I stashed my rucksack in the backseat, sat in the front, and opened the grocery bag in my lap. He’d gotten me a snack-size package of Oreos, a banana, a carton of cherry yogurt (spoon included), and a shrink-wrapped corn muffin. Andy slid into the driver’s seat and closed the door. I thanked him, and he watched me eat. I offered him an Oreo, and for the second time that night I felt like an idiot for asking him if he wanted food that didn’t belong to me.
As I was eating the banana, I nudged a book on the floor with my foot. I picked it up: The Master and Margarita. On the cover was a grinning cat holding a pistol. I opened the book, flipped to a random page, and read:
Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.
For other people, maybe. Definitely not for me.
“I’m reading that for Russian lit,” Andy was saying. “It’s really good. Do you like to read?” I nodded. “What’s your favorite book?”
“I have a lot of favorites. I like The Phantom Tollbooth, and A Wrinkle in Time, and the Narnia books.” Spare Oom. I shivered.
“Are you cold? I can turn on the heater.”
“No, thanks. I’m all right.”
“Well, if you like those books then you’d probably like The Master and Margarita. Have you read Gormenghast?” I shook my head. “That’s one of my favorites. It’s a trilogy. If I see you again, I’ll give you my copy.”
“You’re being too nice,” I said as I polished off the yogurt and tied up the plastic bag with my trash inside. I looked at him and waited.
He reached over and took my hand, lacing his fingers through mine and letting them rest on the console between our seats. “Can I do this? Is this all right?”
“That’s all?” I asked. His breath smelled like Fritos and Pepsi and cigarettes.
He nodded. His hand was warm and sweaty, but it felt nice. For a moment—just the one moment—I felt safe.
“No.” I took my hand away and tucked it in the crook of my knee. “You shouldn’t.”
“It’s okay.” He ran his fingers along the bumps on the steering wheel. “You don’t have to do anything.”
“I don’t want to do anything.”
“That’s okay. I just want to sit here and hold your hand.”
“You want more than that though.”
He shrugged. “Every guy wants more than that.” He hesitated. “But it’s not only that.”
“No?”
“Listen, I know what it’s like. I’m on my own too. Left home last year—I had to. My dad is horrible when he’s drunk. I moved out after he put me in the hospital.”
“What did he do?” Andy lifted his shirt, and I gasped at the sight of a wobbly pink gash across his ribs. “Broken beer bottle.” He paused. “I keep trying to get her to leave him, but she won’t go.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault the man who spawned me is a jerk.” If a laugh could slice an eardrum, this one came close. I knew my father would never do something like that. Mama had married a good-hearted man.
Andy sighed. “Anyway, I’ve got an extra futon in my apartment, in case she ever changes her mind. You know what they say—Better the devil you know? It’s the thought of being on her own that terrifies her. Like life could actually be worse than it is now.”
“She wouldn’t be on her own,” I said. “She’d have you.”
Andy gave me a look then—kind, and grateful for my kindness, but making it clear I was missing the point. “Do you ever stop what you’re doing and go, This is my life?” He was staring at me. He could see I was ready to cry, and that was answer enough.
“I go to this shitty little community college in Williston, and then I go to work in this hellhole”—he jerked his thumb at the blue Walmart sign lit up over his left shoulder—“and then I go home to a shitty little apartment over an all-night laundromat in Plainsburg. It sucks, you know? It really sucks. And then you show up and I think, Yeah. She could understand me.”
I folded my arms tightly over my chest. “You don’t know me.”
“It doesn’t really take that long to learn everything you need to know about a person.”
“I stole a can of chickpeas, Andy. That makes me a thief.”
“That’s just it. You’re even more desperate than I am.” He was still staring at me. “You’re beautiful,” he said.
“No, I’m not.”
“No, you really are. Girls think because they don’t look like models on magazine covers they aren’t beautiful. They airbrush everything, you know. It’s all bullshit.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s not that.”
