Rutting Season

by Mandeliene Smith

  “WE . . . UH . . . GO WAY BACK, RIGHT?” There was a sputtering explosion as Kotlowski cleared his throat into the loudspeaker. His face came back to her: pale and round, puckered as a cauliflower. Officer Stanley Kotlowski.

  “I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A FRIEND TO YOU PLASKIS.”

  It was what he used to say, standing wide-legged in their kitchen: You Plaskis. After some incident of vandalism or petty theft he would come over and stand there like that, resting his small, sunken eyes on each of them in turn. What’s wrong with you Plaskis anyway? Huh? Shaking his head; making a show of it.

  They never answered; they just sat there staring at the floor or his feet or whatever, waiting for him to be done. That was what Amber remembered about those visits: the gray Jell-O soles of his cop shoes, the curled-up edges of the fake brick linoleum. The things he was referring to, the known facts that made up the meaning of “Plaski”—that their mother was a drunk and their grandfather had killed his own wife; that everything they did was the kind of dumb-ass thing a Plaski would do—these were as fixed as the pale blue of their eyes or the tree-fringed patch of sky above their yard, and not worth thinking about.

  “I USED TO, UH, COME CHECK ON YOU AND YOUR, UH, MOM, GODREST,” the loudspeaker said.

  Amber rocked back and a comforting ripple of pain radiated out from her spine. What was it he’d said to her mother, the time Randall had knocked her out? Look at yourself. Wasn’t that it? Look at yourself. You want to be treated nice you should fix yourself up a little.

  Amber had been the one to let him in that night, too. She’d run to the door in her panic, as though he would be the answer to everything.

  “SO I’M, UH, HERE TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT STOPPING THIS NONSENSE. THESE PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO HELP YOU, OKAY? SO HOW ABOUT YOU SHOW A LITTLE RESPECT.”

  She felt it in her chest, a shock, as though she’d been struck. Then the surge of anger, steely and hard.

  “YOU THINK YOU CAN DO THAT? SHOW A LITTLE RESPECT?”

  She whipped around and fired the gun through the empty window frame—a couple of wild shots, not even aimed at anything. In the second before the dogs started barking, she heard the high-pitched hoot of Danny’s laugh. She glanced over at him but his face had closed again.

  “AMBER! DON’T SHOOT! WE CAN WORK THIS OUT!” It was the O’Neill guy again.

  “Guess Kotlowski’s out,” Danny said. He made a buzzer sound, like on a game show.

  Amber leaned back against the wall, a sliver of warmth cracking open in her.

  Danny was right, Kotlowski was out, but they had found other people: nosy Mrs. White and another neighbor whose name they didn’t even recognize, Sullivan or Callahan, Amber couldn’t quite catch it. And then—how they came up with this one, she couldn’t imagine—Mrs. Mackey, their high school guidance counselor.

  “HELLOOOO! AMBER AND DANNY AND JASON! THIS IS KATHLEEN MACKEY!”

  Danny lifted his head. “Who?”

  “REMEMBER ME? MRS. MACKEY? FROM THE HIGH SCHOOL?”

  “No way,” Danny said. He stood up and glanced at Amber; then, when she made no move to stop him, walked across the room to the other window.

  “WELL,” the loudspeaker breathed, “HELLO, KIDS!”

  “Where’s she even at?” Danny said. “Behind the door?”

  Cautiously, taking care to keep the gun securely under her arm, Amber got stiffly to her feet. It was cooler, standing; she could feel a breath of air coming through the broken window. “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “Those are her legs, see? The bare ones. With the sneakers.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Behind them, Amber heard Jason get up. She turned to face him but he went straight to the window without even glancing her way.

  “Well, whaddya know,” he said, “Mrs. Fuckin’ Douche Bag Mackey.”

  “I UNDERSTAND FROM THESE NICE FOLKS HERE THAT YOU’RE, UH, A LITTLE UPSET.”

  “I should go out there and show her my college ID,” Jason said. “Give her a friggin’ heart attack.”

  “Oh yeah,” Danny said, “What was it she said? Work on a garbage truck?”

