Naked Came the Stranger - By Penelope Ashe Page 0,8

knotted up."

Sixty-eight thousand fans were screaming in the stadium. But on Barnacle Drive in King's Neck at the home of Ernie Miklos there was only quiet. Gillian had disengaged herself, risen. She looked at Ernie and reached down to touch him gently. He didn't stir. So that's it, Gillian thought. It's over in less than a minute and already it is as though nothing had happened. Ernie didn't acknowledge her presence in any way. He was watching the set again, watching Army kick off to Notre Dame.

Ernie was dozing when Laverne called from downstairs.

"Isn't it over yet?" she said.

Ernie rubbed his eyes, and all he could see was the face of Walter Cronkite. His hangover was gone and so was Gillian. He could hear kids running across the kitchen floor and the sound of the dishwasher being activated.

"You couldn't even wash the goddam dishes." Laverne was yelling.

He came downstairs then and she asked him whether the game had gone into extra innings. Laverne never knew when the baseball season ended and the football season began and Ernie never bothered to explain it to her. What was the use? What in goddam hell was the use? He returned to complete consciousness as he went back upstairs, and wondered vaguely what had happened to Gillian. His T-shirt was on the floor. The only trace of his visitor was the empty cocktail glass. He shoved it into his desk drawer and went into the bathroom. His eyes were puffy. He turned around to look at Gillian's brand on his back. Goddam broads who scratch. They should all be declawed.

"I'll be right down," he shouted from the bathroom door. He turned on the shower.

When Ernie finally crawled into bed, he was played out. Still, sleep came hard. Laverne was suspicious when he put on pajama tops. Ernie never wore pajama tops, even in winter. In fact, the only reason he wore pajama bottoms was that Laverne had made it a condition for sharing the same bed. Sometimes now he wondered why he had ever wanted to share the same bed. They'd been married fifteen years but sometimes, on nights like this one, Ernie felt he had been born married. Born married. He remembered his father used to say something like that – exactly that, as a matter of fact, whenever he got high on boilermakers. That had been his father's salvation, those boilermakers on payday at the bar across the street from the paymaster's shack at the zinc works. Ernie sometimes thought about Donita, Pennsylvania, and how far he had come from that. It was only four hundred miles but it was a whole other world.

Donita was one of those mill towns that edge the Monongahela River on its flow to Pittsburgh. Like all those towns, it was dirty and its people were poor, not so much in money as in spirit. The mill did it to the town. Its people were a potpourri of Polish immigrants, Irish and Negroes. The parents worked, got drunk, reproduced, died young, figured on the same life for their children, only hoping it might happen somewhere else than Donita.

The Donita football teams were the terror of the state, and Ernie Miklos was the terror of the team and this was his salvation. Lying there late at night, listening to the snores of the stranger who shared his bed, Ernie liked to think back and remember those days, the days of his escape. It was about the only time all day anyone would let him think.

Ernie's father had liked to sing; he had never forgotten his father's voice, especially when he'd had one or two. He had the soul of a poet, Ernie felt. But the mill in those days was the beginning and the end. The town was built around the mill and had never been broken up into sections for slums or ethnic groups. The money people, the mill owners, lived eighteen miles beyond town limits and everyone else lived in town. Ernie's house was just a spot somewhere midway between abject poverty and blind hope. There were nine children in that house and Ernie had always been the favorite. He was the second of two sons; the older boy had died of consumption.

Ernie never disappointed his father, and that was important to him. Those days after the football games and his father hitting him across his back and the girls waiting for him to come by. Ernie had gotten laid when he was thirteen, by Sonia,