You Only Get Letters from Jail

by Jodi Angel

  “You like that Candy?”

  I shrugged.

  “You don’t want to trade, do you?”

  The water got hot, fast, and I let it run so that it blasted the porcelain and the steam rose toward the mirror. “What do you mean?”

  “You know, when we get back to the table, I can swap sides with you if you want. Sit next to Candy. You can take Veronica.” Phillip pumped some soap into his cupped hand and lathered up. The soap was a weak green color that looked toxic. “I mean, I’d rather keep Veronica, if it’s cool with you, but I figure, hey, your mom just died . . .” He paused for a second. “I mean, you should at least get first choice, you know?” He let the hot water hit his hands and jerked them back so hard that his fingers hit the edge of the sink. “That’s fucking burning.”

  I thought about Christy calling for me, yesterday? The day before? Time had turned soft and minutes and hours felt stretched and pulled. I was no longer sure if it was Thursday or Sunday or if it had just been five minutes ago that Christy had called to me, Roy, come here and there had been no sense of emergency or fear, just a voice even as blacktop, come here, and we had done what we had done so many times before out of habit, the rolling and the looking at what we would find, only this time it was different, more than different, less than different. Maybe this was what indifferent really meant. And then we had been running hot water, so much so that the steam banked against the wall, taking turns soaking towels and cleaning up. There just seemed like so much to clean.

  Phillip pulled a couple of stiff paper towels out of the dispenser and rubbed his hands dry. “I mean, they’re about equal. Veronica’s got the bad skin and mustache, but Candy’s a good deuce, so I think it all balances out.” He wadded up the paper towels, threw them toward the trash can, and missed. He did not pick them up and try again. “You don’t mind a fat girl, do you?”

  The room was hot and small and there was still steam in the air, and in my mind I could see Candy laughing with one dimpled hand hovering over her top lip.

  “She’s nice,” I said.

  “Yeah, she’s great. She’s funny, et cetera. It’s like that fat girl joke—Hey, why is fucking a fat girl like riding a moped? Because they’re fun to ride, but you don’t want your friends to see you on one.” Phillip laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. I stumbled forward. “But you know I don’t care.”

  Phillip looked in the mirror and smoothed his hair again. “I would settle for a blow job from Veronica. I wouldn’t say no to that,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. I noticed that the floor was cement and there was a drain in the center and everything seemed to slope toward it, but I was drunk, so I wasn’t sure.

  Phillip scooped some water into his mouth, rinsed, and spit it back into the sink. He squinted one eye closed and picked at a dry whitehead high on his cheek. “If it’s all right with you, I want to keep Veronica. I mean, no offense, but I can close my eyes and she’ll feel just fine. Fat girls don’t work that way.”

  When we got back to the table, there were more beers and the jukebox was stuck on the Eagles, and judging by the stack of quarters on the table in front of Candy, it would be for a while. The crowd in the bar had thinned and emptied, but when I looked at my watch it was blank-faced and I couldn’t read it in the dim light.

  “Hey, you know what? Roy’s grandparents were Nazis.” Phillip leaned back and took a drink from his beer and put an arm around Veronica. “I’m not even kidding. Tell them. Tell them about that time you found the swastika armbands and all that shit in your grandpa’s closet.”

  It was something I thought I had seen once, and maybe I had or I hadn’t, I wasn’t sure, and when I tried to remember what I had seen in that closet, and I put myself back in that room, all I could smell was talcum powder and see my grandma standing at the window, stiff and straight, staring out at nothing in the weak light, her back to me, the tears streaming because I had said it, I had said names, called her things, told her how my mother would disappear every time that she got off the phone with her, my grandmother with her thick accent and twisted language, harsh, guttural, clipped through the phone and for seventeen years I never once remember my mother asking me how I felt—not once—how do you feel? Because feelings, she said, were lies. The only truth was in what you could see.

