Now Is the Hour (32 page)

Rigby John, Sis said.

This
Rigby John
was differnt.
Rigby John
said that way accompanied by a sigh meant only one thing. Sis had a secret.

Sis shoved the ashtray back into the dash.

I'm going to tell you something, Sis said, and you got to promise not to tell Mom and Dad.

I reached down, shut the radio off.

Promise? she said.

I promise, I said.

At the corner of Philbin and Tyhee, nine-forty-five, ten till, after Sis shifted into second, slowed down to twenty-five, turned the steering wheel to the right, and we were in good purchase on Tyhee Road, Sis said:

I'm pregnant.

Holy shit. For a moment there, everything stopped. Breath, movement, the whole world went black. Deep in my bones, in my blood, a fear so vast, I don't know what happened. Perhaps I fainted. All's I know is, when I came to, the pickup was off on the side of the road, Sis was crying and crying, trying hard to get a cigarette lit. I was in the middle of the seat, and my arm was around Sis's shoulder.

Are you going to get an abortion? I said.

Sis's mascara was mud all down her cheeks. Her dark Roosky Gypsy eyes. Sis inhaled deep, turned her head quick, looked over to me, and said: What in the
hell
are you talking about?

The bowling ball a long, thunderous roll down my tongue. The words in my mouth never seemed to come out right.

Abortions are cool, I said. Abortions should be legal.

The way those Roosky eyes looked at me, I should've curled up and dropped dead.

Abortion! Sis screamed. Do you think I'm going to kill my unborn child? What are you, nuts?!

My arm wasn't on Sis's shoulders anymore. I was sitting across the cab, lighting my own cigarette.

Well, I said. What you going to do, then?

Well, duh? Sis said, like I was so stupid. What do you think? Gene and I are getting married, Sis said.

Just then, headlights from a car came around Philbin onto Tyhee. The headlights filled the cab up with light. The headlights on the rearview mirror pushed the rectangle of headlights right onto Sis's eyes.

Everything was in Sis's eyes right then. The day Russell died, the Door of the Dead, how much she hated her brown patch of birthmark on her thigh, how when we were kids I chased her with the dead mouse, the baby inside her, dress-up, the night we won the jitterbug contest.

Gene wants to marry you? I said.

The old Ford passed by slow. The horn beeped.

A bottle out the window, broken green glass.

Indians.

Of course he does, Sis said. It'll just take some time.

Time for what? I said. You only got nine months.

Six, Sis said.

Sis was crying again. Holding her belly, crying. Crying so hard she wasn't just crying for herself. She was crying for her baby too.

I haven't told him yet, she said.

Who? I said.

Gene, she said.

Kelso? I said.

Gene fucking Kelly, you dumb ass.

The first time I heard Sis say
fuck.

When you going to tell him? I said.

Tomorrow, Sis said. Or soon.

Sis reached down, turned the engine off. She was crying so hard, she had to lie down with her head on my lap. She pulled her legs up into her chest and put her hands up across her eyes.

On the Tyhee Flats, in the middle of all that dark, there was Sis and I on the side of the road, the headlights still on, poking a hole in the night. The last time I'd seen somebody cry like that was me with Billie, hunched over Russell's grave.

I put my hand on Sis's hair, rubbed her bangs from off her face. Sis looked differnt now that she was pregnant.

We should have been home an hour ago. Mom and Dad were going to be pissed. I really had to pee.

But what was an hour late compared to a pregnancy?

Einstein was so right on with his theory of relativity.

Still the cigar was only a cigar, and the shit was going to hit the fan.

It was still a while of Sis crying. Finally, she snuffed up, pulled herself together. She sat with her back to me, staring out the driver's-side window.

Can I borrow some money? Sis said.

She wasn't even looking at me.

All I need is ten dollars, she said. I promise I'll pay you back.

Mom and Dad were waiting up. They were sitting at the kitchen table under the new bright light that pulled down. The clock that looked like a black cat with big back-and-forth eyes and its tail wagging above the refrigerator said twenty to eleven.

