Iona Moon (37 page)

Two weeks later, Iona imagined Willy on the streets again. She was already half cocked and had no intention of stopping. If she swerved on her way home, took her corners too wide, she knew that Willy—Officer Hamilton—would be the one to drag her downtown.
For your own protection
, he'd say. And she'd tell him:
You should have thought of that the last time
.

She and Sharla were at the Roadstop, tossing darts. They came here often, whenever Sharla had a night off, shot pool and drank beer till one of them missed the cue ball and they laughed so hard they had to hug each other to keep from falling. Sometimes Sharla's laughter turned to sobs by the time they got to the parking lot, and on those nights Iona felt suddenly sober and wished she lived alone.

Sharla's dart stuck in the wall instead of the board. That was the end of the game. Buck Caudill yelled over the bar, told her she was through, and two men in cowboy hats took the rest of the darts from Iona.

“Assholes,” Sharla said.

But Iona knew they had to do it and blamed Sharla: she might nick somebody's ear the next time.

The smell of sawdust and spilled beer mingled with the smell of sweat. Only ten, Iona thought, but she felt trouble already, a fight about to spark. It wasn't just the smell. It was the heat too, this warm night in April, balmy almost, more like July, so everyone was on edge, and she felt something prickly moving over her bare skin, as if the air itself had a charge.

Jay Tyler sat alone at the bar, drinking tequila by the shot and chasing it with a draft. Iona wished she could say:
Glad to see you out
. But no matter how she put it, the words sounded sarcastic.

Sharla couldn't get a turn at the pool table and wanted to go. Iona said she felt like getting looped. “We can get bombed at home,” Sharla said. “You can drink rum and Cokes till you fall out of your chair.” Iona couldn't face the thought of another night in Sharla's kitchen with Maywood watching over them. They'd smoke cigarette after cigarette, lighting one from the other until their faces blurred.

Once, through this haze, Sharla had whispered: “I used to think she did it on purpose.” She meant the mother on the wall.

Maywood said:
I
don't want to know
.

“She was sick,” Iona said.

“She was unhappy.”

I
don't want to know anything
.

“She died of pneumonia, Sharla.”

“She wanted to be gone.”

Maywood closed her eyes.
What did you expect me to do?

The dim bar was safer than Sharla's place on nights like these. Bodies stayed whole even when faces turned fuzzy. Iona watched a gang clustered at a table. Bright lips, wet teeth—mouths fluttered too fast to read words. Boys picked tobacco off their tongues with one hand and reached under the table with the other while the jukebox played the same song over and over: footsteps and slamming doors.

Iona stared at Jay. His mouth was closed, a thin line. Even when he drank he barely parted his lips. Bodies wavered, blocking her vision, and Sharla said, “I'm out o' here.”

Iona didn't know which was worse—imagining Sharla and Maywood in the kitchen alone or sitting there with them. But she knew how she'd find Sharla hours from now: asleep in the chair, her head on the table, the fluorescent light humming. Iona swayed, almost dancing. “Think I'll stay awhile,” she said, and Sharla muttered, “I figured.”

Iona pictured herself dancing with Jay, pulling him from his stool, holding him close enough so he wouldn't need his cane. She inched toward him. None of this could happen. She knew that. But she still had five dollars in her pocket. She thought she might offer to buy him a drink. Funny idea: dirt-poor daughter of a potato farmer buying a shot for the pretty blond boy with perfect teeth. Pretty, like Jeweldeen, not anymore. Someone had started the song again, a torment, a joke: no more footsteps after all, no more jeans on the floor. Twyla Catts plunked herself down on the stool next to Jay, and Darryl McQueen sat on the other side of her. At first Iona thought it was coincidence: they couldn't be together. Surely Twyla hadn't given up a linebacker and a second baseman to hang out with a gangly guy from the diving team. But Darryl put his hand low on Twyla's back, slipped the tips of his fingers inside her pants. He wasn't even a good diver.

Twyla leaned close to Jay. She wore a low-cut top, white with red stripes. Iona thought her breasts might pop out any minute, might spring free of the stretchy cloth like a pair of jack-in-the-boxes.

