“I want you to come to dinner at my house,” she said.
Peter was quiet.
“It would be kind of a big deal for them,” she said. “It … would be kind of a big deal for me.”
Peter told his mind’s eye to picture the way the sun falls like honey on the grass in autumn and a low stream passing over round stones and the first angel’s-hair sliver of the new moon. Make “this” a lot easier. So we’re a “this” now. As if that wasn’t the exact kind of talk that led to
boyfriend
and
commitment
and other words he was allergic to. Girls. The second you set up a perfectly reasonable boundary is the second they’re shopping for bulldozers. Ever the foremost of ironies that men are considered the hunters of the species.
She looked at him, expecting. Expecting the ten million things that girls get it in their heads to expect. Obviously he was letting things come too far. Obviously she was hard of hearing in that way they get when you say “I need my space” and they hear wedding bells. He knew how to handle this. As Nicolae had said: nine out of ten times a woman is giving you an ache in the belly it can be easily solved by taking her home and giving her the business. There it was. He would just take her home and give her the business like it was going out of style and there’d be nothing more to talk about. He smiled at her and nodded and she smiled back, thinking she was getting her way.
The subsequent evening Marie Godfrey could hardly contain her disbelief that she sat across the table from this greasy and quite plausibly lice-ridden thug like any school friend breaking bread with her family. Or at least the stand-in family whose resemblance to the one she had devoted her best years to diminished by the day. But it was still her table. Appropriate enough for the ritual sacrifice of what was left of sanctity. Classist! The nerve of such an implication when Marie Newport had grown up the daughter of an unskilled steelworker from a side of the tracks that neither her husband, daughter, nor any Godfrey had a conception of any more than the dark side of the moon. As though it made one some scaly old relic out of a Jane Austen novel for having some concern about one’s only child ending up chopped up in a ditch. As though it made any difference how many charitable endeavors you were spearheading or that you would cut off your arm before voting Republican; that one look at the likes of a Peter Rumancek and you had a responsibility to your eyes irrespective of something so notional as class. Unless your name was Norman Godfrey. If this was your name your responsibility was to an argument against an ancestor who had been dead for nearly a hundred years.
But none of this was what caused the greatest strain on Marie’s credulity. What astonished her most about this performance was her own collaboration with it. When Letha had first sprung this proposal, Marie’s response was a hard and brittle laugh unpleasant to her own ears and an unequivocal “Absolutely not.” But Letha had not bothered to argue her ruling or even look at her. She looked at her father in unmistakable collusion: he would handle it. Handling crazy people was his job. Marie wondered if there was a word for what she had become. It would be the opposite of an echo, a body severed from the voice. When all the voice wanted, if anyone could hear it, was to ask how they had let this happen.
After dinner she excused herself, claiming a sudden onset of fatigue, and Dr. Godfrey poured himself a drink and offered one to Peter. The kid earned it sitting under the klieg light of Marie’s hospitality.
And now, upon meeting the accused in person, Dr. Godfrey was more sympathetic to his daughter’s point of view: Peter was a different breed. He was not our neighbor. He did not want the things we wanted. If you told him to straighten up and fly right he could only look at you in utter confusion: to his mind this was exactly what he was doing. Foremost he was guilty of civilization’s unthinkable crime, as plain in his walk as a limp: he was not owned by anyone.
He did not want to be here right now, that was certain. But he was. He was here because Letha had asked him to be and this demonstrated a base level of integrity that in Godfrey’s estimation earned the kid a fair shake. His darkest fear had been that Christina Wendall had concocted the werewolf story much as Letha had, as a psychological bulwark against the more disturbing reality, but his instincts drew him to another theory about that particular patient. Otherwise, it was in the water supply: people were afraid and someone had to account for it, and Peter was not One of Us. But here he was, making this effort (though would it have really killed him to wear a tie?), and besides, it could not be discounted that he had been kind to Shelley. Of all things, that could not be discounted.
Godfrey handed Peter the glass, which Peter held up to clink against his own.
