Caring Is Creepy

by David Zimmerman

  I took offense but couldn’t get my lips to function. I stood with my mouth open. The floorboards groaned as he traipsed into the living room and glanced around in a way that made me think he was looking for something specific. I knew he wanted Hayes, but the way he studied the room wasn’t the way you’d look for a person. It occurred to me for the briefest moment he could be an undercover agent from the Army looking for Logan, or somebody from the FBI looking for Hayes; however, these ideas were only foolishness and soon tossed aside. I didn’t kid myself any longer about the man. Once he shoved his way into the house, I knew this was Marty and I was in a giant, hairy fix. Meanwhile, he made his way through the house like he had it in his head to go visit my mom’s bedroom next. Or, God forbid, mine.

  “Do you even know my mom?” I asked, hoping to delay this possibility.

  “Not to look at, no, but we have a mutual friend.”

  Now I had one advantage. He didn’t know me, and he didn’t know I knew who he was or what he was up to. A fairly slim advantage, I’ll be the first to admit, but I figured there had to be some use I could make of it if I waited and kept my eyes peeled. I edged around the room slowly and put myself between him and the hall leading back to bedrooms. I worried he might already smell Logan and wonder where this stink was coming from. If Mom hadn’t been working so much and been so anxious over the Hayes business, I’m sure she’d of noticed by now herself. My original plan for the day had been to scrub him down and shave him. I’d intended to do it myself with a dish tub of hot water and a scrub brush. I thought it might be fun.

  Marty pulled a drawer of silverware from the china hutch and emptied it onto the floor. The sound, like a hundred tiny sword fights, shocked me more than I can say.

  “Who are you?” I asked him. “And what the hell are you doing?”

  The mouth breather said nothing. Instead, he snatched an unopened envelope from the breakfast bar and held it up to the light. Using a horny, yellow thumbnail, he tore it open and tapped the contents into his palm. Whatever the letter contained seemed to amuse him. He snorted and crushed it all into a ball.

  “What’s the name of this friend of hers you both know?” I asked, speaking a little louder. “See, even my mom’s friends don’t generally go through her mail. How about you put that down and tell me what you want?” I forced myself to sound a good bit more peppery than I actually felt, but this isn’t to say I wasn’t pissed off. I was. Friend or not, and he definitely was not, there wasn’t any call for him to be taking down books, flipping through them, and then chucking them over his shoulder like he did. Or opening up random drawers and poking his big summer sausage fingers into them, which he also did, ignoring me all the while. “Maybe I know this person,” I told him, raising my voice to carry over the racket he was making. “ ’Cause I sure don’t know you.”

  Marty looked over his shoulder at me, and when he saw I was watching, he hauled off and kicked the china hutch so hard half the plates came tumbling onto the floor and smashed as they hit each other. I wished I had a tranquillizer gun like the kind they use in nature shows to take down bears and such. This one here needed taking down in the worst possible way.

  “Hey!” I shouted at him.

  When he didn’t turn around, but only smiled to himself as he flung the contents of the end table drawers onto the couch, I knew he was probably trashing our house partly to get a reaction out of me, and I made a pledge to myself that, in the future, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me get bent out of shape. As he moved closer and closer to the shelves where Mom displayed her boats in bottles, I followed his destructive hijinks with a growing awfulness in my belly.

  “What are you looking for then?” I said.

  “You know Goddamn well I’m looking for Hayes.”

  “Well, you ain’t going to find him in a drawer.”

  He crossed the room in three long steps and peered down at me like I was a palmetto bug or a fire ant. Something irritating he could squish very easily with one of his beat-up, black-tasseled loafers. “Don’t bullshit me, honey. I’ll find that boy one way or another, and if it turns out you’re hiding him, you’ll be as sorry as you’ve ever been. Now answer me this, he holed up somewhere in here?”

  “Hayes was here, but he left. A long time ago. My mom got tired of his foolishness and tossed him out on his ear.” I didn’t know if this was the right thing to say. Fear had made an idiot out of me, I’ll admit it. “Anyway, Hayes don’t live here. He never did live here and I seriously doubt if he ever will.”

