Half Wild (10 page)

It's still dark—the clock says 3
A.M.
—but she can't sleep; she's been up for hours. She switches a light on and goes into the kitchen and makes a pot of coffee. When it's ready she dumps two spoonfuls of sugar in—decadent, wasteful, so unlike her. So sweet it makes her cheeks burn. She sits with the warm cup between her palms and looks out
the window at the barn, lit up in that moonlight. Forty Jerseys used to live in there, calve in there, let down their milk two times a day in there. The paint has worn off the siding, and it's a weathered gray now, a few roof slates slipping. The door, she sees, is open, swinging in the wind. Kevin must not have closed it all the way.

She only saw Lawrence a few times after school let out; there was no longer an excuse to go walking through the woods with a near stranger. Once had been at the Nelson General Store. She sat in the passenger seat of her father's truck and watched as he stepped outside into the light, blinking, and lit a cigarette. Long legs, blue jeans, cowboy boots. His mother stepped out after him, a tall woman with a straight back and dark eyes. Cora ducked back into the shadows of the truck, half-wishing he wouldn't see her, but he did. “Hey!” he called out, grinning and walking toward her, but Cora's father was watching from the pump—she could feel those blue eyes burning behind her—and she shook her head at him, said quietly, “Not here.” The second time was at Sunset Lake in July. Cora's sister lay on the stretch of pebbly stones in her bathing suit, two or three boys standing near her, skipping stones across the water. Cora sat in her skirt on a flat white rock a ways off, her toes burrowing into cool, wet mud. It was late afternoon and the sun shone on the water, creating a glare she had to squint across, and it took her a while to see that there were a few people farther off, down at the next grassy beach, a place at the edge of the cow field
where not many people swam. They were boys, shouting and jumping; she couldn't tell who. One stood waist deep, back and arms and head silhouetted against the sunstruck water. It was a beautiful sight, and Cora felt her body turn strangely light with curiosity, felt a streak of desire shoot from her breasts down to her legs, and then he dipped into the water and disappeared, the surface suddenly still for too long. Cora felt a tremor in her chest: had she imagined it? The water was resplendent, silent, no movement or splash, and she scanned the far bank, and almost called out for help, almost leapt up to go tell the others someone had disappeared out there, when she saw a rippling, then a flash of underwater sun-darkened skin, and then he flung his head up out of the lake inches from her feet: smiling, water spurting from his wet lips, eyes waterlogged and bright. “You coming in?”

A loud bang comes from the direction of the barn, and Cora leaps up. Her legs and knees ache—that coffee too early, that sugar. The wind has picked up, and the open door is swinging wildly, knocking against the pine siding. She doesn't want to go out there, but what else is she going to do? She slips into her rubber boots and wool jacket and grabs a flashlight and goes out into the dark. The night is cool, dry, full of the windblown scent of apples and rotting leaves. She reaches the barn door and grabs onto the iron handle and swings it closed and is about to secure the latch when another gust of wind comes and the door swings
open again, out of her grasp, sending her hundred pounds shuffling backward. She stumbles on the uneven ground, catching herself, but in the moment before she does she imagines falling, her bones snapping like kindling. How long would it have been before Kevin came to find her body, covered in frost and fallen leaves? Another gust of wind blows the door farther open, and she glances, for the first time in a long time, into the barn. The windows on the back wall blaze squares of night-sky blue; everything else is shadow. She can just make out the shapes of Fred's old junk, rimmed in moonlight. A bat darts from one rafter to another. She should go back to the house, climb back into the warmth of her covers. But she doesn't.

Instead Cora steps inside the barn and turns on her flashlight. She can see where Kevin and his friends hung out: a few old armchairs set up next to a low table. On that table sits a kerosene lantern, a deck of cards, an overflowing ashtray, and some darts. Some of Fred's things, she sees, are hung on the walls: a rusted Coca-Cola sign, an ugly life-size plastic reindeer, a rusted milk sign. There are posters she has never seen before too: one of a race car spinning around a track and one of a truck, not dissimilar to Kevin's, jacked up on oversize wheels with two blond women in bikinis in the front seats, the skin on their absurd breasts tan and glistening.
Boys.
She lifts her flashlight upward and sees that there are some other things pinned to the wall. She steps closer and is surprised to find that they are black-and-white pictures of her father:
standing next to a prize bull, riding his International across a field, in his World War II uniform. They must have been in some box out here in the barn. The sight of them makes Cora's cheeks swell with a pride she didn't know was still there; her father was a handsome man who believed in hard work and self-reliance and proved the glory of those things and whose only cause for despair was that he had no sons, just two daughters who could not farm, who married men who would not farm. It's nice, she thinks, to have her father in the barn again. It smells like animal still, and like hay, and like the cigarette butts that are scattered across the table.

