Winter Loon(43)
“I know, Jo. I’m just telling you I would never hurt you.”
“You’re not listening to me, Wes. I will never let you hurt me. That’s what I told Troy and Mona. And, yeah. They’re not excited about you and me dating or whatever. They don’t know you, but they know enough. Mona knew your mom. They know your grandparents some. They know how you wound up here. Mona watched white men heap loads of shit on her sister. Over and over. It was the same every single time.”
I threw my hands up. “Well, fuck, Jolene. Why bother then?” I stood, kicked the hay bale. The lights came up on the midway. Crowds trickled toward the exit. I put out my hand to her. “Let’s shake and be friends if that’s okay. If I’m good enough to be friends with.”
She took my hand and pulled herself up, wrapping herself around my waist so that she had to bend her head way back to look up at me. “You have a lot to learn, you know that, Ballot?” When we finally kissed again, I could feel her interlocking with me, her curves fitting into my hollows. It was all about coming together, like the gears in my factory dream.
We’d barely come up for air when we saw Mona and Troy approach the gate. Troy had Mariah over his shoulder, her face nestled deep into his neck. “Sugar poisoning,” he said. Mona looked us over—my arm over Jolene’s shoulder, hers around my waist, thumb hooked in my belt loop—took a breath in through her mouth, and let it out through lips just pursed. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Let’s get out of here.”
I SAW KATHRYN ONE MORE time at the fairgrounds that weekend. She was dashing into the home economics barn flanked not by friends but by her mother and father. The doorway was crowded with traffic trying to get in ahead of rain that had only begun to fall. I had Jolene’s hand and was leading her through the crowd when I ran square into Mrs. Rook. I apologized before realizing who it was, and we all stood there stunned. I don’t know what it was that I saw on Kathryn’s face, but if she could have snapped her fingers and disappeared, I knew she would have.
“I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” I spoke to the mom but looked to Kathryn for clues as to what she wanted me to do or say. Her eyes were fixed on my hand holding Jolene’s.
Burt Rook glared at me, starched as his new blue jeans. His face flushed, and he took Kathryn by the arm. She looked away, pissed and pained. “Watch where you’re going, Ballot,” gritted out from behind Burt Rook’s teeth. He gathered himself like miffed royalty. Wife and daughter in tow, he pushed his way into the domestics barn, where tidy people had polite conversation and discussed the better nature of piecrust and embroidery. Jolene and I let ourselves be swept up in the roil of the fairgrounds, the mingling crowds, the nickering livestock, and the approaching storm.
CHAPTER 14
A KIND OF church was conducted in the Hightowers’ crowded kitchen over strong coffee and sticky dough baptized in sizzling grease. Sunday mornings were for eating and talking and storytelling, for leaning up against counters and doorjambs if the chairs were taken, for bringing in the week’s worth of groceries. Except for Sunday mornings, the television was almost always on in Jolene’s house, tuned to a game or variety show with a live audience or a laugh track, background noise to the rest of the ruckus, Mariah’s screeching, the constant ringing of the phone in the kitchen, Mona’s telephone voice, which was louder than her loud speaking voice, and the tinkering racket from the shop in the garage, noise on top of noise. The outloudness of it was a stark contrast with my grandparents’ contaminated house, where the only interruptions to murky silence were harsh fights erupting out of nowhere or sirens on televised crime shows.
I’d made myself a fixture at Jolene’s house, so I was there in the kitchen eating warm fry bread doused in butter and clover honey the Sunday morning Bull announced that he’d joined the Coast Guard and would move to Oregon in a week. He said he’d had enough of the middle and was ready to see the edges and that he wanted out of Minnesota before another season of snow fell. “And I’d like to never see a cow on fire again. At least not one with its head still on it.”
Troy patted down Bull with both hands, his sturdy son, pride and no shortage of love on both their faces. Mona pulled Bull to her, hand on the back of his bowed head. If they spoke words, I don’t recall them, but what was unsaid lived between them and I felt it, too—an ending and a beginning and a sense that anything was possible and that it would all be one great adventure for Bull. Mariah squeezed Bull’s legs and made him promise to bring back gifts from the ocean. Only Lester held back, before finally proclaiming it bullshit that Bull could leave but he had to stay and finish high school. “Don’t see what the fuck it matters.”
“Mouth,” Mona said. Lester rolled his eyes.
“You’d wash out,” Bull said, slapping Lester’s back. “Stick around here, get tough like Bull. Maybe then your sister will let you go.”
“Fuck you.” Lester dropped his fry bread on the newspaper and wiped his hands on his jeans.
I knew Lester lived with his sister Agnes but not much more than that. He spent so much time with Bull that I almost forgot he wasn’t really part of their family. “At least you only have one more year. I’m stuck—” I cut myself off, imagining Jolene graduating in the spring and what it would be like for me if I was still with Gip and Ruby and Jolene was gone.