Crime Plus Music

by Jim Fusilli

  I was afraid to get off the bus, afraid Miss Walker would keep talking too, but moving seemed harder, so I stayed. I watched the boys through the big windows as they paced up and down the candy aisle, taking their time choosing what to buy.

  Miss Walker sucked on her cigarette, leaning toward the small window with the pivoting glass beside her high seat. The heat of the sun was seeping through the still metal body of the bus and sharp light was glaring off the black tar parking lot into every small window. I watched three perfectly round smoke rings rise up over the back of Miss Walker’s ball cap, one passing through the next like a magic trick. I couldn’t see her face in the mirror anymore, she was leaning too far forward and I was glad.

  The boys climbed back up the rubber-ribbed stairs, each mumbling thanks as they passed Miss Walker, clutching chocolate bars and cherry slushies. I didn’t even care; I didn’t want any of it.

  She steered the huge bus smoothly in reverse with her right hand on the wide black steering wheel and flicked her burning cigarette butt out the window with her left hand. We were back on the road with the breeze and almost home.

  THE FOUR-BLOCK WALK FROM MY bus stop felt endless and full of menace. I saw three separate motorcycles and their sounds froze me in my tracks on the sidewalk. The clumps of trees that rimmed the empty lot beside Dolphin State Bank held dark places where bodies or bikers could hide. The sun was just beginning to weaken, the air gentle against my bare arms and legs, and it felt strange, like it should have set while Miss Walker was talking. I know I will never forget a word of her story. The white dress, the black fire pit, whiskey breath, and rough pine bark against her naked skin. I will know these details for rest of my life; they flowed through my body like sickness, heavier and more vivid every minute.

  Walking up the concrete path to our apartment, I heard the Beatles through the screen door. My little sister Carrie was dancing in the living room with her neighbor friend from downstairs, two little girls in white cotton panties and multicolored Mardi Gras beads making up a dance to “Run for Your Life” from Rubber Soul. I stood in the doorway and watched. First they chased each other around the coffee table during the “run for your life if you can” lyric, then they stuck their heads under the toss pillows on the sofa for “hide your head in the sand” and finally they dragged their little fingers across their throats in a slitting motion and stick their tongues out for “catch you with another man that’s the end-a, little girl.”

  “Where’s Mom?” I yelled at Carrie, suddenly furious with her. “Put some damn clothes on!”

  Carrie shouted “Jim is home!” and jumped up on the sofa bouncing with excitement like it’s Christmas.

  “Great,” I said flatly, heading into the kitchen.

  Mom’s boyfriend, Jim, was always gone on some job, I don’t even know what kind, so when he returned it was treated like a special occasion, as if I cared. He paid no mind to me but he doted on Carrie, always swinging her around by her hands in the front yard and pulling her onto his lap when they watched cartoons. He knows I don’t like him or trust him, even though I’m super careful to be polite. Mom changed when Jim came home, splashing handfuls of Jean Nate cologne onto her damp skin after her bath and wearing red lipstick and dresses instead of jeans. It was stupid.

  Debbie, our seventeen-year-old neighbor, was straddling the step stool by the kitchen wall phone, the curly beige cord wrapped around her wrist and the receiver glued to her ear. Debbie was “watching us” while Mom and Jim were who knows where, which meant she would hog the phone all night talking to her boyfriend Ron. First her voice would be sweet and high for a while, but by Carrie’s bedtime, she’d get annoyed and hang up on him at least two or three times. It was always the same. Debbie had huge boobs peeking out of a low-cut shirt made of terry cloth and a tiny butt smushed into tight bell bottoms with rainbow stitching down the legs. While I looked her over, she started rolling on pink lip gloss, looking into her compact, her mouth in a big O. She snapped her bumble gum, which wasn’t ladylike, but she did have on great high-heeled boots. I suddenly wondered if the girl still had her shoes. Did she walk in the woods and down the gravel road all that time in her bare feet?

  I heard Debbie say she wasn’t ready into the phone, he’ll have to wait just a little while longer, and then she caught my eye, and shouted, “Don’t be a creeper!”

  I slunk back into the living room and found Carrie on top of her friend, slapping their bellies together and saying the word “hump” over and over again, giggling.

