Winter Loon(30)

She was in the way, so I couldn’t avoid getting up right next to her. I’d grown in those months in Loma and was pushing six feet. I was tempted to measure her off with my hand, or to put my arm around her dark shoulder. I struggled to keep my hands to myself, and my sweaty thoughts from puncturing the moment. I moved to take a drag off my cigarette, but she tweezed it out of my fingers, dropped it, then ground it out with the toe of her shoe. “And stop smoking,” she said. “It’s disgusting.”

I was too shocked to do much of anything other than stare at the swirl mark her shoe had made in the dirt. Had I daydreamed her there?

“You look like you were the one struck by lightning. Stop staring.” She went around and balanced the board on the metal bar. “Go on.” She looked at me like no one ever didn’t do what she told them to do.

I rolled my eyes, swung my leg over, and tried to keep my wits about me. “This is stupid.”

She pushed up with the toes of her red sneakers. She wore cutoff jean shorts and a tight yellow tank top, no bra. I took her in while she was suspended up high, the glimpse of navel, the bead and string bracelets around her wrist, the shape of her breasts. Her fingers, nails polished pink, clutched the handle between her legs underhand like a bull rider. I caught myself staring at her crotch.

“Let me down! God, do you really not know how to do this?”

I pushed my bent legs straight, and she came back down. She splayed her feet out in front of her and leaned back. I was stuck up.

“How do you like it?” She smiled at me then, a funny, crooked, closed-mouth sideways smile that I would later try to imitate in the mirror. It was like she could see something in me that I didn’t know about, and I wanted to try on that expression so I could know it, too. Mercifully, she didn’t leave me up there and, despite how idiotic I felt, we fell into an easy up-and-down rhythm.

“Bull said your mother died. Mine, too. Hung herself.” She said it matter-of-fact, without a hint of embarrassment over the scandal of it all.

“I heard. Lester told me.”

“What happened to your mom?”

The scenery changed behind her with the motion, from sky to earth and back again. I felt weak and dizzy, like I was time traveling to be there with her. I had to warm up the next word in my mouth so it wouldn’t crack out. “Drowned. If it makes you feel any better.”

“Why would that make me feel better?”

“No, I mean. Guess we’re in the same boat, is all.” There was something about the restful look in her eyes, the tilt of her head, the way she sat up straight on that board, not slouched, that told me we might not be all that alike.

She was up in the air when the impatient honking sunk in. I saw the yellow car and panicked. The seesaw and Jolene hit the ground in an abrupt thud. I nearly went to her, to dust her off, to take hold of her. I could picture it, the two of us, hands locked, running down the street, laughing, checking over our shoulders only once, then never looking back again.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “Sorry.”

She stood up, the crooked smile gone, and brushed playground dirt off her back pockets.

“See you around?” I said it hopefully, asking her a real question, asking her to see me. Her answer was in the twitch of her eyebrow, the lingering blink, the shoulder shrug that seemed to shiver up her cheek and land on that scar.



“JUST SOME GIRL,” I TOLD Kathryn, playing the scene off. “Bull Hightower’s cousin.”

“Is she retarded?”

“Why would you say a thing like that? Of course she’s not.”

“Well, why else would a boy in his right mind play like that unless it was to humor some retard? Lots of Indians are slow, you know.”

“She’s not slow. She was there, is all. We talked about Bull.”

Kathryn turned into a dirt pullout under a grove of maple trees past the golf course and cut the engine. She scooted along the seat closer to me. “Well, you ought not make a habit of hanging out there, then. She’s probably trouble.” She straddled me and I circled my arms around her hips, pulling her closer. I felt the weight of her, the flesh, and closed my eyes. Her mouth was on mine, swallowing and probing. I kept my dark focus on the girl I’d left up in the air, black hair against blue sky.





CHAPTER 11

MY MIND WANDERED to Jolene, natural as a leaf floats to the ground. Would her skin be taut and leathery or soft like felt on an antler? Would she smell good behind her ears, like a poultice of soap and honey? I’d catch bits about her once Bull returned to work and he and Lester got to talking, but nothing they shared was as rich as my imagination. Then there was Kathryn, who continued to please and pester me at the same time. Lester was as relentless as a dripping faucet about Kathryn, convinced I was putting the blocks to her, mangling the bird-in-the-hand metaphor by trying to substitute pussy. He was almost as bad as Gip, who leered at me when I came in from a night out with her. One time he even went so far as to sniff the air when I walked by him. “You smell like snatch,” he said.

It was nearing the end of summer and I was sick of all of them—sick of the farm, the endless cycle of work there, the heat and the bugs, the stink of manure and milk souring in the sun. Sick of Bull and Lester and their endless bullshit, sick of Kathryn and her neediness and her mouth, sick of Ruby, who lurked around me like a coyote, waiting for me to flounder so she could pick at my bones. And I was sick to death of myself and the lather I’d worked myself into over Jolene, constantly trying to find reason and chance to casually pass the Hightower house, hoping to catch another glimpse of a girl who lived completely in my head, so worked up over the fantasy I’d go right to Kathryn and start all over again. I thought my days in Loma must be numbered, but the longer I stayed, the less likely it seemed I could ever leave.