Swimming Sweet Arrow: A Novel

by Gibbon, Maureen

“Do you think you love him?” June said.

  “I know so,” I said. I held the smoke in and mouthed the words. “I love the way he feels.”

  “I don’t know if I love Ray.”

  After she said it, she touched the little place at her hairline where the pigment broke. There, just beside her part, her hair was not deep brown but was as blond as mine.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I don’t know what I mean.”

  I kept waiting for her to say something else about Ray, but she didn’t—she just went on fingering that little strip of pale skin and light hair. Though I didn’t know what she was thinking, I thought she seemed sad, so I kept us smoking until we finished two bowls.

  We peed one last time, and I flicked in a Cars tape that would play, over and over, all night. On a night when we had been smoking and drinking, I kept the tape player on because weed made me nervous and fractured my sleep. If I woke up, the sound and the green lights of the tape player would keep me company in the dark until I could sleep again. And I knew I would wake up, because even as I was lying there, trying to let sleep come, I found myself worrying.

  In spite of how much I loved to party, I worried about how all the drugs I did were affecting my body. I was secretly sure they had changed me forever. I also worried about how Del and I would get a place of our own after graduation. All of Del’s money went into his car, and every time I saved something, I’d blow it on weed and booze. Of course, my worries would have been solved if I ever stopped smoking and speeding and drinking, but it never occurred to me to stop, because it wasn’t really my life that I wanted to change—I just wanted not to worry.

  Though I wasn’t sure if it was real or not, as I lay there I thought I could feel a little achy place inside my vagina, sore from screwing. In half-sleep I felt June move on the bed and then felt her leg lightly pressing against mine. Sometimes when we accidentally touched, we moved immediately away from each other. Other times, we’d let our legs stay touching or let our backs rest against each other. That night June didn’t move and neither did I.

  I watched the green lights of the tape player for a while, then closed my eyes. The whole time I could hear June’s breathing and feel the little bit of weight on my skin that was her resting against me. I kept finding those things in the darkness.

  2

  HERE is what they never tell you about being a girl. The lucky few will crack the nut after a time or two, but the rest of us will screw for a long time before we get it right. A long time. I screwed for four years before I came. You tell that to any guy, he’ll shit. They get it from the start, and go on getting it and getting it. It takes a girl longer to figure out how to get hers, because if she isn’t one of the lucky few who spill it on a cock, she’s got to get it in a way that doesn’t hurt the boy’s feelings. Try that when you’re fucking in the woods or a car, or when everyone tells you that you’re only screwing because you want love. You don’t even know you’re supposed to come.

  I first screwed a boy when I was thirteen, but I didn’t come until three boyfriends later, with Del. He made me come when we were sixty-nining on a dirty bunk in a cabin we broke into, out in Mennonite Town. It was all the licking and sucking that did it. When those contractions started, I didn’t know what they were. That’s how ignorant I was about my own body. My mom never said a word about any of it, and the clinic in Ontelaunee where I got my birth control pills made you learn about your fallopian tubes and your ovaries, but as for the rest, as for pleasure, you were on your own. They didn’t even teach you the names for your labia and clitoris—nothing that wasn’t connected with reproducing.

  It was a shock to me that the inside of me could feel so good and loose, and I had to get Del’s cock out of my mouth so I could make the noise that came out of my body. I think I cried out from being scared as much as from the feeling.

  “It’s like that toy with the rings,” I told Del when I got my breath. I knew he didn’t understand what I meant, and that almost made me cry. I was thinking of that toy where colored rings of different sizes rest on top of each other, all on a wooden dowel. Take away the peg and the rings begin to fall. But it is good to let them tumble, roll away, the red going one place, the blue somewhere else.

  I tried again. “It’s like rain,” I said. “It’s like you make my body rain.”

  He listened to me and he let me kiss his mouth over and over. His face was wet with me—chin, nose, cheeks—and I kissed away as much of it as I could. I liked the way it tasted, sweet and salty, not bitter at all.

