by Adam Rapp
“Hey,” I said, “is someone like watching you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t need nobody to watch me.”
“Do you like have parents?” I asked.
“I got a mom.”
“Where is she?”
“Workin’.”
“Does she know where you are?”
“Yeah. She picks me up every day here.”
“What’s she do?” I asked.
“She’s a professional dancer.”
“Like a dancer dancer?”
“Like for videos. Ballerinas and stuff. Can I get some more pop?”
I let June have the rest of my ginger ale. She drank it and then started chewing my ice.
Then the waitress came over with a pot of coffee and dropped my check.
“Don’t let this one bamboozle you,” she said, and turned and limped to the other side of the diner, where she poured coffee for the elderly lady who was reading the paperback.
June chewed some more ice and went, “So you wanna go to the movies with me?”
I said, “Like the movies movies?”
“Yeah, like Star Trek and Forrest Glum and stuff.”
“What about your mom?”
“What about her?”
“Isn’t she coming to pick you up?”
“Oh, she don’t come till later.”
“I don’t have much money,” I said.
It was rude of me to lie to a little girl, I admit, but I had to start thinking long-term. At this point I had no idea where I was going to spend the night. I figured if nothing came along, I could get a room at the YMCA.
“I got money,” June said, producing a crinkled one-hundred-dollar bill from some secret fold in her pickle shirt. She smoothed it on the table. Ben Franklin looked like he’d just gotten his hair done. It was totally wavy like a woman’s.
I left five bucks on the table and grabbed my bag.
Before we left, June ran into the bathroom.
The heavyset guy was guzzling ice water now and the waitress was setting another piece of apple pie in front of him. Man, that guy could put it away.
A moment later, June returned from the bathroom with a roll of toilet paper. “In case we cry,” she said, handing it to me. I stuffed it into my bag and she took my hand.
As we were leaving, the elderly lady with the sad gray eyes started laughing into her book. Something was so funny she could have died right there and gone to heaven. It was weird, though, because she had this totally ugly, over-the-top man’s laugh. I could practically feel it crawling on my skin.
16.
June took me to this movie about a crippled boy who finds a magic horse in the field behind his family’s farmhouse. The kid has to use these metal crutches to walk, and it’s obvious that you’re supposed to start feeling totally sorry for him in the first scene when he tries to kick a half-deflated tetherball and falls flat on his face in a pile of pig feces.
We tried to get into the spy movie with the Scottish guy in the Lamborghini, but the girl at the counter wouldn’t sell the tickets to us because it was rated NC-17.
June bought a big tub of popcorn and fell asleep on my shoulder about ten minutes after the opening credits.
During the movie, I kept thinking about the blue wall and my dad and my mom dying and Welton and how totally screwed up everything was over in East Foote. For some reason I started crying. I can cry pretty well without any sound. It gets all trapped in my throat and it makes me feel like my face is going to burst, but it’s a good technique, especially when there’s a little kid sleeping on your shoulder. I removed June’s toilet paper from my bag. I probably used half the roll wiping my face.
After the movie, I shook June, who was still like totally snoring on my shoulder. There was a little pool of saliva on the sleeve of my squirrel-with-human-testicles T-shirt.
“Rise and shine,” I said.
June nodded and got up and walked up the aisle like I wasn’t even there. For a second I thought she might have been sleepwalking, so I followed her out. First she got a drink from the water fountain and then she turned this circle all sleepy and disoriented and went into the women’s bathroom.
In the lobby there were all these families buying popcorn and candy. This one little kid with a Sammy Sosa T-shirt kept begging his dad for a quarter. He wanted to play this awesome deer-hunting game called Big Buck Hunter II, but his dad kept ignoring him and going on and on to a friend about the stock market and how much money he was going to make on some new dot-com company.
“Post-crash and everything,” he kept saying. “Who would’ve thought? A dot-commer.”
The little kid had a crewcut and huge ears. You could totally tell that his dad made him get the crewcut, too, like he was being groomed for the Marines or whatever. The kid had that kind of blond hair that looks almost white. He tugged at his dad’s belt about three more times but he couldn’t get his attention, so I yelled at him.
I said, “Give the kid a quarter!”
Man, I never do stuff like that. It just sort of blurted out of me. That’s how you get into fistfights, and I’m definitely not a fighter.
The kid’s dad stopped talking to his friend and just sort of stared at me. His eyes were hard and little, like they had been drilled into his skull with a screw gun. He looked like so many of the other dads in Foote. Magazine hair. Clothes the color of ice cream. Shoes from that men’s store in the mall. The perfect white teeth. It was like some artist had sculpted them or whatever.
“Why don’t you mind your own frigging business, smart guy,” the kid’s dad said. He was short, but he had one of those necks. Like he was captain of the rugby team or something. His crewcut went thin at the top of his head. He was probably one of those totally senseless guys who head-butts the refrigerator on a daily basis.
His wife put her hand on his shoulder, but he brushed it off all macho-like. Then she put it back on and said something that they say on TV when a woman’s trying to stop her husband from fighting.
