by Anne Pfeffer
Garret lay in the bed, bandages around both hands and arms. He raised one arm briefly when he saw me. “Walker,” he said. “Wassup?”
“Got a card for you,” I said, handing it to him.
He simpered at me. “What, no flowers?”
“You’re not my type.” I sat down on a chair next to his bed. “It’s from the guys at the station.”
He opened it. It showed a dramatic black silhouette of a firefighter against a wall of flames. “Into the Heat of Battle...” it said on the front. On the inside, it said, “...goes the firefighter.” We had all signed it with messages ranging from the bland to the unrepeatable. Garret read the card, chuckling.
“Perkins said you saved that kid’s life, by the way.” I couldn’t help mentioning it, even if it sounded like sucking up.
A faint smile crossed his face. “Just doing my job.”
“Still.”
He shrugged it off. “You gonna prank me now that you got me when I’m down?”
“After that hamster trick, you’d deserve it.” I grinned at him to show no hard feelings.
“Yeah, that was pretty special,” Garret said. “I outdid myself on that one.”
“Yep.” We eyed each other.
“You like being Perkins’s favorite, don’t you?” A strange expression passed over Garret’s face, almost like a kid looking at a pile of Christmas presents that weren’t for him.
I was going to deny that Perkins favored me, but I knew I couldn’t bullshit Garret. “Not particularly.”
A man and two boys burst into the room, all with Garret’s ruddy complexion and short, solid build. A second behind them was the girl I’d seen at the station, who hurled herself at Garret and planted a long, sexy kiss on him.
I didn’t wait for them to come up for air. “I’ll see you next week,” I said to their turned backs and left, feeling completely alone.
Blindsided
On Monday after lunch, I slipped my hand under Zoey’s elbow and spoke into her ear in a low voice. “Can I talk to you?”
“Sure.” She gave me a curious look as I steered her out into the park as far from the Community Center as I could get. I had to do this right and didn’t need any visits from Hilda or Charlotte. We walked under the trees past the small fountain in the middle and toward downtown. It was the way we’d walked on that first day, after I’d beat up the tree.
I searched Zoey’s face, trying to see what lay underneath, how she felt, if I had a chance with her. Her eyes had turned dark gray and serious.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Everything’s fine.” I only had a half hour before returning to work, so I got straight to the point. “I just wanted to tell you…. that….I really like you, Zoey. I want to spend time with you. Get to know you.”
Her mouth opened slightly, like she was in shock. Finally, she got a few words out. “You know I’m committed to someone else.”
I answered her very deliberately. “So?”
She gasped. “What do you mean—’so’?” We reached the corner of the park and came out to the intersection, where we waited for the light to change. An old couple stood to our right and a mom with a stroller on the other side. I lowered my voice.
“So… maybe it’s time to reevaluate. Tell him you’ve decided to give me a shot, to see which one of us you like better.” I smiled encouragingly at her.
“You’re crazy! I chose Josh a long time ago.”
“But that was before you met me.” I gave her another long, slow smile and reached out to close my fingers around her wrist, sensing movement around us but blocking it out, focusing in on Zoey.
She pulled her hand away, whispering at me so passersby wouldn’t hear. “He and I’ve been together almost six years!” We started to cross the street, but realized we had missed our chance as we stood arguing on the street corner.
“And you’ve outgrown him.” The mother and the old couple had gone, and three girls, maybe age fourteen, now waited for the light to change.
She dropped her eyes, but not before I saw the truth in them. “You know nothing about me or my life!”
“I met Josh. And I saw you guys together.” I was on a roll now, confident, because I knew I was right. “He’s not for you anymore. He’s just a habit.”
She pressed her lips tight together. “What you’re doing is wrong.”
“If it’s so wrong, why are you still listening? Just blow me off. Tell me you’re passionately in love with him.” The light changed again. I took her elbow and steered her across the street.
“I’m…” She shook her head slightly, as if to clear it.
“Go ahead.” We stopped walking in front of some trendy store with music coming through its doorway. My fingers slid around her wrist again, while my other hand reached forward to touch her shoulder. “Tell me that he rocks your world, that he listens to the things you say, wants to know everything about you.”
She opened her mouth, then shut it abruptly.
“Tell me he knows exactly what you like.” My face was inches from hers now. She smelled like flowers, something both spicy and sweet. Like she was.
“Does he know exactly how and where to touch you? Exactly how to turn you on…?”
“Stop it!” A tear rolled down her cheek. “You’re not being fair, Travis. If you’d known him back when he was fourteen...” Her lower lip trembled.
“He’s not fourteen anymore.” I let that sink in for a minute. “I really, really like you. But if you want Josh, I’ll go away. Your call.” I waited, my heart pounding so hard I thought she could hear it. But I knew I’d won. She’d been done with this guy for a while and was just looking for a way out.
Her expression changed, as if another thought had just occurred to her. “But Travis, what about Kat?” She turned back towards the park.
I blinked in surprise. Except for our one disastrous date at Rivers, I hadn’t seen or spoken to Kat. “What about her?”
Zoey gasped and wrenched her hand away from me. “Are you kidding me?”
