Crooked

by Laura McNeal

  “To another country,” Amos heard himself say, which made Sands laugh.

  “To another planet,” Sands said.

  Such was Amos’s present state that when Sands Mandeville told him to take off his beautiful shirt so she could scratch his back, it seemed perfectly normal to him, though he left on his black T-shirt underneath. They stayed like that for a time, Amos stretched out on the floor and propped up on an expansive pillow, watching Sigourney Weaver in various states of undress, while Sands Mandeville, the maybe third or fourth most popular girl at Melville Junior High, scratched his back. She only paused from time to time to take another swallow of blackberry brandy, after which she would always murmur, “Yum.”

  What Sophie and Big Dave were doing Amos couldn’t tell. It was quiet over there, and mysterious. After one especially long period of speechlessness, Sophie left the room and was several minutes in reappearing. “Hey,” she called out from her side of the room.

  “Hey,” Sands Mandeville answered.

  “Let’s play dinks. One a thousand, two a thousand...”

  “Kathy Andrews,” Sands Mandeville said. “One a thousand...”

  “Tim Brewer,” Sophie said.

  “Johnee Clouse.”

  They continued. The game, as Big Dave explained to Amos, was to name somebody they considered a dink in alphabetical order in less than three seconds. The winner got to choose something from the loser’s clothes closet.

  “James Martinson.”

  Sands Mandeville laughed, then got right back to business. “Bob Nesbitt.”

  It went on. Amos, uneasy, stared at the polished cherrywood cabinet, at the expensive porcelain girls with fixed half smiles on their smooth creamy faces.

  “Shelly Vineyard. One a thousand, two a thousand...”

  It was Sands Mandeville’s turn. She said, “Misty AKA-the-Nose Wilson.”

  Sophie groaned. “Tie,” she said.

  Amos, who had a bad feeling in his stomach, said, “What about X, Y, and Z?”

  Big Dave said, “They only play through W. It’s a queer rule, but then it’s a queer game.”

  Sands Mandeville, who’d stopped scratching Amos’s back during the game, peeled up his T-shirt so his back was bare and resumed scratching, except now she used only her fingertips instead of her nails. Amos had never felt anything quite like it. The last thing he wanted was for her to stop. Still, he had a question.

  “Who’s Misty Wilson?”

  “Misty AKA-the-Nose?” Sands Mandeville stopped to finish off the rest of the blackberry brandy— “yum” — then said, “She’s this girl who’s doing props in the play Sophie and I’re practicing for right now.”

  “Clara Wilson?” Amos said.

  “Yeah, that’s her.”

  Amos knew what AKA-the-Nose meant. Also known as the Nose. “Where does the Misty part come from?” Amos asked.

  “Oh, she used to bring these lame horse books to school. Her personal fave was Misty of the Chicateaparty, or something like that.” Sands went back to her massage. Amos tucked the big pillow tighter under his chest. When Sands leaned forward, Amos could feel her sweater press against his bare back.

  Amos thought about it a long time. Finally, in a quiet voice, he said, “I don’t think Clara Wilson’s a dink.”

  Sands Mandeville burst out laughing, a harsh, loud crackling laugh.

  “What?” Sophie said from the other side of the room.

  “The famous Amos doesn’t think Misty AKA-the-Nose is a dink.”

  “Oh, Misty’s a dink, all right,” Sophie said. “She’s got the nose, for one thing, and for another, her mother dresses her funny.”

  “That was before her mother vamoosed,” Sands Mandeville said. “Now Misty dresses herself funny.”

  After the girls’ laughter died down, Sophie said, “And you should’ve seen her when in addition to props she got a part in the play,” Sophie said. “It was the teeniest part. One line. But she almost cried, she was so happy.”

  “Maybe it’s a great line,” Big Dave said.

  “Not exactly. She says, ‘I guess you know I can’t keep this to myself,’ and then she gets shot with this gun that makes this cool-looking blood stuff, and that’s it, she’s dead. Twenty seconds onstage, max, which is a blessing, let me tell you.”

  More whoops and raucous laughter.

  Finally there was a silence. Finally they were done. For a few seconds, Amos said nothing, and was afraid he would continue to say nothing. At last he said, “Yeah, but I’ll bet if you got to know her, you’d see she’s pretty cool.”

