Dessa was the experienced one—the one with “two serious relationships” behind her. Both the dulcimer player and the antiwar organizer had been older than she—had sometimes made her feel, she said, like a foolish little girl. And although her parents only knew about the incident with Julian—she’d called them from the Brighton police station the night he’d slammed her against the wall and broken her wrist—she’d been roughed up by both men. She told me she appreciated my inexperience. My shyness. She said she felt safe in my arms.
“That’s what I hate about waitressing,” she told me one afternoon. “The fact that, some nights, I just don’t feel safe.” The two of us were lying on her bed, listening to music and just holding on to each other. “Most guys get so hostile when they drink. I hate the way they egg each other on.” She shifted around on the bed so that she could look at me. “What are you guys so angry about?” she said.
I rubbed my hand up and down her leg, kissed her temple, kissed the corner of her mouth. “I’m not angry,” I said. “I come in peace.”
“But seriously, though,” she said. “Sometimes at work, even with the bouncers and the bartenders keeping an eye on us, I just don’t feel safe.”
“Then quit,” I told her.
“I can’t quit.”
“Sure you can,” I told her. “How do you think I feel knowing that every guy at that bar is checking you out? If you quit, we could see each other on weekends. Go to the beach. Spend whole days together.”
“Dominick, I have to work,” she said.
“You’ve got your Head Start job. That’s work.”
She laughed. “You know what I clear at that job, Dominick? Thirty-six dollars a week. I make double that—triple that some nights—bringing drunken jerks their beers down at the Dial-Tone.”
“Hey, it’s not as if you need the money. Your tuition’s probably, what? Seven or eight car sales down at your father’s place?”
“But that’s not the point. I need to prove something to myself.”
I stifled a smile, swallowed a little bit of resentment. I wished I had the luxury of working for something other than the money. “You need to prove what?”
“Dominick, my father is the most generous man in the world, okay? He’d give my sister and me anything we asked for. But that’s the problem. You pay a price by being on the receiving end of that. You give up your independence.”
I began stroking the inside of her leg. “If I quit, it would prove his point, not mine,” she said. She yanked her shirt up over her head, unhooked her bra. “Daddy would just love it if his little Dessa couldn’t fend for herself. If she was still just Daddy’s little girl. But I’m not. I’m my own person. Right?”
“Right,” I said.
She slid out of her panties. Grabbed onto my arm. “Does any of this make sense to you?” she asked. “I mean, you’re saying ‘right,’ but do you really get the point?”
I reached over and kissed her breast. “Yeah, I get the point, all right,” I told her. “I’m pointing all over the place here.”
“Oh, forget it,” she sighed. “I swear, you guys are all alike.”
She was a patient lover. After the first two or three jackrabbit sessions, she showed me the value of taking my time, making choices with her. “Do you like this?” she’d ask. “Does this feel good?” Then she’d take my hand in her hand, guide my fingertips and show me how and where I could return the favor. “Slower, now,” she’d whisper. “That’s it. Nice and slow.” When she was ready, she’d draw me against her, inside of her. I learned how to pace it, how to hold on until I’d feel her whole body tense, close to the edge, and then over the edge, lost in a pleasure that was both ours and hers in private. Sometimes that privacy would worry me a little, make me feel insecure, and I’d think, maybe she’s imagining it’s one of those other guys. Then, as if by instinct, she’d open her eyes and smile at me and touch my face. Say something like “Hey, you?” and turn her attention to me. To my pleasure. Until I was caught up in a release so wild and sweet that it was hard to believe that, oh Jesus, this was real and here and happening to me, Dominick.
One time right afterward, when we were both still catching our breath, I told her I loved her. Watched her face go from peaceful to sad.
“I’ve heard that line before,” she said.
“It’s not a ‘line,’ Dessa. I mean it.”
“Okay, why? Why do you love me?”
“Because you’re you,” I said, groping. “And because . . . you’re a good teacher.”
She smiled, jabbed me one. “I think you just like the lesson plan,” she said.
