Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel

by Wendig, Chuck

  * * *

  After English class, Mrs. Lewis pulls her aside. Hands Atlanta a paper. Atlanta’s own paper, by the looks of it. A one-page paper on the subject of A.E. Housman’s “To An Athlete Dying Young.”

  “What is this?” Mrs. Lewis asks. The woman’s got some mean eyebrows. Like dark fuzzy caterpillars, two star-crossed lovers ever straining to reach one another but never allowed, always apart. Now those brows are scrunched up tight.

  “Huh?”

  “You heard me.”

  “It’s my paper,” Atlanta says with some authority. Because, duh, it is.

  “It’s one page.”

  “Thank you. Yes.”

  “I asked for a seven page paper.”

  Atlanta blinks. “Yeah. I know. And mine’s one page.”

  “Do you remember how you ended the paper?” Mrs. Lewis asks. “Do you remember how you reached the conclusion that resolves your thesis?”

  Atlanta does remember. But she just shrugs instead, lets the teacher talk through it.

  “This one sentence just… trails off, and is replaced by, blah blah blah.”

  “I thought it was a nice commentary on the futility of collecting information and, uhh, synthesizing, ummm. Thought patterns.” Atlanta nods, having settled that. “Yeah. Synthesizing thought patterns.”

  “You’re slinging horse apples at me.” Mrs. Lewis’ mouth goes from a tight line to a steadily melting downward into a mean scowl.

  “Well. I don’t mean to.”

  “I need you to rewrite this. Today’s Tuesday. I want it by Friday. All seven pages.”

  Atlanta laughs. It’s not funny, but she can’t help it. “You’re shitting me. Okay. Listen. Mrs. Lewis. I’m sorry. Maybe you didn’t know or realize it but I… went through some stuff recently? It was in the news, as I hear it. I was gone. For three months. And we’ve only got two months left of school. The other teachers—“

  “The other teachers what?”

  “They’re just giving me a straight B+. Across the board. Just to get me through.”

  It’s the teacher’s turn to laugh, but Atlanta can tell she doesn’t think any of this is funny.

  “Miss Burns, is that what you want? To just… get through?”

  She thinks about it, then nods. “Well. Yeah.” She doesn’t add that she thinks school is basically bullshit. That whatever they learn here isn’t relevant to what’s going on outside these walls. That all they’re doing is teaching to the test and watching stats and oh, case in point, they just want to give her a B+ to shut her up and move her along with the rest of the mooing herd.

  This cynicism is fairly fresh, she realizes. Not worth looking too close (no kicking over logs now, remember), but there it is.

  “That’s not going to happen, Miss Burns. Let me tell you something. All we are is the measure of our work. You don’t do the work, you’re not worth the measure. You’re a junior. You want to stay a junior, then keep treating my class like it’s a blow-off. A paper like this won’t fly with me. A paper like this gets an F. You fail this class you and I’ll probably see you again next year. Are we clear?”

  Atlanta feels rage in her heart and tries to bring that up like a bucket full of bile from a well filled with hot vomit, and she spits out, “I went through some bad shit, Mrs. Lewis, some shit a lot worse than you’ve ever seen or had done to you so why don’t you wipe the sand out of your crusty vagina and put on a nice smile and learn how to be a human being for once in your wretched life?”

  For a moment, the teacher says nothing. Finally, she says:

  “Tornadoes in the heartland. Child soldiers in Somalia. Homeless people on the streets worldwide. Everybody’s got problems. Everybody knows tragedy. Life is short and hard. Do the work. Don’t make me fail you. Have a good day, Miss Burns.”

  And then, most galling of all, she waves Atlanta off like she’s the fucking maid.

  * * *

  Atlanta only sees one of the three thugs from the attack the other day. Chomp-Chomp. She sees him in the cafeteria picking at a plate of taco meat with a plastic fork. He sees her, then, too. Then he gets up and almost knocks his chair over and hurries out of the room so fast you’d think he was being chased by a cloud of yellow jackets.

