Ben Day
JANUARY 2, 1985
5:58 P.M.
Diondra had a little belly, it freaked Ben out, and for weeks now she’d been talking about the “quickening.” The quickening had happened, the baby was moving, it was a very special, important moment and so Ben had to put his hand on her stomach all the time and feel the baby kick. He was proud of making the belly, proud of making the baby, the idea of it at least, but he didn’t like to actually touch that area or look at it. The flesh was weird, hard but globby at the same time, like ham gone bad, and touching it was just embarrassing. For weeks, she’d been grabbing his hand and pressing it there, watching his face for a reaction, and then she’d yell at him when he couldn’t feel anything. For a while, actually, he’d thought maybe the pregnancy was just one of Diondra’s jokes to make him feel dumb—he’d sit there with his hand sweating on that gross mound of skin, and think, maybe that rumble, was that it, was that the baby or was that just indigestion? He worried. He worried that if he didn’t feel anything—and he hadn’t those first weeks after the quickening—that Diondra would yell at him, It’s right there, it’s like a cannon going off in my womb, how can you not feel it? And he worried that if he finally said he did, that Diondra would blast him with her laugh, that laugh that bowed her at the midsection like she’d been shot, the knee-grabbing laugh that made her gelled hair shake like a tree after an ice storm, because of course she wasn’t really pregnant, she was just fucking with him, didn’t he know anything?
He had, in fact, looked for signs she may be lying: those big, bloody maxipads that his mom always rolled up in the trash and that always ended up unfurled within a day. Otherwise he hadn’t been sure what to look for, and he wasn’t sure if he should ask if it was his. She talked like it was, and that was probably as sure as he’d get.
Anyway, in the past month, it was clear she was definitely pregnant, at least if you saw her naked. She still went to school, dressed in those giant baggy sweaters, and she left her jeans unbuttoned and partly unzipped, and the mound got bigger, Diondra holding it and rubbing it in her hands like it was some sort of crystal ball of their fucked-up future, and one day, she grabbed his hand and he felt it, no doubt—that thing was kicking and all of a sudden he saw the swipe of a little foot move under the surface of Diondra’s skin, smooth and fast.
What the hell’s wrong with you? You birth cows out there at the farm don’t you? It’s just a baby was Diondra’s reaction when he snatched his hand away. She pulled it back and held it there, held his palm on that twitching thing inside her, and he thought, calving is damn different than your own real baby, and then he thought, let me go let me go let me go as if the thing were going to grab him like some late-night slasher movie and pull him inside her. That’s how he pictured it, a thing. Not a baby.
Maybe it would have helped if they talked about it more. After the quickening, she wouldn’t speak to him at all for a few days, and it turned out he was supposed to give her something for the quickening, that you gave pregnant ladies presents to celebrate the quickening, and that her parents had given her a gold bracelet when she got her first period and that this was like that. So in place of a present she made him go down on her ten times, that was the deal, which he thought she probably picked because he didn’t really like to do it, the smell made him queasy, especially now, when that whole area seemed used. She didn’t seem to like it either, that’s why it felt like punishment, her yelling at him about fingers and pressure and higher, it’s higher up, go higher and finally sighing and grabbing his head hard, by the ears and pulling him to the spot she wanted and him thinking you fucking bitch and wiping her off his mouth when he was done. Eight more to go, you fucking bitch, you want a glass of water sweet-heart? And she’d said No but you do, you smell like * and laughed.
Pregnant women were moody. He knew this. But otherwise, Diondra didn’t act pregnant. She still smoked and drank, which you weren’t supposed to do if you were pregnant but she said only health nuts gave up all that stuff. Another thing she didn’t do: plan. Diondra didn’t even talk much about what they’d do when it was born—when she was born. Diondra had never been to a doctor, but she was sure it was a girl because girls made you sicker and she’d been sick the first month so bad. But she really didn’t say more, reality-wise, than to talk about it as a girl, as an actual girl that would come out of her. He’d wondered at first if she was going to get an abortion. He’d said if you have the baby instead of when, and she’d completely freaked, and Diondra completely freaking was something he never wanted to see again. She was a handful enough at her most calm, this was like watching a natural disaster, the nails the crying the hitting, and her yelling that that was the worst thing anyone had ever said to her, and it’s your flesh too, what the hell is wrong with you, you asshole piece of shit?