  “ ‘If I were you, young man,’ ” Jason said in a high, wobbly voice, “ ‘I’d consider a career in the sanitation department.’ ”

  What Mrs. Mackey had said to Amber was not something she could repeat: I’d keep my legs closed, if I were you. And I’d stop wearing that slutty makeup. Do you want to end up like your mother? Does that look like fun to you? “I thought she said mechanic,” Amber muttered.

  “Yeah, that was her other bright idea.” A regular voice now, the kind he used with Danny. “Didn’t even look at my grades. Didn’t open the friggin’ folder.”

  She glanced at him. Something about the way he was standing reminded her of how he used to look when she spotted him in the hallway in elementary school—small and thin, easy to beat on. The old, lonely pull of their siblinghood flashed up in her. “What a bitch,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Yeah, well.”

  “WE’D LIKE TO TALK ABOUT WHAT’S UPSETTING YOU,” Mrs. Mackey said.

  “Up yours, Mackey!” Jason yelled.

  “WE’RE GOING TO GIVE YOU A CALL ON THE PHONE, OKAY? ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS PICK UP, ALL RIGHT? JUST PICK UP THE PHONE AND WE’LL—”

  “Shove it up your flabby old ass!” Jason yelled.

  Amber shut her mouth to stifle a crazy bubble of laughter.

  “ALL RIGHT? HERE GOES.”

  The phone began ringing again.

  “Hey, remember that guy Eli?” Danny said.

  “Eli?” Amber said. “What one was that? Oh, you mean with the glasses?”

  “Yeah, Eli. You know, the dude who stuck stuff up his ass.”

  “No way,” Amber said.

  “Yes, way. Like the time he stuck the remote up his ass?” Danny waited while Mrs. Mackey said something over the loudspeaker. “Jason, you remember that, right?”

  Jason raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, that was sort of a low.”

  The laughter came up in Amber in a rush, like vomit. But it was okay—Danny was laughing, too.

  “And how about that other guy,” Danny said. “What was his name? The one before Randall.”

  “Jimmy the Jackass!” Amber and Jason said together.

  “Jimmy, yeah. Remember how he ate? Like Bugs Bunny?”

  “Oh yeah! And the food got all stuck in his mustache.”

  “He looked like a friggin’ walrus with that thing,” Danny said.

  Amber stifled another spurt of laughter.

  “WE’D REALLY LIKE TO TALK TO YOU,” Mrs. Mackey said.

  “Man! That’s, like, the third time she said that,” Danny said. “Shoot out another light, Amber.”

  Even Jason laughed then, that high-pitched, girlish cackle she had forgotten.

  They thought of other stuff that had happened—weird, shameful things that Amber normally didn’t like to remember but which now, held up and laughed at, seemed almost something to brag about: the winter they ate everything from cans; the time their mother drove the car into the side of the garage and passed out with her head on the horn; Eli sleeping naked on the couch with Amber’s teddy bear between his legs.

  Amber had started shaking again, just little tremors, nothing they would notice, probably, but she leaned into the wall just in case. It was the relief, or maybe what happened to her sometimes with Julian—an excitement that was also worry that at any moment things would go bad again. Because everything was okay now; by some miracle everything was good.

  It was better not to think about that, she knew; if you thought about it you might wreck it.

  The sun had gone down and now a gloom was settling in beneath the still-bright sky. There was some sort of change going on outside: boots, car doors, an engine starting. When the loudspeaker came on again it was a new guy talking.

  “Mackey’s out,” Amber said. She made the buzzer sound, like Danny.

  “Wait,” Danny said, “what’d he say?”

&nb
sp; Jason shrugged. “I dunno, something about pizza.”

  “Pizza for us?” Amber said.

  “I guess.”

  “Let’s go for it,” Danny said. “I’m starving and there sure as shit isn’t anything to eat in here. What was that phone number again?”

  “Beats me.”

  “He only said it like a million times.”

  “Oh and you remember it?” Jason flipped his hand toward the phone. “Be my guest.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Amber said. “We can just write what we want and hold it up to the window.”

  “Oh yeah,” Danny said. “That’d work.”

  Jason snorted. “Good luck finding a pen in this shithole.”

  Amber reached back with her free hand and fished the lipstick out of her skirt pocket. “Here,” she said, tossing it to Danny. “Write it on the window. But backward,” she added.

  “What do you mean, backward?”

