This Is Not Your City

by Caitlin Horrocks

  “Oh, Honey. Honey. Mr. Zendler is crazy. He’s holed up out there in the park by himself, and I know he looks awfully frail, but he’s crazy as a loon. He hates the summer people. He hates the new people. The police have hauled him in for boobytrapping the woods. He put up tripwires across snowmobile paths. Someone could have been killed.”

  “So he doesn’t—”

  “He hates everyone, really. He’s been banned from the Pirate’s Booty for harassing the girls. Someone told me he’d been banned from the Elks’ Bingo game for trying to cheat.”

  “He doesn’t—know anything, about Charlie?”

  “I’ve known Charlie since he was six years old. Has he given you any reason—”

  “No, I just—”

  “Then Good Lord, stop looking for one. Charlie’s a good boy. And if you believe this nonsense over—”

  “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. No one told me Mr. Zendler was batshit insane, okay?” Robin jerked up out of the plastic chair Mrs. Halstead had offered her. “How would I know that? How would I know you all knew?”

  “Sit down, Honey.”

  Robin fell back into the chair, bent at the waist with her arms wrapped around her stomach.

  “You couldn’t. I suppose you couldn’t.”

  Robin leaned her forehead against the edge of the desk, and her voice floated back up to Mrs. Halstead from the floor. “I feel really stupid now.”

  “Don’t. I’m sorry I didn’t know what was happening.”

  “You won’t tell him?” Robin asked, turning her head so her cheek was resting on the table, her eyes looking up at Mrs. Halstead.

  “Charlie?”

  Robin nodded, her head still pressed against the desk.

  “No, I won’t tell him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No need, Honey. No need.”

  “This weekend,” Charlie said that night over Scrabble, “I thought we could maybe get out of town. Go south to visit your parents. Stop in Battle Creek and go to Cereal City, or this Historic Seventh-Day Adventists Village I read about. Since the Fungus Fest sounds like it isn’t worth waiting for.”

  “I don’t hate it here, Charlie.”

  Charlie didn’t say anything, just put down his tiles. He made H-I-T-S and Robin wanted to tell him, No, save the S for later. Add it to something with an X or Z. “I don’t hate it here. I want to be here with you. I’d sell saltwater taffy at the Salty Dawg’s in Wharftown all summer, okay? I’d re-apply at the Pirate’s Booty.”

  “You don’t have to do that. My dad said you’re the steadiest girl he’s ever seen with a nail gun. You can work for him again next summer, if you want.”

  “I’m just saying I want to be here with you. I’m in love with you, and I just want to make that clear.”

  “Okay. I’m in love with you, too. And I’d like to take you to Cereal City.”

  “I went as a kid. You have to wear hairnets. But I could never pass up a Historic Adventist Village.”

  “They have costumed re-enactors who lead singalongs.”

  “Of what? ‘99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall’?”

  “Nineteenth-century hymns.”

  “You have been holding out on me.”

  “We can leave Saturday morning,” Charlie said, and Robin pictured them throwing their backpacks behind the seats in Charlie’s pickup. She’d hosed out the bed after taking Mr. Zendler’s garbage to the dump, and the water had frozen in a sheet of cloudy ice across the bottom of the truck, pine needles and leaves caught in the flood and freeze. They’d drive to the Historic Adventist Village in Battle Creek, and try on buckle shoes and goofy hats and bonnets, and they would sit on the hard wooden pews of a re-created clapboard church, and they would sing Happy Day, Happy Day, and there would be no doubt in her mind that it was so.

  Steal Small

  I live in a good house now, with an attic where the roof makes a triangle and the heat collects. I stand up there and look out back to the barbed wire where our property meets the neighbor’s, and past that the highway. The neighbor still farms, soy planted right up against the fence. We haven’t planted anything, unless you count the animals. That’s what Leo does, what he grows. From the attic you can see the kennels laid out in a half circle in the backyard, all figured so the mean ones don’t fight, the sweet ones calm the fussy ones down, and the bitches can’t get puppies. Leo can hold them all in his head, who needs what and eats what and is looking sick and should probably be sold on before it looks any sicker. He’s got a good mind for organization. I’ve got a good mind for keeping stuff tidy, which is important in a house like this, which is big and decent and full of what a person needs, but has fifteen dogs caged up in the back. Fifteen give or take. In a good month, take.

