“Don’t say ain’t,” Mom said, although she said it all the time. “It sounds trashy.”
I lowered my voice. I told her about Hayes coming over today and then finding the ears.
“Jesus,” Mom said, her face going pale. She squeezed her lower lip until it turned yellow.
“Sorry for pestering you, but—” Watching her get worried made me feel even more scared.
“I think you should stay at Dani’s tonight.”
“What’s going on, Mom?”
“It sounds like a world of trouble to me,” the woman with the infection said.
My mom didn’t seem to hear her or pretended not to. “You go on over to Dani’s and I’ll call you. I expect Hayes just owes somebody money. It’s none of our concern.” She shook her head and frowned at my feet. “We really got to get you some new shoes. You can’t start school wearing flip-flops.”
Boats in Bottles
My mom’s favorite thing in the world to do is to build model ships. Not just any ships—she likes the kind you build inside of bottles with tiny tools. She built her first one when she was eight with her grandpa. It came in a kit. We used to have a picture of her in our photo album with that first boat in a bottle. She’s standing on top of a chair with the bottle pressed up against her chest like a baby doll, wearing Mary Janes and a blue-and-white polka-dot dress. Grandpa is standing next to her with his hand resting on her head. Because of the chair, they’re about the same height. She has an expression on her face I’ve never seen in real life. She looks like someone just told her she’d become a princess, and in a few minutes, they were taking the whole family off to live in a palace. Since then she’s built dozens of these boats. She had special shelves made in the living room to hold her favorites. They were arranged by type—schooner, clipper, steamboat, frigate.
The month she turned twenty-two, the year before she got married, she won a contest for building boats in bottles. It took place in Providence, Rhode Island. It was the first time she ever left Georgia. Grandpa drove her up I-95 in his nut-colored Chevy Malibu. She had the picture of herself receiving the award framed in black plastic and hung it above her bed. It could be another person, she looks so different in it. She has on what she calls her Little House on the Prairie dress, a sort of long sack with a busy-looking print, frilly cuffs and a high, button-up neck. Her hair hangs to her waist and it’s brown and shiny, unlike now. These days she wears it in a short, frizzy bob. “I don’t have the time to do anything with it,” she’d tell me whenever I’d ask her why she didn’t grow it out again. “It’s not practical for a nurse.” In the picture, her skin is smooth and she’s smiling. Her eyes are clear and unlined. She looks beautiful and happy. But it isn’t really the features of her face or the length of her hair that make her look different. It’s more like the way she uses her face. When I used to look at that picture and then looked at what she’d become, I could see how much the way you feel about yourself and the world affects the way you look. You’d be hard pressed to even recognize my mom now, if all you had to go by was that photograph. Looking at it made me wonder how much different I’d look if I was ever just-won-a-build-a-boat-in-a-bottle-contest happy. Ever since I’d come across that picture, I’d been on the lookout for my own project, my own build-a-boat-in-a-bottle.
I didn’t know it yet, but I’d already found it.
0
“I want to do something dangerous,” Dani said. “I’m so bored, it’s giving me an all-over body ache.” As she talked, Dani clipped fur off an old stuffed elephant with toenail clippers. Fluff drifted around the basement. She started with the belly and worked up to the head. It looked like a dog after it’s been neutered.
If I’d told her about the ears, maybe she’d of felt that was danger enough. But I hadn’t. So I just asked her what she had in mind—rob a convenience store?
“It’d be better than sitting around down here in the damn bat cave.” She got tired of the elephant’s belly and began giving the end of its trunk a circumcision.
We kicked around a few other ideas. Skinny-dipping in Water Oak pond, going bowling in Statesboro. At last I suggested the barn.
Dani tossed me the elephant and sat down at the computer. “I thought you hated going out to Wayne Keegan’s barn.”
“It was just a suggestion.” I picked up the elephant and stroked its sad, bare belly. “They’re probably not even out there.”
“No, they’re out there,” she said. Then she made a sharp little squeak. “We already got mail.” She turned and screwed up her mouth.
“We only made the new Game e-mail address the other day. Only us and Wynn and Logan know about it. Is it from him?”
