Girl, Hero

by Carrie Jones

  “Me too,” I said. “So, what’s your topic?”

  “Some old logging company on the Union River. Jordan Brothers Logging or something like that. I wrote it down. Isn’t it awful?”

  “Uh-huh.” I waited for Nicole to ask me what my topic is.

  “I can’t believe he gave me that. Fifteen pages on loggers. Do you think anyone will ever like me? I can’t go all the way through high school without anyone liking me. I’d go out with anyone, even Travis Poppins.”

  “That’s disgusting. He’s your brother’s best friend. That’s like incest or something.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s just a last resort thing.”

  “You’d rather go out with a jerk than go out with nobody?”

  “Yeah.” She munched on something and circled back. “I can’t believe I have to write about a logging company.”

  “Mine’s on Hannah Dustin,” I said, since I’d realized Nicole wasn’t going to ask.

  “Who’s that?”

  “She’s this old, odd-stick colonial woman who got—”

  “Odd stick? What the hell is odd stick? Are you talking cowboy again?”

  “No. It just means eccentric.”

  “Eccentric?”

  “Weird, okay? Whatever. She got kidnapped by Indians and then killed them all.” Hannah Dustin is my ancestor, but I don’t tell Nicole that.

  “No way.”

  “Uh-huh. She scalped them.”

  “No freaking way! You already know that?”

  “Yeah, we learned about her in seventh grade,” I lied. “Don’t you remember?”

  “No,” Nicole said. “I probably wasn’t paying attention.”

  And when she said this I felt all mudsill for lying, because I could tell (because I know her so well and because she’s my best friend) that Nicole just remembered she’s supposed to be smart this year.

  “I should go,” she said. “I have to do homework.”

  When we hung up, I looked at the clock and saw I only had ten minutes before my mom came home from the Sheraton, where she’s the secretary to the personnel manager. I hadn’t cleaned anything.

  “Crap,” I said and went to the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink where my mom keeps all the cleaning stuff. I grabbed some Windex and a cloth. I don’t think Windex glass cleaner is what you’re supposed to use to clean radiators, but I couldn’t remember what my mom used. I don’t think she’d ever done it before. It’s all for this stupid man from Oregon.

  I pray every night that he’s cool, like you, Mr. Wayne. Sometimes I worry that he’s the type of man who wears pocket protectors in case his pens leak. Sometimes I worry about those newspaper headlines. I told Nicole about those at school. She wiggled her fingers and said, “FREEE-AAKKK-YYYY.”

  Then she changed the subject, and talked about whether we’d be cooler if we highlighted our hair.

  I didn’t tell her what Paolo Mattias said about my dad. I haven’t told anyone about that, other than you.

  Let me tell you, Sunday mornings are the worst. You’d think they’d be great. My homework is done, and you’d think I’d have a whole day to do nothing except maybe ride my bike or gab with Nicole on the phone or watch your movies.

  This is not the case.

  My one day of freedom, Saturday, is over and I’m forced to wait, all morning, for my father to call. Sundays are our days together. When I wait, I watch your movies. I have thirty-six of them, which isn’t good enough to be a real collector, but I’m halfway there.

  Most of the time my dad calls around ten, right in the middle of a movie. That’s what he does this time. I’m full into Hatari! and ring, there goes the phone. My mother makes me answer it.

  “Liliana?” he says.

  “Hi Dad.”

  “How about I come pick you up around eleven thirty?”

  “Okay.”

  “Anything special you want to do today?”

  “No,” I say, and I think, not with you. This is an awful thing to think, I know, but I can’t seem to help it. Sometimes when I think that way, I feel so bad that I imagine I’m on this sinking Navy boat and the men are running frantic, the waves leaping up over the hull, and there I am standing there yelling, “Hold on, men! Hold on!” But there’s no point. There’s nothing to hold onto because we are sinking, sinking fast.

