Jerkwater

by Jamie Zerndt

  “Sometimes I feel like the older sister,” Elmer said, grinning at her. “Always trying to warn you about things.”

  “And I never listen.” Shawna tugged at his t-shirt, pulling it up over his stomach, and ran her fingers along the thin hairs there. His stomach trembled a little, jumping under her touch. Shawna leaned down to kiss him, but just as she was about to close her eyes, she felt Elmer jerk back.

  “Shawna...”

  She looked up and there, peering in through the passenger side window, were three grotesque masks. Or, at least, that’s what they first seemed like to Shawna, like those Halloween masks kids buy with those wide, creepy cut-out smiles that go all the way up to the ears. Only these were real human beings.

  “Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.” The words came out in a rush, running into one another as Shawna eased herself upright. Then one of the men outside made a roll-down-your-window gesture to Elmer.

  “Don’t,” Shawna said, grabbing his arm. “We can just drive away.”

  “Just stay calm. I’ll take care of it.”

  “You’ll take care of all three of them?”

  “If I have to.”

  Shawna let go of him. It was too late. It was in his voice. There was a turning in it. Something that had changed color. Elmer rolled his window down part way, and Shawna could smell the sourness of alcohol almost immediately as the puffy pink faces swayed there out in the dark.

  “This a better time to talk, Tonto? Or maybe you want to finish up with your little squaw first?”

  Shawna could see Elmer’s hand reach for the door handle. “Don’t,” she pleaded again, hating how weak her voice sounded.

  “It’s okay, Cochise, you can come out. We won’t hurt you. That wouldn’t be fair, would it? Three against one.” The small one leaned down and put his nose right up against the glass. He winked at Shawna. “What’s a matter? You don’t trust us?”

  Shawna felt the weakness giving way to something else now. She leaned across Elmer, her words coming out like a growl. “Wannabe Custer motherfucker.”

  The other two men began to whistle and snicker at this, which made the little one bristle. “Your whore’s got a mouth on her.” This seemed to appease the other two as they stopped laughing. “You see,” the little one went on, “we want our money back. You get me, Tonto? You do speak English, right? I always wondered about that. Why speak our language if you hate us so damn much? Why not going around speaking Featherhead or whatever it is you people speak?”

  When Elmer just stared at them, the three men stepped back from the car and started whispering among themselves. After a minute or so, the little man bent down in front of Elmer’s window again, and, with his voice barely above a whisper, said, “Last chance. How about you get out of the car like a good boy, and then I show your sister there how it’s really done?”

  “Gookoosh,” Elmer muttered, and the little man cocked his head dramatically like he was trying hard to hear him.

  “What’s that? Hey, Carl. Big Red here said something in bushnigger.” The little man peered back into the car. “Say it again, Red. C’mon now. What was it? Glucose or something? What’s that mean? I bet it isn’t very nice.”

  Shawna knew the word to mean “pig” in Ojibwa, and that was exactly what they looked like to her. Three drunk, angry pigs. And now one of them was behind the car. She wanted to run over as many of them as possible before driving out of there, but something was stopping her. Anger was stopping her. She didn’t want to run. Her mother’s voice rang out in her ears as clear as gunshot: You will know the face of ignorance. And suddenly it dawned on Shawna what her mother had been trying to tell her. “My phone,” she muttered and started feeling around on the seat for it. “Have you seen my phone?”

  “Shit, they’re lying on the ground now,” Elmer said, his hand still on the door handle. “One in front, one behind.”

  At first Shawna didn’t understand what he was talking about, but then it clicked.

  “If you want to leave, you’ll have to kill one of them,” the little one at the window said. “Or, and this is just a suggestion, you could get out and discuss this like a man.”

  Shawna turned on the dome light and spotted her phone on the floor by Elmer’s feet.

  “You should call Bill,” he said, handing her the phone.

  Bill Songetay was the tribal sheriff. She remembered once tossing a cigarette out her window, back when she smoked in high school, and Bill pulling her over, giving her the choice of getting a ticket for littering or picking up ten pieces of garbage along the roadside. And even though she had been annoyed at the time, she never threw anything out her window again.

  “No, I’m going to record them.”

  Elmer looked at her. “Kind of dark for that, isn’t it?”

  Shawna fidgeted with the phone until she found the right thing to tap and then handed it to Elmer, but the man had gone back to his car for something. “Here, point it in his face when he gets back.”

  Elmer craned his neck under the windshield and nodded toward the basketball court. “There’re cameras up there, too, you know. From when all those fights kept breaking out.”

  Even though Shawna had moved off the reservation long ago when her mother had first gotten remarried, she remembered the cameras being a big deal when they’d first been put up. Many in the tribe saw it as a violation of their privacy. And some saw it as a white man’s solution to their problems. And nobody much wanted that.

  “Just try it. It might spook them.”

  “They aren’t going to spook, Shawna. They’re too drunk for that. I say we just run the assholes over.”

  “And have that on camera?”

  “Oh, right.”

  Before Shawna could do much of anything, the little man sauntered back over with a six-pack dangling from his fingers and handed one to each of his buddies. Shawna and Elmer both noted the brand: Treaty Beer.