Dani shook her head.
I leaned over her shoulder. Sure enough, there were two e-mails 2in the inbox. Both were from someone called [email protected]. The first had a message line that said nothing. The second said, “The angry eyeball has you in its sight.”
“You open them?” I asked.
Dani shook her head again.
I clicked open the first message. It was a single sentence in a weird font.
Your days of torturing men are over
“It’s impossible. Wynn said people can’t track you down like this, remember? I asked him about that guy who said he saw us through the webcam and he told me it was B.S. Are you pranking me, Dani?”
“No,” she said, “I swear.” From the quaver in her voice, I knew she wasn’t lying. “Do you think it’s from the …” She stopped, but I knew who she meant.
“Professor Carrot? No, and I don’t think he was any professor either. Probably works the deep fryer at Krystal’s.”
“He might not be that far away from us. He said he meant to drive from Chicago to Florida. The man could be here already.” She winced at me and squeezed her lips together with both hands like she was fixing to eat them.
“If he had a fast car,” I said, trying to calm her some with a bad joke.
It didn’t go over.
“Shit,” she said, “shit, shit, shit.”
I turned back to the computer and opened the next message. It read:
I know your face. I know your house. I know what you do.
Today you wore a yellow shirt. Tomorrow you’ll wear a frown.
Dani let out a shriek. I covered her mouth with a hand and looked up at the ceiling, where her mom had been pacing across the kitchen talking on the phone. When she made that noise, the pacing stopped. Dani wore a blue T-shirt with a Spam label printed on the front. Nothing yellow about it. I shook her sleeve.
“See, this ain’t yellow, Dani. I didn’t wear yellow today. Whoever this is doesn’t know shit. They’re just trying to scare us.” I smiled, feeling a bit relieved.
“No, no,” Dani said in a high-pitched whisper, “I wore a yellow shirt this morning when I went jogging.”
“I’ll send the fucker a message he won’t forget.” As I leaned across her lap to type, Dani grabbed my hand.
“No, Lynn, that’ll just get him wound up even more. That’s what he wants. To get a rise out of us.”
I tried to soothe Dani’s nerves by helping her pick out an outfit. She always said she didn’t know how she felt until she knew what she’d wear. Once she’d calmed down, we decided on telling Wynn about the eyeball messages tomorrow. For tonight, Dani decided, we’d go to Wayne Keegan’s barn.
“So wait,” I said, now regretting the hell out of my suggestion, “how do you even know those boys’ll be out there?”
“I saw Jared today at the Piggly Wiggly. Anyway, they’re always out there. He told me Wayne’s brother was going to buy them some beer.” Dani hefted a breast in each hand and jiggled them. “I think they’re getting bigger. God, I hope so.”
“What else is there to do?” I said, actually hoping she’d have another idea.
Dani made a circle with her hands and looked at me through it.
Amateur Night
Dani’s dad sat in the living room drinking a
Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boy and watching a PBS documentary about insects. As we passed the bay window, a huge brown spider chased down a mosquito tangled in its web and wrapped it in silk. Dani’s family had a projection TV and the spider looked as big as a Saint Bernard.
Dani worried her dad would hear the truck start, so we opted to hoof it out to Wayne’s barn. This meant a long walk through dark, empty streets and scrubby fields of kudzu and honeysuckle, the only sounds the screech of tree frogs and the twitchy hum of the streetlamps and the tap, tap, tap of the bugs making blurry halos above each pole. August nights in Metter smelled like jasmine blooms and garbage juice with a faint tang of creosote drifting underneath. Lightning bugs flashed yellow in the weeds along the road like tiny thunderstorms. Even though the sun had been down for hours, the air still felt as warm and moist as an armpit. We cut across the lawn behind the First Baptist Church to avoid any late traffic, but we didn’t see a single car until we got downtown. A light shone inside the old train depot and a shadow moved behind the window of Jenkins Hardware. Dani and me struck out along the train tracks that ran through the center of town. A cat appeared, eyed us sullenly, and scuttled away into the shadows. Above it all, a tiny red light atop the water tower flashed on and off, giving us quick peeks at the message painted beneath it: METTER IS BETTER. To me, this always asked the question: Better than what? Hell? Neither of us spoke. The quiet was too perfect to break with anything but the squeak of our shoes in the dew-soggy grass.