  “A dink!” Sophie whooped. “That’s what you’d find out she is.”

  Sands Mandeville chuckled. “It’s true. Lowercase d, dink. Ver-ry dinky.”

  She turned around and stared at Amos in the flickering light. She had a soft, foolish grin on her face. She leaned forward and kissed Amos’s ear, then spoke into it two words that shot down his spine. “Say it,” she whispered.

  “Say what?’

  “Say ‘Clara Wilson’s a dink.’”

  Amos drew slightly away.

  Sands Mandeville took his hand and slid it under her sweater, moving it slowly up her stomach, and then stopped.

  “Say it,” she whispered.

  Amos didn’t speak.

  She nudged his hand slightly upward, and Amos suddenly realized that Sands Mandeville was not wearing a bra. She had been, he was pretty sure of that, but it was clear she wasn’t now.

  “Say it,” she whispered again.

  “Clara Wilson’s a dink,” Amos mumbled quickly.

  “What?”

  “Clara Wilson’s a dink,” Amos said more distinctly, and Sands Mandeville’s lips curled into a satisfied half smile. For one fleeting moment, Amos’s hand covered her breast, taking quick, greedy impressions. But Sands, whose whole body had felt loose-jointed and lazy, suddenly stiffened. “Wait,” she said.

  “What?”

  She sat bolt upright. “Wait,” she said again. She pulled her lavender sweater down and woozily stood. “Bathroom,” she said, and then was gone.

  She didn’t get to the bathroom. Halfway down the marbled hallway, Sands Mandeville stopped, pulled her hair back, bent forward, and threw up.

  “Welcome to the exotic City of Upchuck,” Big Dave said.

  Sophie was laughing.

  Amos asked where the mop and stuff were, but Sands had disappeared into the bathroom. “She wouldn’t know anyway,” Sophie said. “They have help, you know?”

  Amos stared at her and wondered if help just meant house-keepers and cooks, or would it include other people, like the milkman? While the others stood around, Amos found a mop and some sponges in the pantry. He did most of the cleanup. It looked like Sands had dined chiefly on tomatoes, cottage cheese, and carrot sticks.

  While he was finishing up, Sands emerged from the bathroom looking surprisingly refreshed. She grinned as if nothing had happened. “What’s next?” she said.

  Amos, turning, whacked the mop handle into the cherry-and-beveled glass display case behind him. Inside the case, one of the pale, half-smiling, long-limbed porcelain girls rocked and fell forward. The umbrella she held snapped and shattered. Amos, staring down at the broken figurine, said, “I’ll pay for it.”

  From behind him, Sands laughed. “Not unless your father left you a sizable inheritance.” She stepped forward and started cleaning up the glass shards. “We’ll just throw her away and space the others out and they’ll never miss her.” Sands grinned. “Or if they do, they’ll blame it on the help.” She was close to him now. Just behind the mouthwash she’d rinsed with, he detected the sour smell of vomit.

  Amos took the pail out to the kitchen to get clean water. While he was there, he noticed that his coat was thrown over one of the chairs. He didn’t know why he did what he did next. He walked over to the refrigerator—its front door was wood-paneled just like the rest of the kitchen cabinets—and pulled it open. Inside, it looked like an expensive deli cas
e with all sorts of cheeses and olives and fancy sliced meats. And there, lined up in a neat row along one side, were several glass quarts of milk from Cosgrove Dairy.

  Amos pulled one out. The date on the foiled lid was too recent. His father was already dead when the bottle made its way here in someone else’s truck. No, that wasn’t right. In his father’s truck, driven by someone else. Amos looked at the pail in the sink. He looked at his coat slung over the chair, and he looked at the door that led from the kitchen into the backyard. In the backyard, there was a gate. Through the gate was the long cobblestoned driveway. Down the driveway was the street, the everyday, ordinary street that led back to the everyday, ordinary world.

  25

  AMOS ACCOSTED

  Amos pulled his jacket collar snug and headed back home the way he came. It could’ve been worse, he decided. It could’ve been colder tonight. He could’ve been walking uphill instead of down. He could’ve been the one to unload his dinner instead of Sands Mandeville. Still, it was all pretty disappointing. And—a real surprise—although he’d had his hand around Sands Mandeville’s breast, he couldn’t remember exactly what it felt like, and if you couldn’t remember the particulars and, worse, wound up feeling grimy besides, how big an achievement could it be?

