A Buried Land

By Madison Jones

A young lawyer returns to a drowsy Tennessee river town only to be haunted by a shameful, buried secret from his past that will prove to be his undoing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504023542

Book preview

Part One

I

In the evening quiet that had fallen, a bell from far up on Cade’s Ridge could be dimly heard. The ringing died: the noise of a motor had entered the square.

All the same, Percy said, watching the man, he’d be a bad one to get tangled up with.

A dumb bumpkin, Jesse said.

The two of them stood leaning against the polished brick front of the building and watched him angling across the street in just the way he would cross an empty field. The driver of the truck coming down the square had to kick his brakes. The brakes squeaked, they heard the driver curse, but the young man gave no sign of consciousness. He strode on with that air of inviolable physical self-certainty that was not even defiance, as if truck and voice both were idle phantom-threats, striding without haste in the direction of the courthouse, through the parking area which now evening had almost cleared. His overalls were too short, exposing as he walked bare white patches of ankle above the tops of his brogans.

Just a dumb bumpkin, Jesse repeated.

The man, Fowler Kinkaid, did not join the group that was lounging at the corner of the courthouse lawn. He was waiting too, now, but he paid the others no more mind than he had the truck and driver. Standing apart, holding his head up in late sunshine that gave to his disordered hair highlights like those on a crow’s wing, maybe he did not even hear the voices casting the banter back and forth among the group of men. He was several years older than Jesse and himself, Percy thought: twenty-five, perhaps, though it could have been more.

Percy said, Is that what he’s doing, waiting to go to the dam?

Yeah. They’re working their butts off out there now. So little sis is free in the evenings. Free as a bird—or a bee. Round as a biscuit, busy as a bee. Jesse grinned, a grin that lifted one corner of his mouth only and that did not any longer seem affected to Percy. He was a little the shorter and heavier of the two; his muscular neck and keen ruddy features and red hair that grew tight against his skull contrasted with Percy’s finer, quieter, gray-eyed looks. But both wore khaki pants and shirts open at the collar, and, as they leaned there against the glazed brick front of the TVA office, shoulder to shoulder in the same attitude of aloof observation, the contrast was not so marked.

Well, I hope he doesn’t get off early or something, Percy said. Kinkaid’s a tough customer. Mr. Halleran said he thought they were going to have to call in the Army to get him out of that hollow. You knew he took a shot at Mac Leftwich when Mac was trying to get him to sell?

They ought to left him in there. All that kind. Let them swim out—or drown: maybe that’d been the best.

What about my old pappy? Percy said with a wry grin.

"Well, he wasn’t hardly that bad, was he?" Jesse flipped a bright half-dollar into the air and caught it with a smack in his palm.

Mighty near it.

You ever see him any more?

A man in a blue suit and felt hat came out of the building and nodded to them and got into one of the two official cars parked there.

I’ve seen him two times since I left there last summer. He still thinks I’m a sixteen-cylinder son-of-a-bitch. And I can’t say as how I ‘keer’ none.

Jesse yawned and flipped his coin again. The moss grows mighty thick in them thar hills. Raise ingrown folks, like toenails.

Oh, most of them didn’t kick much.

Enough did. This place would have been Tomb Town, Tennessee, for good if they had left it up to them. My old daddy would have been right in there with them, too, if he hadn’t died in time. He looked up from his coin and let his eyes rove the square. It still ain’t exactly fit to live in.

Opposite them the high side of the square, on the foot of Cade’s Ridge that climbed gently southward from town, was nearly untouched by the changes of the past two years. There was the old gapped and flat-topped façade of weathered clapboard and dull brick and stone. The courthouse at the center of the square, shaped like a box, with cupola and four-faced clock on top, also was the same. But here on the low side, especially clustered toward the northwest corner where he and Jesse stood, there were new buildings with efficient brick faces that seemed to stand in a bright foreground—like this one and the post office and the new drugstore and the bowling alley. And two old buildings—one of them Lazenby’s General Store, which had looked like a sagging mill house—were in states of partial demolition. It was not so apparent now, at suppertime, when even traffic and passers-by had thinned down to a trickle and the light was softening on toward dusk and the old town up above appeared to assert itself with a kind of dreamy June languor in the square; but in the heat of day when trucks came booming through and there was movement everywhere of flashing chrome and glass and people with foreign faces and the ragged, thought-demolishing clatter of jack-hammer and wrecking bar at work, then the new would become the soul, the one reality, of the town. It was like a difference between death and life, Percy thought. He did not like this inanimate supper hour, when the tempo still in him had quite gone out of the day. It got on his nerves—even to the point of anger, sometimes.

