The Body

Stud City, by Gordon Lachance. Originally published in Greenspun Quarterly, Issue 45, Fall, 1970. Used by permission.

March.

Chico stands at the window, arms crossed, elbows on the ledge that divides upper and lower panes, naked, looking out, breath fogging the glass. A draft against his belly. Bottom right pane is gone. Blocked by a piece of cardboard.

“Chico.”

He doesn’t turn. She doesn’t speak again. He can see a ghost of her in the glass, in his bed, sitting, blankets pulled up in apparent defiance of gravity. Her eye makeup has smeared into deep hollows under her eyes.

Chico shifts his gaze beyond her ghost, out beyond the house. Raining. Patches of snow sloughed away to reveal the bald ground underneath. He sees last year’s dead grass, a plastic toy—Billy’s—a rusty rake. His brother Johnny’s Dodge is up on blocks, the detired wheels sticking out like stumps. He remembers times he and Johnny worked on it, listening to the super-hits and boss oldies from WLAM in Lewiston pour out of Johnny’s old transistor radio—a couple of times Johnny would give him a beer. She gonna run fast, Chico, Johnny would say. She gonna eat up everything on this road from Gates Falls to Castle Rock. Wait till we get that Hearst shifter in her!

But that had been then, and this was now.

Beyond Johnny’s Dodge was the highway. Route 14, goes to Portland and New Hampshire south, all the way to Canada north, if you turned left on U.S. 1 at Thomaston.

“Stud City,” Chico says to the glass. He smokes his cigarette.

“What?”

“Nothing, babe.”

“Chico?” Her voice is puzzled. He will have to change the sheets before Dad gets back. She bled.

“What?”

“I love you, Chico.”

“That’s right.”

Dirty March. You’re some old whore, Chico thinks. Dirty, staggering old baggy-tits March with rain in her face.

“This room used to be Johnny’s,” he says suddenly.

“Who?”

“My brother.”

“Oh. Where is he?”

“In the Army,” Chico says, but Johnny isn’t in the Army. He had been working the summer before at Oxford Plains Speedway and a car went out of control and skidded across the infield toward the pit area, where Johnny had been changing the back tires on a Chevy Charger-class stocker. Some guys shouted at him to look out, but Johnny never heard them. One of the guys who shouted was Johnny’s brother Chico.

“Aren’t you cold?” she asks.

“No. Well, my feet. A little.”

And he thinks suddenly: Well, my God. Nothing happened to Johnny that isn’t going to happen to you, too, sooner or later. He sees it again, though: the skidding, skating Ford Mustang, the knobs of his brother’s spine picked out in a series of dimpled shadows against the white of his Hanes tee-shirt; he had been hunkered down, pulling one of the Chevy’s back tires. There had been time to see rubber flaying off the tires of the runaway Mustang, to see its hanging muffler scraping up sparks from the infield. It had struck Johnny even as Johnny tried to get to his feet. Then the yellow shout of flame.

Well, Chico thinks, it could have been slow, and he thinks of his grandfather. Hospital smells. Pretty young nurses bearing bedpans. A last papery breath. Were there any good ways?

He shivers and wonders about God. He touches the small silver St. Christopher’s medal that hangs on a chain around his neck. He is not a Catholic and he’s surely not a Mexican: his real name is Edward May and his friends all call him Chico because his hair is black and he greases it back with Brylcreem and he wears boots with pointed toes and Cuban heels. Not Catholic, but he wears this medallion. Maybe if Johnny had been wearing one, the runaway Mustang would have missed him. You never knew.

He smokes and stares out the window and behind him the girl gets out of bed and comes to him quickly, almost mincing, maybe afraid he will turn around and look at her. She puts a warm hand on his back. Her breasts push against his side. Her belly touches his buttock.

“Oh. It is cold.”

“It’s this place.”

“Do you love me, Chico?”

“You bet!” he says off-handedly, and then, more seriously: “You were cherry.”

“What does that—”

“You were a virgin.”

The hand reaches higher. One finger traces the skin on the nape of his neck. “I said, didn’t I?”

“Was it hard? Did it hurt?”

She laughs. “No. But I was scared.”

They watch the rain. A new Oldsmobile goes by on 14, spraying up water.

“Stud City,” Chico says.

“What?”

“That guy. He’s going Stud City. In his new stud car.”

She kisses the place her finger has been touching gently and he brushes at her as if she were a fly.

“What’s the matter?”

