Swimming Sweet Arrow (10 page)

It started with talk, with words. One night I came home
from Dreisbach’s and found that—surprise of surprises—Del had gotten home before me and had actually gone to bed. I snuck around the house in the dark, showering, combing out my hair, and Del didn’t call out to me during any of it.

I thought for sure when I climbed into bed he was going to tell me he was sick, but when I slipped beside him and wrapped myself around his back, he said, “Do you want some of my cock?”

I was still damp from my shower, and it felt good to take him in my arms, he was so dry and warm. I could smell that he’d been smoking weed, but I didn’t care—when he got stoned he was never rough, and he could fuck for a long time. I kissed his shoulder blades and shoulders, then I reached over his arm to his belly and down to his cock, which was hard and warm.

“I want this,” I said.

“How do you want me to fuck you?”

“I want to be able to kiss you.”

“Do you want me to eat your pussy?”

“You know I do.”

“Ask for it then, because you know I will if you ask.”

“Do I have to ask?”

“I like to hear you say it.”

“Then Del, will you eat my pussy?”

He moved away from me in the bed, away from my hand holding his cock, and turned on the light.

“Could you kneel, Vangie? I want to see it.”

So I got on my hands and knees, and he knelt behind me.

“You know how you look right now? You look all fat and wet. Is that what you want me to eat?”

“That’s what I want you to eat.”

So he did. He ate me, fingered me, and he fucked me. I didn’t know if I was going to feel his tongue or his fingers or his cock.

It got to be a game between us, that position. Sometimes Del would have me kneel but leave my panties on. He’d tease me by kissing me through the fabric or pulling the sides of the crotch enough aside to kiss my skin—but not far enough to kiss my wetness. When he did finally take my panties down, he’d do it slow, inch by inch, kissing me as he went. And he’d tease me about how wet I was.

“If I put my finger inside you and you’re wet, you know what you’re going to have to do.”

I’d ask what, and each time it was different. Sometimes he told me he was going to have to spank me. He’d hit me with his hand hard enough to hurt, but not too hard. Other times he’d tell me I had to suck his balls. Once he said something to me, and it took me a while to even put the words together.

“If your pussy’s wet, you’re going to have to swallow my fuck,” he said, and for some reason, those words stayed on my mind for a long time after.

In that position, it was also just a hop and a skip and a jump to fucking me in the ass, and Del learned to do that so it never hurt. He’d use his tongue first, then get out the K-Y jelly and use his fingers.

One night, after he was all the way in, I told him, “My pussy gets lonely when we do it like this.”

“We need to get you a dildo so I can treat your pussy right.”

“Naw, I just want you,” I said.

But when he brought a dildo home—a bright orange one that looked clowny to me—I let him use it. It all felt so good, being full up in
there,
and being full up in
there.
Though I never felt this way at night, when I saw the stuff beside the bed in the morning—the pink-orange dildo that was the color of no one’s skin, the crimped-up tube of jelly, the black cock ring that we were just starting to use—I felt embarrassed and kind of sickened. Other times seeing our toys made me feel like a woman, like Del and I had secrets that no one at Dreisbach’s or in Mennonite Town or in all of Mahanaqua could guess at.

I think Del was embarrassed about the dildo, too, but not in the same way I was. He just never wanted to wash the thing. He wanted it to be there magically on our nightstand, and he wanted to be able to put it anywhere in me—but he didn’t want to know too many details.

“You don’t want me to get an infection, do you?” I said when he asked me why I was wiping the thing down with alcohol the first time.

“What are you talking about?”

So we had to have a talk about how he couldn’t go from my ass to my pussy, not with a dildo and not with his cock, and he got kind of pissed about the whole thing. He wanted to do whatever he liked in any sequence he liked.

“Why do you have to make it so complicated?”

“I’m just telling you what I read,” I said.

So I was in charge of cleanup, and I was the one who had
to say no and scoot away sometimes. Sometimes Del did the stuff anyway, and I’d spend the next couple days smelling myself, trying to see if my odor changed the way my pamphlet from the Ontelaunee clinic said it would if I had an infection. But my smell never changed, and I was not always sorry when Del crossed over my lines. If I was all caught up in what we were doing, it was hard for me to say no. Sometimes I wanted him to go on touching me and touching me, playing in my pussy and my ass, and I did not say no to anything. I wanted what I wanted, too.