On those summer nights alone together in the Constantines’ big house, teasing was part of what was sexy. So was eating. Downstairs, lying on her parents’ beige wall-to-wall carpeting, we’d play Greek music and drink red wine and feast: feta cheese and oily brown olives, tomatoes and basil, crusty bread from Gianacopolis Bakery. Sometimes Dessa would heat up the food her mother had frozen for her in little foil packages before the trip: spinach pie, moussaka. And afterward, more wine and fruit. Sometimes we’d read to each other, or watch TV, or Dessa would tell stories about when she and her sister Angie were kids. After she got me laughing, she’d say, “Now you tell me about your childhood,” and I’d remember nothing but spankings and crying jags—the time Ray caught Thomas and me eating Halloween candy at church, the time he pulled over to the side of the highway and made us get out of the car because we’d been arguing with each other. We were what? Six? Seven, maybe? We got out, stood on the side of the road, and he drove off. Just drove away and left us there. And by the time he came back, Thomas and I were holding on to each other, crying our fucking heads off. . . . It wasn’t all bad. It wasn’t always like that. But when Dessa asked about my childhood, those were the only kinds of things I could think of. So I’d just shrug and tell her I couldn’t remember that kind of stuff the way she could. Then I’d look away and change the subject. Wait for her to stop looking at me. Wait for her curiosity to pass.
Sometimes after dark, we’d swim out back in their pool. Or do other stuff out there. Or go back up to Dessa’s room. Once we even made love on the floor of her parents’ bedroom, Dessa on top and me looking past her shoulder, past the bottles of fancy colognes and lotions on her mother’s bureau and into the mirror at the two of us, rocking, joined together. We hadn’t planned it. It just happened. I’d gone into Thula and Gene’s room to wait out Uncle Costas’s surprise visit and half an hour later, when Dessa came back upstairs and found me, we just . . . bam! It was like we hadn’t seen each other in five years or something. That’s the way it was at the beginning: neither of us could keep our hands off the other. Get filled up. It felt powerful and powerless both—what we kick-started that summer in the Constantines’ big empty house.
Because of our work schedules, I saw her on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights. Come eleven or midnight, I’d throw a couple cups of coffee in me and then get back on my bike—pedal like a maniac down Lakeside, across Woodlawn, and out onto Route 165. By the time I got home, Ray would be at work and Ma and Thomas would have gone to bed. I’d sit in our pathetic plastic-tiled kitchen with its corny knickknacks, its flypaper hanging from the ceiling, studded with victims, and feel embarrassed about who and what we were. Or else I’d lie in the dark in the living room on our shabby, unraveling braided rug from Sears and think, here I am, a rich girl’s boyfriend, the only guy who can make her feel safe. And not just any rich girl, either. Dessa. And I’d feel again the small heft of her breast, my lips against her nipples—see my fingers unraveling that long black braid of hers. Exhausted but wired, I’d twist and fidget, unable to go upstairs and sleep. Unable to get filled up with her.
I thought I was playing it cool. I didn’t think it showed, but it must have. At work, Leo teased me about my yawning, my dozing at lunchtime—about what I must be “ordering off the menu from my little waitress friend.” At home, Ma kept asking me when she was going to be able to meet
my “new gal.” Thomas kept bugging me about what Dessa looked like. Possessive of what I had—reluctant to share even information about her—I volunteered the minimum. “She’s short,” I told him. “Brunette.”
“What else?”
“That’s it,” I said, shrugging. “Short and brunette. She goes to Boston College.”
One morning while I was shaving at the bathroom sink, Ray walked in and stood behind me, studying my sleepy face in the medicine cabinet mirror. I’d gotten in at three that same morning, had copped a grand total of three hours’ sleep before I’d had to get up for work.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Your mother tells me you were out late again last night,” he said.
I shut up. Kept shaving.
“You and this chippy of yours being careful?” he said.
The night before, Dessa had shaken her dialpack at me like a box of Good & Plentys, then kissed me and gulped down one of the tiny tablets that kept us safe from complications. “Safety” was something I saw as her department.
