It was a whole world, the way dreams can be.
He buried her in the yard, with a stone on top to keep the cats from digging her up to sniff at the bones. But over time she drifted in the soil. The grass grew from her own cells into the light and air. She watched him when he passed over with the lawn mower. The times between mowings were ages.
Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives
THE DAY WE RAN OFF WAS HOT, EARLY AUGUST, NO AIR conditioner in my 1962 VW bus. It topped out at forty miles per hour, so the forty-mile journey took us more than an hour, during which we drove along, kind of stunned by what we were doing, sweating, saying little, staring ahead at the highway, other cars and trucks blasting past us in the left lane. Just over the state line we stopped at a Stuckey’s and bought a pair of gold-painted wedding bands for a dollar apiece.
Olivia wore her favorite pair of red and white polka-dotted bellbottoms. None of her other pants fit, by then. The bellbottoms were low-waisted, and Olivia was carrying high, so she wore them often. She never did gain weight. She seemed to lose it. She threw up every day, throughout the day, from the beginning. How she’d been hiding that from her mother, I had no idea. She’d begun to look like one of those starving children in the CARE commercials, all big eyes, gaunt face, stick limbs, and a little round belly up high underneath her ribs.
We parked on the downtown square and started up the old brick walk to the courthouse door. But halfway to the building, Olivia headed back toward the bus.
I caught up with her, took her by the hand.
“Look,” I said, “what else are we going to do?”
She took a deep breath and then looked directly at me for the first time that day. The skin beneath her eyes seemed bruised from lack of sleep.
“I don’t know what else to do,” she said. “I want to do the right thing.”
“I know,” I said. “I do, too.”
We stood there listening to songbirds in the oak trees in the square, watching cars make their slow, heatstroked weave through downtown. A couple of old men wearing fedoras, sitting on a park bench in the shade, stared speechlessly at us, their old mouths open to suck a last strain of oxygen from the incinerated air.
She came along reluctantly. Once, she tried to go back to the bus again, but I held on to her hand. When we got inside the courthouse, she stopped trying to run away and sat like a chastened child in one of the hard wooden chairs in the anteroom outside Judge Leacock’s chamber as we waited our turn. Judge Leacock was known to marry just about anyone who asked. Two other couples sat there like us, silent, jittery. A third couple — a soft, pale, fat girl with pretty blond hair and a thin, pimply boy with a farmer’s haircut — waited in their seats with strangely beatific, vacant smiles on their faces, their hands on their knees. They seemed like Holy Rollers or something, but I didn’t imagine Holy Rollers would get married in a courthouse by a judge.
The ceremony took about five minutes. Judge Leacock was an older man with a slackened face and tired-looking folds beneath and at the corners of his eyes. But the eyes themselves were alert, even crafty, as he leaned back in the chair behind his desk and looked at us for a long moment.
“How old are you?” he said to Olivia.
“Eighteen,” she lied.
“You?” he said to me.
I lied and said I was eighteen, too. We were both heading into our senior year.
He asked us if we were sure we wanted to get married. I said yes. He asked us to sign the certificate, then asked us to stand up before his desk. He remained seated.
“Do you take this little gal to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you take this young fellow to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
Olivia stood there looking stunned, her lips parted, and stared at him.
“You need to be able to say it, darlin,” Judge Leacock said.
“Yes,” Olivia whispered.
“I now pronounce you man and wife,” the judge said. “That’ll be five dollars, please.”
“Can I kiss the bride?” I said.
“Go right ahead.”
I kissed Olivia, pulled out my wallet, handed the judge a five-dollar bill. He gave us our copy of the certificate. We drove back home at forty miles per hour, windows down, sweating, not saying a word.
A FEW WEEKS EARLIER, we’d secretly rented an attic apartment over a small frame house on the south side of town, a block from the state mental institution. They had drug cases over there, dementia, catatonics. Maybe a schizophrenic or two. Retarded people. People with injured or disoriented brains who thought themselves to be other people, elsewhere. No hard-core psychotic criminals like they had in Whitfield over near Jackson.
During the weeks we’d spent cleaning and painting the apartment, I took breaks and walked over to the hospital property for a smoke and a stroll. The grounds were beautiful, populated with big, dark, seductive oaks and magnolia trees, and you could imagine being very happily insane if you were allowed to walk their grassy, shaded slopes every day. Once I saw an old man, apparently a patient there, who crept along as if he were hunting something. He wore a pale blue robe over pink pajamas, torn paper slippers, and a broad-brimmed tan cowboy hat. He held an imaginary rifle in his hands and a look of mischievous anticipation in his watery eyes. It never occurred to me to wonder how he’d gotten out onto the grounds. Stealthy, I guess.
“What are you hunting?” I said.
He froze as if he hadn’t seen me standing there. He turned his little bald head very slowly and put a finger to his lips. He moved his fuzzy eyebrows toward the little glen that lay just beyond us, its grass deliciously lush and green in the afternoon light. Then he scrunched his eyes tight shut and whispered, “Lions.”
THE ONLY PLACES YOU could stand upright without knocking your head on the apartment’s attic ceiling were in the middle of the living room, the hallway, and the middle of the bedroom. You had to crouch to get to the sofa or the bed. The bathroom and kitchen were small but okay for standing upright because they were built into dormers. The bathroom had an old wood-frame window fan the size of a ship’s propeller. When you switched it on the blades began to turn slowly at first, and as they picked up speed they huffed and pushed out the wooden slats that stayed folded shut on the outside when the fan was off. Now that we were in mid-August, the temperature inside the place rose above a hundred during the day. Turning on the fan at night flushed that still, stifling air and pulled a slightly cooler breeze of about eighty-five degrees (on a good night) through the apartment’s open windows, small rooms, narrow hallway, and out the bathroom window. If you closed the bathroom door, the fan created a near-vacuum in there, so your ears sucked in and went deaf, and the whole house shook with the fan’s effort to pull wind through the little crack at the bottom of the bathroom door.
While we were fixing up the apartment, we’d be up there every late afternoon and early evening during the week, after our summer jobs, and all day on Saturdays and Sundays, sweat soaking our shorts and shirts, stinging our eyes and dripping from our chins. We scrubbed every surface clean. We painted the walls, the old brown wooden floor, and hung curtains. We made trips to K-Mart, half for the relief of the store’s air-conditioning, half to get cheap aluminum cookware and plates and cutlery, sheets and bedspread, towels, though some of this we filched from our parents’ houses.
And sometimes in the late afternoon, in spite of the heat, we’d go at each other in the little bedroom in the back of the apartment, right under the rear gable. The bed frame was imitation brass, so I could hang on to the headboard rungs with my slippery, sweaty hands. Olivia was getting so round in the belly, and we had to take care in how we did it, and I needed some independent purchase. We sweated deep into the bedding, the creaky set of old steel springs screeching and squawking at even our most discreet, restrained, ecstatic movements. The scrawny, bitter landlady downstairs shouted up through the floor, “HEY! HEY!” Banging on her ceiling with a shoe or something.