Juliet in August (17 page)

But then he sees Justine's hands rise emphatically and she moves forward so aggressively that the little foreman has to step back. She actually shakes a finger in his face. It's the funniest thing. The foreman tries to get in another lick, but once again Justine steps forward and he steps back. Blaine doesn't know who gets the last word in, but he sees the foreman turn around and climb back into his truck cab. He watches Justine return to her position, and when he catches her eye he gives her a thumbs-up. She laughs. He wants to laugh with her. He imagines the two of them laughing, she the beer-ad girl in a white T-shirt, her brown arms testifying to health and happiness, and he the picture of strength and vitality, the independent man of the West, red-necked from outdoor work and proud of it.

He turns his rig around even though he's not at the end of his pass. He suddenly doesn't want to look at her; she's too young, and she's just inviting trouble by being here. He even feels a moment's anger at her, for being so careless, for taking this job in the first place among all these men who have no respect for women and resent the fact that she's collecting another man's salary. And then he realizes that his anger at Justine is the same as his anger at Vicki, and he's tired of it, tired of being angry. When he gets to the end of the stretch, he turns his rig around again and drives back toward Justine. White T-shirt. Smiling. Waving at a car that slows down in response to her sign. Spinning her sign in the gravel once the car has passed.

She looks bored. She takes off her hard hat and adjusts the ball cap she wears underneath to provide a better peak against the sun. She puts the hard hat back on and spins the sign once more. As Blaine draws closer, he can see that her lips are moving, and at first he can't figure out what she's doing—talking to herself?—but then she begins to bob her head and she even does a little dance step, and he realizes that she's singing.

Singing. Right out loud. Out here in the middle of nowhere. Like Daisy, in her own world, putting on a show for an invisible audience. He tries to look away so Justine won't be embarrassed at being caught. Only she isn't embarrassed. Not at all. She sees him watching her and she grins and does her little dance step again, for him this time.

He nods his acknowledgment, and now he's the one who is embarrassed: that he's been so obvious in the way he watches her.

His face is so red from the sun, no one could possibly know he's blushing.

So Gay

Shiloh walks down Main Street, not really sure where he's going, but he knows he doesn't want to traipse around to all the stores in town with his mother. Maybe he can find someone to hang out with. Then he hears her car coming up behind him, its familiar engine knock, and Daisy calls, “Hey, Shiloh, where're you going?” out the window, and Vicki pulls alongside him and says, “Hey, where are you off to, stranger?”

“Nowhere,” he says without stopping.

“Hop in, then,” Vicki says.

He ignores her.

“Oh, for God's sake, Shiloh,” Vicki says. “Since when did I become the enemy?”

“I don't want to be dragged all over town on some dumb shopping trip.”

“All right. Fair enough,” Vicki says. “Why don't you meet us at the swimming pool. In what . . . an hour?”

She waits for him to answer, so he doesn't. He just keeps on walking, but she won't go away; she follows alongside.

“Okay, okay,” he finally says, just to get rid of them.

“I want to go with Shiloh,” Martin says.

“Well, you can't,” Shiloh says. “So get that out of your damn head right now.” He knows he sounds just like Blaine.

“Shiloh's growing up and he wants to be left alone,” Vicki says to Martin. Then she says to Shiloh, “Watch your language when you're talking to the little ones, mister. There's no excuse for being rude.”

He hates almost every single thing she says these days, and then he feels bad.

“One hour,” she says. “Don't keep us waiting.”

“Two hours,” he argues. He knows she won't be ready in an hour, anyway.

“No, Shiloh,” Vicki says. “We have to get home.”

“An hour and a half, then.”

Vicki looks at her watch. “Okay,” she says. “An hour and a half, but don't be late.”

After she's gone, Shiloh sits on the curb and gloats. It's so easy to get his own way with his mother. Then he realizes he has to find something to do for the next hour and a half. There are a few town kids that he doesn't mind—Mark Matheson and Brad Weibe are okay—but Mark's family has a cottage and they go there for pretty much the whole summer, and he thinks Brad's away at a hockey camp. He doesn't usually see much of the other kids during the summer, and so he feels funny just dropping by someone's house. He decides to wander around town, hoping a plan will reveal itself.

