"Ain't got no smoke,” said Ricky. “Want to search me? Want to strip search me?" He winked at the high school girls on the bus. "You a queer or what?"
"Talk like that'll get you off the bus for a month," said the bus driver.
"Like I really care," said Ricky. He pushed past Mistie and strode to the back of the bus where he dropped onto a vinyl-covered seat. Other high schoolers, sitting nearby, turned around drew together, heads going down, talking loudly but incoherently.
Mistie found a seat by herself halfway back. There was a pencil stub on the seat. She flicked it to the floor. "Mama had a baby and its head popped off."
This was the only bus in the county that had a cross-grade population. It transported kids from all three schools, Pippins Elementary, Curtis Middle School, and Patterson High. The high school kids who rode this bus hated it, and let everyone know. At least they had the shortest ride, only three miles, and then they were gone, leaving the younger kids catching their breaths and rolling their eyes at each other.
A little ways down the road, the bus shuddered to a stop in front of a row of small, once-colorful box houses. A lot of these houses had kids. Bent bikes and up-turned plastic wading pools littered yards. Some of the chain link fences were torn down and most of the grass in most of the yards was gone, leaving cold-packed dirt and ruts. Five cars and two pickups in various stages of disrepair sat in the driveway of the pink house. In the side yard of the gray house, frozen sheets swayed stiffly on the line.
There was a girl who lived in the purple house who Mistie liked. Her name was Tessa Kessler. Tessa and Mistie were in the same second grade class at Pippins Elementary. Tessa was pretty, with bouncy blonde hair and a lot of new clothes. She wore makeup sometimes, and she missed a lot of school because she had to baby-sit her little brother when her mama ran down to Roanoke Rapids in North Carolina to shop. Tessa got to be in pageants on weekends. She looked like Princess Silverlace on that show on Nick.
Kids from the box houses filed onto the bus. Mistie pulled her foot clear of the aisle as they came, and watched for Tessa. A first-grader sat down by Mistie, bearing a blue plastic lunch box and a scowl. He looked as though he'd been crying. Sooty rivulets zigzagged down his face. Mistie was disappointed, because if Tessa were coming to school, maybe she would have sat with Mistie.
But Mistie didn't ask the boy to move. She shifted in her seat, slouched against the side of the bus, and stared out the window at the green house. From the front of the bus, she could hear the door hissing closed, and the grinding of the bus gears as the bus driver settled in for the remainder of the trip.
Then the front door of the purple house opened with a jerk, and Tessa was jumping from the stoop to the narrow concrete sidewalk, a denim book bag dangling from her elbow. Mistie sat straight, watching.
The bus driver said something over the din of students, and the bus door clanked open. Tessa rushed through the open chain-link gate, past her sagging mailbox, and jumped onto the bus steps. Mistie clenched one fist; the other went inside her coat and stroked the satiny nightgown.
"Mama had a baby."
The boy by Mistie farted and scooted his butt around to let the smell escape.
Tessa dropped into a seat near the front, beside another little girl. The bus honked its horn at a passing car, then pulled onto the road. The boy beside Mistie pulled a set of Pokemon cards from his pocket and began to shuffle through them, mumbling to himself that his brother had bent up the best ones. Mistie found a tear on the back of the seat in front of her. She watched it, bouncing up and down and sideways, making her pleasantly dizzy, until the bus was at Pippins Elementary, and it was time to get off.
3
Tony's crotch burned from the tug of last year's too-tight jeans, but the sensation wasn't sexual. It was irritating, and something that a sifting of position could put temporarily past notice. Her head itched under her hat, but she didn't reach up to scratch it. It could be sweat or excitement or maybe even head lice - her little sister was home today with a case of the nits - but right now in the grander scheme of things it didn't matter. Her dark brown hair was already a short crew cut, with half-inch bangs in the front, so if it was lice making her itch, the idea of shaving the rest of it off later wasn't a big deal. But, regardless, sweat or cooties, she kept her hands down and away from her head. A test of willpower.
She was in the back seat of the car, against the door on the right. Buddy was in the front. He was driving, sort of. Buddy didn't have a license, and he didn't know much past how to push the accelerator and that you had to stay on the right side of the road. Buddy was fourteen with thin blonde hair that reached his shoulders. His hat was a Redskins ball cap he got from the Exxon Convenience Mart on Route 58.
