Dolores Claiborne (22 page)

Well, I had a hole for him, one thirty feet deep instead of just six, and lined with chunks of field-stone instead of dirt. You bet I had a hole for him, and one kiss after three years or maybe even five wasn’t gonna change it. Neither was touchin his forehead, which had been a lot more the cause of all my trouble than his pulin little dingus ever was ... but I touched it again, just the same; traced one finger over it and thought about how he kissed me on the patio of The Samoset Inn while the band inside played “Moonlight Cocktail,” and how I’d been able to smell his father’s cologne on his cheeks when he did.

Then I hardened my heart.

“I’m glad,” I said, n picked up the tray again. “Why don’t you see what you can make of those viewers and the reflector-boxes while I do up these few dishes?”

“I don’t give a fuck about anything that rich cunt gave you,” he says, “and I don’t give a fuck about the goddam eclipse, either. I’ve seen dark before. It happens every goddam night.”

“All right,” I says. “Suit yourself.”

I got as far’s the door and he says, “Maybe you n me can get up to dickens later on. What would you think about that, Dee?”

“Maybe,” I says, all the time thinkin there was gonna be plenty of dickens, all right. Before it got dark for the second time that day, Joe St. George was gonna get more dickens than he’d ever dreamed of.

I kept my good weather eye on him while I was standin at the sink and doin up our few dishes. He hadn’t done anything in bed but sleep, snore, n fart for years, and I think he knew as well’s I did that the booze had as much to do with that as my ugly face ... prob’ly more. I was scared that maybe the idear of gettin his ashes hauled later on would cause him to put the cap back on that bottle of Johnnie Walker, but no such bad luck. For Joe, fuckin (pardon my language, Nancy) was just a fancy, like kissin me had been. The bottle was a lot realer to him. The bottle was right there where he could touch it. He’d gotten one of the eclipse-viewers out of the bag and was holdin it up by the handle, turnin it this way n that, squintin at the sun through it. He reminded me of a thing I saw on TV once—a chimpanzee tryin to tune a radio. Then he put it down and poured himself another drink.

When I came back out on the porch with my sewin basket, I saw he was already gettin that owly, red-around-the-eyes look he had when he was on his way from moderately tickled to thoroughly tanked. He looked at me pretty sharp just the same, no doubt wonderin if I was gonna bitch at him.

“Don’t mind me,” I says, sweet as sugar-pie, “I’m just gonna sit here and do a little mendin and wait for the eclipse to start. It’s nice that the sun came out, isn’t it?”

“Christ, Dolores, you must think this is my birthday,” he says. His voice had started to get thick and furry.

“Well—somethin like it, maybe,” I says, and began sewin up a rip in a pair of Little Pete’s jeans.

The next hour and a half passed slower’n any time had since I was a little girl, and my Aunt Cloris promised to come n take me to my first movie down in Ellsworth. I finished Little Pete’s jeans, sewed patches on two pairs of Joe Junior’s chinos (even back then that boy would absolutely not wear jeans—I think part of him’d already decided he was gonna be a politician when he grew up), and hemmed two of Selena’s skirts. The last thing I did was sew a new fly in one of Joe’s two or three pairs of good slacks. They were old but not entirely worn out. I remember thinkin they would do to bury him in.

Then, just when I thought it was never gonna happen, I noticed the light on my hands seemed a little dimmer.

“Dolores?” Joe says. “I think this is what you n all the rest of the fools’ve been waitin for.”

“Ayuh,” I says. “I guess.” The light in the dooryard had gone from that strong afternoon yellow it has in July to a kind of faded rose, and the shadow of the house layin across the driveway had taken on a funny
thin
kind of look I’d never seen before and never have since.

I took one of the reflector-boxes from the bag, held it out the way Vera’d showed me about a hundred times in the last week or so, and when I did I had the funniest thought: That little girl is doin this, too, I thought. The one who’s sittin on her father’s lap. She’s doin this very same thing.