  Leo got a real nasty scratch about a month ago, spiraling from the back of his hand down the inside of his arm. I had him sit on the bathroom counter while I got alcohol and cotton balls out of the cupboard. I dabbed my way down his arm. “Second time this week,” I said. “You should watch yourself better.”

  “It wasn’t the rottie,” he said, looking up, and I couldn’t tell whether or not he liked what I’d done to the ceiling. It’s light blue now, with clouds. I did the clouds with a can of white paint and more cotton balls, more dabbing.

  “If it wasn’t the rottie—”

  “One of the cage doors. I need to go back out with the wire cutters.”

  “You need one of those shots?”

  “Tetanus? I’m fine,” he said, but there’s no way of knowing with Leo if he meant fine because he’d had one or fine because fine’s what you are when you don’t think too much about yourself, about how you’re really doing and what you really need. We’re both of us fine most of the time.

  I was long done with the alcohol, but I was standing between Leo’s legs and he’d put his feet together behind me, up against the backs of my thighs. I still had his left hand in mine. I brushed the backs of his knuckles. “The gangrene’s back,” he said, which it was, but he doesn’t need to warn me like he thinks he does. He doesn’t really have gangrene, just some weird skin thing that makes him itch so bad he scratches even in his sleep, until the skin breaks open and starts oozing, sometimes blood and sometimes something clear and sometimes both together, so his skin shines in the light like a pink glaze, like glass or pastry. He always warns me, before I uncover an elbow, or the back of a knee, or lift his shirt to find a patch on his belly. I kissed the back of his hand, a clear part, close to his wrist. His legs dropped down and he let me go, his heels kicking the cupboard doors.

  “I’ll go start dinner,” I said.

  “I’ll be back in soon,” he said, and hopped down off the counter. He’s much taller than me, long like a noodle and skinny in his jeans. His hair’s long but not too long, tied back and never greasy. He’s got a Cheshire cat inked on his left front forearm. The tattoo seems to keep away the gangrene, and he jokes that he’s going to save up, become the Illustrated Man, stop selling dogs at the Pick-n-Trades and just sell tickets for people to see him in his shorts.

  For dinner I broiled some frozen fish, microwaved some frozen peas, baked a couple of potatoes. The window over the sink faces the back, and Leo had the dunk tank out. I guess you’re supposed to spray flea stuff around the kennels, air them out with no dogs inside, but we’re almost full up until the Pick-n-Trade in Joplin, and there’s nowhere to move the dogs to. So he took them one by one out of the kennels and dumped them in the tank, pyrethrum insecticide mixed with water, strong enough to keep the fleas off them until market. It’s bad for their eyes and skin, worse for their tempers, but Class B dealers don’t mind with temperament. Leo had gloves on, a pair he stole from the outfitter’s offices at the slaughterhouse, but the Rottweiler might have gotten him anyway. We’ve had her here for a month, since Leo found her in the Lamar classifieds and went to pick her up. I think she’s homesick.

  The fish didn’t taste like much, but Leo’s always gracious. “Where’d you learn this on
e?” he asks. “How’d you make that?” I sewed two buttons back onto a shirt of his the other day, which doesn’t take more than a needle and a pair of eyes, but he acted like he’d seen a miracle. Did my mother sew, he asked, had she taught me, and I wanted to laugh but then he’d ask what was funny. It wasn’t something my mom would care about, the way other people looked in their clothes. When Mouse got boobs I was the one who had to tell her that she needed a bra. The elastic had gone out of my old ones, but I could drive by then so we went to Wal-Mart and charged some things. It was a nice afternoon, doing that together.

  Mouse lives in St. Louis now. She’s going to college, studying biology. She sends me postcards, always of the Arch, the Mississippi River, things I already know how they look like. I’d like to see her campus, the streets where she lives, but she’s never volunteered. She says she has a boyfriend who’s studying business, and I thought about writing back how Leo has a business, too, but then she’d ask selling what. Lyssa, she writes. Mango of my eye and possum of my heart. How goes it? I took summer term classes so I’ve got more finals already. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it for a visit. How’s what’s-his-face? It’s cold and rainy in St. Louis. Hope the weather’s better in Neosho. Love and Squalor, Mouse. She always signs the postcards Love and Squalor, and I know it’s a joke, but I don’t get what’s funny.