Twyla's high voice cracked above the chatter of the crowd. “Didn't you used to be Jay Tyler?”

Darryl slapped the bar and hooted. “That's a good one,” he said, “‘used to be.'”

“I just meant—” Twyla was too wasted to know what she meant.
Didn't you used to do double somersaults off the high board? Didn't you used to be the best-looking guy in school?

Jay spit a single word in Twyla's ear, downed the last shot, threw a five on the bar, and headed for the door.

Twyla puffed up red, cheeks and chest ready to burst. She yelled after him. “You can't call me that.” He pounded his cane into the floor with each step. “Fucking cripple.”

The last word hit Jay like a stone flung at his back. He stumbled but kept moving. People got out of his way. Darryl grabbed Twyla's wrist. “Sit your ass down before I knock you down,” he said.

The space Jay had opened with his swinging cane closed quickly. Twyla pulled her jacket around her shoulders, and Darryl yelled to Buck, “I'm dry, buddy.”

Iona squeezed through the crowd. She found Jay outside, propped against the first car in the lot, a long tan Oldsmobile, somebody's daddy's car.

He pretended he didn't notice her, but he stared at her feet, her unbroken legs, and she felt him blaming her. “I don't know if you remember me,” she said.

He looked at her face now. “I didn't crack my head,” he said, “just my legs.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“I remember you,” Jay said. “What of it?”

“She's a bitch.”

“I used another word.”

“You shouldn't let people like her bother you.”

Jay hit the car with his cane. “She doesn't.” He whacked the car again, harder, and Iona thought she heard the cane split. “You know what bothers me?” He hit his right knee with the cane. “This bothers me.” He swung again, smacking his left thigh. “And this.” He raised the stick as if he meant to strike her, but whirled instead to hit the car. “This goddamned car bothers me. Whose fucking car is this anyway?” He pounded the hood until the cane splintered and hung limp. “Look what you made me do,” he said, turning to face Iona.

He started down the lot and Iona followed. “Let me drive you,” she said.

“I may be a fucking cripple,” he said, “but I can drive. Even a fucking cripple can drive a fucking car.”

“You're drunk. Let me take you home.”

“Your place or mine, baby?” He sounded mean, even to himself.

“Wherever you want to go.”

“You're not scared of me, are you?”

“No.”

“Nobody has to worry about a cripple.”

“Let me drive you.”

He said, “I don't want to go home,” but he walked to her car with her, limping, unsteady without his cane.

“Where to?” she said as they pulled onto the highway.

“Just drive.”

She headed toward the Flats, and they didn't talk. She wanted to say:
I know you
. She wanted to tell him about crawling through the snow, how Leon showed her that even when you're on your knees and frozen to the bone, you can choose to live. She had almost forgotten at times; but when she did, Leon swatted her butt, whispered in her ear:
Not this way, not this way, God
. And even when she didn't believe in God, she believed in her brother who had saved her with those words.

She started humming the song that had played over and over in the bar.

“I hate that tune,” Jay said. He flicked on the radio, and Iona let him run through the stations before she said it didn't work.

“Me neither.”

“Doesn't matter to me.”

“No, I s'pose not.” Jay whistled a rift of the song he said he hated. “It's stuck in my head,” he told her.

Iona nodded. A lot of things were stuck in her head: stars flung in a summer sky the night Jay gave Willy Hamilton directions to her house and got them lost; a day, months later, when she stood behind the wire fence and watched Jay leap, first air, then water. She saw it all: Willy pinned to the hood of the car and Jay saying,
Sorry, buddy, I'll make it up to you
. And he did. His knees bent, his feet slapped the blue surface. Jay came up grinning, and Willy won the day. Only Iona knew this was deliberate and just, reparation for a dirty girl with crooked teeth.

Jay stared at Iona's hands, thinking of all the times she must have washed her mother's body. No wonder she wasn't afraid. He remembered how she held him in the back seat of Willy's Chevy, how skinny she was, how strong.

“I was an asshole,” Jay said.

She nodded. She thought he meant tonight, outside the bar.

“I should have beat the crap out of him.”

“Who?”

“Willy.”

She realized he was talking about that other night on this road. “I didn't blame you,” she said.

“You should have.”

