The upshot of it was that he let her go. He said Quincy Nell was a lot younger but that she had a good head on her shoulders and a mind of her own. Quincy Nell’s mother had reservations but she ultimately deferred to the father. Quincy Nell’s father privately felt that he could see down the road a lot farther than Quincy Nell could and he foresaw a day of enlightenment when the revelation that she had been wasting her time on Bonedaddy would hit her and she would get on to other things. Privately her mother thought that Bonedaddy would make a good-looking son-in-law.
That evening she rode in the off-white Toyota for the first time. They drove down to Clifton and had cheeseburgers and cherry Cokes at the Sonic and drove around the sleepy-looking town for a while. He took her home early. His behavior was exemplary. She was slightly disappointed.
That night she took down a pristine notebook and opened it to the first page. She licked the tip of her pencil and wrote the word OBJECTIVES. She wrote: Marry Bonedaddy Bowers and then she underlined it. She thought awhile and then made two subheadings, one, two. Beneath one she wrote: Become whatever he wants me to be. Then she wrote and underlined, Take the place of everyone he knows.
Came then hot honeysuckle nights of eros. Whispers in the dark by the river. They’d take blankets and lie beneath the trailing fronds of mimosa, scented blossoms falling on their bodies in the moonlight. Urgent entreaties and urgent denials and engagements fought over millimeters of bare sweating flesh. Every calculated liberty she permitted just drove him wilder until his entire body seemed tumescent with desire and night by night he was getting more difficult to handle. Candace had told her once, It’s funny the way he does it. He just goes along assuming you’re going to and before you know it you have. Forewarned is forearmed and that wasn’t working this time and there were nights they fought their private war until the world seemed to have fallen asleep and forgotten them, the lights of the town folding one by one and the last drunken carouser home in bed and even the insects hushed and the moon about to set, tracking palely above the surface of the river like the luminescent husk of a dead world.
Some afternoons he would sit about the Quallses’ porch after he got off work at the pallet mill or he’d lounge about the living room watching a football game. He had quit drinking he told her and as summer drew on he drank vast quantities of a beverage called Sharps, brown bottles of it that looked and tasted like beer but were supposed to have the alcohol removed. But all this was mere preamble. Just necessary overture for the hot sweaty darkness when she wanted to as much as he did but fought him bitterly until she cried with frustration.
By the middle of June she was still a virgin she guessed but even she had to admit it was territory she claimed by the sheerest of technicalities.
She heard about the appliances on a radio show called Trade-time and she called the number they’d given immediately. The man said he had a washer and a dryer and a refrigerator and a fifteen thousand BTU air conditioner and that his wife had left him and that he would take five hundred dollars for the lot.
Consider them sold, she told him. And don’t sell them to anybody else until you hear from me.
Are you crazy, Bonedaddy said that afternoon. I don’t need that shit.
We may not now, Quincy Nell said. We will when we’re married. We’ll need all that stuffand this’ll save us a lot of money.
I got nowhere to keep all that crap, he said. I live in a house trailer, you know.
She’d listened for his reaction when she mentioned the word marriage. This was a subject that had come up during the hot sweaty nights but this was its first mention when they were, as it were, cold sober. He didn’t deny it.
We’ll put it in Daddy’s shed, she said. I’ll keep it there and when we’re married we’ll get one of those apartments out on Cisco Pike. The one I looked at had kind of lime-green walls. They’re real nice.
They are? he asked. There was the first trace of disquiet in his voice.
Yeah. You get to decorate them any way you want to.
You don’t have any idea of the time it’s took me to save up five hundred dollars. I ought to have kept my mouth shut about it, too.
It’s for us, she said. Our money, you said. Didn’t you say that?
Sure I did, he said, thinking of the river, the scent of her flesh.
I’ll talk to Daddy about putting it in the shed.
I’d be careful about what I talked to Daddy about, Bonedaddy said. We’re trying to keep this quiet, right?
Sure. I’d just feel better about what we’ve been doing if there was some kind of a definite commitment. Five hundred dollars is a big commitment and I’d know you haven’t been just lying to me. See?
I see all right, Bonedaddy said.
WE JUST NEED A PLACE to keep it until we get married, Quincy Nell said.
Her father was reading a copy of Harper’s and he glanced at the page number he was on and laid the magazine aside with some reluctance.
Married?
Well, not right now. When I’m eighteen. We’re going to save our money until then. I’m going to get a part-time job at the Sonic and Bonedaddy’s got his job at the pallet mill. It doesn’t take much for him to live.
Her father looked indulgent. That had always been his way. He would listen carefully to every word she said as if weighing each word separately and when she was finished he would take off his glasses and wipe them with a tissue studying her thoughtfully with his soft aesthete’s eyes and then he would tell her how full of shit she was. His way had been to warn her and let her go, he’d warned her about older men, younger men, sex, drugs, life itself.
I believe I’ve heard all this before from Candace, he said. This is like a summer rerun.
Candace turned out all right.
Candace hasn’t turned out yet. Candace is in the process of turning out.
Whatever.
Two years from now you’ll be admitting that you were every bit as foolish as you sound to me right this minute.
Maybe so. But what do you have to lose? At the very worst you’ll gain a shedful of appliances. They’re mine. Ours. He’s buying them for me.
I need my shed.
For what? All there is in there are spiderwebs and old fruit jars.
All right all right, he said. Just don’t bother me with it. Do what you want.
BONEDADDY COUNTED THE MONEY out carefully. You sure you won’t come off that five hundred a little?
But the little bespectacled man had already divined more of the way of things than even Bonedaddy had and he wasn’t about to come off. He hooked his thumbs in his suspenders. He winked at Quincy Nell.
That’s about the least dollar I could take, he said regretfully.
All right, here then, Bonedaddy said, shoving the money at him. He looked at his Toyota loaded to the tailgate with five hundred dollars’ worth of used coppertone appliances. Let’s get the hell out of here, he said.
The shed was a converted storm cellar dug out of a hillside and faced with poplar logs. It had a heavy door framed up out of sawmill oak and a hasp and lock. They tore out the shelves and boxed the fruit jars and unloaded the appliances with a dolly Bonedaddy had borrowed from his friend Clarence, who lived just down the road and made deliveries for a furniture store. When the appliances were stored inside and the lock secured through the hasp they were hot and sweaty.
Let’s go swimming, Bonedaddy said. I aim to buy me a Budweiser about waist high and just wallow around in it.
You quit drinking, remember?