You and the man lay there. You study the swollen corner of your ceiling, decide to pop it with a safety pin sometime soon. You wonder if that would be a big enough hole. The man gets up and in the blurry corner of your eye he is dressing himself. He goes into the kitchen and you hear him touching things in your refridge. He reappears in your doorway and you watch him unpeel a slice of cheese from its plastic sleeve, then mash it into a cube. You wonder if he is trying to fashion a new tooth. You got damn near fuckall to eat, young lady, the man says. Your daddy used to call you young lady when you were in trouble. You think, Am I in trouble? The man walks over and kisses the air over your hairline, holding his crotch like it aches. The man says Damn, says your name, which you don’t remember telling him. When he is gone you think about getting dressed, calling someone, going into town. You think about doing a lot of things. Instead you lie in bed and listen to a neighbor down the road mowing his grass, the sound of that motor goddamn ripping you to shreds.
OUT THERE
People burn cars out there. My father took us out there when I was eleven and we burned GranGran’s car, him shaking the lighter fluid over the hood and up against the sides like he was seasoning it, then he let me and Lily toss the lighter through the passenger window but we had to promise to run as soon as it left our hands. ‘Less you want me to roll you in hot sauce and eat you like a crispy wing, you’ll run your little asses fast as you can. We kept our promise and felt the fire at our backs but didn’t get to see it start, when we turned around it was going like it’d been alive forever.
Later Lily asked me did I see the fire reflected in Pop’s glasses, did I see how it looked like millions of goldfish swimming up the lenses. You were watching the wrong fire, I told her. I beg to differ, she said. She’d heard this somewhere and had figured out a way to use it, I could tell by the smug way of her mouth and how she was exhaling through her nostrils.
Another thing to know about out there is there’s a pack of wild dogs that claim it as their home. The story is that a farmer loaded up his sheepdog and her puppies one day, drove out there and pushed them out of the truck because he couldn’t bear to drown them but he couldn’t afford to feed them either. People hear that story and get disgusted but some of these same people have driven the family dog out there and set it free to join the pack, Pop did that to Jinx but said it was good news, Jinx was with her own, was back roaming the desert sands the way God intended, and all I could think was how Jinx didn’t have that many teeth, who would soak her food in water so she could get it down? I’ve never seen the dogs but if you’re out there burning a car or anything else at night you can hear them barking in that wounded way, a whole choir of them sounding like they’re being kicked or shot with BB’s.
The point is Pop knew both of these things. A place where people come to burn cars, a place where abandoned dogs eat sand or each other: these are not comforting facts. But that did not matter to Pop. What mattered was tradition, albeit a tradition starting with me and Lily. This is your legacy, he shouted at us from inside the car. Your rite of passage. If you make it you will be men. If you don’t I’ll lickety-split a prayer for each of you come Sunday. Then he peeled out, left us coughing in his dust. Lily said, Don’t he know we’re girls? How are we supposed to become men then?
It didn’t take long for Lily to start crying. Some book she read described how an orange sun is the deadliest, how letting its rays coat your skin is akin to taking a lye shower, how the orange was from God’s bloody iris, when I asked her if that meant the sun was God’s eye and if so was he a Cyclops she slapped her own face, said she had itches under her skin, it was the orange rays coming for her. She took off running. I let her. In the flat desert I knew I could see her for miles.
Then I learned a third thing about out there. I was watching Lily run, her arms up to shield her, looking like a shimmering exaltation not a hundred feet in front of me. I looked down at something itching my calf and when I looked up Lily was gone. Wasn’t even a dustcloud in her wake. That’s the third thing. The desert is a warp master. Lily warped or I warped but either way the desert opened up its coatflap to take something in and when the coatflap closed again I was alone. I knew it wasn’t any use but you have to go through the motions when something shocking happens. I called Lily’s name. I spun around in place. I followed her footsteps but they petered out and I wondered if I was back where I started. I screamed for her till the sun came down, then I sat in the sand and watched the unlikely colors in the sky, the purple and the silver and the green and the white white line of the horizon which was the last to go.
