Iona Moon Read online

  “You’re never going to see my daughter again. You understand that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “Sir?”

  “The money, Mr. Tyler.”

  Jay pulled the crumpled envelope from his pocket.

  “You know how old my daughter is?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “And she’s gonna have her first child. She’s gonna let that baby go, and she’s never gonna be the same again. Five hundred dollars just bought you your freedom, but I’ll kill you and go to hell without regret if you ever come near my family again.” Above the mantel hung a painting of Jesus, not yet crucified but already heavy with knowledge, his white robe parted to expose a brilliant heart. This Jesus had beautiful hands, delicate and pale, but the heart was ridiculous, the shape a child would draw and much too large.

  Muriel’s mother blew her nose so hard she really did fart. Jay held out his hand to Mr. Arnoux. It was a stupid gesture, something his father would do, his way of saying he understood how troublesome women could be. Muriel’s father showed him the door.

  Jay knew that if he turned and looked up, he would see Muriel at the window, her palms flat on the pane, waiting to mouth the words: I’m sorry, Jay. She was sorry about everything. Sorry about being born and sorry about being female. Sorry she let him do it and sorry she didn’t like it. Jay thought his father was right about Catholic girls. He didn’t bother to turn around.

  In the car, Jay stared at the hand Muriel’s father wouldn’t touch. He thought about swinging by Willy’s, saying, “You wanna go for a ride?” They’d park on the bridge and drop rocks in the river, wait for the sound, count the seconds a stone takes to fall. They hadn’t talked for months. Willy would know something was up and Jay would spill it. Then he’d have to listen to all that crap about giving a blind man a dollar in change when you owed him five, knocking over gravestones, and tipping cows when they were asleep. I told you this would happen. Willy Hamilton knew Jay’s crimes like the fingers of his own hand: crouching in a tree to watch Sharla Wilder take off her bra, telling the Wilkerson boy he could improve his thinking by drinking a cup of his own piss every day for a month, watching him down the first warm gulp, laughing so hard the tears rolled down Jay’s cheeks and Roy Wilkerson knew he’d been duped. See, you’re getting smarter already.

  That was the subject of his last conversation with Willy Hamilton, back in December. Somebody’s gonna pin you to the ground someday and piss on your head. Let you Know how it feels. The lights were on in Willy’s room. Horton’s cruiser was in the drive. Jay slowed down but didn’t stop. You just bought your freedom with five hundred dollars.

  Jay’s father sat in the living room, smoking his pipe in the dark, watching television with no sound. Jay knew what that meant, knew his mother had locked herself in the bathroom upstairs. He stayed with his father, but he turned on the lights because he couldn’t bear that deep, disembodied voice. No, better to see the mouth move, lips and teeth, tongue and spit, just a man after all, smoke curling above his head.

  “Man is ruled by impulse,” Andrew Johnson Tyler said. “Underneath it all, we’re just animals that decided to stand up.”

  How did he know?

  “An animal is ruled by smell, really—the smell of food or fear, the smell of a female.”

  Maybe they told him at the bank: Your son withdrew five hundred dollars.

  “Instinct is stronger than reason. That’s why we have laws. Men understand punishment, or the threat of it.”

  Now his mother was at the top of the stairs, wearing her pearls and black stockings.

  “I hope your mother’s life is a lesson to you, son.”

  He didn’t know about Muriel. He didn’t know anything.

  Delores Tyler clutched her beaded purse and fur stole. Jay breathed hard. He already caught a whiff of her perfume, Southern Rose spilled between her breasts, dabbed behind her ears and knees. His father packed his pipe with fresh tobacco, gave the match and those first sweet puffs his full attention. Only five more steps. She wobbled on her spike heels. Her smell filled the room.

  “I’m going into town,” she announced as she stood at the door. The seams of her stockings made crooked lines up the back of her legs.

  “They’ve done experiments with rats,” Jay’s father said to him. “A rat will take certain drugs until it kills itself. It will starve by choice. A male and female in the same cage will fight instead of fornicate.”

  “Don’t expect me home tonight.” His mother’s voice was husky from cigarettes.

