Whisper Hollow (25 page)

Danny hauled his gaze from Lidia and turned his head slightly toward her friend. “Um, I like it fine. I like the team. I didn’t get to play as much back home as I do here.”

“But you’re really good!” Lidia said.

Danny smiled and she reddened. “Thanks,” he said. “But a lot of fellas were good back in Jersey. Verra’s a smaller pond. So I’m a bigger fish.”

“Are you going to stay here after you graduate?” Peggy asked, swirling the few bits of ice left in her glass with her straw. “You only have another year.”

“I wasn’t planning to. Don’t know if you know it or not, but my mama and I came here because my grandfather needed the help. He’s getting on in years. And since Daddy died, Mama said there wasn’t really much sense in refusing to come.” He shrugged. “I was thinking about going back to Jersey for college, though. Or maybe New York. I want to be a lawyer.” Then he looked at Lidia with an expression she couldn’t read. “But you never know.”

Then, as though pulled back from a distant memory, he glanced at his watch. “Look at the time. It’s a school night, ladies. Can I give you a lift home?”

“You have a car?” Peggy asked.

Danny nodded. “My daddy’s. Okay, well, technically now it’s Mama’s. But she let me drive it all the way here from Jersey.” He reached over and picked up Lidia’s unfinished Coke and took a sip. Then he held it out to her and she smiled, downed the last of it in one gulp. As she reached for her jacket, Danny jumped up, taking it before she did. He held it for her, waiting for her to slip first one slender arm, then the other into the sleeves. Nobody had ever helped her on with her coat before.

“Let’s go then,” Lidia said.

“Ahem,” Peggy said, glancing down at the crushed overcoat on the seat behind her.

Danny huffed a short laugh through his nose. “Sure,” he said, and reached down to help her into it.

There was a brief pause at the passenger door of the 1955 Dodge Coronet. “Lucky me,” Peggy said. “Lidia lives closer, so you’ll have to drop her first. I’ll ride in the back and then switch to shotgun after.”

Danny looked at Lidia but she only smiled and said, “It’s okay. I don’t mind.” He opened the door and Peggy bounced into the backseat. Then he took Lidia’s hand and helped her in, an unnecessary gesture she happily accepted.

They pulled up to Lidia’s house, and she noticed through the window of Danny’s shiny car that the wooden porch seemed to sag. The paint was beginning to chip around the doorframe. She did what she could to keep the house and garden neat, but since her mother had died nearly two years before, her father had started taking on extra shifts. The time he once spent fixing and mending and building around the house was now spent underground. He said it was for the extra money, but she knew different. They never spoke about such things, but she knew.

She looked too much like her mother. And her brother was such an unfathomable disappointment. Even though it wasn’t his fault.

“Thanks for the ride,” Lidia said.

“Jump out, honey,” Peggy said from the back. “It’s my turn up front!”

Lidia climbed out, pulling the seat forward for Peggy; then she stood on the patch of yard amid tiny green stalks of rye grass pushing up through the dirt into spring. Danny leaned in front of Peggy toward the open window. “Goodnight, Lidia.”

Peggy waved at her and said, “Toodles, Lid! See you tomorrow!” Lidia thought she could see Peggy arch her back and push her mohair sweater closer to Danny’s cheek.

Lidia waved back at both of them and watched the car pull slowly away, until the taillights disappeared around the bend of the road. Once the dust settled back down along the curb, she turned and walked up the porch steps. But with her hand hooked into the pull of the screen door, she paused. She took a slow, deep breath and turned around. It was late, nearly ten, and she needed to pack her brother’s dinner bucket and then wake him, a challenging, tiresome process even when her mind was focused. But tonight, her mind was wandering.

To the Sugar Bowl. To the cool leather seat of Danny Pollock’s daddy’s car. To his sixteen years and deep brown eyes and easy smile. To Peggy and her sweater and second base.

She sank down on the top step of her family’s buckling porch and stared up through the clear, dark night at the countless stars. Seeking Orion, the hunter, she leaned back to watch him make his stealthy, patient way across the sky. He’d traveled some distance by the time she saw a pair of headlights glowing at the far bend of the road. They moved slowly and then came to a stop in front of her house. In the same spot as before, but facing the other direction. Danny stepped out, closing the door quietly behind him.

“I really wanted to take you home second,” he said when he got to the base of the porch.

