Chapter 15 #4
She would reach beneath the sheet and masturbate him.
It never took long, sometimes only seconds.
On a few occasions he touched her breasts as she performed this function, but mostly his hands remained knotted high on his chest. When it was over, he would go into the bathroom, wash himself off, and come back in wearing his pajamas. He had seven pairs, all blue.
Then it was her turn to go into the bathroom and wash her hands.
He insisted that she do this for at least three minutes, and under water hot enough to turn her skin red.
When she came back to bed, she held her palms out to his face.
If the smell of Lifebuoy wasn’t strong enough to satisfy him, she would have to do it again.
“And when I came back, the broom would be there.”
He would put it on top of the sheet if it was summer, on the blankets if it was winter. Running straight down the middle of the bed. His side and her side.
“If I was restless and happened to move it, he’d wake up. No matter how fast asleep he was. And he’d push me back to my side. Hard. He called it ‘transgressing the broom.’ ”
The time he slapped her was when she asked how they would ever have children if he never put it in her.
“He was furious. That’s why he slapped me.
He apologized later, but what he said right then was, ‘Do you think I’d put myself in your germy womanhole and bring children into this filthy world?
It’s all going to blow up anyway, anyone who reads the paper can see that coming, and the radiation will kill us.
We’ll die with sores all over our bodies, and coughing up our lungs. It could happen any day.’ ”
“Jesus. No wonder you left him, Sadie.”
“Only after four wasted years. It took me that long to convince myself that I deserved more from life than color-coordinating my husband’s sock drawer, giving him handjobs twice a week, and sleeping with a goddam broom.
That was the most humiliating part, the part I was sure I could never talk about to anyone… because it was funny.”
I didn’t think it was funny. I thought it was somewhere in the twilight zone between neurosis and outright psychosis. I also thought I was listening to the perfect Fifties Fable. It was easy to imagine Rock Hudson and Doris Day sleeping with a broom between them. If Rock hadn’t been gay, that was.
“And he hasn’t come looking for you?”
“No. I applied to a dozen different schools and had the answers sent to a post office box. I felt like a woman having an affair, sneaking around. And that’s how my mother and father treated me when they found out.
My dad has come around a little—I think he suspects how bad it was, although of course he doesn’t want to know any of the details—but my mother?
Not her. She’s furious with me. She had to change churches and quit the Sewing Bee.
Because she couldn’t hold her head up, she says. ”
In a way, this seemed as cruel and crazy as the broom, but I didn’t say so. A different aspect of the matter interested me more than Sadie’s conventional Southern parents. “Clayton didn’t tell them you were gone? Have I got that right? Never came to see them?”
“No. My mother understood, of course.” Sadie’s ordinarily faint Southern accent deepened.
“I just shamed that poor boy so bad that he didn’t want to tell anyone.
” She dropped the drawl. “I’m not being sarcastic, either.
She understands shame, and she understands covering up.
On those two things, Johnny and my mama are in perfect harmony.
She’s the one he should have married.” She laughed a little hysterically.
“Mama probably would have loved that old broom.”
“Never a word from him? Not even a postcard saying, ‘Hey Sadie, let’s tie up the loose ends so we can get on with our lives?’ ”
“How could there be? He doesn’t know where I am, and I’m sure he doesn’t care.”
“Is there anything you want from him? Because I’m sure a lawyer—”
She kissed me. “The only thing I want is here in bed with me.”
I kicked the sheets down to our ankles. “Look at me, Sadie. No charge.”
She looked. And then she touched.
12
I drowsed afterward. Not deep—I could still hear the wind and that one rattling windowpane—but I got far enough down to dream.
Sadie and I were in an empty house. We were naked.
Something was moving around upstairs—it made thudding, unpleasant noises.
It might have been pacing, but it seemed as if there were too many feet.
I didn’t feel guilty that we were going to be discovered with our clothes off.
I felt scared. Written in charcoal on the peeling plaster of one wall were the words I WILL KILL THE PRESIDENT SOON.
Below it, someone had added NOT SOON ENOUGH HES FULL OF DISEEZE.
This had been printed in dark lipstick. Or maybe it was blood.
Thud, clump, thud.
From overhead.
“I think it’s Frank Dunning,” I whispered to Sadie. I gripped her arm. It was very cold. It was like gripping the arm of a dead person. A woman who had been beaten to death with a sledgehammer, perhaps.
