Carnal Innocence

liquor just fine, and had proven it since he was fifteen. And Sissy Koons had known just what she was getting when she’d spread her legs for him. Had he blamed her for getting pregnant? No sir. He’d married her, bought her a nice house and all the pretty clothes she wanted.
    Given her more than she’d deserved, Dwayne told himself now, remembering the letter. If she thought he was going to let that guitar-playing shoe hawker adopt his blood children, she had another think coming. He’d see her in hell first. And he’d be damned if he’d buckle under to that veiled threat that she’d take him back to court if he didn’t increase his monthly child support payments.
    It wasn’t the money. He didn’t give a damn about money. Tucker took care of all that. It was the principle. More money, she’d said in her wheedling way, or your sons’ll be wearing another man’s name.
    His children, he thought again, his symbol of his own immortality. And he had a fondness for them, of course. They were his blood, after all, his link to the future, his shackles to the past. That was why he sent them presents and candy bars. But it was a whole lot different if you had to deal with them face-to-face.
    He could still remember how Little Dwayne— who’d been no more than three—had wailed and cried when he walked in on his daddy during a mean drunk. Dwayne had been getting a lot of satisfaction out of smashing Sissy’s company glasses against the wall.
    Then Sissy had run in, scooping up Little Dwayne as if his father had been tossing
him
against the wall instead of the gold-rimmed tumblers. And the baby had started to bawl.
    Dwayne had just stood there, wanting nothing more than to bash all their heads together.
    You want something to cry for? By God, I’ll give you something to cry for.
    That’s what his daddy would have said, and the lot of them would have trembled in their boots.
    He thought maybe he had said it, too. Maybe he’d screamed it. But Sissy hadn’t trembled, she just screamed back at him, her face all red, her eyes full of fury and disgust.
    He almost slapped her. Dwayne remembered he came within a hair of knocking her sideways. He even lifted his arm and saw his father’s hand on the end of it.
    Instead, he stumbled out and drove off to wreck another car.
    Sissy had the door bolted when Burke hauled him home the next day. And that had been a powerful humiliation. Not being able to get into his own house, and having his wife shout out through the window that she was going down to Greenville to see a lawyer.
    Innocence had been ripe with talks for weeks about how Sissy kicked Dwayne out of the house and tossed his clothes through the upstairs window. He had to drink himself into oblivion for days to be able to take it with a shrug.
    Women just messed up the natural order of things. Now here was Sissy, popping back to do it again.
    What made it worse, what made it bitter, was that Sissy was going to do something with her life. She’d shed Sweetwater as easily as a snake sheds skin, and was moving on. While he—he was bound and mired in generations of Longstreet obligations. The expectations a father passed on to his son. A woman didn’t have that to tie her down.
    No, a woman could do just as she damn well pleased. It was easy to hate them for that.
    Dwayne tipped back the bottle and brooded. He watched the dark water, and as he sometimes did, imagined himself just walking into it, going under, taking a big, deadly drink, and sinking to the bottom with his lungs full of lake.
    His eyes still on the surface, he drank, drowning himself in whiskey instead.
    · · ·
    At a table at McGreedy’s Tavern, Josie was just heating up. Next to the beauty parlor, the tavern was her favorite spot in town. She loved its dark, whiskey-soaked walls, its sticky floors, its rocky tables. She loved it every bit as much as she loved the equally boozy but much more elegant parties she often attended in Atlanta and Charlotte and Memphis.
    It never failed to cheer her up to walk into that smoke- and liquor-tainted air, listen to the country sounds on the juke, to the voices raised in anger or amusement, the snap of pool balls from the room in the back.
    She’d brought Teddy here to down a few beers at her favorite table—under the head of the scarred old buck McGreedy had bagged back when people were pinning I like Ike buttons to their lapels.
    She slapped Teddy on the back, hooted with laughter at an outrageous joke