Something moves against the far wall, and she catches it with her light: a swallow, flitting out of the rafters and making for an open window. She follows it and when it disappears she notices there is something drawn on the beam in front of her with a marker. Some thin lines, loosely sketched. She steps closer, and slowly lowers the beam downward, and sees it is the outline of an animal. A deer. Its body peppered with tiny holes, divots, and on the table, a bowl of darts. Darts. Into the deer's body. That is all.

A gust of wind slams the door closed again, and the whole barn seems to reverberate. She is freezing; she is shivering; she thinks of her body out there in the yard, covered with frost and broken, she thinks of that black girl at the supermarket, her blue ring and perfect braids, she thinks of Fred, hitting their boys with the thin leather of his sweat-stained belt, of the look in those small boys'
eyes. Her light is still on those darts on the table, and when her eyes refocus she sees next to them something scratched into the table with a jackknife. Some letters—
NHR
—and below it the words
NIGGER-HATING REDNECKS.

She reads it again, lowers the light to the floor. She can hardly breathe in the cold. Her Kevin. “No,” she hears herself say out loud. No. She feels as if she has swallowed a penny. She lowers herself into the green-checkered armchair behind her.

That August of 1947, the last time she saw Lawrence, he came to find her. It was a hot, dry evening, the sky luminous and the night breeze sweet with fresh-cut hay, and no one wanted to be indoors but they had finally gone in, Cora and her mother and father and sister, and were just sitting down at the table, her mother carrying meat loaf from the stove, Don Fields and the Pony Boys on the radio, when they saw the Pials' mint-green Plymouth pull into the driveway.

Her father looked at Cora's sister, who shrugged, and then at Cora, who looked back at him, and then he got up and went to the door and opened it. Lawrence stood there in his blue jeans and cowboy boots, his hair combed back. Cora watched her father look him up and down slowly.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Good evening, sir,” Lawrence said, smiling. “I came to see Cora, if that's all right.” He looked at Cora then, and she felt her cheeks go hot; she looked at her plate of food for a moment, then back up.

“What for?” her father said.

He was still looking at Cora, that quiet confidence thrust onto his face.

“There's a dance tonight. Glenn Orfee in Nelson,” he said, and Cora felt a streak of heat shoot through her body. Those tobacco-scented fingers on her skin, that spinning.

But Cora's father just looked at her, then at the boy in the doorway, and then he tipped his head back and laughed. “With an Indian? You think I'd let my daughter go dancing with an Indian?” And with those words Cora knew what she should have known all along: that was why those dark eyes and that dark hair and those cheekbones. Indian. Abenaki.
The niggers of Vermont,
her father called them.

“Come
,”
her father said, and Lawrence followed him out the door into the darkening yard and Cora stood up and followed too.

“Don't,” her sister said, but Cora did.

They walked into the barn—this barn—and Cora followed. They went past the rows of cows, past their slow heat and the soft rhythm of chewing cuds, into the back room. Cora stopped in this room, amidst the cows, and watched through the doorway as her father put his left arm on Lawrence's shoulder and leaned close to him and said through his teeth: “We don't need no Gypsy-Indian blood on this farm,” and watched as Lawrence just stood there, not blinking, or flinching, or nodding, but said, quietly, between his teeth, “Asshole,” and then watched as
her father swung his right knee into the crotch of the man she had let touch her, and as Lawrence fell back against the wall of the barn, and heard the small whimpering that escaped his lips, and then watched as her father strode out the back door and spit into the grass and disappeared. And then came the moment that Cora has not let herself fully remember since—the moment that she looked at him, and he looked at her, and that she turned, and walked out of the barn, without looking back, without saying anything, without feeling remorse, or love, only a strange kind of pity and fear, and she has never known, and still does not know to this day, whether that change in her was because she knew he was Abenaki, or because of the way he had crumpled, without resistance, into the wall of the barn, or because of that strange sound he made as he took the blow. All she knows is that she left, and went back to the table, and ate her mother's meat loaf, quietly.

Cora cannot breathe. She thinks of that peppered outline of the deer's body against the wall, of Lawrence Pial's mother's beautiful, dark face, of the look in his eyes against the back wall of this barn, and cannot breathe. She feels ill: a reeking bitterness in the pit of her stomach. Coffee, pennies, Kevin: sad, bruised-arm boy or no. And this barn, this hillside, this view and mist rising up out of the valley, off the water: is it, was it ever, God's country?

