The Brutal Language of Love (15 page)

“Yes!” I said.

“Let's test her traction!” he hollered, then turned off Ridge Road and onto the school's circular driveway. Instead of following it around, however, he quickly hopped the curb and began driving through the playground. We passed the jungle gym, the swing set, crossed the basketball court, then slipped through a space in a row of wild hedges. From there the hill seemed to go straight up. As we lost momentum, the motorcycle slowed way down and began to strain, but when I asked Dalton if he wanted me to get off, he said, “No, no, she's tough.”

“But she smells funny,” I said, which was true—like she was burning from the inside—and finally Dalton had to agree.

“We'll both get off,” he said. “We'll walk her up, then we'll ride her down. We'll jump all those moguls, one after the other. Just keep on going, all the way back through the hedge. You're not scared, are you? If you're scared, you can walk.”

I was terrified and felt pretty sure we would crash, but taking Dalton's helmet off would have made me feel even worse. “Why should I be scared?” I said, knocking on the outside of my blue fiberglass head. “I'm protected.”

After pushing the motorcycle to the top of the hill, we accelerated purposefully into each mound of earth that faced us on the way down. From there we would go briefly into the air, where Dalton held the handlebars steady, maintained balance, and refused to panic as we skid-landed on the wet grass below. When we got to the bottom and passed back through the hedges, I prayed that he would not want to do this again, and he didn't. We kept riding, past the playground, then, for-going the school's driveway altogether this time, on through the grass toward Ridge Road. Dalton was probably only concerned with hills at that point, which may have been why we wiped out in a ditch.

“I thought I could jump it,” he said, a few seconds later, getting up off the ground. He had been thrown clear of the bike while my left leg was pinned underneath. There was a pasture bordering the school, and the cows grazing in it were now slowly making their way toward me, probably to sniff my head. I worried that they might also lick me, and that their animal breath would be terrifying—Tensie's times ten. “Get this thing off of me!” I shouted.

“Okay, okay,” Dalton said, heaving it up by the handlebars. He put the kickstand down, then stood above me with his hands on his hips. I noticed a tear in the right leg of his jeans. “Can you walk?” he asked me.

It hurt like hell from my knee down, but I thought I probably could. “Just help me up,” I said.

He nodded and held out both hands, neither of which I took. Somehow, it didn't seem like the right approach. “Wait,” he said, and he got behind me and pulled me up from under the armpits. “Can you walk?” he said again, and I took a deep breath and showed him that I could.

“Let's see if she still starts,” I said, and she did.

When we got back to the house, Cliff was still in the drive with Tensie. “What took you so long?” he asked us.

We ignored him and his eyes got pretty big as he watched Dalton help me off the bike, then carry me into the house. “Don't you dare tell Mom and Dad,” Dalton warned him after he had set me on the divan.

“Okay,” Cliff said. “I won't tell Mom and Dad.”

“
My
mom and dad,” Dalton clarified. You had to do this with Cliff, as he was vengeful. When he was really mad, he had a tendency to take everything a person said at face value, then later repeat your exact instructions back to you in his own defense. It was a brilliant strategy, and I might have been more impressed had he not been such a baby.

Dalton changed his torn jeans; then we all watched
Flipper.
We let Tensie come in the living room with us and he got so excited he peed on Grandpa's recliner. Luckily it was vinyl so it wiped off pretty easily. It smelled a little but Dalton said Grandpa wouldn't notice since the alcohol had killed off his taste buds. “I smoke pot in the cellar all the time and he never says a word.”

“I thought that was your perfume,” I said.

Dalton laughed. “Perfume?”

“I mean cologne,” I said. “Don't laugh at me.”

He stopped immediately. “How's your leg?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said, even though it hurt like the devil. “Maybe get me some blackberry brandy,” I added. That was what Grandma gave me when I got my stomachaches after Mom's visits. She hid it upstairs, inside a roomy pump misshapen by her bunion, so Grandpa wouldn't find it. He didn't like going in Grandma's bedroom because she left the windows open year-round, creating what he called “the permafrost.”

Dalton got me the brandy and it really helped. When Grandma and Grandpa came home, they asked what we had done while they were away, and we all agreed that Dalton and I had taunted Cliff from the barn loft, and that Cliff, who was too afraid to climb the ladder, had bawled his eyes out down below. “I ought to take off my belt right now,” Grandpa told Dalton halfheartedly, but he didn't. Instead he gave Dalton a present, an old pair of riding goggles he had found in a thrift store at the plaza. Dalton let Cliff wear them for the rest of the night to bribe him to shut up.

At nine o'clock, Dalton picked me up and announced he was going to carry me to my room to build his strength for wrestling tryouts. First he carried me to the bathroom, where he waited outside so I could pee and brush my teeth, and then he carried me upstairs. “Your leg all right?” he asked as he set me on my bed.

“Yes,” I said, reaching for the frayed cuff of his checked shirt. No one loved Dalton more than I did, and I prayed to God that night as I did every night that he would never get a girlfriend.

When Grandma came upstairs to give me a tight tuck and a kiss, she said, “Are you drunk?”

“A little,” I confessed.

“Blackberry Girl,” she said, which was what she called me when she felt sorry for me, “did you get a stomachache?”

I nodded.

“Did your mother call while I was out?”

“No,” I said. “But I was thinking about her.”

“Well, then don't think about her, for godssakes,” Grandma said, and I promised I wouldn't.

In the morning my entire left leg had swelled and I couldn't get out of bed. “Shit,” Dalton said when I called him into my room. “Shit shit shit!”

“Breakfast now, dammit!” Grandma yelled from the kitchen.