The dark out there was a navy quilt sewn with pearl buttons. There was part of a moon wedged in the sky that gave off a dull glow. The dogs started around then, yelping and whining and getting closer and closer. I brought my knees up to my chest and concentrated on my shoes because I could see them, they were a fact, they were indisputable, I remembered putting them on in the morning, I remembered retying the laces after school, how they were black in their creases from when I jumped into the lake wearing them months before. A furry thing knocked against my back, knocked again, it was terrible in its boniness, it rubbed against me like a cat, a tongue swiped my arm, paws clawed at my legs, they were crying like they were trying to hold it in but couldn’t. They smelled like mothballs and corn chips and old blood.
Pop always talked about mirages, how they happen outside of the desert all the time, like television, like the produce aisle, like any woman in a wet swimming suit. What I noticed first was the black flickering, I wondered how I could see black flicker in all that dark, then my eyes saw the rest of it, saw the orange flames which formed the black flicker, saw them shooting up, undulating tall, saw the fire, saw the fire, saw the fire, and I ran to it.
The desert is a good lesson in life. It proves that what you want most will most likely stay out of reach. That fire was mine, was my love, was the breath in my lungsacks. I heard the dogs behind me singing their brutal chorus, I knew they remembered what it was to beg, that fire moving fast toward the end of the earth.
But out there is different from your typical desert. Because it was Pop burning up our car, drinking from a milk jug, Lily sleeping in the sand like a punished doll, and by the time I reached them the dogs were gone, weren’t making a peep. That Jinx you were running from, Pop asked, laughing wide. His glasses got the worst of the black flicker and I decided not to look at him directly, possibly forevermore. When Lily woke up we thumbed it home.
FINDING THERE
He drove. Called his best friend from a motel with a swimming pool. I don’t know if I can go on.
Everybody thinks that, his best friend said.
He had a wife and some kids. With every state line they became more like lace drapes in a window, with every state line he had to remind himself to miss them. He didn’t know how hard it could get.
In New Mexico the clouds had stretched across the sky like blown sugar. In Oklahoma he poured a jug of water into his engine. He pretended his car was a great paintbrush, that he was leaving a black creek behind him.
He watched the news, the free movie, the scrambled-porn-channel oil painting, turned the volume up to hear the uh, to hear the oh, to hear the yeah, you like it.
The nights were fine. They were dark, they were the bottom of something. At twilight he pressed his stomach into the railing outside his room, swallowed what he was missing into the watered-down sky.
At a Golden Griddle in Alabama he met a woman at the counter. Bought her a cup of coffee and watched her stir it one way and then the other. She pressed her finger into some spilled sugar, told him she was missing the part of her tongue that recognized sweet. At that, his eyes filled.
Back in his room she stood at the foot of the bed and undressed. Her thighs were toned, bits of pubic hair peeked out the sides of her underwear. She bent, crawled up the bed, straddled him. The air conditioning kicked on, light came through the windows lazily, he thought of his middle daughter holding so
mething up, saying Can you open it? He fucked the woman, those were the words he used when confessing to his best friend days later. He didn’t tell his friend about the scar he found over her heart, a scar that had teeth, didn’t tell his friend that she asked for money and he gave her everything in his wallet, that he’d asked to braid her long black hair and she’d laughed at him and walked out and left the door wide open, him on the bed naked and sweating and empty every which way there was to be.
He kept driving. Veered toward the Gulf and rented a room a block from the beach. Kept his shoes on as he waded into the water for fear of jellyfish. It felt natural to be pulled by the tide, to be tempted to let it take him, and then for the tide to finally let go and push the other way. He stood like that for some time, dipping in his fingertips at one point and tasting the salt. He saw a shark’s fin on the horizon and it wasn’t until later that he realized it was probably just a sailboat.
