“Don’t talk foolish,” she said, taking her hand away. “I’ll fix coffee for you. We can make sandwiches.”
“I don’t want any.” I stood up. We were almost the same height, her face inches from mine. I could feel her eyes go inside me. “I want to be with you forever, Valerie. We could go to Louisiana. I could work in the oil field. I know everything about horses and cattle, too.”
I took her wrist and placed her hand on my heart.
“Aaron,” she said.
“You’re stuck with me. For me, there’ll never be another girl. I don’t care if Loren Nichols and his friends kill me.”
“Aaron, please.”
I put my arms around her and spread my fingers over her back and smelled her hair and the heat in her skin. Her head was framed against the window, the late sun lighting the skein of auburn and gold strands in her hair, the shadows from the fan spinning like a vortex around us.
Then I felt her step on top of my feet and mold herself against me. My entire body felt as though it were being lowered into warm water, my phallus rising, my fingers biting into her back. I walked with her on top of my feet into the living room, as though we were dancing. Then she stepped away from me, and I felt my head reel as if I were floating away on the wind, alone, like a balloon with a broken string.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No, of course not,” she said. She took my hand and led me up the stairs to her bedroom. The window curtains were open, and I could see the top of the pecan tree in her backyard and clouds that were like streaks of blood in the western sky. We were both trembling as we undressed. My words clotted in my throat, and I can’t remember what I said to her when I saw her naked. I had never seen a woman undress, and I had never been to a burlesque club, and I had never done more with a girl than kiss her, and that was at the drive-in movie.
She pulled back the covers and lay down and waited, her arms at her sides, her fingers curling and uncurling with anxiety. I kissed her on the mouth and eyes and breasts and stomach, my head hammering, the cuts on my knuckles from the fight streaking the pillows and sheets like wisps of pink thread. When she took me inside her, I put my face in her hair and swore I could smell the ocean and hear wind blowing and feel myself slipping into an underwater cave filled with gossamer fans and electric eels, each tidal surge taking me deeper and deeper into a place I never wanted to leave.
Then I closed my eyes and surrendered myself to the fates, and saw a single bottle rocket rise into the sky and burst in a shower of stars that floated down through the ceiling onto our bed.
Chapter
6
I RODE THE CITY bus home. My father had come home from work late and gone to the icehouse. He did not know of my absence from the supper table. My mother met me at the door, her face like a piece of crumpled paper, a mole peeking from the deteriorating makeup on her chin. “I’ve called all over town.”
“I went to see a girl in the Heights and lost my ride. I called twice. The line was busy. I’m sorry.”
“Which girl? Your father doesn’t want you in the Heights.” Her eyes were jittering, her hands clenching.
I started for my room, exhausted, wanting to lie down on my teester bed; I wanted to sleep as if I’d been swallowed by a hole in the earth, safe from all the violence and cruelty surrounding me. My mother circled my wrist with her thumb and forefinger and lifted my arm and studied my knuckles. “Did you hit someone?”
I was surprised. My mother dealt with reality only in teaspoons. She’d had a hysterectomy and a nervous breakdown and electroshock therapy, an experience that had left her shaking and filled with dread. I’d realized long ago that there are people who are not liars but are incapable of telling the truth or dealing with it. There is a great difference between the two.
“A run-in with a fellow,” I said. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
“Dr. Bienville increased my medication. It makes me confused. Why did you have a run-in with someone? Has a bully bothered you? Is that what all this strange behavior is about? Go get your father, would you? There’s a television set at the icehouse now. Something to sell more beer.”
“I’ll get him, Mother.”
“Tell him about this trouble you had.”
“I will,” I said.
“And leave that girl in the Heights alone. Your father won’t like it.”
“I understand.”
I went to the icehouse and walked back home with my father. Heat lightning rippled through the clouds; hurricane warnings were up along the Louisiana-Texas coast; and earlier I had lost my virginity and tried to beat a greaseball to death. But there was not one subject of either substance or insignificance that my father and I could discuss. I wondered what it would be like to stroll with one’s father along a sidewalk, like two friends out on a warm evening that smelled of flowers and water sprinklers slapping on the lawns. Maybe one fine evening that would happen, I told myself, if I just had faith.
I LAY IN BED and stared at the ceiling until one A.M. and woke to what I expected to be the worst day of my life—cops at the door, handcuffs, a felony assault charge, or maybe Mr. Epstein charging into the house, enraged at what I had done with his daughter. All day at school I waited for a police cruiser to turn in to the faculty parking lot, then a call to the principal’s office. It didn’t happen. The only unusual element in the morning was Mr. Krauser’s behavior. During metal shop he kept staring at Saber and me as though he wanted to say something to us but couldn’t.
At seven-fifteen that evening, I looked out the window and saw Mr. Krauser park at the curb and get out and stand uncertainly on the edge of the lawn, flattening his tie, straightening his shoulders. There was a young guy I recognized in the passenger seat. His name was Jimmy McDougal; he was an effeminate kid whose body was almost hairless, his eyebrows blond wisps. I’d see him shooting baskets at the YMCA after he dropped out of school, his gym shorts barely clinging to his hips when he leaped to make a shot.
“Who’s that man?” my mother said.