The Tie That Binds(44)
And that was the worst goddamn hell of it: all that time she was in love with him. Do you understand what I’m saying? I knew she loved him. She was good to him, good for him, that big sloppy open-faced Clevis Stouffer, with his flour-bag stomach and his flapping shirttails and his dirty socks. He was what she wanted, needed. They made a pair, the two of them together, like a couple of plain solid blocks of mineral salt. And on his part, though he never said so or even showed it much, I believe he was at least half in love with her. He certainly deserved something good in his life, and Twyla was that all right; she was good.
Only here I was—that’s what I mean—I was here, too. Things might have been all right if it had been only two of us, or if Clevis and Twyla had lived in town, or even if they had rented some nearby vacant farmhouse or just bought a trailer and put in electricity. But none of that happened; that wasn’t the way it was. It was always three of us, here, in this house. We had our routine, our little family arrangement, and what made it possible, the thing that allowed it to continue, to go on and on regardless, was that in some ways they were both dependent on me: I owned the ranch, didn’t I? I was the hotshot, the rotten dowel pin. The bank account was in my name. And I played on all of that to prevent things from changing. I knew we were on a dangerous ride, but I still didn’t want to end it even if I had known how. It was too much of a good thing, a heedless, continuous, romping jig and party— when I could keep from thinking. Not thinking, refusing to think, got to be a steady habit for me.
I remember sending Clevis out for the afternoon to swathe hay, for example, or to buy baler parts in Sterling sixty miles northwest of Holt, while I stayed home. And he’d stare at me and say, “What are you going to do while I’m gone?”
“Oh, I’ve got those heifers to move.”
“Yeah,” he’d say. “Why course you do.”
So he understood it all right; he recognized the drift, but he would go on anyway, and then after he was out of the way I’d spend an hour sipping iced gin from a shared glass with Twyla in the middle of the afternoon, and in time I’d be breathing the good perfume of her thick orange hair and tasting the salt of her round white shoulders. Because after the first time with Twyla in my room in the afternoon while the sun speckled on the bed and the curtains billowed in the open window, the second time was easier. There was a lot less fumbling afterwards and somewhat less the need to avoid the look in anyone’s eyes, of playing it secret, of pretending there was nothing there between us to pretend about. Then after the third time it was easier yet. I stopped trying to justify anything but just accepted it as you might accept the shipping fever that came with a truckload of delivered sale-barn calves: there was always going to be some bad mixed up with the good. That’s how I was thinking—or not thinking. Matters would take their own irresistible course, I thought, and meanwhile more than anything it felt just fine to be in bed with Twyla. She had all that rich creamy skin, those large ready breasts like fresh bread, and she was soft all over with so much warm woman’s flesh to feel against your own. There was nothing professional about her, though. She wasn’t practiced or schooled at bed. No, it was more that lying with her—while you smoothed her stomach or stroked her rich thighs—for an hour there were little jokes between you and easy laughter, as if you and she were just two kids in clover, say, and that what you were doing in bed on clean sheets was not a thing that was dangerous or harmful to anyone but merely the simple play of children. Besides, being the warm-cheeked girl she was, she wasn’t used to refusing the feelings of anyone.
It went on that way for a year. Maybe more, I don’t know. But I remember how it ended. The consequences I can recall in detail. We were driving home one night, the three of us as usual, drunk in the cab of the red pickup after closing the Holt Tavern on a Wednesday. The radio was blaring Hank Williams above the rattle of wind coming through the rolled-down windows, and we were singing with the music and shouting jokes at one another as we watched ahead down the road through the windshield smattered red and yellow with dead grasshopper bodies, squiggling legs and veined wings. Then we were home again, here in this house, this kitchen. We each had another drink, and Twyla said she knew of one more joke she could tell us.
“You got our entire attention,” I said.
“Not mine,” Clevis said. “I got to bleed my lizard.” He stood up and went to the bathroom. Then he came back and opened another beer. “So what’s your joke?” he said.
“Promise you’ll laugh?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Because I think it’s funny anyway.” She wasn’t looking at us; she was watching her finger follow a scratch in the tabletop, as if that interested her. “It’s just that one of you gets to be a daddy pretty soon, and I don’t know whose name to pick.” Then she did look at us. “Don’t you think that’s funny?”
“Hell,” Clevis said. “You never could tell jokes.”
“Just a minute,” I said. “You’re telling us you’re pregnant?”
She nodded. Then she kind of laughed, her eyes shining at us with gin and what must have also been fear. “I mean I don’t know which one of you got me like this.”
“We could always draw straws,” Clevis said.
“And I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She was still smiling at us, but there were tears flowing down her cheeks now into her mouth, and she couldn’t wipe them away fast enough to keep up with them.