A Plea for Constant Motion

by Paul Carlucci

  The inside of the Chester home is a lot like Bev’s, except it’s also a lot like that park. They have the same crap carpet, but theirs is even crappier, just a landscape of cigarette burns and sticky patches. The walls have holes in them and the couches smell like feet. The kitchen table is covered in grocery store flyers and the countertop is full of half-crushed beer cans. The only sign of a baby is the small, rickety crib in the middle of the living room, where a coffee table should be.

  Colleen Chester has what Sissy calls a gunt. It means her vagina and belly are the same thing and both are barely stuffed into a faded yellow skirt. She also has huge breasts with pimples on her cleavage and when she talks she sounds like dirty dishwater going down the drain. That’s why she looks so impossible with her black hair tied up in pigtails and her beet-red ears sticking out like something from a fairy tale.

  “Sit where you can,” she says, but there’s nowhere to sit, so Bev just stands there while Colleen crouches in front of a side table and shoves things into her purse: a lighter, a pack of cigarettes, a keychain, and a strip of what looks like unopened condoms. “I pumped some milk this morning. The bottles are in the fridge. He’ll start crying and then you just stick one in his mouth to shut him up. And there’s only two diapers right now, so take your time before you change him.”

  Bev shifts her weight. “How much time?”

  “You feel that out yourself, or ask Joey if he stops by. He’s the one that used to look after Trevor. Don’t worry about him. He likes to come over and play with the rabbit ears on the TV. He might drink some beers and pass out on the couch. That’s fine. He’s like family to my husband.”

  Bev nods but doesn’t say anything. Behind the bars of the crib, Trevor kicks his exposed feet. He’s quiet, his face hidden in the folds of a blanket.

  “Look,” says Colleen. She stands up straight and her huge boobs jiggle. “Fact is, I don’t really trust you. This is a trial run. I have my doubts. But your sister said you’d do it for half the going rate, and that’s about the only useful thing I’ve ever heard your good-for-nothing sister say, so I’m going for it. I figure you can’t be any worse than Joey. But don’t be snooping around my house, okay? I really fucking hate snoops.”

  Bev tries to make her voice sound innocent, even though her lips and ears are flush with heat. “Who’s Joey?”

  “I just fucking told you. You deaf or something?”

  The screenless door bangs as she leaves. Bev stands in the living room pretending to be a car crash victim on the news, like she doesn’t know where to go, just smashed up stuff all around her. Trevor makes a little gurgling sound, so she walks up to his crib, peers over the side, and watches him wag his tiny, balled-up fists in the air. There’s a vicious stink coming off him, a stink of shit, and Bev thinks: I really hate stinks. I really fucking hate them. But that thought feels foreign, so she considers changing his diaper instead.

  Problem is it might be too early to use one. Colleen will be gone for six more hours at least. Bev isn’t sure what to do, but she thinks, This is good experience, and she steps away from the crib to reason the problem through. She’s wearing a tiny pair of denim shorts and the couch cushions scratch the bottoms of her bare thighs. Trevor doesn’t seem that bothered by his shitty pants. Maybe he can hang on a little longer before Bev changes him. But then again, maybe he’s been sitting in shit for hours already, and the stink will only get worse.

  There’s a knock on the door. Immediately, the name Joey flashes through her mind. She pictures a shaved head and dark sunglasses. She pictures big biceps with barbwire tattoos. She pictures a cigarette behind the ear. Bev whirls around smiling, but it’s only Sissy standing there with Cindy in her arms, and they’re wearing matching black shirts with yellow smiley faces.

  “What’re you doing here?” says Bev, planting her hands on her hips and trying to sound stern. “I’m busy. I’m on a trial run.”

  “Is she gone? She’s gone, right?” Sissy comes inside without waiting for an answer. The door slams shut and she looms there with Cindy in her arms. She stabs her eyes around the room and an expression of total disgust settles over her face. “Christ. It’s never been this bad. What the fuck is that smell?”

  “It’s Trevor. He took a shit.”

  “Well fucking clean him, you idiot!”

  “But I can’t! There are only two diapers. Mrs. Chester said to wait.”

