"She looks young."
"She is."
"Have you ever--"
He slides his hand up her leg and smiles. "No," he says. "My brother, maybe, but not me. I like Sally, though. She's got her alimony and her big white Bird, she doesn't care what people say about her."
It starts to seem like a long drive. The Androscoggin, off to the right, is slaty and sullen. The ice is all out of it now. Jane has grown quiet and thoughtful. The only sound is the steady snap of the windshield wipers. When the car rolls through the dips in the road there is groundfog, waiting for evening when it will creep out of these pockets and take over the whole River Road.
They cross into Auburn and Chico drives the cutoff and swings onto Minot Avenue. The four lanes are nearly deserted, and all the suburban homes look packaged. They see one little boy in a yellow plastic raincoat walking up the sidewalk, carefully stepping in all the puddles.
"Go, man," Chico says softly.
"What?" Jane asks.
"Nothing, babe. Go back to sleep."
She laughs a little doubtfully.
Chico turns up Keston Street and into the driveway of one of the packaged houses. He doesn't turn off the ignition.
"Come in and I'll give you cookies," she says.
He shakes his head. "I have to get back."
"I know." She puts her arms around him and kisses him. "Thank you for the most wonderful time of my life."
He smiles suddenly. His face shines. It is nearly magical. "I'll see you Monday, Janey-Jane. Still friends, right?"
"You know we are," she says, and kisses him again ... but when he cups a breast through her jumper, she pulls away. "Don't. My father might see."
He lets her go, only a little of the smile left. She gets out of the car quickly and runs through the rain to the back door. A second later she's gone. Chico pauses for a moment to light a cigarette and then he backs out of the driveway. The Buick stalls and the starter seems to grind forever before the engine manages to catch. It is a long ride home.
When he gets there, Dad's station wagon is parked in the driveway. He pulls in beside it and lets the engine die. For a moment he sits inside silently, listening to the rain. It is like being inside a steel drum.
Inside, Billy is watching Carl Stormer and His Country Buckaroos on the TV set. When Chico comes in, Billy jumps up, excited. "Eddie, hey Eddie, you know what Uncle Pete said? He said him and a whole mess of other guys sank a kraut sub in the war! Will you take me to the show next Saturday?"
"I don't know," Chico says, grinning. "Maybe if you kiss my shoes every night before supper all week." He pulls Billy's hair. Billy hollers and laughs and kicks him in the shins.
"Cut it out, now," Sam May says, coming into the room. "Cut it out, you two. You know how your mother feels about the rough-housing." He has pulled his tie down and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. He's got a couple-three red hotdogs on a plate. The hotdogs are wrapped in white bread, and Sam May has put the old mustard right to them. "Where you been, Eddie?"
"At Jane's."
The toilet flushes in the bathroom. Virginia. Chico wonders briefly if Jane has left any hairs in the sink, or a lipstick, or a bobby pin.
"You should have come with us to see your Uncle Pete and Aunt Ann," his father says. He eats a frank in three quick bites. "You're getting to be like a stranger around here, Eddie. I don't like that. Not while we provide the bed and board."
"Some bed," Chico says. "Some board."
Sam looks up quickly, hurt at first, then angry. When he speaks, Chico sees that his teeth are yellow with French's mustard. He feels vaguely nauseated. "Your lip. Your goddam lip. You aren't too big yet, snotnose."
Chico shrugs, peels a slice of Wonder Bread off the loaf standing on the TV tray by his father's chair, and spreads it with ketchup. "In three months I'm going to be gone anyway."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"I'm gonna fix up Johnny's car and go out to Califor- . nia. Look for work."
"Oh, yeah. Right." He is a big man, big in a shambling way, but Chico thinks now that he got smaller after he married Virginia, and smaller again after Johnny died. And in his mind he hears himself saying to Jane: My brother, maybe, but not me. And on the heels of that: Play your digeree, do, Blue. "You ain't never going to get that car as far as Castle Rock, let alone California."
"You don't think so? Just watch my fucking dust."
