The Shore (13 page)

A baby seems a nice thing to have, one day, but even though you're not sure you want one right now, you're also not sure if you want to get rid of the one you're carrying. Even if Donnie married you now it wouldn't make people forget what they know about you, how your parents threw you out and how you've been living in sin. They need you, need someone to be better than, to point out when their own lives don't go quite
as planned, to carry the communal disdain. Getting married right now would only give them something new to talk about, as most of them can count to nine, even if they have to take their shoes off to do it. And if Donnie was going to marry you, was planning on marrying you, he would have done it by now.

The sky is softening outside, dimming at the eastern edge; the summer evenings are long. The boys have slipped through the wall, come to stand on either side of you, look at the money as you shuffle it. You want them to hold your hands, make you feel better, like how your daddy used to stroke your forehead when you had a fever, but they never do. Their eyes are all the comfort you get, but usually it's comfort enough.

As quietly as you can you slip back into the bedroom, move quickly in the tiny gap around the bed as you dress. As you close the door behind you, you don't look back at Donnie stretched out and asleep on the bed.

You head south down the edge of the highway, the walk you take to work every morning, toward Parksley and your parents' house, cross the highway just before you reach it and follow the main road into Onancock; you haven't been to Parksley since they threw you out. It's a good walk but you take it slow, breathe the soft marsh air deep into your lungs and watch the patterns the wind makes in the tops of the corn. At one time you thought that this would be your forever home, but now you're not so sure. Behind you as you walk you hear the light crunch of feet on the sandy shoulder of the road, and you know if you look back you will see the boys dogging you, the small one on the older one's shoulders, his bare feet swinging.

Stella's looks full but you know it's not busy: the post-dinner
crowd is lounging back in their chairs, sipping the dregs of coffee and toying with half-eaten slices of pie and cheesecake, not wanting to order anything else but not wanting to leave. Stella herself is behind the counter, and you grin and dig into your pocket as you cross the dining room. You think of Ellie as your only friend, but from Stella you've never gotten the judging look the other women give you.

You set a crumpled ten on the counter. “I wanted to give this back to you,” you say.

“Thank you, Izzy,” Stella answers as she puts the bill into the drawer, “but you could have waited until you came in tomorrow.”

“I'm not so sure I'll be in tomorrow, Miss Stella. My problem has gotten bigger than I thought it would.”

She gives you a long look, and you know that she's taking in the raw spots on your face from where jaw and cheekbone scraped the rough wood of the table and she's coming to her own conclusions. You don't correct her.

“Well then. I'm sorry about that, Izzy. And I want you to know that, when everything clears up, you'll still have a job here.”

She makes you wait as she packs you some sandwiches and counts out the pay she owes you, and you stand embarrassed by the counter while she does. You don't want to take charity, but you know that you need it, even with the roll of Donnie's money pressing against your thigh through the pocket of your dungarees. It's going to run out sooner or later, even though it's more money than you've ever seen in one place at a time.

The sky darkens to indigo as you walk back along the highway,
skip the turning to your own home, and continue down the gravel road toward Ellie's. You half-expect to hear her and Bo fighting, first as you step onto the crushed-shell road, then again when you cut through the grass and under the evergreens, but the only sounds are the crickets and the frogs and the rising rattle of cicadas. When you come around the corner you see the dark shape of her sitting on the stoop in front of the screened-in porch, not smoking or drinking, just leaning back and looking at the sky. You sit down on the cinderblocks next to her.

“Whatcha doing out at night like this?” you ask.

“Just getting some air,” she says, and you don't know if she's lying to you or to herself or if it's the truth.

“Took the test,” you say, short and sharp. “It was positive. Donnie wants me to get rid of it. I don't know if I'm going to.”

“So whatcha going to do?” she asks. Her eyes bulge a bit when you show her the money, and you find the look satisfies something deep inside you.

“Come with me?” you ask as you tuck it back deep in your pocket.

It's only a moment before she shakes her head.

“You'll get farther on that if you're alone. We'll just drag you down.”

“You sure?” you ask.

“You can melt away on your own. Get set up before the kid comes if you keep it, have some place to recover if you don't. Donnie will huff and puff a bit, but he'll never get off his ass to find you. Me on the other hand—” she flashes the wire ring, now dulled and dented—“if I run off, he'll hunt me to the end of the earth and bring my head back on a plate.”

“Really sure?” you ask again. You don't want to go alone.

“He hates me and he wants me and he hates that he wants me. If I stay right here I'll be fine. Besides, I don't have a big fat bankroll—we'll eat through that twice as fast, and you're the one that really needs to get out of here.”

