by Sims, Karina
“Well, it’s understandable I suppose.”
“Yeah, but still. Last thing we need to read about in the papers is a porn store owner pummeling a midget couple in his place of business, ya know?”
“They weren’t both midgets...”
“Yeah, but you know what I mean.”
I shrug too. “Yeah I guess.”
“You’re off soon, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Ok, well just tidy up a bit. I’ll count till if you take out the trash.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I got some numbers I have to add from last night, balance some digits.”
I sit down on the stool behind the counter. “Harry, you know I can count till...”
He takes his hands out of his pockets, waves them and touches my arm, which sort of creeps me out. “No no, it’s not that. I know you can be trusted on this shit, but I really do have to add some numbers up. To be honest...” He looks around the store again. “Just between you and me, I don’t think the other guy who comes in nights is all that together, if you know what I mean?”
“Huh?”
“I think he’s got some...” he taps his nostril, “... some habits and I doubt he’s covering them all too well with his salary.”
“Oh.”
“Think he’s got sticky fingers, and is dipping them in the cash register now and again.”
“Oh.”
He leans in a little and half whispers, “I think he’s the reason we lost those gag balls, too.”
“You think he’s stealing stock?”
“Yeah, I do.”
I shrug again and pretend that his point is really sinking in. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”
“I got to keep an eye on him.”
“Yeah, totally. Keep your eye on the creep.”
I swing the bags of trash into the alley dumpster out back, light a smoke and look at the passing helicopters shining their spot lights against the sides of glass buildings. I’ve never stolen cash from here, I don’t think it’s right. The girls I take home and get rid of, they’ve always got some cash on them, so I just take whatever they’ve got in their purses and that’s always covered my extra expenses fine. However, I don’t want Harry to see me ringing in gag balls and dildos.
In the two years I’ve worked here he’s told me a few times about girls wandering in and asking for me, and he’s always had this lingering look in his eye whenever my personal life is brought up. I just try and keep that aspect of myself under wraps with him. Last thing I need is him asking me about my sex life and me having to think about drinking blood and sewing rats into women’s stomachs after the orgasm. Well, I don’t really mind thinking about that, just not while I’m at work with my horny middle aged boss.
Strangely enough, I’ve never met the other guy who works here. I know it’s him, me and some other guy who works part time nights here, I mean I’ve seen them once or twice, but we’ve never really spoken. Except for once when he needed me to hand him his jacket, but that’s it.
I walk around the side of the building, kiss Lilly on the cheek and take her out for Greek food. She tells me about a friend of hers who hooks on the other side of town and is now missing.
XII
When I came home the front door to our trailer was open, just swinging on its hinges, banging lightly against the tin shell of our mobile home. Inside, the hideaway bed was tucked in, the drawers where full of my socks, the floor strewn with my dirty underwear, but all of mom’s stuff was gone.
I slept on the floor because I couldn’t pull out the bed; my arms weren’t strong enough, so yeah, I slept on the floor for two days, the door open swinging in the rain and sun and clouded weather of those forty-eight hours. I missed school and had my first cigarette on the soggy carpet step, staring at the trailer adjacent to us, feeling nothing, not even moving the hair from between my lips when the wind blew it there.
The sleepy social worker showed up on the second morning. The messy, drawn out bitch, yawned through sentences like, “Your mother is now a missing person.” And, “Do you know if there is any coffee in here?”
She opened the cabinets, and when she saw there was only peanut butter and a mini box of Corn Flakes she shut them, asked me to move, pulled out the hideaway bed and collapsed onto it. “Nope, no coffee.”
I just stared at her for a full ten minutes, her eyes closed, her lips moving in little gasps, like a fish pulled out of water and tossed onto the floor of a boat. When she woke up, she looked around, hands absent-mindedly patting her bangs. “Ok, so you ready?”
The only thing I took out of that trailer was my Donkey Kong pajamas.