Mom and Dad sitting at the table that night is a photograph in my mind that I don't think will ever leave. Dad in his baby blue pajamas, Mom in her pink quilted robe, her hair in a hairnet. The way they sat stiff there in the circle of bright light in the quiet house, just Grandma's clock ticking. Sis and I had just entered the
Inner Sanctum.
Suddenly we were all an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Everything was normal — a kitchen, a table, a light above the table, the blue and white squares of the kitchen tile, the table with the oilcloth tablecloth, the yellow plastic chairs — but inside everything, such terrible fear.

You've got some explaining to do, Dad said.

A school night, Mom said. Damn near eleven o'clock.

Nine-thirty, Dad said. You were supposed to be home at nine-thirty.

My knees were buckling. I was leaving my body. I looked over at Sis.

The shower scene. A pregnant Janet Leigh in
Psycho.

I could tell Sis was going to spill the beans.

If I were a better person and a better brother, I would have stayed there with Sis, walked down the narrow, dark hallway hand in hand with her, but really, I had to pee. Plus, the breathing thing I do. I wasn't breathing.

I gave Sis a look, touched her light on the shoulder, said too loud: I really got to use the bathroom.

Frankenstein words in the Alfred Hitchcock kitchen.

I ducked my head and made a beeline over the blue and white tiles, past Dad sitting there in his blue PJs at the end of the table. In no time, I was around the corner. My shoulder pushed the bathroom door into the jamb, and the latch clicked. My hands turned the lock. I pulled on the switch of the fluorescent lights on either side of the mirror. The light flipped and spazzed and made the buzz sound. Out of the dark and into the fluorescence, I appeared.

There I was, still me, still with this family still in this house.

I didn't hear Sis actually say the words, but she told them, all right.

On the other side of the locked door, the silence of the deep.

Then screaming and yelling like thunder and lightning. Sis getting smacked around good. Mom cussing a blue streak. Sis was really wailing.

My face up against the mirror, I looked at everything about me so close. Somewhere in there, in me, there was a person who Billie Cody
found interesting and smart and handsome, said she loved. All I could see was the bad lighting. All I could hear was the war going on in the next room.

My big nose, my crooked bottom teeth, funny ears, curly hair. Zits, always zits on my face. Clueless. How I wished for something more, something
else.
In my life, in
them —
the people who reared me, molded me, showed me the dimensions and the qualities of the world.

Oh my heavens pretty woman so far.

How I wished I was someone else.

From
someone else.

Authentic.

Up close to my eyes, my almond-shaped hazel eyes, inside deep in the mirror, I looked for something graceful, true, beautiful. I looked for God.

The only thing I saw was the fickle fucker who gave us our five senses, gave us sex,
some
smarts, and then set us loose. It was up to us to do the rest.

Frood had a theory. Jean Paul Sartre had a theory. Saint Thomas More.

Theories, fucking theories, man.

Two hours ago, I felt so warm and floaty kissing Billie, and now in this mirror in this moment, screaming and yelling and crying, punishment, exploding hell and damnation.

The sex-shame-guilt thing.

Doom everywhere.

Maybe there was no God, but I still had Billie.

MERCIFUL LORD, HOLY
Lord, Son of the Father, Prince of Peace, Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world, Sis was pregnant, and for a while there the whole world went crazy, and nothing made any sense.

Sis had committed the gravest of sins.

She'd sinned against the Holy Virgin.

And raised the devil.

That very night, Mom made us drop to our knees. Not one, not two, but three rosaries we prayed, all sorrowful mysteries. Then an endless string of litanies.

Fucking litanies, man.

Sis cried most of the way through the first rosary and only stopped after Mom got up after the fifth sorrowful mystery, the Crucifixion, and slapped Sis silly. You can be sure that after that, there wasn't a peep out of Sis. We were on our prayer bones till almost two
A.M
.

Bright and early the next morning, Mom and Sis were doing eighty to the confessional and a private audience with the Monsignor. Sis was going to get married and fast.