I SAW
more of June’s brother than I did of June those days. Kevin wasn’t exactly a regular, but when he did come in to the restaurant, he always sat at my tables, he always asked me how I was, and he always gave me a compliment. It was the same kind of flirting everyone did with me, but over time I got to be more and more aware of Kevin. I was aware of him not only as a result of the stories about him, but also for the way he seemed to live within the stories that were told.

One night, right after I got bitched at by Earl—because instead of just slapping salad into a bowl, I’d actually taken five extra seconds to arrange the tomato like a flower, which Earl thought was a waste of time—Kevin seemed to know things were rough.

“He should be glad you work here,” he told me. “You’re the best thing about this place.”

It was nice to hear the words after just getting screamed at, and I wanted to be nice to him back. So I said, “The best thing, huh? Well, where have you been all my life?”

“In prison.”

At first it felt like a bomb had dropped, but then I realized that was why Kevin said it. It wasn’t like people didn’t already have it on their minds as soon as they saw him, so it was his to joke about if he wanted.

I said, “Was the food any better there?”

He didn’t say anything to that, but he smiled, and I knew I had been right to say it.

That comment sort of broke the ice, and I came to see him as a kind of friend. If I had the time, I would sometimes grab a cup of coffee and sit with Kevin at his table. The only other person I felt safe doing that with was Bill Mahlon, because he was older than my dad. But I felt safe doing it with Kevin, too, in spite of everything, because he was June’s brother and because I felt that I knew the worst there was to know about him. In a way, that made me like him, because there was no secret about him. I still was scared of him, but I knew that people could be more than one thing at a time. I didn’t think what he let happen to June when she was ten was right, but he was also the person who had been tender with her when she was eight, driving her around until she got dizzy watching the sky. He committed a crime, but he’d served time for it. He was what he was.

Kevin and I never talked about anything important anyway. Work and the weather. But kind people who peppered my day were a type of friend, and their compliments, or their teasing, or just the sight of their faces, meant something to me. No matter how busy we got, even if I overlooked him for a bit, Bill Mahlon was always patient and
called me the Peekaboo Girl and made sure I got my dollar tip. The game warden who teased me about the time he caught me and June skipping school and swimming out at Sweet Arrow Lake always made sure I got a dollar tip from each of the guys at his table. Kevin Keel always said I was pretty in whatever color I had on that day and made sure I got my tip. I didn’t give a shit if the reason they gave me money was because they could see the flowers on my underwear or not. Because as tough as I pretended to be, I still craved kindness, and I took it where I could find it.

14

O
NE
night around quarter to ten the phone rang. Before I even answered, I knew it was June. When I picked up the receiver, though, I heard a lot of noise and crackling, and I thought, no, it’s Del calling from a bar, wanting me to come pick him up.

“Hey, it’s me,” June said.

“Where are you?”

“Eighty-one. At the rest stop.”

“What are you doing there?”

June said, “Oh, it’s a long story. I’ll tell you sometime. I just called to ask a favor.”

One of the rigs picked that moment to pull on through. When the roaring was done, I said, “What’s the favor?”

“If Ray calls, tell him I just left. Tell him I just left your place. I told him I was running out to see you.”

“What for?” I said.

“Please, Vangie. I don’t think he’ll call, but help me out just this once.”

“No, I mean, what did you tell him you were coming out here for? What’s the story?”

“I said you needed help hemming a couple uniforms. I couldn’t think of anything else.”

I said, “If I hem them much shorter, I might as well not wear a skirt at all.” Another rig pulled out then, and after the sound passed I said, “What are you doing up there anyway?”

“Getting cleaned up. I couldn’t go home like I was.”

“Where were you before now?”

“In the woods.”

And it took me that long into the conversation to understand what the situation was and what June was asking. She and Luke weren’t just screwing in the house when Ray was at work—she’d left Ray at home, waiting, so she could go fuck Luke in the woods, and she wanted to use me as a cover.

