Josie and Jack (8 page)

“Let me go,” I hissed. I tried to pull away.

He held me harder. “I am the only person who has
ever
loved you. The only person in the entire goddamned world.”

Then he dropped his hands and stepped back. I stood trembling against the wall. He reached out and smoothed my hair down where he’d rumpled it. Then, calmly, he said, “Now let Monkey-boy in and let’s get this over with.”

He turned away without another word and left me standing there alone.

I waited until I heard him climbing the stairs. Then I opened the door. By then I had my breath back, but my hands were still shaking.

Kevin put his arms around my waist and kissed me as if he were back from the wars. I did my best to respond. “Where’s Jack?” he said as he let me go. “Wasn’t he down here?”

“He went upstairs,” I said. “He’s not feeling well.”

We went into the living room and I put the Coltrane record on, but I had trouble making conversation. I was trying to decide whether I felt too weird, whether I should plead sick, too, when Jack came in carrying a bottle of Smirnoff.

“Just came to keep an eye on the circus,” he said, his voice dripping with fake cheer.

I ignored him. Kevin’s smile was only slightly uncertain. He said, “I guess you’re the ringmaster, huh?”

“Naturally.” Jack sat down in Raeburn’s armchair. “And Josie here is the monkey handler. Hey”—as if he’d just thought of it—“I wonder what that makes you, Kevin.”

Kevin half-laughed and glanced nervously at me.

I took his hand. “Lion tamer.”

Kevin laughed again, more normally this time. “Maybe I’m the guy who gets shot out of the cannon.”

“Or the last little clown in the clown car,” Jack said.

“Yeah,” Kevin said. “Sure.”

Then we sat, the three of us, in the parlor. Jack was silent, taking shots of vodka straight from the bottle and staring at us, his green eyes hostile and intense. I rubbed my arms where he had grabbed them.

Kevin broke the silence. “Josie. Didn’t you want to show me something upstairs?”

“I’ll meet you up there,” I said.

He nodded and left. Jack and I sat and stared.

“You hurt me,” I said.

Jack took a long pull at the bottle.

“He’s waiting,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later, Kevin and I were in my bed under the covers, naked and fumbling. The things he did were clumsy and well intentioned. I think it was the first time he’d ever been naked with a girl. I didn’t ask. Jack was playing
Tristan and Isolde
at top volume in his room. The floor of my bedroom shook with each crescendo.

I thought of Jack. I thought of his strong hands and his green eyes; I thought of him fuming and rage-filled in his bedroom on the other side of the wall. If he was hurting, I was glad.

When Kevin fell back panting and sweaty, we lay without speaking for a few minutes. It was nice to lie together. Some of my fury dissipated. But the space that was left was filled with feelings that I liked even less.

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” Kevin said.

“Something is, yes.’

After a small silence, he said, “I don’t think I’d better come up here for a while.”

I shifted so that I could put my ear against his chest. I said nothing for a minute. I could hear his heartbeat hidden under the music like a secret message.

“We’ve lived here for so long,” I said. “Just me and him.”

He nodded. A drop of sweat traced its way down my back. We didn’t say anything else. Isolde wailed in the next room.

Kevin got up and began to put his clothes on. I watched him from the bed.

“I’ll walk you down,” I said when he was done, standing up. I didn’t bother to cover myself. I was shivering and sticky and I didn’t care.

At the front door, Kevin turned to me. “There’s a bonfire Friday. It’s a pep rally sort of thing. Come with me.” His words were rushed, as if he were trying to get them all out before he changed his mind.

“All right,” I said. He kissed me and left.

I went back upstairs and crawled into my clammy bed. I expected Jack, but instead I heard the music cut off, the front door slam, and the truck engine start up outside.

Jack returned hours later and woke me. He brought a bottle of wine and gave me the first sip. I’d been dreaming. I was still half asleep. He never said he was sorry for anything, and I never asked him to.

3

F
RIDAY WAS COLD
. Jack and I had been up all night so I slept most of the day. Around three I shook myself awake, left Jack—who was still sleeping—and went downstairs to make some coffee. For a long time I sat on the front porch and watched the clouds move.