The door swings open and there are footsteps. Cora swats the beam of her flashlight toward the door. Her heart
pounds; she's never been closer to believing in ghosts. But it's Kevin. Just her grandson, Kevin, standing there in the doorway, wide-eyed.

“Grandma? What are you doing here?” He walks toward her a few steps, and she's amazed to think she would have been found, after all, if that door had knocked her down at 3
A.M.
He would have picked her up, carried her inside. The early hours of his eighteenth birthday. Her dear grandson.

“Oh, I don't know, Kevin. I couldn't sleep. The door was swinging and I went out.”

“Right,” he says, looking down at his hands, and she realizes he must come here often, in the middle of the night, to get away, to find a safe and quiet place.

“Sit down, Kevin. Sit down here near me. It's so late. Or so early. It's your birthday.” And so he does. He sits down and closes his eyes, his knee shaking, and the two of them are silent, his breath rancid with beer, or liquor, or both, watching the night's blue sky through the open windows, and after a few moments she hears Kevin's breath drift into the breath of sleep.

Cora lets her weight settle into the moldy green-checkered chair, the chair where Kevin sat to throw darts and drink beer, and her body feels small, thin, old, brittle, and she thinks this is the way it will go; Kevin is the way it will go, like a giant sheet being removed, revealing some darker, broken, meaner heart, and she closes her eyes, and thinks of Lawrence Pial, of what she has always
wished she had done that night, of what she has never let herself imagine: that she had gone to him, and taken his hand, and pulled him up. That they had slipped out of the barn together into that August darkness and heat—crickets, fireflies, stars—that she had lain down in that grass with him, and let him touch her, and touched him, let her imperfect heart explode with his, let there be born, in that night, in that field, the possibility of something different, something beautiful, something new. But she did not. No, she did not. Cora closes her eyes. The barn is all darkness. Just Kevin's slow, uneven breath and the swallow's tail, flickering.
Oh God,
she thinks. She is old. How long until morning?

I choose the red dress, knee-high black leather cowboy boots, and aqua blue to dust my eyes. The camper is stinking hot and smells of Jimmy's beer, of creek water, and of stained sheets, which I take to my great-aunt Hazel's once a week to wash, but once a week is not enough in August. Not with Jimmy, not with the camper down near Silver Creek, where the sun doesn't shine long enough to keep bread from turning blue, the corners of my books from curling up at the edges, the smells from sticking around. “That?” I said to Hazel four months ago when I came here asking for a place to stay and she pointed at the teal-colored tow-along camper that had been parked behind the barn for seventeen years.

“There's always the chicken coop,” she said. She didn't offer to let me live with her, and I didn't want to, even though that's what the social worker had in mind. Two
birds with one stone, pretending I didn't know it. But Hazel didn't want me in her house, and I didn't want to be there. I wanted to be where Jimmy and I could screech like barn cats, fuck like bunnies, pop whatever kind of pill we want to. So I took the camper. “Down by the creek,” I said—not knowing that the sun wouldn't shine here till eleven, that it would set at four—so my cousin pulled it down here to this little field that borders the water, dragged a two-hundred-foot run of extension cords down from the barn, and here I am now, three months later, calling it home.

I light a cigarette and step outside, sit on the cement-block step and smoke it. I'm waiting for Jimmy to come. Needing Jimmy to come. The sun went down an hour ago, and the fields are turning that hazy blue of evening that I like, the color of smoke
.
I don't have a license or a car and my cell phone doesn't work here, so when I get dressed up at night I have to sit outside and wait like this for Jimmy to wonder where I am and decide to come pick me up. Sixteen years old and I crashed my mother's Chevy in a ravine and walked out too quick to hide the half-empty bottle of Bacardi on the floor, and so here I am sitting in fields getting a nicotine buzz on with leather on my feet, a red dress running silky down my legs, my face all made up, and no one to see me but fireflies. Or maybe Hazel. I can't see her windows from here, but sometimes I like to think about her up there at the top of the hill, like a fucking ninety-year-old goat, teeth all splayed, hobbling back
and forth between the barn and the house. “Hazel,” I whisper. “You crazy old horse of a lady. How 'bout coming and getting high with me?” And then I giggle, picturing her smoking a cigarette or cracking open a beer, but I don't mean anything by it, because really I like having her up there, that light streaking across the field late at night, the sound of doors closing, her lawn mower starting up night and day. “Fucking ghost-woman,” Jimmy calls her, rifling through her bathroom cabinets and stashing bottles in his pockets, and I laugh, and then he pulls me toward him onto her bed, and then we are back in that place, that heat and sweet pain and necessity, and oh my God I'm not thinking of Hazel then.

