I reckon a five-hundred-dollar commitment entitles me to drink a goddamned beer, Bonedaddy said. Right?
I guess so, Quincy Nell said.
I would reckon that it entitles me to a lot of things.
NIGHT ON THE RIVER. Boats passed below unseen in the sweet floral darkness. Laughter floated by sourceless, laughter from nowhere, all these lovers faceless in the dark. The Toyota was parked on the point with the radio tuned to a country station. Earl Thomas Conley. Quincy Nell? Bonedaddy said. She clung to him with a stricken urgency. She started to say something. He put himself inside her. She knotted her fingers in his long black hair. On the radio Earl Thomas Conley sang, Love don’t care whose heart it breaks, it don’t care who gets blown away.
SHE HAD THOUGHT THAT that would do it. According to such spotty information as she had accumulated and hoarded she should have hooked him like a bad drug, strung him out like an addict with a vicious little monkey clinging to his back. It didn’t seem to change things much. Life went on. Summer turned hot, then hotter. He used the nail gun at the pallet mill. He drank long-necked beers with his friend Clarence when they got off work in the afternoon. He won forty dollars in a pool tournament and with ten dollars of it bought her a ragged panda that already looked secondhand, as if it had come from a yard sale. He became interested in baseball and said that the Atlanta Braves were going to take it right down to the wire.
In the meantime Bonedaddy sang in her blood like electricity. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She thought about where he was and what he was doing every minute of the day, the thought of him going to bed with another woman took her to the point of madness. She couldn’t quit thinking about him. She lived for the sweaty nights under the mimosas when she would cling to him desperately and think she was going to die in his arms and not caring if she did.
Having fought so long and hard and ultimately successfully for something Bonedaddy seemed to dismiss it as a thing of no moment. Goddamn,Quincy Nell, he said. You’re going to wear me right down to the ground. I have to work tomorrow. I can’t lay up and sleep like you do.
She felt her grip on him loosening, her fingers tiring. She clung to him as if she’d absorb him. She dreamed lime-green walls, yellow chintz curtains she’d seen at Wal-Mart, a baby in a highchair saying Daddy for the first time and her telling Bonedaddy about it the minute he came through the door. While Bonedaddy spoke of the Atlanta pitching staff, the merits of Mike Tyson as opposed to Muhammad Ali.
July drew on to August. She prayed and waited. Something was happening to her. One morning she was sick and fear and anticipation mingled like oil and water.
By now Bonedaddy had talked her into drinking a beer now and again. Two beers made her giggly. I’m missing a period, she giggled. And I can’t find it anywhere.
Don’t joke about such shit as that, Bonedaddy said.
I’m not joking. I think I’m pregnant.
You can’t be.
This was so specious an argument she didn’t even pursue it. She didn’t even reply.
Are you serious, Quincy Nell.
Yes I am.
Well. I guess all we can do is wait and see. Likely it’ll come to nothing.
She knew it already had come to something. Over a month ago she had had a prophetic dream. She had dreamt that her life was overseen by two angels. These angels looked rather like middleaged old-maid schoolteachers and they oversaw her life with a system of awards and demerits, checks and balances. All right, she’s done it five times, the first angel said. Let’s give her a baby. The second angel had said, No we’d better wait. That time out by the pallet mill doesn’t count.
We’re going to get married anyway, Quincy Nell said. I guess we can just do it sooner.
I guess, Bonedaddy said.
HE GOT A REAL DEAL on the washer and dryer and refrigerator. Someone at work had offered him five hundred dollars for them. He was going to take it.
No you’re not, she said. They’re ours. For our apartment.
Look, he said. It’s all the money back and the air conditioner free and clear. We can buy another set of appliances.
There’s no use buying something you’ve already got, she said.
They stood arguing in the yard before the shed. Clarence waited in the truck. From time to time he’d take a drink of his beer. There were other beers iced down in a cooler. Bonedaddy argued with vehemence, there was something sinister about him. The parents watched from the porch, vaguely embarrassed. The father looked wan and ineffectual, like a cardboard cutout of a father.
The damn things are mine and I’m getting them and that’s all there is to it, Bonedaddy said. Clarence, get out and help me.
Clarence got out.
THEN THERE WERE DAYS when she walked on the edge of the abyss. Her parents watched her with hooded eyes. Nothing was yet said, everything was left open-ended. Life was a dark torrent moving beneath her feet and everything that was left unsaid moved inaudibly beneath the waters. Pregnant, statutory rape, courts and lawsuits. Her life seemed unending and she couldn’t see anymore the way that it would go. Maybe he thinks it will just go away, she thought viciously.
Nights he didn’t come and he didn’t call. She called the trailer and the telephone rang and he didn’t answer. She cried into her pillow and her body ached for him and her mind replayed the things he’d said when the mimosa blossoms fell in the windless dark and Earl Thomas Conley warned, It don’t care who gets blown away. Someone saw him at the dance across the river with a black-haired girl from Coble and she beheaded the panda with a single-edge razor and set the truncate corpse on the bureau, poor piebald panda with its jaunty air of yard-sale innocence.
The worst was when she slipped out at night and waited on him at his trailer, listening to the radio in the Gremlin and watching the stars pulse and quake in the hot dark.
When he came he was in a black Lexus with a woman older than he was. He leaned to kiss her when he got out. Either he hadn’t noticed the Gremlin or more likely he just hadn’t cared. Quincy Nell was out before he was and she closed on him before he could even shut the door of the Lexus.
You son of a bitch, she said.
What on earth, the woman in the Lexus wanted to know. She looked mildly amused, as if this were some diversion staged for her benefit.
Quincy Nell and Bonedaddy swayed like graceless dancers in the patchy yard of the house trailer. She tried to slap him, but he shoved her hard backward and she fell and cried out.
You’ll hurt the baby, she cried.
Baby? the woman in the Lexus said. The window powered up on the Lexus and the woman vanished behind smoked glass. The motor cranked and the car backed up the driveway.
Goddamn it, Quincy, Bonedaddy said. Do you have to tell everyone you see? You’re going to ruin me in this town.
I’m going to ruin you in every town there is on a map, she said.
A porch light came on next door. The front door of the trailer opened and a man stood on a makeshift stoop of stacked concrete blocks in the harsh light. Insects spiraled in the electric helix. He was a fat man naked to the waist holding a can of beer. His belly looped over the waistband of his slacks.
I ain’t puttin up with no more of this crap, Bonedaddy, the man said. You ain’t beatin up on no little slip of a girl while I’m around to stop it.
Then stop it or call the fucking law, Bonedaddy said.
I done called them, the fat man said.
A middle-aged deputy sheriff came to put things to rights. An authoritative presence in khaki. She glanced at his holstered pistol. What’s the trouble here, Bonedaddy, he asked.
Bonedaddy was all polite deference. A touch of selfdeprecation in his voice. Well, she just kind of attacked me, he said. Jumped right out of the bushes on me. She seen me with Jewel Seiber and I reckon she’s jealous. Everything’s all right now.