  “Vangie moisture,” he said. “I read about girls coming before.”

  “Where?”

  “Skin magazine. No one ever came with me before, though.”

  He moved down so he could lie with his head on my belly and play with me. He put a finger up inside me. “You got all tight. Your pussy got all tight.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  When he moved away from me, I thought we were going to start screwing, because he still hadn’t come. But we didn’t. Instead, he got the flashlight he’d used when we’d broken the lock on the cabin, and he shined the thing between my legs. He pulled at me, holding the flashlight in one hand, moving my lips apart with the other. His fingers were gentle, but they kept tugging. I knew he was studying me, and I had to close my eyes from nervousness. My whole body felt hot even though the air in the cabin was cool.

  “Pussy looks complicated, but it’s not,” Del said then. “It’s about as complicated as an eyelid.”

  It took me a second to understand what he meant, but then I got a picture in my mind of the inner corner of the eyelid with its little bud, and the way the two little lips on my vagina came up to meet over my clitoris. I’d seen it how many times in the mirror I propped between my spread legs, there on my apartment floor.

  Del put his flashlight away then. This time when he got between my legs, he pushed my knees up to my chest and licked me in one long lick, bottom to top.

  “I’m going to know every inch of you,” he told me.

  I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. But that’s when I fell in love with Del. If it seems like a strange reason to fall in love with someone, you’re wrong. Think how good it feels when the other person’s mouth is on you there, how loved you feel. If the other person will not do that for you, what else won’t they do?

  3

  AFTER Ray, June, Del, and I started screwing together, the four of us got jobs at Noecker’s chicken farm, carrying and packing chickens. The jobs weren’t steady—we worked after school and on Saturdays, and only when an old flock had to be taken from their cages, or when new chickens were brought in. Even though we were two couples, we never worked that way. June and I carried chickens, and Ray and Del loaded or unloaded trucks in the coop yard. We still saw a lot of each other. Old Man Noecker didn’t care what we did on our breaks or what we talked about when we were loading the trucks, just so long as we moved his chickens.

  This is how the job worked. In the coop, a puller yanked the chickens from their cages to hand off to June and me, and we in turn brought the chickens through the coop and out to the yard. She and I carried the chickens by one leg each, hanging upside down, three to a hand. In the yard we swung the birds up in bunches to Ray and Del so they could stuff them in slatted, wooden shipping crates that were stacked on a truck. All of it was hard work, but it was not so hard that we couldn’t mess around a little as we worked. Each time June or I came out to the truck, Ray or Del had something stupid to say to us: Do you need a rooster in your hen house? Let us know when you want a cock. It was endless.

  The old chickens were big, and sometimes a bird got its wings broken when a puller took it from the cage. Other birds had wings and feet growing onto the bars of cages, and the pullers had to yank those chickens like all the others. By the time they were handed off to June and me, the birds were usually too stunned to do anything, but every once in a while we got a chicken who acted up, who tried to peck
us or the other chickens. If I had a free hand, I did what Del taught me to do the first night of work: I punched the chicken’s head.

  I didn’t want to have anything to do with the punching at first. I thought it was the cruel kind of thing only a boy would do to an animal, like sticking a firecracker in a cat’s ass just to see it blow. I tried to quiet the chickens by shaking them a little and holding them against my legs, but it wasn’t enough.

  “Just go ahead and hit the damn thing, Vangie,” Del told me when he saw me having trouble.

  “Won’t it hurt them?”

  “It stuns them, that’s all. They’re too stupid to feel it.”

  I thought the chickens were stupid, too, but I also thought the last thing they needed was somebody punching them in the head. Still, one panicky bird could cause such a fuss that I’d have to drop it, and that meant chasing through the liquid shit of the coop to catch it. After I had to do that a couple times, I started punching. I know I crossed over some kind of line on the second night of work when I bumped a whole handful of chickens against a wall to quiet them. Del laughed when he saw me do it.

