Beautiful Kate (22 page)

He was closer to me now and his fists had come up, as if he knew something about boxing, as if it were in him to smash a face, to pummel, to injure.

“And you believed her?” I said. “Kate wouldn’t lie, would she?”

“You tried the same thing with her when we were, kids.”

“That was a little different, wouldn’t you say?”

I had started to back up now, because he was still coming at me. As I’ve said before, he was slightly taller than I was, and he also had a longer reach. But he was lighter and slower and had never been able to dominate me physically except during that year when he was well into puberty and I was still a boy. Even then, however, I think I could have beaten him in a fight simply because he had so little talent for truculence and meanness. In fact, I don’t think we’d had a real fight since we were kids and even those altercations had not been fist fights but wrestling free-for-alls that usually ended with me getting on top of him and holding him down until he “gave up.”

But I knew instinctively that none of that was relevant now. I could see in his normally warm blue eyes a pallor of rage that no amount of talking or pleading was going to turn. So I had no choice finally but to raise my own fists, and immediately the first blow came, a right hand that I took on my shoulder. Then a left and another right, and he kept on swinging, roundhouses I could see coming a long way off. But he was big enough and fast enough so that I could not block them all, and I took a couple of hard shots to the face.

“Fight, will you
!” he cried.
“Fight!
”

My nose was bleeding and I could feel my mouth puffing up, and his fists were still whistling at me, so I did as he suggested. Blocking one of his roundhouses, I stepped inside and hooked him twice into the stomach as hard as I could, and he folded, his mouth gasping for air that would not come. Kate evidently had been standing at the top of the ladder watching us, for she rushed past me now and got down in the reedy dust with her new champion. She cradled his head and stroked his face. And she looked up at me with raging eyes.

“You hurt him, you bastard! You hurt him!”

I told her that he had the wind knocked out of him, that was all. But she kept yelling at me anyway, telling me to get out of there, to get out of her sight.

“I hate you!” she cried. “Oh God, I hate you!”

In the remaining hours of that long evening, I got my things out of the bedroom that I shared with Cliff and moved into the empty hired man’s room in the basement. (For years, Stinking Joe had been only a day laborer at our place.) But I found it difficult to get anything done, what with all the company I was having: Mother fussing over my wounds and Jason demanding to know why Cliff and I had fought, and Sarah and Junior expecting me to carry on as a kind of living theater for the two of them, topping my mugging and hitchhiking tales with an inside look at the fight game. But it was Jason of course who won out, finally ordering me to follow him upstairs to the library, where he closed the door behind us and had me take a chair facing him at his desk, like a miscreant in the principal’s office. And he again demanded to know what was going on, why Cliff and I had fought, and I knew that I had no choice except to give him an answer that he could accept as truth, even over the white lie Cliff ultimately would have to tell him. So I reluctantly admitted that the fault was mine. Cliff had just been trying to straighten me out, I said. He had been worried about me and my behavior since graduation, not doing the farm work and carousing with Tim Regan and running off the way I did. He had tried to talk to me about it, but I had gotten angry and shoved him and he defended himself.

“And the first thing I knew, we were fighting.”

“It isn’t like Cliff to fight,” Jason said. “You two never fight.”

“Well, that’s the way it was.”

He frowned in anger. “And since when is he the father in this family? Does he think I’m unaware of your behavior? Does he think I can’t discipline you?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Well, I can. And I will. But not on your first night back—I knew your mother wouldn’t want that.”

“Before you do, may I say something?”

“Of course.”

I am hesitant to detail what I said to Jason then, because I know it will only sound like your typical screenwriter’s typical snow job. But I did mean what I told him, and in the six or eight weeks I was to remain at home I somehow managed to live up to my words. I explained to him that I had done a lot of thinking in St. Louis and that I was not proud of my recent behavior. I said that I would not be hanging around with Tim Regan anymore and would not be drinking and getting into trouble. I said that I planned to start cutting our hay the next morning and that I would get it all in, with whatever help Stinking Joe could give me. And I also observed that our fences were getting old and that if Jason wanted to buy the posts and wire, I would put in all new fences for him. I would also repaint the barn and corrals if he wished. I wanted to work hard, I said. I wanted to get in shape and stay in shape.

By then his frown had given way to a look of bemusement. “Well, you must go to St. Louis more often,” he said.

“No. I just want to work.”

“And so you shall. We’ll check the fields in the morning.”

“The blossoms are already turning,” I said. “The clover’s ripe.”

“We’ll check it in the morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

With that, I left him and returned to my new room in the basement. I got my things put away and then I took a long hot bath, wishing I could have soaked the pain and the fear out of me as easily as the soreness from the fight. And oddly, I found myself almost looking forward to the days of work ahead. Sweat and dust and insects and straining muscles, surely that would be a world that even Kate would not be able to intrude upon.

As I sit here in the library writing this, I have no idea how I could have been, even at eighteen, so ignorant of the world as to think that all I had to do was work hard and keep to myself that summer and everything would come out all right in the end. I evidently was not overly concerned about the fact that Kate in less than a fortnight had changed from my pond-side lover into an enemy who wanted me hurt, or that she had turned from me to Cliff. Possibly I thought that, given her other recent behavior, this new twist was only to be expected and that in the end it would be for the better anyway, in that I would no longer have to worry about resisting her madness—and mine. I don’t imagine it even crossed my mind that she might try the same thing with Cliff, who had told me more than once that he would probably be a virgin until he married, since he could not bring himself to try to seduce a girl he did not love. In my mind, it was preposterous enough that Kate had told him what I had “tried,” let alone confronting him with the fact of her own guilt. And if it did cross my mind that she might try such a thing, I must have dismissed it immediately, assuring myself that she had to know Cliff better than that. It would have been like proposing an act of murder to Mohandas Gandhi.

