by Judy Troy
They had sex on the front seat, Mike trying not to put too much weight on her. He held himself over her carefully and, after he had an orgasm, stayed inside her as long as he could. He looked down at her face and shoulders, aware as always of how small she was. And all at once he realized that if anyone was likely to hurt her, it would be him. Not physically—nothing like what his father had done—but in terms of her feelings, which was exactly what she’d been saying earlier.
Afterward he watched her put on her dress, reach for her purse, and brush her hair. He got out of the truck and looked at the dark woods, beyond which were fields; beyond the fields were the Black Hills, which he’d seen, in the distance, practically every day of his life. Beginning tomorrow he’d see something else—it didn’t matter what. It wouldn’t be as good or mean as much. It wouldn’t make him remember specific moments in his life, such as this one. It wouldn’t be home to him.
“What are you thinking about?” Donetta asked.
“You,” he said, shivering as he said it.
ON the way home he made her put on her seat belt. “You should always wear it,” he told her. “It should be the first thing you do when you get in the car.”
“What about you, with your motorcycle helmet?” she said. “You never want to wear it.”
“I do, though.”
“Not all the time.”
“Then I should. I will,” he said. “Anyway, you have to be careful, especially because your car’s so small. It’s not that safe.”
“Does that mean you love me?” Donetta asked.
“Yes.” He took her hand and held it tightly.
After they turned onto Flat Rock Road, they both, at the same moment, spoke of the goat. Donetta said, “I hope the goat’s alive,” and Mike said, “The goat might be okay. Cory might have been right.”
“He hardly ever is, though,” Donetta said.
Mike pulled into her driveway. The house was dark except for the outside porch light and a light on in Donetta’s room. Donetta got a tape cassette out of her purse and put it in his hand.
“I made this for you,” she told him. “Don’t listen to it until tomorrow, when you’re on the highway. You have to promise.”
“I promise,” he said.
They embraced, her wet face against his shirt. “I’ll still be in South Dakota,” he told her. “I’ll just be at the other end of it.” He’d intended it to be funny, but it didn’t sound funny. He didn’t feel humorous. When Donetta moved in order to reach for a Kleenex, he didn’t want to let her go.
It was one in the morning when he walked her up to the door. “If you fall in love with somebody,” Donetta said, “tell me. Don’t make me figure it out.”
“I won’t.”
“Unless it’s with me,” she said, so softly that he didn’t catch the words until she’d opened the door and gone inside. He stood there a minute, under the yellow porch light. Moths fluttered above his head, and from inside the house he heard Donetta’s mother call her name.
He opened the door to his truck and could smell her perfume. He backed down the driveway, and on Flat Rock Road, before it curved to the west, he pulled over and got out. He stood on the shoulder of the road, looking back at her house. It was small from this distance, one of three with lights burning. There weren’t all that many houses, anyway, and they were far apart, like stars, he thought, in what was mostly dark and vacant space. He knew which light was the light in Donetta’s bedroom, and when it went out was when he really understood that he was leaving.
He drove home listening to the tape Donetta had made for him. The first thing on the cassette was her voice. “It’s three o’clock in the morning,” she said. “I can’t sleep, I can’t dream, and I can’t stop thinking of you.”
The first song was “Miss You,” by the Rolling Stones.
SIXTEEN
SAYING good-bye to his mother was easier.
She got him up at seven and helped him finish loading his truck; she made him waffles as well as a lunch to take with him. She was dressed for church in a skirt so new it had a price tag hanging from it.
“You might want to take that part off,” Mike told her, and she laughed and got out scissors.
“Do you think you’ll miss this house?” she asked at breakfast. “It’s the only place you’ve ever lived.”
“Maybe,” Mike said. He didn’t add that he’d miss her.
“Did you sleep all right?” she asked then.
“Yes,” he said, though he hadn’t. He’d dreamed that somebody his own age was trying to run him down with a truck. Awake, then, he’d become nervous about ordinary sounds: the refrigerator starting up, downstairs; a car speeding down the street. By the time he had fallen back asleep, it was almost dawn.
“I’m going to keep tutoring at the college,” his mother told him. “I’m helping Jim Reynolds on Tuesday nights. In fact,” she added, “I’ll probably see him at church this morning.”
“He goes to Saint Ann’s?”
“He just joined.”
“Well, good for him,” Mike said.
“Are you being sarcastic?” his mother asked. When he didn’t answer she said, “Never mind. You say what you want.” She drank her coffee. “Don’t ever skip breakfast,” she told him. “You can’t think on an empty stomach.”
“Who said I was going to think?” Mike said, and his mother smiled. It was probably the nicest moment between them all summer.
She walked out with him into the warm, sunless morning. They spoke for a few minutes, said their good-byes; soon after that he was heading east—driving away from his house, from Wheatley, and from the Black Hills. In front of him the sun emerged briefly, then withdrew into a bank of clouds.
