She forced herself to focus on the math problems, but beneath it all she'd never been so excited in her entire life.
7
"Mam," said Tony.
The woman on the sofa made a snuffling sound, then turned over, her face to the back, a filthy throw pillow clutched to her chest. She was dressed in sweatpants and t-shirt. Her hair, gray and long, was pulled back into a limp ponytail. She stunk like she was having her period.
"Mam!"
The woman said, "What you want? Can't you see I'm trying to sleep?"
"Darlene's out back playing in the sinkhole."
"So?"
"So you told her not to. You told her to keep her nitty head inside so the neighbors wouldn't think she was skipping out school again."
"She ain't hurting nothing. Mine yer own business."
"No problem," said Tony. She went back into the kitchen and pulled a beer from the refrigerator. She took a long swig then looked out the grease-iced kitchen window at her ten-year-old sister in the sinkhole. Darlene was digging with a tree branch. Going to China or something. Little puffs of frosty ground arched up and out of the hole every so often. Maybe she'd fall in and nobody would be able to get her out and the Chinamen would put her in prison and torture her and make her build fireworks for Americans. Tony smiled around the beer can.
Tony’s home was the yellow house on Rainbow Lane. A developer had bought a chunk of farmland off Donald McDolen and had put up a row of ten box houses. One was white, one pink. Another was blue, yellow, green, lavender, peach, aqua, gray, and teal. Each house had started out with chain link fencing, a small storage shed, and deck off the kitchen in the back. Now, the houses had taken on the personalities of the owners, much like dogs begin to look like their masters. Mrs. Sanford in the white house had maintained the fence and deck and had put in rose bushes and a gray stone patio. The Campbell family in the teal house didn't have a fence or deck anymore. Their teenagers had torn it down. The lavender house belonged to the Kesslers, whose daughter did beauty pageants all over the state. And the peach house was now a crack house, with its ratty shades always drawn and a steady flow of customers coming and going in cars with smudged license plates and windows smoked over. People in the neighborhood tried to keep pets but as soon as Tony could get her hands on them, they would be sliced and diced and thrown out in the woods. Nobody knew she did it; everybody blamed the crack house customers.
There were two bedrooms in Tony's house. One was her mother's and Darlene’s, although Lorilynn Petinske seemed to prefer the sofa in the living room. The other bedroom belonged to Tony and the nine-year-old disabled twins, Judy and Jody. Judy and Jody were disabled because they couldn't behave in school and so for the past year, Lorilynn Petinske had gotten monthly checks for the girls to stay home. Tony didn't know where Judy and Jody were now, probably over at the pink house. The bedroom had a double bed where Judy and Jody slept and a cot where Tony slept. There was only enough walking room to sidle between the bed and cot to get to the closet or the dresser. The visible floor space was littered with dirty underwear and crumpled school papers.
"Angela," called Tony's mom.
Tony didn't answer. She refused to answer to that name. Her mother knew it.
"Angela!"
Tony stepped across the tops of the cot and the bed, then dropped down to the floor in front of the closet. She wrangled back the warped sliding door. She had to have something that would make her unrecognizable at the Exxon. The thrill was to do it and to have everyone wonder and tremble, not to be caught. There were several old K-Mart cardboard storage crates in the closet that had accordioned with age and the weight of accumulated clothes and junk. These boxes held stuff that Tony’s mother considered valuable. Tony had been through them many times, had removed and sold a tarnished pocket watch, some costume jewelry, and an old black silk parasol that had belonged to Tony’s great-grandmother. She’d taken the Swiss army knife and stashed it in her dresser drawer beneath her jeans. She’d smashed and then burned the small collection of porno movies and Playgirl magazines she’d discovered at the bottom of the box, a collection that had clearly belonged to her mother.
Most of the stuff, however, was just clothes. Tony’s first school dress. Judy and Jody’s matching knit baby bonnets. A cotton apron Darlene had tried to hand-stitch when she’d been in Brownies for a half-year. Other assorted outgrown clothes that for some reason, Mam had felt were worth hanging on to.
