Girls (31 page)

I went to her room, telling him to wait downstairs for me. I got the light on and the door closed, and then I looked through her socks. I found one pair of stockings. The drawer contained the things of a child, not a fourteen-year-old pushing to be grown. I went to the drawer beneath it, which I had already looked through, but very hastily. I wondered why. I thought, You would have been a shy father.

The drawer held little brassieres, sad small things that looked like models of the genuine item. I looked through them and found, on the bottom of the stack, a brown paper bag. In it was a bag from a chain I’d seen in the Syracuse mall. Inside that bag was a little black bra made mostly of lace. Under it was a matching pair of underpants. I looked at her stacked underpants: all white. This pair, in the bag, looked narrow-cut, like they’d come up thin at the crotch, and again very lacy. She had kept the receipt. She must have worked hard baby-sitting to save up for them.

The great payer of attention read the receipt three times before he figured out what worried him. The bill was for “2 pr wmns pnts and 2 brs.”

So now I knew what she was wearing when she left: the other set. She was wearing sexy underwear. Her mother would have been the one to pry in a daughter’s underclothes, and she’d been too sick. Her father would be as frightened of poking as I was. Though, finally, I hadn’t been. Had I? Good of me to find the courage to try to smell her body on her bed, to finger her little sexy disguise.

But maybe she hadn’t
been
disguised. Maybe the real kid was the one in dramatic lingerie. Why would a child wear clothes like that? Who’d get to see them? I listed on my fingers. One, the girlfriend she has the secret with, and they giggle and they make believe. Two,
herself, but maybe not worth it for the money. Three, the boy who takes her clothes off. I found myself moving slowly in a circle in the room, the underpants rolled in my fist.

The door moved, and I barked, “Wait!”

The door closed. I kept circling. She was wearing the other set of matching panties and brassiere because she was going to meet the boy, or go someplace with the boy, and he was going to take her clothing off and see what she wore for him.

Or man, I thought.

I thought of Rosalie Piri.

A man like me, I thought. I was going to wipe at the sweat on my face with her panties, when I stopped myself. I put the clothes back in the package inside the brown paper bag, and I replaced it in the drawer.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

I stopped and looked at the books again, running my finger from poetry to the thing about the caged bird and on through her school-books. I was on my knees, holding on to the edge of the bookshelf.

I said, “Sorry.”

Then I stood. It took me a long time. I tried to make the room look like I hadn’t been there. The cops might as well not have been. They’d assumed, as I had, that she had run away or been taken and that no clues were going to help. Probably, I thought, they were right. Unless what they wanted was to find the guy and kill him or break his body up. I thought I might be close to wanting that. I thought I might be close to doing it.

When I came into the living room, the reverend said, “She’s asleep.”

“Would you say good-bye for me, please?”

He looked as pleasant as he had when he was making his terrible jokes. But he said, “I really can’t. I can’t bring myself to use that word with her.”

“Would you tell her, then, I sent my best?”

“You’re very decent to us,” he said.

I could only think to thank him, and I did.

I had bought a small bag of kibble for the dog, and Rosalie put out water for him in a thick white bowl. He wagged as he ate to show he knew he was with company. I went outside with him and he checked out her little yard, then climbed through sparse hedges into the neighboring yard to pee and snoop. When we went back inside, Rosalie had changed into her terrible outfit of boxer shorts and flannel shirt. She was wearing ankle-high fleece-lined soft leather cabin boots, and I admired the hard muscle in her calves.

“I feel you looking at my legs,” she said from the stove, parting them.

I went over to her and was compelled to reach down and stroke her inside the back of the shorts. I felt her harden the muscle and then relax it. The way she trusted me with who she was when she relaxed it was as exciting to me as the skin I stroked.

“Do you want pubic hair or anything with your scrambled eggs?”

“Everything,” I said.