She smiled. “Me too.”

He climbed the first step. “Did you know I’d come back?”

She thought for a moment, looked up at Orion. “No,” she said. “But I hoped.”

He took the last two steps and held out his hand. She stood, not knowing what he wanted, but deciding right then she’d give it. He was handsome, but in an unremarkable way. His interest in her — to her amazement — was obvious, but unthreatening. And she wasn’t so much excited by him as she was soothed. She put her hand into his.

He brought it to his lips and kissed it, light as a breeze, then walked backward back to his daddy’s car. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Lidia.”

“Tomorrow,” she said. And to her own infinite surprise, she kissed the tips of her fingers and blew it in his direction, a line drive to second base.

He laughed at that, reaching up fast to catch the kiss coming at him, straight out of the air.

Three hundred and thirty feet into a section just twenty feet below the surface of the earth, inside a glistening cavity worked out from between layers of slatestone, somebody laughed.

“Eagan, you can waste your day off if you want to, but there’s no sense in you registering. The United States Army ain’t gonna send no retards to Vietnam.”

Somebody else shoved the speaker hard enough to make him drop his pickax, but a round of low snickering spread among the men nonetheless.

Eagan Kielar turned red and dropped his chin. He didn’t care for people pointing out his defects. But he didn’t know what to say to them once they did.

“Shut up, Sam. He can’t help it he’s retarded. Just get back to work.”

It was still dark when Eagan’s shift ended that early-January morning. Inside his nostrils, the air was dry and sharp, and he drew it in with great heaving breaths. Each time his lungs inflated to capacity, he exhaled a steaming mouthful with an
audible huff. He sounded like an agitated bull, and with the bulk bundled into his padded jacket, he looked like one, too. Charging into the wind, he walked past neighbors’ houses with their Christmas lights still twinkling around porch posts. He paid no attention to the small group of boys on bicycles who rode toward him on their way to school, then halved, then regrouped once they’d passed him, like a school of striped rainbow trout in New Creek. He didn’t hear the random bark of a dog, or the gritty rumble of a pickup truck engine, or the shouts of mothers calling goodbye to their children.

When he got to his own house, Eagan pulled open the screen and pushed open the door, which he then forgot to shut behind him. The screen crashed shut against the frame and he stood there inside it, his hands hanging thick and heavy against his thighs. He glanced around at the familiar room: the polished grandfather clock, the yellow tweed couch with worn armrests, the floral wallpaper. The smell of bacon and cabbage that clung to everything. He felt better here.

“Eagan, you can’t leave the door open like that,” Lidia said as she walked into the living room, wiping her hands on her apron. She pulled him farther inside, then closed the door with an efficient push. “Here, take off your jacket. Your breakfast’s almost ready.” Reaching up, not quite on tiptoe but almost, she tried to help him. “Let’s get you into your bath.”

He remained still, not responding to her familiar, gentle, busy movements, her small hands on his shoulders trying to work off his coat. He stared at the grandfather clock against the wall next to the faded picture of his parents from their high school prom, which listed slightly to one side.

“Come on, Eagan, help me. Get this off and go upstairs. What’s the matter with you?”

The edge in her voice pulled him out of his thoughts, and he twisted his upper body quickly, a bull shrugging off a fly.
“Nothing’sa matter with me,” he said. His voice sounded too small for his bearded mouth. His eyes looked too weary for his youthful face.

“Okay, then. Come on.”

Dutifully he followed her up the carpeted stairs that creaked under his weight with each step. She was already bent over the edge of the claw-foot bathtub, plugging in the stopper and filling it with hot water when he made it to the bathroom. She stood up and blew a few strands of hair off her face and wiped her hands again on her apron, a practiced move for someone so young. At the sight of him standing limp in the doorway, she put her hands on her hips.

“Eagan, take off your jacket, please, and get into the bath.”

“Sam called me a retard.”

“What?” she asked, only mildly surprised. She stepped forward to help him undress. “When did he say that?”

“Today. Underground. He said I was too stupid to join the army.”

“Oh, Eagan. I’m sure he didn’t mean it.” She lifted his left arm and pulled it out of his sleeve, then his right, then folded the jacket in half and laid it over the edge of the sink.

“He did. He said I was stupid.”

