You Only Get Letters from Jail

by Jodi Angel

  GAP

  Bobby paid eighty bucks for a handful of Scarlet Pussy—fifteen seeds of Afghani hybrid that the ad in the magazine said “could blow your mind”—and when the first green shoots came up out of the peat moss, me and Bobby started thinking about how much we could sell an eighth for, and what exactly an eighth was—grams or ounces—and we started seeing dollar signs and ’71 Pontiacs with dual exhausts and 455 V8s and 400 Turbo-Hydramatic transmissions. I was six months away from getting my driver’s license, but in my mind I already saw myself behind the wheel, right foot on the gas and everybody wanting me or wanting to be me. The car meant everything. The license was just paperwork.

  “They look like tomato plants,” I said. I had Bobby’s closet door open and inside the light was bright and white and hot. There was a tarp on the floor and a pair of Bobby’s dress shoes, and we had the pots lined up in front of a plastic pink fan I’d taken from my sister’s room. I picked up a spray bottle and shot a mist of water across the naked stalks.

  “They’re not tomatoes,” Bobby said. “No way. If I find out that I paid eighty bucks for a bunch of cherry tomato plants, I’ll fucking sue the company.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “What’re you gonna do? Ask your mom to get you a lawyer? Take it to The People’s Court and explain how you paid money for some marijuana seeds and what you got were tomato seeds, a total rip-off, and all you want is your eighty bucks back, and maybe some money for your pain and suffering because if your mom knew that you were growing these in your closet, she’d kick the shit out of you and it would all be for nothing if the most you could do was harvest these plants and then go downstairs and make a salad?”

  “If you keep opening the closet and looking at them, they’re gonna die and it won’t matter if they’re fucking daisies,” he said.

  I shut the door and picked up the January 1980 issue of Playboy that Bobby had on his desk. He’d found a box of Playboys in the shed out back—eleven issues, January through November, that one of his mom’s boyfriends had left behind, along with a broken Coleman lantern and a half-empty box of .22 shells—and now they were under his bed, and the box of shells was in his desk drawer, and we spent a lot of quiet time after school in his room, licking our thumbs and turning pages. We knew the name of every centerfold and her stats, and what her favorite food or color or thing to wear was, and I mostly liked to spend time with the May issue because the centerfold’s name was Martha Thomsen and when she was looking at me over her shoulder, pink satin panties cut like half-moons, I didn’t give a shit if there were two hundred and twenty-six other pages in the magazine—that full-color tri-fold glossy was all that mattered.

  “You haven’t told anybody about the plants, have you?” Bobby asked. Me and Bobby had been friends since fourth grade, and while the rest of us grew and got older, Bobby just got wider and had to wear glasses and the best thing he had going for him was the fact that he was a fucking genius, but as far as I knew, being smart never got anybody laid. I tried to help him out the best that I could—got him on protein shakes and free weights for an entire summer, but Bobby was the worst kind of fat, a deceitful soft, like a cucumber that has been left in the refrigerator drawer too long and looks okay until you grab it and your fingers punch right through. Underneath his clothes I knew that he was held together with the same unreliability as pudding skin, and it was that thought that stayed with me the most—seeing his dents and dimples, and his chest, white and hairless. I heard the calls of “fatass” in the locker room and “wide load” in the halls, but Bobby would just give the assholes the finger and load his tray at lunch as though piles of food were a way to say “fuck you.”

  “She’s got great tits,” Bobby said. He held up the picture of Lisa Welch, even though I’d seen it so many times that I knew her fingernail polish was red and there was a tiny scar just above her left collarbone. “I mean, all of these girls are fucking great,” he said. “Everything about them—their skin and their hair and their tits and those stomachs so flat you could rest a drink on them. They’re perfect.”

  Outside it was raining hard and we had walked to Bobby’s from the bus stop. My T-shirt hadn’t dried all the way through and now it stuck to me in places. I had forgotten my jacket in my gym locker and my walk home was going to blow. My backpack wasn’t waterproof and the last thing I needed was a stack of swollen notebooks ink-blurred and stuck together on the night before a biology test when me and a C were just kissing distance apart. Bobby lifted the curtain above his bed and slid his window open so that we could smell the wet trees, smell the dirt and the street, and the sound of the rain ran together so that it was a solid noise without the definition of drops.