He turns to her. Her eyes flick down to his penis and then up again hastily. Her arms twitch to cover herself, and then she remembers that they never do stuff like that in the movies and she drops them to her sides again. Her hair is black and her skin is winter white, the color of cream. Her breasts are firm, her belly perhaps a little too soft. One flaw to remind, Chico thinks, that this isn’t the movies.

“Jane?”

“What?” He can feel himself getting ready. Not beginning, but getting ready.

“It’s all right,” he says. “We’re friends.” He eyes her deliberately, letting himself reach at her in all sorts of ways. When he looks at her face again, it is flushed. “Do you mind me looking at you?”

“I… no. No, Chico.”

She steps back, closes her eyes, sits on the bed, and leans back, legs spread. He sees all of her. The muscles, the little muscles on the insides of her thighs… they’re jumping, uncontrolled, and this suddenly excites him more than the taut cones of her breasts or the mild pink pearl of her cunt. Excitement trembles in him, some stupid Bozo on a spring. Love may be as divine as the poets say, he thinks, but sex is Bozo the Clown bouncing around on a spring. How could a woman look at an erect penis without going off into mad gales of laughter?

The rain beats against the roof, against the window, against the sodden cardboard patch blocking the glass-less lower pane. He presses his hand against his chest, looking for a moment like a stage Roman about to orate. His hand is cold. He drops it to his side.

“Open your eyes. We’re friends, I said.”

Obediently, she opens them. She looks at him. Her eyes appear violet now. The rainwater running down the window makes rippling patterns on her face, her neck, her breasts. Stretched across the bed, her belly has been pulled tight. She is perfect in her moment.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh Chico, it feels so funny.” A shiver goes through her. She has curled her toes involuntarily. He can see the insteps of her feet. Her insteps are pink. “Chico. Chico.”

He steps toward her. His body is shivering and her eyes widen. She says something, one word, but he can’t tell what it is. This isn’t the time to ask. He half-kneels before her for just a second, looking at the floor with frowning concentration, touching her legs just above the knees. He measures the tide within himself. Its pull is thoughtless, fantastic. He pauses a little longer.

The only sound is the tinny tick of the alarm clock on the bedtable, standing brassy-legged atop a pile of Spiderman comic books. Her breathing flutters faster and faster. His muscles slide smoothly as he dives upward and forward. They begin. It’s better this time. Outside, the rain goes on washing away the snow.

A half-hour later Chico shakes her out of a light doze. “We gotta move,” he says. “Dad and Virginia will be home pretty quick.”

She looks at her wristwatch and sits up. This time she makes no attempt to shield herself. Her whole tone—her body English—has changed. She has not matured (although she probably believes she has) or learned anything more complex than tying a shoe, but her tone has changed just the same. He nods and she smiles tentatively at him. He reaches for the cigarettes on the bedtable. As she draws on her panties, he thinks of a line from an old novelty song: Keep playin till I shoot through, Blue… play your digeree, do. “Tie Me Kangaroo Down,” by Rolf Harris. He grins. That was a song Johnny used to sing. It ended: So we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde, and that’s it hanging on the shed.

She hooks her bra and begins buttoning her blouse. “What are you smiling about, Chico?”

“Nothing,” he says.

“Zip me up?”

He goes to her, still naked, and zips her up. He kisses her cheek. “Go on in the bathroom and do your face if you want,” he says. “Just don’t take too long, okay?”

She goes up the hall gracefully, and Chico watches her, smoking. She is a tall girl—taller than he—and she has to duck her head a little going through the bathroom door. Chico finds his underpants under the bed. He puts them in the dirty clothes bag hanging just inside the closet door, and gets another pair from the bureau. He puts them on, and then, while walking back to the bed, he slips and almost falls in a patch of wetness the square of cardboard has let in.

“Goddam,” he whispers resentfully.

He looks around at the room, which had been Johnny’s until Johnny died (why did I tell her he was in the Army, for Christ’s sake? he wonders… a little uneasily). Fiberboard walls, so thin he can hear Dad and Virginia going at it at night, that don’t quite make it all the way to the ceiling. The floor has a slightly crazy hipshot angle so that the room’s door will only stay open if you block it open—if you forget, it swings stealthily closed as soon as your back is turned. On the far wall is a movie poster from Easy Rider—Two Men Went Looking for America and Couldn’t Find It Anywhere. The room had more life when Johnny lived here. Chico doesn’t know how or why; only that it’s true. And he knows something else, as well. He knows that sometimes the room spooks him at night. Sometimes he thinks that the closet door will swing open and Johnny will be standing there, his body charred and twisted and blackened, his teeth yellow dentures poking out of wax that has partially melted and re-hardened; and Johnny will be whispering: Get out of my room, Chico. And if you lay a hand on my Dodge, I’ll fuckin kill you. Got it?