“You’re not stupid.” Starting at the top, she unbuttoned his flannel shirt. “You’re just … different.” She patted him on the chest, then knelt down to check the water temperature. Too cold. She twisted the tap with the H on its porcelain button and dragged her hand through the tub in figure eights to blend the rush of hot water. He was silent as he finally stripped off his coal-stained work clothes, dropping them item by item in a heap on the floor.

“Get in.”

Stepping inside, he shuffled one foot, watched the wake it created. She sighed at the pile of clothes, then gathered it up.

He was barely audible over the water. “I don’t want to be different.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being different,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. With her free hand, she pulled a clean towel off the hook by the door and laid it across the toilet seat. “I’m going to get your breakfast ready so don’t dilly-dally up here. I have to get going or I’m going to be late.”

He kicked once at the water, sending an arc of it out of the tub and onto the tile grid of the floor. “I can get my own breakfast. I’m not a baby. You don’t have to treat me like a baby. I’m a grown-up man.”

“Yes, Eagan, I know you’re a grown man. Now I’m going on downstairs. Hurry up.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” The pitch of his voice went up. “I’m a grown-up man! You don’t believe me? Look.” He pointed to his exposed male parts, as if she hadn’t seen them a thousand times before, and kicked another spray of water onto the floor.

“Eagan, stop it! Look what you’re doing!” Lidia grabbed the towel off the seat and was about to toss it down to absorb the puddle when Eagan reached out to take it from her. But being twice her size and standing at an even greater height inside the bathtub, he pulled her off balance and sent her sprawling backward instead. She landed on her backside, her feet splayed, her apron and the nightgown she still had on underneath it hiked up. She stared at him with her mouth open like a doll propped up by rigid arms.

“You don’t think I’m a man!” His normally docile face went red and wrinkled with anger, his big hands clenching into white-edged fists, his chest heaving up and down with every breath.

Lidia remained where she fell, mouth still open and eyes wide, until she saw the undeniable and increasing evidence of Eagan’s manhood. Pointing first at the floor in front of her, it
quickly aimed itself like an accusing finger up her uncovered legs and her lap and then at her own heaving chest.

“Eagan, no.” She kept her eyes on his, pushed herself a foot or so backward toward the door. A hot rip of pain across her tailbone made her cry out. “No!”

He stepped out of the tub and moved toward her, but there was no compassion in his approach. His eyes went black, sharp and dull at the same time. He lunged down, collapsing on her as she fell back again under his weight.

“Stop! Stop!” But he did not. He grabbed the top hem of her white panties and yanked them down, not all the way, but far enough, the tiny pink satin bow mashed into her thigh. She kicked and twisted under him, but he was too big and too angry. “No!”

“I’m not a baby! I’m a man and I’ll show you I’m a man, and you’ll never call me a retard again. You’ll never call me stupid ever ever again.” He shoved her down, kicking her legs apart and clamping them to the slippery tile floor with his own. He pushed himself into her. In that searing moment, she became still. Too shocked even to cry, she lay in submission for those few eternal seconds until he finished.

Another few seconds passed while he lay unmoving on top of her. She looked at the pipe snaking out from beneath the sink and entering the wall behind it. It seemed to be leaking. A sour-looking stain sweated through the wallpaper. She would have to call the plumber.

Eagan pushed himself off her. He brought his hands to his mouth and she could see that the ebony glaze in his hazel eyes was gone. Now it was his turn to stare wide-eyed at her as his face rearranged itself. He let go a piercing yelp, the sound a puppy would make if its tail had been crushed, and he bit into the back of one hand. His eyes filled with tears and he shook his head.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said, his voice quaking. He scrambled backward across the wet floor, dragging his limp-again weapon like a tail, and wedged himself in the too-small space between the bathtub and the toilet. He began to rock back and forth, back and forth, hitting the wall each time. “I’m sorry, Lidie. Please don’t tell? Please don’t tell?”

Lidia sat up, wincing at the pain from her initial fall and at the burning sensation between her legs. While Eagan begged her forgiveness, she peeled the ripped panties off and balled them up. She stood weakly but calmly up, and straightened her nightgown and the apron over it, the paisley one that had been her mother’s. Pushing her hair off her expressionless face, she looked down at the slick floor and saw a runnel of blood flowing to meet the spilled bathwater. Eagan’s plea was a run-on susurration: “Please don’t tell please don’t tell please don’t tell …”