I spent the next four years in a foster home, sleeping in the same room with a deaf girl named Gina. She taught me sign language and how to dance to music by feeling the vibrations. I taught her how to make paper airplanes and toys out of twist ties. The first year I was there, she showed me pictures of her dead parents. The second year, she showed me how to read brail. The third year, she showed me how to eat pussy. And the fourth year she showed me a newspaper detailing the torture and death of an American citizen at the hands of eight children ranging in age between seven and twelve down in Mexico. The kids, all orphans, called themselves pirates. They sailed around the coasts of Mexico in stolen boats, robbing and looting from elderly store owners and lost tourists. The kids, they found a woman passed out drunk inside one of their hideouts, some abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere. The kids, the boys, they kept her there for over a week, locked in the shack, beating her with chains, pushing pins in her arms and legs and leaving them there for a day or two. Then they raped her, starting out slow and curious, putting all kinds of things in her from around the house, the boat, their pockets. They pushed paperclips inside her urethra, forced crabs inside her vagina, and eventually made her eat their shit while they pulled all the hair out of her head with their sticky little hands. Those eight wetback throwaways broke her legs and all her teeth. The newspaper said when the police found her she didn’t have a face and one of her arms was missing. The kids only got caught because after the lady was dead the older boys started raping the youngest one and making him eat their feces. The little boy ran away, got taken in to the cop shop by some day sailing tourists. At the police station, the little smudge agreed to show authorities where the other ‘pirates’ were hiding. When the cops got there, they found the boys, beating and raping each other. Shoving handfuls of shit down each others throats.
Two weeks after Gina showed me that newspaper, she was eating me out in the bathtub when my foster mom knocked on the door. “You girls are too old to be in the bath together...”
I was wearing my bathrobe walking past the kitchen, drinking a coke when my foster mom said, “Amanda, can you come in here, please?”
Two police officers were sitting at the dinner table while my foster mom, Debbie, was crying into a dish rag. This first cop to speak, he looked like the kind of guy you could slap in the mouth and he would think it was his fault and probably apologize for getting in the way of your hand. He looked like a wimpier Don Knotts, like his legs were made of wet bread and his spine was nothing more than a cord of garden worms. This wimp looked at the other police man who stood up, took off his cowboy hat and stared at his shoes, shoes that I couldn’t see, because the breakfast table was covering his legs.
“Amanda, Miss, could you come here for a minute please? We’d like to talk to you.”
I walked over to the table, put my coke down, Debbie moved the can away from the ledge. I remember thinking the policeman with the cowboy hat should really have put the fuckin’ thing back on because he was so damn bald without it. The cowboy cop took out a newspaper tucked in his arm pit and unrolled it on the table. “Miss, I believe we’ve found your mother, Francis Troy.”
The picture of the woman on the gray paper, printed in halftone, she sat in the living room of our trailer for five years, on top of the TV watching my mother and I watch whatever was
on. I was sitting in the shopping cart chewing gum and fucking up my shoe laces when she got the picture taken at Walmart. When she got the prints back, she spilled gin all over them except for the one we put up on top of the TV.
Debbie, sobbing into that old shitty rag that smells like garbage, she isn’t sad, she’s just trying to make the story better. Trying to make herself part of something half the country will hear about. The bald cowboy is blowing bad breath up my nose as his mouth contorts around the words, “Francis Troy has been identified as the victim of a child gang slaying down in Mexico. All suspects have been apprehended. The State would be willing to pay your way to see the case in court, if you’re willing to attend the trial.”
There is a moment in our lives when things change. For a lot of people this happens after death. Their ways of thinking, their views of others, their awareness is brought to an entirely different plateau. But for some, when this happens in the midst of life, the reality of objects, others, what is being said, become crystal clear. I saw the man in the cowboy hat wiggling his tongue around words he didn’t fully understand. I saw the age on his face, the wrinkles on Debbie’s face. I noticed she had her nice slippers on, I noticed the wimp with the gun and the shiny badge pinned to his shirt didn’t really give a fuck. And even if he did, he couldn’t bring my mom back. He wouldn’t be putting those eight Mexican kids in prison. Even if he had the best intentions in the world, he couldn’t do shit about anything. And because of this, in reality, he held no honest authority.