  “You two ever tried this stuff? It’s not half-bad. What’s that line from that movie? Tastes like...victory.”

  Shawna nudged Elmer, and he fumbled with the phone before holding it up to the window. “Whatcha got there? Hey, fellas, they’re filming me! I’m gonna be an internet sensation!”

  “Make sure to smile real purty!”

  The voice came from behind them. Shawna could see the back of his bald head resting against the trunk of her car. She turned the engine over, gassed it. Both the men gave a start, crouching just in case they’d have to run. “Go slow,” Elmer said, keeping the camera in the man’s face. “They’ll move.”

  Shawna revved it again and when she began inching forward, the one in front turned and placed his hands on the hood, bracing his feet in the gravel like maybe he thought he was Superman. Shawna let the car push forward. She could hear his feet skidding now, see the look on his face turn from leery bemusement to fear. The small one, seeing that his prey were escaping, began to punch at the window.

  “That’s it,” Elmer teased him, smiling behind the phone, “keep swinging, little gookoosh.”

  Shawna had, until now, entirely forgotten about the horn. She expected it to do very little, but when she laid into it, the man in front jumped back like he’d been electrocuted. She gave it more gas, turning the wheel hard as she did, making sure there was a wide enough berth between her car and the drunks. Shawna was just starting to feel good, like they were in the clear, when she heard Elmer scream. It was a frightening sound, something between a bleating cow and a screaming child.

  “Mmmmrrraaaaaaaarrrrrrggghhh!”

  The little man had somehow managed to get his hand through the open window and was now hanging on to Elmer’s ear. Shawna slammed on the brakes, but, just as she did, Elmer, who had both his hands around the man’s thin arm, sank his teeth into him. There was another loud howl outside the car, and the man’s arm slithered back out the window. Shawna hesitated
for half a second and then tore out of the parking lot, the other two men giving chase, the screams of their leader soon getting fainter and fainter.

  Chapter Eight:

  Kay

  It was a Sunday, which meant it was count-the-donation- money day at church. Kay sat at an old card table in the basement un-crumpling dollar bills and working them into an envelope. Across from her sat Alma, a widow like herself, and someone Kay had only recently taken to calling a friend. She was often quiet, introspective it seemed to Kay, which made her different from the other blue-hairs, the gang of widows, who volunteered at the church and whose every word seemed to spring from some deep well of fear and loneliness. As if the act of talking signified life itself. As if even a moment’s silence meant death was descending upon them. They always made Kay anxious.

  “With all this money,” Alma said quietly, conspiratorially, “you’d think they could afford better coffee.”

  Kay shrugged. All coffee tasted pretty much the same to her. Like a cupful of dust. God knew she drank enough of it anyway, though. “With all this money, you’d think they could afford a better priest.”

  “Kay...”

  “Well? You can’t tell me it hasn’t crossed your mind.”

  “I like him just fine.”

  “He wears sandals.”

  “He’s hip. And they’re called Birkenstocks. My Caroline has a pair.”

  “I don’t want to see my priest’s toes, thank you.”

  Alma laughed a little at this and shook out another pile of bills and coins onto the table. “I think he has nice feet.”

  “I don’t care if they’re nice or not; I don’t want to see them. And did you know where he was before he came here? San Francisco. On vacation. What kind of priest goes to San Francisco on vacation?”

  “A fun one?”

  “A gay one. C’mon now. You know it as much as I do.”

  “I don’t know that. I thought my Caroline’s new boyfriend was gay, but she says he’s definitely not and that just because he has a ponytail wrapped up into a ball on top of his head like a little pile of poo and does yoga and drinks white wine doesn’t make him one.”

  “In Mercer it does.”

  “Well, maybe that’s why they moved to Madison then.”

  At the table next to them, one of the blue hairs was giggling, tittering, over something one of the others had said. She sounded just like a little girl to Kay. Like a stupid, inexperienced little girl who had lived a sheltered life. Everything was funny to them, always a smile on their faces. It made Kay’s skin crawl. Because what they were laughing at was never actually all that funny.

  “Father Jason has a lisp,” Kay said, trying to ignore the others and focus on Alma, who never laughed much. Or even smiled much, for that matter.

  “I guess I just don’t see why it matters. Would it be better to have John Wayne as our priest? They’re supposed to be married to the church anyway. Either way you go, they’re supposed to keep their guns holstered.”

  Kay knew Alma had a point. And the thing was she wasn’t even sure why she did care. She had no real problem with gays. Or sandals. Or toes. “I’m just being stupid. And old. Ignore me.”

  “I think you just miss Father M.”

  There was a wink in the way Alma said this, like she was saying something more than what she actually was. “Father M was a drunk.”

  “Maybe,” Alma said. “But he was a good priest.”

  “A priest’s priest.”

