White Horses Page 11

  Dina had been ready to take that chance long before she met King Connors. And so when she sat next to him in the garden she was already imagining dark night kisses, orange moons. Then and there, in the bright sunlight of a neighbor’s garden, Dina decided that when he left town she would be with him.

  “I’m leaving here as soon as I can,” King told Dina that day. “Where I’m going there are blue herons and pelicans, a mist rises up from the river every morning, butterflies are yellow and as big as my hand.”

  “California,” Dina said. She whispered the word like a chant.

  “You can’t go any farther,” King Connors told her. “When you stand at Goat’s Rock beach and look out, you might as well be at the edge of the earth.”

  As her neighbors served dinner, Dina shivered; she had always known this day would come, King Connors was the one for her, she was certain of it. Dina sat next to him on a wooden folding chair, too nervous to drink her lemonade. But Dina’s father knew Connors for what he really was—a drifter who would’ve given anything for a home, even if that meant a trailer surrounded by fruit trees. When Dina’s father squinted he could tell that his daughter was under some sort of spell—he could tell from her white cotton skirt pulled just above the knee, and her untouched lemonade. He called her aside; they stood under an apricot tree.

  “You like him, don’t you?” Dina’s father asked, and when his daughter said yes, he ground his teeth. “Forget about him,” he told her. “That man’s nothing. There are a million more like him.”

  Dina’s hair was pulled back and tied with a velvet ribbon; she leaned her head against the apricot tree and smiled.

  She thinks she has a secret, the old man thought. She thinks she knows something.

  “Will you just look at him,” Dina’s father said. “He’s a nobody. Look at his boots, girl. Look at his hands.”

  After dinner, when the old man walked his daughter home from the neighbors’ house, he knew he had lost her. “What do you see in him?” he asked.

  “I thought you would know,” Dina said. “He’s an Aria.”

  “An Aria!” Dina’s father said. He lowered his voice. “I don’t even know if there is such a thing. I may have invented Arias.”

  Dina shook her head. “He’s one of them,” she told her father, and when she looked upward stars were falling out of the sky, horses were racing across the clouds.

  On the other side of town, in a motel room that had blue walls and a small mirror above the bureau, King Connors packed up all his clothes. He paid his bill, then drove to a filling station where he gassed up his car. He cleaned the windshield and went inside the station to buy a pack of cigarettes and a map of New Mexico. Later, Dina went to meet him. When she climbed out her bedroom window at midnight, her father heard her fingers grab onto the ivy which grew up the chimney. After she had run across the yard and gone out the gate, the old man went upstairs to her bedroom. There, on the window ledge, he saw her dusty footprints. He pulled up a wooden chair and stared at the ledge until the marks had all but disappeared, and by that time Dina was already halfway across the Black Mesa, going west.

  When Dina discovered that she was wrong about King, that he was as far from an Aria as a man can be, it was too late, she could never have admitted her error to her father. But these days, Dina felt it had not all been in vain; these days, she was certain her father had been describing someone not yet born. Dina wished that her father had lived long enough to find out that he had one of them for his very own grandson. His grandson moved across Santa Rosa like a night rider, his grandson didn’t know the meaning of loneliness or fear. Dina knew that her father would have understood who Silver was, the boy was an Aria. Dina’s father would have looked at Silver with admiration, he would have shrunk from him with fear, he would have blessed the boy twice.

  “That boy,” Mrs. Raleigh, Maureen’s mother, said one afternoon. She and Dina both stood in their own yards, separated by a hedge of jasmine and weeds; they both watched as Silver got into his car and stepped on the gas, leaving tracks on the road behind him. “He should be in school,” Mrs. Raleigh said. “He should be kept out of trouble.”

  “Impossible,” Dina told her neighbor. “Silver lives for trouble. There’s nothing he’s afraid of.”

  “There are laws, you know,” Mrs. Raleigh said. “There are jails. There’s a lot to be afraid of for someone who acts as crazy as he does.”

  “I never worry about Silver,” Dina said proudly from behind the hedge of jasmine. “Never.”