On the way back to his room a teenaged boy said Hey man, you got any change? and then, You want a date? He brought the boy back to his room, sat on the bed and waited while the boy went into the bathroom, locked the door, turned on the water. He put the TV on, some kind of soap opera, interrupted by a weather report hinting at a tropical storm in the next day or so. The bathroom door opened and the boy walked out, wet hair, no shirt, drips of water running down his neck, hands shaking. His heart filled and he stood up, put his hands on the boy’s shoulders to try and calm him. Don’t worry, he started to say, and the boy punched him in the sternum. It wasn’t a hard punch, but he guessed that it was supposed to be enough to knock him down, so he played along, landing on his stomach, clutching at his chest, moaning, trying for breath. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty, held it in the air like a small green flag. The boy took it, backed away from him, called him a pervert and then a motherfucker and then a perverted motherfucker, opened the door so hard that it slammed into the wall. He could hear the boy’s boots on the metal steps outside, then as they ran across the parking lot. Only then did he push himself up onto his knees, wipe the carpet bits from his face. The weather report was showing an animation of the tropical storm growing until it covered half the state. The weatherman assured him that it wasn’t a definite, but that he had to be prepared.
He sat on the bed for a while, watching families walk by his open door with towels and snorkels and baggies of sandwiches and cookies, looking in at him and then looking quickly away. He walked to the 7-Eleven on the corner, bought a pint of rocky road and a couple MoonPies. On the way back to the motel the sun was an orange yolk sliding down the sky. He forced himself to look into it, but after a short time had to look away.
Back in his room he thought for a second about hanging himself from the shower rod. Ate both the MoonPies and started on the ice cream, turned on the evening news. Someone had been abducted, a small girl with saucer eyes and messy hair. In the morning he’d drive north, make another state, maybe two. He finished the ice cream in four large spoonfuls. It slid down his throat and iced his heart. He pulled the covers up to his belly, wondered what he could leave of himself behind and all he could do without, thought of how his wife often had lipstick on her teeth, how it made her look like she’d just bitten into something alive, something that bled. At a commercial break he picked up the phone, dialed home, hung up when he heard his daughter’s voice, small and distant, singing Hello, Hello, Are you there?
NOTE
I wrote my sister this note about all the things I hate. Gorgons, it said. And how people go nutville any time the moon throws a shape. Nasty ass Nilla Wafers. The smell of crotch, which only seems to come wafting out from my sister’s room. Football players and especially football players who spend time in my sister’s crotch-smelling bedroom. The way the cable box gets all warm so Daddy knows when he puts his hand on it I been watching my shows instead of doing my papers. Cats, but not kittens. Arm hair. Cutting the grass on Sundays ’cause Daddy didn’t have no sons. Thigh chafe. Sun-In. Hair that has Sun-In in it. Hair from my sister’s head and finding clumps of it in the drain or in a tangle breezing around the bathroom floor. Anything orange-flavored. I hate, I said, and then I corrected myself by crossing out hate and writing despise above it, but not crossing it out so much that she couldn’t still see the word hate, I despise shit in other people’s teeth. Namely peppercorns and chewed-up bread products. But then I got specific and said Shit like them threads, them filaments, I said, that get left behind and flutter from between your teeth once you bite into a orange slice and have swallowed down all the juice and loose pulp, because my sister sure did like a good orange slice. The words loose and pulp coming anywhere near each other, come to think of it, I said. And also, the smell coming from the kitchen drain. That spoon that got caught up in the kitchen drain that I keep getting stuck with which is surely mangling up my lips with every bite of store-brand breakfast whatever. Lip chap. People that don’t brush the mung off they tongue. The sound of two tongues meeting somewhere in the middle, like slurp-slap, slap-slurp. Any song by that one guy. Any song that could be described as a song to get kissing to. Any boy that makes any kind of noise loud enough for me to hear as I happen by my sister’s room on my way to none of your business. Any boy says Jesus like anyone else’d say Mark or Dave. Thick lines of dirt in some fingernails. How cologne smells like toothpaste and rubbing alcohol. How Daddy walks around shirtless. How I can’t help but notice the swirls of hair around Daddy’s nipples. How Daddy has nipples in general. The word nipples or any word starting with the letters N-I-P. How Momma farts when she’s doing her exercises and no one reacts. The VHS that’s been sitting on top of the TV since last summer labeled For Adults Only. Adults in general, and how they seem unaware of things like fate and magic and daughters who are losers and music that is current and candy that ain’t Hershey’s. How God is I guess an adult too.
