Pretty Ugly: A Novel

by Kirker Butler

  The other mothers could barely contain their glee. It had been a long time since there’d been a public dust-up like this, and the first with such marquee names. It was the same feeling their husbands got watching their least-favorite Nascar drivers smash into the wall.

  Theresa’s anger could have fueled an army. “Fine. If that’s how you want to play it, fine.”

  Storming to the edge of the stage, she stuck her macilent finger in Bailey’s face and shouted, “When’s your birthday?”

  Misa and Jinks ran screaming for their parents.

  “What’s wrong?” Theresa sneered. “Period got your tongue?”

  Bailey did not want to get involved. This was not her fight. So she held her perfect smile, ignored the crazy woman screaming at her from the edge of the stage and prayed for an adult to step in.

  “I’m talking to you, you fat little pig! When is your goddamn birthday?”

  Margaret winced. “Theresa! Language!”

  “Hey!” Miranda screamed and grabbed Theresa’s shoulder. “Get away from my daughter!”

  “Don’t you ever put your filthy hands on me, you bitch!” Theresa threw back her arm, intending to shrug off Miranda’s hand, but in her rage she misjudged the distance and backhanded the seven-months-pregnant woman hard across the face.

  The audience audibly gasped and took one step back, while every member of the camera crew instinctively took one step closer.

  Rubbing her cheek, Miranda looked at Theresa and waited for an apology she knew would never come. It had been a long time since she’d been in a fistfight, and pregnant or not she wasn’t going to let some spray-tanned ogress hit her in the face and get away with it, even if it was an accident.

  Without another thought, Miranda leaned in and slapped Theresa hard across the face. The familiar, resonant pop of skin hitting skin echoed through the hall. The crowd gasped again. Miranda covered her mouth, immediately ashamed of herself, but Theresa just smiled like a teenager who’d finally been given permission to drag race the family car and made a fist.

  The punch only grazed Miranda’s chin, but the intent behind it knocked out everyone in the room. In her thirty-nine years, Theresa Kennedy had done a lot of things she wasn’t proud of, but punching a pregnant woman—even one she despised—was arguably the worst. None of that mattered now. The genie was out of the bottle, and she was pretty sure that genie was going to hit her back.

  Rubbing her chin, Miranda recalled the words of her late father: “If you can avoid a fight, do it. But if you can’t, then find your opponent’s most vulnerable spot and hit them there hard, fast, and often. The worst thing you can do is let a fight escalate. Shut it down as soon as you can. And remember, there is no such thing as fighting dirty. You either kick their ass, or have yours handed to you.”

  So Miranda took a step forward and kicked Theresa in the vagina.

  The room became a vacuum. There was no air, no sound, no past, no future. There was only that moment.

  “Are we done?” Miranda went to Theresa, who was now bent over, gasping for breath. “Theresa?”

  “Ahhhh!” Theresa screamed and lunged at Miranda, who reflexively snatched two handfuls of Theresa’s brittle, faded hair. With her left hand, Miranda yanked hard, tearing out a handful of extensions and leaving a noticeable bald spot. Her right hand, meanwhile, worked itself into a fist at Theresa’s scalp, lacing the hair between her fingers, attaching to her head like a tumor.

  The other adults jockeyed for better angles, standing on chairs or holding their cameras high over their heads. Whether it was fear of getting involved or just a base desire to see two unlikable women beat on each other, no one even considered stopping them. Contestants pushed their way out onstage to get a peek. Even Benny and Margaret couldn’t help but gawk. No one, however, was more engaged than the producer of the reality show, who stood several yards away thinking about the new BMW this footage was going to buy her.

  Theresa had never considered the complexities of fistfighting a pregnant woman. Aside from the obvious tackiness of it all, practically there weren’t many viable targets. Yes, she hated Miranda, but her baby shouldn’t be forced to pay for her mother’s bitchiness. Body blows were off-limits, as was anything that could cause Miranda to fall and hurt the baby: tripping, shoving, or tackling. The only acceptable mark was the face, but with Theresa unable to control her own head, all she could do was blindly swipe at it with her open hand. She connected only once, leaving three perfect scratches down Miranda’s cheek, making her look like she’d been attacked by an angry French-tipped cat.