  “Jesus,” I said, and stalked to my bedroom, slamming the door. Seconds later, Carrie, now completely naked except for the bright green and blue beads around her neck, threw my door open and yelled, “Debbie says we get pizza!”

  “Get out of here and put on some clothes or I will murder you!” I screamed.

  Carrie puffed out her bottom lip and it started to wobble like it did when she pretended to cry, then she slammed the door so hard in bounced back open and I watched her tiny butt running into the kitchen.

  I got up to close my door and lock it, even though I’m not supposed to. I laid back on my bed and realized I hadn’t changed my maxi pad in hours, but I didn’t feel like getting up. I turned on the reading lamp beside my bed and pulled my backpack over to me. As I unzipped it, the crumpled paper Kevin threw at me rolled into my lap. I unfurled the wad and smoothed it out on my thigh, the rough black ink scribbled over the pale blue loose-leaf lines was a drawing of a penis, with big cartoon drops squirting out of the top and a bubble over it like it’s talking. It read, “Cum on yer face!” I took the words like punches in my stomach and I felt the blood breaking through onto my shorts. I tore the paper into pieces and threw them behind me while I ran to the bathroom.

  Sitting on the cold toilet seat, bent over with cramps, tears came up the back of my throat. I kicked off my sneakers, pushed my bloody cutoffs and underwear down my legs and pulled my stinking T-shirt over my head. I peeled the blood-soaked pad off of my underwear and folded it tightly into thirds, then wrapped it in thick looping layers of toilet paper, making a clean white ball I could leave in the wastebasket. I used up all the paper left on the roll, but I didn’t care. While I wrapped it up, I finally let the tears break through, so hot and strong it scared me. It wasn’t just the gross thing Kevin wrote. I couldn’t stand the thought that Jesse saw that note and didn’t stop him from hurling it at me. I folded my chest over onto my lap and rocked myself until I was calm enough to flush and stand. I stepped over Carrie’s mangled Barbie with her legs bent in the wrong direction and her hair cut off and landed directly on the bloated belly of her rubber baby doll, almost slipping. I turned on the shower as high as it goes and the heat and steam soon calmed me. I rolled the white bar of soap around in my hands and washed the blood off of my thighs, the water running red, then pink, then clear. As I washed my small, sore breasts, I had a weird thought.

  If I did not have these little pink swells on my chest, I wouldn’t have gotten that awful note. If I wasn’t getting boobs or bleeding, Jesse wouldn’t avoid me on the bus. It wasn’t so long ago we took baths in this same tub all the time. When we were young like Carrie, we didn’t even notice our bodies. Everyone can see me changing now and my tiny boobs are like a signal I can’t control, sending out a message that filled me with fear.

  I was too tired to eat pizza, too tired to brush my teeth or do my homework. I just wanted to sleep. I pulled on one of mom’s T-shirts off the towel rack and went back to my room. Night was finally falling and the fading sun turned my room a hazy, glowing pink. I crawled into bed and watched the warm light disappear.

  I woke up disoriented, unable to shake off a dream where I am naked and afraid, walking on sharp gravel in cold bare feet, my legs so heavy I can barely lift them. Without thinking, I pulled my sheet off my bed and wrapped it around me, dragging its length behind me down the hall to my mother’s door. I stood with the glass knob in my hand and heard a sound like a howl, then a panting, straining cry. A b
aby animal was trapped somewhere, back inside my dream, but as I shook off my nightmare, standing in the empty hallway, I realized the sound was my mom and Jim.

  I dragged my sheet down the hall to the kitchen, my mind filled with hate. There was no way to reach into her dark room and pull my mother out. There was no way to get comfort from her no matter how much I needed it. She belonged to her boyfriend.

  I wouldn’t be able to sleep again, I knew it, and I panicked. My mind was filled with naked bodies, with hands and mouths and blood. I walked down the hall, took up Debbie’s perch on the step stool by the phone, and punched in the number I knew by heart even though it was maybe a year and a half since I used it.

  “Jesse? It’s me.”

  “Oh, hey.” His voice was deep and strange, sleepy and grown sounding.

  “Can you talk?” I asked.

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. Late. Could we play the game?”

  “Huh?” Jesse’s voice went higher and I recognized it now.

  “You know. The radio? I have to be quiet, but I’ll be able to hear yours.”

