“Holy crap,” Atlanta says. “The dog came home.”
“Yeah.”
Maybe it was time to revise her assessment of dogs. Because that shit was pretty incredible.
Chomp-Chomp goes, straddles the four-wheeler’s saddle, waits expectantly. Atlanta goes to get on behind him, and he reaches back to pull her hands around his middle—
“You need to hold on when—“
Alarm bells. Klaxons. Hands hot like they’re touching a casserole dish without oven mitts. She staggers backward off the thing, bowlegged and nearly falling over. Every inch of her body feels like it’s covered with spider legs doing a creepy little waltz across her skin.
That smell again: expended gunpowder. A ringing in her ears.
“You go ahead,” she croaks. Voice dry.
“But you’re not feeling—“
“I’m fine.” A harsh protestation but there it is. “I’m fine. Go on, now. Go. Don’t want to lose my breakfast on the back of your neck.” Not that she ate breakfast. And not that she’s going to, now. She sends Chomp-Chomp away. He hesitates, doesn’t want to go, but she yells at him and that makes him drive off—slow like a sad donkey, head hung low, Eeyore in a death metal t-shirt.
* * *
Atlanta isn’t a big fan of dogs. You walk into somebody’s house that owns a dog, you know it. You can smell it, and you can see it. Chewed corner of the coffee table. Musky musty pissy odor. Ratty toys on the floor. A half-eaten rawhide gummy with saliva and stuck fur. And dogs are all drooly. Jumpy. Needy.
Atlanta doesn’t like needy people, so she damn sure doesn’t care for needy animals. Dogs are like that little kid in the grocery store who won’t stop tugging on his mother’s ovaries: Mom mom mom mom mommy mommy mom.
Not that she likes cats much better. Because, seriously, fuck cats. Those dismissive emperors of the living room. You don’t own a cat so much as you petition them for your time.
Plus, cat smell? Makes that dog odor smell like Old Spice. Cat stink crawls deep. Into carpets. And subflooring. Wood will hold a cat piss smell until the sun flares up and burns out and all of mankind is left to die in a cold godless galaxy. On a hot, windy day, the cross-breeze coming from the Cat Lady’s house next door smells like a doom-wind. Rankling ammoniac smell heralding the end of days.
Cats. Dogs. Ugh.
If Atlanta were allowed a pet, she’d choose a lizard. Maybe a snake, too. Or a tarantula.
Small. Not cute. Doesn’t give a shit and doesn’t need much.
And doesn’t piss on your stuff.
But just the same, not liking dogs doesn’t mean she feels good about what happened to Jenny’s little lady. You just don’t do that to an animal whether you like animals or not.
* * *
Going back home doesn’t sound appealing. It’s there her mother will be making a nest out of ruined Kleenex, sitting there and hatching little pity eggs like the saddest bird on the block. When the woman gets on a crying jag, it goes and it goes with all the energy of that stupid-ass battery bunny.
She wanders around town for a while. Not sure what to do next. She’s a shitty shamus, she knows. Atlanta’s not so sure what she expected: she’d turn the corner just past that little coffee café on the corner and there, in front of Dosie Sawicki’s kielbasa stand she’d see some canine serial killer tying a noose around a Newfoundland’s neck? Performing dentistry on a Chihuahua? Stuffing a Jack Russell into a cannon?
In the midst of her floundering, a kielbasa starts to sound pretty dang good. Throwing up does that to you, sometimes—leaves you hollow, ragged, but feeling like you need to be filled up again. Time, then, to eat.
She goes to the counter, orders up. The Sawickis have that coal cracker accent going on, replete with all the dialect that makes Atlanta—with her muddy Southern twang—want to bite glass. Y’wanna kilbo griller? Kilbo for kielbasa. Dincha want mustard wit dat? Come back tamarra!
And they say Southerners sound dumb. If there’s one thing Atlanta has learned is, hicks are hicks. Being red-in-the-neck is a global pandemic and everybody sounds stupid to everybody else.
