Let's No One Get Hurt_A Novel

by Jon Pineda

  We passed empty fields with FOR SALE signs in their middle.

  “Let’s play a game,” my mother said. “Name your favorite animal.”

  “That’s easy. It’s Marianne Moore.”

  As if on cue, Marianne Moore slipped her head between us and tried to lick our ears.

  “I was going to say it was you.” My mother squeezed my arm. “You’re my favorite animal, Pearl.”

  “I’m not an animal.”

  “We’re all animals.”

  * * *

  Outside the station wagon, the air was woven with brine. We stretched our legs and arms. This body of water, my mother explained, was called a sound. We pulled into a parking lot buffered with chunks of jagged concrete hauled in from somewhere. The water lapped in crevices like Marianne Moore drinking from her bowl. Disappearing into the sound was a long pier with people gathered at the far end.

  Marianne Moore, meanwhile, spun in the backseat.

  “C’mon, Princess,” my mother said.

  I wasn’t sure if she meant me or if she meant the dog.

  It was one of her jokes. She would call us from another room in the house—“Princess! Princess!”—and wait to see which of us would come running. It made her clap every time to see our stunned faces.

  “I got her,” I said.

  “Can you handle her alone?”

  I snapped the leash onto the collar, and Marianne Moore took off, tugging to a standstill. “I guess we’re going out there.”

  All of the benches along the sides were splattered with paper-white gull droppings. Everyone gathered in a circle. Marianne Moore kept pulling, digging her claws into the salt-treated boards.

  * * *

  In the middle of the circle, a man was holding a long knife. He crouched. The others swarmed around him.

  “They must have caught something,” my mother said.

  Marianne Moore looked back at us and started hacking. Nothing came up. She went back to pulling on the leash.

  “Go,” my mother said, “before she kills herself.”

  She shooed us both ahead.

  * * *

  The man, it turned out, was younger, more boy than man. His cheeks were brushed with fresh pimples. Near his boots was a large stingray the size of a welcome mat. The top of the stingray was dark brown, and when he flipped it over, its belly was white as milk.

  * * *

  The circle opened to let us inside. I had to jerk Marianne Moore back.

  The boy stepped on the barbed tail and pressed a palm onto the creamy flesh.

  “What’s going on?” my mother said, coming up behind me. “Oh, Pearl, look at that.”

  The boy said to no one, “Check it,” and took his free hand and tried to slip his fingers into the gill slits. The stingray arched and splashed back flat again.

  The boy moved both hands to its middle. “I feel something.”

  He could’ve been talking to Marianne Moore. I had to hold her by the collar.

  * * *

  The boy sliced the base of the stingray’s tail. It wasn’t a clean cut. He had to press harder to get through the last bit of cartilage. I felt it crunch. My body went cold.

  “Let’s go,” my mother said, touching my back, but I didn’t move. I watched the boy. I was held as he stabbed the knife into the pier. He placed both palms flush against the belly.

  “Well, would you look at that?” my mother said.

  A baby stingray slipped out. There was a collective gasp. The boy took the little diamond-shaped body and dropped it in the water.

  More baby stingrays appeared from the mother. They followed the path of sliding out of her. The boy began to fling them like cards. My mother’s hand trembled against my back.

  “Stop that.” Her voice rose. “What are you doing?”

  The boy froze and looked at her. The circle quickly split and spilled behind him. Another baby stingray slipped into his hand. For a moment, I felt sorry for the boy. He held the small body up and offered it to my mother.

  “It’s just a baby,” she said. “Don’t you realize it’s just a baby?”

  “I’m saving them.” The boy shrugged.

  He placed the baby stingray in her hands.

  “Take it back!” She held it out to him, but the boy was already busy dragging the mother.

  “Please,” my mother said, crying now.

  It shocked me that she was crying.

  The boy took the baby from her hands. He threw both of them, the baby and the mother, over the edge. I turned my head.

  * * *

  When he picked up the mother’s severed tail and held it in the air like a stick, I thought Marianne Moore was going to lose it for sure.

  WE TELL NO ONE. Mason Boyd becomes my secret, and I become his. He says that’s the way it has to be, if I want to keep living where I live, that is. “My dad doesn’t need to know about you and the others.” He says this a lot.

  I like being with him, so I don’t argue. After all, if we didn’t have the boathouse, where would we go? Where would Dox have another pier to sit out on and play his cigar-box guitar? Where would Fritter be able to finish his mural?

  Where on earth would my father be able to keep me this safe?

  * * *

  I show up after Mason’s parents have left the house for the day, his father in a white Ford custom F-350 diesel truck and his mother in a sparkling-champagne Mercedes SUV. When they’re gone, it means we can spend all of our time holed up in his room. We do it four times, sometimes five times even. He calls me a rabbit, but it’s more like dams have broken inside us and the rivers are finally running wild. We’re just forcing away the sediment that had gathered in that one spot for too long.

  We’re just being ourselves is what I want to tell him.

