Unknown, p.36
Unknown, page 36
"Aren't you forgetting he was the guy who started it? He-"
"Don't give me any of your lip, you lousy queer," he said, backing up.
"All I know is you started trouble and then just about killed that guy.
I'm calling the cops!" He dashed and went back inside.
" Okay," I said to nobody in particular." Okay, okay."
I had left my rawhide gloves inside, but it didn't seem like a good idea to go back in and get them. I put my hands in my pockets and started to walk back to the interstate access road. I figured my chances against a ride before the cops picked me up were about ten to one. My ears were freezing and I felt sick to my stomach. Some night.
"Wait! Hey, wait!"
I turned around. It was her, running to catch up with me, her hair flying out behind her.
"You were wonderful!" she said." Wonderful!"
"I hurt him bad," I said dully." I never did anything like that before."
"I wish you'd killed him!"
I blinked at her in the frosty light.
"I heard the things they were saying about me before you came in.
Laughing in that big, brave, dirty way-haw, haw, lookit the little girl out so long after dark. Where you going, honey? Need a lift? I'll give you a ride if you'll give me a ride. Damn!"
She glared back over her shoulder as if she could strike them dead with a sudden bolt from her dark eyes. Then she turned them on me, and again it seemed like that searchlight had been turned on in my mind ." I'm coming with you."
"Where? To jail?" I tugged at my hair with both hands." With this, the first guy that gave us a ride would be a state cop. That cook meant what he said about calling them."
"I'll hitch. You stand behind me. They'll stop for me."
I couldn't argue with her about that and didn't want to. Love at first sight? I doubt it. But it was something.
"Here," she said, "you forgot these." She held out my gloves.
She hadn't gone back inside, and that meant she'd had them all along.
She'd known she was coming with me. It gave me an eerie feeling. I put on my gloves and we walked up the access road to the turnpike ramp.
She was right about the ride. We got one with the first car that swung onto the ramp. Before that happened I asked, "What's your name?"
"Nona," she said simply. She didn't offer any more, but that was all right. I was satisfied.
We didn't say anything else while we waited, but it seemed as if we did.
I won't give you a load of bull about ESP and that stuff; there was none of that. But we didn't need it. You've felt it yourself if you've ever been with someone you were really close to, or if you've taken one of those drugs with initials for a name. You don't have to talk.
Communication seems to shift over to some high-frequency emotional band.
A twist of the hand does it all. You don't need the social amenities.
But we were strangers. I only knew her first name and, now that I think back, I don't believe I ever told her mine at all. But we were doing it. It wasn't love. I hate to keep repeating that, but I feel I have to. I wouldn't dirty that word with whatever we had-not after what we did, not after Blainesville, not after the dreams.
A high, wailing shriek filled the cold silence of the night, rising and falling.
"That's an ambulance, I think," I said.
"Yes."
Silence again. The moon's light was fading behind a thickening membrane of cloud. I thought we would have snow before the night was over.
Lights poked over the hill.
I stood behind her without having to be told. She brushed her hair back and raised that beautiful face. As I watched the car signal for the entrance ramp I was swept with a feeling of unreality-it was unreal that this beautiful girl had elected to come with me, it was unreal that I had beaten a man to the point where an ambulance had to be called for him, it was unreal to think I might be in jail by morning. Unreal. I felt caught in a spiderweb. But who was the spider?
Nona put out her thumb. The car, a Chevrolet sedan, went by us and I thought it was going to keep right on going. Then the taillights flashed and Nona grabbed my hand." Come on, we got a ride!" She grinned at me with childish deli lit and I grinned back at her.
The guy was reaching enthusiastically across the seat to open the door for her. When the dome light flashed on I could see him-a fairly big man in an expensive camel's hair coat, graying around the edges of his hat, prosperous features softened by years of good meals.
