The scars are a textbook study in the phenomenon of wound shoring. When you shore a target against another object of similar density, like one body part against another, the secondary target, the shoring object, takes the brunt of the injury. The bullet goes through the primary target and passes most of the kinetic energy to the secondary target. The exit wound of a shored target is usually small and neat like the entrance wound, while the exit wound of the shoring object tends be quite ugly.
Meda touched each scar once, only once, and each in its proper order: entrance, exit, entrance, exit. She wasn’t going to ask me, because she’d already asked someone. She put her hand back on my chest without a word. I was grateful that the thing could be done so easily. We knew each other’s secrets, but didn’t have the burden of talking about them.
Even so I lay there with my stomach full of acid. When Meda hadn’t moved for a while, I reached down and touched her cheek, felt her breath against my fingers. She stirred and asked if I was okay. I tried to be okay, but eventually I slid away from her and stood up. She sat up and looked at me in the near dark.
“What’s the matter?”
“I just can’t.”
“You can’t what, even sleep with me, just sleep?” she said.
“It’s not you, it’s just I can’t sleep with someone else in the room.” The same lie I’d told my second girlfriend. I preferred the way it sounded to the way the truth sounded.
“You can’t at all?” She laughed.
“I know it’s abnormal, but I really can’t sleep with you. I’m sorry. I’ll go sleep in another room.”
“It’s okay, I’ll sleep with Annadore,” she said and crawled out of the bed. As she crossed the room in the dim light, her pale legs seemed disembodied below her black hair and dark turtleneck.
Baby Girl Amos
Meda
Bernie knocking on the door woke me up in the morning. He was standing in the doorway in his blue jeans, but he looked more naked in his skin than most people do.
“Hey, are you awake?” he said.
“Kind of. You can come in.”
He came over and sat down on the foot of the bed, but didn’t look at me.
“I didn’t get to say thank you for the necklace and the coat,” I said. “You really didn’t have to. You’ve done so much already. I feel bad that I can’t get you anything as nice as what you’ve done for me.”
“I know you said you didn’t want anything, but I’m glad you liked it anyway.”
“If we promise there won’t be any sleeping, would you like to get in bed with us?” I said. He looked like he couldn’t quite make up his mind, so I lifted up the edge of the covers for him, and he crawled into bed. It was silly, because he was too tall for the bed and it was too small for all of us. That was half the fun, being packed together like that. “We used to play sardines when we were little, Loren and David and I, we’d all get in one twin bed together to get warm.” He relaxed a little then and put his arm around me, so that we were like three spoons in a drawer: iced tea, soup, baby.
Lying there pressed up against him, I could tell he had a hard-on. I looked at him over my shoulder, because I was curious what he was thinking. I couldn’t tell, so I slid his hand up my belly to my breast and said, “Are you happy to see me?”
“I always am.” He laughed and he wasn’t even embarrassed. He didn’t do anything else, but he didn’t move his hand.
After about ten minutes of being cuddled together with us, Annadore started to get wiggly. “Santa Claus come?” she wanted to know.
“No, Baby Girl Amos, you know there’s no Santa. We don’t play that game at our house. I guess her cousins gave her the idea.”
“Santa come. More pressies.”
“You’ll get more presents for your birthday,” Bernie told her and then looked at me. “Why do you call her Baby Girl Amos?”
“I didn’t name her for a couple of weeks, so when she first came home from the hospital, that was her name. You know those plastic hospital bracelets? That’s what they put on them. Baby Girl Amos, Baby Boy Raleigh.”
“I was never Baby Boy Raleigh. Bernham isn’t really my name, just a name they give boys in my family.” He sounded kind of surprised at himself.
Annadore started crawling on top of us, jabbing us with her sharp little knees and elbows. “I know what you want, good girl,” I told her. “You want scrambled eggs, don’t you?”
I was sorry to have to get up, we’d gotten so warm and cozy, but Annadore was hungry so we went downstairs and I made breakfast.
