Train Wreck Girl

by Sean Carswell

  “I don’t know,” I said. Though I did know. I walked up the boardwalk steps.

  “Do you regret your tattoos?”

  “Enough with the tattoos,” I said. “They look cool.”

  “What about those scars in the middle of your tattoos? The ones on your belly?”

  “I’ll tell you about those when you’re older,” I said. Because I didn’t even want to think about that shit. I kept walking across the beach and up the boardwalk stairs.

  The wheelchair dude was there. I’d been thinking about him the whole time Taylor told her story. She’d given me an idea. I stopped when I got to the wheelchair dude and said, “Clay Barker?” Like it had just occurred to me who he was. “That’s right. I knew I recognized you. Dante Jones introduced us at one of those cop parties in Cocoa.”

  The wheelchair dude shook his head.

  “No. No. I’m pretty sure about it. You were talking about playing football for Merritt Island High. You were on the team that won state in ’79, right?”

  Clay kinda smiled. How could he not? He was on that team. He did win state. He didn’t say anything to me. He just tried to keep down the smile.

  I pointed to Taylor, standing behind me. “Clay, this is Taylor.”

  Taylor put out her hand to shake his. He shook hands and said, “Is Taylor your first name or last name?” he asked.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  “Listen, man, I was gonna have some drinks with Dante next Monday night. Why don’t you come down and hang with us? We’re going to Duke’s. Around seven.”

  Clay said, “I don’t know.”

  I knew he’d be there, though. It was his job. So I said, “It’s up to you, man. We’ll be down there either way. Maybe I’ll see you then.”

  Clay nodded. Taylor and I walked away. All I could hear was that nagging id screaming inside my head.

  22

  The Way of the Barnacle

  Helen invited me over to her house. I got excited. Turns out, I had the wrong idea.

  I went over to her house. She had a little two bedroom bungalow down around Duke’s. It wasn’t much bigger than the half of a duplex Bart and I shared, but she had a garage. I always wanted one of those. That’s where Helen and I went. Not inside the house. To the garage.

  Helen unlocked the side door. She said, “Remember when you used to do all those sculptures? Before you ran off on me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you still do stuff like that?”

  “Sorta, yeah,” I said. “I have a whole pile of that shit over at Duane’s.”

  “Who’s Duane?”

  “The guy I used to work for.”

  “Did you just get fired again, Danny?”

  “Not fired, exactly. Duane just said I couldn’t work for him anymore until the guy in the wheelchair stopped watching me all day.”

  Helen nodded. “Who is that guy?”

  “A private investigator.”

  “Why’s he following you?” Helen paused. “Wait,” she said. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  She opened the garage door but didn’t go in. She said, “Anyway, you shouldn’t call your sculptures shit. I like them. My ex-husband loved them. I had a few of those sculptures lying around from the last time you lived here. He sold them for, like, hundreds of dollars.”

  “Hundreds of dollars! How many did I leave behind?”

  “I don’t think you understand,” Helen said. “He sold them for hundreds of dollars each.”

  “Damn,” I said. Because Helen and Sal sold those things, too, but for usually for between twenty and fifty bucks each. I couldn’t imagine some sucker paying hundreds of dollars for one. “I wish he was still around.”

  “He is,” Helen said. She opened the door to her two-car garage and turned on the light. One side of the garage was piled in junk. Old lamps, sheets from a tin roof, a metal bed frame, metal everything: magazine racks and chairs and table legs and balcony railings and all kinds of shit. It was all pushed up against a wall. The rest of the garage was pretty clean. Helen had her pickup truck there. She had her bicycle. A washer and dryer. A tool bench. My old acetylene torch and set-up.

  I walked over to the tool bench. A bunch of my old tools were still there. My shears. My mallet. A vise. Some pliers. Some clippers and center punches and metal files. Even my old welder’s mask. “You kept all this stuff?”

  Helen shrugged. “I figured I could get some money for it. But I didn’t know who to sell it to. I couldn’t bring myself to take it to a pawn shop.”

  “I’ll buy it,” I said.

  Helen smiled. “You don’t have to buy it, Danny.” She walked over and sat on the tool bench. Her feet dangled. She pointed at the pile of junk. “My ex-husband left all this stuff here when he moved out. He doesn’t want it. I figured you could do something with it.”

  I walked over to the pile. There was some good stuff there. And Duane had a buddy who ran a body shop. I figured I could get some scrap quarter panels and fenders and shit like that off of him. You could never hammer that stuff flat again, but you could get some nice textures out of it. It all seemed easy enough. It all looked like possibilities. It was kinda beautiful. “I could do something with this,” I said.

  “I get half,” Helen said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I get my ex-husband to sell your stuff, and I get half of what we make. He’d get a commission. I get half of what’s left over after that.”

  “You can have it all,” I said.

  “I don’t want it all,” Helen said. “I want half.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t care about any of that. I didn’t really believe that her ex-husband could get any real money from anything I made. I kinda wanted to get to welding, though. I mean, I wanted to hang out with Helen, sure. But really, I wanted to start welding.

  Maybe Helen saw this in me. Who knows? She got up from the workbench and handed me a key. “This unlocks the side door,” she said. “It won’t unlock any other door in the house. You can use the garage whenever you want. Roll my truck into the driveway if you’re welding.”

  I nodded. She smiled and started to walk away. I said, “Thanks, Helen.”

  Believe it or not, this actually changed things. Now that I wasn’t working for Duane, I had a lot of time to spend welding for myself.