PART II
BROOKINGS
SEVENTEEN
IT was drizzling by the time Mike reached Brookings and found his dormitory, Hansen Hall. When he’d come to campus in October, with his parents, he hadn’t known where he would live. He’d pictured one of the older, redbrick dorms in the center of campus. But Hansen Hall was at the western edge of the university, on Eleventh Street. It was a newer building, a rectangle four stories high, with a dimly lit lobby in the middle that separated the west wing from the east wing. Males west and females east, the desk clerk told him; she was an older student—older than Mike, anyway—studying an economics textbook. “Is there an elevator?” Mike asked. His room was on the fourth floor.
“No,” she said, smiling briefly. She returned to her book.
Mike’s room was at the end of a long, plain hall and faced the street. The door was open. A tall, brown-haired boy was sitting next to the window, in front of a computer. “Raymond Nelson,” he said, getting up to shake Mike’s hand. He had a thin face and wore glasses. His limp hair was collar-length.
“Hi,” Mike said, looking at the beds, one on each side, raised up on iron posts more than five feet off the floor. There were rungs at each end.
“It’s so that we can use the space underneath,” Raymond told him. That was how small the room was. At the foot of each bed was a desk, and above each desk were three small shelves. “I’m on the left side,” Raymond said. “Though I can switch if you want.”
“No. That’s okay,” Mike said. “How long have you been here?”
“Since Friday.” He was already engrossed again at the computer. Mike could see some kind of drawing on the screen. Raymond’s computer was more sophisticated than his was.
Mike went downstairs and unloaded his truck, carrying suitcases and boxes into the lobby. His hair and denim jacket were wet by the time he finished. A boy who’d come down to watch television helped Mike carry things up the four flights of stairs. “Thanks,” Mike said.
“No problem.”
Raymond looked up, surprised, when Mike came back in, lugging suitcases. “Sorry,” he said. “I kind of got into this thing I’m doing.”
“What is it?”
“High-tech space warfare.” He helped Mike bring in the
remaining items and watched him unpack the first box: a striped rug, tan curtains, and a phone machine. “Wow,” he said. “You thought of all that stuff?”
“My mom did. She said that if you already had any of it, I could just bring mine back home.”
“I don’t,” Raymond said. He took the rug from Mike and put it on the bare floor, under the beds. “Homey,” he said. At first Mike thought he was kidding. But Raymond watched with a lot of interest as Mike unpacked a microwave.
“I have money for a small refrigerator, too,” Mike said, “in case you don’t have one.”
“Shit,” Raymond said. “I don’t. That’s great.”
“She memorized every word of everything the school sent me,” Mike told him.
“That’s lucky.”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“What’s another?” Raymond asked. He was serious.
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “I was just talking.”
For the next two hours he unpacked, putting his clothes in the small dresser and closet at the head of his bed. From down the hall he could hear a television; Raymond didn’t have one, and Mike’s mother hadn’t wanted Mike to have one. Mike hadn’t argued with her; he’d worried about hearing or seeing something about his father on the news. It was bad enough that he had brought a radio.
During the seven-hour drive to Brookings he had planned what he’d say to people who recognized his last name: “He’s a relative I hardly knew,” or, to people who somehow knew more: “My mother’s divorcing him.” Mike worried about teachers who might know but not say anything. He hated for anyone to know more about him than he knew they did. Thoughts along those lines had occupied him for the whole seven hours.
“Are you hungry?” Raymond asked, after Mike had set up his computer. “We could walk to Mad Jack’s. It’s not far.”
“Okay,” Mike said. He had forgotten that he hadn’t eaten.
They went downstairs and through the lobby, empty now except for two girls watching an old black-and-white movie on television. “Don’t you wish guys dressed up like that now?” one of the girls said. “And took us dancing?”
Outside the rain had stopped. The night was warm, and so muggy that halos of mist surrounded the streetlights. “It’s pretty humid here,” Mike said.
“You’re West River,” Raymond said. “I thought you’d show up in a cowboy hat.” West River, Mike knew, meant that you lived west of the Missouri River, and that you spent more time with cows and horses than with people.
“I left it home with my spurs.”
Raymond laughed. “A lot of people didn’t.”
Mad Jack’s, across the street from campus, was crowded and noisy. In a back corner was a large group of students who seemed to be getting together for the first time that semester. They were informal and cheerful. At another table were three scornful-looking long-haired guys.
Mike and Raymond sat at a table next to the window and ordered a pizza. Beyond their reflection in the glass, Mike could see the bell tower across the street, lit up from below. It was four or five times as high as the big elm trees around it.
“I’ve only gotten lost once,” Raymond said. “The campus is not that big.” He had weak brown eyes and pale bad skin. “I wanted to go to school out of state,” he told Mike. “I was interested in an engineering program at Purdue University. Dad said, ‘There’s nothing in Indiana you won’t find here.’ ”
“Except Hoosiers,” Mike said.
“That’s good,” Raymond said. “I wish I’d said that.”
Mike started to ask about his father—if he was some kind of engineer, himself, up in Aberdeen. But he caught himself. He needed to stay focused on college, or the future, so that Raymond—or anyone Mike talked to—wouldn’t ask him about his own family and past. “Isn’t there some kind of meeting Dr. Boyd is having tomorrow?” he asked instead. Dr. Boyd was the head of the honors program, whom Mike and his parents had met the previous fall.
