The Stud Book

by Monica Drake

  When did people get so delicate?

  It’s a special crowd that settles in to the amber candlelit glow of booze and mirrors before mothers of the neighborhood call their children home to dinner, before a standard workday ends. Humble was part of that crowd. It warmed the cockles of his heart, whatever the hell cockles were. In this haunt, on a strip of northeast Portland, the new owners had added three flat-screen TVs. One, almost overhead, showed the news. Another, just past the pool table, CSI reruns. The third was a string of ads.

  He watched TV, all three of them, and waited for a girl to die.

  Bourbon coated his tongue and burned its way down his throat. He watched the news. His guess? Dead local girl inside of fifteen minutes, almost to the weather report, halfway to sports. He would’ve laid that bet.

  The way you played the game was, watch TV with drinks ready. When you see a dead woman, pour a shot and throw it back. When you see a girl pulled out of the river, fake-looking TV-land strangle marks on her pale neck, chug a pint. When you see a glamour girl splayed-legged and faceup, dusted blue, dressed just enough to please the FCC, shout “Skoal!” and clink glasses and bottoms up.

  Humble missed those days. It’d been fun.

  On the CSI rerun, a dead girl started the episode. Humble’s internal meter told him there wouldn’t be another body there for a while.

  You could lay bets. With the TV off, you could bet how many minutes until the dead girl showed up, turn the TV on, and time it. Bet how many channels and flip through. You could bet how many channels until the dead girl, or how many channels, at any minute, were showing a dead girl.

  So many ways to play the dead girl game. Drunk, it’s better. When you play it right, you’re wasted.

  The bartender surfed. He landed on VBTV, Vampire-Based TV, all hot chicks, dead and undead at the same time. That channel wasn’t even fair to bet on—it was too easy. Humble said, “Go,” and the bartending kid did, and Humble felt himself command the space.

  Another channel flashed the fat body of a monkey. Closed captioning read … EXPECTING A BUNDLE OF JOY … That knocked-up monkey looked right at Hum. It looked as though it knew him. Under the stern eyes of the monkey’s gaze he thought he ought to get up and go home to his wife and their new baby, their daughter. Then the channel changed. Any urgency he’d felt faded into the warmth of bourbon.

  Home?

  Home to Georgie, with her stitches in her gut and her bad back, her postpartum gas and grievances. Bella, that elfin thing, was red faced and scowling. He loved them both. He did. He loved them in a way that made him half-sick, to see them waiting at the door, Georgie smiling hello, Bella still wrinkled and squinting, everyone eager to be a family. His daughter was a sleepy pink kidney bean. She was as fresh as a car from the factory, everything new, no miles; no scars, no flaws, no resentments. All the world would do was mess that up. When he looked at her, Hum was reduced to the role of a gnarled tree in an enchanted forest waving old limbs and warning, “Go back! Go back! Danger ahead.”

  He loved them in ways beyond his practiced levels. He’d never envisioned himself getting married, but then they did and it’d been his idea, really. That was okay. They’d been married for ten years. He never thought they’d have kids, and now they had one. It made him feel myopic, like he couldn’t see past the next year, or maybe past what he’d already done. But the baby thing? It brought out, in Georgie, a new level of need. Their easy marriage had been a loose knot. Put a baby in the picture, and it pulled those bonds tight.

  Humble was self-employed in computer maintenance. This was supposed to be paternity leave, but Georgie and Bella both slept so much he hadn’t figured out why they needed him home. He itched to order another round, linger in this drinker’s limbo. When the bartender didn’t catch his eye, he almost got up to head home.

  Instead he laid a bet against himself: If the next dead girl showed up within two minutes, on any one of the three TVs, he’d stay. He’d have another bourbon. If the girl didn’t show, he’d pick up his keys and coat and close the tab. Two minutes. The answer to the question that was the rest of Humble Johnson’s evening, or the rest of his life, he laid in the dead girl’s stiff blue hands.

  A real woman, alive, reflected in the mirror, stepped in behind him. She was tall and thin, her hair streaked red and blond like cedar. She shook rain off her dark coat and hung it on a brass hook on the side of a booth. The woman was young, in one T-shirt layered over another, with sweet curves and a high, inviting ass. She turned toward the bartender, caught Humble’s glance in the mirror, and said, “Hey. I know you, don’t I? You fixed my old PC.” She twirled a barstool with one hand.

