“You gonna show me what you’re made of, rich boy? Huh? We’re into this thing now.” He let Teddy go and again handed him the pliers. He gestured to Dale, who was cowering on the floor under Harv’s hands. “Now get it done.”
“Please don’t,” Dale implored Teddy. “You can’t do this to me. Please.”
Incredibly, Teddy straddled Dale’s hips while the other men held him down. “Hold still now,” Teddy ordered, his voice eerily tender, but Dale clenched his teeth defiantly, and the more he refused the more determined Teddy became. “Son of a bitch! He won’t open his mouth!”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Rudy said, crouching down at Dale’s side.
“Don’t be a fucking pussy.” Using his hands, Rudy manipulated Dale’s jaws so that Teddy could get the pliers in. Dale’s eyes flared white as Teddy grasped hold of a back tooth and began to pull. Horrible noises curled out of Dale’s throat. From where she sat Willa could see that the sole of Dale’s boot was coming off and she could see his red sock underneath. Teddy’s face had gone white and Rudy was standing over him, overseeing the extraction from above, a passive expression on his face. He was a man, she knew, who had grown accustomed to witnessing terrible things. Behavior like this, she imagined, was an acquired habit. Dale began to scream and Teddy pulled the pliers out like he’d been bitten by a snake and he shook his head and threw them down. “I can’t get it, I can’t do this.” He shook his head again, waiting for Rudy, and Rudy nodded. “But you tried, that’s the important thing. You put the effort in.” Then Rudy picked up the pliers and with savage determination finished the job.
They let Dale up and he staggered, holding on to his mouth in pain, and she could see tears glittering in the corners of his eyes. His hand was covered in blood, thick as a glove. He walked by Rudy like an invisible man, but he gave Teddy a cold look and shoved him out of his way, leaving a handprint of blood on his school clothes. Rudy fished in the bucket for a twenty-dollar bill and stuck it in Teddy’s pocket. “Here’s a little something for your trouble.”
But Teddy snatched it out and dropped it on the floor.
Outside, behind the house, Teddy puked up his whiskey. He leaned up against a tree, shaking his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “you shouldn’t have seen that.”
He rode her home, sweating out the whiskey. The air was colder now, but she felt numb to it. The moon was high and keen. You could smell wood smoke in the air and she knew before long there would be snow. She wondered about Dale, where he lived and what it must have been like being down on that floor. She’d never been held down by anyone and she imagined it must be the worst thing to endure. Just imagining it made her skin go clammy. It made her hate Teddy a little for what he’d done, but the hate was twisted up with other things, things that made her chest and thighs and belly warm, things she did not understand nor could she explain.
When she got home, they stood in front of her father’s enormous house. He had his hands in his pockets like a little boy. “I’m really sorry, Willa.”
"I know.”
“Forgive me, okay?” He looked at her a minute more. “Later,” he said, and rode away.
Behind her, the door opened, and her father stood there waiting. He would want an explanation, she knew, and after she lied to him, fabricating a story about studying all night for a Latin test and losing track of the time, she would kiss his forgiving cheek good night, and crawl into bed and weep with gratitude that somehow God had given her this life—these parents, this house—her beautiful horse—and that, at least for now, she was safe.
10
The man with the burn on his face was named Luther Grimm. People said he’d burned his mother’s house down for the insurance money and had gotten caught, but for some reason nobody could figure out why they’d never convicted him. He was harmless, people said, slow. His mother had gotten hurt in the fire, she was an invalid now. They lived in a small house across the railroad tracks, a mile or so from Teddy’s grandfather’s house, through the woods and down the hill. Sometimes in town Teddy would see Grimm’s truck with the dog chained up on the back of it. It was a brawny animal with short muscular legs. If you got anywhere near that truck the dog went ballistic, barking like crazy and foaming at the mouth. On several occasions when Teddy went walking through the woods behind his grand-father’s house, he’d hear the dog barking and it was not an ordinary dog’s bark, he’d decided, but one shrill with desperation, a frantic yodeling that gave him a stomachache.