“To … Roman,” said Godfrey. He’d been searching for something leavening and innocuous but that’s what came out.
“To Roman,” said Peter, and in his eye was a sort of strange character Godfrey had caught at odd moments all through the meal, not so much a maturity as a nature consciousness as though he were at times a boy exactly of his years and others a soul out of time wearing a boy mask.
Godfrey noticed him squeeze Letha’s leg, and that filled him with a gladness that surprised him considerably. But he was glad. That his strange daughter had found this strange suitor, that there was a person in her life to touch her like that. Here was a woman he had made.
Once the table was cleared he made a show of skepticism when Letha said she would drive Peter home, but, as she pointed out, he’d been drinking, and neither broached the idea of rousing Marie. And by now he had privately abdicated any responsibility of being another obstacle between them. They would run into plenty without his contribution. He gave them the parting admonition “Behave,” counting on that they would do the contrary. They would live.
A real live woman. What did you know about that?
* * *
From the archives of Dr. Norman Godfrey:
CW: It was that dream again, the one in the mill. But it was different this time, this time the moment comes, I don’t know whether to hide or to turn and face it, but this time I can see someone outside, someone out the window. It’s Francis Pullman. I can tell because … God, I hate saying this out loud, but because of that creepy dead eye. And that’s the only thing that changes, he’s just standing out there not saying anything, and I’m still stuck in the same place but with a dead man watching me.
NG: Do you have any idea what significance Pullman or Pullman’s ghost would have here?
CW: I … This is going to sound a little crazy, Doctor.
NG: I think you’re in the right place.
CW: The look on his face.
NG: What do you mean?
CW: He wasn’t saying anything, but I knew he was telling me something by the look on his face.
NG: Is it something you’re comfortable sharing here?
CW: He was telling me … You are going to lose your soul.
NG: …
Peter’s Hierarchy of Shit He Can Live Without
It was the last day before the Snow Moon, and when the eighth-period bell rang it dismissed not only the student body for the day but also the last hot minute of denial on Peter’s part of what he had been putting off for the last two weeks: now he would have to tell her. Women and talking, the way it just went together like drawn and quartered. He walked from study hall to his bus, wincing at the prospect, when Alex Finster and Tom Dublyk appeared at his flanks, with an additional one or two behind. This was not the reprieve Peter had in mind.
“Full moon tomorrow,” said Alex.
Peter said nothing.
“You got spunk in your ears, Rumancek? I’m talking to you, you dirty Gypsy piece of shit.”
Peter did not take his eyes from the exit sign down the hall over the wave of heads.
“Aw, he’s probably just down his girlfriend’s in a coma,” said Tom.
The question, Peter knew, was simple: make it to the bus. They wanted him to give them a reason. If people were going to jump you, they just jumped you; these shitheads needed him to give them a reason. So it was the simple question of just keeping his mouth shut and getting on his bus.
Alex called him a deaf Gypsy faggot and as they passed through the door the crush pressed their bodies together and Alex turned his head and breathed hot in Peter’s ear.
“Probably needs to run home and suck Sleeping Beauty’s dick,” said Tom.
Just keep his mouth shut long enough to board bus 89. They wanted him to give them a reason but Peter had been on the wrong end of enough beatings to know that nothing was worth it. This was what made Peter not like Roman; Peter had control. When they can take that from you there is no floor under what else you can lose.
Tom drew two fingers under his own nostrils, inhaling deeply. “Is that pussy I smell?”
They were outside now and the buses were in an idling line no more than fifteen yards away. Fifteen yards, an achievable goal.
Alex put an arm around Peter’s shoulders. “So where’s the wolf half come from, anyway?” he said.
He thought this intrusive familiarity would goad Peter into reacting. Just enough smart to get on the bus.
“Your mom toss a steak between her legs and say, ‘Come and get it, boys’?” said Alex.
Peter hit Alex in the balls.
