The Speed Queen

by Stewart O'Nan

  He waited until Mister Fred Fred, the graveyard guy, came in. You’d love Mister Fred Fred, he’s a whole book in himself. They hired him as part of this outpatient placement thing the state was doing. He was basically nuts. He had this notebook he was filling up with scientific formulas to prove something about the planets. He showed me the diagram once. All the planets were lined up right in line with Oklahoma City—really with Mister Fred Fred. In a circle in a corner there was a smaller diagram showing this lightning bolt going through his head. He was trying to prove the planets were doing something to him, that they were against him somehow. I don’t know what he thought anyone was going to do about it if he actually proved it.

  I gave Mister Fred Fred his name. Really he gave it to himself, I was just there when he did it. This counselor guy brought him over from Nancy Daniels, this group home. All he had to do to get the job was fill out this application. Stan the manager brought him in the back of the booth to do it. His hair wasn’t completely combed, it was kind of fluffed up in back like he’d been sleeping on it. The counselor guy was saying everyone thought Fred was ready for this big step and how generous it was of us and everything, and meanwhile Fred is filling out the form all by himself. I go in back to get a box of Milky Ways, and on my way out I look over his shoulder. The only thing he’s filled out is his name. He’s circled Mr. First name: Fred; last name: Fred. The rest is blank.

  That first night Lamont drove me home, Mister Fred Fred came in with his notebook. All he ever said was hello; after that it was like you weren’t there. I always said a little extra, thinking it might trigger something. Now remember Mister Fred Fred, because he comes back later.

  So I close out my register and sign the tape and slip it into the safe. Mister Fred Fred is already ringing people up. “Good night,” I say real loud, and go outside and wait for Garlyn to pick me up.

  But I’m not really waiting for her, I’m waiting for Lamont to come over and offer me a ride. I like that he doesn’t right away. The 442 has tinted glass; under the lights the purple turns black, you can’t see a thing.

  Then he starts the car. It’s like an animal, it makes my heart jump. The lights shine right on me. It’s silly—I already want him—but it’s sweet.

  He pops the clutch and the 442 leaves a streak. It lunges and then stops right in front of me, the exhaust popping. I still can’t see anything through the windows.

  The passenger door swings open, letting out some vintage MC5. It’s like high school, I’m thinking, but so what?

  I look around one last time for Garlyn, then get in.

  His eyes are the same as the other night, just sucking me in. He smiles and gives me those fangs of his.

  “So,” he says. “Where you want to go?”

  I forgot to tell you about Jody-Jo. He didn’t make it to Edmond with us. One day he laid down under the glider and died. Nobody noticed until after supper. Usually he’d clean up under the table by licking the rug. It was disgusting. My mom called him but he didn’t come. She found him under the glider and thought he was asleep. She stuck her foot under and pushed his shoulder. She did it again, then knelt down.

  “Get your father,” she said.

  My dad came out and put one hand on Jody-Jo’s neck, like he was trying to take his pulse.

  “It doesn’t look good,” he said.

  My mom was hugging herself, holding her elbows like she was cold. I remember that because she did the same thing at my trial.

  My dad got up and held her. “He lived a long life,” he said, like it was an accomplishment for a dog. He squeezed her and then turned her toward the door, an arm over her shoulder, and I could see he wanted us to all go inside.

  My mom went in to finish the dishes while I watched TV. This was way before cable, and out near Depew there wasn’t much of a choice of stations. Outside, the glider clanked and screeched. There was some nature show on—animals eating each other—and I went to the front window to see if I could see my dad.

  He was wearing my mom’s gardening gloves. He had a big trash bag he was trying to stuff Jody-Jo into. He had the twist tie in his teeth. Jody-Jo’s back legs kept flopping out. My dad lifted the bag off the floor to get him all in, then closed the mouth, spun it around and fastened the tie. The bag held air like a balloon. When he set it down it toppled over. He threw the gloves on the glider and lit a cigarette, then after a few hits tossed it into the yard. He grabbed the stem of the bag and dragged it across the floorboards. Before he made it to the stairs, it ripped, and one of Jody-Jo’s legs fell out. My dad saw it but didn’t stop. He bumped the bag down the stairs and hauled it across the yard all the way to the road, where he leaned it against some other bags. Then he came back and put the glider back where it was supposed to go and brought my mom’s gloves in.

