Friend of My Youth

else to do, and after a moment he churns back onto the pavement and she starts walking again.
    That’s all right, she’s not in any real danger. She doesn’t even worry about being seen by someone she knows. She feels too free to care. She thinks about the first time Neil came to the Furniture Barn, how he put his arm around Samson’s neck and said, “Not much of a watchdog you got here, Ma’am.” She thought the “Ma’am” was impudent, phony, out of some old Elvis Presley movie. And what he said next was worse. She looked at Samson, and she said, “He’s better at night.” And Neil said, “So am I.” Impudent, swaggering, conceited, she thought. And he’s not young enough to get away with it. Her opinion didn’t even change so much the second time. What happened was that all that became just something to get past. It was something she could let him know he didn’t have to do. It was her job to take his gifts seriously, so that he could be serious, too, and easy and grateful. How was she sure so soon that what she didn’t like about him wasn’t real?
    When she’s in the second mile, or maybe just the second half of the first mile, the Mercury catches up to her. It pulls onto the gravel across the road. She goes over and gets in. She doesn’t see why not. It doesn’t mean that she is going to talk to him, or be with him any longer than the few minutes it will take to drive to the swamp road and the van. His presence doesn’t need to weigh on her any more than the grit blowing beside the road.
    She winds the window all the way down so that there will be a rush of chilly wind across anything he may have to say.
    “I want to beg your pardon for the personal remarks,” he says.
    “Why?” she says. “It’s true. It is fat.”
    “No.”
    “It is,” she says, in a tone of bored finality that is quite sincere. It shuts him up for a few miles, until they’ve turned down the swamp road and are driving in under the trees.
    “If you thought there was a needle there in the drawer, there wasn’t.”
    “It isn’t any of my business what there was,” she says.
    “All that was in there was some Percs and Quaaludes and a little hash.”
    She remembers a fight she had with Cornelius, one that almost broke their engagement. It wasn’t the time he slapped her for smoking marijuana. They made that up quickly. It wasn’t about anything to do with their own lives. They were talking about a man Cornelius worked with at the mine, and his wife, and their retarded child. This child was just a vegetable, Cornelius said; all it did was gibber away in a sort of pen in a corner of the living room and mess its pants. It was about six or seven years old, and that was all it would ever do. Cornelius said he believed that if anybody had a child like that they had a right to get rid of it. He said that was what he would do. No question about it. There were a lot of ways you could do it and never get caught, and he bet that was what a lot of people did. He and Brenda had a terrible fight about this. But all the time they were arguing and fighting Brenda suspected that this was not something Cornelius would really do. It was something he had to say he would do. To her. To her, he had to insist that he would do it. And this actually made her angrier at him than she would have been if she believed he was entirely and brutally sincere. He wanted her to argue with him about this. He wanted her protest, her horror, and why was that? Men wanted you to make a fuss, about disposing of vegetable babies or taking drugs or driving a car like a bat out of hell, and why was that? So they could haveyour marshmallow sissy goodness to preen against, with their hard showoff badness? So that they finally could give in to you, growling, and not have to be so bad and reckless anymore? Whatever it was, you got sick of it.
    In the mine accident, Cornelius could have been crushed to death. He was working the night shift when it happened. In the great walls of rock salt an undercut is made, then there are holes drilled for explosives, and the charges are fitted in; an explosion goes off every night at five minutes to midnight. The huge slice of salt slides loose, to be started on its journey to the surface. Cornelius was lifted up in a cage on the end of the arm of the scaler. He was to break off the loose material on the roof and fix in the bolts that held it for the explosion. Something went wrong with the hydraulic controls he was