Got it, bro, Chico thinks.

For a moment he stands still, looking at the rumpled sheet spotted with the girl’s blood, and then he spreads the blankets up in one quick gesture. Here. Right here. How do you like that, Virginia? How does that grab your snatch? He puts on his pants, his engineer boots, finds a sweater.

He’s dry-combing his hair in front of the mirror when she comes out of the john. She looks classy. Her too-soft stomach doesn’t show in the jumper. She looks at the bed, does a couple of things to it, and it comes out looking made instead of just spread up.

“Good,” Chico says.

She laughs a little self-consciously and pushes a lock of hair behind her ear. It is an evocative, poignant gesture.

“Let’s go,” he says.

They go out through the hall and the living room. Jane pauses in front of the tinted studio photograph on top of the TV. It shows his father and Virginia, a high-school-age Johnny, a grammar-school-age Chico, and an infant Billy—in the picture, Johnny is holding Billy. All of them have fixed, stone grins… all except Virginia, whose face is its sleepy, indecipherable self. That picture, Chico remembers, was taken less than a month after his dad married the bitch.

“That your mother and father?”

“It’s my father,” Chico says. “She’s my stepmother, Virginia. Come on.”

“Is she still that pretty?” Jane asks, picking up her coat and handing Chico his windbreaker.

“I guess my old man thinks so,” Chico says.

They step out into the shed. It’s a damp and drafty place—the wind hoots through the cracks in its slapstick walls. There is a pile of old bald tires, Johnny’s old bike that Chico inherited when he was ten and which he promptly wrecked, a pile of detective magazines, returnable Pepsi bottles, a greasy monolithic engine block, an orange crate full of paperback books, an old paint-by-numbers of a horse standing on dusty green grass.

Chico helps her pick her way outside. The rain is falling with disheartening steadiness. Chico’s old sedan stands in a driveway puddle, looking downhearted. Even up on blocks and with a piece of plastic covering the place where the windshield should go, Johnny’s Dodge has more class. Chico’s car is a Buick. The paint is dull and flowered with spots of rust. The front seat upholstery has been covered with a brown Army blanket. A large button pinned to the sun visor on the passenger side says: I WANT IT EVERY DAY. There is a rusty starter assembly on the back seat; if it ever stops raining he will clean it, he thinks, and maybe put it into the Dodge. Or maybe not.

The Buick smells musty and his own starter grinds a long time before the Buick starts up.

“Is it your battery?” she asks.

“Just the goddam rain, I guess.” He backs out onto the road, flicking on the windshield wipers and pausing for a moment to look at the house. It is a completely unappetizing aqua color. The shed sticks off from it at a ragtag, double-jointed angle, tarpaper and peeled-looking shingles.

The radio comes on with a blare and Chico shuts it off at once. There is the beginning of a Sunday afternoon headache behind his forehead. They ride past the Grange hall and the Volunteer Fire Department and Brownie’s Store. Sally Morrison’s T-Bird is parked by Brownie’s hi-test pump, and Chico raises a hand to her as he turns off onto the old Lewiston road.

“Who’s that?”

“Sally Morrison.”

“Pretty lady.” Very neutral.

He feels for his cigarettes. “She’s been married twice and divorced twice. Now she’s the town pump, if you believe half the talk that goes on in this shitass little town.”

“She looks young.”

“She is.”

“Have you ever—”

He slides his hand up her leg and smiles. “No,” he says. “My brother, maybe, but not me. I like Sally, though. She’s got her alimony and her big white Bird, she doesn’t care what people say about her.”

It starts to seem like a long drive. The Androscoggin, off to the right, is slaty and sullen. The ice is all out of it now. Jane has grown quiet and thoughtful. The only sound is the steady snap of the windshield wipers. When the car rolls through the dips in the road there is groundfog, waiting for evening when it will creep out of these pockets and take over the whole River Road.

They cross into Auburn and Chico drives the cutoff and swings onto Minot Avenue. The four lanes are nearly deserted, and all the suburban homes look packaged. They see one little boy in a yellow plastic raincoat walking up the sidewalk, carefully stepping in all the puddles.

“Go, man,” Chico says softly.

“What?” Jane asks.

“Nothing, babe. Go back to sleep.”

She laughs a little doubtfully.

Chico turns up Keston Street and into the driveway of one of the packaged houses. He doesn’t turn off the ignition.

“Come in and I’ll give you cookies,” she says.

He shakes his head. “I have to get back.”

