Fragile Beasts (26 page)

“Wow, Kyle,” she laughs. “That was deep. You’re turning into a little Aunt Candace disciple. I never saw that coming.”

She’s making fun of me. I don’t understand why. Shelby’s got money and class, and I know she cares about education. She freaks out if she gets less than an A
—
on a test, and she expects to go to an Ivy League college. Yet she’s crazy about a guy like Klint who barely squeaks by with a C average and thinks a bus trip to Pittsburgh for a Pirates game qualifies as traveling abroad. This isn’t the first time she’s reacted to one of my intelligent observations with the patronizing tone of someone praising a little kid for telling a dumb “knock knock” joke.

“How’s Klint?” she asks, which only makes me feel worse, but I realize she doesn’t know she hurt my feelings.

“He’s okay. The move’s been harder for him.”

“Does he still hate Aunt Candace?”

“He doesn’t hate her. He never did. He hates change. Dad was the same way.”

“That’s great about the truck.”

“Yeah,” I say, brightening. “The truck is awesome.”

“My dad went through the roof when he found out.”

“What do you mean?”

She blushes deeply.

“I mean …,” she begins to explain, obviously embarrassed. “My dad was just concerned. He doesn’t want Aunt Candace to get carried away and spend too much money.”

“Klint didn’t ask for that truck,” I reply, trying to keep the anger out of my voice. “It was all your aunt’s idea. And he’s paying it off. I told you that.”

“I know, Kyle, and that’s very noble of him, but do you know how long it will take to pay for a truck with the salary from a part-time job at a dairy? Let’s be real. Aunt Candace paid for the truck.”

She smiles at me again.

“Do you think he’d take me for a ride?”

“He’d take Bigfoot for a ride,” I grumble.

She bursts into giggles. She laughs so hard she falls against me and grabs my arm for support. I wasn’t trying to be funny, but I’m pleased with the results.

By the time we turn back, we realize we’ve gone farther than we thought. The sun has already begun to set and the air has become cold. Neither one of us has a coat, plus we both fear the wrath of Miss Jack if we’re late for dinner.

We give each other half-panicked glances as we finally approach the house. Two other cars are parked by Shelby’s and people are sitting on the porch. Miss Jack loves candles and there are colorful blazes of light everywhere.

We’re a little late, but I don’t care. I almost laugh out loud when I see Klint sitting stiffly in a chair at the mercy of Miss Jack and her family without any assistance from me.

One of the cars is a big, black Cadillac with a vanity license plate that reads:
JPCOAL
1. I don’t have much trouble figuring out it belongs to Shelby’s dad. The other car is a little silver Mercedes I assume belongs to the little silver man Miss Jack introduces as Bert Shulman, “a dear friend of mine and a very dear friend of my late brother’s.”

Bert Shulman has silvery hair and a silvery mustache and in this light his eyes even look silver. They twinkle behind his glasses like polished nickels. He’s wearing a gray suit with a kind of pewter sheen to it and a pink shirt and purple bow tie. He gives me a friendly smile and shakes hands briskly while saying he’s very happy to meet me.

Cam Jack is not happy to meet me. He looks me up and down like I might be the kid he saw throwing eggs at his front door last night. He has a flabby, sweaty handshake.

“So you’re the other kid,” he says to me.

“Yes,” I reply, uncertainly. “I’m Kyle. It’s nice to meet you.”

He sits down without saying anything else.

Shelby’s mom is a much nicer and tanner person with a toothpaste commercial smile and lots of frosty hair.

She doesn’t stand up to greet me. She just holds out her hand, and I’m forced to look down at her and her boobs bursting out of her sherbet orange
dress that’s also showing a lot of leg. I’m never comfortable looking at a mother’s breasts, even when they’re good ones, so I concentrate hard on staring at her face.

She’s pretty from a distance, but I realize up close her face has cracks and creases just like my aunt Jen’s. They’re not the natural kind of wrinkles like Miss Jack has that come from being old. They’re the kind that come from being varnished and baked.

She tells me she feels like she already knows me since Shelby’s told her so much about me. That makes me feel pretty good. Then she introduces me to her dog, Baby.

I didn’t even notice him. He was huddled between her hip and the side of the chair she’s sitting on. At the sound of his name he tries to hop up onto her lap but slips twice and falls back onto the cushion. He yips a couple times and makes a final effort and meets with squeals of approval from his mistress.