  He turned right on Genesee and checked his pace as he approached Clara Wilson’s house. Clara Wilson, whom he had betrayed, out loud and in public. There was a light in an upstairs bedroom, slight shadowy movement on the ceiling. Probably it was Clara’s room and Clara’s shadow. Amos looked around. On the dirty sidewalk, there were wet pebbles of just the right size to tap at her window without breaking it. But what would he say even if he got her attention? “Hi, I was just walking by after feeling up Sands Mandeville and calling you a dink”?

  Amos walked on. He was tired and cold and miserable. He wanted nothing now except to be home, to talk to no one, to crawl into bed and stay there for about a year. Most of the houses he passed were dark or had just a single light on in some dim room. Only an occasional car would pass, its tires hissing on the wet pavement. A lighted bus droned by, carrying a single rider. When a car slowed alongside him, Amos had the fleeting fantastic thought that it was his father, smiling, alive, coming to pick him up in the old Econoline, to give him a warm ride back to a warm, normal life, and so Amos turned with a kind of pleasant expectancy.

  It wasn’t his father’s Econoline, of course.

  It was half car, half truck. The front portion contained two seats and looked like a large sedan; the rear had been fitted out with pickup bed and lockbox. There were three people in the front seat. The passenger-side window went zipping down. The driver leaned past the passenger and spoke in a soft crooning voice. “Hello, Hero.”

  Amos stopped, completely dumbfounded. And then, trying for nonchalance, he lifted his chin and said, “Hello, Eddie.”

  Eddie was leaning forward and grinning past a girl in the middle of the seat and, on the far end of the seat, his brother, Charles, who was paying little attention to the girl and even less to Amos, or so it seemed. Charles stared straight ahead. In profile, Amos could clearly see the strange veiny contours of his shaved scalp. He said something under his breath, and the girl let out a raucous laugh. Charles smiled thinly and let the girl tangle herself more tightly into him. Eddie ignored them. “C’mon over closer,” he said to Amos. “I don’t like to yell.”

  Eddie was acting more normal than the time Amos had seen him in the west-wing bathroom. He stepped closer to the car, but not too close. Charles was now turned away from Amos, whispering to the girl, who kept laughing moronically. Amos could see her legs. They were parted and bare. Eddie, still leaning past the occupied couple, gave Amos a friendly grin and waved him closer.

  Amos took one more half step, and while he was leaning close and glancing at the girl’s bare legs, Charles Tripp’s long arm flashed out, caught Amos’s belt buckle, and yanked him close enough that he could get his other hand on Amos’s jacket collar. In another second, Amos’s head had been pulled into the car and Charles had raised the window until the glass bit into Amos’s Adam’s apple.

  “There,” Eddie said in a soft voice. “We’ve been meaning to speak to you, and now we can.”

  Charles made a murmuring sound. The girl dipped her head and grinned at Amos. She wore heavy black and white makeup; when she playfully wagged her tongue at him, he saw at least two silver studs.

  Eddie idly massaged his own neck and let a pleasant smile stretch across his face. “Where ya been? Up at Clara Wilson’s? Is that where you were, Hero?”

  This reminded Amos of how you feel when the dentist asks you questions while he’s got two different sharp tools in your mouth. Amos tried to roll his eyes toward the dashboard but couldn’t see much. All he was really aware of was the girl’s bare legs, a thick smell of tortilla chips, and, when Charles Tripp belched, the sour smell of beer. “Can’t talk,” Amos said in a strangled voice.

  Charles lowered the window fractionally.

  “Now,” Eddie said soothingly, “what were you doing at Clara Wilson’s house?”

  “Walking by it,” Amos said. “I was coming home from somewhere else.”

  The girl laughed derisively, then her hand disappeared inside Charles’s clothes. Charles smiled and stared straight ahead, looking at nobody.

  “You might’ve gone home a different way, though,” Eddie said.

  “I guess so, yeah.”

  “And I suppose the next time you would?”