I didn’t know what that thought meant then, Andy, and I don’t really know now, but I’m tellin you anyway—because I made up my mind I’d tell you everythin, and because I thought of her again later. Except in the next second or two I wasn’t just
thinkin
of her; I was
seein
her, the way you see people in dreams, or the way I guess the Old Testament prophets must have seen things in their visions: a little girl maybe ten years old, with her own reflector-box in her hands. She was wearin a short dress with red n yellow stripes—a kind of sundress with straps instead of sleeves, you know —and lipstick the color of peppermint candy. Her hair was blonde, and put up in the back, like she wanted to look older’n she really was. I saw somethin else, as well, somethin that made me think of Joe: her Daddy’s hand was on her leg, way up high. Higher’n it ought to’ve been, maybe. Then it was gone.

“Dolores?” Joe ast me. “You all right?”

“What do you mean?” I asks back. “Course I am.”

“You looked funny there for a minute.”

“It’s just the eclipse,” I says, and I really think that’s what it was, Andy, but I also think that little girl I saw then n again later was a
real
little girl, and that she was sittin with her father somewhere else along the path of the eclipse at the same time I was sittin on the back porch with Joe.

I looked down in the box and seen a little tiny white sun, so bright it was like lookin at a fifty-cent piece on fire, with a dark curve bit into one side of it. I looked at it for a little while, then at Joe. He was holdin up one of the viewers, peerin into it.

“Goddam,” he says. “She’s disappearin, all right. ”

The crickets started to sing in the grass right about then; I guess they’d decided sundown was comin early that day, and it was time for em to crank up. I looked out on the reach at all the boats, and saw the water they were floatin on looked a darker blue now—there was somethin about them that was creepy n wonderful at the same time. My brain kept tryin to believe that all those boats sittin there under that funny dark summer sky were just a hallucination.

I glanced at my watch and saw it was goin on ten til five. That meant for the next hour or so everyone on the island would be thinkin about nothin else and watchin nothin else. East Lane was dead empty, our neighbors were either on the
Island
Princess
or the hotel roof, and if I really meant to do him, the time’d come. My guts felt like they were all wound into one big spring and I couldn’t quite get that thing I’d seen—the little girl sittin on her Daddy’s lap—out of my mind, but I couldn’t let either of those things stop me or even distract me, not for a single minute. I knew if I didn’t do it right then, I wouldn’t never.

I put the reflector-box down beside my sewin and said, “Joe.”

“What?” he ast me. He’d pooh-poohed the eclipse before, but now that it’d actually started, it seemed like he couldn’t take his eyes off it. His head was tipped back and the eclipse-viewer he was lookin through cast one of those funny, faded shadows on his face.

“It’s time for the surprise,” I said.

“What surprise?” he ast, and when he lowered the eclipse-viewer, which was just this double layer of special polarized glass in a frame, to look at me, I saw it wasn’t fascination with the eclipse after all, or not completely. He was halfway to bein shit-faced, and so groggy I got a little scared. If he didn’t understand what I was sayin, my plan was buggered before it even got started. And what was I gonna do then? I didn’t know. The only thing I
did
know scared the hell outta me: I wasn’t gonna turn back. No matter how wrong things went or what happened later, I wasn’t gonna turn back.

Then he reached out a hand, grabbed me by the shoulder, and shook me. “What in God’s name’re you talkin about, woman?” he says.

“You know the money in the kids’ bank accounts?” I asks him.

His eyes narrowed a little, and I saw he wasn’t anywhere near as drunk as I’d first thought. I understood something else, too—that one kiss didn’t change a thing. Anyone can give a kiss, after all; a kiss was how Judas Iscariot showed the Romans which one was Jesus.

“What about it?” he says.

“You took it.”

“Like hell!”

“Oh yes,” I says. “After I found out you’d been foolin with Selena, I went to the bank. I meant to withdraw the money, then take the kids and get them away from you.”

His mouth dropped open and for a few seconds he just gaped at me. Then he started to laugh—just leaned back in his rocker and let fly while the day went on gettin darker all around him. “Well, you got fooled, didn’t you?” he says. Then he helped himself to a little more Scotch and looked up at the sky through the eclipse-viewer again. This time I couldn’t hardly see the shadow on his face. “Half gone, Dolores!” he says. “Half gone now, maybe a little more!”

I looked down into my reflector-box and seen he was right; only half of that fifty-cent piece was left, and more was goin all the time. “Ayuh,” I says. “Half gone, so it is. As to the money, Joe—”

“You just forget that,” he told me. “Don’t trouble your pointy little head about it. That money’s just about fine.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about it,” I says. “Not a bit. The way you fooled me, though—that weighs on my mind.”

