When the can is done, Atlanta wings it past the margins of the lot into the bushes.
The smoke clears, revealing the trio of assholes writhing on the ground. Faces red. Crying. Even from here she can see the blood vessels standing bright in the whites of their eyes. Jonesy’s clawing at his face like he’s got a rat chewing on him from the inside. He’s got dog shit on his arm. Virgil is blubbering. Pounding the ground with a fist. Like that’ll help. The mute toothy third, Chomp-Chomp, lays curled up like a baby rat. He’s got his eyes clutched so tight she thinks they might never open again.
She lets out a long breath.
A little voice inside her asks: is this who you are, now?
She doesn’t want to find the answer.
So she turns and runs. Bag flopping at her hip.
* * *
Back at the house she tries to cry but it just isn’t coming. It’s like, she wants to. It’s in there somewhere. But like a stubborn sneeze she just can’t make it happen, and that’s somehow all the worse.
Up the long driveway, shoes crunching on driveway gravel.
Past the fallow fields on either side. Green starting to poke up with spring trying to get sprung.
A dead brown Buick—might as well be a boat, not a car—sits off to the side, the car draped in the choking vines and soon-to-be purple clusters of wisteria.
Atlanta takes a moment. Her right hand is shaking. Her index finger in particular.
Then she goes in through the garage.
Mom’s in there. Setting up the cot, pulling sheets over it, fluffing up some pillow that looks about as soft and comfortable as a sack of grain. A long lean cigarette is pinched between her lips.
Seeing Atlanta, she quick puts it out. I’m quitting, she told her daughter a few days ago. Like that somehow mattered. Like fixing a sucking chest wound with a single stitch.
“You want dinner?” Mom asks, finally.
“I do not,” Atlanta says. “I got it covered.” Which means, some generic frozen entrée from the Amish store where they sell grocery goods that are either off-brand, out-of-date, or both. Froot Loops from two years ago, or Fruit Scoops only a month old.
Probably best her mother isn’t cooking dinner, she tells herself. Funny thing. Mom can make a hell of a breakfast, but her dinners are at the end of the culinary spectrum reserved for roofing shingles.
Just to be a bitch, Atlanta walks over near to where her mother is setting up the cot, opens the garage fridge, and pulls out a beer. Coors Light. Tastes like the watered-down piss from a diabetic cat, the girl thinks, but it’s one of her mother’s and part of her just wants to see how far she gets to push.
Mom sees but pretends not to see and that’s all Atlanta needs to know.
The girl goes inside while the mother sets up her new bedroom on the oil-stained concrete.
* * *
Knock knock knock.
He about scares the tits off her. Standing by the kitchen window like that. Atlanta goes and opens the back door and pokes her head out. The Venezuelan kid about jumps out of his skin.
“What?” she barks.
He steeples his hands in front of him, a nervous gesture.
“I just wanted to, uhhh, ahh, say thank you.”
“So say thank you.”
“What? Oh. Thank you.”
She nods. “Uh-huh.” Then she slams the door.
But as she rips the cardboard zipper off the frozen dinner, she still sees him out there. He’s no longer looking in the window, but he’s on the back lawn by the rusted patio furniture. Pacing.
Fuck it. She ignores him. Perforates the plastic with a fork. Dinner in the microwave. She cracks the beer and takes a sip and makes a face, then dumps it in the sink. It’s not skunked, but it might as well be.
The kid knocks at the back door. Moon face peering past floral curtains.
“Piss off,” she says. “Don’t want any. Already have plenty. You’re welcome. Scram.”
That worked. When next she looks to the door and window, the kid is gone.
Five minutes later she’s eating bad General Tso’s chicken, each nugget so nasty she half-imagines that each is some kind of forbidden testicle meat, breaded and deep-fried and dipped in spicy ketchup.
And of course here comes the smell of gunsmoke again and suddenly she’s reveling in just how ridiculous it is that everything can make her think of that.
Door to the garage opens up. Mom comes in.
“Hon?” she asks. Atlanta’s about to tell her mother, no, thank you, I said I got dinner covered so you go on back to your garage now, but instead her Mom beats her to the punch with: “I think a friend’s here to see you.”
Atlanta’s about to protest but it’s too late. Mom’s already letting the Latino kid with the oil-slick hair and the round acorn-storing cheeks in the door.
Mom waves like she did something nice, like this earns her credit or karma or something, and then she again vanishes quicker than a lake monster.
Latino Charlie Brown doesn’t say anything.
They stare at each other in the cramped kitchen.
Finally: “You want a TV dinner or something?”
He nods. “Okay.”
She goes and gets him something that looks (but probably doesn’t taste) like lasagna.