On the passenger's side up front was Leroy. Leroy was sixteen and the oldest so he thought he was too good to drive. Let baby boys do that, he’d say. He also thought since he was oldest, he was smartest. That was a crock of shit. Leroy wore a really old tattered knit hat that said, “I’m a Pepper,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. He also sported bent sunglasses. Around Leroy's neck were old dog tags that belonged to someone in his family, but he didn't know who. They had been flattened on a railroad track years before he was born and the letters were way past legible. Looking at Leroy was like looking at a scrawny snowman with big black coal eyes jabbed into his forehead.
In the middle between Buddy and Leroy was DeeWee. DeeWee was ugly and retarded, but he was Leroy's fourteen-year-old brother so he always came along. DeeWee's hat was just like Leroy's, only green. The gang didn't do colors, although they knew from the T.V. that gangs out in California and other big cities did. The Pippins gang wore hats. They called themselves the Pippins Hot Heads.
Next to the left window in the back was Whitey. Whitey was black but he got burned once and it left a long white scar on the side of his neck. Whitey had an old beret he'd stolen from his uncle. Whitey was almost as old as Leroy, but Leroy didn't let it matter. Whitey didn't let it matter, either. Leroy was boss.
Between Whitey and Tony was Little Joe. Little Joe thought he was a cowboy, just like the country singers on channel 47. Little Joe had bright red hair and freckles and was from Louisiana. He used to wear a cowboy hat but Tony cut it up with a razor one time. So Little Joe was reduced to a red stocking cap advertising “Castrol Motor Oil." He also wore a belt buckle with Johnny Cash's face on it that he polished with spit.
It was almost 11:30 in the morning. The Pippins Hot Heads had been riding around since just after ten, trying to keep warm since the car's heater didn't work very well, shooting road signs and a bum-legged skunk with Leroy's bb gun, drinking the beer Tony had stolen from her mom, and having a half-hearted on-again off-again belching contest. Everyone's breath was cotton-smoke on the cold air in the car. Tony could see spit in Little Joe's breath smoke and it pissed her off. Idiot should learn to breathe without spitting; it was gross.
Today's car was a green-and-rust Chevelle. It was Whitey's aunt's but she didn't go to work today, she was in bed with the cramps, so she didn't know it was making the rounds. The thing groaned and thumped and smelled of private, auntish things like perfume and sex. The sex smell pissed Tony off even more than Little Joe's spit did.
"Shit, Little Joe, get them goddamn boots away from me!" Tony shouted suddenly, slamming her heel onto the top of his foot. "Keep them away from me!"
"Ow!” whined Little Joe. “Can't just cut my damn legs off just to give you room. Where you want me to put my feet? Whitey ain't complaining."
Whitey turned his attention from the flat countryside out the window and looked at Little Joe. "That's 'cause I got control of myself. Tony don’t know nothing ‘bout control. If I was Tony, I'd tore ‘em off long ago."
"I’m ready to cut your feet off inside those boots and throw ‘em all out the window!” swore Tony. “Those boots’s pussy, Little Joe.”
Little Joe's eyes drew into slits and he slumped against the back of the seat. "Fuck."
But slowly he pulled his feet together as closely as he could. "Ain't pussy."
"They's pussy and they’s queer, too," said Leroy from the front seat. He fingered the buttons on the radio, sending a mad barrage of song clips yelping out through the speakers in the rear. "We'll find you a good pair of shoes soon, baby boy, and you can kiss them high heels good-bye."
"These boots cost a lot," said Little Joe. But his voice was almost a whisper, and Tony was the only one who heard him. Little Joe was the bottom of the Hot Heads pecking order and knew it.
"Damn radio," Leroy hissed. "Can’t get nothing but old shit and preachin’. And on a Tuesday."
“Bent antenna,” said Buddy. “It wasn’t bent we’d get something better, maybe from up at Richmond.”
Leroy drove his fist into the on button; the music died. "Yeah,” he said, “if we had a good antenna we could get Richmond stations with rap and shit. Whitey, tell your aunt get her antenna fixed."
Whitey grunted, then let out a long, crisp belch that threw DeeWee into a temporary fit of laughter.
