Ironweed - William Kennedy [59]
“Howdy,” he said.
“Yes?”
Her.
“Brought a turkey for ye.”
“A turkey?”
“Yep. Twelve-and-a-half-pounder.” He held it aloft with one hand.
“I don’t understand.”
“I told Bill I’d come by of a Sunday and bring a turkey. It ain’t Sunday but I come anyway.”
“Is that you, Fran?”
“It ain’t one of them fellas from Mars.”
“Well my God. My God, my God.” She opened the door wide.
“How ya been, Annie? You’re lookin’ good.”
“Oh come in, come in.” She went up the five stairs ahead of him. Stairs to the left went into the cellar, where he thought he might first enter, carry out some of their throwaways to Rosskam’s wagon before he made himself known. Now he was going into the house itself, closing the side door behind him. Up five stairs with Annie watching and into the kitchen, she backing away in front of him. She’s staring. But she’s smiling. All right.
“Billy told us he’d seen you,” she said. She stopped in the center of the kitchen and Francis stopped too. “But he didn’t think you’d ever come. My oh my, what a surprise. We saw the story about you in the paper.”
“Hope it didn’t shame you none.”
“We all thought it was funny. Everybody in town thought it was funny, registering twenty times to vote.”
“Twenty-one.”
“Oh my, Fran. Oh my, what a surprise this is.”
“Here. Do somethin’ with this critter. It’s freezin’ me up.”
“You didn’t have to bring anything. And a turkey. What it must’ve cost you.”
“Iron Joe always used to tell me: Francis, don’t come by empty-handed. Hit the bell with your elbow.”
She had store teeth in her mouth. Those beauties gone. Her hair was steel-gray, only a trace of the brown left, and her chin was caved in a little from the new teeth. But that smile was the same, that honest-to-god smile. She’d put on weight: bigger breasts, bigger hips; and her shoes turned over at the counters. Varicose veins through the stocking too, hands all red, stains on her apron. That’s what housework does to a pretty kid like she was.
Like she was when she came into The Wheelbarrow.
The canalers’ and lumbermen’s saloon that Iron Joe ran at the foot of Main Street.
Prettiest kid in the North End. Folks always said that about pretty girls.
But she was.
Came in lookin’ for Iron Joe,
And Francis, working up to it for two months,
Finally spoke to her.
Howdy, he’d said.
Two hours later they were sitting between two piles of boards in Kibbee’s lumberyard with nobody to see them, holding hands and Francis saying goopy things he swore to himself he’d never say to anybody.
And then they kissed.
Not just then, but some hours or maybe even days later, Francis compared that kiss to Katrina’s first, and found them as different as cats and dogs. Remembering them both now as he stood looking at Annie’s mouth with its store teeth, he perceived that a kiss is as expressive of a way of life as is a smile, or a scarred hand. Kisses come up from below, or down from above. They come from the brain sometimes, sometimes from the heart, and sometimes just from the crotch. Kisses that taper off after a while come only from the heart and leave the taste of sweetness. Kisses that come from the brain tend to try to work things out inside other folks’ mouths and don’t hardly register. And kisses from the crotch and the brain put together, with maybe a little bit of heart, like Katrina’s, well they are the kisses that can send you right around the bend for your whole life.
But then you get one like that first whizzer on Kibbee’s lumber pile, one that come out of the brain and the heart and the crotch, and out of the hands on your hair, and out of those breasts that weren’t all the way blown up yet, and out of the clutch them arms give you, and out of time itself, which keeps track of how long it can go on without you gettin’ even slightly bored the way you got bored years later with kissin