Somebody Else's Daughter (12 page)

Teddy heard a truck coming up the road. It was Luther Grimm's truck and it was turning into the driveway. Teddy jumped down off the porch and slipped out of sight behind the garage. Grimm and another man got out of the truck. Dale.

Dale's mouth looked crooked, his cheek swollen. The dog caught their attention, jerking and barking and squealing. Dale looked around the yard, furtively, like a man planning his escape. Grimm walked over to the dog. “What's your problem?” He kicked the animal lightly in the belly. The dog wrestled with Grimm's boot, nipping at it, growling playfully. “He's still a puppy.”

“Don't look like no puppy to me,” Dale said. “You ever fight him?”

“Fight him? No.”

“Well, you should. You could make some money.”

“He could get hurt.”

“He'd like it,” Dale said. “A dog like that. You should think about it.”

“He's just a puppy,” Grimm said again, and kicked the dog once more, this time a little harder, and the dog growled and tumbled back.

“He ain't gonna be a puppy long,” Dale said.

The dog got up to run after them, but by now they were near the porch, and he jerked once more on the chain and yelped. Dale laughed at the dog, an exaggerated guttural laugh, and Grimm laughed too, and they went into the house. The dog walked around in a circle, then lay down and whined.

Teddy felt sorry for that dog. If he wasn't so afraid of it, he'd steal it.

He walked back up the hill into the woods, crossing over the tracks. He wondered what Dale was doing hanging around with Luther Grimm. Whatever it was couldn't be good, he thought.

The sun came pouring through the trees. You could hear the trees on their old trunks. They whined just a little, whispering their worries to one another like old men in church. They were old and tired and had been standing for centuries and had had enough of it. He could smell the earth and the dry leaves. He came to the field and crossed it and he saw a hawk flying with its brown wings spread wide. It flew wide and slow. Hawks were the smart birds. They knew things. They knew people were stupid. Teddy hoped his mother was home. He wanted to tell her about the dog. He wanted to sit across from her beautiful face and tell her about the dog and about Luther Grimm who'd burned his mother's house down. But his mother wasn't home. She'd left a note. She'd gone to the city for art supplies. He wandered the big empty house. The rooms glimmered with sunshine. They smelled dusty. It was weird to think she'd grown up here. He compared it to the series of dumpy apartments in L.A. where he'd spent the majority of his childhood and it pissed him off. He had a whole lot of reasons for being angry with her, but at the same time he wasn't angry at all. He loved her fiercely.

He took his bike and rode to town. He met up with Willa at the Pizza Shack. Willa had on black eyeliner. He could smell her lipstick and something else, an earthy musky scent that turned him on. He wanted to push himself against her. They each had a slice, sitting at the counter. The TV was on and there was stuff about the war in Iraq. The war was like white noise, people hardly noticed it. You could still eat and watch the report. You could still eat and see bodies piled up along the road like dead pigs in burlap. You could see men with machine guns and still swallow your food.

What would happen next? He could not imagine a future—what that meant—because he had started to doubt the possibility that there'd be one. The way he saw things, the future was tainted food that you unwittingly swallowed because people told you that you'd starve without it, but at the same time you knew it would make you sick. Maybe not right away, but it would work through your body like a virus and once you got to your future, you'd be on your knees, begging God or whoever the fuck was up there for mercy. Because no matter what, everyone was guilty and would suffer the consequences. He looked back at the TV and saw tanks on a deserted road, a correspondent in a khaki vest. The future was unknown, the reporter was saying. It wasn't anything you could count on.

“You want to play some games?” Willa asked. “I've got change.”

“Sure.”

They walked around to the video store and went down into the basement where they'd put all the games. There were some other kids there from school. She wanted to play the car-racing game. She liked to sit in the leather seat. “Alas, my throne,” she would say in her Shakespearean accent, swinging one leg over like mounting a horse. He stood there next to her for a while. Watching her yanking on the gears, her foot pressing down the pedal, did something to his insides. She raced an eighteen-wheeler truck and it buzzed her out. He could see it in her eyes, they went dull and glassy. He played one of the paramilitary games, shooting at gangsters, but couldn't kill enough of them to get a free game. “I need a smoke,” he said, and left her there with the game and walked out without turning back. It was almost five and the sun was going down and the air was getting cool. There were some people hanging out at Bev's, eating ice-cream cones. Little children chased one another up and down the breezeway. He saw Ada Heath coming out of the bookstore. She was with this other girl, Beth, who was chunky and always had too much spit in her mouth. He watched them laughing on the street. He wondered what could possibly be so funny. Willa came out and they walked down to O'Brien's for more cigarettes. It was getting dark and he told her he wanted to go home.

