What This River Keeps: A Novel

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER EIGHT S unday morning came down hard on him, sleeping in the hot, airless bedroom of his trailer. The window stood open, the screen behind it torn and pulled away from the frame, but no breeze came through. The dew had long since burned off and a green fly that had spent the night outside on the windowsill felt the sun warm its wings and walked through an open corner of the screen and buzzed over Ollie's sleeping mouth on its way to the smells ofthe kitchen. It was gravid with eggs and seeking a rotting mass suitable for the raising ofmaggots. Somewhere in his unconsciousness he sensed the reverberations of the fly's wings and woke up. He was sweaty and waking up hot pissed him off, but then he thought of her and he felt himself smile. Summer. The room smelled of sweat and beer and the sheets clung to him in a dank mess. On his wall, the antique Pabst Blue Ribbon sign with the builtin thermometer read over eighty degrees. He closed his eyes again. He had found Coondog, and they'd walked the emptying fairgrounds together until they ran into Troy Beasley, someone Coondog used to work with. Troy gave them a ride back to Coondog's place in an old '69 Firebird that had been painted red with black flames on the hood and front quarters. Once there, all three of them got drunk while throwing horseshoes under the security light in the backyard. At close to four in the morning, Troy gave Ollie a ride back to the fairgrounds, where his truck was still parked in the pits. Troy was leaving then anyway to go wake up his ex-girlfriend to try to have sex with her. A long night, but today Ollie would not go to work, and that pleased the hell out of him. He lay there in his dirty bed, which felt like it might be steaming, remembering everything that had happened with Summer. He recalled the little things: the way she first turned to look at him from the horse stall, the way her cheeks pulled in when she sucked on the milkshake's straw. It made sense to start at the beginning, right when he saw her while puking up bites of hot dog so familiar he almost remembered taking them. He wanted to start there and slowly revisit the whole night with her. But he couldn't do it. He'd be reliving their first conversation when suddenly he'd think ofher ass as she bent into the Omni. Then he'dgo back, work his way up to the milkshakes, and think of something stupid Cheryl had said. Finally, he'd thought so much about the night he could hardly remember if any of it had happened at all. But he knew her phone number! He also carried a vague idea of where she lived, and he seriously thought about getting up and driving until he saw her car. What if she saw him, though? Would he seem weird? He didn't 62 What This River Keeps 63 want to seem too creepy right away. He wondered how early he could call her. It was-what time was it?-he opened his eyes and looked at the clock. The sun coming through the window cast a glare on the clock face and he couldn't see. Jerking the damp sheet aside, he walked down the hallway to the bathroom, where he urinated in the moldy, piss-splattered toilet. He could smell the filthy toilet standing over it. Cleaning it had been on his list for a while now. But ifthere was one thing he hated to do, it was scrub a toilet with that flimsy little brush. Another thing he hated to do was clean anything in general. Once back in the bedroom, he noticed it was almost ten in the morning. When he picked up the jeans from the floor to remove his keys he found the tuft ofhorse hair. He threw the jeans out behind the trailer because they still smelled but he put the hair in the drawer of the coffee table. He would get something to eat and call her. Maybe she could do something even today. Not that he usually went on dates on Sunday-he tried to recall if he ever hadbut he didn't think he could wait until Friday to see her again. A car show came...