“Fucking A,” he said when I’d finished, and then he let loose of me.
I collapsed into myself and slid to the floor. Not caring anymore. You’d of thought I’d run out of tears by now, but there were plenty left for me to squeeze out, and I did. My sodden shorts felt cold and nasty and the stink of my own pee came up and shamed me just that much more. He had got me and broke me down. That much was sure. But tell me this: what kind of accomplishment of bravery is it for a large and fully overgrown man to reduce a young and skimpy girl like myself to shoulder-squeezed crying fits? Not much, I say. Not much at all.
“Good,” he said finally, with all the airs of a man who thinks a job well and truly done. He shot the cuffs of his sports coat and dusted off some imaginary dirt he got on him from squeezing me. “Remember, he and your ma got till tomorrow. After that, anything bad happens, it’s their own damn fault.” And then Marty did something really strange. He barked at me and growled like a dog. “You do that to Hayes and see what he does.” Whatever this meant, it cracked him up something ferocious. He laughed a few long and ugly seconds about it. Then that mouth-breathing troll turned around and walked off into the sunshine. Not even bothering to shut the door.
It was a beautiful day. Eighty-nine degrees, cool for August in Metter, Georgia, a decent northeastern breeze and not a cloud in the sky. A bird twittered in the holly tree beside the stoop, as if it were any old day. A car passed one street over. When I felt like I could stand up, I went back to the bathroom and threw up.
Business Card
Marty’s card was the color of a fresh-dried scab with lettering
Martin Keegan
Manager and Co-owner
Bow Wow’s
Register, GA 31225
Ph: 912-556-9875
Fax: 912-556-9876
On the right was a bad drawing of a dog’s head. It was so sloppy you couldn’t tell what kind, only that it had a spiked collar and big, sharp teeth. Drool came out of its mouth in golden drops. Underneath the head were two crossed bones. All in all, sort of like a retarded version of a pirate flag.
A Misdiagnosed Stomach Bug
Logan’s face looked as tight and twisted as a convenience-store Halloween mask. He sat in the far corner of the storage room gouging a circle into the plywood floor with an old tin Christmas ornament. A dented red wise man. I waited a good long time before I came back to see him. Long enough for me to round up and lash down all the escaped emotions running wild in my head. Or so I thought.
“What the fuck?” he said when he got a good look at my face.
“Not so loud, wait—” I started, worrying Marty might still be somewhere close enough to be dangerous.
“I’m going to kill him.” Logan threw the wise man across the room and stood up as much as he could in that cramped space. “Where is he? Where is this asshole? If I’d of known he was doing that, I’d of killed him right then. Even if he is your mama’s boyfriend.”
“Logan, it ain’t what you think.”
This only seemed to make him angrier, if he’d heard me at all. He closed his eyes and sucked in a furious breath. The squeaky fan in the corner did its level best to cool things down. My hands were so slick with sweat they slipped off the little doorframe as I crawled through and I tumbled in with a double thud. Logan clenched and unclenched his fists. His bare toes curled against the floor.
“Anybody who could do that to you don’t deserve to be walking around taking up space. Shit, a man who’d do that to a little girl, there’s bound to be more and worse in him.”
I couldn’t help but cringe at “little girl.”
Logan grabbed a ceiling beam with both hands and pounded his forehead against it.
“Hey, listen to me.” I took his sticky cheeks in my hands and pointed his eyes toward mine. “That wasn’t Hayes. It was somebody much, much worse. He and his are after Hayes for money or pills he owes them. He wanted Hayes. I just had the shit luck to be here when the man couldn’t find him.”
Logan stopped trying to pound his head against the beam and started to pay attention to what I was telling him. “What do you mean, not Hayes?”
It all came out then. The whole pot of shrimp. My head was still a blurry mess of a place, so it was all I could do just to spit the story out in fits and starts, sometimes having to back up to tell him a bit I’d forgotten to tell in its place. Fake dog dope, bloody ears on the door, Hayes’s chopped pinkie, Heckle and Jeckle and Unkie Marty. All of it.