“I know.” She puts her arms around him and kisses him. “Thank you for the most wonderful time of my life.”

He smiles suddenly. His face shines. It is nearly magical. “I’ll see you Monday, Janey-Jane. Still friends, right?”

“You know we are,” she says, and kisses him again… but when he cups a breast through her jumper, she pulls away. “Don’t. My father might see.”

He lets her go, only a little of the smile left. She gets out of the car quickly and runs through the rain to the back door. A second later she’s gone. Chico pauses for a moment to light a cigarette and then he backs out of the driveway. The Buick stalls and the starter seems to grind forever before the engine manages to catch. It is a long ride home.

When he gets there, Dad’s station wagon is parked in the driveway. He pulls in beside it and lets the engine die. For a moment he sits inside silently, listening to the rain. It is like being inside a steel drum.

Inside, Billy is watching Carl Stormer and His Country Buckaroos on the TV set. When Chico comes in, Billy jumps up, excited. “Eddie, hey Eddie, you know what Uncle Pete said? He said him and a whole mess of other guys sank a kraut sub in the war! Will you take me to the show next Saturday?”

“I don’t know,” Chico says, grinning. “Maybe if you kiss my shoes every night before supper all week.” He pulls Billy’s hair. Billy hollers and laughs and kicks him in the shins.

“Cut it out, now,” Sam May says, coming into the room. “Cut it out, you two. You know how your mother feels about the rough-housing.” He has pulled his tie down and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. He’s got a couple-three red hotdogs on a plate. The hotdogs are wrapped in white bread, and Sam May has put the old mustard right to them. “Where you been, Eddie?”

“At Jane’s.”

The toilet flushes in the bathroom. Virginia. Chico wonders briefly if Jane has left any hairs in the sink, or a lipstick, or a bobby pin.

“You should have come with us to see your Uncle Pete and Aunt Ann,” his father says. He eats a frank in three quick bites. “You’re getting to be like a stranger around here, Eddie. I don’t like that. Not while we provide the bed and board.”

“Some bed,” Chico says. “Some board.”

Sam looks up quickly, hurt at first, then angry. When he speaks, Chico sees that his teeth are yellow with French’s mustard. He feels vaguely nauseated. “Your lip. Your goddam lip. You aren’t too big yet, snotnose.”

Chico shrugs, peels a slice of Wonder Bread off the loaf standing on the TV tray by his father’s chair, and spreads it with ketchup. “In three months I’m going to be gone anyway.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m gonna fix up Johnny’s car and go out to California. Look for work.”

“Oh, yeah. Right.” He is a big man, big in a shambling way, but Chico thinks now that he got smaller after he married Virginia, and smaller again after Johnny died. And in his mind he hears himself saying to Jane: My brother, maybe, but not me. And on the heels of that: Play your digeree, do, Blue. “You ain’t never going to get that car as far as Castle Rock, let alone California.”

“You don’t think so? Just watch my fucking dust.”

For a moment his father only looks at him and then he throws the frank he has been holding. It hits Chico in the chest, spraying mustard on his sweater and on the chair.

“Say that word again and I’ll break your nose for you, smartass.”

Chico picks up the frank and looks at it. Cheap red frank, smeared with French’s mustard. Spread a little sunshine. He throws it back at his father. Sam gets up, his face the color of an old brick, the vein in the middle of his forehead pulsing. His thigh connects with the TV tray and it overturns. Billy stands in the kitchen doorway watching them. He’s gotten himself a plate of franks and beans and the plate has tipped and beanjuice runs onto the floor. Billy’s eyes are wide, his mouth trembling. On the TV, Carl Stormer and His Country Buckaroos are tearing through “Long Black Veil” at a breakneck pace.

“You raise them up best you can and they spit on you,” his father says thickly. “Ayuh. That’s how it goes.” He gropes blindly on the seat of his chair and comes up with the half-eaten hotdog. He holds it in his fist like a severed phallus. Incredibly, he begins to eat it… at the same time, Chico sees that he has begun to cry. “Ayuh, they spit on you, that’s just how it goes.”

“Well, why in the hell did you have to marry her?” he bursts out, and then has to bite 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. Beanjuice 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 so fuckin 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 feel 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 your hamstrings.

You could hurt me if you wanted to, the calm brown eyes say. I 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 backs 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 don’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 Billy.”

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 ragged idle. At last he is on his way, creeping up the road toward 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. I 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 tire when the Mustang came skidding and skating across the infield with its muffler draggin 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 wildly 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 him 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 onto Route 14 and gets rolling.