down on the rest of it: If you hadn’t married her, Johnny would still be alive.
That’s none of your goddam business!’ Sam May roars through his tears. “That’s my
business!’
‘Oh?’ Chico shouts back. ‘Is that so? I only have to live with her! Me and Billy, we
have to live with her! Watch her grind you down! And you don’t even know -‘
‘What?’ his father says, and his voice is suddenly low and ominous. The chunk of
hotdog left in his closed fist is like a bloody chunk of bone. ‘What don’t I know?’
‘You don’t know shit from Shinola,’ he says, appalled at what has almost come out of
his mouth.
‘You want to stop it now,’ his father says. ‘Or I’ll beat the hell out of you, Chico.’ He
only calls him this when he is very angry indeed.
Chico turns and sees that Virginia is standing at the other side of the room, adjusting
her skirt minutely, looking at him with her large, calm, brown eyes. Her eyes are
beautiful; the rest of her is not so beautiful, so self-renewing, but those eyes will carry her
for years yet, Chico thinks, and he feels the sick hate come back -So we tanned his hide
when he died, Clyde, and that’s it hanging on the shed.
‘She’s got you pussywhipped and you don’t have the guts to do anything about it!’
All of this shouting has finally become too much for Billy -he gives a great wail of
terror, drops his plate of franks and beans, and covers his face with his hands. Bean-juice
splatters his Sunday shoes and sprays across the rug.
Sam takes a single step forward and then stops when Chico makes a curt beckoning
gesture, as if to say: Yeah, come on, let’s get down to it, what took you sofuckin long?
They stand like statues until Virginia speaks – her voice is low, as calm as her brown
eyes.
‘Have you had a girl in your room, Ed? You know how your father and I fee! about
that.’ Almost as an afterthought: ‘She left a handkerchief.’
He stares at her, savagely unable to express the way he feels, the way she is dirty, the
way she shoots unerringly at the back, the way she clips in behind you and cuts at your
hamstrings.
You could hurt me if you wanted to, the calm brown eyes say. / know you know what
was going on before he died. But that’s the only way you can hurt me, isn’t it, Chico? And
only then if your father believed you. And if he believed you, it would kill him.
His father lunges at the new gambit like a bear. ‘Have you been screwing in my house,
you little bastard?’
‘Watch your language, please, Sam,’ Virginia says calmly.
‘Is that why you didn’t want to come with us? So you could scr – so you could -‘
‘Say it!’ Chico weeps. ‘Don’t let her do it to you! Say it! Say what you mean!’
‘Get out,’ he says dully. ‘Don’t you come back until you can apologize to your mother
and me.’
‘Don’t you dare!’ he cries. ‘Don’t you dare call that bitch my mother! I’ll kill you!’
‘Stop it, Eddie!’ Billy screams. The words are muffled, blurred, through his hands,
which still cover his face. ‘Stop yelling at daddy! Stop it, please!’
Virginia doesn’t move from the doorway. Her calm eyes remain on Chico.
Sam blunders back a step and the back of his knees strike the edge of his easy-chair.
He sits down in it heavily and averts his face against a hairy forearm. ‘I can’t even look at
you when you got words like that in your mouth, Eddie. You are making me feel so bad.’
‘She makes you feel bad! Why won’t you admit it?’
He does not reply. Still not looking at Chico, he fumbles another frank wrapped in
bread from the plate on the TV tray. He fumbles for the mustard. Billy goes on crying.
Carl Stormer and his Country Buckaroos are singing a truck-driving song. ‘My rig is old,
but that don’t mean she’s slow,’ Carl tells all his western Maine viewers.
‘The boy doesn’t know what he’s saying, Sam,’ Virginia says gently. ‘It’s hard, at his
age. It’s hard to grow up.’
She’s whipped him. That’s the end, all right.
He turns and heads for the door which leads first into the shed and then outdoors. As
he opens it he looks back at Virginia, and she gazes at him tranquilly when he speaks her
name.
‘What is it, Ed?’
“The sheets are bloody.’ He pauses. ‘I broke her in.’
He thinks something has stirred in her eyes, but that is probably only his wish. ‘Please
go now, Ed. You’re scaring BUly.’
He leaves. The Buick doesn’t want to start and he has almost resigned himself 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. / 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 tyre 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 PRODUCE 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