“Sweet cheeks,” Benny says. “I have a proposal for you.”
Here it comes. The invitation I’ve been waiting for. Everyone’s been talking cummerbunds and tulle and blowouts for weeks. Also dinner reservations in Fort Wayne and limos and disc jockeys versus live bands—the pros, the cons. To hokey or to pokey. It’s lame, it’s ridiculous, it’s girly, pretty in all sorts of pink kind of bullshit, but I can’t help it. I want to go to prom with Benny, or, at the very least, I want him to want to go with me. I try to look up at him but can’t. A hole is growing in the toe of my right shoe. Under my left is a blue band camp flyer.
“Let’s do something exciting today,” Benny says. “Go wild. Get in trouble.”
The disappointment makes my back sweaty. Also my nose itch. I don’t say anything for a moment.
“C’mon, kid.” He punches me in the arm.
“You mean like skip and go to the Fun Spot?”
“Nah. I mean like rob a bank. Steal a plane. Blow up a building.”
“Kidnap a brat and hold him for ransom?”
“Now you’re onto something.”
“Whatever,” I say. “You’re all talk. Remember what happened when I sliced into that fetal pig in bio? You practically fainted.”
“That was different,” Benny says. “That was a smell thing. I’m talking about indulging in real criminal behavior here. Something for the papers. Something for the interwebs. Let’s put Colliersville on the map.”
I can never tell if Benny is serious. His dark eyes say he is, but his perfect mouth is grinning at me. Those lips. Those white teeth. I want to make out with him until we’re both stunned and out of breath, until we forget where we live and who we are.
“We could break into my dad’s junkyard,” I say, because where we go doesn’t matter—Fun Spot or junkyard, clowns or cars or clown cars, as long as Benny’s there and I can touch him and feel for a moment no one’s on his mind but me.
Benny snorts. “We did that last week.”
His eyes drift over my shoulder. Wally’s gone now, probably to the girls’ room to touch up his mascara, and Marissa the Italian Slut is in Benny’s sights. The dead giveaway’s the sticky pink blush spreading up his neck and the way he keeps sniffing like his allergies are back. No one but Marissa makes him lose his cool like that. Certainly not me.
I lean up against the wall so Benny can, if he so desires, get a good view of my boobs. I’m proud to say that, if they aren’t my best feature, they’re at least a close second to my legs. No Kleenex necessary, in other words. My body’s my biggest asset, ask anyone, even Uncle Scottie, who’s gotten drunk at our house a few times and slurred something about my filling out real nice. What’s not so great is my face—Stridex doesn’t come with a money-back guarantee—and my feet (flat and too long) and my hair: limp, lifeless, the kind of blondish brown that can’t make up its mind. My eyes are okay, I guess. Blue. Nothing like Benny’s deep, dark magnets or Marissa the Italian Slut’s light brown M&M’s eyes that make all the boys melt in her hand. The warning bell rings. We have five minutes to get to class or else. Benny’s still staring Slut-ward.
“Count me out, Benny,” I say. “I’ve got all the excitement I can handle with Gonzo.”
He finally looks at me. “Fine, fine, rain on my parade. You militia girls are all the same. All bluster and no bullets. So what’s your dad going to do to poor Mr. Gonzalez anyway? Blindfold him? Take him out behind your house and use him as a human target?”
“Daddy’s just going to talk to him. You know. Scare him a little.”
Benny whistles, a perfect imitation of Uncle Scottie. Then he shuts his locker and drapes his arm around me again. “This cannot end well,” he says.
“Au contraire, mon frère.” I grab some of my worthless hair and chew on it. French is one of Benny’s turn-ons, so I’m applying myself like hell in that class, but I can tell it’s not working today. I smile up at him and grab the sides of his face, kiss him hard and quick, because what choice does a girl have? He’s bored with me. “This will end exactly the way I want it to.”
* * *
God must have an extra-special hate just for me, because first period is geometry with Mr. Gonzalez and guess what? Last period is history with Mr. Gonzalez. So, I start and end my day in exactly the same way—staring at Mr. Gonzalez’s pockmarked mug and wishing I were anywhere but where I am, I were anyone but me.