Raymond nodded. “At ten,” he told Mike. “Maybe we can catch breakfast beforehand.”
They were finishing their pizza when the group of students in the corner got up to leave. At another table, a pretty, blond-haired girl looked over and smiled at Mike; her smile died when she looked at Raymond. Raymond wasn’t paying attention. He’d taken a pencil out of his shirt pocket and was drawing what looked like a space station on his napkin.
“I get these ideas sometimes,” he said to Mike. “Suddenly I’ll just have a solution to a problem.” He folded the napkin and put it in his pocket. On the short walk back to Hansen Hall, he took it out once and looked at it.
In their room the phone machine was flashing. There was a message from Mike’s mother: “Did you forget to call when you got in?”
Mike called her back. “Sorry,” he said. “Raymond and I went out to eat.”
“What is he like?”
“Okay,” Mike said. “You know.” Raymond was in the room, working at his desk again.
“Where did you eat?”
“Mad Jack’s. A pizza place,” Mike said. He imagined her shaking her head. “It’s just a few blocks away.”
“So the drive was all right? I was afraid you’d run into rain.”
“It was drizzling when I got here,” he told her.
“Well, I’m glad you had a safe trip.” She was silent for a moment. “The house feels a little lonely,” she said then, “a little too big. But I’ll survive it. I’ll get used to it.”
“I told you I’d stay home,” Mike said.
“Don’t be silly. I’ll be fine. You take care of yourself. Get settled in and buy your books, and I’ll talk to you later in the week. Call me if you need anything.”
“I will.” Mike stayed where he was after he hung up, looking at the concrete-block walls and the ugly, industrial-looking beds. Even the view from the window was poor: just the wide, flat streets and a row of small houses, probably rented to students.
Mike picked up the phone to call Donetta but put it back down. Because she would say that she missed him, and what would Mike say—that what he missed were the fields on either side of Route 8, as he rode out to the Schofields’? Or the antelope you could see early in the morning or just before dusk? He was missing things more than people. He missed how things made him feel.
Though it wasn’t even eleven o’clock, he got up into bed, which was narrower and less comfortable than his bed at home. The room was dark except for Raymond’s desk lamp, a small circle of light shining down on the keyboard.
Mike listened to the rain start again and to Raymond at his computer. He wasn’t used to having somebody in the room with him. He’d always slept alone except for the nights, in childhood, when Josh had slept over. Mike hadn’t liked it even then. As he’d gotten older he’d tried to hide that fact about himself, because on TV, weirdos were always described as antisocial, or loners. They turned into serial killers when they grew up.
Raymond turned off his computer, left the room for a few minutes, and came back in. He got into bed.
“Did you finish what you were doing?” Mike asked him.
“Almost. I thought you were asleep.”
“Not yet.”
“That was your mom who called before?”
“I was supposed to call when I got here,” Mike said.
“I do E-mail. It’s easier.”
“Your parents have a hookup at home?”
“Dad does,” Raymond said. Then, “It’s not parents, exactly. I have a stepmother and a stepbrother. My mother died four years ago.”
“Oh,” Mike said.
“She had cancer.”
Mike didn’t speak, afraid that anything he said wouldn’t sound serious or sincere enough.
“You can get E-mail here easily. I can show you.”
“Thanks.”
After a small pause, Raymond said, “People get freaked out when you say your mother’s dead. I just like to say it and get it over with.”
�
�I know,” Mike said. “I mean, I don’t know, but I know what you mean.” He wished he could say: I know because my father’s dead, so that whatever his father had done might be erased. Finally he said, “It doesn’t freak me out. I just think it’s sad.”
“Okay.”
Only a few minutes passed before Mike could tell, by Raymond’s breathing, that he was asleep. Mike never fell asleep that quickly, not since he’d been eleven or twelve. He’d always thought of it as a sexual thing, as if puberty had gotten in the way of sleep. Nights were when you thought about girls and sex. He got an erection now, thinking about the girl at Mad Jack’s who had smiled at him. She’d been wearing a tight little top and no bra. He’d caught her looking at him a few more times. But he had trouble now keeping her in his head. Other things intruded—worries about school, thoughts about home—and his erection disappeared.
The problem was being in a new place, in a new phase of his life, while feeling, somehow, that he hadn’t come to terms with the old phase. He couldn’t catch up with the things that had happened to him. Worse, there was an acceleration to it now, sending him at a faster rate further and further behind.
He closed his eyes and tried to lie exactly in the center of the bed, as if he were in a boat in danger of capsizing.
EIGHTEEN
THERE were 1294, freshmen at South Dakota State, including Mike. There were something like 5,000 undergraduates in all. Nonetheless, late Friday afternoon in the University Union, he almost ran into a girl he knew from high school. He managed to escape into a rest room before she saw him.
Afterward he went to Hansen Hall to pick up his mail—a letter from his mother and one from Donetta—and retreated to the privacy of McCrory Gardens, on the opposite side of campus. He found a bench half hidden by dogwood trees.