Two rivers of light spilled into the darkness, dancing a duet down the driveway. The boys had arrived. She hated poker night. Or rather, she hated how Bobby dissolved into the alcohol. How it released a cruelness in him that she otherwise seldom saw. She scraped her supper into the garbage and went into the adjoining porch, watching through the darkened window as they pulled to a stop beside Bobby’s truck. A comical site, they would have made her laugh if she’d been able to. Years ago, they had all fit comfortably into the truck, but the passing of time had slowly swollen them into puffy balloons, pressing against the doors and windows of the truck until it looked like it would burst from the pressure. Opening the doors, they oozed out into the night, completely oblivious of how ridiculous they had become.
John Jr. was the first one through the porch door. Cuddling a case of Old Style and a bottle of whiskey under one arm, his bicep bulged with bold black lettering:
STAPH
,
a drunken tattoo attempt aborted when he realized halfway through that he didn’t know how to spell the girl’s name. Without bothering to knock or acknowledge Victoria, he brushed past her into the trailer. She stood quietly in the corner of the porch holding the door open for Peter and Sam. Victoria despised Peter about as much as she despised John Jr., maybe more. An insecure, fleshy lump of a man, he delighted in spurring Bobby and John Jr. forward in their pursuits of nastiness while he cleverly hung back and hid his intentions behind a baby-faced innocence. Ruled over by a tyrannical wife who constantly beat him down with a barrage of demands and complaints, he reveled in the one night a week she allowed him to go out with the boys. But it wasn’t for Peter that she held open the door, but rather for Sam, who as usual, had stopped on the stairs outside to take off his filthy work boots.
Sam Billyboy was a massive boulder of a man who wore his long hair suppressed in a thick black braid that tied him to his native ancestry. A mountain of muscle, his strength was legendary. In his youth, he’d been a rough and rowdy street fighter and had routinely displaced anyone simple-headed enough to challenge him. Just short of his twenty-eighth birthday, however, he’d developed an intolerance to the liquor that fueled the fire of his fighting and was forced to give it up. As the alcohol evaporated from his life so did his anger, and he mellowed into a Goliath of a man with a heart soft as a kitten’s purr. But local legends live a life of their own in a small town, and even though he hadn’t lifted a combative fist for years, he still had young boys gaze at him with awe when he happened by. He lowered his head as he stepped through the doorway, smiled shyly at Victoria.
“Hi, Vic. How’s it going?”
“Pretty good, I guess, how about you?”
“Yup, not too bad. Working lots, but I guess that’s good.”
“You should bring your boots in, Sam. It’s freezing out tonight.”
“Oh, no. They’re okay out there. They’re really muddy.”
“You sure?” she asked again, noticing the mud hadn’t stopped anyone else from clomping on in.
“Ya, I don’t want to make a—” he started as JJ’s voice thundered through and ordered him to quit yakking with the women and sit down so they could play cards.
“Hey, Petey. It was good of your mama to let you come out to play, must have been a good boy this week, hey?” Bobby boomed.
“Was ya a good boy, Petey? Did she let you have all your allowance to lose this time?” John Jr. added, not wanting to be outdone.
Peter flushed flamingo pink, an embarrassed smile jumping on and off his face as he attempted to defend himself.
“Ahh . . . get lost you guys, I don’t get no allowance.”
“No shit, really?” Bobby shot back with mock seriousness. “What does she do? Pay you for your services?”
A howl of laughter and then John Jr. struck. “No wonder you never have any money!”
Harsh laughter pounded the walls of the trailer, Peter’s voice twice as loud and twice as shrill in the desperate attempt to prove himself part of the joke rather than the butt of it. The party had begun. Victoria quickly removed the dishes into the sink and wiped the table. Bobby and Peter had already started sucking their beers while John Jr. slowly filled his glass with a poison that could have come straight from his own heart. As the cards and insults were dealt around the table, she removed herself to the relative safety of the living room, pulled the rocker away from the wall and, her back against them, sat down facing the window. Some Saturday evenings she would read or knit, but mostly she just kept the light off and rocked, staring out into the blackness that surrounded the trailer, semi-aware of volley after volley of insulting innuendoes.
