Give Me Your Heart (11 page)

Outside, all I can see of the early-evening sky is massive bruise-colored clouds. Still there is heat lightning way in the distance.

“Here y’are, Ann’slee. Shouldna been so scared.”

Croke tosses the Cougars T-shirt at me. I’m so grateful for the shirt, smelly from where Croke wiped his sweaty face with it, I’m stammering, “Thank you!”

There is a break in what the guys are doing, I can feel it. Or maybe they’ve been waiting for Ann’slee to emerge from the bathroom, uncertain what they would do with me, or whether
they would do anything with me: like turning a card, possibly. It just might be the card that makes you win big, or it might be the card that assures you will lose. It might be a card that will
mean nothing in your life. Or everything. It might even be a card you won’t need to request—the card will come flying at you.

Now I’m wearing my Cougars T-shirt over my swimsuit top again, I am not feeling so exposed. It’s a baggy shirt, coming down practically to my thighs.

I will pretend I haven’t heard Deek. How he’s staring at me with a loose wet smile, running the tip of his tongue around his lips.

Things a guy can do. You don’t want to know.

My heart is beating hard, hidden inside the T-shirt. My voice is calm-sounding, telling the guys, “There’s other kinds of stripping, not just taking off clothes. There’s this
card game we play called truth—you ever heard of truth?”

“Truth? Some kids’ game? No.”

I’m a little distance from the nearest of them, who happens to be Heins. The way I’m standing is to let them know that I am not going to make a run for the front door as I tried to
do earlier; I am not panicked now, or desperate. I am smiling at them, the way a girl might. I am trying to smile. The heat pumping off these guys is a sex-heat so palpable you can feel it yards
away. Like the charged air before a storm. I don’t want to think it’s the dogs’ instinct to lunge, tear with their teeth, they can’t help it.

I tell the guys maybe we can play truth. “It’s a little like poker, except you don’t bet money, instead of paying a bet you pay in truth. There’s high cards and low cards
and a joker that’s wild. If you lose, you reveal a truth about yourself that nobody else knows.”

Nobody seems very interested in learning this game, I can see. Deek says disdainfully, “How’d you know what a person said was true? Any old bullshit, how’d you know?”

“You would want to tell the truth—wouldn’t you? If it was the right time.”

Croke says,
“You
tell us, li’l dude. Make up for how you been acting, like you’re scared of us.”

Quickly I say, “I’m not scared of you! I love being here, coming across the lake on Deek’s boat . . . There’s nobody I know has a boat like Deek’s.”

At this, Deek smiles. Then the smile freezes.

“You bullshittin’ me, babe? Wantin’ a ride back acrost the lake, that’s it?”

No! I’m smiling at Deek, keeping my distance from him. Between us there is Heins, slouched at the table, idly shuffling the pack of cards. I tell Deek I wouldn’t lie ever, not to him
and his friends. I would tell only the truth, which is stripping the soul.

Jax shoves a chair out for me beside him at the table. So I sit down. There’s a little distance between Deek and me. One of the guys has opened an ale for me; I will pretend to sip.

I’m not drunk now—am I?

Drawing a deep breath. This truth I have to reveal.

“Two years ago this August, my father was driving back with me from his cousin’s place down in Cattaraugus, this town called Salamanca on the Allegheny River. It was just him and me,
not my mother or my brother Jacky. Driving back to Strykersville from Salamanca and Daddy wants to stop at a tavern in this place outside Java. Daddy was living away from us then, like he does now,
and this was my weekend to be with him. At the tavern, which was on a lake where people had rowboats and canoes, Daddy bought me some root beer and french fries, and I was sitting at a picnic table
while Daddy was inside at the bar. There were kids in the park, people were grilling hamburgers and steaks, some girls playing badminton asked me if I’d like to play with them, so I did, but
after a while they went away and I was by myself and thought that I would walk around the lake. It wasn’t a big lake like Wolf’s Head, and I thought that if I walked fast, I would get
back before Daddy came out of the tavern. But the path around the lake wasn’t always right beside the lake and was sort of overgrown, so I wasn’t sure if I should keep going or turn
back. I was worried that Daddy would come out of the tavern before I got back and see I wasn’t there and be anxious. These years he’d been away, at Follette, he’d got so he
worried about things more, like his family, he said, he’d had a lot of time to think—”

Deek interrupts: “Follette? That’s where your father was?”

