“I would never hit a child,” Saul told her.
“Oh, you wouldn’t? That’s interesting. What I heard was, you shook him so hard last week, his head just about come off, and his teeth out of his head. He had a headache afterwards.”
“Gordy was on my property. He had knocked my beehives over,” Saul said, in explanation, and his forehead broke out in a sweat. “He’d been prowling and trespassing.” It sounded lame to him even as he said the words. His inadequacy in argumentation startled him.
“Could have been the storm did it. We had terrible winds around here, flung things all over the yard, as you can see.” Saul didn’t dare take his eyes off her. She had some sort of birthmark on her neck, a discoloration in the shape of a tiny football, and the smoke from her cigarette, when she exhaled, surrounded her head like an insulating aura. It was as if her head was smoldering, a peat bog of a head. She tossed the cigarette off into the bushes. “He came over to your house this morning again? Well, he was supposed to stay here,” she said.
“That’s why you hit him?”
“Nope. I hit him because he took my gun with him, stole it out of the house, and headed up on his bicycle to where you live. And even if it wasn’t loaded, which it wasn’t, it scared the death out of me just now that he had done that, that he would think of doing that. He’s got a thick skull, Gordy has. You have to hit him pretty hard to make a single thing register on him.”
“All he wanted to do was show me the gun. That’s really all it was,” Saul said, not certain that it was the whole truth, or that he should bother to excuse this inexcusable boy. “Well,” Saul said, “I guess I had better be going.”
“That’s a good idea.” She nodded. “I like your explanation for it, that he wanted to show you that gun. Well, you can think what you like. I certainly won’t stop you. I’d invite you in for coffee, but you’re not wearing shoes,” the woman said, pointing at Saul’s bare feet. She scowled at his appearance.
“Should we talk again about this? We need to talk about Gordy’s future.”
“That’s a good one,” the woman said, starting to laugh. She reached into her mouth and picked a shred of tobacco off her tongue. “His future.” She laughed with feeling. “Well, I got work to do here, so if you’ll excuse me,” she said, and leaned down to finish the job she had started.
When Saul got back to the house, his barber-friend, Harold, was sitting in the kitchen with Patsy, the two of them drinking coffee, Mary Esther fussing in Patsy’s arms. Harold had come over to steal Saul away to play basketball for an hour; he was dressed in his T-shirt, shorts, and expensive name-brand athletic shoes. Mad Dog and Karla would join them— Karla was a better player than Mad Dog anyway. It was a Saturday-morning ritual. Harold stared at Saul. “What happened to you?” he asked. “You look all messed up.”
Patsy stared at him, too. Saul realized that he must be a sight. “Honey, where’d you go?” she asked, as she lightly bounced Mary Esther twice. “You were out here in the kitchen, and then you were gone, and you didn’t leave a note or anything. I was a little worried.” Her hair filigreed back from her forehead. There was a tiny stain on her blouse from her lactation. Her beauty tore through him like an electric shock, and he felt himself stirring. For a moment, he didn’t even want Harold looking at her. At that moment, she handed the baby to Harold.
Recovering himself, Saul explained about Gordy, about the gun, and the hammer handle to the head. “Funny that she broke the skin,” Harold observed. “Usually you just get a lump raised with a hammer handle.” Both Patsy and Saul examined Harold in the moment that followed, and Harold shrugged. When Saul mentioned Gordy Himmelman’s gun, Patsy inhaled so suddenly that the baby started to wail. Harold passed the baby back to Saul.
“We have to report this to somebody,” she said.
“Report what? To whom? And for what? Possessing a concealed weapon? Trespassing? You can hit your kid all you want in this country. It’s fully legal,” Saul said, bouncing Mary Esther until she quieted. “People do it just to get their excess energy out. Anyway, it wasn’t loaded, and this whole state is sympathetic to concealed weapons.”
