Pretty Bad Things

by C. J. Skuse

  “Yes,” she continued, “once I’ve got that, you’ll be as free as you want to be. We’ve got a long time together, boy. I suggest you make nice. I may even throw in a little cash bonus for good behavior.”

  She would have let go if I’d said something nice, something palliative. But I didn’t have it in me to be nice to her anymore. That old Beau was gone. Well, I hoped he was gone, anyway. “Paisley will kill you for this.”

  Her mouth screwed up in a knot. “I don’t want to hear that name again.”

  “She will. She’ll know where you’re going and she’ll find you and she’ll kill you. You don’t know what she’s capable of.”

  Matt scoffed and took the bag from Virginia, heading outside to the parking lot.

  Virginia gripped my hair harder. My eyes bulged. “You don’t know what I’m capable of. And I have a pretty damn good idea of what your sister can do. I watched my home burn to the ground, remember?”

  She finally let go and shoved me back down onto the bed.

  My scalp throbbed. “Is that what this is, a revenge thing?”

  She reached behind me and picked something up. Two Wit. She didn’t take her eyes off me, but clutched the owl with both hands and started pulling it, until the stitching ripped apart at the neck and it was two separate pieces of useless white stuffing. She took a handful of it and crammed it in my mouth. Then she took Two Woo from Paisley’s bed and, still looking at me, did the same again, except she threw all of the stuffing behind her into the trash can.

  “Where’s my gun?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Where’s my gun, Beau?” She came over to the bed and stared down at me. I lay on my back looking up at her, still with a mouthful of stuffing. I laughed in her face. She slapped me hard and some of the stuffing came out. I laughed again. She hit me again, twice as hard and this time with nail digs for good measure. I laughed again, though my eyes were running with tears.

  She pulled the rest of the stuffing out of my mouth and yanked me upright on the edge of the bed, gripping the sides of my face in her claws. “Where … is … it?”

  “You know where it is,” I said.

  Matt came back inside and closed the door. “You ready?”

  She nodded. “Take him.”

  Bundling me over his shoulder, Matt took me out to his pickup. There was a large blue tarp over the back, folded over to one side. I didn’t know what Virginia was up to, but she hadn’t yet come out of our room.

  Matt threw me down on the bed of the truck. I lay next to a pile of old tools and a lawn mower on its side. He took a roll of duct tape out of the pocket of his hoodie.

  My heart was hammering so hard I didn’t think my breath would make it out of my chest. I just said it before I could edit myself.

  “You won’t see a penny of that money. Think about it. If she’s doing this to her own grandchildren, what’s a two-bit gardener mean to her, huh?”

  He tore off a length of tape and plastered it over my mouth. Then he looked at me, as if weighing something up. I gulped. The last thing I remember was the fist coming toward my face.

  PAISLEY

  TWENTY-ONE

  LUCKY INN MOTEL,

  THE STRIP,

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  I made it back to the motel, all pissed at Beau for going on ahead without me. The door to our room was hanging off its hinges. And something was burning.

  I ran inside. In the middle of the orange carpet, a fire was burning. And the fuel was Dad’s letters.

  “Oh shit!”

  I ran over to the little burning mound to try and stamp it out, but the flames were too big. And it was still spreading. The carpet was catching, the skirt thing on Beau’s bed was catching. I saw the mess all over the room: My clothes all torn up and scattered around the floor; my backpack empty, dumped beside my bed. I scrabbled around and found the one letter of Dad’s that I had kept separate, in the front pocket of my backpack. I opened it. It was okay. I folded it up and put it inside my bra. The closet was wide open. I ran to it and saw that the bag of antiques was gone.

  “Fuck!”

  All our stuff was gone, except for a stack of Wonder Twins stickers on the nightstand. I grabbed them.

  The fire was all along Beau’s side of the room now, right up to the drapes, which caught within seconds. There was no way I could get out the way I came, not without burning up myself. So I had to go through the bathroom. I stepped up onto the sink and sized up the window for my head, shoving the stickers down into my boot. I could just squeeze out. The catch caught on my belly as I writhed and wriggled and squirmed like a caterpillar to get outside, landing with a flump on the grass. Inside, something exploded.

