Piper (24 page)

He'd missed one set of eyelets in his right shoe and I bent over to restring it. “To get back at what he did to Mom. You bet.”

He rubbed his pants thoughtfully, but I had no idea how much of this was sticking.

About a week before Carlisle's trial, Rozene was peeling an orange in the cafeteria, trying to take it off as a single, contiguous skin when Bagmore came by. I'd never seen him pay any attention to her.

“You want to go for a walk?” He was standing over her, and I knew he was trying to see down her blouse. I was sitting kitty-corner across the table from them, finishing a chili dog I'd bought from the snack bar. Sauce was dripping down my chin.

“I have to work on a history assignment with Piper,” she told him, which was news to me, but I played along and mumbled my assent through a mouthful of warm frankfurter. One thing I could say in Bagmore's favor: his radar was good. He'd picked up on something between me and Rozene and he seemed determined to jam it. Maybe I was flattering myself, but the way he went about it made me think he was doing it to spite me for dissing him in the storage locker.

The fantasy in my diary that night took off from Rozene's orange peel, which I had saved and reshaped into a perfect ball that carried the indentations of her fingernails. When I put it against my nose, I could smell her. When I cupped it in my palms, I imagined that it was one of her breasts. On the blanket I created in the privacy of my diary, we laughed about the orange and I pulled her hands against my cheeks and smelled the sweetness of pulp in the tips of her fingers and, in this way, anchored my fantasy with one shred of reality.

I was interrupted by Dirk's phone call. I'd tried several times to get past Colonel Thurgood, but he'd tightened security, saying nobody was supposed to talk to him because of the trial. Dirk wanted to meet at the billboard, which, compared to my fantasy, wasn't particularly attractive at that moment. He was practically whispering.

“I wouldn't ask you if it wasn't important.”

“Is your dad trying to screw you over again?”

“You've got part of it right.”

I was the first one to arrive and worked my way up the braces, sniffing like a dog to see if anyone else had used it since we were there last. The thin frost that had formed on the planks soaked through my jeans when I sat down. I pulled the collar of my jacket up around my neck and wished I'd grabbed one of the knit pullover hats from the top shelf in our closet on the way out the door. Even though I'd stopped shaving my head since the day Rozene and I sat in her car under the flight path at Harvey Field, growth was slow and it still felt cold. Dad told me that a person lost a third of their body heat through the head and a third through the feet, conjuring in my mind the picture of someone lost in the woods trying to stave off hypothermia with nothing on but a hat and a pair of wool socks. His theory strained credulity, the way a lot of things he'd been saying lately did.

Sitting in the billboards was such a throwback to the days when Dirk and I had to make up problems to solve. Now they were coming at us like a meteor shower. I was glad I had a few minutes to switch gears. I'd let my fight with Dad blot out everyone else's problems. Dirk had never given me any details, except to say that Carlisle used to sometimes insist he “take a tub” with him when he'd finished mowing the lawn or cleaning leaves out of the rain gutters. I'd wondered if they wore swimsuits. Maybe he'd gotten him in the shower next to the Jacuzzi while they were rinsing off the chlorine. Maybe he hadn't entered him at all, and it was all fingers and fondling.
Ugh
. I gathered up the saliva off the inside walls of my cheeks and spit, watching it disperse into a scattershot that rained down between the supports.

“What're you doing?” Dirk was on the crossbars below me.

“Sorry, I forgot you were coming.”

He moved easily up the incline with his tennis shoes, balancing himself with hand-over-hand action along the supports over his head. When he stood on the platform in front of me, his Chicago Bulls jacket seemed baggy. He looked twenty pounds lighter than when I'd seen him last. I'd always imagined Dirk as someone who would become obese when he got out of school and lived a regular life. In his cutoffs, I could see definition in the silhouette of his calves. The field stubble on his face had become a scraggly chin beard. “You're wasting away,” I said.

He held up his arms and puffed his chest. Where the jacket lifted, his stomach was a memory of its former self. “I'm fasting.”

“Fasting?”

“Ramadan.” It wasn't Ramadan, I thought, it was the thrill of impersonation. Anything was better than being Colonel Thurgood's son. Dirk could be Bogart one week, Hawkeye the next. Why not a follower of Muhammad?

