Losing Cherry

Eighteen-year-old Cherry is pregnant by a man twice her age, but her problems go from bad to worse when she encounters murder, mayhem and madness in her journey of self-discovery.

Chapter 1

I was seven months pregnant at the time Troy Brewster tied me to the chair and threatened me and my folks with a gun. I think he’d had too much to drink on account of it being our wedding day. Right after that I had the baby.

I was eighteen when I met Troy. I had been planning to get a job as a beautician but life kinda got in the way. Troy was thirty-seven. It seemed weird at first ‘cos my Moma was the same age as he was and she said no good would come of it and I ought be earning a living before I thought about getting myself hitched to anyone, but nature took over in that argument and I ended up pregnant. Anyway, I was thinking Troy would look after me - I was that dumb.

Moma wanted me to get an abortion. She couldn’t abide the thought that a man the same age as her could father her grandchild. I don’t think whether I was old enough or not really came into it. Moma had always wanted a big family, but I was the only child she had. Maybe she thought I’d let her down; maybe she wanted to take her revenge on my unborn child, though Lord knows it hadn’t done anything to ask for it. My father worked on the Southwest Chief; the train running through Gallup to Santa Fe, Las Vegas and Raton. We weren’t from around these parts; we come from over the border in Colorado, so we stuck out like cloves in an apple pie. Least, that's what Pa said, and up until then he'd given me no cause to disbelieve him.

Anyhow, right after Moma found out I was in the family way she fixed for me to go visit the Doc and he said he knew someone who could make everything okay again. Which meant Moma would pay a whole chunk of rainy day money out to some little old lady with a coat hanger. Least that was what my friend Maria Running-Wind said would happen. I was so innocent I believed Maria and I couldn’t let that happen to my poor baby, no sir. So I went straight to Troy and I told him he got to marry me, because if he didn't I’d tell the world his most cherished secret. I didn’t know whether he had a cherished secret or not, but I was bargaining on him having one though. Hell who doesn’t? He wasn’t very happy about it I can tell you that for nothing.

Well now Troy's wife had run off with a carpet salesman from Phoenix three years back, and right after Troy had filed for divorce so I knew he was free to marry me, and I also knew he didn’t have any kids to worry about, so I couldn’t see what the problem would be, but Troy just got so antsy about the whole thing that I was sorely tempted to go let Moma fix it with the coat hanger woman. You see Troy didn’t think I was really that young and I have to admit I did let on I was nearer twenty-four than eighteen.

I remember one night I met Troy down by the bridge back of the chicken factory at six o’clock. It was a Friday. A warm wind was blowing the smell of dying chickens from the East and my hair wouldn’t set straight. I watched him walk out of the gates to the factory and thought he could be eighteen like me. He didn’t have to be thirty-seven. He could be any age I wanted. He was a lean man with a bony face and a wisp of a goatee beard that didn’t look as if it ever grew any longer even though he never shaved it. So I played this game; I gave him and me a new age and new names and, as he walked towards me, I pretended he was already my husband and I was his pretty little wife meeting him from work. We were Mr and Mrs Charles Benton and he was twenty-five and I was, like I said, twenty-four. Well Troy walked right up to me and grabbed me by the arm and whirled me around like he was in some kind of a real state about something.

“I thought I told you never to meet me out of work.”

“But Troy I was only...”

“You’re a jumped up b***h and I never want to see you again.” He had a hold on my arm like he wanted to tear it right out of my shoulder.

"Troy? Troy we have to talk."

He stopped in his tracks and faced me.

"Ain't it just a little too late for talk?"

"Troy I..." He didn’t give me a chance to explain. He marched me right to the edge of the bridge and pushed me forward so that the bricks cut right into my belly. I could see the water down below and I thought this is a mighty fine way to end your life; going over the top of a bridge and floating all the way down to the sea though I hadn’t ever seen the sea. Maria Running-Wind hadn’t ever seen the sea either and I thought that if I got out of this mess with Troy I might ask her if she wanted to catch the Greyhound bus down to the coast. We could sleep on the beach like I'd heard folks did in Florida. Florida seemed such a long way off even when I had the view of the river going down to the sea over the bridge to remind me.

Troy had a handful of my hair and he twisted it and twisted it until I screamed with the pain. Then he kind of came out of a dream world and let go of me. I don’t know exactly what had come over him, but whatever it was it was gone in an instant. I turned toward him slowly, just in case he reared up nasty again, but he just put his hand on my belly, which wasn’t that big yet, and cried. Tears rolled right down his face. He set down on his knees and buried his head in my belly and I felt his tears through my dress and I couldn’t hold back my own pain. We must’ve looked a real sight, him and me; the bleached grass and desert air, the bright blue sky fading to night, the chicken factory and us two poor lost souls weeping for our unborn child as the Friday night shift got off work.