“This chippy?” I said. Tried on a Ralph Drinkwater smirk of indifference.
Ray took a box of Trojans out of his workshirt pocket and tossed them onto the top of the toilet tank. Said nothing. I steadied the razor in my hand and shaved—tried as hard as I could to act nonchalant, to ignore his big investigation. De-fense! De-fense!
“I’m not discussing my personal life with you, Ray,” I said. “It’s private.”
Ray let go a one-note chuckle. “Fine with me, Romeo. As far as I’m concerned, you can go out and be as private as you want. Just don’t come back here telling your mother and me that you got the clap or that you knocked up some little tootsie.”
I turned and faced him, half of my face lathered, the other half clean-shaven. “Atta boy, Ray,” I said. “Go to it. Make love sound as ugly as possible.” Then I turned back and faced the mirror.
He stood there for another several seconds, watching as I nicked myself, winced, dabbed at the blood. Then he did something totally unexpected: reached up and grabbed my arm with his leathery hand. More in a fatherly than a threatening way. For a couple of seconds, we stared at each other in the mirror. “All I’m saying, hothead, is that I remember what it’s like to be your age and getting a little pussy,” he said. “I was in the Navy, kiddo. I know the ropes. Just be careful where you’re sticking your dipstick—that’s all I’m saying. Don’t let it get complicated.”
I couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t accept this sudden father-to-son stuff. I resented him anywhere near what Dessa and I had put in motion. So when he walked out of the bathroom, I called his name. Reached over to the toilet tank for the box of safes. “Here,” I said, tossing them back. “You forgot these.”
He caught them. Threw them back again. They landed in the sink bowl, under the running water. “I didn’t forget them,” he said. “Who do you think I went out and bought the damn things for? The Pope? Your brother?”
After a week or so of graveball, Ralph Drinkwater did start passing around those joints of his. The first couple of times, it was a novelty for Leo and me, getting high on the job, working with a buzz on. Then it turned into a kind of semiroutine. While Dell was sleeping one off—and even some afternoons when he wasn’t—Leo and Drinkwater and I would find something real interesting out in the woods, then circulate the wacky weed. Get wrecked on company time. Leo kept trying to get Thomas high, too, poking the lit roach in front of his face no matter how many times my brother refused. It flustered Thomas, having to keep saying no; he’d get up on his high horse. “Just what I want to do, Leo,” he told him once. “Inhale something that’s going to turn me into as big a goofball as you are.”
Drinkwater’s dope shifted the whole dynamic. Ralph, Leo, and I turned into a trio and Thomas became the odd man out. If we had a field to mow or an acre of brush to clear, the three of us would cook up a plan to make it go faster, easier, and Thomas would plod along on his own, uninvited. At lunchtime, he’d sit by himself in a huff, hardly speaking to the rest of us. Sometimes Dell would assign Thomas a separate job altogether—send the three of us off someplace and then sit there and watch Thomas work. Criticize him. Bust his balls. Dell began to take a special interest in making Thomas’s life miserable.
“Tell your brother he better watch out for Dell,” Ralph said to me one afternoon. The two of us were painting picnic tables side by side down at the fairgrounds, high on hemp and paint fumes. Dell and Thomas were across the field, painting a set of bleachers.
“What do you mean, ‘watch out for him’?” I said.
He shrugged. “I don’t mean nothing. Just tell him.”
During the first couple of weeks on the job, it was Drinkwater who’d ridden shotgun in the cab with Dell, but now Thomas sat up front. That saddens me now, but it didn’t back then. I was glad for the reprieve—grateful to be a free agent for a change. I remember Thomas, sitting up front, craning his neck back at Leo and Ralph and me—the three of us laughing and hooting at girls on the street or sipping another joint on the way back to the city barn.
“That brother of yours is fucked up,” Leo said one time when he caught Thomas looking back at us.