  “I can name about fourteen girls at school who look like that,” I said. “You get them out of their clothes—any girl—and she’s got everything that these centerfolds do. I’m serious. They ALL look like that.” I pointed to Amy Miller and Michele Drake on the cover of the January issue, both of them in tiaras with their legs wrapped around Steve Martin, who was in a diaper.

  “Wesley, Wesley, Wesley,” Bobby said. He set the magazine on the bed in front of him, but did not close it. Outside there were sirens in the distance, but the sound faded as they moved away from us. “I hear what you’re saying, and part of me totally agrees that naked girls all look hot, but I think even you can admit that any girl looks like a prom queen when she has your dick in her mouth.”

  He gave me a smirk and I cocked my arm back to throw Miss January at him, but then I decided I didn’t want to wrinkle the pages. He thumbed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, but did not flinch. “One time,” I said. “I got a blow job one time.” She had told me she was a freshman, but I found out later that she was really in seventh grade and the only person I could admit that truth to was Bobby. I knew that for my other friends, head was head and the only shame was in getting none at all.

  “You never answered my question,” Bobby said.

  “Yes, you’re a fag,” I said. I unzipped the pocket of my backpack and started digging around for cigarettes.

  “Have you told anybody about our plants—that we’ve got this plan and everything?”

  I pulled out a Bic pen without a cap, a wad of gum with lint with hairs that didn’t belong to me, and a paper clip I had unrolled and straightened for some reason that I couldn’t remember now. “Why would I tell anybody?” I said.

  Bobby looked out the window, but it had turned blank with fog. “Because maybe I think that you’d rather do this with somebody else. Like Joe Ross or one of those guys.”

  I gave up on finding cigarettes and started poking the paper clip into the carpet. “I want to do this deal with you. I mean, you’re the one who got this all figured out. I just know how to turn Ziplocs into cool little baggies with a lighter.”

  Bobby ran the edge of his closed fist against the window and wiped away the film but there was still nothing outside to look at.

  “I need a cigarette,” I said.

  “My mom’s got a carton on top of the fridge. Go get a pack. She’ll never know the difference.”

  “Your mom smokes lights. I fucking hate lights.”

  “This isn’t Circle K, Wesley. You get what you get.”

  I stood up and walked over to Bobby’s turntable, flipped Road to Ruin to the B-side, and as soon as “I Wanna Be Sedated” started, I cranked the volume and stepped into the hallway. Bobby lifted his magazine and unfolded the pages. I knew that he had been with only eleven women in his life—January through November—and there wasn’t much chance that he’d have another one unless December showed up in one of the other boxes in the shed. I pulled his door shut behind me and all that I could hear was the muted sound of Marky on drums and the rain sheeting the roof.

  My Chucks were drying on Bobby’s floor, so I walked the hallway in my dirty socks, and just before I rounded the banister to head downstairs, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and I stopped. Bobby’s mom’s bedroom was at the top of
the stairs, next to the bathroom, and when I turned I saw that her door was cracked and there was someone inside. I took two quiet steps backward and slid against the wall so that the stucco snagged my T-shirt and I held my breath without thinking about it. It was too early for Bobby’s mom to be home, and I knew she changed boyfriends more often than Bobby changed his sheets. I took a step away from the wall and moved toward the space in the door so that I could get one eye focused inside.

  What I had seen was her reflection in the mirror, her white skin moving past like a cloud passing in front of the sun. Bobby’s mom, Rose, was naked, with her back toward me, and I stood there looking at her, with my socks stuck to the carpet and my lungs screaming for air. Rose Harris was big in a way that I wouldn’t know how to describe until The Fabulous Moolah took the WWF title from Wendi Richter in 1985 by pulling a screwjob, and I was half in the bag at the time and watched it all go down on TV. It was Rose Harris I saw in the ring that night, all five foot five of her thick and solid and sixty years old, coming back to me, and it was Rose Harris that I watched in that bedroom, watched her so that even though her back was to me, her front was caught in the mirror and I could see everything—the purple grooves of stretch marks that ran over her hips and around to the middle of her back, and the skin on her stomach, white and puckered and loose. Her nipples soft and dark at the ends of her breasts, which hung so far down her chest the skin beneath them was folded and creased. She was putting powder on, dusting it into her palms and rubbing her body, and in the reflection I could see a pink towel on the bed behind her, and I noticed that her hair was wet and stringy from what I guessed was rain.