When I’d finished with this sorry tale, I finally looked up to see what he made of it. I’d pretty much kept my eyes pointed at the floor while I’d told him the whys and whats and whos. Now I wanted to know what he’d say. But Logan said nothing. Instead, he cried. The tears drew jagged lines of pink skin on his cheeks. He made no sound. His eyes might of looked red and raw, but they were full of a generous kind of sad. A look that was absolutely new to me. I knew then that whatever else might happen between us after he finally left my attic storage room, good or bad or nothing at all, I would always love him for these ten tears. Ten. I counted five on each side. It didn’t matter to me what I’d just gone through to buy them. Right then, and maybe even now, they seemed to me a bargain.
“What’s his name?” Logan asked, his voice a croak.
Neither of us breathed a word about the tears. I knew this would only ruin them.
“It don’t matter, Logan. He’s gone.”
He stared at me until I looked down.
“What,” he said in slow, careful voice, “is the man’s name?”
I showed him the crumpled card.
Logan glared at it for a long time, his lips moving silently. I sat there blunt-brained. That terrible afternoon had hogged up all the space in my head. There wasn’t room for extra thoughts of any kind. I could of sat there like that for a cat’s age, all nine lives of it. I believe Logan must of said my name a few times before I heard him. He handed back that mean bit of cardboard.
“Why didn’t you tell me all this before? I could of helped. Protected you. If I was worth half a shit, I would of anyway. That fucker was slapping the shit out of you five feet away and I just sat there with my hands under my ass. I’m sorry.”
“There wasn’t a blessed thing you could of done, Logan. And it was me who told you to go back. I thought I could handle him. You ain’t got nothing to be sorry for.”
“Still.”
“You got more than enough problems of your own to sort out. I’ve already caused you plenty of trouble. I didn’t want to give you any more to have to worry over.”
“The one who ought to be worrying is that fat fuck Marty. He comes back while I’m here it’ll be the last time. If I had a pair of pants, I’d—”
“See, that’s what I was afraid of. You’d go out and get yourself in trouble over this, get arrested or worse, and it’d all be my fault. You sure as hell don’t need a dozen more burdens loading you down.”
“You’re no burden, Lynn Marie.”
“And you’re sweet to say it, but I know a burden when I see it in the mirror.”
Logan puffed through his nose and shook his head. I saw something then, maybe in the way he set his lips or the cast of his eyes. I had a feeling I’d made a giant mistake telling him all this. If I’d only waited a half-hour longer or at least until I’d gotten my head together a little more before I came rushing back here, looking for him to say, oh, poor little Lynn Marie, then I’m sure I would of had the sense to keep my mouth shut. Ten minutes ago, these two separate lives of mine, even if they were only about five feet and a piece of sheetrock apart, were completely separate, unmuddled. Each had its own problems, sure, but mixed together as they were now, they were like a lit fuse on an atom bomb. Right as he opened his mouth to keep on with this angry, self-disgusted talk and work himself up into doing something we’d both sorely regret, I cut him off.
“Listen now, Logan, honey, we already said it all. There’s no point in driving ourselves crazy with it. The egg’s
been broke, the milk’s tipped over, so instead of smearing it all into a terrible mess on the floor, let’s us see if we can’t bake a cake.” This was something my mom always said and I was shocked it’d come out of my mouth. But he smiled to hear it, so I guess it was okay.
I moved in to kiss him and add a little sugar to this batter I was talking up. It will probably sound more than a tad strange considering the timing, but my body surprised me by wanting to get with Logan’s body in the worst way. But before I could make good on this, something new and drastic happened inside Logan’s head. What little color I could see under the grime on his face fled to some lower portion of his body. The pink tear trails went ashy. He took my hand in both of his. And what cold and clammy things they were, too. He looked about to puke. I feared he must of drawn some fresh and horrible conclusion from all of this crazy shit I’d unloaded on him.