“What is it, then? You’ve listened to me. Now let me listen to you.”
“Please.” I shook my head. “Please don’t be so nice to me.”
He lifted a hand to my cheek and stroked it. “Why shouldn’t I?”
I smelled him—the corn chips and cinnamon gum and cigarette smoke—and it was making me twitch. I had to get out of there. I reached for the handle and heard the click as he pressed a button and locked all four doors.
“If you really want to go, then fine, I won’t keep you,” he said. “But I know you don’t have anyplace to go. So why won’t you let me help you?”
“You don’t understand, Andy. I’ve done horrible things, and if you don’t let me leave I’ll end up doing it to you too.” I put my hand on the lock, but he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me toward him.
“Please,” he whispered. “Just let me hold you.” As he kissed my neck, he ran his fingers down my leg to my knees and gently pried them apart.
Your mother.
I’m sorry.
She’ll never leave him now.
He could have guilt-tripped me. He could have made me do things for him, but he didn’t. He was alone, and he knew I didn’t have anybody either, so to him it made merciful good sense that we should sit in his car and eat Oreos and hold each other’s hands. But as I ate, a little voice inside me whispered, Everyone is lonely, you can’t do something just because you’re lonely.
I tripped on the pavement coming out of the car and skinned my knee. I had no idea how many people might have seen me—I’d never done it out of doors before apart from Luke, never in such a public place—and I ran out of the parking lot into the night like there was someone right behind me. I was so out of my head that I couldn’t have heard them even if they had been there.
The Walmart had gone up in the middle of the cornfields, so there was nowhere to run except back to the highway. It had to be ten o’clock, but there was still a lot of traffic. A hot gust of air blew the hair off my forehead as a Mack truck hurtled past.
All thoughts of finding my dad drifted out of my head like the smoke from Andy’s cigarette. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it—to take one step into the road and let the next truck rid the world of me? The driver wouldn’t be hurt, and no one would blame him. They’d be able to tell I wasn’t hit from behind.
It was a beautiful plan. It was simple. It made sense.
I didn’t have long to wait. I stepped into the road and let the headlights flood my vision. The driver came down heavy on the brakes and the horn. I was dazzled by the lights but forced myself not to raise my hands to my eyes, and in another second or two I felt the red heat of the grille on my face—
Getting hit by a truck didn’t feel like I thought it would. I felt myself yanked sideways, as if gravity were giving out. I came down hard on the pavement as the truck tore by, the driver still pounding his fist on the horn and shouting obscenities out the open window.
“Are you insane?” I heard someone say, and for one wild second I thought the voice belonged to Andy. He was all right. I hadn’t done it.
I felt a hand under my arm, and gasped. “Sorry,” he said as he grabbed me gently by the inner elbow and drew me up. “There wasn’t time to organize a smoother landing.” Not Andy. It was the boy in green. He brushed some grit from my shoulder. “You’re gonna hurt tomorrow, but not as bad as if that truck had
gotten you.”
I wouldn’t have to wait until tomorrow. I hurt everywhere. I put my hand to my lips and remembered what I must look like. I covered my mouth and turned away, but he laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. “You’re all right.”
“I’m not,” I mumbled through my fingers. “I’m really not.”
The boy put an arm around my waist and helped me over the metal barrier and back down the embankment. “You did something to that man.” My side hurt when I talked, but I had to ask. “That horrible drunk guy who came into the store in his boxer shorts.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Where did you get that hat?” But I knew where he’d gotten that hat.
With his free hand he took something jingly out of his back pocket and dangled it where I could see it. “Same place I got these keys.”
“It was his hat.”
He put the keys back in his pocket and laid his hand on the Stetson as if to reassure himself it was still on his head. “He won’t be needing it anymore.”
We reached the bottom of the embankment and walked across the empty parking lot. I had so many thoughts, but none of them would connect. What had he done to that man?
