still scared him even though they felt good. It happened in bed one night while he was dozing off and his hand started diddling on it own. But it wasn’t a real one because he stopped himself short when he felt something big was about to happen, something he only vaguely knew about—a barrier he just wasn’t supposed to cross. Except some fluid rose up, probably what the kids called “jizz”—a sticky stuff like egg white that dried on his fingers and sent him to the bathroom to scrub away with soap.
“Sure.”
“Then you’re not ascared of going blind, which is what Jerry says will happen, but I think is bulltticky, because every boy I know’s got eyes like a damn hawk.”
Rodney didn’t know how to respond, but it didn’t make any difference because the next thing he knew, Nora had rolled up to his side. And before he could say anything, her hand slid down his front and came to rest on his privates.
“Wha-wha-what’re you doin’?” In spite of himself, he felt himself harden.
“Shhh.”
And she began to rhythmically move her hand up and down across his erection that she had flattened against his belly. Then she slipped her hand into his pants as if she’d done this a dozen times before. Which shocked him. She was only fourteen but so advanced—probably what happened to girls from Pennsylvania where they know about animal husbandry and stuff.
But pecking at his conscience was what Father Cardarelli had said about sex with family members—and what the devil does to those who do that.
Rodney gasped for air as Nora pulled him out of his pants and began stroking him oh so gently. He tried to stop her but he couldn’t, and he groaned and moaned with devilish pleasure until he thought he’d explode. But she knew what she was doing and stopped just in time.
Then he felt her take his hand and place it on her crotch. He had never touched a girl. He didn’t even know what girls looked like down there. Some of the kids had made crude pencil drawings of huge holes with dark scribbly wreaths of hair, but that did nothing for him. And all the art books in the library showed big fat women with puffy blanks. And medical textbooks only had disgusting diagrams of the insides.
Nora unzipped her bottoms and made him slip his hand inside.
Rodney nearly passed out. My God! All the hair, and she’s wet, and slippery and deep, like a gash—just like Buddy Peterson said.
She rubbed up against him, and before he knew it he was pulling her pants down. And she let him. But when he tried to roll on top of her, she pushed him off. “Uh-uh. Just this,” she whispered. And she continued stroking him.
Maybe it was some deep animal instinct that powered him or all the things that Buddy and Wade and the older boys had told him, but he pushed Nora’s hands back and rolled on top of her, poking her privates with himself, keeping his knees spread so her legs would stay open. Magically he felt himself slip inside her as if guided by all the forces of evolution—and something broke in his mind.
This was it. THIS WAS IT. The epicenter of all adult secrets, all the snickers, the crude pencil drawings, the movies, the jokes, the dirty words. In a stupendous moment of epiphany Rodney connected himself to every other human being on the planet and human being who ever lived, right back to Adam and Eve.
While his cousin Nora struggled to stop him in time, to get him off her, to muffle her protests before their parents heard, Rodney exploded inside her.
When it was over, she was gathering her clothes and swearing at him under her breath as she tried to wipe away his jizz, saying how oh-my-God she could get pregnant.
The next several minutes passed in a blur. Nora disappeared into her tent and he lay there, feeling the chilled air, his sperm crusting on his skin.
Then he was walking across the lawn toward the house, guided by the light and the radio station that played old-time tunes:
Way down by the stream … How sweet it will seem …
Once more just to dream in the moonlight …
But he wasn’t naked anymore, or chilled. Instead he was dressed in pants and the striped sweater that Edna had given him for his seventieth birthday a few years ago. Before he passed into the kitchen, he stopped in the living room and removed from the bookshelves the red leather-bound book, its pages now flaky with age. Father Cardarelli’s signature still looked fresh.
“Uncle Rod, is that you down there?” Edna asked.
Edna.
He said nothing as he made his way to the cellar door.
“I’m in the bathroom. I’ll be right down. Don’t forget to take your medicine. The white pills.”
Rodney opened the cellar door He could hear the familiar creaking of the stairs as he made his way down.
He moved to the workbench with the tools neatly lined up on the pegboard, the wrenches ranging from tiny to large plumber items, the same with the screwdrivers and pliers and coping saws. Even the knives—from small carving blades to a steel hunting knife that Nora gave him for Christmas a long time ago. Nora whom they disowned and who took her own life before she turned twenty.
Nora, mother of his daughter, Edna. Secret Edna. Edna who was born far away and whose father nobody knew. Nobody except Rodney.
“Uncle Rod,” Edna called from upstairs. “You fell asleep in the backyard. Did the radio wake you? You looked so cute on the blanket beside the tent.”
He laid the missal on the bench. Forgive me, dear God. He undid his belt.
“I’ll get your pills.”
He pulled his pants down.
“But tonight you belong to me. Just to little ol’ me …”
“The white ones.”
He removed himself.
Upstairs water ran from the kitchen faucet into a glass.
Rodney removed his old hunting knife, still shiny and razor-honed the way he left it the other day.
“You were talking to yourself out there.” Footsteps crossed the kitchen floor to the cellar door at the head of the stairs.
“I know with the dawn that you will be gone …”
Rodney gripped himself tightly.
“But tonight you belong to me … Just to little ol’ me!”
And with his right hand he slashed.
50
JACK WAS IN HIS WHEELCHAIR IN the picnic area listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn on his MP3 when the woman named Rene Ballard approached him from across the patio.
She was young—in her twenties—very attractive and with a clean, varnished look. She was not in a nurse’s smock or an aide’s green uniform but a beige pants suit and white shirt. She walked toward him with graceful purpose, promising to be better company than Joe McNamara, who had to be taken inside a few minutes ago because he had some kind of spell.
She also looked vaguely familiar—like a face from beneath layers of film.
