Plainsong (Plainsong #1)(58)

He wanted to know when she was due to have the baby and in answer to this question she had told him a lie. She said the baby was coming later than was true, that she was expecting to deliver at the end of May. You still sick a lot? he said.

No, she said. I was at first.

This is just part-time, he said. With little notice. Just when we want you, if we need you to come in. Whenever somebody calls in claiming they’re sick. All right. You still want it?

Yes.

All right. We’ll train you starting tomorrow.

She went in and trained for parts of three days with the woman on the afternoon shift and then a night with the woman on the night shift, and then she waited a week and a half for the first call. When it came it was at suppertime on Monday, and Dwayne was tired and didn’t want to drive her to work. She said she would walk. She got up from the table to leave, and that shamed him so that he drove her after all and neither one of them said anything to the other on the way. She worked through the night without incident and in the morning when she got off her shift she took the bus home since it was past the time Dwayne was due to start his shift at Gates. Upstairs in the apartment she found a note from him on the table saying, See you tonight I’m not mad anymore are you, written like that other note a month ago with a pencil on a scrap of paper in a slanted child’s scrawl.

Two weeks later, the third time she was called, she was working behind the counter and a man came in at one-thirty in the morning when she was the only one in the store. He loitered in the aisles picking up different things, putting them back. A skinny man with a badly wrinkled face, with lank brown hair. Then he came up to the counter with nothing in his hand to buy and said, I guess you know Doris, don’t you?

Who?

Doris. She works here.

I met her, yes.

What do you think about her?

She’s nice.

She’s a bitch. She locked me out and called the cops on me.

Oh, the girl said. She watched him, to see what he was going to do.

What do you think I got in the car? he said. Go ahead, think about it.

I don’t know.

I got a gun out there, he said, looking straight into her eyes. With three shells loaded in it. Cause there’s three of us. Her, me and her goddamn dog. I’d love to kill that son of a bitch. I can’t stand that son of a bitch. You think I’m crazy, don’t you.

I don’t know you.

I am crazy. That f*cking dog. I wouldn’t hurt you though. When do you get off?

I’m not sure yet.

Sure you are.

No. It may be later. I don’t always know.

Here. I’ll buy some chewing gum. I got her goddamn dog anyway. I got him out in the car with me right now. She can lock me out but I got her dog. I can start with him if that’s what she wants. Okay, don’t work too hard, he said. He took his package of gum and went outside.

The girl watched him get into his car and drive away and she made a note of his license plates and gave the numbers to the manager, and in the following days she watched the newspapers for anything about the man, but nothing was ever reported. Doris, when she was told about him, said he was more or less harmless. She didn’t know what the girl was talking about, she didn’t have a dog. The last dog she’d had was five years ago.

In Denver Dwayne took her to a few parties. They attended one on a Friday night at the apartment of some people he knew from work, Carl and Randy. Randy was a big tall girl with tight jeans and skinny legs, and she wore a little tube top and had fixed breasts. Carl was a talker. By the time they got there he was wound up. There were lots of other people in the apartment too. They were all drinking and smoking and on the coffee table a basket of joints was set out for anybody’s use. The walls of the room were covered with tinfoil, with blinking Christmas lights still up, and the room was hot and the music was going so loud she could feel it in her stomach. People were dancing and laughing. One girl was dancing on the sofa, flinging her hair back and forth. A boy was dancing between two girls, in a routine of bumping hips. Randy brought her a drink from the next room and she stood back against the wall and watched, and Dwayne went into the kitchen with Carl. Randy looked at her and said, Hey, enjoy, you know? and smiled brilliantly and spread her arms in a gesture, meaning: You can have all of this, and disappeared. She stood against the wall, watching.

Later she went out to the kitchen to find Dwayne. He was seated at the table playing euchre and drinking with some others and she stood behind him, and once he put his hand on her stomach and said, How’s my little man? and patted her and drank from his glass. She watched the game for a while and wandered away to find the bathroom. The door was closed and she knocked and somebody opened it enough that she saw in quickly, and there were two boys sitting on the edge of the bathtub waiting their turn while a girl was taking on another boy on the toilet. The girl was naked from her waist down, her long white legs spread out, and the girl might have been Randy, but she couldn’t see her well enough since the door was closed so fast, the boy who opened it only saying, Wrong place. Upstairs.

When Dwayne took her home it was about four in the morning. By that time she had been coaxed into drinking four or five vodka Squirts and taking hits from the joint whenever it came around. She was so out of place and so lonely she couldn’t care for a while, she wanted something like everybody else did, and in time she ended up losing herself to the music and the crowd-feeling, and danced and danced, holding herself under her stomach, supporting the baby while she twirled around the room. When she woke the next morning she felt sick immediately, as she had in the first months, except it was for a different reason now. There was a red bruise high up on her leg that she could feel with her fingers though she had no memory of where it had come from. She turned in the bed. Dwayne was still sleeping beside her. She lay for a long time feeling sick and sad. She looked at the bar of sunlight that showed thinly along the edge of the window shade. She didn’t even know what the weather was doing anymore. The sun was shining but what else was there? She drifted into a daze of sorrow and disbelief. She didn’t want to think what any of the night before might have done to her baby. She could only remember the first of it. She could remember the dancing, but there were other things too. She didn’t want to think about them. But it was what she couldn’t remember that scared her most.