  The window banged shut behind me, but I didn’t look back. I got to my feet and just started running, filled with a rage so painful I could have torn off limbs. I didn’t know where I was going, I just ran.

  All hope plummeted like a bird shot down. All my stuff was burned. Dad’s letters were burned. Beau had vanished. I just knew the Skank had taken him. She’d done it, and she’d do more if she didn’t get what she wanted. No matter how hard I ran or how deep I breathed to control it, I couldn’t stop my own tears. I stopped in a sheltered doorway, some defunct record store just off the Strip, trying to stifle the huffs caught in my throat. I breathed hard and heavy, in, in, in then out, out, in, out. I stood back against the wall, feeling the cold tiles against my hands. I was sweating; my hair had become stuck across my face as I ran, but I didn’t move it away. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I sobbed.

  I sat in the doorway until two bums came stumbling along, shouting that I was in their spot. They were still shouting at me when I began running back along the Strip. What was it about that fucking block that kept me coming back to it? Dad, that was what. I’d seen him there, I knew I had. I watched people walking along, hand in hand, on vacation, smiling, laughing, taking photos, sipping drinks through curly straws. Families. Little girls with their dads. I watched groups of guys strutting past with calling cards for hookers. More hunched-up homeless shuffling along, holding their hands out for spare change. I watched drag queens shimmying past on their way to a show, acting like the whole world owed them a favor. None of the faces I saw was Dad’s, and that made me hate them all. I hated the world. It was all so dirty and loud and complicated. Everything was fugly. Everything was wrong.

  I didn’t stop walking for hours. I moved around unseen in the crowds. I didn’t know what to do: I had no money, nowhere to go, I hadn’t found Dad, and—worst of all, I now realized—I’d lost Beau, too.

  I was totally lost.

  My chest felt like it was being crushed, like a piano had fallen on it or something. The pain squeezed and squeezed and there was nothing I could do about it. I thought about hamsters. Hamsters get on their wheels when they’re stressed out, right? I needed to just keep walking, run if I had to, run it all out of me.

  I ran down the Strip, weaving in and out of tourist clusters, and finally stumbled into some bullshit gift shop. I bummed up and down the aisles with no intention of buying anything. Thumbed through magazines without even reading them. Picked up packets of crap I couldn’t even identify through the water in my eyes. As I came to the last aisle, I scoped the shelves displaying the Scotch. There were so many kinds, but only one that meant anything to me. One particular bottle came into focus. Black-and-white label. I grabbed the bottle and walked to the entrance. Then I ran like a bitch. I could still hear the alarm screaming as I reached the Jumbotron outside Caesars. I sat down on the bench, watching for police or security guards—nothing. Nobody. Nobody gave a shit about me, and I gave a shit about nobody. I twisted off the lid of the bottle and brought it up to my nose. It smelled disgusting. Like the living room the day we found Mom. Like my grandmother’s breath when she was shouting. My stomach turned over at the thought of drinking it.

  I sat there with the open bottle between my knees and watched the screen. We w
ere on again. Two old dudes were debating the effect we were having on teen America.

  “… It’s a sorry state of affairs if these are the kinds of role models we are producing for our younger generation….”

  “They don’t want to be role models, Glenn. They’re doing this because they’ve lost their way, that’s all. They’re lost souls. Society has failed them….”

  When in doubt, blame society. I put the bottle to my lips and swigged. I held it in my mouth. I spat. I tried it again. I held it in my mouth for longer. I tried swallowing again, but my damn throat wouldn’t let me. I spat it out and heaved into the trash can. On my third swig, I swallowed. I shivered. It was disgusting. But I needed it. I needed it to forget where I was. Who I was. I understood Mom. For once, I understood my grandmother. I felt the swig going down my throat, into my stomach, like a little rush of liquid Band-Aids traveling to all the places in my body where it hurt. My heart. My stomach. The pain deep inside my body that no doctor could ever get to. The more I drank, the less it hurt me. Beau being gone. Dad being gone. All my criminally insane efforts to find him a total bust.

