Authors: Sarah Kernochan
Three nights later, when the road crew moved on to the next county, he left the waitress nothing except the memory of his ropy, sunburnt muscles, his blue, prematurely haunted eyes, and how odd he was, both insolent and shy. For his part, he would remember how she made him a man. He still held onto his misogyny, but he had discovered that a woman could be hammered down to size with the skilled use of his blunt instrument. It was almost a duty to do so: to neutralize the foe.
Inspired, he knocked up three girls back at school in quick succession. After the third request for abortion money, Ham Eddy gave up on Hoyt. Tired of raising sons, he decided to cut his losses. Though he agreed to pay for the rest of Hoyt’s education, there would be no more beyond that: the boy was hereby disinherited.
As if chastened, Hoyt immediately applied himself to his studies, and never faltered. As his years of education extended from high school to university to graduate school, his master’s degree in European literature was followed by a law degree, and Ham Eddy began to feel the prickings of fatherly pride despite himself.
Then Hoyt moved on to business school for two years, studying human resources management. Next came agricultural college, two years in animal husbandry. By now his father suspected he was being hustled. When Hoyt tried to enroll in divinity school at the age of thirty, Ham retracted his promise, cutting his son off for good.
Once again, Hoyt found himself undefined. Who was he? For all of his childhood he’d been an adjutant to his mother’s fury: a page to her rage. Then from sixteen to thirty he’d become the vengeful scholar, determined to have his old man pay through the nose for a never-ending education.
Now it was time to put his abundant knowledge to some use. He had no particular ambition. Where should he live? He was a campus rat. What attachments did he have? His male friendships were fleeting, and he had never fucked any woman long enough to fall in love. Who was he? Where did he belong?
He pictured himself hanging his attorney’s shingle in a quiet, affordable town, not too much work, plenty of time to himself to reread the classics and walk back country roads in the snow; under a canopy of green trees in the summer.
His thoughts wandered back to Graynier. For three days there, he dimly remembered, he had felt himself emerging as
something
—a man, a free working man. He remembered the smell of the leaves, the tar, the beer nuts, and his own sweat, pungent and eager; remembered a woman who lived above the bar; the excitement and anticipation as his manhood came forward to greet him.
Could he force time to yield up that moment again?
Another force was pulling him back to Graynier, one he wouldn’t have understood even if he had been aware of it. Something darker, baser, unnamable, like the suck of a bog, like a mother’s mud embrace.
Buying a small bungalow at the foot of Rowell Hill, he had started out full of enterprise. He rented an office in town for his law practice, posting his ad in the community bluebook and The
Graynier Gazette.
He introduced himself at churches, town meetings, high school sports rallies. He was handsome and magnetic—too good for the sorry little town, really. Jobs began to trickle in: a property closing here, an estate filing there.
He made the rounds of the bars, handing out his card at the Graynier Saloon, Shicker Shack, The Hut, and O’Malley’s Mare.
One night on his way home he stopped off at the Mare to chat with the owner, Russ. It was Saint Patrick’s Day; the place was crammed with singles. At one end of the bar, a trio of women wearing plastic leprechaun hats took turns shooting glances at him. At the opposite end, a small middle-aged man of Indian descent was giving a hicky to a scrawny flaccid-breasted fortyish blonde in a green sweater.
Spotting his mortgage officer across the room with a couple of cute bank tellers, Hoyt took his glass over to their table. A woman stepped in his path.
“Aren’t you gonna say hi?”
It was the hickeyed blonde in the green sweater. She was smiling broadly; he noticed a back molar was missing. She struck a challenging pose, one hand coyly covering the burst vessels on her neck. Apparently she thought this was provocative.
“I’m meeting friends,” he said.
“Aren’t we friends?” she teased. “Whoops, more than friends, I’d say.”
He remembered there was a ten in his pocket, change from the gas station. He proffered the bill. “Go have another on me,” he said, hoping to get rid of her.
Instead she roped her arms around his neck, pulling him in tight. “I can’t believe it’s you. Hoyt! You came back!”
Despite himself, the pressure of her deflated tits against his ribs woke up his dick.
The next thing he knew, she was weeping with happiness. “Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod.” She snuffled tears back up her nose, taking her hand away from the hicky to fan herself.
He looked at her wet, hope-filled eyes, the wrinkled lids powdered blue, her lips coated in some sticky petroleum product. Even through the odor of whiskey and sawdust he knew her scent. She was the waitress of his sixteenth summer.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he had known, when he moved to Graynier, that this encounter might happen. He had been content to leave it to chance, but now he wondered if he had sought it all along, wanting a reprise of the past—so that she might answer the question a second time, and show him what kind of man he was.
But he hadn’t reckoned on her aging badly.
She fumbled in the purse hanging from her shoulder, handing him a photo. “Look. Guess who!”
He glanced at the picture of a grim overweight adolescent girl. “That’s Pearl,” she said. “She’s your daughter, honey.”
He smelled bait, saw the trap. He lifted cold eyes to hers. “The hell she is.”
Her smile vanished as he thrust the photo back at her. “Hoyt, it’s Marly. Don’t you remember me?”
“No,” he lied. “Somehow you know my name, but that hardly makes us acquainted.” As she rocked back, he observed her clinically, verifying the wound. Then he flashed his handsome grin. “However, we can fix that. What’s your name again?” And smacked her lightly on the rump.
Later, leaving Marly’s bed while she slept, he stumbled over the dog in the corridor, falling against Pearl’s door. The girl, fourteen then, stuck her head out: “What the fuck?”
Hoyt apologized, barely glancing at her as he moved off.