  The mouth breather put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. He had the strength you might imagine a gorilla’s hand having, if he was the biggest gorilla in the whole pack. Maybe Marty didn’t know his own strength, or maybe he meant to cause me a boatload of pain all along. Either way, his squeezing hurt like all get-out.

  “Ahhh,” I said, my voice rising to within a short hair of an all-out shriek. “Owww. Stop. Let go, please. You’re hurting me.”

  “Where’d he go?” Marty looked at my eyes. He wasn’t looking into them. He wasn’t making eye contact. He was looking at them. His own eyes now appeared even darker than before. The color of a driveway oil stain. They seemed to shift and change shades the way seawater does during a storm. It was this look that really put the scare in me. Before it, I was frightened, but seeing those empty, careless eyes, I became terrified. My bladder went slack and it weren’t no mere sprinkle that came out. Warm wet sopped the seat of my shorts.

  “I don’t know,” I wheezed. There was hardly any air left in my lungs for talking. “He just left. No one explains anything to me.” By now his hand hurt my shoulder enough to make tears come popping out of my eyes. He squeezed really, really hard. It felt like my collarbone might snap at any moment.

  “Hmmh,” he said. That was it. Just, Hmmh. Then he picked me up and moved me out of the way, so he could get down the hall.

  Please don’t smell Logan, I thought. Please, please don’t smell him.

  “What’s in here?” he said, pointing to my mom’s room.

  “Nobody. It’s my mom’s room.”

  “Nobody, huh? That ain’t even what I asked.”

  The mouth breather opened the door and went in. Right away I heard something fall over with a heavy thud. It sounded like it might be the lamp on Mom’s bedside table. The place on my shoulder where he’d squeezed me throbbed. I had an awful headache and my knees didn’t want to hold me up anymore. The bones had all turned to soggy bread. Back in Mom’s room, something small and fragile smashed. I knew what it was without looking. The painted china clown on the windowsill. Mom had gotten it from her crazy Uncle Brett on her fifth birthday. To me, the clown was creepy-looking, but my mom loved it. I leaned against the couch and prayed.

  I hadn’t prayed in earnest since my father disappeared, and even back then it wasn’t much more than a mumble-mix of wishes, patchwork memories of Sunday school, and bits from Sunday morning TV pastors. Back when I was smaller, I used to ask God to bring Dad back, to make Mom stop sleeping through the afternoon on her days off, to get me some flair DKNY jeans, and to blow away the dark gray smoke that sometimes clouded my brain with sad thoughts. My little tangerine-sized head imagined God to be half-Santa Claus and half-Wizard of Oz, a faceless beard with a single, giant, all-seeing eyeball that spoke in a deep Darth Vader voice. Nothing happened when I prayed then. Even so, you have to do something when a guy with fists larger than your teenage head barges into your house, almost breaks you in half, and is on the verge of finding a naked, dirt-smeared soldier gone AWOL behind your closet, and, no matter what you might of thought of yourself yesterday, you’re still only a kid and your arms and legs feel as flimsy as McDonald’s straws and there’s nothing else left to do. That’s when you pray even if you know it probably won’t help.

  Right then, I made it simple. God, sir, I said in my most polite inside-the-head voice, please don’t let him find Logan. That’s all I ask. It ain’t much. I don’t want nothing for
myself. If you could just see your way toward doing this one bitty little thing, I’ll do … I’ll do … I don’t know what. Something. Anything. Just please, please don’t let him find Logan.

  After Marty finished smashing Mom’s prized clown, the room went quiet for a long time. This was nearly as worrisome as the previous racket. He stayed in her room for another fifteen minutes. I couldn’t imagine there was fifteen minutes’ worth of stuff in there to look at, unless he’d turned on the TV.

  “What is it you really want?” I asked when he came back into the hall.