Dumbly, I shook my head. “No. What’s the big deal?”
She lashed out so fast that I never saw it coming.
“You’re really an asshole, you know that?” Her anger hit me like a right hook to the face. Shocked, I almost put my hand up to my jaw to see if it still worked.
“Stay away from me. I mean it.” Her voice was low and cold. She took off, while I stood there on the sidewalk, people passing me on both sides, wondering what the hell had just happened.
Flood
When I entered our apartment that evening, Mom was kneeling in the hallway with a flashlight, a bucket, and a pile of rags. “The toilet,” she groaned, handing me a rag.
It had overflowed. Again. This time the water had spread from the bathroom into the bedroom and hallway.
It was the perfect ending to a perfect day. I was still reeling from Zoey’s anger, which I didn’t get at all. Except that it had to do with Kat, which was not a good sign.
I waded through the water in the hallway. Mom hadn’t called a plumber, first, because we couldn’t afford a plumber, and second, because we couldn’t afford a phone. Just last week, we’d had to give up our land line in the apartment, which meant my cell was now the only phone in the family. I brought it with me to work, so Mom was now left at home in the dark with no way to call out. I had told her to go to a neighbor if she had any problems, but I still worried about her.
It took us, or rather, me, an hour to clean up the mess by the beam of our one flashlight. Mom tried to help but pretty soon got so tired she had to go lie down on the bed with a cloth on her forehead. I spread what rags we had on the wet floors, letting them soak up water over and over again, wringing them out each time in the bath tub.
I wished I could borrow Mrs. M’s water vacuum, but we delinquent tenants were last in line for favors and service, if we got them at all. And we didn’t have power to run the vacuum anyway.
As I cleaned, m
y mind went to Zoey and the strange rejection she’d served out to me. Either I’d messed up somehow, or she’d gotten the wrong idea about me. I grabbed a scrub brush. Even though I’d soaked up the water from the bathroom floor tiles, all the disgusting toilet water germs still had to be there. With the brush and some cleanser, I scoured the tiles, muttering to myself.
I would talk to her again. Ask her to explain.
Having finished the bathroom floor, I piled dirty rags into a laundry basket and inspected the toilet. It was obviously still clogged. I picked up our plunger standing behind the toilet and set to work with it, while my mind churned out scenes of me and Zoey naked, me driving her mad with my insane sexual skills. In my mind, she was eager for it, begging even. But I took my time, slowly undressing her and admiring her beautiful woman’s body.
It sure was easier back when I didn’t care much and went to Chick’s for a quick lay.
I went to bed on the sofa, as usual, where I continued my fantasies, making them longer and wilder and more intense until eventually I took matters into my own hands, or more specifically, into my right hand.
Not as good as having a woman, but a few short minutes was all it took, and finally, I could sleep.
##
I still couldn’t believe what had happened with Zoey. Every day, I waited for a good time to catch her, but she assigned Terra to help me set the tables and stayed away from me.
Our crew continued to work in Liberty Heights, as the weather stayed unseasonably hot for October, the Santa Anas raged, and red flag warnings remained in effect for the whole county. The firefighters were out on call after call, exhausting them and forcing them to postpone one of the Discoverer meetings. Garret pushed me hard, and Brandon brought up Perdido High every time he saw me.
I had finally paid the August rent but now owed all of September and October. Despite all my attempts to charm her, Mrs. M had threatened me again with Bye-bye just last week.
At the Free Clinic, Nurse Bridgette renewed the same useless prescription. She had nothing else to suggest, and no doctor was available to see Mom, who hadn’t been out of bed in a week.
The thing with Zoey was the last straw. At the end of a lunch shift, I finally cornered her.
“Please talk to me.”
“There’s nothing to say.” She was cool and remote, her eyes fixed on something over my shoulder and far away.
“Just go for a walk with me. Please.” I took her arm, headed toward the park, and fortunately, she went with me.
Today was another Farmer’s Market day. We wound our way through the brown, orange, and gold displays from the local fall harvests. A guy with a little kid carried two pumpkins away, probably all set to carve jack-o-lanterns.
“Why are you so mad at me?”
“How could you not know? It’s because of Kat!” She wore this little thigh-length dress with stockings on her legs.
I wanted to slip my fingers up under the hem and distract her the way she was distracting me. “Kat has nothing to do with us!”
“You honestly think you can date both of us at the same time?”
“I’m not dating Kat!” I practically shouted. A merchant stared at us over his fresh sprout display, while a woman hustled her children past as if we were a couple of gangbangers.
We faced off against each other near a flower stand. Even as pissed off as I was, I could appreciate the sight of Zoey, spitting mad, in her little blue dress, against a backdrop of roses and sunflowers.
“You’ve been taking her out! Ever since she came to work here that day. At the soup kitchen.”
We stared at each other, while other shoppers stared at us.
“Is that what she told you?”
“Yes!”
“Well it’s not true! I’ve never even called Kat. I’ve never seen her outside of the Community Center, except that night with you.”
