She was finally lost for a moment in this ridiculous song. She thought she’d gone far away. Against her own advice, she opened her eyes, expected to see that giant salt-and-pepper bird in the rusting mirrors behind her, large beak nearly at her neck, bulging glassy eyes unblinking. She expected to see part of the bird over here in this mirror and a large, hulking mass of it over on this side in the other one. But it was just the top of Frank Moort’s head, no massive, dark bird. Just his own salt-and-pepper pate with flushed, droplet-covered skin peeking through. He was puffing hard and bobbing forward and back.
He was still grunting. Drops of sweat hit the small of her back where her white shirt had been pushed up. She grabbed a handful of material from her pink apron and stuffed it into her mouth.
She shut her eyes again. Don’t watch, she warned again, inside her own head. Don’t watch.
More from Sammy and the echoing chorus of kids. They droned on and on about this stupid candy man.
Frank Moort had been right, oh so right. This hurt. And a lot more than she’d ever expected. It was nearly unbearable. And Teeny thought she might actually let her bowels go. It felt like the slow, gurgling onset of diarrhea up inside her. Would that be worse?
Way more embarrassing, yes, absolutely, but at least this would stop.
But, it would end this. Frank Moort would be so grossed-out, he would walk right out of this bathroom here, through the pale blue-and-green men’s room door and that would be the end, the very end. She needed to hold it together—just until he finished.
But, oh, the searing pain. Like a knife jabbing straight on in. This was so much worse than having her left boob cupped after that dance senior year. So much worse. This time in the dark, she couldn’t help but picture Miguel cutting strips of back bacon, serrated blade on his shining knife. Long pink and red tendrils lined with yellow-white strips of fat. The flesh ripping and leaving jagged lines. For the first time she let out a cry, muffled by the mouthful of pink apron. She thought she tasted egg, old and crusted. Tears were coming from her shut eyes, tiny gullies tracing down her cheeks and probably dropping into the scaly sink.
Up there—out there—Sammy kept singing. Now it was about baking everything so satisfying and so delicious. About childhood wishes and even doing all the dishes!
That chorus of happy children, they repeated everything he sang, and she hated them. Oh God, she hated them so much. Bastards, every one, singing so happily about that candy man and how he mixes his candy with love and then the world tastes so damn good.
Swish-swish. The overhead fan went around and around.
Rip-rip. The vision of back bacon being torn to strips in her close-eyed view.
Slap-slap. Pounding and smacking with that distant puckering sound. Over and over.
His body coursed with electricity and he bucked against her, pulling her feet nearly off the floor. It felt like her body was pushing him out, rejecting him. And her intestines were coiled like tight springs. His left hand yanked her hip forcefully and his other reached around and grabbed hold of her breast, squeezing it painfully. He groaned with an open mouth. He threw his head back and the sound rose from him as his movements calmed.
And then he was finished. She’s not sure of much but she was sure of this. A slithering sloppy withdrawal that felt like the most painful bowel movement was next, almost like something had grown up inside her and now fell away. She swallowed hard on a ball of bile in her throat, forcing it back down at the thought of this thing pulling out. The gooey feeling was far away, now, though. The pain had numbed her backside, down her thighs and also up her spine to her neck. She did not open her eyes again. Just waited. Stiff and unmoving. Her fingers were throbbing red beacons. Her legs were wet and cold.
She heard the jangle of his belt. And the rustle of paper towels being dispensed and rubbed, then discarded in the wide green bin near the door. Still she looked at the darkness behind her eyelids concentrating on her wet thighs and the burn.
Frank Moort paused. She could tell, even without opening her eyes to look at him, that he was standing there, perhaps looking her over to see if she was going to move or just perusing her bare ass, probably red-skinned and filmed with blood. She did not move. Her knees threatened to buckle. They wobbled and the flesh on her legs jiggled uncontrollably. These tremors in her legs threatened to pull her down to the floor. The fan kept rotating and its false cool breeze brought gooseflesh to her exposed parts. Her forehead broke out in a band of itch-inducing sweat.
