Justice (16 page)

“Where are your manners, son?” Mr. Hayden asked Wesley. “Aren't you going to offer this young lady a taste?” He raised his own glass to indicate that Iris might like some bourbon.

Iris wrinkled her nose. “I wouldn't want any.”

But now Wesley had to make the offer; his father was giving him a lesson that he had to learn.

He held his glass out to Iris. “Would you like to try a sip?”

Frank lightly slapped his brother on the arm. “Maybe she wants her own glass.”

“Would you?”

Iris shook her head. “I don't even like the smell.”

“This is different,” Mr. Hayden said. “This is as good as whiskey gets.”

Iris continued to shake her head. “My dad let me take a sip of his whiskey once. It burned my throat.”

Frank said, “Your old man never had twelve-year-old bourbon like this in the house.” Frank looked over at his father so abruptly Wesley wondered if his father had kicked Frank under the table.

“You can't swallow liquor like water,” Mr. Hayden scolded. “Especially not fine whiskey like this. If you just throw it back you're not doing it justice.” He raised his glass and sipped slowly. When he took the glass away he kept his lips pursed; the whiskey was obviously still in his mouth. Then he inhaled deeply, as if swallowing whiskey was done with the nose. He licked his lips and sighed. “By God, whoever
made this knows a hell of a secret.”

Mr. Hayden looked to his sons before offering his next advice. “Now, if you're drinking the bootleg liquor you get around here, you might as well hold your nose and get it down as quick as you can. Then hope you don't go blind. Or worse.”

His father reached past Wesley and held out his own glass to Iris. “Go ahead and try some, Miss. Like I told you. Just take a small sip and roll it around in your mouth a little before you swallow.”

Iris looked at Wesley but before he could speak or register any expression, she took the tumbler from his father.

“Sure, go ahead,” Frank said. “We're not going to tell your folks.”

For Wesley's family, like most others in their part of Montana, Prohibition was something to be got around rather than observed. There were plenty of nondrinkers, but their abstinence was more likely for religious rather than legal reasons. Certainly, Sheriff Hayden made no special effort to enforce the 18th amendment unless some bootlegger tried to take undue advantage of the county's citizens. Wesley couldn't remember seeing his own mother take a drink of whiskey. She would have an occasional glass of sweet wine, and on hot summer evenings she might share her husband's beer, but hard liquor—Wesley didn't think so. He was quite sure he had never seen his father offer his mother a drink of whiskey.

Iris lifted the glass to her lips. Before she drank she said to Frank, “You
better
not tell.”

Her eyelids fluttered and almost closed. According to Mr.
Hayden's instructions, she held the liquor in her mouth for a moment, but when she swallowed it was with such noticeable effort that it seemed to take muscular strength to get the whiskey down.

Iris shuddered as if a draft from an open window had reached her. She twisted her mouth down. “Ugh!” Wesley's father and brother laughed at her reaction.

Why the act, Wesley wondered. He had seen Iris drink—wine, beer, and hard liquor—at parties. Just last summer, on a sweltering day, Wesley remembered, he and Iris had gone swimming in the Knife River, and Wesley had brought along two quarts of homemade beer. While they swam, the beer chilled in the river water. When they got out of the water, they opened both bottles, one for each of them, and Iris finished her bottle well before Wesley finished his. The ice-cold beer gave him a headache, so he gave Iris what was left in his bottle. She drank that down as quickly as she had her own. Admittedly, Wesley was not just being generous in offering her more beer.

They had been going further and further with their sexual experiments, and Wesley had a notion that perhaps that day he and Iris would actually have intercourse. The conditions seemed perfect: they were both in bathing suits, Iris was in an especially playful and affectionate mood, and perhaps with enough beer in her....

For shade and privacy they crawled up under the bridge where it was dark and cool, even on the summer's hottest day. Years of the river rising and falling, rushing and slowing, had weathered the beams and timbers of the bridge until they
felt soft to the touch. Even the boulders and concrete pilings were furred with moss. The Indians who fished the Knife River's deep holes or the fast water in the spring had cleared away the brush and arranged logs under the bridge, so it was easy to find a place to sit. Or lie down.

Wesley pushed his kisses harder and harder into Iris until she fell back under their pressure. She was still wet from their swim, and his hands slid across her skin as if she had been lubricated for his touch. Her wet hair smelled of river water and permanent wave solution.

He tried to get his hand inside the top of her bathing suit, but the angle was awkward and the wet fabric clung to her. Iris twisted away from his fumbling hands. Done for, Wesley thought. But then Iris astonished him.

She sat up straight and, with what seemed nothing more than a simple shrug of her shoulders, slipped her bathing suit down to uncover her breasts. She wriggled around until she got the suit down around her waist. Then she lay back, her torso exposed now to his sight as well as his touch.

For a moment, Wesley couldn't move. He had seen a woman's breasts before, but only in Tommy Salter's French postcards. Iris's breasts were small, and the nipples weren't much larger than pennies. Their dark skin was puckered and erect. He had felt those breasts only by reaching under layers of clothing and only in darkened rooms. For the moment he didn't want to do anything more than look at her—it was enough, it was too much—but he dimly knew that just staring was a violation of some etiquette that ruled moments like these.