“Why did it take so long to name her?” Bernie wasn’t eating, just moving his food around on his plate.
“Because I’m stupid? Maybe they’ll put that on my headstone: ‘She was stupid.’“
“You’re not stupid,” Bernie said. Bless him.
“Well, Travis and I broke up the last time about a month before she was born, but I thought we’d get back together. I thought once he saw her he’d get a backbone or figure out a way to make things work or something. He didn’t, which is okay with me now. She’s better off not knowing him.”
After we had breakfast, Bernie took a shower. I went into his bedroom to get the rest of my stuff and heard him singing. He had a nice voice, so Annadore and I lay down on his bed and listened to him sing. I was brainless, lying there and feeling sort of sappy about him. I was so stupid that I was relieved thinking about how he’d acted in bed. Whatever else was going on with Bernie, it was about sex.
So Lucky
Meda
We worked a day between Christmas and New Year’s, just to keep up with stuff and I went into the office to empty the trash, because half of what Bernie and Celeste did was make trash. Bernie wasn’t there; he was at some meeting.
“Is it weird dating Mr. Raleigh?” Celeste said. “I mean, because he’s your boss. I’d think it would be a little weird.”
“Not really.”
“Not that he isn’t a nice guy, and he’s cute, but I think it would be awkward.” She giggled and said, “Are you going to the Hall of Fame dinner with him? I sent in the RSVP card and he said he was taking a guest, so I thought that was probably going to be you.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re so lucky. It’s really formal. I bet it’s going to be wonderful.”
“What do you mean by formal?” The last time I had to dress up for anything formal was when I was the Winter Homecoming Queen.
“You know, black tie, like tuxedos and evening gowns.” She took the invitation out of a drawer and showed it to me. It was printed in gold.
“That’s nice,” I said, knowing she was trying to make me nervous. It was working.
“Are you going to the party at Mr. Tveite’s?” When she saw I didn’t know, she said real smugly, “He’s the Chairman of the Board at Raleigh Industries. Are you going with Bernie to that party?”
“I don’t know.”
“I bet you are. I bet he asks you. You’re so lucky.” I really wanted to whack her when she started going on about what a fabulous house the Chairman had, about how she’d gone there for a Christmas party last year. “It was just an employee Christmas party, you know, where they invite everybody, but his house is like a mansion, even more than this house. I mean, this is a really nice house, but Mr. Tveite’s house is a lot newer and it’s enormous, even bigger than this house. Imagine how bad it would be cleaning that. And it’s so elegant, just really beautifully decorated.”
She kept saying how amazed she’d been and how fancy it all was, and I nodded like I knew all about it, but it pissed me off that Bernie hadn’t been totally honest about what he was getting me in for.
Lady’s Choice
To go dancing with Meda, I had quarters for the jukebox, a roll in each of my front pockets. I’d submitted to boots, which I hadn’t worn since I was about eight. I’d submitted to a shirt with snaps, but when she handed me the straw Stetson that she insisted would be “great,” I tried to take a belated
stand against public humiliation.
“I draw the line at that hat,” I said.
“No, you don’t. And why do you do that to your hair?”
She took the hat back and directed me to the bathroom where she made me sit on the toilet and submit to her erotic hair styling efforts.
Erotic, because the way she tormented my hair was electrically arousing.
Erotic also because when she pronounced me finished, I looked in the mirror and said, “That’s nice, you gave me oral sex hair.”
“What hair?” She started laughing.
“Oral sex hair. The hair you end up with from some woman grabbing onto it during oral sex.” She laughed harder and gave me a look that distinctly accused me of knowing not whereof I spoke.
“It is,” I insisted. She subsided into a giggle. When I reached up and tried to smooth my hair down a little, she pushed my hands away. I took the hat and jammed it on my head, wondering if that had been her intent all along—to get me to wear the hat.
