by J. S. Volpe
14
“This would’ve been a lot easier if we’d driven,” Donovan said as he, Cynthia, and Violet plodded north up Wheeler Road.
“We already talked about this,” Cynthia said. “In a car we’d pass things too quickly. We wouldn’t get a good enough look at the terrain to spot all the potential hidey-holes.”
“There’s nothing you can see from your feet that you can’t see from a car.”
“Maybe not. But on foot you can see more. Traveling by car you’re compelled to go above a certain speed, and you don’t have as much time to see everything unless you go up and down each road multiple times, and then it just winds up eating up as much time as doing it on foot and wasting lots of gas and gas money in the process.”
“I guess.”
“Besides, at this point we’re more than halfway through. It’ll only be another hour or so.”
“Dude, it’s better this way,” Violet told Donovan. “Trust me. I keep telling you: Cars’re for suckers. They’re just giant fucking money pits, like houses and babies and stuff. It’s just another tool the world uses to keep you running for dollars in your little rat wheel and never realize what a sucker you are.”
Cynthia, who had just bought a new car, couldn’t help feeling that this was yet another of Violet’s little jibes at her. She was debating whether or not to respond when they came upon a park on the corner of Wheeler and Weber Roads. The park wasn’t very big, and considering that its only man-made features were a swing-set, a jungle gym, a teeter-totter, and a very short drinking fountain, it appeared to have been built mainly for the use of neighborhood children. Narrow bands of woods separated the park from the houses on Wheeler and Weber. The woods couldn’t be more than twenty feet thick, but that was probably enough to hide and house a leucrota.
She got her pen out of her white belt pack, then opened up the Kingwood street atlas she carried, ready to note the location of the park. During their travels so far, she had already noted another small park, a ravine, and a large cemetery bordered with trees and heavy brush.
When she tried to circle the corner where the park was located the pen made only an inkless groove in the paper.
“Crap.” She shook the pen and tried again. This time the pen produced a watery gray line that faded out after half an inch.
She licked the pen tip and tried once more. She was back to just a groove again.
“Do either of you have a pen?” she asked. “Mine just died.”
“A pen?” said Donovan. He blew a sharp, quick blast of air between his lips as if to say “kid stuff” and started digging in the right front pocket of his black trench coat. His breezy, cocksure smile gave way to a frown as his digging went on and on.
“I know I have one somewhere,” he said. “I just have too much shit in my pockets.”
“Here we go,” Violet said with a groan. Already looking bored, she sat down on a wooden bench next to the sidewalk on the west side of the park. “You always have too much shit in your pockets.”
“No, I know I have one…” He sat down next to her and started pulling items from his pocket and piling them in his lap. Out came a packet of Kleenex, a tin of Altoids, a few slips of paper with phone numbers scribbled on them, two one-dollar bills, eighty-four cents in assorted change, a movie ticket stub, a Jack Chick comic about Hell, two safety pins, a key to a pair of handcuffs, and a tiny screwdriver.
“Maybe it’s the other pocket,” he muttered, and started digging through the trench coat’s left front pocket.
Getting the sense that this might take a while, Cynthia sat down on Donovan’s other side.
Violet leaned around him and scowled at Cynthia. “You just had to start him off, didn’t you?” She flumped against the backrest, making the whole bench shudder. “Guh! We’re gonna be here all fuckin’ day now.” She pulled out a Marlboro and lit it, then sat back with a sigh and watched two little girls playing on the teeter-totter on the other side of the park. The squall of the old metal teeter-totter carried to them across the grass. Creeeeek. Pause. Creeeeek. Pause.
By now, Donovan had pulled from his pocket his own pack of Marlboros, a disposable lighter, two books of matches, an American flag lapel pin, a Swiss army knife, a rubber band, a pair of earmuffs, a handkerchief, a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, and a nearly used-up tube of KY jelly.
“Aw, geez.” Cynthia quickly wrenched her eyes away, wishing she hadn’t seen the tube or the dreamy, reminiscing smile that had spread across Violet’s face at the sight of it.
