by Deni Béchard
Brad was telling his Watermelon Sister about living in Germany, about what really happened to Hitler’s body and how a friend’s dad had his jawbone.
“You see, they know it was his because there are so many gold fillings in the teeth. My friend’s dad keeps it locked in his filing cabinet. It’s worth millions.”
As he spoke, he leaned close to his Watermelon Sister, but she put her palm against his chest and pushed him back. He stopped talking, and she changed the subject to a girl who’d talked shit about her and how that wasn’t cool and there was going to be a reckoning.
The wind kept slamming the walls and thrashing at the plastic, blowing up dust that stung our eyes. Elizabeth stood close. She sipped her beer and told me how, each morning when she did her hair, she looked for spiders on the walls and gave them a shot of hair spray, then watched as they walked slower and slower and finally froze. She said she wanted four more piercings in each ear and an eagle tattoo on her back with wings that went down her arms.
I told her how my father was an ex-con and that someday I’d rob a bank, and about my list—steal a car, break into a house, get shot. Wind knocked against the walls as some forgotten Steinbeck character, invoked as if in a séance, spoke through me.
“If you get shot, you’re close to death. Imagine how badly you want to live.”
She stepped close and pushed her lips to mine. I kissed back, careful not to spread saliva, following the rules I’d heard from Brad: not to slobber, to stay close to the lips, to let her put her tongue in my mouth first, and, above all—the cardinal rule—never to exhale into her mouth while kissing, or else the air would make a sound like a duck.
As I imagined divers did, I controlled my breathing. We kissed, and she rubbed my jeans. The world sparkled and anguished, and then she pulled away.
Travis and the Watermelon Sister had come back and were saying that we had to go. They were scratching their arms and legs as if fleas were devouring them.
As we returned to the dance, he kept clawing at his limbs, rubbing and patting, sighing and groaning, as if having sex with himself now.
“Goddamn,” he hollered and clutched his balls. “I can’t stop itching.”
“Maybe you got crabs,” Brad told him.
“Ew,” Elizabeth and the other Watermelon Sister said.
“No, you dipshit,” Travis told him. “It’s the insulation. Fiberglass itches like hell.”
The girl who’d been with Travis stayed quiet, her shoulders pulled in as she walked ahead, one hand reaching up under her skirt to rub at her ass and thighs.
Brad was staring for each glimpse of pale skin.
“Was it worth it?” he asked Travis.
“Hell yeah. It’s always worth it.”
The Watermelon Sister walked faster, leaving us behind, dark hair whipping about in the hurricane’s final push.
The next day we arrived at school to see that, on the hill with the new subdivision, the house where we’d been had collapsed, pummeled by the wind. Though I wanted to claim this disaster, to say I’d started a fire or kicked the walls like a martial artist, I didn’t think I could get away with the lie. Besides, it was enough to say I’d been inside, drinking just before it fell.
Brad and Travis and Elizabeth liked the story and took it up, saying it collapsed just after we left, while we were crossing the field.
We all heard it, we agreed.
“I heard something, anyway,” Elizabeth said. “I was scared just being in there.”
Despite our stories, something about it seemed grim, an omen, a bad beginning for love.
The narrow lane, shaded by high trees, followed the sunlit train tracks, then veered over them and wound down through the dense forest that, with each turn, became increasingly crowded with battered cars.
Dickie came here often to look for the parts he claimed he’d been seeking forever, even though he just cleaned them and never used them. I liked the wrecked vehicles, trucks torn nearly in half, cars like accordions, motorcycles squashed as small as suitcases. I pictured the swarming lights of police cars and ambulances, arms and legs sticking out from crushed metal, a bereaved wife falling to her knees as she tore at her hair.
“Hey,” Dickie called. He was holding his bucket of tools and stood hunched in the shadow of a massive oak. “Why don’t you go ask the old man for a job?”
