A 'Lil Bit Crazy

by Daphne Cox

  “A long time ago - I’m talking about the 1800s, now - there was a village of Cheyenne people and some others down in Colorado. They used to have a great big piece of land, until, one day, someone struck gold nearby. Then, the government came on down and they took that land away from my people. Some of my people agreed. They signed contracts they couldn’t read, took gifts, and then they found themselves cooped up with nowhere to go, like Tabitha back there. After a while, some of the Cheyenne, they didn’t like this, so they started to get angry. They started leaving the cage that had been made for them, riding and hunting in the old lands they used to own.”

  “Like in movies?” Frankie said.

  “Just like in the movies, riding and shooting guns and arrows with their shirts off and all that great stuff. Then there came the war, and lots of soldiers came with it. And to the white men, my people weren’t worth a damn. All they could see was land, lots of it, which my people had the nerve to live on. There was a chief at this village, he’d been to the White House, you know? The president himself had given him an American flag. And he was so proud, this chief. He’d raise that flag every day over the village. And when he heard that soldiers had been going around the country, murdering his people? He said, ‘No. This will not happen to us. We are Americans.’ Even when the soldiers rolled up on his village, he just raised that flag. The men were all out hunting that day, leaving only women, kids and the old folks. And this chief gathered everyone up and said, ‘If you stand under this flag, nothing bad will happen to you.’ So they did. Have you heard about this in school?”

  Frankie shook her head.

  “You won’t. The white men call it The Battle of Sand Creek. My people had a different name for it: The Sand Creek Massacre. Nearly a thousand soldiers rode in there and murdered a hundred and fifty, two hundred people - women, children, old folks. And they murdered them good, let me tell you. Even the babies. They took trophies so they could show off to their friends back home: ears, noses; they’d even skin the tattoo off someone as a keepsake.”

  Frankie was starting to feel a little sick.

  Teddy nodded. “Yep,” he said. “My daddy used to tell me all about this stuff. ‘That’s how the white man’s world works,’ he’d say. Because, you see, Frankie, white men take and take and take and they convince you that it’s for the best. They take everything you have, and they get you so scared and so beaten down that eventually you have to convince yourself that you’re happy with what you got, because otherwise what’s the point in living?”

  Frankie put the feather down on the table. Teddy swigged his beer and took a deep breath, trying not to look angry, but Frankie could still see it.

  “Let me give you a tattoo,” Teddy said, putting down his bottle. “A real one.”

  Frankie swallowed. She didn’t want to say no to him when he looked that upset.

  “I have some special ink,” he said. He leaned in and lowered his voice. “People like those who you met today, people like your daddy, they don’t give you respect. They don’t treat you like a human being, right? Growing up Cheyenne, I know all about that. It nearly took my life, but then I got myself an education, a dark education, you get me?”

  Frankie was quiet. She hugged her arm with her hand and her leg was shaking.

  “You can’t be afraid your whole life, Frankie,” Teddy said. “Let me help you. No-one will ever touch you again, I promise you that.”

  Frankie wanted to say yes.

  “There are forces in this world that men like that haven’t even dreamed of.”

  Frankie wanted to say yes. Teddy walked into his bedroom compartment and pulled up the carpet in the corner. Underneath, in a small, dark gap, was a wooden box with horses carved into it. Teddy brought it back and laid it on the table.

  “This isn’t Cheyenne stuff I’m talking about here. This isn’t some kind of Indian magic bullshit,” he said. “This is the real deal. The ink that’s in this box will give you all the help you’ll ever need. You won’t have to ask for it, it’ll just come. This ink will connect you with the earth itself. This is dark shit. This is low magic. The dark and the low creatures, they’ll become your friends. You’ll never have to be afraid of anyone. You’ll never had to run from anything ever again.”

  Frankie wanted to say yes. “Are you tricking me?” she said.

  Teddy took her hand and looked her in the eye. She tried to pull her hand back at first but then she looked up at him. She could see in his eyes a lifetime’s worth of anger, but also compassion. “I don't want your money, Frankie. People like you and me,” he said, “we have to look out for one another.”