“I want you to go with me.” As you say it you know it's urgent, it's important, and you know that she isn't going to.

“I can give you a ride to the bus station in Salisbury,” she says, and pulls herself up. “Let me get my keys.”

She holds your hand the whole ride north. Her eyes are straight ahead, she doesn't say a word, but her hand in yours is warm and firm and comforting. You lean back and grip it tighter.

At the bus station she waits as you buy a ticket—she doesn't want to know where to, so Donnie can't make her say if he comes asking—then squeezes you goodbye. Then she's gone, and you're left waiting alone on the hard metal bench in the outdoor terminal.

As you stare at the ground two forms walk into your peripheral vision, but it isn't until they sit down on either side of you, isn't until you look up, that you recognize the boys. Part of you thought that they would have stayed behind, thought that they were tied to the land, to the marsh. They look at you, and you feel a momentary pang of guilt, knowing that Cabel will be expecting you in the morning and you won't be coming. Then the little one reaches out and takes your hand, and so does the older one. Their skin is smooth and cool against yours, and for a moment you forget that no one else can see them.

Your bus comes, and you show the driver your ticket before climbing on and taking a seat near the back, and the boys follow you and settle on either side. The bus won't be leaving for a
while, but you feel too exposed outside. It's tomorrow already. Your eyes close on their own, your head rocks back against the threadbare purple headrest, but just on the edge of sleep you feel it: the hot, wet breath on your neck, fear knotting your stomach.

1991

P
ORTER
M
OUNTAIN

T
hey'd been on Porter Mountain for a day, a day and a half, before his cousin Dave showed up. Laying low, Pierce called it. Just for a while. He'd neglected to mention that his cousin would be coming to work on the fences, patch leaks in the roof, and generally get the place back in shape. The farm belonged to Pierce's disgustingly rich grandfather, and all the cousins reportedly had his permission to use it as they needed. Pierce and Becky had gone there for a few quiet weekends and clandestine afternoons, when they could afford the gas or when her parents were hovering more than usual. Becky loved the Blue Ridge Mountains, loved being out of touch and out of reach of anyone who could want to find her, but staying in a stranger's empty house had made her uncomfortable, no matter how short the visit. Pierce said that they were allowed, and she didn't think that he was lying to her, but he so often lied to himself about the things he wanted that she wasn't sure if that were the case with the farm.

Then Donnie Hammond, Pierce's dealer back home, had been arrested and Pierce suggested going to the farm as an option preferable to going to jail. She hadn't liked the idea
of using someone else's house as a place to hide from the law while living in sin, but arguing with Pierce was useless; he always brought the conversation back around to her performance in bed, and she automatically lost. So she hadn't said anything, either when he first mentioned it or while they bought groceries for the trip or on the way up the mountain. She sat over near the passenger door as they wound slowly over the rutted logging paths, her forehead pressed to the window, looking out at the trees whipping by.

It was a charming place, she had to give it that: an old-fashioned kitchen, tiny parlor, and master bedroom on the ground floor, with two little rooms like an afterthought above. The front porch looked out on a small meadow, with the mountains rising beyond it, and no neighbors within sight or holler.

On the night they arrived, they cooked bacon, eggs, and rice together over the old wood stove, almost smoking themselves out of the kitchen in their efforts to light the fire: it had become a point of honor that they not use the little electric range that sat in the corner of the kitchen. Afterward, with dirty dishes still spread across the table and grease congealing in the frying pan, Pierce pulled her to the top of the bald hill behind the house to look at the stars and the smudge of the Milky Way, and she almost forgave him. It was easy to forgive him when he had his arm around her, and it was quiet enough that she could hear his breath rasping in his lungs. They messed around a bit, up under the naked sky, but he hadn't felt like doing more. For once she didn't want to push it. The fields around the house were rented out to valley farmers for cattle grazing, and on their first visit, when Pierce had pulled her down to have sex on the dead grass in the front field, one of the bulls had smelled them and chased
her all the way up to the porch, his erection flopping almost to the ground. Pierce had joked about making her fuck it so he could make some money off the film, and she'd become acutely aware of the presence of all the bulls since.

The front bedroom and its enameled brass bed frame had been used by generations of Pritchetts, and the part of her that did not quail at the thin, stained mattress quailed at the idea that Pierce's grandparents had once spent private nights together in that bed. Pierce fell asleep almost immediately, naked except for his boxers, curled up like a dog with his smooth back radiating heat. She had tried curling around him, but there was no give in his shoulders, so she'd turned her back to him to avoid sliding into the dip in the center of the bed. There were no sheets, and it was too hot for the quilt, so Becky lay uncovered, looking at the turning stars through the slotted blinds as pinfeathers slowly worked their way through the mattress and etched into her skin.