  “She’s right,” Jason said. “It has to be backward so they can read it.”

  Again, the crazy, improbable feeling of hitting the target without trying; flinging things out and having them miraculously land right.

  * * *

  There were rules, it turned out. They were to stand at the window with their arms up while the officer put the food down on the lawn. Once he’d made it back to the cars, one of them could come out, but whoever it was had to stop on the porch first, still with hands in the air, and turn around slowly so they could see there was no gun.

  “THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT, OKAY?” the guy on the loudspeaker said. “WE HAVE TO SEE YOU’RE UNARMED OR ELSE WE MIGHT HAVE TO TAKE STEPS TO ENSURE OUR SECURITY AND SOMEONE COULD GET HURT.”

  Danny did the whole song and dance exactly as they said. It occurred to Amber, watching him from the window with the gun wedged between her feet, that he might make a run for it. But he didn’t; he just stacked the three jumbo milk shakes on top of the pizza boxes and carried it all back into the living room.

  “Smells good!” He grinned at Amber. “Where d’you want it?”

  “I don’t know. Here?” It seemed like too much trouble to clear all the crap off the kitchen chairs.

  “With him?” Jason said.

  How could she have forgotten about Randall? She glanced over at the huddled shape of him, sprawled behind the chair. The puddle of blood had grown unbelievably large—even the chair legs were in it now. Quickly, she went to the chair and pulled off the old, dog-hair-matted bedspread that covered it. “Here,” she said, throwing the cloth over him with her free hand; then she turned away so she wouldn’t have to see the edges of it soaking up the red.

  They ate with their backs to him, folding the slices and jamming them into their mouths, tossing the crusts to the dogs. Not talking, not even looking at each other. The quiet made Amber nervous, so she said the first thing that came into her head: “Do you think he’ll, like, haunt the house?”

  “Who?” Danny said.

  She jerked her head toward Randall.

  Danny shrugged. “I don’t know.” He threw a crust and Axl snapped it out of the air. “Grandmom doesn’t. It’d be her if it was anyone.”

  “Why Grandmom?”

  Jason gave her a look.

  “I mean why her and not, you know, Mom?”

  “Because Mom didn’t die here, stupid,” Jason said.

  She flushed. Of course their grandmother had died there, she knew that. And yet for some reason it had seemed to her suddenly like maybe she hadn’t, like maybe in this new slapstick, shame-free version of their childhood, that might have ceased to be true. But thinking that was a mistake. A wrong move.

  She shook it off. “This house sucks,” she said.

  “No shit,” Danny said. “We should burn it down. Do the world a favor.”

  Jason wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “No, what we should do is get the fuck out of here.”

  “Let’s get the fuck out and then burn it down,” Amber said.

  Laughter, like the rush of coins down a slot machine.

  There was a game they used to play in early winter when the first, brittle ice formed on the little ponds back in the woods. The goal was to slide from one side of a pond to the other without breaking through into cold water underneath. This seemed impossible—the ice would shatter if you so much as stood on it. But you could do it if you went fast enough. If you kept your feet moving, you could slide all the way across with the ice popping and seaming behind you. What you couldn’t do was stop.

  * * *

  Amber had laid the gun down and was putting the pizza boxes on the floor for the dogs to lick when her foster mother’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “AMBER, HONEY.”

  She could feel her brothers’ eyes on her, the sharp silence of the room. Instinctively, she reached for the gun.

  “I GOT OUT HERE SOON AS I COULD. IT JUST TOOK A WHILE, YOU KNOW, TO GET OFF WORK AND ALL.

  “OH. IT’S ANGELA. I SHOULD’VE SAID THAT.”

  Secretly, Amber liked this voice, as she liked the other worn and comfortable things about her foster mother: the grainy shadows beneath her eyes, her heavy chest, the frank band of silver hair that ran down both sides of her part.

  “I’M HERE TO SEE CAN I HELP YOU ANY. IT MUST HAVE BEEN TERRIBLE— OH!” There was an electronic squeal, then some amplified fumbling. “SORRY, HONEY. I CAN’T WORK THIS THING. THE OFFICER SAYS I COULD CALL YOU ON THE PHONE. OH, HE’S GONNA DIAL FOR ME. ALL RIGHT, THANKS.”

