Oona got the giggles, and then they both forgot about Ben Toy. He forgot his blues. They indulged in a freak rift that would have put good southern writers to shame. Berryman told a story in which a family?s grandmother dies on a long car trip, and the father puts her in the trunk so that the kids won?t know, and the car gets stolen at Hojo?s with grandma in the trunk. He said it was true.
Hours later, Oona Quinn sat stoned, looking at his face. Berryman held both her breasts in his hands, feeling them through her blouse, testing their weight.
A burning oak log gave the bedroom a smell like backwoods. The curtains on the open windows ballooned in the night breeze.
She stared at cool, splintering blue eyes.
A thick bushy mustache that wasn?t well groomed.
A flickering, pearly smile that caused her to smile back.
She imagined Thomas Berryman as one of Clark Gable?s sons. And she imagined, or remembered, a strange man who kept caged crickets to simulate the backwoods in his bedroom.
?Bugfucker,? Berryman commented when she told him. She sucked and ate crickets like the French candies with hard shells and gooey centers. She thought there was nothing she wouldn?t like to try.
?Ever been married?? he asked her in response to that.
?No. You??
?I guess,? Berryman smiled up with his eyes closed. ?For about seventeen days in high school. It wasn?t religious or legal bound. Lived in a treehouse if I remember right. Say,? he went on, ?you said that Benboy called before? You said that, right? You said that??
The bedroom where he and Oona Quinn were lying was the plainest space in the house. It was a wide place with a low, wood-beamed ceiling, a small fieldstone fireplace, and white rows of library shelves stacked with bound-up
and
(from a past owner).
The one small window (it is clouded with salt) looked out on the ocean, while a big bay window faced up the long narrow highway. Berryman said that the house had been spun assbackward in a hurricane and/or it had been built by assholes. Take your pick.
Oona slipped an expensive peasant?s blouse up over her hair, and her tiny breasts popped out of the folds one at a time. They were white and startling.
?Do you like my boobs tanned or white?? the twenty-year-old in her asked. She was both self-conscious and serious.
Thomas Berryman pinched one nipple and held it up near his chin. He examined it like a grocer with an apple by its stem. ?Yes,? he said. ?Very, very much.?
He pulled his own shirt over his head. He was lobster pink from the roofing job. ?How do you like my little titties??
She wrinkled her nose. ?You?ll look like a black man in a week or so. Except your nose is so waspy.?
?I have to kill a blackman.?
She laughed. ?That gardener. Good, he?s a snot.?
Berryman knelt in the middle of the bed and kissed her, without touching his pink chest against her.
He told her that ladies in Texas never cursed, and that they always kept scented handkerchiefs in their bosoms, and that they talcumed their rear ends.
Outside the bay window, far across the highway in the sand dunes, Ben Toy sat in darkness on the hood of the white Mustang. He studied the glowing second floor window. In his mind, he was there to protect Tom-Tom and the Irish girl. In return, they had to protect him.
A few times out on the dunes Toy heard a black woman?s voice announcing it was James Horn?s mother. One time he heard his father. Ben Toy thought he was having a nervous breakdown, and he was right.
Oona and Thomas Berryman continued to smoke the night away, and at a time when neither of them could do much more than nod their overblown heads, he started to ramble about a southern blackman he had been paid to kill.
As he described his plans for the unfortunate man, Oona Quinn threw up on the bed and then conveniently passed out.
Hampton Bays, June 19
In the morning, he was wearing a gray PROPERTY OF NEW YORK KNICKS sweatshirt and looking innocent as a new M.D.
He was ministering to the sick, too. Fluffing feather pillows. Opening old singed shades to bright ocean sunlight.
He carried Oona a pewter pot of coffee and honey cakes in a different bedroom from the one she?d thrown up in. The two of them didn?t have much to say, and only slowly did she realize he?d moved her, and changed her clothes sometime between night and morning. Put her in black tights.
?If you don?t want to stay,? he said, ?you ought to go pretty soon. I had to find out, you know. You don?t have to be afraid to leave.? He continued to break bags of natural sugar into her coffee. ?I?ve never harmed any friend. Not even anyone I liked. Don?t be afraid.?
She sipped the steamy coffee and watched him over the cup?s rim. Her eyes were slow and sad. Berryman had already figured that if she?d wanted to go, she would have tried to sneak away earlier.
