by Joshua Furst
“You know what it means.”
The park had been left intentionally wild. Weeds sprouted into tall grass. Half-strangled trees rose out of dense webs of shrubbery and thistle. To the left was darkness and brambles. To the right, the river—it sounded like rain. This was where Trent went, down the steep ridge, bending to grab something from the ground on his way. She could see him down there, in shadows, pressed against the iron fence, breaking pieces off whatever it was he'd picked up—a dead twig, it must have been—and lobbing them into the water.
The thing to do was to walk away and let this be the end. Or rush up behind him and slam him into the fence. Instead, she gravitated slowly toward him and pressed up against the dull iron spear tips to wait for him to send her away.
He whipped the chunks of rotting wood as far as he could. Once they hit the river they were barely visible, shadows on black water, floating toward the retaining wall and collecting in the glistening web of foam there. When the stick couldn't be broken down further, he threw the last finger as far as he could and picked up another one. He bounced it in his hand.
“We killed the dog,” he said.
Then he whipped the new stick whole into the river.
Gripping the fence to hold herself steady, she refused to look at him. The water was an empty space below her, nothing but sound and an unstable pitch of black. Beyond it, streaks of muddy gray, cliffs, and then a line of pale electric yellow where the lights of West River Road were strung like some optimistic thing beyond her imagination. In places, trees jutted into the light, black furry creatures, hulking on the ledge.
“We had to,” Trent said. “It kept jumping on the bed. The ho-bag said he had to get rid of it.”
She'd misunderstood everything. Jarod. The sorrows locked behind his droopy face. She saw herself reaching over to muss his hair. The dog. All of this over a stupid dog.
The tall grass cut at her shins as she raced through it. Burs pulled at her shorts and bunched in her shoelaces.
Behind her, Trent was yelling. “We didn't have a choice! Cheryl! Wait! Fucking hear me out!”
Cheryl. Not Betty, but Cheryl. The same old Cheryl she'd always been.
The sharp sting of bile pierced the back of her throat. Saliva welled up and pooled under her tongue. She reeled, swallowed back vomit, continued running. When she heard him chasing her, she sped her pace. Her knees buckled. She toppled into the pathway, the light.
He wrapped her up and pinned her. She couldn't kick herself away. He was knotted around her, the rope pulling tighter and tighter as he whispered into her ear, breaking her. “Let me explain, okay? Then you can go ahead and fucking hate me.”
A rhythmic padding moved toward them along the path, then a couple of women emerged into view. Their identical ponytails bounced back and forth, and though they kept their eyes fixed on the distance in front of them, they were discussing something, slinging half sentences back and forth between huffs of breath.
Trent rolled off Cheryl, and as if by agreement, the two of them scooted to the edge of the trail and sat cross-legged, their knees almost touching. They waited, scowling, for the women to pass.
“It's sort of unnecessary, though, huh?”
“Did you tell him that?”
“I can't talk to him about these sorts of things.”
“That's probably the real problem.”
Noticing Cheryl and Trent, the woman closest to them arched her eyebrow and tipped her head. Her friend's mouth stretched into a perfect O and they both fell silent and sped their pace.
Once they were gone, Trent spit between his legs and picked up where he'd left off. “It was ugly,” he said. “I knew it would freak you out.” He was staring at her, searching. He'd expected something that wasn't there.
She exploded. “Don't you understand anything? I don't care about the fucking dog!” The fury in her own voice scared her.
“What the fuck, then?” The look in his eyes. It was like she was the one hurting him.
The best she could think to do was fall back on the grass. It was stiff and prickly, a bed of nails. She pulled giant clumps out with her fists. “I thought you were kicking me out,” she mumbled.
She didn't have to look to know he'd gone cold.
“Not everything is about you, alright? I know you wish it was, but it's not.”