She picks him up in both hands and holds him out to me. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I reach out my forefinger and tap him lightly on the head.

“Nice doggie,” I say.

Miss Jack was right. Mr. B’s at least three times as big as Baby. I wonder what Mr. B would think of him. I doubt he’d think he was a dog. Maybe some kind of hairless, uncoordinated rodent.

Shelby’s sister Starr is the last one to be introduced to me. She’s sitting the farthest away, with her long legs in a pair of tight jeans and black leather high-heeled boots swinging over one side of a blue wicker chair.

She’s smoking and each time she leans down to tap ashes into the ashtray on the floor, her hair covers her face like a blond silk handkerchief, and I get a good shot of her breasts, too. I don’t have a problem with this. I’ve imposed no personal restrictions on myself regarding the viewing of sisters’ breasts.

Hers aren’t pushed up like her mother’s. They’re soft and free beneath a gray and blue blouse. I don’t think she’s wearing a bra. I wish Klint was the kind of brother I could share this information with.

I know about her. Shelby’s told me some of her checkered past. Her parents caught her in their bed having sex with her boyfriend when she was only fifteen. She’s been arrested for underage drinking and got kicked out of one of her boarding schools for spray painting
FAT ASSES UNITE
on the cafeteria wall.
She ran away to Australia for three months with some old guy in his thirties and came back alone with a broken arm and two Campbell’s Soup thermoses filled with hundreds of the most beautiful opals Shelby’d ever seen. She’s wrecked two cars, shaved her head once, and can use chopsticks with her toes.

Standing in front of her, I feel like I’m presenting myself to some mythical warrior princess who’s probably going to torture and enslave me, but I don’t really care if she does.

She looks me up and down like her dad did but without any hostility, only a bored curiosity. Her smoking is slow and sensual, nothing like the frantic, gulping way my mom and aunt Jen smoke. She smiles slightly and doesn’t say anything.

I sit down next to Klint, who gives me such a look of gratitude that I completely forget being mad at him for being such a distant jerk to me lately.

Everyone has a drink. Miss Jack tells Shelby to run inside and get sodas for us. Miss Jack and her nephew are drinking whisky. Shelby’s mom is slurping at something pink and frozen. Bert has a martini. Klint has a Coke. Starr’s drinking a bottled beer. I think she’s only nineteen, but what’s the point in telling a girl like that she’s not old enough to do something?

Mr. Jack starts talking to Bert about tax shelters and other business-related stuff. His wife chatters about a shopping trip she wants to make with her girls next weekend and how she’s thinking of remodeling two of the bathrooms in their house in Florida.

Miss Jack watches her with a pained expression on her face and occasionally glances at a large vase full of yellow roses sitting on a small table next to her.

Starr smokes in silence, stretched out on her chair, watching everyone in a detached yet intent manner like a beautiful, deadly, honey-wheat-colored panther.

Shelby returns with our Cokes. She scoops up Baby and plunks him down in her lap where he curls up in a trembling ball no bigger than a fist. Every once in a while he raises his tiny head and yips at me. I can’t help smiling at this. I’d give anything for Mr. B to come by right now, but he’d never come near all these people.

The unmistakable roar and rattle of Tyler’s pickup truck suddenly drowns out the voices.

Miss Jack looks momentarily startled, then stands up and walks to her usual greeting place at the top of the steps. She looks very regal tonight in a long skirt and deep purple velvet jacket over a high-necked lace blouse.

Klint glances at me, smiling.

Tyler’s truck is his pride and joy. It’s a 1990 sky blue Chevy he bought for $600 and fixed up himself. He did a good job, but the engine’s not exactly fine-tuned.

He parks and jumps out seemingly before the truck’s even come to a complete stop.

Aside from my dad’s funeral and the All-Star banquet last year, I’ve never seen him as dressed up as he is now. He’s wearing polished black shoes, brown corduroys with a belt, and a dark green sweater over a shirt with a collar.

He comes sauntering toward the porch with something in one of his hands. It takes me a second to realize he’s carrying flowers: a grocery store bouquet of carnations and mums.

