The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  But my sister, she coulda come back for me. She coulda taken me outta that hellhole, but she never did. Never gived me no second thought. I heard about it when she finally run off for good—where I grew up, everybody knew everybody else’s business—and she didn’t bother to come fetch me afore she upped and gone.

  I think maybe it’d been better if she’d just died. That way I’d still’ve felt abandoned, but it wouldn’ta been her fault. I still coulda loved the memory of her. But the way she done it, it was just plain meanness and there’s not one damn thing I love about her. Not then and not now.

  Anywise, like I was saying, once I sliced Pinky’s knife across the back of Del’s knee, everything changed again. Del he didn’t make no more midnight visits to my room. He was hobbling around for months, playing the brave soldier, done protected his sister and the house and all. Jimmie and Robbie could see he was cautious of me, and that made them keep their own distance. There wasn’t much to the pair a them, the one dumber than the next, but they had a dog’s sense about the lay of the land. Knew when to back off and when they could follow the bullying ways they learned from Del.

  The old man didn’t seem to notice any change, but Mama sure did. ’Cept I wouldn’t take crap from her anymore’n I’d take it from anyone else.

  Oh, we was wild in those days, me and Pinky, but I learned from my sister’s mistakes. I didn’t run off so that the cops could bring me home again. I didn’t skip school, though I just sat there like some old tree stump from the time I got there in the morning until the bell rang at the end of the day. I didn’t get in trouble, in or outta school—or at least I didn’t get caught, which works out to be about the same thing. I wasn’t going to end up in juvie, find myself in some girls’ home with a buncha dykes and a broom handle up my hole, and I wasn’t going into no foster home neither. I wanted my freedom, so I played dumb, but I lived smart.

  Like the time Pinky decides she’s gonna get back at Mr. Haven, our algebra teacher. It’s not that he’s flunking us, which he is, like we care. It’s that Pinky finds out he’s been boning her cousin, Sherry. Has her come by his house for extra tutoring and puts it to her, twice a week. Lets her know that if she squeals, they’re gonna come and take her away from her parents, stick her sorry ass in jail till she’s old and gray, because there’s laws against little girls seducing their teachers.

  I know, I know. Sherry’s a sweet kid, but not exactly the sharpest pencil in the box, believing that line of crap. She’s got the face of a little, angel, the body of a woman, and the brains of a squirrel. Sorta runs in the Miller line some, I guess, her being kin to Pinky and all. And the real trouble is, while she developed too soon, like me, she don’t got her the spine I do. Ain’t her fault. Took Pinky and her knife to give me mine. And you know, there’s no reason a kid should need that kinda hardness sitting inside her, ’cept there’s freaks out there just a-waiting to take advantage of all them little girls that don’t.

  What Haven’s done to her’s the same difference as what Del done to me. Somebody what’s supposed to be looking out for you—your family, your teacher—they ain’t supposed to break that trust. But it happens all the same. Happens all the goddamn time and there’s nothing we can do about it ’cept make the freaks pay when we can.

  How this all come out is Haven don’t have no use for rubbers, so Sherry finds herself fourteen and pregnant, her old man right ready to kill her, she don’t tell who she’s been catting ’round with. Sherry, she’s too damned scared of what Haven told her to say a word. More scared of going to jail than she is of the lickins her old man gives her. Just starts in on crying anytime anybody asks her anything.

  But sooner or later, every dam’s gotta spring a leak, and Sherry’s leak sprung one night when Pinky were visiting with her, just the two of them in that ugly old double-wide her family’s living in.

  “You got to promise you won’t tell nobody,” Sherry says.

  “I promise,” Pinky lies, ’cause she told me, didn’t she?

  And that’s what brings us to me and Pinky sitting on a picnic table out behind the donut shop the next day. I seen Pinky mad afore, but not like this. Usually there’s a lotta hollering going on. She’s gonna cut this and bust that. But she’s real quiet today. All that mad she’s carrying is just a-sittin’ there in her eyes, burning and smoldering. I was Haven, I’d be worrying ’bout now.