This statement would haunt her, torture her, later. She'd hold it to the light and study its color, layer it over the fragments of her life, trying to figure out how true it was. These were exactly the sorts of words she used to hurl at me when she wanted to wound me. Hearing them from Trent shocked her, terrified her. The physical world is a porous place and reality a hypothetical thing. I'd neglected to teach her how to believe in it, and in order not to slip, she'd had to be vigilant. She'd had to construct a wall of rules and surround herself with them in order to ensure she didn't become like me. Now the barrier she'd built between us was breached and that old fear came flooding back in. She couldn't trust her perceptions—not a single one.
But sitting there next to the river with Trent, she wasn't thinking of how like me she was. She was thinking about him. He'd been supposed to help her create a new world. To be her escape. She was thinking he wasn't an escape at all, now. There was no escape.
He touched her arm softly. “I'm not gonna kick you out, Betty. Why would I do that? You're all I have.”
“THEY HAD TO DO IT, Mom,” she would have said, if we'd ever been able to discuss these events. “The world's a tough place. It doesn't matter what they say their intentions are, do-gooders like the Humane Society are really just there to make the middle class feel like they've done something worthwhile with their lives. You know what I mean, Mom? Like to sweep all the horror and death into the corner, to turn everything into white rooms and gleaming steel tables. These people can't handle real blood and guts. The truth bums them out. You know what I'm saying? How are they gonna keep their fantasy alive if they have to see how they're like everyone else? Right? I mean, right? It's bullshit. It's just like organic farming.”
These words would not have been hers, not originally, anyway. They'd belong to Trent, and like a college freshman enamored with her teacher, she would have rolled them around on her tongue until they felt natural in her mouth. My job, then, would have been to respond with tolerance, to patiently nudge her back toward herself.
“Remember when we got Gremlin?” I'd say.
“Uh-huh. Yeah, okay, Mom. But so what? So we went to the Humane Society. That doesn't change it. For every cat they give away, they kill ten more.”
I'd wait. I'd speak slowly and re-create that day. “There were some spectacularly fine cats there. Beautiful, full-breed cats. A Persian. A Russian Blue. All kinds of kittens—the place was crammed with them, gazing out at you from those metal cages, their eyes wide and pleading. And what did you do?” A rhetorical question to which she'd know the answer.
This story was a favorite, enshrined in family legend. She'd heard me tell it dozens of times. And despite everything I'd put her through, despite all the ways she'd tried to kill this part of herself, she was still sentimental, still cherished the image of herself the story contained. I'm positive she would have played along.
“What did I do?” she'd ask.
“You walked up and down every aisle of the shelter. You peered into each cage one at a time. And when you found the oldest, most snaggle-toothed cat there, you pointed and said, 'That one.' I thought, My God, this cat's covered in grease. It can barely lift its head. It's on its last legs. I imagined eyedroppers and midnight trips to the animal hospital. This cat won't last a week and then what'll happen? I'll have a bawling ten-year-old on my hands. I don't think I'm ready to teach her this lesson. 'Here,' I said, 'Cheryl, let's revisit the kittens.' I tried to guide you away but you wouldn't budge. 'We have to take this one, we have to, Mom,' you said. And when I asked you why, remember what you said?”
She'd wait. She'd let me finish the story for her.
> “Those other cats are easy” is what she'd said. “Those cats will find homes. But nobody but us is gonna love this gremlin.”
CHERYL AND TRENT spent more and more time on the roof. They scaled up the drainpipe almost every night now. They slept there. In the early hours after dark, the tar remained warm, pliable and sticky. Later, as the head abated, they'd wake briefly and nestle together under the rank comforter, missing most of its stuffing, smelling faintly of cat piss, which they'd found in the dumpster behind an apartment complex on University. As the weeks went by, other detritus accumulated: whiskey bottles; empty forty-ouncers; wrappers from candy bars and mini-mart burritos; small blue ziplock bags, so minuscule they barely fit the tip of a finger inside, ripped at the seams, licked clean of their contents; a handful of prized books from Trent's wall downstairs, Henry Rollins's journals, Charles Bukowski's poems, a few rumpled issues of Cometbus and a glossy coffee table book that retailed at nearly a hundred bucks but had been discounted to five fingers by Trent, the definitive photo history of an anti-culture subculture, a revolution that had disappeared into the great hegemon and died right around the time the two of them were born—I can say with authority it wasn't as much fun as it looked.