The popgun sound of a truck door closing woke her, though Pierce only stirred and settled again, and she lay bewildered, sick in the stomach and head aching from the sunlight streaming through the cracks in the blinds, as a set of heavy footsteps clunked up the front porch. A long, bulky shadow fell across the blind, and a watery blue eye peered at her through a gap between two bent slats. She shrieked and rolled into the space between the bed and the wall, clutching her arms over her breasts. Pierce jumped up, cussing, then called out, “Thought you were getting here tomorrow,” and stumbled to unlock the front door.

They exchanged what Becky assumed to be the usual cousinly banter while she scrabbled around the room for her clothes, which were clammy and limp from the humidity of
a Virginia morning. Embarrassed and shy, she'd managed to draw out getting dressed until after they'd brought Dave's things in from his truck and ensconced them in one of the upper rooms, and began rummaging through the fridge for breakfast things. He kept looking across the table at her with curiosity while they ate, but she hadn't responded. It seemed that Pierce had told Dave as much about her as he had told her about Dave.

As she filled the cast-iron sink with hot water to wash the dishes, they discussed what had to be done around the place. The family had apparently come together some weeks before and decided Grandpa Skip, a landowning octogenarian who lived with his much younger girlfriend on a Georgia plantation and castrated his own livestock as a hobby, was simply too old to be expected to keep up with all of his far-flung properties alone, and Dave had been delegated to repair and winterize the house on Porter Mountain; Pierce had apparently volunteered to lend a hand. Becky offered to clean out the upper rooms and the attic, even though it was hotter in the house, and the cousins agreed that it was a good idea before going back to their discussion of barbed-wire fences. She stayed at the sink, soapy to the elbows, chipping burned scraps out of the bacon pan until the front door banged behind them.

The stairs were silent, which surprised her: in such an old house she expected an atmospheric creak. They'd never bothered with the upstairs, the times they'd come here before: the downstairs had always been more appealing, the narrow staircase dark and eerie. The first of the upper rooms contained nothing but a double bed draped in plastic sheeting and littered with dead ladybug husks, and Dave's suitcase, backpack, and pillow in a stack by the door. She gathered up the sheet and
discarded the ladybugs out through the crooked window. This bedstead was enameled brass too, and made her think of Victorian women mooning about in dressing gowns, holding babies and teapots and pieces of embroidery. She wondered, briefly, if anyone had ever given birth in this room, walked the floor before this window between contractions while nervous men waited below, if anyone had run up and down the stairs with boiling water and clean flannel.

The second room had two beds, side by side, with shelves above them; their middles sagged gently like the top of her grandmother's red velvet cake. The gnawed plastic sheeting that covered the beds was scattered with pellets of green rat poison. She imagined brothers and sisters holding hands across the gap at night, and 1950s TV shows with married couples gazing chastely at each other from separate beds. This room had a tiny closet, a scant two feet square, with clothes still in it: thin polyester dresses and dried-out saddle Oxfords wrapped in yellowed tissue paper. She took up and shook out the plastic on the beds and the blue quilts underneath, but the clothes she left alone; it felt like too much of a violation to move them.

Leaning out the window with one of the quilts, Becky caught sight of Pierce and Dave stapling barbed wire to fence posts. They were shirtless, Dave's movements lazy and slumped in the heat, Pierce's more angular and jerking. For a moment she had a flash to the books she had read as a little girl, about pioneer families living out in the wilderness. Her mind's eye painted a black felt hat over Pierce's rust-stained Mohawk, and she fell back into the room, giggling.

As she watched them from behind the edge of the curtain, she remembered stories Pierce had told her in those unguarded
moments right after sex, while they lay together exhausted and unable to tell where the other's limbs ended and their own began. He told her that he'd grown up in a dirt-poor, stone-dull farming community out on the water, a long, narrow island where all they did was watch corn grow and try to bang their sisters. He'd seen porn for the first time with a cousin: they'd found it in their uncle's workbench in the garage when he was six and the cousin not much older. He had so many cousins and she wasn't sure if he'd told her the name of this one. At first they'd been horrified, then curious, then had taken the magazine to the cousin's older sister, who had turned out to be a lesbian later in life but explained everything to them with solemn authority, turned the pages of the smut rag and pointed out illustrations as if she were a teacher in a biology class. This had only aroused the two boys' curiosity further, and they had tried what they saw on each other after putting the magazine back, first with their hands, and then with their mouths, taking turns back and forth until they'd achieved the promised results. The taste was odd, but the feeling was addictive. Their exploration had continued into their early teens, but they lived far apart, or as far apart as you could get on the Shore, so Pierce had taught what he knew to one or two of his best friends, the ones who could be trusted, the ones who he knew would never tell. This was all before he'd started doing things with girls, of course, and even if he'd kept at it for the first few years that he had girlfriends, well, he wasn't a faggot. A faggot fucked men, and he'd never done that, even though his cousin had once suggested that they try, just to see what real sex would feel like when girls finally stopped being icky, as the lesbian sister said they one day would.