One box was crammed with clothes that had belonged to Tony's grandfather. Her mother's father. Trousers, a pair of cracked and musty shoes, two flattened hats, a couple starched, faded shirts, a moth-chewed gray knit vest. They smelled of silverfish and thirty-year-old sweat. Mam, who wasn’t real crazy about Granddad, hadn't thrown them out because she said it was an insult to the dead to do that.
Tony pulled out Granddad’s box and tossed it onto the double bed. Granddad had not been a large man, unlike Buddy's Gramps who had a gut like a wheelbarrow and a beanbag butt. She put on the beige slacks and drew them up tightly with the old vinyl belt. She added a long-sleeved checkered shirt, the vest and the black shoes. Her feet swam in the shoes, so she found three pairs of socks in the dresser and put them on and tied up the black laces. The socks kept the shoes from slipping. She studied herself in the full mirror on the back of the bathroom door, and then pulled one of the flattened hats down over her eyes. She found the knife in the drawer beneath her jeans and stuck it in the side of her shoe, working the handle up under the leg of the trousers. She tore a strip of cloth off one of the blouses Darlene had left on the floor and used it to tie the handle in place, snug, against her ankle.
Her mother's sunglasses were found on top of the fridge. She put them on. They were cheap and the bridge cut her nose.
“Angela, goddamn it!” called her mother from the living room.
Tony tried to see herself in the window glass over the sink. From what she could tell, she looked a little like herself, a lot like her father. That was good. Her father, Burton, had been a real man. He’d left when Tony was six but that was okay because he didn’t really want to, Mam had made him go. She had found a new boyfriend and told Burton to get out, she never wanted to see him again. Tony understood why he didn’t try to stay. Burton had been a real man and a real man could never have put up with the shit on the sofa in the living room.
Tony dumped her mother’s black vinyl purse out on the kitchen table and collected up the three tubes of Shop-Rite lipstick. These went into the shirt breast pocket. War paint for the Hot Heads.
“Angela, you’re in there, I hear you!”
Tony shoved a kitchen chair over to the stove and climbed up to get the shoebox from the back of the tiny cabinet over the stove. The box was covered with chew marks and inside were little black mouse turds. Also inside were Burton’s revolver and a small paper bag of bullets. Burton had lost the revolver in the divorce along with the sofa and his television. Tony had tried the weapon out several times in the woods behind the houses of Rainbow Lane, drilling holes in trees and downing groundhogs and starlings. It had a good feel to it, the wooden veneer on the handle slick and easy to grip. She put the revolver in pocket of the slacks and patted it. It felt like a hard-on. She grinned.
As she was pulling the small paper bag of bullets out of the cabinet, her fingers lost hold and the bag fell, bounced on stove, and the folded top popped open. The three bullets in the bag rolled out, skipped over the lip of the stove, and disappeared into the black maw of the crack between the stove and the solid sink counter.
“Fuck!” swore Tony. She grabbed at the air as if she might actually draw the bullets back out of their hiding place, but came up empty.
“Tony!” Mom at last relented, her voice dissolving, changing from demanding bitch to whiny child. “I need a beer, honey. Please?”
Tony tried to rock the stove to move it backward, but it was too heavy. She yanked the long-handled barbecue fork from the utensil drawer, got on her knees, and scrape
d the narrow space with the prongs. Nothing came out.
“Goddamn it!” Tony kicked the stove, tried to rock it again. It didn’t budge. She slammed both fists against the white enamel surface of the stove, and kicked it with her Granddad’s shoe.
“Tony, honey? You out there in the kitchen? Please bring me a beer. My throat’s so dry I can hardly breathe.”
Tony shoved the kitchen chair back into place and took another beer from the fridge. She popped the tab, then found the can of Bug-Be-Gone spray in the cabinet under the sink. She spritzed down the hole in the can, not too much, just enough to make Mam sick, then swirled it around and wiped the top with the wet dishrag.
You’re a fucking bug, Mam, a lazy ass mosquito, sucking everybody dry.
Tony took the can to Mam, who thanked her meekly, then left by the back door, stomping in Granddad’s shoes across the warping redwood deck and down the steps. Darlene glanced up from the sinkhole, stuck out her tongue, and kept on digging. Tony walked down the brown graveled drive to the road with the empty revolver in her pocket. It was already after three-thirty. Leroy and Buddy wouldn't be long.
