Kurt nudged his elbow with one of the beers. “Nintendo, my brother,” he said, motioning with the beer toward the television, where a bright image of boxing rodents blinked and weaved. Trevor took the beer and gulped down what he could without gagging. The pill nudged its way down his throat, scraping a raw, wounded path as it went.
“Nintendo rocks!” Charlie said.
Kurt and Charlie played three games and then, just as Charlie was offering his controller to Trevor, Kurt’s mother came in with a tray of cut-glass tumblers and cookies.
“Pudding’s ready,” she said.
Kurt threw himself back against the couch cushions and hid his beer between them. “For fuck’s sake, Ma. I’m not twelve.”
“Language.”
“Thanks, Meemaw.” Charlie dipped a finger into one of the tumblers and licked it clean. “I love pudding. I want to rub my balls in it.”
“Your what?” Kurt’s mother asked.
Charlie started to repeat his statement but Kurt interrupted him. “Storm’s brewing,” he said, parting the plain red curtains over the couch. “Gonna be a doozy.”
Trevor edged up a bit in his chair and looked out. The sky seemed to tilt toward the grass under the weight of a black cloud. An open hand of fanned maple branches squeaked against the glass pane, leafless, and rain began to fall in fat drops onto a window box of weeds and wrought-iron wands bent to look like sunflowers.
“Do you guys have a basement?” Trevor asked.
But no one heard him. Kurt’s mother leaned over Charlie to watch the storm and jumped when a bright bolt flashed over the neighbor’s house. She fingered the cross on her necklace.
“I just heard on the radio they found poor little Daisy Gonzalez,” she said.
“They found her?” Trevor didn’t understand. He hadn’t told the cop a thing. How had the case been solved so quickly? Who was the hero? Not him. He knew that for sure. Not him.
Kurt’s mother nodded. Her eyes were still red and moist. “She’s gone, I’m afraid. To meet her Maker.”
Everyone was silent for a moment. Then Charlie said, “She went to my school.”
Kurt tousled Charlie’s hair. “I’m sorry, buddy.” But he was looking at Trevor, searchingly. Trevor couldn’t say it. He thought of Brianna, the threat she’d made back at the store. His throat kept closing on its own.
“They’re not going to give a rat’s ass about that girl in a second,” said Blue Fish.
“What?” Trevor wished he hadn’t drunk that beer or popped one of his pills.
“What what?” Charlie asked. “She went to my school?”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” Trevor leaned toward the fish tank.
“Let’s leave asses out of this for once,” hissed Red Fish.
“Give it a rest.” Blue Fish blew a line of bubbles at her. “I’m trying to warn him.”
“Warn me why? Of what?”
“You okay, buddy?” Kurt asked.
“Lightning,” Blue Fish peeped. “Lightning strike. Imminent. Pick us up, half-wit. Pick us up or you’ll be sorry.”
“Hurry,” said Red Fish.
“Hurry hurry,” said Blue.
Trevor did as he was told. He lunged forward and grabbed the fish tank, raising it above his head like a barbell. Dirty water sloshed onto his White Swan polo in a heart-shaped stain.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Kurt asked.
“Language,” Ma said, and then it hit, the bright light and the purple light, the fire and the traveling burn. The current jumped from the sugar maple next to the window to the TV antenna and traveled through the wall to the socket on the other side. Nails popped and drywall cracked. The window shattered into tiny pieces on the couch. The television fell to the carpet and an acrid smell of smoldering wire filled the room, which was silent now except for a hiss coming from the wall. Kurt and Ma were at Trevor’s feet, both of them staring openmouthed at him from their puddle of spilled pudding. Charlie was on his knees over the Nintendo set.
“Shit, Trevor,” Kurt said.
“I wasn’t lying,” Trevor said, his throat open now. His throat a whole road. You could drive a car down it. “I know who did it. Who kidnapped Daisy. It was Brianna Pogue and Josh Seaver. I saw them throw her body under the Spencerville Fun Spot Ferris wheel and bury it sort of.”
“Bury it?” Ma asked.
“Sort of?” Kurt said.