Sadie shook her head. She was looking up at the ceiling, her mouth trembling.
Clud, thump, clud.
Plaster-dust sifting down.
“Then it’s John Clayton,” I whispered.
“No,” she said. “I think it’s the Yellow Card Man. He brought the Jimla.”
Above us, the thudding stopped abruptly.
She took hold of my arm and began to shake it. Her eyes were eating up her face. “It is! It’s the Jimla! And it heard us! The Jimla knows we’re here!”
13
“Wake up, George! Wake up!”
I opened my eyes. She was propped on one elbow beside me, her face a pale blur. “What? What time is it? Do we have to go?” But it was still dark and the wind was still high.
“No. It isn’t even midnight. You were having a bad dream.” She laughed, a little nervously. “Maybe about football? Because you were saying ‘Jimla, Jimla.’ ”
“Was I?” I sat up. There was the scrape of a match and her face was momentarily illuminated as she lit a cigarette.
“Yes. You were. You said all kinds of stuff.”
That was not good. “Like what?”
“Most of it I couldn’t make out, but one thing was pretty clear. ‘Derry is Dallas,’ you said. Then you said it backwards. ‘Dallas is Derry.’ What was that about? Do you remember?”
“No.” But it’s hard to lie convincingly when you’re fresh out of sleep, even a shallow doze, and I saw skepticism on her face. Before it could deepen into disbelief, there was a knock at the door. At quarter to midnight, a knock.
We stared at each other.
The knock came again.
It’s the Jimla. This thought was very clear, very certain.
Sadie put her cigarette in the ashtray, gathered the sheet around her, and ran to the bathroom without a word. The door shut behind her.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“It’s Mr. Yorrity, sir—Bud Yorrity?”
One of the gay retired teachers who ran the place.
I got out of bed and pulled on my pants. “What is it, Mr. Yorrity?”
“I have a message for you, sir. Lady said it was urgent.”
I opened the door. He was a small man in a threadbare bathrobe. His hair was a sleep-frizzed cloud around his head. In one hand he held a piece of paper.
“What lady?”
“Ellen Dockerty.”
I thanked him for his trouble and closed the door. I unfolded the paper and read the message.
Sadie came out of the bathroom, still clutching the sheet. Her eyes were wide and frightened. “What is it?”
“There’s been an accident,” I said. “Vince Knowles rolled his pickup truck outside of town. Mike Coslaw and Bobbi Jill were with him. Mike was thrown clear. He has a broken arm. Bobbi Jill has a nasty cut on her face, but Ellie says she’s okay otherwise.”
“Vince?”
I thought of the way everyone said Vince drove—as if there were no tomorrow. Now there wasn’t. Not for him. “He’s dead, Sadie.”
Her mouth dropped open. “He can’t be! He’s only eighteen years old!”
“I know.”
The sheet fell free of her relaxing arms and puddled around her feet. She put her hands over her face.
14
My revised version of Twelve Angry Men was canceled.
What took its place was Death of a Student, a play in three acts: the viewing at the funeral parlor, the service at Grace Methodist Church, the graveside service at West Hill Cemetery.
This mournful show was attended by the whole town, or near enough to make no difference.
The parents and Vince’s stunned kid sister starred at the viewing, sitting in folding chairs beside the coffin. When I approached them with Sadie at my side, Mrs. Knowles rose and put her arms around me. I was almost overwhelmed by the odors of White Shoulders perfume and Yodora antiperspirant.
“You changed his life,” she whispered in my ear. “He told me so. For the first time he made his grades, because he wanted to act.”
“Mrs. Knowles, I’m so, so sorry,” I said. Then a terrible thought crossed my mind and I hugged her tighter, as if hugging could make it go away: Maybe it’s the butterfly effect. Maybe Vince is dead because I came to Jodie.
The coffin was flanked by photomontages of Vince’s too-brief life.
On an easel in front of it, all by itself, was a picture of him in his Of Mice and Men costume and that battered old felt hat from props.
His ratty, intelligent face peered out from beneath.
Vince really hadn’t been much of an actor, but that photo caught him wearing an absolutely perfect wiseass smile.
Sadie began to sob, and I knew why. Life turns on a dime.
Sometimes toward us, but more often it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes: so long, honey, it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it?