Tonight, however, she would busy herself with the task at hand. She reached down beside the chair and pulled up a floppy white plastic bag, dumped its contents onto her lap and began to sort through it. The pastel balls yielded softly to the light pressure of her hand as she stroked them, each one reveling in her pleasure like lazy cats. Eventually she settled on the gentle yellow one and put the rest away. Soon she was enveloped by the soothing click, click, click of her knitting needles as they chatted their way through another baby sweater. It was the eighth one she would give to Diana, each one made and delivered with meticulous care. The first one she’d made was actually for herself, although that too was a secret that remained buried deep in her heart. But as time had worn onward, it had become clear that the only use the little sweater would ever get would be wrapping other peoples’ precious little bundles. As it became obvious that they would never produce a legacy of themselves, Bobby had become adamant that it was because of her failure and not his own. He had no reason to believe that that she knew of, no tests had ever been done. Gradually it became common knowledge throughout the valley that Victoria was barren, and before long it had crystallized into a fact.
She stopped her knitting and wiped her eyes, dismayed to find them spilling hot tears, alarmed at the prospect of being seen—the perfect target—by JJ or Petey. Once she’d made the mistake of trying to defend herself after John Jr. had taken a shot at her with one of his one-liner backhands. Instantly she’d found herself drawn into their carnage, verbally pummeled and beaten until she’d fled into the bedroom in tears, Bobby’s approving laughter chasing her as she ran. She could not risk them seeing her tears, a magnet that would draw them to her pain like vultures to carrion.
Her hands tenderly smoothed the partially formed sweater that nestled in her lap.
It would have been the perfect sweater for her baby,
she thought morosely. A partially formed sweater for a partially formed baby. Again, the tears started, and she stifled them. It wasn’t that she’d wanted the baby, certainly not at the time, anyway. Considered it something evil, cancerous, a tumor living inside her eating at her like a parasite. But after it was gone, destroyed, she had often wondered about it. Sometimes she’d even envisioned it, a little person she could create and carve to perfection in the studio of her mind. After the third month had passed with no sign of deliverance, she’d been almost immobilized by fear and disappointment and hatred. Her dance career was over; teenage mothers did not receive auditions. It was as simple as that.
And her father, once he found out, would have put her out on the street like a stray dog. Let her stay there until the rightful owner came along or some poor sap felt pity for her and took her in. Not willing to be claimed by the rightful owner and detesting even the thought of being held hostage by some over-sanctified well-doer’s pity, she chose a rushed wedding to Bobby, hoping he would never be the wiser about why their child appeared so soon before the expected date. She suspected over the years many of Hinckly’s healthy premature babies had arrived under similar circumstances. She could have saved herself the maneuvering, however; nature had its own plans. The pregnancy had signaled the end of everything for her that she held dear. And so, when she was wrenched from her sleep late one night by vicious, heathen cramps that forced her to suffocate her cries into her pillow, it was a sense of joy not sadness that filled her.
And as she’d watched the gnarled, twisted mass of bloody tissue swirl around in the bloodstained bowl, she was elated. She’d watched with tingling excitement as the crimson water had spun around and around until finally the toilet opened its greedy throat and with one swallow and a rushing gurgle devoured the whole mess. Instantly, clear water had rushed in and calmly denied any memory of the death that had just passed there. Her prayers had been answered. She’d been set free. But the answer had come too late and, now married to Bobby, freedom was more elusive than it had ever been.
She’d never seen any reason to tell him. The miscarriage saved her the profound indiscretion of joyously informing him she was pregnant with his child. But when, later on, he’d made such a point of blaming her for their inability to conceive, going so far as to allude that he and not Diana’s husband had really fathered Diana’s first child, she would have loved to throw the truth in his face. Would have loved to remind him of what the doctor had said regarding his childhood bout with the mumps and possible low sperm count as a result of it. But she knew it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Bobby believed what he chose to believe, and the truth rarely stood in his way.