Outside, he stood in the gray dawn light. Marly had indeed answered his question a second time. Now he knew what kind of man he was: a man who didn’t give a shit.
What was he doing here, in this town of all places? He felt suddenly that he would never leave, as if he were condemned to the spot. The hills leaned in, the sky pressed down; here he would stay.
Graynier was his home because it held his truth. He belonged here in this shithole because he was shit. He neither gave a shit about the whore he’d knocked up nor the fat kid who might or might not be his. He would go on banging Marly, now and then: it didn’t mean anything. His feelings were dead.
And, being dead, required burial. He went back in Marly’s trailer and swiped a bottle of tequila.
TURNING ON THE JETS
in the Meltzers’ steam room, Hoyt strips off his clothes. He sits on the tile banquette to sweat out the skunk odor, swigging from a bottle of Jack Meltzer’s Meursault.
The wine fails to anesthetize the pain in his neck.
Images of the accident return. The girl suddenly appears in his truck lights; he rakes the wheel to the left… the car out of nowhere…the smash. His neck in a hot noose of pain.
He curses Marly. He drinks. He curses the girl in the road. He should have pasted her to the grill. Later, he lies naked on the Meltzers’ bed, letting his body dry in the breeze from the balcony.
He imagines MOM walking in and catching him. Opening her mouth to scream. He clamps one hand over her mouth, inserting the other between her legs. His fingers find her cleft, squeezing forth the juice until she groans for release. He throws her onto the bed, straddles her, grips a fistful of her hair to hold her head steady, guiding his member to her mouth. She opens to receive it…and laughing, he empties his bladder on her face.
Hoyt’s laughter subsides. He listens to the birds outside—larks, a phoebe, a raucous jay—as he strokes himself. His penis is unresponsive, pickled from the long bender begun that gray dawn in the trailer park.
And that’s the way he wants it. Deny them the satisfaction—take away their bone! If Jack Meltzer had any sense, he’d do the same. Instead, he has to lie here just like Hoyt, awaiting the will of the Mistress of the Manor. Under the white canopy, between four posters, the swagged bed curtains like white thighs, his head in their vise, he is doomed to his cage.
Mephitis mephitis.
C
HAPTER
F
IVE
C
ollin clings to the slick obsidian rock. Foam-topped waves furl toward him, one after another and another. The sea rises like a chest filling with breath. He pounds his fists on the rock,
Let me in!
But he knows what will happen. He has been stuck in this dream before.
The rock will change into a house, and he will continue to bang on its door, screaming over the waves and wind, but the door will stay shut and he will remain locked outside.
And locked outside the dream is his body, limp as a corpse on his bed. The body’s mouth will open, and his screams escape. His mother will come into the bedroom, wake him up, and take him in her arms. And still he won’t feel safe. For days after, the memory will cling: shut out of his home, engulfed by a relentless tide, choking on water. Dying.
His silence, his wariness, his privately held terrors make him a strange child to his peers, his teachers, even to his mother and grandparents. “Seems confused, possibly has a learning disability,” the school counselor notes, sug gesting tests and meds.
But why shouldn’t he be confused? There’s the matter of his skin. As long as he has been alive, he has heard from his family: black is best. “You come from
kings
,” they say, then glance at each other, which he interprets to mean
even though you’re not actually black.
Once again, he’s locked out of the club, his cries ripped away by the wind.
Gita Poonchwalla is the first person to open a door, to make him feel he belongs. In fact, he is crucial to her plans.
“You’re the Tawny One,” she always says. “The one I’ve been waiting for.”
This morning his father wakes him from the dream, calling “Breakfast!” from downstairs. Collin still isn’t used to Brett’s voice: the flat cadence, the absence of vigor. No “Git yo’ black be-
hine
down here!” like his grandmother, or “Don’t you be missin’at
bus
now” like his mother.
His college-educated mom always switches to another voice if some white person needs handling. She can “go Webster” as she puts it, speaking in the careful, armored tones of a newscaster, her eyes going hooded if that person gets a false idea about her friendliness.
Collin wishes the whole skin thing would just fade away. Gita Poonchwalla says anything is possible through prayer, so Collin recites the “
Our Gana Mother of Fire,
” then the “
Yenu Krisnu Fills My Soul
,” as she has taught him. Then he makes a silent plea:
let Jane be gone this morning.
But when he goes down for breakfast, she’s still there.
Jane is the whitest person he has ever seen. Way past white, as if she’s from some realm where there’s no sun at all and the inhabitants produce their own eerie glow like fireflies.
Collin slides into his chair. He notes the paper towel folded like a triangle beside his plate. He smells Canadian bacon frying, French toast and coffee. Pots of different jams sit in the middle of the table.
It was never like this before Jane came. There was only the cereal box on the table, and Collin fetched his own milk, spoon, and bowl. Later his father would come yawning downstairs to open a Coke and unwrap a granola bar.
Jane lifts her eyes to Collin. “I’m still here,” she says, seeming to read his mind. Unfolding her paper towel, she smoothes it on her lap as if it’s fine linen. “Did you sleep well?”
Collin grunts, instead of saying
No I didn’t, I had nightmares ‘cause you took my room.
The day after she arrived, his dad took her upstairs to offer her the middle bedroom. “Jane is going to stay a while,” he told Collin, who was trailing them suspiciously.
“Why?”
Brett paused on the landing. “Because she needs a place to stay until she…figures things out.”
Meanwhile Jane passed the middle room without looking in. Instead, she walked right into Collin’s room.
“Hey!” Collin trotted anxiously after her.
Inside his room, Jane was turning slowly in circles, a crazy smile on her face.