The Starlight motel was right on the intersection. It was a quiet place catering for the needs of salesmen and cheating husbands mostly. Troy lived in a chicken-s**t trailer no bigger than a dog kennel and he didn’t like to have company drop in there, so when we needed to be alone we would rent a room at the Starlight, overlooking the car park, and Troy would bring a bottle of bourbon and I would make like the place was home. That Friday night we ended up at the Starlight, but Troy didn’t have any booze with him and it didn’t feel much like any kind of home to me. We didn’t even do the business.

Troy's love making was limited to a fumble under the sheets. It was a wonder how I had gotten pregnant in the first place. Anyhow, I thought maybe Troy and I were closer because of all that had happened between us, but I guess he had seven kinds of demons inside of him and he was no place I could reach. I just sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the nets and wondered why it was I loved him when he reminded me so much of my Pa. Mostly I would think about getting my nails manicured like Consuela's. Consuela had the longest, most highly polished nails west of the Mississippi. I heard Moma tell that Consuela paid a woman to do her nails because she couldn’t keep her hands still unless they were resting on the table. It may have been on account of the booze Consuela knocked back, but then Moma may just have been exaggerating. Moma was given to exaggerating. Anyhow you cannot beat getting your nails done properly.

That night Troy locked himself in the john and didn’t come out all night. I don’t know what he was doing in there and I didn’t dare knock the door and ask. I lay down on the bed and hugged my knees, because I could imagine the child inside my belly better that way even though it didn’t seem real yet and wasn't no bigger than an apple seed.

Right around four in the morning, Troy lit out of the motel. I remember because I hadn’t been able to get any sleep and when I heard the door go I looked at the clock. He never kissed me goodbye or looked at me or nothing. I could have followed him I guess, but it wouldn’t have done no good. A man with a problem is like a tornado; you got to leave him be until he calms right down to a breeze again. I waited until I was sure he’d gone and then I got up and went for a pee. Right away I knew he’d been shooting up. There was a needle in the basin. The whole place smelt like he’d let off a thousand times and I had to get out of there. I stepped out into the dawn and wondered what Pa would say this time. It was little more than four thirty by then and the sun was rising out on the rim of the world. The weekend shift would be clocking in at the chicken factory and I thought of all those poor birds about to meet their maker, and Maria Running-Wind and me on a beach in Florida, or some place similar.

My Pa was waiting for me on the porch when I got home. He wanted to know where I'd been, not that it had ever mattered to him before. I think he might have been sitting up all night.

"This time it's different" he said.

"Why" I asked.

"Because a woman in your condition shouldn’t go putting it about at four in the morning." He hadn’t ever called me a woman before. I guess the problem had suddenly hit home.

“I went to see Troy. I thought we’d be getting married now." I was hot and tired and I didn’t want my Pa mad at me so early in the day.

"I'll handle him. You just get yourself to bed before your mother sees you."

He watched me go inside and I could hear him grumbling to himself about the sins of the fathers and I thought that perhaps he had flipped. I went into my room and closed the door and lay down on the bed. The heat was already up although the sun wasn’t high yet and I could feel sweat on my back, so I pulled off my dress and lay there naked watching my belly rise and fall. I knew my Pa would fix things right and that I would be hitched to Troy sooner or later and I hoped sooner because I didn’t want to be a single mother and I sure didn’t want to go see the coat hanger woman. I must have slipped over the edge into sleep. When I woke Moma was sitting in the chair across the room watching me like she used to when I was a little girl.

That's more or less what happened. Six months later Troy married me. It took all the persuading Moma and I could muster, but then I didn't know the half of it, and I think he did it more out of a sense of duty than anything else. We never did get real close again, not like that moment on the bridge when he had bared his soul to the baby.

It couldn’t be a church wedding on account of Troy's divorce and the fact that folks around here are just so damned religious so we went to the Justice of the Peace and then Moma persuaded the Priest to bless us after. I was sad that I hadn’t had a real white wedding and all but Moma said that those folks who go getting themselves pregnant before they’re hitched don’t deserve a decent wedding and that I was lucky Troy had finally agreed to marry me anyway. I could tell that Troy was higher than the wisps of cloud that hung in the sky that morning and I wondered just exactly what I had let myself in for. Maria Running-Wind said she would be my bridesmaid and then at the last moment dipped out of it with the excuse that some family problem had reared its ugly head and she had to go down to the Pueblo with her Moma.