  Over her shoulder, a crew of men stumbled upon a dead woman near a river. That dead woman’s body gave Humble what he needed. It gave him a gambler’s permission to stay.

  Nyla stood on the white cement of Georgie’s driveway. Dulcet stomped her way out of the boxwood bushes that lined the house. She used one hand to balance a wobbling pink bakery box. With the other she brushed off dried leaves that clung to her skirt. They’d come to see the baby. They’d called, knocked, rang the doorbell, slapped the back window in case Georgie didn’t hear them at the door, and still nobody answered. She’d said she’d be home.

  A white curly-haired dog jumped against Dulcet’s shin. The sleeve of her satin coat flapped against the claw of brambles. That coat was like something a boxer might wear, in beige satin the color of skin, with wide white cuffs at the sleeves. On the back, in a cursive script, it read:

  More Established Than the Rules

  It was a tour coat from a show she’d put together about sex before social norms—her own fantasy of prehistoric promiscuity—a sleeper show in three cities playing to an audience of six, or two, or a janitor, with Dulcet stripping down onstage in rooms the size of a bedroom. Edging up on forty, she, too, was more established than the rules and moved like she knew it.

  Her T-shirt read I AM WOMB-MAN! HEAR ME ROAR, written in Sharpie. Now she said, “What the hell?” She was tall, made taller by her clogs, and scrawny-thin, all sinew and muscle, with big hands. She snapped her fingers at the dog. “Down, Bitch.”

  “Do you have to call her that?” Nyla said, and eyed the house’s front door.

  Georgie wouldn’t answer the phone. She hadn’t been out of the house much at all, or at least nobody had picked up the FoodDay, those free food newspaper inserts full of ads. They’d piled up on Georgie and Humble’s front step, making it look like a house neglected.

  “Sweet little Bitchy Bitch.” Dulcet ran her free hand over the dog’s curly head. “Little Bitchybitchybitchybitch.”

  “That is not a name.” Nyla was soft in all the ways Dulcet was hard. Nyla was short and dressed in a sage-green windbreaker over worn yoga clothes. Her honey-brown hair was tucked back in a loose ponytail. Dulcet’s bleached hair couldn’t have been shaved any shorter without scraping her scalp. They’d known each other since sixth grade. Back then, almost thirty years earlier, they’d pooled their money and bought a tub of ready-made frosting at the 7-Eleven, chasing the same sugar high.

  Dulcet said, “It was on her papers, at the pound.”

  “That’s her gender, not her name.”

  “It might be her breed, too,” Dulcet said. “A bichon bitch?”

  “Bichon frise,” Nyla said. It grew dark early in Portland in the winter. Some gray days it never got light out at all. The lights were off inside the house. Nyla said, “Georgie’s probably asleep. Those first baby days are exhausting.”

  Dulcet said, “So we’re stuck with a thirty-dollar cake?” She used one hand to point, as though cocking a gun at the cake box.

  “After you’ve had a baby the whole world shifts.” Nyla gave birth to her first child, Celeste, when she was barely twenty. The girl’s full name was Celestial; that’s how young Nyla had been when she’d had her. She’d named her daughter after her favorite tea, Celestial Seasonings. If it’d been a boy, she would’ve named him Stash. Now
Celeste was off at Brown.

  Nyla’s second child, Arena, was in high school.

  Dulcet handed over the cake box. Bitchy Bitch lunged in an effort to snag the cake midtransfer, but she was a short dog with no luck.

  “Babies are parasites.”

  Nyla said, “We all start out as babies.”

  “All parasites.” Dulcet pulled a lighter out of her bag. “I hope she doesn’t make me hold it. If I wanted to hold a baby, I wouldn’t have had that eighth-grade abortion.”

  “Or sophomore year,” Nyla said.

  “That one, too.”

  Nyla had been there for Dulcet through them both, more or less. With the first, she was still so young and clueless she honestly thought an abortion was dental work. Seriously. She’d had to look it up.