“Renee Seaver,” he says when there are exactly two minutes left in history class and the whole, miserable day, “come here, please.”
Which of course means I’m in trouble. Everyone who’s had him knows that Mr. Gonzalez calls you by your first and last name when you’ve done something wrong. The first-name treatment’s reserved, as far as I can tell anyway, for students of color and kids like Marissa (olive skinned, but I don’t think that counts) who always have the right answer when he calls on them about the top five causes of the Great Depression or the first seven digits of pi. Then there are the last-name kids, “Sloan,” “Daugherty,” “Nelson.” Those are the jocks with at least a fifty-fifty chance of getting athletic scholarships to a state school.
Most teachers have their desks at the front of the room, but Mr. Gonzalez sits in the back behind a mountain of paper and books and confiscated cell phones. I guess it’s his first line of defense in case someone like the Taiwanese kid goes all postal, but what it really does is just reinforce how short he is. A Mexican Napoleon avenging himself on anyone lucky enough to be blessed with height. Room 323 is Mr. Gonzalez’s own island of Elba, although it’s more like us kids are the ones in exile. Take that, Gonzo. Someone knows her history.
“Ms. Seaver.” He rubs his forehead. “I got a call from your uncle today during my planning period.”
Ah. Uncle Scottie. Or Daddy masquerading as Uncle Scottie. I manage to look confused. “Really?”
Mr. Gonzalez shuffles some papers and almost knocks over his Starbucks thermos. Standing above him like this, I can see his bald spot. It’s slightly wet with sweat. Up close he smells like creamed corn.
“It seems I’ve been invited over for dinner tonight,” he says.
The room has that end-of-the-day roar, and I lean in. There’s no way I heard him right.
“Sorry?”
“I guess that means you’ll be cooking.”
I don’t know what I expected, Daddy making a quick but memorable visit to the principal’s office maybe, or him and Uncle Scottie meeting Gonzo at his sad-man Honda in the teachers’ parking lot and giving him the what-for. Either way, I was hoping they’d leave me out of it.
The bell rings and the roar rises and gets sharp with the squeak of chairs pushed back and knocked over. Next to Mr. Gonzalez’s leaning tower of cell phones is a pink plastic-framed picture of his daughter. I’ve seen her around the Bottoms some, playing basketball with a retarded illegal who lives in the Ranasack Apartments. The picture’s a good one. She has dime-sized dimples, a coffee-colored face, and a mermaid necklace hanging around her neck.
“You can bring Daisy to dinner if you want,” I say.
“Thank you, but I’ve arranged a sitter for her.” Mr. Gonzalez riffles through a stack of papers. “Let’s just hope you’re better at the culinary arts than you are at the Cultural Revolution.” He hands me my last test.
A D+. Bright red like communism, bright red like the period stain I found in the girls’ toilet at lunch. The plus sign mocks me as I shuffle out the door, where Benny’s waiting, his eyes plastered to his iPhone. We walk together not talking, not touching, to the diesel-soaked outdoors, me getting on bus number 1989, the one Marissa and her crowd call the ghetto bus, and Marissa and Benny boarding number 2010, the very year of our Lord we’re living through right now. The rich bus. The bus that’s twenty years ahead of me, Balinda, Wally, and Twitchy Taiwanese Kid there in the back. Maybe it’s just me but I swear the windows in 2010 are cleaner than the rest. How else would I be able to see Benny slide in next to Marissa, take a lock of her h
air, and twist it tenderly around his finger?
* * *
Uncle Scottie’s depression-gray Ford Bronco’s in the drive when I get home, and the front windows are wide open, despite the fact that a rainstorm is gearing up in the west and a black cloud full of eyes, a puffy Mount Rushmore, looms over the roof, staring me down.
From the front walk I can hear Daddy shouting, “The new powder, numb-nuts. Use the new powder.”
Cake or bomb, I wonder, and take my time going in.
It’s not something I think about often, but when I imagine Benny paying a visit to my house—he never has, just as I’ve never been to his place—I see everything through his eyes and wish Daddy and Uncle Scottie spent less time on the militia and more on home repair. The used-to-be-peach siding’s green with mold and the canvas lawn chairs on the front stoop are full of holes and rusting up their sides. The window screens are the worst, ripped as they are and ready for the mosquitoes to push themselves through at night. When Mom was still here the house was lots nicer—flowers out front, not just weeds, everything with that woman’s-touch shine to it. We even had a pretty sign under the porch light that said WELCOME TO THE SEAVERS, but that sign was one of the first things Daddy used for target practice when the militia got going two years ago.
