by Drew Perry
“No,” said Carolyn.
“Did it get washed?”
“Did you wash it?”
“God,” Delton said, and went back toward her room.
Carolyn got up, walked through the kitchen to the laundry, came back with a yellow shirt folded into a tight square. “Here,” she said, and handed it to me. “Use it as a peace offering.”
I said, “Do we need one?”
“You will,” she said.
“You guys are scaring him,” said Alice. “We all are.”
“He needs it,” Mid said.
“I don’t,” I said. “I’m plenty scared. I work on it.”
“That’s actually true,” Alice said, taking the shirt from me. “He does.”
Delton wanted to keep the tinfoil on the windows. She walked in the room, turned off the light, shut the door, and we stood like that—us in the hall, and Delton inside, in the dark—for what had to be way too long. Already we were doing it wrong. Finally she said, “I’ve never seen anything this nothinged-out in my entire life. This is the best thing ever.” She opened the door and blinked into the light of the hallway. “Can I leave it? Is that OK?” We told her it was. We had no idea what else to tell her.
Lying in bed, Delton closed into her room and us into ours, Alice said, “Are they cute at that age?”
“They’re supposed to be,” I said. I was feeling a calmness about her being with us, and had no good idea why. Maybe it was that she came off like a creature it might be possible to understand: She had, as it turned out, a pretty basic set of needs, and they were give or take the same as anyone else’s.
“I don’t always, always want it,” Alice said. “You know that, right?”
“The baby?” I said.
“Catherine of Aragon. Whatever you’re calling her. I’m not always a hundred percent behind it.”
“I get it,” I said.
“No, you don’t. You think I’m some cheerleader who wants four hundred kids.”
I said, “Did I do something?”
“I know it’s supposed to be me. I know I’m supposed to be in charge. It’s just hard. It turns out having her actually here is hard.”
“Why do you have to be in charge?”
“Well, it’s not going to be you, is it?”
“That’s not fair,” I said.
“I still want it. I completely still want it. But then sometimes I kind of don’t. Some days.”
“Sure you do.”
“Not if she’s going to be fifteen.”
“I think she’s going to be fifteen,” I said, sitting up. “I think that’s the whole deal. If we’re lucky, she turns out to be a normal, impossible fifteen-year-old girl. That’s what I was trying to tell you all along. This was the losing argument.”
“Then forget it,” she said. “I change my mind.”
“I think it’d be great if she turned out like Delton.”
“I don’t understand how you wouldn’t be afraid of that,” she said.
“I’m completely afraid of that. I’m just more afraid of other things.”
“Like what?” she said.
“Like everything that comes first. I’m afraid of never choosing what to watch on TV again. Or the kid getting brain damage. Or CP. Or syphilis.”
“She could get syphilis riding around on that motorcycle with that boy.”
“Were we not just sitting around Mid and Carolyn’s table with you telling them not to scare me?”
“Keep your voice down,” she said.
“Plus aren’t you the one who’s supposed to be all cool under fire? Isn’t it you who takes the kid to the liquor store to buy condoms and cigarettes before the prom?”
“I’m tired of being cool under fire,” she said. “It’s wearing me out. I can’t do it all the time. And I thought you were the one who hated all things child.”
“I don’t hate all things child.”
She rubbed her feet together under the covers, then held herself still. She was wearing an old long-sleeved T-shirt of mine, some wintertime fun run from ten years before. “I just don’t have any idea how to have a fifteen-year-old,” she said, whispering. “That’s all.”
“You don’t have to know,” I said.
She pointed at the door. “In fact, I do. We have one now. She’s on loan, but we have one.” She was blinking a lot. “I can’t believe we did this,” she said. “She doesn’t know us. I can’t believe anybody thought this was a good idea.”
“You were for this,” I said.
“You said yes, too,” she said, right away. “You sat there and you said yes.”
“What else would I have said?”
“That’s never stopped you before.”