“Yes.”

Not like I am ashamed, just this is a fact: Daddy served four years of a nine-year sentence for aggravated assault and was released on parole for good behavior when I was eleven years old.
Follette is the men’s maximum-security prison up north at the Canadian border, the facility in the New York State prison system where nobody wants to go.

The guys’ eyes are on me now. The guys are listening, and I continue with the story, which is a true story I have never told any living soul before this evening.

“So I’m hoping that I am not lost, I’m on a kind of woodchip trail and there’s a parking lot nearby and a restroom, I’m thinking that I can use the women’s
room, except out of the little building there comes this man zipping up his trousers and he’s seeing me, he’s in these rumpled old clothes and his face is boiled-looking and hair
sticking up around his head, older than my daddy, I think, and he’s coming right at me, saying, ‘H’lo, honey, are you alone way out here?’ and I tell him no, my daddy is
right close by, so he looks at the parking lot but there’s no cars there, but he says, ‘Well! Too bad, this time’—I think that’s what he said, he might’ve been
talking to himself.

“I wasn’t listening and walked away fast. And I waited for him to go away and I thought he did and I went inside the women’s room which was hard to see in, there wasn’t
any light and the sun was about setting, and I’m inside one of the toilet stalls, and there’s a scratching noise, and this guy—it must be this guy—has followed me into the
women’s room! Where a man is not ever supposed to be! He’s poking a tree branch beneath the stall door, to scare me, saying, ‘Li’l girl, d’you need help? Need help in
there? Wiping your li’l bottom? I can wipe, and I can lick. I’m real good at that.’ I’m so scared I am crying. I tell the man Go away please go away and leave me alone, my
daddy is waiting for me, and he’s laughing, telling me the kinds of things he was going to do to me, things he’d done to girls that the girls had ‘liked real well’ and
nobody would know, not even my daddy. But there was a car pulling up outside, and a woman comes into the restroom with a little girl, so the man runs out, and when I come outside he’s gone,
or anyway I think he’s gone. The woman says to me, ‘Was that man bothering you? D’you want a ride with me?’ and I said no, I was going back to my daddy’s car and would
wait for him there. Why I told the woman this, I don’t know. I thought that the man was gone. I headed back to the tavern the way I’d been coming. Now the sun is setting, it’s
getting dark. I’m walking fast, and I’m running, and there’s the man with the boiled-looking face, almost I don’t see him squatting by the path, he’s got a rope in his
hands, a rope maybe two feet long stretched between his hands he’s holding up for me to see, so I panic and run the other way, back to the parking lot, and the man calls after me,
‘Li’l girl! Don’t be afraid, li’l girl, your daddy sent me for you!’ Things like that he was saying. I found a place to hide by some picnic tables, and for a long
time, maybe twenty minutes, the man is looking for me, calling, ‘Li’l girl!’ He knows that I am there somewhere, but it’s getting dark, and then there’s headlights, a
car is bumping up a lane into the parking lot, and I can’t believe it, it’s my daddy. Just taking a chance he’d find me, Daddy would say afterward, that I’d be on this side
of the lake—he’d asked people if they had seen me and somebody had and he’d come to the right place, at just the right time. He caught sight of the man with the boiled face. I
told Daddy how he’d been following me and saying things to me, wanting to tie me up with a rope, and Daddy runs after him and catches him. The man is limping and can’t hardly run at
all, and Daddy starts hitting him with his fists, not even saying anything but real quiet—Daddy does things real quiet. It’s the man who is crying out, begging for Daddy to stop, but
Daddy can’t stop, Daddy won’t stop until it’s over . . . Daddy says when a man uses his fists it’s self-defense. Fists or feet, nobody can dispute
‘self-defense.’ Use a deadly weapon, like a tire iron—like Daddy used fighting another man in Strykersville, which got him arrested and sent to Follette—and you’re in
serious trouble, but just your fists and your feet, no. What Daddy did to that man who’d wanted to tie me up and hurt me, I didn’t see. I did not see. I heard it, or some of it. But I
did not see. And afterward Daddy dragged him to a ravine, where there’d be water at some times of the year but was dry now, and pushed him over, and I did not see that either. And Daddy comes
back to me excited and breathing hard and his knuckles are skinned and bleeding but Daddy doesn’t hardly notice. He grabs me and hugs me and kisses me. Daddy is so happy that I am safe.
‘You never saw a thing, honey. Did you?’ And I told Daddy no, I did not, and that was the truth.”