Dalton tried to pick me up and carry me down but I couldn't help it, I screamed. Cliff was standing by, already dressed for school. “Don't you say a fucking word!” Dalton hissed at him as he set me back down, because we could hear Grandma coming up the stairs.

“Why aren't you dressed, Patty?” she said when she got there. “Get out, Dalton! There's girls in here!”

Dalton left the room but I knew he was just outside the doorway, since I didn't hear him creaking down the steep, narrow staircase. “Grandma,” I said, “I didn't tell you, but when I was climbing up to the loft I fell off the ladder and hurt my leg. I thought it would be okay by now but it really hurts and I can't walk. Sorry, Grandma.”

Cliff was watching all this and I waited for him to spill the beans but he didn't.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Grandma asked. “I'm responsible for you two. Your mother has entrusted you to me. What's the matter with you?”

“I thought I would be fine,” I said.

“Dalton didn't push you?”

“No!”

“I see,” Grandma said. She was thinking it all over.

“I didn't push her!” Dalton said from the hallway.

“Breakfast!” Grandma yelled back at him, and he finally went downstairs.

“Let's call Mom,” I said.

“After we go to the doctor's,” Grandma said. Then she hollered, “Gauge! Come carry Patty downstairs. She can't walk!”

Grandpa ran up the stairs, which was hard for him to do from all his smoking, I knew, and it made me love him almost more than Dalton. “What happened here?” he asked, and Grandma told him about the loft. She told him an even more detailed story than I had told her, about how Dalton had tried to catch me when I fell and that he had gotten hurt too, but not as badly as I had. I almost interrupted then and said no, that Dalton had gone up first (which was usually the case), not me, but then I remembered it had never even happened at all.

Grandpa carried me downstairs and out to the car, with Dalton and Cliff running behind us. Grandma got her purse and keys and met us in the drive. “You sure you don't need to go to the doctor, too, son?” Grandpa asked Dalton, and he shook his head no.

“I need to go,” Cliff piped up, and we all looked at him.

“Just kidding,” Cliff said, and we ignored him again. Cliff sighed. I mouthed the words
shut up
to him, and I was almost sure he saw.

The doctor said I had a hairline fracture in my
tibia, and he put a cast on me that ran from my heel all the way up above my knee. When Mom met us back at Grandma's, she said that was what I got for teasing poor Cliff, but Grandma disagreed with her. She said it was nobody's fault since the teasing hadn't yet begun. “There was an intent to tease!” Mom argued. “Hogwash,” Grandma said, probably because she had survived Grammy Sue and secretly believed Cliff needed mental toughening. He and I were in the living room at the time, poking straw from the barn down my cast to help with the itching.

As for gym class, I was exempt until at least after winter break. Meanwhile, the doctor put a rubber stump beneath my foot so I could walk without crutches. This was fine for home but I always used them at school, since the other kids enjoyed playing with them so much. Suddenly it seemed people didn't hate me anymore. Besides the crutches, this probably had something to do with the meat Dalton had painted on my cast.

Another of Dalton's projects was to become a fine artist, and frankly I thought this was the one he would most succeed at. He had a knack for painting meat. When Grandma brought it home from the supermarket he removed it from the cellophane, positioned it on a plate, and set to work behind his easel.
Still Life with Flank Steak,
one was called, or
Still Life with Duck.
They were beautiful portraits that often included fruit and colored bottles. Dalton was especially good at re-creating the marbling of a steak. The problem was that this was a lengthy process, and occasionally the meat went bad while he was working. One time Grandma cooked it anyway, which made us all sick—particularly Grandpa, who was forced to remove his belt.

For my cast, Dalton went all out. Each cut of meat—chicken legs, pork chops, London broil—was optimally arranged, almost like a puzzle whose pieces someone had laid out without actually clicking together. What was most impressive was the way he did it all from memory, sketching first with charcoal before applying his oil paints. Looking at the finished product, I often had the sense that I was seeing inside myself, and it pleased me. “I want to be a butcher,” I told Mom one weekend, and she said, “Such ambition.”

Then one of the boys at school, Jared, had an accident with my crutches. He was trying to walk up the slide with them when they slipped out from beneath him and he fell and bashed his skull against the slide's steel edge. The doctors had to shave his head to stitch up the gash, and when his hair began to grow back, none appeared along the line of the scar. It looked a little bit like a tiara, and some of the fourth graders began calling him “Princess.” To punish me for bringing this on him with my crutches, Corbin, Jared, and Arthur took me aside at recess one day and suggested we all urinate together. To be fair, they said, since I was the only girl, they would go first. At that point they took down their pants and peed all over my cast.

“What smells?” people asked in class after recess, and they tracked the odor to me. “She peed herself!” Corbin announced, and as quickly as they had crowded around me, they all disappeared. “Do you need to go to the nurse's office?” Mrs. Walpin said, and I told her yes, though I wasn't sure how that would help.

“Did you pee yourself?” Nurse Kimmie asked me as I lay on her padded vinyl cot. “No,” I said, but I could tell she thought I was lying. She called Grandma, who arrived a few minutes later with a black plastic garbage bag to tie around my leg.

“What happened?” she asked me in the car, and I told her the whole truth. She laughed so hard she had to pull over. Then suddenly she got serious. “Oh boy,” she said, daubing her eyes with a tissue. “We have to think about this. Let's just think for a minute.”

I thought about it as hard as I could, until Grandma finally said, “Okay,” and we got back on the road. She drove me directly to the doctor, who seemed disappointed that I had not heeded his warning to keep my cast dry. “What the heck happened?” he asked Grandma, and she said, with such naturalness, “The dog peed on her. Tensie. Just lifted his leg and peed, like she was a tree or something.”

The doctor laughed and turned to me. “You're kidding!” he said.