CHAPTER TEN

1958

How it started was just how anything else starts. Mother and Roe were at Barbara’s for lunch, and I was supposed to be watching Betty Sue, only I was watching the window instead, waiting for Charlie. I had let in the dog and was petting him on the couch. It was too cold to leave Nig outside, even though that was the rule. No dogs in the house! Roe said. What did I care? When Roe was at work Mother wouldn’t care if Nig so much as pulled up a chair and joined us for dinner.

Winter had come on overnight in a gray burst, kicking up snow and wind to blow against the house. Air made it through cracks, like pieces of glass that scraped at my skin, and the whole world groaned with loneliness. I was cold on account of wearing the skirt, because I had just stole Roe’s razor and shaved my legs and I wanted Charlie to see. It was the first time I had did this, and it didn’t go very well. I wasn’t sure of the bones and the shapes and which way you should move the blade. I cut myself in the kitchen sink, and left the spill of blood on the counter, and the drops on the floor, to show Charlie how it hurt to be beautiful.

Betty Sue waddled out in a sagging diaper. She needed a change, but I did not want any part of it. The more you changed her, the more she’d go on thinking it was just fine to do it wherever she wanted. I went on playing with Nig’s ear like I didn’t even see her. His head was asleep in my lap. “Who dhat?” she said, hiding her sticky little face behind one hand.

“If you’re not going to talk correct,” I said, “you can just quit talking altogether.”

“Who dhat?”

“You know damn well who I am.”

Nig sat up and cocked his head with one ear up and the other down, broke from being shaked too hard, and there was Charlie’s red Ford pulling in. He slammed the door and swaggered up in his leather jacket, pausing on the step like he knew himself to be watched. Betty Sue followed me to the door.

“Who dhat?” she said.

“It’s me, Charlie,” Charlie said.

“She’s playing dumb.” I took his hand.

“Maybe she’s not playing.”

I pulled his arm and drug him over to the couch and pushed him down. His leather squeaked. Then I sat beside him. There were water drops on his glasses so I took them off and cleaned them on my shirt and put them back on his squinty little face. A smile creeped up over the edge of his frown. “What?” I said.

“Damn snow on my leather.” Charlie brushed his shoulders.

“Why’d you wear it then?” I snuffled my nose in his ear.

“Quit it,” he said. “That tickles.”

I threw my bare legs up on his lap and leaned my hair back over the arm of the couch and just let it hang there. Betty Sue chased the dog into Mother and Roe’s room. Charlie ran his hand up and down my leg. I thought about saving the dog. Charlie’s fingers caught at the cut. “What happened?” he said.

“I shaved for you. Blood’s all over the kitchen.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have did that. You had better clean it up,” Charlie said. “Put on some pants.”

I took my legs off him and crossed my arms over my chest. I blew air out through my cheeks like it was a heavy burden I held to make him happy, getting heavier every minute like a snowball rolling bigger and bigger until it gets so big it could crush a person.

“Don’t be sore at me, Caril Ann,” Charlie said. He sneaked his arm around my shoulder and put his lips to my neck, and just like that I wasn’t sore. My eyes closed for the rush. “There ain’t any reason to be sore,” Charlie whispered. His voice tickled my skin. “It’s not your fault you can’t see what’s coming. I like your smell.”

“Like?” I said.

“I love your smell.”

“What do I smell like?”

“I don’t know.” He reached my hand over to his pocket. “Feel this,” he said. And I pulled out a twenty. I took it between my fingers and stretched it tight and breathed in the green smell.

“Are we going to Vegas?” I said.

“We’re going for steak.”

“It’s the middle of the day.”

“You gotta eat sometime.”

“Well, I can’t bring Betty Sue along, can I? She’ll spoil our romantic time.”

Charlie made to cover my mouth with the front of his hand. “Come on, chickie, stop your cheeping,” but I didn’t laugh. I had to eat sometime, but nobody cared about that. Only Charlie cared to do nice things for me. Mother and Roe only told me all I couldn’t do. And now Charlie and me had to sneak around because Roe went and made not seeing Charlie a rule too. It wasn’t fair.

I shrugged away. “I can’t leave the baby.”

“It ain’t your baby. Not even your full sister.”