For a moment his father only looks at him and then he throws the frank he has been holding. It hits Chico in the chest, spraying mustard on his sweater and on the chair.
"Say that word again and I'll break your nose for you, smartass."
Chico picks up the frank and looks at it. Cheap red frank, smeared with French's mustard. Spread a little sunshine. He throws it back at his father. Sam gets up, his face the color of an old brick, the vein in the middle of his forehead pulsing. His thigh connects with the TV tray and it overturns. Billy stands in the kitchen doorway watching them. He's gotten himself a plate of franks and beans and the plate has tipped and beanjuice runs onto the floor. Billy's eyes are wide, his mouth trembling. On the TV, Carl Stormer and His Country Buckaroos are tearing through "Long Black Veil" at a breakneck pace.
"You raise them up best you can and they spit on you," his father says thickly. "Ayuh. Thafs how it goes." He gropes blindly on the seat of his chair and comes up with the half-eaten hotdog. He holds it in his fist like a severed phallus. Incredibly, he begins to eat it ... at the same time, Chico sees that he has begun to cry. "Ayuh, they spit on you, that's just how it goes."
"Well, why in the hell did you have to marry her?" he bursts out, and then has to bite down on the rest of it: If you hadn't married her, Johnny would still be alive.
"That's none of your goddam business!" Sam May roars through his tears. "That's my business!"
"Oh?" Chico shouts back. "Is that so? I only have to live with her! Me and Billy, we have to live with her! Watch her grind you down! And you don't even know--"
"What?" his father says, and his voice is suddenly low and ominous. The chunk of hotdog left in his closed fist is like a bloody chunk of bone. "What don't I know?"
"You don't know shit from Shinola," he says, appalled at what has almost come out of his mouth.
"You want to stop it now," his father says. "Or I'll beat the hell out of you, Chico." He only calls him this when he is very angry indeed.
Chico turns and sees that Virginia is standing at the other side of the room, adjusting her skirt minutely, looking at him with her large, calm, brown eyes. Her eyes are beautiful; the rest of her is not so beautiful, so self-renewing, but those eyes will carry her for years yet, Chico thinks, and he feels the sick hate come back--So we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde, and that's it hanging on the shed.
"She's got you pussywhipped and you don't have the guts to do anything about it!"
All of this shouting has finally become too much for Billy--he gives a great wail of terror, drops his plate of franks and beans, and covers his face with his hands. Beanjuice splatters his Sunday shoes and sprays across the rug.
Sam takes a single step forward and then stops when Chico makes a curt beckoning gesture, as if to say: Yeah, come on, let's get down to it, what took you so fuckin long? They stand like statues until Virginia speaks--her voice is low, as calm as her brown eyes.
"Have you had a girl in your room, Ed? You know how your father and I feel about that." Almost as an afterthought: "She left a handkerchief."
He stares at her, savagely unable to express the way he feels, the way she is dirty, the way she shoots unerringly at the back, the way she clips in behind you and cuts your hamstrings.
You could hurt me if you wanted to, the calm brown eyes say. I know you know what was going on before he died. But that's the only way you can hurt me, isn't it, Chico? And only then if your father believed you. And if he believed you, it would kill him.
His father lunges at the new gambit like a bear. "Have you be
en screwing in my house, you little bastard?"
"Watch your language, please, Sam," Virginia says calmly.
"Is that why you didn't want to come with us? So you could scr--so you could--"
"Say it!" Chico weeps. "Don't let her do it to you! Say it! Say what you mean!"
"Get out," he says dully. "Don't you come back until you can apologize to your mother and me."
"Don't you dare!" he cries. "Don't you dare call that bitch my mother! I'll kill you!"
"Stop it, Eddie!" Billy screams. The words are muffled, blurred through his hands, which still cover his face. "Stop yelling at Daddy! Stop it, please!"
Virginia doesn't move from the doorway. Her calm eyes remain on Chico.
Sam blunders back a step and the backs of his knees strike the edge of his easy chair. He sits down in it heavily and averts his face against a hairy forearm. "I can't even look at you when you got words like that in your mouth, Eddie. You are making me feel so bad."