He nodded, kinda solemn n thoughtful, as if to show me he understood n even sympathized, but he couldn’t hold onto the expression. Pretty soon he busted out laughin again, like a little kid who’s gettin scolded by a teacher he ain’t in the least afraid of. He laughed so hard he sprayed a little silver cloud of spit into the air in front of his mouth.

“I’m sorry, Dolores,” he says when he was able to talk again, “I don’t mean to laugh, but I did steal a march on you, didn’t I?”

“Oh, ayuh,” I agreed. It wasn’t nothing but the truth, after all.

“Fooled you right and proper,” he says, laughin and shakin his head the way you do when someone tells a real knee-slapper.

“Ayuh,” I agreed along with him, “but you know what they say.”

“Nope,” he says. He dropped the eclipse-viewer into his lap n turned to look at me. He’d laughed s’hard there were tears standin in his piggy little bloodshot eyes. “You’re the one with a sayin for every occasion, Dolores. What do they say about husbands who finally put one over on their meddling busybody wives?”

“‘Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,’ ” I says. “You fooled me about Selena, and then you fooled me about the money, but I guess I finally caught up to you. ”

“Well maybe you did and maybe you didn’t,” he says, “but if you’re worried about it bein spent, you can just stop, because—”

I broke in there. “I
ain’t
worried,” I says. “I told you that already. I ain’t a
bit
worried.”

He give me a hard look then, Andy, his smile dryin up little by little. “You got that smart look on your face again,” he says, “the one I don’t much care for. ”

“Tough titty,” I says.

He looked at me for a long time, tryin to figure out what was goin on inside my head, but I guess it was as much a mystery to him then as ever. He pooched his lip out again n sighed so hard he blew back the lock of hair that’d fallen on his forehead.

“Most women don’t understand the first thing about money, Dolores,” he says, “n you’re no exception to the rule. I put it all together in one account, that’s all ... so it’d draw more interest. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to listen to a lot of your ignorant bullshit. Well, I’ve had to listen to some anyway, like I just about always do, but enough’s enough.” Then he raised up the eclipse-viewer again to show me the subject was closed.

“One account in your own name,” I says.

“So what?” he ast. By then it was like we was sittin in a deep twilight, and the trees had begun fadin against the horizon. I could hear a whippoorwill singin from behind the house, and a nightjar from somewhere else. It felt like the temperature had begun to drop, too. It all gave me the strangest feelin ... like livin in a dream that’s somehow turned real. “Why
shouldn’t
it be in my name? I’m their father, ain’t I?”

“Well, your blood is in em. If that makes you a father, I guess you are one.”

I could see him tryin to figure out if that one was worth pickin up and yankin on awhile, and decidin it wa’ant. “You don’t want to talk about this anymore, Dolores,” he says. “I’m warnin you.”

“Well, maybe just a
little
more,” I says back, smiling. “You forgot all about the surprise, you see.”

He looked at me, suspicious again. “What the fuck’re you babblin on about, Dolores?”

“Well, I went to see the man in charge of the savins department at Coastal Northern in Jonesport,” I says. “A nice man named Mr. Pease. I explained what happened, and he was awful upset. Especially when I showed him the original savins books weren’t missin, like you told him they were.”

That was when Joe lost what little int’rest in the eclipse he’d had. He just sat there in that shitty old rocker of his, starin at me with his eyes wide open. There was thunder on his brow n his lips were pressed down into a thin white line like a scar. He’d dropped the eclipse-viewer back into his lap and his hands were openin and closin, real slow.

“It turned out you weren’t supposed to do that,” I told him. “Mr. Pease checked to see if the money was still in the bank. When he found out it was, we both heaved a big sigh of relief. He ast me if I wanted him to call the cops n tell em what happened. I could see from his face he was hopin like hell I’d say no. I ast if he could issue that money over to me. He looked it up in a book n said he could. So I said, ‘That’s what we’ll do, then.’ And he did it. So that’s why I ain’t worried about the kids’ money anymore, Joe—
I’ve
got it now instead of you. Ain’t that a corker of a surprise?”