  “I had to,” I said. “I didn’t have a free hand to punch.”

  “Don’t worry. They’re fucking birds.”

  Still, I thought a lot about the chickens as I carried them. Their legs felt skinny through my gloves, and I knew it would be easy to break their bones with just my hands. The whole bird was a thing people could break apart and eat. Not for me, though. From the time I started working at Noecker’s, I stopped eating chicken. I couldn’t bring myself to have anything to do with eating chicken meat off chicken bones.

  The jobs at Noecker’s were fashionable. A lot of kids from school worked there, and going to work was almost like going to a party. It didn’t matter that we all smelled like chicken shit or that we looked foolish with bandannas on our heads. No one could escape the smell, and we wore the bandannas to keep the specks of dried shit floating in the coops from settling in our hair. We didn’t think about the flecks of shit we breathed into our lungs—people didn’t worry about things like that back then.

  Noecker’s was such a social thing I even had a special outfit picked out for work: Lee jeans with straight legs, an old pair of cowboy boots, and a flannel work shirt with a few buttons open so the scoopy muscle T-shirt I stole out of my dad’s drawer showed. The T-shirt was low-cut, thin, and clingy, and I knew Del could see my bra through it. My breasts were 36D, up from 34B in the last year, and I thought they were my best shot at being pretty. I still hated when people called them tits, and I left the room when my old man called me a cow, but I wanted Del to look at them. I loved the way his hands and mouth felt when he was kneading me and sucking on my nipples, and I wanted him to think of that when he was working. Because no matter how much I worried about the chickens, it wasn’t birds that I thought about when I was working, it wasn’t the three-fifty an hour that I was earning, and it wasn’t the ever present stench and shit of the coop. It was skin.

  When Del squatted to tighten the belts holding down the wooden crates, I liked to watch his jeans pull tight over his legs. When he took the chickens from me, I liked to watch his forearms twitch with the effort. Below his cuffed-up shirt, veins crisscrossed over the muscle, under the smooth skin. Only guys had forearms with thick, raised veins showing like that. Something about seeing those veins carrying the blood to and from his hands made me wild.

  One night I got so aware of Del’s arms and hands it seemed like he was touching me every time I came out to the truck, even though he wasn’t. When we finally got a break and went out back of the coop—where you went if you wanted to make out or smoke some weed—I pulled Del’s cuffs further up his arms and put my mouth over one of the raised, blue veins. I could feel its soft shape when I pushed at it with my tongue.

  “Vangie,” Del said after a bit and pulled me up so he could kiss me.

  “I can’t help it.”

  “You don’t have to help it. I like it.”

  Usually when we stood against that wall, we did what all the other couples back there were doing: we’d kiss and Del would rub my nipples through my shirt and I’d stand hard between his legs so I could feel his cock through his jeans. That night those things weren’t enough. When he moved his hand to one of my breasts, I sighed into our kiss.

  “You like that?”

  “It’s like being at a party,” I said, because that’s how dizzy and breathless I felt.

  We kissed some more, then he moved his hands to my jeans. When his fingers found the little tab on my zipper, I said, “Del, wait.”

  I think he thought I was going to say no, but all I did was lean back against the wall at a different angle so he could get at me. When he slipped his hand inside the elastic band of my bikinis, I tried to move further up the wall. I could feel the concrete scraping my shoulders through my shirt.

  “Can I come to your party?” Del asked.

  I thought it was the best thing to say, and I knew I’d have to tell June about it. For a second I thought of his chicken hands going inside me. Then I didn’t care, didn’t care, didn’t care.

  IN MAY, after we got rid of the old flock, we had to bring in a new one, and the whole procedure for moving chickens was reversed. June and I picked up chickens from Del and Ray, carried them into the coop, and handed them off to a stuffer, who put them in the cages. Since the new chickens were young and light, we had to carry four birds in each hand instead of three. It was hard to get a handle on the extra legs and control eight birds, but I still liked unloading better than loading. The new chickens were clean and tidy. They didn’t have missing eyes and broken wings, and their feathers were still white instead of being soiled with the shit of the coop.