Jesse flipped his bright coin. It still ain’t exactly New York City. In fact it ain’t even exactly Johnson City.

Wait a few years, Percy said. You won’t know this place. It hasn’t even got started booming yet. Right here on the lake, with all that power just a few miles away. There’ll be factories—

You’re a man of vision, Jesse said.

All right.

You’re a deep one. The scholar of Peniel School.

Okay, Percy said. Wait and see.

Except when it comes to the facts of life, Jesse went on. To the birds and bees. But Uncle Jesse’s going to put you through the first grade.

Kinkaid stood exactly as before, apart from the group at the corner of the courthouse lawn. Abstractedly Percy said, Not quite the first grade, and kept on watching him. His manner, his look of blank unrecognition, came of plain stupidity, Percy thought: that ingrown, backwoods kind of dumbness that made a man as blind as a mole. And made him dangerous too, like something in its burrow. And even when you got it out, no matter what you tried to do for it, its spirit was in that burrow still. They never should have overlooked that shot he took at Leftwich.

Well, near enough, Jesse was saying. The second grade, then. He moved from the wall and briefly stretched, flexing the vivid muscles in his sunburned arms, revealing the tattoo of a rose on his left bicep. That re-vival’ll be out about eight-thirty. But don’t come too early; she’ll wait. I ain’t exactly dying to start people connecting her up with me. Or you either.

What if she’s gone and got religion? He was not looking at Jesse. He did not like to do it this way, to take Jesse’s leavings, even to do him a favor. What did it matter, though, for such a purpose, with such a girl? Percy felt again his odd, mixed excitement.

Nuts, Jesse was saying. Grow up, boy. A little religion’s a help: fires them up.

Still not looking at Jesse: Why do you think she’ll go with me if she’s hot for you?

Be rebounding. She saw me the other day with my nice little wop woman. She’ll get the point.

Don’t call them ‘wops,’ Percy said irrelevantly.

All right, Eye-talian. Jesse had moved off a step or two; again he flipped the glimmering coin. Anyhow, there’s some people fool enough to think you’re even better-looking than me.

Anybody’s better-looking than you, Percy said. He was just aware of Jesse’s hand flipping a casual good-by back over his shoulder as he moved away up the square toward his home. Left alone now, his gaze fastened upon Kinkaid, Percy felt his odd excitement grow keener still.

A truck was coming down the slope. When it squealed to a halt the group of men, already standing, came toward it across the parking area. Kinkaid followed at a little distance. By taking a rear corner seat which left space between him and the others on the truck-bed, he managed still to preserve the illusion of being quite alone. The other men appeared to acquiesce in this. Not even his closest neighbor on the bed—a man with a swarthy, foreign face—so much as cast a glance in his direction.

The truck moved past Percy and out of the square into the shade of the avenue, while he stood watching, as long as he could see it, the isolated figure of Kinkaid on the rear of the bed. The other men must have sensed in him what he had, Percy thought: that quality of something absolutely shut, with maybe a danger behind it. In these moments his feeling toward Kinkaid had gathered a certain venom, which he checked now, as out of proportion and childish.

He walked up the street to Mr. Silver’s lunchroom and without any appetite ate a bowl of stew. When he came out, there was nothing left of the sun but the flush on the cupola of the courthouse. He stood gazing at the clock—six-thirty—conscious how heavy his supper lay on his stomach. Two hours, his lips said. And once again he chided himself for this excitement which had gripped him all day long, as though he were a kid with a smutty picture. His purity, he thought. There was nothing like the desire tormented by a conscience always screaming at it—nothing that could dirty it so.

The flush was gone from the cupola when he turned away up the sidewalk. On the corner where Duck Pike entered the square at midblock he stood thoughtlessly waiting upon the traffic light, newly hung there, which had no use at this time of day. He looked down the pike to the river half a mile away, the slick silver afterglow on its face. He tried to imagine how it would look spread all over the valley, high up on Julie’s Bluff at the far side and halfway up the slope to town at this. Duck Pike would run beneath the water in an eerie, silent, crystal light. And soon, he thought: in a few months if they finished on schedule and there was rain before fall. From flank to flank of the hills opposed across the basin he saw the great dam gently arching—immense, white, shining like a miracle in his mind’s eye.

