Caring Is Creepy
Page 9
“He said he can hardly wait to meet me.” Not exactly true, but I felt inspired. “We’re going on a picnic.”
“Shit, got to go. She’s back.”
Will Hayes Go to China?
The phone rang again, and I picked it up because I thought it was Dani calling back.
“Hey, Dani, what is it?”
A man breathed heavily into the phone. Before that first breath was through, I knew who this was. The mean man who called before. I recognized the wheezy sound and the way he blew out air with a kind of grunt at the end. After his second noisy suck of air, I matched up the breath with the man. Not that it made me any happier to of figured it out. This was Marty. H.K.’s uncle, who ran the Bow Wow club. The boss creep. The head thug. The mouth breather.
“You tell Hayes I found his car.” His voice had a flat sound to it, bored almost, as if he was reading from a piece of paper he’d already read a hundred times. “I’m taking it as mine and it don’t count for nothing toward what he already owes, not even the vig. You hear me?”
That bad night flashed through my head again like pictures in a PowerPoint presentation. The paper cutter goes whomp. The little pink nub jumps across the table. The hand squirts red. Plain, old-fashioned fear turned my insides into goo.
“I don’t speak for Hayes,” I told him, trying to keep the wobble out of my voice.
“Shit. You tell him, you tell him this—” He made a long sound of disgust, like he was clearing his throat. “I ain’t going to let this slide. You tell him that. He goes to fucking China—I don’t care—I’ll find him. You tell him it don’t have to go bad for him. But, but, but, if he don’t get with it, I’m going to send Butthole Gibbs after his sorry ass. Hayes will know what I mean. He’s got two days.”
Then he hung up.
This is the end of summer, I thought.
Guido Gardens
Pastor Guido was a local televangelist. Even though he was from New Jersey, most people liked him anyway. His wife’s people were from Metter, so that made up for it some. In fact, I think my mom’s aunt was his wife’s second cousin once removed or something like that. He had this little TV show that came on once in the morning after the local news out of Savannah and once after the late news at eleven. A Seed from the Sower, it was called. Only fifteen minutes long. It always started with some lame joke and ended with a passage from the Bible.
Pastor Guido built the garden a couple years before I was born. My father took me there every year to see the Christmas lights. At the gate they’d usually put up a huge plaster birthday cake with electric candles that said, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESUS! Thirty-three candles. I’d count them each year. Once I asked my dad, “Shouldn’t it be one thousand nine hundred and ninety-some candles.” He said, “Shhh, these people are as serious as a heart attack.”
The gardens were about forty minutes away from my house if you walked. Half that if you rode a bike. They were pretty in a loud way, like a Hawaiian shirt. Artificially colored streams ran along fiberglass beds and splashed from cement waterfalls and fountains. The whole place was only about three acres, but it was strangely shaped and filled with trees and covered pavilions, so it seemed a lot bigger. Someone told me once that if you walked every path it was exactly eight miles. The paths were made of brick and lined with black-eyed Susans and ferns and bright purple coneflowers. No matter where you were in the park you could hear Muzak versions of famous gospel songs playing out of hidden speakers.
I chose this place to meet Logan because there were lots of hidden nooks where we could talk and not be seen. The place I had in mind was at the very end of the gardens near the road. A wrought-iron bench beside a waterfall. It was surrounded by weeping willows and plastic statues of geese. It’d take a long time to find it if you didn’t know where to look, and if you wanted to get out of the gardens fast, all you had to do was jump over a couple of bushes and you were out on Turner Street. A sign behind the bench said, PLEASE ALLOW ME TO COMFORT YOUR SOUL. I hoped Logan might do something very much like that.
