Walking Dunes (16 page)

“I don't think so, but we can't do anything here, Davy, I couldn't!”

He laughed at her and rubbed her breast. “Just kissing, Hewett,” he said. She was warm and soft and uncomplicated. He felt grateful for the flood and the long quiet evening. “Until something comes on
TV.”

“I'll tell Mom you're staying for supper, okay?” she said happily. She brushed his hair with her fingers. “You look lazy, David, didn't you sleep in all that horrid rain?”

“I couldn't sleep,” he said. “I was thinking about you.”

Her mother insisted that he stay the night. She put quilts and pillows out for him on the couch, and she and her husband went to bed early. Glee and David sat bundled on the couch and watched an old movie about mummies escaped from an Egyptian tomb. Very stealthily, they made love. He did everything in slow motion, murmuring in her ear. “Do you think I'm different?” he asked. “You're the best,” she whispered back. “Ohhh,” she said softly. He didn't know when she left him. By then the movie was over, and he had fallen asleep.

When he got home Sunday, his mother was in the kitchen in her wrap, drinking coffee and reading the Sunday paper. “Leland called,” she said. “He wants you to call him. It's about this drowning—” She tapped the paper. He sat down and read the article. A three-year-old boy had drowned on Chesterfield, about five in the afternoon on Saturday. He had waded into the pool the flood had created at the intersection of Chesterfield and Clermont, right where they had been in their sightseeing.

“Oh man, we missed it!” Leland said when David called.

“I don't see how it happened,” David said. “There were people standing all over the place.”

“I know, I know. My cousin was there, too. This little kid, he just walks right to the middle, to the deepest part, and without a splash, he disappears!”

“Didn't they see him going in?”

“Sure, they saw him, but they thought when he got to the deep part he'd turn around and come back out.”

“He was three years old!”

“I
know
. They didn't know how deep it was, maybe. They didn't think that a little kid like that could get—
lost under water, on a city street
!”

“Somebody should have seen. Somebody should have gone in. Jesus Christ, they all stood around and watched him drown! A little kid!”

“Aw shit, Puckett, you can say that, you weren't there. You can say what you would do and wouldn't do, you're so smart.”

“I wouldn't have just stood by, I can tell you that.”

“You don't know, you weren't there. You wait till somebody's in trouble in front of you and see what you'll do. That's the only way you'll find out. Wait and see how wet you want to get.”

15.

“I'll never see you!” Glee protested when David told her what his rehearsal schedule would be. It wasn't really true. The first week they rehearsed after school, and he went over to Glee's a couple of nights to do homework. When they moved into night rehearsals, it was only Sunday through Thursday, so he had his weekends, just like any other time. It was only at the end that it would take all his time. Besides, when he explained to her what his part was, she changed her tune. She liked the idea that he was the star, “
A
star,” he corrected her. “Hardly the word anybody would use. There are three of us. You say, ‘lead,' not ‘star.'” She told everyone. Her friends came up to him in the hall and said they were dying to see him in a play. Glee was only jealous of his time, not of the girls on the set. She knew Patsy Randall was no competition, and the other girls, David told her, were all sad sacks, except for Betsy, the Student Council girl who was stage manager. He thought Betsy was keeping tabs on him, but there wasn't anything to tell.

He didn't have time to go up to the hospital, and his mother complained, but if he borrowed her car he could spend the last hour of her shift up there, and if he was home, he put a kettle on for tea, or heated a can of tomato soup when she was due. One night he brought home a caramel from the prop table and sliced it into six pieces and arranged them artfully on a saucer. He set the saucer on a paper napkin on the table. Marge loved it. “Silly boy,” she said. She played with the pieces of candy, moving them slightly on the saucer. “Go on, eat one,” he told her. She never did anything for a lark. She never did anything for herself. She laughed and flipped a tiny slice over, like an egg on a skillet. “You know I don't eat sweets,” she said.