Right before we got to the gravel road leading down to the Keegan place, a car came up the hill behind us fast. A big engine with a deep-throated growl. Dani grabbed my hand and yanked me toward the stand of young pines beside the road, but we weren’t quite quick enough to avoid being spotted. The car slid to a stop on the sandy shoulder and idled for what felt an infinity. We froze, blinded by the headlights, two ditzy does. I scrutinized its silhouette, shading my eyes with a hand, but couldn’t tell if it had a cop-car top. But no, an old Buick Skylark with these horrible spinning silver rims pulled up. The window came down with a glassy squeak. Dani sucked in a breath and squeezed my hand.
“Where you two ladies going—”
Another person sniggered.
“—on such a fine summer night?”
The voice sounded familiar—in Metter, every voice is familiar—but I couldn’t match a face to it.
Dani could. She let loose of my hand and stepped up onto the shoulder, stumbling over a loose rock and holding out her arms for balance. “You scared the hell out of us, H.K.”
Now I knew. H.K. Keegan. This was Wayne’s older brother. Four years since he dropped out of Metter High and still wild as all get out. Every single one of the Keegan boys was trouble, but H.K. distinguished himself. I’d heard he spent three months in the county lockup for punching someone out in the parking lot of the Quick & Sleazy the year before. The man had told H.K. he liked his new tattoo. H.K. didn’t believe him.
“You need a ride someplace?” H.K. asked Dani. “You and your friend there?”
That dark someone in the car beside him mumbled a couple of things. I heard the word “jailbait.” H.K. shaded his eyes and peered over at me.
“Well,” Dani said, drawing the word out a second or so longer than necessary.
“Aw, come on. Get your butts in here. I won’t have it said I’m not a gentleman.”
Again, that sniggering from the other passenger.
The door swung open and H.K. pulled himself out. He stood about five foot eight, but carried himself like a much bigger man. Stringy, hard muscles and tattoos on both forearms. I noticed a tattoo of Woody Woodpecker on his neck. He made a small bow and gestured us into the backseat. Dani bent to crawl inside and he patted her on the ass as she passed beneath his arm.
When I hesitated, he took my arm and helped me in back—his touch was gentle but had firmness underneath that said, You ain’t going nowhere, girl—then got in the front.
“I recognize you from somewhere.” He tugged at an earlobe and made a short study of me in the dome light. “Yeah. You’re Darla Sugrue’s daughter, ain’t you?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Your mama sewed up my arm one time.” He lifted up his arm to show me a thick, pink smear of scar tissue behind his elbow. “Ran a little three-wheeler into a rusty strand of barbwire. Bled like a gut-shot buck.”
“Must of hurt,” I said.
“I weren’t feeling no pain.”
“Where you all going?” the guy in the front passenger seat asked. He wore his hair clipped down close to his scalp. I thought he might be twenty-five. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. Planted squarely in the middle of his left eyelid was a small, pink nub of a wart. He winked and the wart looked to be waving at me.
“We’re heading over to you all’s barn, H.K.,” Dani said, “to hang out with Wayne and Billy and all them.” She grabbed my thigh and gave it a painful squeeze.
“That ain’t no fun,” H.K. said, wheeling out on the blacktop and away from the road we needed to take to get to the barn. “Believe me, I know. I’ve spent plenty of nights out there eating bugs and drinking piss-warm beer. Come on with us. We’re going to Bow Wow’s. It’s amateur night.”
“Don’t worry,” the second guy said, “it ain’t that kind of amateur night. You don’t have to get your shirt wet or nothing.”
“I thought Bow Wow’s closed down,” Dani said. “Anyhow, won’t we get carded?”
“Naw,” he said. “H.K.’s uncle Marty runs the place now.”
“That’s Ealey,” H.K. said, jabbing his thumb at old wart-eye in the passenger’s seat.
