Beautiful Kate (11 page)

“Now!” she said, jumping up and scampering off through the woods toward our house.

Cliff and I were behind her when we heard the blast of the shotgun and saw a flock of birds explode from the top of a tree off to our right. And abruptly we were out in front of her and pulling away. But then we had an advantage. We were not laughing.

I recount this escapade only because I think it is a fair example of what Kate probably had in mind later, in high school, when she lamented our lost past, saying that
I liked it before, the way it used to be
. At the time I did not understand her at all, filled as I was with the lunatic juices of adolescence, looking forward to such impending glories as growing tall and driving cars and having sex. The irony is that now that I have grown up, I have no trouble seeing it all exactly as she did then, as the passing of something finer than anything that was to come after, for her and Cliff in their few remaining years just as for me, in all of mine.

As it turned out, the incident closed on a happy or at least a satisfying note, with Jason surprisingly standing up for us like a real trooper. Little Tim had broken an arm and lost a tooth in the fall and his father had come over to our house in a high purple-faced dudgeon, threatening mayhem and lawsuits if Jason didn’t beat us there and then, with him as a witness. Instead Jason told him to get the hell off his porch and off his property or he would throw him off, and in the bargain would have him clapped into jail for trespassing and destruction of property and the reckless use of a firearm. Regan blustered and swore and promised revenge—all the way out to his battered pickup, which he drove off in such a heavy-footed fury that the engine kept flooding out on him. It was the most ignominious retreat I have ever seen and it promptly made Jason a great hero to the three of us, which is probably why he neglected to punish us, unaccustomed as he was to seeing such shining admiration in our eyes.

So, for Kate and me, the treehouse incident was a thing of beauty from start to finish. As for Cliff, he never said much about it, evidently feeling that it was not one of our finer moments. And, oddly, this too was something I think that Kate and I relied upon in our young lives: the leavening effect of Cliff’s unflagging decency and good sense. Without it, as a counter force, she and I might have had to develop scruples of our own, which surely would have tamed to a degree the considerable joy we found in mischief.

But as I’ve already said (at least a dozen times, I’m afraid) those innocent days finally came to an end, in the sea change of puberty. And it was really only then, during the transition years, that the going was particularly rough. Later on, such debacles as the Sadie Hawkins Day dance simply did not occur, probably not because Kate had changed so much as that she had learned to adjust, or at least to dissemble. To all appearances, she became virtually a different person, cool and quiet and uninvolved. She did her homework and got good grades, better even than Cliff’s, but she never went out for any sports or joined any clubs, nor did she ever date or encourage the friendship of other girls. For the most part, she just went through the motions at school and then came home to her real life, which was the farm. Over the years Cliff and I had become so involved in sports and other affairs (such as his assistant manager job at the Eskimo) that we had less and less to do with the farm. But whatever slack we created, Kate was more than able to take up. In fact, I think she eventually contributed more than Stinking Joe to keeping the place in running order: brushhogging the fields and mending the fences and caring for what cattle we had left after Jason sold off the milk cows and those Angus that couldn’t nurture their own young. Her one true passion, though, was an Appaloosa mare and its colt, which she herself broke and then proceeded to ride over our fields by the hour almost every afternoon, often not coming home until dark and missing supper altogether.

It was also during those years that Kate developed into a real beauty, to my mind the most beautiful girl in school, though I’m not sure everyone saw her that way, blinded as they had to be by the carapace she had built around herself, that hauteur which scared off boys and girls alike, just as it did her teachers. Yet she was never the kind of girl anyone would have felt sorry for, and not because of her looks so much as her air of total self-confidence and contentment. If anyone worried about her (other than Mother) it was probably Cliff, who was forever asking me about her. Was she happy? Did she still like us? What did I think she would become? A movie star? A tragic dramatic actress on Broadway? Just what did I think?

Actually very little, for the change in Kate somehow did not bother me anywhere near as much as it did Cliff. For one thing, I still had more important matters on my mind, like getting an actual, legitimate, certifiable piece of ass instead of the measly bare jug and hand-jobs which by my junior year were still the zenith of my sexual experience. Back then, most of the girls I dated—the girls from “good families”—simply were not as generous as I understand they are now. Consequently I made desperate pilgrimages to the east side of Woodglen, hoping to score with the Italian and Mexican girls there. But they invariably turned into little nuns for the occasion, evidently feeling that a date with a west-side Wasp (even country variety) was a social opportunity. (And, believe me, I am not unaware how obscenely smug that sounds. But it’s the way we were back then. And I didn’t invent the world, not even this one.)

So, for me, Kate was simply
there
, in the background, somewhat like an eccentric and beautiful cousin who I was sure didn’t really like me all that much anymore, doubtless because of my commonness, my disinclination to share her enthusiasms for horses and chastity and solitude. At the same time I can remember feeling a certain rueful disappointment that none of my dates looked at all like Kate or had that special quality of hers, that thing that made her stand out in a crowd like a leopard strolling through a herd of sheep. Very distinctly I remember entering the Eskimo with a date one night and thinking, as the other kids all looked up at us from their tables, how much better it would have been, how much more flattering, to have had someone like Kate on my arm.

Yesterday afternoon Junior came in from the barn with a broken nose and a swelling eye and a bad cut across his cheekbone. He knocked over a chair and punched the wall and almost kicked the downstairs bathroom door off its hinges before he finally made it to the sink and began to bathe his wounds. Toni started to enter the bathroom to help him, but he growled at her to leave him alone and she obeyed.

“What do you think happened?” she asked me.

“I can’t imagine.”

