Beautiful Kate (5 page)

He waited for my answer, long heavy seconds that went on and on. But I said nothing. And he continued.

“You know, there were times when she looked like she would come out of it.”

“Come out of it?”
I almost laughed at his choice of words. I almost cried.

“You don’t know! You weren’t there!”

“The hell I wasn’t. I went to the hospital, Jason. I
saw
her.”

“Once!”

“Twice.”

“Big deal.”

“It was enough.”

“Didn’t it ever occur to you that if you’d stayed, she might have hung on?”

“As what?”

“As a human being!” He flung the words at me like a curse.

“A vegetable, don’t you mean? A faceless, brain-damaged, paraplegic Cyclops! What did such a creature as that have to do with Kate! I didn’t leave Kate! I left—”

“You left her to die!”
he broke in. “You left us to bury her! You left us with nothing.”

I had gotten up by then, knocking over the desk chair in my haste to get out of the range of his eyes. Standing at the window, I shakily lit another cigarette. Outside I saw a tall black youth bouncing a tennis ball off the side of the barn, over the heads of other Congo Lords gathered around the door, loafing and sitting in the sun. One of them had his knife out and was busily carving letters into the wood, perhaps only his own initials and not some casual threat of death and destruction. As I watched, a door opened and Junior miraculously appeared, followed by a black kid who looked both edgy and angry. Junior said something to him, but the kid turned away and headed for the street. The one bouncing the tennis ball laughingly called out to him and got the finger in response. Junior ambled toward the house.

Without turning, I finally spoke. “Well, you’ve said it, old man. You got it all out. So why not leave now, okay? I’ve still got some ‘scribbling’ to do.”

A few moments later I heard the rocker creaking as he pushed himself laboriously to his feet. He shuffled to the door and stopped, already breathing hard. I waited.

“Do you have any idea how much we needed you?” he asked.

I continued to stand at the window, looking out upon the bright November day. And I said nothing, not until I heard the door close behind him. And then I whispered the words. I fogged the window with them.

“Do you have any idea how much I needed to leave?”

It is growing dark now. Sarah is gone again, attending some function at her school, which she and her colleagues call Combat High. Toni and Junior meanwhile have been downstairs playing cards and drinking beer most of the afternoon. Occasionally she will come up to our room and work me over:
What is it, you too good for the rest of us? You gonna LIVE up here finally, take your meals here, for God’s sake? Well, that’s fine, it’s okay with me, you can sleep with that lousy diary if that’s what you want. You can have sex with it
.

And then she is gone and I hear laughter in the kitchen, hers and especially Junior’s, and I wonder if he’s beginning now to dream the big dream, yokel that he is, not knowing what an Olympian cockteaser he’s in with. Still, there is also the little matter of what I saw out the window earlier. If no other “Lords” had been around, no one except Junior and the slender kid emerging guiltily from the barn, then I might have had something more than this nasty, nettling suspicion that my little brother may be a bit of a pederast. But immediately I realize that the idea simply doesn’t wash, basically because Junior otherwise certainly seems straight enough, perhaps even as relentlessly heterosexual as his cunt-crazed older brother if that is possible. So I discount the idea. I laugh at it. Almost.

From the barn, even as far away as it is, the sound of recorded soul music—Rick James, Brick, Michael Jackson—booms against my window. Occasionally there is shouting or laughter or a crash of some kind, though I have yet to hear the gunfire that Junior says erupts now and then, as the Lords, in brief bursts of high spirits, shoot holes in the barn roof. And I remember another time, when Stinking Joe came up with a solution to our persistent barn sparrow problem.

Joe was unchallengeably a member of the old school, especially when it came to dress, favoring overalls and heavy blue workshirts and woolen long johns that he did not believe in overwashing, to the extent that each morning’s first sweat would waken the miasma already slumbering in the wool. It was in fact not unlike a diurnal uncapping of the septic tank—and the only remarkable thing about the man. Otherwise he was ruthlessly ordinary: middle-aged, average size, and no more stupid or lazy than our other hired men had been. It was only behind his back, however, that Kate and I called him
Stinking
Joe. But Cliff did not even approve of that.

“If he hears you, it’ll hurt the man’s feelings,” he remonstrated. “Is that what you want?”

“It might get him to wash,” Kate said.

“Why should he? He’s just a farm worker.”

“Yeah—a
stinking
farm worker.”

Like most of our arguments, it was never resolved. Cliff would take the high road and Kate the low road, with me usually trailing along after her, for no better reason than that her way always seemed so much more fun than his.

In any event, on this occasion Stinking Joe said he knew a sure way to get rid of the sparrows inhabiting the barn and fouling the fresh hay bales stacked there. It had to be a nighttime operation, he said, and the only tools we would need were Ping-Pong paddles, a flashlight, and two pans to beat against each other. When he explained further, Cliff demurred, saying that it wasn’t a humane way to kill the birds, which only confused Stinking Joe and exasperated Kate.

“For God’s sake, Cliff, they’re only freaking sparrows. How the devil should we kill them—with sleeping pills?”

“Well, I don’t want any part of it.”

“So what else is new? You can stay down here and work on some freaking merit badge for all we care.” She turned to Stinking Joe. “Let’s go. We’re ready if you are.”

With our flashlight and paddles and pans, the three of us went up the ladder into the mow and climbed the mountainous stacks of hay bales, Stinking Joe heading for one end of the barn while Kate and I made our way to the other. We had to get to the very top, at that point under the peak where the upper haymow doors were kept open, to vent the still-fresh hay. Following Joe’s instructions, we closed and hooked the doors and fashioned a platform of hay bales to stand on. Kate had taken one paddle while I had the other one and the flashlight. Joe meanwhile had reached the opposite end, under the peak.

