to walking in the rain when the engine finally catches. He lights a cigarette and backs out onto 14, slamming the clutch back in and racing the mill when it starts to jerk and splutter. The generator light blinks balefully at him twice, and then the car settles into a rugged die. At last he is on his way, creeping up the road towards Gates Falls.
He spares Johnny’s Dodge one last look.
Johnny could have had steady work at Gates Mills & Weaving, but only on the
night shift. Nightwork didn’t bother him, he had told Chico, and the pay was better
than at the Plains, but their father worked days, and working nights at the mill would have meant Johnny would have been home with her, home alone or with Chico in the
next room… and the walls were thin. I can’t stop and she won’t let me try, Johnny said.
Yeah, I know what it would do to him. But she’s… she just won’t stop and it’s like I
can’t stop… she’s always at me, you know what I mean, you’ve seen her, Billy’s too young to understand, but you’ve seen her…
Yes. He had seen her. And Johnny had gone to work at the Plains, telling their
father it was because he could get parts for the Dodge on the cheap. And that’s how it happened that he had been changing a tire when the Mustang came skidding and
skating across the infield with its muffler dragging up sparks; that was how his
stepmother had killed his brother, so just keep playing until I shoot through, Blue,
’cause we goin Stud City right here in this shitheap Buick, and he remembers how the
rubber smelled, and how the knobs of Johnny’s spine cast small crescent shadows on
the bright white of his tee-shirt, he remembers seeing Johnny get halfway up from the
squat he had been working in when the Mustang hit him, squashing him between it
and the Chevy, and there had been a hollow bang as the Chevy came down off its
jacks, and then the bright yellow flare of flame, the rich smell of gasoline-Chico
strikes the brakes with both feet, bringing the sedan to a crunching, juddering halt on the sodden shoulder. He leans widely across the seat, throws open the passenger door,
and sprays yellow puke onto the mud and snow. The sight of it makes him puke again,
and the thought of it makes him dry-heave one more time. The car almost stalls, but
he catches it in time. The generator light winks out reluctantly when he guns the
engine. He sits, letting the shakes work their way out of him. A car goes by fast, a
new Ford, white, throwing up great dirty fans of water and slush. ‘Stud City,’ Chico
says. ‘In his new stud car. Funky.’
He tastes puke on his lips and in his throat and coating his sinuses. He doesn’t
want a cigarette. Danny Carter will let him sleep over. Tomorrow will be time enough
for further decisions. He pulls back into Route 14 and gets rolling.
8
Pretty fucking melodramatic, right?
The world has seen one or two better stories, I know that -one or two hundred
thousand better ones, more like it. It ought to have THIS IS A PRODUCT OF AN
UNDERGRADUATE CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP stamped on every page…
because that’s just what it was, at least up to a certain point. It seems both painfully derivative and painfully sophomoric to me now; style by Hemingway (except we’ve
got the whole thing in the present tense for some reason–how too fucking trendy),
theme by Faulkner. Could anything be more serious! More lit’ry?
But even its pretensions can’t hide the fact that it’s an extremely sexual story
written by an extremely inexperienced young man (at the time I wrote Stud City, I had
been to bed with two girls and had ejaculated prematurely all over one of them–not
much like Chico in the foregoing tale, I guess). Its attitude towards women goes
beyond hostility and to a point which verges on actual ugliness–two of the women in
Stud City are sluts, and the third is a simple receptacle who says things like ‘I love you, Chico,’ and ‘Come in, I’ll give you cookies.’ Chico, on the other hand, is a macho cigarette-smoking working-class hero who could have stepped whole and breathing