I can’t help wondering what Gonzo will think, especially now that the militia’s all but taken over the side yard with a new set of targets plastered with President Obama’s face tricked out to look like the Joker from Batman. Nailed to the trees are a bunch of cheap straw sombreros Carl Nickels brought home from his job at the card and party outlet. The guys had a field day with those, drawing thick black mustaches on the brims to sort of symbolize illegal immigrants. Then they made some margs and shot the hats up while Uncle Scottie played a song about El Paso on his guitar. If Marissa the Italian Slut ever left her gated community and drove past my house she’d probably confuse it with the junkyard where my dad works.
Turns out it’s neither cake nor bomb.
“We’re making cornbread,” Daddy says to me from the kitchen, “and I’ve been schooling Scottie here on the importance of fresh baking powder. Fresh powder, my dear, is paramount.”
Scottie rolls his eyes. He’s wearing my mom’s old flowery apron. I can see them both through a hole Daddy made in the living room wall right after he lost his job, back during the scary times. The hole started out as a mistake, a fist through the drywall Daddy didn’t feel like puttying, and then one day he took a sledgehammer to it, singing the praises of the open floor plan. It’s almost finished now, but a few loose wires can really fuck you up. Get your arm too close to the edge and you’ll come away with black fingers and a peeing-yourself sort of shock.
“Fresh powder,” I echo. I drop my backpack near the front door. “It makes the bread rise better.”
They’re drunk, or at least three-quarters of the way there. They’ve stacked their Milwaukee’s Best beer cans in a pyramid on the coffee table.
“Right you are, pumpkin,” Daddy says. He sidles over and gives me a wet kiss on the cheek. When he’s like this I actually miss my mom.
I glance around the living room, taking in what for Daddy and Scottie has clearly been a very good day. In addition to the beer-can pyramid, the coffee table’s sporting a few girlie and Field & Stream magazines and a mostly eaten bowl of microwave popcorn. Scottie’s gun and Cher are both out, resting barrels up against one arm of the couch, and there are a couple of Netflix envelopes on the floor. Chiggers is in his cage against the sliding glass door, gnawing on a few wood chips and gazing out at the agility course.
“So what’s the plan, you guys?” I ask, letting Daddy lead me into the kitchen.
“Dinner with Chi Chi Rodríguez, of course,” Daddy says. He motions to the counter. An Apple Mart taco kit, half-open, and an onion share some space with a bottle of Pepe Lopez tequila and a mountain of dirty dishes. “Tex-Mex followed by a short introduction to basic firearm safety. That is…” He glances at Scottie. “If there’s time.”
“If there’s time?” I ask.
Scottie shrugs and stirs the batter. “Could get a few extra visitors.”
“Just some militia business, sweetie,” Daddy says. “We may or may not have pissed off a few guys from the Spencerville chapter.”
“Turns out they wanted Helman Yoder.” Scottie greases a cake pan with a fingerful of lard. “We stole their only arrow guy.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.” Daddy chucks his empty into a box by the fridge. It bounces off the others and lands near Scottie’s bare feet. “Everything’ll go smooth as cream.”
The last time Daddy told me not to worry my pretty little head, a bunch of neo-Nazis from Michigan and their waxy-eared kids landed in our front yard for a weekend’s worth of assault rifle training. It was like something you’d see in an al Qaeda recruitment video, all ratty tents and AK-47s. One of the fascists’ little girls got shot, a calf graze and not much blood, but still. I held her while her dad wrapped the wound. She was chilly and soft, like the other side of the pillow.
“So when’s Mr. Gonzalez coming?”
Uncle Scottie shoves the cornbread in the oven and sets the timer on the microwave for ten minutes. “Could be anytime, right, Hank? I think he said he’d come straight from school, but I can’t quite remember.”