I waited while he fished a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit up. What the match illuminated was an oval of tension: squinty eyes, cheeks hollowed like a giraffe's, and rapid blinking. He tilted his head back and held onto the first inhalation, sucking it dry of nicotine, then released it out the side of his mouth like so much exhaust. “God, it's been too long,” he said, rubbing his hands quickly down the outsides of my arms.

His touch was sweet and softened me instantly. I reached out my hand, but couldn't manage to do anything better than a swat on the sleeve of his jacket. “We should've kept better track of each other.”

“Tell me about it.” He squatted down on the platform, sideways to me, and took another drag.

This was Dirk's meeting so I had no intention of going into all of the crap that was happening at my house. I just wanted to prime the pump, show him that whatever it was he had to say wouldn't shock me. In my experience, people told you as much as you told them. Once when I lied to a woman on the Greyhound bus saying that I was going to Seattle for an abortion, she told me how she had to shoot bullets into the floor the last time her ex-husband came around drunk, looking for a warm place to stick his dick. “I hope you cream Carlisle's ass.”

He slapped the cross-piece so hard in front of him that the fire broke off the end of his cigarette and he threw the rest of it down in disgust. “Pisser!”

“What's the matter?”

He straightened up so he could get his hand inside his pocket for another cigarette, lit up, and then held the first drag with his teeth bit into his upper lip. “You remember that picture Bagmore taped to the blackboard?”

“Of course.”

“My dad went apeshit when he found out.”

“I know.”

“He kept calling me a homo, and I didn't know how to answer him, so I just blurted it out. I said he was right.” Dirk was trembling, his body heat exiting with the words he was spitting out. “I thought if me being a faggot was the worst thing that could happen to him, I wanted to be a faggot. I told him Carlisle and I had been sucking each other's dicks for months. ‘How do you like that, Colonel?' I told him. He slapped me around and called me a liar. That's why I decided to go to the police with it. To shame him.” Dirk pushed his palms into his eye sockets, with a cigarette still caught in the fingers of one hand. “But it's a lie, Piper. I made it up.”

I stood up on my knees and wrapped my arms around him. He started sobbing, nuzzling his head against my chest. I was in six states of shock. I'd believed Dirk. Except for Dad, the whole town had believed it happened. I could feel the wetness through my shirt. Dirk was always such a softie, scared at the sight of his own blood, spooked by spiders, queasy in confined spaces, but I'd never seen him cry. He was the doughboy you could tease and poke and he'd just sag and give and rise again. But what he was doing to his dad was the stuff of young Shiite boys who strapped bombs around their rib cages and rode busses with the Israelis knowing that in their moment of glory they'd be as dead as their enemies.

“It's all right,” I said, patting him awkwardly on the back. “Nothing's irreversible.” Except suicide, I thought, because that's what was going through my head. I could almost imagine the headlines in the
Herald
. Dirk would be revealed as a public liar. What further jiggling would it take to detonate the bomb?

“I wanna go through with it,” he mumbled into my shirt.

“What are you talking about? You can't.”

“I'm not going to let
you
down.”

“Me?”

“It'll clear your mother.” His hands were locked onto the back of my jacket like the pinchers of a lobster. “If he was doing me, nobody would believe he had anything going with her.”

“That's stupid.” The going-nowhere circles I was making on his back replicated the thought processes in my head.

“I can't not do it now. It's not like the guy's a saint.”

I cradled him until the sobbing stopped and then he curled into a fetal ball between my legs and I stretched out my shirt and wiped the tears away from his eyes. It was as if Dirk had put a power in my hands I didn't deserve. Like with the woman on the Greyhound, it was my turn to tell him something. Rozene Raymond would have been a good place to start. I could have told him about the aching I felt for her, the touches that had become milestones, how I was the Jezebel stalking his Rozene. As I looked down on this lump of a man in front of me, I couldn't help but feel a profound welling of affection.

He fell asleep with his face against the jeans on the inside of my thigh, his mouth and nose contorted so that it made him snore. I moved my legs in closer to cover his bare knees and calves. There was nothing to lean back against so I alternated between leaning forward and sheltering him like the hood of a car and then sitting up and supporting myself with my palms stiff-armed against the plank behind me. Dirk's revelation had pushed me back to a precipice I thought I'd already navigated. If Dirk was lying, that meant Dad was right and something was happening between Mom and Carlisle.