“He’s more fucked up than a soup sandwich,” Ralph added. And the three of us broke into snorts and giggles, courtesy of Thomas. On another of those rides, Leo started blowing kisses to this woman in a convertible behind us. She yelled back something about us being the Three Stooges, and Ralph launched into this imitation of Curly Joe that was so dead-on and unexpected, none of us could breathe from laughing so hard. Leo made up a theme song for us: “Three Dumb Fucks,” sung to the tune of “Three Blind Mice.” Sometimes we’d sing that song all the way back to the barn, making up new lyrics that struck us all as hilarious. The three of us were happy as pigs in shit to be wasted and working for the Three Rivers Public Works.
But as tight as Leo, Drinkwater, and I got that summer, there was always a kind of mystery about Ralph. A question mark hanging over his circumstances. He never volunteered much. We knew he didn’t live at home, but he never quite said where he did live. He took a ride home from Dell sometimes, but he always refused one from Leo. He was always “too busy” to hang out with us on the weekend. The only time that whole summer that Leo and I got together with Ralph was one Sunday when the three of us drove up to Fenway for a doubleheader. And even then, Ralph acted like some kind of secret agent about where he lived. We had to pick him up downtown in front of the post office, I remember. And drop him off there, too, even though we got back late in the middle of a rainstorm—the three of us soaked to the bone because of Leo’s broken convertible top.
Part of what was between us was Ralph’s race. You’d see it sometimes when Dell started up with his stupid jokes, or when Leo hit a nerve. Indian or mulatto or whatever he was, Drinkwater was different from us lily-white college boys who got to go back to school at the end of the summer while he stayed stuck in Three Rivers. And it wasn’t like he was stupid. He was always trying to talk to us about politics or something he’d seen on the news or read about in some science article. He read a lot—as much as any college kid. He kept trying to get us to read this one book, Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver. He recommended that book to us so many times, it got to be a joke.
One time Leo called Ralph “Tonto,” and he got pissed about it. He told Leo that Leo wasn’t fit to lick the foot of a Wequonnoc Indian. Another time the three of us were toking up out at the reservoir. I was sucking away on the end of the roach and Leo said, “Jesus Christ, Birdseed, you don’t have to nigger-lip the thing to death.” Drinkwater and I both laughed a little when he said it, but then there was this silence that lasted about fifteen seconds longer than it should have. Ralph got up and walked off into the woods. “That was real swift of you,” I told Leo. “Congratulations, man.”
“Hey, shoot me, okay, Birdsey,” Leo snapped back. “I can’t keep track of whether he’s an Indian or Afroman or what he is.”
Anot
her wedge between Ralph and us—between Ralph and everyone—was the death of his sister. I didn’t catch on at first. Couldn’t read where some of his moodiness was coming from. I knew the obvious: that Penny Ann was buried out there at the Indian cemetery. His cousin Lonnie, too. You couldn’t miss Lonnie’s gravestone. “In Memory of a Modern Warrior.” In contrast, Penny Ann’s stone was about the size of a dictionary. “P.A.D.” was all it said. “1948–1958.”
Ralph would get sulky every week when we mowed the Indian graveyard. Nothing anyone said out there struck him as funny. It was something I thought I understood. Then one day it hit me like a brick in the head: this wasn’t just the place where his sister’s and cousin’s graves were. It was worse than that. This was the place where that sick bastard Monk had taken Penny Ann during the snowstorm. This was where they’d found her body.
Dell liked to save the Indian cemetery—the smallest of the town graveyards—for Friday afternoons. We always finished ahead of time, and more often than not, Dell would take out his Seagram’s and start celebrating the weekend early. One hot afternoon, Leo got the bright idea that we should head up the path to the Falls, then climb down and go swimming in the river. I figured Drinkwater would steer clear of the place. It made me a little squeamish myself. But Ralph surprised me and followed us up the path. I don’t remember Thomas being there that day. It may have been around the time he cut his foot.
There were “no trespassing” signs posted all over the place and chain-link fence on both cliff edges at the waterspill. All that stuff had been put up by the town years ago in response to Penny Ann’s murder. But by the summer of ’69, those “keep out” signs had all rusted and chipped. Kids had long ago bent an opening in the fence and trampled a path down to the water.