misery, with the pillow in a strategic position. I made it just in time.
Within seconds it was upon me, and I was snorting,whooping and yawfling into the pillow, the sobs knotting and bursting. When Christy cries, she goes all the way, spasming in damp agony. When it’s over, and it usually takes a long time, my face looks as if my head had been boiled in beet juice.
It ended, as it always does, and I lay spent and, in some measure, content. With a ghost of a sob once in a while, like a remote hiccup. Heard the night sounds. Whispery hum of traffic. Lap of water. High whee of a jet. Music somewhere nearby. A man laughing.
You can’t hardly get good armor any more. The kind you can get, it dents easy. And rusts in damp weather. And the joints squeak. And if you try to chunk your lance into a windmill, the seams split on you.
I wonder if Anne’s armor is better than mine.
And what brand is Leo Rice wearing?
I have the feeling that something is ending around here. An era. The end of a piece of my life. It’s a restless feeling of change, and with a smell of violence about it. As if the fight tonight was just a sample. I don’t like fights …
FIVE
Alice Stebbins
… but somehow I have to watch them, even though they make me sick to my stomach. How many have I seen here since I married Jess ten years ago? More than a dozen scary ones, like tonight. I don’t count the tourist fights, when they get to scrapping about their women. They get drunk, take a few wild punches, then grab each other and roll around until they run out of wind.
I mean the man-fights, like tonight. Mike used to love a fight. He said it was a good hobby for a construction man. He’d come home all banged up and happy as a clam, win or lose. Twenty-two good years with Mike, from when I was seventeen to when I was thirty-nine. Had the one boy and lost him when he was eleven, and from then on the years weren’t quite as good. But good enough. Until a cable snapped and whipped and cut him into two pieces. Even if I think of that a thousand more times, it will make my stomach turn over every time. But you could never tell it, looking at him in the coffin.
That first outfit he was with, they built a new highway across the farm. The day the job ended, when they all tossed their hats into the last slab poured, I ran off with him, so crazy in love I didn’t care if he married me or not. But he did.
It’s a crazy world, how a farm girl from west of Columbus can end up owning a boat yard. Always wanted to see Florida. After Mike was gone, nobody was more alone. In construction you never settle long enough in one place to put down roots.
I got permission to fish off the end of B Dock. Ten yearsago you could catch fish in the basin. Not any more. Restful to sit and fish. Jess got into the habit of wandering out every day for a little chat. It took me a while before I could understand everything he said. He would stay a little longer every day. I told him about the farm and Mike and the boy and the accident, and all the places we’d lived. He told me about working on the trawlers when he was a boy, and how his three brothers drowned in a hurricane, and how he came to buy fifteen acres of land for a boat yard. He told me about his two wives and what they died of and when, and how his son got killed in a plane crash in the early part of the war and how his daughter died of leukemia.
I remember the day I told him it was my fortieth birthday. There’s this about a birthday. Even when you know it doesn’t mean a thing, you feel as if you have to tell somebody. So I told him. When I was leaving late that afternoon, he called to me and asked me in, and that was when I first climbed those narrow stairs up to this apartment. He had a store-bought cake he’d gone out and gotten, with Alice written on it in green goo, and four little blue candles. Being so alone after never being alone your whole life, you get edgy. All of a sudden I couldn’t stop
Within seconds it was upon me, and I was snorting,whooping and yawfling into the pillow, the sobs knotting and bursting. When Christy cries, she goes all the way, spasming in damp agony. When it’s over, and it usually takes a long time, my face looks as if my head had been boiled in beet juice.
It ended, as it always does, and I lay spent and, in some measure, content. With a ghost of a sob once in a while, like a remote hiccup. Heard the night sounds. Whispery hum of traffic. Lap of water. High whee of a jet. Music somewhere nearby. A man laughing.
You can’t hardly get good armor any more. The kind you can get, it dents easy. And rusts in damp weather. And the joints squeak. And if you try to chunk your lance into a windmill, the seams split on you.
I wonder if Anne’s armor is better than mine.
And what brand is Leo Rice wearing?
I have the feeling that something is ending around here. An era. The end of a piece of my life. It’s a restless feeling of change, and with a smell of violence about it. As if the fight tonight was just a sample. I don’t like fights …
FIVE
Alice Stebbins
… but somehow I have to watch them, even though they make me sick to my stomach. How many have I seen here since I married Jess ten years ago? More than a dozen scary ones, like tonight. I don’t count the tourist fights, when they get to scrapping about their women. They get drunk, take a few wild punches, then grab each other and roll around until they run out of wind.
I mean the man-fights, like tonight. Mike used to love a fight. He said it was a good hobby for a construction man. He’d come home all banged up and happy as a clam, win or lose. Twenty-two good years with Mike, from when I was seventeen to when I was thirty-nine. Had the one boy and lost him when he was eleven, and from then on the years weren’t quite as good. But good enough. Until a cable snapped and whipped and cut him into two pieces. Even if I think of that a thousand more times, it will make my stomach turn over every time. But you could never tell it, looking at him in the coffin.
That first outfit he was with, they built a new highway across the farm. The day the job ended, when they all tossed their hats into the last slab poured, I ran off with him, so crazy in love I didn’t care if he married me or not. But he did.
It’s a crazy world, how a farm girl from west of Columbus can end up owning a boat yard. Always wanted to see Florida. After Mike was gone, nobody was more alone. In construction you never settle long enough in one place to put down roots.
I got permission to fish off the end of B Dock. Ten yearsago you could catch fish in the basin. Not any more. Restful to sit and fish. Jess got into the habit of wandering out every day for a little chat. It took me a while before I could understand everything he said. He would stay a little longer every day. I told him about the farm and Mike and the boy and the accident, and all the places we’d lived. He told me about working on the trawlers when he was a boy, and how his three brothers drowned in a hurricane, and how he came to buy fifteen acres of land for a boat yard. He told me about his two wives and what they died of and when, and how his son got killed in a plane crash in the early part of the war and how his daughter died of leukemia.
I remember the day I told him it was my fortieth birthday. There’s this about a birthday. Even when you know it doesn’t mean a thing, you feel as if you have to tell somebody. So I told him. When I was leaving late that afternoon, he called to me and asked me in, and that was when I first climbed those narrow stairs up to this apartment. He had a store-bought cake he’d gone out and gotten, with Alice written on it in green goo, and four little blue candles. Being so alone after never being alone your whole life, you get edgy. All of a sudden I couldn’t stop
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