  That morning the county garbage truck woke me up, the back of it grinding. I went to my window and watched its lights blinking. The two guys riding the back had sweatshirts with hoods on. They threw the bags in and climbed on again and the truck pulled away.

  At breakfast my mom said Jody-Jo was buried behind the chicken house. Later we took some flowers out. My mom stuck them in the turned dirt like they might grow.

  “Dad put him in the trash,” I said. “The garbage truck squished him.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” she said. “If you keep making up stories, no one’s going to believe anything you say.”

  I know that’s not really interesting, but a year before that, my dad hit Jody-Jo with my mom’s car. It was an accident. Jody-Jo liked to run out and jump around my mom’s car when she came home, like he was saying hi. This particular day my dad’s old Polara was in the shop, so he was driving the Toronado, and Jody-Jo thought it was her. What Jody-Jo did was he’d run right at her car and she’d stop and he’d come around to her window and give her a kiss. So when the Toronado pulled in he ran right at it. My dad must have thought Jody-Jo would swerve at the last second, because he ran right over him. My dad said he heard a thump and then stopped. Jody-Jo was okay though, he just had a big knot on his head.

  Maybe you could put those two things together. They were both accidents, but my dad really didn’t like him. I don’t know, it’s just a suggestion. You know what you’re doing, I don’t.

  6

  No, I hadn’t done that many drugs before Lamont. I was pretty conservative. I smoked weed all through high school but everyone does that. Drank beer, a little vodka, just on the weekends. It was pretty tame. I used to do downs when I could get them—Percodan, Percocet, bootleg Quaaludes. Percocet and gin used to be my favorite. I could watch TV for hours that way. Saturdays we’d go over to Mary Alice Tompkins’ house and watch the Sooners destroy somebody. By halftime it didn’t even matter. But that was just fun stuff, things kids do.

  I did a little acid, five or ten trips in all. It was mostly speed, I think. You’d sweat something terrible and your fingers would go cold. You’d drop before homeroom and cut the rest of the day and when you got home you’d still be going and you’d have to force yourself to eat. I remember spreading my food around on my plate to make it look like I did. I’m sure my mom thought I was anorexic. Getting up the next day was always tough.

  So no, not really. I was pretty straight.

  I drank a lot. No one ever says anything about that. It’s the Speed Queen thing. It started when I was living by myself. I was going to the university during the day and working at Mister Swiss nights.

  Mister Swiss was an old Tastee-Freez made up to look like a chalet. You had to dress up like a milkmaid. All the burgers were named after the Alps; the double-decker was the Matterhorn. The big thing was the sundaes, which they called Avalanches. The manager made you say these things. You couldn’t say, “Double cheeseburger,” you had to say, “Matterhorn.” It was on a speaker so everyone in the place could hear you. Everything they made was fried—burgers, rings, chicken and shrimp baskets. Every other day you had to drain the Fry-o-lator and take the bucket of gr
ease to a special dumpster out back. There was a big grease spot on the parking lot, and when it rained you didn’t dare step on it. After your shift, you felt like you’d been dipped in oil.

  I got home around midnight and I’d take a cold beer into the shower with me. It was my reward for making it through the day. I’d have another while I dried my hair, and then one watching Letterman, and pretty soon I was sleeping in and missing class.

  I got put on probation and my mom said she wouldn’t help me pay for classes unless I started doing better, but the next semester was worse. I took some summer classes and did all right, but that fall I got sick and fell behind and just stopped going. I forgot to withdraw, so I got all F’s. My mom said that was it, my dad wouldn’t have wanted her to throw any more money away. It didn’t really matter that much to me; I was only going because he’d wanted me to. It was easier not to. Now all I had to do was go to work.