One afternoon after school, on his way home from Marco Liddy’s house, where he’d gotten exceptionally stoned and eaten most of the contents of the Liddys’ SubZero—Marco’s mother was a pastry chef— he heard the dog barking and decided to go down to Grimm’s house to have a look. The woods were a jumble of overgrowth. Prickers coiled up from the ground, sticking to his jeans. He crossed the railroad tracks then shuffled down an incline through piles of leaves. He made a lot of noise walking through the leaves and the dog started to howl. Teddy stood on the edge of Grimm’s lumpy yard and saw that the dog was chained to a tree. The driveway was empty, Grimm was not at home. The dog was barking and jumping around, yanking the chain, which was the length of a jump rope. Teddy had read up on pit bulls and knew they were, in some circumstances, dangerous, but part of him believed he could save this dog from its miserable fate. The dog kept yanking the chain and the more it yanked the more irritated it got and the louder it barked. You didn’t put a dog like that on a short chain, Teddy thought, unless you wanted to irritate it.
He didn’t like it when people were cruel to animals. There was a lot of cruelty in the world, you saw evidence of it every night on the news, you saw it on those cop shows, when they’d catch someone and maul them to the ground and snap on the cuffs. Even in his own life back in L.A. he’d seen things. And he’d witnessed a kind of brutality in himself that night at the Men’s Club. What he’d done to Dale, the way it had felt holding him down. He’d been in fights before once or twice, but this had been different. It wasn’t something he could explain and he wasn’t proud of it and every time he thought about it he felt sick.
Teddy surveyed the muddy yard, Grimm’s house. Most of the paint was peeled off and the window curtains were yellowed and drooping. Just behind the house was a ramshackle well with a little wooden roof over it. Teddy gave in to his curiosity and crossed the yard and looked into the well—a funnel of darkness—then climbed up onto the back porch, which had all sorts of junk stacked on it, rusty old tools and broken machines with buttons and levers, and by now the dog was barking like crazy and there was foam dripping out the sides of its mouth. Teddy peered through the window in the back door. He saw a kitchen that was surprisingly neat. A short dog crate sat under the window. There were pictures of Jesus all over the place, on the walls, the tables. A short hall led to another room where he could make out a hospital bed pushed against the wall. Grimm’s mother was in it, which creeped him out. He couldn’t see her face, only the back of her head, a nest of white hair. A TV sat on a rolling cart beside the bed, playing a game show. It was turned up so loud that the flimsy walls of the house trembled with the sound of applause.
Teddy heard a truck coming up the road. It was Luther Grimm’s truck and it was turning into the driveway. Teddy jumped down off the porch and slipped out of sight behind the garage. Grimm and another man got out of the truck. Dale.
Dale’s mouth looked crooked, his cheek swollen. The dog caught their attention, jerking and barking and squealing. Dale looked around the yard, furtively, like a man planning his escape. Grimm walked over to the dog. “What’s your problem?” He kicked the animal lightly in the belly. The dog wrestled with Grimm’s boot, nipping at it, growling playfully. “He’s still a puppy.”
“Don’t look like no puppy to me,” Dale said. “You ever fight him?”
“Fight him? No.”
“Well, you should. You could make some money.”
“He could get hurt.”
“He’d like it,?
?? Dale said. “A dog like that. You should think about it.”
“He’s just a puppy,” Grimm said again, and kicked the dog once more, this time a little harder, and the dog growled and tumbled back.
“He ain’t gonna be a puppy long,” Dale said.
The dog got up to run after them, but by now they were near the porch, and he jerked once more on the chain and yelped. Dale laughed at the dog, an exaggerated guttural laugh, and Grimm laughed too, and they went into the house. The dog walked around in a circle, then lay down and whined.
Teddy felt sorry for that dog. If he wasn’t so afraid of it, he’d steal it.
He walked back up the hill into the woods, crossing over the tracks. He wondered what Dale was doing hanging around with Luther Grimm. Whatever it was couldn’t be good, he thought.
The sun came pouring through the trees. You could hear the trees on their old trunks. They whined just a little, whispering their worries to one another like old men in church. They were old and tired and had been standing for centuries and had had enough of it. He could smell the earth and the dry leaves. He came to the field and crossed it and he saw a hawk flying with its brown wings spread wide. It flew wide and slow. Hawks were the smart birds. They knew things. They knew people were stupid. Teddy hoped his mother was home. He wanted to tell her about the dog. He wanted to sit across from her beautiful face and tell her about the dog and about Luther Grimm who’d burned his mother’s house down. But his mother wasn’t home. She’d left a note. She’d gone to the city for art supplies. He wandered the big empty house. The rooms glimmered with sunshine. They smelled dusty. It was weird to think she’d grown up here. He compared it to the series of dumpy apartments in L.A. where he’d spent the majority of his childhood and it pissed him off. He had a whole lot of reasons for being angry with her, but at the same time he wasn’t angry at all. He loved her fiercely.
