Afterward, in her bed, she clung to me, not saying anything. I recalled Doyle’s stories about her ways. She was a talker, he said. Being with her, it was like making it with a radio play-by-play announcer. Oh, you’re doing that, she’d say, and now you’re doing this, as if she were describing things for a nationwide audience who couldn’t see the field. But with me Dawn had scarcely said a word — she was fiercely concentrated, and when we had done, there was no game summary, no mention of great moves or big plays. She caressed my face and kissed my neck. This made me feel guilty, but that didn’t stop us from compounding the felony and doing it a second time. Only after that, as I sat on the edge of the bed buttoning my shirt, did Dawn speak.
“I suppose you’re blaming me for this,” she said.
“What gives you that idea?”
“You just sitting there, not talking.”
“No,” I said. “It was mutual.”
“Well, that’s refreshing.”
She padded into the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush, and she came out belting a robe that bore a design of French words and phrases: Ooh La La and Vive la Difference and such.
“Don’t go whipping yourself for this. Okay?” she said, sitting beside me.
“I’m not.”
“Sure you are. You’re fretting about what Doyle’s gonna say. Don’t worry. I won’t tell him. Me and him are over. mostly, anyway.”
I glanced at her and began pulling on my socks. She looked neither happy nor sad, but stoic.
“It was my fault, kinda,” she said. “I needed to be close with someone. Doyle hardly ever lets me in close, but I thought you would. even though it’s a one-time thing.” She angled her eyes toward me, awaiting a response; then she nudged me in the ribs. “Cheer up, why don’tcha?”
“I’m all right. I was thinking about my mama. About how I used to scorn her when I was in junior high for sneaking around behind my daddy.”
The seconds limped past and she said, “I don’t reckon we’re much smarter than when we were in junior high, but we’re for sure less likely to be judging folks.”
She offered to fix me lunch, and not being urged in any direction, I accepted. We sat in her kitchen and ate. It was dead gray out the window. Four or five grackles were perched in a leafless myrtle at the corner of her front yard, flying up and resettling. No pedestrians passed. No cars. It was like after an apocalypse that only grackles had survived. I polished off two BLTs and Dawn fixed me another, humming as she turned the strips of bacon, like a young wife doing for her man. I suddenly, desperately wished that I could fit into her life, that we could sustain the fantasy that had failed my parents.
She slipped the sandwich onto the table and handed me a clean napkin, and sat watching me eat and swill down Coke, smiling in pretty reflex when I glanced up. I asked what she was thinking and she said, “Oh, you know. Stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
I half-hoped she would mention what was in the air and we could embark on a deluded romance that would of course be a major mistake. I was for the moment in love with the idea of making such a mistake. Getting involved with Dawn was the easy way out. Not the easy way out of Edenburg, not out of anywhere, really; but with Dawn and a couple of squalling kids in a double-wide parked on my folks’ acreage, at least my problems would be completely defined. Dawn, however, was too smart for that.
She flashed her cheesy waitress grin, the same one she served with an order of chicken-fried steak and biscuits at Frederick’s, and said, “Can’t a girl keep none of her thoughts private?”
Sundays in Edenburg were deader than Saturday mornings. There was one car in the Piggly Wiggly lot that must have been left overnight, and the store windows gave back dull reflections of parking meters and empty sidewalks. Kids had managed to sling several pairs of sneakers over the cable supporting the traffic light at the corner of Ash and Main — a stiff wind blew, and the shoes kicked and heeled in a spooky gallows dance. It reminded me of a zombie movie where things looked normal, but half-eaten citizens lay on the floors inside the feed store and Walgreens.
Somebody with a strong arm could have heaved a baseball from one end of town to the other in maybe three throws, but it took me a long time to drive from my house on the east side to Doyle’s, which lay to the west, a mile beyond the city limits sign. I sat idling at the light by the Sunoco station. Wind snapped the blue-and-yellow flags strung between the pumps, scattering paper trash and grit across the concrete apron. I tried once again to resolve the problem I’d wrestled with most of the night. Sooner or later Dawn or one of her friends would tell Doyle, I figured. If I didn’t beat them to the punch, I’d lose his friendship. Yet telling him would be a betrayal of Dawn. The whole mess was so fucking high school, it made me want to puke. The light changed. I gunned the engine but didn’t put the car in gear and let it drop back down to an idle, resting my head on the seat and closing my eyes. Screw Doyle, I thought. I wasn’t going to tell him. We’d drive on over to Snade’s and sit on the front stoop with a couple of Buds and talk football.
A dairy van pulled up behind me and I rolled down the window and motioned for it to go around; but it just sat there. I peered back at the van. Its windshield was streaked with bird mess. I couldn’t make out the driver, though I detected movement inside the cab. I motioned again, and the van didn’t stir. It began to piss me off. I climbed out of the car and gestured like one of those guys who guide planes up to the terminal. Nothing. I was inclined to walk back and pound on the door, but the van looked to have acquired an air of menace. Beneath the streaks and gobs of bird shit, its windows were dark, as if they had been blacked out, and I had again a sense of agitated movement within. Horror movies about haunted vehicles flickered through my head. I got back into the car and peeled out, leaving the van stuck at a red light.
Doyle was standing atop a hillock in the field that adjoined his father’s property, wearing his letterman jacket, waist deep in brown weeds and grasses; grackles were circling above his head, a half dozen or so. I pulled onto the shoulder and got out and called to him, but he was facing in the opposite direction from me and the wind snatched my words away. I was about to cross the highway when the dairy van came whispering over the hill, going at a fair rate of speed. I flattened against the car, my heart doing a jab-step, and it rolled past me, continuing toward Taunton, disappearing over the next rise. Shaken, I walked to the edge of the field and called to Doyle again. One by one, the grackles dropped from the leaden sky, secreting themselves among the tall grasses, but Doyle gave no sign of having heard. I found a gap in the rusty wire fencing and went twenty or thirty feet into the field. There I stopped, made uneasy by the birds.
“Doyle!” I yelled.
He turned, his face expressionless and pale, and stared — it was like he didn’t recognize me for a second or two. Then he signaled me to come up to where he stood. I took pains to avoid places where I thought the grackles had gone to ground.
“Let’s go,” I said.
He surveyed the empty field with what seemed a measure of satisfaction, like a man contemplating the big house and swimming pool that he planned to build thereon. “Ain’t no rush,” he said. “Snade’s ain’t going nowhere.”