“You’re going to get a job sooner or later just because you have that bun on your head,” I said to make her feel better, because she was even doing that: pulling all her hair, which covered her shoulder blades, into a brown donut on the top of her head.
“It’s called a shin-yon,” she said, and I later found out she was saying the word chignon, which I never heard pronounced before. From the donut/chignon she let a few pieces sneak out so they strayed prettily around her face and the nape of her neck. I could have told her I knew those pieces were called tendrils, but I didn’t want her to think I was teasing her about the way she talked. Even if we were country girls who fucked in cornfields, we knew how to read, and we knew words like chignon and tendril.
Even though June looked for almost a month, she could not get a job at any of the businesses in Mahanaqua. They all told her the same thing: that she should go on for more schooling, over to the business institute in Mingo County.—“Well, you could do that,” I said. “You always did get good grades.”
“Like I have money for it, Vangie.”
She ended up doing what a lot of girls from our school did: sewing piecework in the factory: It was the one job I told myself I’d never take. I knew I’d rather listen to Neil Roy talk about me sucking his dick than sit hunched over a sewing machine every day. My mom had done it for thirteen years, and she told me it was a killing thing. So if June did have to sit sewing shirt collars all day, I was glad she at least got to go home to Ray, even if there was another person in the house with them.
I never said this to June, but I thought that if she hadn’t been a Keel, if her father and brothers hadn’t made the name so bad, she might have had a better chance of getting hired. But I think people in Mahanaqua heard the name Keel and figured she was one and the same with Dean and Kevin, and no fancy hairdo was going to change their minds.
I didn’t know the older of June’s brothers at all, but I often saw the younger one in Dreisbach’s. Kevin. He was the one who served time for vehicular manslaughter after striking down an old man on a county road. He came into Dreisbach’s a few times a week for dinner. He did not let on that he knew I was June’s friend, and I was sure he didn’t know. He had no reason to know anything about his sister’s life, judging from the distance June kept from him now. Yet that one time she talked about him, when she told me it was one of his friends that screwed her, I got the feeling things hadn’t always been like that between them, and I wondered what it all meant to Kevin. Did he miss her at all? Was he sorry about letting one of his friends fuck her when she was ten? Was it why June didn’t want to talk about him now?
Kevin Keel acted toward me like many of the men who came into Dreisbach’s acted: he flirted with me, but he never crossed over the line. In turn, for my tip, I flirted back, but I never crossed over the line either. With all those men, what I mostly did was make a big show of taking care of their needs. When I brought their dessert or coffee, I’d set it down with a flourish and sometimes touch them—on the hand or arm, nothing more. When one of them ordered a Yuengling with his meal, I’d pour the beer for him from the long-necked brown bottle, careful to tilt the glass. It was a thing men seemed to like: someone pouring their beer for them.
“I can do that,” Kevin said the first time I did it for him. “I know you’re busy.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. I tried to smile a real smile, not one of the fake kind like I gave everyone else, but it was hard because of what I knew about him.
“Working hard?”
“Hardly working,” I said.
“Now that I don’t believe. I seen you in here enough to know that.”
I felt uncomfortable around him not only because of June, but also because I’d heard so much about the manslaughter conviction. The stories about that were rife. I heard Kevin was so drunk the night it happened, he thought the old man he ran down was a pole on the side of the road. I heard that a piece of jawbone from the old man had somehow worked its way onto the dashboard of Kevin’s car. I heard that Kevin’s skinny girlfriend, Sherry, was happy when he got locked up, because she could finally leave him without getting a black eye for trying. I heard that other inmates at the prison had feared him because he was always lifting weights and working out.
Still, something in me wanted to talk to Kevin Keel, and one night when I got up the courage, I sat down at his table and introduced myself.
“Your sister and I went to school together,” I said. “I’m Vangie Raybuck and June’s my best friend.”
“Is that right? Good friends are hard to come by.”
I thought I could tell by the way he held himself and looked at me that he did not want me to go on talking. So I stood up and was about to leave his table when he put out his hand to shake mine. He said, Pleased to meet you, Vangie Raybuck. When I was looking at him, I could see June in his face, in the eyebrows and the shape of his mouth. He knew I was looking at him, and he let me. I imagine I wasn’t the first person to study him.
I knew some of the stories about Kevin had to be lies, but I knew that some of them were probably true. Still, it was hard for me to put all those stories together with the man who sat at my tables and ate dinner quietly, who never drank more than one beer, who had my best friend’s eyes and nose and mouth. But that is the nature of people, how they can surprise you with their ordinariness, and all the while a deep, powerful river is flowing through them, carrying them in whatever direction they choose to let it take them.