“Can you give me a lift?” she said.

“I guess so.”

“You
guess
so?”

“You can have the seat, is what I meant.” He grinned at her.

“Chivalry is not dead.” She took his face in her hands and kissed his cheek like a mother.

They rode down Main Street with its white houses and crooked shutters, its front porches and rocking chairs, its pumpkins and brittle mums. He saw boys making a fort in a pile of leaves and a girl on a tree swing, pushing her heels to the sky. He saw an old man sweeping the sidewalk. Lights were coming on in the windows. He could see people in their houses, a woman setting the table, a family sitting down to supper, and he felt something pull in his chest, a kind of longing he'd never felt before, and it made him want to hold Willa. It made him want to lie down with her someplace and just look at her.

She lived down the road from his grandfather's place. When they finally got there he was covered with sweat. It was nearly dark and fog had settled over the fields. It gave him a feeling, like another kind of ocean, like he was small. “Come in,” she said.

He followed her into the house. The place was like a museum. Everything in place. Everything in order. The floors were shiny and clean. He didn't know where to put his feet. He could hear music coming from one of the rooms. They went through the kitchen, into the foyer. The music was coming from her father's study, a symphony on the stereo. The door was ajar and her father was inside. The phone rang and the music went down and the door started to close. Teddy could smell a cigar. Willa started up the circular staircase and Teddy followed her, glancing into the father's study. Joe Golding nodded to him as he closed his door. In Willa's room, horses galloped across the wallpaper and she had ribbons all over the place that she'd won in horse shows. They shut her door and sat down on the rug and she put some headphones onto him. It was strange music, like chanting. He didn't know what it was and he didn't ask her. Then she unzipped his pants and made him come.

Once Teddy had Willa Golding under his skin he thought about little else. He did not focus at school. His tutor would point to various sentences, lines of little black marks, and read the words out loud, but he heard none of it. They were words and they made a sound when they came out of her mouth and her mouth made a funny shape when she said them, but none of it mattered to Teddy—it meant nothing to him. He could not interpret the sound. He watched his tutor's lips pronouncing the word
somnolent
and he thought about kissing Willa.

He could stretch it apart and the letters separated like bread in a puddle, so he saw
TENT
and he saw
TENT ON SAM
and it did not make sense. He saw
TENSION.
And he heard monks chanting.

He had brought his face down to her belly, the soft pillow of flesh, and he had played with her nipples and they had poked up in his mouth like gumdrops.

He wanted Willa. He wanted to be
inside
her.

Romeo and Juliet did not interest him. It bored him silly. He was
stupefied
with boredom. He was
FRIED WITH STUPE.
He was
STUPID and FRIED.
At school, he felt like an outlaw, like in those old Westerns. Like when he'd walk into Mrs. Heath's class everyone went quiet and looked at him expectantly, nervously, like he was about to take out a gun or something. It was weird. Mrs. Heath turned the shade of curdled milk at the very sight of him and he'd think:
This town's not big enough for the both of us!
She would mark up his papers with wild abandon, encircling his terrible grades in red ink like some stamp of disapproval, and he'd have to pretend it didn't get to him, but it did. He told his mother he wasn't doing very well and she shrugged and said, “Just try your best.” He didn't know what his best was. He wasn't good at reading and he'd never be good at it and you had to be good at it if you wanted to do well. There was no way around it. When the teachers asked questions in class and the hands would rise up like the flags of inferior countries, he
knew
the answer too; it just took a little longer for it to come into his head. It would fly into his brain like a big clumsy insect, one of those slow-flying cockroaches, and land there, finally, making a spectacle of itself. What did it matter if he was a little slow? They never called on him anyway.