But I don't mind thinking of her now, smoking my Marlboro. That's the name of a college town nearby, full of rich kids—Marlboro—which is the reason I've always smoked them: “Spelled like the cigarette,” I'll say, grinning, because I like to think how I'm sitting out in a field smoking a cigarette but I'm also, in some abstract way that turns me on, smoking this place, the whole fucking mess of it: the rich assholes and the punk kids like me and the sad old ladies like Hazel and the do-gooder hippies turned into yuppies or stoners and the ones with second homes and ski chalets meant to look like
The Sound of Music
Swiss crap. Now when people ask where I'm from I say, “Vicksburg, like the song,” and giggle, though most people don't know the song. Yeah, that's my hometown. Six generations, baby. Crazy fucked-up place the Japa
nese and southern bus tourists think is pretty. “Leaves!” they cry out, their buses getting stuck on back roads, falling into ditches and making detours to find the second homes of movie stars. Whoopi Goldberg has a house near here. For real. And once a Japanese woman fell into a beaver pond trying to get a picture of a maple tree reflecting on water. Fuck yeah! I giggle, thinking of them dragging her up out of the water, pond muck and rotting leaves and algae dripping from her face and hair. “So pretty!” I giggle again. Jimmy, who was on the volunteer fire department at the time, said the woman was fine, “just cold as a witch's tits.”

There's still no sign of headlights coming down the river road toward me, so I get up and start walking. My cell only works once I hit the pavement, about a mile away, so I can't even call Jimmy. He told me he'd be here by four and now it's eight, and so I hope he's at one of his buddy's apartments: Duke of Hazzard and Skinny Lenny, that's what Jimmy calls them, to their faces and behind their backs. They love it—grin their pocked faces and slap him five and say “Shit yeah” and know that Jimmy will be back tomorrow with however many OxyContin they want. That's the kind of guy he is: the man. My man. Twenty-four-year-old Jimmy with a brand-new Jeep SUV and that beautiful win-you-over shit-eating grin, throwing fives down the front of my dress when we're at parties, saying, “Shake it, Vale, come on, show me what you've got, shake it.” And just like a stripper I do.

The river road that winds along this side of the field isn't a real road, it's just a dirt track packed from farm trucks and tractors, so the heels of my boots sink down into mud. I stumble but the grass is worn enough so I can see where I'm going. Just a skinny moon—Skinny Lenny moon—coming up behind Hazel's hill, turning my dress all shiny crimson. I didn't grow up in fields like this; I grew up in Nelson, and it was only once a month or so that my mom would drop me off out here to throw hay bales up onto a truck with my cousin Danny or make strawberry jam in June with Hazel. My mom would never stick around. “It's like hillbilly central out there
,
” she'd say, flicking her cigarette out the window, as if this wasn't where she'd been fucking born and grown up and lost her virginity, no doubt, in some field like this one, but I didn't say anything. I didn't mind it then, getting away from her and her shit. I don't even mind it now, for the summer: this trippy field down by the water and crazy Hazel on her tractor (how many girls have tractor-driving great-aunts?) and the camper all my own where I've hung a picture of me as a baby and a picture of me and Jimmy last summer, swimming, and my collection of miniature owls. Owls—I don't know why, except that I found a couple at a flea market once and they've been popping up ever since—salt and pepper shaker owls, plastic owls, wooden hand-carved owls. I go into the junk stores in town every now and then and look around and buy another for a dollar or two, and so they're lined up on the bookshelf, star
ing at me when I'm trying to sleep, and the crazy thing is that there's a
real
owl down here by the river that almost every night makes his crazy hooting love song, and when I hear it I turn to my little owls and say
,
“Hear that? The real thing, you little bug-eyed babies. The real thing.”

At the pavement I stop to catch my breath, pull my cell out of my bag. Where I don't want him to be is at a party, without me. Where I don't want him to be is near any other girl. I get two bars on my cell and call Jimmy. It rings three times, and then he's there: “Vale.”

“Dude,” I say. “It's eight thirty.”

I can tell he's at a party by the music in the background. He laughs and yells, “Get your hand off my butt!” And then, “Sorry, Vale. What'd you say? Girl, where you be at?” And when I tell him I'm standing by the edge of the road at the edge of a fucking farm looking hot as melted butter he laughs and says, “I'll be right there.”

I can hear his Jeep before I see the headlights—he's pinholed the muffler so it sounds like a pack of Harleys.