8
WHEN Del and I finally rented an old farmhouse out in Mennonite Town, it was a green time. I say that because it took us a good part of the summer to earn the money for first and last month’s rent, plus a deposit, and because I felt like everything in my piece of the world was green and new. Del and I could fill the whole bottom of our refrigerator with beer if we wanted, we could play our stereo as loud as it would go, and we had a big bed that was always waiting for us to lie down on it. All I had to do was bump up against Del in the kitchen, or kiss his back when he was working shirtless over his car, and to the bedroom we’d go. One or two kisses and we were ready—he’d pull my lips apart with one hand and slip, in he’d go. It seemed like I was wet all the time, like the tissues down there were always swollen. In the morning Del was rock solid at my ass, and we’d say good morning by screwing, or by putting our mouths on each other. He even liked the taste of my morning cunt. We didn’t speak those mornings, and sometimes we hardly looked at the other’s face. I’d glimpse a brown eye when he lowered his body to mine, and because I saw it through the tangle of his hair, I sometimes felt like I was with a brown-eyed animal. I liked the feeling, because it meant I could be like an animal, too. Grunting when it felt good between my legs, running my hands over skin, pulling on the black hair that fell over the brown eye to bring the mouth down to mine.
More than just Mennonites lived in the area of Mahanaqua called Mennonite Town, but certainly Del and I were the last people you’d expect to fit in. We were as foreign as tropical birds out there, what with our drinking and drugs, Del’s long hair, and the waitress uniforms I wore that just barely covered my ass. Still, that farmhouse gave us a kind of freedom we couldn’t have had in an apartment in town, and I liked the place. I liked the old blue asphalt tile that covered the outside, and I liked the two old metal chairs with backs like seashells that sat on our porch. I was content.
While I liked all the sex and partying Del and I got to do once we moved in together, I also appreciated the everydayness of living with Del: being able to walk around the house in my nightgown—a comfortable cotton one, not the sexy one my mom gave me—and having someone to talk to every night before I fell asleep. Sometimes I remembered old things that happened with my mom and dad, and it often made me fretful and sick, and I was glad Del was there. Some things about my mom and dad were half funny to remember, like how we mostly ate off paper plates after they’d broken a couple sets of dishes in their fights, but most of the memories just made me sad. I w
ondered how the two of them got to the point where they screamed and threw things at each other. How did that much anger happen in a person? I blamed some of it on my dad’s drinking, but my mom did not drink often, and she sometimes met my dad blow for blow in those fights. She was the one who split his scalp open when she threw a candy dish at him. My dad mostly used words to hurt.
“Can’t you just forget about it?” Del asked me the first time I made myself sick with remembering. “You know, just push it to the back of your mind?”
“I don’t set out to think about the two of them,” I said. “Sometimes it just happens. You don’t have to be around me if you don’t want to.” ‘
“I want to be around you,” he said. “I just think you should put it out of your mind. That’s what I do.”
But he didn’t bug me about it, and sometimes when he could tell I was feeling sad, he sat with me and brushed my hair, or played cards with me until the feelings passed. Other times, if it was what I wanted, he let me be—because of course it wasn’t just old memories of my mom and dad that made me fret. Sometimes I thought of what I’d done with Frank Pardee, and it goes without saying that I did not tell Del what was on my mind then. It was my secret and I had to carry it alone.
Still, no matter how hard Del and I tried to understand each other in those first weeks of living together, it was a strange time, because everything real about life—stupid, little, everyday details of life—seemed to disappear or get complicated. We ate hamburgers, spaghetti, or bacon and eggs almost every night, because that was all I really knew how to cook. I had trouble shitting if I knew Del was in the house. And night after night, after all our screwing, I could not relax enough to let myself sleep and dream beside Del. I’d lie wakeful until three or four in the morning, when I finally would let myself drift off. Some days, depending on the shifts we were working, I stayed in bed long after Del left for work so I could catch up on the sleep I missed beside him. I told myself it was natural. I knew you could not learn everything about living with someone in a month, or get comfortable around another person in a couple weeks, even if you’d been screwing them a long time.
There were plenty of things I had to learn about Del. We kept our dope and our drugs in one drawer in the kitchen, and one of the first things I noticed about him after we started living together was that he went to work high. I used to go to school stoned or doing speed, but having to wait tables made me clean up my act. It was just too hard to weave together all the pieces of waitressing if I was stoned. If I did speed, I was great for the first part of my shift, but by the end of the eight hours, I was crashing and ready to snap. And if I went in with a hangover, I wanted to die, because the job took so much from me physically, what with standing and walking and serving food and bussing tables and washing dishes. So I became a weekend partyer, or I’d get my buzz on right after I got home so that I could enjoy the dope and still straighten up in time for work.
Not Del. Del parried hardy seven days a week, and he made a special point of leaving time to get stoned when he was getting ready for work. He was working a brake press at Traut’s, and I knew that job was hard: working with the heavy sheet metal, all of it covered with oil, punching out circuit breaker boxes all day long. I knew he hated the work, and I knew that a lot of people on his crew parried, but I worried about him working around heavy machinery. One morning when he was tooking up, I said, “Honey, don’t you worry you’re going to fuck up at work if you’re stoned?”
Del said, “No,” and kept smoking. When I didn’t even get a goodbye kiss, I knew he was pissed, so I wasn’t really surprised when he didn’t turn up at home that night. I knew I was getting payback. I tried to tell myself it would all work out and just to go to bed and get some sleep, but I slept fitfully, trying to listen for his car. And I thought to myself, Vangie, you are not going to make it if you can’t sleep when he’s beside you and you can’t sleep when he’s gone.