A Red Shirt and a Polka-Dot Dress
Two middle-aged women pushed into the restroom when I was at the tail end of cleaning up—in fact, practically just about taking a shower in the sink. With the heat index, it was pushing a hundred and ten. I’d had to pedal along a busy road for most of the way, so to really get an idea of how I looked, add a few cups of dust and grit to a bucket of sweat and pour that over the image of me in your head. By the time I finished washing, the sink looked like somebody had scrubbed a pig in it. I finished off my transformation by putting on Mom’s old blue-and-white polka-dot dress, the one Dani said made me look older, and rubbing my neck with a perfume sample out of that month’s Vogue. The women turned their fancy hats and pinched little frowns on me. As I stumbled out, the first one nearly knocked me into the wall with her breasts, which were so big and mushed together, they looked like a single, jumbo-size loaf of Wonder bread set up there above her bellybutton.
Clamped down on the head of the second woman was a hat with a fake flower bed glued to the brim. This fancy bit of headgear resembled a natural history exhibit I’d once seen on a field trip to the state park museum. All it needed was a stuffed owl. She clucked her tongue and, after a last headshake in my direction, said, “Gary told me he was overjoyed to see my mama. Overjoyed. But he can’t fool me. I know that man like the back of my hand. He is up to something. Mark my words.”
“You got to watch them every second, Carrie.” The big-bosomed lady’s voice boomed inside the tiled room.
And then the door banged shut.
I’ve wondered often about that word—overjoyed. People say it a lot, but it usually doesn’t make sense the way they use it. If you overdo something, then it most often means you’ve done it too much, like overeating, which can keep you up all night groaning and clutching your belly or send you racing to the toilet. Does a big, greedy gobbling of joy give a person some other variety of indigestion? Joy lives mainly in the head, right? So then it stands to reason a day of overjoying will end in a night of headaches and sinus trouble. Since joy is a feeling that generally escapes me, it’s a rare day I get the opportunity for joying of any kind, much less overjoying. I suspect the term that best applies to my usual state is underjoyed. The day I met Logan for the first time I was afraid to hope for anything as extravagant as joy. I wished I had real breasts instead of these two little hen’s eggs with match-head nipples. I wished Dani’d been there in the bathroom to help me with the makeup. All I wanted was to avoid embarrassing myself. If I could manage that, it would be a good day. Joy could wait for later.
The gardens were almost empty, so it was hard to keep a lookout for Logan without him seeing me do it. The last time I’d been here was almost five years earlier, with my Sunday school class. I couldn’t think of any easy place for us to meet before I took him back to the little nook at the south end of the garden to talk, so I told him to wait for me at the gate. He said he’d wear a red shirt.
I sat on a bench about a hundred feet from the entrance. Across the goldfish pond, three solemn men in dark suits talked quietly. Every once in a while I’d hear one of them quote something with a scripture sound to it. Thees and thous and the like. It was a quarter after four and I was sweating again, even though I was in the shade. The gnats found me right away and launched an invasion into my ears and up my nose. I sang peppy radio songs in my head and tried to think of nothing. School started in a matter of days, but I couldn’t quite make myself believe it. Sitting there, waiting to meet up with a soldier I might later even kiss (fingers crossed), made the idea of high school as distant and unreal to me as a family sitcom from the eighties rerun on cable. Metter High School seemed like some other world that didn’t have anything to do with what was happening to me now.
At four-thirty, Logan showed. I’d about given up. He was shorter than I imagined, and wiry like the boys on the track team. I’d pictured him with a military buzz cut, but his hair came down below his ears. The onl
y thing I didn’t like was a mole on his cheek that looked like John Boy’s from The Waltons. My mom liked to watch The Waltons on cable, and whenever John Boy’s mole came on the screen, it always made me leave the room. The one on Logan’s cheek wasn’t quite as big, but you definitely noticed it. He held a blue box in his hand wrapped with a white ribbon. Something went suddenly wrong with my inner organs, and I thought I might have to make a dash to the restroom, but I didn’t.