For a long moment, Zoey stood thinking, while doubt and irritation alternated on her face. A vendor next to me served pear samples to a couple with his-and-hers dreadlocks. The girl hand-fed a bit of pear to her boyfriend.
Finally Zoey spoke. “Really? You’ve honestly not talked to her or seen her at all?” She said it as if it pained her, but without surprise.
“Honest to God.”
“So she lied to me,” Zoey said, resignation on her face.
This was getting weirder and weirder. “I thought you guys were best friends!”
“What? No!” Zoey shook her head, her hair swinging. “We were best friends as kids. But in high school we grew apart.”
“Does she do this a lot?”
“She plays games. It’s so natural to her she hardly knows she’s doing it.”
“Why?” I asked. We walked slowly toward the parking lot, our heads together, while both questions and hope popped up inside me.
“She’s crazy. I never see her anymore, except when she temps at the Community Center. You brought us back together when you asked me to give her that note.”
“Jeez. Sorry about that.”
She looked me over, like she was trying to figure me out. “She and Josh are friends, but I stay out of that, if I can.”
We walked up to Zoey’s car, an old Subaru with faded blue paint. When she turned to say goodbye, I put my hands against her car on either side of her shoulders. Her face was an inch from mine, her back to the car.
“Go out with me.”
“Travis, I’m not your flavor of the week!” She bit her lip, like I’d seen her do when she was trying to solve a problem.
“It’s just a date. I want to know you better.”
“You want to sleep with me.”
“Well, I do think you’re amazingly beautiful and hot, so, yes.” I drew back from her a little. “Do you really have a problem with me being crazy attracted to you?”
“I have a problem with your being crazy attracted to a different woman every week.”
“That hasn’t happened since I met you.”
I could feel her body heat. Her lips were a dark pink that got me hot just looking at them. Now her tongue came out to lick her upper lip as she tried to shift away from me, but couldn’t.
A lot of women, at that moment, would have been easy to kiss, ready, wanting it. But, here with Zoey, a warning bell went off in my head.
Instantly, I moved back, giving her a couple of inches of space. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
A pulse beat in her throat. “I don’t plan to.” Her voice came out husky and breathless.
She seemed to realize at the same moment I did that her hands were on my chest. She whipped them off, while I went rock hard, more turned on than I’ve been ever been in my life.
I leaned in again. “Go out with me.” Our cheeks brushed as I spoke into her ear, my body an inch from hers.
My sentence hung in the air. Then, she pushed me back and began to dig in her purse for her keys. “Do you do this to every girl who comes along? First, Kat, now me?”
It looked bad, I had to admit.
“None of this means very much to you, does it?”
She was kind of right, at least as far as every other woman in my life was concerned.
“You’re different!” I said.
Her eyes rolled up. “How dumb do you think I am?” She opened her car door and stood facing me.
I squirmed, not knowing how to convince her.
“Let’s just be friends,” she said.
“You’re not attracted to me?”
She lowered her eyes. “I didn’t say that. But, really, it’s better like this. Now, go home, Travis.” And she climbed into her car and turned the ignition.
It was time to leave for work, anyway. Feeling like a dog’s dinner, I slunk off.
Paper Blizzard
“Hey, man.” Benny approached me as I arrived at the day’s worksite. “Thought I’d let you know you’re doing a good job for me.”
“Thanks. You giving me a raise?” I was tired already, a
nd the day was just starting. I slapped on the baseball cap I wore to keep the sun off.
Benny threw back his head and laughed. “Travis, man, you crack me up, you really do.” He recovered himself. “Maria wants to talk to you.”
“I’ll give her a ring,” I said, figuring I’d do it one of these days.
“No. I mean Maria wants to talk to you.” He held out his cell phone, and there she was on his display, holding for me.
She was hollering before I even said hello. “Travis, why haven’t you called me? We need to talk about how you’re going to finish high school!”
I leveled with her. “I can’t go back to school. I have to work full-time, and I’ve missed too much class to make it up.” And we’re about to get evicted, and something’s really wrong with my mother.
“Then you will take the GED,” she informed me. “I’m going to mail you some materials, so you can register and begin preparing.”
“Okay. Thanks, Ms. Val.” Easier to just say yes than to argue with her.
She was right, of course. But when and where was I supposed to do this? I’d be like Abe Lincoln, working late into the night by candlelight. In my new home beneath an underpass.
##
Mrs. M corralled me as I came in the building. I’d managed to avoid her the last three days, but she must have been waiting for me this time.
“T’avis! I need mo’ money!”
“I’ll have it for you Friday.” I knew I sounded curt, but shit. She knew when I got paid. She knew I came to her every Friday with every penny I could spare and more. She knew I was killing myself to pay her, so why didn’t she lay off me?
“How much you will give F’iday?”
“Same as usual, Mrs. M.” Now I just sounded tired. I felt tired. I wanted to go lie in Zoey’s arms.
“I need mo’!”
“I’ll do my best.”
“T’avis, I wait long time….”
“I said I’ll do my best!” I pushed past her to the elevator, then seeing the usual “Out of Order” sign, headed for the stairs and took them two steps at a time. A sick feeling burned in my stomach.
