Whipple's Castle (17 page)

“Don't light a match,” he said.

“Really?” She looked up at him, startled, and saw that he was kidding. “Don't do that, Davy. I'm nervous enough already.” She showed him her cigarette. “I thought for a second we'd be blown to kingdom come.”

“This'll just blow the back of your head off,” he said. “Cheers!” He took a little sip, grimaced and shivered.

She put her mouth on the little glass, and it burned her lips. It smelled awful. “I wish it tasted better. I hate it,” she said. It was sweetish, and as she tried to swallow, it seemed to eat her, to go right through the membranes of her throat and come out of her skin. “Agh!”

“It won't work until you've had at least a glass of it,” David said. “Mark where the V basin is, just in case, and toss it down.”

She did, and the chemicals boiled and burned inside her. Fumes even came out her nose. Finally she got a breath. “It's real, anyway,” she said. “Now that's what I call
real.”
She felt older, all of a sudden. A moment, or a year, or a whole age seemed to go
click,
and she had passed a marker of some kind. “I can feel it already,” she said. “Can you feel it, Davy?” She took her first long breath, and the air itself tasted sweetly chemical.

“Just the taste,” he said.

“It's supposed to make you different, I know.” She felt different, but she wasn't sure it was the alcohol. “Should I have some more yet?”

He poured her another glass. “I'll just nurse this first one along,” he said, “in case you decide to throw yourself from the window.”

“I don't think I will.”

“Well, let me know if you decide to, so I can grab you by the foot or something.” He laughed, took another sip and shivered again. “We ought to put the cover on the jar when we aren't pouring, so the alcohol won't evaporate.” He did this.

Her cigarette tasted bad, so she put it out. When she moved her leg, the joint of her knee seemed to be full of molasses, and yet it was a lazy, pleasant feeling. Her elbows felt that way too. “I'm afraid I'm beginning to feel good,” she said.

“Don't drink too fast or you'll get sick right away,” David said. He sat across from her, perched on his cushion, looking at her interestedly.

“Oh me, oh my, oh me, oh my!” she said. “I can feel it, Davy. It's creeping all through my bones and up my nerves. Wow! The room looks different already.”

“You know that alcohol is really a depressant?” he said.

“A what?”

“A depressant. It depresses you, I guess.”

“It's not depressing me. I feel sort of good, except for the puky taste in my mouth.”

“What I think it does,” he said, “is depress your modesty or embarrassment or something like that, so you act freer. Something like that, anyway. Mr. Collins told us that in general science. He used another word for what it depresses, but I can't remember it.”

“I wonder if it's depressing my modesty. I don't feel like doing a striptease, or anything,” she said.

“Not in front of me, maybe, but—”

“Ridiculous!” She giggled, hearing the funny sounds come from her own head. “I still don't know if I'm just thinking myself into feeling funny, though.”

“That stuff you're drinking is the real McCoy, Katie. It's got to have some effect.”

“‘Old Post-Mortem,' Dad called it,” she said. “What does that mean, Davy?”

“After death. In detective stories it means to examine the corpse after death, to see what it died of.”

“That's a great name.”

“Maybe they call it ‘P.M.,' meaning afternoon, like you should start drinking it in the afternoon. I don't know.”

“Dad doesn't start till around five.”

“I think you're sobering off,” David said, and poured some more of the whiskey into their juice glasses. Its very color, amber, seemed official and powerful. Adult. Not anything like the primary colors of childhood.

“I'm kind of filled up already,” she said. The whiskey seemed to sit, steaming, right at the brim of her throat.

“Well, it ought to be working. You've had maybe four ounces.”

She went to lean back against the wall, and bumped her head on the window sill. “Owl That's dangerous. I didn't know the wall was that close. Now I am a little scared.” She remembered that she had taken several sips without really thinking that it was whiskey, that ominous, experimental stuff. The brimming in her throat had gone down, and she was conscious of her spine, long and pearly, comfortable now in the warmth of her blood. Her whole lazy body was so friendly, so dependable and valuable. But then came a shiver, because she had bumped her head, hadn't she? Or had that really happened with enough importance to have really happened? She felt no pain; it seemed cancelable, theoretical, that she had bumped her head on the sill.