  Mason likes to pull up video clips on his laptop and we try to reenact some of them. It always ends with us in the shower, like we’re trying to wash it off, but then he wants me to go down on him, and I say, “Only if you do, too,” and he nods and then pushes my head down. When he finishes, he never goes down on me, even though I’m in the shower with him, glazed with the same water, my body the cleanest it’s probably ever been in my life.

  * * *

  When I ask later why we can’t hang out in other parts of the house, where he tells me there’s a Ping-Pong table and even an enclosed racquetball court in the basement, any place other than his room is really what I’m asking, Mason shrugs and says, “If you don’t want to be here, then fucking bolt,” but I don’t care how it sounds, I want to be here. I need to be here.

  If we had a map stretched out, I would push on this one spot. Right here. And I tell him that, I want to be here, and that makes him smile. If I was being precise, I would tell him how I want to lie in his bed, on sheets I didn’t have to scrub, and I want to feel the cool air of the AC slip into the room unannounced and cup my face and make my nipples sharpen as I stare up at the pair of skylights floating on the ceiling and think this isn’t such a bad life, having everything you desire right at your fingertips. I would tell him to forget what he knows, that, yes, we’re out there on the property his father bought for him, but that doesn’t mean we have to leave. No one needs to know we exist or ever existed. I would tell him, as long as I could help it, I’m not going anywhere, and isn’t that what we’re talking about here?

  AFTER I HAD COME HOME from that day in kindergarten, my father had sworn never to send me back, but that was just talk. My parents fought because my mother thought I had made up the story, and it only infuriated my father even more, especially since my shoulder had almost been dislocated. “Why would she lie?” my father said, but my mother wouldn’t answer.

  The next morning, while my father walked to campus for his office hours, my mother didn’t put me on the bus. Instead, she drove me to the doctor for an exam. The doctor was an older Filipina woman who had long slender fingers just like Dox, though I was a lifetime away from meeting Dox.

  The woman gently touched al
ong my shoulder.

  “What do you think?” my mother asked the doctor.

  “If you care about this little girl, you need to leave him.”

  I WAKE UP AND CHECK the traps for crayfish. I hoist the soaked lines and raise the chicken-wire cylinders to scrub the sides glazed with mud, but nothing is in the middle of the traps, one after the other, except for emptiness. Fritter stays in his room and so does my father. Only Dox is awake and in the sweltering kitchen, cutting the eyes out of a few potatoes soft as hacky sacks. His cigar-box guitar sits over in the corner next to Marianne Moore, who’s panting like she’s huffing Freon. I haven’t heard Dox play in a while, but I don’t mention it so as not to stir up anything.

  * * *

  “Honey, where you been going?” Dox says without looking up, his gray hair a chunk of marble chiseled into the texture of lambswool.

  “Nowhere.”

  “Is that right?” He says it like a question he doesn’t expect to have answered.

  “I’m just riding.”

  “Riding what?”

  He doesn’t look up. He keeps cutting out the eyes.

  “My bike.”

  “How much gas does that bike of yours hold?”

  “I don’t know. A lot, I guess.”

  “You riding far out?”

  “Why are you asking so many questions, Dox?”

  “Just checking on you. I don’t want you getting too far away and run out of gas and can’t make it home to us.”

  “I’d find my way back.”

  “On a golf cart?”

  I don’t answer him because I love him. Dox, that is.

  * * *

  I walk outside and get on my dirt bike before he can stop me, but when I turn around, no one is standing there. There’s just the boathouse with its side sagging, its broken washing machines in the yard. Marianne Moore is nowhere to be found either.

  I rev the engine and lift my feet off the ground. The scenery moves on its conveyor belt. The bike is on automatic. It pushes onward, like there’s a homing device that will carry me safely, unharmed, all the way to Mason Boyd’s bedroom.

  I lean into it and let it take me.

  REESE IS STANDING ON THE highest branch of an oak and tying off climbing ropes and carabiners.

  “Does he know what he’s doing?” I say.

  “No clue,” Mason says.

  “Then why’s he up there?”

  “Short straw.”

  “Well, that’s real smart.”

  Wythe sidles up next to me, holds his waist where a belt buckle would be if he were wearing one. “Howdy, Fuckface.”

  “Really?” I say.

  Mason is suddenly deaf.

  Everett is helping Clint into a harness.

  “You guys climbing the tree, too,” I say.

  “No,” they both chime.

  Fucking flies.

  “We’re going to make an obstacle course,” Wythe says.

  “In the tree?” I say.

  “Part of it.”

  “That seems excessive.”

  “What does?”

  “Your stupidity.”

  Wythe fumes.

  “Can you film us?” Mason says, suddenly alive.

  “Sure,” I say. Behind me is their fleet of tricked-out golf carts, minus Mason’s.

  “We’ll all get up in that tree in a second.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then you take this camera and film us.”

  “Then what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What are you going to do in the tree?”

  Wythe leans in and punches Mason in the arm. “I told you she wouldn’t get it.”

  “I’m just trying to understand why I’m here,” I say.

  “You’re here,” Mason says quietly, “because I invited you. If you want to go, just say the word. Just say you’d rather be somewhere else.”