I rolled my eyes at him to say I didn’t have time for his reasons, but inside, my heart got full for Charlie treating me like a queen.

“All right,” Charlie said, standing up and fussing with the collar of his jacket. “I’m just gonna sit and have a steak by my own self and tell the waitress I love her instead of you.” He kicked the edge of the rug with the tip of his boot.

“That’s not nice,” I said. I wanted to kiss him.

“Don’t you love me like we talked about?”

I got up and kissed him on the end of his nose. He was sad things weren’t turning out like he thought. He could be that way, like a little boy. I wanted to make it better for him. “If you let me drive, I’ll love you.” I squeezed him tight. It was a game with us, but not so much a game to me. Charlie never would let me drive. He said, for one, I would be a woman in a couple of years and everyone knew they couldn’t drive, and for two, I spent too much time goggling at him to ever look at the road. But Charlie didn’t laugh now. I could feel his arms squeeze back, and how there was a kind of sadness in the way he held on like I was the last piece of straw in a great gust of wind.

He pulled free and went to the window and got lost in staring at ice on the road. I could tell he was thinking bad thoughts about how the world wasn’t any good to him.

“Chuck,” I said.

He ran his finger on the crack and looked over his shoulder at me. “It makes me mad how they go and say I can’t see you. Who do they think I am, some no-good dumb-ass trash hauler, Caril Ann? I don’t gotta listen. And neither do you.”

“I’m not listening.” I put my arms around Charlie’s neck and buried my face in the smell of his jacket. “They never once took me for a steak,” I said into the wrinkle of it. “There’s nobody to give me steak but you.”

I went and put Betty Sue in her crib. “Be good,” I said. “Go to sleep,” but she wouldn’t quit crying. I fixed her diaper and bounced her around and made her a hat from a piece of newspaper that was laying on the floor half under the bed. I thought it was a nice thing to do and so did Betty Sue. She mashed it in her hand and pushed it down over her eyes and popped her finger in her mouth and stood watching me through the bars of the crib. “Don’t say anything,” I whispered, and closed the door real soft like I was trying not to wake her up.

I could see Charlie through the window, already outside, sitting up on the hood of his car and waiting for me to come along. He tapped his foot on the fender and hugged himself for the cold. Everything, as far as I could see from the window, was gray and dead. The neighbor’s house covered in plastic to keep out the wind, the rusted out icebox, the no-good tire laying out front under a hunk of snow. Charlie’s hair was the only brightness I could find and I followed it out, like a glint of light in a dark cave. You have to take good things like lights in the dark and steak when they come your way.

Charlie opened the passenger door for me, but I shrugged up my shoulders like I didn’t even see. I walked around to the driver seat and slid myself in behind the wheel.

“We’re not going anywhere like that,” Charlie said.

“Give me the keys.”

“You’re fourteen. You ain’t allowed to drive.”

“So? I’m not allowed to see you either.”

“It’s different,” he said.

“Who do you think I am? Don’t you trust me?” I pressed my foot up and down on the pedal.

“You want steak or not?” Charlie looked hard at the ground ’cause he couldn’t look at me. “Move over or don’t move over.”

“I won’t,” I said, but I slid over anyway ’cause I had already decided to go, and I was hungry, besides. What else was there to do? Charlie could be this way when it came to cars. He was the only one at Capital Race Track who wouldn’t bow down. Still, I thought he should bow down to me.

He put his hand on my knee and said he was sorry, and I forgot in the meantime about how he didn’t trust me and how in that case it couldn’t be love.

*   *   *

Charlie said he liked how the waitress treated him respectful, not even asking him for so much as proof when he ordered a beer despite of sitting across from a baby like me. I brought him down, he said. I made him look fifteen even though he was really nineteen, but I also made him look lucky. What I really wanted to say was You look young ’cause you’re barely pushing five-foot-four. But I bit my tongue and pretended to smile. I understood all the things that could be said but shouldn’t. You should love someone for all that they are, even the weak parts. I was trying my best. I just sat there sipping pop, staring out the window of Hanger’s. A lady bundled up good tucked her little girl into the backseat of a car, and across the way black bags stuck over the gas pumps blew in the wind.

