Iona Moon by Melanie Rae Thon Page A

didn’t like it. Jay thought his father was right about Catholic girls. He didn’t bother to turn around.
    In the car, Jay stared at the hand Muriel’s father wouldn’t touch. He thought about swinging by Willy’s, saying, “You wanna go for a ride?” They’d park on the bridge and drop rocks in the river, wait for the sound, count the seconds a stone takes to fall. They hadn’t talked for months. Willy would know something was up and Jay would spill it. Then he’d have to listen to all that crap about giving a blind man a dollar in change when you owed him five, knocking over gravestones, and tipping cows when they were asleep. I told you this would happen . Willy Hamilton knew Jay’s crimes like the fingers of his own hand: crouching in a tree to watch Sharla Wilder take off her bra, telling the Wilkerson boy he could improve his thinking by drinking a cup of his own piss every day for a month, watching him down the first warm gulp, laughing so hard the tears rolled down Jay’s cheeks and Roy Wilkerson knew he’d been duped. See, you’re getting smarter already .
    That was the subject of his last conversation with Willy Hamilton, back in December. Somebody’s gonna pin you to the ground someday and piss on your head. Let you Know how it feels . The lights were on in Willy’s room. Horton’s cruiser was in the drive. Jay slowed down but didn’t stop. You just bought your freedom with five hundred dollars .
    Jay’s father sat in the living room, smoking his pipe in the dark, watching television with no sound. Jay knew what that meant, knew his mother had locked herself in the bathroom upstairs. He stayed with his father, but he turned on the lights because he couldn’t bear that deep, disembodied voice. No, better to see the mouth move, lips and teeth, tongue and spit, just a man after all, smoke curling above his head.
    â€œMan is ruled by impulse,” Andrew Johnson Tyler said. “Underneath it all, we’re just animals that decided to stand up.”
    How did he know?
    â€œAn animal is ruled by smell, really—the smell of food or fear, the smell of a female.”
    Maybe they told him at the bank: Your son withdrew five hundred dollars .
    â€œInstinct is stronger than reason. That’s why we have laws. Men understand punishment, or the threat of it.”
    Now his mother was at the top of the stairs, wearing her pearls and black stockings.
    â€œI hope your mother’s life is a lesson to you, son.”
    He didn’t know about Muriel. He didn’t know anything.
    Delores Tyler clutched her beaded purse and fur stole. Jay breathed hard. He already caught a whiff of her perfume, Southern Rose spilled between her breasts, dabbed behind her ears and knees. His father packed his pipe with fresh tobacco, gave the match and those first sweet puffs his full attention. Only five more steps. She wobbled on her spike heels. Her smell filled the room.
    â€œI’m going into town,” she announced as she stood at the door. The seams of her stockings made crooked lines up the back of her legs.
    â€œThey’ve done experiments with rats,” Jay’s father said to him. “A rat will take certain drugs until it kills itself. It will starve by choice. A male and female in the same cage will fight instead of fornicate.”
    â€œDon’t expect me home tonight.” His mother’s voice was husky from cigarettes.
    Jay and his father knew there was nowhere for her to go in White Falls, no place to dance till dawn, no place to hold your shoes in one hand while you shuffled in your stocking feet, too tired to stop. There was no place with piped-in piano music where a woman could meet a stranger, a man who whispered tender obscenities. No, there was only the Roadstop Bar with the jukebox blaring, all the familiar faces, wolf whistles, and propositions shouted above the din.
    In an hour, Jay saw himself walking