  I didn’t come out and say I knew his father was probably passed out drunk in his recliner and wouldn’t hear his radio.

  “Yeah, all right. Hang on.”

  I heard the muffled sound of him fumbling with his blankets and then his radio came on.

  “. . . I had to take her upstairs for a ride . . .”

  “Stones! Point for me!” he whispered emphatically, like a quiet shout. “Hey, they’re coming to the Gator Bowl this summer.”

  Jesse and I must have started playing this game of Name That Tune when we were seven or eight, in our moms’ cars, at the beach with his little transistor radio, and best of all, on the phone after our parents went to bed. I fell back into it like no time had passed. I felt his cheek pressed against his black phone, and saw his dark brown bangs hanging messy over his closed eyes. I remembered how long Jesse’s lashes were, and how his nose whistled while he slept, his round cheeks turned pink and hot, and his curls matted into small circles that stuck to his forehead with sweat. He spent the night here when his mom worked late waiting tables like mine. It seemed normal. It felt safe. I listened to the light sound of Jesse’s breath and try and slow mine down to meet his. I wanted that young, easy feeling to come back to me, but I had to ask.

  “Jesse, do you think it’s true? Do you think that could’ve happened out in Palm Valley and we know nothing about it?”

  Jesse didn’t answer right away, and we listened to the twangy guitars and bursts of cowbell of “Honky Tonk Woman” for a while.

  “I don’t know. Probably not. That was totally ridiculous,” he said when the song ended. “But, then again, that kind of stuff happens all the time. Not the bikers and the tree and all, but the rest.”

  “Don’t say that. That can’t be true.”

  Jesse heaved a big sigh and rustles his blankets.

  “Haven’t you ever noticed the fliers outside the grocery store? Missing girls? Don’t you ever watch the news?” He was talking louder now, annoyed.

  “Not around here, though,” I whispered.

  “Why not here? The whole world is the same, everywhere you go.” Jesse sounded so sure.

  The radio let out a watery, warbling sound so familiar it was a thrill to hear, a mix of voices and effected guitar, then drums kicked in and the whole band fired up. Jesse and I started singing at the same time, in perfect harmony just like Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, “Sweeeeeet Emoooooootion . . .”

  “Aerosmith,” I said fast, “My point.”

  “Too easy,” Jesse whispered.

  We sang every word to the whole song, but for the first time the lyrics seemed mean and ugly:

  “Some sweet hog mama with a face like a gent . . .”

  I tried not to pay too much attention. I tried to stay with the lush sounds and keep away from the girl they’re singing about. When it was over and the DJ starts talking, the girl in the story came right back to me.

  I said, “It’s worse than if they killed her.”

  “That’s nuts,” Jesse said.

  “They put a bottle in her, Jesse.” I whispered. “A bat!”

  Jesse cracked a mean little laugh, his breath escaping in a dismissive rush.

  “You’re awful,” I said.

  “Sorry. I actually think that’s physically impossible. Miss Walker saw that in a movie or something. Why would she know all those things about it? Like what she was wearing and all?”

  I didn’t have an answer. My stomach hurt and the top of the step stool was hard under my bottom. My hair was still damp and clean but my sheet and T-shirt were sweaty. Jesse was all snuggled in his warm bed and I was sitting here, uncomfortable. It all made me mad.

  “You don’t understand. You don’t have to and you never will. Something gets crushed inside that you can’t fix when you are raped. That’s worse than death.” I didn’t know how I knew this, and it was like Jesse read my thoughts.

  “How do you know? You’ve never even kissed anybody.”

  “God, what does that have to do with anything?”

  A delicate guitar line, pretty and sad, started a new song.

  “Oh, Perfect. Alice Cooper, ‘Only Women Bleed,’” Jesse said, “I’m winning.”

  It’s true, I thought. I’m losing and I’m bleeding. I could feel my cheeks go hot with shame when I imagined telling Jesse about my period. We quietly listened to the spooky, pretty song about a man hurting his wife.

  “. . . he slaps you once in a while and you live in love and pain . . .”

  “Do you think the girl could have been Denise?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Denise, from last year. Mrs. Johansen’s class. Do you think maybe that’s why Denise’s mom took her out of school and moved her away?”