  Though he wouldn’t have let anyone know, there were some things that did frighten Silver. The thought of working for Angel Gregory for the rest of his life, the prospect of being poor, the possibility that someday women would no longer want him. And Teresa. He was frightened of his sister, and he wasn’t even quite sure why. When he avoided the dinner table he was avoiding Teresa’s eyes, when he disappeared for weekends it wasn’t Bergen’s presence that drove him away, but Teresa’s. The curve of her cheek sent shudders through him, one glance from her could fill him with sudden sorrow; there were times when he found himself wishing they were still children, that they would never grow up. Teresa didn’t know how often Silver thought about her, she knew only what she saw, and she saw Silver avoiding her. Part of her was relieved, part of her wanted nothing to do with him. But in her heart she felt abandoned. The more distant she became from Silver, the lonelier she was, and she began to accept the offers she was getting from boys in school. She went to movie theaters and dances, she bought eyeliner and a pair of high heels, and soon after her fifteenth birthday she stopped braiding her hair and began to wear it loose. Silver pretended not to see the change in his sister, but he couldn’t help but notice. Men stopped to stare when she walked down the streets, cars slowed down and offered her rides. The more she was asked out on dates, the less control Teresa felt she had over who she was; she came to believe that she was destined to be whatever was expected of her, and in time she went out with any boy who asked her.

  After a while all the boys at school knew—if pushed, Teresa would bend; if talked into the back seat of a car or the bedroom of any stranger’s house, Teresa would agree to almost anything. Sex was one step closer to forgetting; when boys whose names she barely knew wrapped their arms around her she almost forgot about Silver. Before long Teresa was a much surer lover than any of the boys—soon it was Teresa who led the way into bedrooms, but she remained a swimmer, drowning in the past, stuck in the jade-colored water of the reservoir. She became an actress: there were boys who were convinced she was wild about them, and by the following autumn Teresa had turned down three offers to go steady. Maureen, from next door, was impressed. She had had one boyfriend only, Larry, whose I.D. bracelet she wore until he asked for it back. One afternoon, the girls sat side by side on the Raleighs’ front porch, watching the rain and sharing a cigarette Maureen had swiped from her mother’s purse. Maureen talked about her breakup with Larry, there were tears in her eyes.

  “When he kissed me,” Maureen confided, “the earth moved.”

  “Oh, Maureen,” Teresa said. She took a drag on the stolen cigarette. “If the earth moved it must have been an earthquake.”

  “We did it,” Maureen said now.

  “Did what?” Teresa asked, though she didn’t really want to know any more.

  “And now there’s something wrong,” Maureen said. The rain splashed over the porch railing just beyond their feet. Teresa buttoned her sweater and wished that Maureen would shut up. “I don’t have my period any more,” Maureen whispered. “I just don’t have it.”

  Maureen and Teresa watched the rain; they didn’t look at each other, their breath came out in cloudy streams.

  “How long?” Teresa finally asked.

  “Three months,” Maureen answered. “Maybe I’m sick,” she said hopefully. “Maybe I have a tumor.”

  “You’re pregnant,” Teresa said.

  “I am not,” Maureen cried. “I’m not. I only did it t
wice.”

  Teresa stared at the puddles on the porch. “What are you going to do?”

  Maureen shrugged. “Nothing. What can I do?”

  “What about Larry?” Teresa asked. “Aren’t you going to tell him?”

  “No,” Maureen said, horrified.

  With all of the boys she had been with in the past few months, Teresa had not thought once about getting pregnant—that was something that happened to other people, girls in other towns, never anyone she knew.

  “Your parents,” Teresa said.

  “If you say anything to anyone, I’ll kill you,” Maureen said. “I’ll never talk to you again.”

  Soon enough the Raleighs found out about Maureen without anyone’s having ever said a word. By the end of the month, Maureen had withdrawn from school; two suitcases full of her clothes had been packed. On a rare sunny day in the last week in November, Mr. Raleigh washed his car and then threw the two suitcases into the trunk.

  “I’m going away,” Maureen whispered to Teresa across the hedge which separated their backyards.

  “They can’t just send you away,” Teresa said. “They can’t force you.”

  “It’s all right,” Maureen said. “It’s not like I’m going to reform school or anything. It’s just like boarding school; there’s even a swimming pool. Indoors.”

  “I’m sorry,” Teresa said.

  “If you tell anyone at school, I’ll never be your friend again,” Maureen vowed.

  “Never,” Teresa promised.