  The second night we were unloading the new flock, they were short of stuffers and Old Man Noecker asked June and me if we wanted to move into one of the rows and stuff the cages.

  “Want to, Vangie?” June asked, and I knew what she was saying: if we were stuck in a row, we wouldn’t get to see as much of Del and Ray. But I’d never done that part of the job, and I wanted to try, so I said, “Sure. We’ll see them at break.”

  Stuffing was a hundred times better than carrying. With one hand you held a bunch of four chickens, and with your other hand you took each chicken by its legs, pointed its head at the cage opening, and slipped it in. The whole thing was so easy that I started feeling like I was tucking little white pillows into little wire houses.

  Because the new chickens didn’t fuss, it was easy for June and me to work at the same pace and talk as we worked. We started gossiping about a girl we went to school with who’d refused to have sex until her boyfriend put a preengagement ring on her finger. This week she’d finally shown up at school with a ring, and now she was driving us all crazy with her declarations of what a good lay she was.

  “Oh God,” I said. “He slipped that cheap little thing on her finger and boom! She’s fucking like a rabbit.”

  “I didn’t need a ring to tell me when to fuck,” June said.

  I knew from other talks we had that June was more experienced than I was. She’d gone on birth control pills in the eighth grade. That was before I really knew her and before we were friends, but she told me about it. What she hadn’t ever told me about was when she first had sex, so that night I asked, “When did you first do it?”

  “Fool around or fuck?”

  “Fuck.”

  “When I was ten.”

  She didn’t look up from the chickens when she said it, and I let myself look at her for a while, and then I looked away. After a bit I said, “Who with?”

  “Just someone,” June said. “One of my brother Kevin’s friends.”

  I kept my eyes on the chickens, because I did not want her to see the look on my face. I did not want her to think I judged her. All the same, I knew that when I was ten, I was a little girl in the fifth grade and about a thousand miles away from the she-cat I became by the seventh grade.

  �
��Did it hurt?” I said. “Did he hurt you?”

  “He didn’t mean to. That person didn’t mean to hurt me.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Oh Vangie. It always hurts the first time. I already had my period anyway.”

  I didn’t say anything—I knew my voice would sound funny if I did—I just went on tucking chickens into cages and so did June. My mind was working, though. Kevin Keel was seven or eight years older than June, and his friends would have been, too. What would they have wanted with a little girl?

  The whole thing was a shock to me, but it wasn’t really a surprise. The stories June told me about her family made mine seem like a dream. Her older brothers were forever getting arrested for DUI, possession, and disorderly, and Kevin, the younger of the two, had served time for vehicular manslaughter. June’s dad, Ty, used to lock June and her brothers out of the house when he wanted to be alone with her mom, Jeanette, and he threatened to kill them if they tried to come in. He would not let Jeanette drive or go anyplace alone, and sometimes he made her take Spanish fly.

  When June told me that, she’d said, “My mom says it doesn’t make you horny, it just makes you pee.”

  “Why does she take it, then?”

  “My dad wants her to.”

  “Where did you go when you got locked out of the house?”

  “To my grandma’s. Or out in the woods.”

  After hearing those stories, it was no wonder to me why June always kept to herself at school. She was maybe the prettiest girl in our grade—long walnut hair with that one blond piece, eyes slanting just a bit at the corners, cheek-bones so high it looked like she had sickles carved into her cheeks—but you would never notice, because she did not have good clothes and she never raised her hand to talk in class, but sat instead at a desk in back and read. She was shy at school out of plain shyness, but also because of her name. A name like that had come from years of a certain kind of living, and if her father and her brothers had made the name wild and bad, there was nothing June could do about it.