They got used to the open air and, more, to the privacy, the distance from Mike's clomping three a.m. boots and the incessant nonsense that dribbled from Devin's mouth. They began to take for granted the ease with which they could strip off each other's clothes and fuck the night away, though most nights now they were too drunk to fuck.
Since Trent had admitted his need for her, she'd undergone a profound change. Her dreams of chaos and revolution had softened, transformed into radical versions of something else, something a lot like domesticity. Not the suburban home life in which she'd been raised, not the nesting she'd been trained by years of sitcoms and baby dolls to believe in, what she imagined was more a raucous house party, but a home built in squalor, cobbled out of other people's trash. A place that absorbed every vagrant and lost child who showed up at its shattered windows, let them in after curfew, never asked where they'd been. Something like the communes of the sixties and seventies, but minus the body paint and inane optimism. A rougher and meaner capital-free zone, with her at the center of it all. They'd build a family out of the rubble. They'd still smash shit up, though, they'd still be badass.
During the day, Cheryl and Trent scrambled back inside to avoid the unbearable burn of the sun. They hid in the permanent shade of the living room. The heat hit the low hundreds in the afternoons, the air thickened like gravy, the humidity rose. Rain came in brief spritzes, offering no relief. The kids cooked like dumplings in a steamer, lumps of dough, glistening on the hardwood floor. Movement exhausted them. Better to do nothing. Once in a while, a rumor about a prospective street action floated through—burning down a Gap, defacing a Target, vandalizing a McDonald's Playland—and they roused themselves, briefly energized by the hope of combusting in righteousness and anger. Then nothing would happen, the rumor would sink under the suffocating heat and the kids would give in to their lethargy again, lying around, marking time by the trickle of sweat down their bodies.
I want to say it was the delirium of summer that made the signs so hard for Cheryl to read. Five or six days after the boys killed the dog—who could say how many, they were all the same, they all blurred together—a faint sweetness began to accumulate in the kitchen. The smell was subtle, it wafted in and out, but each time Cheryl caught it, she paused for a moment to wonder what it could possibly be. An idle thought. She'd remind herself to bring it up with Trent, then forget until the scent hit her again.
The one time she did remember to ask him about it, Trent was fading in and out of sleep, lying on his back, his head propped on the kiddie pool, limbs splayed out so as to catch the most breeze. His eyes remained shut. He grunted and mumbled something Cheryl couldn't decipher.
“I swear there's some weird smell,” she said again. “No?”
His mouth formed slow, half-articulated words.
Leaning in close, she whispered in his ear. “In the kitchen, like right around the sink. I can't believe you haven't noticed it.”
Nothing.
She placed her open palm flat on his chest and an immediate moistness accumulated under it. “Trent?”
Shaking her off, he rolled onto his side to face away from her. “Sleeping,” he said.
“But, just real quick. You haven't smelled it?” It wasn't so much that she cared about the smell as that she didn't like him ignoring her. “Trent?”
“What the fuck?” he said, turning, staring, wounded. “I'm fucking sleeping.”
“You don't smell it?”
“What?”
“I don't know. Downstairs. In the kitchen. There's a weird smell down there.”
She didn't notice his shudder before answering, “It's probably just Devin.”
“It's not Devin. It's—”
“Or garbage. Something. Let me sleep.”
“It's like a rotting smell. Really nasty.”
“Where is this?”
“I told you already. Under the sink.”
“I don't know, Betty. Maybe it's a dead rat. Who cares?” He turned again, adjusted the kiddie pool under his head and that was that.
She didn't push it. She didn't wonder if maybe they should conduct a search, remove the carcass from their living space. Nothing like that. Trent was right. Who cared? Except for passing through on her way to and from the roof, she didn't hang out in the kitchen anyway. And having decided it wasn't important, she hardly noticed the smell gaining texture, slowly infiltrating the whole squat. Like the other inconveniences of their situation, it was bearable. Live long enough with it and it disappeared.