  * * *

  She’s still pissed when she walks to Guillermo’s after school. Every stone or can in the road, she kicks it into the corn or the soy or whatever sits in the fields as she walks. It’s coming up on late April and she can’t tell what little shoots are sticking up out of the mud and she doesn’t much care, either.

  Guy’s got a little slice of farmland north of town, a parcel of land with dead fields and a gutted, burned husk of a farmhouse next to a red barn that’s got a deep drunken lean to it. Guy doesn’t live in the farmhouse: place burned down a handful of years ago when a nest of squirrels got to chewing the old knob-and-tube wiring in the attic. Killed the older couple that lived there, and from what Atlanta heard, they found their two charred bodies still in bed like they didn’t even know to get up.

  No, Guy’s got a double-wide trailer out back of the farmhouse. She finds him this time just past the trailer, taking potshots at cans and bottles on a fence-rail with a little .22 pistol.

  Pop, pop, pop, pop. A soup can jumps like it was bit in the ass. A bottle neck shatters. Two other shots miss, go off into the field or the trees beyond.

  He drops the magazine out of a lean, black, snazzy-looking shooter, and then turns and sees her.

  Guy—Guillermo Lopez, or as he sometimes calls himself, “Guy-Lo,”—is a taut stretch of rope in a black wife-beater and urban camo pants. His head is shorn to the scalp and even the day’s meager sun gives it a slight shine. The smile that spreads across his face is like two doors thrown open wide, and his arms move to match the gesture, spreading out in welcome.

  “Oh holy shit, look who the fuck just came slinking up my six like an alley cat. What up, girl?” He moves in to give her a hug and she extends a finger and presses it hard against his breastbone. All she has to do is give him a look and he gets it and backs off. “Dang, sorry, sorry. Stupid. The fuck was I thinking?”

  She shrugs it off even though her body feels like it just touched an electric fence. Irrational response, of course. Not like she doesn’t know Guy. She does. Trusts him like she trusts few others.

  More than her own mother, plainly.

  And yet. And still. Shit.

  They stand there like that for awhile. But Guy isn’t comfortable in silence.

  “I’m sorry to hear about what happened,” he says. “Fucked up, man. Real fucked up. I, uh, y’know, I gotta ask and all—that shotgun, the little .410 chicken shooter, you didn’t, it wasn’t…”

  “I did. It was.”

  His face goes ashen. She knows what he’s thinking so she gets ahead of it:

  “The cops don’t care,” she says. “They’re not following the case. There’s no case there. My part in it is… well, they saw it how it happened and they’ve got more important things to worry about. I spent a few months at Emerald Lakes. And the shotgun, they think it’s my Mom’s.”

  “Cool, cool,” he says. “Then I guess I’m glad you came by to buy that gun offa me.”

  “I need something else,” she says, in part because she likes cutting to the heart of things and in part because she’s too close to the heart of the wrong things. “I need drugs.”

  He waves her inside. “Let’s talk.”

  * * *

  His trailer is nicer than it should be. It also looks like the trailer of a middle-aged housewife, with the kind of décor Atlanta’s mother would’ve chosen. A pink wooden pig hangs by the front door to hold keys and mail. An Amish hex—a blue and red 8-pointed star—hangs above an old avocado-green stove. On the breakfast nook table, the salt-and-pepper shakers are a ceramic sheep and goat respectively, each framed by a cutesy wooden paddock made of popsicle sticks. Powder blue curtains hang at the windows. Blue like a robin’s egg blue.

  “It cam
e like this,” he told her once upon a time. “But I kinda started to like it. Made me feel all cozy and shit. What, you think I was going to hang up the Puerto Rican flag all over the place? Soccer balls and and rap posters and shit?”

  What’s funny to her is how clean he keeps it. He must dust. Her own mother doesn’t dust. But her gun-and-drug dealer does.

