“They don’t got shit,” Little-little went on. “Sis, it’s dumb. You got a cigarette?” I took one out. He held up his hands. I tossed it across the room. The cigarette flipped through the air like a slow-motion kung-fu ninja. Little-little leapt up with the spry of a cat and caught it, then sat back down in the lap of the hacked-up armchair. “Naw, they don’t got nothing. Listen to this shit, sis, and you tell me if you think it’s right.” Little-little lit up. My pack was already out, so what the hell, I lit up another one, too.
“All right.”
Little-little tilted his head back and blew smoke rings into the air. They hung around looking like flying saucers above him. “He was dating this girl for a while,” Little-little told me, pointing at Not-cousin. “Then he met this other girl he liked better, and he started getting with her.”
“I cheated on her,” Not-cousin let out in a whimper, his neck already crooked for an execution.
“Right, but then he told his girlfriend the truth and broke up with her,” Little-little continued. “She freaked out. She was only, like, seventeen, and she had problems anyway. Really, dude. She had problems.”
Not-cousin’s red eyes were sparkling in his doughy head. “I know,” he cracked out in a whisper.
“Last week, his ex-girlfriend sent him all these text messages saying she was going to kill herself if he didn’t come back to her. She said if he didn’t come over right then, she was going to do it. And he didn’t answer them or come back to her, and she killed herself.”
“She killed herself,” I said. “Wait a minute. You’re saying she killed herself?”
“Hung herself,” Little-little told me, acting out the noose-snapping motion with his hand in the air and his neck falling sideways.
“I never saw the texts before it happened,” Not-cousin blurted out, his whole body becoming a pale, quivering mess. “I swear I didn’t see them.” The police scanner crackled. He twitched, then fidgeted with the dial. We all got quiet, listening. It was hard to make out what they were saying. It was mostly numbers. I guess he was listening for his name.
I was becoming even more confused. “What does it matter if you saw them or not? I don’t understand.” They didn’t respond, but stared intently at the scanner. I kept on with my endless questions. “How are they charging you when they know she hung herself? They don’t think you helped her hang herself, do they?” Now everything was a big question. Fuck. I sucked on my smoke.
Little-little jumped up and went to the window that looked over the backyard and the woods. “Shit, I think I see one. There it is. Come here.” I got up and went to the window. I didn’t see anything. “It was there for a second,” Little-little told me.
I turned back to Not-cousin and repeated my question. “Do they think you helped her hang herself?”
Not-cousin was a young man who was trying too hard not to cry. He remained silent. Little-little spoke for him, keeping one eye out the window, watching for green, glowing alien orbs. “Sis, don’t you get it? She hung herself because of him, and they’re charging him with second-degree manslaughter.” He sucked his cigarette and looked at me like I was stupid.
My cigarette was done, so I just lit up the next one on the end of that one. “That’s not how manslaughter two works!” I said, my voice all jumpy, becoming exasperated.
Little-little let out a frustrated sigh. “There’s some law in this county that says if you get a message like that, or a phone call, where someone is threatening to kill themselves or someone else, or bomb something or shit, that you got to report it or you’re responsible. It’s like, ‘If you see something, say something,’ you know?”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s like a Good Samaritan law,” I said. “Ah.” Little-little shrugged, pinched his cigarette out between his finger and thumb, and went back to staring intently out the window. “Or maybe it’s because of the Patriot Act?” Not-cousin turned the dial on the police scanner. “Either way, it’s bullshit,” I told him. “They can’t get you for that. There’s no way they have any legal ground to stand on. No one’s going to want you to go to jail for that, because that would set this crazy precedent that would make everyone around here liable for every crazy fuck who threatened anything.”
For a moment a glimmer of hope sprinted across Not-cousin’s red eyes. I even saw a hint of a smile light on his lips. “Ya think so?” he asked just above a whisper. But then everything went shitty again. He looked to the ground and shook his head no, answering his own question. “It don’t matter anyway. I broke my probation now, so they’re coming to put me up either way.”