“We just have to not kill her,” I said. “That’s all.”
“It’s not all. We have to be role models. We have to feed her breakfast.”
“We’ll feed her breakfast,” I said.
“We have to send her back fixed.”
“She’s not broken,” I said.
“Then what’s she doing here?”
“The same thing we’re doing here,” I said.
“We have to fix her.”
I said, “Why can’t we just make sure not to send her back any worse?”
She didn’t answer. I didn’t say anything else, didn’t ask her any more questions. I let her be. She was another creature. A new one. I reached across her to turn out the light, a huge thing with a huge shade, nothing I’d have ever bought, and nothing she would have, either. I rubbed her arm on my way back by, trying to make peace. Also I just wanted to touch her, wanted to make sure she was still real.
Mid called. “You don’t sound so good,” I told him.
“We’re a little back and forth over here. We fight, I lose. We fight some more, I lose some more. I think the central problem could be that my argument sucks. How’s the teenage wasteland?”
We’d made it through the night without fire or flood. I was making eggs. Alice and Delton were out on the balcony, waiting for the parachutist. In the light of day, Alice seemed more herself. She had her shirt up. Delton reached out to touch her. “Fine,” I told him. “I think.”
“You think?”
“Everybody’s still in one piece.”
“How about I pick you up in twenty?” he said. “I want to go see a guy about a flatbed.”
“A flatbed?” I asked him.
“I’ll explain on the way.”
I hung up the phone, stood there in the kitchen. I needed Alice to want the baby. That before all else. Because if she didn’t want it, then we were both alone, on separate islands, and the BOJ was off on her own island, too, and we were all going to die. That’s how I saw it, anyway. I was tired. I was leaking. We were gone from anything I knew, and we were getting farther away with every passing week. What I wanted was a break. A plainness. I wanted to make goddamn scrambled eggs without feeling like there was some manner of import built into it. I wanted to stand outside and watch Hank fly through the sky without suspecting he had some vital piece of information to pass along.
“Pretty still around the house this morning,” Mid said, once we were out on the highway. “Quiet. Nobody going on about how life is so unfair. I’m not quite sure how to proceed, you know? Maybe I have Stockholm Syndrome or something.”
“I thought you said you and Carolyn were at it,” I said.
“That was last night. This morning we achieved a nice gentle post-apocalypse.”
“Got it.”
“She yelling at you yet?” he said.
“Alice?”
“Olivia.”
I said, “She’s only been there twelve hours.”
“She’ll yell at you.”
“What does she yell about?”
“You name it, she’s outraged by it. Except that boy—but even that still counts, because in that particular case she gets to be outraged that we’re outraged.”
“She doesn’t seem outraged,” I said.
“That’s how she gets you. She’s reeling you in. You wait.”
She didn’t come off as the kind of kid who reeled you in, but hell, maybe she was. Maybe she was home right then hollering at Alice. I cracked the window to let some air in. I said, “Where are we going again?”
“St. Augustine, to see a tow truck.”
“I thought you said flatbed.”
“It’s both. It’s supposed to be one of those tilt-bed things.”
“Mind if I ask you a question?” I said.
“Fire away.”
“Do we need a tow truck for any reason?”
He sucked on his lip. “Need’s a funny word, I guess. This is more of a grease-the-wheels kind of operation.”
“How’s that?” I said.
“This guy with the truck?” He changed lanes to let a couple of motorcycles hurtle by. “He’s the nephew of one of my county commission guys. I’m to understand that if we purchase this truck for a fairly solid pile of cash, the commissioner’s general feeling about my high school might come around a little bit.”
I heard him say it, and I tried to let it wash past. Whatever else there was about him, he’d made it so we had a place to live, given me a chance to carve out a new corner of the universe for my family, whether I wanted a thing like that or not. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t quit. Maybe that’s why I made a bad spy. Maybe that’s why I was in the car with him one more time. “Mid,” I said. “No.”