As a sharp winter wind blew up around her legs, Tony wished she'd brought her heavy coat. But she wasn't going to go back into the house with that stinking new nigger. She wouldn't step foot inside that dump again until she’d done what she had to do.
She licked beer and salty sweat from her upper lip, jammed her hands into the trouser pockets, leaned against the yellow house's sagging chain link fence, and counted, counted, counted, until the Chevelle showed up.
8
The teacher was going to take her on a ride. Mistie didn't know this woman, but she'd seen her on the school playground sometime. The teacher wore bright lipstick and had pointy eyebrows and smelled good like the soaps and hand lotion Mama had tried to sell from that pretty catalog. The teacher had told Mistie what her name was but Mistie had forgotten it.
Now, the two of them were in the teacher's classroom. Mistie sat in a desk the teacher had pushed behind her own desk. The desk wasn’t like the second grade desks. This one was bigger and there were papers and books inside. "Sit there," the teacher had said. "Don't get up, okay? Can you sit still for just a few minutes? I need to get a few things before we go."
And so Mistie sat in the desk, looking alternately at the dots on the ceiling and the rows of little clay houses in the classroom window sills. Some of the clay houses were painted, some of them were plain. Some were cracked. Some looked like they hadn't been finished.
The teacher said, "We’re studying ancient man. Those are supposed to be early native homes from the southwest." The teacher was talking really fast and her voice went up and down like a cat when you squeezed its stomach. "Some of the boys and girls did a very nice job, don't you think?"
Mistie didn't. She looked at the ceiling again. Her stomach growled. She poked at it, making it growl some more.
The teacher had a big cloth tote bag with writing on it and a picture of an apple. The teacher crammed in books and a few things out of her desk drawer. "My senior annual," she said, holding up a blue and orange book. "I can't leave this behind. I graduated from the University of Virginia nearly twenty years ago, can you believe that? Yes, I'm just an old Wahoo. Wa-hoo-wa! Well."
Mistie put her hand between her legs and rubbed hard until it got hot.
"Mistie, don't do that," said the teacher. "Please. Okay? Mistie? Here, here's a Tootsie Pop I took from one of my students. It’s raspberry I think. Hard to tell raspberry from cherry in this light. Here."
Mistie took the sucker, unwrapped it, and stuck it in her mouth.
"Okay, all right," said the teacher. Her lips kept moving around like she was tasting something sour. "A little food and some drinks, then the bank, and we'll be off. It's going to be a nice trip, Mistie. Oh, it's going to be fantastic. You'll see. We're both going to have a wonderful, wonderful time." She paused, placed her hands on her hips, and glanced about. There was sweat over her eyebrows. It looked like the sweat on Mistie’s Daddy’s eyebrows at night. "Now, what else do I need, is this it? What time is it? I think we can go now. Most everyone is out of here by now. Mistie, button your coat, please. It's very cold outside."
Mistie stood and buttoned her coat. She took the sucker out, looked at it, then bit the red orb off and spit it into the air. "Mama had a baby and its head popped off," she said.
"Oh?" said the teacher. "Fine, then. Let's go." She reached for Mistie's hand but Mistie didn't want to hold her hand. But when the teacher said, "Come follow me. And be just like Elmer Fudd, okay? Ever see him on cartoons? Be vewry, vewry quiet," Mistie was.
9
It was a few minutes before four o'clock. As Kate had hoped, most of the faculty and staff had left for the afternoon, hitting the road for home and putting as much space between themselves and the school as possible in the least amount of time. Mr. Byron's pickup was still in his reserved spot nearest the flagpole but he was required to stay until five. The gray Toyota next to it belonged to Miriam Calhoun. She would stay as late as Mr. Byron stayed. There were three other cars belonging to teachers. Some liked to stay after and grade papers. Kate used to be like that.
Kate's own white Volvo was one of the three, sitting on the far side of the parking lot because she’d arrived too late that morning to get one of the choice spots near the front. Kate led Mistie out the back of the school, by the exterior of the gym, the cafeteria, and the row metal trash bins. Kate paused and peeked around the wall. She almost laughed aloud, but bit it back. Good for you, Nancy Drew! she thought.
