The girl watched him get into his car and drive away and she made a note of his license plates and gave the numbers to the manager, and in the following days she watched the newspapers for anything about the man, but nothing was ever reported. Doris, when she was told about him, said he was more or less harmless. She didn’t know what the girl was talking about, she didn’t have a dog. The last dog she’d had was five years ago.
In Denver Dwayne took her to a few parties. They attended one on a Friday night at the apartment of some people he knew from work, Carl and Randy. Randy was a big tall girl with tight jeans and skinny legs, and she wore a little tube top and had fixed breasts. Carl was a talker. By the time they got there he was wound up. There were lots of other people in the apartment too. They were all drinking and smoking and on the coffee table a basket of joints was set out for anybody’s use. The walls of the room were covered with tinfoil, with blinking Christmas lights still up, and the room was hot and the music was going so loud she could feel it in her stomach. People were dancing and laughing. One girl was dancing on the sofa, flinging her hair back and forth. A boy was dancing between two girls, in a routine of bumping hips. Randy brought her a drink from the next room and she stood back against the wall and watched, and Dwayne went into the kitchen with Carl. Randy looked at her and said, Hey, enjoy, you know? and smiled brilliantly and spread her arms in a gesture, meaning: You can have all of this, and disappeared. She stood against the wall, watching.
Later she went out to the kitchen to find Dwayne. He was seated at the table playing euchre and drinking with some others and she stood behind him, and once he put his hand on her stomach and said, How’s my little man? and patted her and drank from his glass. She watched the game for a while and wandered away to find the bathroom. The door was closed and she knocked and somebody opened it enough that she saw in quickly, and there were two boys sitting on the edge of the bathtub waiting their turn while a girl was taking on another boy on the toilet. The girl was naked from her waist down, her long white legs spread out, and the girl might have been Randy, but she couldn’t see her well enough since the door was closed so fast, the boy who opened it only saying, Wrong place. Upstairs.
When Dwayne took her home it was about four in the morning. By that time she had been coaxed into drinking four or five vodka Squirts and taking hits from the joint whenever it came around. She was so out of place and so lonely she couldn’t care for a while, she wanted something like everybody else did, and in time she ended up losing herself to the music and the crowd-feeling, and danced and danced, holding herself under her stomach, supporting the baby while she twirled around the room. When she woke the next morning she felt sick immediately, as she had in the first months, except it was for a different reason now. There was a red bruise high up on her leg that she could feel with her fingers though she had no memory of where it had come from. She turned in the bed. Dwayne was still sleeping beside her. She lay for a long time feeling sick and sad. She looked at the bar of sunlight that showed thinly along the edge of the window shade. She didn’t even know what the weather was doing anymore. The sun was shining but what else was there? She drifted into a daze of sorrow and disbelief. She didn’t want to think what any of the night before might have done to her baby. She could only remember the first of it. She could remember the dancing, but there were other things too. She didn’t want to think about them. But it was what she couldn’t remember that scared her most.
McPherons.
There came a night at the end of winter when Raymond McPheron went into town for a meeting of the board of governors of the Holt County Farmers’ Co-op Elevator. He was one of the seven farmers and ranchers elected to the board. When the meeting was over he drove out with some of the men for a drink at the Legion, and he was sitting at a table with them when the man across from him, not one of the farmers but a man in town he knew by name only, said: Too bad that little girl didn’t work out.
I think so, Raymond said.
You got some good out of her anyway, I guess.