What do you mean?
You taking turns with her, I mean. Was that how it was? Tell us the truth now. Was it sweet? The man grinned. He had little even teeth, well-spaced.
Raymond looked at him for a time, not saying anything. Then he leaned over the table and took hold of his wrist just below the shirt cuff and said, You say something like that again about Victoria Roubideaux and I’ll cave your fuckin head in.
Well what in the hell? the man said. He tried to pull back. Let go of me.
You heard what I said, Raymond told him.
Turn loose. I never meant nothing.
Yeah. You did.
I’m just saying what others have.
I’m not talking to no others.
Turn loose of me. What the hell’s a-wrong with you?
You mind me. Don’t you even think something like that again about her.
Then Raymond opened his hand and let go. The man stood up. You dumb old son of a bitch, he said. I was joking.
You got some of that right, Raymond said.
The man looked at him, then walked over and stood at the bar and spoke to the bartender and a second man standing there. They had seen what happened. He talked to them, rubbing his wrist, looking back at Raymond.
At the table Raymond finished his beer and got up and went outside to his pickup and drove home in the moonless late-winter night. When he was back inside the house again he walked into the girl’s bedroom and switched on the overhead light and stood looking at the old double bed with the quilt on it and the new crib against the wall with the new sheet stretched tight over it and the blanket folded down, all of it in readiness yet for the girl and the baby just as it had been before the girl had left that other morning and not come back. He stood looking around the room for some time. Thinking, remembering, considering different things here and there. Finally he switched the light off and went upstairs and paused in the hall. He stood in the open door to his brother’s bedroom. You awake? he said.
I am now, Harold said. I heard you come up the stairs. You must be flat perturbed about something, for the racket you was making. The room was dark, with just the light from the hall shining in. A pale square of window at the back wall gave out onto the yard and barn and corrals. Harold raised up in bed. What’s the matter? Something go wrong at the board meeting? Corn prices gone to hell?
No.
What then?
I went out for a drink afterward. At the Legion there with some of em.
Yeah? They haven’t made that a crime yet. What about it?
You know they’re talking, Raymond said.
Who is?
People in town. They’re talking about Victoria. About you and me with her. Saying things about the three of us.
So that’s what this is about, is it? Harold said. What did you expect would happen? Two old men take in a girl out here in the country, with nobody else around to look in on em. And the girl is young and good-looking even if she is pregnant, and the two old men that’s keeping her are still men even if they are about as old and dried up as some of this calcified horse shit. It’s going to happen. People are going to talk.
Maybe they are, Raymond said. He looked at his brother in the dark room with the window squared behind him. Only I don’t care for it, he said. They can keep their goddamn mouths off her. I don’t care for it even a little bit.
There isn’t a whole hell of a lot you can do about it.
Maybe not, Raymond said. He turned to cross the hallway to enter his own room, then he turned back. I might even come to understand that too, he said. But that don’t mean I got to like it. That don’t mean I’m ever going to get so I got to like it.