  Jay and his father knew there was nowhere for her to go in White Falls, no place to dance till dawn, no place to hold your shoes in one hand while you shuffled in your stocking feet, too tired to stop. There was no place with piped-in piano music where a woman could meet a stranger, a man who whispered tender obscenities. No, there was only the Roadstop Bar with the jukebox blaring, all the familiar faces, wolf whistles, and propositions shouted above the din.

  In an hour, Jay saw himself walking half a mile down the road, finding his mother slumped at the wheel. He’d bring her home and help her climb the stairs, tuck the dancing shoes under her bed. An hour after that, he’d cruise down the River Road, hands tight on the wheel.

  “I think I’ll retire,” Jay’s father said, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. “You should get some rest too, son.” Jay nodded but didn’t follow.

  He waited until he heard the toilet flush to crack the door and slip outside. The night was cold, moonless; he needed his jacket but didn’t dare go back. He found his mother just where he thought she’d be.

  “I lost the keys, baby.”

  “I’ll look for them later, Mom.”

  She draped her arm over his shoulders. Her body was soft, her skin warm. His father said she was fat, but she felt nice, a good flesh hold, hot breath on his neck, and the sweet burp of brandy. The cold had weakened her perfume, and she smelled as she used to smell years before. Late at night, after parties or bridge, she’d come to Jay’s room, lift him to the dizzy height of a dream with the scent of bruised flowers, wake him with her cool kiss and say: Don’t worry, baby, I’m home.

  They stumbled together. Black trees lined the drive, trunks long and straight, leaves numb as praying hands. The Milky Way swirled, a storm of stars, but the earth was unbearably still, strange and soundless, without wind or the rush of water, without the comfort of a car passing, that temporary light throwing elongated shadows, willowly human shapes. “I should’ve put the porch light on,” Jay said. His mother clung to his arm. “I like the dark,” she murmured.

  She giggled at the bottom of the stairs and took off her shoes. “Don’t want to wake your father.”

  Jay put his arm around her, his hand just below her breast.

  At her door he said, “Three more steps.” She fell onto the bed, her body limp and heavy.

  “Do you think I’m pretty, Jay?”

  Your mother dresses like a whore.

  “You look nice, Mom.”

  “Not too fat?”

  Puffed up like Marilyn Monroe.

  “No, Mom, you look fine.”

  She was an alcoholic too, you know.

  She patted the soft bulge of her belly. “I used to have a flat stomach, but having you took care of that. That doctor your father knows in Boise wrecked my muscles cutting you out. Stitched me up like the Bride of Frankenstein too. I should have sued, but your father said he couldn’t do that to a friend, another man of medicine.”

  “I know, Mom, you told me.”

  “He was a butcher.”

  “Yes, you should have sued.”

  “My father said I was the prettiest girl in White Falls.” She lay very still, eyes closed. “Any boy I wanted and I end up with a man who hates me.”

  “He doesn’t hate you, Mom.”

  “Lie down next to me, Jay. I caught a chill out there in the car.” He stretched out beside her on the bed. She wasn’t cold at all, but he
stayed. “You know what they did to me when your father sent me to that clinic in Wharton, that spa for worrisome wives?”

  “You told me, Mom.”

  “Did I tell you I thought I was blind?”

  “Yes.”

  “‘Just a little jolt, Mrs. Tyler. This won’t hurt at all.’ But they put a piece of rubber in your mouth so you won’t break your own teeth.”

  “Sssh, Mom, don’t think about it. Just go to sleep.”

  “I heard my spine crack.”

  Jay put his arms around her. “You’re safe now.”

  “I could feel my blood burning my brain. The doctor said, ‘One more time.’ That’s when I died, Jay. I swear to you I died. When I woke up, I kept thinking about your father and his father, walking me up the steps, one on each side, the last day of my life. I looked at your grandfather. His face was tan and wrinkled, his teeth too white when he grinned. I said, ‘Please don’t leave me here,’ and he said, ‘There now, be a good girl, Delores, and don’t put up a fuss.’”