I want my ticket. She didn’t voice the words but tried. She swallowed hard with a parched throat that hurt like she’d been shouting. She didn’t know if she could even get the words to come out of her mouth. I want my sweepstakes ticket.
Then Frank Moort spoke.
“I knew yer dad, y’know. Knew him pretty well.”
Then she heard the creak of the door and he was gone. She panicked then, tried to stand completely upright and move to the door but lost her balance in a tangle of her underwear and the shaky malfeasance of her wobbling legs. She fell forward and managed to brace her weight against the closed door banging into it with elbows and her chest. Her body burned. Moving like this aggravated the pain. She shouted after him, but to no one, really. “I want my sweepstakes ticket Mr. Moort!”
Nothing from him. Silence on the other side of the door.
And then footsteps. She couldn’t go after him. Physically couldn’t.
After he’d gone, she locked the main men’s room door with the latch from the inside. She slid down the door to the cool tile floor, careful not to land on her rump. She pulled her knees up near her chin and, for the first time, saw her white underwear, still at her ankles. The white velour-cotton was patterned with fifteen or twenty penny-sized dollops of red. How could this possibly fit into God’s plan for her? She was hurt—injured really—but more than that she felt alone.
She looked again at those buttons of red against white now starting to turn crusty and dark.
Her lips crinkled and tears formed in her scrunched eyes but she held. For seconds or even longer, she held. She waited until she heard the distant dingle of the bell over the front door of the café. She heard that and then she heard crying. She realized it was her own.
She fell sideways to the floor then lay on the tile of the men’s room and cried.
Her mind was mostly madness and at one point she screamed.
It was ten minutes past eight.
Part IV
Locking Up
1.
Teeny stood in two places: the dim men’s room and the corresponding men’s room inside the rust-tainted mirror. She didn’t look that other Teeny directly in the eyes. There was one big splotch of liquid soap on her right breast. It had three fingers protruding from it and she remembered the groping when he’d finally finished. Hair was thrown everywhere like burned stalks of messy crop stubble. Her apron had been bunched up into a crinkled ball and she’d pulled it off. It was in the sink, dotted with wet teeth marks: her own. Her skirt was up around her belly and her white shirt was drenched in sweat at the armpits and down her back.
First, she carefully threaded her panties from her ankles, gingerly, to avoid falling. To knock herself unconscious on the edge of one of these white sinks now, after it all, would be horrendous. She imagined one of the other girls coming in to find her after Dabney Saum learned the lights had been left on in his café past eight o’clock. That other waitress, maybe Helen, maybe Shelly, would find her naked, smeared in her own blood and unconscious on the floor. Maybe one of her front teeth would have been thrown a few feet away on the floor in a spray of blood.
But no, she’d stay conscious, and upright. She had too.
She rinsed her panties in one of the sinks then laid them—now vaguely pink—over a stall door while she went through stacks of paper towels to wash down the insides of her legs. She used hot water on the legs, running it until steam made the mirrors opaque, but switched to cold for a couple of compresses on
her rectum.
Knowing a bath when she got home would invite too many questions from her mother, Teeny finally stripped her bra and uniform shirt off and then tried to scoop warm water from the sink and pour it down her scalp, neck and back.
She dried herself with more towels and threw them on the floor to sop up some of the spills. She put her wet underwear back on, then the rest of her clothes.
Not looking too long at herself in the mirror, she tidied herself as best she could. Blindly, she wiped her face and smoothed her hair with wet hands. She realized there were still some drops of blood on the light green tile floor at the foot of the sink, the area she’d been straddling. She got down on her hands and knees and wiped those too. Then she threw all her spent towels in the green bin near the door, briefly thinking about how her mucous and blood were now mingling in there with his moist paper towels. She wondered if she should take it all out to the commercial bin in the back but thought better of it. She crumpled some dry, unused pieces of towel and laid those across the top of the nearly full bin. Miguel or one of the other line cooks would empty all the garbages first thing in the morning. And none of them would look twice at used paper towel in the bathroom garbage can.
