by Averil Dean
The back door opens. A small, dark-haired man steps outside, wearing a grease-stained apron with the Roadhouse logo on the front. With him comes a draft of warm air, carrying the stench of stale grease and smoke and the earthy scent of fried potatoes. The man sees me and grins.
“Jenny,” he says, arms open, head tilted. “Hey, baby, where you been?”
I stand and embrace him, let him kiss my cheeks. His are soft, sticky, like a child’s.
“Here and there. Are you off work?”
“I look like I’m off?” He gestures down at his apron. “Some of us got to punch a clock.”
“Shit, that’s too bad,” I say as if this is news to me. I remember Amado’s schedule well, and have timed my visit accordingly. “I’ve got a little smoke, thought you could help me burn it.”
He clucks his tongue. “Don’t need to be off the clock for that. I got fifteen minutes—you can get me right for the rest of my shift.”
We go across the lot to my car, push the seats back and light up the joint. He turns toward me, propping his arm on the seat and his head on his fist, his brown skin tinged blue from the light of my dashboard radio. The strands of his hair pick up the color like optical fibers, straight and flat across his brow. After spending so much time around Jack, Amado’s body seems formless, his fingers smooth as a young girl’s. But I know from past experience that Amado’s appetites are as insistent as any man’s, and I see from the way he’s eyeing me that he hasn’t given up the dream.
“So how’ve you been?” I ask. “Still playing games?”
He launches predictably into a long, involved tale about his online gaming life. I have no idea what he’s talking about and I’m too keyed up to keep track of the complicated rules and anonymous opponents, but it doesn’t matter. I listen, keep him smoking, make sympathetic noises. Amado is a puppy, a forty-year-old puppy who lives for his mother and the occasional scratch behind the ear.
I met him more than a year ago when I first followed Ray to the Roadhouse. I feigned a shy and distant romantic interest in Ray, and to keep me from losing my heart, Amado revealed all the dirt he could find on his coworker. He told me about Ray’s drug habits, his skirt-chasing, the sleazy way he’d managed to get Jack Calabrese thrown in prison. It was Amado’s gossip that got me thinking hard about Jack.
“So,” I say as we get down to the roach, “do you happen to know where I can find Ray?”
He blinks at me. His eyes are glazed, and filled with sudden disappointment. He leans his head against the headrest, and something in the gesture reminds me of my mother.
“You still hung up on that dude, nena?”
I smile and shake my head. “He has something for me.”
Amado groans. “You, too? Every chick I know is a crackhead now.”
“Yeah, well. Where’s he working now, A?”
He sighs, gazing at me across the small space between us. The need in his eyes is palpable, transparent, as he means it to be. But behind that is something vulnerable. I think of the men Jack described in prison, always dreaming about pussy. Jerking off alone every night, remembering how it felt to be next to a woman. Inside her. Watching her come. You don’t know, oh, you don’t even know....
I take Amado’s hand in mine and lay it upturned on my knee. There is a burn mark on his wrist and another on the side of his thumb. I stroke his palm, trace the creases and lines. His fingers flatten and open out, his breath accelerates. I raise his hand to my mouth, press a kiss into his palm, slide his whole hand inside the neckline of my shirt, under my bra.
He sighs out a stream of Spanish words. His fingers curve around my breast, and my nipple stiffens against his palm. He strokes the slope of my breast with his thumb, reaches lower to nestle the side of his hand against my ribs. His gaze moves up to mine.
“We all need something,” I tell him.
I can’t give him more than this. He will go home to his mother’s apartment after a night of grease burns and barked orders and he’ll think of my breast in his hand, the texture of my skin. He’ll take his dick in his fist and stroke and move and come, thinking of me—of how much more he wanted that I wouldn’t give him, maybe, but it could be that I’m the trigger for him to get the hell out in the world, meet a woman, have a life beyond the one he’s built inside the playground of his internet games.
I hope so. I’ve always liked Amado.