In retrospect, the only way I can explain my behavior that spring and summer—and my state of mind that night as I went to bed in the hired man’s room—is to plead ignorance. At eighteen, and even after my St. Louis “adventure,” I simply did not understand the full enormity of what had happened between Kate and me, how irredeemable it was, how fatal. I have always told myself that, given the nature of our childhood together, how insular we were, how my best and virtually only friends had always been Kate and Cliff, it was only natural that the three of us in time came to form the matrix of each other’s reality. If Kate had become a saint, I would have considered sainthood that much more common, just as I now judged her behavior with me as more a willful aberration than some sort of neurosis.

And then too there was my
own
sickness. To lie in bed was to feel her hand close around me; to shut my eyes was to see her smile and taste her mouth; to sleep was to enter her again and hold her, twined with me as in our mother’s womb, for all time. In short, how was I to kill my own dream? How was I to think my lover mad?

Nevertheless I did have the door locked as I lay there in the dark, smoking and listening to the sounds of the night. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the trumpeting of a bull in rut, one of the most fearsomely beautiful sounds in all of nature, yet not fearsome enough that night to prevail against the sound of the township’s hotrodders on Reardon Road, measuring each other’s manhood in calibrations of squealing rubber and roaring metal. At midnight the grandfather clock in the living room chimed a peaceful and harmonious end to what had been a discordant day, but for me the sounds of the night went on: the scratching of mice in the walls and the sibilant rustle of elm leaves in the wind and then that most mysterious of all sounds, the one that dwells only in silence, that soft rushing beating thing I can only conceive to be the flowing of time or of one’s own blood.

It was almost one o’clock when I heard the creaking of the back stairs, followed by the padding of bare feet across the kitchen floor and down the basement stairs. The door handle turned in vain, and finally there was a knock, light and hesitant. By then my heart was punching away at me, because I thought—or was it hoped?—that it was Kate at the door. But it was not.

“Greg, it’s Cliff. Let me in.”

I took my time getting up and going to the door. After I had unlocked it, I went back to the narrow bed and fell into it, making a show of my indifference. Cliff meanwhile was fretting about the room, unable to decide whether to look out the basement window at the darkness or to sit in the chair or just stand there in front of me, like a supplicant. Not owning pajamas, he had pulled on a pair of jeans for the trek down to my new room.

“How come you had the door locked?” he asked.

I did not answer. “What do you want?”

“Just to talk, that’s all.”

“About what?”

“About what?
All of it. This whole mess. None of it makes any sense.”

“Out in the barn you seemed pretty sure about everything.”

“I know, I know. But I’m not. I’m all mixed up.” He sat in front of me now, trying to see into my eyes. “
Why
, Greg? Can you tell me that? Why would you try such a thing?”

“What did she tell you?”

“Well, what do you think? You were there.”

“I still want to hear it. In detail.”

“Why? Isn’t it disgusting enough the way it is? Without raking it all up again?”

“Maybe it’s not the same—what you think happened and what I think happened.”

“Okay, then. All right.” Embarrassed and even stammering, he laid it out for me: how I’d come home drunk that night and how Kate had seen me heading for the pond and had followed me there, wearing her bikini,

“You were skinny-dipping, Kate said. So she’d expected you to stay away from her. But you didn’t. She said—”

Cliff had to get up and walk to the window. He leaned against the wall there, as though he were submitting to police search.

“She said what?” I asked.

“That you tried to kiss her. That you tried—” He was strangling on the words, but finally he got them out. “That you tried to feel her up.”

I asked him if he believed her.

“Why would she lie?”

“I don’t know why. I’m just asking if you believed her.”

“Yes.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

Shaking his head, he sagged down onto the chair again, straddling it. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I guess I just can’t believe you’d do such a thing. And yet I can’t believe she’d lie about it either. I’m caught in the middle.”

He had lowered his head onto his crossed arms. “Can’t you tell me anything? Can’t you give me some help?”

I truly did not know what to say, did not know what I
could
say. So I offered him a piece of advice, without really thinking of its implications.

“Be careful with her, Cliff.”

His head came up abruptly. “What do you mean by that?”

“Just that. Be careful with her. She’s not like she used to be. She’s changed.”

“You got something to say, spit it out!”

“Nothing more. Just that.”

He stood up so suddenly he knocked over the chair. Without intending it, I had thrown him a lifeline—of righteous indignation.

“You bastard, Greg!” he hissed. “To imply something about your own sister—your own
twin!
—and not have the guts or decency to spell it out! I swear to God, I don’t know what’s happened to you.”

With that, he was gone, slamming the door and running up the stairs and across the kitchen floor like an animal in flight. I locked the door behind him and fell back into bed.

I don’t either,” I said aloud.

Junior came home from the bank with considerably less enthusiasm than he had taken to it. The safe deposit box was “pretty much a bust,” he said. Aside from a stack of old legal papers, there had been only one small envelope holding four one-hundred-dollar bills, which he had changed into twenties for the sake of convenience. But, other than the loss of enthusiasm, he seemed oddly unruffled by the affair, almost as if his drooling greed of an hour earlier had been only a pose. And when Jason philosophically allowed that we would at least be able to fix the front of the house now, Junior did not even berate him as a senile fool living in a pre-inflation dream-world.