“I don’t want to,” I said, making myself appear stern and uninterested. Dickie and his ideas were beneath me. I’d accompanied him just to get out of the house for a while.
“What the hell? Come on. You’d be a good mechanic.”
“I don’t want to be a mechanic.”
He curved his back like an angry dog. “Get your ass down there!”
My dirty sneakers scuffed dark red lines in the sunburned clay. I knocked at the trailer.
The old man pulled the door open with one hand while checking his fly with the other.
“Yeah, what do you want?” Head tilted back, mouth open, he studied me from beneath his glasses.
“I was wondering if you need to hire someone.”
“Hire someone?” He glanced around the fields and forest that looked like a crowded parking lot decades after Armageddon. “To do what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hell, boy.” He shook his head as if I were the nuttiest damn kid on earth and he had nothing but sympathy. “I don’t make no money, can’t pay no money.”
Later, when Dickie and I got home, I saw the oily metal stashed under the front seats. He’d used me as a distraction so he could take things without paying. He’d also stolen the old man’s portable welding kit. Pathetic, I thought—robbing a junkyard.
He carried it all into the basement to clean, and I worked out on the back porch. How much longer would I have to live like this? With my feet propped on the steps, I did push-ups until sweat ran into my eyes and dripped from the tip of my nose. I did sit-ups with a thirty-pound dumbbell behind my head, counting eight goddamn it, nine goddamn it, ten motherfucker. I wanted a new life, a new body, money, and respect—to get laid. I did biceps curls until the veins in my arms bulged and my hands shook and I couldn’t flex my fingers to hold the weights.
Dickie slunk up from the basement and stood, wiping his greasy hands on his work jeans as he blinked in the sunlight.
“Check it out,” I told him and came down from the porch. I flexed my arm.
His eyes popped open. Then he lifted his right hand as if to make a muscle too, but he grabbed the meat of my arm. My knees almost gave out.
“Have you been using my stuff to make bombs?”
“No!”
“Bullshit. I’m missing a lot of stuff.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My jaw clenched as he dug his fingers, but I forced myself to show nothing. That was how you won with men, by not caring, by making them feel stupid.
“Don’t let me catch you in my shop. I’ll tear your fucking arm off.”
He let go and went back downstairs.
The next day, each finger was imprinted in black on my skin. After school, when my mother came home, I showed her. Her eyes lingered.
“What did you do?” she asked, her face drawn. “You must have done something.”
“Don’t blame me,” I shouted, though I knew she’d yell at Dickie in private. “I don’t want to stay here anymore. I want to go back and live with André.”
I stormed outside, onto the back porch and down the stairs, intending to sulk in the fields, where I could find things to smash.
She caught hold of my sleeve in the yard. Her hair had gone entirely gray, though she called it frosted, and the curls of her perm had relaxed so that a few strands hung about her face.
“You know what? Your father was just a kid. He had to be the center of attention. But he was worse than a kid because you couldn’t question a damn thing he did. If he came home late, he had to wake you guys up. He’d play games so you knew he was the good guy. I was the bad one.
I made you go to bed. I made you eat good food. He’d let you do anything as long as it didn’t threaten him. And he’d take you places with those people of his, let them drink around you or whatever. If you want that, fine, you can go back when you’re fifteen. But if you do, your life won’t be what you want. It will be what he wants. You’ll be there for him. Maybe that doesn’t make sense now, but it will someday.”
I refused to look at her. Stars were appearing behind the filmy light of the nearby subdivisions. A firefly blinked above the trash bins.
“Why did you stay with him so long?” I asked.
She looked away. “I was afraid. I didn’t believe in myself, and he kept me from believing in myself.”
Dickie opened the screen door onto the porch. He leaned on the banister, the sleeves of his T-shirt lifting above his faded army tattoo, an eagle just beneath his shoulder.
“I’m getting tired of this. Why don’t y’all come inside?”
“Go back in the house,” she told him with a coldness that made me proud. “We’re talking.”
