Everyone but You (13 page)

I sit down at the table. I wait. Finally he says, “Christ Almighty.”

“Sorry, Charlie,” I say. I tell him he can’t be a hound dog all his life.

He doesn’t move. “Daisy,” he says, “I never knew you could be a bitch.”

“I thought I was an angel.”

“Oh, piss off,” he says.

I say nothing. My eyes well up, and Charlie, raking his hands through his hair, looks over to me and sighs and says, “Christ, all right. Don’t start blubbering.”

“I’m not blubbering,” I tell him.

He stumbles over to the sink, promises, and pours out the half-empty bottle of scotch. “I’m the one who should be crying,” he says.

“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t start.”

“Fine,” he says. When I go up to him and touch his arm, he turns his face toward me and says, “You’re right, and you’re a good woman.” He pats my shoulder.

I tell Charlie I don’t want to fight. I tell him that he’s sweet and brave, sweeter than anyone I’ve ever known. I kiss his neck.

E
VEN THOUGH CHARLIE
is drunk, I straddle him in bed to ride him like a pony. I’m already down to my fishnets and bra, and Charlie—well, I’ve managed to get him down to his boxers. He says, “You got a good body,” and I say, “Thank you.” His bed feels warm and lived-in.

“I want to feel the love of a good woman,” he tells me.

“Thank you,” I tell him again. “Thank you very much.”

Amused, Charlie sings a line from “Heartbreak Hotel.” When I touch him, he trembles in a quiet way, not like Ray, who was loud and rough and thrashed around. That night, after the blond girl shot Ray down, he wrestled with me on his bed as if he had something desperate to prove. He put a knife to my cheek and said, “What’s one more thing wrong with your stupid face?” The knife was sharp. I didn’t flinch. I barely felt anything. I thought he was playing, because he always did like rough sex. But then I saw the blade again—not silver but silver and red—and I put my hand up to my face and it was warm and moist and then there was a deep, sharp pain. Ray held the knife to my throat, pressed. Then he laughed in a bitter way and said, “Even
ugly can get uglier,” and I thought for a moment that my time on this earth was over. I thought, then, too, that it didn’t matter if I was beautiful or ugly, any more than it mattered if I drove a Beemer to work or had a million dollars or was poor. It didn’t change the fact that we all died, and no matter who was there with you in those final moments, dying was still something you did alone.

Charlie doesn’t flail around, and he’s still soft between my legs. He’s so soft I could cry. I take his hand and place it on my rump, pat a little. “Would rough sex work, and get things started?”

“No, Daisy,” he says. “I’m not going to hurt you.” He kisses my bra. Then, tired, he leans back and settles onto the pillow. He makes a strange, sobbing sound, and turns his head. “I’m sorry, Daisy. I’m just so damn drunk. It’s me, not you.”

“All right,” I tell him and roll off of him. I move to go, but he places his hand on me.

“Why are you always running off so quickly?” he asks. “Stay, and tomorrow I’ll take you out for eggs.”

I say, “You might wake up tomorrow and see everything differently.” But when I look over at him, his eyelids quiver and I know he’s asleep and already dreaming. I don’t know what Charlie dreams about.

Usually I’d leave now while it’s still dark, but tonight because he told me I was a good woman and held my face, and because he called me his angel and threw out his booze, I stay. I’m so close to Charlie that I can hear the sound of his heart.

Tomorrow he’ll wake and his eyes won’t look mournful but lustery, like the sky after a storm has cleared, and then I’ll know. And it’s funny, not really funny, I guess, but sad-funny. When I look at him sleeping like a stray dog under the light from the
alley, I think of the old people’s faces when I lift them from their beds, right before I unlatch their fingers from my arms. Sometimes their faces are looking off beyond me, and sometimes they look scared, like they’re closing their eyes and mouths on death, cupping their lips over death like it’s an old lover. Other times, they smile like they’ve quit being scared and are moving to a light that has all the love they need in the world. I think of me and Charlie in those faces. Tomorrow when the sun comes up Charlie will lift me out of bed and maybe, if he’s really a gentleman, smile and take me out for breakfast.

J
ess peers under his visor and squints at the sun. He’s been quiet for the past hour, but now, surveying the desert, he says, “We’re nowhere, Prue. Absolutely nowhere.”

In the passenger’s seat, Prue fans her skirt and lifts her sticky thighs from the seat, releasing them like duct tape. Somewhere back in Kansas the air conditioner went and Jess refused to pay to have it serviced. Now, as heat blasts through the open windows, Prue breathes in the desert until she feels as though she, too, is desert, part of the endless landscape, the unforgiving sky. She should feel lucky with her man beside her. But when Jess curses the absence of road signs and markers, Prue only wants to say he could have gotten a map back at the last gas station. She wants to say he is one of those men who never asks for directions, and that it is his pigheadedness that has them here—lost, the air conditioner broken, the gas gauge flirting with E,
that tenuous line of demarcation. Men and directions, she wants to say, go together like coffee and Jell-O.

Instead, she says, “We’re on Veteran’s Memorial Highway, I think. Outside Winnemucca, like in the song ‘I’ve Been Everywhere.’ Have we been to enough everywheres yet?” she asks.

“Hardly,” says Jess.

“Well, there must be a gas station somewhere.”

“There’s probably not anything,” Jess says with a hint of bitterness that surprises her. “What you don’t know is that deserts go on and on. What you don’t know,
Prudence
, is that deserts eat everything up.”