“Woman,” he says when I open the door. “You look like a goddamn whore out here.” He grabs my thigh and I give him the finger and lean over and kiss him on his mouth. He tastes like beer and the taste goes all the way down through my body. I want him to live here with me, though I haven't told him that. He says the woods are some spooky fucked-up shit. He spins the car around at a wide place in the road, but still we go down into the ditch
and then peel out, leaving skid marks on the road and mud on our hubcaps, and I laugh and then we're back out on the highway.

The party's at Liz Stokes's house, a dude ranch in a field with three horses and two Beemers and a pool. The doors and windows are open, and JT blasts from the thousand-dollar stereo. Jimmy hops out and grabs my hand, and I leap out the driver's door behind him. Inside there's a fishbowl of pills and everyone I know is there. Jimmy pulls something out of the bowl for each of us and hands me a beer, and I start to shake my booty to JT's beat. My best friend, April, comes up behind me, and we grind together and I whisper, “Sexy ladies” into her ear, and for a minute—I have no fucking idea why—I think of Hazel up at the top of that hill in her house alone and wonder what she'd think if she saw me here, if she's ever heard this music, if she's ever even moved her body the way I'm shaking mine now, say while trying to get shit off a shovel. The thought makes me snort, and I finish my beer and look around for Jimmy but he's gone, so I go to the keg for another. He's probably outside selling whatever pills he's got and I think of the way money rolls through his hands and I imagine the kind of ring or car he might buy me someday and I close my eyes and shake, shake, shake, until I feel hands on my hips and my back—big hands, strong hands, Jimmy's hands—and those hands are around my flat stomach now and his tongue is in my
ear and I'm still shaking my hips to the music, still tossing my head, and he is whispering, “I want you,” into my ear, and then everything is
all
right.

At midnight people start taking their clothes off and leaping into Liz Stokes's pool. “Come,” Jimmy says, pulling me into the master bedroom. He puts two pills on my tongue. My head goes blitzo. He slips my dress down off my shoulders, reaches in his pocket, and pulls out a handful of pretzels. Pretzels—I start to giggle. Through the open windows come the sounds of splashing, of bodies cascading into water, of dudes and girls and every once in a while the whinny of a horse. Jimmy pushes me down onto my back on the bed. He is whispering to me—“Vale, Vale, Valley Vale
.
” He takes a pretzel from the bed and slips it between my lips. “Eat this,” he's whispering, and I let the pretzel slide into my mouth and the salt explodes all along my tongue and gums and seeps into the roof of my mouth like some crazy constellation of bright stars. A pretzel! And then Jimmy is slipping my underwear down off my legs and his lips are on my stomach and brushing against my thighs and the sounds of squeals and screams and water splashing drifts in through the open window, and then he is going down on me and someone screams at the pool and oh my God I am no longer in my body I am no longer even a body I am a flame, a globe of trembling light and I am about to disintegrate into that flame and into ash when the lights flick on and Liz is standing in the doorway, stone-eyed, saying, “My mom's home,” and
Jimmy starts to laugh so hard that blood comes out of his nose and drips onto my leg and Liz rolls her eyes and leaves the room and I yell, “Fuck!” and scramble to get my dress back on.

He drives me home, popping PBRs and throwing the empties out the open windows. He's laughing the whole time, but he's not looking at me, and my body is some bruised color, so tender I think my skin might break if it is touched. But it doesn't. Jimmy is drunk by the time we get home, and our sex is Jimmy's drunk and stoned sex: fine. Okay. Quick and painless and easy, and I lie in bed afterward with my head spinning listening to Jimmy snore and think of Hazel up there in her house alone in the dark and wonder if she was ever in love, and if so, if this is what came of it, or not.

When I wake up, the clock next to my head says four; the moon's gone, there's a faint rim of blue at the edge of the sky. I reach my arm across the bed, but there's just a pocket of cold sheets. My head throbs and that bruised feeling slides up from my toes back into my whole body and fills it, and then I hear the owl—
Who-cooks-for-you?—
a barred owl. I look up at my little owls on the shelf that I can just barely make out in the moonlight. “Hear that?” I say. The barred calls again and its sound slips down and settles between my legs. I wonder if Hazel hears it, up there on the hill, Hazel who once told me that owls are a sign of the death of something old and the start of something new. It calls again, only this time it's right
outside my window on a low-hanging branch, so close I could touch it if there weren't a screen between us. “What the fuck?” I whisper to that bird who's staring back at me, and I think for a moment I might cry, like a fucking baby, but I don't. Its eyes are black, unblinking. They don't look away. They take it all in: me, the creek, the camper, sky. They swallow us whole, and inside its body is stillness: blue velvet, peppered with holes. “What the fuck?” I ask again, to which it blinks its black eyes and flies away, not telling me a thing.