I laid the body armor beside the door and undressed. I lay down beside Ricky, my breasts touching his back, my arm on his side, my hand spread across his stomach. I knew he was still awake. I moved my hand higher, feeling the smooth skin, the hair on his chest.
“Don’t,” he said, removing my hand.
I lay there listening to the noises, knowing neither of us would sleep much that night. I got up after a while and went to the pay phone out by the front gate.
Momma answered on the fourth ring, still half asleep.
“What’s wrong, Ellie?” she said, because after midnight she knew well as me no one calls with good news.
“It’s complicated.”
“Then I reckon there’s a man involved,” Momma said. “Are you and Ricky having problems?”
“Yes, but not what you’d think.”
“So it’s not money, drinking, or snoring.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, if it’s sex you best read Cosmopolitan. All I know is what it’s like for me and your daddy, and I got the feeling you’d rather not know the details.”
“It’s not that, either. Ricky says he’s afraid he loves me too much.”
“Well,” Momma said, “all I can say is there’s many a woman who would be happy to have that kind of problem.”
Right then I knew there was no way to explain it to Momma. There was one person who could help me work this out and he was back at the camper.
“Yes, Momma,” I finally said. “I guess you’re right. I’m sorry I woke you.”
I walked back to the trailer and lay next to Ricky. His breath was deep and regular, and I knew he’d finally managed to fall asleep. I thought how it had been with Robert and how one morning I’d woke up and felt to be in bed with a stranger. I thought about the family photos, how I was always on the edge, almost out of the picture — even in the five-by-seven black-and-whites somehow apart from the rest of the family. I thought about how the last eight months I’d found something that finally felt like home. Because home for me wasn’t so much a place but a feeling you were where you should be, and at the center of that feeling was Ricky. I finally went to sleep. I dreamed I stood in front of the plywood. Ricky was down at the far end of the tent, a bow in his hands. It was not knives that crossed the space between us. It was arrows.
WE SLEPT TILL noon the next day, and in the hours before the show we had little to say to each other. Ricky and me had always been good at talking to one another, but it was like we’d taken ourselves to a place where we needed a new language, a language we hadn’t yet learned to speak.
At six-thirty Ricky lay down on the bed. “Don’t Fear the Reefer” blasted through the speakers. I listened to the words careful, hoping they might say something Ricky’s words couldn’t say. And they did, because I suddenly realized I’d been hearing the song wrong. The singer was saying “Don’t fear the reaper,” not “Don’t fear the reefer.”
Ricky left the camper before I did. I changed into my blouse and skirt but left the body armor by the door. The Human Skeleton was leaving his camper at the same time I was, so we walked to the midway together.
“We got a change in the weather coming,” he said. “I can feel it in my bones.”
I walked into the tent and saw the bleachers were already full. Ricky stood near the entrance, his knife case open. I pressed my back against the plywood. When Ricky picked up his first knife and turned to face me, I raised my hands and unbuttoned my blouse until the V between my breasts showed. The townies cheered and clapped but that meant nothing to me. My eyes and Ricky’s met as the world narrowed to the twenty feet from him to me. He raised the knife to his ear as if the blade might whisper something to him. Then his arm came forward and the knife flashed out of his hand, closing the distance between us.
The Projectionist’s Wife
One warm December morning forty years ago I stood in a grove of oak trees, the blood on my face confirming what I already knew. At my feet lay what the old deer slayers called a hart — a big male with antlers sprouting like coral from its forehead. My right hand gripped a Browning 30–30, the rifle I’d raised earlier that morning to defend Mrs. Merwin, the projectionist’s wife, a woman who came from a place that did not exist.
“Drink up,” my uncle had said earlier that morning as he handed me a cup of coffee. “You can’t be snoozing when a deer comes your way.”
I nodded, too sleep-dazed to speak. The grandfather clock chimed five o’clock as I sipped the black coffee, ate the gravy and cathead biscuits my uncle made as I dressed. We spoke in whispers, because my mother and aunt still slept in the back rooms. My father had died when I was eight, leaving behind a son and a twenty-nine-year-old widow, who now spent what remained of her early adulthood working inside the town’s paper plant. My uncle, besides giving my mother and me a place to live, served as a surrogate father. He taught me how to use a saw and ax, catch and clean a trout, and hunt — first tin cans scattered on a hillside, then squirrels and rabbits, finally, at age twelve, deer.
Often my first cousin Jeff or my uncle’s neighbor Luke Callahan hunted with us. I liked Jeff but did not care much for Mr. Callahan, a red-nosed, scarecrow-thin man who drank too much and told jokes I did not understand. Unlike Jeff, I hadn’t been blooded yet, my only shot a flash of antler behind trees. I’d watched enviously the previous November as my uncle and Mr. Callahan dipped their hands in the warm blood, reddened Jeff’s face as if the blood was war paint.
“You ain’t a man till you get blooded, boy,” Mr. Callahan had said, looking at me as he tasted the deer blood on his fingers. “I killed my first deer when I was ten.”
“All Russell needs is a decent shot,” my uncle said. “He’s shot targets all summer so he wouldn’t get rusty. He’s been hitting them too. His time will come, Luke, and he’ll be ready.”
And I was ready to be a man. I saw my body’s readiness in the stubble on my chin, the way I’d sprouted four inches over the summer. I felt a readiness inside me as well, not as I waited in that deer stand but in the darkness of the Enlo Cinema.
The theater Mr. and Mrs. Merwin ran was the one exotic place in a town I always remember in shades of gray, in large part because of Carolina Paper Company, whose twin smokestacks sooted the whole valley. Most of Enlo’s adults worked inside that mill. They all seemed to wear an ashy pallor, as if it were papier-mâché instead of flesh wrapped around their bones. But it was more than the paper mill, the grown-ups it swallowed for eight hours each day, or even the highland weather when so many days passed in a monotone of fog and drizzle. It was the surrounding mountains themselves, the way they cast huge daggers of shadow over the valley, blocked any distant gaze as we moved beneath in the gloaming like cave fish.
And this was why stepping into that theater lobby was like stepping into a radiant dream — the multihued coming-attraction posters, shelves of bright-wrapped candy, the popcorn machine’s yellow lambency. Mrs. Merwin was a part of that brightness. She dressed bright as a parrot from head to toe, the cloth tight against her skin, mouth rimmed scarlet with lipstick, a woman literally from nowhere who’d suddenly appeared in Enlo’s midst. It was she who allowed me entrance, sitting in the ticket booth like a fortune-teller, exchanging the coins my mother had reluctantly given me for two hours’ respite from a dreariness that seeped through my skin to my very bones.
Mrs. Merwin was the only person in town I could imagine describing as glamorous, not only how she dressed but how she smelled, her perfume ordered directly from Europe, Mr. Lusk the postmaster said. She spoke a different English as well, faster, sounding out her g and d endings. Even her first name was glamorous, a consonant-thick montage no one in Enlo but her husband could pronounce.