He came rolling in that night around three. When he sat on the edge of the bed, I could smell the high stink of the barroom on him: alcohol, smoke, the sweat of working eight hours at Traut’s. It shocked me that the smell was that strong, though I didn’t know why it should. He proba bly smelled like that other nights when he was drinking, but I never noticed before because I was drinking, too.
I didn’t care what he smelled like. When he bent over to unlace his boots, I wrapped myself around the back of him.
“Hey,” I said.
“Wake up, Vangie, I want to tell you something.”
“I’m up,” I said.
“I’m nineteen and faster than most things on this earth. If some kind of trouble is coming, I’ll get out of the way.”
“What if you don’t see it coming?”
“I got out of more scrapes already than the average person.”
“All right,” I said. “It’s your business. But I worry about you.”
“Vangie, they set up the press so you have to put both hands on the controls just to run the thing. Don’t worry.”
He stripped off his clothes and got into bed beside me, and even though his mouth was like a cesspool, I kissed him and kissed him and pulled him to me. He managed to get between my legs, then he passed out. I rolled him over on his back.
That combination of sweat and smoke and alcohol as it got pushed out of the pores—the rank odor brought back more than a few memories. From the smell of Del, you’d have thought I was in bed with my old man. That thought was so strange I refused to think it, and as soon as it came, I pushed it from my mind. I did wonder if I stank that bad when I was drinking. I didn’t think so. In the old days, even when my mom sat up with my dad, matching him drink for drink, she didn’t get the same smell he did. Maybe because her sweat was different, maybe she was cleaner when she started out drinking—I didn’t know. It just wasn’t a smell a woman could get. Or so I told myself.
EVEN THOUGH it upset me in some ways, in other ways I liked it when Del came home drunk. If he didn’t just pass out, he was wildest those nights. Sometimes he took a shower because I told him how his smell reminded me of my dad, but other times he could not, or would not, wait to be with me, and I’d lie down in his stinking embrace. I forgot it soon enough, because when he was drunk he’d eat my pussy forever, or roll my nipples on his tongue and teeth until I couldn’t wait to feel him move inside me. His drunkenness sometimes meant he couldn’t keep an erection, but most of the time it meant he was hard for hours and still couldn’t come. So he turned me out.
It was on a night when he was hard and couldn’t come that we figured out a new position. Well, it wasn’t a new position, but what we did with it was new. Del was fucking me and holding my feet up by his chest. He kept trying to reach down to play with my clitoris, but it was hard for him to stay up inside me when he did that.
I said, “Go on, baby. Just enjoy yourself,” but he knew he was a long time from coming, so he kept trying to pluck my flower. Then the idea hit and he said to me, “Vangie, play with your pussy. Make yourself come.”
So I moved my own hand between my legs. Del kept stroking, holding my ankles, turning to kiss my legs, and watching my face the whole time.
If you thought it was crazy that I didn’t come the whole first four years I fucked, you will surely die when I say that night was the first time I ever masturbated and made myself come. But that was me: young and dumb.
It took a while, and I sort of rubbed myself raw, but I came that night on Del’s cock for the first time. I came so hard and shook so much that Del got pulled out of his alcoholic numbness and came right after me. I was still banging my head back on the pillow when I heard him. When he finally lay his head down near mine, I kissed his cheek over and over through the tangle of his hair and I made cool circles on his back with my hands. I was happy, happy, happy.
After that night, though, I made it my business to learn everything I could about my own climaxes. I learned where to make the small circles, how to start and then stop and then start, and
how, for some reason, the orgasm felt better if I hung on to the back of the bed frame with my left hand, squeezing the wood as hard as I could. As glad and as grateful as I was that I had orgasms when Del went down on me, I didn’t want him to be in charge of them anymore. I didn’t want anyone to have to give me my own body.
Del was into it. It turned him on to see me touch myself. I did it every time we screwed, but I’d also do it sometimes when we were sitting on the sofa watching TV, or just sitting there at the dinner table. And Del watched everything I did and dropped whatever he was doing when I spread my legs. I think I was probably like a skin flick for him, except that I was right there and real.
“Do you think you could suck my cock while you did that?” he asked one night when I was lying on the sofa, watching TV with him, playing with myself.
“I don’t know. Bring it on over here.”
He knelt on the floor beside me, and the sofa was just the right height for me to get him easily inside my mouth. It took a little more coordination on my part to keep everything going, but it was exciting, too. I didn’t use all my terrific cock-sucking techniques, because I was concentrating on the tightness and pitch in my own body, but it didn’t seem to matter to Del.
I met Del’s eyes a couple of times while he was in my mouth. I had to look up over his belly and chest to see his face, and it was intense to see him from that angle. I felt like I was seeing the whole of his body. What I felt for him then had nothing to do with words.
After I made myself come, and after I made Del come, he stayed kneeling on the floor beside me. He played with my hair, moving it back from my face, running his hand from my temple to my neck, moving his fingers through the length. He played with my hair and kept touching my face and lips for the longest time, and then he said, Vangie.
When he said my name, I knew that he felt the thing without words, too.
9
Swimming Sweet Arrow: A Novel Page 5