He crossed the street in gathering twilight. On the steps at the end of the courthouse walk two old men were sitting, faces long familiar to him. One was Perkins Starke. The other, propped on the stick he held in crooked fists, was a senile kinsman of Percy’s. His face with peering rheumy eyes gaped at Percy; the jaw, quite toothless, began to work as if in some desperate last effort to call a name bound to escape him in the end. Percy gave a nod and murmured, Cousin Lon, which he doubted would ever penetrate the old man’s tufted ears. He saw, as he stepped hurriedly through a gap in the hedge, still another old man coming down the courthouse steps, a small man. It was Judge Buck, looking—with his flat glaring merciless eyes—not down at the steps under his decrepit legs but straight out ahead of him. Percy walked on past the courthouse through dim shadows of maple trees toward the high side of the square.

The house where he roomed, amid hackberry trees and immensities of untended shrubbery, sat back a little distance off the highest corner of the square. It was a faded frame, two stories, with a wide front porch walled off at one end by the protruding ell. There was no light on this evening. There was no sound but the ticking of the big clock on the bookcase in a hallway otherwise bare. He climbed the dark steps and entered his room at the front of the house. It was sparsely furnished. Enamel pitcher and basin on the washstand glowed palely in the gloom. A gas jet depended from the ceiling, but by the table there was a floorlamp with a shadowy cord than ran snaking across the room to a wall plug by the door. He sat first on the iron bed. Then he went to the table and sat, his elbows on a stack of books, and gazed through the low window, through heavy foliage, at tatters of light that now had come on in the square.

Much later he turned on the floorlamp and opened a book at random. It was one of those on psychology that Lawyer Cadenhead had lent him. He turned pages aimlessly, noting the passages marked in bold red lead, the indecipherable marginal notes, and pictured Edgar Cadenhead over the book, pencil in hand, all cocked and focused with that nervous intensity of his. He was a man of nearly fifty, smooth bald, with quick intelligent eyes that challenged and little gleams of scorn that lurked just beneath their surface. The scorn was not for Percy. With Percy he was patient to a fault, like a kindly groom, and the gleams of scorn were pitiless mirrors where familiar things appeared in perspectives that put them quite out of countenance. While the gooseneck lamp cast a glow on his slick dome, Edgar would sit there like a nervous Socrates, drawing answers from Percy, deftly pulling pillar and post from the old haphazard edifice which Percy, wondering, had thought was made of solider stuff. Why? Edgar would say. If it doesn’t make sense. If it doesn’t, isn’t it nonsense, no matter who said it? Does being a father give the right to impose nonsense on children? Or obligate children to take it seriously? That is one of the troubles with the family; it stifles freedom. A person’s real obligation is to think.

He had spent much time on Percy over the past three years. He had enjoyed it, though, Percy thought. This was because he had no family of his own, no boy to groom, and besides was a man isolated by his nature and education.

Percy went on turning the pages, seeing only the passages marked in red, the inscrutable words stuffed into the margins. But at last he found that he was not doing even this, he was not moving at all, and his blank eyes were arrested on a page. There was one pencil mark, one word brightly encircled: super-ego. A breath of night air from the window touched his face. He discovered that he was listening, and only afterward that he was listening to something, a real sound. It was not the clock down there in the hall, though this went ticking on in measured undertone. It was a slow sound, muffled and very regular: bump, bump, bump—a sound like that of his pulse, or anyway like a thing that somehow came to hearing through his blood. It was a rocking chair, only someone rocking on the porch—old Mrs. Gaines. Still he was oddly moved. He kept on listening, sitting there in the one small pool of illumination under the hot lamp, while out of the gloom around him the slow bump, bump went on like the throb of his blood. There were odors, even, without any source: locust bloom and honeysuckle breathed on faint night airs from a distance. There was something. He remembered. Was it today, or was it tomorrow, that they were to move the family dead? And hadn’t he told Daryll—his little brother sent to inform him—that he would come for this?