When Kate was quite certain there was no one on the long front walk or milling about the lot, she hustled the girl to the Volvo, pulled open the back door, and helped Mistie inside. "Just sit way down,” she whispered in as calm a voice as she could manage. “Sit way down for just a little while. You can get up in little while, promise. Okay? Mistie?”
Mistie didn’t seem to understand. Kate demonstrated, slumping low and peeking back at Mistie around the side of her seat. “Like this. Pretend you’re real short.”
Mistie didn’t argue, and she scooted down far enough that Kate was pretty sure the top of her head couldn’t be seen from anyone outside the car.
“Good,” said Kate. “Thanks.” She patted the girl on the head. The hair was sticky. On the floor of the back was a quilt Kate kept in the car in case she’d ever been caught in a blizzard, while she hadn’t. Kate carefully draped the quilt over the girl. “We’re being secret, okay?”
Mistie didn’t say anything, but didn’t seem to mind the quilt.
The strange little girl had been amazingly easy to collect when the bell had rung. She’d been lagging behind most of the other students, her coat on backward. Kate had motioned Mistie aside when the bus duty teacher wasn't looking and said, "Won't you come to my class for a few minutes?" The dulled eyes didn't seem to register the request, but the body did. Mistie Henderson had obediently followed Kate down the hall and had sat in the desk while Kate had snatched up a few important items. Her grade book and some teacher manuals so it would appear she'd planned on returning the next day. Some change from her desk drawer for quick drinks later tonight. Her university yearbook, Corks and Curls, which she'd brought to school last week when notice of the upcoming twentieth reunion had arrived in the mail. During brief moments of free time, Kate had been flipping through the pages trying to re-associate herself with names and faces for the get-together in May. Donald thought they should certainly go, and she wanted to. One of the few things they’d agreed on in a long time. She’d gazed at Donald’s photo. Handsome, sandy blond, member of the Pep Band and Intramural Track Team. God, but he’d been a charmer, a romancer, a fast-spending, generous man who had seemed to Kate to be all the right things back in college. Kate had gazed at her own picture. A slight grin, hair straight and past her shoulders, her chin tipped up just a bit at the encouragement of the photographer. And then the photos of Alice and Bill, smiling placidly from a sea o
f other smiling fourth-year faces.
As her students had started to work on some problems she’d posted on the overhead projector, she’d pulled out the yearbook and looked at Alice again, then Bill. They knew what she was thinking, and they thought it was a splendid idea. Their approval had made the plan more than possible to Kate, it had seemed probable.
Canada was about a sixteen-hour drive straight north except through Pennsylvania which, for some reason, didn’t have any major highways leading north through the middle of the state; she’d have to go west and up. With enough high-octane soft drinks and coffee, Kate knew she could make it without sleep, though it would be one hell of a haul. The Volvo’s tank was full of gas, so any stop would be way north of here, somewhere in Never-Never Land where no one knew her or the Volvo or the child.
The Christmas cards Kate got yearly from Alice and Bill Harrison had the return address of Bracebridge Run, outside Toronto, Ontario. Chatty cards all, speaking of a lovely home full of adopted, handicapped children and adopted, stray pets. Alice and Bill had been friends of Kate during their university years. They had been social activists then and social activists still. Wild children they were themselves, hippie-holdovers at the University of Virginia when hippies had been out of fashion for nearly ten years. They’d worn long hair and flowing blouses and sandals and handmade clay beads around their necks and on their wrists. They’d been laughed at by the preps and the jocks who dominated the campus, but it all rolled off their backs like water on duck feathers.
Alice had gotten Kate interested and involved in some wonderful causes back in those days. Kate, a shy and quiet girl from a comfortably wealthy and politically disinterested family in Norfolk, had become involved in Amnesty International, the University Environmental League, and Friends of Animals - a very new movement at the time. She’d called home about her adventures; her sixteen-year-old sister Amy had said, “Just don’t get arrested,” and her father, chief accountant at Elizabeth River Financial, had told her “Honey, we love you. But do remember why you’re there, and that has more to do with books and papers than anything else.”
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