  And then I saw her face in the mirror, and she smiled—not all the way, but enough that I knew that she saw me, had probably seen me the entire time. I tried to make myself smaller so that I could disappear into the wood of the door, but she knew that I knew that she saw me—this was between us now, and her hands did not stop filling with powder, her cratered thighs lifted and exposed, dusting and rubbing, so that her body was glossy and shined.

  I could’ve stepped away then and come clean from her, traced my way back to Bobby’s room and lied about the cigarettes, put on my shoes and ran, but instead I kept that moment for myself, with nothing but a gap between us, and I watched her for as long as she let me, until I had memorized her and there was nothing more to see.

  THE DIVING REFLEX

  One-Legged Ed had moved in last year, three houses down from Hurley Gatz, but it wasn’t until summer that me and Hurley caught on to what One-Legged Ed was doing. It was late July and nothing moved, and the thermometer had locked its grip above the ninety-degree mark ever since June and didn’t show any sign of tiring. The neighborhood hummed with the constant noise of air conditioners that kicked on early and stayed on late, and me and Hurley Gatz holed up in his living room, drew the curtains, and flipped through channels. We might have stayed that way—burnt the whole summer in his house—but his mom started coming home from work for lunch and kicking us out, locking the door behind her, and Hurley didn’t have a key. She said that fresh air was good for us and we should be out doing something, something that she called “playing,” when in fact Hurley and I hadn’t played in years. Hurley knew that she didn’t give a shit if we lost ten pounds sweating in the shade or ate the last can of Pringles and rubbed our greasy fingers on her couch—what it came down to was the fact that the mechanic was back with Hurley’s mom and the mechanic was pitching in for bills and he had started making a lot of noise about the cost of the electricity we were blowing through with our thermostat control and nonstop television. We didn’t thank Hurley’s mom on the first day for kicking us out, but later I would realize that if she hadn’t, we would not have found the dead girl—and cable television couldn’t compete with that.

  Harrison Creek was more of a slough than a creek—backwater that had been brought on by the Fish and Game’s construction of fish ladders off the river to move the migrating salmon upstream while still keeping a count. The slough was slow moving and prone to stagnation when the season was dry and there was no rain to fill the mud cut of puddles or its banks. In lucky summers the slough was wide and thick, and we would challenge each other to swim across it because the opposite shore was just far enough away to make you feel winded when you hit the midpoint and there was always a moment far from shore when you made the decision to flip over, go belly up, and hope you could backstroke the distance. It would start out as a race, but at that midpoint it always became a shared struggle to keep above the surface and not drown.

  The slough was across the road from where we lived, and when Hurley had motorcycles that ran, we would ride them across the road and down to the banks—tear through the trails that flattened the brittle and high yellow grass. Hurley Gatz’s motorcycles were prone to breakdown, and their only chance at repair was when his mom was dating the mechanic, so whenever she kicked him out, we’d be without them, and even though he had been back in Hurley’s house since late June, the motorcycles wouldn’t run, constantly smelled flooded with gas, and the mechanic wouldn’t do shit because of the electricity bill and the fact that he considered us freeloading. If he knew that the cops had come knocking a couple of times because we didn’t have licenses and weren’t supposed to be riding on the street, he would have just sold them off to his drinking buddies at the Palomino Room, and mostly he was just looking for an excuse to do it anyway.

