The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  “You learn pretty quick to read a body in these parts,” she says. “Read ’em wrong, and if you’re lucky, you’ll at least live to regret it.”

  “Somebody hurt you?” I ask.

  “We all hurt each other,” she says. “That’s the way the world turns.”

  “I guess that’s the truth.”

  I keep seeing myself in her. And here’s the strangest thing: I want to help her out afore she gets to where me and Pinky got ourselves. Never much thought of myself as a social worker. Hell, I never much thought of much more’n me and Pinky. But I got no time for this now.

  “I gotta get going,” I tell her. “Want me to drive you back to the park or let you off somewhere else?”

  “Take me with you,” she says.

  I look at her for a long moment afore I have to turn my attention back to the road.

  “I can’t do that,” I tell her.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, you’re underage and I don’t want to have the cops on my ass for abducting a minor.”

  “Nobody’d even miss me.”

  I shoot her another look.

  “What is it you think I do?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. But it’s gotta be better than my life.”

  The sad thing is, she’s probably right.

  “Tell you what,” I tell her. “I got me some business to finish up, but when I get that done, I’ll swing on by the park again and we can talk some more about all of this.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  I pull the Caddy over to the side of the road so I can give her my full attention.

  “Listen,” I say. “We don’t know shit about each other, so I’m not going to ask you to trust me or nothing, and I don’t think you should even if I did. But if I say I’m gonna come back to get you, then that’s what I’m gonna do. Now you can believe it or not—it don’t make no never mind to me—but one thing I know for sure: you’re not coming with me now.”

  “Why would you come back?” she asks.

  “’Cause I been in your shoes and I woulda thought I’d died and gone to heaven, somebody ever offered to help me outta here. So maybe I’m doing it for the little girl I was that never had no one come along and offer her what I’m offering you.”

  I don’t know why I’m saying this—no, that ain’t the truth. I know why. It’s like I told her. I can’t explain why this little girl got me wanting to help her, but I know I do want to do what I can for her. Maybe it’s to prove I ain’t like my own sister. But I don’t know what I’m gonna tell Pinky.

  “Okay,” Lizzie says. “I’ll wait for you.”

  “I won’t let you down.”

  “Yeah, well, the jury’s still out on that one.”

  Neither of us have a whole lot to say on the ride back to the trailer park. I pull over and catch hold of her arm afore she gets out of the car.

  “I don’t come back for you,” I tell her, “it’s that I’m dead or in jail.”

  She nods, but she don’t believe me for a moment. I don’t know why it’s so important to me that she do.

  “And then what?” she asks.

  “Then we’ll talk. ’Bout what you want. ’Bout what I can do to help you get there.”

  She looks at me for a long moment.

  “There’s something I can’t figure out here,” she says. “I got me this feeling that me believing you’re coming back means more to you than it does to me. Why you reckon that is?”

  “I know what it’s like, waiting on someone who’s never gonna come for you. That ain’t gonna happen here.”

  “You know what?” she says. “I think maybe I do believe you.”

  Them’s only words. But I can see in her eyes she means it. Then she leans across the seat and gives me a quick kiss—like a girl would her mama in that make-believe world on TV where families actually care ’bout each other—and she steps outta the car. She gives me a wave, then goes sashaying down the dirt lane between the trailers. I watch her go and I think, she looks different. The set of her shoulders and the swing in her walk, it’s like they’re radiating hope.

  For the first time in longer’n I can recall, I feel good. I don’t know why this little Lizzie gal makes me feel that way, but she does. I let my gaze drift over to Del’s single-wide.

  “Fuck you, Del Carter,” I say. “Whatever you got coming to you is gonna be delivered by somebody else’s hand.”

  Because I ain’t gonna risk no jail time over him. Not when I got me somebody I can maybe look out for now. Not like Pinky and I done for each other all these years, but somebody whose life ain’t all screwed up yet.

