by Naomi West
I stuff a bundle of underwear into the bag and then go to him, kneeling down so that he’s taller than me, just. “When Dad told you to protect us, he was just talking like dads do. That’s what they always say. You’re the man of the house now. It’s just words, Travis.”
“Maybe to you.” He turns away from me. “You can tell me Dad meant this and you can tell me Dad meant that. Whatever. I know what he meant.”
“Oh, she’s brave.” Greg stomps around outside the door. “She’s a real brave girl.”
“You can’t do anything to protect Mom,” I say, “if she won’t protect herself.”
“I can try.”
I return to the bag, pausing in my packing. Perhaps I should stay. It isn’t fair of me to abandon Travis. But then, Greg has never laid a hand on Travis. He’s never bruised Travis. Once or twice he’s even been passing nice to Travis. I suspect that Greg hates women far more than he hates men; that’s one of the reasons he hasn’t hurt him yet. But that doesn’t mean that he won’t turn on him one day.
“I need you to promise me something.”
“What?” He stands at the window, hands behind his back, looking far older than his years.
“You can’t ever push things too hard with Greg. He hasn’t hit you yet, but that doesn’t mean he never will. You have to be careful.”
“I’m always careful.” He goes to the dresser and takes out some sweaters. “It will be winter soon.” He carries them over to me. “Do you remember last winter when it was really warm but you kept saying it was cold?”
“It was cold.”
He smiles. “It wasn’t. You’re just a big baby.”
I finish packing and zip up the bag. Then I look around the room.
“What’re you looking for?”
“Something to stop him from killing me.”
“Oh.”
We search together, opening drawers, crawling under the bed, until we find my old dress scissors in a plastic storage box. I used those for a week when I was fifteen and then stuffed them away, forgotten as so many things are when you’re growing up. I take the scissors in my hand and go to the dresser. We move it out of the way and then open the door.
Greg stands at the top of the stairs, staring at me. “Are you going to stab me?” He coughs out a laugh. “You really are brave, Marilee. A real brave girl.”
“I want you to go into Mom’s bedroom and stay there until I’ve left. If you don’t, I’m going to stab you in your neck, and I don’t care what happens after that.”
He curls his upper lip, looking disbelieving, scared, and angry all at once; perhaps anger is the dominating emotion. But he can’t convince himself that I’m bluffing, or that I don’t have it in me. He watches me warily and then heads for the bedroom. “I don’t give a shit,” he mutters. “Just get out of my fucking house.”
I shoulder the bag and go downstairs, where Mom waits with the kitchen towel still clutched in her hands. She’s deer-eyed and stupid-looking. She offers a smile as though that will fix the situation. “Are you going somewhere?”
I drop the bag and the scissors and march over to her. Pulling up my sleeve, I say, “Do you see these, Mom? No, don’t look away. Don’t pretend that it isn’t happening. Don’t pretend that you haven’t been a pathetic excuse of a parent for almost a decade. Look at my arm. Do you see these bruises? Imagine Travis covered in bruises like these next time you want to pretend that everything’s okay. Imagine Travis crying himself to sleep because he can hardly breathe, he’s in so much pain. You need to step up now. You need to stop being so weak all the time. It’s too late for us. But maybe you can do something to make your son proud. Maybe you can protect him.”
She bows her head, chastened, and then looks up at me with some semblance of strength. “I’ll do it,” she says. “I’ll be better.”
Maybe I’d believe her if Greg didn’t choose that moment to slam his fist into something upstairs, causing the whole house to shake. The reverberations don’t just spread throughout the house; they spread throughout Mom. Her grimace falters, her hands clench.
“I’m going.” I pick up the bag. “Travis.” I spot him just behind Mom, near the kitchen door. “Come with me. Please.”
“No,” he says firmly. “I’m staying here with Mom.”
I go to him and kiss him twice, once on each cheek, and hug him tightly. “Be safe,” I whisper.
“I’m always safe. I can take care of myself. I’m going to be strong like Dad. You don’t have to worry about me ever.”
“You’re strong,” I agree, giving him a final kiss. “You’re the strongest person I know.”
Then I leave that house, hoping and praying that something changes, hoping and praying that Travis and Mom will be okay. I feel selfish as I drive away, as the street I’ve lived on my entire life gets smaller and smaller in the rear-view and then disappears as I round a bend. Maybe I should turn back. Maybe I should put my little brother before myself. But what happens when Greg has too much to drink one night and decides to claim what he believes to be his, as he’s threatened time and time again? What happens when he creeps into my bedroom and . . . Terror seizes me at the thought. I can’t go back there, no matter how guilty I feel.
I pull into the motel and go into the main building. A girl around my age sits behind the desk, a big mound of pregnant belly resting on her withdrawn knees. She chews gum and glares at me as most pregnant girls my age do; she’s waiting for the look of judgment in my eyes. I smile at her, hoping that’ll make her a little less nervous.
“Hello.”