But otherwise, they didn’t plan or couldn’t plan, since Diondra’s dad would literally kill her if he ever found out she was pregnant outside of marriage. If he ever found out she even did it outside of marriage, he’d kill her. Diondra’s parents had only one rule, only one single rule, and that was that she must never, ever let a boy touch her there unless he was her husband. When she turned sixteen, Diondra’s dad had given her a promise ring, a gold ring with a big red stone that looked like a wedding ring and she wore it on that finger, and it meant a promise to him and to herself that she would remain a virgin til marriage. The whole thing grossed Ben out—doesn’t that seem like you’re married to your dad? Diondra said it was a control thing, mostly. This was the one thing her dad had decided to get hung up about, it was the one thing he asked of her, and goddamit, she’d better do it. She said it made him feel better leaving her alone, unsupervised, unprotected, except for the dogs, for months at a time. It was his one parental thing: my daughter may drink or do drugs but she is a virgin and therefore I can’t be as fucked up as I seem.
This, she said, with tears in her eyes. This she said while near her pass-out part of a drunk. She said her dad told her if he ever found out she’d broken the promise, he’d take her out of the house and shoot her in the head. Her dad had been in Vietnam, and he talked like that, and Diondra took it seriously, so she didn’t do any planning about the baby. Ben made lists of things they might need, and he bought some hand-me-down baby clothes at a Delphos flea market right near Christmastime. He’d been embarrassed, so he just bought the whole bunch from the woman for $8. It turned out to be undershirts and underwear, for a bunch of different ages, lots of ruffly undies—the woman kept calling them bloomers—which is fine, kids need underwear for sure. Ben stored them under his bed, which made him more glad he had the lock, he could picture the girls finding them and stealing whatever fit. So true, he didn’t think enough about the kid, and what would happen, but Diondra seemed to think even less.
“I THINK WE should leave town,” Diondra said now, a surprise, the hair still over half her face, Ben’s hand still clamped to her belly, the baby scuttering around inside like it had dug tunnels. Diondra turned slightly toward him, one lazy boob lolling on Ben’s arm. “I can’t hide this much longer. My mom and dad will be home any day now. You sure Michelle doesn’t know?”
Ben had saved a note from Diondra, it talked about how horny she was and how much sex she wanted from him even now, and nosy-ass Michelle had found it going through his jacket pockets. The little bitch had blackmailed him—$10 not to tell Mom—and when Ben complained to Diondra, she went ballistic. Your little fucking sister could tell on us at any moment, you think that’s OK? This is on you, Ben. You fucked up. Diondra was paranoid that somehow Michelle would figure out she was pregnant from those two words—“even now”— and they’d be undone by a fucking ten-year-old, how perfect.
“No, she hasn’t mentioned it again.”
That was a lie, just yesterday Michelle caught his eye, shook her hips, and said in a teasy voice, “Hey Beee-ennn, how’s your seeeex life?” She was such a shitty kid. She’d blackmailed him on other things—chores he’d left undone, extra food he’d eaten from the fridge. Little stuff. It was always little crappy stuff, like she was there just to remind Ben how cramped his life was. She’d spend the money on jelly donuts.
Trey made a loud loogie noise in the other room, and then a thweeewp! spit sound. Ben could picture the yellow phlegm dripping down the sliding glass door, the dogs licking at it. That was something Trey and Diondra did: they hocked loogies at things. Sometimes Trey shot it straight into the air, and the dogs would catch it in their drooly mouths. (“It’s just body stuff going into another body,” Diondra would say. “You’ve thrown some of your body stuff into my body and it doesn’t seem to bother you none.”)
As the TV got even louder in the den—wrap it up you two, I’m goddam bored—Ben tried to think of the right thing to say. He sometimes thought he never said anything to Diondra that was just pure talking, it was all verbal elbows and arms, trying to fend off her constant annoyance, say what she wanted to hear. But he loved her, he did love her, and that’s what men did for their women, they told them what they wanted to hear and shut up. He’d knocked Diondra up and now she owned him, and he had to do right by her. He’d have to drop out of school and get a full-time job, which would be fine, some kid he knew quit last year and worked over near Abilene at the brick factory, got $12,000 dollars a year, Ben couldn’t even begin to think how to spend it all. So he’d drop out of school, which was just as well, considering whatever the hell Diondra thought she’d heard about Krissi Cates.
It was weird, at first that made him really nervous, that those rumors were going around, and then part of him got kind of proud. Even though she was a kid, she was one of the cool younger kids. Even some of the high schoolers knew her, the older girls took an interest in her, that pretty, well-bred girl, so it was sort of cool that she had a crush on him, even though she was a kid, and he was sure whatever Diondra had just told him was her usual exaggeration. Hysterical, she sometimes got.
“Hey, hello? Try to stay with me. I said I think we have to leave town.”
“Then we’ll leave town.” He tried to kiss her and she pushed him away.
“Really, that easy? Where d’we go, how will you support us? I won’t have my allowance anymore, you know. You’ll have to get a job.”
“I’ll get a job then. What about your uncle or cousin or whoever in Wichita?”