  You might say I was going to school to be an artist or a writer or something. That might be interesting. I never really declared a major, so technically it wouldn’t be untrue. All I took were some business courses—statistics and economics, boring stuff. You could make me a painter, and I’d paint weird, runny pictures of my dad or the house near Depew, or Jody-Jo, or my tricycle out behind the chicken house. I could go inside my paintings, like in Rose Madder. I’d meet this other painter from New York City or Paris, and we’d have this unbreakable bond. All we’d do is drink wine and make love by candlelight, and then he’d be killed somehow or die of some rare disease, and I’d start drinking more wine and painting him over and over until I couldn’t stand it. I could break a mirror with a bottle and I’d look just like one of my paintings, all runny and weird. Then I’d burn all my paintings and quit Mister Swiss and go work the drive-thru at Schlotzky’s and meet Rico.

  Another thing about Jody-Jo is that he had a house. It was under the one tree in the front yard and had actual shingles on the roof. After he was dead, I’d sit in it and spy on the cars driving by. My dad taught me all the names—Javelin, Montego, Wildcat. You could still smell Jody-Jo; there was a dark ball of hair in one corner. Sometimes I’d close my eyes and pretend I was him. My mom said that he’d gone to heaven, and I wanted to go there too. I couldn’t picture what it looked like, I could only see Jody-Jo walking this white path surrounded by cotton-ball clouds. Then I’d see the trash bag and his legs going into the cruncher and I had to open my eyes.

  My mom wanted another dog but my dad said no. It got to be a kind of joke between them, like when she saw a puppy on TV, but they were both serious. When my dad died, my mom went down to the Animal Rescue League and got Stormy. It’s funny, she never said my dad went to heaven.

  Where am I going to go? I know you’ll ask that later. But in case I don’t make it to the end, let me say now that I’m going to heaven. I’m a prayer warrior, and I’ve had to fight my own evil heart to get there. If Jody-Jo and my dad are there, I’ll give them both a big hug. But I don’t want to live with them again. I’d like to have a place with Lamont if that’s possible, and if for whatever reason it isn’t, then I’d like a place of my own.

  Hang on, Janille wants something.

  Yeah?

  Double on the hot links, double on the beans. And lots of sauce. The hot.

  Hold the Texas Toast, or you can have it.

  Gimme the regular. I think it’s too late for the diet.

  Sorry. That was Leo’s double-checking my order. Last time they forgot the brisket, and Janille let them hear about it. You like barbecue? You should come out here. I could take you some places.

  The Last Supper, right? I’m sure you can do something with that. I’ll have to stop the machine for that. You’ve got to concentrate on good barbecue.

  I think I saw an “Outer Limits” where this guy who’s going to the chair asks for this impossible last meal. He just keeps ordering and the cooks keep bringing the food and he’s eating and eating and getting bigger and bigger until he’s too big for the cell, and the bars bend and the concrete cracks and he breaks out. He’s as big as Godzilla, and the guards in the towers are shooting at him, but he kicks right through the wall. In the end it’s all a dream he’s having while he’s in the chair. You see him jerking. Rod Serling or whoever is talking about how a man finally becomes free and they zoom in on the guards unbuckling the straps. When they do that to me, I’ll have hot sauce under my nails.

  7

  What do you mean by evaluated? I was tested in New Mexico when they caught me, but I was never committed or anything. Mr. Jefferies said everybody gets those tests. He said we wouldn’t use it as a defense because of the judge.

  There are some people here who think I’m crazy and there are some people here who think I did all of it. A lot of them are the same people. I can see why they’d think that, the way they were all cut up. I heard that Mach 6 took all their ads off the air right after that.

  I’m not saying that wasn’t me, just that I wasn’t the only one. I wasn’t the one who started it and I wasn’t the one who planned it in the first place; I was just there. When you’re there and it’s happening, you don’t say, “Wait, this is crazy.” It’s different just sitting somewhere and thinking about it; you think you’d never do it. Then you’re there and you do and there’s nothing at all crazy about it.

  Those tests are like lie detectors, you can’t trust them. They’re easy to trick; you just pretend you’re someone else.

  When I was a kid I used to think I was crazy. I thought I was the only one who could talk inside my head. I’d sit inside Jody-Jo’s house and talk to myself.

  “Dad put him in a bag,” my inside voice said.

  “Mom said he buried him,” I said. It was like two people talking.

  “Dig him up and see.”

  “With what?” I said.