A businessman or a salesman. Alone. When he saw me he did a double take, but it was a second or two too late to put the car back in gear and haul out of there. And it was easier for him this way. Later he could fib himself into believing he had seen both of us, that he was a truly good-hearted soul giving a young couple a break.
"Cold night," he said as Nona slid in beside him and I got in beside her.
"It certainly is," Nona said sweetly." Thank you!"
"Yeah," I said." Thanks."
"Don't mention it." And we were off, leaving sirens, busted-up truckers, and Joe's Good Eats behind us.
I had gotten kicked off the interstate at seven-thirty. It was only eight-thirty now. It's amazing how much you can do in a short time, or how much can be done to you.
We were approaching the yellow flashing lights that signal the Augusta toll station.
" How far you going?" the driver asked.
That was a stumper. I had been hoping to make it as far as Kittery and crash with an acquaintance who was teaching school there. It still seemed as good an answer as any and I was opening my mouth to give it when Nona said:
"We're going to Blainesville. It's a small town just south of Lewiston-Auburn."
Blainesville. That made me feel strange. Once upon a time I had been on pretty good terms with Blainesville. But that was before Ace Carmody messed me up.
He brought his car to a stop, took a toll ticket, and then we were on our way again.
"I'm only going as far as Gardner, myself," he said, lying smoothly."
One exit up. But that's a start for you."
"It certainly is," Nona said, just as sweetly as before." It was nice of you to stop on such a cold night." And while she was saying it I was getting her anger on that high emotional wavelength, naked and full of venom. It scared me, the way ticking from a wrapped package might scare me.
"My name's Blanchette," he said." Norman Blanchette." He waved his hand in our direction to be shaken.
" Cheryl Craig," Nona said, taking it daintily.
I took her cue and gave him a false name." Pleasure," I mumbled.
His hand was soft and flabby. It felt like a hot-water bottle in the shape of a hand; the thought sickened me. It sickened me that we had been forced to beg a ride with this patronizing man who thought he had seen a chance to pick up a pretty girl hitching all by herself, a girl who might or might not agree to an hour spent in a motel room in return for enough cash to buy a bus ticket. It sickened me to know that if I had been alone this man who had just offered me his flabby, hot hand would have zipped by without a second look. It sickened me to know he would drop us at the Gardner exit and then dart right back on down the southbound ramp, congratulating himself on how smoothly he had solved an annoying situation. Everything about him sickened me. The porky droop of his jowls, the slicked-back wings of his hair, the smell of his cologne.
And what right did he have? What right?
The sickness curdled, and the flowers of rage began to bloom again. The headlights of his prosperous Impala sedan cut the night with smooth ease, and my rage wanted to reach out and strangle everything that he was set in among-the kind of music I knew he would listen to as he lay back in his La-Z-Boy recliner with the eyening paper in his hot-water-bottle hands, the blue rinse his wife would use in her hair, the kids always sent off to the movies or off to school or off to camp-as long as they were off somewhere-his snobbish friends and the drunken parties they would attend with them.
But maybe his cologne was the worst. It seemed to fill the car with the sweet, sickish stench of his hypocrisy. It smelled like the perfumed disinfectant they use in a slaughterhouse at the end of each shift.
The car ripped through the night with Norman Blanchette holding the wheel in his bloated hands. His manicured nails gleamed softly in the lights from the instrument panel. I wanted to crack a wing window and get away from that cloying smell. No, morel wanted to crank the whole window down and stick my head out into the cold, purifying air of the night, wallow in its chilled freshness-but I was frozen, frozen in the dumb maw of my wordless, inexpressible hate.
That was when Nona put the nail file into my hand.
When I was three I got a bad case of the flu and had to go to the hospital. While I was there, my dad fell asleep smoking in bed and the house burned down with them and my older brother Drake in it. I have their pictures. They look like actors in an old 1958 AmericanInternational horror movie, faces you don't know like those of the big stars, more like Elisha Cook, Jr., and Mara Corday and some child actor you can't quite remember… Brandon DeWilde, maybe.