At five I went back upstairs. Jack was awake now, but still in bed, smoking a cigarette and throwing darts at the dartboard that hung from his bookcase. His room was hot. When he saw me standing in the doorway, he moved his legs to make room for me at the foot of his bed.

“Open a window,” I said. “It stinks in here.”

Jack dropped the darts on his pillow and reached for the window. The sheets had been bunched under him and had left dull red lines on his back. “Raeburn home?” he said, handing me his cigarette.

“Not yet,” I answered, and we smoked in silence for a few minutes. His blond hair was thick with grease and stuck up at weird angles from his head. He looked like a rumpled lion.

“Can I borrow your leather jacket tonight?” I asked eventually.

“Why?”

“Because it’s cold.”

“You have a coat.” He threw his blanket onto the floor and stood up, rooting through a pile of clothes on the floor until he found a pair of jeans.

“Mine smells like wine.”

“So wear a lot of perfume.”

“Just let me borrow it, okay?”

“To go to that bonfire thing?”

I nodded.

“No,” he said, pulling on a sweater.

“Why not?”

Jack took a drag from his cigarette. “Maybe I don’t want Kevin McNerny’s monkey hands all over it.” He sat down in the old armchair we’d dragged down from the attic and watched me. His eyes were steady and their full force was formidable.

Finally he spoke. “You know, Raeburn left those quadratic equations that I was supposed to do.”

“So?”

“When’s he getting home?”

“I guess six. Like always.”

“Time’s it now?”

“Five.”

My brother had a roundabout way of making a point.

“Those equations are weighing on my mind. Maybe if they were done, I’d be able to think about whether or not I wanted to let you take my jacket.” Jack picked up a half-full coffee mug, sniffed at it, and took a drink.

“How many problems are there?”

“I don’t know.” His eyes glittered. “More than you can do in an hour.”

“I hate quadratic equations.”

“I hate Kevin McNerny.” Jack stepped close to me, reached out, and brushed something off my cheek. He smelled like whiskey and stale cigarettes.

I sighed and said, “Brush your teeth.” Then I went to find my calculator.

Raeburn came home cackling and blissful. Because of the equations, I hadn’t had time to fix anything except spaghetti for dinner, but for once he didn’t seem to care.

“It’s a paradox,” he told us, and laughed. “If my enemy does something explicitly self-serving, it’s unethical; but if I do the same thing, it’s strategy. We have to make our own opportunities. The world does not deliver kindnesses.” He picked up his fork and put it down again. There was a dreamy look on his face.

“I’ve solved the Searles problem,” he said. “We’ve had the most brilliant idea, Margaret Revolt and I.” He threw down his napkin and pushed away from the table. He hadn’t eaten anything. “I believe I’ll go have a celebratory drink. I don’t suppose there’s any of my brandy left, is there?”

“Some,” Jack said.

“Excellent,” Raeburn said cheerfully. A moment later we heard the study door slam shut.

“Is Monkey-boy waiting for you?” Jack said.

“He won’t be here for another twenty minutes.”

“Then you have time to do the dishes.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Love must suffer,” Jack said. He turned around in his chair, folding his arms across its high wooden back, and watched as I carried the dirty plates to the sink.

“At least I won’t be sitting here all night listening to Raeburn describe what it will feel like when my atoms start to split,” I said as I scraped Jack’s plate into the garbage. “And I’m not in love.”

“Only fucking him, then?”

“None of your business.”

“I’d say it is.” He stood up. “I’d say it’s very much my business who you have sex with.” He pushed the chair into place and left.

When I was done with the dishes I went to my room, changed into jeans and a sweater, and tied my hair into a ponytail. I used some of Crazy Mary’s left-behind lipstick and powder. Then I changed my mind about the hair, let it down again, and went to see Jack.

He had taken off his tie and was lying on his bed. “Look at you,” he said when he saw me standing at his door. “What time is the sock hop, anyway, kitten?”

I stuck my hands in my front pockets and then took them out and slid them into the back ones.

“Quit fidgeting,” Jack said.

“Come on,” I said. “I did your stupid equations.”