“Christ,” he said. The screen door clacked behind him, and the stove light flickered as he passed in front of it.
“All I ask,” she went on, “is that you trust me. I’m doing what’s best for you. That’s why I took you away. I wish I could tell you more and someday I will.”
“Why someday and not now?”
“I can’t.”
I clenched my fists. “I’m sick of everything here. I hate it. I want to go.”
“You’re not fifteen. I told you you can go when you are.”
“He can’t be that bad.”
“You don’t know how bad he can be. He told everyone that I left because he was going bankrupt, but I left because he was crazy. I always told myself I’d know when it was time. Then one morning he was reading an article about a man who went bankrupt and killed his wife and children and himself. He said it made sense to him. That’s why I took you so far away. I told him that a psychic said I should leave, about the earthquake and that stuff. If I’d said he was crazy, he might have hurt me. But I gave him another reason.”
It made sense. Nobody wanted to hear that something was his fault. But I didn’t believe he’d have hurt us. People talked all sorts of shit when they were angry. He hadn’t meant it. My fondest memories were of times with him, his wildness, our adventures.
She put her cheek against my shoulder. Cars passed on Route 28. Pods from the maple helicoptered down with each gust of wind and disappeared in the dusk, on the shingles of the roof.
A leather jacket came in the mail, but it was the wrong kind, glossy and thin, the seams making a V in the back. It was something a European rock star would wear. I’d wanted the heavy, armored look of a biker, but this would have to do.
At school, Elizabeth told me that we weren’t girlfriend and boyfriend. Though she was thirteen, she said, “Sorry. You’re just a kid. I like men.”
Every day, Travis and Brad wanted to know how we’d get the motorbike frame. I said we had to wait—that it would be soon. But I could hardly wait myself. This seemed the longest year of my life, and to take the edge off my impatience, we broke into a storage unit one night, disappointed that it held only boxes of old Christmas decorations and one of smoke detectors, which we stole, thinking they might be worth something. We prowled farmland, smashing the windows of old cars on blocks, taking rusty pipes and knocking out headlights and reflectors, gouging the few still-inflated tires with our pocketknives. We broke into a house and took tools and cassettes, spare change and more knives.
I saw crime everywhere. My brother kept to his room, curtains drawn, the only light his computer screen. He was pale, with etiolated hair, but surely a hacker breaking into government databases, taking over the world like the computer in The Terminator. I still snuck into the vaultlike silence of his room to read his stories: men who stared women in the eye, longing, or who looked out windows. Longing was in the inky darkness, in the canyons between the towers of the future, in the galactic space between alien nations. But the men never did anything. They watched. They calculated. The women paced before them in black skirts and high boots.
Did he feel what I did? Did he burn with the same obsessions?
From time to time, he went into the kitchen and took a jar of hot peppers from the fridge. He slouched at the table, eating them until tears gathered in his eyes.
Two dozen people sat on a basement carpet before a medium, a woman who communicated the wisdom of a celestial being.
I was next to my mother and Dickie, who had his knees pulled to his chest, his eyes wary. Over the years, my mother had tried to convert him to her vision of the unpolluted palate, but he still smoked and now he was drinking again, watching shoot-’em-up action flicks and eating dinner before a TV loud enough to drown the steady and unconscious smack of his chewing. The séance was a victory for her, and for me, a return to childhood magic.
The medium sat, spine straight, palms on her knees. Her facial muscles slowly relaxed, becoming lugubrious, like those of a drunken man. With half-lidded eyes, she surveyed the audience. Her assistant announced that she was ready.
Someone asked about a recurrent nightmare, and the medium cleared her throat.
“This dream,” she said, sounding like a man, “it is an expression of fear, but there is no real fear, only the unknown. There is no danger . . .”