  “OK,” Frankie said. “Do it.”

  Teddy nodded. He opened the box. Inside was an ink bottle, a series of different sized needles and a small wooden stick.

  “The design is very specific,” Teddy said.

  “It’s not an elephant, is it?” Frankie said.

  “No. Roll up your sleeve.”

  "What is it?"

  Frankie turned up the sleeve of her baggy t-shirt. Underneath was a large, sore bruise. Teddy clenched his fist when he saw it. He looked at her and said, “It's a snake.”

  *

  Frankie’s tattoo burned her skin as she jumped over the fence and got back on the road home. She had tears in her eyes and a little blood was seeping out from under the bandage. Walking back in the full light of day, Frankie felt like she had emerged from a dream in which she’d made a horrible mistake. She took the long path back through the trailer park which stayed well clear of Henry and Heinrich’s trailer and out of the woods. When she got home it was ten o’ clock and she knew her daddy would be waking up soon. The trailer, once painted green and white but now mostly green with mold and brown with weathering, was little bigger than Tabitha’s cage.

  The door closed behind her and she stopped and held her breath for a moment, listening for signs that her daddy was awake. There was nothing. Frankie went into the tiny bathroom, no bigger than an airplane bathroom, she imagined, and she rolled up her sleeve. Unpeeling the bandage from the bottom, Frankie got her first look at the design. The ink was a deep black and spots of blood surrounded it. The long, thick snake was wrapped around the top of her arm, its head resting just under her shoulder. The snake's scales were intricate patterns that looked like words in a long-forgotten language. It didn't look like any Indian drawing she'd ever seen. The snake was angular and almost mathematical-looking.

  "Cool," she whispered, but she couldn't shake the sickness in her stomach, the knowledge of what her daddy would do if he saw it.

  Wiping away the blood, Frankie pulled on a long-sleeve t-shirt and began tidying up the trailer ready for her daddy. When a low moan sounded from the bedroom, Frankie went in to begin their daily routine. Her daddy's legs weren't what they were before the crash. It was a long time since he wrapped the car around a tree and killed his wife and son. Somehow, the physical pain remained. It would come and go. Sometimes it was a dull ache that caused him to be irritable, other times it was a sharp agony which meant he couldn't walk more than a few steps, sending him to the bottle, to shouting, to violence.

  Opening her daddy's bedroom door, Frankie saw him sat on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands.

  Today is a bad day, she thought.

  "What are you lookin' at?" he said, without turning his head. "I can hear you sneaking around from a mile away."

  'Want some breakfast?" Frankie said.

  Her daddy grunted. Frankie went to prepare bacon and eggs. He followed her through, leaning on the walls and on the kitchen units, groaning in pain. A small patch of wetness on Frankie's arm started to nag at her attention.

  It's still bleeding, she thought.

  She tried to turn herself away from her daddy at every opportunity as he shuffled by and slumped onto the sofa chair beside the dining table. His face was drawn and gray beneath permanent stubble and the dark eyes and red nose of a habitual drunk. As Frankie lay his breakfast on the tabl
e in front of him, his half-glazed eyes fell on her shoulder. On seeing his daughter bleeding, his first words were, "I didn't do that."

  Frankie said nothing. She took out a single Pop Tart for herself and jumped up and sat on the counter to nibble at it.

  "What you do?" her daddy said.

  "I just cut myself on a branch in the woods," she said, trying to sound relaxed as every muscle in her body tensed. "It's nothin'."

  Through a mouthful of bacon, her daddy said, "I decide what's nothin'. Come here."

  "It's OK," she said, forcing a smile. "I'm OK."

  "I ain't askin' if you're OK," he said. "I'm asking what you done to your goddamn arm."

  Frankie sat and took a small bite of her breakfast. She was shutting down. Her eyes fixed on a spot on the wall opposite. Her legs stopped swinging. She didn't even swallow her breakfast, rather, she chewed it gently as if stuck in a loop. She let herself enter the loop automatically. Trouble would either begin or go away and all she could do was wait and see.