“Probation. You were on probation?” He nodded. “For what?”
“Rape,” Little-little answered for him.
“Oh. Rape.” I put a period at the end of those words. I was still smoking my cigarette, but I wanted another one. I wanted ten another ones. I wanted to line up all the cigarettes I could fit between my lips like overgrown teeth and set them on fire.
“Statutory,” Not-cousin added, chewing his cheek. “Damn, man, statutory. Always say statutory first, okay?”
“Whatever.” Little-little gave up his disappeared-green-orb watch for a minute to go to the kitchen and get a glass of water. “That was dumb, too. You want a drink, sis?” The dishes in and around the sink were piled up an extra foot above cabinet level and looked like they hadn’t been washed in years, literally. They could accompany the talking couch in giving guided tours across the trailer moat. Put some suspenders on those dishes, they could have passed for tour guides.
“Nah. I’m good,” I replied.
“She was his girlfriend,” Little-little told me from the kitchen. “She was sixteen, and he was nineteen. Her mom’s a Christian and all, and she didn’t like him. When she found out they’d been having sex, she called the cops on him.”
“What’s the age of consent in Illinois?”
“Seventeen.”
“Well at least this girl who killed herself wasn’t a statutory thing, too,” I said. Not-cousin nodded. Little-little came back with his glass of water and sat down next to me. “Still, you can beat this.” It felt weird telling him this, because I’m not the kind of lady who usually sides with convicted rapists wanted for manslaughter. “The longer you break your probation, the longer you have to serve,” I went on. “Your best bet is to turn yourself in and fight this. Have some people write letters to the paper outlining your case. Hell, call the ACLU. They might provide a free lawyer or at least get you some publicity. There’s no way people are going to support prosecution. People will think it’s crazy. No one wants to be liable for what their ex or what someone else threatens to do. The DA won’t touch it. No way.”
They were both looking very confused at me. They were looking at me like I was a floating green alien gas orb. Not-cousin shivered as if shaking off my incomprehensible statements. “I been to jail once already. Seven months was too long.” He swallowed hard and tensed his quivering jaw. “I ain’t going back. It don’t fuckin’ matter. One way or another, I ain’t going back.”
“Don’t you start talking like that! I swear to god, man. Don’t you fucking talk like that!” Little-little was on his feet suddenly, shouting. “Give me the gun! Dude, give me the gun!” Not-cousin swatted him away as he reached for it.
I watched them argue over the gun, continuing on with my cigarette chain gang. I knew why he was reacting this way. I knew what “I’m not going to jail one way or another” meant, too. When Little-little was nineteen, he and some of his friends had a little meth lab set up for themselves, also out in the woods, but in a different woods. Four of them got busted. But not Little-little. He was lucky enough not to be around that day. That’s all. His best friend, who was also nineteen, got slammed with some serious time, several years in prison. Instead of going to prison, though, that kid shot himself in the head.
Little-little still talks about him and how grateful he was for the short time he was blessed to have known him. He hasn’t gone near the dr
agon since, no matter how broke he is.
I felt really dumb for everything I’d just said to them. What was I thinking? They kept arguing, like in a ballet in front of me. I tried to blow smoke rings, but failed. What a stupid little faggot I was. I thought about what a stupid little faggot I was; about my stupid little art-fag clothes, and how I was talking at them with my faggoty, self-educated voice, telling them my faggoty New York ideas. I’m such a queer faggot, I was even thinking about Michel Foucault. I was thinking about how he said, “The guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. Punishment is directed, above all, at others, at all the potentially guilty.” I was thinking that, here and now, where I was, Michel couldn’t have been wronger. There’s always this faggoty debate about the three possible purposes of prisons being reform, punishment, and/or dissuasion. I started laughing thinking about it. What do academics know?