The now drunken voices in the next room rose upward and outward, riding along the ceiling until they consumed every inch of the trailer.
“Oh yeah, shit. I knows who ya means. That broad with the—” An adolescent gesture earned Bobby an ovation of laughter. “Forget it, you peckerhead. Even Bassman would have a better chance at her slot than you.”
“Bull-shit! That’s a bunch of bull, Bobby. She ain’t gonna let scum like that touch her. I could have her if I wanted to.”
“Yeah, so what’s the problem? Go get the bitch then, Petey. Come on, we’ll even give you a ride to town.”
“Yeah, well. Well, at least I’d know what to do with her if ya did. You wouldn’t even know, Bobby, wouldn’t know what to do even if he got the chance, would he, JJ? He wouldn’t even know, would he?” Peter hurried to get this out before somebody took him down with another jab, anxious to set John Jr. on the attack.
“Hell no, Petey, I don’t believe he would. Been a long bloody time since Bobby’s seen a set of knockers like that. Come to think of it, I heard he didn’t know what to do with the last ones he got his hands on!”
A confusion of pompous laughter joined the scraping of chairs and tables and bodies as Bobby made a lopsided lunge across the table to grab John Jr. The sobering smash of a glass meeting an undignified death cut them short for a half thought before they resumed their braying.
“Hey! Hey, Vic! We need ya in here. Stupid here dumped my drink.”
She put down her knitting and sighed. Wished she could just walk out the door. Disappear into the night. Wondered what Elliot would think if she appeared on his porch seeking refuge from this war zone of twisted mentalities. But she couldn’t do that. And even if she could, in reality they’d only shared a brief, mild flirtation. Probably no different than he’d have done with half the girls in town. Hardly a gesture that warranted throwing herself wholeheartedly at his feet; although for her the flirtation had been far from mild, and her heart had already chosen where it would be thrown.
“Hey!”
She rose from the rocker, walked into the kitchen avoiding eye contact, and surveyed the damage. Shards of glass littered the floor like geometrical chunks of ice; yellow liquid drooled its way down the paneled wall into a swampy pool on the kitchen floor. Gathering some paper towels, she began to mop up, being careful not to pierce her fingers as she swept up a soggy handful and dropped it into the garbage pail. She moved with precision and care, yet the inevitable happened, so she leapt up to the sink and ran water over her finger as the wound spouted a tiny red river.
“Here. Might as well empty this while you’re at it,” John Jr. mumbled as he thrust an overflowing ashtray onto the counter, sending stinking cigarette butts skidding into the sink and onto the floor. She watched as the stubby projectiles hit the water then bobbed amongst the dirty dishes.
“Hey, look out!” She turned just as Peter flicked his cigarette past her, off the window and into the sink, where it snarled an angry cat hiss, then drowned.
“Bobby! Hey you dumb dickhead, put some music on will ya?”
“I gotta take a leak. Vic!” He motioned her to the stereo with a toss of his head as he crashed down the hall and into the washroom, yelling back at her. “Put on some Meat Loaf, will ya?”
Under John Jr.’s orders, Petey went into the living room as soon as she’d put the tape in and cranked up the volume, their voices rising to keep afloat of the intolerable levels of a screaming rendition of “Bat Out of Hell.”
Trying to ignore the carnival behind her, Victoria stood at the sink and began picking the cigarette butts out of the water. She turned on the tap and attempted to wash the ashes and grime and filth from her soft white hands, but it seemed suddenly impossible to her that they could ever come clean and, driven by desperation, she grabbed the potato scrubber from the haze of slimy water and started frantically scrubbing the skin from her hands.
“Hey, what the hell are you doing?” Bobby’s paralyzed speech dragged out like a record set one speed too slow. “Quit wasting the friggin’ water.”
Victoria crumpled under his yell as if she’d been struck, dropped the potato scrubber and twisted shut the faucet. Appalled, she stood in the madness of noise and looked down at the destruction she’d caused to her own hands . . . by her own hands.