  Whatever.

  Whatever.

  Whatever.

  What-fucking-ever.

  I laid my head on the arm of the bench and watched our news reports on repeat. Pretty soon I closed my eyes.

  And when I opened them, the Jumbotron was still twinkling above me. They were looping the old dudes. Same shit, different news cycle: “Bad role models. Lost souls.” The crowds hadn’t thinned out, either. Moms and dads and kids and friends and grandparents and boyfriends and couples and bums and brothers and sisters and guys in red shirts. Guys in red shirts. No, not guys, a guy in a red shirt. A guy standing there, watching the screen. Watching the Jumbotron. Watching us.

  He had his back to me, hands in his jean pockets.

  I thought I was dreaming. I thought he’d disappear like a ghost. Like the day we saw him from the bus. But he didn’t.

  I sat up. He was still there. I stood up. I came up to his shoulders. He was still there. I was wobbly on my legs, but I walked up to him. He didn’t turn around, just kept on watching the screen. Now it was the governor again, talking about the manhunt for those dastardly Wonder Twins.

  I reached out and put my hand on his back. I still thought he would disappear even as my hand touched his shoulder blade. He twitched.

  He turned around and looked at me, frowning at first like he was gonna tell me to fuck off. And then he really looked at me. And he frowned even more. And I started to cry.

  “Dad? Are you my dad?”

  “Paisley? No! Baby … is that you?”

  He was smaller than I remembered, and not just ’cause I’d gotten taller. He’d lost a lost of weight, too. His face was hairy. He’d grown a thick beard and mustache, but underneath it all it was my dad, all right. His face lit up like there was a candle under his skin when he said my name. Just like when I used to run into his arms when he came home after work.

  He was shaking. “Oh my God. Paisley …” He went to hug me, but stopped and put his hand over his mouth, like I’d told him not to.

  “I can’t handle this,” he said and started to cry. He had bits of trash stuck to his clothes, and he smelled like he’d fallen down in a public toilet. But it was my dad and I didn’t care, so I touched one of his hands and he grabbed on to it. I leaned over and hugged him. And he hugged me back. His cheek was cold and quivery against my face. And he held me like we were going to jump off a building. Normal hugs don’t last long. A quick hug, a pat on the back, and then you pull away. Not this one. He was there, like all my sunrises at once. My dad.

  “Please tell me this isn’t a dream.”

  “It’s not a dream, honey,” he said, leaning back to look at me. “God, I can’t believe you’re here!” He kissed my hair and breathed it in, his tears forming a little damp patch on the top of my head. He held my face in his hands.

  “I knew it,” I told him. “I knew if we got on that screen, you’d see us. I knew we’d get to you somehow,” I said, holding on to him again so tight. I didn’t ever want to let go. I didn’t even care how dirty he was. I buried my face into his filthy red shirt and breathed him in like he was lavender. The last time I’d hugged him, I’d only come up to his waist. Now my head was on his shoulder. We stood there for the longest time. I had my dad and he loved me. And that was all that mattered….

  I pulled back. “Dad …”

  “We’ve got so much to talk about, Paisley,” he said, wiping his eyes on his shirt sleeve. “God, look at you. You’re so beautiful. My little girl. I’ve been watching the news. I saw you.” He rubbed his eyes. His fingers were blackened with dirt. He saw the bottle of Scotch in my hands and took it from me. “What are you doing with this? You don’t need this.” He aimed it at the trash can he’d been searching through days before.

  “Dad, everything’s gone wrong. We’ve done some pretty bad things. Well, I have.”

  “Yeah, I saw….”

  “No, before the robberies. Beau and the fire and I … shit, sorry, I don’t know where to start … I got expelled … like, five times.”

  “Well that’s—”

  “And I punched a girl.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I burned down Virginia’s house.”

  “Whoa.”

  “And I drugged a guy and robbed him.”