Alex doubled over and tripped over his own feet and fell and Peter broke for it. The other boys were just behind him, but the moment’s lapse in their reaction was all he needed to get to the bus, whatever was nearest, something at least he could hang on to and kick. He made passing eye contact through the bus window with those girls, the Sworn twins, staring at him with those spooky little eyes, but if staring was the worst of it there were things worse than eyes.
He leaped up the steps but then one of the twins’ eyes widened (which?—lost to history) and she yelled, “Watch out!” but Peter knew: he had lost, and a hand seized him by the ponytail and wrenched him down off the bus and he was shoved to the pavement, finding himself in a ring of boys and looking up directly at Duncan Fritz, 210 pounds of Duncan Fritz who had not been seeking this fight but now that a fight was in the air could not pass it up. This is what a fight cost you: the right to abstractions, like “fair.” This is one of the things a fight cost you. Peter attempted to bring his hands up in protection, but before he could Duncan punched his face. It was like looking into a very bright spotlight, and a quick succession of half a dozen flashes of this spotlight followed before Peter was successful in getting his hands into place and curling his knees into his chest and wheezing blood into his palms and waiting for the kicking to begin.
But then sharp elbows broke through the ring surrounding him and another combatant entered the fray and he felt the weight of this new body come down on top of him and a pair of arms encircle his neck. It was not a lot of weight and the arms were shaking and skinny like a girl’s. It was a girl. It was Letha. Letha had thrown herself on top of him.
Things were quiet again. Letha clung to him, shaking. There flowed from the center of her body a power so great even now Peter could feel it in his Swadisthana, and it caused her whole body to shake with her intention of not letting go of him.
“Aw fuck,” someone said eventually. The party was over before it had begun: this stalemate alongside the immediate threat of some authority’s arrival caused the mob to drift, deflated. As suddenly as the tribe lust for sacramental violence had arisen, the pregnant girl was a real wet blanket.
Letha helped Peter up. His hair was loose and in disarray and his face was red and bleeding from cuts over his eye and his mouth. And although he was standing now and okay what she saw in her mind’s eye was that other boy standing over him and hammering his fist into him again and again. She had never herself seen such violence before but knew instinctively and unequivocally that the only real way to fight it was with its equal and opposite, and she kissed his face. She covered the face the other boy had beaten with fists with kisses that were the fluttering of moth wings. An eye for an eye.
Peter leaned his forehead against hers. He put his thumb to her mouth and wiped his blood from her lips. She was crying and mucus was leaking from her nose. He drew his index finger along her upper lip.
“Snot,” he said.
He fished a spare hairband from his pocket and pulled his hair back in its ponytail. He took her hand.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Hey!” barked a voice like clapper boards and Vice Principal Spears seized Peter’s elbow. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“He’s coming with me.”
The vice principal released Peter. His face paled twice in the twin reflections of Olivia Godfrey’s sunglasses.
* * *
Peter and Letha went with Olivia. Shelley, for whom Olivia had come, sat in the bed of the pickup, and the three of them in the cab, Letha in the middle, tucking her legs to the side of the gearshift. Olivia had furnished Peter with her head scarf and he held it to his bloody mouth. The inside of his cheek wall was torn and he worried it with his tongue. Olivia, in response to a question that had not yet been voiced, said, “He’s the same.” She lightly rapped Letha’s thigh, which at first seemed like a gesture of solace—but she needed room to shift.
She drove them to the Rumanceks’ trailer. She told Letha, “I really should take you home, darling.”
Letha said nothing. Olivia made a display of mulling her adult responsibilities and relented.
“Call your mother, at least. She is wound rather tightly these days.”
At the sight of Peter’s split lip and swollen eye, it took Lynda the better part of fifteen minutes to grieve and rage. She spat on her own breast, calling some of the more voluptuous curses on the poison wombs that conceived such monsters that could do that to a face so handsome. Then she calmed to practical maternal authority and cleaned him up and gave him a tea with two crushed aspirin and a joint and sent him to the bed with a Saran-wrapped frozen pork chop against the swelling. Olivia stayed to have a discussion with Lynda.