He walks up Main Street, but the only familiar person he sees is Brittney Vass, who is coming toward him with her mother. He just about dies, and would cross the street to get away, but it's too late. Brittney's father has the insurance business in town and they have money. He knows the other girls think she has the best clothes, and she's good at sports and won the girls' athletic award at the end of the school year, even though she was only in grade seven. Once, when Shiloh missed the bus after school, he watched the girls' basketball team play—or more correctly, he watched Brittney Vass play—while he waited for his mother to come and pick him up. There were several boys from his class watching, but they were boys who played on sports teams, too, which meant they were all town kids. Shiloh stood by the gym door, and when Brad Weibe saw him and waved him over to the bleachers, Shiloh pretended he didn't see him. Still, he couldn't help but see the other boys look his way and laugh. When he got to school the next day, someone had written in chalk on the wall of the school
SHILOH DOLSON IS SO GAY
. Again, he pretended he didn't notice and by recess it was gone, or at least rubbed out so you couldn't read it.

Shiloh notices how much taller Brittney is than him, and as she and her mother come closer on the sidewalk he tries to pull himself up and at least give the impression of tall. He sees that Brittney is wearing lipstick. When they pass, she doesn't even give him a glance. You'd think she'd never seen him before in her life. He hears her mother ask, “Wasn't that the Dolson boy?” but he can't hear Brittney's answer. There might not have been one.

Anyway, he hates her. He hates all the girls in his class, but at the same time he wants to do a U-turn and watch Brittney walk down the sidewalk. He tries to think up some excuse to turn around and go the other way after her, toward the hardware store maybe, or the post office. But it would be so obvious. She'd know and she'd call up her friends, the other cool girls, and tell them he was following her around, stalking her even; that's how girls are. She'd get on the phone as soon as she got home and they'd rip him apart, talk about how short he is, or how funny his voice sounds. So instead of following Brittney, he goes to the schoolyard. He searches the ground for a soft rock, the kind that you can write with, and he scrawls
BRITTNEY IS SO GAY
on the brick wall and, as an afterthought,
GIRLS ARE SO FUCKING GAY
. Then he goes to the little kids' playground, drops his backpack in the grass, and sits on a swing and scratches the letters in Brittney's name with his foot in the dirt, and rubs them out, and writes them again.

A car coming slowly up the street catches his attention. It gets to the end of the block and then the driver does a U-turn and comes back. The car stops by the curb bordering the playground and a woman steps out, no one Shiloh recognizes. She's wearing high heels and a light blue suit and big black sunglasses. Shiloh watches as she leans against the car and stares at the school. She lights a cigarette and then notices him on the swings. He looks away, but he can still see that she is coming toward him, tottering through the sparse and dusty playground grass on her high heels.

“Do you go to school here?” she asks when she reaches the swings.

Shiloh says, “If you want to smoke you have to be at least a block away from the school. That's the rule. I thought everyone knew that.”

“Oh,” she says. “Well, I'm not from around here.”

“That's the rule everywhere,” Shiloh says. He knows he's being rude, but it feels good. She's a stranger. Who cares what she thinks?

“I don't imagine anyone's going to enforce the rule during the summer,” the woman says. She takes a drag on the smoke and then butts it out in the dirt, grinding it beneath her shoe. Her fancy city shoe, Shiloh thinks. No women here wear shoes like that, at least not where he sees them. She picks up the butt and holds it in her open palm.

“So is this a pretty good school, then?” she asks Shiloh.

“It sucks,” Shiloh says.

“You like the teachers? The principal?”

“They suck, too. This whole town sucks.”

“That's kind of what I thought,” the woman says. “Call it a first impression.” She looks like she might be about to ask him something else, but then she turns around and walks back to her car. She stops to read what Shiloh wrote on the wall of the school before getting in her car and driving away, this time not slowly. She even spins her tires.

Shiloh is wondering what he should do next when a kid comes into the schoolyard with his white dog, some kind of little terrier. Shiloh recognizes the kid from the reading buddy program. He wasn't his own reading buddy, but he was in the same class of grade ones and twos—the one that Daisy is in. When the reading buddy program started up, Daisy wanted Shiloh for her partner, but the teacher said no.

