It’s a freak chance, a big mistake, that Kyle’s the one here on the receiving end. So he doesn’t have time to work out the consequences: it has to be fast, brutal, full-on. Instinct over thought.
Maybe, he thinks for the millionth time, he isn’t done with punk rock yet. Maybe he can save her.
Drawing out a large swath of the paper, he wraps it round the girl, placing his hand gently on the crown of her head to keep her still and try to communicate that he’s trying to help, until she’s just an inconspicuous brown sausage, another bit of material piled on the back platform of his Caterpillar. He makes sure she’s on her back, has a slit to breathe through. Does what he can to tell her to keep still. She gives no pushback. Before folding the flap down over her head to hide her smooth black hair, he leans in and whispers to her, shitting his pants, patting his chest, “Friend. Friend. Home. My home. Konichiwa?” A bit of packing tape and she’s invisible.
Hour and a half until quitting. Finish your tasks, don’t look anyone in the face, park the lift, haul her out like an old carpet or a bit of excess wrap for dumping, throw her in the back seat of the pickup, drive home without speeding. Get her inside. Between now and then, he figures, he can sort out what the fuck he’s going to tell Abby.
They sit on the worn turquoise carpet, playing. Most of Abby’s dolls have missing limbs and torn clothes, but she still manages to craft amazing mini-luxe fantasies with them: shopping, eating at fancy restaurants, driving around astride the old Tonka truck Kyle picked up at the Sally Ann. The language barrier is less of a problem for kids. The Asian girl — he’s resisted giving her a name — took no time to warm up to the dolls. She obviously knows Barbie. She and Abby are busy placing them in pairs, with their thin plastic legs stretched out, feet touching.
He thinks how much Krista would have loved this. She always said she wanted two.
It will be six years in November. It’d be impossible to forget anyway, but the anniversary coming a day after Abby’s birthday always makes for a particularly bad emotional thrashing. He still has trouble believing it. Sepsis doesn’t seem like a thing that should kill people, not in this country, not in this age. Not at barely twenty-four years old, with skin thickened to the toughness of steel by a lifetime of fighting to convince people that you’re more than your bleached hair, your piercings, and your poisoned history. Kris had already been through hell by the time she met Kyle — gropey father, drunk mom, more than a few winter nights sleeping on the street. That she’d managed to pull herself up, find the strength to help others through her work at the shelter: it was a miracle. She only got the one, though. Unless you also count Abby, the child she knew for a day and a half. Kris never even made it home from the hospital.
The girls are keeping busy for now, so Kyle gives himself a minute to sit on the couch and work up a plan. Normally he’d put on a record to help him think, I Against I or Monuments to Thieves, but he doesn’t want to scare the new girl with the noise he loves. Instead he turns on the TV and clicks around until he finds a station rerunning The Shawshank Redemption. Vanilla as it is, Kyle has a soft spot for the movie. He’d convinced his old band, Pinched Nerve, to name a song after it — “Andy Dufresne.” Krista had always loved that one, made sure to come up close to the stage whenever they played it, to watch him shred through the blitzkrieg chorus: “He says there’s no memory / I want to live what’s left of my life / In a warm place / Without memory.” Her smiling, arms raised, screaming along with him, feeling the same ache.
He’ll have to keep the girl here for tonight, at least. He knows it can’t go much beyond that. An orphanage, maybe? The thought chills him, all wrought iron beds and sadistic nurses and gruel. Besides, what’s he going to do — leave her on the doorstep, tied with ribbon? Rewrap her in the packing paper and call it an early Christmas parcel? He wants her to be safe, protected, but there can’t be anything linking her to him. With the band long finished, the wharf is his lifeline now. Abby will be starting school next fall, which means books, clothes, backpacks. Things to pay for.
He opens a couple cans of Beefaroni for the girls and gives them another half hour of play before taking them together into the washroom. Abby picks up her toothbrush and squirts on a blob of bubblegum-flavoured toothpaste.
“Daddy, is it okay if Soo-bin and I share?” she says.
For a second he hears soy bean. Then he realizes. Winces. Nods his head.
“Yes, sweetie.”