  “Were they really Nazis?” Candy asked. “That’s crazy.” Her blue eyes were wide and filled her face.

  “Did they kill people?” Veronica asked.

  “Kill people!” Phillip yelled. His voice put the music to shame. “Probably. Of course. Hey, tell them about that time you had to help your grandma kill all those kittens.”

  “Oh my God,” Candy said. She was staring at me with her mouth open. I could see that her lipstick was cracked around the corners of her lips.

  “His grandma made him put them all in this sack. This burlap sack, right?” Phillip didn’t want the answer to his question. He just wanted everyone to settle in to what he was saying.

  “So he puts them in there—there’s like what, ten or something?”

  “Seven,” I whispered.

  “And he has to throw the sack into this pond out on their farm, so he does, you know, puts these baby kittens in this sack and knots the top and throws them out in the pond.”

  Candy had closed her mouth, but she wouldn’t look at me. She was staring at Phillip and Phillip was smiling as though this was the funniest fucking story he had ever told, and he was taking his time getting to the punch line.

  “The only problem is though,” Phillip took a swig from his bottle and ran the back of his hand across his mouth, “his grandma didn’t tell him that he had to weight the bag down. You know, put some rocks in it or something. So when he throws it out there, it just floats on the surface with all of these kittens screaming and trying to swim, but they’re trapped in that bag, you know.”

  “Screaming?” Candy said.

  “Fucking screaming. All ten of them. Roy told me that it was like hearing babies cry.”

  “But he swam out and got them, right?” Candy asked. She turned toward me at the table and her thigh touched my leg. “You swam out and got them right?”

  Veronica had the same look on her face that Phillip did, and I realized that they were meant for each other and it was perfect that she’d found him.

  “There was nothing I could do,” I said.

  “But you could swim out and get them,” Candy said.

  “My grandma wouldn’t let me.”

  “His grandma wouldn’t let him. Fucking Nazis.” Phillip slammed his bottle down on the table and beer foamed and ran over the top.

  “What happened?” Candy asked.

  “They died,” Phillip said. “What do you think happened? He and his grandma stood there and watched the bag thrash around until they finally drowned.”

  “God,” Candy said. She was looking down at the table, and there was something in her voice that made me want to put my hand over hers and let her know that I was just as sorry as she was. “How long did it take?”

  Everyone around the table looked at me. Veronica had her head cocked against Phillip’s shoulder.

  “Twenty minutes,” I whispered.

  No one said anything. I could remember watching that brown sack take on water, and I could remember how the pond smelled with all of its black mud and fish and water grass and the summer heat pulling mosquitoes off its surface. I had started to take off my shoes to wade in to get the bag, but Grandma Hannah had put her hand against my arm and stopped me. She didn’t say “no,” or “stop.” She just kept her hand on my arm, not tight, not gripping, just present, and we stood there and watched the sack together and listened to the kittens crying on and on until one by one they tired and drowned and the last one that held the sack above the surface finally gave up and went down with the weight.

  Candy’s thigh was warm against me. I couldn’t remember what she was wearing, if she had on jeans or not. The more I thought about the weight of her
thigh, the more I could feel her taking up the space beside me, spilling over the invisible line down the middle until she absorbed me.

  Phillip leaned his head toward Veronica’s and whispered something in her ear, and she laughed and pulled back and hit him lightly on the chest, but did not move away from him. She stood up slightly so she could lean across the table and cupped her hand around Candy’s ear, and Candy nodded and pulled at the disintegrating label on her bottle, and when Veronica sat back down in her chair, there was a spark of understanding that jumped around the three of them and I was the one breaking the circuit.

  I was picking at my bottle label, and trying to peel it off in one piece because I could, and Candy put her hand over mine and I let her, and she squeezed my hand and her palm was cool and damp and soft and so much different from the thigh pressed tight and hot beside me. Phillip and Veronica were kissing; I could see the silhouette of their tongues moving back and forth between them.