“Good. That was the right answer.” She shut the burner off and turned from the stove to stick her hand out. Her eyes were closed. I took her hand and shut my eyes to join her, and we led each other to the bedroom. “Stay,” she called to the dog, “if you don’t mind.”

I loved the darkness, and I loved the feel of her skin. I kept denying that we made my ribs hurt, or my fingers burn, and we made love with her riding me, her hands, at the end, in my hair and her body on top of me, bandages and ribs and all. It hadn’t taken long, because I was filled with urgency and hungry for as much sensation of her, inside and out, as I could have. It occurred to me to ask if we should do it differently to be better for her, but I was led to be quiet by the way she pulled the covers up and rolled to the side of the healthy ribs, wrapping her legs around my left thigh, rubbing her toes on my right calf. I heard the dog sigh and lie against her bedroom door.

I came out of the sleep because I’d heard a question, but not its words.

“Hmm?”

“The little girl.”

I thought of Professor Rosalie Piri, her small body under and around my own, which was big and ugly and busted.

I made more noises and touched her tight skin where I could.

“Tell me what you saw in Janice’s room,” she said.

“Stuff.”

“Cops know how to brief one another,” she said. “Come on.”

I sighed. I wanted to sleep beneath her and above her and smell her breath and kiss her stomach and make love again.

“Brief me,” she said.

I recited the room. I told her about the sexy underwear and the coronet and the books and Heisenberg and Mrs. Tanner.

“So all we really know,” I said, “is she went voluntarily.”

“So we have to backtrack. Boyfriends, teammates, the girls she might have confided in.”

“No, the state police are good at that. They’ll be doing that anyway. They always look for boyfriends. So we don’t have anything much, except it wasn’t, probably, a stranger who killed her.”

“You should always try and get killed by a friend.”

“I’m your friend.”

“And you wouldn’t hurt me. You adore me, Jack.”

“I do?”

“Tell me how much you adore me or I’ll crush your balls.”

“Your hand’s too small.”

“I warned you.” But her hand on me was gentle and then very exciting.

“Oh dear,” I said.

“I warned you,” she said, moving on me. And then she said, “You don’t have to love me. It’s all right if you can barely tolerate me.”

“I
can
barely tolerate you,” I said.

“I can stand you, too. About this much. About this far. Well, no. Maybe, oh my, maybe we can—
this
far. Yes, I can stand you this far.”

S
CUTTLING IN
Janice Tanner’s room hadn’t done my ribs any good, nor my fingers. Neither had scuttling under Rosalie Piri. Because it felt too good with her. Because it all led to seeing Fanny’s face. Fanny when our baby died. Fanny feeling old because Rosalie wasn’t. Fanny needing to lift me and shake me, Jesus Christ, and get me well. Fanny moving out to make me move.

I said to the dog, “Sometimes they take these things and climb up into the upper floors on college campuses and they take out targets of opportunity.” I made sure the safety was on and then I put it in the pocket of my coat. The problem was its front sight, which was too high for easy working in and out of coat pockets. A belly gun is supposed to clear for action without getting caught on clothing or equipment. That, and a size that makes for hiding it, are its excuses for existing. Otherwise, nobody needs a .32-caliber piece. And this one was too broad and too heavy. It was guaranteed to do nothing much for anyone unless you were ten or twelve yards, at most, from your target, and you put a cluster into him—all, or most, of the cylinder. In the service, I had refused to carry the standard issue to the military police for close-in combat. I’d taken the idea from pilots
who wouldn’t carry their standard-issue .38 in its shoulder holster. Like them, I lugged the World War I .45-caliber Colt with its horrendous kick that made for buck fever and that tended to intimidate more people than it wounded. You looked into its bore, and you obeyed. I didn’t know what the .32 would do if I fired it in anger, because I’d never wanted to. Now I did.