“I really thought I had the votes,” he said, only half at me. “I thought I’d lined up enough fucking votes.”
I said, “Are you saying you bought people off?”
He had both hands on the wheel. “I am saying I thought I had the votes.”
“Is that why the agents are hanging around? The real reason?”
“All the reasons are real reasons.”
“Do they know you’re doing this?”
He said, “They do not.”
The elevator had cut loose from its cables, was falling from the upper floors. We were goners. “You can’t do this,” I said. “This is way too fucked up. This is extortion.”
“It’s bribery, I think,” he said. “And it’s just a little out of hand.”
“But why would you tell me this? Why would you even have me along?”
“You’re not an accessory,” he said. “Don’t worry. I haven’t told you anything. All I said was that we were going to look at a tow truck.”
“You just told me—”
“I said I thought I had the votes. I expressed surprise about that.”
“Please don’t do this, Mid. This puts people in prison. Real prison.”
“I’ve still got a few ideas.”
“Like what?”
He looked over at me—so long it made me nervous, made we want to tell him to keep his eyes on the road, to please not kill us. He said, “Walter, I’m trying very, very hard to put it all back together. And I’m going to make it right. Nobody believes that, but I am.”
Finally, there wasn’t any question: Something was genuinely and actually wrong. I wanted Alice in the car. I wanted her to see it for herself. I wanted her to understand why Mid’s trapeze act could feel for so long like it was off on the periphery somewhere, instead of front and center. And already I wanted it over, the whole of it—I wanted somewhere quiet to sit down with her, do the post-game, compare notes, make absolutely sure we’d witnessed the same thing.
Mid said, like nothing was happening, “How’s Alice, by the way? She doing OK?”
I should have made him stop the car. I should have made him take me back home. “She’s fine,” is what I said instead. “Still no heavy lifting.”
“That’s it?”
“And no sex.” The hum. Always the hum.
“How long?”
“Ten days. But we weren’t really having sex anyway.”
“Why not?”
We hadn’t talked about it, but we’d stopped. It had been two or three weeks. I said, “I’m not sure.” I was trying to remember if I knew the difference between bribery and collusion. I could see the local news anchors staring out from the TV and saying graft.
He said, “You should be having sex.”
“I’ll pass that along.”
“Once you get the all-clear, she’ll be on you like a zoo animal. Let it happen, my friend.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“Because when the kid gets here, you’ll never have sex again. Now’s the time.”
“You had sex again.”
“And look what happened,” he said. “Big Walter, all I’m trying to do here is help you out. You don’t like what I have to say, maybe we can swing back through the old Pray N’ Wash, see if we can procure some higher-level intervention.”
“We might need some higher-level intervention,” I said.
“Relax. Let’s just go see this truck. We’re taking a look. Nothing more.”
I said, “No part of this a good idea. Do you get that?”
“To be honest,” he said, “I think you might be right. But it may be the best of what I’ve got left.” He eased us across the lanes toward an exit. Something flew by out the window, some bird. Big. A hawk, maybe. I didn’t know what it was. I needed a book. I should have made him take me home. No doubt I should have made him take me home. It’s what Alice would have done.
The same desperate strangeness hung on St. Augustine every time. We came in from the south, toward the Bridge of Lions, which was under repair and only half-open. They were building a new bridge next to it. Everywhere down here had the new bridge next to the old one, like there was some rule against pulling the first one down. We slid past mini golfs and bars and restaurants, long low roadside hotels with views of nothing but the mini golfs and bars. Once you were over the bridge, you were into St. Augustine proper, they way the brochures had it pictured: Flagler College dead center, palm trees on a crayoned quad, and then on both sides of that, the French Quarter thing that went on downtown. Wrought-iron balconies, outdoor dining, horse-drawn carriages, fudge shops. A plague of tourists. The tourists rode trollies, walked the streets. They walked up what passed for a hill at the old Spanish fort. The kids carried plastic swords and plastic shields. There was a historical marker about the Fountain of Youth. The nearest fountain was not that fountain.