Was it today? If so he had missed it. Had they waited, with covert glances up at the road that scarred the green of the steep hillside? A whole year now, and he had gone back to visit only twice—the last time at Christmas, just before they had moved. Pointless visits, an air that his father’s tight-lipped presence had made as stiff as frost. Only once that Percy remembered had those lips parted in speech, to ask, You still working for them—that TVA? Was the house demolished yet? It would be soon, and the trees felled, the fences razed. An anonymous valley once more, and then a lake. Let it happen soon. And he would be gone from here. The thought raised a flush of pleasure in him. After waiting a year he had it—the scholarship to the university that Edgar at last had secured for him. With the money he had saved and his car, he would be free then. There was only the summer left, just three more months to be got through.

The clock in the hall below had begun to strike. He found, at the last stroke, that he had been counting, that he had counted eight. This fact remained, the one real fact among the drifting shards of feeling it had blasted. He was staring at the page, elbows straddling the book on the table, staring dumbly at that word which the red circle lifted out of the blurred and cluttered print. He got up with a lurch from the chair. He stripped off his clothes and from a hanger in the tall cabinet snatched the tan sport shirt and pants. He washed his face and hands in the basin, in dirty water left from the morning, and jerked the comb through his tangled hair.

Mrs. Gaines was still rocking on the porch. She did not stop when he came out; in the dimness he could see her white head flowing slowly forward and back on a body shrouded and blended with the chair by the dark widow’s garment she wore.

You going out so late? she quavered.

It’s just after eight, he said, checking his haste as he went down the steps.

The meeting’s near about over by now. And that old picture show too, it ought to be.

I’ll just be gone a little while.

But he had to stand there chafing at the foot of the steps amid the heaped black shrubbery and wait for her to finish, had to endure her quavering hill-voice that came and went as by the lazy thrust and withdrawal of her rocking. I just don’t like to see our young folks go out late of a night nowadays. There’s a heap of meanness goes on that never did use to. It ain’t like it was no more. There’s—

Yes’m.

He turned right from the gate, leaving his car parked where it was for the time. He hurriedly followed Cade Street up the gentle incline among shaded houses that in one way or another resembled Mrs. Gaines’s. The only light came from their windows, filtering through trees and shrubbery onto the pavement. The pavement ended and then the houses; there was gravel underfoot. The lights he could see now were far off down the slope, orderly row after row of them in the workers’ village just at the edge of town. Now he heard singing, a familiar, rousing hymn that instantly formed in his mind the words:

… where I first saw the light

And the burden of my heart rolled away

The road turned. There was the meadow, the lighted tent, and cars and a few hitched teams standing around in the shadows. He stopped some distance away, at a point where he could see into the tent. The people were standing.

It was there, by faith, I received my sight

And now I am hap-py all the day.

That night air, fresh with the scent of early summer’s bloom and greenery, was cool on his face. Still he was sweating. He tried to pick out the women’s heads and among them that one with rich black hair a little wantonly astray. He had looked her over with care on the street just yesterday. The hair and hazel eyes and sharp cut of the jaw recalled her brother in a way that had repelled him at first. But not for long: it was her own body, the swelling female curves and soft swing of the hips when she walked in the sheer cotton dress. There had been in his desire an extra savor, a quality both bitter and sweet.

The hymn stopped and there was the stirring, the subdued rush of breath and garment as the company seated itself. Now he could see better individual heads in the glare under the tent. He thought he saw her—at least there was one dark female head at the outer end of a bench near the rear, apart a good space from the others. At length, still watching the dark head, he was hearing the preacher’s voice, a nasal tenor voice pitched high with its plea to sinners: Won’t you come forward, brother, sister—for Jesus. Jesus is … It was that begging voice, that begging-hour of which he seemed to have a thousand memories all fused in one immense glare of boyish humiliation under such a tent as this. There he would sit, unsure of grace but ashamed to go up in front of so many eyes; instead he would endure the insulting conscience which at last he would have to carry home and listen to in the night.

He remembered it all with a kind of inward snarl. He watched the dark head, willing it not to respond, not to stir, while the voice whined on like friction against his nerves. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, it said.

Percy is.

This, coming from over his shoulder, made him start. It was Jesse.

Go on up there if you ain’t ashamed of the gospel, Jesse said, his grin lifting the corner of his mouth.

We ought to cut the tent ropes, Percy said between his teeth.

Not tonight, old boy. You got something better’n that on. You see her?