She did a thorough round of the café before switching out the lights and locking up. Instead of hanging her pink apron up in the back, she would take it home and wash it with everything else.
Outside, the breeze was cool but the sky was already tinted so bleak. She saw clouds but couldn’t make out the surface of the water down at the harbour anymore. That time had passed.
The walk home was excruciating and humiliating.
2.
It was black out. Few solitary porch lights ignited little holes in the fabric of the night but most were extinguished for the evening. The citizens of Dovetail Cove were nothing if not dollar-conscious. Teeny’s back end was a pit of burning embers. Each step from the café to home was like having a scorching hot poker riding up inside her. Even the rub of her thighs together made it worse so she tried to widen her gait. She only saw one person on her stiff walk home, Mrs. Dawkins on Eighth Street. To her, Teeny probably looked as though she’d just climbed down off a horse after a week in the dessert riding saddle-back. She didn’t acknowledge Mrs. Dawkins who was walking her dachshund, Homer, but Mrs. Dawkins didn’t say a word to Teeny either.
Her head was hung low when she hazily rounded the lane but she still saw her own porch light lit up, plus many of the lights on the main floor of her Mama’s two-storey Georgian down at the end of the lane. Despite the darkness, the front and side yard were lit enough for Teeny to see Police Chief Birkhead’s personal vehicle in the driveway, pulled with its nose right up to the front step of the house.
Teeny slowed as she approached, panic rising. It was the Chief’s car, after all. But her feet were so tired, her back side so raw. She just needed to get inside and lay down. She trudged up the soft cedar stairs and pushed through the front door with a squeak. To her left, in the kitchen, Birkhead’s deputy was standing with his arms crossed. He was still in uniform, his wide brim shielding his eyes. Birkhead was sitting at the kitchen table and, between them, like a small bird, was Teeny’s Mama, sitting in one of the two wheelchairs she owned. She was crying, and wiping at her nose with a wad of crinkled pink tissue. She didn’t look up, not yet.
When the men heard the door, they turned to Teeny. “Mama, what is it? What’s going on?” Birkhead stood from his chair, leaving a coffee mug there to steam on the table. Without a word, the deputy eased around her and out of the kitchen. Both men gave Teeny a grim look as they passed and went out into the cooler air of the front porch and verandah. The screen door banged behind them.
Red-eyed, Bexy McLeod looked up at her only daughter. There was a layer of anguish and downright pain on her worn face.
“I made a big mistake, Teensie. A real big one. And I’m so, so sorry.”
3.
Teeny sat in stunned silence while her Mama told her.
It was Delia and Cordell Smythe who had approached Mrs. McLeod and other parishioners to make an investment in an overseas brokerage, one that promised an eight per cent return on a thirty day investment. Give it a try, they said. Only a month, they said. Split your profits with the church, they said.
Teeny didn’t respond as her mama talked, only listened, only thought about that indignant look on Delia Smythe’s face just this afternoon and how there had been more to Mama’s relationship with the woman than she had ever suspected. Looks like the Smythes needed salvation after all, Teeny thought, then remembered how Delia was going to help Mama buy a new dress. She wondered if Mama had indeed found one at Kresge and if it could now be returned.
It was ten thousand to get in on this guaranteed investment. The Smythes had gotten in the month before and had come back with close to eleven thousand after thirty days.
After some serious thought, Mama had jumped in to the investment with both feet, as well, and all three had felt the swelling rush of adrenaline after another thirty days had paid a handsome dividend.
“After yer daddy, well, he didn’t leave us with much but I had some squirrelled away,” she said. “I wish to God almighty above I hadn’t trusted Delia Smythe with so much…money. Chief says it’s called a…Potsie or some such, I dunno--”
“—A Ponzi, Mom. It’s called a Ponzi Scheme.” Teeny’s voice was filled with a tired resignation. She didn’t know why she would even care to correct her mama on what the swindle was coined.