“That’s all I know, though. I don’t know how it happened. I was hanging out at the Fun Spot. I do that sometimes, because, I don’t know. It’s quiet. Nobody’s ever there. Except for that night, of course. And sometimes this teenage girl and her boyfriend. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. She’s dead. Daisy. She was a beautiful little girl and she’s dead and everyone knows now.” Trevor stopped and saw that Charlie was staring up at him with huge, admiring eyes.
“You saved them,” Charlie said.
Only then did Trevor glance up at the fish, who, seemingly undisturbed, were swimming silently in a circle, working the water into an effervescent whirlpool. He watched them for several minutes, long enough for Kurt and Charlie to gather up the Nintendo set and declare it unscathed, long enough for Ma to stack the pudding dishes in a pyramid on the tray. The fish didn’t say anything. They didn’t tell him if the storm that had started outside was going to end in Armageddon. They didn’t chastise him for waiting this long to tell someone about Daisy. They didn’t say if Trevor should run, hide, stick his head in a ditch, or declare his love, because what, after all, did he have to lose?
They didn’t even thank him.
Damage Waiting to Happen, Collateral and Otherwise
(June)
1.
The roof flew off first. No. That’s not right. The windows broke, came inside, turned to sparkling grains like sugar on the floor. The drywall died next, became flour. It was like God was saying, Forget this storm. Make cookies. Then she changed her mind because the paint cans and brushes and tarps I’d stacked so neatly on shelves in the corner started flying around the room, whirled into a separate and smaller but just as deadly tornado by my bed, which wasn’t really a bed, just a futon mattress I borrowed from Rhae Anne. I hid, of course, did what my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Moody, and my mom taught me—I stopped, dropped, and rolled under the nearest couch. Only I didn’t have a couch, either. No bed, no couch, just that mattress and a broken satellite chair that served the purpose at the moment.
It wasn’t so much the wind as the roar. People like to say, “It was so loud I couldn’t hear myself think.” That can be a good thing. Things crashed against the concrete. Things smashed and spilled. I cowered. Not because I’m a pansy. Suck it, Benny Bradenton. But because I’m smart.
For a second I did wonder how Mom was. Not Dad. Dad is what Benny Bradentons turn into. But what about Mom in her new Wyndham-on-the-River landominium? Mom in her pearls. Those pearls would save her, I told myself. The pearls and the pills she still snuck although not as often. And maybe her bridge table.
While I worried, the roof left and the ceiling above me followed it, both pulled into the air by an invisible hand and now part of the roar. The hand was coming for me, too, so I clung to a cord I’d taped to the floor. My hair dryer. All that stood between me and certain death. Rhae Anne would love that.
It was all over in a minute and a half, maybe two. While it lasted, I held my chest, wished hard they were real. Someday. I felt my hips. So bony, hairy, too. Round out, I told them. Not that they listened. They couldn’t hear me over the freight train barreling through. Round the fuck out.
The paint cans and brushes and tarps were still spinning. I could hear them whipping around my chair and ricocheting off the door and walls. I imagined for a second that I was standing there in the center of the storm in the center of the room, rolled over by the funnel cloud from feet to forehead, transformed like some superhero by the power of nature, stripped and polished and made perfect. No more back fur, no pimples, no penis, just pink, dewy beauty and legs
that crossed at the ankles automatically. What once was Wally was now Willa. The end.
Not that this whole thing has ever just been about the looks part, the prettiness. It’s a feeling, too, a knowledge, an entire body of it, and I made a promise to God that if she saw fit to let me live through this storm I would do it right, be the woman I was born to be, not the boy or girl everyone expected. I would embrace the sacred feminine, whatever the hell that was, and be a good sister friend to all the ladies, even ones like Una Prokus who hated to get too close to me in case my kind was catching.
But really, after this storm, it wouldn’t be a big deal, right? My wig and face and fishnets. Nobody would care. How could they when the world was ending anyway?
Then it was done. Quiet. The roar left, gone as quick as it came. Rain fell in. Soft. Cold. I opened my door, now dented from the paint cans and a mess of white and beige and brown stains, and crept up the stairs. There weren’t walls around them anymore. Or a second floor above. The stairs went nowhere. Juan was hiding in the hollow underneath, clutching his basketball. He sang to it like a baby, a Spanish lullaby or something. That Nina person in her trucker hat was next to him as usual. She wasn’t singing. She said to me, “You don’t pay no rent.”