* * *
The next morning, I drive to the range with the leather man’s gun in my purse.
My palms are sweaty. I rub them on my thighs and walk up to the wooden huts, where two groups of men are shooting. One group is older, three guys in plaid I take to be hunters practicing for the season, maybe trying out some new equipment. They each carry a rifle. The two younger men at the hut to the right are shooting handguns.
I sit on the hood of my Chevy, watching the way the young men load their revolvers and get them ready to fire. I notice how they hold the guns. Arms straight, one hand cupped around the butt, one finger curled around the trigger. A slow squeeze, a loud bang that makes me jump.
The report is much louder than I expected. A dangerous whiplash of sound. I imagine the bullet hurtling through space, too fast to see, ripping into flesh with a small explosion of blood or brain matter. The thought of it nauseates me. My mouth waters and I swallow hard to clear it. I need to try.
I go to the end of the row, into the last shack, and set my gun on the wooden shelf. I wipe my clammy palms again, and fumble in my pocket for a bullet. After a moment, I figure out how to open the cylinder, slide the bullet inside the chamber, close it and disengage the safety. I cock the hammer.
My hands tremble as I raise the gun and point it at the tree stump with a crude plywood target nailed to the center. A wave of nausea rises in me. I fight it back, hold my breath and pull the trigger. The gun kicks in my hands. For a moment I can almost see the blood—the soft, fragile, human insides. The thick wet splatter, lumped with tissue and shards of bone.
My mouth fills again with hot water, and this time there is no swallowing it back. I stagger around the wall of the shack and vomit into the soft green grass at the edge of the forest. Gagging, upended, my stomach heaves again and again, until there is nothing left inside me.
The men down the way are concerned, calling, “Hey, are you okay?” But I can’t answer. I’m too ashamed. This was my last hope and I can’t do it, no matter how much it needs to be done, no matter that it’s my responsibility. I think of the little girls and the gray house and my mother and everything Nana taught me, and still it’s not enough. I can’t do this.
I lean my head on the rough wooden siding and close my eyes.
Jack...
* * *
When my stomach settles, I put the revolver in my purse and drive to Jensen Point. It’s a cloudless day and the sand is dotted with children. I stand for a few minutes at the edge of the pines, watching a potbellied toddler collect shells in an old tin bucket. With each addition, he peers over the rim as if he can’t believe the wealth he’s accumulated. Finally the bucket becomes too heavy and he drops it. The shells spill out and he plops down next to them, sobbing, his cries like that of a strange young bird.
It’s hard to believe Jack was once this small, that all grown men were babies at one time, then toddlers, and knobby-limbed boys on the playground, with outsized teeth and cowlicked hair. They used to cry, their cheeks ruddy and glazed with tears. I look at the toddler’s sand-dusted roundness and try to reconcile it with Jack’s gridded abdomen and the solid heft of his shoulders, the thick pad of muscle at the base of his thumb, the depth of his voice. That this little boy will someday be a grown man seems an alien concept today.
I adjust my canvas purse over my shoulder and stroll past the silvery driftwood to the piled-up outcropping at the far end of the beach, where low tide has bared the mollusk-
encrusted rocks and left pools of flat, still water in the crevices. I wander among them, stopping to investigate a fat, four-armed starfish and a pair of crabs that face off like tiny duelists, thrusting and parrying, feinting and scurrying along the barnacles. I put a finger between them but the combatants ignore it, determined to continue the squabble.
I shake the droplets off my hand and watch them scatter across the surface of the tide pool. As the ripples melt together and smooth away, I see my face reflected, shimmering on the water—and over my shoulder, Jack’s.
I flinch, my thoughts darting immediately to the gun in my purse, and almost fall into the water. Jack catches me around the elbow and helps me to my feet.
“Jesus.” I turn to him, moving gingerly over the rocks. “You scared me.”
He steadies me but does not apologize.
