Women & Other Animals (17 page)

After lunch I carried some crushed ice to my vegetables to revive them and to keep the milkforcats cold. I tied Jessie to a cement block nearby to graze. She had to get away from her calf for a few hours in order to have any milk by evening. There wasn't any Page 112

reason people couldn't drink her milk—we did, after all—but, according to Mr. VanderVeen who sold us straw and cheap hay that had been rained on in the field, it was against the law to sell the milk for people. Jessie dragged her block behind her, tearing a line through the grass, and she swatted flies disinterestedly with her tail. I looked through my newspaper again, though I had already read it front to back. Then I used it to fan myself.

It was hard to concentrate in the new summer heat, hard to remember things, hard to make plans. I walked around to investigate John Blain's car, which was rusty and faded olive green. The back was folded down, and there was a mattress but no room for anyone to sleep with all that junk back there—cables and loose rusty tools, a chain saw, and even a bicycle with the wheels taken off. The front seat was full of food wrappers and Styrofoam cups, and across the passenger seat lay a green army sleeping bag. A freezer bag held a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a plastic razor. The least he could do, I thought, was move this rusted hulk away from my stand so I could earn a living.

I'd been cupping my hands at the passengerside window to get a better view, and when I stepped back, the figure of a man towered behind me in the reflection. I screamed.

"Find anything interesting?" asked John Blain.

"You're a slob."

"And you're a nosey girl." John Blain walked around to the driver's side of the car and brushed his teeth in some water from a bottle, spitting foam onto the driveway.

Then he grinned into his sideview mirror, showing all his teeth. "You take care of your teeth, kiddo, and they'll take care of you." I let him see me roll my eyes. He pulled a tool box out of the back of the car and carried it toward the house.

I yelled after him, "The price of the car is 250 bucks!"

Since my dad had left us, there'd been a river of nogood men running through our lives. I was glad when they didn't stay around, and they usually didn't. I knew Mom wasn't happy without a man, but she didn't have to go for whatever guy showed up in our driveway. That's what I told her that night at supper.

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"How come every guy who comes around you're falling all over him?"

"I wasn't falling over him. He seemed like a nice man, didn't he? He stayed with his aunt in Alexander when he was a boy. That's why he came here. But his aunt's dead."

"Well, I hate him."

"Why don't you want me to be happy?" She asked the question with a heaving of her chest, as though exhausted and beleaguered by a long history of cruel treatment at my hands.

"Why can't you be happy without a stupid guy?"

"Reg, you're so young. You don't know how terrible it is to be alone."

"I'm alone all the time. I like being alone."

"Wait until you're grown up. Besides, this John Blain's not like the other men around here. I can tell." Mom lay on the couch, fitting herself into the imprint she'd made in the cushions over the years. We'd brought it with us from the trailer.

"Well, I hope he doesn't come back."

"You're so mean." She sounded tired and sad. "You're every bit as mean as your daddy."

"Maybe Daddy had a reason to be mean. Some day I'm going to find him and ask him all about it."

Mom turned away from me and fell asleep.

When John Blain showed up the next evening with a pizza, Mom said he could stay the night, but he didn't end up sleeping on the couch like she'd suggested in front of me. That next morning, he got up early and drove out for a box of doughnuts from the highway stop, getting back just as I finished chores. I sat in the kitchen and ate a chocolate cake doughnut and a cruller without saying a word, even though John Blain kept going upstairs and returning and pacing. Finally, I overheard him in Mom's room saying her name louder and louder. I carried a frosted long john upstairs and watched from the hallway while he shook her. He turned, panicstricken, his forehead strained.

"Oh, God! What's the matter with her? Why won't she wake up?"

"She's got the sleeping sickness," I said.

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"Sleeping sickness? Encephalitis? She wasn't sick last night."

"She just sleeps a lot," I said. "Twelve hours a night. You can't wake her before eleven or even noon sometimes. And then she takes a nap in the afternoon."

John Blain collapsed in the chair by the bed. I noticed his blond hair was streaked with gray.