  Sometimes my inside voice would surprise me and say things I didn’t know—like the guy in The Waste Lands. It would say things I know I didn’t think.

  “With the pitchfork,” it said. “With Mom’s garden shears.”

  “It was just a story,” I said.

  “With your hands.”

  “Dad wouldn’t do that.”

  “You’re just afraid to find out.”

  But everybody does that. It’s not like voices, it’s just the way people think. I used to think it made me crazy. No one told me different, and I wasn’t going to ask.

  In eighth grade they gave me a test to see what I was best at, one of those ones where you’re supposed to describe yourself. You’d say what you’d do if this or that happened to you, like You find out your friend Mary has been spreading lies about you. What do you do? (A) Confront her. (B) Say nothing. and other stuff like that. They wanted to see if you’d be a good waitress or something. I was stoned, so I just filled in all the A’s.

  The next week I got called down to Mrs. Drake, the school counselor. She had posters on her walls of seagulls with poetry on them and ivy plants spilling over her desk. She took her glasses off to talk to me.

  “Marjorie,” she said, “I was looking over the scores and yours jumped right out at me.”

  “I just wrote down all the A’s,” I said.

  “Now why did you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Have you ever had a problem with anger or aggression?”

  “No,” I said, hoping she didn’t know about my fight on the bus with Shona Potts.

  The week before I’d made fun of Shona’s new glasses. Getting off at her stop, Shona pointed at me and said, “See ya tomorrow, Marge the Barge,” and everyone laughed. The next morning when she got on, I snuck up the aisle till I was sitting right behind her. Everyone knew what I was going to do. Her hair was held in stiff pigtails by red rubber bands. I rolled my sleeve up and made a fist like my dad taught me, making sure my thumb was outside of my fingers. I reached my elbow back as far as the seat would let me and punched her in the side of the head. Her new glasses flew over the rows. Later they sa
id that Shona would have double vision from it, but at the time I thought I’d let her off easy. I didn’t hit her that hard; it didn’t even hurt my hand.

  I got suspended but didn’t tell my mom. I’d ride the bus in and hang out around the auditorium. For a while no one talked to me. At lunch, people winged their salt packets at me, and once an empty chocolate-milk carton that spotted my blouse. I’d come home and go to my room and sit on my bed with the sun going down. My mom didn’t understand what was happening. What kind of school was I going to?

  Mrs. Drake wanted me to retake the test and a bunch of other ones, and I did. I did fine. They were easy. The big one said I would enjoy a career helping other people.

  8

  I have no idea what my IQ is. In grade school I got B’s and C’s, and then C’s and D’s in high school. I didn’t like high school, the teachers made me feel stupid. I didn’t see the point. I learned more from watching TV and reading books. My dad had really wanted me to go to college, so I did. Lamont used to call me his college girl. I liked that at first.

  I’ve gotten smarter since I’ve been here. That’s one good thing, it gives you time to think. In the morning one of the trusties rolls the book cart around and you get to pick one. They’ve got all of yours, but they‘re always out. The last one I read was an old one—Cujo. I think I liked it, how the rabies made this regular dog into a monster. At first I thought it would be stupid—I mean, who’s really afraid of a dog?—but it was good. You could almost believe something like that could happen.

  The cart’s got everything: Danielle Steel, Mary Higgins Clark—all the good ones. Sometimes the good parts are missing, like when you cut coupons out of the newspaper, but I like filling things in on my own.

  You’re allowed two books of your own here, and one has to be religious. Besides the Bible, I have my road atlas. Discover America! the cover says. I lie on my bunk and drive all across the country. I just pick a road and go.

  I read the Bible every day. Not much, just a page or so. When Sister Perpetua comes, we talk about it. She’s a good teacher, she knows what it’s like to lose yourself. She’s an orphan. Darcy said her family was on vacation in New Mexico when they were in an accident, and only Sister Perpetua lived. Sometimes I picture it on Route 14, the Turquoise Trail. Maybe they’re driving a station wagon, and her dad tries to pass this gravel truck on a blind rise. When she tucks her hair back, her one ear looks like melted wax. Sometimes I come up with things she hasn’t thought about, and she nods like she’s thinking and says we’ll talk about it next time.