"She makes you feel bad! Why don't you admit it?" He does not reply. Still not looking at Chico, he fumbles another frank wrapped in bread from the plate on the TV tray. He fumbles for the mustard. Billy goes on crying. Carl Stormer and His Country Buckaroos are singing a truck-driving song. "My rig is old, but that don't mean she's slow," Carl tells all his western Maine viewers.
"The boy doesn't know what he's saying, Sam," Virginia says gently. "It's hard, at his age. It's hard to grow up."
She's whipped him. That's the end, all right.
He turns and heads for the door which leads first into the shed and then outdoors. As he opens it he looks back at Virginia, and she gazes at him tranquilly when he speaks her name.
"What is it, Ed?"
"The sheets are bloody." He pauses. "I broke her in."
He thinks something has stirred in her eyes, but that is probably only his wish. "Please go now, Ed. You're scaring Billy."
He leaves. The Buick doesn't want to start and he has almost resigned himself to walking in the rain when the engine finally catches. He lights a cigarette and backs out onto 14, slamming the clutch back in and racing the mill when it starts to jerk and splutter. The generator light blinks balefully at him twice, and then the car settles into a ragged idle. At last he is on his way, creeping up the road toward Gates Falls.
He spares Johnny's Dodge one last look.
Johnny could have had steady work at Gates Mills & Weaving, but only on the night shift. Nightwork didn't bother him, he had told Chico, and the pay was better than at the Plains, but their father worked days, and working nights at the mill would have meant Johnny would have been home with her, home alone or with Chico in the next room . . . and the walls were thin. I can't stop and she won't let me try, Johnny said. Yeah, I know what it would do to him. But she's . . . she just won't stop and it's like I can't stop . . . she's always at me, you know what I mean, you've seen her, Billy's too young to understand, but you've seen her ...
Yes. He had seen her. And Johnny had gone to work at the Plains, telling their father it was because he could get parts for the Dodge on the cheap. And that's how it happened that he had been changing a tire when the Mustang came skidding and skating across the infield with its muffler draggin up sparks; that was how his stepmother had killed his brother, so just keep playing until I shoot through, Blue, cause we goin Stud City right here in this shitheap Buick, and he remembers how the rubber smelled, and how the knobs of Johnny's spine cast small crescent shadows on the bright white of his tee-shirt, he remembers seeing Johnny get halfway up from the squat he had been working in when the Mustang hit him, squashing him between it and the Chevy, and there had been a hollow bang as the Chevy came down off its jacks, and then the bright yellow flare of flame, the rich smell of gasoiine--
Chico strikes the brakes with both feet, bringing the sedan to a crunching, juddering halt on the sodden shoulder. He leans wildly across the seat, throws open the passenger door, and sprays yellow puke onto the mud and snow. The sight of it makes him puke again, and the thought of it makes him dry-heave one more time. The car almost stalls, but he catches it in time. The generator light winks out reluctantly when he guns the engine. He sits, letting the shakes work their way out of him. A car goes by him fast, a new Ford, white, throwing up great dirty fans of water and slush.
"Stud City," Chico says. "In his new stud car. Funky."
He tastes puke on his lips and in his throat and coating his sinuses. He doesn't want a cigarette. Danny Carter will let him sleep over. Tomorrow will be time enough for further decisions. He pulls back onto Route 14 and gets rolling.
8
Pretty fucking melodramatic, right?
The world has seen one or two better stories, I know that--one or two hundred thousand better ones, more like it. It ought to have THIS IS A PRODUCT OF AN UNDERGRADUATE CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP stamped on every page . . . because that's just what it was, at least up to a certain point. It seems both painfully derivative and painfully sophomoric to me now; style by Hemingway (except we've got the whole thing in the present tense for some reason--how too fucking trendy), theme by Faulkner. Could anything be more serious? More lit'ry?