  “I’ll just have the baby and then I’ll come back,” Maureen said. “Just make sure you don’t get another best friend while I’m gone.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Teresa said. “I would never do that.”

  When Teresa watched the Raleighs’ car pull out of their driveway, she didn’t for a minute regret not telling Maureen more of her own secrets. If she learned anything from Maureen’s going away, it was to be more careful, to demand that her boyfriends protect her from pregnancy. She didn’t care how, she didn’t want to know how, she only wanted it done. And even though not one of her regular boyfriends protested, slowly Teresa dropped each one of them. The boys she knew were light-years away from the perfection of an Aria, they seemed like children, and she wouldn’t have imagined ever bringing any of them home—Silver would have sat in a corner and laughed at each and every one of the boys she had dated. If she went out with anyone, it had to be someone Silver would respect, or at least not laugh at. And that was why, one winter afternoon. Teresa found herself agreeing to go out with Silver’s one-time friend Eddie.

  Teresa was in a booth at Max’s Café on Webster Street. She had stopped there after school to avoid a rainstorm and had ordered french fries and a large vanilla Coke. Now that Maureen was gone, Teresa was rich—she had inherited all of the babysitting, she worked nearly every night. On that afternoon, just after the french fries had been set on the table, Teresa was thinking about Maureen, wondering when her baby would be born. It was then she happened to look up—Eddie was at the counter, drinking a coffee, staring right at her.

  Quickly, she looked away. Teresa hadn’t seen Eddie since that day at the reservoir. She sipped her Coke; she was afraid to look up, afraid that Eddie might hold her responsible for the end of his friendship with Silver. Without looking, she knew that he had picked up his coffee cup and was walking down the aisle. When he stopped at her booth, Teresa felt as though her heart might escape through her mouth, so she kept her mouth shut. She looked up only when Eddie rapped on the Formica tabletop with his knuckles.

  “Mind if I sit down?” Eddie asked. He had already placed his cup and saucer on the table.

  Teresa shrugged. “Sure,” she said, but she lowered her hands onto her lap, she didn’t want him to see that she was shaking.

  Eddie didn’t fool around. “You look good,” he said to Teresa. “Real good.”

  “Oh?” Teresa said. She reached for her soda and drank. “You think so?”

  “Different,” Eddie said. “Grown-up.”

  Teresa felt braver. “Aren’t you going to ask about my brother?” she said.

  “No,” Eddie said, “I’m not.”

  “He’s working for someone named Gregory now,” Teresa volunteered. “He’s almost never home any more.”

  “Yeah?” Eddie smiled. “Is that an invitation?”

  “No,” Teresa said quickly, then she met Eddie’s gaze. He looked different, too, almost as good as Silver. And Teresa smiled when she imagined how angry Silver would be if she dated Eddie, how jealous. “Maybe it is,” she admitted.

  “I’ve got a job in a machine shop,” Eddie told her. “Got my own car.”

  “Silver has a car, too,” Teresa said. “A Chevy. Deep blue with white seats.”

  “Listen,” Eddie said. He leaned over the tabletop and took Teresa’s hand in his own. “Don’t mention that motherfucker to me again, understand?”

  Teresa nodded and took her hand from him. Her pulse was pounding—all she had to do was say one word to Silver. Just get up, walk home, and tell Silver that Eddie had grabbed her hand. One word and Silver would be at Eddie’s front door, banging on the screen, ready to fight for her. Teresa leaned back, smiled, then took a cigarette from Eddie’s pack of Marlboros. She lit a match, then blew it out while staring at Eddie.

  “If I told Silver what you just called him, he’d kill you.”

  “Let’s just say he’d try,” Eddie said.

  They were doing something dangerous and they knew it. They smiled at each other across the table.

  “I think you’re beautiful,” Eddie said. “I’ve always thought that.”

  “No you haven’t,” Teresa said, suddenly shy.

  “Well, I think it now,” Eddie told her. “You are.”

  Teresa’s face felt hot, she lowered her eyes. “I have a job, too,” she told Eddie. “Babysitting. Tonight I’m at Forty-five Greene Street. There’s a two-year-old, but he’s in bed by eight o’clock.”

  “Eight o’clock,” Eddie repeated.

  They sat at the table and smoked cigarettes. Outside the rain was ending.