  Whatever Father M’s faults or virtues were, the man had certainly liked his whiskey. And although Kay wasn’t one to frequent Ruggers, she knew from both Norm and Douglas that their old priest had been there most nights they’d gone. Father M was in fine form tonight, arguing pound for pound with Tate Barnes about the existence of God. Tate kept saying Father M’s God was an insecure God, that he needed everybody to worship him and believe, that an all-knowing, omnipotent God wouldn’t be insecure like that. He just wouldn’t care is what Tate was saying. So Father M asks Tate if he cares about his children. And if he considers himself stronger and smarter than his children. And if he liked to hear his children tell him they loved him. You should have seen the red come over Tate’s face. It was one of the few times she’d ever heard Norm say something even remotely positive about the church.

  Kay knew, without having to turn around, that the new priest had entered the room because the blue hairs had all quieted down and begun to sit up straight like good little girls when father came home. She found herself wondering lately if it mattered at all to this particular breed of follower what kind of man was behind the collar. Or was it simply the power of the collar that put them under such a spell? In a similar way as, say, people tend to become nervous and polite when speaking to police officers. Or doctors.

  “Please help yourselves to more cookies, ladies. Don’t be shy. If you don’t eat them, the good Lord knows I’ll polish them off myself later and we wouldn’t want that.”

  A few of the ladies got up dutifully to get more cookies, and Kay rolled her eyes at Alma. “Be good,” Alma said, nodding in the priest’s direction. “Here comes Father Birkenstocks.”

  But the new priest wasn’t wearing sandals that day. He had just given a sermon, on Daniel and the Lion’s Den no less, and was stopping by after seeing his flock off. In other words, he was in his work duds.

  “How did we do today, Alma? Enough for me to buy a Hummer?”

  Alma gave Kay one of her deadpan looks that was clearly meant to shut down any plans Kay may have had to laugh outright at the comment. Which, of course, only made Kay want to laugh all the more.

  “Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t really be interested in one those, Father.”

  “Wouldn’t I?” he said, beaming at Kay now. “Might be fun.”

  “Well, I hate to disappoint you then, but it looks like we’re more in the Honda Civic range today.”

  “Ah, well. Probably for the best.”

  With that, the priest strolled off to tend to the other hens. As the blue hairs spoke with him, Kay could almost taste the sugar that had come into their voices. Any diabetic within range would be in serious danger.

  “I’m impressed you managed to hold your tongue, Catherine.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You looked like the whale with Jonah in its mouth.”

  “Nonsense. I don’t even know what a hummer is.”

  “It’s a car.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  They were nearly done. Kay reached into her coat pocket where she kept her digital watch but found the silver key instead. She didn’t remember putting it there, but, then, that wasn’t all that unusual these days. She thought of showing Alma the key, telling her how she had found it, but decided against it. She just wanted to go home now. Everything seemed so plastic there: the table, the laughter, the priest. She thought of Seven and imagined him snorting away there in the basement of the church, how magnificent and out of place he would be among all the fake. Just thinking about it gave her a little thrill.

  Suddenly Kay changed her mind and set the key on the table. “I found this among Norm’s things. But it doesn’t fit anything in the house.”

  Alma merely raised her eyebrows at Kay, as if to say, “So?”

  “It’s a strange key, don’t you think? Small, I mean.”

  “Looks like a P.O. box key to me. There a number on it?”

  “No number.”

  “Maybe a safe deposit box?”

  “I don’t think Norm would even know how to go about getting one of those. Or have anything valuable enough to put inside.”

  “Value is usually defined by the valuer.”

  “Secrets are valuable.”

  Alma sat back in her chair, a rare smile on her face. “Catherine, what is going on with you?”r />
  Kay told her about the book of matches she’d found from Les Deux Magots, that she knew it was silly to even give it another thought but that something didn’t feel right.

  “I don’t know. You ask me, some things are best left unopened.”

  “You’re probably right.” Kay put the key back in her pocket. “I can’t open what I don’t have anyway, right?”

  Kay hadn’t been back to the repair shop since Norm died. She put all of that right on to Douglas. Which wasn’t fair, but there was just no way she could have handled it. The shop was like a giant closet filled with Norm’s clothes. Or like stepping into an urn. Even driving by it, something she had to do at least two or three times a week, was still difficult. She’d gotten good at not looking at the shop, pretending it wasn’t there, but that was no good either.

  As she entered, the radio Norm would play his “oldies” music on was now blaring something that, honestly, didn’t sound much like music at all to Kay. But, then, she’d never understood what all the fuss had been about Elvis either. He’d never done a thing for her. Not even when he went religious. Maybe especially when he went religious.

  She rang the buzzer by the entrance just like a customer would, and soon Marty appeared from around the corner of the office. She’d apparently caught him during a bathroom break.

  “Mrs. O!” he said once he saw who it was. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  The way he was nervously wiping his hands on the rag hanging from his belt made Kay feel like a nun. A feeling she didn’t like one bit. “It’s just me, Marty. At ease.”

  “I know,” he said, taking it down a few notches. “It’s just, well, I haven’t seen you around here since...”

  “Since Norm passed. I know. I’m sorry about that.”

  She used the word “passed” for Marty’s sake. He’d been close to Norm and the word, while annoying and inaccurate at best, was softer than “croaked.” Which is what she’d nearly said.

  “Douglas went out for a bit. I can get lost, too, if you want to be alone or something.”