  Leo only bunches part time. He works days over at National Beef. He’s one of the top guys there who’s not management, a twelve-dollar-an-hour man. He started off down the chain, but now he’s a knocker. He stands up on the catwalk with a bolt gun and lets the cows have it as they come down the chute. “Pow, right between the eyes,” he told me. He talks big but I don’t think he enjoys it all that much. He stands eight hours in his rubber coverall, goggles, his hair tied back and stuffed under a net. The slaughterhouse has been losing money so steady they’ve got the line speed up to a cow every nine seconds, trying to do in volume what they can’t do in beef prices. Down the chute and up by the ankles, Leo’s quick hand on the bolt gun the only thing saving the cows from being butchered alive. “Goddamn angel of mercy,” Leo says. “What kind of a life does a cow have, anyway?” He says top line speed is 400 an hour, which means Leo can kill 3,200 animals in a day, minus his breaks, two fifteenminute ones and a half hour for lunch.

  I work twenty hours a week at the Goodwill, mostly sorting donations. I’d work more if they had the hours for me. It’s nasty work in lots of little ways, but since Leo’s work is what it is, I can’t complain to him. We have to keep the stuffed toys wrapped in plastic for two weeks in the back, to suffocate any lice that might be on them. We have to check the clothes for stains, like old blood the color of sweet potatoes on the insides of women’s pants. If the clothes are stained too bad to sell, they’re shipped out in big bundles to somewhere else, somewhere in Africa or South America or something.

  Leo ate his potato last, scooping out the halves and then rolling the skins up into tubes with salt and pepper inside. He ate the tubes with his hands, like brown paper hot dogs. I got out ice cream bowls, a half gallon of vanilla and the kind of chocolate sauce that hardens on top of the ice cream. “I’m glad it wasn’t the rottie,” I said, “who scratched you. She’s a pretty one.”

  “Pretty ugly. She’s a dog.”

  “All your pretty uglies.”

  “You too, Miss Lyss. You can be my favorite. My prettiest ugly.”

  I tapped my spoon against the hard chocolate. Underneath the shell my ice cream was already melting.

  “I’m just kidding,” Leo said.

  “Stop messing with the gangrene. You’ll make it worse.” He was rubbing his knuckles up and down on the edge of the table. When he’s itching bad he’ll rub his fingers against stuff without even realizing and the skin breaks open right away. There are little smears of blood all over the house, on the prickly surfaces that feel best when he’s itching—the rough carpet in the rec room, the weave of the couch, the furry cover on the toilet. I could track him through the house like that, like a hurt animal, something leaking and in pain.

  “Maybe it is worse this time. Maybe I have leprosy. My nose’ll fall off. Then I’ll be your pretty ugly.”

  “If your nose falls off you’re not going to be my anything,” I said, which sounded kind of mean, and I thought about telling him the truth, which is that he’d be my lovely ugly even if his nose did fall off, and then that seemed pathetic, and I thought perhaps I shouldn’t say anything at all, so I didn’t.

  “If you’re not working tomorrow, can you come with me?” he asked.

  “Carthage?”

  “Webb City.”

  “You got a paper?”

  “We can pick one up there. Look through it over some breakfast. We’ll go to the Denny’s off 71.”

  “Sure,” I said, and hoped he didn’t think the Denny’s was what swayed me. I don’t do what I do for Leo so he’ll buy me breakfast.

  In bed that night I was careful of the gangrene. Leo fell asleep right after but it took me a while. It had been dark for hours, but the weather wasn’t cooling. We had the ceiling fan going and the windows open. The crickets were chirping the way they did all summer, a long low buzz like power lines, and the dogs were suffering in the heat. I bet Leo’d never find anyone else who can listen to dogs cry the way I can. They call out and I can turn over and not hear them, not even a bit. I don’t need the radio or the TV. I just need my own two ears and then I don’t hear a thing. I dreamed good dreams but I don’t remember what they were.