“Um, sorry,” Donovan mumbled, thrusting the jelly back into his pocket. He moved on to a pocket on the inner lower left-hand side of his coat. “Just hold on a second. I know there’s a pen in here somewhere…”
“How many pockets do you have in that coat?”
“I dunno. Five? No, six, I think.” He grinned. “Coats with lots of pockets are cool.”
“Yeah,” Violet said. “He’s probably got more stuff in there than Calvin has in that dorky messenger bag of his. It’s like an investigator’s kit that actually looks cool.”
“Yeah, except he doesn’t have anything even remotely related to investigating in there,” Cynthia said as she watched the latest batch of miscellany emerge from his pocket: a Yoda action figure, a ping-pong ball, a pair of black leather gloves, a broken cigarette (which he regarded with a grimace, then tossed onto the sidewalk), a chain of paperclips, and a snack-size Milky Way bar (which, judging by its rather lumpy shape, must have melted and resolidified numerous times).
He moved on to a pocket on the inner right side of his coat. This time he produced a battered address book with cartoon kung-fu monkeys on the cover, a compass, three black hair bands, a packet of aspirin, a small red squirt gun, and a purple bandanna with white paisley designs.
“Hey,” said Cynthia, snatching this last item out of Donovan’s hand. “That’s mine!”
“I was wondering where that came from.”
“I’ve been looking for that for, like, three months now. What are you doing with it?”
“Beats me. It’s been in my pocket for a long time. I don’t know how it got there.”
“I think his pockets are like a black hole for stuff, you know?” Violet said. “They just suck things in somehow. It’s like, you know how you lose a sock in the dryer every now and then? Well, those socks wind up in Donovan’s pockets.”
Donovan moved on to an inner breast pocket on the left side. He pulled out a sunglasses case, a small bottle of hand sanitizer, a pack of rolling paper, and a Baggie full of pot.
“Oh, fuck,” he said, stuffing the Baggie back into his pocket while whipping his head about to make sure there weren’t any cops around. “I forgot that was in there.”
“I do not fucking believe this.” Cynthia jabbed a finger at her brother. “You’d better not get me in trouble. If you get stopped and searched or something, I’m gonna claim I don’t know you.”
“Fuck,” said Violet, rolling her eyes. “Paranoid much? We’re not gonna get stopped and searched. I can guarantee it.”
“And how can you guarantee that?”
“‘Cause if we see any cops heading our way, we’re just gonna run like hell in the other direction. They can’t search you if they can’t catch you.”
Cynthia opened her mouth to respond, then realized the utter pointlessness of having a debate about something as idiotic as this with someone like Violet.
“So,” she said, turning to Donovan. “That pen.”
“Oh, right. Um…” He looked at his coat. “I think I tried all the pockets.”
“Nuh-uh,” said Violet. “You forgot the one on the outside over your right tit. And the secret one.”
“Oh!” Donovan stuffed his hand into a small pocket on the right front breast of the coat. He fished around, found something, and pulled out a string of condoms. His face reddening, he quickly stuffed them back inside. “Um…”
Once again Cynthia averted her eyes, pretending she hadn’t seen the condoms. She pretend
ed especially hard that she hadn’t noticed they were Magnums.
Violet was smiling dreamily again.
“Sorry,” Donovan said as he felt around on the inner lining of his coat halfway down on the right. “Anyway, there’s a secret pocket here. Um, it’s, y’know, secret, so just forget you heard about it.”
“Not a problem,” said Cynthia. “I’m trying to forget just about everything I’ve seen and heard the last ten minutes.”
“Good, good.” He groped around some more, frowning with concentration, the tip of his tongue protruding from between his lips. “I know it’s here somewhere…” Then his face lit up and there was the zip of a zipper unzipping. “There we go.”
From his not-so-secret pocket, he pulled a small rubber airplane, a piece of paper with a locker combination on it, another piece of paper with a few names and phone numbers of it, a wad of ten- and twenty-dollar bills, and a black Papermate ballpoint pen.
“Bingo!” he said, handing the pen to Cynthia.