  “Well, let’s see,” my dad says, and he pauses all namby-pamby. I go and open the silverware drawer. In the background, I can hear Grammy talking to him. She’s telling him to take me to a movie or the mall.

  “Do something girls like,” she yells.

  He doesn’t listen. “Why don’t we go to an engine show up in Blue Hill?”

  “Okay.”

  Grammy moans so loudly I can hear it through the phone lines. I look at my reflection in the handle of a knife. I’m warped, all nose and zeppelin-shaped eyes.

  We hang up the phone and my mom comes in, real chipper, like she’s a sitcom mom, only in sitcoms parents are never divorced and if they are, the stepfather doesn’t die. And the reason the sitcom mom is chipper isn’t because the dad called and she knows they’ll get a check this week. You weren’t ever on The Brady Bunch, were you? It’s an ancient sitcom they run on cable. I hate The Brady Bunch even though it’s all retro campy. Which means, according to Nicole, that it’s now cool. The first time I ever saw you was on the oldies channel, and you were on a Carol Burnett show, guest starring. You looked strong and so tall. Six four is big for a man, Mr. Wayne, which I’m sure you know. I’m only five feet. That’s not good even for a girl. My mom’s even shorter.

  “What are the plans for today?” she asks as I balance the knife on the palm of my hand. It tips over and clangs onto the kitchen floor that my father put in when he still lived here.

  “An engine show,” I groan, and go into the living room to flop on the couch.

  “Oh. Well, maybe it’ll be fun.”

  I raise my eyebrows at her.

  “You never know.”

  I turn away and stare at the back of the sofa. There’s no point in watching the rest of the movie. I know it by heart anyways. I listen to the gunfire, your words comforting slow out of your mouth, and examine the threads on the sofa that are woven together all yellow and gold and white. I wonder how my father and mother could have agreed on this couch. They bought it together. It’s older than I am. Now my body is as long as the couch when I lie on it. I remember when I didn’t even take up one cushion. I’m getting old. Too old to go to engine shows with my father. Too old to have to do anything with my father on Sundays.

  My dad belongs to this group for divorced people called Parents Without Partners. They do all these group activities with their kids. This was okay when I was little, but now I feel like the biggest dork mini golfing and bowling with these traumatized six-year-olds while their divorced parents all make goo-goo eyes at each other and set up dates. None of the men talk to my dad at these things. They all wear nice corduroy pants that don’t expose their blue underwear, unlike my father. None of them chew toothpicks like him and they all look at me like I’m poor, which I am, sort of, but I don’t need to be looked at that way.

  At least the engine show isn’t a Parents Without Partners expedition.

  An engine show.

  I will have to pretend to care.

  I hate that.

  “I don’t want to go,” I say to my mother, arching my back and stretching down the length of the couch.

  “Don’t whine, Liliana. You look like a cat, stretching like that.” She sits on the armrest of the couch and puts her hand on my forehead. She starts smoothing back my hair. It feels nice.

  After a minute she adds, “I know you don’t, honey. But he’s your father.”

  I sit up. “You always say that. Like it’s the excuse for ev
erything.”

  “Well, he is.”

  I clomp into my room and close the door. I won’t come out until he cruises up the driveway and honks the horn for me the way a date does in movies; a date that’s already met the parents and is way too cool to come inside. My father is definitely not too cool to come inside. He’s the kind of man whose pants fall down and you can see his bottom. When you tell him this, he blushes and pulls them up. This is called having a working man’s smile or the plumber’s drip. It happens all the time, and still he doesn’t buy pants that fit. What does that say about a person? What does that say about me? My genetic legacy? A scalper (via the lovely Hannah Dustin genes) and a working man’s smile. Jesus. I bet your daughters never had to go to an engine show, Mr. Wayne. I saw that picture of one of them—what, was she maybe four years old and in Cosmopolitan wearing $800,000 worth of diamonds for some Cartier’s ad? She was beautiful, Mr. Wayne. She must have loved you.