  At Denny’s, Leo got the Grand Slam and I got waffles. He took the classifieds from the Webb City Gazette and let me have everything else. I read about a meth lab bust and a church swap sale on the front page while Leo circled ads with a red pen. I grew up in Webb City, but with Mouse in St. Louis, there’s not much to bring me back. I don’t know where my mom’s got to these days.

  “Anything promising?”

  “Loads. Some purebreds, too. Or so they’re claiming. I thought we’d try and hit those first.”

  “Sounds fine.” I went to check my hair and makeup in the bathroom while Leo settled up. I was wearing a flowered dress and sandals, my hair down, a little liner for my eyes and color for my lips, not too much. Like a Sunday School teacher, Leo said, and it was strange to hear something like that come out of him as a compliment. Leo was wearing khaki pants and a long-sleeved shirt that covered his tattoo but was too hot for the weather. He already had sweat stains under his arms. We sat in the van with the air conditioning on while Leo started calling houses on his cell phone. Beagles are good finds. Hounds, labs, retrievers, too, either purebred or close enough so you can tell the breed without squinting. It’s because they’re mid-sized dogs with large chest cavities, the way Leo explains it. I don’t quite know why that’s important but I guess it makes them easy to work with.

  Before I moved in with Leo the biggest thing I’d ever stolen was a stick of butter. Not even a package, a single stick. Mouse and I had decided we wanted to make chocolate chip cookies. We found a recipe on an index card in the kitchen, but none of the ingredients. All we needed was a teaspoon of this, a half-teaspoon of that, and we didn’t have anything. 1/8th of a teaspoon baking soda. We looked at the tiny bowl of the measuring spoon, the size of the nail on Mouse’s pinky finger. We found a chain of little plastic snap-off paint tubs that had come with a paint-by-number set, and cleaned them out and put them in Mouse’s pink vinyl purse. At the grocery store we took baking soda and baking powder off the shelf, looked both ways for clerks, opened the containers, and tapped out a few spoonfuls into the tubs. We were doing the same thing with a tin of cinnamon in the spice aisle when a woman confronted us, a lady with a cart full of food like kids would eat, fruit snacks and Hi-C. “What do you girls think you’re doing?” she asked.

  “We want to make cookies,” Mouse said.

  “Are you going to pay for that?”

  “We can’t. So we’re only taking a little,” I said, and Mouse nodded sol
emnly, because Mouse was already an expert in solemn truths.

  The woman looked at us in our old shorts and stained T-shirts and you could watch her feeling sorry for us, deciding to let us keep right on stealing. I let Mouse put two eggs and the stick of butter in her purse after she promised to be careful with them. At the checkout we paid for flour and sugar and chocolate chips and asked for two plastic bags. I put them on the handlebars of my bike, one on each side, because I figured Mouse had enough to worry about with the eggs in her purse.

  The next morning, Mouse and I were eating some of our cookies for breakfast when Mom came home. “Where’d you get cookies?” she asked, and we told her, because we figured she either wouldn’t care or would think we were resourceful. She put some bread in the toaster and opened the fridge. “Where’s the butter?” she asked.

  “There isn’t any.”

  “You don’t put four sticks of butter in a batch of cookies.”

  “That’s why we only took one,” Mouse said.

  “Lyssa and Mouse. You steal, you steal something worth taking. Then I’d at least have butter for the damn toast.”

  That’s one of the only pieces of advice Mouse and I can remember getting from her, and I didn’t even take it. I still steal small. Not things other people want, or things that are worth a lot. I just take what I need.

  The first house we went to in Webb City was in my old neighborhood, a street that had been kept up a little better than the one I grew up on. The house was a nice little ranch, painted white with geraniums in the window boxes. Leo rang the doorbell and then stepped back so we were standing side by side. The woman who came to the door had an armful of brown cardboard boxes, so Leo kept it short. “Mrs. Sidore?” he said. “I called a few minutes ago. About the dog. Leo Tillet.”

  We were shown to the couch in the living room, which was full of boxes labeled Estate Sale, and Rubbish, and Keep, and Kids Might Want??? I could feel Leo smile. Death lingers on a dog. Families want rid of it. Leo’s a quick appraiser, and I knew he was looking over Mrs. Sidore and the dog she brought in, which even I could tell was a poodle, purebred or pretty close, a little gray around the muzzle but spry enough. “You’re quick off the mark. The first call we’ve had.”