I had no relatives to go to and so I was sent to a home in Portland for five years. Then I became a state ward. That means a family takes you in and the state pays them thirty dollars a month for your keep. I don't think there was ever a state ward who acquired a taste for lobster. Usually a couple will take two or three wards as a hardheaded business investment. If a kid is fed up he can earn his keep doing chores around the place and that hard thirty turns into gravy.
My folks were named Hollis and they lived in Falmouth. Not the fancy part near the country club or the yacht club but farther out toward the Blainesville town line. They had a three-story farmhouse with fourteen rooms. There was coal heat in the kitchen that got upstairs any way it could, and in January you went to bed with three quilts on you and still weren't sure if your feet were there when you woke up in the morning until you put them out on the floor where you could look at them. Mrs.
Hollis was fat. Mr. Hollis was dour, rarely spoke, and wore a red-and-black checked hunting cap all year round.
The house was a helter-skelter mess of white-elephant furniture, rummage-sale stuff, moldy mattresses, dogs, cats, and automotive parts laid on newspaper. I had three "brothers," all of them wards. We had a nodding acquaintance, like co-travelers on a three-day bus trip.
I made good grades in school and went out for spring baseball when I was a high school sophomore. Hollis was yapping after me to quit, but I stuck with it until the thing with Ace Carmody happened.
Then I didn't want to go anymore, not with my face all puffed and cut, not with the stories Betsy Dirisko was telling around. So I quit the team, and Hollis got me a job in the local drugstore.
In February of my junior year I took the College Boards, paying for them with twelve bucks I had socked away in my mattress. I got accepted at the university with a small scholarship and a good workstudy job in the library. The expression on the Hollises' faces when I showed them the financial-aid papers is the best memory of my life.
One of my "brothers," Curt, ran away. I couldn't have done that. I was too passive to take a step like that. I would have been back after two hours on the road. School was the only way out for me, and I took it.
The last thing Mrs. Hollis said when I left was, "You write, hear me?
And send us something when you can." I never saw either of them again. I made good grades my freshman year and got a job that summer working full-time in the library. I sent them a Christmas card that first year, but that was the only one.
In the first semester of my sophomore year I fell in love. It was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. Pretty? She would have knocked you back two steps. To this day I have no idea what she saw in me. I don't even know if she loved me or not. I think she did at first .
After that I was just a habit that's hard to break, like smoking or driving with your elbow poked out the window. She held me for a while, maybe not wanting to break the habit. Maybe she held me for wonder, or maybe it was just her vanity. Good boy, roll over, sit up, fetch the paper. Here's a kiss good night. It doesn't matter. For a while it was love, then it was like love, then it was over.
I had slept with her twice, both times after other things had taken over for love. That fed the habit for a little while. Then she came back from the Thanksgiving break and said she was in love with a guy from Delta Tau Delta, a guy who also came from her hometown. I tried to get her back and almost made it once, but she had something she hadn't had before-perspective. It didn't work and when the Christmas vacation was over they were pinned.
Whatever I had been building up, all those years since the fire wiped out the B-movie actors who had once been my family, that broke it down.
That pin on her blouse.
And after that, I was on again-off again with the three or four girls who were willing. I could blame it on my childhood, say I never had good sexual models, but that wasn't it. I'd never had any trouble with the girl. Only now the girl was gone.
I started being afraid of girls, a little. And it wasn't so much the ones I was impotent with as the ones I wasn't, the ones I could make it with. They made me uneasy. I kept asking myself where they were hiding whatever axes they liked to grind and when they were going to let me have it. I'm not so strange at that. You show me a married man or a man with a steady woman, and I'll show you someone who is asking himself (maybe only in the early hours of the morning or on Friday afternoon when she's off buying groceries), What is she doing when I'm not around?
What does she really think of me? And maybe most of all, How much of me has she got? How much is left? Once I started thinking about those things, I thought about them all the time.
