by K. W. Jeter
Back when Lindy had shown up and asked for him-that golden moment-he'd managed to clear off Garza and the rest of his buddies. They'd been too dazzled by the sight in the flesh of a total number like her, as though she'd stepped out of the TV screen, to have put up any argument. Not just dazzled, but even a little scared-Doot still got a kick out of that, just thinking about it. What'd they think she was going to do, eat 'em up with her little white teeth? Christ, you would've thought they'd volunteer for that.
Maybe it was the fear of the unknown. There were a couple of girls in the high school who tried to pull it off, but you knew that underneath the hard-edged makeup and the drop-dead expressions, they were the same ones you'd gone through grade school with, back when they'd been scheming on getting their first training bras.
There were still bits of party debris around, though.
An empty beer can clattered away when his foot hit it. He'd have to finish getting this place cleared up and aired out-it still smelled like stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer-before his dad got back. Though if his dad showed up and the place still smelled like the Lysol atom bomb had gone off, he'd know that something had gone on here. Not to mention the dead giveaway of the missing cases of beer.
Shit-he'd have to think about it later. Right now he had something else on his mind. He carried the plastic water bottle, its contents sloshing back and forth, back to his bedroom.
A big utility table, the kind with the metal legs that folded up if anybody wanted to move it, served as a desk. It practically stretched from one side of the bedroom to the other; its whole six-foot length was covered with books and magazines, paper and all the other crap he accumulated. The good stuff, like all those library discards that Anne had paid a nickel apiece for and given to him-stacks of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a beat-up Kafka collection-had all sunk with their own weight through the levels, leaving a bunch of Playboys and silly-ass comic books floating on the surface. People around here thought that if you read The Dark Knight, it made you an intellectual.
Doot cleared a space on the table with his elbow, shoving a whole stack of stuff onto the floor. He set the bottle down, then sat on the bed a couple of feet away, between a pillow and a mound of his dirty laundry. He cupped his chin in his hands, looking at the white plastic, tinged darker by its contents.
On the wall above the table hung a poster of a Lamborghini Countach, shot three-quarters profile on a black background. A girl wearing nothing but a pussy-binder bikini and a full-face helmet lounged against the front left fender. Anne had used a heavy yellow marking pen to draw in a speech balloon coming from the woman: "I used to have existential angst, before I found this bucket to carry my brains around in." The words were a little hard to read against the shiny black.
He leaned forward to pick up the bottle and unscrewed the cap. The sulfur stink oozed out into the room. He dipped a finger into the bottle's neck and tasted the water.
"Christ." It made him gag. He scraped his tongue against his front teeth, trying to get the taste off.
Setting the bottle back down, he looked around the bedroom. He pushed himself up from the bed and walked over to his dresser.
A ten-gallon aquarium tank sat on top. Rust specked the chrome edges; the water, murky with algae, had evaporated a couple of inches down from the top, leaving white-streaked glass above. The air pump beside the tank sputtered and wheezed, sending up a thin stream of bubbles in one corner.
Doot tapped on the glass with his fingernail. "Hey… you guys still in there?" He sprinkled in a few bits of food every morning, more out of habit than anything else, but he hadn't actually checked on the tank's inhabitants in a long time. He'd grown out of his tropical-fish phase a couple years back, when a friend had cleaned out a tank and given him a pair of cichlids, a Jack Dempsey and a grey-striped one that he hadn't known the name of. Both of which had proceeded to annihilate practically everything in the tank-those fucking cichlids were killers.
A flash of pink moved through the tank's gloom. The survivors, two gouramis, were still swimming about. With nothing else in there with them, they had grown to a good size; they looked big as the palm of a baby's hand, and the same color.
He stood looking at the fish, as a minute ticked by. Then he went off to the kitchen, and came back with a roll of paper towels.
A double layer on the tabletop; he dug out an X-Acto knife from one of the cardboard boxes underneath and laid it down beside the plastic bottle.