There was a light on a chain over our table with a shade made out of dark glass, and it cast Charlie’s hair in a glow. I squinted my eyes so his hair was like fire, not the hard kind of fire but the kind that would melt my heart. I ate a steak the size of my head, and the bread kept on coming so I ate that too. “I’m fat up to here,” I said, putting my hand to my throat.

“You couldn’t ever be,” Charlie said. “You’re so tiny, that steak would break you clear in two before it made you fat.”

I rolled my eyes and ordered a slice of fudge cake with whip cream on top. Charlie got another beer. I closed my eyes for the sweetness of the dessert. I made the whip cream into shapes and a tower. “I could eat this forever until I floated away,” I said.

“No, you couldn’t.” Charlie stared at me like there was a piece of chocolate stuck on the corner of my mouth. “You couldn’t die from eating whip cream.”

“Who said anything about dying?”

“You said floating.” Charlie shrugged like that was answer enough and leaned his head back on the red leather bench. “I wish I had twenties around all the time so I could spend every last one on you.” He took a sip of beer and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he was smiling. “Caril?”

“What?”

“If you wanted something bad enough, I’d spend the night in the gutter for it. I’d do whatever.”

“Don’t sleep in the gutter, Chuck,” I said. “Don’t be crazy,” and all of a sudden I did not want to ask where he had got this first twenty.

“I’m not crazy,” Charlie said. “I love you.”

I thought about Betty Sue with her leg stuck half over the crib with trying to climb out, and how she could fall that way and hit her head on the floor, and how everything would be my fault for not watching her right.

I pushed the rest of the cake away. “If you loved me, you’d let me drive your car, but you don’t. You don’t trust me.”

Charlie looked at me like I’d slapped him clear across the face. His cheeks went red. Maybe it was from the beer. Then he reached in his pocket. “I do too love you,” he said, and he gave me the keys. “It ain’t right to let you drive my wheels, though, so don’t tell. Everyone’d call me a pansy.”

“You’re not a pansy, Chuck. I love you,” I said. “I love you more than Frankie Avalon. I love you more than the whole wide world.” And I jingled the keys around my finger with a bright silver sound.

*   *   *

I made a left turn out of hanger’s, and went real careful down O Street, barely poking my foot to the pedal. There were not so very many cars on the road, and no one was coming, so I went straight through a stop sign. It didn’t make any sense, but Charlie got mad. “You gotta stop anyhow,” he said.

“How come?”

“They’ll throw you in jail.”

“Who?” I said. “I don’t see anyone.”

“They come out of wherever and bust you up.”

“OK,” I said, checking the mirror.

The gas and the brakes and the wheel. That was all there was to it. The metal on metal, and all the simple things you did that made everything come out right on the road. It was a wonder how something so filled up with power could be so easy. I felt the wheel and the way the sounds from the engine jiggled up through my arms and into my jaw and tossed my teeth together like flints. For a minute I did not think to look at Charlie beside me. I was too busy looking at the road. But I could tell he was nervous. There was a string of tenseness and I could feel it twang. I didn’t need to look. Soon we left the buildings behind, and I kicked it in and barreled out of town. I rolled down the window so I could feel the wind rip my hair, but it was too cold, so I had to roll it back up, and when I leaned over, the car leaned too. “Watch it!” Charlie said.

“Can we turn down that road where they found the body?”

“What for?” Charlie said, leaning forward to play with the radio. But it was more commercials, so he gave up and shut it off.

“So I could practice driving more.”

“There isn’t time. I got a mind to do some hunting before your folks come back,” Charlie said, and I knew he meant to kill some of the rabbits who lived out in a pile of logs under the cottonwoods.

“Please don’t kill the rabbits,” I said.

“I’ll only get one.”

“What if it’s married?”

“Rabbits don’t get married,” Charlie said, and kissed me on the cheek. I pressed my foot to the floor, but a blue truck with one headlight was coming the other way, and I slowed down on account of the road looking tight. The tires squealed over a crust of ice and it all fell out from under me like that half-broke chair in school when my skirt went up and everyone laughed. The truck stopped. The road wheezed and the wheel shook and Charlie was yelling at me not to brake, but I broke anyway, and it was the last choice I ever made.