by Alex Behr
In the bathroom, she pulled the shower curtain back. A duckling sat in the bathtub, not yellow and fluffy but an adolescent, with gray feathers. It moved its head rapidly. It stank and its water bowl was dirty. Cookie filled the bowl and set it down in the tub, wiping off her arms when the duckling flapped at her.
Marcus stood outside the bathroom door. “You like ducks?” he asked. “I don’t think we’ve had a proper greeting.”
Cookie’s hands were wet. She wiped them on her pants. His dry hand touched the scar on hers.
“Oven burn?” he asked.
Cookie pulled her hand away. The door Theresa had gone into was still shut, and Cookie could hear her laughing.
“I’ll wait outside,” she said.
“You can stay. Have a soda. He coughed and patted her on the head. “Nice hair. Theresa’s work?” He held out some grapes. Some were brown, but most looked edible.
“No thanks,” Cookie said.
“Really? I’m harmless,” he said.
Cookie blushed and took the grapes. “Tell Theresa I’m outside.”
“Come back soon,” Marcus said.
She shivered. She would never go back there. She left the apartment, wishing she knew the way home. On the stoop, she watched a couple of kids walk by eating folded pizza slices. It was one of her self-improvement goals: to meet a best friend. So far, she was unsuccessful.
She wandered out to a playground, eating grapes. She peeled off the skin with her teeth so the grapes resembled slippery eyeballs. The metal equipment was flaked with red and yellow paint. She climbed up on the monkey bars and hung upside-down, her arms dangling. She liked the world better this way. Her hair touched the dirt. But the blood rushed to her head, and she saw Theresa’s legs with her arms on her hips.
“Come on,” Theresa said. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Cookie pulled herself up and dropped down, tossing the grape stems into a bush. She wanted to ask Theresa why she left her with that man, Marcus, and why she wasn’t protecting her. Theresa was supposed to be her sister, but she couldn’t articulate a way to say it without seeming meek.
“So you won’t believe this,” Theresa said, “It’s so funny.” She held Cookie’s hand and pressed it close to their side. She leaned her head on Cookie’s shoulder. The moon appeared in the blue like a hologram. “Look up,” Theresa said, as if anything beautiful had to be claimed by her first.
“Tell me. What were you going to say?”
Theresa skipped over the sidewalk squares. “So I got us some money,” she said. “Let’s get ice cream. We can sell the clothes later. Don’t tell Anne about our little errand, though.” She frowned at Cookie. “You’ll regret it.”
In the car, Theresa told Cookie she had held a guy’s limp cock in the bedroom. “‘Wow!’ I said to him. ‘Wow! Wow!’ Until he got hard and laughed, too. It was just a hand job. So easy. You could do it. It’s as easy as milking a cow.” She stroked Cookie’s cheek. Cookie felt diseased, with some man’s cooties on her. She flicked the door lock open and shut.
Theresa held a hand behind her back with the other holding the steering wheel. She looked at Cookie while talking. She wouldn’t tell Cookie what she had in her hand until Cookie guessed. The sky darkened, and they drove around Lake Merritt, its necklace of lights shimmering on acres of trapped tidal water.
Cookie loathed that game. She knew Theresa liked to steal from people’s houses, things people wouldn’t notice until much later, like a doll’s brush or beaded earrings. It didn’t matter what price it could fetch. It was like a variation on the game of Clue.
This time Theresa held out her hand at a light and showed Cookie: it was one of those rubber balls from the couch, filled with brown liquid. “It’s liquid hash,” she said. “The best use for a condom I’ve ever seen.”
Before dawn, the doorbell rang. Cookie, like a ghost, wandered down the hall, believing it was her mother, who sometimes forgot her key. She walked by feel, her arms out to her sides, bouncing from one wall to the other, banging into framed pictures of sunflowers, one falling then another.
The porch light was on, but she couldn’t see anyone outside the window screen. She felt blood dripping down her leg; earlier, she had been too ashamed to ask Theresa for money to buy pads. She had wadded toilet paper in her underwear, but was sure it soaked through. She felt like a gutted fish.
Someone banged against the door. She opened it and Marcus, the guy with the grapes, fell into the hallway. Under his coat something squirmed. Its webbed legs kicked.