  When I get in the car, my father pats me on the knee and leaves his hand there waiting for me to lean over and kiss him on the cheek. I do. One good thing about my father is that he smells nice, the way fathers are supposed to, of minty aftershave and hair stuff, sometimes with a little cut-grass scent underneath. My stepfather smelled like that too, with Old Spice deodorant thrown in.

  My father turns the car around at the top of the hill and heads down the driveway. It’s easy for him to turn the car around. He’s used to tractor trailers, eighteen-wheelers and all that. It must be strange for him to drive something so small.

  “How was your week?” he asks me.

  “Good.”

  “First day of school go okay?”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “Things going well?”

  “Yep,” I say, because I am a woman of few words.

  We start down 101 towards Blue Hill and the engine show. I wonder if he’ll remember to get me lunch. There aren’t many places to eat on the way to Blue Hill. Maybe they’ll have popcorn or something at the show. They do sometimes, popcorn in the boxes like they have at the movies and Coke in those little red cups that have wax on them. The wax always comes off on my lips when I’m drinking, and it makes me think I’m drinking candles.

  “So, how’s your mother?” he asks, biting the edge of his fingernail while we drive past the OK Corral Redemption Center.

  “Good.”

  He always asks how my mother is. For a second I feel bad for him. His big blue eyes stare out the car window at the traffic. He pats my knee.

  “She’s excited about Mike O’Donnell coming to visit,” I say, staring out the window as we drive past an Exxon gas station. I bet they have food in there, Doritos or something toxic like that. Twinkies maybe? I’m so hungry I’d eat anything.

  “Mike O’Donnell?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Mike O’Donnell from town?”

  “Yep. You guys used to know him and his wife or something.” I pick at my fingernails because it’s something to do. We drive by a horse farm. Horses stand waiting for something to happen. I want to jump on and ride off into the sunset, but it’s only noon.

  “How’s Jean? Is she coming too?” my father asks, smiling and all excited now. He’s a social butterfly. He loves all the old friends from his married past. Most of them are still his friends, too. They all gave up on my mother. They don’t mind the toothpicks and the falling-down pants, it seems. They prefer it to my mom, the adulteress, who left my dad for my stepdad who died on her.

  “Goes around comes around,” they say when I go visit them with my dad. They think I can’t hear. So stupid. It’s too bad that there aren’t more people of few words, you know?

  “Don’t need ’em,” my mom always says, swatting her hand through the air like she’s swatting flies. She talks real big for a woman that’s all alone.

  My dad isn’t like that. He talks small. My mom doesn’t need friends. He does. She drives fast. He drives too slow, usually at least ten miles under the speed limit. I count the cars as they pass us on the left as soon as the spotted highway lines appear. Five pass. It’s a good amount of time to let thoughts sink in. You don’t want to go at things too fast, right?

  “Saddle up,” I whisper to my dad.

  “What?”

  “I think they’re divorced or something,” I say after a second. “The Mike O’Donnell guy and his wife.”

  “Oh, I think I heard about that. That’s too bad.” He turns onto Route 3. He keeps both hands on the wheel when he turns. He’s a careful man, not a confident one. “When’s he coming?”

  “Next week.”

  “I’d like to see him.”

  I sigh. “I’ll tell Mom.”

  “Good. Good. You do that.”

  “She says to remind you that you owe us a check from last week and this week.”

  “Oh. Okay. Did I forget last week?”

  “I forgot to remind you when I got out of the car.” I stare at the big knuckles on his hands. “I should’ve told you when you dropped me off at school.”

  “You shouldn’t have to remind me. It’s not right. Me giving you a check.”

  “You could mail it.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s like I’m renting you. It can’t be good for you, me giving you that check.”

  We pull into the parking lot of the Blue Hill Grange. The sign outside says: Engine Show. Here Sunday Noon. There are already tons of rusted-out Ford trucks, Dodge SUVs and Chevy vans. All the cars here are American. A trivial fact that I note and then don’t know what to do with. Another trivial fact here is that everyone wears grandpa clothes like we’re stuck in the 1980s, these old jeans and big belt buckles and plaid shirts or T-shirts with truck company names on them. I shake my head.