  Dulcet said, “Thank God, or the Great Teutonic Dawn Goddess of Fertility, or whatever, that there’s a total surplus of babies. My baby-making skills aren’t needed.”

  They walked back to Nyla’s old Jetta wagon. Nyla rested the cake box on the hood of her car, opened the top, and ate fresh fruit off the cake one glazed piece at a time.

  “Avoid pain, seek pleasure,” Dulcet said. “Babies are all about pain.” If the goal of living is to balance the wonder of life against the fear of death, Dulcet needed help finding that wonder ever since she watched both her parents crawl out of the world early.

  Her mother had turned a dark yellow before she died. Her father had been simultaneously both bloated and emaciated.

  They left her with pills, by way of an inheritance.

  She kicked a foot at a pair of high heels near the curb. “The cream of the crap. Pretty good, for hooker shoes.”

  If New York is the city that never sleeps, Portland is the city that never throws anything away. Streets are littered with paper signs screaming FREE! Free cardboard boxes, ironing boards, weathered chairs, stereo systems, and paperbacks. It’s a materialist’s cornucopia. Except for the rain. Then it becomes a multileveled mold collection.

  She kicked off a clog and slid her foot into one of the free shoes. They were dark brown with a pale blue piping that matched perfectly the blue veins over her instep. She kicked it off again.

  Dulcet rummaged in her oversized purse until her hand emerged, pale fingers laced around a slim clay pipe. She slid it into her coat pocket and dug through her bag again. This time she pulled out an amber vial of Vicodin, a wad of Kleenex, and a bottle of K-Y, and piled them all on top of the car.

  In sixth grade, when they met, they’d been twins in their indulgences. These days Nyla opted for the endorphin high of power yoga. She asked, “You’re going to smoke?”

  “I have a license.”

  Nyla said, “To smoke in the car?”

  Dulcet pulled out a string of condoms, a fistful of pens, and a sleeve of Vicks cough drops. She turned the purse upside down and unloaded the rest of the contents on the car’s roof. “You have a license to drive, I have a license to smoke. We’re covered.” She found what she sought and held it up, victorious: her baggie, clouded with use, and the dried herb inside.

  Almost immediately a cop car turned the corner at the end of the block. With the low rumble of an engine meant to move at higher speeds, the cruiser made its way to the curb.

  “Shit.” Dulcet dropped her stash back in her purse. “Am I bugged, or is this whole city on camera now?” She wadded up the string of condoms. She swiped at the K-Y too fast and sent the bottle flying in a nice arc. She reached again, like a cat batting at a moth, and knocked it out of the air. It fell into the sprawling box of FREE! molding party clothes. Dulcet turned away fast, acted like it wasn’t hers anymore, not at all.…

  The cops parked nose to nose with Nyla’s beater.

  “Do they ticket if you’re parked the wrong way?” Nyla murmured under her breath. She pushed the lid on the cake box closed. Two cops got out of the car, both tall and big, in their dark uniforms. Bitchy Bitch leapt up to say hello. Dulcet snapped her fingers, and thank God, the unleashed animal doubled back.

  Twenty years earlier nobody’d even carded in Portland bars. You could live well in an abandoned warehouse—it wasn’t against any law that was enforced. The tofu factory would give away the corners they made when they cut round burgers out of square pieces of tempeh. Alternative living was that easy. Now people were shot by cops for pissing in an alley and the only thing easy was to get on the wrong side of the law. So much for the Wild West! Still, the streets smelled sweet with herb, smokers smoking and taking the risk.

  The first officer hitched up his pants. The second squinted toward the house like he needed glasses, then headed up Georgie’s short driveway.

  Through a front window, there was a flash of Georgie’s pale face and what seemed to be the inadvertent wave of a white hand against the darkness as she reached to close a curtain.

  Dulcet wrapped her fingers around Nyla’s arm, holding her back. When Portland’s finest were involved, Dulcet’s inclination was to run.

  But Nyla was a mother and carried that authority. She lifted the cake in its box like it was her turn to bring the school snacks, shook Dulcet off, and followed the cops to Georgie’s door with one arm swinging, the other holding the box tight against her side. She asked, “What’s going on?” to the backs of the officers—their short haircuts and thick waists where they spilled over heavy belts. “Is there a problem?”