Theresa appeared behind them. She took the duck into her arms and stuck its head under her bathrobe. “Ducks are gullible,” she said. “Here, take it.” She handed it to Cookie.
Cookie looked at the dried blood around Marcus’s nostrils. She stepped on blood she had dripped on the floor. Like a girl in a fairy tale, every word out of her mouth seemed like toad’s words. She stammered. “Should we-we get him help?”
Theresa led him into the kitchen and Cookie put the duck in the sink. She got out the first aid kit. Theresa hummed and opened a couple of beers, as if this were normal, this man, this duck.
Cookie went to the bathroom to clean herself. When she got back, Marcus seemed cheerful. “I stabbed a bouncer,” he said. “I’m not sure how bad.” He said he had a bad count on the drugs or something, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem, he muttered, was this duck. He couldn’t take it into the bar. People were laughing at him. Theresa shined a light into his eyes. His pupils were huge.
“Alcoholics like to keep their bottles close,” Theresa said to Cookie. “Remember that. This guy, for instance.” She reached into his coat and took out a flask.
They went into the bathroom and Theresa ran water in the tub. Cookie stared at Marcus, naked, with bruises on his ribs. Hair formed a V across his chest, and a scar ran above his navel. He had another scar down his forearm. He spat into the sink and got into the bath, leaning against the rim.
Cookie went to her mom’s bedroom, shut the door, and wrapped her arms around her chest. She watched the seconds on the digital clock whir past, and each minute snap down and click into place. Marcus must have guessed who had taken the condom bag of liquid hash.
After sleeping a few hours, Cookie heard the front door shut. She looked out her door, clutching a stuffed bear. The kitchen light was on.
In the kitchen, Cookie’s mom, Anne, poured herself a cup of tea. Cookie rubbed her eyes and sat at the table. “Is Theresa gone?” she asked. “And that man?”
“What man, honey? And why are feathers in the sink?”
Cookie wiped out the sink, as she had wiped out burnt toast crumbs earlier, always covering up for mistakes.
“I don’t want Theresa here anymore.”
Anne hugged Cookie, and said, “Soon. I promise.” Anne squeezed lemon into her tea. Her brown hair, streaked with gray, was pulled back. She lit a joint. “Rub my shoulders, honey?”
“Mom,” she said. “Just stop.”
Anne had taken Cookie to meetings in church basements, with ministers in sneakers talking about liberal theology. She wanted to sponsor Salvadoran families, yet she didn’t know the only so-called refugee they actually harbored had gotten violent over a duck.
“Get me a washcloth, honey,” Anne said. She put her feet up on the other kitchen chair and leaned back. Cookie laid the cloth on Anne’s forehead, cool like she liked it.
Later that morning, Cookie went out to the garage and saw the duck under a laundry hamper. Its water bowl had spilled. “God-fucking-shit,” Cookie said. She put the duck in a milk crate bungee-corded to her bike and made a makeshift trap with a sweatshirt over the duck’s head and a rope around its body. The duck hissed at her, so she fed it corn puffs.
She rode past driveways where men in shirtsleeves set out dominoes on card tables and shouted out to her. She hated Berkeley. She hated the tube socks and incense sticks for sale at the flea market; she hated roaming the aisles with Theresa, looking for her drug c
onnection in the food stall lines or by the reggae drummers. She hated the men who whistled at her and told her to smile.
She pedaled toward Lake Merritt, with its turtles, ducks, and grebes. Marcus’s duck was part of her outlaw adventure. That would shock Theresa. On the north side of Lake Merritt, Cookie walked her bike up a slight hill to Fairyland’s entrance. This park was Oakland’s version of urban nature, evergreens growing by parking signs and bare spots on the grass. Cookie had outgrown Fairyland. The tiny amusement park was protected by barbed wire, as if it could keep out anyone with a good set of clippers. By the entrance, a concrete Old Woman peered out the window of her pink shoe, the color of Pepto-Bismol. She has too many children, Cookie thought, but she’s smiling. My mom only has one but I’m not good enough. She had to get a fake one.