It’s Madge Sawicki behind the counter, big pink lips and cakey make-up and hair teased into a rat’s nest, all in service to staving off the rigors of mid-life. She’s nice enough, and wants to chat, but Atlanta’s just not in a chatty mood. Instead she just orders—yes, mustard with that, no, not spicy—and goes and sits on the once-green now paint-flakey bench around the corner.
By the time she’s half-done eating the kielbasa—the skin with a sharp snap, the meat spicy and strange, the mustard doubly so—she takes a look at the folder sitting by her side and suddenly the bottom drops out of her stomach and the food goes rancid in her gut. She gives it a couple minute, but—still sour. Atlanta wads up the remains of her meal and pitches it in the metal trashcan next to the counter.
Madge waves. “Y’wanna wooter ice wit dat?” You want a water ice with that? That’s another thing regional to the area. Water ice. It’s what they called shaved ice. Water ice? What other kind of ice would there be?
She tells Madge no, then turns and sees someone across the street.
No, no, no.
Mitchell Erickson. Student council president. Pitcher on the baseball team. Blonde hair and green eyes and a too-white smile you could see from the International Space Station.
Oh, and secret Neo-Nazi fascist gay-hating racist dickhole.
Said dickhole sees Atlanta.
No! No.
And then starts to cross the street toward her.
She’d seen him around school a few times since Chris died, but always stayed out of his orbit. The last time she had any actual interaction with him was when she threatened to shoot his father with a pistol her own mother had given her. After Mitchell had beaten her up, thrown her in a truck. After she’d gone slinging threats at him and his secret Neo-Nazi fascist gay-hating racist dickhole crew, including rage-punk John Elvis Baumgartner and that cunty scary Hitler Whore Skank named Melanie.
Never mind the fact he might’ve been involved in Chris’ murder.
Her blood boils. Her middle churns.
“Atlanta!” he calls over to her. Waving and smiling like they’re fucking yachting buddies.
She wants to run screaming, wants to dart around the corner or dive in a passing car or climb up into the food counter window like a cat fleeing a house fire. But her boots stay rooted to the sidewalk.
“Been a while,” she manages to say as he suddenly stands before her. Smelling like soap and smugness.
“It has,” he says. Tongue probing the inside of his cheek. “Sorry to hear about your friend.”
“I’m sure you sent flowers to the funeral and I just missed them.”
“I’m sure.”
“What do you want, Erickson?”
He leans in close, lowers his voice. The smile falls away like an ill-hung painting tumbling off a wall. “Just wanted to say, sorry to hear about your house.”
“My house?” Her chest tightens. “What about my house?”
“Little mouse squeaked in my ear, told me that your mother’s having a hard time paying the mortgage. Foreclosure, huh? Man. Symptom of the down economy, I guess.” Sympathy so fake a breeze would knock the cardboard cutout down, blow it across the street where it’d get hit by a bus.
She says through clamped teeth, “How do you know that?”
“Oh! Didn’t I mention that my dad’s got friends at First National? Golfing buddies. He keeps all his investments there, too—a sizable package.”
“I’ll rip off his sizable package and cram it down his throat.” She feels dizzy. Like the world in front of her sits in sharp-sharp focus but has gone blurry and greasy at the edges. Consequences again come crashing down upon her. The chain of action and reaction laid bare. Chris Coyne’s father hires some local kids connected to the gun club to mess with his son, scare the boy straight. Chris comes to Atlanta. Atlanta pushes back against the bullies, bullies like Mitchell Er
ickson, son of Orly Erickson, most powerful man in town. Chris is dead. And now Orly has called in favors at the bank to make sure her mother doesn’t get six months to play catch up on her mortgage, that it’s all coming due with no warning at all.
This tree she planted has twisted roots. Roots that want to choke her dead.
“Good luck with everything,” Mitchell says. He reaches up and musses her hair; she swats his hand away.