  Jay found the keys down the crack of the seat. He could have taken the car home, parked it in the drive, awakened in his own bed, but instead he drove toward the Snake, all the windows down, March wind blowing through his hair, the radio blasting: a pair of dueling banjos that made Jay pound the wheel. He longed to fill the night with noise, but beyond this car the only sound was the slow water of late winter.

  He knew every curve of the road, every bend of the river. His life eddied at the banks with the beer cans and the drowned cat. He pressed himself to the hard chest of Iona Moon; her fingers moved to his crotch. He hit sixty and felt good. He had steady hands. I can control myself. It didn’t even last that long, didn’t feel that much better than what he did alone in the bathroom—no, it was worse because Muriel lay there so still, and he had to ask, “Are you okay?” Then she looked at him as if nothing was ever going to be okay again. Don’t worry. I pulled out in time. Iona Moon pulled the cat out of the river and tossed it up on the bank. I’ve touched plenty of things that were dead longer than that. The Chrysler could still do eighty on the highway. He pushed it to sixty-five. Muriel said, “I’m pregnant, Jay.”

  He raised his arms to save his eyes. She came out of nowhere, leaped onto the road as he barreled around the curve. He couldn’t stop or swerve in time. The high beams of his headlights cut the night and struck her eyes, paralyzing her thin legs. Her body flopped on the hood, the most terrible sound he’d ever heard. Her small feet shattered the windshield. The car spun and the doe hit the pavement. He tried to get out but couldn’t move his legs, couldn’t even curl his toes without the pain shooting all the way to his skull. He didn’t know if the blare in his brain was his stuck horn or his own screaming.

  Jay’s right leg was fractured in three places, his left in one. Shards of the windshield had cut his arms and hands, left slivers embedded in his cheeks. His eyes were spared.

  “You broke your own legs,” the doctor said, trying to offer some comfort or lay the proper blame. “You would’ve been all right if you’d just relaxed. People punch the brakes and go rigid. Just your luck to have such strong thighs.”

  “Yeah,” Jay said, “I’m a lucky guy.”

  All that spring Jay waited for a disaster, an avalanche or a flood, a search for survivors that would make his father turn up the sound on the television. He wished his mother would get off her bed and knock on his door, so he could hear himself say: Leave me alone. Any day, he thought, a car will turn in the drive, just by mistake.

  The grass grew greener. Leaves unfurled. The air grew hot and his skin itched under the casts.

  Muriel came in August. “My father would whip me if he knew I was here,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t have come.”

  “I had to see you, Jay.”

  He stared at the wall. He wanted her to go.

  “I feel like I lost a part of myself,” she said, “like my arm’s been cut off, but the missing thing is inside.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re lucky,” Jay said.

  She looked at his legs, the right one still huge and heavy in the dirty cast, the left one withered and white. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sometimes I’m so stupid.”

  “I hate it when you say that.”

  “When I say what?”

  “Sorry. Why the fuck are you so sorry?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Forget it.”

  At his bedroom door, she turned. “It was a boy,” she said, “if you want to know.”

  Days shortened. Crickets sang. One night he broke his dinner plate, flung it across the room, saw it splinter against the wall. The sound split the air, but no one ran to his room and nothing changed. His father and his grandfather still walked his mother up the steps; he still had Muriel Arnoux pinned to the backseat of the Chrysler. When he closed his eyes, the doe leaped out of the woods. He saw her dark, startled gaze, her thin legs. Why didn’t she run? He slammed the brakes, but there was no way to stop.

  5

  Iona Moon wasn’t exactly happy when she heard what had happened to Jay Tyler, but she wasn’t sorry either. He never came back to school that spring, and he still hadn’t returned by fall. So he wasn’t going to college like Mama had said. No educated girl with light hair and straight teeth was going to follow him to White Falls.

  Iona had imagined Jay Tyler’s life with one of those pink-skinned women who played afternoon bridge with the ladies. She’d cut the crust off the tiny sandwiches and serve cookies no bigger than Iona’s little finger. All the women would kiss her soft cheek when they said goodbye. But at night this same pretty woman, loved by the ladies, would lie beneath her husband like driftwood, her limbs smooth, her body cool and hard.