What was coming out of the cowboy’s mouth, they were just words. Sentences in fragments that I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t put together. I reached for my coke, when I dropped it in the kitchen I just kept walking until my back was against my bedroom wall, my bum on the carpet.
I heard words floating through the door, words like “Francis” and “Marcy” and “raped by cousin.” Excited voices popping, “both runaways from Mennonite commune,” “Francis kept the baby... Amanda.” I could hear Gina splashing around in the tub, her fingers skipping across the water.
Whoever was in charge, whoever’s finger hovered over the button of my fate, decided it was in my best interest to stay with Debbie and Gina until Marcy could fix up a suitable place for me.
While I waited at Debbie’s for Marcy, I filled the big plastic laundry basket with water, I put the cat in it, and held the lid shut until the bucket stopped shaking. I broke into my neighbor’s house and stole his pornography. I beat a rabbit to death with a hammer and pushed pencils up our other neighbor’s dog’s ass. I lit the garage on fire and kicked a two year old in the back at the supermarket when no one was looking. And I never got caught or blamed for any of this stuff. I could literally break a cats front legs and everyone would say, “Aww, there’s that girl we saw in her pajamas crying on the news about her deadbeat murdered mother.” When Gina would eat me out, I would pull the sides of her hair hard enough until her little deaf screams came out in high whistles. She’d spend all day hiding away from me, crying and saying she was sorry and she loved me. She’d hug me and wave her arms around saying, “Don’t you love me anymore?” I didn’t even use my hands to tell her I couldn’t feel anything with her anymore, I walked into her until she was against the wall and our faces where too close for her to read my lips. I told her I didn’t want to fuck her if I couldn’t put my fist in her. She went away crying, coming back, her hands flailing around, telling me she was trying to get herself to open enough. She never could and the last night I was there, I snuck over to her bed while she was asleep, put all my weight on her chest and fisted her until the sides of her pillow were soaked with tears, her lips shredded from biting down so hard.
The next morning, that same sleepy social worker came over and asked Debbie for coffee and then she drove me to Marcy’s house. The house my dad owned and left to the commune at his passing. They in turn gave it to Marcy, this house, the one I live in now, sixteen years later.
XIII
Around eleven I’ve finished my coffee, I’m scratching my crotch and thinking about wandering over to Alison’s and getting another cup if some jerk off doesn’t come in here in the next five minutes. Harry’s in his office, door wide open, chatting on the phone, his voice getting real loud every time it’s his turn to speak. He’s talking about road trips and Chlamydia. From way up here at the front of the store I can hear him tell the telephone he pulled crabs out of his pubes and was scared at first that one had scuttled down his pee hole.
I toss the empty cup into the trash, stand and dig around the counter for the ‘back in five minutes’ sign as soon as he shouts, “...sorry sweetie, I’m all out of lube so this might sting a little.” His feet clapping the cement flooring of his office.
I can only imagine the kind of guy on the other end of the line, I mean what kind of weirdo talks this long to another man on the telephone? Let alone the subject matter, such senseless banter as this. So, I get up to get coffee and ditch for a few when Lilly comes limping through the door, her eyes all swollen up, lip split, she’s got an arm wrapped around her ribs. Her shirt torn from collar to midriff, scratched knees weak and shaking in broken heels. “Amanda...”
I barely catch her before she collapses forward, “Lilly... what happened?”
Before she can speak she just comes apart, crying and writhing in my arms, feet scraping the carpet. “They jumped me, I got out of the car and...” I can tell the way her wrist is twisted when she goes to wipe the snot from her nose that her radius and ulna are fractured if not completely broken. “...two guys in the fucking back, they were just watching me and him in the front… fuckers got me in the alley. The car, the guy in the car just drove away. I think...”
