“He was fine this morning. We had a good time. Then he goes all to pieces. Been up and down like a rollercoaster lately. Hormones, I guess, but maybe that’s too easy,” he speculates. “I’ve had the strongest feeling for a while now there’s something going on he’s closing me—us—out of.”
“Lot of pressure this year,” Pearl observes and Reuben grins at her affectionate mimicry of his usually laconic speech.
Pulling her down into his lap in the rocking chair next to the stove, he cups her breast.
It’s easy to forget in the business of the day that Sammy’s growing up. He’s always backed Sammy’s decision to keep the recruiters at bay, though he is a little disconcerted to have it go on so long—he had really thought one of these days, Sammy would quietly make some choice, on his own terms. But here it is January, the date fast approaching for signing a letter of commitment to one school or another, and Sammy has done no more than send off the same terse carefully printed postcard in response to all expressions of interest. He hasn’t toured a single school. Perhaps he should push Sammy a little about his future. Maybe the kid is confused and feels like he isn’t getting any guidance. He resolves to take it up with Sammy as soon as the kid comes home.
“Cut that out right now, you’ll get me leaking.”
“I like it when you leak. It tastes good,” he answers. “Let’s spend the afternoon in bed.”
The road is glassy under his wheels and Sam deliberately slews the truck onto the main road. As his body shifts with the truck, he feels weirdly boneless. It makes him think of a childhood toy, a rubbery mannikin that could be stretched and contorted like Plastic Man in the comic books, only its name was Stretch Armstrong. Body heat made Stretch pliable—and if he wasn’t handled enough or if he was just plain cold, manipulating him resulted in the rupture of his unnaturally pink skin and the leakage of the gooshy green substance inside him that was the secret of his plasticity.
“He feels funny,” Sam remembers confiding to Frankie. “Like pulling on my dink.”
Frankie clapped a hand over his little brother’s mouth.
“Don’t say that,” he advised, his face working the way it did when he got a fit of the giggles in church. “Mom’ll have a kitty.”
“It’s true,” Sam insisted.
“Yeah, yeah. Just nobody wants to hear about you playing with yourself.”
Thereafter Frankie took to asking him, in front of unknowing grownups, if he wasn’t afraid ol’ Stretch might rupture, getting yanked around so much. Along with all but a few of the childhood toys stored in the attic, ol’ Stretch had been a victim of the farmhouse fire.
Forces beyond him seem to be pulling him this way and that, distorting him into a comic-book figure like Stretch. Just now, he feels as if his skin is so thin at certain points that it is ready to tear and let all that gooshy green shit come dribbling out.
Crossing into Greenspark, he has an impulse to keep on going. He wants—he wants to see his mother. Not just to see her. He wants her back—the same old childish plea for the impossible. If he had her back, he’d hate her worse than he does now; she’d be driving him crazy with her religion and her rules and her hypocrisy. It’s her fault Karen’s on the street and Frankie’s waiting his turn to be road pizza on the other side of the world and he’s an uninvited guest in his own home.
Grow up, he tells himself. So the world’s fucked up. It’s not being run to your specs. Tough shit on you. You’re walking on your own hind legs, you get enough to eat and nobody puts cigarettes out on you. Which reminds him—Deanie’s waiting. He hopes. Thinking of her overnights at the Mill, he has slipped an old sleeping bag behind the seat of the cab. When he goes home, he’ll apologize to his father and Pearl for being a dink. Maybe he’ll tell them about Deanie. In fact, he should bring her home for supper. And as soon as he gets a chance, he should get off his blaming ass and go find Karen. If he can bring Deanie home for supper, he ought to be able to bring his idiot sister home too.
All its Sunday papers sold, the Greenspark Pharmacy has few customers. The bored druggist is working the register himself. He glances at the packet of condoms and money Sam drops on the counter and reaches for the bill. The instant the druggist claims the money, Sam palms the condoms directly into his jacket pocket. The druggist counts the change back into his hand and then smiles beatifically.
“Have a nice day, Sam,” he says, and winks.
Sam smiles back, gathers his dignity and manages to get out of the door without knocking anything off the shelves or tripping over his own feet.
He breathes a long sigh of relief. That wasn’t so bad.
From outside, as he shifts his burdens to open the door, he can hear the thunk of the ball on the floor, the scratch of the grit under rubber soles. For a moment he watches her work the ball through a figure eight and back again under the floodlights. She gives him a quick grin.
In the shadowy cavern of the Mill, she is a candle-flame, her face and body alike alive with her own consuming light. Bareheaded as only she can be, she wears his faded orange sweatshirt, its cuffs and edges excised by pinking sheers—she has cut it and he doesn’t mind after all. The fleece balloons as she moves inside it. Her face is clean of makeup and she looks really young to him, more like a kid than a girl of sixteen, her stubbled scalp and rings and chains a childishly extreme costume.
When he turns on the boombox, the emptiness