“What are you doing here?” My voice is too high and too fast. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
He backs up a step, takes a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his dusty flannel shirt, taps one out and offers it to me. I shake my head.
“Why are you worried about where I should be?” he says. “Are you where you’re supposed to be?”
The weight of my purse is dragging on my shoulder. I switch the strap to the other side, farther from him. My chest feels strangely hollow. The sea air sweeps into my lungs but doesn’t seem to fill them.
He squints at me sideways as he lights the cigarette, cupping his hand around the flame. “You have something you want to tell me, Alice?”
His expression makes me uneasy. This is an odd place for either of us to be, alone in the middle of the day. Guilt makes me rise to the attack.
“No, Jack, I don’t. How about you tell me why you followed me here?”
He smiles around his cigarette. “You really need me to spell it out?”
“You don’t trust me.”
“Sure I do. What’s not to trust?”
I glance around at the innocent beach full of small children and pointedly back at him.
“Living a blameless life, aren’t you, sweetheart,” he says.
“Except when I follow you.”
“Mmm, but who’s following now?”
He drags on the cigarette, half smiling, gazing at me down the line of his cheekbone. Clearly he knows or senses some deception. But I won’t be trapped. If he knows something about where I’ve been today, he’s going to have to say it out loud. I’m not going to hand him the information.
I brush past him and pick my way across the rocks, through the tangles of bone-gray driftwood, and retrace my steps across the beach. When I glance over my shoulder, I expect to see him close behind me, or watching from the rocks.
But he is gone.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I’m dreaming of Nana.
We’re back in the trailer with the beaded curtains, but in my dream it looks more like my house or Jack’s. I know it’s Nana’s house because she is at the stove, stirring a pot of soup. She turns to me and smiles. I’m on the other side of the kitchen counter, waiting for my bowl to be filled.
What kind of soup is it, Nana?
She smiles, a stranger’s smile that frightens me. She dips her ladle into the pot and sets a bowl in front of me.
Floating in the broth is the hairless, grinning head of a dog, its lips pulled back over pale pink gums, its skin boiled and ragged, like a pig fetus in formaldehyde. Its eye is clouded and blue, rolling freakishly in the socket.
My stomach turns. I recoil in nausea and dread.
Eat your soup, Alice. It will make you strong.
But I recognize this dog.
It wasn’t fit to live, Nana says. She has poisoned it and boiled it in a pot.
I can’t eat it, Nana, the poison will kill me, too.
No, lovey, it will make you strong.
In the bowl, the dog’s eye stares through the oil-smeared broth. And I know it’s somehow alive—and can see me.
The eye blinks.
I run out the door and into the street, where I stop to look back. Nana’s window frames are filled with spiderwebs instead of glass. Behind them, the house is burning. Nana is trapped inside. I see her face at the window, engulfed in flames.
I wake up screaming, clammy and nauseated, the sheet clinging like wet cobwebs to my skin.
Jack is there, awake but disoriented. He thinks at first there’s an intruder in the house and reaches for the crowbar he keeps by the bed. I’m clawing at the sheet, my feet bicycling, kicking the covers away.
He pulls me into his arms. I try to push him away but he won’t let go.
“Shh, it’s just a bad dream. Shh...”
I turn and bury my face in his shoulder. He holds me that way until I’ve stopped shaking. Then we share a small bowl of weed and he settles me into the bed. He goes back to sleep, but I lie there listening to him breathe, watching the pine trees take shape against the brightening sky.
After he leaves for work, I scoot to his side of the bed and bury my nose in his pillow, thinking of the way he looked at me yesterday as we stood beside the tide pools, the easy suspicion, eyes narrow and mouth smiling. He took me out to dinner last night as if nothing had happened, but followed me into the ladies’ room and locked the door behind him, lifted me to the counter and fucked me right there, with the faucets turned on and his lips at my ear.
“I’ll always find you,” he said.
Whether he meant it as a threat or a promise, I don’t know.