“I'm scared, Davy. But not really,” she said. He looked at her calmly. “I'm in the grip of it. It's in my inside, holding onto me.”

He nodded, and his bright face receded without moving, so that the room turned without turning into a huge hall, with a twenty-foot ceiling. Only David and the copper heater and she stayed the same size.

“Oh!” she said, and put her glass down carefully—her tiny glass.

“Do I look funny or something?” David asked. They were little children, sitting huddled and small in the great high room, with the frost creeping up the tall windows pane by pane.

“My tower,” she said, looking up into its vastness. The rafters came together at the center of the peak, like the hub of a wheel big as the sky.

“Sally calls these things minarets,” David said.

“No, they're not minarets. They're square,” she said, impressed by her logic. “Do you ever go into yours, Davy?”

“Sometimes I shoot crows—shoot at crows, I mean—out the windows. I used to, I mean, when I could get CBs. Shorts make too much noise. And I can't even get shorts any more. You've got to go into the service to get ammunition these days.”

“You?” Little David, who seemed her age.

“I'll be sixteen next week,” he said. “In a year I could join the Navy. Maybe by then they'll be taking seventeen-year-olds in the Army, who knows?”

“Oh, a year.” But as she said it, a year changed from forever to a very short time, no time at all.

“Wood, for instance,” David said seriously. “He's just eighteen, and—”

“How can Wood go, Davy?”

“There's a war on,” he said, and she saw him brace proudly, braggingly, to show her that he was a man. “Look at everybody we know who's gone into it. Peggy's father—”

“But he's grown-up.”

“Gordon Ward, Eddie Kusacs-”

“Ugh. Gordon Ward. I hate him.” The tower room had sneakily returned to its proper size. “Anyway, he's pretty old.”

“Wood's age,” David admitted.

“Did you ever know him very well, Davy?”

“Yeah, sort of. I think he kind of liked me, for some reason.”

She reached down for her glass and spilled it onto the blanket, all of it. The whiskey ran lightly over the fuzz, as though it spurned the blanket, and then all at once it was sucked into the cloth.

“That's going to smell,” David said. “What'll we do about that?”

“Oh, what the hell,” she said. “If we're going to get drunk. I can leave this old blanket up here—Hank won't notice it's gone.”

“You're feeling it, all right. Maybe you're getting too brave.”

“I've always been pretty brave,” she said. What the hell? It was true. David sat there pretending to be so calm, so neatly self-sufficient, and she wanted to use her bravery on him, to crack him open a little. Not to hurt him, but why should he sit there being so observant, and her like a little bug on a pin? A pug on a bin? Strange.

“Tell me a secret, Davy.”

“What secret?” He smiled at her, a big-brother smile.

“Tell me about your secret love life. I know you've got a crush on Carol Oakes.”

“Me?” He blushed a little. She saw that!

“What do you see in her, anyway? She's sort of rabbity. Sort of…mousery. All she has are those two big things in front.” This shook him a little.

“This experiment's on you, not me,” he said.

“I can tell by the way you danced with her. You didn't dare squeeze her. I could tell.” She heard herself laughing, and listened carefully, interestedly.

“If you're going to laugh, laugh,” David said.

“Fime gonna what?”

“Laugh.”

“Don't change the subject. If you tell me exactly what you see in Carol Oakes, I'll tell you all about Wayne Facieux.”

“Wayne Facieux?” he said incredulously, which she resented. “That meatball? That creep?”

“He's sensitive—”

“He's sort of a girl, if you ask me.”