“Lynn Marie,” he said, his voice a rasp so low I had to lean in close to make it out. “I know what it is now.”
“What what is?” I said.
“I love you.” He blinked at me. “So it makes sense now, all the other stuff. The you know …”
“No.”
“Me puking and all the rest.”
“Puking?” None of this made a lick of sense.
“Oh, right, you were at school.”
“What now?” I was truly alarmed.
“Which part, the puke or me loving you?” He coughed out a laugh, looking more surprised by this statement than I imagine even I was.
And I was floored, this having been the absolutely last thing I ever would have imagined coming out of his mouth at that moment.
Seeing my look, he said, “I know, I know, it’s crazy.” Logan laughed again. His color came back and then some. The blush of blood showed in his ears. “For a while I thought I was coming down with a stomach bug.”
You Clean Up Nice
I made sure the water in the two salad bowls was warm, but not too hot, and I brought along some liquid soap that smelled like limes, and a fresh towel. It’s alright for men to smell like limes. Limes are an either/or smell. As I put together Logan’s bath kit, I got to worrying more and more about the crazy behavior of his I’d seen before Marty came. It troubled me, I’ll tell you. I couldn’t have him strolling about in the altogether for the entire world to see the next time he got it into his head to sort through my dirty laundry for disgusting headgear. I figured giving him some kind of discouraging punishment, no matter how much I hated having to do it, was even more important now that I knew Marty might come back any time.
When I came to give him his bath, I knocked Logan in the head with the doorknob by accident. For some reason he’d gone back to cowering in the corner behind the door and scratching the floor with his dented, red tin wise man. He didn’t recognize me at first, which worried me more than a little, especially after our love talk. Did that mean he was lying when he said it?
“Jesus,” he said, once I’d calmed him down. “What was all that? I thought we were under … I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
My Specialist Loy sounded nearly as scared as I did when Marty squeezed my shoulder. This irritated me. I wanted Logan to be strong and sure and capable in an emergency, and it seemed pretty clear this wasn’t going to be a dependable trait of his, but what confused and confounded me was I also wanted him to be the little boy I kept an eye on and took care of. I never knew which one I’d find when I opened the closet door.
“What was what?” I said carefully.
“The shooting. Somebody fired off a gun. Not just once. Five times. I counted.”
What was he talking about? There hadn’t been any thunder. Or any other loud sounds I’d heard. Then I got an idea of how I could use this to my advantage. This is going to sound cruel. I know it better than anybody. But you got to remember, I did what I did to protect him. If I couldn’t count on him to be a soldier, I needed a way to protect the little boy from his own mischief.
“They’re looking for you,” I told him. “Those weren’t guns you heard. The police have been knocking on every door around here. You know the way they do, knocking on doors like they hold a grudge against anything with a knob. Didn’t you hear me talking to them out front?”
“Uh-uh,” he said.
I made him sit down on several sheets of clean newspaper and then I took a washcloth and soaped him up. I’d watched my mom do this at the hospital many times. I started with his face. Careful downward strokes. First the left cheek, then the right. Logan was so agitated by what I’d told him, he didn’t seem to notice what I was doing at first. Somehow he’d managed to get grime in his ears, but I washed it all away. I made sure to be methodical about it. One bowl for scrubbing, one for rinsing. This was how I managed to keep the brittle bits of my brain together on that unhappy day. Without someone else to look after, I feel certain I’d of come to pieces in under an hour. In this way, Logan saved me. He served me more by sitting and allowing me to scrub his dirty hide than he would of done had he leapt from the closet and served Marty up with a mighty thump on the head. And besides, Marty would of turned and done something even worse to Logan. Maybe even given him the gift of nine grams, as Logan himself was always saying. I noticed, just before he left, that Marty carried some sort of firearm beneath his sports coat in a shoulder holster. And nine grams is the weight of your normal workaday bullet.