  “I’m gonna say he raped me,” Pinky says. “Sherry ain’t never gonna step up and talk her own self, so I’ll just say it was me he done it to.”

  At least she isn’t talking ’bout going by his house with a baseball bat and breaking his legs, or sticking a knife in his gut like she done with Russell Henderson, but this ain’t a whole lot better.

  “You can’t be doing that,” I tell her.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for cutting the freak down my own self, the piece of work that he is, but there’s a right way and a wrong to go about things. The right way is, you get what you want, but no one even knows you was anywheres near where it went down.

  “Like hell, I cain’t,” Pinky says. “You just watch me.”

  But I shake my head. “I ain’t saying, let it go. I’m saying that showboating ain’t our only option here.”

  We been friends a long time, but this past year, Pinky’s got herself a whole new respect for the way I can worry at a trouble, figure a way out that keeps us on top.

  “So what’re you saying?” she asks.

  “Hold your horses,” I tell her. “Let me think on it a minute.”

  The trick to any damn thing is keeping it simple, but I guess I couldn’t help but want to showboat some, even if it was only me and Pinky what knowed how it went down.

  ‘Round then there was this hillbilly Mafia up north of Tyson that pretty much run the bootlegging trade. The Morgan family, they was called, and they had them a place in Freakwater Hollow, up off of ’Shine Road. You’d see ’em in town from time to time, clannish and mean-looking and all of a kind, tall and lean with their silvery blond hair and dark eyes. Time was they had them a hundred stills up in the backwoods, but then they turned to growing fields of marijuana and nobody but nobody stepped on their toes.

  That left the hard drugs to the local chapter of the Devil’s Dragon. I guess they was as mean in their own way, but they were bikers and they liked to have them some fun, too. The Morgans didn’t mix, but you get the Dragons in the right mood, and they’d party with anybody. They had them a clubhouse just off the Ramble where you could get your heroin and your crack, and the drug of choice, in them days, you had the money: coke. But you didn’t mess with ’em neither, and poor old Mr. Haven, well, I guess he didn’t learn him that lesson in time.

  It was kinda fun, at the start. The most dangerous part was stealing that bag of dope from the Dragon. We knowed they kept the drugs locked up in the back of this old Chevy sedan when they was making their delivery rounds. So one night we took to following them. Pinky was driving one of her brothers’ Ford pickups that we’d borrowed without his knowing, and we’d stayed way back, watching as a couple of the Dragon made their deliveries. They’d stop at a place, one of ’em’d get out and pop the trunk, grab something and go inside, the other’d wait in the car.

  After a couple a hours of this I pretty much figured this was a bust, ’cept right about then that Chevy stopped around back of Cinders, this strip club on Division Street, and after getting their delivery, both them boys went inside. Now either this was their last stop, or the guy doing the waiting got tired of sitting in the car. Or maybe he just wanted himself an eyeful a what was going on inside. Same difference right now, I suppose, since they was both gone inside and this was my first chance to pop that trunk my own self and have a look-see what might still be there.

  Pinky watched the door, ready to run interference if they come out too soon. I don’t know what she woulda done. Probably just pulled down her tube top—that’s the kinda thing them boys would find impossible to ignore. Be a little chilly ton
ight, but while they were counting her goose bumps, I’d be gone.

  The trunk weren’t no big problem. I been learning my way around locks this past summer. Part hobby, I suppose, and part nosiness. I like to know what people got locked up.

  “Holy shit,” I said when I get me that trunk open.

  “What? What?” Pinky called back to me in a loud whisper.

  I just shook my head. There was about twenty little plastic bags sitting there in rows, each as big as my hand, and they weren’t full of flour. I grabbed me a half dozen, dropped that trunk lid, and we took off.

  Course Pinky had to sample the stuff, just to make sure it was what it was. Me, I don’t do dope. Don’t drink neither, ’cept for beer, and never enough to get me drunk. I don’t like the feeling of being out of control of myself. ’Cause the plain truth—I know this for a fact, and my sister rubbed it in with her leaving—is you only got yourself to depend on. I got me Pinky, I know, and she loves me and I love her, but come down to the wire, I don’t know which way she’d turn. Least, I didn’t then.