* * *
They’re watching one of those gavel-banging shows on cable. Blah blah blah. Dog bit my leg. Bitch dinged my car. Deadbeat won’t pay for a paternity test.
The couch has as much give in the cushions as a body with rigor mortis, so it’s not all that comfortable, but what’s even less comfortable is the space between the two of them.
She hands him the remote. “You want to watch something else?”
“Nah.” He pauses. “Well. I do like the Food Network.”
“This is basic cable. We don’t get the Food Network.” She blinks. “You watch the Food Network?”
“Yes.”
“Do you like to cook?”
“Yes.”
“That lasagna you’re eating then probably tastes pretty dang bad. Like tomato paste pressed between layers of shoe leather or something.”
He puckers his lips. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“Let’s go back to the kitchen. You’re going to cook me dinner for saving your tail today. It was either this or an appetizer of dog-shit poppers. C’mon.”
* * *
She can’t lie. It’s the best grilled cheese sandwich she’s ever had. Has a good crunch but isn’t burned. Soft in the middle. A little sweet, too. She tells him so as they sit at the rickety card table that serves as a dinner table.
“The secret is cook it low and slow over an iron skillet,” he says like he’s been practicing saying this for his own food show someday. He even waves his hands around, gesticulating like he’s on-camera. “If you had Brie cheese, I’d make it with that. That’s the best way.”
“Brie. That ain’t a cheap cheese, is it? Sounds French.”
“It is French. And no. I guess not.”
“Your family can afford Brie?”
“Well. No.”
“You ever eaten Brie cheese?”
He hesitates. “…No, not exactly.”
“Whatever. This is a good sandwich whether it has cheese made by French surrender monkeys or not.”
“You know that’s a myth. That the French were all cowards. The French Resistance was instrumental in helping America win the war.”
She just shrugs, keeps eating her sandwich.
“I put a thin layer of mustard in the middle,” he says.
“Ish sho good.”
They sit and chew.
She says, finally, “I figured you’d make, y’know, Mexican food or something. A chalupa.”
“A chalupa.” Blink, blink.
“Yeah. Why? Is that racist or something?”
He thinks about it. “No, I suppose not.” Though the look on his face says he’s not so sure. Atlanta figures if that’s the kind
of racist she is, so be it. Last year, they found a dead Guatemalan kid under the bushes ringing the water tower at the edge of town. Beaten and kicked. Story goes that it was because he was dating a white girl. Atlanta doesn’t truck with that kind of racism. She thinks people deserve whatever niceness they can squeeze out of this world no matter what their color or creed. But she also figured that, you give a Latino a chance to cook they’re going to make a chalupa. Or an enchilada or burrito or whatever. Now she feels like an asshole because of Mexican food. Or the assumption of Mexican food. Dangit.
“Thanks again for earlier,” he says.
“Yeah. Well. They were looking to hurt you.” She points to his head. “Guess they already did. How’s the head?”
“Hurts but okay.”
“How’d you get cut?”
It’s like he doesn’t want to tell her and she gets that, she really does. “The one, the muscle guy, he had a ring. A skull ring. He turned it to the inside of his hand and then he slapped me.”
“Slapped you. Kind of a bitch move.”
“I guess.” He watches her, then. He’s on the edge of something, like he wants to say something, and finally she just turned her index finger in a barrel roll—a gesticulation meant to say, get on with it. So he does. “The story. About you. It’s true?”
“I do not have a dick.”
“Not that story.”
“I did not bite the head off a bat on stage at a Black Sabbath show.”
“What? No. Is that even a…? Not that one.”
She rolls her eyes. “I know not that one, dumbass. Yeah. The story’s true.”
“Do you still—“ But he stops, then leans in. Voice low. As if nobody should hear. “Do you still have the shotgun?”
“I do. Told the cops it was my mother’s.”
“And you didn’t have to do time?”
She shrugs. “Felt like I did. Six months of therapy. Not here at home, either. But… away. At least I didn’t have to go to school.”
His mouth forms a reverent “o.”
“You should go,” she says abruptly around a huge mouthful of grilled cheese—it comes out, ooo shoul guh, but then she swallows the big hunk of greasy goodness and says it again. “You should go. You need to go. We’re good here.”
“Okay.” He looks confused, stung, but he gathers his bag. She plants a hand in the middle of his back and pushes him toward the door. “What do I do?”
“What do you do what? When?”
“If they come back. The three of them. They’ll come back. I’m sure of it.”
“What’s your name?” she asks, changing gears. “I didn’t get your name.”
“Shane.”
“Shane is not a Mexican name.”
“That’s because I’m Venezuelan. Like I said.”
“Shane is not a Venezuelan name, either.”
He shrugs. “My Mom’s Hawaiian. My Dad’s Venezuelan.”
“What’s your last name?”