“Hey.” She sits up. “How can I help you?”
“I’d like to check how long I have a room for.”
“You don’t know how long you’ve got your room for?” She raises an eyebrow. “Oh, I get it. Okay. Let me see.”
I get it. Is that really what I am, just another young girl taken to a motel and left behind? I wonder how many prostitutes come in here asking the same question.
She taps a few keys. “A month from yesterday,” she says. “It looks like your sugar daddy really loves you, doll.”
“Yeah.” I head for the door. “Thank you.”
“No problem!” she calls after me. “I should get your man to teach mine a thing or two! I’m serious! Bring him by here, doll!”
A sense of freedom comes over me as I return to the best room in the motel, my room, at least for a month. That’s a month longer than I’ve ever had to myself. That’s a month without bruises, a month without the constant fear of assault. That’s a month without constantly having to worry about what will happen to me, when it will happen, how it will happen. I can free my mind. I can let it float. And even if Travis is always on my mind, and even if Dusty doesn’t return, this is more freedom than I have ever had.
I pack away my things with a smile on my face, though it’s a guilty, secret smile. The door is locked and bolted and nobody knows where I am. I’m the safest I’ve been in years.
Chapter Eleven
Dusty
“It’s all about 4K these days. I was reading that in a magazine.” Clint roots around in his bag. “Wait, I didn’t bring it with me. I’ll bring it tomorrow.”
“Shit.” Dagger laughs. “You can read, custard-head?”
“Hey!”
I slug another whisky and lean back, sinking into the surroundings. I’m part of the clubhouse, not a person. I’m one of the chairs, one of the photos on the wall, a door, a jukebox. No, not a jukebox, because a jukebox makes noise. I’m silent. I’ve been near-silent for the three weeks since I last saw Marilee, since I got up in the dead of the night and snuck away from her, terrified of what she revealed to me about myself: that I am human, just like everybody else, that I have the capacity to cry. I slug a third—or maybe it’s a fourth—whisky.
“You hear that shit?” Dagger asks. “Trying to talk to me about this brand-new tech and he doesn’t even know what a HDMI cable is.”
“I don’t know what one is, eith
er,” I say. “I never used one in my life.”
“Goddamn.” Dagger’s words are punctuated by the hiss of his butterfly knife. “You fellas are even more hopeless than Lex.”
“Lex is 150. Of course he doesn’t know anything about fancy TVs!” Clint laughs raucously at his own joke, clutching his sides and struggling to draw in air. “What about you, Dusty? What sort of TV do you got? Wait a sec. Do you play videogames? I can’t remember if you ever said or not. Because I’ve got this awesome 4K TV and everything looks so sweet on it, like really cool.”
“I don’t play videogames.”
“Uh, okay.”
“Goddamn, Dusty. He’s just asking you a question.”
“I answered him, didn’t I?”
Dagger flips his blade around his hand and catches it. “Something’s been niggling you for a while now. I don’t get it. We’re working. We’re getting paid, aren’t we? Is it that warehouse job? Listen, man, what are you supposed to do when some fuck pulls a gun on you? You had to drop him.”
“You think I’m worried about dropping a rapist drug dealer? You think I give a shit about some lowlife who was dealing to kids?”
“What is it, then?”
“Since when is this a fucking sewing circle? Are we outlaws or are we women?”
Clint smiles, flashing his gums. “Dagger’s a girl, no doubt about it. He’s even got a vagina.”
“You wanna be careful about what you say, tough guy.”
Dagger’s joking, but I decide to take it seriously. “Or what?” I sit up, laying my elbows on the table. “What’ll happen if he doesn’t?”
Dagger tilts his head at me. “Are you joking?”
“You wanna be careful with your threats,” I say. “Maybe some folk don’t take kindly to hearing their friends threatened, Dagger.”
“You’re gonna turn on me now?” He looks around as though for a crowd to witness the insanity. And it is insanity. I know it’s insanity. And yet I don’t stop.
“Maybe I am.” I stand up, pushing my chair back. “Maybe that’s exactly what I’m fuckin’ doing.”
Dagger gets to his feet, gripping his knife white-knuckled. He’s not playing anymore. “Are you sure you wanna do this?” he asks. “Is this really the game you wanna play?”
“Guys.” Clint stands up, towering over both of us. “How many times have you saved each other’s lives? And now you’re going to hurt each other? That doesn’t make any sense. You can call me stupid all you want, but that doesn’t make any sense.”
We stare at each other for a long time, long enough for some of the fellas around us to turn and see what’s going on. Then I really understand what I’m doing. It’s like I wake up. I pick up the whisky bottle and hand it to Dagger. “Let’s have a drink.”
Everything goes back to normal, the jukebox blaring some rock, everyone drinking and laughing and playing cards and shooting pool, the whole place having a whale of a fuckin’ time and me just wondering if I’ll ever be able to feel like they feel again, like I’m not constantly pulling my mind away from a girl.
