would the townsfolk think Buddy deserved? He couldn’t literally kill a little boy, could he? This wasn’t South Carolina. All my life I’d had this confusion as to whether castration is cutting off the thing or cutting out the balls below the thing. Either way made me nauseous and shrivelly.
So far, Dot’s predictions had all come true. Which meant Buddy would brand my butt, but I didn’t know if that meant metaphorically as in “Somebody gonna kick your ass,” or literally as in imprintation by a red-hot branding iron. Branding would hurt like hell, only less permanently than castration. It might give me a romantic allure, along the lines of a tattoo or a vivid facial scar.
There was one possibility worse than public branding. Buddy might force her back to the abortion place. Maurey was almost six months along, which made me wonder if there is a moment where a fetus becomes a baby and can no longer be flushed down the toilet.
If Buddy tried to make her abort, I would offer to fistfight him. If that didn’t do it I would kidnap Maurey and take her to Greensboro and hide her in Caspar’s basement. Nobody was flushing my baby now.
At home, Dougie was in the kitchen cooking something called chicken cordon bleu while Lydia sat at the table painting her toenails black cherry. Dougie smoked Tiparillos and puffed smoke straight up at the ceiling. He had fingers like a girl.
“Lydia, Maurey’s telling her dad today.”
Lydia blew on her foot. “That’s interesting.”
“If Buddy comes here will you protect me?”
“You must be responsible for your own actions, Sammy. You knocked her up.”
“But you taught me how.”
“That is irrelevant.”
Dougie opened a drawer. “Where can I find the tarragon?”
At 10:30 I fetched Lydia’s Gilbey’s and locked the doors. Dougie had washed the dishes and gone home in his Volkswagen. The Idaho Falls news, weather, and sports were over and Lydia was into her nightly bitching about the TV not picking up
“Remember what we were doing a year ago today?” I asked her.
Lydia carefully measured her first two ounces of gin. “I was drinking my gin and watching Joey Bishop. Now I can’t watch Joey Bishop.”
“Joey’s not on
“Joey Bishop will always be on
I picked both my books off the couch. “Today is May twenty-fourth, my annual trip to the plant. You think Caspar missed us today?”
“He didn’t miss me.”
May 24 was the anniversary of Caspar’s first roll of carbon paper. We always had waffles for breakfast on May 24, then I would dress in my Sunday suit and Caspar would drag me through the carbon paper factory. It was awful. May 24 often coincided with freedom from school, a day for being outside, not a day to wander through a hot windowless cave full of loud machines and carbon black, reenacting a someday-this-will-all-be-yours ritual.
Who wanted it? I was twelve years old my last trip to the plant, torn between professional baseball and fiery novelist fighting off the adoring girls. Both my career choices leaned heavily on adoring girls. Women would love a golden glove second baseman with the soul of a poet. What they wouldn’t love is a pasty-colored carbon paper maker with permanently black fingernails.
Caspar and I put on hardhats so he could conduct me up and down rows of webs, Shriber carbon coaters, slitter rewinders, core cutters, God knows what all, back into the warehouse mountains of paper waiting and paper done. The big treat came when he let me steer the forklift, which had been a kick when I was six, but come on already.
I stood in my wool suit and politely shook hands with Caspar’s some-of-my-best-friends-are-Negroes employees. One old guy without a left thumb had been on the same trimmer six days a week for forty-three years. He always grinned like the brain dead in
“How’s the whippersnapper these days?”
“He’s raring to go, Tommy,” Caspar said every single year. “Can’t wait to take your job away from you.”
Tommy chuckled and touched my head while I made up stories about how he lost his thumb and what box of carbon paper it surfaced in.
Maurey’s thinking about the rotating watermelon reminded me of my least favorite stop on the tour. At the end, right before we went for ice cream, Caspar led me to the ball mill where this huge silver cylinder spun about fourteen rotations a minute. It was king-hell scary standing in front of all that power, made me feel like a mouse in a bowling alley gutter.
Caspar stuck me right in the roar while he explained how ten thousand pounds of ball bearings spun in there smashing the walls of carbon into liquid, nine tons of spinning ball coming right at me—the ultimate second baseman’s nightmare.
Caspar’s eyes shone like Buddy’s when the foal was born. His moustache crinkled. “Sam, you are on the edge of life. I envy the challenges you shall face in the coming years. There’s nothing in the free world as exciting as carbon paper.”
Way late I was dreaming Dothan Talbot and his sister castrated me with a pair of first-grader safety scissors, when a bang woke me up and Alice shot off the bed. It wasn’t a fuzzy yawn wake-up. I went from sound asleep to Apache alertness in a single moment.
The bang came again; I wished I hadn’t thrown out all the bullets with Otis’s leg. A voice called from the window.
“Sam, wake it up. I’m tired.”
“Maurey?”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
I turned on the lights and opened the window so she could crawl in, which was awkward on account of her growing belly. Maurey’s hair was one tangled mess, her jeans caked with mud.
“Why not knock at the door?”
“You might of thought I was Daddy and been scared.”
“I was scared.”
Scooting over my desk, she got mud in the typewriter. Her eyes were puffy red. Red and blue makes an odd combination.
“Can I sleep on your couch tonight?” Maurey asked.
“You can sleep in the bed, I’ll take the couch.”
“I need some water. My mouth tastes like dead stuff.”
When I came back from the kitchen with her glass of water, Maurey hadn’t moved. She just stood there with her hands at her sides, her shoulders slumped. I’d never seen Maurey with poor posture.
I handed her the water. “How did it go?”
“He said I’m a slut and a whore. He’s ashamed to have me for a daughter.” I think she’d put a lot of stock in Buddy being understanding. Everyone thinks love changes attitudes, but it doesn’t.
“You just surprised him is all. I mean he’s a father and he’s real old, you can’t expect instant faith. He’ll think about it awhile and come around.”
Maurey collapsed into my desk chair. “No, he won’t. Daddy has morals and I don’t.”
I wanted to touch her, but I couldn’t. “What have you been doing since you talked to him?”
She blinked three or four times. “Can I sleep on your couch tonight or not?”