“Oh, you don’t want to get mixed up with Brenda Bagley, anyway, that whole crew,” Harold said, scratching himself and standing up to provide a certain inflection to his sentences. As he stood and stretched, he said, “That woman you saw is Gordy’s aunt, as you know. Gordy was the son of common-law Mrs. Himmelman number one, that woman’s sister, that woman you talked to being Brenda, and as for the man of the house, he’s been gone for a couple of years. I knew him — now there was a piece of work. Rufus, his name was, and dumb as a box of rocks, but he did always have girlfriends, and he liked to hurt people. She — Brenda — got custody of the boy, I don’t know, a year ago, at least, long after Rufus disappeared into the depths of Wyoming. It’s complicated. It’s always complicated with people like that.”
“What happened to her? To Gordy’s mother?” Patsy asked.
“Lois? Oh, she died in a house fire.” Harold shrugged again, but there was something behind the shrug, some anger or resentment, and a shake of the head. “They smoke cigarettes twenty-four hours a day, preferably in bed, they drink like fish, they pass out with their cigarettes burning, and bingo, you’ve got yourself a house ablaze, people screaming and what have you.”
“How do you know all this?” Saul asked.
“Saul, I wasn’t always as you see me now,” Harold said. “And I was in school here with those people.” He bent down to stretch, touching his toes. “I’m a townie. I dated some of those women, when we were small.” He waited. “I knew her. I knew the first wife. I knew the one who died in the fire. I dated her.” Harold’s face took on a quick passing melancholy.
“You dated her?” Mary Esther grabbed at Saul’s fingers, making intricate tiny fists.
“Yeah, I dated her before Rufus appeared on the scene. Rufus overcame Lois with his charm. He’s got two other brothers, one named Cash, and the other Kerry. Cash and Kerry — both of them are in prison. The kid, Gordy, wasn’t killed in the fire because he was being baby-sat with the aunt at the time, this Brenda you had your encounter with today. Where Rufus was during that fire, that’s never been completely established, and I don’t like to talk about this, so can we play basketball now?” He glanced down at Saul’s feet. “Want to put on some shoes?”
“It’s too hot to play basketball,” Patsy said. “Are you two guys nuts?”
“Could be,” Harold informed her. “Get some shoes on.” Once Saul was out of the room, Harold turned conspiratorially toward Patsy and, after twisting his head from side to side to loosen the muscles, said in a smilingly hopeful, daydreaming tone, “I’m going to school his ass. Saul can’t play in the heat.”
Patsy watched them go. Men were such bluffers. It was all a bluff. With relief, after the baby’s brief outburst, Patsy opened her blouse and her nursing bra. As she nursed, Mary Esther lifted her tiny, perfect hands so that the palms faced outward onto Patsy’s breast, and it occurred to Patsy that in adults, this same gesture was one of adoration and astonished happiness.
Her nipples were still sore, but the soreness was occasionally pleasing to her. She felt as if her entire body was being used in the way for which it was designed. She had kept this thought to herself. The apocalyptic sun flung itself through the window onto the linoleum floor as Mary Esther shifted in her arms, and Patsy leaned back, hot and tired but happy, though she could feel a spell of weeping coming on, more or less out of nowhere. Mary Esther had been eating well and was past her first siege of colic. She was growing a fine five-month-old baby. What was there to weep about? But there was no logic to crying sometimes; it was simply a visitation. When Patsy turned around, she performed a small inventory of the kitchen: the toaster, the polished white blender, the array of cooking utensils hanging to the side of the stove — spatula, serving spoon, potato masher. She loved to stake her claims by listing humble domestic objects to herself, and doing an inventory calmed her down whenever the tears appeared. Here was the dish drainer, there was the phone, and next to it the small yellow pad of paper for messages, with the blue plastic mechanical pencil nearby. The kitchen utensils liked her and accepted her. She gazed at her daughter, who had fallen asleep, though her lips were still moving, small contractions like kisses.