"Come on, boy…" He splashed his hand around in the tank, cornering one of the fish. He carried the wriggling thing to the table and dropped it on the paper towels. It flopped back and forth, bending in its middle.
He picked up the knife. He took a deep breath and blew it out.
"Hate to do this to ya, fella." He shook his head, then brought the knife down, slowly and carefully. The point sank into the wet flesh, and he winced.
The sight of the fish thrashing, blood seeping into the paper towels, made him feel sick. He'd done one deep cut, a little over an inch long. The fish's innards showed through the new opening. The towels reddened, soaking up more.
He bit his lip, watching the fish's agony. None of this seemed like such a good idea now.
It finally lay still. He poked it with his finger. The fish twitched. It was alive, but just barely.
From the kitchen, he brought a clear glass mixing bowl, filled halfway with water from the tap. He set it down beside the dead fish. The plastic bottle already had its cap off; he picked it up and poured a splash into the bowl. He stopped when the water was tinged grey, as though somebody had emptied an ink pen into it. Picking the fish up by its back fin, he dropped it into the bowl. Blood from the cut seeped out and made a cloud around it as it sank.
He stepped back to watch.
The dying fish drifted in the murky water. It looked broken, hinged in the middle. The staring eyes came round toward Doot.
"Aw, fuck." He felt like an idiot. Five minutes had passed; he'd timed it by the alarm clock on top of the dresser, The time had gone by, and he'd felt sicker and sicker. The poor little bastard was probably dead by now.
Drowned, if the cut hadn't killed it; it seemed like a stupid way for a fish to go.
He felt even stupider. He sat down heavily on the side of the bed, shaking his head, disgusted with himself. He had killed an innocent gourami that hadn't wanted to do anything except paddle back and forth in a dirty ten-gallon tank for the rest of its life, and had proved what a jerk he was for making up and believing weird shit about that rotten water from out at the old clinic. This was turning out to be a long day. He flopped back onto the pillow, picking up an old Watchmen from the mess beside the bed and holding it in front of his eyes. He stared at the same page without turning it, not even trying to read the words.
Water splashed; he heard it. He lowered the comic and looked over toward the dresser. Probably left the lid off the tank, he figured. If the other gourami jumped out and expired on the floor, that'd be consistent with everything else that had happened.
The lid was on the tank. He could see the gourami swimming back and forth behind the green-mired glass.
Wait a minute. He swung his feet over and sat up on the bed, gripping the mattress with both hands. On the table, just a few feet away from him, in the bowl with the dark-tinged water…
The fish, the gourami he'd cut open with the X-Acto knife, barreled back and forth, its tail thrashing the water. Little dark flecks slopped over the rim.
"Sonuvabitch." He stood up and looked down at the bowl in amazement. "You little sucker."
In the dark water, the fish surged back and forth, its tail whipping in powerful strokes.
***
The trailers looked shabby, like cheap boxcars for an abandoned railroad line. The sign out at the front of the park called them mobile homes, but there weren't any of the fancy double-wides with covered carports that better-off people had. These were trailers.
All of them seemed to have sagging clothes
lines strung with women's underwear-old bras and strange-looking panty girdles with dead elastic. They looked strange to Doot, at least. They were a long way from what you saw in a Frederick's of Hollywood catalog.
And why did all the trailers have broken Big Wheels sitting in the too-long grass around them? He couldn't figure that one out. Didn't any of these kids ever get a new Big Wheel? And if it wasn't that, it was Bert and Ernie dolls, and Big Bird, that all looked as if they'd gone to war and come back with limbs shot off. Like the kids didn't play with them, but used them for target practice with their daddies' guns.
The motorbike sputtered down the trailer park's central lane. One old bat in a faded housedress and cat's-eye glasses, sitting sprawled in a lawn chair with busted webbing, glared at him as he went past.
He parked the bike at the end of the lane. From the carrier rack he unfastened a cardboard box. The water bottle was in there, sloshing around, down a couple of inches from when he'd first filled it up.