The kid recognizes Shiloh and comes to the swings and asks him if he wants to play Frisbee with the dog. The kid has a lisp. Shiloh says sure, and they take turns throwing the Frisbee, which the dog is pretty good at catching. Shiloh tries throwing it harder and the dog runs like crazy and picks the Frisbee out of the air. Shiloh keeps trying to throw it farther and farther, but the dog always manages to get there and catch it. The kid gets more excited about how far Shiloh can throw the Frisbee than he is about the dog's ability to catch it. He keeps saying “Farther, Shiloh, farther.” The kid's own attempts to throw the Frisbee are pretty bad, so Shiloh gives him a lesson. The kid thinks it would be a good idea to invent a Frisbee that would come back, like a boomerang. Shiloh hangs out with the kid and his dog until the kid decides he should go home. As the kid is leaving he sees the writing on the school wall and he wants to know what it means.

“Nothing,” Shiloh says. “Just some dumb crap.”

“Someone's going to get heck,” the kid says. He pronounces it
thumb one
.

“It's summer,” Shiloh says. “You can write whatever you want on the school in summer.”

After the kid leaves, Shiloh heads across the lawn in front of the school. There are a couple of high school girls—grade ten or eleven—on inline skates in the parking lot. They're wearing shorts and tank tops, and they're all geared up with helmets and knee pads and wrist guards. Shiloh hardly dares to look at them. In fact, he decides to skirt the parking lot altogether.

But then one of them yells to him, “Hey, Shiloh, want to see a cool trick?”

How would they know his name? He must have heard wrong.

“That's your name, isn't it? Shiloh Dolson?”

He keeps on going with his head down.

“What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?” And then the other girl says, “We think you're cute, Shiloh. Come and see us in a couple of years.” This is immediately followed by the sound of girls laughing, completely pleased with themselves.

He hates girls. He crosses the street and turns down the alley that runs behind Brad Weibe's house. He doesn't expect him to be home, but he looks over the back fence anyway and sees that the house looks quiet and locked up. There's usually a camper trailer parked on a pad behind the house, and it's not there. Shiloh takes this to mean the whole family has gone to the hockey camp. That makes sense. Brad's parents are the town's biggest hockey fans, along with Greg Bellmore's mother. Greg Bellmore, who played eight seasons in the NHL and never lived in Juliet, but his mother married a Juliet teacher, who died a year later. Mrs. Bellmore (she kept the name Bellmore because of her famous son) had stayed, and now the town talks about Greg as though he were born here. In the winter Mrs. Bellmore hangs out at the rink every day along with Brad's dad, who doesn't work because of an accident he had several years ago and now is just a hockey fan. The two of them had headed a committee to raise the money for a new rink, and they'd been so successful that the rink is practically theirs. The rink has
NO SMOKING
signs everywhere, but Brad's dad and Mrs. Bellmore are allowed to smoke during practices. They have to butt out during games, though, when the bleachers are full of other smokers who are expected to follow the rules. One Saturday when Shiloh was killing time in town, he had gone over to the rink to watch Brad practice and he'd sat in the stands behind Brad's dad and Mrs. Bellmore. They talked on and on about Greg and Brad as though they weren't even real people. Mr. Weibe talked about Brad as though he were already in the NHL.

Shiloh continues on down the alley, pretending that he doesn't know Brittney Vass lives just a block away from Brad. When he comes to her house he looks over the fence and there she is, suntanning in a lounge chair beside an inflatable kiddie pool. She's wearing a bright blue bikini, and music is blasting from a portable music player that is attached to an outlet by a long red extension cord. Her eyes are closed and she dangles one foot in the pool. The lounge chair and the pool are on a low wooden deck, and there are pots with flowers in them everywhere. Shiloh can't help it; he stops and stares over the fence. The yard is like a park, and Brittney looks so grown-up. He doesn't even recognize the music she's listening to. He tries to commit it to memory so that he can find out who it is. He leans against the fence and closes his eyes, taking in the music, and when he opens his eyes again, Brittney is sitting up in her lounge chair and looking right at him.