The evening was beginning to qualify as a good date against which to measure all others. We had a pitcher of beer and danced and talked. She showed me how to lead on a half-time two-step and we actually got comfortable with it. She wore a pair of boots that added about four inches to her height, a nice surprise that made it easier for us to dance. When we sat down for a break, I asked about the boots, and she obliged me by putting a foot up on my lap. More accurately she slid her foot up the inside of my thigh and brought it to rest in my crotch. I got the strangest feeling she’d given up entirely on having sex with me and only wanted to rattle my nerves.
The boots laced up the front and were form-fitting around her calf. Above the top of the boots, her legs were bare, an invitation that reminded me of being mercilessly pressed against her, feeling her soft, bed-warm legs. I had drunk more beer than was advisable and felt sufficiently loosened by it that I slid my hand up the back of her calf, enjoying the transition from slippery leather to the damp, velvety flesh behind her knee. I slid my hand a little higher, and skimmed her skirt up off her knee, giving me a glimpse of her thighs. Her legs bristled with gooseflesh, and she blushed. Thinking about how easy it would be to end up in some incredibly lonely moment with her, I flicked her skirt back down. When I gave her the next four quarters, she said, “Lady’s choice.”
After we closed down the bar, we drove out to a truck stop for breakfast. The place was decorated with the traditional wagon wheel chandeliers, with jackalope pictures laminated to the table tops. I didn’t see anyone who looked like he’d put in a full day’s work driving a truck. Instead, the restaurant was crowded with people of our own ilk, who had stayed out too late and drunk too much.
We’d gotten our food just a few minutes before when I felt Meda shiver next to me. I followed her gaze to where she was burning holes in the plaid shirt of one of a group of non-descript guys being seated at a booth not far from ours. The guy looked back at her and smiled.
Meda’s fingertips, like the planchette from a Ouija board, traveled to the scar on her mouth. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t say, it’s the man who cut up my face, who scarred me. She didn’t say, it’s the man who raped me. She didn’t even say his name. It was an omission that spoke volumes to me. What would I say if I ever saw the man with the ether rag again? There’s the man who—what? Took me? Kidnapped me? There’s the man who—I didn’t know. The thought made the hair on the back of my neck jolt up and filled me with almost as much panic as I imagined Meda was feeling.
In a movie, he would be a stereotype, maybe a roughly handsome guy with cold eyes a little too close together and a hard smile. Instead, if I had passed Ray Brueggeman on the street, I never would have noticed him. No outward manifestation of evil was in his face, nothing to show what he was capable of.
“I want to go,” Meda said and stood up. I left money on the table and got up to follow her. To leave, we had to walk past where Ray and his friends looked at their menus in between glances at Meda. It might have been better to wait the thing out, except that Meda was miserable.
“Hey, Meda, baby. Lookin’ good,” Ray called out, and winked at her. She kept walking without looking at him and I followed her, thinking of Robby, of what Robby might have done in the situation. It made me feel pathetic. Robby was the Raleigh brother Meda needed.
“What a cunt,” Ray said, louder, emboldened by his friends’ laughter. Meda didn’t pause and my gut churned to hear him reduce her to the thing he’d done to her. The truth is that every fistfight I ever had, most of them with Robby, ended with me getting the worst of it. I was not prepared to take on five guys. I wasn’t afraid. It’s not like my nose was ever going to be straight again, but it seemed futile. I think even by the kindest standards I was something of a weakling, but I had only that one chance to do the right thing. Then it occurred to me: I didn’t have to take on five guys. Ray Brueggeman was so intent on Meda’s retreating back that he hadn’t even noticed me.