“Just this once,” he told her. He talked her into it. She put a slice on her tongue and sat while it melted, looking off in the direction of the stove. She sucked at the juices the candy made, smiled at him, and got up to get her whiskey.

He wondered why there were caramels on the prop table. Every once in a while he would see someone carefully peeling a piece. Some kids popped caramels into their mouths whole and chewed furiously. Some nibbled like rats. He never took one; they were too sticky for his taste.

He sat on a chair in the wings with his English text on his lap, telling himself he ought to use the time to study. But the scene on stage was between Catherine and Dr. Sloper, and he could not stop watching Patsy as Catherine. She was wearing a long muslin practice skirt with a dirty ruffled hem, and her hair was caught up in a rubber band, pieces escaping at the neckline. When Mr. Turnbow stopped the scene to talk something over, she chewed on her lip, or sucked her cheek in. She wore no makeup, and under the stage lights she looked pale. Her shoulders were like slats under the man's tee-shirt she wore, but he could not stop watching her. She stood very still—when she moved, there was some reason—but her face was so expressive. Her cheekbones seemed to tremble as her father rebuked her. Once she looked over and saw David watching her. Their eyes fixed, quite clearly, for an instant. She did not acknowledge him at all, she went back to her business, but he felt as if she had touched him inside his shirt, or on the back of his neck. That was what she did on stage, she got to you.

Mr. T. called a five-minute break. David went outside. He walked briskly away from the auditorium, to the edge of the schoolyard light, breathing deeply. He put his hands on his hips and threw his head back. The next scene was between him and the father. He had to defend himself with just the right blend of confidence, deference, and, somewhere, a quiver of doubt. This man could take away what he wanted, his bulk and authority could be a wall Morris could not get around. David did not know where the doubt ought to show. He didn't know how to ask Mr. T. about it, maybe not in the scene, maybe at the end, privately. He did not want to seem too cerebral; he did not want to seem to think himself too important.

He stood in the shadow and practiced raising his eyebrow, practiced smiling so that anyone would say he was being respectful, but so Sloper would still hate him for his cockiness. Oh, it was subtle, all right, and you had to use all you had to project subtlety from the stage. The trick was to be honest and true, while all the time using the smooth speech and the careful gesture of the deliberate gentleman. The play was a world of artifice, he had to be a master of it. Each movement, each inflection of his character, he believed, came out of deliberation or carefully built habit. He had never realized how much power there was in really knowing yourself. He thought there were certain boys who had an instinct for creating themselves—he thought of his friend Burt Lasky, who was handsome and insouciant—but in the end, those who produced themselves deliberately would have more control. That was what he was learning from drama. He wished he could discuss it with someone. He told Glee the play was fun, he told her little anecdotes about rehearsals, but he could not say, “I'm discovering myself, little by little.”

When he walked back in the stage door he was met by a great blast of laughter. He heard Betsy's silly giggle, Don Witham's snorty laugh. For one terrible moment he thought they were all laughing at him, but it was only an accident of timing. They were laughing at Derek, who played Sloper. Derek was chewing as fast and hard as he could while everyone stood around and watched him. David was baffled.

Patsy slipped over by him. “It's a tradition. A joke. The set people put out those caramels, and then they wait for one of the actors to have a mouthful when he's called on stage. It always works eventually. You're caught so off guard you can't think. Derek could have just spit it out, but look at him, trying to get it down.” David shook his head and tried to look amused. Mr. T. called out, “Remember the caramels go when we start dress week, you clowns!” He was an easy guy. Derek took a big gulp and waved his arms. “Ready,” he said, and laughed loudly.

“Ho, ho,” Patsy said.

Sissy caught up with him in the alley after school. He slowed down for her. At the back of her house they leaned against the rickety fence and talked a few minutes. She said she had checked out
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
from the school library. She said she could see things would have to get bad for Tess, because she was a sinner. David did not try to argue the point. Sissy was perfectly serious. He thought it might do her good to plow through someone else's sad story.