“Don’t worry,” he said. “The only person who saw what you did is me, and believe me, I’m not telling anyone. Nobody’s noticed his car yet. We’re all right.”
We’re all right.
“You…”
We stopped walking then, and for what felt like ages we stood there looking at each other. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Me too.”
I was just waiting for him to come out and say it before I let the relief of not being alone anymore take me over. It felt so strange to have this second chance at friendship when every other good thing in the world had fallen away from me. “How did you…?”
“The men’s room. Followed him in and locked the door.”
“I knew there was something weird going on. You were leading him away from the exit.” He gave me a half smile.
“Are you sure no one else saw?” I asked.
“I’m sure. But we’d better get out of here.”
So I hurried, hobbling a little, back to Andy’s car. The boy followed me, and when I opened the back door to get my rucksack he opened the driver’s-side door, pulled a crumpled shopping bag from under the seat, and began gathering Andy’s clothes, and the other bits. On the floor was the book about the pistol-wielding cat he’d been reading for his Russian lit class, bookmarked midway through with a receipt for a sixteen-ounce Pepsi and a chicken sandwich. He’ll never know how it ends.
I tucked the book in my bag as the boy pushed down the mess—my mess—with his bare hand before double knotting the bag handles. “That your book?” I shook my head. “You take things too, then.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Thanks for doing that.”
“Someday you can return the favor.” When he smiled there was a twist in it. “We’ll toss it someplace else.” He hooked the bulging plastic bag with his index finger, slammed the door, and strode away from the store, toward the drunken cowboy’s black pickup truck parked out of the radius of the floodlight. To no one’s surprise, the cab reeked of beer and cigarettes. We climbed into the front seat, and he turned the key in the ignition. He knew how to drive a stick.
“Where are we going?”
He plucked an envelope from a stack of papers on the dashboard and tossed it in my lap. It looked like an electric bill. BARRY COOK, it said. 5278 Route 13, Pittston, IA.
We drove in silence for a few minutes, taking the exit for Route 13, before the boy said, “Hey, what’s your name?”
“Maren. What’s yours?”
“Lee.”
“Where are you from, Lee?”
He shot me a wary look. “Does it matter?”
I shrugged. “I was just making conversation.”
“Sorry. Haven’t had one of those in a while, unless you count that drunken cowboy toad. Guess I’m a bit rusty.”
“Well, can I ask how you got to that Walmart? I mean, didn’t you leave your car?”
“Nope. Clutch blew out on my last ride five miles up the highway. I was just as stuck as you were.”
“How do you know I was stuck?”
Lee smiled. “’Cause we’d have taken your car instead.”
I rolled down the window and let the cool night air hit me full in the face. I thought of Sully. “Why now?” I asked, half to myself.
“What do you mean?”
“All my life I thought I was the only one,” I said, “and then I meet two other people like me in less than a week.”
“Hold up a second. Who’s the other one?”
“I can’t tell you the whole story now,” I murmured. “My head hurts.”
I felt him shrug. “You can tell me when you feel better.”
“It’s just so weird,” I went on. “None, and then two.”
“And who knows how many more.”
“Really? You think there are lots of us?”
He shrugged again. “It’s like anything else, I guess. You’ve never heard of it, and then once you have you see it everywhere you look.”
I gave him a doubtful look.
“You find what you expect. That’s what I’m getting at.”
“Maybe.” I was thinking of a history teacher I’d had three schools ago, when we lived in Maine. Miss Anderson was young and pretty and nice enough, but she wasn’t anybody’s favorite. One day, after the last bell rang, she was going over my chapter test at her desk. I was looking over her shoulder, and when she turned and smiled up at me I could’ve sworn I smelled it on her breath, the rotten old-penny smell hiding under the mouthwash. I snatched up my test paper and ran out of the room, and the next day she acted like nothing had happened.
