Beautiful Kate (3 page)

“What do they live on—Sarah’s salary?”

“I suppose so—that, and bank interest. Jason used to have a nest egg in the bank. That’s what we lived on, not farm income. The farm never made a dime, as I remember.”

“How much of a nest egg?”

“It earned five or six thousand, something like that.”

“And he’s kept it in the bank all this time? With inflation and everything?”

“How do I know? I haven’t been home for over ten years, remember?”

Toni was frowning, drumming her fingers on my hip. “Five or six thousand—then, that must mean about a hundred thousand nest egg, right?” I couldn’t help laughing, she was so transparent in her greed. “You want to heist it?” I asked, nibbling her ear.

She rolled onto me, straddling my waist and leaning down so we were eyeball to eyeball, in the Defense Secretary’s deathless phrase. I’m sure I blinked.

“Part of it will soon be yours anyway, won’t it?” she said.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether it even exists. On how long he lives. And on whether he leaves any of it to me—which I seriously doubt he will.”

She shook her head thoughtfully, summoning all her thespian talents. “God, I get scared, Greg. I mean, what if the police do trace you back here? What if they say you were in on the deal too? You could serve time.”

“You think so?”

“And what would I do? Where would I go?”

“There’s always Dandy.”

“Screw Dandy. I’m talking about my man, not some lousy agent.”

“So what do you suggest?” I asked, though of course I already knew. A cretin would have known.

“We’ve got to get our hands on some money, Greg. We really do. We’ve got to get the hell out of here. Go to Florida or someplace. You know it’s gonna be
winter
here soon?” She enunciated the word as if it meant certain death for us.

“Some
money, huh? Like whose?”

She saw then that I was laughing at her, and that was all it took. Immediately she was scrambling out of the tub and fighting off my hands. In her fury, she even swatted my cock, which had grown hard again under her weight. She began to towel off.

“That’s it, buster. You’ve had it. It’s gonna be a cold day in hell before you get me into the tub again. Or anywhere else.”

“Deny me anything but that,” I mourned.

“Yeah, you’ll see.”

She angrily flounced out of the bathroom, leaving me with the vision of that splendid tush, as though to rub it in, all that I would be losing.

“Hey baby,” I called to her. “I’m sorry. I really am. I see things more clearly now.”

Later that night I lay awake in the too-soft brass bed, with Toni sleeping soundly against me, her right leg draped over mine. And in the penumbral dark, the room seemed slowly to come alive around me, partially lit by the same old farmyard polelight, its rays slanting past the edge of the window shade, forming that remembered pane of whiteness in which even the swimming dust motes were not of now, like the ceiling water stains and the mythic figures I had always seen in them and saw again: Otto Graham passing the football and the even more formidable torso of Anita Ekberg, both having waited all these years just to be seen again by me, to be freed for one more night before melding back into the stains that even Kate had never been able to see as anything other than what they were.

Often she would sneak in at night and join us, in summer sitting on Cliff’s twin bed or mine, but in winter diving under the covers to stay warm, oblivious of any turmoil such proximity caused us.

The time I am thinking of, she was thirteen and just beginning to develop, as Cliff was, at fifteen, both of them late bloomers, in sexual development anyway. (In my own case the magic occurred at fourteen, which meant that though I was not as tardy as they were, I was still behind them by a full year—a year that I remember now as the most painful of my young life, a sort of training ground for later. Suddenly the two most important persons in my life, and with whom I had hitherto shared that life as an equal, now treated me as the little guy, the snotnose, and it made me preternaturally nasty. All it would take is one wrong word or condescending look and I would tear into them, trying to reassert my lost equality.)

But getting back to that particular night. It was shortly after Cliff and I had gone to bed when Kate came slipping in, from the bathroom, as was her habit. And this night, it was my bed she sat on.

“We gotta do something,” she said. “We just gotta do something.”

“About what?”

“
Him
, you jerk! Your brother. Don’t you know what Jason’s been doing to him?”

“What about me?” I protested. “Jason’s been working my butt off too.”

“Bull!” she said. “He’s always got Cliff doing more. And now there’s the book work besides.”

I shrugged. “It’s his own fault. It’s your own fault, ain’t it, Cliff.”

Cliff was lying there with his usual look of battered noblesse oblige, a boy who was not just a good scout but an Eagle Scout, so unfailingly generous and noble and right-thinking that I often wondered how he could make it in the world without Kate and me to protect him.

“I guess so,” he said. “But I still think it’s important what Jason’s trying to do—teach us the stuff we don’t get in school.”

Kate looked to the ceiling for strength. “Sweet Jesus, Cliff, it ain’t just the French and Russian Lit—it’s the freaking farm too. Look what he’s got lined up for you there—a few summer chores, he calls it—and it’s more damn work than him and Stinking Joe have done in five years.”

Cliff did not protest. He was too tired. From ten that morning till after dark the two of us had been bucking hay, tossing the filthy heavy itchy bastards up onto the hay wagon and then unloading them into the barn—while Stinking Joe, the hired man, drove the tractor and Jason himself sat in his air-conditioned library preparing our daily tests in Beginning French and Russian Literature. The difference between us was that Cliff sat in bed now with his light on and Menard’s French grammar propped on his lap.

“Sweet Jesus,” Kate said, “you’re really gonna study it. Can’t you for once go in there like we do and just tell him.
Sorry, father dear, but I just didn’t have the time
.”

“He won’t take that from me.”

“Because you never make him, dumbo!” Kate said it loud enough to wake the house.