“God, you’re dirty,” I told him. “How did you get so filthy dirty?”
“Now I think about it, maybe I did hear somebody talking. You swear that wasn’t a gun?” Sweat and soapy water drew lines through the dirt on his chest.
“Yeah, I’m sure. Last time it was Mr. Cannon’s door set you off, remember?”
“Right,” he agreed, with an extra-sad look. Logan had taken to tapping each of my toes three times in quick succession every time I came into the room. I can’t recall when this practice started. But instead of the usual one time through, he kept at it over and over as I washed him. “How’d they know to come looking for me here? You said it was safe.”
I knew I had him now.
“Remember that man we saw when you bought the wine? Mr. Jenkins?”
I took his left arm and rubbed it down, rinsed the cloth and washed the soapsuds off. Then I did the other arm. He had a faint star-shaped scar on his shoulder. I kissed it.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “That old guy from Cobbtown?” The one who called my sergeant? Damn, I knew that’d come back and bite me on the ass. What’s he done now?”
I washed his chest, scrubbing in circles. He had a dusting of hair there, darker than the hair on his head but lighter than the hair on his boy parts. Dirty lint had collected in his belly button. I lifted his arm and gave his pits double washings. That’s where he smelled the ripest. There and down between his legs.
“He went and told the police he saw us together. I guess snitching to his brother wasn’t enough.”
“What did you say to them? The police, I mean?”
“Turn around,” I said, so I could get at his back. The grime was smudged in the shape of an upside-down bottle. I’d only now begun to really scrub and already the water in both bowls was filthy. “I told them I got a ride from you. I didn’t really know you all that well and that was the last I saw of you. I don’t think they believed me. That’s why they wanted to search the house. I said they’d have to wait for my mom. They know you’re around here somewhere because they found your car.”
“Who was it that found it? The hardware guy again?”
“A policeman. Don’t you remember? I told you all that.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” he rubbed his hands against the tops of his thighs. “What am I going to do? I knew I should of brought my rifle.” Then he mumbled something about bombs. I didn’t like the way his eyes looked. If I hadn’t of known first hand, I’d never of believed this was the same Logan pitching me woo only an hour before. He wasn’t a bit scared of Marty, the one who was worth worrying over, but a couple of
handclaps drove him to distraction.
“When I’m back here all by myself,” Logan said, “I have to listen out for every sound. Just in case, you know? It makes my neck hurt, and my back. Today, all those sounds about drove me crazy.”
For some reason, being the source of common sense soothed me, even if I was the one who’d set these fears in motion. My own shoulder ached down deep in the bone, but telling Logan the simple fake-truth like this somehow made even the worst of my hurts feel better too. I can’t explain it.
“I’m fucked.” He took a deep breath and let it out with a long, wheezy squeak. “I am so fucked.”
I washed his thighs. This went more quickly. They weren’t as dirty as the rest. The washing soothed him, but not enough to make him sit still.
“Calm down. You’re safe in here. I told you that a dozen times. They didn’t find you, did they?”
Logan shook his head, still jittery with worry.
“And believe me, mister, they questioned me pretty hard. This is as good a hideout as you’re likely to find.” I held his chin in my soapy hand and forced him to look at me. I made my voice go soft and low. “You’re still here with me, right?”
“Right.”
“And you feel safe here with me, right?”
“Mmmm,” he said.
“And you love me, right?”
“Mmmm,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I love you. Of course, of course.”
Then I went on to his feet, which were black on the bottoms and took some serious scrubbing. The big toe on his right foot was crooked. I’d forgotten about it until then. Logan told me the story the first night he spent behind the closet. He’d broken it the day his base was overrun in Iraq. The insurgents had caught him napping, literally, and in his rush to put on boots, he’d stumbled against a cot and cracked that little bone in two. If you knew his alphabet of scars, you could read Logan’s body like a book. Slowly, I was learning the ABCs of Logan Loy.
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