They drove a few more minutes, down a stretch of frozen country road, with no sound other than Little Joe's raspy breathing and Buddy's occasional sniffs and curses. Silently Tony counted the rails of the fences they passed so she wouldn't jump out of her skin. The day was frosty and clear. It was December tenth. Good little boys and girls were in school. But not the Pippins Hot Heads. They were in a beat- up Chevelle, driving around the county looking for something to do. Usually, if they could get a car, the something to do was stealing folks’ mail then smashing their mailboxes and whacking cows in the butt with a crowbar to watch them run. When that got wearisome, they'd pool their cash for a couple gallons of gas at the Exxon, swing by Whitey's trailer at MeadowView for some of the doughnut sticks his aunt always had hidden in an upper kitchen cabinet, and go eat behind the old chimney in the woods back of the trailer park.
Here, in the farmland back roads between the tiny towns of Pippins and Capron, fifteen miles from Emporia and Interstate 95 that ran north to Richmond and south into North Carolina, it was real easy to hang out and not go to school. There weren't many police around except for troopers and not many of those, either, and they watched Route 58 most of the time, watching for speeders. The Hot Heads rarely talked to anybody else, and if, while pumping gas or pocketing candy at the Exxon, someone actually demanded to know why they weren't in school, the gang just said they were homeschoolers. Worked every time. Homeschoolers were good, Christian kids.
Tony squinted and kept up with the rails on the side of the road. Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty, sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three. Boredom and rage burned her spine with a furious heat.
The need to teach that bitch Martin a lesson clawed the tendons in her neck.
"Buddy, Buddy, stop," said DeeWee. "Gotta pee."
Tony peered over the seat and grimaced. DeeWee was holding himself through his pants, pulling and tugging like he was manning a fire hose. Buddy pulled the car to the side of the road. The cotton field next to the road was flat and broad with a small barn squatting in the corner. The barn was a pretty cool place in the summer because you could have damn good parties once you scraped the spiders from their hiding places. One time, a couple months ago, the Hot Heads had caught two middle schoolers making out in one of the barn's stalls. The Hot Heads had made the two strip naked and run barefoot across the stubbly pasture to wherever, anywhere but the Hot Heads' barn.
Tony had kicked the girl just outside the barn door and the girl had come down in the sharp cotton stalks on her pretty little made up face with its fucking pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. Stalks, right in her face and in her hands, making her bleed, kinda like Jesus after Pilot got through with him. It was beautiful. Tony had then stomped the girl on the neck, hard - stomp stomp stomp! Oh, it felt wonderful! - until Leroy pulled her off, then the girl had choked, gagged, then scrambled up and ran, stumbling, after her white-assed boyfriend. It had been good for a laugh, then it was into Tony's mama's beer and the doughnut sticks.
It took DeeWee a full eighty-three seconds to whiz, zip, and get back into the car. He smelled like pee. He had probably leaked on himself. The car pulled back onto the road. They drove another quarter mile, past the strobing fence posts along a small cattle farm.
Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five, forty-six.
Tony couldn’t stand it anymore. "Stop the car.”
“Nuh-uh, ain’t stoppin’,” said Buddy. “You shoulda peed when DeeWee peed.”
“Stop the goddamn car, Buddy.”
Leroy hawked, rolled the window down and spit. Most of it caught the rear window like a clear streak of bird shit.
“You ain’t my boss,” said Buddy, but his foot came up a bit on the accelerator, and the car slowed a fraction. He glanced at Leroy. “Tony ain’t boss,” he complained. Leroy shook his head but said nothing. When Tony used the tone, he paid attention. He knew he’d better.
“Gotta pee, gotta pee, Tony gotta wee wee!” sang DeeWee.
“Gotta shut your mouth hole, DeeWee.” Tony leaned over the back of the seat and put her teeth at Buddy’s ear. She said slowly, “Stop…the…fucking…car.”
“Back off, Tony,” said Leroy. But then he said, “Pull it over, Buddy.”
Buddy cursed and pulled the car over. It bit the gravel and then a baby rabbit that didn’t move fast enough into the poison ivy by the fencing. The car engine died.
Leroy turned and his knee came up on the seat, ramming into DeeWee’s side. DeeWee squawked. "What the hell’s wrong with you, Tony?" Tony could see his nose twitching. That was good. He was nervous. Tony liked it when he was nervous like that.