He took his bike and rode to town. He met up with Willa at the Pizza Shack. Willa had on black eyeliner. He could smell her lipstick and something else, an earthy musky scent that turned him on. He wanted to push himself against her. They each had a slice, sitting at the counter. The TV was on and there was stuff about the war in Iraq. The war was like white noise, people hardly noticed it. You could still eat and watch the report. You could still eat and see bodies piled up along the road like dead pigs in burlap. You could see men with machine guns and still swallow your food.
What would happen next? He could not imagine a future—what that meant—because he had started to doubt the possibility that there’d be one. The way he saw things, the future was tainted food that you unwittingly swallowed because people told you that you’d starve without it, but at the same time you knew it would make you sick. Maybe not right away, but it would work through your body like a virus and once you got to your future, you’d be on your knees, begging God or whoever the fuck was up there for mercy. Because no matter what, everyone was guilty and would suffer the consequences. He looked back at the TV and saw tanks on a deserted road, a correspondent in a khaki vest. The future was unknown, the reporter was saying. It wasn’t anything you could count on.
“You want to play some games?” Willa asked. “I’ve got change.”
“Sure.”
They walked around to the video store and went down into the basement where they’d put all the games. There were some other kids there from school. She wanted to play the car-racing game. She liked to sit in the leather seat. “Alas, my throne,” she would say in her Shakespearean accent, swinging one leg over like mounting a horse. He stood there next to her for a while. Watching her yanking on the gears, her foot pressing down the pedal, did something to his insides. She raced an eighteen-wheeler truck and it buzzed her out. He could see it in her eyes, they went dull and glassy. He played one of the paramilitary games, shooting at gangsters, but couldn’t kill enough of them to get a free game. “I need a smoke,” he said, and left her there with the game and walked out without turning back. It was almost five and the sun was going down and the air was getting cool. There were some people hanging out at Bev’s, eating ice-cream cones. Little children chased one another up and down the breezeway. He saw Ada Heath coming out of the bookstore. She was with this other girl, Beth, who was chunky and always had too much spit in her mouth. He watched them laughing on the street. He wondered what could possibly be so funny. Willa came out and they walked down to O’Brien’s for more cigarettes. It was getting dark and he told her he wanted to go home.
“Can you give me a lift?” she said.
“I guess so.”
“You guess so?”
“You can have the seat, is what I meant.” He grinned at her.
“Chivalry is not dead.” She took his face in her hands and kissed his cheek like a mother.
They rode down Main Street with its white houses and crooked shutters, its front porches and rocking chairs, its pumpkins and brittle mums. He saw boys making a fort in a pile of leaves and a girl on a tree swing, pushing her heels to the sky. He saw an old man sweeping the sidewalk. Lights were coming on in the windows. He could see people in their houses, a woman setting the table, a family sitting down to supper, and he felt something pull in his chest, a kind of longing he’d never felt before, and it made him want to hold Willa. It made him want to lie down with her someplace and just look at her.
She lived down the road from his grandfather’s place. When they finally got there he was covered with sweat. It was nearly dark and fog had settled over the fields. It gave him a feeling, like another kind of ocean, like he was small. “Come in,” she said.
He followed her into the house. The place was like a museum. Everything in place. Everything in order. The floors were shiny and clean. He didn’t know where to put his feet. He could hear music coming from one of the rooms. They went through the kitchen, into the foyer. The music was coming from her father’s study, a symphony on the stereo. The door was ajar and her father was inside. The phone rang and the music went down and the door started to close. Teddy could smell a cigar. Willa started up the circular staircase and Teddy followed her, glancing into the father’s study. Joe Golding nodded to him as he closed his door. In Willa’s room, horses galloped across the wallpaper and she had ribbons all over the place that she’d won in horse shows. They shut her door and sat down on the rug and she put some headphones onto him. It was strange music, like chanting. He didn’t know what it was and he didn’t ask her. Then she unzipped his pants and made him come.
Once Teddy had Willa Golding under his skin he thought about little else. He did not focus at school. His tutor would point to various sentences, lines of little black marks, and read the words out loud, but he heard none of it. They were words and they made a sound when they came out of her mouth and her mouth made a funny shape when she said them, but none of it mattered to Teddy—it meant nothing to him. He could not interpret the sound. He watched his tutor’s lips pronouncing the word somnolent and he thought about kissing Willa.