We'd only lived on the farm two years, ever since my grandpa J.T. had died. Mom had gotten pregnant at age sixteen, and J.T. had told her that if she ran off with my dad, he'd never speak to her again, and because he was a man of his word, I never met him. Maybe the only reason he left her the farm was because he knew she hated it. If it had been up to her, she would have gotten rid of Jessie and the chickens, but I argued until she let me keep them so long as I took care of them. For weeks, then, Mrs. VanderVeen from next door had to come over and help me milk the cow until I could do it myself. When Mom was drunk, she'd say the house was "a goddamn jail." Whenever something went wrong, like a roof needed fixing, she'd say that she ought to sell the place. A few days before John Blain came, I told her I'd fix the roof over the porch, and she'd said accusingly, "You'd do anything to keep me here, wouldn't you?" That night I dreamed that we still lived in the trailer and that Mom's exboyfriends were all with us, drinking canned beer and sucking the oxygen out of the air. I woke up twisted in my sheets, sweating.

By the middle of tomato season, John Blain was well entrenched. He got a secondshift job, so I didn't see too much of him, except on the weekends, when I ignored him. One Saturday evening, though, I finished milking the cow and carried the bucket up to the porch, where John Blain was always squatting, his elbows on his knees, as still as a plant putting out roots. He stood when he saw me coming and made to open the door for me.

"I can open the door myself," I told him.

He let go of the door, wrapped a hand around my skinny biceps and clamped tight. "Why are you such a brat, Regina?" he asked. His breath smelled like whiskey, a bottle of which I'd seen him hide

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in the crotch of the apple tree next to the barn. ''Your ma is so nice, and you're so damned mean."

My arm was starting to hurt, but when I twisted to free myself he tightened his grip. When I kicked him a dozen times hard enough to bruise his shins, he squeezed tighter still. I noticed white, dry salt around the edges of the sweat marks on the neck and armpits of his Tshirt. "What do you want?" I asked.

"A little respect. A kind word, maybe. For your ma's sake."

"I've got to strain the milk. Let me go."

"The milk'll wait. Life is too short to be so mean, Reg."

His grip exhausted me. He was only a halffoot taller than me, but I couldn't come near matching his strength. When tears threatened to drop over the edges of my eyes, I turned away and looked west, over my garden, toward the hot, dirty sun. I let out my breath in a tired sigh. John Blain leaned toward me and then kissed my mouth. His lips only just touched mine, then he pulled away with a look of surprise on his face. I sloshed milk onto the porch and on my shoes, and he followed me into the kitchen. "I'm sorry, Reg. I don't know what happened."

"Go to hell!" I screamed. He shook his head and went back out onto the porch, holding the door so it didn't slam. I set up my milk funnel and filter, but I could hardly see. I kept knocking the hall gallon bottle over, and finally I just left it all on the table. Ripley jumped up and started drinking right out of the bucket.

After that, John Blain kept a distance from me, as though we'd come to some kind of understanding. The next day he bought me the Detroit Sunday paper, and he continued to buy it every week, so I could spend Sunday afternoons reading and refolding each part. He wanted only the crossword puzzle. One Sunday, while I was reading at the kitchen table, Mom and John Blain were sitting in the living room where I could hear them.

"She's a beautiful girl, you know," he said, in just above a whisper.

"She's twelve," said Mom.

"But it happened just like that," he said and snapped his fingers. "All of a sudden, she's beautiful."

"I was beautiful, and where'd it get me?"

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"What do you mean 'was'? Any man would trade his soul for a chance to gaze into that freckled face of yours. I'll die happy, woman, so long as I die with your hair twisted around me."

Mom laughed with pleasure. When I dared look at them from the kitchen, John Blain was back at his crossword, and Mom had fallen asleep on the couch.

After dinner, I usually worked in the garden, pulling weeds and picking vegetables to sell the next day. Mom did the dinner dishes. John Blain, when he wasn't working, would go out on the porch and squat down, and smoke cigarettes like a cowboy at a camp or a soldier staying low to avoid enemy fire. Both he and Mom looked west, Mom's face blurry through the window screen over the sink, John Blain's out in the open in clear focus. By the time I finished in the garden, Mom and John Blain would have started drinking jug wine, either sitting at the picnic table on the porch, or else in the kitchen if the mosquitos got bad. They'd be reading or playing cards or John Blain would be doing the crossword, and then after a while, for no reason, they'd start arguing and accusing each other. Sometimes Mom would tell him to get the hell out, but John Blain knew as well as I did that this was her way of testing whether or not he was going to stay. I took to going to bed even earlier so I wouldn't have to hear them. If they carried their argument up to the bedroom next to mine, I'd go out to the barn to sleep with Jessie. By the next day they always seemed to have forgotten whatever it was that had made them fight.