  Anywise, we had the dope, and got us the Dragon riled up. Can you see where this is going?

  Next stop was Haven’s place, but that was going to have to wait for another night. We went to school the next day like the good students we were. In algebra, Pinky stopped by the desk to ask Haven a question, bending down real low so that them bug eyes of his was locked tight on her cleavage. Meanwhile, I sidled over and slipped a little folded-paper packet of dope in the front chest pocket of his jacket which was hanging on the back of his chair. There was a chance he’d up and find it, throw it out afore it had a chance to do us any good—’less he had him some other urges we didn’t know about—but it was worth a try. How often does a guy look in that pocket, anyways?

  That night we snuck ’round his house, but he was playing hard-to-get and never went out. The same thing happened Thursday. But Friday, hell, even cradle-robbing sons a bitches got to have them some fun, and he drove off, all spruced up like he had him a hot date. I had to smile, seeing’s how he was wearing that same sports jacket that I left my little surprise in.

  I went in through the back. He had him a summer kitchen that he was using as a shed and the door weren’t even locked. The one inside it, leading into the house, was, but it was a cheap lock and I made short work of it. I didn’t have me the tools of the burglar’s trade, but you’d be surprised what you can do with a couple of stiff wires.

  Inside, I made straight for the crapper and taped three of them bags of dope to the back of the toilet. I had me another handful of paper packets like I left in his jacket, and them I put in the drawer of the night table by his bed, along with a nice little mirror and some cut-down straws that Pinky had used the night before. She sure enough was enjoying that crap.

  After that it was just a matter of waiting till he got home. When he did, Pinky drove off to the closest pay phone and called the Dragons’ clubhouse with a little hot tip ’cause she could fake a man’s voice better’n me. She got back and we waited some more till them motorcycles showed up. When they was pounding on his door, we went back to that phone booth and called the cops.

  Either the bikers’d get him, or the cops. We didn’t much nevermind which it was. We heard later that the cops showed up while the Dragons was beating the crap outta him. The bikers took off and the cops went in. I woulda liked to have been there, seeing Haven’s relief turn on him when the cops beelined for that dope we pointed ’em to.

  Just to finish everything off, make it all nice and tidy, I put the word out—soft and easylike, mind, so it wouldn’t come back on me—how it was Bobby Marshall who’d been putting the bone to Sherry. I was just trying to confuse matters, but it shows you how stupid some people can be. That rumor got ’round to Bobby and he’d just wink and grin, like it was all true. Which was funny, I guess, until Sherry’s old man come up to him outside the donut shop and gut shot him with his squirrel gun.

  I woulda felt bad, but it weren’t like Bobby was some choir boy. He maybe didn’t do Sherry, but there’s a lotta other meanness could be laid at his door. I just wished I’d knowed what Sherry’s old man had planned. I woulda give up Del’s name if I had.

  “Raylene,” Pinky told me. “You got yourself an evil mind in that pretty little head of yours.”

  “Evil?” I said, pretending to be hurt.

  “I mean that in the best possible way.”

  When it was all over, Haven got off on some technicality, but he lost his job and then moved away. The Dragon never recovered their dope. I heard they tracked Haven down, but not the details of what they done to him. Still, I got me a good imagination. Sherry’s old man went to the pen. Bobby had him a nice funeral. Sherry had her a baby girl that she and her mama raised in that double-wide. And me and Pinky? Well, we kept up our wicked ways.

  Autumn turned into winter. Spring followed on its heels. And then we was both seventeen, finished school, and ready to make our own way in the world. That summer of ’72, we got us a room in a rundown boardinghouse off of Jefferson Street, right on the edge of Stokesville—a move up in the world for a couple of gals from Hillbilly Holler—and figured we was set until our rent come due. Neither of us was much willing to work, but it ain’t anybody’s idea of a party without any cash.

