, anyway.”
“I guess you don’t trust me very much,” Mike said indignantly.
“I know,” Donetta said. “That’s what I talked to him about.”
Mike’s face reddened. He couldn’t think of a response. After a minute he reached for her hand and held it as he drove. She didn’t pull it away.
HE parked where they always did, a little distance from the lake, out of sight of the road. Donetta rolled down her window. In the darkness came the sound of wind through the trees. Mike waited for Donetta to say something. When she didn’t, he touched her white dress. “Is this new?” he asked awkwardly. She nodded. “I like it,” he told her. “It looks good on you.”
“I ordered it from a catalogue. I got it for tonight.” She turned her face tow
ard the open window. “That’s the kind of lovesick thing I do for you.”
“That’s not lovesick,” Mike said. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“It’s what you always say about me. Not that word, exactly, but that I think about you too much. Which is like saying, ‘You think about me more than I think about you.’ ”
“Well, I was wrong,” Mike said.
She got out of the car and walked down the dark path to the edge of the water. There was enough moonlight for Mike to see her, but he couldn’t tell if she was crying. He felt depressed and defeated. He didn’t know, anymore, what she thought, or how he came across to anyone.
He walked down to the water and stood beside her. “I’m not as bad as you think,” he said.
“What does that mean? Like, ‘I’m bad, but I could be worse’? Well, so could everybody.” She crossed her arms. “I’m trying not to be stupid.”
“You don’t have to try. You’re not.”
“Stupid is when you love the wrong person,” Donetta said.
He stepped back clumsily, and when Donetta saw his face she moved close to him. “I shouldn’t have said that,” she whispered. “I should have used different words.” She put her arms around him. A car drove up on the other side of the lake, and they heard people get out. One of them said, “The water’s cold.”
“I’ve fucked up this night,” Donetta said.
“No, you haven’t.”
“I think it started with the goat. I felt okay until then.”
They walked back to the truck, holding hands. Mike opened the door for her, and they sat together on the wide front seat. The windows were open to the sounds of frogs and cicadas, wind and water. For Mike everything about Donetta suddenly seemed important—how she felt, what she thought, how this night would seem to her tomorrow.
“I wish I didn’t have to go,” he said.
“Do you really feel that way?”
“Yes.”
She kissed him, and for a while that was all they did. Now that he was leaving so soon, he wasn’t in a hurry. He wanted to delay time instead of speeding it up. Donetta was wearing only her dress and sandals, and she took them off while Mike was still dressed. It aroused him to see her naked when he wasn’t, to see her smooth skin against the rough fabric of the seat. She unbuttoned his shirt as he undid his belt. She watched him as he took off his jeans.