T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“He’s a very dangerous man,” O‘Kane said to distract himself.

“Who?”

“Mr. McCormick.”

The sun, the flowers, the soft gabble of the chickens, the roar of the motor. Giovannella lifted her eyebrows.

“He’s what they call a sex maniac — you know what that is?”

She didn’t. Or at least she pretended she didn’t.

“He needs — well, he has physical needs all the time, for women, you understand? He gets violent. And if he’s not satisfied, he’ll lash out if he has the opportunity and attack a woman, any woman — even his wife.”

Her face had turned somber and he wondered if he’d gone too far, if he’d shocked her, but then the mask dissolved and she leaned in close, her hand on his elbow. “Sounds like the average man to me.”

Suddenly O‘Kane was on fire. It was as if an incendiary bomb had gone off inside him, three alarms and call out the village companies too. “Listen,” he said, “you know I really like you, you’re a real kidder, but it’s such a grinding bore here, isn’t it? What I mean is, I think I can get Roscoe to take us into town tonight in one of the Packards, that is, if you want to come… with me, I mean… together.”

She looked over her shoulder again, as if someone might be listening. Her head bobbed low and her eyes took on a sly secretive look. Her father would never let her go, O‘Kane knew that, though Baldy never suspected O’Kane was a married man. It was just the way the Italians were when it came to their women — especially their daughters. They were wary of every male between the ages of eleven and eighty, unless he was a priest, and no matter how drunk they were on their Bardolino and grappa they always had one eye open, watching, waiting, ready to pounce. He was sure she was going to say no, sure she was going to plead her father’s prohibition and her mother’s lumbago and the crying need to look after her ragged shoeless little brothers and sisters and keep the fire going under the big pot of pasta e fagioli, but she surprised him. Compressing her lips and sucking in her breath, her eyes leaping round the yard to fasten finally on his, she whispered, “What time?”

O‘Kane was drunk when he got in the car, drunk when he instructed Roscoe to pull over on a dark lane by the olive mill while Mart fidgeted in the front seat and Giovannella, dressed all in white, darted barefoot out of a gap in the oleanders and climbed into the leather seat beside him with her shoes in her hand and smelling of garlic and basil and melted butter till it made his mouth water, and he was drunk as Roscoe fought the gears and Mart looked straight ahead and Giovannella fit herself in under his arm and nuzzled the side of his face.

They had a high time of it in town, all four of them going into a lunchroom and having fried potatoes and egg sandwiches with ketchup, which sobered O‘Kane enough to allow him to concentrate on the way Giovannella sipped sarsaparilla from a straw, and then they went on to Cody Menhoff’s restaurant and saloon, where O’Kane restoked his fires with whiskey and beer till he practically attacked her on a bench out front of the Potter Hotel. And the thing was, she didn’t seem to mind, giving as good as she got, and by the time she hopped down from the car again and disappeared in the gap in the oleanders like a sweet apparition, it was past midnight and O‘Kane was in love.

By the end of the week she’d let him do everything, out under the stars by Hot Springs Creek where they lay naked for hours on a quilt his grandmother had pieced together by candlelight back in Killarney. He was careful to withdraw before he came, but she was reckless and passionate, thrashing beneath him and clinging to his shoulders and groin with a ferocity that made it almost impossible to tear himself away, and in that moment when he felt the uncontainable rush coming up in him it was like a wrestling match, like war, like the birth and death and resurrection of something as terrible as it was beautiful. But he was stronger, and he prevailed. He’d got one girl knocked up already and he was damned if he was going to knock up another one.

Giovannella sat up quaking in the rinsed-out light of the moon and sobbed over his spilled seed, touching her fingers to the glistening puddle on the taut brown drum of her abdomen and then sucking the tips of them till her lips glistened too. “Eddie,” she sobbed, over and over, “don’t you love me? Don’t you want to give me a baby? Eddie, it’s a sin, a mortal sin, and you don’t love me, I know it, you don’t.” He’d whisper nonsense to her, promise her anything, then she’d quiet down for a minute and he’d take a long drink from the jug of wine and hand the jug to her and she’d take a drink, her breasts trembling and swinging free with the movement of her arms and he’d put his hands out to steady them and press his mouth to hers to kiss away the sobs and before long they were at it again, locked together like adversaries, like lovers.

He couldn’t get enough of her. All day, every day, he felt her touch, the whole world gone tactile, electricity surging through him, his clothes chafing, the blankets on his bed itching and binding like so many hair shirts. He wanted to be naked. He wanted to be with her, wanted to touch her, taste her, run his fingers through her hair, over her breasts, into the wet silk of her cleft. He didn’t write to Rosaleen. He didn’t open her letters. She was dead and buried and so was Eddie Junior, a mistake, a mysterious excrescence that had grown up out of nothing, a mound of yeast, a toadstool, a cancer, this thing that emerged from a quick hot struggle with heavy clothes on a cold night in a cold barn. “Giovannella,” he said to himself, whispering her name even as he lowered Mr. McCormick into the shower bath or listened to the doctor go on about his monkeys or sat at breakfast with poor simple Mart and discussed the weather. “Giovannella,” he breathed, “Giovanella Dimucci. ”

A month went by. And then there came a night when he went into town with Mart and Roscoe and no thought for her. He was drunk, very drunk, and he went swimming off West Beach in his clothes and ruined his shoes and a good pair of trousers. He woke at four A.M. with a spike driven through his head, as parched as a desert nomad, and somehow she was there, in his room, perched atop him with her legs splayed and her hands balled up, muttering to herself. “You son of a bitch!” she cried the minute he opened his eyes in the gloom, the hard little nuggets of her fists raining down on his chin, his ears, his mouth, in a buffeting fury that was like a storm at sea. He tried to shush her, afraid Mart would hear from the adjoining room, or worse, Hamilton from the far side of the house, and he held up his forearms to deflect her blows, but he was too weak and too sick and her fists hit home again and again. He writhed, bucked his hips, tried to roll out from under her, cursing now, outraged and violated, the taste of his own blood on his lips, but she made a vise of her thighs and the drink sapped him until finally he could only cradle his head in his arms and wait her out.

How long it went on he couldn’t tell, but when she was done sobbing and punching and flaying his forearms with her teeth and nails, she leaned forward till her face was in his and he could feel the harsh fury of her breathing on the naked surface of his eyes, his lips, his cheekbones. Her breath was metallic. Acidic. It wilted him where he lay. “I would kill myself for you,” she hissed, “kill my parents, my sisters and brothers, kill the whole world.” And then she was gone. Through the window, out into the night, and back to the shuck mattress she shared with her sisters Marta and Marietta in the dark seething fastness of the Dimucci household.