But even its pretensions can't hide the fact that it's an extremely sexual story written by an extremely inexperienced young man (at the time I wrote "Stud City," I had been to bed with two girls and had ejaculated prematurely all over one of them--not much like Chico in the foregoing tale, I guess). Its attitude toward women goes beyond hostility and to a point which verges on actual ugliness--two of the women in "Stud City" are sluts, and the third is a simple receptacle who says things like "I love you, Chico" and "Come in, I'll give you cookies." Chico, on the other hand, is a macho cigarette-smoking working-class hero who could have stepped whole and breathing from the grooves of a Bruce Springsteen record--although Springsteen was yet to be heard from when I published the story in the college literary magazine (where it ran between a poem called "Images of Me" and an essay on student parietals written entirely in lower case). It is the work of a young man every bit as insecure as he was inexperienced.
And yet it was the first story I ever wrote that felt like my story--the first one that really felt whole, after five years of trying. The first one that might still be able to stand up, even with its props taken away. Ugly but alive. Even now when I read it, stifling a smile at its pseudo-toughness and its pretensions, I can see the true face of Gordon Lachance lurking just behind the lines of print, a Gordon Lachance younger than the one living and writing now, one certainly more idealistic than the best-selling novelist who is more apt to have his paperback contracts reviewed than his books, but not so young as the one who went with his friends that day to see the body of a dead kid named Ray Brower. A Gordon Lachance halfway along in the process of losing the shine.
No, it's not a very good story--its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside. But it was the first time I had ever really used the place I knew and the things I felt in a piece of fiction, and there was a kind of dreadful exhilaration in seeing things that had troubled me for years come out in a new form, a form over which I had imposed control. It had been years since that childhood idea of Denny being in the closet of his spookily preserved room had occurred to me; I would have honestly believed I had forgotten it. Yet there it is in "Stud City," only slightly changed . . . but controlled.
I've resisted the urge to change it a lot more, to rewrite it, to juice it up--and that urge was fairly strong, because I find the story quite embarrassing now. But there are still things in it I like, things that would be cheapened by changes made by this later Lachance, who has the first threads of gray in his hair. Things, like that image of the shadows on Johnny's white tee-shirt or that of the rain-ripples on Jane's naked body, that seem better than they have any right to be.
Also, it was the first story I never showed to my mother and father. There was too much Denny in it. Too much Castle Rock. And most of all, too
much 1960. You always know the truth, because when you cut yourself or someone else with it, there's always a bloody show.
9
My room was on the second floor, and it must have been at least ninety degrees up there. It would be a hundred and ten by afternoon, even with all the windows open. I was really glad I wasn't sleeping there that night, and the thought of where we were going made me excited all over again. I made two blankets into a bedroll and tied it with my old belt. I collected all my money, which was sixty-eight cents. Then I was ready to go.
I went down the back stairs to avoid meeting my dad in front of the house, but I hadn't needed to worry; he was still out in the garden with the hose, making useless rainbows in the air and looking through them.
I walked down Summer Street and cut through a vacant lot to Carbine--where the offices of the Castle Rock Call stand today. I was headed up Carbine toward the clubhouse when a car pulled over to the curb and Chris got out. He had his old Boy Scout pack in one hand and two blankets rolled up and tied with clothesrope in the other.
"Thanks, mister," he said, and trotted over to join me as the car pulled away. His Boy Scout canteen was slung around his neck and under one arm so that it finally ended up banging on his hip. His eyes were sparkling.
"Gordie! You wanna see something?"
"Sure, I guess so. What?"
"Come on down here first." He pointed at the narrow space between the Blue Point Diner and the Castle Rock Drugstore.
"What is it, Chris?"
"Come on, I said!"
He ran down the alley and after a brief moment (that's all it took me to cast aside my better judgment) I ran after him. The two buildings were set slightly toward each other rather than running parallel, and so the alley narrowed as it went back. We waded through trashy drifts of old newspapers and stepped over cruel, sparkly nests of broken beer and soda bottles. Chris cut behind the Blue Point and put his bedroll down. There were eight or nine garbage cans lined up here and the stench was incredible.
"Phew! Chris! Come on, gimme a break!"
"Gimme your arm," Chris said, by rote.