His mind wandered. He'd watch the people at school. They all seemed stuck inside little clouds and he couldn't hear them or understand them. Even when he heard what they were saying,
what
they said made no sense. He would yawn and yawn. They were all talking so much. It was noisy. Talking and laughing and scratching and smiling. He watched the jiggling girls at school. They were flashes of pink. They were this hand or that leg. This foot. This pair of glossy lips. Those tits. Their hair smelled of coconuts. It fell in their faces as they spoke. But Willa was not pink. Willa was a striped cat high up in a tree, ready to pounce. She had little soft paws. She was a dark animal in the shadows. She was a rubber ball rolling through the wide hallways of her father's house, down the stairs,
bounce, bounce, bounce.
Willa bounced and floated. She bounced up and down and up again. She was a fucking Super Ball.

11

What it felt like sucking on Teddy's penis. He had a nice one and it was friendly, it was polite. She didn't have any trouble making friends with it. She liked its shiny hat. She liked his musky smell. She liked his clothes and wanted to wear them. She liked boy's clothes better than girl's clothes. His clothes always smelled good and fresh. She tried to imagine his mother washing them. His mother didn't have any help like her mother did. Sucking on Teddy's penis was not as big a deal as people thought. It made him feel good and she liked the way he looked afterward with his face ruddy and damp and that beautiful smile he had, one tooth sticking out a little more than the other. Teddy was gorgeous. He was going to be something when he was in his twenties, she knew. But he wasn't as smart as Marco, at least he couldn't seem to get good grades like Marco. Willa didn't know why. He had refused to read aloud in class and nobody said anything, not even Mr. Jernigan, everyone just teetering on their tipped-back chairs to see what he'd do. Teddy seemed smart to her. Smarter than most people. He was always thinking. He had ideas about things. Just the way he looked at something—like some ordinary thing—he'd consider it as though it had just dropped down from Saturn or something. You could tell he was thinking something deeper than most. And things bothered him. Trash on Mount Everest, rude people, careless behavior. Whenever he rode her home on his bike he'd point out all the trash along the side of the road that people threw out of their windows. “How can people be so careless?” he'd say to her. He took it all to heart. She liked Teddy so she sucked on his penis. It didn't worry her much. She opened her mouth and let him in and let him go down her throat till her eyes teared. She wasn't comparing what she did for him to what he did for her—you didn't do that when you loved someone. He might put his head on her belly and breathe her in—she took care to dab some perfume below her belly button—but she wasn't letting him inside her pants and he knew it and he respected that and he didn't even try. She felt like she could be herself with Teddy. They could just
be
together and it was all right. It was quiet and peaceful. They could just
be.

Mrs. Heath was always getting after Teddy. She was a bitch, and everybody had started to hate her. She was always after the girls for rolling over the waistbands of their skirts so that the hem rested at midthigh instead of at the knee, where it was supposed to be. She'd chase you down in the courtyard and make you lower it while she watched, but with Teddy it was different. Mean-spirited. She came up to him at lunch that day, her face jaundiced and wrinkled like a dried apricot, and explained in a voice dripping with honey that his paper for her class was unacceptable, on something like a fourth-grade level, and how dare he attempt to turn something like that in to her. “Your work insults me,” is what she'd said, shoving the paper into his hand. Willa took him into the girl's room to smoke before Chemistry and they stood there together in the way horses will stand quietly, hardly moving. Teddy leaned at the window with his tortured squint, wearing his usual gray wool sweater. It was his dead grand-father's sweater and the sleeves were frayed on the bottom. Teddy was a big husky dog with his pretty blue eyes and pink tongue and if he had a tail it would be wagging, no matter what his trouble. He was a happy dog and she knew he didn't care what Mrs. Heath thought—not really he didn't. Then Ada Heath came in and complained, “He's not supposed to be in here, there are rules for Christ's sake, why can't he follow them.” Teddy muttered something under his breath and walked out and Willa absorbed Ada's drama like some kind of toxic smoke. Ada rubbed her eyes with her yellow fingertips and bragged about her bulimia. Yesterday she'd done it twice. “Your face is yellow,” Willa told her. “Be careful.”