I said, “I live in the utility closet.”
“Whatever,” she said.
On the other side of the building, people were crying. The Bottoms had been turned upside down. The trees weren’t trees anymore. More matchsticks, things you could play with. Cars were stacked on top of each other in twisted metal pillars, and the river had crawled right up on land and lay there like a lizard sunning itself, only there was no sun. Not yet. That would come later. Blue skies and birdsong and the digging out. The cleaning up.
For now, the water lapped at my feet. A huge fish swam out of the old Udall place and made its way across the street. There was something on its back, sort of stuck to it. I leaned in to get a closer look. It was a picture in a broken frame. A square-jawed baseball player with a pair of glittery panties on his face. I grabbed the panties, let the picture drift on by.
2.
Welcome to Miss Kitty’s, where every girl’s a princess and every man’s a king, if not for a day then at least for an hour, or seven minutes. That’s the lap-dance limit. Ask Stan McElroy. It’s his rule. “Anything longer’ll cost ’em more, and if they don’t like it, they can lump it.”
Is this your first time dancing? Oh well. You look young, is all. I hope you realize what you’re getting into here. Miss K’s is an institution. A few pervs have tried to have us shut down over the years, but no luck. We’re untouchable basically, unless the Board of Health gets wind of what Beans does back there in the kitchen. Whatever you do, don’t order the hot wings.
Do you have any questions so far?… Stan? Don’t bother with Stan. He’s in his office most of the day crunching numbers. That’s what he calls it. Crunching numbers. Really he’s doing coke and talking to his wife on the phone. They can’t let an hour go by without talking about something, even if it’s just what Stan should have for lunch instead of the hot wings. That’s love, I guess. Or one way of doing it. Me and my boyfriend, we’re less needy. We give each other our space. Oh, you wouldn’t know him. He’s a homebody type. Never comes here, thank God. Boyfriends should stay away. If you have one, tell him that. He probably thinks he’ll like watching you but he’ll hate it. He’ll get all eaten up with jealousy. Trust me. It gets ugly around here no joke.
I’ll show you the dressing room. That’s where you’ll spend most of your time between dances although Stan does like it if you mingle with the customers some and there’s a little nook over there for giving private couch dances and even privater massages. It’s up to you if you want to do that—there’s money in it duh, but that’s also how you get your stalkers. One stole a girl a few years back. Just took her to like Canada or Greenland or someplace and no one’s seen her since.
Oh yeah, Daisy, well. I’m not living under a rock, am I? I’ll tell you a secret. That Juan person did it, no doubt in my mind. All the signs point to him, but the pussy cops let him go. Just set him free to menace the rest of us to death and I sincerely hope they don’t regret it.
Well, here we are, glitter ground zero. I like to call it the “shituation room,” mostly because Maria Pinto leaves her shit all over the place for the rest of us to clean up. Maria thinks she runs and rules this place but she’s just this side of delusional. Want to know who tips well or doesn’t tip at all, ask me. Same goes for where to buy the best baby wipes, how to shave so you don’t get bumps, and what to eat between sets so you don’t pass out or puke or die. I can hook you up, is what I’m saying. It’s no problem. I’ve done it for lots of girls. I’m by way of being a bit of an ambassador.
What’s Colliersville like? It’s small, but you probably already knew that. There are the tree streets downtown and the Bottoms at the bottom near the river and Maple Leaf Mobile Home Park in between. Oh, and Wyndham-on-the-River out a ways. Not on the river. Ironic, eh? Everybody knows everybody. Well, except the Ranasack Apartments people, who know each other and not us and us who know each other but not them. Whose fault is that, though, if they won’t speak English?
Hey, hey, no offense. I didn’t realize. You know what’s funny? You actually kind of remind me of this woman who lived here for a while. She was from some island down south. No, not Cuba. I don’t know. One of those islands the cruise ships go to. My boyfriend’s uncle ordered her from a magazine, I shit you not. She was pretty in your way. Pretty and sad. Superstitious, too. She covered Rita Washburn’s yard in plastic fork crosses one time to try to get rid of a pregnancy. Didn’t work apparently because she and Josh’s uncle have a kid who’s probably your age. Or last I heard.