  Dulcet followed more slowly, with her bouncing dog circling at her feet.

  The first officer knocked on Georgie’s door. The door creaked open.

  Georgie smoothed her hair back as she ducked around the door. Her skin was splotchy. She cradled her baby, blinked, and through a fleeting, shaky smile, offered one word. “Yes?”

  The officer asked, “Everything okay here, ma’am?”

  “All good.” Georgie’s eyes were blue and watery. Her face seemed superimposed on her neck, the way her head bobbled. She was barefoot, in worn flannel pants and a sweater. A soft blue nightshirt poked out in a ruffle below the sweater’s edge.

  The officer asked, “Mind if we come in?”

  She let them in without resisting, without asking questions, as though out to prove her own innocence by a sheer willingness to comply. Did she know what this was about? She moved away from the door. The house was dark inside, the curtains closed. Dulcet, Nyla, and Bitchy Bitch followed on the heels of the cops.

  Dulcet whispered, “Did you call them?”

  Georgie shook her head, a swift, secret negation.

  The officers walked from room to room, restless animals, and gave a cursory glance to the bedroom and bathroom. The two men were as tall as Dulcet and twice as wide. “You have one child?” the first officer asked. He held up a thick finger, a simple illustration: one.

  “That’s right.” Georgie held Bella tightly to her chest. The baby was calm, sleeping.

  Bitchy Bitch nosed a Diaper Genie near the front door.

  The women clustered in the kitchen, leaned against the counters, and were mostly silent, as though they’d be arrested if they said the wrong thing; nobody knew what that wrong thing was. You have the right to remain silent.… That was the only right they could count on. They waited together the way they had years before when somebody had called the cops on their parties, or when they sat in cars, pulled over for speeding tickets. If you moved slowly, didn’t argue but went along with it, there was a good chance the cops would go away.

  One of the officers said, “We got a call from a concerned party. Thought there might be trouble.” He ran his eyes over a chipped plate with a piece of toast on it, a half-full glass of orange juice, an open bottle of baby formula, and three white drips on the counter. A package of cloth diapers rested near the door.

  Nyla slid the cake box onto the counter.

  The second officer asked, “Are there any other children in the house?”

  Georgie said, “No.” She said it loud and clear, as though testifying.

  “Anybody else at all?” he asked. G
eorgie shook her head. She might’ve raised her right hand, if the baby hadn’t been in it, and sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth—and nothing except exactly what you want to hear, officer!

  The cop looked at Dulcet, then he looked at Nyla, studying each of them in turn.

  “We just got here,” Nyla said.

  They were big men with big shoes and heavy tools, trying to solve a problem they couldn’t see.

  One looked at Dulcet’s shirt. “Womb-man, huh?” he said, and smiled.

  She pulled her satin coat closed over her shirt.

  After a moment, the second officer looked toward the first and said, “Okay?” That was their conference; they made a silent decision. The first put a card on the kitchen counter with his name and badge number on it. “Take care,” he said, satisfied.

  Once the police were gone the small house felt a little bigger, the air a little lighter. The women could move. Nyla asked, “What was that all about?”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Georgie said. “God almighty.” She held the baby in one arm and reached the other down her flannel pants. Her hand came back up with a vial of prescription pills. She slapped the vial on the counter. Dulcet and Bitchy perked up their ears.

  “A mistake.” She wrapped the baby blanket more tightly.

  Nyla said, “Oh! She’s got a little bonkie-bonk on her sweet li’l noggin.” She leaned in to kiss the baby’s head.

  Georgie pulled Bella possessively close and ran a finger over the red patch on her girl’s white forehead. “I hit her with the phone.”

  Nyla blanched.

  “It was an accident. It fell on her.” Georgie moved away, toward the bedroom. “You can have those pills. If the phone rings, don’t answer.”

  Dulcet said, “But these drugs are yours. They’re legit—”

  Nyla added, “Georgie, that’s enabling.”

  Georgie, in the next room, called back, “It’s nurturing. Dulcet needs pain pills.” They knew one another well.