Harry’s laughing in the back, banging his feet on the floor, his voice getting hoarse, “...she misses that rough cock in her, semen dripping out of her, underwear pulled down to her ankles! Ask her!”
I pick Lilly up, push the door open and carry her to Alison’s work. Trisha is flipping through the newspaper, circling ads when I kick the door open and lay Lilly down on the floor. She screams, a few customers stand up, hover over and don’t leave until I push them out. I grab the phone, Trisha tries pulling it away from me, “What are you doing? This is a business line.”
“What’s going on? Holy fuck!” Alison grabs the phone from Trisha, dials nine one one. “There’s a girl! A fucking girl looks like she’s going to die...”
“Amanda?” Lilly’s twisted little arms are waving in the air above her. I grab a cup of water and wrap my arms around her shoulders, I can feel her getting colder and in the eighteen minutes it takes for the ambulance to arrive I never move my face from her hair.
When the paramedics load her up on the stretcher and all the onlookers watch the ambulance speed off, Harry is standing there, arms crossed, staring at me. “You left the store unattended.”
I look down at myself, the front of my white t-shirt is all wet, scrunched up and smeared in blood.
“... And you’ve got blood on your shirt.”
“She might die.”
“You should’ve told me.”
“You were on the phone.”
He sighs, “Someone could have come in and taken shit. You have to let me know if you’re...”
“She was gonna die, asshole.”
“Hey!”
“Fuck off.”
I push past him and head back to the store.
“You can’t talk to me like that, I’ll...”
“Fuck off.”
He follows me in, points at my shirt again. “I can’t let you work in that.”
“You telling me to go home?”
“No...I just...” He unfolds his arms, scratches the back of his neck and waves a hand towards his office. “I got a bunch of tank tops in the back. Find one that fits and come back to the front.”
His little janitor closet turned office smells like wet paper and old garlic. I’m digging through a cardboard box, ‘titty tops’ scrawled in red marker on t
he side in Harry’s handwriting. The office is so damn small I knock over a stack of magazines piled beside the desk. I quickly slip on a black tank, ‘Hustler’ spelled out in gaudy rhinestones, and bend down to pick up the skin rags. Half of them are water logged, pages swollen. Under the desk it reeks like piss. I’m just grabbing the last magazine off the floor when I notice the phone cord isn’t plugged into the jack. I look on top of the desk and see the receiver off the hook. I plug it back in, stand up and push call history. According to this, the last phone call was made today at seven thirty AM. One missed incoming at nine o’clock. I look at my watch. It’s four fifty seven PM.
“Amanda?” Harry is shouting from the front of the store.
“Yeah?”
I unplug the phone again and lay the receiver back on its side. There’s five long black strands of hair laid out beside the keyboard of his computer. I touch my scalp, pluck out a hair and hold it up to the bulb on the ceiling.
“You finding everything OK?”
I’m squinting one eyed to make sure I’m right, that I’m positively correct.
“Yeah... I found everything.”
I walk back to the till. “You OK, Harry?”
He shakes his head. “No.” He rubs his belly and laughs. “I’m hungry enough to eat a whore.”
I make sure I pace my blinking and breathing to his. “Oh?”
“Yep.”
He scratches the back of his neck again and points at my top. “Looks nice.”
“Ok.”
“Well, I’m gonna head off to McDonalds. You want anything?”
“No, I’m not hungry.”
“Come on, you look thin. I’ll bring you back something.”
“No, I’m not hungry.”
He shrugs. “Fine. Go for your lunch when I get back.”
He goes to his office, gets his coat and leaves out the back door. The second he leaves I crack my neck, grab the sandwich out of my lunch bag and look through the newspaper to see if the remains of the jogger have been discovered yet. I’m sort of pissed when I see, after two goddamn weeks, there still hasn’t been a missing persons notice. I wipe the crumbs off my stomach and wave at Trisha when she gets in her car outside the store. She holds a thumb up to her ear, a pinkie to her mouth. I smile and swallow the rest of my sandwich.