Noise poured out of the trailer's screen door. He could hear children squabbling-little kids, like five or six years old, their voices pitched so high it hurt his ears-and a TV set tuned to the soaps. He knocked on the door's thin aluminum frame, adding its clatter on top of the rest.
"Yo, Anne"-he knocked again-"you home?"
One of the kids started crying, a sobbing heat-irritated wail. A fan was droning in a window opposite, but not accomplishing much. These tin cans were like ovens, Doot knew.
"Just a minute!" The shout came from deeper inside the trailer.
He stood waiting, the box in his arms. One of the kids, face damp with recent tears, came up to the screen and looked out at him.
Anne had to push the kid out of the way to get to the door. Her face lit up when she saw him.
"Hey, Doot-how you been?" She unlatched the door and swung it open. "Come on in."
The trailer had that smell of sour milk and a trash can tucked somewhere full of used Pampers, which Doot always associated with lots of rug rats running around. There seemed to be even more of her little brothers and sisters than the last time he'd come here; Anne's step-dad should've tied a ribbon on it a long time ago. The screen door clapped shut behind him, trapping them in the trailer's dimly lit heat.
He shrugged. "Been okay, I guess." It seemed like a long time since he'd come by to see her.
She had on her usual faded jeans and too-big T-shirt. This one said Precision Castparts on it. "Whattaya got?" She nodded toward the box.
"Got something to show you." He held the box up. "Something you'll think is, uh, interesting."
"Oh?" Anne tilted her head and raised an eyebrow. "Come on back here, then."
One of the kids was flopped stomach down on the bed in Anne's room, playing with a couple of Transformers. Anne grabbed the kid's ankles and swung him around, half off the bed.
"Come on, squirt-ee-o, beat it. Me and my buddy Doot have some stuff to talk about."
She hurried him along with a hand between his shoulder blades. Soon as the kid was out the door, she sat down beside Doot on the bed.
"Hey, it's good to see you." She gave him a punch in the arm. "I haven't seen you since graduation-I mean, if you'd been there."
Her leg was right next to his, and he felt its warmth going through the two layers of denim. He got a twitch, but nothing approaching a hard-on, nothing that he had to hide. He could if he'd wanted to-he had in the past-by thinking about different pieces of her. She had a nice pair underneath the big loose t-shirt. And the legs and the butt were all nice enough, too. She'd even been the first girl he'd ever kissed, way back in sixth grade. But that had been before he'd learned what all of his buddies had already seemed to know. That you weren't supposed to go for girls who didn't wear makeup and had their hair cropped shaggy-short instead of in one of those big stiff, tangled fluffs. And who played tympani in the school orchestra, and got B's and A's-at least when she wasn't telling the English teacher to go fuck herself for calling Emily Dickinson a man-hating spinster. Most of the high school's girls had already figured that teacher out as something of a dyke, anyway. She was always standing behind their chairs when they'd be taking a test and trying to look down their blouses. The dyke label got tossed at Anne, too-probably because of the short hair and the fact she'd waited until her sophomore year to start shaving her legs-but she hadn't given a fuck about that, either. She'd told Doot a long time ago that she was planning on blowing this whole popsicle stand.
He laid his hands on top of the cardboard box. "I didn't know if you'd be here or not. I thought maybe you'd already left."
She shook her head. "Naw, those National Merit people only gave me a partial scholarship. I gotta stay here till September, maybe get a job and save up some money."
"You still going to go premed?"
"Yeah. Going to try to, at any rate."
Doot unfolded the box's flaps. "That's why I brought this over. I figured it was something you'd think was, um, pretty wild."
She made space on her desk in the room's corner, not shoving the books and papers off but stacking them neatly on the floor. Doot started taking the things out of the box and setting them out.
Anne picked up the plastic bottle with the dark water rolling back and forth inside. She unscrewed the cap and sniffed.
"Jeez!" Her nose wrinkled in disgust. "What's this stuff?"