“I had enough of this shit,” she said.
“What shit?”
“Us. You see us? You know what you’re seeing? Don’t you want to just puke when you see us?”
Whitey sneezed.
“What you talking about?” said Leroy.
“Just what I said. We’re shit. We’re fucking babies, all this baby trash we do.”
Leroy’s eye hitched, but he held his ground. “What trash you talking about? Think them cows thought we was just a bunch of bitin' flies when we hit their butts with them bb’s? We drew blood! Think them folks thought the tooth fairy took their mail to Never-Never Land?"
"Bitin’ flies!" giggled DeeWee. “Cows thought we was bitin’ flies!”
Tony scoffed, “Think Little Joe's boots is baby? Huh? I’ll give you baby. That b.b. gun. Like that little kid in that movie they been showin’ over and over on channel 45. He wanted a bb gun for Christmas. Oh, ain’t he just so bad, now? Asked Santa for the gun."
"You saying I got this gun from Santa?" said Leroy. He pulled off his sunglasses. His dark, snowman eyes looked even darker.
“You ain't making sense," said Whitey tentatively.
"And you pissin' me off," said Leroy. "Ain't nothing I can't hit with my bb gun. I can take off your pimply nose with it. I can take out your whole face if I wanted to, whiny baby. Bang-bang-bang, out like a star at the carnival shooting gallery. Nothing left but that shitty haircut on top your scalp."
"Don't ever call me whiny baby," Tony said.
Leroy popped open the door. A tiny piece of cotton blew in on a breeze. "You want out right now, Tony? I’ll pull your ass over the seat and throw you out. Thought you was cool like a guy, Tony. You just whiny like a brat."
“Whiny little brat,” said Buddy.
"Who asked you into this?" Tony knocked Buddy's cap off and yanked a fistful of hair from his scalp. Blood beaded on the raw flesh. Buddy yelped and grabbed his head.
"Hold your tongue," Tony said. "Or I’ll pull that out, too!” She threw the hair into Buddy’s lap. Some still clung to her fingers and she wiped it off on Buddy’s headrest. Whimpering, Buddy held the wad of hair to his head as if he might be able to put it back.
“Listen to me, everybody,” said Tony. “We should be doin’ big stuff. Real stuff. Or we should just go ba
ck to suckin’ Mama’s titties for all the good we are.”
“Like what stuff?"
“I been thinkin’ about a robbery.”
Leroy blew air through his teeth. “Big deal, Tony. We steal stuff all the time.”
“Not like that. Not stealing. Robbin’. There’s a difference, case you didn’t know. Show the firepower. Rob ‘em blind. Leave our mark on something besides cow asses."
“Arm robbery! Steal a arm!” laughed DeeWee.
“Who we gonna rob?” said Whitey. “There ain’t nothin’ around here. And we ain’t got no cars that could make it all the way to Richmond or over to Portsmouth."
Tony felt the blood stir in the backs of her hands. Hot, cold. Hot, cold. That new nigger at the Exxon would shit her lacy little drawers. Out the dirty window dry grasses strummed the air and the clouds boiled in the white sky; Tony could smell the shit and the sweat. “It’ll be the best,” she said. “Stick 'em up! Hand it over! Money in the bag, now, you stupid bitch!”
“What bitch?” said Leroy.
"’Possum!" shouted DeeWee.
A scraggly opossum had appeared on the roadside gravel. It waddled into some brush near the car.
Tony’s head was itching again, and she fought to keep her hand from scratching. “Bitch at a bank,” she said with a shrug, not caring to share her personal vendetta with the other Hot Heads because it didn’t matter. She’d kill two birds with one stone with the robbery she had planned. “Bitch at the store, the gas station, whatever, crying, ‘Oh, help me help me! Lord save me! Take what you want and leave me alone!’ Fucking pussies.”
Little Joe's booted foot slipped down onto Tony's and she slammed it back with a kick so hard to his shin she could hear the denim rip. Little Joe grimaced but made no sound.
“Well,” said Buddy. He looked at Leroy for direction.
“Well, well, well,” giggled DeeWee.
Leroy pulled the passenger door shut. He rubbed his mouth. “You know,” he said. “Ain’t too bad a idea, even if I didn’t come up with it myself.”
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