  “It’s Miss Chester,” Sissy says, shaking her head as she picks a trail through the living room mess to Trevor’s crib. She peers at him, wrinkles her nose, and makes a bunch of silly noises. “Poor kid,” she says. “You came out the wrong womb, mister.”

  Sissy says she’ll bring more diapers and tells Bev to sit on the couch with Cindy. Then she walks into the kitchen and starts opening and closing cupboards. Cindy sits in Bev’s lap and fidgets with her toes. She looks in Bev’s eyes and pokes her in the chest.

  “What’re you looking for, Sissy? Miss Chester said she fucking hates snoops.”

  “Fuck that fat whore. I’m just looking around. It’s none of your business, okay?”

  Bev hears Sissy’s heavy footsteps thudding from the kitchen and into other parts of the house.

  “Sissy? Can you come back, please? I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  But Sissy doesn’t answer. Bev keeps looking outside to make sure it hasn’t gotten dark yet, because the clock on the stove is flashing noon, and there’s no other way to guess the time. Will Joey be stopping by soon? If he does while Sissy’s snooping, will he tell Miss Chester?

  In his crib, Trevor starts snorting and trembling. He’s about to cry.

  “Sissy?”

  She comes stomping into the room with an angry look on her face. “One of the hallway doors is locked. Did she tell you where the key is? I need to get in there.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Bev. Don’t bother me about why, okay? I left something in there, okay? This is a Sissy thing, not a Bevie thing, okay?”

  Trevor is crying now, but it’s not the kind of shrieking that Cindy makes. It’s way sadder. It’s a tiny, snuffling sound, like a little dog stuck in a cage.

  “When the fuck is Joey supposed to get here? I need to talk to him.”

  “You know Joey?”

  “Of course! When’s he coming?”

  Bev glares. “I don’t know, Sissy. It’s none of your business, okay?”

  Cindy’s wriggling turns into something more like thrashing. She’s going to cry, and Sissy swoops in to scoop her from Bev’s arms.

  “You need to change that baby,” she says. “Otherwise, he’ll cry all night. You can get a diaper from our house if you run out.”

  “You need to get lost, Sissy! I’m trying to work here!”

  Sissy’s face gets all clenched and pale. But just as quickly, she calms down, smiles a little, and shrugs. “Right. Tell you what. If you need an extra diaper before the fat whore comes home, then we’ll smuggle one in here. She’ll never know. Trust me. She’s clueless.”

  Much later, after Sissy leaves and Trevor is asleep again, a car pulls up in front of the house. Miss Chester throws open the front door, shoots Bev an irritated look, and digs around in her purse. She hands Bev a crumpled twenty and tells her to come back tomorrow.

  Outside, the car idles in the street. A dark figure sits at the steering wheel, the shape of his head and shoulders pointed in Bev’s direction. She just knows it’s Joey, and he’s watching her move.

  IV.

  For work the next day, Bev takes a few extra diapers from home, but she’s really hoping Trevor doesn’t shit himself again, because if he does, she might throw up.

  Things get off to a bad start when Miss Chester, with her gunt stuffed into the same yellow skirt as yesterday, grabs the diapers from Bev’s hands and holds them up as if they were already full. She flutters her heav
ily made-up eyelids and purses her lips. “What’s the big idea? Did I ask you to go shopping?”

  “Sissy wanted you to have them. Because you only have one left, right?”

  “You’re kidding me. Sissy thinks I need her fucking charity? Sissy thinks I can’t look after my own boy? Fuck Sissy. You don’t use these diapers on Trevor, you understand? You do and you’re fired. I’ll bring some when I get back from work. He shits himself, just wipe his ass and put him back in the crib naked.”

  After she leaves, the house hums with leftover energy. Bev looks around the living room at the stinky ashtrays on the side tables and the ketchup-encrusted dinner plate on the floor by the couch. She imagines Miss Chester living her life in here, chain-smoking while she watches game shows and eats hot dogs. Maybe she gets up during commercials to look inside Trevor’s crib. Maybe she twiddles her fat fingers at him and makes a bunch of silly noises. Maybe she giggles when they’re happy, like Sissy does when she’s with Cindy.