But Marilee . . . Marilee is something else. Marilee is better than any drug, any drink, anybody. Marilee is the best person I’ve met and I can’t go near her because she scares the shit out of me. I tell myself that I took advantage of her. Maybe that’s true. I let my animal side out on her. She’s only eighteen years old and I let myself go on her and maybe that wasn’t right. But then I get to thinking about how we laughed together, how close I felt to her while we were fucking. It wasn’t just fucking. It was something more.
Most of all, though, I think about how it felt to share all that stuff about my mom and Rick with her. I don’t know how I’m supposed to come back from that. I don’t know how I’m supposed to go on being the same old Dusty when I’ve already shown—to myself, to her—that there’s more to me than that.
I drink and I lean back and I sink into silence, thinking about the last couple of weeks. I’ve ridden by the motel more than a couple of times to check on her and she seems to be doing okay. I sit far back from the lot, near the road, and watch as she walks to her car or back to the room. Sometimes she’ll glance up, but by then I’m already riding away. I wonder if she guesses it’s me. It’s like she’s a magnet, a force I can’t resist. No matter how hard I try, I can’t get her out of my head. I haven’t been able to fuck with the club girls. And it’s not like they’re leaving me be. Alice is hounding me just as badly as she has been for weeks, trying to get me to go to bed with her. It’s verging on desperate, but there you go: maybe most club girls are that way deep down.
As if on cue, the club girls strut into the room to the howls and catcalls of the men. They claim the dancefloor—or what passes as a dancefloor here—and start bending and flashing and all that stuff, all that enticing stuff women do who want to make men crazy for them. I don’t look. I just stare down into my whisky glass and try to make the liquid form into Marilee’s face.
Alice drops into the seat Clint was sitting in until a few seconds ago. “Hi,” she chirps.
I let out a sigh.
“Wow, that’s really how you’re going to greet me?”
I take a sip of whisky.
“Why do you have to be such a jerk, Dusty? I just don’t get it. What have I done to you? I’m just trying to be friendly.”
“Look at all these men.” I wave at the room in general. “I don’t understand why you have to hang around me, Alice. I don’t reckon there’s any point in it. It’s not gonna lead anywhere. It’s a waste of everybody’s time. That’s all it is. I promise you that. So you might as well—”
She flicks her hair. She’s dyed it jet-black now. “Now we match,” she told me the first time I saw her with it. “Don’t tell me what I might as well. Okay? I can do what I want. The last time I checked, this is a free country.”
“Which means a man ought to be free to tell a woman to lay off, the last time I checked.”
“You’ve definitely found a girl, Dusty. You can’t sit there all grumpy like that and tell me you haven’t found a girl. What happened, she decided she didn’t like the outlaw life? You have to remember that some girls just aren’t cut out for this sort of thing. They don’t know how to handle it. They just pretend they can, but when it comes down to pleasing men like you . . .” She leans across the table, her usual routine: flashing her breasts. “I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m sure you do, but the thing is, I don’t wanna wake up tomorrow feeling like I’ve taken advantage of somebody. And that’s how I’d feel with you.”
“Why?” She sounds genuinely curious.
“Look, Alice, I don’t wanna hurt your feelings.”
“I just asked you a question.”
I massage the bridge of my eyebrows. “There’s no way in hell you’d be hounding me like this if you didn’t have some problem with men. Look, I don’t know what it is, but I’ve said no, and it’s like you can’t believe it. It’s like you think ’cause you’re pretty all men’ve gotta be attracted to you, or—I don’t know—like you see yourself as the hot girl and so if a man doesn’t want it, you go all crazy.”
For a moment it’s like I’ve really gotten through to her. She narrows her eyebrows and begins to nod, as though my words are settling somewhere deep in her mind. But then she remembers that she’s Alice the hot girl, and Alice the hot girl can’t hear this. Maybe she’d have to face reality; that isn’t an option.
“Wow,” she says, shaking her head and pouting. “You really are something, aren’t you? You’ve really got some fucking problems.”
She marches away, throwing herself at a nearby table. You’ve really got some problems. Yeah, maybe she’s right.
Chapter Twelve
Marilee
It’s all about confidence. That’s what I’ve learned. The men will respect you and know to leave you alone if you have confidence. Before, I slouched and I pursed my lips and I let the men know that I was vulnerable, that it was worth their time
trying to intimidate me. Now, I stand with my shoulders back all the time and I never let my composed face slip. Man after man pulls up, mostly old, but sometimes nearer my age, eyes fixated on my bare flesh, licking his lips if he’s a real creepy freak.
I keep Dusty’s lighter pressed against my breasts at all times, a cool reminder that once I was a cowardly girl, scared of my own shadow, and now I am changed; I was changed by the simple act of taking this lighter from an outlaw and everything that came afterward. As I serve the customers, I think about Dusty, wondering why he hasn’t returned to me. He’s paid for another few weeks at the motel, so I know he hasn’t forgotten about me.