He reached out for her, and as he did someone stepped onto the bridge above them. Whoever was crossing walked slowly and stayed close to the rail. When the walker came to the center of the bridge he stopped, gazing at the river below. He began to whistle a tune Wesley almost recognized. Wesley looked at Iris. She had made no move to cover herself, not with her bathing suit or her arms. In fact, she was trying not to laugh out loud.

The walker began again, and soon his steps no longer echoed on the bridge planks.

Immediately Iris stood, balanced on a rock, and jumped up to grab one of the bridge's iron cross braces. She pulled herself up until she could see above the bridge. “Who the hell was that?” she asked.

Wesley just sat there, staring at her once again, but this time with another brand of amazement. Who was this girl, hanging there, her breasts exposed to the summer air? He suddenly felt as though he didn't know her at all—could never know her. How could he have dared to put his hands all over her?

She was Iris Heil, the only girl in a family of five children. Was that how she had gained the strength to chin herself like that, from trying to keep up with her older brothers? Another disquieting thought occurred to him. Surely her brothers had seen her breasts, and perhaps so frequently she had no hesitation or shame in revealing herself to Wesley.

Still holding onto the brace, Iris lowered herself, the hard, bunched muscles in her arms and shoulders stretching and thinning. She must have seen something in Wesley's eyes
because she did not come back to him under the bridge. She pulled her bathing suit back up and adjusted its straps on her shoulders. “Are we going back in the water?” she asked.

Without waiting for his answer, she picked her way among the rocks until she was above a pool deep enough for swimmers to dive into. She leaped awkwardly, all arms and legs, and as she vanished underwater, Wesley felt as though he had a new knowledge of loss: when opportunities that will never come again slip away untouched.

In the months that followed, Wesley was haunted by the memory of that day down by the river. But the image that kept recurring wasn't of Iris in his arms but of her swinging from the bridge's cross brace like a beautiful, half-naked trapeze artist. Even in his mind she was there for him to see but not to touch.

Now, Iris put the whiskey glass back on the table and lifted her fingers to her lips as if to wipe away the bourbon's heat. “I don't see how you can drink
that
,” she said.

Wesley looked away, disgusted with Iris's hypocrisy. He glanced into the kitchen, where his mother was cleaning up after the meal. At that moment she was not working. She held a dish towel in her hands, bunched like a bouquet of coarse cloth. Wesley's mother was staring into the room where her
husband was teaching an underage woman how to drink sour mash whiskey. When Wesley's eyes and his mother's met, she turned away and went back to her work.

“It'll put hair on your chest,” Wesley's brother teased Iris. “Look out!”

“That old wives' tale,” she said and turned back to Wesley.

What was the look in her eyes? Was she asking him for help? Did she want him to take her away? Or was she enjoying the attention and did she only want him not to give her away as she pretended, for his father and brother, to be someone she was not?

“Then you better pour yourself another glass,” Wesley said to his brother. “You need all the help you can get.”

“Hey, brother. You don't want to get into a hair-counting contest. You'll lose for sure.” Frank laughed the same easy laugh that Wesley had spent hours alone trying to emulate.

Wesley pointed to Frank's glass. “You going to drink that?”

“You want to make a contest out of that, too?”

“I'm just asking.”

Mr. Hayden leaned toward Iris. “Your brothers get along like this?”

Iris wrinkled her nose the way she did after drinking the whiskey. “All the time.”

Frank waved his hand as if his brother was not worth his time or energy. Then he directed his attention back to Iris. “Pretty necklace you have there,” Frank said.

Iris smiled at Wesley. “Wesley gave it to me.”

“Is that right?” Frank moved his chair closer to Iris. “Where'd you get the good taste to pick out something
that nice, little brother?”

“Maybe you got some help from your mother, eh?” Mr. Hayden suggested.

Wesley was about to deny that he had had his mother's aid when Iris volunteered, “I might have given him a hint or two.”

A hint or two. Last year in the month before Christmas, Wesley and Iris walked downtown every day after school, ostensibly to meet their friends at Douglas's Rexall for Cokes or phosphates. But the real reason for the daily excursions, Wesley came to know, was to provide Iris with more opportunities to stop in front of the window of Hesvig's Jewelry and point out the necklace she loved and wanted so badly she was “ready to throw a rock through the window and just grab it for herself.” When he gave her the necklace for Christmas, Iris couldn't even pretend to be surprised.

“Can I get a closer look?” Frank asked Iris.

She looked down and pushed her chest out slightly but made no move to lift the necklace for Frank's inspection.

She didn't have to. Frank picked it up for himself. He did not pick it up with his thumb and index finger, as he would if he were lifting a pebble from the floor. He slid four fingers under the pendant and held the necklace in his palm.

What bothered Wesley most was the fact that Frank didn't lift the necklace from Iris's chest. He simply held it there, the gold chain and rhinestones glittering in the candlelight, and the back of his hand resting on the swell of Iris's bosom.