I fed the dog and let him out to run a while. I filled his plastic jug and stuck a bottle of aspirin in my other coat pocket. I swallowed a couple of the remaining codeine jobs to convince my ribs I’d enjoy bending myself behind the wheel. In the refrigerator I saw margarine and peanut butter I could spread on toast, but I couldn’t imagine who would eat it beside the dog. I swallowed a little orange juice from the carton. The carton flap was pulpy and most of the juice was gone. “Bachelor kitchen,” I said, making a face, but I didn’t think me funny and I didn’t reply.

I drove to work slowly, and I squinted into a white sky. The sun was strong behind it. My eyes felt sore from not enough sleep, and I thought of lying someplace with my hands on them to keep the sun out. Which reminded me, of course, of Rosalie, and how she’d shielded or shut her eyes like a child and how, later on, I had shielded my eyes like a grown-up under the covers with a child.

And Fanny’s sad face that had been so easy once, and not so breakable-looking.

“It’s because I’m looking into the goddamned sun,” I told the dog.

I listened to sheriff’s deputies talking about road wrecks and house fires. It was a way of not listening to me. I knew a local man with a scanner who would sit in his chair at night and drink beer and listen to catastrophes. He never went to bed unhappy, he said, because he was alive to do it and somebody else, between seven and ten, would have died in a stupid way while he sat in his chair.

The branches were thickening a little, just as Fanny would have pointed out. I saw the tops of grasses in the fields off our road. They were scoured by driving winds after the storms, and then the winds polished them. At dusk or dawn, they gleamed. As spring came on, as no new snow was deposited and as the winds diminished, the tops
of the fields grew coarse and started melting down. It seemed a likelihood, I was ready to admit, that winter might be ending. But we had suffered snowfalls in April with some frequency, and I could remember May snow that took saplings over into twisted shapes that looked all spring and summer like suffering. So, yes, it was possible we’d have some spring. But I was ready for winter to go on.

At the Blue Bird, where I had my thermos filled and bought some doughnuts for the dog, I saw Archie Halpern and I waved. I didn’t go over because I felt like one of those patches of grass-topped swamp ground you intend to step on and instead you step into. I was brimming with it and trying not to let it show. I figured if I sat with him for half a sip of Verna’s sour coffee, I’d be shouting into his shoulder and crying out loud. Just thinking of it made me turn away from him. He knew. He knew something was up. He just let his eyebrows go up and come down the next time I looked over.

I read every piece of campus mail, and I signed off on everything I could—rosters for night watch, extra-duty rosters, an agreement with the student rape-prevention service that escorted girls to and from the library at night. The head of the political science department must have hand-delivered the announcement that the Vice President of the United States of America would not be appearing on campus because of unalterable schedule conflicts. “For more information,” his memo said, “consult Head Librarian Horstmuller.” I hadn’t ever much liked him because of his schedule. He was one of those professors who came to work at nine and left at five, like a man who had a job. That kind of trying to act like a businessman annoyed me, since I figured this guy, like most of the others, couldn’t balance his own checkbook. Of course, neither could I. Anyway, I thought Ms. Horstmuller had some balls, even if I didn’t agree with her holding back the information, so I didn’t appreciate the chairman’s tone. What a pity for him, I thought.

Then, letting the dog have one more run before we settled in to cruise, I warmed up the Jeep. The temperature was rising, but the moisture in the air was, too, and my elbows and knees reacted to it. I didn’t even want to think about my ribs, and I wondered if they were
going to have to put a screw into the little finger of my right hand. I kept thinking I could feel the pieces of bone shift and grate against one another. I moaned and hissed a bit when I got into the car. This made the dog very pleased and he sat up prettily to pose for the students and teachers we passed.

“She had to have a diary,” Rosalie had said. “They sometimes stop after a while, but most of them at least begin. Girls that age keep diaries.” Rosalie had also said, “I wouldn’t be surprised to hear her parents had found it and suppressed it. They’d hate her sad little cries of ecstasy about the tenderness of whoever was committing statutory rape with her.”