  “You ’member them dog boys we met over in the other place?” Pinky says when I get back to the motel. “One of them was wearing this T-shirt said somethin’ about not buyin’ no Thai products.”

  I’m just through the door when she starts in on this and I can’t figure out what it’s got to do with anything.

  “He chased us off that kill of ours,” she adds. “Back in them woods we go to when we’re dreamin’.”

  I kick off my shoes and settle on the sofa.

  “Sure,” I say. “What about him?”

  “He was out there in the parking lot today,” Pinky says. “Him and his pal—least I think it was his pal. They didn’t neither of ’em have dog heads today, but I ’member that shirt on accounta you makin’ this point of talkin’ ’bout it. They did them this slow ramble ’round the parkin’ lot and then they crossed the highway and just up and disappeared.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  So she goes through it again for me, with more detail this time, and I get a worry on. What’re they doing, tracking us down like this?

  “Where were they when they disappeared?” I ask.

  Pinky gets up outta her chair and I join her over by the window.

  “They was right there,” she says, pointing. “Under the sign for that old muffler shop.”

  I can’t see nothing special from here. There’s some raggedy bushes under the sign, musta looked pretty once when someone was taking care of them. Now they’re being choked out by weeds and litter. The asphalt in behind is all cracked and overgrown, the shop’s boarded up, and there’s a couple a junked cars along the side of the building.

  “And they just disappeared?” I say. “They didn’t just walk on outta sight or nothing?”

  Pinky shakes her head. “One minute they was there, big as life, and the next they was gone.” She snaps her fingers. “Just like that.”

  I need me a closer look at this. I put my shoes back on and go out into the parking lot, Pinky trailing along behind me.

  “What’re you expectin’ to find?” she asks as we cross the highway and stand under the sign for the muffler shop.

  “I wish I knew.”

  I walk all around that sign and in and outta the weeds, looking for I don’t rightly know what, ’cept I’m pretty sure I’ll recognize it when I see it. But everything looks pretty much like you’d expect. It’s driving me crazy. I know there’s something here—so damn close I can taste it like a bit of hot pepper on the tip of my tongue—but it ain’t nowhere I can see. I kick a beer can and it goes skittering across the asphalt. Pinky lights a smoke.

  I start to turn toward her, to ask if she can show me exactly where them dog boys vanished, and that’s when I catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye. It’s nothing I can really describe, just a kinda thinning in the air, like a shimmering heat wave you see on the highway of a time. I turn to look at it straight on and it’s gone, so I shift my head, moving slowly. And there it is again, sitting right back there in the corner of my eye again.

  I feel a tugging from it, like something in me’s drawn to it, something deep and hidden most of the time. It’s like wherever it is inside me that the wolf lives recognizes that shimmer and wants to walk right into it. I give Pinky a look but she’s not paying any attention. She’s just smoking her cigarette, staring back at the m
otel, bored.

  I put her outta my mind. I put everything outta my mind and come up on that shimmer easy and sly, not looking at it straight on, moving sideways toward it like a crawdad’ might. I come right up to it and the air feels different. Thick and thin at the same time. I kinda give it a push. I feel it touch me all over like walking into a spiderweb. There’s a moment of dizziness and then I just about fall on my ass.

  I catch my balance and my eyes go wide and I just start in a-grinning ’cause the world of motels and highways is gone. No, not gone. It’s like I’m looking out of a window at it. I’m standing in scrub bush, but looking out at the cars and semis going by on the highway. There’s the motel across the highway. But I’m not in that world.

  I turn and look over the tall grass and scraggly trees to where there’s this kinda glow maybe a hundred yards away—where the muffler shop should be. That’s the dreamlands, I tell myself and I know I’m right. I can feel them, taste their smell in the air from where I’m standing. This place I slipped into is some in between place, a kinda waystation separating the two, I guess.

  And as I’m thinking all of this, I can feel something shift inside my head. It’s a way of looking at things, I reckon, ’cause I know that when I step back into the world I left behind I’m never gonna have me no trouble getting back here again.