Finally, I give up on sleep, get dressed and into my car and drive up-island, to the suburban neighborhood where Nana’s trailer once stood. Now the land is covered with a cluster of pastel-colored houses with neatly trimmed lawns and squared-off boxwood. But the trailhead is still there. I park my car and start up the path, where as a child I used to walk looking down, seeking out snails and iridescent beetles on my way to the Red Ranger bicycle in the tree. Here in the forest, nothing has changed. The path turns and switches back under a canopy of moss-draped branches and spiked fingers of pine, where the scent of loam overwhelms the briny scent of the sea. I pass a grove of small trees and stop in front of the Vashon bike. Two young boys are looking up, circling the tree.
The bike is smaller than I remember and not as far off the ground. Someone has replaced the front wheel. The new one is the right size and shape, but too shiny. The bike is a patchwork now, a revisiting of the original injustice, an insistence on keeping the tragedy alive. I wonder how long it will take before the bike is vandalized again, and how long after that before someone reassembles it.
The boys are arguing about why the bike was left here.
“My dad says the kid went off to war and never came back,” says the blond boy.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” says the boy in the cap. “It’s a little kid’s bike.”
This is inarguable. The bike is small enough to be ridden by a five-year-old.
“Maybe he died,” says the blond wistfully. “Maybe he got run over at the tracks, and now he haunts the bike.”
There is a silence. Then one of them says, matter-of-fact:
“Or maybe he just forgot where he left it.”
* * *
At noon, I pick up some deli sandwiches and go to Jack’s work site.
He’s on the roof when I arrive, silhouetted against the chalkboard sky, moving nimbly along the spine of the skeleton house that someone else designed, where someone else’s dreams will live or die, where children will be born and grow and where they’ll sit for hours, staring out the windows. Where secrets will be kept—because what is a house, after all, but a very large box?
I get out of my car and navigate the gauntlet of scrap lumber and mud and knowing looks from the crew, to stand on what will be someone’s front lawn. The groun
d sinks under my feet, squelching around my shoes.
I call Jack’s name.
He’s surprised, and gratifyingly pleased to see me.
I hold up the lunch bag. “How about a date?”
“Mick’s gonna be so disappointed.”
He climbs down, and we sit on his tailgate with my picnic. I turn my face to the sky, wishing for some warmth from the sun. Summer has come and gone in a flash, hazy and fleeting as it used to be when I was a child. Now the days are shortening and the nights are chilly.
“So what was that dream about last night?” he says.
I shake my head. The dream left me with an inexplicable but overwhelming sense of shame; the last thing I want is to relate it to Jack.
“I can’t remember. Something about work, maybe.”
“You haven’t said much about the writing lately. How’s it going?”
I light a cigarette and shrug. “Well, there’s no shortage of words, but a definite lack of coherence. Gus keeps saying I should take a break. So I’m taking one.”
“For how long?”
“No idea. Until inspiration strikes?”
He points a corner of sandwich at me. “Thought it was you who said there’s no such thing as a muse, that it’s all just a lot of hard work.”
I wobble my head. Writing is unexplainable, one thing today and something else tomorrow. I need to finish the final book in the Zebra series and send it to my editor so I can move on to something new. The ideas are coming at me fast and hot, but even as I write them down, I’m conscious of a deeper story brewing underneath.
“How about this,” he says. “We’ll take the motorcycle, drive down the coast and find a place to stay for the weekend. By the time we get home, you’ll be walking funny and so ready to get me off you, writing will seem like the easiest thing you’ve ever done.”
“You’re always trying to put something big and fast between my legs.”
“Who said anything about fast?”
* * *
The motel is small and trim, perched like a sugar cube on the rim of a rocky cliff. The wind rises around us, a cool shock on my face when Jack parks the motorcycle and we take off our helmets. While he goes to the front desk to check in, I wander down the path to the cliff’s edge and stand looking over the sea and the creaming surf below.