What?… That? That’s just thunder. NBD. We get a lot of storms in the spring and summer and this season’s been a doozy already, but we’re fine where we are. Don’t listen to Maria. She doesn’t know shit about shit.
No, see, if there’s a tornado there’ll be a siren. And then we can hoof it to the basement. Trust me, you don’t want to go down there if you don’t have to. It’s overrun with rats, and it’s also where Stan keeps his mannequin collection. He started stealing them from stores years ago, mostly from the Fort Wayne Sears but JCPenney, too, and Hudson’s and Ayres—those girls are the fancy kind, all pointy elbows and chins—and now he’s got enough to start an army. Not sure how good they’d be against the terrorists. At the very least, they could scare them to death.
I love that sound, the thunder. Then the rain on the roof. Adds to the atmosphere, don’t you think? I like to close my eyes for a minute and pretend I’m in Flashdance.… Oh. Before your time, probably. So this really beautiful girl welds by day and strips by night and eventually she tries out for the ballet or something but what I like is the love story, her handsome millionaire boss showing up with roses and sweeping her off her feet. I figure, if it can happen to her it can happen to me, right? When it rains like this, I close my eyes and pretend I’m Jennifer Beals dancing with like a waterfall in the background. The problem is, when I open my eyes there aren’t any millionaires or waterfalls, just the same loser old men and college boys I see every day, and since I can’t really weld I know that I’m pretty much doomed to rot here on this mirrored floor in six-inch heels, getting calluses in my armpits from the pole for the rest of my life.
It’ll be different for you, though. You’re smart. You give off that vibe. Also, you have the heart-shaped face and teardrop tits guys like. My tits are a mess but no one seems to care that much. It’s all about confidence. The strut. Faking it. Hot chicks are a baker’s dozen. Guys can’t tell hot from fugly, and I’m not really sure they care.…
Honestly, I don’t really remember. High school happened and some random retail gigs, then this. I was going to go west with my best friend, Frannie, but the night she showed up wasn’t a good one and here I am. Just do what I do: tell people you’re working your way through medical scho
ol. They love that.
Fine, fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you about the mannequins. One of them’s dressed like the queen of England. Stan has a thing for her. Grab that flashlight, will you? If we make it down there quick we can grab the corner with the least amount of mouse shit.
You shut up, Maria Pinto. Bitch. I wasn’t talking to you anyway.
3.
The house was dark and quiet and Daisy was nowhere and Hector was walking from room to room, yelling her name. He was looking in empty closets and throwing blankets on the floor and telling her this wasn’t funny, this wasn’t a game, she better come out or else. He was throwing open windows and calling for her over and over and then he was outside—how had he gotten there?—and he was jogging around the house, tripping on his lawn furniture and a doll Daisy had left out in the rain. The rain was falling sideways. It pushed against him. Trees were falling, too. He dodged them. Slipping in his socks, Hector promised himself and his dead wife that he would get their girl out, out of the Bottoms and Colliersville and Indiana, out of the entire Midwest bread basket/Bible Belt if he had to, give their Daisy a chance to blossom. Ugh, sorry, Tina baby, he thought. Sorry for the mixed metaphor slash cliché. Bread baskets and blooming flowers. He was not at his best. He was running right into someone’s over-turned trashcan. People magazines and empty cigarette packs and Diet Mountain Dew cans spilled onto the street from its rusty mouth. How had he ended up here? Not just Colliersville but the Bottoms where the Seavers from down the street and the Tucker boys from Maple Leaf often used national holidays as an excuse to turn the entire neighborhood into one big midnight brawl, an adult game of cowboys and Indians, the cowboys (Seavers) armed with BB guns and the Indians (Tuckers) with air cannons that shot potatoes? I hate all of you so much my heart burns, he thought. I hate you with my whole heart. I hate you with the hole in my heart. He wasn’t making sense. He didn’t have a heart murmur. Not that he knew of anyway. He wanted to throw up.
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