Now she saw that he really had a crush on Carol Oakes, who was dull and totally unworthy of him. Carol Oakes never said anything except to answer somebody else. She just washed herself carefully and brushed her hair and came to school to write the usual answers in nice round, soft, gooey handwriting. It was ridiculous. All she had was that fabulous set of jugs. But Wayne, with his pale thin arms, and bones sticking out behind his ears, and the slight, distinguished stoop to his shoulders, and his gold-rimmed glasses—rimmed only around the tops. Among the other boys, he was delicate, like a prince. He used big words unashamedly, and wrote poetry for
The Quill.
“Garish,” he said quite often. “That's really garish.” About him a whole atmosphere moved, of culture and wit. He liked to talk to girls, and he had recommended her to be an editor of
The Quill
next year, when she would be in senior high.

“What do you see in him, anyway?” David asked. She blinked, and each time her eyes opened, his face had moved an inch to the left. It seemed a nasty trick on his part.

“All right!” she said, feeling anger. “I'll tell you! There's something sneaky about all you boys. You're bullies, and you're always trying to take advantage of a girl. You moon around, maybe, but once you get hold! Sneaky and smirky, and when you get a girl like Susie Davis the way you want her, you all…pile on…and then make your dirty jokes about her, and tell all about it as if you're great and she's just a piece of—”

“Hey! Whoa, Katie!”

“Whoa? What am I, some kind of a horse?”

“We already got a Horse.”

“Oh, shut up!” Now, in her anger, the room grew intolerably small, and she was a big red creature, heated and cramped; her head pressed the ceiling and in a gulp she breathed all the air there was. “Oh!” she said.

“Don't get all upset, Katie,” David said.

“Upset!”

“Yeah, huh?”

Then she was calmer, and David wasn't so bad. “Davy, I don't necessarily mean you, you know. But I suppose you're more or less the same as all of them.” Oh, what the hell, she thought. “But all girls do is talk about boys. That's all we think about, do you know that? You don't have to settle for a little cuddlebunny like Carol Oakes, do you know that?”

“I'm not ‘settling' for her, Katie. I hardly even talk to her. She's just-”

“A body.”

“I guess so. Nice body,” he said seriously. “To tell the truth, it's her waist I like, for some reason, not the most obvious parts. She gets me.”

She laughed, resenting this dissection of a girl. “What do boys talk about when they talk about girls? Things like that?”

“Yes. You wouldn't like it.”

“Nobody's going to talk about me like that!”

“Well, you're pretty all over. You kind of stun them, if you want to know the truth.”

“A freak.”

“That doesn't please you, does it?” he said.

“It gets tiresome. I can't know anybody. Really.” But she wondered how much it did displease her. She liked her body. She liked to look at herself in the mirror on her closet door. She had to admit that.

“What words do they use?” she said.

“Words?” he pretended to ask.

“You know what I mean. What words do they use for parts of girls? Come on, tell me.”

“Well…” He blushed. “Tits. They talk about them quite a lot.”

“What else?”

“The usual things.”

“Look, Davy. If we can't be honest—”

“Well, you know them as well as I do,” he said, beginning to get angry.

“What's for down there?” she said, and now he really blushed. Though she was nervous herself, she felt triumphant over him.

“There's a million words for that,” he said. “But you probably know them as well as I do.”

“No, maybe not. Girls don't talk the way boys do. They're different. They're ashamed.”

“All right.
Cunt,”
he said. “That's the usual one. Can we change the subject now?”

“My goodness. You're all embarrassed,” she said.

“Well, you're a girl, after all. This whole conversation's unnatural.” He took a sip of whiskey, and shook his head.

“We don't talk about boys'
parts
like that. You know that? We just say he's a real icky, he's handsome. Like that. He's sort of all one piece. Like Wayne—he's not physical at all, really. Do you know what I mean, Davy? He doesn't have to be.”

“He's not very physical. That I'll agree.”

“A girl doesn't want some big, red, hairy boor of a muscle man like Gordon Ward, Davy.”

“Well, some must.”

“Maybe some, but not me.” She thought of Gordon Ward, him leaning over her and breathing on her. He wouldn't let her go, and she began to suffocate. His big mouth latched onto her mouth and he forced her down against the greasy old seat cushions of his car. “Agh!”

“You sick?”