“He was your friend.”

“So were you.”

Friend
, she was amazed to hear him call her that.

He watched her, looked at her body—yellow arms and dark face, tangled hair and sharp nose, all her frail bones almost visible. Strange comfort, this girl, but it did comfort him to think of her ribs and knees, her bony pelvis, all the parts of her he would feel if he lay down beside her, nothing soft and simple, just the hard fact of this particular girl, this night, this body against his own.

She punched off the lights as she turned up the rutted road that led to her father's house. “Don't want to wake them,” she said.

“What are we doing here?”

“I want to show you the barn and the outhouse. I want you to smell the cows. I want you to know how we live, out here on the Flats.” She hit the brakes and put the car in reverse, started backing up the road. “But I can just take you home—if that's what you want.”

“We're here. I might as well see.”

“Don't do me any favors.”
Friend
. She remembered but didn't trust him, thought he might do the same thing all over again.

“I want to see.”

“We should leave the car.”

“I don't mind walking,” Jay said.

The night was cool now and fog filled the valley. Damp air smelled of the fields: fertilizer and black earth.

One of the dogs growled, and Iona whispered, “It's only me.” Her familiar voice made him whine. “Stupid mutt.” He growled again. She said, “Hush, baby, I didn't mean you.” The dog whimpered.

She lifted the latch on the barn door and took Jay inside. The smell of dung was dense, sweet, stronger than it was as it blew off the land. The cows stamped in the dark. She led Jay to each stall, to Ruby and Myrtle, to pretty Belle, to Tessa and the new calf. “Born the same day as my niece,” Iona said. “Have you ever watched something being born?”

Jay shook his head.

“I used to milk these cows every morning—before I came to school.”

“Who does it now?”

“Jeweldeen. Leon says he married her because a wife's cheaper than a milking machine.”

“I heard he had to marry her.”

“It's a lie,” Iona said. “Machine's cheaper than a wife.”

“It's so quiet.”

“Do you want to stay?”

“Where else would we go?”

“Back to town.”

“I'm in no hurry.”

“Can you climb a ladder?”

“What d'you think I am? A cripple?”

They climbed up to the loft and lay side by side in the straw. “I wish we had a blanket,” Iona said.

“Are you cold?”

“Yes.”

“Me too,” Jay murmured.

He rolled toward her and laid his head on her chest. She took his hand in hers and slid it under her shirt so it rested on her belly. “See,” she said, “see how warm it is?” The words rose up in her, her mother's words to her father when he was still scared of the girl in his bed, her mother's words to the child as she handed her a potato just dug from the earth. All these months she'd been trying to find Hannah, trying to turn fast enough to catch her.
See how warm it is?
Hannah was right here all along, inside of her, tender and alive.

Jay's body curved to hers, his hand on her stomach, one leg over her legs. “I remember this,” he said, “all this time, how you felt.”

They were warm enough and they slept.

Hannah said:
All your kindness is never going to change him
.

She was right about Matt Fry and had come to warn Iona again.

But it will change me.

Dentists don't marry the daughters of potato farmers
.

He's not a dentist.

Son of a dentist
.

I don't want to be married.

But you want to be loved
.

I just want to love, the way Daddy loved you, with that little doubt.

And you think you love this boy
.

I know him.

It's not the same
.

It feels the same to me.

He'll break your heart
.

Tell me about the bear, Mama.

Iona woke before dawn. Her left leg was numb, asleep beneath the weight of Jay's leg. She saw Eddie, though she didn't want him to be here, Eddie naked on the narrow bed, dark hair splayed on the blanket, dark chest, his arms the only warmth in the damp cabin of the boat, his fingers in her mouth, salty, feeling inside, the most delicate place,
soft
, he said,
so soft
, and he was the one moaning as if touching her there took him outside his own skin, out into the water, terrifying and deep. She smelled his wet hair, and later she saw him from a distance, behind the glass of the station, his blood-red shirt. Cars moved down the street in the rain, and she heard the lonely sound of tires hissing through water, then she was on the boat again, endlessly rocking, feeling that his touch could shatter her, his breath could tear her open, throat to bowel, and the day that had never been light was growing dark around them.