“You kids ready?” he called.

“Damn right we are!” was Kate’s answer.

All along the rail above us we could hear the rustling of the birds, hundreds of them. And to my shame, I kept wondering if what we were about to do was wrong, if for no other reason than that my big brother disapproved of it. At the same time my heart raced with excitement and anticipation.

“Well, turn it on, stupid,” I heard Kate say.

And I did just that, shining the flashlight straight ahead, toward Stinking Joe. Immediately he began to make a racket, yelling and banging the pans against each other, and within a few seconds the rustling of the sparrows became a roar, a dry desperate beating sound that made me grip the paddle tightly as the first of the birds arrived, right in front of me, winging toward the light which it thought promised escape and freedom. And I swung, hitting it like a shuttlecock, swatting it back and down. At the same time, I heard the splat of Kate’s paddle striking another of the birds, and she let out a squeal of delight. But quickly there were more upon us and we both kept swinging, while Joe continued to shout and bang his pans together at the other end of the haymow. The sparrows came at us in such numbers that most of them escaped, but only to fly back toward Joe and the racket which promptly made them turn again and head once more for the light. It seemed almost like a game for them, a game of death in which they kept trying over and over to score, until they finally did, almost all of them.

For a while I continued to think that it was excitement I was feeling, something kindred to Kate’s reveling squeal. But then I began to realize that what I really felt was desperation, a cold-sweating, gut-clenching longing for it all to be over and done and for us to be out of there. And finally the birds did stop coming. What few were left must have called on some unknowing instinct for species survival as they fluttered to the safety of the rafters, perches where my flashlight’s treacherous promise could not reach them. I lowered the light then, only to see the feathered carnage at our feet, and below, on the bales of hay there. At the same time, in the dimness, I saw Cliff’s head peering up out of the ladder opening far below us, and in my mind I saw what he saw, the flash moving in the blackness, flickering over me and Kate and the scattered, the mounded, sparrows at our feet. I wanted to yell at him to get out, to run, but Kate’s voice beat me.

“Boy, you missed it, Cliff! You really missed it!”

Coming down from the mow, Stinking Joe allowed that it had been a good job well done. His excitement was right up there with Kate’s and I would not have been surprised if the two of them had performed a little jig in celebration. But Cliff as usual had a problem.

“What about all the dead ones?” he asked. “You just gonna leave them up there for the cats to eat?”

Kate gave me a wry look. “Jesus, there he goes again—his holiness himself.”

“So the cats have a little feast tonight,” Joe said. “What kin that hurt? Less for me to clean up in the morning.”

Cliff turned away from us. He picked up a rock and winged it against a tree in the yard, an angry, deadly shot. Stinking Joe raised his hand in parting as he headed for his rattletrap pre-war Ford. And Kate gave me a punch on the arm.

“Come on, squirt, let’s get rid of this sweat.” She was already starting down the path toward the pond.

I motioned for Cliff to come along, but he just stood there under the polelight, blond and gangling and suffering, a spirit not really designed for life in this world of red teeth and claws. Finally, though, he shrugged and came along, following us through the trees to the pond, which rang in the warm night air with the racket of crickets and frogs and cicadas.

When we were younger, the three of us had often gone swimming nude, and without thinking much about it, this casual baring of our sexual difference. And I imagine that if Cliff or I had ever said anything to point up that difference, Kate would have taken a poke at us. In later years, however, and especially after Cliff and Kate reached puberty, we either swam in bathing clothes or peeled down to our underwear and dove in. And this last was what I had expected us to do that night, mostly because I didn’t think there was any other alternative. But then I was not reckoning with the intensity of Kate’s anger at Cliff, how deeply she resented his censure and how badly she needed to get even with him, in any way she could.

She and I had reached the pond first and were already shucking off our shirts and jeans when Cliff arrived. But Kate did not stop there. Clearly lit by the distant polelight, she slipped out of her bra and panties and stepped to the edge of the rickety dock, smiling insolently back at Cliff while I stood there and gawked in my jockey shorts. She still had the hardness of a boy, with long sleek legs and a flat belly, but there was a subtle curvaceousness to her now that I had never seen before, a difference symbolized by the diamond of dark hair between her legs. Her breasts were the size of peaches and so beautiful to me that I immediately had to dive into the pond to hide my swift erection. When I came to the surface I saw that she had disappeared too, though only for a few seconds as her head came popping up out of the water now between me and Cliff, who was still standing fully dressed on the grassy bank.

“Here I am again!” she cried. “Kate the bird-killer! The stripteaser!”

“You go too far,” Cliff said to her. “Lately all you want to do is shock people. You don’t seem to know right from wrong.”

Still smiling at him, she treaded water. “Come on, Saint Clifford—take it off and join us. Take it all off.”

While Cliff did nothing, I impulsively pulled off my own shorts and threw them up onto the dock, too late remembering how small and hairless I still was between my legs.

Kate laughed happily. “There! See, your holiness? It’s easy—you just peel ’em off and jump in.”

Cliff went over and got my shorts and threw them back to me in the water. “Don’t you be an ass too, Greg,” he said.

This time, for emphasis, I sailed the shorts over his head. He looked at Kate again.

“Now you’ve got
him
all screwed up. You proud of yourself? And he’s just a kid.”

“Fuck you, Cliff!” I yelled at him. “Why don’t you go home and
study
something!”

“That’s just what I’ll do,” he said, leaving the dock. “You two infants can stay here and shock one another. Big deal.”

His leaving seemed the last straw for Kate. Yelling, she began to strike her fist against the water. “Go on, get out of here, you holy bastard! You freaking self-righteous bastard! You freaking asshole!”