Different Seasons(121)

“You don’t think so? Just watch my f**king dust.”

For a moment his father only looks at him and then he throws the frank he has been holding. It hits Chico in the chest, spraying mustard on his sweater and on the chair.

“Say that word again and I’ll break your nose for you, smartass.”

Chico picks up the frank and looks at it. Cheap red frank, smeared with French’s mustard. Spread a little sunshine. He throws it back at his father. Sam gets up, his face the color of an old brick, the vein in the middle of his forehead pulsing. His thigh connects with the TV tray and it overturns. Billy stands in the kitchen doorway watching them. He’s gotten himself a plate of franks and beans and the plate has tipped and beanjuice runs onto the floor. Billy’s eyes are wide, his mouth trembling. On the TV, Carl Stormer and His Country Buckaroos are tearing through “Long Black Veil” at a breakneck pace.

“You raise them up best you can and they spit on you,” his father says thickly. “Ayuh. Thafs how it goes.” He gropes blindly on the seat of his chair and comes up with the half-eaten hotdog. He holds it in his fist like a severed phallus. Incredibly, he begins to eat it ... at the same time, Chico sees that he has begun to cry. “Ayuh, they spit on you, that’s just how it goes.”

“Well, why in the hell did you have to marry her?” he bursts out, and then has to bite down on the rest of it: If you hadn’t married her, Johnny would still be alive.

“That’s none of your goddam business!” Sam May roars through his tears. “That’s my business!”

“Oh?” Chico shouts back. “Is that so? I only have to live with her! Me and Billy, we have to live with her! Watch her grind you down! And you don’t even know—”

“What?” his father says, and his voice is suddenly low and ominous. The chunk of hotdog left in his closed fist is like a bloody chunk of bone. “What don’t I know?”

“You don’t know shit from Shinola,” he says, appalled at what has almost come out of his mouth.

“You want to stop it now,” his father says. “Or I’ll beat the hell out of you, Chico.” He only calls him this when he is very angry indeed.

Chico turns and sees that Virginia is standing at the other side of the room, adjusting her skirt minutely, looking at him with her large, calm, brown eyes. Her eyes are beautiful; the rest of her is not so beautiful, so self-renewing, but those eyes will carry her for years yet, Chico thinks, and he feels the sick hate come back—So we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde, and that’s it hanging on the shed.

“She’s got you pu**ywhipped and you don’t have the guts to do anything about it!”

All of this shouting has finally become too much for Billy—he gives a great wail of terror, drops his plate of franks and beans, and covers his face with his hands. Beanjuice splatters his Sunday shoes and sprays across the rug.

Sam takes a single step forward and then stops when Chico makes a curt beckoning gesture, as if to say: Yeah, come on, let’s get down to it, what took you so f**kin long? They stand like statues until Virginia speaks—her voice is low, as calm as her brown eyes.

“Have you had a girl in your room, Ed? You know how your father and I feel about that.” Almost as an afterthought: “She left a handkerchief.”

He stares at her, savagely unable to express the way he feels, the way she is dirty, the way she shoots unerringly at the back, the way she clips in behind you and cuts your hamstrings.

You could hurt me if you wanted to, the calm brown eyes say. I know you know what was going on before he died. But that’s the only way you can hurt me, isn’t it, Chico? And only then if your father believed you. And if he believed you, it would kill him.

His father lunges at the new gambit like a bear. “Have you been screwing in my house, you little bastard?”

“Watch your language, please, Sam,” Virginia says calmly.

“Is that why you didn’t want to come with us? So you could scr—so you could—”

“Say it!” Chico weeps. “Don’t let her do it to you! Say it! Say what you mean!”

“Get out,” he says dully. “Don’t you come back until you can apologize to your mother and me.”

“Don’t you dare!” he cries. “Don’t you dare call that bitch my mother! I’ll kill you!”

“Stop it, Eddie!” Billy screams. The words are muffled, blurred through his hands, which still cover his face. “Stop yelling at Daddy! Stop it, please!”

Virginia doesn’t move from the doorway. Her calm eyes remain on Chico.

Sam blunders back a step and the backs of his knees strike the edge of his easy chair. He sits down in it heavily and averts his face against a hairy forearm. “I can’t even look at you when you got words like that in your mouth, Eddie. You are making me feel so bad.”

“She makes you feel bad! Why don’t you admit it?” He does not reply. Still not looking at Chico, he fumbles another frank wrapped in bread from the plate on the TV tray. He fumbles for the mustard. Billy goes on crying. Carl Stormer and His Country Buckaroos are singing a truck-driving song. “My rig is old, but that don’t mean she’s slow,” Carl tells all his western Maine viewers.

“The boy doesn’t know what he’s saying, Sam,” Virginia says gently. “It’s hard, at his age. It’s hard to grow up.”