He’s always had a buzz cut as long as I’ve known him. He says he can’t be bothered with hair. The combination of the clothes, the haircut, and the flowers make him look like a guy from the 1950s on his way to pick up his date at her parents’ house.

He walks right up to Miss Jack and holds the bouquet out to her.

“Miss Jack, this is a true pleasure,” he tells her. “I’m Tyler Mann. You may call me Tyler, even though I’m known far and wide to high school baseball fans everywhere simply as The Man. Thank you for inviting me to your beautiful home.”

Miss Jack takes the flowers and says, “Thank you, Tyler.”

The smile falls off Klint’s face, and his mouth hangs partially open in shock.

“You know Tyler’s a wild card,” I whisper to him. “You can’t ever count on him acting the way you want him to. He only acts the way he wants to.”

“It’s still early,” he whispers back.

“I feel we have a kind of bond, Miss Jack,” Tyler continues, “because quite a few members of my family have worked for J&P Coal. My grandfather and his brother were both miners in Lorelei, and I have an uncle who used to work in Marvella and another uncle who currently runs one of your continuous mines in Beverly. My own father would’ve gone into the mines except for an
unfortunate fear of small, dark places that he developed as a child when a couple of his cousins locked him in the trunk of a car overnight.”

He stops and laughs at the memory of the story like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.

“I applaud your family for their long-standing affiliation with J&P Coal,” Miss Jack tells him after he’s calmed down, “but I have nothing to do with the hands-on running of the company.”

She gestures at Shelby’s dad.

“My nephew, Cameron Jack, is the CEO.”

Tyler bounds across the porch to where Cam Jack is getting up from his chair. He takes his doughy hand and pumps it.

“Mr. Jack, this is an honor, sir.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Jack replies, looking a little stunned.

Miss Jack introduces him to Bert Shulman next, then to Shelby’s mom and sister.

“I must apologize,” Tyler says, grinning and glancing from female to female. “If I had known there were going to be so many beautiful ladies here tonight, I would’ve brought flowers for all of them. Mrs. Jack, it’s certainly easy to see where Shelby gets her good looks.”

Shelby’s mom giggles and gets all flustered. Even Starr and Miss Jack are smiling at him. It takes some nerve to be able to throw around clichés the way Tyler does it, but he gets away with it because he sincerely means what he’s saying. It also doesn’t hurt that women love praise, any praise, even the empty kind.

“It never occurred to you he might like coming here?” I whisper to Klint.

“No. Did it occur to you?”

“No.”

“Tyler, may I offer you a drink?” Miss Jack asks him.

He takes a seat after flashing a smile at Klint and me and crosses one ankle over his knee like a junior executive.

“A Jack Daniels on ice, please.”

Shelby busts out laughing.

“For now I’m afraid I can only offer you something nonalcoholic,” Miss Jack says, without showing any surprise or amusement at his request, “but you may certainly have wine with dinner.”

“Sweet,” he says.

He grins at Shelby, then suddenly gets up from his chair, returns to the bottom of the porch steps, and looks back at the house with his hands on his hips.

“Anyone ever jump off this roof?” he asks.

“You mean on purpose?” Miss Jack replies.

“Yeah.”

“Not that I know of.”

He shakes his head sadly and walks off around the side of the house.

“Where’s he going?” I hear Cam Jack ask.

“He has a hard time sitting still,” I explain. “But he’ll be right back. He never misses dinner.”

Miss Jack’s formal dining room is a lot like her regular dining room where we usually eat except it’s bigger and has a chandelier made entirely of blue glass that looks like a frozen shower of tears hanging over the table. The floor is made of more hand-painted ceramic tiles—these are decorated with brilliantly colored birds—and the walls are covered with the impressionist-style paintings she likes so much. Just like in the other rooms, it’s a collection of images that doesn’t seem to go together: small white houses near a teal sea, a crowd of people in a smoky bar, a girl in a pink gown sitting stiffly in a chair, a dark battle scene with piles of corpses and pools of scarlet blood, a hunter and his dog carrying a dead rabbit, a fat man dancing. I notice right away there are no bulls or toreros in this room.

The table is set with so many different plates, glasses, and pieces of silverware, it looks like we’re going to eat ten meals.

We all take our seats and instantly two serving women appear, one with a pitcher of water and the other with a bottle of wine she presents to Miss Jack who approves it with a nod.