In addition to my whiskey courage, I was beginning to dimly perceive some kind of slur on my gender if I didn’t do the things the guys could do. So I was very near to jumping when a white light lower to the ground and of longer duration than lightning splashed over us. The headlights of Kenny’s truck.
He’d sent the guys on their way, but I was sitting wet-haired and sobering fast in the cab of his truck.
“Tell me you never went cliff-jumping as a kid,” I demanded.
“That’s not what bothers me,” Kenny said. “It’s your drinking. You’re getting something of a reputation, Sarah.”
Reputation. That word had a connotation beyond drinking.
“What are you trying to say?” I demanded. “I haven’t slept with any of those guys. Not a goddamned one. If anyone’s saying so, they’re lying.”
“No, that’s not what they’re saying,” Kenny said. “They’re saying you’re a lush and a tease.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You drink and dance with these boys, Sarah, go out to the lakes with them with no other girls around. What do you expect them to think?”
“That I like drinking and dancing and going to the lakes. If they think I owe them anything, that’s their problem.”
“If you get hurt, it’s not going to matter whose fault it is,” Kenny said. “You’re a tall, strong girl, but one day it isn’t going to be enough. One morning you’re going to wake up and be the last person in town to know you pulled a train the night before.”
Never would I have believed that Kenny knew a phrase like that. It was like a slap in the face. I was a child to chiding, at least with him. I swallowed hard and didn’t let the hurt show. “I can take care of myself,” I said thinly.
“You keep saying that, but you’re not doing it,” Kenny said.
Later that month, coming home drunk, hot, and thirsty late on a Friday night, I knocked a glass from the kitchen cupboard. I thought I was being a good roommate as I got out the broom and dustpan to clean up.
But in the morning, Cheryl Anne and Erin noticed a few shards of glass my clumsy efforts had left behind. They also inspected the kitchen trash and found the broken remains of a champagne flute that had been a keepsake from Erin ’s sister’s wedding. They suggested it was time I found a place of my own.
I found a vacancy in a three-story rooming house. Kenny’s big truck would have made the move a lot easier, but he and I weren’t speaking much.
August brought the hottest days of summer, and the most humid. Everyone who didn’t have air-conditioning was out on the streets. My third-floor room was a very efficient trap for the heat, so when the weekend came around, I also planned to spend as much time away from home as possible. The bar was air-conditioned, and after a certain hour, the bartenders were too busy to notice someone underage in the corner.
One Sunday morning, I woke up in a holding cell, with a pounding headache. When the jailer came down, it was Kenny.
“What’d I do?” I asked.
“If you don’t remember,” he said, “why should I tell you?”
Half a dozen possibilities ran though my mind, none of them good. I thought of Wayne and his broken nose. I thought of the beautiful deep-gray Nova I’d just bought and told myself I’d never drive drunk. Please God, not a hit-and-run.
Kenny relented. “You didn’t do much of anything,” he said. “Just drunk and disorderly in public.”
“Okay,” I said, sitting on the bench with my hands dangling loosely between my knees. “I get a phone call, right?”
I was thinking I’d have to call a bail bondsman. Who else was there? Silva? The shambling old man across the hall from me at the rooming house, who smelled of layers of cigarette smoke and whose last name I’d never learned? Kenny was my closest friend, and clearly there was no help coming from that quarter.
“You’d get one phone call if you’d been arrested,” he said. “I didn’t arrest you last night. You’re not officially here.”
“What?” I said.
“I brought you in here to sober up and think a little.”
I should have been grateful, but instead I just got angry. I stood up, and immediately my blood pressure rose, making my head throb. “You think I want favors from you?” I said. I held out my hands as if for handcuffs. “If I did something wrong, arrest me. If I didn’t, then let me out.”
Kenny shook his head.
“No, arrest me if you think I deserve it. Then at least I can call someone, make bail, and get out.”
But Kenny shook his head again. “I don’t want to do that today for the same reason I didn’t last night,” he said. “I don’t want you to have an arrest on your record, because it could hurt your chances.”
“Chances for what?”
“For being a cop,” Kenny said.
I let my hands fall. If he had said, For the space program, I couldn’t have been more surprised. My voice, when I spoke, was faint. “Are you kidding?” I said.
“You’re too smart to be a miner and too mean to be a college girl,” Kenny told me. “You’ve got a lot of energy and it’s all going nowhere. You need a job you can pour it into.”
“You’re not serious,” I said. “They don’t need people here, anyway. There probably isn’t even a vacancy in the every-other-weekend citizen’s reserve program that you do.”
“No, there isn’t,” Kenny said. “But they’re always looking for good people down in the Cities.”
“You’re serious,” I said.
“Yes,” Kenny said.
For a moment I didn’t even feel the ache in my temples. Kenny thought I could be someone like him, and this amazing realization made all my anger drain away. He was wrong, of course.
“Listen, Kenny,” I said, “thanks, but I’m not cut out for it.”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“I just do. You’re reading me all wrong.” After another moment I said, “Really, I’m sorry.”
When he saw I meant it, Kenny fished for his keys.
Weeks passed and September came. Kenny had gone back to his work, patrolling the mines during the week and the streets and jail on the weekend. I went back to what I did best, drinking on the weekend nights.
Around 3 A.M., after a typical Saturday night, I was in a familiar position: kneeling over the toilet bowl. When you throw up on a fairly regular basis, you lose your distaste for it. Afterward, I wiped the corner of my mouth with my hand, swaying slightly on my knees, feeling the dampness of unhealthy sweat on the nape of my neck, grateful for the cool night air from the open sash window. I’d just brushed my teeth and was splashing water on my face, when outside the window, a woman screamed.
I froze, completely still except for the water droplets crawling on my face, and then I went to the window.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Is someone out there?”
The bathroom window looked out onto a grassy slope, which led up to the railroad tracks. It was dark there, except far to my right, where I could see the signal lights on the tracks.
“Hey!” I yelled again. There was no response.
“Goddammit,” I said, fumbling for my towel. I wanted to hear drunken tittering, or a sour voice saying, Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I wanted to feel irritated. It was preferable to feeling worried about someone in the dark who’d screamed and now wasn’t answering.
Back in my room, I undressed and pulled back the bedcovers, instructing myself to forget about it. I told myself that animal noises could trick you sometimes. Like bobcats, for example; they sounded a lot like women screaming. Or barred owls.