Percy pointed her out. Jesse said, Um-hmm, and then, Running late, ain’t they? I didn’t want to have to listen to none of that. But the voice in the tent had stopped. The preacher, lank and bushy-haired and towering over his stand, lifted his arms, and the congregation stood up. Percy could hear him intoning, First, second, and fourth stanzas, and then his voice rising in song, drowned in an instant by the chorus of others.

I wonder what always happens to the third stanza, Jesse said. Some day I’m going to get me a songbook and find out what goes on there that they can’t sing it at church.

They were standing well back in the shadows when the people came out of the tent. They did not see her until all but the teams and the last two cars were gone; then a sweep of headlights briefly picked her out of darkness under some trees at the edge of the meadow. They moved toward her only when the lights had gone out in the tent and the wagons were rattling off in the dark of the road and the one car left was starting up with a noise like musketry. She was moving off too as they approached the trees. When Jesse called out she stopped, a dim figure just paler than the night. The car went sputtering out of the meadow. There was left only the sound of whippoorwills and of their steps which brushed the dew-wet grass.

Sorry I’m late, Jesse said casually. Couldn’t make it any sooner.

She did not answer. The clearest thing about her was her face. Her hair was visible only by the faint sheen of starlight like a phosphorescent line that drew its random silhouette. She made no movements at all. Percy knew that she must have noticed him. He knew also that his blood was pounding and he doubted whether, when the time came, he could lay a hand on her.

This is my buddy Percy Youngblood, Jesse said. I wanted you to meet him.

Maybe she looked at him, maybe she didn’t. After a moment he was inclined to think not, for the thin still aura of starlight around her head appeared somehow to detach her from an element which could support tones as callous as Jesse’s and intentions as ugly as his own. Yet she did move, now, and it was Jesse’s hand that moved, had turned her and set her walking close at his side along the edge of the meadow. Let’s get on down the road, he said and started his casual chatter going.

Percy walked not quite abreast of them, conscious still of Jesse’s hand on her arm. It was like the evidence for what now had come back to him: that Jesse had lain flesh to bare flesh with her. Nevertheless he could not see it in his mind. Even in Jesse’s embrace she appeared to him like something etched out of darkness by that still—or, as now, shimmering—aura of starlight which quite sealed her away from his lust. And no more sound from her, either, than if she were a shadow. She was moving at Jesse’s side, under his hand, but Percy could not observe the least response in her. They walked on the gravel of the road, and he tried to distinguish, beneath the aimless chatter of Jesse, the sound of her steps from theirs. Maybe if she would speak …

But she did not speak, not until they had passed the row of houses, mostly darkened now, and reached the corner of the square. Here, where light from a streetlamp not very distant fell on his parked car and on the black billows of Mrs. Gaines’s shrubbery beyond, they had stopped. Jesse had abruptly said, I can’t take you home tonight, baby, there’s something I got to do. My buddy Percy here’ll take you.

Her dress, Percy could now make out, was some dark blue or green; he could see the curve of her hip. But her head was turned wrong and bowed a little, and all he could clearly see was one cheek and the white flesh of her neck below her hair.

"I thought you was," she said, very low, without raising her head.

I can’t tonight, baby. You go on with Percy. I’ll see you pretty soon.

Percy just caught the wink and the faint toss of the red head as Jesse turned away and headed down the square. Standing near her, he could feel his pulse-beat once again. But also he was tasting a brackishness in his mouth, an ugly taste like copper, and all he could do for the moment was gaze with a sudden hostility down the square at Jesse’s receding figure. Even when he was conscious that she moved he did not look directly at her.

He heard her murmur just audibly, I got to get on home.

He did look at her and now he plainly saw her face. There were the eyes, the sharp-cut jaw, the black hair astray on her forehead. Again he got that unpleasant sense of recognition, and he let his gaze slip down her body and come to rest on the pavement. Let me take you, he mumbled.

She did not seem to hear this. What she said at last, as if to herself, was, He’s done quit me, ain’t he?

It was that plaintive hill-twang. Except for his desire, he was unsure what he felt toward her. He swallowed. Come on, I’ll take you home. I got a car.

You needn’t to. It ain’t but a little of a walk.