The girl — Soo-bin — takes the brush, touches it to the stream of water from the tap, and runs it back and forth across her little Chiclet teeth, curious and mute. He wonders how much of this is new to her, what kind of conditions she lived in back home. He wonders if she feels lucky that Kyle found her. He wonders if she is.
Once the girls are asleep, he sits down in front of Shawshank with a can of Pabst to decompress. He goes through the exercises his mother taught him after Kris died: start with the eyes. Then the jaw. Move down through the neck and shoulders. Let relaxation fall over your joints like dandelion wisps. He still finds himself fighting it — answering every loosening with a desire to grit teeth, grip mic, bark a righteous retort. Pummel stress into submission. Live hardcore as a steady inner scream.
There’s no one to scream at, though. Just Red and Andy Dufresne, and why would he scream at them. He swigs beer, savouring the sour aluminum fizz. Closes his eyes, trying to feel the warm place.
Kris, massaging his shoulders after a show. Working the strained muscle, popping a joint into his mouth from behind, holding it for him while he inhales.
Over the droning of the TV, he hears a dull thump outside. His eyes pop open. The girl? He gets up, drains his beer, and goes over to peer through the half-open door to Abby’s room. Two bundles snuggle each other on the bed, rising and falling with children’s breath. Safe, both. He turns back to the movie, where Andy Dufresne is counting seconds between thunderclaps. Kyle doubts anyone from the wharf would come for him at night. Not worth the effort, when you can intimidate someone just as well in the light of day.
He hears the hollow clunk again. Recognizes tactile, insistent scratching. This part of town is a magnet for raccoons. He grabs the broom and another Pabst and snaps the porch light on before stepping out into the foggy, grey night.
Crouched comfortably on its haunches amid a chaos of apple cores and cheese-caked pizza boxes, nibbling away at the remains of an old corn cob, the fat masked invader squats in front of the upturned bin and turns its head toward Kyle: What? What you gonna do? Kyle waves the broom around a few times, smacks it on the paint-chipped porch slats. He knows it’s futile. These things have no fear, will sit there ransacking your trash right in front of you unless you take drastic measures. Kyle’s never had the heart. Krista volunteered at the humane society and would always come home with horror stories about coons full of buckshot, or choking their way through the last throes of death by Javex-brined chicken carcass. For the most part, he’s learned to live with them, clean up their toxic feces during the day, and hope they end up moving on to another bin once they’ve had their fill of the meagre leavings in his.
Besides, Kyle and the raccoons go back a ways. He remembers a night his grandfather let him help set the traps. Non-lethal — just a bit of peanut butter bait and a trigger-action wire-mesh door that would hold them until morning, when Granddad would load the cage in the back of his pickup and drive them outside the city limits to let them free. Kyle wanted to know why he couldn’t just put them in the neighbour’s yard.
“Thing about raccoons,” said his grandfather. “They know where they live. Know their territory. You gotta take ’em an hour out at least, go out beyond their home range. Otherwise, they’ll just come back.”
Kyle stares at the big mangy guy gnawing the cob like an old man chewing on a pipe stem. He wonders if this critter has been here before. If he recognizes Kyle — knows that this thin, wiry ex-punk with the two-day stubble and bramble tats is no threat to him. Kyle can smell his musk, th
e sour stink of old fish and muddy water. The raccoon keeps nibbling, eyes cast sideways at Kyle, waiting for him finally to get angry and take a real swing with the broom.
Kyle turns and goes inside and clicks off the porch light. White credits crawl up the black screen, hundreds of names disappearing as they crest the dusty curve of his old tube TV. Kyle clicks off the remote and the room plunges into darkness. He listens, for a minute, to make sure he can still hear the girls breathing, before going into his bedroom and collapsing into his unmade bed with his jeans on.
The knock comes at ten a.m., as the girls are tucking into their Quaker Maple & Brown Sugar Instant Oatmeal. Even though he’s been waiting for it, Kyle flinches like he’s been stuck with a shiv up under the ribs. He spent all night thinking, trying to sort out what to do with the girl — with Soo-bin. But he just kept coming back to Andy Dufresne, hammering on his sewage pipe in the darkness, and to Krista, lying on the hospital bed, the berserking metronome of the heart monitor shocking her life into the terrible flatline that took all of Kyle’s rage and pinched it into the helpless scream of a newborn. And to Abigail, his daughter, his daughter, his daughter, the word so charged with joy and pain that it still explodes, every time he thinks it, like a bomb inside the chambers of his scar-worn heart.