  Bev is good at seeing stuff like that. She does it at home all the time, usually imagining her dad. There aren’t any signs of him in the house — no ketchupy plates or heaping ashtrays, not even a stick of deodorant in the medicine cabinet — but she can see him anyway, sitting at the kitchen table, chewing on a pen as he sorts through a pile of bills and her mom boils tough cuts of beef on the stove, which is what they eat for dinner these days, too. Occasionally, her mom floats over and runs her hand through his thinning hair. She bends over to kiss him on the forehead and he reaches up to squeeze her hand on his shoulder.

  One time, Bev told Sissy she can imagine stuff like this, and then Sissy said it was all a bunch of shit. She said their dad was mostly never home, and then he was gone forever — and he sure didn’t pay any bills. But Bev doesn’t believe her. Bev thinks that’s just how Sissy felt, because Sissy was a selfish brat and didn’t understand adult things at the time. But Bev didn’t actually say that, because Sissy looked so sad cursing their dad. Her face was trembling, her lips especially.

  When Bev got home after babysitting last night, Sissy was sitting on the couch, cradling Cindy and looking like she was about to cry. She had the phone and a list of numbers in her lap, because it was her night to make sales for the call centre downtown. Bev sat next to her, but Sissy didn’t say anything, not even when Bev reached out to pinch Cindy’s toes.

  “It’s okay, Sissy,” she said. “I have a job now. And I’ll do my chores before work tomorrow.”

  Sissy hummed for a couple minutes. Then she turned and caressed Bev’s face with one of her soft hands. “Find that key, okay? The one to that room? There’s something that belongs to me in there.”

  So now, while Trevor’s sleeping, Bev snoops around Miss Chester’s house. Underneath her feet, she can feel all the bits of crap hiding in the carpet. It’s still bright outside, so she knows she has lots of time, but she pauses at the edge of the living room anyway. The tap is dripping in the kitchen. Trevor’s breathing loudly. Outside, a car door slams and Bev freezes, staring down the dark hallway, waiting. But no one comes to the house.

  The door Sissy’s so curious about is in the middle of the hall. Bev pokes it with her index finger. It feels thick and heavy. The doorknob is locked and cold. She presses her ear against the wood and listens closely, but she can’t hear anything. And no matter how hard she tries, she can’t imagine what might be on the other side.

  If she were Miss Chester, Bev would keep the keys in her bedroom. There are two other doors in the hallway, each one open just a touch. The first one is the bathroom, which Bev saw up close and personal last night when she took a pee. It was disgusting and still is. Trevor’s last diaper is stuffed into a garbage can full of crumpled tissue. The toilet bowl is flecked with Miss Chester’s diarrhea and there’s a billion tiny, black hairs all over the place, stuck to the sink and matted into the corners of the walls. Maybe, thinks Bev, she shaves her ugly neck in here.

  Miss Chester’s bedroom is behind the second door, which creaks open after Bev gives it a nudge. The damp smell of sweat wafts into the hallway like an armpit breathing. There’s a double mattress on the floor in the middle of the room with only a thin, off-white sheet covering it and a few flattened pillows scattered around. The smell is coming from her clothes, which are heaped up in front of the closet. There’s no desk, no mirror, no dresser. But there is a nightstand next to the mattress, and Bev figures the key’s in that drawer right there. She sucks her breath into her chest, until her face feels like it might blow to pieces. The floor creaks as she tiptoes to the nightstand.

  But it’s not inside. All that’s there is a creased picture of Miss Chester sitting at a restaurant table next to a burly man with snakes tattooed on his forearms. Miss Chester almost looks like a different person. Her cheeks are rosy and her hair is short. A brown kerchief covers the birthmark on her neck. She’s smiling, winking, pointing at the camera. But the man just looks bored. He’s smoking a cigarette and picking at something on his pants. His thick goatee doesn’t quite hide a scowl.

  Behind them, just barely recognizable in the shadows, Sissy is staring at the back of the man’s head. This must be from a few years ago, because Sissy looks skinny and ill, the way she did before she got pregnant, when she used to come here for parties.

  “Well looky this right here.”