Half-Cocked
Meda
I’ve seen guys fight. I’ve even had guys fight over me. Most guys get some friends together and they go out in the parking lot and they bluff a bunch. Maybe a few punches get thrown, and their friends scuffle a little. They don’t go off half-cocked and punch somebody out in a restaurant full of people. That was what Bernie did. And he didn’t just hit Ray, he punched him in the face like he was trying to ram his fist down Ray’s throat. Then the other guys at the table jumped on Bernie and it turned into this pile of broken glass and guys punching each other. It’s hard to get a clear idea of Bernie’s strength, because he’s skinny, but he’s not one of those toothpick tall guys. He’s big enough that, except for Ray’s friends, nobody else wanted to get involved. Still, there was no way he was winning a fight against four of Ray’s asshole friends, and I was glad when a sheriff’s deputy came over from the smoking section and broke it up. Before the deputy decided to arrest people, I grabbed Bernie by the arm and got him out of there.
Bernie didn’t say anything on the drive back, even when I asked him how he was. Sometimes he was a little spacey, but I hadn’t ever seen him like that. Once we got back to his house, I turned the dome light on to get a look at him. He wasn’t pretty, but he didn’t look very hurt, either. There was a gash on his cheek, his lip was split and his nose was bloody, but it didn’t look more broken than it usually did. I shook his shoulder and said, “Are you okay? Come on, Bernie, are you alright?”
“I think so, but my hand hurts,” he said, like he’d been talking to me all along.
His left hand looked bad, all puffy and cut up, and he still had it in a fist. When he opened it, I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants. For the whole fight he’d had a roll of quarters curled up in his fist. As soon as I stopped laughing, I hauled off and whacked him on the arm as hard as I could.
“That was so stupid. What was that supposed to prove?” Bernie doing that over some stupid insult pissed me off so much I didn’t even know what to say. I’d accepted the fact that there was nothing I could do about Ray. “Why would you ever think that was something you should do?”
“I didn’t want you to walk away from him saying things like that. It didn’t seem right for him to say that, after what he did.”
I knew someone would tell Bernie about Ray, about me, about what happened. It was easy enough to find out everything I wanted about Bernie, because those things went both ways, but I hadn’t been looking forward to the moment when it would come up. Then Bernie did the exact opposite of what I thought he would. Split lip and all, he kissed me, long and hard, so that I tasted his blood in my mouth. I forgot to breathe; it was that kind of kiss. I pushed him back a little and looked at him. I didn’t have a clue who he was. I’d never met him before. Then he blinked and said, “I’m getting blood all over you. I’m sorry.” He wiped the blood off my face with his shirtsleeve and he was Bernie again.
Beauty and the Beast
I stayed in bed most of the next day, nursing something betwee
n a hangover and whiplash. It felt like a grenade had gone off in my hand and I vaguely remembered Meda’s anger and kissing her. The three things seemed to have a cabalistic connection.
In the evening, she came out to pick me up for the New Year’s Eve party at the Chairman’s, and was kind enough to try to fix me up. She re-wrapped my hand and put a butterfly bandage across a cut on my cheek, remarking that it was probably from a piece of jewelry.
“His senior class ring. That’s what cut me was the stone in his ring,” she said matter-of-factly, without any hint of her earlier terror.
Despite an ice pack the night before, the left side of my face was swollen, and the white of my eye was bright red. The split in my lip was black with dried blood, but it hurt too much to clean. Only Meda’s handiwork on my cheek gave the impression that I’d made any effort. I was irremediably ugly. Meda on the other hand looked heavenly. Her hair was down on her shoulders, and she wore a hazy lavender sweater set with the necklace I’d given her for Christmas. The pearls were almost as creamy and elegant as the neck she was wearing them around. As we drove, she took some lip-gloss out of her purse and smoothed it on, dreamily working her lips against each other. Admiring that last minute attention to her toilette, I had no worries.
The anxiety didn’t surface until we reached the Chairman’s neighborhood. Mr. and Mrs. Tveite lived in a gated community in Nichols Hills that was awash in white Christmas lights. When we pulled into the driveway at the Chairman’s house, a uniformed valet stepped off the curb and opened Meda’s door. She rolled her eyes at me.