The next knock comes, more insistent than the first. He gets up and gives himself maybe thirty seconds to haul Soo-bin up out of her kitchen chair, shushing Abby to quell her hurt questioning look, and hauls the cargo girl into his bedroom, where he stuffs her into the closet and puts all the compassion he has into his eyes and mumbles an apologetic plea — justaminutepleasebequietjustaminute — before piling an old Slayer hoodie on top of her and closing the door and heading back out to answer to whoever it is that wants her back. As he grips the knob, Kyle puts on his calmest face, thinking how natural it will be to pretend that the second bowl of Quaker was for himself, hoping for the absurd impossibility that somehow, instead of someone from the union, it’s the raccoon from last night come knocking to ask him for another corn cob, or to apologize for the awkward standoff they’d found themselves in during the midnight raid.
“Mr. Miller. Good morning.”
Kyle’s fantasy falls away as soon as he opens the door and sees Szandor Szabados, head of the local ILA chapter, standing there with his cigarette pinched daintily between thumb and forefinger, shoulders hunched into his thick khaki coat, eyes gleaming oily crow-black under a thinning fringe of copper-pipe hair. Kyle has seen Szandor berate his fair share of stevedores, but that’s just the tip of it. Rumours have him deeply involved in trafficking, graft, and pedophilia, and they’re the kind of rumours everyone knows are true. Szabados keeps one can of Diet Pepsi per day in the staff refrigerator. Kyle remembers the day some rookie decided to drink it and ended up getting a pink slip and a six-foot-five, 270-pound escort to the parking lot, who made it crystal clear that any further appearance at the wharf would result in a dislocated jaw and the distinct possibility of an indelicately removed testicle.
“Szandor?” Kyle says, feigning surprise, trying to channel his old performer’s instincts. “Surprised to see you on my porch on a Saturday morning. Can I do for you?”
Szabados takes a long drag of his cigarette and looks sideways down the street, in the direction of the ocean.
“You want to come in?” says Kyle, stepping slightly to the side, hoping to hell the answer is no.
“I got a bit of a problem, Miller,” Szabados says. “Maybe you can help me.”
“Sure.”
“You were on 17 yesterday, yeah?”
“That’s right.”
Szabados looks him in the eye, a barrel of smouldering ash clinging to the tip of his butt. “I know it is. I know you were on 17.”
Kyle manages a curious frown. “What’s the problem?”
“You see anything unusual on your shift?”
“No . . . can’t say I did.”
“Can’t say? Or . . . ?”
Kyle tries to summon saliva into his mouth, which suddenly feels coated with cement.
“I honestly don’t know what you’re getting at. Sorry to disappoint. Yesterday was a pretty standard shift.”
Szabados chucks his smoke onto the worn planks of Kyle’s porch, not far from the dark smears left from the raccoon’s marauding. He shoves his hands deep into his pockets, looks back down the road, presenting Kyle with a gnarled cauliflower ear veined through with red blood vessels.
“All right, Miller,” he says. “Just remember. The union’s here to take care of you. I know you like your days off to spend with your daughter.”
Kyle says nothing.
“Be sure to let me know if you hear anything on the wharf, yeah?”
“Okay, Szandor. Will do.”
“Me, I’m gonna go get some lunch. Great little Korean place up near Fairmount,” he says. “You like Korean?”
For a minute Kyle is confused, thinks this evil gnome might actually be asking him out for a meal.
“I love it,” Szabados says. “Even that kimchi. Smells like an old sock. You gotta watch the spice, though. You’re not careful, it can wreak havoc on your insides.”
The implication jabs a stinger at Kyle’s brain, prodding for the name that’s suddenly shaking inside him like a trembling kitten: Soo-bin.
Like Korean, Kyle?
Szabados turns to go, but stops and twists his head around, demon-style, at the bottom of Kyle’s steps.