  We get the landlady to give us a couple of days and put our heads together, see what we can come up with.

  Naw, that ain’t true. Pinky sits on the front porch, drinking the last of our beer, and I’m the one figures things out.

  We could find us jobs, but who wants to work? Trouble is, pretty much everything else needs a stake. Deal dope? First you needed some product and that blow of Pinky’s was long gone by now. Get us a gun and we could hold up a liquor store or one of them gas bars out on the highway, but I don’t like the idea of putting my ass on the line, though I do like the thought of that gun. Still they cost money, too, and they don’t come cheap.

  “We could always peddle our asses,” Pinky offers.

  I shook my head. “I’m drawing the line at certain things,” I tell her.

  “Like what?”

  “Like whoring. Or stripping. Or lap-dancing.”

  “It comes to that,” she says, “I’ll do it. I ain’t ’shamed of my body.”

  “It ain’t a matter of being ’shamed or not.”

  She just laughs. Ever since I stopped Del’s nighttime visits, I’m a lot more choosy who I do it with. And it’s got to be when I’m in the mood. Pinky’s not near’ so discriminating.

  “Maybe we should move out west,” Pinky says. “Get ourselves to L.A. It’s always warm there.” She has another swig a beer and grins at me. “We can become movie stars.”

  “I ain’t gonna be in no porn flick, neither,” I tell her.

  “So when are you gonna have some fun?” she asks.

  I ignore that. “We go anywhere,” I say, “we need us a stake. But first we got to make it through the week.”

  “So we’re back to peddling our asses,” she says.

  I shake my head, firm. I won’t be swayed on this. “No one’s doing any whoring,” I tell her.

  But she’s got me thinking. There’s ways to make money in the sex trade without ever putting out. That’s the beauty of a scam. It ain’t what you actually give, it’s what the mark thinks he’s gonna get. You manage to rip him off, what’s he gonna do? Once he’s offered you cash for favors, he’s gone and broke the law his own self, so he won’t be crying to the cops. The only real consideration you got at that point is he don’t beat the crap out a you.

  “Go make yourself sexy,” I tell Pinky. “But classy, mind you. Not cheap. You and me is going downtown.”

  Now, downtown Tyler ain’t exactly a social whirl, but we got us a convention center and a buncha hotels, and we got the out-a-towners hitting the bars and making their way down to the Ramble, looking for action. Most of ’em are married and married’s best for what I got in mind.

  Pinky’s done a bang-up job o
n our makeup. She coulda been a beautician, and she was somewhat seriously thinking on it till she found out it meant more schooling and you were spending most of your day trying to make old bags look halfways reasonable, which was a lost cause in the first place. But she had quality goods to work with when it come to us. She was done and I didn’t much recognize either of us, we was so gussied up. We coulda been a pair of models, ’cept for me being so short, or movie stars, and I ain’t saying we looked old, but we didn’t look like no jailbait neither.

  We took us to a bar cozied up near the convention center and ordered some drinks. Pinky woulda had a wallbanger, and probably more’n one, but I convinced her to have a ginger ale like me. I had no thoughts on how this was going to go, or how long it’d take, but quicker’n you can spit, we had us a couple of middle-aged men asking could they sit at our table and next thing you know, we’re going up to their rooms. I’m a little awkward on the dollar amount, so I let him do the talking, make the offer. We settle on a yard for the night, no rough stuff.

  The whole thing’s easier’n you’d think. He’s already half-cut afore we go up and first thing I do we get to his room, I open the little wet bar under the TV and fix us a couple of drinks. He’s so busy fondling my tits, he don’t see me filling his glass with three a them little bottles of vodka afore I top it off with some orange juice. Me, I’m just having the juice, but he don’t know that.

  “Whew,” I say when I slug it back, all in one go. Like the liquor’s going right to my head.

  I stand up and pretend the room’s going all dizzy on me while I try to get my dress off. He just sits there, smiling big and watching the show, tosses back his own drink. I hide a grin when I see his eyes tear up and he starts to cough.