The Tie That Binds(45)

“What are you crying about?” Clevis said. “Hell, girl, you just bought the farm.”

“Don’t.”

“Why not? I can’t afford no kid. You and him hash it out.”

“But you promised me.”

“I never promised you nothing.”

Her mouth was still open in that awful smile. “You promised me you would laugh.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well: ha ha.”

“Leave her alone,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“I said leave her alone.”

“Now that’s funny—coming from you. That’s real funny.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Sure. You send me over to Sterling or some goddamn place else so you and her can jump in bed as soon as I’m gone, and now you tell me to leave her alone.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Wasn’t it? Well, don’t tell me about it. I couldn’t stand no more jokes tonight. I’m wore out.”

He got up then and started to walk back to the bedroom.

“Cleve,” Twyla said. “Honey, wait.”

“What for?”

“Don’t you want me to come with you?”

“Nah,” he said. “You can sleep with lover boy tonight. That shouldn’t be no surprise to anybody.”

Then he left the kitchen. We could hear him in the back bedroom stomping on the floor and after that the rattle of the bed when he lay down heavy to sleep. I sat with Twyla for a while, not talking; it was too late for talk; I wouldn’t have known the right words anyway. Finally I went to bed myself, leaving her sitting there with her red cheeks, like those of a healthy child, shining wet under the light. She had been an unselfish, uncomplicated girl, but now, six or seven years later, with my interference she had become something different. It was not only that she was pregnant without knowing for sure whose baby it was or that she didn’t know how to ask one of us to claim it—it was more that she had become a woman staring unfocused at a grease spot above a kitchen sink out here in the country in the small hours of a Wednesday night.

She was still here the next morning when I got up. She was asleep with her head twisted uncomfortably on the kitchen table, her shoulders slumped forward. I started some black coffee on the stove and went outside to see how the day looked. Clean, with high clouds gathering in the west, the day appeared acceptable. But the pickup was gone. I went back into the house. Twyla was awake. She looked as if during the night she had been disassembled and put back together with flour glue. Her face was all pasty.

“Did Clevis take the pickup?” I said.

“What?”

“Where did Clevis go?”

“Portland, Oregon.”

“What do you mean Portland, Oregon? Here, drink some coffee.” I poured coffee into a cup for her. “Drink it hot,” I said.

“He said because it was a long ways off,” Twyla said. “He said he wanted to see the water.”

“Water? Jesus Christ. What else did he say?”

“Nothing. Only for me to say he would send back money for the pickup when he found a machine job.”

“But I don’t care about the pickup. He can have the goddamn pickup. I want to know why you didn’t go with him.”

“Because,” she said. “He never asked me.” She was talking very woodenly; she might as well have been repeating a ten-year-old market report or reciting Dick and Jane, something as indifferent as that. “I was waiting for him to,” she said, “but he never said so.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “I don’t know what you think of me. Maybe you still like me some—I don’t know; we’ve had some good times—but whatever it is, you love him, don’t you? You want this baby you’re having to be his, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t want no baby. Not no more.”

“Yes, you do. You will. Here, listen now: I want you to go to Denver for a week or two. I want you to take yourself a motel room. Rest up, see some movies, buy some clothes, whatever you’re going to need. Then I’ll come there and see you have enough money so you can go to Oregon. Will you do that?”

“It won’t make no difference.”

“Yes, it will. It’s the only way, Twyla.”

“I’m just sorry,” she said.

But later that day Twyla allowed me to take her to Denver and to install her in a Holiday Inn near the Stapleton Airport. Then I came home and went about selling the remaining quarters of farmland my dad had accumulated. I take no pride in that. I had to sell some land anyway to pay off the bad debts I had run up through constant partying and buying red pickups and by acting as if I was so rich and so smart that any form of steady discipline could go to hell. Anyway, in part because of my debts, I decided to make a clean sweep of it, so I sold those last quarters and kept only the pastureland, the native grass and the hayfields, so I could still run cattle, and then I returned to Denver and put Twyla Thompson on the plane with fifteen thousand dollars in her purse.

All of that took longer than I expected. It was more like a month than two weeks. But by the time I checked her out of the motel Twyla looked quite a lot better. She seemed almost cheerful again, like a big wonderful farm girl, and her stomach was starting to show. “Sandy,” she said.