Little-little hasn’t been off probation for more than a few months at a time since he was thirteen. Every time he breaks any part of his probation, whether it’s a ticket, a missed phone call, or a failure to report a change in address, he goes to jail. Every time he goes back to jail, he accumulates more fines and goes in longer than the time before. He’s in his early twenties, and pretty soon, they’re going to get him. He has a snake wrapped around his ankle, its tail is tied to an anvil, and he’s hanging off the edge of a cliff. He spent the last five years of his childhood being illegal. He’s spent the majority of his adult life being illegal. He’s an illegal person. He’s been marked as such, and as soon as they can, they will remove him. They will find whatever trumped-up reason to remove him, and for as long as possible. They will remove him.
And people will be glad. People will not be dissuaded. People will be relieved. He will not be reformed or punished, simply removed.
Keep America Clean. Please use provided containers.
Sometimes things are extremely simple.
I could tell Not-cousin was the same kind of case. He generally just seemed illegal. They both did. You could look at them and tell. They were illegal people. Eventually they would be removed.
Little-little finally had possession of the gun and was walking it down the hallway that led to the bedroom. He was putting the gun to bed. The gun was real sleepy and had started fussing. But when he got it in there, it went down easy as cold, hard steel.
I tried another smoke ring. It failed. Not-cousin went back to flipping the switch on the police scanner. Finally, some words came out of me that didn’t sound like stupid, gay New York words. “You need a plan. You got a plan?” He shrugged. Little-little came back in, then went through to the kitchen and searched around the fridge for a beer. “Maybe,” I tried, “you should leave Lebanon. There are only three thousand people here. If you just drive for fifteen minutes, you’ll be two towns away. They have different cops, cops who might not be looking for you so hard, cops who might not even know you.”
“You think so?” he croaked out.
Not-cousin isn’t the brightest bulb. “They just want to get rid of you,” I told him. “If you can, leave the state. But at least, you have to leave the town. If you really don’t want them to find you, at least get out of town.”
Little-little went back to the window and sipped his beer. “Yeah, dude. They did find you here the last time.”
“Ummmm,” came out of my mouth like a long frog. I should really leave soon, before the SWAT team bursts in, I thought.
But it’s hard to leave, sometimes. I knew that. This was the kind of place where people just stay, and stay, and stay. This place had staying power. The staying power had installed itself in Not-cousin’s mind like an invisible electric shock line around a chicken coop. He hadn’t received the shocks in quite a while, because he didn’t even remember that it was an option to try and cross the line. It was not an option. If I hadn’t been such a weird faggot, I might not have ever tried too hard, either. I was shoved repeatedly over the shock line at a young age. I was a chick that got shoved. At the time, it seemed like an awful happening, being ostracized for my strange plumage. Sitting there, though, I knew my feathers of faggotry were my privilege.
I shook my fancy feathers and extinguished a cigarette. Not-cousin’s eyes met mine, glimmering. “Your brother said you live in New York. Is that true?”
I nodded. My feathers were too big. They were going to knock things over. They were going to put someone’s eye out if I wasn’t careful.
“New York City?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” Something was trying like hell to get out of his throat, but it was banging into something else down there, and making all kinds of weird noises. “How are you . . . well, I mean, how are you going back?”
Goddamnit. My fancy feathers drooped. My fancy feathers got all wet with shame and sorrow. My fancy feathers were impotent. They didn’t really fly. They couldn’t let me take anyone away. They just looked nice. I wanted to fold them up and hide them beneath my ridiculously sequined vest. “A plane. I’m sorry.”
“Right, right,” he nodded. “How much does that cost?”
I just shook my head no, solemnly. The words A plane. I’m sorry bounced around my skull like two clean sentences. Complete sentences. Heavy, cold, sculpted sentences. A plane. I’m sorry. Four words, two periods making up a real pair.