The Smythes were the second rung from the bottom on this illegal investment ladder, one that traversed from the mainland out here to the island only recently, and must have gone up dozens, if not a hundred or more levels. The scheme had taken in a pile of Dovetail Cove residents, about fifteen or so, and almost all had been members of the Pentecostal Church of Zion, same as Mama. Mama had taken her eleven thousand after the first thirty days and was enamoured with that taste of success that the she put it back in with another nine thousand she had scraped together by cashing some bonds and borrowing on the credit cards.
Now, that money was gone. All of it.
“Delia Smythe didn’t even come by. Chief said they’d been found at the ferry station with their suitcases. Some of the others who got in when I did got wise. Called the police. Delia said their contact with the investment company was gone. Money’s gone too. Just gone.
“Goodness gracious, Teensie, I could have gone over to her house and hit her. Do you know that? I could have just waited for her to open up the door, wound up and socked her in the mouth. But of course, I didn’t. I’m not that kind of Christian.”
Teeny said nothing. She fell into the chair the Chief had vacated and collapsed her chin and cheeks into her hands. She blew out some air. Tired, frustrated, the air hit her own bangs in a hot blast. Her rear still hurt but, right now, the pain was distant. Her head was foggy. Coming up those soft cedar stairs she’d had the crazy notion that the Police Chief was here to see her, that maybe someone had caught wind of her in the men’s room at the Highliner or that Frank Moort had blabbed about the sweepstakes ticket he stole from her at one of the island pubs. But that was irrational. What happened in the men’s room couldn’t have possibly made any rounds yet. And only Frank Moort and she knew about the sweepstakes ticket. She had tried to think of any other reason that he’d been there, thought of a million others, even some that saw Mama in a distorted heap at the bottom of the main stairway. Anything.
Anything but this. Teeny hadn’t in her rambling imagination ever conceived that Mama could ever be the victim of something like this. Not because Mama wasn’t gullible or easily swayed with talk of helping the church—she was both of those things, but more because she was so tight with her money.
“Oh, Teensie. Can you believe it? I wanted to make extra money so you could have some nice things for a change. Delia and I were going to Kresge’s today, did I tell you that? Not to get a dress for me, Teence, to get a new one for you. I trusted Delia. T
rusted her! All the while she was sitting at the station waiting for the six o’clock ferry. I thought we were even friends, Tee!” She started crying again. “Chief’s office called at supper time, once it started to set in. The Smythes were rounded up and there’s an investigation under way. Oh Dear God in heaven, Teensie…what are we gonna do?”
Teeny didn’t say it, but her first thought was this: I’m going to go get Mr. Moort from his bedroom. She put her hand over her mouth, feeling her eyes fill with water. Oh Dear God! It’s not Frank Moort she had to blame for this, not even the Smythes. This one was Mama’s fault. But still. It was like Frank Moort banging his hand on the Highliner’s table then diddling himself in the bathroom stall, that was the one spark that ignited this whole Godforsaken mess. This was Frank Moort’s fault. All of it was.
Without him, Teeny would be gone now and, away from Dovetail Cove. And, as much as she hated to say it, away from Mama’s money problems that should not be dragging her down too.
It didn’t make perfect sense to Teeny. But she still wanted to trot over to Frank Moort’s house and yank him out of bed, pull him from his peaceful sleep and see just what could be done about things. “What to do, what to do,” she’d say to him.
Teeny McLeod, ever the dreamer, saw it unfold in her minds’ eye as Mama sat before her sobbing uncontrollably and inserting bits of babble into the bursts of crying. Instead of consoling her crippled mother, Teeny was awestruck with a vision of violence so incredibly unbecoming of her.
Her tired mind fired out images. Her two older brothers would need to help her because little Teeny McLeod surely couldn’t gather up a sizeable man like Frank Moort alone. In the dark of Moort’s bedroom, Big Mac and Dave would bind him with heavy gauge fishing line and haul him out of his house down to Mac’s white Ford. Together the three would drive him out to the north point up past the power station and dump him down in the dirt. He’d probably whine and curse and beg to be let go, so confused at what was happening. He’d say, “dollface, dollface, what’s going on? What are you doing to me?” And then, mocking him, she’d add “Don’t you dollface me.”
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