Dirk woke up and rubbed his eyes when a semi coming down Horse Heaven Highway pumped its air brakes and shuddered to a stop at the intersection.

“Hey, cowboy,” I said, “we've never slept together.”

He managed a smile. “How was it for you?”

On the way home, we took the shortcut through the asphalt playfield next to St. Augustine's, which was pitch dark. He kept putting his arm around me and squeezing me.

“I don't know what I'd do without you, Piper.” As if somehow I'd put a dent in his problem.

He kicked a stick, sending it shuffling across the hopscotch courts painted on the pavement. “Does Rozene ever ask about me?”

His question startled me and I almost walked into the pole that tethered the girls' volleyball, even though I would have sworn I could find that pole blindfolded under a minus moon. My first instinct was to lie, but I couldn't lie after I'd just begged him to come clean about the Carlisle thing, so I equivocated. “Everyone's worried about you.”

He probably knew it was a crock, but he didn't say anything more until we were at Commercial Street. “I guess we better go our own way, huh?”

I was feeling pretty low-down and decided to make one last try at being a friend. I bunched his sweatshirt into my fists. “Look, Dirk. Nobody's ever risked their ass for me like you're doing, but life's not that long and I don't want you to spend the next twenty years of it in jail for perjury.”

He put his stubby hands over mine. “Don't take this one away from me, Piper. Okay?” His voice was firm. The trembling was over.

“You can drop the whole thing and come clean.”

“Don't squeal on me, okay?”

I let go, leaving the protrusion of little tents where I'd twisted his sweatshirt. “Only if I have to.”

He shook me playfully by the shoulders, which were limp. “I know you won't. You're one of us.” As if we were a whole gang. But I knew what he meant, even if I still didn't know what I was going to do with what he'd told me.

He headed east and I headed west, but after about twenty uncertain steps I turned around to watch him cut across the street toward the Comet Tavern. Before his dad went into seclusion and put the house up for sale, he might have been there with his handball buddies. The streetlight cast a shadow in front of Dirk that he was walking into. His shoulders were stooped like he was carrying a cross on each of them and his scarecrow arms drooped lifeless at his side. I was editing a story about the Payton Miller family reunion when someone knocked on my door.

It was John Carlisle, in his loafers and tights with leg warmers bunched around the ankles and a teal-colored silk ascot looped under his chin and tucked into the V of his shirt. A week ago I would have told him I didn't want to talk to him, but Dirk's revelation had undercut me. “How're you doing?” he asked.

When I made a nervous exhalation, a little snot shot onto my upper lip. I wiped a sleeve under my nose and fluffed up the pages on my desk, wishing I'd come to work earlier and avoided this little tête-à-tête. “Fine, I guess. My dad would probably be a better judge of that.”

“He's a good teacher, isn't he?” He smiled and rested one buttock on the two-drawer filing cabinet. “Do you mind?”

“No, fine.”

“I think it's special when a father and daughter work together.”

“Beats mowing lawns, I guess.”

“I always thought my sister Ashley and I would end up working together.” He reached down and evened up his leg-warmers.

“That's nice.”

“When Dad didn't come home from Vietnam, Mother started drinking. Then she developed Parkinson's. That was on top of the neurosis.” He laughed to himself and I evened up the papers on my desk, wondering why he was telling me this. “It got so bad she was ashamed to go out of the house. Of course, I would have been ashamed if she had.”

“The house where you live now?” I could at least comment on the logistics.

“She made my sister do all the cooking and cleaning and blew up at her if she caught me helping. At night, Mother would get buzzed on her sherry and lecture Ashley about how she was too sloppy and too bitchy to find a husband.” I wanted to ask him why they didn't just cut off her liquor supply if she never left the house, but then it occurred to me how easy it would have been for a Carlisle to phone out for deliveries. Gray Cab still worked the territory between Stampede and Machias. “Mother was the sloppy one. We had to put a bib on her. One night, Ashley became fed up and dumped a Tapioca pudding in her lap and Mother started throwing dishes at us. She banished Ashley to the attic and made me take away the ladder.”