“It don’t matter. It’s a extradition state anyway,” he told me, letting me off the hook.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Look, sis. There they are! Fuck! Quick, come here.” Little-little was losing it by the window. Not-cousin and I both hopped up and took a place beside him. He pointed. “There they are. See them?” I didn’t see anything. “Wait.” Little-little flipped the light off. The three of us stood in the total darkness of the trailer listening to the mixed static of the police scanner, staring out the window. It was really very dark out there. The stars were trying to peek out through the mist left over from the rain. One could vaguely make out the silhouette of the forest line. “See? Right there,” Little-little pressed. I scanned the trees’ edges. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, something became startlingly clear. Little-little might be crazy, but he wasn’t bat-shit crazy, or we all were.
There, bouncing along the forest’s edge, radiant as extracted souls, were two glowing green balls of gaseous light. But they didn’t move like gas. They were balls that bounced, as if moving of their own internal agency. They bounced up and down like gummy bears. They bounced into and off of each other. They bounced back and forth and around and around like a children’s song. They did all of this very slowly and unself-consciously, as if they were absolutely real and would have been surprised if you told them that their existence was a serious problem for humanity, for logic, science, and all that.
They bounced around for a good minute and a half, then they bounced back into the forest, totally out of sight. “What’d I tell ya? What’d I tell ya? That’s what we saw the other day, isn’t it?”
“Yep.” Not-cousin nodded yes.
Little-little turned the light back on. “Hot damn, sis! You saw ’em?”
I nodded yes.
“Come on.” He started going through the pile of shirts again. “Let’s go out there and find ’em.”
“Ummmmmmmmm.” Another long frog. “Yeah. I gotta get going.” I picked up my bag, threw it over my shoulder, and headed to the door. Little-little followed skipping behind me.
“You can’t go. Not after what you just saw,” he said insistently.
“Yeahhhh. I gotta get going.” I nodded and made an unfortunate face. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” He was totally stunned. But what could I do? I wasn’t going out into the crime garden to hunt semi-intelligent glowing green orbs, with the possibility of a SWAT team breaking in any minute hanging over my head. I could deal with one thing or the other. Not both. Something in me had absolutely shut down. I wasn’t cut out for that. That just wasn’t my idea of a good night. I was supposed to meet an old high school friend at a bar at ten, anyway. I searche
d for some way to make things normal, to make things right. “Here. Take this. Keep it.” I reached into my bag, retrieved an unopened pack of cigarettes and pressed it, like a talisman, into Little-little’s hand. “Call you tomorrow,” I told him. “Good luck,” I told Not-cousin. “Be careful,” I told them both.
I sped down the pitch-dark winding country roads. These roads were burned into my head like a map of crisscrossing scars. My mind was racing over several thoughts. I was thinking about how I probably look rich to my brother. I was thinking how broke I was in Brooklyn. I was thinking that if I changed my plane ticket and stayed a few months, I could probably help keep Not-cousin out of serving outrageous amounts of jail time for an outrageous charge. I was thinking, even if I was pretty broke, I had language, and they didn’t. I was thinking about Pygmalion. I was thinking this would be madness on my part to stay and try to help him, because eventually, they both would do something else to land themselves in the slammer no matter how many marbles I shoved into their mouths, no matter how many times they repeated “The rain in Spain,” I moved away for a reason, I reminded myself. This place kills people, I reminded myself.
I slowed at an unlit railroad track and remembered that those same tracks had taken two of my uncles. One of them was a suicide. He just laid his head down there on the cold steel one night and let the train take care of the rest. The other uncle was working on the tracks and fell over from a heart attack and hit his head on a spike. He was a few months away from retirement, but was already too old for that kind of work. I was thinking about how much sad death, murder, and suicide I had seen there in the southern border of the rural Midwest, and how little I had seen since moving to a big city. I was thinking how ironic that seemed. But amid all these thoughts was one glaring thought that kept screaming at me that I was trying not to pay attention to. What the fucking hell were those green glowing orbs that bounced around like gummy bears, seeming to move of their own agency? This was not a good thought for driving down an empty country road at night. I flipped the doors to lock and turned on the radio, then pressed the pedal to sixty.
Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country Page 2