  "Come over here, right now," her daddy said.

  Trouble had begun.

  "What the hell have you been doing around here?" he said. He stood.

  "It's nothin'," Frankie said, the loop dissolving under the pressure. "I got beat up," she said quickly.

  Her daddy scowled at her. "Who?" he said.

  "It doesn't-"

  "If you tell me one more time what does or doesn't matter in my own house then you can get out and never come back."

  "It was Henry and Heinrich," she said. "Those guys are assholes."

  "Did you hit them first?" he said.

  "No! I told you, they're assholes. They always hit me!"

  "You musta done something," her daddy said, pointing. "I know their mom pretty good. She's a good friend of mine. You better go over there right now and apologize."

  Frankie felt as if she'd been hit in the stomach, again.

  "Apologize for what?"

  "You better get your skinny ass over there right now and tell them you're sorry for whatever you did or I'm gonna make you sorry."

  Her daddy came around the table and stood right in front of her. He snatched her Pop Tart from her and threw it to the floor. Frankie looked at her shoes.

  "You hearing me, girl?" her daddy said. "I have had just about enough of your shit."

  "I didn't do anything," she mumbled.

  "What?"

  "I didn't do nothing," she said.

  "Lift up your face," her daddy said. "Lift it up. Look at me."

  Frankie slowly lifted her head to look at her daddy. As she got high enough to look up into his eyes, his open hand slapped across Frankie's face with a clack. She turned and put her face in her hands. Through her own sobs she could hear him.

  "I say what you've done around here," her daddy said. "I'm not having the whole park thinking I'm keeping a troublemaker."

  He grabbed her arm and yanked her down to the floor. She hit hard and didn't want to get back up. From her position on the floor she could see underneath the sofa, into the trailer's hidden places. Something was moving in the dark, she thought. Looking closer, ignoring her daddy's insults, she could see that the darkness was alive.

  Everything was moving in there.

  The darkness had a hundred legs and a hundred eyes. Her daddy pulled her to her feet and grabbed a walking crutch and threw her out the trailer door.

  "We're going visiting, you little shit," he said.

  *

  Henry and Heinrich's trailer was twice as long as Frankie's and built into a ramshackle L-shape with an extension crafted from scrap wood and plastic sheets which acted as a tool shed and (not very) secret meth lab. Her daddy stumbled as best he could through the mud behind Frankie, hurling curses at her the whole way. Frankie had stopped proclaiming her innocence. She had resigned herself to humiliation.

  But something inside her was ready.

  Frankie felt a kind of stillness. She had felt acceptance before. She had taken the beatings and everything else and put it to the back of her mind. This wasn't the same. This acceptance felt different. Her face burned red, but not with shame. For the first time, she was angry on schedule, as needed, and she felt something of a purpose rising within her.

  The darkness in the trailer had given her a glimmer of how the world really is - a disgusting, ferocious hole into which the human race had fallen - and it had given her a glimpse of what she could be in this world. The darkness was coming to her, she was convinced of that.

  As she thought about it, her pace quickened to the point where her daddy had to slow her down. She could feel the darkness following her. The long grass moved in her wake. The leaves rustled. Tiny legs silently followed. Tiny eyes watched. Frankie felt them. She could feel the darkness at her back and it gave her strength. Her calmness now was not the silence of defeat. It was the calm before the storm.

  "Henry!" her daddy shouted in an amused tone as they approached. "Heinrich! Get out here, you sorry sons of bitches."

  Frankie stopped when she saw them emerge from their trailer, looking half-confused and full-drunk. Henry was in a bathrobe. Heinrich wore only dirty underpants, but he was carrying a shotgun.

  "What you want, old man?" Henry shouted.

  Frankie stood frozen to the spot, but her daddy hit her with his walking crutch and pointed her towards to the trailer. Frankie could feel a pressure building in her head. She could hear a low ringing noise which was becoming more and more intolerable. The darkness was with her and she was fighting the urge to go back to her room to read her books, to pretend her life was bearable, to pretend her daddy still loved her deep down and that the world had something it was going to offer her one day, that she had a future. Every time her daddy hit her and poked her with the crutch, it chipped away at that idea of a future. It made it harder for Frankie to refuse the darkness.