I started to drink and my grades took a nose dive. During semester break I got a letter saying that if they didn't improve in six weeks, my second-semester scholarship check would be withheld. I and some guys I hung around with got drunk and stayed drunk for the whole holiday. On the last day we went to a whorehouse and I operated just fine. It was too dark to see faces.
My grades stayed about the same. I called the girl once and cried over the telephone. She cried too, and in a way I think that pleased her. I didn't hate her then and I don't now. But she scared me plenty.
On February 9 I got a letter from the dean of Arts and Sciences saying I was flunking two of three courses in my major field. On February 13 I got a hesitant sort of letter from the girl. She wanted everything to be all right between us. She was planning to marry the guy from Delta Tau Delta in July or August, and I could be invited if I wanted to be.
That was almost funny. What could I give her for a wedding gift? My penis with a red ribbon tied around the foreskin?
On the fourteenth, Valentine's Day, I decided it was time for a change of scene. Nona came next, but you know about that.
You have to understand how she was to me if this is to do any good at all. She was more beautiful than the girl, but that wasn't it.
Good looks are cheap in a wealthy country. It was the her inside.
There was sex, but the sex that came from her was like that of a vineblind sex, a kind of clinging, not-to-be-denied sex that is not so important because it is as instinctual as photosynthesis. Not like an animalthat implies lust-but like a plant. I knew we would make love, that we would make it as men and women do, but that our joining would be as blunt and remote and meaningless as ivy clutching its way up a trellis in the August sun.
The sex was important only because it was unimportant.
I think-no, I'm sure-that violence was the real motive force.
The violence was real and not just a dream. The violence of Joe's Good Eats, the violence of Norman Blanchette. And there was even something blind and vegetative about that. Maybe she was only a clinging vine after all, because the Venus flytrap is a species of vine, but that plant is carnivorous and will make animal motion when a fly or a bit of raw meat is placed in its jaws. And it was all real. The sporulating vine may only dream that it fornicates, but I am sure the Venus flytrap tastes that fly, relishes its diminishing struggles as its jaws close around it.
The last part was my own passivity. I could not fill up the hole in my life. Not the hole left by the girl when she said good-bye-I don't want to lay this at her door-but the hole that had always been there, the dark, confused swirling that never stopped down in the middle of me.
Nona filled that hole. She made me her arm. She made me move and act.
She made me noble.
Now maybe you understand a little of it. Why I dream of her. Why the fascination remains in spite of the remorse and the revulsion. Why I hate her. Why I fear her. And why even now I still love her.
It was eight miles from the Augusta ramp to Gardner and we did it in a few short minutes. I grasped the nail file woodenly at my side and watched the green reflectorized sign-KEEP RIGHT FOR EXIT 14-twinkle up out of the night. The moon was gone and it had begun to spit snow.
" Wish I were going farther," Blanchette said.
"That's all right," Nona said warmly, and I could feel her fury buzzing and burrowing into the meat under my skull like a drill bit.
"Just drop us at the top of the ramp."
He drove up, observing the ramp speed of thirty miles an hour. I knew what I was going to do. It felt as if my legs had turned to warm lead.
The top of the ramp was lit by one overhead light. To the left I could see the lights of Gardner against the thickening cloud cover. To the right, nothing but blackness. There was no traffic coming either way along the access road.
I got out. Nona slid across the seat, giving Norman Blanchette a final smile. I wasn't worried. She was quarterbacking the play.
Blanchette was smiling an infuriating porky smile, relieved at being almost rid of us." Well, good ni-"
"Oh my purse! Don't drive off with my purse!"
"I'll get it," I told her. I leaned back into the car. Blanchette saw what I had in my hand, and the porky smile on his face froze solid.
Now lights showed on the hill, but it was too late to stop. Nothing could have stopped me. I picked up Nona's purse with my left hand.