“Anything pops into your head, anyone call you with something to talk about, you remember — the union takes care of you.” He fishes in his pocket, pulls out a flattened pack of Kools, draws one out, and starts tapping it on the inside of his wrist. “Remember that.”
“Will do, Szandor.”
“See you at work.”
Kyle watches Szandor Szabados get into his big black Escalade, shut the door, and drive off in the opposite direction of Fairmount, most likely back to the wharf, to retrieve his voodooed Pepsi from its shelf in the staff fridge. Kyle thinks about what’s in his own closet, about Abby and her oatmeal, the other bowl cold and congealing beside her. He thinks about Andy Dufresne, keeping his eye on the warm place with no memory. And he thinks about Krista, because he’s always thinking about her.
“Where are you going, Daddy?”
The question scuttles back and forth across the dome of his skull, mewling. Abby had known something was weird, of course: Saturdays were their together day, the one put aside to forget bank accounts and old music and dead mothers and the clawing of freighter exhaust in the back of your throat. When he’d taken Abby next door to Mrs. Coover’s to plead the favour of watching her for a couple hours, his daughter had been smart or scared enough not to mention Soo-bin. He’d told Abby that he was going to help the girl get home, and she’d accepted that. But she still required some answer for his absence, a good reason for his leaving her with the neighbour on a Saturday evening.
The truth would have meant nothing to her. Wharton State Forest, just north of Atlantic City, isn’t somewhere she knows. In fact, it’s far enough in the wrong direction that Kyle hopes it’s a place she’ll never end up. He tries not to pressure Abby, to be patient and careful with her. But he’s definitely pointing her outside the state — across the river, maybe. Or even farther — north, to a saner country. If he has any say in the matter, the whole south shore of New Jersey will exist outside her universe, just not something she’ll have to live with, not the way he does.
The Korean girl — North Korean, is Kyle’s guess, almost a ghost to begin with — shifts in the passenger seat, staring out the window at the strip malls and industrial parks running along the edge of the turnpike. The cabin smells of stale coffee and sweat and Cheetos and Armor All, which together Kyle processes as the reek of his own helplessness and guilt.
Wharton is big, big enough for someone to get lost in. To go unnoticed. But also a place, maybe, where someone small but resourceful might find a way to survive. It’s only the begi
nning of November. Kyle’s leaving Soo-bin with Abby’s Barbie parka from last season — a bit tight, but warm — some plaid galoshes, a pair of track pants, and an old sweater of Krista’s that’s big enough for her to wrap around herself like a blanket. To eat, a bunch of bananas, a couple packages of Fig Newtons, and a Thermos of instant hot chocolate. It’s a far cry from a proper wilderness-survival kit, but surely better than what Szandor Szabados had planned for her.
He couldn’t bring himself to call the cops. One way or the other, they’d have involved Szabados. Some of them are probably on his payroll. Besides, if Kyle’s honest with himself, he’s already, technically, kidnapped the girl. What else might they say he’d done? What horrible mix of tar and feathers and bird shit could they smear all over him? The orphanage appears in his head again, rows of metal-frame beds and hard-edged shadows, but this time it’s Abby standing there, dressed in a grey smock, surrounded by faceless orphans. Her mother dead. Her father convicted. Maybe dead, too.
He’s trying. Trying so hard. With the Chef Boyardee and the oatmeal and the thrift store dolls. Processed shit, material shit — the kind of shit he used to rage against. It’s all he can afford now, though. You make sacrifices. Kyle wants Abby to have a good life with him, and a decent shot at a better one down the road. He can’t shatter that chance. Not for anyone. Not after what he promised.
In the hospital, Krista’s just lying there. The oxygen mask makes it hard for Kyle to hear her, and there’s a noise in his head like a thousand bands slamming through a frenzied breakdown, all shredded vocal cords and shrill guitar and kick-drum hammering. He’s squeezing Kris’s hand, hard, but his other hand is up on her forearm, wrapped around the blue ring of barbed wire tattooed on her bicep, not squeezing as tightly there because he knows her skin is tender. Abby is with the nurses. There will be a little more time for mother and daughter to be in the same room — they’ve promised her that — but the doctors don’t like having the baby in the ICU. Kris has already had one kidney fail. They’ve stopped telling him she’ll get better.
Different Beasts Page 3