She didn’t take it right away, her attention focused instead on the wad of bills he was tucking back into his coat.
“Um, I know I’m gonna regret asking this, but where the hell did you get so much money? There has to be at least four or five hundred dollars there.”
“Um…” Donovan glanced at Violet, whose attention had become suddenly and unswervingly fixed on the girls on the teeter-totter. Then he looked down at his coat as if he hoped it would disappear, cash and all, and obviate the need for the question. Then, reluctantly, he looked back up at Cynthia.
“It’s just, uh, money I sort of, y’know, accumulated over the last while from, uh…various things.”
Cynthia’s jaw dropped.
“You’ve been selling drugs, haven’t you?” Almost as an afterthought she snatched the pen from his hand.
Donovan straightened up with mock indignance, ready to deny the accusation, then realized he wouldn’t be able to pull off a bluff. Not with Cynthia.
“Just some pot,” he said.
Cynthia shook her head. She started to say something, stopped, started to say something else, stopped, then turned and watched the girls on the teeter-totter until her wits had cooled enough to permit coherent thought.
Creeeek. Pause. Creeeek. One of the little girls squealed with laughter as she ascended high upon the oar-like teeter-totter seat.
“Out of Mom and Dad’s?” Cynthia exclaimed, turning to look at Donovan so swiftly her hair fanned out around her. “If you get busted, they could get in trouble. Hell, with all those bullshit forfeiture laws, they could lose the house.”
“I’m careful, Cyn,” Donovan said. “I don’t keep it at the house. Or, well, at least not much of it. I keep it somewhere else. Somewhere safe. And I only sell it to people I know. Friends.”
“And where do you get it? It doesn’t grow on…” Her words trailed off as she noticed Donovan looking guiltier and more uncomfortable than ever. Her jaw dropped again. “You’ve been growing it in the woods out back, haven’t you? You idiot!”
“Hey!” said Violet. “Leave him alone. Just cuz you’re a big fucking chickenshit who craps her pants the minute she sees a cop, it doesn’t mean we all are. Some of us are, you know, braver than that.”
“Excuse me? Don’t confuse bravery with an inability to think beyond the next beer.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you lack the imagination to think about the consequences of your actions.”
“Yeah, well, you have too much imagination. You imagine shit that’ll probably never happen and then act as if it already has. You’re a coward.”
Cynthia glared at her, her cheeks flaming the same color as her hair.
“Did you just use the words ‘I think’?” she said. “You? Are you telling me you actually use that beer-sodden lump of tissue between your ears?”
“Fuck you, Little Miss High-and-Mighty. We might not have totally useless philosophy degrees like you, but we’ve got smarts that’re more practical. Street smarts.”
“‘Street smarts’? That’s what people say to justify having the I.Q. of a turnip.”
“You are such a—”
“Will both of you shut the fuck up?” Donovan snapped. “We should be, like, looking for monster hiding places. You can bitch at each other later if you really want to, okay? God!” He stood up and stormed off down the sidewalk, his trench coat flapping behind him.
Cynthia and Violet just stared at him, too shocked by his outburst to do anything else for a moment. Cynthia felt her face burning redder than ever. She wasn’t used to being reprimanded by her younger and generally much more irresponsible brother. But he was right; they were wasting valuable time.
She glanced at Violet and was strangely touched to see that Violet looked similarly abashed. Then Violet noticed Cynthia looking at her, and she sneered and flashed Cynthia the finger. Cynthia rolled her eyes, more disdainful than angry. Why had she even been arguing with this child in the first place?
With Donovan’s pen she circled the park in her map book. Then she capped the pen, clipped it to the map book’s cover, and stood up. She looked down at Violet, who still sat on the bench, her arms folded across her ample breasts.
“Come on,” Cynthia said. “Let’s just get this over with.”
“Finally something outta your mouth that makes sense,” Violet grumbled, then sprang to her feet and stomped off after Donovan.
With a weary sigh, Cynthia followed.
Behind them the two little girls kept playing on the teeter-totter.
Creeeek!