She looked at him like he was crazy.
“With the sporting-goods store?” he pushed.
“You can’t work there, you’re fifteen. You can’t drive. In fact, I don’t even think you can get a real job without your mom’s permission. When do you turn sixteen again?”
“July thirteenth,” he said, feeling like he’d just told her he wet himself.
She started crying then. “Oh my God, Oh my God, what are we going to do?”
“Your cousin can’t help?”
“My uncle will tell my parents, how will that help?”
She got up, walking naked, her stomach bulge looking dangerously unsupported, Ben wanting to go stick a hand under there, and thinking how much bigger she’d get. She didn’t put on any clothes to walk across the hall to the shower, even though Trey could see right down the hallway if he was still sitting on the couch. He heard the guttural sound of the shower twisting on. Conversation over. He wiped himself off with a moldy towel near Diondra’s hamper, then squeezed back into his leather pants and striped T-shirt and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to guess what smart-ass comment Trey was going to make when they went back out to the den.
In a few minutes, Diondra breezed into the bedroom, wearing a red towel, her hair wet, not looking at him, and sat in front of her dresser with the mirror in it. She squirted her mousse into her palm, a giant dogshit of a pile, and scrunched it into her hair, aiming the blowdryer at each section—squirt, scrunch, woosh, squirt, scrunch, woosh.
He wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to leave or not, so he stayed, sitting on the bed still, trying to catch her eye. She poured dark foundation into her palm, the way an artist might pour paint, and swirled it onto her face. Some girls had called her a base face, he heard them, but he liked the way it looked, tan and smooth, even though her neck sometimes seemed whiter, like the vanilla ice cream under the caramel dip. She put on three coats of mascara—she always said it took three, one to darken, one to thicken and one for drama. Then she started with the lipstick: undercoat, overcoat, gloss. She caught him looking and stopped, dabbing her lips on little foamy triangles, leaving sticky purple kiss marks on them.
“You need to ask Runner for money,” she said, looking at him in the mirror.
“My dad?”
“Yeah, he’s got money right? Trey always buys weed from him.” She dropped the towel, went over to her underwear drawer, a thicket of bright lace and satin, and dug around til she pulled out underwear and a bra, hot pink, with black lace edges, the kind girls wore in the saloons in westerns.
“Are you sure we’re talking about the same guy?” he said. “My dad does, you know, handyman stuff. Labor. He works on farms and stuff.”
Diondra rolled her eyes at him, tugging at the back of her bra, her tits overflowing everywhere—over the cups, under the clasps, unwrangleable and eggy. She let the bra go finally, threw it across the room—-fuck, I need a goddam fucking bra that fits! She stood glaring at him, and then her underpants started rolling under themselves, edging away from her stomach, up in her ass crack. None of those sexy underclothes fit. Ben thought first: chubby, and then corrected: pregnant.
“Are you serious? You don’t know your own dad deals? He sold to me and Trey last week.” She tossed away the underpants, then put on a different bra, an ugly plain bra, and new jeans, pouting about her size.
Ben had never bought drugs himself before. He smoked a lot with Trey and Diondra and whoever had pot in that crowd, and sometimes he chipped in a buck or two, but when he pictured a dealer, he pictured someone with slick hair and jewelry, not his dad in the old Royals baseball cap and the cowboy boots with the big heels and the shirts that looked like they were wilting. Not his dad, definitely not his dad. And weren’t dealers supposed to have money? His dad definitely did not have money, so the whole argument was stupid. And if he was a dealer, and he did have money, he wouldn’t give any to Ben. He’d make fun of Ben for asking, maybe hold a twenty just out of Ben’s reach the way a bully would grab a nerd’s notebook, and then he’d laugh and shove it right back in his pants pocket. Runner never had a wallet, he just carried mangled bills in the front of his jeans, and wasn’t that enough of a sign he had no cash?
“Trey!” Diondra yelled down the hall. She threw on a new sweater with patterns that looked like a geometry experiment. Ripped off the tags and tossed them to the floor, then rumbled out of the room. Ben was left staring at the rock posters and the astrology posters (Diondra was a Scorpio, she took it very seriously) and crystals and books on numerology. All around her mirror were stapled decrepit, dried corsages from dances Ben had not taken her to, they were mostly from this senior back in Hiawatha named Gary that even Trey said was a prick. Trey, of course, knew him.
The corsages unsettled Ben, they looked like organs, with their folds and their twists, their pink-and-purpleness. They reminded Ben of the stinking globs of meat sitting in his locker right now, a horrible gift Diondra had left him—surprise!—the girl parts of some animal, Diondra refusing to say where it came from. She hinted it was from a blood sacrifice she did with Trey; Ben assumed it was just leftover pieces from a Biology experiment. She liked to freak him out. When her class did baby-pig dissections, she brought him a curlicue tail, thought it was hilarious. It wasn’t, it was just nasty. He got up and went to the living room.