  I notice Pinky then. She’s looking stupidly around herself, can’t figure out where I’m gone. She turns in a slow circle. I wait until her back’s to me and there’s no traffic, then I step out and tap her on the shoulder. I swear she jumps two feet in the air.

  “Jesus fuck!” she yells. “I think I peed my panties.” Then she gets this real puzzled look. “Where’d you come from anyway?”

  “I found the way across,” I say.

  No, I think. Not the way. A way. There’s these thin crossings everywhere, you know how to see ’em, and I know now. Don’t ask me how. I guess doing it once unlocked something in my head, ’cause as I’m standing here I can see how there’s these shimmers in the air all over the place. I catch ’em, from the corners of my eyes, every which way I turn.

  I try to show Pinky, but she just can’t see any of them. I can’t figure that out at all. Finally I take her by the hand and pull her through. The dizziness hits her harder’n it hits me and I get the sense she’s somewhat scared about all of this. Me, I feel like I been given the keys to the world and I guess in some ways I have.

  When we cross back to the muffler shop’s parking lot, Pinky still can’t find them places even though I’m seeing them all over the place. I practice walking through them, popping in and outta Pinky’s sight until I realize anybody happen to glance this way—and with Pinky in her half-unbuttoned blouse and skintight Capri pants, that’d be any guy that ain’t gay—is gonna see what I’m doing and wonder.

  So I head us on back to the motel room. There’s even one of them shimmering places right inside of here, up by the wall we share with the unit next door. I have me another go through it, stepping back and forth and just a-laughing. I take Pinky the first time and we walk right on through into the dreamlands, you can tell right away. I’ll admit to a touch of unease the first time, but when I look back and see that shimmer, all my fears just wash away. Pinky’s not near so happy as me. When we’re in that in-between place she can’t shake this feeling like she’s gonna hurl, but once we get through to the dreamlands she comes ’round.

  After we get back, Pinky sits her down in her chair and lights up a smoke, but I keep on a-playing with the shimmer.

  “You’re givin’ me the creeps,” Pinky says.

  “Why?”

  “It’s like you’re walking right through that wall and disappearing.”

  “That’s ’cause I am.”

  “It still gives me the creeps.”

  She can’t see this shimmer neither, though I can bring her through with me. She has to be holding on my hand, is all.

  I finally get over the novelty of it and set me back down on the sofa again.

  “That damn old juju woman lied to us,” Pinky says.

  “I don’t think so. She just didn’t tell us everything. She told us two of the ways to cross over, and just didn’t bother letting on there was any others.”

  “Why you figure she do that?”

  I shrug. “Miss Lucinda strikes me as a woman who likes to cause trouble. We do it one of her ways and it’s either trouble for us, or for them dog boys. Either way she gets her a laugh.”

  “I don’t know,” Pinky says. “I don’t trust me none of this.”

  “You got a right to be suspicious,” I tell her. “It don’t pay to trust nothing. But that don’t change what we know now.”

  “How come I can’t do it? I mean, you can take me over, but I don’t see a damn thing. When you’re takin’ me through, it’s like we’re gonna walk smack into that wall. And the whole time we’s over there, I get the feelin’ like I’m gonna puke.”

  “It went away once we got all the way over.”

  “I suppose. But I don’t like bein’ there like this. You know, just a couple of gals. Something comes at us, how’re we gonna protect ourselves?”

  “We got knives,” I tell her. “And we got the shotgun and a box of shells.”

  We picked that up first thing when we got to Tyson.

  “I’d be a lot happier with a little more firepower’n that,” she says. “A couple of pistols and an Uzi, say.”

  I shake my head. We been through all of that. Even a handgun’s too much trouble to get one legal-like, and I don’t feel up to spending the cash to get us an unregistered one. ’Sides, we can’t be going around with no arsenal, not with our records.

  “Well, I been thinking,” I say.