SHE MOVED into a state of consciousness beyond caring, out of my reach, beyond saving.
Even Devin stopped annoying her. He spent most of his time sunk into the beanbag, leafing through the various porn magazines he'd stolen from gas stations and blue bookshops or found in gutters and trash cans, in stacks tied with twine behind public housing complexes and in the basements of co-ops. The more perverse the photo, the more he fetishized it, but his interest never seemed to be sexual— as far as Cheryl could tell, he had no sex drive at all. What he responded to in these images was the way they invoked the extreme limits of the human spirit. He took comfort in knowing that someone, somewhere, was being degraded, that contempt was such a universal emotion. And when he was especially bored and cranky, he liked to thrust the uglier photo spreads in front of Cheryl's face. Golden showers, gagging scenes, bukkake and skat, whatever he thought would upset her the most.
With one hand thrust down his pants, resting there in a way she'd once found creepy but now thought was touching, he waved a magazine over his head. “This is some freaky shit. Look—check this out.”
She snatched and gawked. She'd grown to enjoy this game.
Today, what she saw was a woman with her hair up in greasy pigtails—naked, of course—balanced spread-eagle on the handlebars of a Harley Davidson while peeling her vagina open for the camera. She was extremely pregnant, but somehow still rail thin. Her breasts, which should have grown plump and heavy, were shrunken like popped balloons.
To better savor Cheryl's reaction, Devin tumbled from the bean-bag and slithered up next to her, peering over her shoulder at the photo. “Check out those bruises!”
There were yellowish-purple marks up and down the woman's arms and a large welt on her inner thigh. She was only vaguely real to Cheryl; the circumstances that had led her to the moment caught on camera weren't worth getting up in a snit over. What most interested Cheryl was her contorted pose. A woman made of rubber. Gumby does Dallas. Hilarious.
Devin had this proud look on his face. “Why are you crying? She's just some skank whore,” he said, and when he saw Cheryl wasn't crying but laughing, he punched her hard on the shoulder.
Grabbing him by the hair, she shook his head back and forth in mock anger. “Leave me alo
ne,” she said. They were both grinning.
That smell floated in and out of the room. It was getting so she kind of liked it. She'd dared herself toward apathy, and now, here she was. It was a kind of milestone. A victory.
Even Devin—Devin, who from the start had pestered and picked at her, who loathed women maybe even more than he loathed himself—was no longer capable of disturbing her. Where once she saw him as stupid and dangerous, she saw him now as charming, sweet, harmless. He was on the inside, along with her and Trent.
Mike was inside too, but less so now. When he was home, he glowered and muttered. He zinged Japanese throwing stars at the walls.
Disgusted by their aggrieved wastrel ways, he'd stopped bringing food back for them weeks ago, and without his handouts, Cheryl and Trent and Devin mostly starved. So what? It was too hot to eat anyway. They took turns spanging out on the street with their cardboard signs and their screwed-on expressions of utter dejection. When they got desperate, they nibbled dry pasta, which expanded in their stomachs and created a convincing facsimile of fullness. Mike didn't care. He enjoyed watching them starve. He stood, arms folded and flexed, over their crumpled forms and laughed. “Man, I'm so glad I'm me and not you fuck-alls.”
Soon he'd be a Marine, and as the day drew closer, he distanced himself more and more from the rest of them. This smacked of betrayal, and Cheryl was even more wary of him now than she used to be.
Unable to wait the five days he had left, he'd begun practicing his low defensive crouch, his arms out in front of him at severe angles, knuckles cocked. He hoped, before boot camp, to smelt his body and mind together into an iron rod. Flinging his legs sideways in inept deathblows, made all the clumsier by the jackboots laced up his calves, he'd shout “ki-kou” or “pitang,” “di-pa-mou-tow,” raging mock-Asian nonsense. When his boots hit the floor, he'd find himself in cool new positions and he'd freeze, teeth clenched, lips spread wide, waiting for everyone to be impressed. Aikido, he called it. Cheryl called it crap.