Another afternoon they took a long way around, it was such a perfect, balmy fall day. In a yard not far from her house they saw an abandoned project, a fall-out shelter. He said, “Someone started into that with a lot of trouble, they might as well finish it.” He was thinking, in case of tornadoes, although Basin was never in the path. Sissy said, “You can't hide from Armagedon, can you? Besides, who'd be left if everybody else was dead?” She could give him the willies. When he told Leland about Armagedon, Leland said, “Whooey, that girl needs cheering up.” David suggested that Leland ask her out. Leland hooted at the notion. “Don't you know she adores you, Fuckett? Because you're so understanding.” David wrote some notes so he wouldn't forget her strange remarks. He tried to imagine Leland and Sissy making love. He was sure they were both virgins. He would have liked to write a story about them. He thought it would be comic.

One night at rehearsal, waiting for a scene, he sat down two rows behind Patsy with his civics book. She was reading a textbook. He noticed how pale the skin on her neck was. She laid down the book and picked up a library book. He could see that it was Robinson Jeffers,'
Roan Stallion
. He had checked the very same book out the year before, from county. They did not have Jeffers at school. He remembered that after he read it, he walked for miles in the dark, he simply could not recover from the drama of the long narrative poem.

There was a scene in progress on the stage. He moved quietly down to Patsy, sat, and leaned close to whisper. “I'll give you a ride home if you want, and you can tell me what you think of a woman who falls in love with a horse.” He did not think she could fail to be surprised, maybe as excited as he felt; he had not known there was another human being in this county who knew Jeffers, let alone a high school girl. Patsy held her finger in the book, and whispered back. “I don't want to talk about it. It would ruin it to try to understand it, like school.”

He felt humiliated. He popped up and jumped over the seat, making a racket, and went back to his civics book, his face burning. Patsy turned around in a few moments and hissed at him. He looked up. She put her fist to her chest and pounded over her heart, smiling at him. It was all very stagy, and too late. Jeffers did not make his heart pound; he made his head thick with ideas.

As rehearsal was breaking up, she touched his arm and asked if she could still have the ride. He did not know how to refuse. It was gusty and cold. In the car she said she walked everywhere, a mile and a half back and forth to school. She was relaxed and friendly, as if she had not just put him down and then made fun of him. He just drove, but it stirred him when she said, right after she told him where to turn, “I don't think a day goes by that I don't think of that line of Jeffers', ‘I would sooner be a worm in a rotten apple than a son of man.'”

David remembered the line. It was in a poem about men stoning a mammal in a pit. “I read he lives in a tower. He climbs the steps every morning and sits above the ocean to write.”

“I guess that proves you don't have to live a dramatic life to write,” she said.

“Oh, but wouldn't it be more fun to have things happen!” he said earnestly.

“Maybe reflection is for old poets.”

He liked her better now.

She lived in a seedy tourist court on the edge of town, a rundown motel that rented studios by the month to oilfield workers. She invited him inside, where there was a small room, combining kitchen and sitting room, with a sofa covered in a faded yellow chenille spread, a broken down arm chair, and a card table with two straight-back chairs. He saw a tiny hall with two doors. The room had a shabby air, but it was clean. Patsy opened a window a few inches and told him to sit down. “I'll see if I have some pop.” She opened the fridge. “Aha. Want to split the last beer?” He said he wouldn't mind. She poured the beer into two glasses as he watched from a chair. He rubbed the prickly fat arms of the chair with his thumbs. He liked it that she poured the same amount into both glasses; Glee would have given him two-thirds of the beer.

Patsy curled up on the sofa, her legs tucked, a couple of pillows behind her back. She pulled the rubber band out of her hair, wincing, and her hair flew out around her face. She stretched one arm up high above her head until something popped. “It gets me in the neck, all that concentrating,” she said.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” he said. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Is it just you and your dad?” She had already said, coming home, that her dad was a night watchman for a cement company, and did maintenance for the motel. She did lots of chores, cleaning up the rooms weekly, or when somebody moved out.