The baby dancing on the man’s thigh makes a sudden lunge at her face. As the baby bats at it, ‘god catches the brat’s hand and the man hauls her back. He gives the baby a cracker. The brat crams it in her mouth, slimes it up and then takes it out and wipes it along his mouth.
“Da!” she declares.
“Da,” the man agrees.
“We can eat any time now,” Pearl says.
Reuben’s grin fades. “The Gulf news today sounded bad. If nobody objects, I’d like to break the rule and eat in front of the tube to catch the news.”
“No tube when we’re eating.” Sam explains the house rule to Deanie.
Pearl glances at the table Sam has set and then at Sam.
“I’ll set up the trays,” he volunteers.
A few minutes later, Sam bears a tray into the living room. She clings to him like a nervous shadow. In the living room, the only noise is the voice of the newscaster; the nightly news broadcast has been on the air for some time already. On the couch, his father has his arm around Pearl and the baby climbs back and forth between the two of them.
“The war started,” Reuben says.
Eyes riveting on the tube, Sam sinks into the easy chair next to the couch. Deanie kneels before him, facing the tube. He draws her back, making his knees her backrest.
“Show me your room,” Deanie whispers to him when they finish their soup.
The news is going to continue into special coverage. His father is rooted in front of it. Pearl has the baby to put to bed.
“After I do the dishes,” Sam whispers back and then gets up to clean their trays.
With an anxious puppy air, she follows him to the kitchen.
“You can stay and watch the tube with Dad if you want,” he tries to reassure her.
“Uh uh.”
The way she scuttles after him, it’s like she’s afraid of his father. Probably everything about being here is extremely weird to her. Barely conscious when he carried her into the house, all she knows is sunporch, living room, bathroom, kitchen. She needs to get familiar with the place. A few days with them and she’ll realize they don’t any of them bite. Or put cigarettes out on each other.
“This is Pearl’s house, really. Our old place is bigger.” He hitches his head vaguely toward the window. “Up on the height of the Ridge. Big old farmhouse. Had a fire. We’re just living here until it’s fixed up again.”
“Oh,” she says. “You really own two houses? You must be pretty rich.”
Bemused at the thought, Sam whips through the cleanup.
It’s the first time he’s ever brought a girl into his bedroom. He sniffs the air and is relieved not to pick up something like the vague and constant odor of piss that characterizes Indy’s nursery. The room does smell more than a little of the locker room—sweat, sneakers, rubber, leather, oil of wintergreen. Parfum de jock. But Deanie is a jock herself. Maybe it’ll make her feel at home. Her own little room, he remembers, had smelled of her, of course, and cigarette ash, candlewax, very faintly of dope—things burning.
This space is three times the size of the wretched little room under the stairs of the house on Depot Street. His bed is king-sized, spread with a handmade quilt. He has built it into a wall of shelving that accommodates his stereo system, his considerable music collection and even the handful of books he has read, like trophies. There is room for his bench and weights, for a scarred old oak rolltop desk and office chair, for a highboy dresser and a lowboy with a mirror. Braided rug on the oak floor, family pictures above his desk. The other walls are collaged with posters.
Sports icons take up most of one wall: Robert Parish, Kareem, Magic Johnson, Roger Clemens, Nolan Ryan, and his most valuable baseball cards, framed under glass. Three successively sized baseball bats dangle by their necks from a homemade rack, a shorthand graphic chart of his physical growth since Little League. His mitts and caps hang on a coatrack, along with a pair of cleats suspended by their tied laces.
The fourth wall is devoted to music. A handbill advertises a rock music concert at Wallkill which never happened—it was moved to Woodstock. Around it is a constellation of posters or copier blowups of album and CD covers. One depicts a trio of unprepossessing young men, self-labeled Puds, who composed a now defunct band called Big Black. Among others are an X-rayed skull from an album by Ministry, twin X-rayed fetuses from one by the Becketts, the stills from Godzilla flicks used as covers from two collections of Japanese pop, Slitherama and Big Lizard Stomp. There is one of an underground-band guitarist performing in a mask and Depends adult diapers.
A basketball stops the closet door from closing. Like a sculpture, a solitary ragged high-top rests on his desk. A stack of comic books spills from under the bed. On the closed door is taped the reproduction of the James Wyeth painting, Pumpkinhead, that she gave him. It strikes him he really is rich in comparison with her.
She kneels on his bed to reverently caress the matte black surfaces of his component system. “You got a lot of buckage tied up in this system.”
“I save a lot of money, not smoking.”
She flips him off. It hurts her to laugh aloud; she keeps it inside and it shakes her shoulders and brightens her visible eye.
“Your dad’s worried about your brother, isn’t he?” she asks.
“Sure.”
“What do you think? Will they start up the draft again?”
“If it goes on long enough, I guess. Let’s not talk about it.”
He jacks a dub of assorted punk obscurities into the machine