  The phone began to ring. Five rings, ten rings; it broke off.

  Another squeal. “AMBER, HONEY, CAN YOU ANSWER THE PHONE?”

  Amber held on to the gun and waited, a noise like the sound of the highway in her ears.

  “WELL, ALL RIGHT,” Angela said, finally, “I GUESS YOU’RE NOT READY.” Even through the loudspeaker, Amber could hear the hurt in her voice. “I’LL COME BACK IN THE MORNING, ALL RIGHT? YOU GET SOME REST IN THERE AND I’LL TALK TO YOU TOMORROW. OKAY. I LOVE YOU. SEE YOU TOMORROW.”

  Amber made the buzzer sound. “Out!” she cried.

  Her brothers were looking at their feet, both of them, and they didn’t answer.

  * * *

  There was no more joking after that. The O’Neill guy got on the loudspeaker to tell them the rules for coming out, which were basically the same as the rules for picking up the food: no dogs, no gun, stop on the porch with hands raised. Then Jason stood up and said he was going to sleep.

  Their old bedrooms were jammed with what looked like trash picks—old TVs, lawn furniture, the tented metal hands of shadeless lamps—and from the smell of it, dog shit, too. The only usable bed was the one in their mother’s room, where Randall must have been sleeping. They stood outside the door, looking in at the rumpled covers. There was junk in there, too, but the bed and the area around it had been kept clear.

  “You guys take it,” Amber said.

  “Good,” Jason said. He was already walking in anyway.

  Danny followed her back into the living room and stood there while she arranged a pillow at the end of the couch. “Man! Jason didn’t clean up his puke.”

  “It’s okay,” Amber said.

  “You sure you’re okay here?” Danny said.

  “Yeah, sure.” She jammed the gun in the crack between the seat cushion and the couch back and lay down next to it. “Could you get the light?”

  He didn’t move right away, and when he did, he went slowly. The light shut off.

  “Thanks,” she said, but she could hear that he was still standing there. “What?”

  “You’re really gonna sleep with that.”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I dunno. Never mind.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Forget it.”

  She heard the creak of the loose floorboard by the bathroom and then, after a few minutes, the toilet flushing and the sound of his footsteps going into the bedroom. Then the thunk of his shoes and the bedsprings, then nothing—the soft stutter of the clock on the k
itchen stove. On the floor next to her, Axl sloshed his tongue around contentedly. The room had seemed dark at first, but as she lay there the night thinned and the shapes of things began to re-form themselves: chairs, dogs, the lump that was Randall.

  There’s a dead person right here in this room, she thought. She waited a moment for a reaction but she felt nothing; the idea of Randall was curiously empty for her now. What came to her mind instead was something her mother used to say—used to yell—near the end.

  “Beaten to death!” She would lurch around the house yelling that, her mouth sagging open in outrage: “Beaten to death! Right here in this house!” As if this was news, as if their grandmother hadn’t been dead for years.

  “We know, Mom,” they’d mutter. Or, if she kept at it, “Mom! Shut up already!” They had said it, too, of course—to impress a friend or for the shocking thrill of it, or just as a statement of fact: beatentodeath. Now, lying in the dark, Amber wondered what it actually meant. Hit, of course; maybe kicked. A bunch of times, it would have to have been. And her trying to get away—cowering and stumbling, crawling, even, until she came up against the final limit of the wall or the floor or the stove or whatever it was she would finally die against.

  But why? Amber had never thought to ask; none of them had. They didn’t need to: The answer had always been there right in front of them—in their grandmother’s sagging mouth and birdlike arms, and the way she bent her head when her husband yelled at her; in what she said and how she walked and her pale, uncertain eyes. She was the reason, she was why.

  Something floated up under the surface of Amber’s mind, ghostly and sick-hued, like the ink-swamped triangle in a Magic 8 Ball. A horror. She felt it close around her in the dark.

  She sat up, her body electric. But no—there were the stairs; there was the doorway leading to the kitchen. Behind her, no more than fifteen feet away, the front door. Not a trap, just the house, pretty much as she’d always known it. She lay back down, shifting a little so her thigh rested against the cool length of the gun.

  She’s right. Jason had said that. And, shoot out another light—that had been Danny. It was okay, she thought; she could sleep.