  Bev drops the photo and jumps to her feet, banging her knee on the drawer. The man in the doorway is not the one from the picture. He’s too trim, except for his arms, which are oddly muscular. His head is shaved bald and he’s wearing a black Guns N Fuckin’ Roses T-shirt with yellow skeletons all over it. He’s got his thumbs in the pockets of his ripped-up jeans and he’s looking at Bev with his head tilted to the side, eyes all watery, lips smiling loosely and an unlit cigarette stuck between them.

  “You see Trevor shit himself out there, girl? You don’t want me to tell fat ol’ Collie Chesty about that, do you?”

  Bev needs to think fast, so she says: “I’m just looking for diapers.”

  The man chuckles and shakes his head. “I know a snoop when I see one. Beverly, right? The babysitter? Collie told me to check in on you today. Feed the snakes and make sure you wasn’t snooping. You ain’t snooping, right? Pretty girl like you? Up to no good?”

  Bev doesn’t really have anything to say to this, so she closes the drawer and turns away to smooth the bedsheet. This way it looks like she’s in here cleaning, a crucial act, because this must be Joey, and he’s like family with Miss Chester’s husband, even though Sissy says Miss Chester isn’t married. The floor creaks as he walks toward her. He smells like sweat socks, ashtrays, and cologne.

  “Nah,” he says, from somewhere close behind. “Nah, you ain’t a snoop. Just a keener. A keener cleaner. I won’t tell her nothing.”

  The grooves in the mattress are filled with tiny flecks of ash. Soot streaks Bev’s fingers and palms. The man is still for a few seconds, towering back there while she runs her hands back and forth across the sheet, trying to look busy. Then she feels his presence shift away. She hears his boots clump across the floor.

  “Name’s Joey,” he calls from the doorway. “Follow me if you want to see a great big snake.”

  In the hallway, Joey unclips a ring full of keys from his belt loop. He stops in front of the locked door and turns to see if Bev’s still following. In the living room, Trevor is crying in that soft, defeated way of his. She feels pulled in two directions.

  “What about Trevor?”

  Joey fits a key into the lock and the door creaks open. He winks at Bev, his eyelids huge and dark, then crosses the threshold. Bev knows Sissy would never forgive her if she turned down a chance to go into the room. Trevor will have to wait.

  Inside is like stepping into a different house. There’s still all the stuff Bev kind of expects from Miss Chester’s universe. Belt buckles shaped like revolvers on the bookshelves. A zombie pirate flag hanging in the
window. An ashtray full of crushed cigarette butts and a long, sticker-covered mirror hanging on the closet door. But it’s spotlessly clean, like maybe Joey takes care of the place whenever he comes over, like maybe he just can’t handle the overwhelming mess of the rest of the house, so he keeps this little place neat and tidy for himself. And maybe Bev’s face is registering some of these thoughts, because Joey looks at her, nods his head, and smiles his loose smile.

  She clears her throat and looks at the floor. “It’s nice in here.”

  “It sure is,” he says, his fingers dangling on the drawer handles of a squat, black filing cabinet in the corner of the room. “And out there it ain’t. But looky here.”

  He crouches, slides open one of the drawers, and right away Bev can see that it’s not a normal filing cabinet, not like what you see on TV police shows or in the principal’s office or anything like that. These drawers are like aquariums, but instead of water and fish they’re full of woodchips and rats. Not ugly rats either, like those ones with gross white fur and red eyes from science movies. These ones are cute little things with brown stripes running from their faces down their backs. They’re snuggling in the corner of the drawer, breathing slowly. One of them is crouched on his hind legs washing his tiny, brown face, little hands cupped just like a person’s.

  Bev can’t help it: she makes a girlish squeaking noise.

  “Come have a closer look,” Joey says, bending over the drawer, his veiny hands on his knees. “Bet you never seen a filing cabinet full of rats before, eh?”

  Trevor’s crying fades completely into the background as Bev peers into the drawer, her fingers curling around the edge. She’s thinking how amazing it is that Collie has something like this in her house, how magical it is, and that’s when she feels Joey’s rough hand settle over her own, his dry thumb massaging her knuckles. He tells her how soft she feels, how cute it is when she giggles.