  “Let go of my hair, goddammit!” Theresa screamed.

  Miranda turned Theresa’s head so they were eye to eye. “Are you going to stop?”

  “Fuck you!” Theresa spat and kept swinging.

  Again, Miranda thought of her father’s advice, and with her free hand began punching Theresa repeatedly in her fake breasts, not too hard but enough to get her attention. It was a good strategy. After only a few punches, Theresa started to panic, screaming any excuse she could think of for the fight to stop.

  “That’s not fair! You’re going to burst them! This is a sexual assault!”

  Theresa thought about kicking Miranda in her vagina but worried that also might harm the baby. After two more direct blows to her now permanently misshapen breasts, Theresa decided to sacrifice what remained of her dignity and began wildly flailing her arms, hoping one of them eventually connected. Much like Bailey, she hoped that an adult would step in, but surprisingly (or not), not one did.

  Bailey watched from the edge of the stage, knowing her beauty pageant days were finally over. No one was going to let her, or her mother, within twenty miles of a pageant for a very long time. It was an odd feeling. Bailey had been dreaming of retirement, but a part of her never thought it would actually happen. And now that it was here, she felt unprepared, like a test she hadn’t sufficiently studied for. Black, glitter-flecked tears ran down her face as she watched her pregnant mother repeatedly punch a horrible woman in the boobs, and even though the fight was technically about her, Bailey felt no responsibility. She was a civilian now. It was someone else’s job to get worked up over this nonsense. That being said, pageants had defined her entire existence since she was six weeks old. A part of her—albeit a very small part—would miss it. Any little girl can call herself a princess, but very few have the crowns to back it up.

  As the host of the event, Uncle Wes figured it was probably his responsibility to restore order. Twenty years of vacationing in the Florida Keys had taught him a little something about breaking up hair-pulling catfights. Jumping from the stage, he planted himself firmly between the two women and attempted to hold them each at arm’s length.

  “Miranda! Theresa! Come on, now! The girls are watching! You’re embarrassing yourselves!”

  Grateful someone was finally putting an end to this—and satisfied she’d kicked Theresa’s bony ass—Miranda released Theresa’s hair and staggered backward into the crowd. Theresa, however, was too panicked to understand the fight was over and interpreted her freed hair as an opportunity to regroup.

  “Aaarrrrrrrrrggggghhhhhhhh!” she screamed and flailed her arms with twice the intensity.

  “Theresa! Stop it, now, sweetie! Everything’s okay! It’s over!” Wes took a step closer, trying to grab her arms, but he misjudged the distance and received a close-fisted blow to the top of the head.

  “Oh, my Lord!” He doubled over just as Theresa’s other arm came down and snagged his hairpiece on her wedding ring, ripping it from the double-sided tape that anchored it to his grotesque pate. “My hair!”

  Theresa finally opened her eyes when she felt what she believed to be some kind of animal attached to her hand.

  “Ahhhhh! Get it off me!”

  Again, Theresa flailed her arms, sending Wes’s precious trademark soaring over the heads of the onlookers and onto the stage, where it landed under the incriminating glare of the spotlight.

  S
eeing Wes without his hair, Theresa screamed again, believing she had scalped the child pageant icon.

  “Oh, my God, Wes, I’m so sorry!” Then, unable to take any more, Theresa Kennedy fainted.

  The crowd barely noticed. All they could see was the man who looked like a bizarro version of their beloved Uncle Wes. This man appeared to be at least ten years older than Wes claimed to be, and his imposing barrel chest now looked like regular old fat. Sweat had matted the remaining strands of hair to his lumpy head, and the double-sided tape hung down past his ear. The sixty-plus cameras zeroed in on him, and Wes realized he was now the focus of everyone’s attention. Contestants who didn’t immediately start crying looked at him with a morbid fascination usually reserved for burn victims or dead animals. Not since getting caught with Corporal Bowe’s phallus in his mouth had he been so overwhelmed with fear and humiliation. Straightening his jacket, the fat old bald man gestured to his hairpiece. “Bailey, dear, do you mind?”