Daddy’s doing his best to chop the onion. “Can’t seem to summon that-there memory myself, Scottie my boy. I guess it’s like warfare, this whole entertaining-at-home business. You got to be ready for any and all eventualities. Uninvited guests. Collapsed soufflés. Tornado watches.”
“There’s a tornado watch?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Scottie says, “but I can tell this one’ll just blow over. The clouds aren’t the right color green.”
I flip open my phone and study the screen for a second. It’s an ancient Nokia piece of junk, not nearly as cool as Benny’s iPhone loaded up with apps, and I’m limited to 160 letters per message or Daddy gets a bill that makes him scream and threaten to go old-school on my ass and make me pick out my own switch. I want to tell Benny that I’m scared and that it’s a new feeling and it hurts. I want to beg him to come over now and rescue me, but he’d probably say, “From what?” and I wouldn’t know how to answer. How can I explain Helman Yoder and the rest of it to a kid who hates his parents for not getting him a new flat-screen for his bedroom? I settle for I’m screwed. Gonzo disaster. Help. I know it’ll probably be hours before he responds. That’s usually how it works and even then, after I’ve wasted most of my night envisioning him rolling around naked on a puffy rug in Marissa the Italian Slut’s perfect pink bedroom, he sends me something disappointing, something fucking inadequate, and I begin to doubt his sincerity in promising to drive me away into the sunset. I begin to think he might not love me after all, at least not the way I love him, and that thought makes it hard to breathe.
“Renee, sweetie,” Uncle Scottie says. “Do us a big favor and set up the card table in that little nooky area there. And your pop and I need another round of beers. Cold ones are in the cooler behind the couch.”
Just then the doorbell rings.
I run to the door to make sure it’s Gonzo and not one of the Spencerville hicks pointing an Uzi through the peephole. “It’s him,” I say.
“Entrez-vous, amigo,” Daddy shouts.
And it all goes downhill from there.
* * *
“My daughter was born smart,” Daddy says halfway through the meal, which, because he forgot to brown the meat and Uncle Scottie used the old powder, consists of broken taco shells, some sliced onions, and a handful of lettuce. “She came out of her mama’s magic baby door talking in complete sentences and the like. And she’s one hell of an artist. Did you know that?”
Mr. Gonzalez hasn’t looked at me once since we sat down at the card table and started passing around the taco shells. In fact, his eyes have barely strayed from his plate,
a situation that gives me a clear view of his bald spot. I think of Daisy and glance at his left hand. There’s a wedding band on his ring finger, bumping up against a hairy knuckle.
“’Course,” Daddy continues, “all of those complete sentences were in English because that’s the language we speak here in the ole U.S. of A. Do you speak English, Mr. Hernandez?”
“Gonzalez,” he says to his plate.
“What’s that?” Daddy says. “My hearing ain’t what it used to be since I got a gun. Repeated blasts near the ear canal, etcetera.”
“His name’s Mr. Gonzalez, Daddy,” I say, looking over at Uncle Scottie for some help, but he’s concentrating on trying to fill a split shell with lettuce.
“It just keeps breaking more.” Scottie stares at the sad remains of the shell. “Every time it breaks just a little more. Like a heart. Like my heart. Did I tell you, Hank, that Paige dumped me because I said that lady on that show where people see dead people was pretty?”
Daddy nods quickly. “You mentioned it once or twice today, Scottie, and sad as you are, I have to ask you not to stray from the main topic at hand, which is Renee, her God-given intelligence, and the shitty grades this guy keeps giving her because, well, hell if I know. My daughter seems to think it’s on account of her last name, a little something she just so happens to share with me. I think it’s time you started talking, sir. Did some explaining of yourself.”
A long moment of silence follows, broken only by the sound of Chiggers kicking wood chips over a new poop. Then Uncle Scottie starts to cry noisily, the tears leaving wet tracks on his face, and outside there’s a deafening boom that rattles the walls, followed by what sounds like shotgun spray against the house.
Mr. Gonzalez jumps in his chair and his hands tremble over what must be the crappiest dinner he’s ever not eaten.
“Daddy.” The bangs outside get louder, closer. “Do you think…?”
Daddy puts both hands on the table like he’s about to do a push-up. His veins are blue puffy paint. “Could be, sugar bear. Could be.”
Tornado Weather Page 4