I kept walking toward him until he saw me and waved. We were still too far apart to say anything and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I forgot what I usually did with my hands when I walked. Did I usually swing my arms or hold them by my sides? I couldn’t keep looking him in the eye that long. I waved and looked down. My face felt like melting wax.
I thought he would shake my hand when we met, but he hugged me instead. It surprised me, but I liked it. All of my inner organs really went into overdrive then, churning and squirming and making dangerous noises. I wanted to say something clever or funny, but my head was an empty egg. I felt all thin shell.
“Hey,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”
“Okay,” I said, immediately thinking, Why did I say that? What the hell does that mean? Okay? Dani would laugh if she heard me. He must think I’m retarded and I’ve only said one word!
“You want to walk around?”
“Okay.” It was all I seemed able to say right then. Maybe if I concentrated really hard, I could add one more word to my vocabulary. Like sure or great.
He took my hand, which probably felt like pickled pig’s knuckles, and we walked along the outer path. The flies buzzed very loud at that moment, and although the sky was the color of skim milk, the sun shone so brightly I could barely see. He talked. He said I looked better than he imagined, older. He liked my hair and my polka-dot dress. He told me he’d had some problems leaving the base. Literally five minutes before he planned to leave, his asshole sergeant assigned him to do something really big that afternoon. I can’t remember what. See, Logan’s presence took up so much of my attention I could barely hear what he said. I do remember he asked me if I listened to the Shins a lot. For a long moment, I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
He hummed a song.
“Oh,” I said after a moment, “right, yeah, the band. I only really know the songs from that movie soundtrack. My friend plays it a lot. I do like the creepy caring song, though.”
Logan laughed.
A bus of nursery school kids unloaded at the visitor center and the gardens filled up with screaming children. It seemed oddly late in the afternoon for them to be there. Everything in the garden suddenly felt bigger and louder and brighter than normal. My voice warbled when I talked. I told him I liked his red shirt, but I hadn’t really looked at it. His eyes changed color when we left the slanting afternoon light and walked in the shadows under the trees. He had very white teeth. His lips were thick but not too thick. Full, I think is the word. He said a lot of things. Things I can’t remember now. I could barely concentrate on walking. I forgot how to do the most basic things, like breathe and talk. We circled the garden three or four times before he gave me the package. By then I’d forgotten he had anything with him at all. The package was small, about half the size of a CD case but thicker, and it felt light when he put it in my hands.
“What’s this?” I said. The package made me even more nervous than I was before.
“Open it.” He smiled and his teeth looked very bright in the sunlight, like polished bits of stone.
I took off the paper carefully, peeling the tape back instead of tearing it, as though I meant to reuse it and not just chuck it in a trash bin like I did. This was something that irritated me to no end when my mom did it, and there I was doing it too. The box inside had a gold foil sticker that said, LEVY’S JEWELRY, in raised, bumpy letters. He watched my face very closely and this made it even harder for me to use my hands like a normal human. Lying inside on a mattress of white velvet was a thin gold bracelet with a charm shaped like a puppy.
“See these little loops?” He pointed with his pinkie, as though the gold was so delicate a larger finger might wreck it. “You can add more charms later on if you feel like it. I didn’t know what kind of animals you liked. This guy’s smiling, which I thought was pretty good. The penguin looked mad or …” Logan seemed to run out of words there. He smiled an apology. Without even thinking, I grabbed his wrist and squeezed it once before realizing and yanking away.
“Thank you,” I said. My tongue seemed to fill up my entire mouth and spill out over my lips. At least that’s how it felt. I could hardly get the words out around it.
