The tall man with the big head-Iron Steve, she presumed-caught Bosky under the arms as he rocked back from Pris's white-knuckled grip, and then Richard and Ogden Stump converged on him like tacklers on a football field. She watched his features draw down in surprise, a heartbeat's respite, Pris's empty hand and awakening face, and then he seemed to detonate. He flung himself in four directions at once, screaming like a woman, a long tailing high-pitched shriek that had nothing but fakery and hate in it, and then the four of them were rolling around in the weeds and the mud, good clothes spoiled, the crowd giving way and the band freezing out the chorus of Hank Williams's “Cold, Cold Heart.”
In two minutes it was over, black-headed Joe Bosky trussed in arms and Iron Steve's elbow pinned to his throat, the eight-legged walk to the verge of the property and the necessary threats and imprecations hurled back and forth, the band lurching again into the defeated chorus and Sess's eyes gone cold as a killer's. “Good God, Sess,” her mother was saying, “but you've got some excitable friends. Too much to drink, I guess”-with a laugh-“or maybe Pris was too much for him to handle. My daughters are like that, you know.”
And here came Pris, flustered, blotched, her hair a mess and the hem of her dress stiff with mud. “What was that all about?” she said, extracting a cigarette from her purse. “I was just starting to warm up there. Who was that guy, anyway-an escapee from the mental ward or something? I mean, I kind of liked him. His spirit, I mean.”
Sess wouldn't say a word. Her sister looked to him, her mother, but he just stood there rooted to the spot, rigid as a fencepost. “It's all right,” Pamela kept telling him, “don't let it spoil the day. It's all right, it is-”
But it wasn't. Sess wouldn't soften, wouldn't give. They danced, they drank champagne, received congratulations and gave thanks in return, and one after another people came up to them, lit with hilarity and goodwill, but it wasn't the same after Joe Bosky had put in his appearance. This was her wedding day, her wedding _night,__ and her husband was as distant and impenetrable as some alien out of a spaceship in one of those corny B movies she'd watched as a kid. _Wake up, Sess,__ she wanted to say. _Wake up and snap out of it, your bride's here-remember me?__
It must have been around ten when the party began to wind down, people gone off in pairs, migrating to the Nougat and the Three Pup, falling unconscious in the gravel on the bank of the river. Tim Yule was seated on an overturned bucket in a stripe of sun, stirring a plastic cup of Everclear with a big-knuckled finger and holding a sotto voce conversation with himself. Howard Walpole and Richie Oliver had long since drifted off, shoulders slumped in mutual commiseration. Pamela's mother was in the back of Pris's station wagon-“A little catnap, that's all I need, don't worry about me”-and Pris was holding court for the benefit of three drunken bush crazies who would have stripped the flesh from their bones for just a touch of her, while the band had been reduced to a single fiddle sawing away at the melancholy traces of a classical education. The hour had come. She pressed her husband's hand and felt the blood start in her veins. “Sess,” she said, her voice echoing oddly in her ears over the strains of the violin-saddest thing she'd ever heard, and what was it, Borodin? Shostakovich? Something like that. “Sess,” she said, “don't you think it's time the bride and groom went in and-”
“Went to bed?”
They were on the back porch of the house Richard Schrader had magnanimously vacated for the night. Mosquitoes sailed into their faces, softly rebounded from their lips, their eyelashes. She'd changed into a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved hooded sweatshirt, but she was conscious of the underthings she'd picked out in Anchorage with Pris, lacy satin panties and a brassiere that clung to her like a man's spread fingers. He leaned in close and they kissed, easeful and sweet, all the rage and the woodenness gone out of him finally, finally, and she murmured, “Yes, to bed.”
The drone of an outboard came to her then, to both of them, a speedboat planing up the river in the slanting sun of ten o'clock at night, droning closer, a glint of churned water trailing away from the stern and the bearded face of Joe Bosky, black-crowned, at the helm. Joe Bosky, back for one final thrust. Sess rose up off the porch even as the bow leapt out of the current and careened for shore. “Hey, Sess Harder, fuck you!” Bosky roared over the engine, dancing at the throttle. “Fuck you and your dog-faced woman too!” And then the bow cut back and the boat shot past and was gone.
Richard had left them a pair of vanilla-scented candles, one on each side of the bed, tapering pale phallic things rising up out of matching ceramic dishes his ex-wife had shaped and fired herself. The cabin was four rooms, two of which Richard closed off in winter, and it featured a kitchen sink with a hand-pump for water and a bathroom replete with a flush toilet that generally worked, at least in warm weather. As in most of the cabins and frame houses in Boynton, aesthetic considerations had been sacrificed to practicality, and all four rooms were lined floor-to-ceiling with flattened cardboard boxes-Birds Eye Peas, Rainier Pale Ale, Charmin Toilet Tissue-to provide a last line of defense against the winds screaming down out of the polar barrens in the dead of winter. The bedroom was constructed as a kind of loft, four steps up from the main room and the top-of-the-line Ashley stove Richard's ex had insisted on. There was no need of the stove tonight. It was as warm inside as a cabana on a white crescent beach in the Bahamas.
She was sitting on the bed, taking her hair down. She'd lit the candles and set aside the plastic cup of lukewarm champagne-the taste had gone saccharine in the back of her throat, and she didn't need any more. The cabin was still. The sun held. She could hear the sound of her own breathing, the tick and whirr of the blood coursing through her veins. After a moment she got up and pulled the shades over the two slits of the windows.
Sess was busy in the main room, fooling with something, his shoulders so squared-up and rigid you would have thought the vertebrae had fused in his neck. Something clattered, fell to the floor. He was struggling for control, she could see that, but Joe Bosky had poisoned the day, the moment, the night to come, and she didn't know what to say or how to defuse it. In her bag was a paperback her mother had given her, _The Bride's Advisor: 100 Questions and Answers for Your Wedding Night,__ but there was nothing in all its three hundred pages and appendices to address the situation at hand. Her husband was in no tender mood. He was twenty-five feet away, his back turned to her, and he might as well have been on another planet. There was a dull thump as some other object fell to the floor.
She stood up then, where he could see her when he turned round, and pulled the sweatshirt up over her head and dropped the jeans down round her ankles and stepped out of them. She was in her underwear, in her sixteen-dollar-and-ninety-nine-cent silk panties and matching brassiere from Oswalt's department store, and she wanted him to see her in them, to be turned on, to see her flat abdomen and the curve of her hips and her long, tapered legs. Her voice was caught in her throat. “Sess,” she was going to say, “Sess, why don't you turn around,” but she couldn't do it. A long deracinated moment shuddered by and she was thinking about high school, making out with Gary Miranda in the den of her parents' house while they were away at work, the Platters and the Ink Spots dripping honey from the hi-fi and the heat of his tongue and how it made her feel. His tongue was wet and thrusting and insistent, and he took her own tongue into his mouth and sucked it as if it were a peppermint candy or a jawbreaker, and it made her feel abandoned, made her feel wild, but she never let him touch her breasts or anything else, because she didn't believe in that. In college there was petting, the furious dry friction of it, the boys all sprouting second sets of hands and grinding against her like windup soldiers, the rhythm and movement as automatic as the pounding of their hearts, and half her sorority sisters going all the way with their steadies and not a bit shy about it either. Her panties were as wet as if she'd fallen in a lake, her jeans, her skirts, but no boy, even Eric Kresten, and she dated him for almost two years, ever got her to take anything off but her bra. And then she was in her twenties and Fred Stines came to her apartment and she stripped to her panties for him while he stroked her everywhere his fingers lighted and sucked at her nipples like an underfed puppy and she felt herself giving way time after time but she never did.