That first week, I thought for sure Mom was going back to the Russell days. That migraine look was in her eyes. The rosary, the rosary, the rosary, pray the rosary. Out loud in her bedroom, whispered in the living room, her rough, red farm hands going over the beads. Once she even ran out in the field, and Dad couldn't find her anywhere, and
I found her in my secret place on top of the granaries. She was lying prostrate in the little place that's the shape of an hourglass, her arms out like a cross. She didn't move, only the wind in her hair. Then I saw her fingers, slow rolling over the beads.

Dad totally disappeared. Too bad he didn't drink, or he could've got drunk, but his dad was the drunk, so Dad didn't drink, he just acted like a drunk. Gruff old bastard. And he was spoiling to get into it with me. I had to watch every move I made. All of a sudden I had twice the irrigating to do, and weeds to pull and ditches to burn, and the Augean calf pens I had to haul shit out of. I was fucking Hercules, man.

I felt sorry for Sis. She was alone with her sin. Not that it was a sin, but she thought it was. My attempts to talk to her went nowhere. She was pregnant and scared and alone, and all I was was her little brother. Strange, though, what another life can make you do. As the days went on, Sis with her baby inside her, slow but sure, a change started to come about. It was as if the baby growing inside her was growing a place for Sis too, a place to come out on her own.

Mom didn't speak to Sis, not once, the whole time before the wedding ceremony. When Mom wanted to say something to Sis, she said it to me, then I told Sis. Can you imagine — the dress, the fittings, the invitations, ordering the cake — the whole schmeer? All Mom did was mumble litanies under her breath, and never once looked up at her pregnant daughter or said a fucking word to her.

At first, all Sis could do was keep her distance from Mom. After a while, though, Sis figured out that two could play that game. And the Mom-Sis War began.

I wish to hell I'd have done some figuring myself. How to get my ass out from in between those two.

The night Gene Kelso came over for cake and ice cream, there was no shotgun loaded by the dinner table, but there might as well have been. Everybody had their Sunday clothes on, and it was Tuesday. Sis looked particularly nice, tanned in her yellow summer dress and blue eye shadow. Mom had never allowed blue eye shadow. Even Gene, who always wore Levi's riding low on his hips and a white T-shirt with
KELSO PLUMBING
on it every time I'd ever seen him, wore a shirt and tie. It was an ugly tie. Green and gold with a weird pattern. Looked like butterflies and dice.

It was weird, all of us sitting at the table. No one moved. I mean, our arms moved and our mouths opened and closed, but our bodies didn't move, and when they did move, our bodies looked like in our heads we'd been practicing how to move, and then all of a sudden decided it was time.

When Gene got up to leave, it was the sound of the chairs scraping the floor. All of a sudden everybody came alive.

Mom said: Joe has spoken to Monsignor about the special dispensations.

Dad said: They just have to announce the wedding banns three weeks in a row.

Mom said: It wasn't easy.

Dad said: Monsignor owed me a favor.

Mom said: It took an arm and a leg.

Dad said: You'll have to pay us back.

Mom said: You're the ones who got yourselves into this mess.

Dad said: Hell of a way to start out a life together.

Mom said: You think it's easy. But it isn't easy.

Dad said: You'll need all the help you can get.

Mom said: It isn't easy at all.

Dad said: You're going to find out.

Mom said: Your work is cut out for you.

Dad said: You got to make a life for yourself and your family.

Mom said: At first, it's all lovey-dovey. It's all music and laughter.

Mom said: At first, you have no way of knowing how hard it's going to be.

But there's more. As fate would have it, a lot more. When Sis fucked Gene Kelso and got pregnant, a crack opened up in the world we thought we lived in, and nothing was ever the same again. Sis didn't just break a commandment, she went right to the heart of the matter and banged on the door. The Joe Kluseners went from a family who never could talk about sex to a family whose sexual secret became the sole conversation of Saint Joseph's Church. Really, they might as well have announced it in the Sunday bulletin. Mom said she couldn't show her face at Mass again, and both those Sunday mornings before the wedding it took all Dad had to get Mom in the car. Then at church to get her out of the car. I swear, if Mom and Dad weren't Catholic and knew only one way, their marriage would've been toast. Then the
night after the wedding dance, what happened between my mom and dad I'm still trying to figure out.