Prue frowns at the sound of her name on his tongue. It is a name given by her ex-hippie-turned-banker mother, a name that caused constant taunts in high school. High school is where she and Jess met, in fact, in that time when she loved his easiness, his lank, ungainly body and long hair, his sweet teasing and laughter. They are both nineteen and have been married just over a year. Jess is on leave from Fort Bragg, where he and Prue live on base, and she is pregnant, so newly pregnant in fact that she hasn’t yet told Jess.

She turns up the Bob Dylan song that plays in the tape deck.
“How many roads?”
she questions, knowing Bob Dylan irritates Jess—he has often said that Dylan is for pussies—and irritating him gives her an odd sense of satisfaction. It repays him for the broken air conditioner, for being lost with practically no money left, for this unending road trip. “A tour of America,” Jess had called it. At first the idea invigorated Prue, gave her a strange sense of purpose. They headed south to snap photographs of the big peach and the world’s largest Coke bottle. They drove to the International Towing and Recovery Museum, then to Silo X in Missouri, with its top-secret disasters and toxic gases that
turned men into monsters. In Hebron, Nebraska, they admired the world’s largest porch swing. They stopped at cheap motels and out-of-the-way diners for greasy burgers and fries that coated Prue’s fingers with oil. They talked about movies, alien invasions, the cost of things, and a whole lot of nothing. When they ran low on cash, they spent a few nights sleeping on the hood of Jess’s Chevy, buried under blankets, her head on his chest. But now Prue only feels tired, a little too sick, and in need of home.

She releases her seat from its upright position, leans back, and props one tan leg up on the dashboard. She says, “It’s been a real blast, baby, but after a while anything gets a little old. Don’t you ever get tired of going everywhere and nowhere, all at once?”

Jess glances over. “You don’t even care that you’ve never seen anything, do you? If we turn around, we’ll miss the
Hornet
in Alameda. It’s only a national treasure, you know. A living monument to our history. One of the guys went to California
six
times to see it, it was that good.” Then he adds: “There’s a lot that’s good on the West Coast.”

“Home is good,” Prue says, pointing. “That direction.”

Jess snorts in disgust. “The
Hornet
’s better than home. Bet you didn’t know it’s haunted. Real live ghosts in
that
baby.”

Prue rolls her eyes. “Only kids believe in ghosts, Jess.”

“Bull-
shit
,” he says. “Two hundred sightings of soldiers lost in battle.
Doc-u-mented
. That ship’s seen more action than
you’ll
ever see, that’s for damn sure. Everything holds on to its ghosts. There’s not anything that’s been through war that gets off scot-free.”

“Gas,” Prue reminds him.

“Pru-dence,”
Jess retorts. For a moment, his stare is unyielding,
but then, suddenly, he snickers. He glances at the gauge, snorts again, then leans back and steers with his wrist. As is a recent habit, he runs his free hand over his crew cut, back and forth. It is an act that somehow hurts Prue to witness, just as it hurts her when, late at night, Jess turns and tells her they can never go home again, that he’s seen too much to ever go back.

Prue feels a strange tiredness, an unaccustomed ache. She knows she should feel grateful that Jess wasn’t sent home to her in a coffin, like so many other husbands and wives. She has often tried to imagine what it was like for him to be in the desert, to be caught in its swirling storms. Did killing, she wondered, ever become as easy as pulling in a breath of air? One, two, three, breathe, and it’s over—no real discomfort, no real shock, but only a sweet relief that you are the one left standing? And what—if anything—dies, in the process of all that? Prue wants to ask Jess now but she can’t. He would only say she is talking stupid. He would only give her that hard look she’s seen so many times since he’s been home—jaw clenched, eyes deep, concealing—and Prue would feel unsettled, cast-off, as if longing for the boy she knew in high school weren’t enough, as if she’d met a stranger coming home instead. And that is the truth, she realizes. The boy she knew is gone.

“I bet you didn’t know they give you at least twenty extra miles after empty,” Jess says. “I bet you’ve never been out of gas in your life, Pru-dence.”

“I’ve been out of gas plenty,” Prue says.

“Bullshit. I bet you don’t even know what real empty feels like.”

“Oh, I know empty,” Prue says. She glides her tongue over her teeth and tastes the bare, gritty sand. “I know
real
empty, too.” For a moment, she thinks of Fort Bragg and North Carolina’s
lush forests, that weedy heaviness that hangs over everything. She says, “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the
Hornet
. I bet you didn’t know
that
. I don’t give a rat’s ass anymore about a whole lot of things.”

“Oh, I know,” Jess says, nodding. “And I agree with you on that last part.”

Prue cranks up Dylan and turns over possibilities. She will leave him, she knows. She won’t keep the baby. One, two, three, breathe, and she will walk away. She says, “I know no desert can go on and on and eat up everything, you’re wrong about that. Not if you don’t want it to, it doesn’t.”

“You don’t know shit,” Jess laughs. He cranes his head out the window and lets out a fierce, sad howl. He speeds, kicking up dust behind them. “And I know
that
just like I know it’s only pussies who cry for home, just like I know that we’ve got at least twenty miles before real empty, and that the
Hornet
is sure as hell loaded with ghosts
you’ll
never see. It’s what you don’t know that kills you, that’s what I know. Bang, bang, bang, dear Prudence. Knocks you real dead.”

I
think, though I am unsure, that my flatmate Cass knows what I have done. She has been stalking me around our apartment for days, laying word traps, hoping I might confess. I want to remain inconspicuous about the whole affair. We are not friends, she and I. We have only lived together six months, since the start of the school year, and we are bound by the necessity of shared rent that is due to our landlord, Mr. Tannen, on the second of each month. Beyond this, I have no commitment and refuse to suffer through the cumbersome condition of affection.