  “You ready?” Candy asked. “We’re first,” she said.

  I took a swallow of beer and it was warm and hard to get down. The table was covered in bottles and I tried to line them up in rows like fence posts. I didn’t look at Candy. “First?”

  “Phillip said we can have the car first.”

  For a moment I was confused, and I was back in my living room and in the corner by the front door were two black garbage bags with the sheets and the towels that we had used to soak up what had come from our mom, Christy and me, before anybody came, and the first thing I had to do was get rid of them, throw away the evidence, everything except the narrow bottle in my front pocket.

  Phillip pulled back from Veronica and there was a glazed look in her eyes that threw back the overhead light like the wet road had done up the mountain. He dug the car keys out of his front pocket and slid them across the table toward me. “Thirty minutes,” he said. He smiled at me, and then Veronica slipped her hands around his neck and pulled him back toward her and her mouth.

  Candy shoved her chair back from the table and stood, waiting for me to follow. The keys were cold and I looked at each of them and knew what they were meant for—the car, the front door, the door to my grandmother’s house. I could tell the difference just by touch. Candy took my hand as we walked across the empty floor. When we were outside and the door closed behind us, the Eagles were muffled and the night air hit us. I took a deep breath and swallowed the taste of rain and pine and forest. Underneath it all I could smell a campfire, and I wondered how far away it was and wished that I could sit beside it.

  The gravel crunched and shifted under our shoes, and I walked toward the car and led her behind me, leashed with my arm. “It’s cold,” she said. There were no cars on the highway, no distant drone of a truck coming through. I wanted to run down the white center line as fast as I could, run between the trees and suck down the air until my lungs burned and I had to run with my mouth open just to keep my breath.

  When I put the key in the door, Oscar jumped up off the backseat and started barking and lunging at the glass, and Candy screamed and jerked her hand out of my grip, but then Oscar saw that it was me.

  “My God that scared the shit out of me,” she laughed. “Is that your dog?”

  “He was my mom’s dog,” I said. The past tense had caught up with me. It had only taken a day and a night and already it came second nature.

  “He’s cute,” Candy said. She knocked on the glass and Oscar let out a sharp whine and tried to lick her hand through the closed window.

  I opened the door and Oscar jumped over the seat and tried to jump on me. Candy kept holding her hand out toward him and saying things in a singsong voice that I couldn’t understand. “He probably has to pee,” I said. I hooked my fingers into his collar and pulled him down from the seat, and when he was out of the car, Candy started rubbing his head and scratching behind his ears and he rolled over in the dirt.

  “He is so sweet. I love him. What’s his name?”

  “Oscar,” I said. I gave a sharp whistle and Oscar jumped to his feet and tried to sit without touching the gravel. “Go on. Go pee,” I said. I pushed at him with my knee and pointed him toward the brush that edged the parking lot in front of the car. From the glow of the lights around the lot, I could see that there was a low scrub of bushes and tree trunks, and then the land sloped up and away from the parking lot and became a hillside and then a mountainside as the ground cover fell away in favor of rocks. Oscar put his nose to the ground and disappeared in the trees.

  “Go ahead,” I said. I pulled the driver’s door wide and swept my arm toward the seat.

  She sat down behind the steering wheel and tried to slide to the other side, but there wasn’t an inch of slide to be had and she was firmly wedged between the wheel and the seat and to get her to the passenger side from there was going to take a lot of pushing. “We’d be more comfortable in the back,” I said quickly, and I reached behind her and pulled the lock on the back door and she stood up and smoothed her shirt front, and then she was able to get herself onto the backseat and with some hard breaths and a few kicks against the floorboard was able to move to the other side and make room for me.

  I shut the door, and we were in the quiet, and the car smelled like dog and dog food. The combination reminded me that my stomach was full of nothing but cheap beer and distant handfuls of Doritos, and my stomach did a slow turn that made me swallow hard. I reached for the window crank and then remembered that it was broken off. “Can you roll your window down a little,” I said. She turned the crank a couple of times and the air came in and cooled the car and cleaned out the smell in one breath. Outside the car I could hear Oscar’s tags rattling and the occasional sound of snapping brush as he walked around in the bushes.