I didn't need an alarm clock to wake up each morning between fivethirty and six, and I'd do the chores first thing. Often I'd come across John Blain lying in a heap somewhere. Once I found him outside my room, and a few times he was on the kitchen floor, but more often I'd find him outside, as though he'd tried to leave us but collapsed from the effort. Most of the time he'd be north of the house, up the incline. The farthest he ever made it was into the pasture and to the row of white pines that made the property line. I'd say, "Get up, you," and if he didn't, I'd nudge him with my foot, then stand nearby until he slogged off.

The day he made it to the pine trees, I didn't find him until the afternoon. When I came in from the vegetable stand for lunch, Page 117

Mom was fidgeting, not drinking the coffee she'd poured. So I hunted around and found him lying awake on the moss, his hands locked across his belly. "I knew you'd find me if I waited," he said. "I'm glad you don't hate me anymore." We regarded each other, John Blain smiling, myself determined not to smile.

"Mom's worried. She thinks you left."

"She can see my car's still here," he said. "I'm not going to leave her, Reg, so you may as well get used to me." He supported himself on one elbow while he lit a cigarette. I probably looked skeptical, and maybe I rolled my eyes. "I swear, Reg, I'm not leaving your ma," he said, looking right at me. We walked back to the house, keeping a distance between us. Probably my dad had promised to stay too.

John Blain fixed the pasture fence during the last week of August. It'd been down in two places—one where a tree had fallen on it, the other where a corner post had rotted away. I'd tried propping it up using ropes and twobyfours, but none held. The VanderVeens were mad because Jessie and the calf had gotten into their garden twice. John Blain found tools in the barn and restrung the whole thing, replacing parts of it, making it strong and tight, even better than the VanderVeen's fences. When I acted surprised that he knew how to put up fence, he said, "I can do just about everything, kiddo. And I'm going to teach it all to you."

The last fence post we reset was at the far corner of the pasture, out of sight of the house. Mom was most likely sleeping on the couch, and John Blain lay on the ground with a small log under his head. We'd already put the post into the hole and I was tamping the dirt with an axe handle.

"You're a hard worker, Reg. And you're strong for your age."

I shrugged and didn't look at him.

"You're a lot tougher than either me or your ma, and you're a lot smarter. You're not going to end up like us, a couple of drunks."

"You're not drunks," I said. I finished tamping and lay down beside him on the ground and propped my head up. "You're not a drunk." I was close enough that I could smell his cigarette breath and his sweat. I'd never noticed before that he had a tattoo on his forearm, a tiny eagle with wings folded, the size of a thumbprint.

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Though I'd never before touched him on purpose, I pressed the tattoo through the hair on his arm. The pasture would be perfect now, after John Blain stretched this last corner. I opened my eyes and he was looking right at me, and for no reason I could fathom, I wanted him to wrap his fencestretching arms around me and pull me to his chest and hold me there next to his heart. His chest expanded and deflated as he breathed, and my own breathing seemed loud. How could I live, I wondered, if he didn't put his arms around me? I moved closer, and he snubbed his cigarette in the dirt. He reached an arm around my shoulder, grabbed my bra strap through my Tshirt, pulled it out, and let it snap back.

"You creep!" I yelled.

He laughed and coughed, and reached for another cigarette. I stood and brushed myself off. "Why don't you just fix your stupid car and go back to the U.P.?" I picked up the mattock and lugged it down the incline, lifting and swinging it at every burdock plant.

That evening, I walked by the door to my mother's room and saw her sitting on the edge of her bed, looking into the adjoining bathroom, listening to John Blain. Her hair shone like a fresh penny in the light from the setting sun, and she wore a nylon slip that she used as a nightgown. She rested her bare feet on the wooden bed frame and wrapped her arms around her knees. John Blain was shaving with no shirt on, telling her about a Russian he knew in Copper Harbor. The humidity seemed to have softened the edges and the corners on everything in the room—the pictures in their frames, the furniture, and the steamy bathroom mirror all looked soft. Once I looked at John Blain, I couldn't look away. His nipples were like a girl's, like mine, his arms bronze below his shirtsleeve line but as pale as Mom's above, and the tattoo like a bruise. As he shaved, I became afraid that he would cut himself with his razor, and I watched, concerned, until he caught my eye in the mirror. He smiled at me and winked.