On through that, pushing back away from the water: Ripley’s Believe It or Not! The Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. The Alligator Farm, with shows on the half-hour. A rehabbed carousel. Scooters for rent. Signs for bus and boat tours. All manner of America’s First City paraphernalia at sidewalk stands—pop guns, airbrushed T-shirts, salt water taffy. I kept closing my eyes, opening them again, and finding myself still in the car. Mid pushed us along and got us into something half-residential, turned off the main road past two astrologers in two houses next to each other—KNOW YOUR FORTUNE! KNOW YOUR FUTURE!—and checked a scribbled piece of paper he pulled from his shirt pocket. “We go three blocks this way,” he said. “I think.”
There were little lots carved out of the mangrove, crushed-shell driveways running up to houses in various stages of rot and sink. Roads with no names. Cars pushing into the ground. We rode slowly, Mid looking out the window, squinting back at his notes. We passed two dogs tied to the same chain. We passed a knot of kids who looked like they’d be perfectly willing to do us harm. Then Mid said, “Here we go,” and pulled us into what was either a drive or just a yard gone to bare ground. He stopped in front of a big black flatbed tow truck, and everything was already wrong: The truck had the bottom half of a mannequin mounted, ass down and feet in the air, to the back bed. The legs were in fishnet stockings. She had green and red elf shoes on her feet, with brass bells on the toes. There were Christmas lights strung all over the truck. The lights were on. Mid said, “This isn’t quite what I’d hoped for.”
“Where are we?” I said.
“Oz?”
“You’re making jokes?”
“That
truck doesn’t look like it’d be for sale,” he said.
I said, “Where do you think he plugs the lights in?”
He shut the engine off. “That’s your first question?”
“You weren’t answering my first questions,” I said. “That was just one more.”
A man walked out the front door of the house, which was sided in sheets of plywood that had once been orange. He looked at us from the porch. Then he came across the yard in no tremendous hurry, stopped at the hood of the car. He was wearing corduroy pants and a white T-shirt and looked like he’d maybe just finished shaving when we pulled up. Mid rolled down his window. The guy said, “Are you the guys?”
Mid said, “Is this the truck?”
He said, “Yes, sir, it is,” and Mid got out, and I did, too, and then we were all shaking hands. The air was still, the heat like a jacket. “Pete Brett,” the guy said. “Two first names. They didn’t have any left for my brother.”
“Mid,” Mid said.
“Mid what?” said Pete Brett.
“Middleton.”
“No.”
“It’s a nickname,” Mid said.
Pete Brett looked at him closer. “Do I maybe know you from somewhere?” he said. “Different name?”
“I don’t think so,” said Mid.
He turned to me. “What about you?”
“Walter Ingram.”
“Pleasure to meet you. Want y’all both to know I can sell the truck with or without adornment.”
Mid said, “Meaning—”
“The legs. We can adjust the price accordingly.” Pete Brett got down on one knee to look across some sight line or another on the Camaro. “This is a fairly sporting vehicle,” he said.
“It’s on loan,” said Mid. “I’m trying it out.”
“What’s to try?”
“My wife doesn’t approve.”
“Of the car?”
“Of me, more like it.”
Pete Brett said, “Excuse me, sir?”
“What?”
“She doesn’t approve of you?”
“Not always,” Mid said. “Not recently.”
“Not sure I can sell a truck to a man whose wife doesn’t approve of him,” he said. Pete Brett looked familiar to me, too, but I couldn’t place him. The lights on the truck blinked. Pete Brett pulled a sleeve of peanuts from his pocket, opened it carefully, ate peanuts one at a time. There was something wrong with his teeth. “Ah, what the hell,” he said. “I guess y’all drove all the way up here.” He grinned. “Peanut?” he said. I wanted to leave.