  As my father parks next to a baby blue van that looks like it’s been involved in a good twenty-seven kidnappings, he says, “I’d never remember to mail it.”

  I look at him, confused.

  “The check,” he says. “It would drive your mother crazy.”

  I nod, unlock my car door so that I can get out. I don’t like talking about these money things.

  The cuff of his blue pants lifts up a bit. It shows me his ankle and calf. Light blue nylon covers them. No, not nylon, cotton. Cotton tights stretched so tight that the black leg hair matted against the weave is visible.

  My father is wearing tights.

  Engines big and little shine their metal inside the grange hall. They sit on card tables and men, mostly old men like my father, walk around them and talk about things like carburetors and engine years. They touch the moving engines the way a woman touches a baby, reverently. Their hands stay away from the inner spokes of the spinning wheels; their heads nod up and down with the levers. The engines are lined up in rows and all the men do is walk up and down slowly, staring at the engines, touching. I usually count the colors to keep myself awake, place bets on whether there’ll be more green or red engines at this show.

  Sometimes I imagine a gunfight. Maybe a crazy, played-out man comes in with wild eyes. The engine show community has slighted him and the man with the souped-up John Deere engine stole his wife away after singing her some country Tim McGraw song at a late-night karaoke. He’s got nothing to lose, this man. He’s got a bomb strapped to his shirt and his eyes are cold steel and everyone is terrified. The men with the plaid shirts dive for cover. One man with an American Legion hat lunges for him, but the terrorist whacks him down with a karate chop to the neck. He crumples.

  I wait. I think. The crazy man gives threats.

  “Everyone down!” he yells. “Or we all die together!”

  I do not go down on the floor. I will not give him that. Instead, I squat behind a big generator. I peek out and when he’s not looking I lunge, grab his legs and he falls. With two hands, I rip the bomb off his chest and thro
w it through the window. It was velcroed on or something.

  The bomb explodes outside. A bit of ceiling falls on us and another window shatters but no one is hurt, except me. I’ve got a gash across my cheek and it bleeds.

  Everyone is silent. A tumbleweed blows down the center aisle at the grange and then suddenly everyone starts cheering.

  My father, who is suddenly tall, wearing normal socks and a cowboy hat, stares and then lifts me from under my shoulders saying, “That’s my girl. That’s my girl.”

  All the old men pet me on the shoulder and think of when they were heroes, too. Someone buys me a pizza from up the street and my picture is in the paper. At school, everyone loves me, even stupid Paolo “Is Your Father Gay?” Mattias. The principal lets me wear a six-shooter on my hip to school to help ensure its safety.

  I draw my pretend gun and turn my index finger into a pretend barrel.

  “Pow,” I whisper to the engine show people. “I’ll save you. Pow. Pow. Pow.”

  But there is no crazy man, just happy old guys rubbing their hands together, jawing away, looking at moving parts.

  On the way home I cock my gun, spew it out, and I say to my dad, “I’m not looking forward to this Mike O’Donnell guy coming.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrug. My stomach growls real loud. My father’s eyes go big.

  “I forgot to feed you!”

  “It’s okay,” I say and cross my legs.

  “That’s no good. Oh, how can I do that?” He smacks his forehead with the palm of his hand. It makes a horrible sound, like a gunshot.

  We’re at my driveway. I put my hand on my dad’s arm and play the heroine role, sweet, understanding. For extra oomph, I shake out my hair, because that’s what they would do in a movie. “It’s okay. I’m not hungry.”

  He shakes his head. “What kind of father am I? I can’t even remember to feed you.”

  I kiss his cheek. “I’ll see you next Sunday, Dad.”

  “Okay,” he says, hands clenching the steering wheel. “Okay.”