She never had looked squarely at him. Without deciding to, he moved closer. Come on, he said and surprised himself by softly taking hold of her arm. It was bare flesh, a firm strong arm that did not resist his gentle grip. He had the haphazard feeling that what he might next say or do would happen without his willing it. Come on.

She let herself be gently steered and put into the car. Outside the opposite door he paused and drew deep breaths of the fresh, pollen-scented air, feeling as if maybe this would clear the haze from his mind. He heard the katydids sawing away in the hackberry trees behind him. Down where the figure of Jesse had vanished at the bottom of the square, a truck with a trailer came rumbling into the light.

She did not stir when he got in, and he, his hands on the wheel, sat waiting as if to observe what his body would do next. There was something different inside the car, in the closer air—a scent.

He’s done gone and got him another girl now, ain’t he?

It was cheap perfume she wore, which she had put on for Jesse.

I seen him with her. A little, dark woman.

Was her mouth painted? He could not very clearly see her bowed face. Maybe you’d better forget about him, he said. And later: We could get a Coke.

I got to get on home. My brother don’t allow me to go out but to meeting and such.

Is he waiting? When she did not respond he said, You went out with Jesse, didn’t you? Then: It needn’t be but a little while.

Maybe she moved one hand on her lap. Oh, I don’t care, she said. I don’t care none. All right.

The engine turned over with a sputtering violence which it seemed must shatter every sleep in the square. They lurched off down the slope and at the foot turned into Mill Street and quickly were out on the highway, on the bluff above the star-flecked river. It seemed a long time they rode, so long that he kept glancing with anxiety at her. But she showed no consciousness of the distance. The noise of the engine was too loud for talk, and if she spoke at all it was not audible. Not until they had rounded a curve and slowed down where there was light and one car parked in front of a clapboard, overgrown shack with a small neon beer sign, did she even lift her head. Then she did not speak.

The smell inside was vaguely smokehouse-like. There were a rough board dance floor, a counter to one side, and against the opposite side and the rear wall stark, peeling wooden booths. The gaudy nickelodeon in a corner kept changing colors, but everywhere else in the room the three or four bulbs that hung from the rafters shed a desolate light. He bought a beer and, after considering, a Coke from the slovenly man reading a comic book at the counter, who did not look at him but only at the change he laid down. From the rear booth where he had put her she watched him cross the floor with the drinks. There was silence after he had sat down beside her. He watched her fingering the bottle and heard the voices from one of the booths across the room. He said, You rather have some beer instead?

I don’t like the taste of it, she said, low and flat.

She had done nothing yet but slip her fingers up and down the neck of the bottle—blunt fingers with uneven nails clipped near to the quick. Her lips were painted, awkwardly, distorting the shape of her mouth. After a silence which he thought she never would have broken he said, You might as well forget about Jesse. He’s not the steady kind.

There was no answer and he watched her fingers on the bottle. At last, Your name’s Cora?

She only nodded. It was like moving weight. He took a swallow of the cold beer and said, How old are you? Twenty?

Seventeen, she barely said.

She did look older, but he was not surprised. It was that early ripeness—that bumpkin bloom, Jesse would say—which would be quite gone by thirty. He could see her at thirty, her anonymous face gazing with blank unrelief from the doorway of some decrepit dwelling, some shack beyond a strip of dusty yard and a few stunted fruit trees. But then he thought of the dam and of the water coming. He said, Are there just you and your brother? Your mother and father not living?

She shook her head.

They been dead long?

Mama ain’t. Just back in the spring. She was sick and we moved her to town and she died.

I’m sorry. He sat there making rings with his wet glass on the peeling table top. Her body next to his in the dim booth was no excitement to him. He felt quite cheated and barren. All that was left of the passion which had kept his blood afire since morning was a dull, oppressive anger. He lifted the glass of beer to his mouth and drained it with one long draft. He poured the rest from the bottle.

Your brother raised the devil when they moved him out, didn’t he?

He never wanted it.

What about you? he asked, in his dull anger, just to hear her say exactly what she did say next.

I kind of felt like him and Mama.

He watched her blunt thumb still stroking the neck of the bottle. He could smell it here too, that cheap, that stinking perfume. Can’t you see how much better it’ll be now? he said, then violently shut up. His voice had made her thumb stop its motion. He said, Drink your Coke. She lifted it by the neck, quickly—again because of his voice. He watched her swallow, once, twice. The soft whiteness of her throat made no