  He motions for her to sit at the table, then he plops down across from her, and sets a beer in front of her. A proper beer. Yuengling Black & Tan.

  “What you need, girl?”

  “I need to not sleep.”

  “But sleep is fucking awesome.”

  “Not to me it isn’t.”

  He leans in. Smiling, like he’s solved all the world’s problems. “You know what you need? You just need to sleep harder. Dang, that sounds like a fucking movie and shit. Sleep Hard 4: Sleep Harder. Whatever. What I’m saying is, you get a little Ambien, that’s like a baseball bat in pill form, you take that and it’s like wham, your head’s a mailbox and it’s hitting the ground.”

  “I don’t know.” She sips the beer.

  “Plus—plus!—you do it right, Ambien can get you really fucking high, too. You push past the urge to sleep and next thing you know, you’re like, breastfeeding a baby that’s not yours while hang-gliding over the Amazon river basin and shit. You don’t know what the hell happened.”

  “A baby that’s not mine? Hang-gliders? That does sound special. For now let’s try something that picks me up rather than puts me down. How’d that be?”

  He nods. “Okay. Okay. Yeah. But don’t be asking for meth. I don’t sell that shit up in here. You want that, you head up Grainger Hill way.”

  “No meth.” She’s seen what meth does to people. Bad skin. Funky teeth. Every meth user ends up looking like a pumpkin or gourd that sat too long on someone’s porch past Halloween—mushy and rotten, the skin puckered with the pock-marks of decay.

  “Okay. Hold on then.” He disappears down the hall of the trailer. She hears one of the accordion doors slide open, slide back, and then he’s back. The pill bottle rattles as he plunks it down in front of her.

  She picks it up. The pill bottle’s unlabeled.

  “Adderall,” he says. “You know, for like, hyperactive kids. I don’t know why the fuck anybody would want to give an upper to a kid who’s already acting like he just ate ten bowls of Sugar Smacks, but shit, once upon a time people thought the sun traveled around the earth.”

  “Some of them still do,” she says.

  “I know, right? Anyway. You take that. It’ll focus you up real good. You know you gotta sleep at some point though, right?”

  “Of course,” she lies. Her fingers work to peel the wet beer bottle label off the glass. Like peeling a sunburn, she thinks. “Yeah. Duh. I know that.”

  “Just in case,” he reaches in his pocket, tosses her another pill bottle. “Ambien. If you decide to go the other way with it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I normally get seven bucks a pill. You got ten Ambien there and twice that of the ADD meds, but let’s call it an even hundred for the Adderall, and the Ambien can be my gift to you. For being such a bad-ass chick and all that.”

  She pockets the drugs. “I’m not bad-ass.”

  “From where I’m sitting, you’re one I wouldn’t mess with.”

  “I don’t have money right now. Soon.”

  “You can owe me. It’s no thing.”

  “You’re a god among mere mortals, Guy. Thanks.”

  Atlanta finishes her beer in one long pull, then gets up. She thinks to move in to give Guy a hug but again the hairs on her neck and arms raise and it’s like she hears this keening frequency in her ears and for a moment she thinks, oh, fuck, I’m gonna pass out right here, right now—

  But then the sound goes away and she’s left feeling wobbly, but stable.

  Instead she just fake-punches him in the arm. He nods like he gets it. She leaves.

  * * *

  It’s gone dim by the time Atlanta gets home. Sky the color of a bruised cheek.

  Mom’s in the garage, face lit by the little TV she’s got sitting on a cooler. The cigarette between her two fingers has a long, crumbly ash hanging there, smoldering like a snake made of cinders.

  When she sees her daughter her face lights up. “We got our check today.” She fishes underneath her butt sitting there on the cot and pulls out an envelope and waggles it around. Then she notices: “Oh, shoot, this is the power bill. Gosh-dang PP&L, they didn’t even read the meter last month. They just estimated a bunch of nonsense. Thieves, I’m telling you. And it’s legal. But we did get our check.”