Cookie had outgrown the ice cream man, too. He had strung brass bells below the handle of the pushcart, and plastic bags hung from the corners for people’s trash. Grime smeared across the white surface of his freezer. A boy wearing pajamas ate a chocolate Popsicle and stared at Cookie blankly. Chocolate dripped down his chin. Although she was by Fairyland, none of its magic helped her charm this boy.
By the shore, ducks and geese staked out their territory, crapping so much that no one put out a blanket to relax. She put her bike down and let the duck out of its makeshift trap. It flapped, trying to escape. Cradling it like a doll, she took it to the water’s edge. She held its bill closed and stroked its feathers.
The duck hopped into the green lake, joining the other ducks. It shook its tail feathers and disappeared underwater, with air bubbles popping on the surface. Like bumper cars, the ducks moved smoothly, pedaling their feet through the water, yet never hitting each other. The patterns in their wake looked like the V shapes of migrating flocks, but these birds were too habituated to leave. Their greetings were guttural, perhaps territorial. Cookie wondered if she had brought this tame duck to its doom, or maybe its instincts would kick in. At least it would die with the sun and moon and tourniquet of Lake Merritt’s lights surrounding it, and not under an electric bulb in someone’s stained bathtub.
Cookie found an oak tree to rest against. She almost fell asleep, her legs crossed over her bike. She felt a ripple under her body, the slightest of earthquakes. It seemed to promise something bigger in life.
A Mexican—no, a “Latina,” her mom would say—glanced at Cookie to see if she had felt the tremor. She nodded back. The woman was pushing a baby carriage, and she paused to tuck in the blanket, as if that would protect the baby from danger. Cookie dreamed of having a baby one day. Being a teenage girl was like being meat on a stick. Some girls she knew compensated by not eating. They grew so skinny that light-brown hair covered their arms and legs. Others ate too much as armor. Cookie wanted to get bigger through pregnancy, with the right man, a good man, creating someone who would love her purely and completely.
THE PASSENGER
A backtrack. A rewind. Not too far. Just a taste.
A moon curve lit my way. Punk kids were hanging outside an all-ages warehouse, and they held torn blankets as the newest fad. They sucked the edges, bleeding fireworks going through their spinal cords. Sparks shot out of their fingers and the soles of their feet. They knew more about their bodies now than they did sober, and what they learned scared them.
I used to be in a band with Royann. Before she knew I was back to town, I met with her in secret, in an aural land of phone calls late at night. She didn’t know I was calling from across the river. The water lapped. It brushed against piers. It touched the fur of muskrats and fish died in it, suffocated by sewage, damaged by prescription drugs flushed down toilets. I couldn’t hear the river, couldn’t feel it, but I knew it gave me some protection. I didn’t want to see her in person.
I called from a phone booth outside a Dollar Tree, its floor punctuated like a speech balloon of flattened cigarette butts. Its phone book was torn off the plastic holder, except for one page, on which I wrote fragments of our conversation with a pencil stolen from a bar. I put my finger in the metal slot, searching for extra coins.
“The electric guitar is not an instrument on its own,” I said. “It’s a relationship with the amp. If you plug it in straight, it’s boring and flat. It has to be loud enough so the strings resonate, so there’s a sympathetic vibration. You’re never going to get anywhere with Connor if he has guitarists with a clean sound.”
“No, he’s moving away from that. He’s got a new approach. He’s a dick, but I think he’s going somewhere. Danny quit.”
“What’s he going to do now? He has no life.”
“He’ll figure out something. They weren’t talking toward the end. It was time.”
“But you liked him,” I said.
“We only slept together once,” she said.
I didn’t answer right away. I never knew if I talked too much, or maybe Royann’s steady breathing and occasional grunts indicated a soulful understanding. Sometimes I didn’t even know if she was listening. Maybe she put the phone down. Maybe she was watching the TV on mute. Sometimes I believed I could hear the bubbling of the aquarium, or was it the hiss and bubble of a bong?
“Are you still there?” she asked.
I was getting cold. I nodded, hoping she could feel that, but she said, “I have to go. Don’t overthink music. Don’t go on dead-end tangents.”
I hung up, and picked it up again to hear the dial tone. It soothed me, as if it remembered the talk, her voice, her cadences, and could link me to her again.