There was a soft familiarity, a comfort, to their movements, almost like they were dancing, and Becky wondered if she was imagining it. Probably she would be suspicious no matter which cousin she saw with Pierce. It was too easy to read into a situation what you thought you would find, see light touches, tender glances, where there were none. Probably Pierce was getting in the way and screwing things up, and Dave was getting more and more annoyed; for a farm boy, Pierce couldn't do a thing with his hands, had all the manual dexterity of a rock. She went back to cleaning.

More insects came down when she shook out the folding ladder to the attic, and she swept them up before climbing into the dark under the shingles. Here the air held a weight of its own, fixing the breath in her lungs like a cork in a bottle. Humidity made it impossible to find the point where her skin ended and air began, and she slumped down for a moment as her eyes adjusted to the dirty light filtering in through the streaked window in the peak of the roof.

Piles shoved into the corners clarified into heavy steamer trunks, mounds of cloth, black plastic trash bags, jumbles of children's toys, squirrel-gnawed blankets, and cardboard boxes. Wicked roofing nails poked through the paper backing of the insulation packed between the joists, like blackened witches' fingers, and she instinctively bent into a half-crouch, even though she was beneath the peak of the roof. There was no order to the attic—it seemed that things had been thrown in piecemeal and forgotten about—so she began by clearing a space in the center in which to work. Some of the trunks were empty, and she lined them up close under the slope of the roof and began stacking the stray tools and toys into them. It made
Becky think of her mother kneeling in her and her sisters' room, sorting and re-sorting their dolls and toy food and plastic jewelry into labeled bins, every week inventing a new system, one that would finally keep them all organized.

Most of the chests were packed with clothing, even older than the pieces she had found in the closet. There were silk dressing gowns and lace bodices, high button shoes and kid gloves, white wool scarves riddled with moth holes and heavy skirts with mysterious stains. Up against the roof she uncovered a cracked full-length mirror, and for a few moments considered propping it up and trying on one or two of the old dresses, the way she and her sister had done when they were younger. None of the clothes would fit her though, made as they were for a different time and a different body type. Becky was solid, thickly muscled, breasty no matter which diet she tried, and she wasn't up for the feeling that always accompanied her attempts to try on something she liked only to find that she was just as fat as she thought. Pierce didn't say much about it, except when they were fighting, but she knew he preferred skinny girls, short girls, girls with small, perky, single-serving-sized breasts.

She couldn't see Pierce and Dave through the diamond-shaped window under the peak of the roof, but if she closed her eyes she could hear them, the rise and fall of their voices as they cursed at the barbed wire or laughed over some shared story. The window framed the mountains, purple with cloud shadows, the image marred only by the telephone line cutting through the trees at the bottom of the front meadow. The lines went right over the mountain, the trees and brush trimmed back beneath them, and for a moment she wondered what would happen if she picked up her backpack and just walked out, followed the
path of the power lines straight down the face of the mountain, stuck out her thumb by the side of the highway, went back to her parents' house in Lynchburg and refused to explain where she'd been for the past few days. Her parents would scream, and beg, and cry. The police would get involved, because Donnie would have sold Pierce out within hours of landing in custody. Donnie drove a sweet motorcycle and had a big mouth, and she was a bit surprised that he'd gone so long without being busted. He rented space for the trailer he lived in from Pierce's other grandfather on the Shore, one of those hard-luck cases Pierce said the old man was so soft for, young girlfriend and no place to go, though the girlfriend had wised up and left years ago. If Pierce went down he'd take her with him. It wasn't spiteful, it was just how he was, but after jail and community service—probably not prison for a first offense—it would all blow over. But even if she succeeded in walking away from Donnie and Pierce and their mistakes there would be other problems to deal with, problems that couldn't be plea-bargained into a few hours of picking up highway trash. And Pierce had become necessary to her, in their year or so of not exactly dating, but association. She didn't think she could actually leave like that; there were far too many things left unsaid, too many loose ends to tie up. But it was certainly a tempting idea.