“It’s important,” Cliff insisted. “We should learn French. We should know it. We should be grateful we have a father who can teach it to us.”

To keep her head from exploding, Kate pressed her hands over her ears and fell back onto the bed. She was wearing a pair of Cliff’s outgrown pajamas, with a button missing in front, which prompted me to scrunch down as low as I could get, hoping for a glimpse of one of her budding jugs, as we elegantly called them then. Though I think she sensed what I was up to, she ignored it—Greg after all was still just a snotnose kid.

She sat up again, wagging her head. “Okay, that’s it. Cliff is so keen on all this, that’s his business. But me and Greg, we just don’t give a dog’s turd about French or
The Brothers Karamazov
. And we sure ain’t gonna do the freaking chicken house on top of it.”

This was another of Jason’s summer projects for the three of us: scraping and repainting a superfluous chicken house that he intended to turn into a “theater” in which we were to perform those same ancient French plays we refused to study.

“We just ain’t gonna scrape all the paint off that thing,” Kate said. “And we ain’t gonna scrub it and repaint it either. And above all, we ain’t gonna convert the freaking place into—what the devil does he call it?—a theatuh in the round! Who for, I’d like to know? Stinking Joe and Emily’s kids? I’m not sure they’re ready for Tartuffe.”

Cliff tried to explain, pointing out how few visitors were dropping in to see Jason now, and consequently how much time he had on his hands.

“Fine,” Kate said. “Then let
him
paint the damn thing. We’ll conjugate his precious French verbs.”

Cliff could barely hold his eyes open. “Please leave, okay?” he asked her. “I still gotta go through my vocabulary.”

Kate shook her head and sighed. As she got up I copped the peek I wanted, the bottom curve of one of her tiny jugs. At the bathroom door she stopped.

“Just let me say this,
mes frères
. Old Jason’s gonna have to make a choice this summer. His theater or his
français
. He ain’t gonna get both.”

I had no idea what she had meant by that pronouncement until a few days later, when the two of us were busy scraping paint off the chicken house in ninety-five-degree heat. Cliff was out mending fence with Stinking Joe, Mother was busy with “her” family, and Jason as usual was involved in some vital intellectual pursuit in the air-conditioned comfort of his library. Because the day was so muggy and hot and the labor ahead of us so long and tiresome, I had tried to “turn off my head,” which was how I thought of it then, the task of trying to outlast agony. So I was not really aware of what Kate was up to until she was well along with her plans. I did know that she was not scraping her share of the paint, but I didn’t know why, not even when a line of laying hens began to file past me, clucking and pecking at the ground as they spread out into the barnyard. I immediately ran around to the front to see how they had escaped from their pen, which adjoined the building. And what I found was Kate crouched inside the wire walls, herding out the last few stragglers. She shushed me with her finger.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“You sure you want to know?”

“Tell me.”

“Just watch.”

With all the chickens liberated, I followed her from the pen into the small building. On a platform against one wall six cans of white exterior paint and two gallons of turpentine had been stacked. Kate picked up one of the bottles of turpentine and emptied it onto some bales of straw, also stacked against the wall. She recapped the bottle, put it back on the platform, and repeated the process with the second bottle. By then I knew what she was doing, but I didn’t say a word, possibly because it was so damned mesmerizing, standing there watching a
girl
, my twin sister, casually going about the business of doing what I would never have had the guts to do, not even if I’d had a hundred chicken houses to paint. Finishing with the turpentine, she pulled out a pack of Camels and lit one.

“It’ll be my fault,” she said, dragging deeply. “I was taking an illegal smoke break, and—”

Casually she flipped the cigarette onto the straw and a sheet of flame roared up the wall.

“And
poof!”
she finished. “There went our
theatuh in the round
!”

We were both running out of the building by then, breathless and excited and scared. At least I was scared. As we ran toward the house I glanced at Kate and saw that she was smiling, a wild joyous smile that struck in my heart the first fear I had ever felt for her. But it failed to last. Within minutes, as I stood with her and the rest of the family watching the chicken house disappear in a tower of flame, all I felt was an awed sense of pride. What other snotnose, I wondered, ever had such a sister as mine?

2

The next morning, leaving Toni still asleep in bed, I went downstairs and found Sarah and Junior at the kitchen table reading the Sunday paper and looking for all the world like a typical married couple, silent and weary and bored. Sarah had her hair up in curlers again and was wearing her bulky chenille housecoat, a combination that would have made Cheryl Tiegs look dowdy. As I got a cup of coffee and sat down, she excused herself and hurried back upstairs, saying something about being late for church, which not unexpectedly drew a smirk from Junior.

“Me, it’s okay to look like a bum in front of. But big brother—now, that’s a different story.”

I reminded him that she had to get ready for church, which only made him laugh.

“Listen, I know her better than she knows herself. And for some reason, she actually thinks you’re hot shit. Now, ain’t that a laugh?”

I toasted him with my coffee. “You’re a sweet kid, Junior. You brighten your little corner.”

“Amen, brother.”

That bitchy exchange must have satisfied him, given the muscles of his animus sufficient workout for the time being, for he became almost pleasant from that point on. I scrambled some eggs and made toast and a glass of reconstituted orange juice. And, sitting down to eat, I scoured the
Tribune
as if I expected to find my story bannered in it:
Unemployed Screenwriter Flees California under Suspicious Circumstances
. But once again the world had failed to take note of my comings and goings, almost as if it had better things to do, such as chronicling the previous night’s inventory of mayhem, all the beatings and rapes and shootings and robberies that had occupied the citizenry since the last issue of the paper, twenty-four hours before.