"Hold on. You'll see." He had brought a couple of paper towels and laid them on the desk top. From the box he took ajar filled with clear tap water. The other gourami from his aquarium swam around in the jar. He reached in-the jar's mouth was just big enough to squeeze his wrist through-and caught the fish. He laid it wriggling on the paper towels.
Anne watched him dubiously as he picked up the X-Acto knife. He'd wiped its blade clean.
"You know, Doot, I've seen dissections before." She folded her arms across her breasts. "Remember, when we were lab partners in biology class? We did the little froggie on the board?" She shrugged. "I mean, I did the little froggie. You chickened out."
He didn't answer her. Knife in hand, he bent over the fish on the desk.
A shake of her head. "It's not really, you know, ethical to go cutting up some poor animal, for no good reason-"
He brought the knife point down. "I got a good reason. Just hang on."
A moment later, he stepped back from the desk. The knife's edge was bloodied. He reached down and lifted the clear glass mixing bowl from the cardboard box.
"You'll see…"
The tap water splashed into the bowl. Then he poured from the plastic bottle until the water was tinged grey. He stirred it with his hand, then dropped in the gourami. It floated a couple of inches below the surface, bleeding and twitching.
Anne bent down, bringing her face close to the side of the bowl. The fish had stopped moving, drifting now in the cloud of its own blood.
"Way to go." She turned her head, looking up at Doot. "You've killed some poor goddamn guppy. Am I supposed to applaud now, or what?"
He smiled, tapping the edge of the bowl with his finger. "Hang on."
The fish looked dead now, the cut raw in its side. Anne stepped away, shaking her head. "I don't know, Doot. Maybe you've been out in the sun too long…"
A splash of water. Then another, as though someone had flicked the surface with a finger.
Anne looked over her shoulder, eyes widening. "What the fuck-"
They both bent down, on either side of the bowl. He saw her face bent and magnified, the amazed look even bigger.
"Sonuvabitch," said Anne. "That's wild…"
Between their faces, the fish swam back and forth in the dark-tinged water, swerving against the bowl's curved glass.
EIGHTEEN
"It's quiet out here, you know?" Lindy laid her head against Mike's shoulder. Her last hit was fading away, leaving her in peace. "Real quiet," she murmured. "I've never been anywhere it's this quiet."
They were sitting on the steps outside the clinic, the ones leading up to the
verandah. The sun had just started to lower behind the hills, pouring a pink-tinged radiance across the dry valley fields. A hawk drew a slow wheel in the distant sky.
She glanced at Mike beside her, but he didn't seem to have heard her. His face was all dark and broody.
"I always lived in the city." The chemical drift made the words come rolling out of her. "With everybody screaming at you all the time. Not like it is here."
She closed her eyes, so she could just feel him next to her and not have to see him scowling all slit-eyed at the landscape.
"I could learn to like it out here… It's so peaceful. You know what I mean."
Her head snapped to the side as Mike shoved her away from himself. She opened her eyes and saw him looking with disgust at her.
"What the fuck are you talking about?" The corner of his mouth curled. "Are you kidding? This fucking place is a dump. You want to become like the assholes who live out here?" Flecks of spit showed white on his lips as he yelled at her. "Like that stupid kid that comes around? Is that what you want?" He turned away from her, shoulders hunched. "Yeah, peace and quiet-peace and quiet until your fuckin' brain turns to Jell-o."
She had shrunk back from him, from the force of his wrath. Trembling, she watched him squeeze his hands into white-knuckled fists.
***
Doot gave Anne the binoculars. They were a pair his dad used for spotting deer whenever he went out during hunting season. "Down there," he said, pointing.
Lying on her stomach beside him, Anne propped herself up on her elbows and scanned the territory below. She spoke as she kept the binoculars up to her eyes.
"You got it from that old place?" She peered into the rubber eyecups. "Where?"
They were keeping low in the dry grass at the top of the hill, to avoid being spotted. Doot slapped away a bug that had been itching at his chest. They'd had to wait until Anne's mother had come home from work, to take over watching all the younger kids, before they'd been able to come out here, Anne riding behind him on the motorbike.