  Wythe won’t look me in the eye. He’s too busy staring at my neck.

  “I’ll do it,” I say.

  “Fuck yeah, you will,” Wythe says.

  THAT NIGHT, MY FATHER STOPS me on my way to bed. He holds up his arm and taps the scratched face of his wristwatch, making a big show of it. It must have been annoying to be one of his students.

  “She’s still alive,” my father says. “Just so you know.”

  “I know she is.”

  “So we’ll just let her keep on living?”

  “She doesn’t get to die. Not yet.”

  He makes a kissing noise, and Marianne Moore comes from around the corner. She’s dragging one of her hind legs until she catches her balance and hobbles, but then lifts the paw again and freezes.

  “She’s favoring it,” he says.

  “That’s one interpretation.”

  “How much more evidence do you need?”

  “How much more what now?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You make it sound like a crime.”

  “Keeping her alive, yes. Putting her down, no.”

  “I would reverse it.”

  “Pearl, you can’t go holding on to things.”

  “I thought that’s what we did.”

  “Not when you really, deep down, know you should let go.”

  I laugh, but he doesn’t flinch.

  “She’s not well, Pearl. She hasn’t been well for a long time.”

  “She’s fine. Here, girl. Come here, girl.”

  I make the same kissing noise as he did, and the dog struggles to get closer to me. When she does, she leans all of her weight right up against my leg. If I take a step, she’ll crumple to the floor for sure.

  “So that’s what fine looks like.” My father gives her a once-over and nods. “Okay. Good to know.”

  “She’s not ready.”

  Both of my legs hurt from riding the bike back and forth to Mason’s house. My wrists and arms, too. I rub the ash from my knees. I want to sit down on the floor with Marianne Moore, but I’m afraid if I do, I won’t be able to get back up.

  “I think you know she’s done.” He bends down and rubs the dog’s head and ears, and she licks the graying scruff on his neck. The two of them smell the same, like rot. As if reading my mind, my father stares up at me and sniffs the air. “Someone rolled around in flowers.”

  I shrug.

  “That’s strong perfume,” he says, even though it’s just soap from Mason’s shower.

  “It’s not perfume.”

  “So what’s the story?”

  My father touches my arm and leaves a mark from whatever was on his hand. I study it and try to rub it off. It’s ink or grease. It smears. I should tell him the story Mason keeps telling me, that the land where we live was for sale, that everything around us has been bought. That’s what Mason has mentioned a thousand times already.

  “There’s no story to tell.”

  “Just like your mother.” He laughs. “You and your secrets.”

  “That shouldn’t be an insult.”

  “Who said it was an insult?”

  * * *

  I sit down in front of him and unlace his boots. It’s the least I can do. He is terrible about checking his feet, so I do it for him. He used to complain of pins and needles all the time. He doesn’t do that anymore.

  I soak his feet in a bowl of Epsom salts and scrub the bottoms real good. The tops of his feet have blown veins and are silvered blue with lavender streaks, like hickory shad pulled from the river. I clip his nails for him and gather each splintered yellow crescent and put it in the coffee can with the other gnarled pieces he seals away and stuffs under his bed. He thinks we’re living in an artists’ colony. He thinks he’s Picasso. When I look up at him, he is crying, quietly.

  “Did I cut you too close?”

  He shakes his head.

  * * *

  I rub his feet until he eventually conks out. There are a few bright notes being plucked down by the pier: Dox as a presence woven into a fragment of a song. Fritter is a l
ong pause in his bedroom. I leave my father, go downstairs, and stop next to the empty cans of black paint stacked beside Fritter’s door. Most of the cans are crusted and sealed shut. I find one can I can open. In it are wet remnants I sometimes use with Q-tips to do my toes or my fingernails. Because my father is asleep now, I do his toes and his fingernails. I don’t feel like fishing out the keys from his pocket and starting up the truck so I can charge my phone, otherwise I’d do it and take a bunch of pictures to show Mason later. He’d appreciate this prank. The flies, too. I lie awake in bed and try not to think about the day, and all those bodies swinging from branches.

  MY MOTHER AND I DIDN’T speak about the stingray again. Instead, we climbed in the Gran Torino and kept driving until we reached the big bridge. We pulled off into a side lot near the water. There was a park with a wide field and a hospital nearby.

  “I think we’re close to my uncle’s place,” she said.

  “Can we go there?”

  “One day.”

  * * *

  Gulls circled overhead. Marianne Moore whimpered. I could just tell she wanted to get out on the grass and show the gulls what she could do. I asked my mother if it was okay, but she didn’t answer. She was looking at her hands. I got out and let Marianne Moore go. The dog tore across the field and spun.

  The gulls looked pinned to the sky.

  I got back inside and sat next to my mother.

  “I wish I could be a boat,” she said.

  * * *

  We passed more fields with FOR SALE signs.

  We drove home in silence.

  BEFORE MY FATHER RETURNED FROM his conference, we made a trip back and parked in the side lot near the big bridge. My mother had brought all of her pills with her this time. She lined the bottles up on the dashboard like it was our kitchen counter. When she shook each one, it sounded like rain.