That’s when I gave him the finger, which surprised me even, and he made a quick move toward me, but his Internet friend practically jumped on his back, and then his wife dropped this big tub of popcorn and it was suddenly everywhere.
I stood there and glared at Dad in his Dockers and his nice plaid summer shirt and his mahogany tan and his cell phone stuck to the side of his belt like some kind of electric black bug that he couldn’t get rid of. The bald spot on the top of his head was so red it looked like it would pop. He was leering at me like he wanted to slaughter me and feed me to his family.
“Easy, Jack. Easy now, buddy, it’s not worth it,” the Internet friend said to him. Then to me he said, “Nice shirt. Real mature.”
The guy behind the refreshments counter offered the wife another tub of popcorn, and she nodded and thanked him and told him how sweet he was.
“Don’t even look at the freak,” the Internet friend told the kid’s dad. “Don’t even look at him.”
Then the kid’s dad got himself together and brushed off his pants and pinched the creases.
It had been about ten minutes since June disappeared into the women’s bathroom. I was starting to worry. I was tempted to go in after her, but all these elderly women kept staring me down. They had just come out from that sequel about the senior citizens who get sucked up into a spaceship.
“What’s in the bag?” the kid’s dad shouted at me. “A bomb?”
Then this manager with a clip-on tie finally came out to calm the crowd. The guy looked more like an undertaker than someone who ran a multiplex movie theater. He was really tall — way taller than me, maybe like six nine or something — and he slouched so badly I thought he had some sort of medical condition.
The kid’s dad explained the situation to the manager, and he and his wife and his friend pointed at me several times, and the manager nodded and apologized for my behavior and offered them a bunch of free tickets, whic
h they accepted with hearty handshakes. After that, the movie manager guy took a few steps toward me and pointed.
“Move along now, friend,” he said.
“I’m waiting for someone,” I explained.
“Who exactly are you waiting for?”
“My little sister,” I said. “She’s in the bathroom.”
“This is a public theater, where everyone deserves to seek out entertainment in peace,” he said. He was obviously doing everything he was supposed to under the circumstances.
For some reason, his speech made me want to sit right on the water fountain, so that’s what I did.
“Hey, now!” the manager cried. “You can’t sit on that!”
Fortunately June came out or I’m sure he would’ve called the cops. She still looked sort of dazed, and she was holding a new roll of toilet paper.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” I said. “You okay?”
“This old lady wouldn’t come out of the crapper. She was like changing her wig and stuff.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
June took my hand, and we walked toward the glass doors. Just as we passed that family, I removed a quarter from my pocket and tossed it to the little kid. He caught it and turned it in his hand.
“Give me that!” his dad demanded, and the kid handed him the quarter.
That guy hated me so much it was making him crazy. I had ruined his afternoon, and I must admit that I was glad. Later that evening, at home, he would punch a hole in the wall in the bedroom — I could just see it. Then all of their wedding pictures would fall off the dresser. And after that he and his Internet friend would come searching for me in his Ford Explorer. The thought made me paranoid and itchy.
Outside, the heat was on us like an animal.
“You missed a good movie,” I told June.
“I watched it,” she said. “It was about a dog, right?”
We headed back toward the diner.
“Hey, lemme have a cigarette,” June said as we crossed the street. She could obviously see my Camel Lights sticking out of my back pocket.
I said, “You’re way too young to smoke.”
She said, “So are you.”
Which was true at that point.
“I don’t even inhale,” she said. “C’mon, Steve, lemme have one.”
We stopped at the McDonald’s and sat at one of the picnic tables. Someone had overturned a Dumpster, and trash was everywhere. I handed June a Camel Light and lit it for her. And then I lit one for myself.
Man, most little kids smoke like their eyeballs itch, but June smoked like a film star. She would take these long drags and everything.
The streetlamps were starting to go on everywhere, and you could see moths and mosquitoes swirling.
“Hey, Steve,” June said. “What were you cryin’ about, anyway?”
I said, “What?”
“During the movie,” she said.
“I wasn’t crying.”
“Yes, you was. The movie wasn’t that good.”
“Finish your cigarette and I’ll walk you back to the diner.”
We smoked and watched the trash whip around for a few minutes. Trash will make some pretty interesting shapes if you watch it long enough. I thought maybe it was trying to tell me something. Like my future or whatever.
We walked back to the diner and stood outside waiting for her mom, who I wasn’t yet sure really existed. The heat was making things slide down the sides of buildings. It was like Foote was totally sweating or something.
Through the window of the diner, I could see the same waitress from before. She was carrying a full pot of coffee. She never actually poured it; she just sort of wandered around aimlessly with it, like some battery-powered Christmas toy.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” June asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Why?”
“You should come by. We could go see another movie. The one about those aliens.”
Just then this dark blue, totally lopsided Pinto pulled up in front of the diner. The windows were smoked ghetto-style, and you could see the streetlights sort of trapped in glass like bewildered fireflies.
“Let’s go, June-June!” a woman shouted from the driver’s side.