“Wait,” she says. He stops and smirks. “Let me tell you something, Mitchell Erickson. If I find out you had anything to do with Chris’ death, anything at all, then you better run and you better hide because your Daddy or his banking buddies or his gun club fascist freak-show friends won’t be able to stop me from hurting you. I’ll crash your car. I’ll break your pitching arm. I’ll find whatever it is you love—because even for a monster like you there’s gotta be something—and I will tear it into screaming pieces.”
Again his face falls. The smirk drops. “Coyne killed himself. It was suicide.” The way he says it, like he’s not sure.
“That your story? That what helps you sleep at night?”
Mitchell grabs her. Both hands around her shoulders. His face a sudden rictus of rage. “You listen to me, I didn’t have a fucking thing to do with—“
“Hey!” Madge Sawicki yells from the counter. “Git off her! You wan’ me to come out dere with my Louisville?”
She offers up a baseball bat, shakes it above her head like a monkey with a bone-club.
Mitchell relinquishes his grip. Steps backward off the curb, almost gets hit by a car. He says nothing else, just points at Atlanta and then crosses the street. As if harried by dogs nobody can see but him.
Atlanta lets out the breath she didn’t realize she was holding. Goes back to the counter where Madge waits.
“Thanks, Madge.”
“Nat a problum,” she says. “Richie-riches are ruinin’ this dang town. You go’n home now, ‘Lanta. Go’n.”
* * *
When she gets home, Mom’s in the kitchen, which is never a good sign unless the waffle-maker is out or she spies a carton of open eggs, and this time she spies neither. What she instead sees is a fryer chicken. And a box of generic cornflakes. And a big jug of vegetable oil that’s been in their pantry so long it’s probably rancid.
“You’re gonna start a fire,” Atlanta says.
Arlene shrugs. Sniffles a little. Eyes so puffy the crow’s feet are gone, like bird tracks swallowed by snow. “I want fried chicken so I’m gonna make me some fried chicken.”
“Do you know how to make fried chicken?”
“Well.” Arlene blinks and looks around her at the fixings like an archaeologist staring at the icons of a lost civilization. “Sure. Coat the chicken in flour. Then cornflakes. Or maybe cornflakes, then flour. And I guess I need some way to make that stuff stick to the chicken. Whatever, and when that’s done you dunk it in hot oil. For some… amount of time. Abracadabra, got us some fried chicken. See? Can’t beat that with a stick.”
Atlanta thinks that if she sees her mother go anywhere near a pot of hot oil she might just have to beat the woman with a stick. Thing about Atlanta’s mother is, when she gets in a mood, Arlene decides she wants comfort. And the way she gets comfort is with home cooking. Collard greens. Or red beans and rice. Or god forbid some ugly ill facsimile of barbecue. Of course, she can’t cook worth a shit. Unless it’s breakfast.
Though, maybe if she burns the house down they’ll get the insurance money and all this will be blood under the bridge. Provided they both don’t die in the fire.
“Mom, we gotta talk.”
“Can we do it over dinner?”
“I think we should do it now.”
Arlene picks up the box of cornflakes, shakes them at her daughter dismissively. “Honey, I know that you’re thinking I’m going to burn the house down but I promise I am not.” She pleads: “Just let me have this.”
“It’s not about that. I mean, it is about the house. It’s about the mortgage payments—“
The woman begins to move about the kitchen, improvising this fried chicken recipe as she goes. Atlanta watches as she dumps an indiscriminate amount of flour and cornflakes into a plastic grocery bag—which has a little hole in it so tiny streamers of flour drift from the bottom like dust from a broken vacuum bag. Clouds of it kicked up. “I got that taken care of, sweet-cheeks, no problem. Mommy’s on the case.”
“You… are?”
“Uh-huh. I took what we had in the bank account and what I get from the state and I put that toward a Wonderfully Delicious kit. Should be coming in a few weeks and then—“
“Wait, what’s this kit and what’s so wonderfully delicious about it?”