How attractive Jesus is in his pictures. And anyway, I said in this letter, I hate how Momma buys store-brand feminine products with names that always end in O. TampOs. MaxOs. And then also how you answer everything with Oh. It’s 8:30, where’re your school books? Oh. That boy you shut in your bedroom the other day was manhandling a girl that wasn’t you over behind the library. Oh. Your face is a shiny clock without no hands. Oh. And alright, I hate the following things about myself: big boat feet, mosquito-bite chest hints, plague of freckles, can’t sing, brain feels swole all the time, but least I don’t go around offering up my tater on a platter for a cocktail party of wieners to lay up against, and least the cat ain’t got my tongue when I see you in the halls, and least I can look at a jar of buttons and see it for what it is whereas you look right at something and see all them dances to come and boys to kiss and stars to count while you laying in the driveway looking up and I’m laying in bed looking nowhere.
PEGGY’S BROTHER
We play truth or dare and it keeps getting worse. I run down the driveway and back up again with a hot dog in my teeth and my bikini bottoms in a wedge, I am on all fours, my naked butt in the air, a turd-like swirl of toothpaste on the small of my back, my best friend Jessica licking it off and gagging, I am dared to eat one of the twins’ boogers. This I don’t do. I take one look at it, dark red in the center, both dry and glistening, and I run to the bathroom and lock myself in.
Peggy’s mom’s soaps are shaped like seahorses; the one in the bathtub dish has been worn down into a featureless grubworm. I hold it in my hand, its underside slick and cold, while the other girls knock on the door, say, Come on you don’t have to eat it, and Shelley wiped it on Peggy’s brother’s door so don’t worry, and, from Jessica, You’re being boh-ring.
After I hear them walk away and pad down the hallway, I come out. Peggy’s brother’s door is open slightly, I can hear the low tones coming from his television. The last time I was over at Peggy’s he’d woken me up and I’d had to step over the other girls as he led me into his room and then he just held my hand, rubbing my knuckles with his thumb so hard that the next day my knuc
kles were red and chapped and my mother rubbed Eucerin on them for a week. That was all. He’d held my hand and then he’d dropped it and opened his door, waited for me to leave, and then closed it behind me. In the morning we ate cereal across from each other and he told Peggy he’d farted into her box of Corn Pops.
I hear Grace say, I am seriously going to vomit, which means the game is still going on. I knock on Peggy’s brother’s door and then, when I hear one of the girls coming down the hallway, I duck in and shut the door gently behind me. Peggy’s brother is watching The Shining, waves of blood rushing down a hallway, two dead girls laying askew. I’d watched it many times at Peggy’s house, and it had always seemed funny, too dramatic, we roared with laughter at the little girls asking Danny to Come play with us, forever. But here, in Peggy’s brother’s room, it is suddenly terrifying, Danny’s face frozen in fear, the stifling browns and gold of the hotel, Danny’s mother’s crowded, gnashing teeth.
Hey, Peggy’s brother says. Come over here.
My face is hot, I feel goldfish in my stomach and I trip on a basketball making my way over to him in the dark room. He laughs quietly. There’s nowhere else to stand but in front of him, stretched out on the bed, his feet crossed at the ankles and sheathed in white gym socks.
Daddy's Page 4