No matter, the deed was done and I was a married woman. I don’t want to say much more about tying the knot because it wasn’t much of anything 'cepting that we both got to say, "I do". We went back to my folks' house and Pa and Troy sat on the porch drinking tequilas while Moma and me made sopaipillas and tried to keep the flies at bay. It was a hot June day. I could hear Pa whispering to Troy about us finding someplace else to live that was better than the beat up trailer Troy slept in.

"You can’t go expecting a wife to live in a trailer,” he kept saying and all Troy said was "nope". That's all he said.

I didn’t know then that this would be the last time I ever saw my family all together again. The kitchen was hot and dusty and I had maize flour smeared on my face where I kept on pushing my hair back from my eyes. All the time the baby kept right on kicking me in the ribs and I laughed and smiled at my Moma, because despite the fact that she had wanted me to go get an abortion I had done the right thing in the end and married the man I loved.

I set a sopaipilla down on the side. Pa was shouting at Troy out on the porch, but his words didn’t make any kind of sense and Moma ran outside to see what was happening. I stood on tippy-toe at the open window and wished that there was a breeze that afternoon when the screen door slammed back against its hinges and Moma came flying in through the door. Troy pushed Pa inside and Pa wasn’t making no attempt to stop him. Moma screamed and Troy drew a gun out of his shirt and pointed it at Moma's head.

"One word from you and she’ll get it." Troy snarled at my Pa and shoved him back down on a kitchen chair.

Pa was kind of shrunk up like a used watermelon. I think he was scared to do anything on account of the gun but it could just have been the drink. Troy grabbed me by the neck and held the gun then to my head. I wasn’t frightened at that point because I'd seen Troy get riled before and this wasn’t anything new to me, so I just stood there and waited for him to calm down. Moma was crying and crying and Pa wrapped his arm round her and was trying to calm her down.

"Why aren’t you screaming too?" Troy shouted at me and he shook me by the neck until I thought my head would roll right off. I couldn’t say anything because the words wouldn’t come out past Troy's hand but I felt tears in the corners of my eyes and I knew that I hadn’t meant to cry but that this was one of those things that happen when you’re stressed out.

Troy pushed me down on a chair undid his belt and tied me to the chair so that the buckle on the belt dug into my fat belly. Then he held the gun against my head. My Moma and Pa were huddled together against the table and I couldn’t think straight anymore. It was like a nightmare only it didn’t seem as real as that even. I noticed that the flies had started to settle on the sopaipillas and I could see honey running out of one of them and I thought that we would have to make more now.

"Why is this happening Troy”I asked, but he never answered. He just looked at my Moma and twisted the gun against my head.

"This is what you done to me" he snarled at Pa.

"What" asked my Pa, although it was barely a whisper. Pa looked used up. He was two years younger than Troy but he looked more used up than a man twice his age.

"You forced me to marry her. I should have done this a long time ago instead of letting you con me into something I didn't want."

I closed my eyes and felt Troy place the barrel of the gun against my forehead again and at that moment I almost wished he would pull the trigger. Then the baby kicked me hard in the ribs and I let out a little cry. No more than a yelp but it was enough to cause Moma to rise slightly from her chair towards me. Her hand was stretched out and she had tears rolling down her face.

"Oh my poor baby, my poor, poor baby" she said.

"Quit the noise" growled Troy and he struck Moma across the face with the butt of the gun. Moma went down on the floor and at that moment a ripple of pain cut through my belly like I had never had before. Pa didn’t do anything. He just sat there like he had seen it all coming and was ready now to take his punishment. I grabbed the table with one hand and with the other tried to free myself from the belt, but the pain kept on coming and it was all I could do to breathe. I closed my eyes for one moment, trying to draw strength, and when I opened them Troy was gone. Just like that. One moment he was standing there like a mad man and the next it was a hot June afternoon, the screen door was banging and more flies were circling the sopaipillas on the table ready to take over when the others had finished. Moma got up off the floor, her face a mess of bruises, blood and flour and Pa put his hand up to his mouth and scowled at me.

"I told you no good would come of it" he snapped.

The pain in my gut stabbed again and then I realised that I was sitting in a puddle. My waters had broken and I hadn’t even noticed until now. I clutched my belly and Moma came right over to me and put her arm round me.

"Billy-Ray she's having the baby, go phone the Doctor or something."

"I'll get the truck,” said Pa.

"You do that, Billy-Ray, you do that." Moma undid the belt that still held me to the chair and I felt like the whole world was about to slide out of my backside.

"Don't move,” she said. "As soon as your Pa's got the truck round the side I'll help you in. Don't move."

I heard her turn away from me and pick up the phone but I didn’t see her because my eyes were closed. All I kept thinking was; it’s too early - it’s way too early."

 

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