  He held his hands up. “All in good time. But I saw you guys on the news. You did all that for me?”

  “Beau said it was a stupid plan.” Beau, oh my God, where was he?

  “It was a stupid plan,” said Dad. “But it worked. We’re here, together. That makes it a perfect plan.” He hugged me again, but I just stood there like some stupid pillar. Everything was so fast in my head, it had made my body completely still. Dad was still talking, brushing the hair from my face.

  “My baby’s gone all Bonnie Parker just for her old dad?” He laughed. “I can’t wait to see Beau. Is he all right? Paisley? Paisley?”

  I snapped out of it when he said my name twice, like he used to when he caught me doing something I shouldn’t, like coloring on the wall or clogging the toilet with Legos. “I … I lost him in the crowds. We were headed back to our motel, but … Oh God, the fire, Dad, our room was on fire. Our stuff … It’s Virginia, she’s got him.”

  “Whoa, what do you mean, ‘got him'? Where is he?”

  “She took him, her and her gardener boy toy…. They’ve got him; I know it. They’ve probably been trailing us for days. They trashed our motel room, set the letters on fire….”

  “Set fire … were either of you hurt?”

  “No. She just burned the letters you sent.”

  He looked at me. “You got them? You kept them?”

  I nodded. “She hid them from us. We got the last one you sent from Paradise. That’s why we came. We found Eddie, he told us to look for you on the Strip, so …”

  “Where did they go?”

  “I don’t know. Dad, I don’t know!”

  “It’s all right, it’s all right….”

  “No, it’s not, Dad. I have to know! What’s she going to do to him? I’ll kill her if she hurts him, I’ll fucking …”

  “Paisley, watch your mouth.”

  “I’m sorry, but Dad …” A thought hit me like a wrecking ball. I could hear Beau’s voice in my head.

  “The lake house. In Utah. I saw a picture of it in her desk drawer. Mirror Lake. She bought it a while back. It’s pretty remote…. For vacations, I guess. A retreat.”

  I almost spat it back out at Dad. “The lake house. She must have gone there!”

  He held my hands, just like he used to when I had one of my tantrums.

  “All right, calm down, talk slowly.”

  “I can’t! We have to go there now. We have to get Beau!”

  “You think that’s where they’ve gone?”

  “I can’t think of anywhere else. Beau said it’s remote. She probably wants to lock
him up again, keep him until he’s eighteen. She might kill him, Dad. She might wanna come after me and kill me. Just so she can claim all the money …”

  “What? What money?”

  And just then he looked down. Mom’s necklace. I didn’t think he could cry anymore. He kind of cry-laughed.

  “You got it back for me. You got it back,” he spluttered.

  We hugged again.

  “Oh Dad, I’ve got so much to tell you.”

  BEAU

  TWENTY-TWO

  SOMEWHERE HEADING NORTH ALONG INTERSTATE 15

  I woke up, my brain feeling like it had been kicked around on cobblestones. All I could see was blue. My body was being bumped and jerked around, and as I fully opened my eyes to see the scratchy blue tarp lying over me, I remembered where I was. My heart started pounding. I was in the truck. I was tied up. My mouth was stuck closed behind a strip of duct tape. It was daylight outside the blue sheet. I could feel the sun. The truck clattered on, metal clinked, loose tools rattled. Lying beside me was the lawn mower, and as I turned onto my side I stared straight into the blades. Bits of lawn cuttings were stuck to them. I could hear some country-western song coming from the cab. Hear voices over the top of it.

  Virginia’s voice. “You’re very quiet.”

  Matt’s voice. “What?”

  The music went off.

  “I said you’re very quiet. Something the matter?”

  “I was just thinking over something you said.”

  “What?”

  “About keeping him chained to a water pipe for two years.”

  “It’s not two years. It’s barely eighteen months.”

  “You’d really lock him up?”

  “He’s always had a strict curfew….”

  “Yeah, but that didn’t involve tying his hands together.”

  “We’ll have to see how he behaves. If he promises to comply, we won’t have to tie him up.”