  Later, there would be blond children, and everyone would say Jay Tyler was a lucky man to have a beautiful wife and beautiful babies. Certainly an educated woman would be clever enough to have one boy and one girl. She’d grow waterlogged and heavy with love for them, devoting her days to matching their socks and wiping their runny noses, combing the tangles from their silky curls and sewing fur collars on their little wool coats. Every night, exhausted by the endless needs of her children, she’d sink into sleep as wood sinks to the bottom of a lake.

  Some evening Jay Tyler might find himself dragging Main, looking for a girl like Iona Moon, the kind who didn’t mind the cold vinyl of the backseat, a resourceful girl who knew how to find her own way home.

  But none of this was going to happen, because Jay had locked himself in his room. He wasn’t going to be a dentist like his father or marry a woman who looked like his mother. Only a rich boy could afford the luxury of staying sick on purpose, that’s what Hannah said. He drank his tea from a porcelain cup; he ate baby peas with a silver fork. But he might as well have bars on his window because he was just as much a prisoner as Iona’s mother was. Only Jay was worse: he chose. So he was a damn idiot besides.

  Iona started to think that no one she knew ever escaped White Falls. Everett Fry was the last one who’d left for good, and he had to kill himself to do it. Sharla Wilder nearly killed herself too. She bled on her daddy’s couch for two days before he gave in and took her to the doctor. When she recovered, she packed one bag and headed to Seattle, but she was back home in six months. Now she had an apartment in town and worked graveyard shift for the phone company. At least she’d gotten off the Kila Flats and out of her father’s house.

  Hannah said there were three ways out: the river, the tracks, the long, winding road. Iona remembered the summer Leon jumped a train. Bruised and broke, he called three days later. Frank said, “You got your ass to Portland, you can get your ass home.” And it was true. Getting back was easy if you didn’t mind the hunger, the cold night wind blowing through the slats, the steady clatter of the boxcar.

  One March, when the river was fast, a woman leaped from the bridge to the water. She twisted like a cat in midair. When she hit, her body lost all grace, crumpled on the hard surface. The kids in
the bus watched her red coat swept downriver and thought she’d disappear. But even she was saved, brought back, raised up, revived against her will.

  In the winter, Iona’s brothers moved to Missoula to work at the pulp mill. Every year they said they might stay on, but every spring they sat on the porch again, waiting for the ground to thaw. They reminded Iona of the three mongrels Daddy kept on tethers in the yard. The dogs had big heads and long tails, hair the color of mud. Yipping and dancing in the cold morning light, they bounded after one another. But the ropes were always shorter than they remembered, and the spikes that held them were planted deep. Chains tightened around the dogs’ necks, and the animals fell back, squealing and betrayed. They butted their knobby heads together and nipped at their own legs, lashed their tails and hopped on one another’s haunches.

  A fine layer of snow blew across the fields, exposing patches of bald earth. Iona wore the coat Hannah had always worn for milking, Frank’s fur-lined jacket. The zipper had broken last year or the year before; now Iona hugged herself as she ran to the barn.

  She whispered to her cows, scratched their heads, murmured in their ears. Don’t ever sit down at an animal’s rear end without letting her see who you are, Hannah had said the morning she taught Iona to milk Ruby. But the cows knew her footsteps, recognized her breath. A cow knows everything she needs to know. When her udder’s full, she’s glad you’ve come to milk her. When you’re old, she’ll feel your cheek against her flank, soft, unchanged. When she’s old, your touch will bring her more comfort than the grace of God.

  Iona gripped Ruby’s warm teat, remembering her own small hands moving beneath her mother’s hands. Breathe when she does, Hannah said. The dense smell of cow shit made her light in the head. It was almost sweet if you liked it, and she did.

  Cows have no God, so they don’t fear the future. Ruby’s milk rang against the metal pail. She groaned, an almost human sound, soft and satisfied, from somewhere low in the belly. A cow has no wish to be anything other than herself. Except for Angel after the five-legged calf died.