  The man didn’t even bother to answer. He went into the bathroom and knocked over the shampoo bottles, opened up the linen closet and threw all the towels on the floor, and then came out to kick apart the flimsy door to the fake closet that held the water heater. Once he finished destroying that, the mouth breather looked over his shoulder at me for the smallest slice of a second, strode across the hall, and threw open my bedroom door, like there might be a couple or three Hayeses cowering behind it. I followed Marty down the hall, stopping for a few breaths at the doorway. I couldn’t do nothing more than stand there and be afraid.

  In order to reach under the bed, Marty had copped a squat on my throw rug. He treated me to an eyeful of ass crack so hairy it would of shamed a bear. In those few minutes I’d been trembling in the hall, he’d already managed to scatter the little girl stuff hidden under the bed all across the room. When the mouth breather finally noticed me in the doorway, he sniffed loudly and wrinkled up his nose.

  “Something’s spoiled in here, girl.” The surprise in this came from the way he said it, as though nothing strange had been going on and he was only giving me a bit of uncle wisdom.

  “What?” Coming out of my mouth, the word sounded like it had rust on it. Did he mean me? That I was spoiled?

  “I expect you just left out a dish of something, and in this heat, it’s gone south in a hurry.” Marty peered around the room and then lifted each of his scuffed loafers and squinted at their soles before his frown zeroed in on me again. “You really need to start learning how to keep house, honey, especially if you ever hope to hold onto a man longer than a night.”

  A bit of clumsiness was the only thing that protected Logan from certain awfulness. Were it not for that cute little wiggle Logan’s ass made as he squirmed back into the storage room, my black dress wouldn’t of fallen in just the right way, so that it covered the storage room door with barely an inch on either side to spare. Marty was right about one thing. Logan put off a furious stench. His calling attention to it made me realize how bad it really was. A mixture of dirty socks and sex-sweaty crotch and overripe armpits and old shrimp shells and a few other dark and nasty flavors of stink. This never seemed to bother Logan any, or at least he hadn’t said so if it did. If and when I get through this, I told myself, I have to clean that boy up first thing. It’s only a matter of time before that smell gets us caught.

  The mouth breather seemed content to let stinking dogs reek. He picked up my old jewelry box, the one Dad bought me for Christmas when I was seven. The box was covered in pink satin and had a ballerina inside. When opened, tinkling music played and the little dancer turned in circles. Brahms’s “Lullaby,” Dad said it was.

  “This is my house.” My voice sounded stronger now, not so pipsqueak as before. “You hear me? This is my room. Hayes ain’t even allowed in here. Get out! What do you—?”

  “Shut up,” he mumbled, pushing me aside with one of his huge pink paws.

  “You shut up. Come into our house and smash my mom’s clown. How’d you like it if I came over to your house and smashed your—whatever nasty shit you care about? Huh? Huh? You ain’t nothing but trash, you hear me, tra—”

  Without even looking at me, without even turning around, he swung his hand out and backhanded me across the cheek and sent me stumbling into the wall.

  “I think you broke my jaw,” I said.

  Something scrambled and creaked in the closet. I tried my best to sit up. A head peered out from beneath my old church dress. I made frantic motions with my hands and mouthed the words, Go back! Go back! Logan watched me for what seemed a dangerously long time with a pair of woeful eyes and then vanished. He was naked, weaponless, and barely bigger than Marty’s right leg.

  The man was a troll waiting under the bridge for billy goats. He was a rusty-haired version of Bluebeard with half a shave and on his way to a head-chopping. He was the big, bad wolf turned the color of squash, sucking in his mouthy breath so he could blow the house down. He said the words shut up like they meant I’ll kill you in some other language. Troll language.

  Finally, after one last peek behind the drapes, Marty straightened up and brushed something invisible off his pants, took another long, hard look around the room, and left. I followed him but made sure to stay out of paw’s reach. When he paused to kick one of the slats from the broken door to the water heater, he might as well of kicked me. That thick stew of piss and vinegar, hot sauce and black pepper still simmering in my brain boiled over again and another steaming dollop of crazy came spilling out. I pushed him with both hands as hard as I could. Which, considering the bulk this man carried, didn’t do a hell of a lot, but it still felt good to do it. A fierce urge to shout came over me.

  “Get out,” I told him. “Get out!”