“Jesus Christ, June,” I said. “Don’t you think that’s dangerous?”

“No one saw us. I’ll tell you more later.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Are you going home now?”

“Straight home from here.”

“Where’s Luke?”

“I don’t know. He’ll wait a couple hours before he goes back. He’s probably in a bar.”

“So you’re there by yourself?”

“I have to go, Vangie. I’ll tell you more later.”

“All right. I got it,” I said, and she hung up.

After I hung up, I sat there in my kitchen in Mennonite Town, picturing June washing up at the rest stop on the interstate. I knew the place. There was a line of sinks—one of them with a tall, curved faucet where you could wash your hair if you needed to. I pictured June standing in a stall, washing with wet fingers and paper towels.

It was crazy what June was doing, and I was crazy myself for being part of it. I wasn’t doing a goddamn thing wrong, and yet here I was, caught up in a lie and worrying a liar’s worry over it. It was bad enough each time I didn’t tell Del the truth about what was happening to Ray, but I didn’t also want to be June’s alibi. To withhold information was one thing—I withheld information from Del every single day of my life when I didn’t tell him about Frank—but I did not want to have to tell a lie. I did not want to put my mouth around the words.

As it turned out, all my worrying was for nothing. Ray didn’t call that night or any other night, and that was the only time I ever got a phone call like that from June. Either she and Luke planned their outings better, or June took it on faith that I’d invent a story if I had to. That’s how much she trusted me, but that’s also how well she knew me. Because while I could resolve not to lie when I was sitting by myself in my house, when the time came I’d probably do what
came most naturally. I knew myself well enough to say that. And June knew me that well, too.

THAT FRIDAY
I came home early from dinner shift one night because I was feeling so bad. I stayed long enough to help Lorraine serve the “mad rush” of the dinner crowd and barely made it through, and I was sure I had some kind of fever, because nothing else would make me feel so stupid and weak. The whole drive home, I kept to forty. When I pulled up to the house, I was surprised to see Del’s car. When he worked the seven-to-three shift, he usually went out partying with his buddies. I was glad, though, because I figured all I had to do was make it into the house and he’d be able to take care of me if I did have the flu. When I walked in the house, though, I found Del sitting at the kitchen table, high from sniffing a can of
PAM.

I couldn’t even believe it. He’d sprayed
PAM
into a bag and inhaled the fumes—there among the breakfast dishes and crumbs, there beside the refrigerator and stove. He still had the bag in his hand when I walked in the door. When he turned to look at me, his eyes were so far gone I knew he was high, high, high.

“Vangie, get me a washcloth, just a washcloth,” was the only thing he said. I guessed he wanted to wash the grease off his face from where he had been holding the bag to his nose and mouth. He looked at me a little while, and then put his head down on the table.

I took the bag from his hand, threw it in the trash, and then just stood and watched him. I’d never seen anyone huff
before. It was something I’d only ever heard of, read about. It must have been a gentle kind of high, because Del’s hand had no tension in it when I took the greasy plastic from him.

In a couple seconds, he looked up at me again and said, “Vangie, a washcloth.”

I ran the water until it got hot. I soaked a washcloth and smeared soap on part of it. I ended up washing his face for him, still there in the kitchen, him sitting on a chair, me standing between his legs.

When I was done, I said, “I’m going to bed. I’m sick.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll be up later.”

“I threw out the can and the bag,” I said.

“That’s all right,” he said.

When he came to bed later, I felt sick—as much from what Del looked like sitting in that kitchen chair as from whatever bug was in my body. I didn’t really want to touch him, but when he started moving up against me, I knew he wouldn’t sleep without sex. So I let him fuck me. Or I let someone fuck me—I didn’t know who. He didn’t talk to me at all, and he didn’t touch me—except to stick his penis into me. After, he slid away and fell asleep. I thought of going downstairs to sleep on the sofa, but I felt weak and hot and didn’t want to move. I didn’t know what difference it would have made at that point, anyway If I let him fuck me, it didn’t seem like I should care about sleeping beside his body.