  Eddie Tripp was jealous about Clara Wilson? But Amos played with this strange notion a half second too long. Charles cranked the window until it clamped into Amos’s throat. “Mmmf” was the sound Amos made.

  Eddie, in his smooth voice, said, “I take that as an affirmative, right?”

  “Mmmf.”

  Hard laughter spilled out from the girl’s lips and, right behind it, the stale smell of beer.

  “Okay, change of subjects,” Eddie said. “Our real reason for speaking with you is that we’ve been wanting to thank you for putting us on notice. Charles and me moved into our new place today, and whattaya know? We haven’t even got the beer into the fridge when we have a visit from a Detective Obese. A nice guy, Detective Obese. He said you’d had some trouble at the house. We told Detective Obese we were sorry to hear it. We told him our rule is not to screw with the rules. We told him we’re not the problem. The problem is that the rule guys like to make up a special set of rules for Charles and me.” Eddie’s eyes drilled into Amos. “So we’re not too happy when some little dickhead milkboy sics the rule guys on us with their special set of rules. Comprende, Hero?”

  “Mmmf,” Amos said. Then, when Charles slightly lowered the window, Amos said, “Yeah, sure. I understand.”

  “Loud and clear?”

  “Loud and clear,” Amos said.

  Charles said nothing. He continued to stare straight ahead. The girl was running her tongue along a bulging blue vein on Charles’s scalp, and Amos didn’t look where her hand was. Eddie said, “What I’m telling you, free of charge, is that you’re in control of your own fate here. If you make trouble for us, what can we do except add a little helping to it and send it right back at you?”

  Amos said nothing. Eddie studied the road in front of him. Then he eased off the brake and the car lurched a foot or two forward. Amos, his throat vised by the window, stumbled ahead. The car stopped.

  “It’s up to you,” Eddie said, letting his close-set eyes bore into Amos before glancing up at his brother. “Any words of advice for our young friend, Charles?”

  Charles stared silently forward for a long enough time that Amos thought he hadn’t heard the question. Then he said, “Just this,” and Amos felt the window again raised tight into his throat, tighter than before.

  The girl let out another hard laugh.

  Charles made a flicking-forward motion with his chin, and Eddie again eased off the brake. The car rolled ahead. Amos, panicked, tried to yell and keep up with the
car at the same time. A few yards more, and the car stopped.

  Eddie Tripp shrugged and smiled broadly at Amos. “Oops,” he said. Charles lowered the window, and Amos pulled free of the car. He didn’t want to rub his neck in front of them, but he couldn’t help it.

  “You okay, Hero?” Eddie said with exaggerated concern.

  “Yeah,” Amos said.

  “Excellent,” Eddie said. “And thanks again for sending out the nice fat man. We enjoyed making his acquaintance. But do yourself a favor and make sure he doesn’t visit again.”

  When Eddie stopped talking, Amos stood frozen. He didn’t know what to do next. He didn’t know what Eddie and Charles would let him do next.

  Eddie grinned past Charles and the girl. In a mocking voice, he said, “You want to run along now, or would you like to stay and keep chatting?”

  The girl laughed one last raucous laugh, and Amos, stinging with humiliation, turned and started walking. The dark half car, half truck pulled away slowly, unhurriedly, so that Amos could watch its taillights for a long while before they dissolved into the black winter night.

  When he got home, his mother was sitting in the front room with her back to Amos, reading a book called Major Biblical Prophecies. The week before, she’d taken a waitressing job (at Bing’s, of all places, where everyone went). She’d told Amos and Liz that she just needed something to do and that she’d always actually liked waitressing, but Liz had told Amos that she needed the job to help make ends meet. Tonight, while she read, Mrs. MacKenzie was still dressed in her green-and-tan waitressing uniform. Amos stood in the doorway for a while, but his mother didn’t turn. “I’m back,” he said.

  She didn’t move.

  “Mom?” Amos—and this would later shame him—almost didn’t want to touch her. Finally, though, he did, laying his hand on her shoulder and giving it a little shake. “Mom?”

  Her eyelids rose heavily. She stared blankly at Amos. “Oh, hi, dumpling,” she said in a thick, slurry voice. “I’m sleeping.”

  “I know,” Amos said, “but it’s late. Don’t you want to go upstairs to bed?”