“Later,” June said, snapping twice, pinching the back of my arm as hard as she could, and then turning and running toward the car in another impressive multipart move. Man, this kid had more moves than those white R&B guys with all the music videos.
June got in and closed the door, and then the Pinto pulled off down the street, a cloud of silver exhaust sort of coughing out the back. The back license plate was missing, and although I know that’s illegal, I was just relieved to see that someone actually did come and pick June up.
After the Pinto disappeared, I looked through the window of Jack Palomino’s again. The waitress had set the pot of coffee down on a table, where it was burning through the linoleum. It would leave a black ring, but I supposed no one would mind much.
That old woman was still in there, reading the same paperback. She never slept, I thought; she just constantly read. Or maybe she was faking it the whole time. Maybe she never actually read a single word.
For some reason I had this fear that she was going to get locked in with that depressing waitress, and I wanted to bang on the window and scream at her to leave, but I didn’t. Instead, I turned and headed down the street.
It was that hour when everything starts to look not quite real. The trees. The parked cars. All the windows on the office buildings. It’s like someone drew it all on the back of a racing form or something.
I didn’t even know what direction I was heading. All I knew was that the sun was setting pretty quickly and I wanted to get somewhere before it was totally dark.
17.
Later it started to pour.
You’re probably thinking, Of course it poured, right? Well, I’m not simply trying to be dramatic — it really did pour, I swear.
And it started about three blocks before I got to the YMCA, so I was pretty much soaked by the time I got there.
In downtown Foote there’s the old Y and the new Y. The new Y is this totally blond-brick building with a big, overly lit, multicolored YMCA sign. It has one of those million-dollar Olympic pools and a yoga room and video games in the lobby and modern vending machines with ergonomic punch pads. It probably has like some totally user-friendly community e-mail room too.
From the parking lot, the old Y looks like some failed arsonist’s project. The limestone is stained and the windows are sooty black and the entrance looks totally untrustworthy and somehow rigged, like there’s a trapdoor just beyond the threshold. The building hogs an entire block, and it pretty much comes across as being either totally haunted or condemned.
On the inside, the old Y feels like some strange cross between a mental institution and a halfway house for war criminals. In the main room there’s a small collection of lopsided bumper-pool tables whose half-upholstered surfaces are choked with ashtrays and racing forms. Slashed and maimed chairs are randomly arranged among the bumper-pool tables like some weird furniture virus. Beached on these pathetic furnishings is a species of man not known to most. They are male, yes. They are vaguely conscious, yes. They are also semi-overweight, incredibly suspicious-looking hairy guys either half watching TV with the sound turned up too high or playing an endless game of poker. And most of them have at least one hand stuffed down their pants. They live in this room the way certain creatures inhabit square footage at the zoo.
Once Welton told me that people don’t go swimming at the old Y; these ageless freaks just take turns defecating in the pool.
It’s only like twelve bucks to stay the night, which worked perfectly well with my meager budget. When I asked for a room, the guy behind the desk studied me for about ten minutes before he spoke. I thought he was either deaf or stoned out of his mind. His teeth were the color of the parking lot.
I told h
im I got locked out of my house and that my parents were out of town. He nodded through most of it, and then when he finally gave me a key, his lips parted and for some reason he smiled this huge smile that revealed other fantastic mysteries of his mouth. For instance, there was this totally cancerous-looking black spot in the center of his tongue. I’d seen German shepherds with better mouths.
The towel he pushed toward me looked like something you’d use to wipe off a toilet seat. It was probably infested with VD. I gave him a twenty, and he pushed eight bucks back at me like it was something I had to eat.
“Clear out by eleven,” he instructed. “If you want the room another night, you gotta pay up by noon. Don’t use the machines on the fourth floor ’cause they’ll eat your money. And you gotta let the showers run for a minute before the hot water kicks in. And the elevator’s currently being serviced, so you gotta use the stairs.”
He rapped his knuckles on the desk a few times and added, “And no smoking in the room. If you wanna smoke, go to the corner lounge. Or come down here. You smoke?” he asked.
I was like, “Yeah, why?”
“Can I get a cigarette?”
I reached into my dad’s bag and produced a half-empty pack of Camel Lights. He took two and winked at me.
“I’ll get you back,” he said. He had already lit a match and started smoking by the time I turned and headed for the stairs.
My room was on the sixth floor.
Man, the stairwell smelled terrible. And it wasn’t exactly what you’d call well lit. Each time I got to a new floor, I felt like someone was going to like totally jump out and get all kung fu on me.
The room I got is best described as being a glorified closet. It was like four times worse than what they give you here at Burnstone Grove. The twin bed looked like some little kid had died in it. It was made up with these totally sad, urine-yellow sheets, a moth-eaten comforter, and a pillow that was about as fluffy as a folded dishrag. The mattress was lumpy and smelled like pets and weather.
Also featured in my twelve-dollar room were a metal desk-slash-dresser ensemble, a sink complete with rusty faucet and cracked mirror, and a small, overly painted closet door that I was afraid to open.