  It was hotter than fuck, but next to the slough it was cooler and we had decided to stop kicking around in Hurley’s backyard, waiting for something to do, and walk down there and swim. We both took our shirts off and shoved them into our back pockets. The water had a smell—thin black bottom mud, frog, and cattail all competing for the same heavy air. It was a familiar smell and it made me feel good. I sat down on the bank and watched the bugs swarm in shifting clouds that hung over the surface. It was even too hot for the fish to take bait, so we hadn’t bothered to bring poles even though it would pass the time. I knew the fish were at the bottom, beneath the layer of water that the sun still warmed, and that was the best part of swimming out there—diving down to the point where the water went cold.

  Hurley was lecturing me about The Flintstones and pollywogs and God, and smoking cigarettes he’d stolen from the mechanic, and I was sleepy and warm and loosened my laces, slipped out of my shoes and jeans, and waded out into the water until the bottom switched to soft mud and small waves knocked against the tops of my knees. I could smell cigarette and pond mud and wet grass and I wished I had something to float around on like at a pool. I waded into the blond grass without looking down, just felt it touch my legs and wrap around and then my shin hit something stiff and narrow that bobbed and moved and it took me a minute to realize that the blond grass was hair and the tree branch was an arm and I was wading through a person.

  “There’s a girl in the water,” I said to Hurley, but he wasn’t listening to me. He was preaching about good and evil and Bugs Bunny, and putting his stolen Zippo to a Lucky Strike.

  Hurley Gatz and I had lived on the same street for the last seven years. He and his mom had moved in during a rainy November, right before Thanksgiving. Most people liked his mom—she was pretty and young and laughed easily, and she liked to drink and dance, and people liked that about her, too. My dad worked up in Susanville a lot and wasn’t home much, so my mom started hanging out across the street at Hurley’s and they would sometimes go out and leave us behind and that meant we could do what we wanted to do. Lately what we wanted to do was spy on One-Legged Ed down the street, and we had stashed binoculars up in Hurley Gatz’s bedroom and we would cut the lights on the house, open the window in his room, slide his bed up to the sill, and pop the screen off so we could lie there and look out on the neighborhood.

  Usually we just spied on Missy Lingenfelter making out in a blue Ford with someone who looked way too old to be in high school, who had a beard and a way of leaning his head back on his seat when Missy was no longer in hers.
We both knew Missy. The blue Ford came around a lot late at night, and sometimes Missy was already inside and sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes we watched her crawl out a downstairs window, and then she’d get in the car and they wouldn’t go anywhere, just stay at the curb and we would watch the flat bottoms of her feet press against one of the rolled-up back windows and we’d spend the next four minutes trying to dial in the focus on the binoculars and fight over whose turn to watch was next.

  But then One-Legged Ed had moved into our neighborhood and Hurley Gatz and I had kept our eyes on him ever since. He was missing one leg below the knee and there were a lot of rumors as to how and why it was gone, and he was gray-bearded and long-haired and he kept his hair pulled back and sometimes he wore glasses with thin wire frames like a doctor’s. He went around on crutches, and he had a tendency to crutch up to the corner of Placer and Karel, and he’d sit on the dirt patch that had been left behind by a hundred restless pairs of tennis shoes waiting for the school bus over the years, and sooner or later a car would pull up and One-Legged Ed would struggle up from the dirt, crutch over to the driver’s side window, lean in, reach in, reach out, and crutch away back to his house. He sometimes did this two or three times in a day, or sometimes more, and sometimes not at all, but he did it more than he didn’t do it, and me and Hurley took notice of it, because no matter how much we tightened the focus, the binoculars couldn’t dial in what happened between One-Legged Ed and the cars.

  In the past few weeks there had been guys coming and going from One-Legged Ed’s, guys with jackets and patches that said things like “Harley-Davidson,” “MIA-POW,” “In Memory of Tanks 4-27-77,” “These Are My Church Clothes.” Me and Hurley kept a list on a sheet of paper in his room. The guys drank and smoked and blared the Stones’ Emotional Rescue for days and days from speakers they set up on One-Legged Ed’s back porch, so that the entire street was forced to keep time with Charlie Watts. From Hurley’s bedroom window we could look across two houses and into the small window on the side of One-Legged Ed’s garage—a window high up that looked out at the night sky for him and was a hole inside of him for us.