He took the bracelet and draped it over my wrist. It was hard not to shake as he fixed the clasp. I made a fist to keep my fingers together, but my hand still trembled. In the bright sunlight, the bracelet looked like a squirt of burning lighter fluid on my wrist. Once he got the bracelet on, he leaned over and kissed the inside of my wrist. It surprised me so much I almost pulled my arm away again. A couple of little boys ran past us yelling, chased by a girl in pink shorts waving a branch as long as she was. Logan gave me a serious look and took my face in his hands and kissed me on the lips. He didn’t open his mouth when he did it. He just pressed his lips against mine, like a kiss in a black-and-white movie. Logan had a nice, soapy smell. But hiding right beneath was something spicy and sharp that reminded me of nutmeg. It was the kind of smell to fill your belly with raw blue swirls of electric current. And his lips left behind a clean, mint taste.
“I know it ain’t much,” he said, holding my wrist with both hands and tapping the bracelet with his thumbs, “but I wanted to bring you something.”
Boone’s Farm
Logan had an old, mint-green Grand Marquis. The backseat was big enough to hold my bike, but we put it in the trunk. An Army duffle bag rode shotgun with the seat belt holding it in place. He tossed it in the back and helped me into the car. I wondered about the bag but didn’t say anything. The air conditioner was broken—he apologized for this three times—so we put the windows down. Something was wrong with the automatic window on my side. He had to get back out and yank on it a few times to make it come down even halfway. He told me his father had given him the car when he joined the Army, and he tried to take care of it as best he could, but it was old and there was always something that needed to be repaired. While he was over in Iraq, his ex-fiancée drove it. She hadn’t thought to change the oil once in an entire year, and this had added to its sorry decline. Even I would of known to do that.
Logan turned left on Lewis and we drove through Metter, crossing over the interstate and going a ways out into the country toward Cobbtown. The cotton fields along the road were dark green and powdered with orange dust. The bolls themselves had only barely begun to burst into white. I leaned back in the seat and watched the neat red rows of clay flicker past between the lines of cotton plants. I gave up my head to happy, empty looking. The sun-baked air blew my hair out straight behind my head. We topped a small rise, and on the other side, the hard sunlight of the cotton fields ended and the swaying, speckled shade of the pine tree farms began. Tall, straight trees rose up on either side, darkening the asphalt and filling the car with the sticky, medicine smell of rising sap. We passed the rusty ruins of the old turpentine factory. A donkey and a cow chewed grass in the building’s blue shadow. I threw them a wave, but neither one bothered to look. The clover in their pasture must have been juicy and sweet. All their wishes had been granted. They had no need of me and my cheerful teenage waves.
“Where are we going?” Logan had to shout because the wind roared in through the windows. Even with the air fluttering my hair here and there and keeping it up off my neck, the car was still hot. Sweat puddled up under my legs, so they stuck to the vinyl seat, and a dribble dripped down the middle of my back.
“I don’t care,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. And then, after a couple of seconds, “I’m not going back.”
“I wish I didn’t have to go back to Hunter. I can’t stand it there. I hate it worse than anything I’ve ever hated. And the idea of going back to Iraq—it just—” He banged his fist on the outside of the door. It made a hollow thump. “I don’t think I can do it.”
“What would you do instead?”
“I don’t know. But I’m sick to death of the Army. I did my bit. Nobody can say I’m not patriotic. There’s plenty of other assholes who could go instead of me.”
We were quiet then, thinking about this. We drove past Dean Martin Taxidermy with its huge JESUS SAVES sign and pasture out in front. A couple of fat black sheep leaned together back to back, so still in the shade of a cypress tree they looked like great big rocks. I wanted a cigarette. We passed the little gas station at the edge of Cobbtown and I wondered if I should ask him to stop and buy me a pack. Logan beat me to the thought.
“Do you drink wine?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I think some cold wine would be good.”
There were no cars coming, so he made a U-turn in the road and drove back to the gas station. It was a little cinder-block box with peeling white paint and a window made of glass bricks. On one side of the gas station, a row of pecan trees kept the service island shady, and over past the trees, two tireless rust heaps were parked forever in a patch of jimsonweed and buttercups.
“Mind going in the store for me? I’ll give you the money. I don’t really like crowded little places like this.”