He spat dryly into the dust, swallowed from his canteen, then yelled for another one. They were climbing a long, curve-banked hill now, and his words came in out-of-breath bursts.
“Pris was on the first floor, the showcase for all the idiot tourists who didn’t have anything better to do than go on a guided tour of the place that made their jam jams. It was nice down where Pris was. Pretty pastel walls, nice modern machinery, air conditioning. Pris sewed on buttons from seven till three. Just think, there are men all over the country wearing pj’s held up by Priscilla’s buttons. There is a thought to warm the coldest heart.
“I was on the fifth floor. I was a bagger. See, down in the basement they dyed the raw cloth and sent it up to the fifth floor in these warm-air tubes. They’d ring a bell when the whole lot was done, and I’d open my bin and there’d be a whole shitload of loose fiber, all the colors of the rainbow. I’d pitchfork it out, put it in two-hundred-pound sacks, and chain-hoist the sacks onto a big pile of other sacks for the picker machine. They’d separate it, the weaving machines wove it, some other guys cut it and sewed it into pajamas, and down there on that pretty pastel first floor Pris put on the buttons while the dumbass tourists watched her and the other girls through this glass wall… just like the people are watching us today. Am I getting through to you at all, Garraty?”
“The scar,” Garraty reminded.
“I keep wandering away from that, don’t I?” McVries wiped his forehead and unbuttoned his shirt as they breasted the hill. Waves of woods stretched away before them to a horizon poked with mountains. They met the sky like interlocking jigsaw pieces. Perhaps ten miles away, almost lost in the heat-haze, a fire tower jutted up through the green. The road cut through it all like a sliding gray serpent.
“At first, the joy and bliss was Keatsville all the way. I screwed her three more times, all at the drive-in with the smell of cowshit coming in through the car window from the next pasture. And I could never get all of the loose fabric out of my hair no matter how many times I shampooed it, and the worst thing was she was getting away from me, going beyond me I loved her, I really did, I knew it and there was no way I could tell her anymore so she’d understand. I couldn’t even screw it into her. There was always that smell of cowshit.
“The thing of it was, Garraty, the factory was on piecework. That means we got lousy wages, but a percentage for all we did over a certain minimum. I wasn’t a very good bagger. I did about twenty-three bags a day, but the norm was usually right around thirty. And this did not endear me to the rest of the boys, because I was fucking them up. Harlan down in the dyehouse couldn’t make piecework because I was tying up his blower with full bins. Ralph on the picker couldn’t make piecework because I wasn’t shifting enough bags over to him. It wasn’t pleasant. They saw to it that it wasn’t pleasant. You understand?”
“Yeah,” Garraty said. He wiped the back of his hand across his neck and then wiped his hand on his pants. It made a dark stain.
“Meanwhile, down in buttoning, Pris was keeping herself busy. Some nights she’d talk for hours about her girlfriends, and it was usually the same tune. How much this one was making. How much that one was making. And most of all, how much she was making. And she was making plenty. So I got to find out how much fun it is to be in competition with the girl you want to marry. At the end of the week I’d go home with a check for $64.40 and put some Cornhusker’s Lotion on my blisters. She was making something like ninety a week, and socking it away as fast as she could run to the bank. And when I suggested we go someplace dutch, you would have thought I’d suggested ritual murder.
“After a while I stopped screwing her. I’d like to say I stopped going to bed with her, it’s more pleasant, but we never had a bed to go to. I couldn’t take her to my apartment, there were usually about sixteen guys there drinking beer, and there were always people at her place-that’s what she said, anyway-and I couldn’t afford another motel room and I certainly wasn’t going to suggest we go dutch on that, so it was just screwing in the back seat at the drive-in. And I could tell she was getting disgusted. And since I knew it and since I had started to hate her even though I still loved her, I asked her to marry me. Right then. She started wriggling around, trying to put me off, but I made her come out with it, yes or no.”
“And it was no.”
“Sure it was no. ‘Pete, we can’t afford it. What would my mom say. Pete, we have to wait.’ Pete this and Pete that and all the time the real reason was her money, the money she was making sewing on buttons.”
“Well, you were damned unfair to ask her.”
“Sure I was unfair!” McVries said savagely. “I knew that. I wanted to make her feel like a greedy, self-centered little bitch because she was making me feel like a failure.”
His hand crept up to the scar.
“Only she didn’t have to make me feel like a failure, because I was a failure. I didn’t have anything in particular going for me except a cock to stick in her and she wouldn’t even make me feel like a man by refusing that.”
The guns roared behind them.
“Olson?” McVries asked.
“No. He’s still back there.”
“Oh…”
“The scar,” Garraty reminded.
“Oh, why don’t you let it alone?”
“You saved my life.”
“Shit on you.”
“The scar.”
“I got into a fight,” McVries said finally, after a long pause. “With Ralph, the guy on the picker. He blacked both my eyes and told me I better take off or he’d break my arms as well. I turned in my time and told Pris that night that I’d quit. She could see what I looked like for herself. She understood. She said that was probably best. I told her I was going home and I asked her to come. She said she couldn’t. I said she was nothing but a slave to her fucking buttons and that I wished I’d never seen her. There was just so much poison inside me, Garraty. I told her she was a fool and an unfeeling bitch that couldn’t see any further than the goddam bank book she carried around in her purse. Nothing I said was fair, but… there was some truth in all of it, I guess. Enough. We were at her apartment. That was the first time I’d ever been there when all her roommates were out. They were at the movies. I tried to take her to bed and she cut my face open with a letter-opener. It was a gag letter-opener, some friend of hers sent it to her from England. It had Paddington Bear on it. She cut me like I was trying to rape her. Like I was germs and I’d infect her. Am I giving you the drift, Ray?”
“Yes, I’m getting it,” Garraty said. Up ahead a white station wagon with the words WHGH NEWSMOBILE lettered on the side was pulled off the road. As they drew near, a balding man in a shiny suit began shooting them with a big newsreel cine camera. Pearson, Abraham, and Jensen all clutched their crotches with their left hand and thumbed their noses with their right. There was a Rockette-like precision about this little act of defiance that bemused Garraty.
“I cried,” McVries said. “I cried like a baby. I got down on my knees and held her skirt and begged her to forgive me, and all the blood was getting on the floor, it was a basically disgusting scene, Garraty. She gagged and ran off into the bathroom. She threw up. I could hear her throwing up. When she came out, she had a towel for my face. She said she never wanted to see me again. She was crying. She asked me why I’d done that to her, hurt her like that. She said I had no right. There I was, Ray, with my face cut wide open and she’s asking me why I hurt her.”