  “Super,” Atlanta says, not meaning it. She moves to head inside.

  “It’s funny,” Mom says a little too loudly. “I remember we’d go to the bank, you and I, and you were obsessed with the lollipops they had in a fishbowl by the counter. You wanted the blue ones, always the blue ones. I don’t even know what they tastes like. Wasn’t blueberry. I don’t think anything in nature tastes like that so I called ‘em ‘Windex Pops,’ but Lords-a-mercy, if they didn’t have any Windex Pops in the bowl you would go unhinged, so one time—“

  “Great story but I don’t care,” Atlanta says.

  Her mother’s face falls like a ruined soufflé. “I’m just saying, I need to go to the bank to cash this. I thought you and me could hop in the Oldsmobile and go into town. Maybe checkout the consignment store. Been wantin’ a new mixer.”

  “Here’s an idea. Get a job instead and then we don’t need to rely on you getting money from the state for doing nothing at all. What a crazy idea.”

  Then Atlanta goes inside, ignoring her mother’s stunned, stung face.

  She slams the door and goes and pops two Adderall soon as she’s inside.

  * * *

  The Adderall is good. Real good. The high has no jagged edges. And it does the opposite of those anti-whatevers they gave her at Emerald Lakes. Those little pills, each the shape of a baseball home plate, each the color of Pepto Bismol, softened everything. Life through a Vaseline-smeared lens. It took the pain and smothered it under a downy mattress.

  The Adderall takes the pain and straight up ignores it. It makes all the other shit going on so much more interesting, diminishing the pain by removing its bite. That night, she doesn’t sleep because she doesn’t have to. She cleans her room. She takes a walk down the driveway under the midnight moon, notices the windows of light still coming from the cat lady’s house next door, she goes back inside and writes that seven-page paper demanded by that hag, Mrs. Lewis. (Of course, it’s a seven-paged hate-fueled screed written in bold strokes with permanent marker.)

  Atlanta even cleans the shotgun. She doesn’t have gun oil so she uses WD-40 and olive oil. She doesn’t have a barrel brush, but she does have a wire clothing hanger that she bends and breaks and corkscrews into a wad of paper towel.

  She even pulls back the hammer and goes to clean it, but next thing she knows her heart feels like a jar of moths and it’s like she’s standing on the edge of a building teetering on the balls of her feet—the vertigo threatens to overwhelm her, to eat her the way a bullfrog eats a mayfly.

  The shotgun has to go. She slides it under her bed.

  For the rest of the night she lays above it, staring at her ceiling with wide open eyes, willing her heart to stop flipping and fluttering.

  * * *

  “Psst!”

  Whatever that is, Atlanta assumes it has nothing to do with her.

  She’s got her locker open and going through the motions—pulling books down off the shelf and letting them tumble into her bag even though at class-time she’ll instead just sit in the back and read her Stephen King novel du jour (today it’s The Stand), collecting that sweet B+—and she’s thinking too about how she didn’t sleep one wink last night and doesn’t feel tired. Sure, the Adderall’s blissful ignorance failed her eventually, but really, that was her fault. C’mon. Getting out the shotgun? It’d be like juggl
ing a couple of hornet’s nests and wondering how you got stung.

  Then: “Psst! Tsst! Fsst!”

  Again, ignorance is bliss.

  She slams her locker shut, takes a long slurp from a Diet Coke.

  Motion catches her attention at the corner of her eye.

  “Atlanta! Hey!”

  It’s Shane Lafluco. That squat little tamale. Shit, is that racist? Dang. Whatever. Shane’s well put together again: Polo shirt, khakis, wingtips, not a hair out of place (so much so it calls to mind the plastic hair-helmets you snap onto LEGO figures, she thinks). He’s hiding behind the water fountain which nobody uses because the water tastes like weed-killer. He waves her over and then ducks into the alcove behind him.