  Pinky shakes her head. “You’re always thinkin’.”

  “Now we got us a way to deal with my sister,” I go on like she never said nothing.

  “How you figure that?”

  “What’d she do last time we come upon her?”

  “She disappeared like them dog boys did.”

  I shake my head. “No, she woke up.”

  Had to be that way. If she could cross over like I just learned, she wouldn’t be walking nowhere. She’d just be a-lying there, crippled and helpless.

  “So?” Pinky says.

  “Well, imagine what’d happen if she couldn’t wake up? Say someone was to feed her a few sleeping pills—not enough to hurt her, just to keep her under. She wouldn’t be able to get away from us then seeing’s how she’d have no place to wake up to.”

  “Hell,” Pinky says. “Comes to that you could just grab her sorry crippled ass and haul her into the dreamlands with you, that’s sayin’ you can find one of them shimmers in that room she’s in.”

  “I got me a feeling you can find them pretty much anywhere, you know how to look.”

  “But then we’re gonna get us some cash and retire from all this shit, right?”

  I think about the promise I made to Lizzie, but now isn’t the time to bring that up.

  “We’ll do anything we damn well want,” I tell Pinky. “Anything at all.”

  She gives me that old grin of hers.

  “Now you’re talking,” she says.

  Seeing’s how we don’t know how this is gonna play out, we prepare for anything. I take my duffel bag. Rolling up the shotgun and the box of shells in some clothes, I stick them in. I change to jeans and running shoes.

  “You got any decent walking shoes?” I ask Pinky.

  “I got my pink sneakers.”

  “They’ll do.”

  Our next stop is a drugstore where we buy the sleeping pills in case we want to feed them to my sister. I also pick up some bottled water, granola bars, and then add some candy bars for Pinky. She wants to stop at a liquor store and bring something a little stronger, too, and pouts when I tell her no, but she tosses a carton of smokes into the basket and lets it slide.

  The whole time we’re in the store and we’re driving I’m checking for them
shimmers. I see more of them than I don’t and that makes me feel good about Pinky’s idea. I kinda like the thought of my sister lying crippled in the dreamlands just a-waiting on me to decide on what I’m gonna do to her. And that way I can explain real clear how she brought all of this on her own self.

  It’s getting close to nine-thirty by the time we’re finally pulling into the parking lot at the rehab building. Good timing, I think. We don’t have to pay for parking and most of the spots are free. And once inside, well, visiting hours are over and all we got to do is get by the nurses.

  We get outta the car and I reach into the back for my duffel bag.

  “Ray, honey,” Pinky says.

  I look over at her.

  “You’re gonna be smart here, right? We’re either gonna pull that sister of yours into the dreamin’ world, or we’re gonna feed her a few sleepin’ pills. You ain’t gonna go all postal on me in there, are you?”

  “I got everything under control,” I assure her.

  But she won’t let it go. “Yeah, I’m sure you do. But every time you so much as look at a picture of this woman, you stop firin’ on all cylinders, honey. Now I ain’t the one to say what you should or shouldn’t be doin’,” she adds when I start to shake my head. “It’s just, if there’s a chance this is gonna get messy, maybe we need to do us some real plannin’ first. You know, like park the Caddy closer, or better yet, get us somethin’ a little less conspicuous for while we’re doin’ the job.”

  “You don’t have to worry none on my account,” I say. “I’m thinking clear.”

  “Okay. You know I’m only sayin’ this outta worry for you, right?”

  “I know, Pinky. You’re the only damn person in this whole wide world I’d ever stop and actually trust with anything important.”

  She gets that grin of hers then.

  “Okay,” she says. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  I been in the rehab building after visiting hours afore, but never this early. Usually I come creeping in late at night, having me a look at that sister of mine and I can’t account for why I’m doing it. But tonight’s different. I got Pinky at my side. I got the shotgun in my duffel in case things go wrong. Hell, I got me escape routes like no dumb cop’s ever heard tell of afore.