“You sorry sack of shit,” Trey called from the sofa, where he’d just lit a joint, not taking his eyes off the music video. “You don’t know about your dad? The fuck, dude.” Trey’s bare stomach was almost concave, but rippled, perfect, tan. The opposite of Ben’s soft white mouse-belly. Trey had balled the shirt Diondra gave him under his head as a pillow.
“Here, you broke-dick dog.” He handed Ben the joint, and Ben took a big pull off it, feeling the back of his head go numb. “Hey, Ben, how many babies does it take to paint a house?”
Annihilation.
There it was back, that word. Ben pictured barbarian hordes busting through the big stone fireplace, and swiping Trey’s head off with an axe, right in the middle of one of his fucking dead-baby jokes, the head rolling over across the dogshit and stopping next to one of Diondra’s black buckle shoes. And then maybe Diondra dies next. Fuck it all. Ben took another drag, his brain feeling minty, and gave it back to Trey. Diondra’s biggest dog, the white one, glided over to him and stared with no forgiveness in its eyes.
“Depends on how hard you throw them,” Trey said. “Why do you put a baby in a blender feet first?”
“I’m serious, Trey,” Diondra said, continuing a conversation Ben wasn’t privy to. “He thinks his dad doesn’t deal.”
“So you can see its reaction. Hey, Ben? You’re smoking your dad’s stuff, buddy,” Trey said, finally turning to look at him. “It’s crap. Potent, but crap. That’s why we know your dad has money. He overcharges, but no one else has any right now. Think he said he got it in Texas. He been to Texas lately?”
Runner had disappeared from Ben’s life after Patty gave him the boot. For all Ben knew he might have gone to Texas for a while. Hell, you can drive to Texas and back in a day if you drive hard, so why not?
“This is cashed,” Trey said, in a toke-choke voice. “Anyway, he owes me money, like everyone in this town. They love to make the bet, they never want to pay it off.”
“Hey, I didn’t even get any,” Diondra pouted. She turned away and started sifting through the cabinets—the basement den had a minikitchen, too, imagine that, needing a separate room for all your junk food—and then cracked open the fridge, got herself a beer, didn’t ask Ben if he wanted one. Ben saw the inside of that fridge, which had been packed with food the month before, and now just had beer and a big jar with one single pickle floating in it like a turd.
“You grab me a beer, Diondra?” he said, pissy.
She cocked her head at him, then handed him hers, went back to the fridge for another.
“So let’s go find Runner, and we’ll get some pot and get some money,” Diondra said, draping herself next to him on the chair. “And then we can get the hell out of Dodge.”
Ben looked at that blue eye, that bright blue eye—it seemed like Diondra was always looking at him sideways, he never saw both eyes at the same time—and for the first time he felt really bone scared. He couldn’t even drop out of school without his mom’s permission before he turned sixteen. Much less get a job at the brick plant or anything that made enough money for Diondra to not hate him, not sigh when he came home at night, and now that’s what he saw, not even that little apartment in Wichita, but some factory near the border, near Oklahoma, where the really cheap work was, where you worked sixteen hours a day, worked weekends, and Diondra would be with the baby and she’d hate it. She had no mothering instinct, she’d sleep right through the baby crying, she’d forget to feed it, she’d go out drinking with some guys she met—she always was meeting guys, at the mall or the gas station or the movies—and leave the kid there. What can happen to it, it’s a baby, it ain’t going nowhere! He could already hear it, him being the bad guy. The poor, idiot bad guy who can’t provide.
“Fine,” he said, thinking once they left the house, they’d lose track of the idea. He almost had. His brain was bundling itself up, getting woolly. He wanted to go home.
Trey immediately shot up, jingling his truck keys—I know where to find him—and suddenly they were out in the cold, tromping through the snow and ice, Diondra demanding Ben’s arm so she wouldn’t fall, Ben thinking, but what if she fell? What if she fell and died, or lost the baby? He’d heard girls at school saying if you ate a lemon a day you’d have a miscarriage, and had thought about sneaking lemon into Diondra’s diet Cokes and then realized that was wrong, to do it without her knowing, but what if she fell? But she didn’t, they were in Trey’s truck with the heater wushing on them, and Ben was in the backseat as always—it was half a backseat, really, only a kid could fit on it, so his knees were smashed sideways to his chest—and when he saw a shriveled pinky of a fry on the seat next to him he popped it in his mouth and instead of looking to see if anyone saw, he just looked for more, which meant he was very stoned and very hungry.