  Candy put her hand on the seat between us and in the bright light from the parking lot I could see how white her skin was. I reached out and touched it with my fingertips. It was warm, and I could feel the uneven ridges of veins, but they were soft and rolled away from the pressure of my fingers and I knew that I would have to press hard to find her pulse.

  Candy turned toward me, but there was a lot of her that had to come between us and it was going to be hard for me to reach her with my mouth if kissing was the next thing to do. I would have to get up on one knee on the seat and climb up a little, but she seemed okay with that and helped me get into position, and I closed my eyes and fumbled through the best that I could. Her lips were nice, and she was comfortable and slow and when she kissed me I stopped thinking about all of the things that were cluttering my head. She ran her hands down my ribs and pulled at the bottom of my T-shirt, and for a second I thought that I would feel her hands on my skin, but then they dropped my shirt hem and moved down and she fingered the fly on my jeans and her left hand started rubbing at the crease, and then it moved to the right and started squeezing the bottle in my pocket up and down and up and down and I knew the rhythm she was trying to rub and I realized that what she had in her hand was not what she thought she was gripping.

  I pulled back from her and she tried to keep me from going but I rolled back enough to get a hand down to my jeans, and she put her hands on my shoulders and pulled me back toward her and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  I fished the pill bottle from my pocket and held it up to her. The light from the pole beside us caught the amber and made it flash like a turn signal. She took it from me and squinted at it to read the label. “OxyContin?” she said. Candy held the bottle up to the shaft of light. “Who’s Sharon O’Donnel?”

  I leaned my head back against the seat and wished there was no top on the car and I could look up at the stars and find Orion, because he was always there when I needed him. I could always take comfort in the three stars of his belt. “Sometimes my mother,” I said.

  “Was she sick?”

  I remembered the nights of crying in the bedroom, the muffled sound of her pillows taking the brunt of her sobs while Christy and I sat in the living room, inches apart, the TV o
n in front of us, blank-screened and throwing back light, and the only thing we moved was our eyes.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I nodded and stared out the windshield toward the tree trunks and buckthorn that I knew were somewhere in front of me.

  She handed the bottle back to me but I couldn’t make my fingers close around it, so we held it between us together. “She’s been dead for twenty-six hours,” I said.

  She was quiet for a minute and when she spoke it was barely a whisper. “Phillip told us,” she said. I felt her hand slide up to my wrist. She took the bottle and I let her. “Come here,” she said.

  She pulled me in toward her and she undressed me in layers and she was so careful and soft that I hardly felt her. I closed my eyes and let her move me, lift my arms one by one, raise the T-shirt, pull it over my head, take the jeans and the socks and the shoes. Every time she took something off me, she pulled me closer to her so that the heat from her body held me like a blanket. I tried to talk to her, tried to apologize, but every time I found my voice, she said shhhh against me and lifted a finger to my lips.

  When I was undressed, she unbuttoned her shirt and pulled me to her and wrapped the open sides of the shirt around me, and she edged down against the door so that we were both lying across the seat and I wasn’t so much against her as settled into her, pressed in below her surface. When I opened my eyes, she was looking up at me, and I could see the creases in her brow, the lines on her face, and I knew that the parking lot light was showing her age. She raised her head a little and kissed both of my eyes and went back to work, moving me, burying me, guiding me, drowning me, and from that height above the seat, rocking and rocking, I could see over the door panel and out onto the hillside, and smell the mountain grape and deer brush leaking in. Far away I could hear a dog barking, faint clips of sound breaking the heavy stillness of the highway and moving away from me. I knew that soon Phillip would be at the car, and he would want inside, and I would have to come to the surface again. I didn’t know for just how long I could stay.