  "Your mom home, boys?" Frankie's daddy said. "Me and Frankie here need to talk with her. With you, too."

  The brothers looked at one another with sly smiles.

  "Come on in," Henry said.

  Frankie had been taken to other trailers before. The men who lived in them, Frankie's routes through the park took her nowhere near them. She could see where this night was headed and she was almost relieved. What they were doing, for Frankie, made her thoughts OK. What they had planned, it justified the onset of the darkness that nipped at her heels. She felt like she could give herself to the dark and low creatures of the world completely. She would let them take what they wanted of these men, so that no man would ever take anything of her again.

  She didn’t know what the darkness had in store, but it felt big, final.

  The interior of the trailer looked like an indoor junkyard and smelled like a cow shed. Oily car parts covered the table, beer cans covered the floor, decade-old pornographic magazine pin-ups decorated the walls and a skinned and treated deer hung headless over the kitchen sink. Frankie stepped inside and Heinrich was directly behind her. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck as he giggled.

  Behind the giggling and the small talk and the blaring television which called the plays on a college football game, Frankie could hear a whispering and a sneaking and a crawling. A dark cloud was descending upon the trailer as these men laughed and joked and scratched their crotches and spat on their own floor. Their mother was in the master bedroom. Frankie was led in by her daddy. The woman was sick and lying under a thin, dirty green sheet tucked under her chin, like a gray turtle stuck on its back and doomed to die. At first glance, Frankie thought she was dead, but then she tried to speak. It was German. It was mumbled. It barely qualified as words.

  "Looking good, Eva," Frankie's daddy said, standing beside Frankie, cornering her next to the living corpse, the dying turtle. Henry stood at the foot of the bed, watching with his beady eyes. Heinrich's huge frame blocked the doorway. "I hate to bother you,” Frankie’s daddy said, “but I understand there's been some trouble."

  Eva said something else
that wasn't words, her ashen face barely moving.

  Frankie's daddy looked at Henry.

  "She says Frankie is a bitch," Henry said without a hint of a smile. Heinrich chuckled.

  "I'm real sorry," Frankie's daddy said. "Truly, I am. I don't know what to do with the girl."

  Eva stared at the ceiling, passive, distant. She coughed and speckles of phlegm jumped out of her mouth and onto her face.

  "Momma says something should be done," Henry said.

  Frankie's fist balled up. She stared a hole through the wall almost, looking straight ahead. Her jaws locked together and the pressure was so hard she thought her teeth might bend and break. Her eyes were stinging with tears. She didn't want anything to happen, but she could feel the pressure building in her head. One of two bad things was about to happen, she knew. It would either be the old bad thing - the thing that had haunted her sleep, which she had spent her waking hours trying to escape from both physically and mentally - or it would be some kind of new bad thing.

  "How much money you boys got between you?" Frankie's daddy asked.

  They looked Frankie over. Henry said, "We got enough."

  Teddy's words returned to Frankie in a loop: "They take and take and take and take and take." His words echoed in her head. "They take everything you have, and they get you so scared and so beaten down that eventually you have to convince yourself that you're happy with what you got, because otherwise what's the point in living?"

  Her daddy grabbed her arm and shoved her out past Henry and Heinrich and into the other bedroom. The two brothers were laughing. Tears ran down Frankie's face, but she slowed down her actions, made herself aware of her surroundings. There was one dirty window, broken in one corner and too grimy to let much light through. Stacks of detective and pornographic magazines filled much of the room. Cobwebs dangled from the corners.

  "You don't mind if I pull up a chair?" Frankie's daddy said.

  Teddy's words returned to Frankie: "That's how the white man's world works."

  “Lie on the bed,” Henry said.

  Frankie sat on the edge of the bed. Her tattoo was a burning pain and a constant reminder of the power she had been promised by Teddy, a power that she could feel growing as the world grew dimmer.