That's how it was this time too.
I think my hand was on the ignition as soon as her rock went crashing
through the window. I think the car was in drive and my foot on the
brake before the shattering sound even left my ears. Part of it was
instinct, part of it self-preservation.
It was her house. But I had the feeling it would be my ass.
My throat felt constricted.
'Jesus!' I yelled. 'Come on!'
Somehow I couldn't get her attention.
She was still moving in that same determined way across the field stone
path and then across the right side of her lawn, ignoring me. I knew
instantly what she was doing, where she was going. I knew it like I
knew how my head would hurt if you hit it with a hammer. There would
be no stopping her. Calling out would only make it worse. The sound
of breaking glass had been so loud I half expected to see porch lights
go on all along the street. But everything was still quiet. As she
marched across the lawn and over a macadam driveway to the house next
door.
I looked back to her place. My hands were sweating on the steering
wheel. I saw her father framed in the window. He had just come
through the doorway and was standing there in perfect profile, staring
down at the damage, at all the broken glass I imagined winking up at
him from the floor.
He turned slowly toward the window and looked out. He looked to the
right and then to the left, and then he looked at me.
I had to turn away.
*
There was too much sadness there, too much guilt in me.
I heard another crash. Louder than before. She had put the second
rock through the right front window of the house next door.
I didn't ask myself why. I knew why. There would be questions now,
plenty of them. Her father would be answering some of them.
There was shouting inside. A woman. A man. Casey was straightening
up, recovering the follow-through. A slab of glass came drifting down
off the top sill like the blade of a guillotine, hit the
bottom sill and shattered. The shouting sounded almost hysterical
tome.
I watched her walk back to the car. She took her time.
There was a moment when I almost left her there I glanced back to her
place and saw that her father was gone from the window. The porch
lights went on. Soon he would be standing there. I leaned out to
her.
'Get in, goddamn you!'
Sympathy can turn so quickly. Just add fear. Stir.
By the time she was back in the car I was burning. Burning and scared.
I had just enough control left not to gun the thing to get away from
there. We slid away from the curb nice and slowly.
See no evil, hear no evil.
I wondered if anybody was buying it but me.
I wanted to hit her.
I wanted to slap her so bad my shoulders twitched. I wouldn't even
look at her. I kept thinking how she'd involved me, how she'd done
this to me. Not just to the people next door or to her parents for
whatever idiot reason, but to me. I hadn't done anything. I hadn't
asked for it. ,_, ..p
All kinds of things went through my head. I felt like opening the door
on her side and giving her a push. Never mind that the car was moving.
Fuck her. If she could do that to me. Just fuck her.
I drove two blocks under the most careful, most frantic control of my
life, absolutely boiling inside, and then hit it hard and went looking
for the highway.
I hit sixty on the quiet streets of Dead River and pushed it up to
seventy-five on the coast road. The road was not nearly good enough
for seventy-five. Neither was the pickup. I realized what I was doing
and pulled over.
I cut back the engine, cut the lights. We sat there in the deep black
of emptynighton the shoulder of a bad road with noonearound but the
crickets and the frogs, and I had not lost an ounce of my delicious
anger. I held out as long as I could, hoping she'd say something to
make it all right again, knowing in my heart that there
was nothing she could say, not now. And then I groped for where I
knew her shirt would be and pulled her over with both my hands and
shook her like a rag doll, bounced her against the car seat while she
whimpered to me to please stop and I told her to go to hell and felt
the shirt tear along the sides of my big, happy fists.
'You don't understand!'
She was crying again but this time I didn't care. It didn't mean a
thing. She couldn't touch me. I shook her until I felt the shirt go
at the shoulder too and then that was no good to me so I slid my hand
into her hair and shook her that way.
'You sonovabitch! You don't understand!'
Then suddenly I had a tearstained screeching little bomb on my hands.
I've told you she was all muscle.
Well, we came close to taking out the front seat in that pickup of
mine.
I could barely see her and she could barely see me, so there was a lot
of inadvertent pain for both of us. One of us broke the rearview
mirror. Somebody put a dent in the radio as big as an apple.
When it finally wore down for us the palms of my hands were wet with
her tears and the musty smell of them filled the car as she sobbed into
my shoulder, great mangled racking sounds that tore what was left of my
anger to shreds and left me holding her, stroking her, wondering how in
the hell it had come to this, anyway.