He didn’t move. “Take it.” He gestured toward his leather jacket, which was slung over the back of the armchair in the corner. Jack had brought the jacket home a few years earlier. It had once been black, but by the time he bought it, it had been fading to brown and was half beaten to death. Now it was three-quarters dead, but the sheepskin lining was intact and warm and it was his only prized possession. I picked it up and put it on. It was too big and smelled of old leather, cigarette smoke, and the cologne he sometimes wore. Jack’s face was completely blank.

“Jack,” I said, and stopped. I didn’t know what I was going to say, anyway.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Better get going,” he said. “You’ll be late.”

When I left, Jack was with Raeburn in the study, laughing about something. Raeburn already sounded drunk. I used the back door in the kitchen and took the path that cut straight through the woods to the main road. There was an old family cemetery back there, one or two graves. The white headstones were worn smooth and they gleamed in the fading daylight.

Kevin was waiting for me at the bottom of the driveway in his father’s car. He told me that he liked my jacket, and we drove off down the highway.

We didn’t look at each other. The engine hummed.

“I’m glad we’re doing this,” he said. “None of my friends quite believe in you.”

“I know how they feel.”

“You don’t believe in them either, huh?”

“Exactly,” I said, although he was wrong. I watched the highway roll under the front wheels.

At the next stoplight, Kevin leaned over and gave me a quick kiss. While I rode to the high school in Kevin’s father’s Pon-tiac, I was thinking of Jack and Raeburn drinking brandy in the study. I knew that if I looked through the back window I would be able to see our attic window above the trees. I told myself I wouldn’t look back, but eventually I did, and there it was, harmless-looking in miniature and a long way behind me, on top of the Hill.

Kevin put a hand on my knee. “You okay?” he said.

“Sure,” I said and pulled Jack’s coat closer around me.

“Good.” Kevin turned the radio up.

The high school was built over an abandoned strip mine. The main building, which sprawled around an open courtyard, was tucked onto a series of plateaus carved into the side of the hill, artificially flat stretches of land that had once held the mine’s cranes and loaders. The parking lot where Kevin left the car was at the edge of the uppermost plateau. Looking through the chainlink fence that separated us from the steep drop, I could see the tennis courts and the track spread out beneath me in the dusky valley, each on its own level with its own set of splintering railroad ties serving as steps to the levels above and below it. The air was thick with smoke and music and voices.

Kevin led me around the front of the school, to a place where there was a wide notch cut out of the half-mile or so of forest that separated the school grounds from the main highway. The bonfire was already raging in the center of the notch. The lawn between the fire and the place where we stood was choked with cars. Each car had four or five kids draped over it, soaking in the light and heat of the fire like lizards. Some of them greeted Kevin with a nod or a “What’s up?” or a “How’s it going?,” glancing at me with lazy curiosity and then looking away. Only a few stared.

“How do you like being the mystery woman?” Kevin whispered.

“Call me Mata Hari.” My hands, in Jack’s pockets, were clenched into fists.

“She is
bootifahl,”
Kevin said, in a fake accent that wasn’t French and wasn’t anything else, either. “But she is
deadlee.”
He leaned in close, grinning, a possessive arm slung around my shoulders. A kid with spiked blond hair was watching us blankly from the hood of a car.

Kevin tried to kiss my cheek.

Annoyed, I said, “Stop.”

He pulled back. “What?”

I thrust my fists deeper into the jacket pockets. “Nothing.”

“You’re nervous.”

“I’m not nervous. I’m tense. There’s a difference. ”

All this time we were walking, weaving our way toward the bonfire. Some of the cars were parked so close together that we actually had to climb over the bumpers where they touched. I could hear at least three different radio stations playing. The music was jumbled and discordant. My ankle turned in a hollow in the ground and I swore.

Kevin peered down at my foot. “You okay?”

I shook his hand away from my elbow and said, “You live in an ant swarm.”

“Relax, Josie.”

“How do you deal with this? All these people?”

He shrugged. “I’ve known some of them since kindergarten. They’re okay, most of them.” My distrust must have been written on my face, because he let go of my hand and said, “Of course, you’re probably safer back home with your psychopath brother. My friends are over there.” Before I could say anything, he was headed toward them. There was nothing for me to do but follow.