Junior heard me. “Don’t be cute, all right? Just bring the jeep around. I’ll be out in a minute.”

Toni asked if she shouldn’t go too, and I told her to save her mothering instincts for me. I put on a coat and brought the jeep around from the garage, revving its cold engine for minutes before Junior finally came out, wearing sunglasses and holding an already bloody towel to his face. We drove to Saint Helen’s Hospital and went to the emergency room, where a Chicano doctor had Junior X-rayed and then pushed his nose back into place and packed it. He stitched up his cheek and bandaged it. But there was not much he could do for his eye, he said. The damage there was only superficial, but it was already too late to control the swelling and the discoloration, which would just have to run their course. He gave Junior some antibiotic salve and told him to see his own doctor in a few days, or sooner, if there were complications.

I went out to the jeep and waited while Junior stopped at the desk to pay, an operation that took him a good twenty minutes and had him kicking the banked snow when he came out. Getting into the jeep, he angrily pulled the door shut.

“A fucking hundred and twelve goddamn dollars!” he bawled. “Can you believe that?”

“Sure.”

“Too bad I ain’t a pauper like you,” he said. “Then the stinking government would pay for it.”

“Yeah, that is a shame.”

For the next couple of minutes, as I drove toward home, he sat there in the bucket seat cracking his knuckles and fuming. Finally he turned to me again.

“Well, ain’t you curious how it happened?”

“I got a pretty good idea.”

“Oh yeah? Then tell me.”

“I figure it was one of your little chocolate fruits. What’d he do, turn straight on you?”

It was impossible to read his reaction, what with all the bandages and swelling. Finally he laughed. “So I you’ve been on to me. Big deal. What you gonna do now, run to Jason and tell him all about it?”

“I figure he probably already knows. You aren’t exactly a tower of discretion, you know.”

“Jason don’t know nothing that ain’t on the radio.”

“So what if he did find out—what difference would it make? I understand you’ve already milked him for all he had.”

“Now, who could’ve told you a story like that?”

“I just guessed.”

“Sure you did—with sister Sarah’s help.”

“Could’ve been a little birdie.”

“And you believed her?”

“What difference does it make?”

“None. I ain’t ashamed of anything I ever did. And least of all, I ain’t ashamed of who I happen to like sex with.”

“Good for you.”

He laughed again, or tried to anyway. “But then in that department, we Kendalls are all a little kinky—isn’t that right, brother?”

I felt like a woods creature suddenly hearing the heavy step of man. And it was not Junior’s words so much as the tone that alerted me, that oozing burden of informed malice. My hand involuntarily tightened on the steering wheel.

“You trying to say something?” I asked.

“Don’t be coy.”

“Was I?”

“You’re forgetting that old Stinking Joe worked for us a few more summers after you left.”

“So?”

Junior wagged his head in mock wonderment. “Ah, such innocence. Such a look of downy innocence.”

“You’re boring me,” I said.

“Sure, I am.” He settled back in his seat and crossed his arms, a raconteur about to perform. “Yeah, old Stinking Joe, he really had some stories to tell. Loved to tease me, that dirty old man. Just loved to say such awful things about you and Kate and Cliff, like how you used to swim naked together and play grab-ass—claimed he saw it too, the lying old bastard.”

“That’s what he was, all right.”

“Old fart even claimed he overheard things. And then when Cliff crashed the car like that—well, old Joe he just put two and two together.”

“And what did he get?”

Junior looked over at me again, his good eye twinkling merrily. Like an elocutionist, he elaborately formed his answer:

“
Incest.
”

And that was as long as I could last. Braking the jeep in the snow, I reached over and slammed my little brother back against the hardtop door, making it pop open.

“That’s all,” I told him. “Don’t you ever open your filthy mouth about Kate or Cliff again. You do and you’re gonna wish you were back with your spade boy friends. You got that?”

He did not answer, but I got the impression that he understood. So I drove us on home, getting out and leaving it up to him, in his shape, to put the jeep away in the garage. Inside, Toni started to pump me about how he was and why I had left him outside, but I walked past her and came up here to my room. I slammed the door shut and went over to the window, trying to get control of myself. I pressed my hands together to stop their trembling and I closed my eyes against the tears welling in them. But I could not stop the sound of my little brother’s voice, which went on shaking me like a leaf in the wind.

In the three days since Junior was beaten up, Toni has spent much of her waking time with him, changing his bandages, bringing him food, talking with him. And at first I welcomed the change, in that it gave me more writing time than I would otherwise have had, now that she has run out of Harlequin Romances. But then I began to wonder if my little brother, gradually forgetting the warning I gave him, might not be filling her ear with mischief. Which is exactly what happened, as I learned last night.

In her inimitable way, Toni tried to be super subtle in broaching the subject, waiting until after we’d had sex and were lying quietly in bed, smoking what I thought would be the last cigarettes of the day.

“How come you didn’t tell me Junior’s a homo?” she asked.

“True confessions today?”

“How come?”

“I didn’t know he was, not for sure. So I saw no reason to prejudice you against him.”

“
Me
prejudiced?” she laughed. “You know I’ve always liked gays. They’re so much more fun than you straights.”

“Yeah, they’re a neat bunch of fellows.”

She dug her toes into my legs. “Don’t be so sarcastic and superior. Listen, if I could find a guy who was like you in the one department and like them in every other, I’d jump at him.”

“I bet you would.”

“Well, I would. And we’d have fun together too. Jabber like a couple of girls. You macho types have got a lot to learn, you know that?”

“Maybe if I went back to school. Say, a Hollywood barber college.”