  “Nah, why would you think that? Her folks just got a divorce and moved.”

  “But they lived in a trailer,” I said. “Not in Palm Valley, but it was out in the woods somewhere. We never did see her again or hear anything after her mom took her out of school. She had a white dress, too.”

  “Don’t you have a white dress? And she said the girl didn’t go to school. Why are you making this such a big deal?”

  I heard the whirling static of Jesse changing the station, stopping at a nasty guitar riff.

  “. . . I feel like making love! Feel like making love! Feel like making love to you!”

  “Uh . . .” I say.

  “You don’t know this one?” Jesse asked, sarcastic.

  “Yes, I do. It’s Sweet, the band not the song. It’s dirty.”

  “Nope. It’s Bad Company! I’m still winning.” I could hear Jesse grinning, and he suddenly seemed stupid and younger than me. I thought of all the stories in all of the songs I knew and it made me shake inside. It didn’t matter if Sherry Walker’s story was true or not. There were a million other stories just like it, some true and some made up, but all of them were awful and all of them were about women doing wrong in one way or another. A private, peaceful place inside me was filling up with confusion. From now on, I wouldn’t even be able to hide inside of songs.

  “Why is every song about sex or women getting hurt or being awful?” I asked.

  “Don’t be a bitch,” Jesse said, flat. He sounded just like his daddy.

  “Wow,” I said. “Fuck you, Jesse!” I hung up. It was ruined.

  I waited for a few minutes, but he didn’t call back.

  I WENT BACK TO MY room and turned on my bedside light. I opened my closet and slipped my white dress from Easter off its special padded hanger and threw it on the floor. I pulled off mom’s T-shirt and smoothed out the sheets on my narrow bed. Laying on my side in my underwear and awkward maxi pad, I stared at the Rolling Stones poster on my wall. Now even the cartoon lips parted by the fat red tongue disgusted me. Why did Sherry Walker plant this girl inside of me? What good would scaring me do? Was her story supposed to terrorize Jesse
and the boys too? It didn’t seem to. Jesse wasn’t thinking about that girl and how she had to live her whole life always thinking of those men hurting her. Every time anyone touched her, she’d remember. Every damn pine tree, every motorcycle or extension cord she ever saw would be like a poisonous snake wrapped around her ankle, rearing back to strike.

  I leaned over the edge of my bed and saw a dusty extension cord and yanked it out of the wall. I wasn’t really thinking; I had slipped inside the girl’s scraped knees. Her bloody thighs and cut-up wrists were mine. I tasted her metallic fear in my mouth and I wanted to feel it. I wrapped the end of the cord around my left wrist and looped it through the iron post of my headboard. I pulled the cord tight and twisted it around my wrist again before I made a double knot. I laid back on my pillow. It hurt. I couldn’t straighten my tied arm, but I tugged it a few times just to test it. The plastic coating over the wires pulled at my arm hair like a burn. I wished I had thought to turn off the over head light. I closed my eyes and concentrate. I tried to feel their heavy bodies pressing against me, one after the other, the rough beards scraping my face. I tried to smell their sour breath and hear their hooting laughs, and I tried not to feel afraid.

  I knew the end of the story. I knew we get away, the girl and I, so I explored it. I imagined hiding in the deepest part of myself where no one could touch me. I put one finger slowly inside myself to see what it would feel like to be entered, and an immediate warmth rose up through my legs. The men disappeared and the night sky arched over my head, a dizzy dome of clear white stars. I let myself settle against the strong body of the tree and felt the cold piney breeze on my skin. The tight cord melted off of my wrists and ankles and my body was free. Before I understood what I was feeling, a stunning pleasure began in my belly. I kept my finger inside and waited for the sensation to stop, but it built up like pressure. It felt so good. I didn’t think about what I was doing and just did it. I let go of the story and went deeper into my body. Behind my closed eyes was an eclipsed, molten sun, a velvety black orb surrounded by wisps of golden light. I was rocking in a warm explosion that made my limbs tingle and sing as the orb moves away and the light became blinding. Every bit of fear and confusion and shame was simply gone: melted, evaporated, vaporized. It was the most beautiful feeling I had ever felt and I rested inside of it for a long time. Then my heartbeat slowed, my breathing deepened and sleep finally took me down.