I convinced myself I’d imagined it. People didn’t like her, but they didn’t avoid her the way they avoided me, and she didn’t wear black. We’re all different, I knew that now.
5
Again, no surprise: the drunken cowboy had lived alone. It was a tiny house, just a den with a kitchen beyond it, and a bathroom and bedroom off to the left. The whole place smelled like he’d done nothing but smoke and drink in it every day for a hundred years.
I dropped onto the sofa and looked around. The den was done in fiberboard paneling, and behind the TV there was a floor-to-ceiling KISS poster in a dented metal frame. There were empty PBR cans and Marlboro packs strewn across the coffee table along with a stack of grease-stained pizza boxes. I found a magazine opened to a spread of naked women, peroxide blondes who might have been made of plastic, each of the pictures captioned with a 900 number. I closed the magazine and threw it behind a La-Z-Boy in the corner.
Lee was in the kitchen, flipping through a pile of mail on the table, parting the curtains and looking out the side window. Even from where I sat I could see the dishes in the sink were covered in mold. He opened the freezer. “There’s a box of Ellio’s in here,” he said. “But you’re not hungry, are you?”
I shook my head.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me neither.”
I took my toiletries and pajamas out of my rucksack and pointed to the bathroom door. “Do you mind if I…?”
“Nope. Go right ahead.” He grinned at the idea of telling me I could do this or that, like this was his house, and I smiled a little as I closed the door behind me.
Sure enough, there was a red stain around my mouth, down my chin, and between all my teeth. It didn’t matter that he did it too, I hated that he’d seen me like this. I brushed my teeth four times and gargled with Listerine again and again, but I could still taste Andy under the mint.
There were several pairs of boxer shorts crumpled on the tiled floor, right where Barry Cook had stepped out of them, and the bath mat looked like it had never seen the inside of a washing machine. Two little turds and a half dozen cigarette butts floated in the toilet bowl. I took off my T-shirt and shorts and rubbed at them with a nub of soap under the faucet, and then I hung th
em over the towel rack to dry.
I looked over my body in the mirror. There was a bruise forming along the bottom of my rib cage, another on my shoulder, and a cut on my forehead. I looked like I’d been in a street fight. I stepped into the bathtub and turned on the showerhead. The hot water felt good, and I turned it hotter and hotter, as though I could get it hot enough to wash away the things I’d done. My knee stung as I soaped out the grit.
I patted myself off with the cleanest-looking towel I could find on the door hooks, and I looked at myself in the mirror again. Could I be pretty to anyone besides Andy? Now there was a laugh. What difference did it make?
When I came out of the bathroom Lee was sitting at the kitchen table, chewing on a stick of beef jerky and reading Barry Cook’s mail. “I thought you weren’t hungry.”
“Habit.” He shrugged, his eyes still on the letter. “He’s from Kentucky,” he said as he chewed. “That explains the accent. Hasn’t been back to see his parents in ten years.” Lee shook his head. “This is from his mom. She says his dad’s got cancer. Postmarked four months ago. He never opened it.” He took another bite of jerky.
I found the remote, plopped down on the sofa, and turned on the television. I watched two men pace off amid the tumbleweeds, turn to face each other, and fire their pistols. Lee sat down in the La-Z-Boy, noticed the porn magazine splayed on the carpet, picked it up, flipped through it for a second or two, and tossed it back on the floor.
One man was lying in the dirt, and a woman of ill repute was weeping over his corpse. “Are you watching this?” I asked.
“You’re the one who turned it on.”
I flipped it off again and dropped the remote into the mess on the coffee table. “Why are we here, anyway?”
“Did you have someplace else to be?”
I wrinkled my nose. “Please tell me we’re not staying here tonight.”
“Nobody’s making you,” he said. “You can do whatever you want.” He slumped back in the chair. “Look, I know we’ve only known each other for an hour, but I hope you know I have no intention of staying here longer than one night.”
Bones & All Page 9