  “I don’t want to touch it,” she said. There was something so creepy and sad about the inanimate pile of hair in front of her. It reminded her of Henry, her dog who got run over by her drunk neighbor.

  “Then kick it to me,” he snapped, then swallowed hard. “Please.”

  With the toe of her sequined sneaker, she sent the mound of lifeless hair skittering across the stage. Audible snickers broke the tension, as the crowd started slowly coming back down to earth.

  Thanking Bailey with a quick nod, Uncle Wes placed the rug back on his head, and with all the authority a man in a slightly askew toupee could marshal, said: “How about we all take ten minutes?”

  chapter eleven

  The cabin in Gatlinburg was a ramshackle shit box. “Rustic” was the word Safari Leasing used on their Web site, which apparently in Tennessee was just another word for “shitty.” The living room smelled of mildew, menstrual blood, and ashtrays. Staples and duct tape kept the water-damaged wallpaper on the walls, and every surface was mildly sticky, as if the cleaning crew had been instructed to wipe everything down with Diet Sprite. There was a bird’s nest in the fireplace and raccoon hair on the pillows. It was not how Courtney imagined spending the most important birthday of her life. She certainly wasn’t expecting a luxury hotel, but she also wasn’t expecting to step on a snail in the bathroom. The rancid accommodations could have been overlooked, however, had the cabin been anywhere near the city.

  “It’s like we’re not even staying in Gatlinburg at all!” Courtney whined as Ray’s Jeep Wrangler wound through a barely paved mountain road that on his GPS looked like a child’s first attempt at cursive writing.

  She wasn’t wrong. Technically, there was “access” to entertainment and restaurants just like technically there was “access” to Alaska. But anything Courtney wanted to do, like putt-putt golfing or designing her own T-shirt or firing a real machine gun, required a twenty-minute drive back down the serpentine road that had made her throw up twice on the way up.

  “I’m pregnant, Ray! I throw up all the time anyway. I can’t go up and down that road a thousand times a day! I’m not, like, some magic robot or something!”

  “I know you’re not a magic robot,” Ray said, expressionless.

  Working two full-time jobs and making sure his pregnant wife didn’t find out about his pregnant girlfriend didn’t leave Ray much energy to argue about the accessibility of the Appalachian slum dwelling he rented on the Internet with a dead man’s credit card.

  Agreeing to the trip was the worst idea Ray had had recently, and recently all he’d had were bad ideas. Three days in Gatlinburg was not his ideal getaway, but eventually he grew to see it as an opportunity. How often does a thirty-five-year-old noncelebrity get to spend a weekend in a hotel with an uninhibited, barely legal teenager?

  Like most men with an Internet connection, Ray had watched a lot of porn. He’d learned things, and he looked at his weekend as the culmination of his two decades of study, his thesis, a three-day master class dedicated to the power and wisdom of his penis. But he and Courtney weren’t going all the way to Christ’s asshole to stay inside and have sex. They could do that in Owensboro. Besides, she was now the future mother of his child. Introducing her to reverse cowgirl now just seemed disrespectful. What Ray really needed was a magic pill to make all his problems go away. Thank God for modern pharmaceuticals.

  Bee Rock was an underweight drug rep with the sharp features and angry sexuality of a Fox News anchor. Relaxing in the nurses’ lounge, Ray snapped out of a Percocet stupor when the pretty blond skeleton handed him a sample pack of pills and a possible way out. The package showed a young woman with a knowing smile hugging her knees while gazing off into a bright future. In a reassuring font, the drug Ceaseocor introduced itself to Ray, and asked, “Why shouldn’t the future belong to you?”

  “Abortion pills?” Ray asked.

  Hearing the “a” word, the young rep’s smile broke for an almost imperceptible moment before she answered.

  “That’s not how I would describe them.” The slight edge in her tone made Ray wonder if she was defending the drug from a place of corporate loyalty or personal experience.

  “Ceaseocor is a safe and legal solution to a difficult dilemma many women face on a daily basis, unexpected pregnancies. With Ceaseocor there is no stigma and no discomfort. Additionally, it is safe enough to be used at home and has been approved by the FDA, the AMA, NOW, and Planned Parenthood, and is pending government approval in fourteen foreign territories. It’s a real lifesaver,” she concluded without a hint of irony.