Listening to my story, the guys have gotten quiet. Even Deek is sitting very still, listening to me. The look on his face, like he’s waiting to laugh at me, bare his glistening teeth at me
in a mock-grin, is gone. Fresh-opened cans of Black Horse Ale on the table the guys have not been drinking. Must be they are waiting for me to continue. But my story is over.

Hadn’t known how it would end. Because I had not told it before. Even to myself, though it is a true story. I wouldn’t have known that I had the words for it. But you always have
words for a true story, I think.

I am not going to tell Deek, Jax, Croke, Heins how there was never any article in any newspaper that I saw about the man with the boiled-looking face if he’d been found in Java State Park
in that ravine. What was left of that man, if anything was left. Or maybe he’d gotten all right again, next morning crawled out of the ravine and limped away. That is a possibility. I
didn’t see, and Daddy never spoke of it afterward. Daddy drove us back to Strykersville that night. It was past midnight when we got home, and Momma was waiting up watching TV, and if
she’d meant to be angry with Daddy for keeping me out so late, by the time we got to the house she was feeling different, and kissed us both, saw that I was looking feverish and
said,
Annislee, go to bed right now, it’s hours past your bedtime.
That night Daddy stayed with Momma.

Off and on then Daddy stayed with us. Then that fall something happened between him and Momma, so Daddy moved out; that’s when he began working at the stone quarry at Sparta. But Sparta is
only about fifty miles from Strykersville, and Daddy and Momma are still married, I think.
Till death do us part
Daddy believes in, and in her heart Momma does too.

I’m smiling at these guys crowded at the battered old table in Deek’s uncle’s cottage, so close I can see their eyes, and the irises of their eyes, and as far into their souls
as I need to see. Saying, “I feel lucky—I’d like to try poker again, a few hands. I think I’m catching on now.”

Smother

Only a doll, Alva! Like you.

That’s what they told her. Their voices were a single voice.

She was very young then. It had to be 1974, because she was in second grade at Buhr Elementary School, which was the faded red-brick building set back from the busy street; she has forgotten the
name of the street and much of her life at that time but she remembers the school, she remembers a teacher who was kind to her, she remembers Rock Basin Park where the child was smothered.

This was in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. A long time ago.

Now it begins: this season of the year.

Early warm spring. Why?

Can’t sleep. Can’t concentrate. Questions put to her, can’t hear. Can’t seem to walk more than a few feet without swaying. Fear of losing her balance in some public
place, falling. Strangers’ hands on her.

It’s worse this year. Must be airborne pollen, can’t breathe.

Can’t breathe. Smother!

Is it a buried child she remembers? Or only a smothered child?

Is
it a child? Or a baby?

Only a doll, Alva. You can see.

Is it a girl? Or . . .

She’s desperate, ridiculous. Praying,
Dear God, don’t let it be a girl.

She is an adult now. She is not a child. Somehow she has become thirty-seven years old.

An orphan! Thirty-seven years.

Can’t sleep. Can’t breathe. Hurriedly dresses, leaves for the arts college. On the bus her head rattles. A man is peering at her from behind a raised newspaper,
eyes she feels crawling on her, disrobing her, poking fingers, prying open.
Cut
is a nasty word she first heard at the faded red-brick school long ago. No idea what it meant. No idea why the
older boys laughed. No idea why she ran away to hide her face. No idea why her teacher spoke so carefully to her:
Alva, have you been hurt? Alva, have you been touched?
Holding out her left
arm, where the purplish yellow bruise had blossomed in the night.

Alva pulls the cord. Next stop! Can’t breathe in the crowded bus. Eyes crawling over her like lice. She has disguised herself in swaths of muslin, like a nun, like a Muslim woman,
wrappings of saffron material, mist-colored, soiled white. And her waist-long hair that needs washing, spilling from a makeshift velvet cowl.

Alva’s long narrow bony feet. In need of washing.

Venus de Milo,
it’s been said of Alva, unclothed.