  “If he knew we were sitting here together we’d be in trouble,” Teresa said in a low voice.

  “Oh, yeah?” Eddie said. “And what if he knew I was going to be at Forty-five Greene Street tonight?”

  “You wouldn’t,” Teresa said, but she knew he would, and what’s more, she wanted him to be.

  By the time Teresa left the café she was dizzy with excitement and shame. She was relieved when Silver wasn’t home for dinner; she didn’t have to face him before she left the house. She had dressed with the same ease as she would have for any old date; she pretended that she wasn’t nervous, that every step she took didn’t feel like a betrayal. She tried to convince herself that seeing Eddie had nothing to do with getting back at Silver for avoiding her, but she was edgy as a fugitive, and when Linda and Joel Harmon left that night to go to the movies, Teresa almost begged them not to go. She regretted having told Eddie where she would be working. There was no way around it: Teresa had agreed to date Eddie because she knew that when she and Eddie kissed. Silver would be there too. Late in the evening when they went into the bedroom and pulled down the shades, when Eddie took off his jeans and folded them over an oak chair, Teresa would be thinking of Silver so intently that Silver would nearly be pulled back from the bar in Oakland where he was drinking a beer and waiting to meet one of Gregory’s connections.

  But it was too late to cancel, too late to lock all the doors and windows. Teresa put the two-year-old to bed, and then she waited. At eight-thirty Eddie pulled up into the driveway. Teresa ran a comb through her hair and checked her mascara; she got out the bottle of whiskey Joel Harmon hid under the kitchen sink. By ten o’clock they were on their second whiskey and water, they had smoked nearly half a pack of Eddie’s cigarettes. They sat in the living room, barely speaking; they listened to the wind. Eddie sat on a rocking chair. The sleeves of his shirt were
rolled up, his eyes were trained on Teresa.

  “You don’t look like fifteen years old to me,” Eddie said. “What you look like is my type.”

  He took her hand and led her into the bedroom as if he had been there a hundred times before. Teresa pulled down the shades, then sat on the bed and took off her shoes. She reached around to unzip her sweater.

  “I’ll do that,” Eddie said. He came over and slipped Teresa’s sweater over her head, then he told her to lie down. He guided her onto the sheets covered with a pattern of palm trees. “Don’t rush me,” he told Teresa. “We’ve got all night, don’t we. And I’ve been waiting for this,” he whispered. “I’ve been waiting a long time.”

  All of the boys Teresa had known had rushed, they had pulled down their jeans in the back seats of cars, they had rushed as fast as they could. But now, Eddie took off all of Teresa’s clothes and his own; he made her lie still on the bed, he ran his hands over her breasts so slowly that she shuddered; she felt that he was laughing at her, she could sense it in his fingertips. When the telephone rang, Teresa began to get up to answer it, but Eddie held her back.

  “Let it ring,” he said.

  “It could be Mrs. Harmon,” Teresa said. “It could be anyone.”

  “I don’t care who it is,” Eddie said. “Let it ring.”

  Once he was on top of her, Teresa couldn’t move. He ran his tongue along the raised line in her ear, as the telephone rang, again and again. Then he whispered, “Maybe it’s Silver. Maybe he knows what I’m doing right now.”

  Teresa shuddered; in the dark she was nervous, in the dark she knew they weren’t alone. She wasn’t the only one who had been thinking of Silver, and it was now clear that Eddie was there for only one reason. He was rough, as if he wanted her to cry out, because when she did gasp he seemed to want her even more, he seemed to hear Silver’s voice in every cry. There was nothing he told her to do that Teresa wouldn’t have done; when he told her to turn around and raise herself up on her hands and knees so that he could force his penis inside her rectum, Teresa closed her eyes and did just that. Eddie was doing the telling, Eddie was arranging acts he had thought about for a long time, and even when Teresa was certain that he had walked over to her table in the cafe only because she was Silver’s sister, she didn’t curse that meeting. It wasn’t until she realized that he had probably never thought she was beautiful that she started to cry. But she was quiet about it, no sound escaped, there were just some stray tears that fell onto the sheets. Over and over again, Teresa imagined that she was being punished; in silence she begged Silver’s forgiveness. When Eddie had moved away from her, heaving himself facedown on the bed, Teresa curled her legs up, she held the pillow as tightly as she could.