Her words on life and death and the currents of pain and the fractured, dissatisfied selves that haunt our sleep—the unknown both within and outside us—seemed obvious. But I, too, had a recurrent dream. In the valley, I went to the shed where my father had built the pen for his German shepherds. A man stood inside, covered in matted hair, his hands on the two-by-four slats. I could hardly see him or decipher his rough, muddled language, but I understood that he was asking to be let out. I fled, knowing that sooner or later he’d break free and find me.
All that night, after returning home, I read a bulky fantasy novel. Dawn reached my window as I began the last chapter. The hero accepted his destiny and trekked to a tower in desolate mountains to face a being so evil that its origins were a mystery. This was his purpose, to destroy the source of evil itself. But the confrontation was inconclusive. The being vanished. There was an unforeseen glitch in the prophecy, some mystical red tape that the hero would have to sort out in the sequel. My mother was already reading it.
I tossed the novel on the floor and stood. Blood buzzed in my ears. I shuffled to the bathroom and peed. Then I stared in the mirror: a pimply boy with a bad haircut and not nearly enough muscle. I went out the front door. The highway swayed like a rope bridge, and I stumbled alongside it. Before I’d left British Columbia, my father had told me that if I stayed, he’d give me direction. He’d teach me how to fight.
Dawn lit the rural dregs of a landscape bought up and hewn into subdivisions, the bashed fenders and bald tires and rusted appliances of forgotten lives appearing through the October leaves after a dry summer. On the gravel shoulder, I saw myself from the sky, as if my father might be looking down, ashamed of my worn-out jeans and dirty sneakers, the scraps and flattened cans, the cigarette butts and bottle caps that littered my path.
We were moving again, to a mobile home in the woods, beneath a leviathan electrical tower whose lines cut a swath through the boondocks. My mother and Dickie would build a house there, and the cramped trailer would be temporary quarters. But I didn’t care. I was almost fifteen.
I walked to the neighbor’s carport and knocked. The last of the evening commute shuttled along Route 28. The woman answered, looking tired, the TV loud inside.
“My friends and I put some money together,” I told her. “It’s almost enough. I thought maybe I could try the motorbike out first.”
“Sure,” she said, again perking up at the mention of money.
I felt as I had standing next to the highway at night, inching nearer to each passing rig, wind against my skin and in my hair, metal blurring just before my
eyes.
The yellow raft slid from the bike frame. The woman just stared.
“My stepson must have taken all the parts.”
I made myself look disappointed, even a little angry.
“I wanted to buy it. I was trying to get the money together.”
She went into the kitchen and took the phone. An argument ensued between the father watching TV and drinking beer and his son, as she repeated what they said.
“I didn’t touch your piece-of-crap bike,” the father yelled over his shoulder.
“He said he didn’t touch your bike,” she called into the receiver.
“Your loser friends probably did it,” the father hollered. “They know you don’t use that thing.”
When they’d finished and she’d hung up, I chewed my lip and shrugged.
“Hey, look, I guess I could use the frame if you’re just going to throw it away.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
I took a twenty-dollar bill from my pocket.
“I could give you twenty dollars for it.”
She stared at the money.
“Oh, heck,” she said and reached for the bill. “I’m just going to say we threw it away.”
That weekend, I packed: childhood books on fish, those of myths; the many fantasy series, Civil War accounts, and tomes about ancient cities; and of course Steinbeck’s novels. They all traced a line into mystery: primal shapes beneath dark water, the world’s creation, the excesses of violence and the ceaseless vanishing of empires, and at last, the solitary longing of a drifter.
Back at school, minutes stretched into years. What would the medium say about my future, and would I want to hear? My body felt caught in a current, pulled by floodwaters.
There was a home football game that night, and after it started, I walked out and sat in the parking lot, on the curb between two cars. The tidal roar of cheering reached me. Floodlights gave the suburban sky a cadaverous hue. I was so frustrated, so impatient, I could hardly breathe, as if the air refused to fill my lungs. The emptiness in me joined me to the world, everything I saw made to satisfy me, to fit into the story I could hear myself writing.