“Hi,” Ealey said, suddenly sounding shy. He wore a black T-shirt with the words MAXIMUM GRUNTS written in red across the chest.
“I thought your uncle was still—” Dani stopped, looking unsure, as though she might of crossed a line she shouldn’t of.
H.K. laughed at her. “He got out on Christmas Eve, and let me tell you what, he hit the ground running.”
H.K. tore through the gears, making the engine whine and cry uncle. Dark trees whipped past the fingerprint-smeared windows in a blur. Thin trash pines and palmetto bushes. On the curves, me and Dani went bouncing from door to door, sliding across the seat and bumping heads. Beer cans and take-out bags from Forkin’ Pork BBQ rattled between our feet.
“Can I have one of those smokes?” I asked Ealey.
He lit one with the tip of his own and passed it back over the seat. The filter was wet. He said, “Sorry if I nigger-lipped it.”
I’d driven past Bow Wow’s a thousand times, but I’d never been inside. It was an unpainted cinderblock building set back about a hundred yards from the two-lane county highway under a droopy, old live oak covered in Spanish moss. Somehow, even the Spanish moss looked ratty. There was no sign that said Bow Wow’s out front. There wasn’t even a real parking lot, just a raw red clearing of packed clay full up with patched-together, primer-spotted trucks. Just beside the turnoff, a floodlight pointed at a sign with the words AMATEUR BOXING TUESDAY NIGHT—$50 ENTRY/$500 PURSE spelled out in black removable letters, like the kind they use on church signs to spell out Jesus slogans. We stepped out of the car. I could hear the screaming and the music.
H.K. nodded to the doorman, a huge guy with a glistening shaved head and a wifebeater stained with little brown blobs of what looked to be some sort of gravy. When the man gestured with his chin at us, H.K. counted four bills into his oven-mitt hand. The doorman smiled at Dani, showing her a mouth of teeth so perfect and white they almost seemed fake. Inside, a rush of smoke and beer-sour breath hit us full in the face. The shouting was such I couldn’t hear a word H.K. said until he yelled it right in my ear.
“Beer?” he asked.
It took a few seconds to get an idea of the place. Bow Wow’s looked twice as big on the inside. A long plywood bar set atop dented aluminum kegs ran along a good part of the left wall. Three bartenders raced about behind it, setting up Dixie-cup shots and pour
ing draft beer. Just inside the front door there were three pool tables with green glass shades hanging from the ceiling above them. Men with cigarettes screwed into angry mouths leaned over the red felt and slung their cues. A good hundred people were packed into the building. Mainly men, but here and there I spotted a brightly colored miniskirt. In the center of the room, set up about three feet off the ground, was a platform lined with double strings of yellow nylon rope. From somewhere up in the ceiling, several spotlights shone down on it painfully.
That Makes Quite a Stink
H.K. came back with two beers and shouted something that sounded like, “Do you want to go to church?”
When he saw me frowning at him and obviously not understanding what the hell he’d said, he grabbed my free hand, the other being firmly connected to Dani’s nervous palm, and dragged us across the room. Ealey had vanished into the crowd, an easy trick since everyone looked like him. H.K. took us over to a door marked private at the end of the bar. The noise dimmed a bit when he shut it behind us, and I went completely blind. It took a few seconds to see we were in another room about half the size of the one in front, and instead of a raised platform in the center, there was some sort of pit lined with yellow sand.
He handed me and Dani our beers.
“It’s where they fight the dogs,” H.K. said. “You want to see something that’ll blow your little girly minds, come to one of these dog fights. Shit, man, they’re vicious as all fuck.”
“Do the dogs die?” Dani asked.
“Them dogs love it. Believe me. They live to fight,” H.K. said, warming to the topic. “I’m thinking about running a couple myself once I get the money.”
“Do those terriers fight with the rats here?” I asked.
He grinned. “How’d you know about that?”
“Rats?” Dani’s mouth shrank down to a pink, lowercase o.
“Places like this, Dani, they put these fierce little dogs down there in the sand along with a mess of rats.” I pointed to the pit. “People bet on how many rats they can kill in a certain amount of time.”
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