“Lafluco.”
“Okay. Fine. Listen, Shane Lafluco, here’s what you do. Go to Cabela’s. Online or take an hour drive south, they have a store there. Buy a big ol’ frosty can of bear mace. They come at you again, hose ‘em down like a rampaging grizzly. That’s what you do.”
“Wait—“ he says, but she’s already pushing him out the door.
She closes it, locks it. Click.
* * *
In the hallway upstairs, she sees the shotgun. Leaning against a door frame where last she left it. It’s a lean little bugger. A single-shot .410 bore scatter gun. Winchester Model 20. Break the barrel open, pop in the shell, that’s it. Pull back the hammer when you’re ready to go. A chicken gun. Or a squirrel gun. That’s what Guillermo—or Guy, Guy-as-in-Guillotine—told her when she bought it.
It’s been sitting here in the hallway since that night. She runs a finger along the mouth of the barrel. Pulls it away thick with greasy dust.
She lifts her finger to her nose.
Smells like smoke and powder.
She feels like throwing up, so that’s what she does. She goes to the bathroom and throws up, then takes a shower in her clothes because that’s what they do on TV and in movies. Atlanta suspects she’ll enjoy the liberation, the anarchy of the act, but it just isn’t there. She removes her sopping wet clothes and sits on her bed and stares at the wall for hours until sleep finds her.
* * *
Anymore, the way she sleeps is like she’s been shot in the head. A deep fast sleep like she’s falling off an oceanic shelf and sinking fast into darkness. The dream that finds her there is squid-like, a kraken with many tentacles and mean suckers that pulls her toward its biting beak. It’s always hard to pull away—the dream feels so real, so alive, that while in it, she rarely realizes that it’s even a dream at all.
Every time it’s the same but different. Same feel. Same story. Different presentation. Like a morality tale with the same puppets but a different backdrop, or different voices, or different character names.
Here faces shift. Blood on the carpet. Her head shoved face down in a pile of comforters that for some reason smell like the cat lady next door. A thumb wetted by a long, too-long tongue and pressed against her cheek to wipe off a smudge. Again the shotgun goes off. Again the wicked stink of discharged powder. Again she awakens. Wet not from the shower but from her own sweat. Drenched, actually.
After school tomorrow she resolves to go see Guy on the other side of town.
* * *
What’s that they say about Pennsylvania? Philadelphia on one end, Pittsburgh on the other, and Kentucky in the middle? Way Atlanta sees it, that’s about right. She’s from North Carolina and comes from a town where half the floor of the nearest gas station mini-mart is dirt, and even still, this part of Pennsylvania—stretched across the belly band that is I-80, sitting smack in the middle of it, not far from the town of Centralia, a town whose bowels forever burn thanks to a mine fire that won’t go out—is pretty damn red in the neck.
William Mason High School isn’t straight-up Hicksville, and it has its rich kids and its poor kids, it has blacks and Latinos and a handful of Chinese kids, it has one Arab girl and two billionaire kids (twins). But for every kid that drives a Lexus you get three who can drive a tractor. For every kid that cares about the poetry of e.e. cummings you get five who give way more of a shit about NASCAR.
For every black kid, Latino kid, Chinese kid, Arab kid, you get a dozen white kids.
So it goes. None of them know her anyway. Some of them do. Or did. And all of them watch her as she walks down the halls past bands of lockers painted bright. She’s only been back a week now and it’s like she’s a ghost that everyone can see. Like she’s a poisonous toad or toxic jellyfish—interesting to look at, but for God’s sake, do not touch.
* * *
Once in a while she catches glimpses of old friends. Like Petra Bright. Or Dosie Schwartz. Or her once-best friend, Becky Bartosiewicz (pronounced, Bart-o-savage), aka, “Bee.”
Most times, they don’t look at her or say much to her. Petra will sometimes be polite. Say hi as she passes. Even offer a, don’t forget, we have homework in bio-chem, as if Atlanta’s going to have anything to do with homework for the rest of the year. Susie will meet her eyes and it’s always a sad look, like the look you probably get when you watch one of those Humane Society commercials with the crusty-eyed dogs and the Sarah McLachlan music. You feel bad for 30 seconds. Then you don’t do shit and go about your day.
Bee, though, Bee pretends Atlanta isn’t even there. If she ever looks in Atlanta’s direction, it’s like the girl’s eyes slide off Atlanta’s frame, like Atlanta’s body is covered in bacon grease and all glances slip to the margins. They used to be so close. Being a transplant, it wasn’t like Atlanta was really a big part of the ecosystem to begin with. Now she’s at the periphery of the pond. On the shore. Dry when everybody else is wet.
Even the tadpoles and snails and water-skeeters don’t want shit to do with h
er.
Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel Page 2