SOMNOLENT
He could stretch it apart and the letters separated like bread in a puddle, so he saw TENT and he saw TENT ON SAM and it did not make sense. He saw TENSION. And he heard monks chanting.
He had brought his face down to her belly, the soft pillow of flesh, and he had played with her nipples and they had poked up in his mouth like gumdrops.
He wanted Willa. He wanted to be inside her.
Romeo and Juliet did not interest him. It bored him silly. He was stupefied with boredom. He was FRIED WITH STUPE. He was STUPID and FRIED. At school, he felt like an outlaw, like in those old Westerns. Like when he’d walk into Mrs. Heath’s class everyone went quiet and looked at him expectantly, nervously, like he was about to take out a gun or something. It was weird. Mrs. Heath turned the shade of curdled milk at the very sight of him and he’d think: This town’s not big enough for the both of us! She would mark up his papers with wild abandon, encircling his terrible grades in red ink like some stamp of disapproval, and he’d have to p
retend it didn’t get to him, but it did. He told his mother he wasn’t doing very well and she shrugged and said, “Just try your best.” He didn’t know what his best was. He wasn’t good at reading and he’d never be good at it and you had to be good at it if you wanted to do well. There was no way around it. When the teachers asked questions in class and the hands would rise up like the flags of inferior countries, he knew the answer too; it just took a little longer for it to come into his head. It would fly into his brain like a big clumsy insect, one of those slow-flying cockroaches, and land there, finally, making a spectacle of itself. What did it matter if he was a little slow? They never called on him anyway.
His mind wandered. He’d watch the people at school. They all seemed stuck inside little clouds and he couldn’t hear them or understand them. Even when he heard what they were saying, what they said made no sense. He would yawn and yawn. They were all talking so much. It was noisy. Talking and laughing and scratching and smiling. He watched the jiggling girls at school. They were flashes of pink. They were this hand or that leg. This foot. This pair of glossy lips. Those tits. Their hair smelled of coconuts. It fell in their faces as they spoke. But Willa was not pink. Willa was a striped cat high up in a tree, ready to pounce. She had little soft paws. She was a dark animal in the shadows. She was a rubber ball rolling through the wide hallways of her father’s house, down the stairs, bounce, bounce, bounce. Willa bounced and floated. She bounced up and down and up again. She was a fucking Super Ball.
11
What it felt like sucking on Teddy’s penis. He had a nice one and it was friendly, it was polite. She didn’t have any trouble making friends with it. She liked its shiny hat. She liked his musky smell. She liked his clothes and wanted to wear them. She liked boy’s clothes better than girl’s clothes. His clothes always smelled good and fresh. She tried to imagine his mother washing them. His mother didn’t have any help like her mother did. Sucking on Teddy’s penis was not as big a deal as people thought. It made him feel good and she liked the way he looked afterward with his face ruddy and damp and that beautiful smile he had, one tooth sticking out a little more than the other. Teddy was gorgeous. He was going to be something when he was in his twenties, she knew. But he wasn’t as smart as Marco, at least he couldn’t seem to get good grades like Marco. Willa didn’t know why. He had refused to read aloud in class and nobody said anything, not even Mr. Jernigan, everyone just teetering on their tipped-back chairs to see what he’d do. Teddy seemed smart to her. Smarter than most people. He was always thinking. He had ideas about things. Just the way he looked at something—like some ordinary thing—he’d consider it as though it had just dropped down from Saturn or something. You could tell he was thinking something deeper than most. And things bothered him. Trash on Mount Everest, rude people, careless behavior. Whenever he rode her home on his bike he’d point out all the trash along the side of the road that people threw out of their windows. “How can people be so careless?” he’d say to her. He took it all to heart. She liked Teddy so she sucked on his penis. It didn’t worry her much. She opened her mouth and let him in and let him go down her throat till her eyes teared. She wasn’t comparing what she did for him to what he did for her—you didn’t do that when you loved someone. He might put his head on her belly and breathe her in—she took care to dab some perfume below her belly button—but she wasn’t letting him inside her pants and he knew it and he respected that and he didn’t even try. She felt like she could be herself with Teddy. They could just be together and it was all right. It was quiet and peaceful. They could just be.