Somewhere on this side of the river a band was playing. It didn’t matter where. I found a show in a bar by a feminist bookstore, flashed my ID to the chick at the door, and waited in the back, so no one would talk to me. The room was long and narrow, with dark gray walls. Velvet paintings of women with blue-tipped nipples hung above the bar. The lamps on the walls were barely functioning and Christmas lights flickered. No heat. Everyone smoked, flicking ash on the floor or into pint glasses. Chicks in fake fur coats, guys with chain wallets and Carhartt jackets. A tribe of nihilism and overdrawn debit cards. Skullcaps, thermal shirts, and track marks. Like a downpour indoors: no one talked to each other. No one looked at each other. Everyone was pasty white. (No wonder Royann—whose mom was black—had contempt for us all: if she were here, she would spit as she sang.) No stage for the bands, though. The monitor speakers were like bulwarks, but not for long.
The singer was goose-stepping on the bar. He sang in bundled vocal complaints and yowls of off-key obscenities. He knocked over people’s drinks, kicking them into people’s laps. They lunged at him, but he’d shimmy out of their way.
I walked closer, passing the few people left. I wanted to be near the singer. I wanted to feel something. I could punch myself in the face and it would mean nothing. Would someone hit him? I wanted to see. It’s not like I was a sadist or even a masochist, but the singer couldn’t keep time, couldn’t sing in tune, yet you couldn’t not watch him. His skin was white and greasy, and his chest was covered with tiny cuts, like he slept in rose bushes.
The drummer pounded on the toms—his fills copped from AC/DC’s greatest hits—and the bassist examined his fingers on the frets, or grinned at the audience, his teeth held together with meth glue. The guitarist created a screechy high end through distortion pedals lined up as in a bakery display case. He stared like the pain he was transmitting through our bones would make us all feel better in the morning, the ringing in our ears like the sting of a venereal disease.
You wanted to believe you’d lived through something. That the music wasn’t empty. That the muscles and blood and skin were put together for some reason beyond a pissing match between a bartender and a singer with a chipped tooth, now breathing heavy, now punched in the stomach by a skinhead.
I didn’t mean to sleep with her. I needed a place to stay. She looked like me. We had the same colored eyes, brown, and we each had a mole on the inside of our elbows. I licked her eyeball to see what she’d do. She didn�
��t flinch.
But that didn’t mean we needed to sleep together. I was lonely for Royann. And this chick, she said, “I’m high. Can you take me home?” And she said it in such a fragile voice. I didn’t have to tell her anything about me. She seemed to trust me. She told me her name was Jolene. Who was I to question her fake name to my generic “Joe”?
She pointed out the sound guy. “Don’t look at him at the same time I do.” She leaned against me. He had a scarred face, from acne, and deep-set eyes, brown hair that loped over his face. I recognized him. He was good at his job. He put his hair in a ponytail to work, and didn’t care how stupid he looked. He was supposed to mix the opening band lower, so the headliner would sound better, but he didn’t follow that rule. He waited to see if the opening band had anything to offer. He knew them through drugs. If they could talk to his drugs, they would get good sound.
The sound guy stood behind the board, with wires linked to boxes linked to the direct boxes, to the mics and amps and monitor speakers on the stage.
“He gives me money sometimes,” Jolene said, about the sound guy. “Sometimes I put it in here.” She pulled out a purse she’d made from under her dress. Her skin smelled good, even dressed in smoke.
“I need you to walk me home,” she said. “My bones are softening.”
I got her out of there. She was wearing her Granny’s party dress. It was black like her hair, and its neck was encrusted with fake jewels. Someone had tipped her over into a bad trip. She wouldn’t say who. I guessed it was the singer. He had poked her chest and said something about death.
Jolene felt her Granny inside her, and she was pulling her down. The last time she’d seen her Granny she was listening to a Walkman, with the radio turned to a God station. Her Granny wrote many checks to that preacher. I shook my head in sympathy and put my arm around Jolene. We were the same height. We were the same weight.
I walked her home to an apartment one floor up from a dry cleaners, and she leaned against the kitchen table that held bags of chips, spilled salsa, and a deserted ant farm. I poured us water in coffee mugs.
