The Sin Eater 16: One Day

Me and Ty went through a Simon and Garfunkel phase.

He had a car and I didn’t. It was a white compact car and it had been his father’s. We were both in choir and we were both stars. He took Simon, I took Garfunkel. Simon is lead. We learned every word. I learned every harmony. He would pick me up, and he would drive and we would sing the entire tape. “America” always hit me really hard. I was looking for something I wasn’t getting.

The cheating became a game with Ball even more than it had been. Breaking a woman was fun for him. Now it was not only the hunt that he would brag about. Not only the number he was slowly growing, but now it was also the way Breezy would find out. He often described the look she would get when she tasted another woman on him. He would tell me about it and laugh.

Another number and her broken heart.

One day in the trailer, his daughter was young. Maybe two years old. They had a toy that was a stuffed animal rocking ride. The kid got on the weighted stuffed animal and would sit and rock back and forth. Their feet could still touch the ground and it was a very safe toy. I loved watching Little Man and Dewdrop ride it. I saw my precious little cousin Dewdrop sitting on that toy one day and she started jumping up and down. She laughed as she bounced on it, kicking off the floor and dropping her diaper on the toy’s back.

Uncle Ball looked at that beautiful little girl and laughed. “One day she will make a man really happy, huh?”

I went to the bathroom and vomited.

One day I was riding past Uncle Wrath’s old neighborhood. He had made enough money selling baseball cards and other collectibles that he bought a big beautiful house on a hill. Soft blue with a big yard. A back porch, everything that was fine about the American Dream. We were driving past that old neighborhood, Wrath driving, Ball passenger, me excited to be going wherever I was going with them. And Wrath said, “Jesse have you fucked that girl down there yet? What was her name? Misty?”

“I’ve never dated her.”

“Who is talking about dating?” Uncle Ball said. “Did you fuck her yet?”

“No, I would never fuck a girl I am not in love with.”

They both laughed.

“You gotta get to her first. If you get to her first, and you satisfy her, then she will belong to you forever. That is the good thing about girls like her. Virgins, if you are the first to satisfy them, it doesn’t matter who they have after you. Could be any fucking stud that does anything to her, she will always love you.”

“I won’t do that to her.”

“But you could. I see the way she looks at you. I go to that church every now and then. You could pluck her without much effort,” Ball said.

“Teach her, train her,” Wrath said.

I leaned back and tried to drown them out as they told me exactly what I needed to say and exactly what I needed to do to her. But I knew it would only lead to heartbreak for her. And it made me sick to think of the pain on her beautiful, expressive face.

One day, Uncle Ball took me to a whorehouse. He didn’t tell me where we were going until we were there. He gave me seventy-five dollars and shoved me in.

I don’t remember her name. It was a lie anyway. I was seventeen but I looked nineteen, and she knew I was coming. She took me to a back room and she opened her robe. She looked at me for just a second, but she knew. She knew exactly what she was looking at.

“You’re not here to fuck, are you?”

“Uncle forced me here.”

She snuffed out her cigarette and waved the smoke out of her face. “Gonna tell me how ugly I am? Gonna tell me that I’m just trash. I bet you are a church boy, whacks it in the back pew and—”

I walked to her very slowly. I did not smile. I did not speak. I put my finger to her lips to silence the terrible things she would say, and I asked her if I could lay down in the twin bed against the wall.

“Yeah baby, you can do whatever you want on that bed.” Her voice had smoked a lot of cigarettes but there was still a chime in her tone, hidden way back in the twist of her throat.

“Jesse,” I said to her as I laid down. “Just Jesse.”

She looked at me with a shocked look on her face and said, “That’s your real name, isn’t it? You want to hold me, don’t you? You’re one of those types.”

I opened my arms to her and she crawled in bed with me. Her silk robe pulled up past the top of her thigh and I pulled it back down.

“Turn around,” I said.

She spun and gave me her back. I wrapped arms around her and I spoke.

It wasn’t me, it was Artist. “I just want to talk. I just want to caress you with my words.”

“You want to talk me off, darling?” She stuffed her hand between her legs. I pulled it away.

“I just need you to listen.”

She nodded.

Artist spoke. He talked to her the way he used to talk to Jazz.

He talked to her the way he used to talk to Ruffle.

He talked to her the way he used to talk to Precious.

Destiny.

Draconic.

He talked to her the way he would one day talk to his wife. He told her things that weren’t true. He told her things that could be true and he told her about the things he saw swimming around them.

First she pleasured herself. Then she wept. Then she reached back and gripped my hair and pulled my mouth to her ear. I can’t tell you what she smelled like. I can’t tell you what her name was because I called her so many different names. 

Ruffle.

Jazz.

Destiny.

Lip.

Kit.

I called her Love and I called her Draconic.

I called her Bekah. And I said the words I would have said, or had said to them.

She wept and she rocked back and forth and she orgasmed and she gasped and I cried. Because I knew I was not supposed to be there. Artist knew he was not supposed to be talking to her like this. Not supposed to be giving her the love he held for others. But he also knew she needed it so badly. And he knew she was being abused by the love he was wrapping around her.

“Beaten,” she gasped. “Call me Beaten.”

Then he talked to her. Then he told her all the things he felt for her.

I walked out of that room a virgin. She stumbled out and dropped into a chair across the trailer from Ball. Her hands trembled when she grabbed her cigarette, and she could not light it. Shadow took her lighter from her and gave her fire. Then he walked out.

“We need to flip the mattress,” he heard her say with a wavering voice as he walked back out into the hot Missouri summer. Ball didn’t speak to me at all on the way home.

One day he asked me if I had ever been in love.

“A few times. Jazz, Destiny, Precious, Draconic. A few times,” I said. “But you have only been in love once.”

“One day we will talk about her.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Well Uncle Ball, one day you will read this. And when you do, you will realize that this was the day. This was the time we talked about love and we talked about Glass. This is your story as much as it is mine. I don’t like telling other people’s stories, but see you and I are intwined. Your life. My life. They were bound together by a priest in a Lutheran Church when I was five.

You’re my godfather. You were supposed to raise me to be a man. And I guess you did. Because I am a man. I took everything you taught me and I turned it around. I held it from behind and I whispered stories to it. I called it many names and it has pulled me close to its ear and asked for more.

I’m going to go out now and smoke a cigarette. I’m going to think about you the whole time I am doing it. I have been thinking about you for a long time. Four decades and a year ago, you told me about my number. You told me I needed to work that number.

Yours was how many women you have fucked and dropped.

Mine is how many I have loved with some, part, or all of my life.

One day you will read this.

One day.