Machine Dreams

team manager and stayed late. Afternoons, she worked with her father in the billiard room, doing food orders for customers while Shinner poured drafts and saw to the tables. Billy played pool or shot the bull with Shinner until he had to go home to supper. Later, he phoned. Saturday nights they went to the movies at the Colonial, then walked across the street and upstairs to Kato’s room. They were always alone then and they didn’t have to hurry. Sometimes Billy fell asleep afterward, as though her bedroom were his own, then got up and left after midnight.
    He supposed they’d acted grown-up long before they really were. But in some ways Kato was never a kid. Her mother had died a long time before, and she and her brothers had raised themselves. Shinner didn’t impose many rules, and he drank. Billy had cleaned him up a few times to save Kato’s doing it. Shinner wasn’t a mean drunk but he was fairly dependable; twice a month he’d drink himself into a stupor. One of the brothers or even Kato ran the billiard room then, though it meant she served beer. She hadn’t turned drinking age until recently, but the cops knew the story and looked the other way.
    Billy had gotten used to it all gradually, so nothing hadseemed odd. Only now he wondered, because he wondered about everything. Shinner had bought the building outright with an inheritance years before, and the family lived upstairs. He had no overhead and a pretty good business; there weren’t money problems but the rooms upstairs looked impoverished. A rug, one long couch, a cheap maple coffee table, and a color TV console in the living room. Arrangement of blue plastic flowers on the console. The kitchen with its Formica table and chairs, its prefab cabinets and old sink. A dishwasher, outcast and new, off by itself on one wall. A low ceiling full of pipes. Kato’s bedroom: white child’s bureau, big stuffed animals, presents from Billy, on the floor. A double bed on a frame. Dimestore full-length mirror he’d helped her mount on the back of the door, the closed door. They kept a box of rubbers under the bed, though Shinner would never have bothered looking.
    He liked Billy well enough. Sundays, Billy ate dinner with them in the kitchen, Rice-a-Roni and pork chops Kato cooked in a big frying pan. The two brothers, three and four years older than Kato, ate when they passed through the kitchen. The boys more or less roomed above the billiard hall and kept no particular hours. The older one was 4F—
basketball, hell
, Shinner said,
he messed up that elbow leaning on too many pool tables
—and worked in the mines near town. The other played football at Lynchburg State. Weeknights, whoever was around ate downstairs at the counter: hot dogs, fries, hamburgers made at the grill, and beer. Sundays, anytime, Billy loved being with Kato above the billiard hall. He liked all the nearly empty rooms. He loved how she looked, like she didn’t need anything else around her.
    Last spring, senior year, when it was certain he’d go away to college, things had gotten bad between them. She flirted with other guys and went out with some. He wasn’t about to ask her why or yell at her; he just got his class ring back and stayed away. Now she was going out with some city cop who hung around the billiard room; cops ate lunch there. Billy saw her now and then, not much; she didn’t hang around with the high school crowd anymore. The cop was seven or eight years older—apparently they went to Winfield to supper clubs, and skeet shooting. Maybe it wasn’t so strange; cops around town had always gone easy onShinner, and the whole family had reason to be nice to them. But what did she think was happening to her?
    Danner had asked Billy, around graduation, if he’d thought of marrying Kato. He hadn’t. He didn’t want to be married. He couldn’t see Kato married either, to anybody. But nothing was right anymore.
    His parents were glad when it ended, especially Jean. She’d talked to him about it in July or so. She was sorry, she told him, but after all, he and Kato were so young. And Kato might be a nice person—her father and Jean had gone to high school together and, no matter what anyone said, there wasn’t a better person in this town than Shinner Black—but Kato had never had a mother to teach her certain things. Would she ever have made the kind of home Billy had grown up in, the kind he might someday want?
    Billy didn’t know what he wanted. Jean had gone