  I’d pretty much lost whatever sense I had left at this point, seeing as I knew what I could expect from this kind of behavior. I pitched a good, old-fashioned fit. I punched one of his ass cheeks. Twice, thrice, five times, maybe more. This was like slugging an extra-large pair of pantyhose filled to bursting with Velveeta cheese. I kept on with the yelling throughout. I’m not sure what all I said, but I expect I told him to get out of my house in every and any way I could think of, adding a choice swear word here and there for flavor. I didn’t have even the tiniest crumb of self-control left and I smelled of stale pee.

  That ass-hat Marty turned around in the doorway to the living room and laughed at me, a heaving wheeze that looked and sounded more like an asthma attack than any fit of the giggles I’ve ever seen. This little burst of fun didn’t last but three seconds before he took me by the shoulder again and squeezed even harder than before. He leaned over and put his face right down next to mine, so close I could feel the scratch of his mustache on my cheek and smell his breath. Rotten meat and whiskey and overripe bananas. And then he squeezed. And he squeezed. God did he squeeze. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of making me squeal or beg, but finally, I just couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Stop it … please … stop … ”

  He grinned wide to hear me say it, the way a man might when he hears a few bars of a dearly loved tune from his teenybopper years. But this smile only creased his face for the briefest flash and then his mouth fell back into its usual rut.

  “You best be sure your mama gets this.” Marty pulled a grey business card out of his jacket pocket, placed it on my palm, and then closed his fingers around my hand and squeezed it tight to make sure this little scrap of cardboard stayed put. I didn’t even look at it. “You tell her this: You can fool your old Unkie Marty once, but you try to do it twice and by God you’ll be sorrier than you ever thought you could. The deal has changed. You got that?” He shook me. My head jiggled atop my neck like a bobblehead doll. “Every day he don’t come through with them pills, the vig doubles. You got that?”

  “What’s the vig?” I asked, and then wished I hadn’t before the taste of the letter g even left the tip of my tongue.

  Marty pressed my arms against my sides and slid me up the wall until I was a good three feet off the ground and the two of us were eye-to-eye, a hand’s breadth apart. I know it don’t sound all that bad, especially when you compare it to the other things he’d just done to me—slapping me and squeezing me—but his eyes were not a place any sane normal person would like to dwell for long. I knew it wasn’t so, that it couldn’t be true, but it felt like he was sucking something important out of me, som
ething that lived way down deep, something I needed to keep. I did my best to stare at his forehead instead, right between his eyes.

  “Why won’t you leave?” I said, the words sounding odd and misshapen to my ears. “Ain’t you done yet?”

  “Not quite, little pullet.” Marty tried on a smile. He wore it like a bad-fitting suit, something several sizes too small, painful and slightly disturbing to look at.

  I went away for a spell. Somewhere gray and fuzzy. When I came to, I was flat on my back.

  “Look at me, girl,” he said, kneeling in front of me now, his voice loud but not quite raised up to a shout. “You awake? You all the way here? I lost you for a little bit. Worried me some. You remember what happened?” He didn’t seem all that worried to me, squinting down as though sizing me up for something, a noose, maybe, or a body bag. I didn’t like the feeling one bit.

  “Hey, quit playing possum. I know you’re awake. Let’s not make this any tougher, huh? You remember that message for your mama I told you before?”

  I must of paused too long to suit him. Marty sat me up against the wall again and gave me a shake. Not as hard as before, but I had more hurts than before, too. The tears came gushing out again. They kept coming and coming until my chin dripped like the broken showerhead in our bathroom. I’m still embarrassed I cried so much. I wish I could tell you I acted different, braver, but I can’t.

  “Oh, the waterworks again.” He sighed. “Let’s try this one more time. You look like one of those smarty-pants kids the teachers are always cooing over. Pretend it’s a spelling test. Tell it back to me.”

  I did. Stuttering with sobby little sucks of breath between the words. I thought for sure my shoulder was about to come off in his hand like the wrenched-off arm of an abused Barbie doll. The pain was such I could barely think my way through it. It took all the brain I had left to reply to this simpleminded request to recite his orders back to him.