Mohawk

me.”
    “Some people would say I just had it.”
    She put her head on his chest and traced her index finger along his abdomen. “Not you,” she said. “You tell me, then. What?”
    The girl sighed. “I don’t know. Something weird, probably, knowing you.”
    Why did people say things like that about him, Randall wondered. It was as if someone had started a rumor when he was a baby and by now everybody had heard it. He never seemed strange to himself, despite the conventional wisdom. They lay quietly, and the girlwas nearly asleep, her head on his chest, when the baby cried and she got up. This was Randall’s first time in a trailer, and this particular one seemed so precariously balanced that whenever anybody moved, his first instinct was to grab for a support.
    “I know what I like about you,” she said when she returned, yawning, from the baby’s bedroom. “You never fall asleep after we screw.”
    “You do.”
    “Somebody has to be first.”
    “I never thought of that.”
    “Night.” She closed her eyes and went right to sleep.
    What
did
he want with her? “Did you read the paper tonight?” he asked.
    She grunted awake. “What?”
    “Did you?”
    “No.”
    “You should—it’s full of interesting stuff. Did you know that another kid from Mohawk got killed in Vietnam?”
    She didn’t say anything.
    “That’s not even the interesting part,” he said. “Would you like to know the interesting part?”
    “No.”
    “The interesting part is that the guy who got killed beat me up once when I was a kid. Right out back of Harry’s. Then your uncle showed up, saved my goose and cooked his own.”
    “So. What’s the point?”
    “No point at all. Go to sleep.”
    “Okay,” she said, and closed her eyes. Then she opened them. “You mad?”
    “Of course not.”
    “And there really wasn’t a point?”
    “Not a point in the world.”
    “Good,” she said. “I’m always missing the point, and I hate it.”
    Thirty seconds later her breathing was rhythmic, her eyelids fluttering. Randall was free to watch her. The girl wasn’t nearly as pretty asleep as she was awake—as if consciousness were the main focus on her beauty. Asleep, she looked seventeen-going-on-thirty-five. It had never occurred to Randall that people assumed postures in their sleep, but B.G. did. Asleep, her body lost its confidence, and he wondered what she’d look like when she really was thirty-five.
    It would’ve been nice if she’d stayed awake long enough to talk. Not that he blamed her for conking out. Nobody at Harry’s worked harder than she did, running back and forth between rooms, between the racing-formers at the counter and the argumentative old bags eating chicken salad platters. The latter required her to be handy without intruding. She was too pretty not to be an annoyance among such women, some of whom once were pretty in the same way she now was. When she was at the table, they wanted her to go away; but if she stayed away too long, they felt slighted and would scrimp on the tip. At the lunch counter the men wanted her to linger and listen to slightly off-color jokes calculated to make her blush. The men seldom came on strong, being as shy as they’d always been, but didn’t like to be ignored. She found that if she joked with them and indulged their fantasies, they treated her well enough. She didn’t mind the remarks they made when her back was turned, the hastily exchanged glances, the ooooh-shaped lips. At the end of the work day she wanted to play with the baby, get laid and go to sleep. She told Randall she didn’t thinkabout her husband any more, and as far as he could tell she literally meant what she said. She didn’t mean that she’d stopped worrying about him, or being angry with him for abandoning her and the baby, or guilty about being unfaithful to his tainted memory. As far as she was concerned, he just didn’t exist any more.
    She wasn’t much of a talker anyway, or even a listener. Maybe that was why Randall enjoyed talking to her. She seldom responded to anything he said; and if she had any reaction at all, it was frequently puzzlement, as if she hadn’t any idea where such odd notions came from. After college professors, Randall found her refreshing, and the more she frowned at him, the more critical he became of what he heard himself saying. He had attempted, just once, to explain to her the nature of ethical dilemmas, but gave up once he realized her own daily life had