  Ray could not believe he hadn’t thought of this sooner. It was as if the answer to his problem had been hiding in the shadows waiting for the right moment to jump out and say, “Hey, Ray, why don’t you mash up a bunch of abortion pills and put them in Courtney’s Dr Pepper when you take her to Gatlinburg?”

  “Occam’s razor,” Ray mumbled through a faint smile.

  “Excuse me?”

  He hadn’t meant to say it out loud. “Hm? Oh, um … nothing. Occam’s razor.”

  The drug rep scrunched her nose to try and look cute but instead looked like a bird smelling a fart. “What’s that?”

  “It’s, uh, basically it’s the idea that, all things being equal, the best solution is usually the simplest one.”

  Bee nodded seriously. It may have been the most profound thing she’d ever understood.

  “I like that.” She took out a small black notebook and started scribbling while Ray imagined the many ways sex with her would be disappointing. “Can I use that?” she asked.

  Ray shrugged. “Sure. I didn’t come up with it.”

  “Who did?”

  “Occam.”

  “Right. And it’s a razor?”

  “Yes. It’s a razor.”

  “Perfect.”

  Putting on his most professional nursing face, Ray took a dozen sample packs and slipped them in his pocket.

  “Well, Ceaseocor sounds like a real game changer. I’ll pass these along to our OB. Thanks for coming by.”

  Instantly, Nurse Miller felt taller, as if he was standing upright for the first time in weeks. Why shouldn’t the future belong to him?

  Ray knew this plan was despicable, but he honestly didn’t know what else to do. How else was he supposed to protect the family he loved? He wasn’t ending a life; he was saving a family.

  It’s actually the most moral option, he rationalized to himself. Courtney was young and still had twenty quality childbearing years ahead of her—and at least five to ten sketchy ones. More than enough time for her to prepare for the challenges and ravages of motherhood. She was eighteen. Her life had potential, and there was no reason to throw all that away for some partially wanted baby.

  If Ray had any lingering questions about whether he was doing the right thing, the drive to Gatlinburg put those to rest.

  “I read that boys do better at math than girls because of something about their brains. Is that true?” “Do you know what the Bible say
s about breast-feeding at, like, a McDonald’s?” “Is six months too young for pierced ears?” “Did you know that bacteria from baby poop never, ever comes out of clothes? You can’t see it, but it’s always there. Something about their intestines or the way they digest food or something. How gross is that?” “Hey, you’re a nurse. Is it true that for the first year of their lives, babies can see in 3-D and after that it goes to normal?” “I read on a mommy blog that mothers have something like a million times more chances of skin cancer, and then when the baby turns two everything goes back to the way it was before. Something about hormones or something. The article was real long so I didn’t read the whole thing. But isn’t that scary?” “How do you feel about the name Miley Dakota if it’s a girl and Timberlake for a boy?”

  Ray simply could not raise a child with this person.

  There would be no easy end to their relationship, no parting as friends, but he believed/hoped the emotional anguish from “miscarrying” would give him the opportunity to say, “Look, we’ve both been through something traumatic here, and I think it’s probably best if we just take some time apart to pray about everything and sort out our feelings.”

  Courtney, being emotionally devastated from having been pushed down the stairs by life, would want to separate herself from anything that reminded her of little Miley Timberlake, and Ray would be free as a bird—a vulture, perhaps, but a bird nonetheless.

  If all that wasn’t enough to justify his actions, somehow Courtney had gotten it into her head that when her grandfather died, Ray would be moving in with her, a belief so immature he wondered if she also thought a fucking stork was going to deliver her baby.

  As Marvin’s only heir, Courtney stood to inherit his property as well as somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-five thousand dollars in cash and investments. A sum so immense, Courtney’s teenage brain could barely comprehend it.

  “You know, Ray, pretty soon I’m going to be rich, and that will be nice and all, but I’m still going to need major help getting the house ready for the baby. I was thinking Memaw’s old sewing room would be, like, the best nursery ever. And the bathrooms need to be totally redone, too.”