Arlene laughs as she uses a pair of metal tongs to deposit parts from the cut-up fryer chicken into the bag. “No, Atlanta, that’s the brand. Wonderfully Delicious. I’m going to be a saleslady for them. You order the kit and then people come over and you demo their… culinary products…” Way she says culinary it’s like she’s feeling along a dark room as she walks through it. Cu… lin… ary? “It’s going to be wonderful, sugar-pop.”
Oh, crap-on-a-stick.
“It’s like Amway.”
“It’s not like Amway. Amway’s a scam.”
“It’s just like Amway, Mom. For fuck’s sake—“
“Now watch your tongue, girl.”
“—don’t you remember back home when that older boy next door got wrapped up in it? He had to spend more money than he got back. Amway’s best customers are their dang salesmen. That’s how they make their money.”
Arlene, indignant, shakes the chicken bag. Flour and cornflakes do a herky-jerky polka inside.
“This is not that,” Arlene insists. “I get to host a party and be a real saleswoman. Like with Avon. Or Tupperware. It’s… esteemed.”
“It’s a pyramid scheme!” Atlanta’s hands ball up into frustrated fists. “Shit, Momma, how much did you spend?”
Shake shake shake. “Not your business.”
“I said, how much.”
“Like I said—“
“Momma.”
Arlene says in a much quieter voice. “Five hundred. Ah, five seventy five.” She upends the bag onto a nearby plate, which rattles as a pile of gluey chicken tumbles onto it. Each chicken piece has an uneven clumpy coating of flour and maybe two cornflakes per piece. Three on the breast. The rest are still in the bag. “Oh, what the hell I thought I did this right.”
Atlanta sees her mother’s eyes shimmering like they do in cartoons. Like the first few raindrops before the storm hits, sure enough the woman starts to whimper and her lips tighten up like a closed-up coin purse and the tears start to fall. Atlanta knows she’s supposed to go there and hug her but she just can’t stomach that right now and all she can do is scowl and stomp out of the kitchen.
* * *
Funny thing is, she was going to apologize to her mother. That was the talk she hoped to have. She wanted to say, “Mom, I’m sorry, but the reason the mortgage bill is due is because I pissed off a very powerful man and with the bank, well, he’s got the tiger by the tail and now he’s siccing the beast on us and I’m going to try to help make this right and I got a job and it’ll help pay a couple months and I’m sorry again.”
But it didn’t go like that.
It never goes like that.
Arlene stepped in it. Opened her mouth, stuck her pink-painted toenails all up in there. And now all Atlanta can think about is how mad she is at her mother and how this is actually Arlene’s fault—it was Arlene who didn’t pay the mortgage, which opened the door enough for the rats to come creeping in. It was Arlene who had a bad boyfriend, a boyfriend that saw Atlanta as dessert under glass, a young girl with neverending sexuality who surely didn’t mean those words she kept saying over and over again—no, don’t, stop—and who cried so hard not because she was sad but because she was overwhelmed by the strong emotion of it all.
Again that gunpowd
er stink. The shotgun’s in the closet but Atlanta can feel it there. Can almost see it through the wall like she’s got fucking X-Ray vision or something. She hears a man screaming. Here, in this room, in her bedroom. But not now. Then. The blast of a gun and blood on the sheets.
That began it all and it was Arlene’s fault and—
Atlanta rubs her eyes. She just can’t stop kicking over anthills to see what crawls out.
With an angry darting hand she snatches the folder. Opens it again. Flashes of raw skin beneath abraded fur. Of crusting over wounds. Blood gone from red to black. A ruined paw. A pink tongue pushed past a toothless mouth. She slams the folder shut again. It’s like a horrible drug. An ugly hit of Adderall straight to her soul—a car battery jump, crass but effective. It focuses her. Lets her put Arlene and the house out of her mind.
Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel Page 13