  Since Helen had set all this up for me and since she owned Duke Kahanamoku’s and since she dug that whole Pacific Island kitsch, I came up with a tiki theme for the stuff. I fashioned the balcony handrail into metal bamboo shoots. I hammered the tin roof sheets flat and cut them into strips and wove them into mats that I could use with the bamboo and make all kinds of shit. I turned the bed frame into a picture frame with wiry waves and diamond-shaped strips of metal and I framed her Duke Kahanamoku painting. I made actual tikis out of old fenders and lamps. It was weird to see metal versions of all that stuff. I kinda liked it.

  The more I worked, the more abstract the tiki theme became. It was just a starting point for all kinds of weird shapes and designs.

  Helen seemed to like the stuff. Or she acted like she liked it, but she never did anything with it. She just lined each sculpture up against the garage wall, right where the metal had been originally. She did take the painting and frame to Duke’s and hang it up there. Everything else, she just piled along the wall.

  Still, I got kinda obsessed with all that scrap metal. For a month, it was just about all I did. I’d pick up dead bodies at night, sure, and I’d surf with Taylor a few times a week. But mostly, I hung out in Helen’s garage, welding all this shit. Helen usually wasn’t around. Usually, it was just me and my metal and my flame.

  Helen came out to check on me one afternoon. I was using a tin woven mat and an old magazine holder and trying to rip off Picasso’s painting about the three hookers. I don’t know why. It wasn’t coming out how I wanted it to and I was getting frustrated and thinking about torching it all when Helen called out to me. “Doing okay, ther
e?”

  I turned off the torch and lifted my mask. “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “I heard a lot of banging,” she said. “Wanted to make sure everything’s okay.”

  I put the torch on the tool bench. I loosened the vise and let my latest pile fall to the floor. “It’s all a bunch of shit,” I said. “A waste of time.”

  “You gotta stop running yourself down, Danny.”

  I shrugged. I took off my mask. “Do you ever wonder what you want to do with your life?”

  “I’m kinda doing it,” Helen said. She looked like she felt bad for saying it, but she went on. “I have my own bar. My own house. No bosses. No landlords. It’s not bad.”

  “I guess so,” I said. “That’s not bad at all.” I started to put away my tools. Helen walked over to the tool bench and sat on the middle of it, just to my right. From where she was sitting, I couldn’t put my tools up and I couldn’t go back to work. I took a step away from her.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Do you ever wonder what you want to do with your life?”

  “All the fucking time,” I said.

  “And what do you think about?”

  I shrugged and said, “I don’t know. You know, I thought I’d be dead by now. I’m turning thirty in a couple of months. I thought the booze and drugs would kill me by then.”

  Helen shook her head. “You never did enough to kill yourself.”

  “I don’t know. Brother Joe did. I felt like I was on the same track.”

  “Wasn’t your brother in his forties when he died?”

  “Yeah. But still…”

  Helen wasn’t having it. She dealt with boozers for a living. She knew. She said, “It takes a lot to kill yourself. Especially by thirty. Look at your friends. Look at Bart. He drank enough to die by thirty. And Sophie did enough drugs. You never did half as much as them. If they’re both doing fine, where does that leave you?”

  “Exactly,” I said. I felt bad even talking about it with Helen because she was a bartender and people dump their problems on bartenders all the time. Especially Helen, because she was kinda nurturing. She actually listened. That’s dangerous for a bartender: to actually listen. I figured I’d let the subject drop. I pushed a bunch of tools to the back of the bench and sat next to Helen. “I appreciate you letting me use your garage.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Helen said.

  “But, really, I appreciate it.”

  “Well, really, I get half.”

  I looked at the metal against the garage wall. Both the stuff I’d welded and the stuff I hadn’t welded yet. “Half of what? You haven’t even tried to sell it.”

  “I just like the way it looks there,” Helen said. “You took a bunch of junk and welded it into something worthwhile.”

  I nodded. I knew Helen was trying to give me some advice, there.

  23

  Twilight of the Idles

  The time for my showdown with Clay Barker, Wheelchair Dude, was well overdue. I was having problems making it happen, though. For one thing, I couldn’t get Dante to come have a beer with me. I’d made the mistake of telling him what I was up to, and he’d said, “Deal with your own shit, Danny. Leave me out of it.” And, nagging id or not, I couldn’t find a way to beat up a guy in a wheelchair and not feel like a bully. So Clay kept following me around and I kept trying to figure out a way to deal with it. And, finally, I figured out a way.

  I was locking up my bike outside of Duke’s when I saw Clay in the parking lot, waiting on me. There was nothing unusual about this. I also saw Bart and Sophie pull into the parking lot. This was unusual. At this point, a plan occurred to me.

  I unlocked my bike and walked over to Clay’s van. I opened the side door and put my bike in. Clay said, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  I climbed into the van and made my way to the passenger seat. “Let’s head over to Sully’s. It’s on Brevard Street, between 1st and 2nd Streets North.”

  “I know where fucking Sully’s is,” Clay said.

  “So what are you waiting for?”

  Clay gave me a long stare. I guess he was sizing things up in his head. I was already in the van. I wasn’t acting violently, but I also wasn’t going away. So what choices did he have? He could call the cops. He could pull a weapon on me. He could try to talk me out of the seat. Or he could just go to the bar and see what was up. He chose the bar.

  I checked out his van while he drove. Seven or eight different paperback crime novels lay scattered around the floor. All of them were old, noir types. Early twentieth century stuff. The type of books that Brother Joe had handed down to me and I kept going back to again and again. He even had Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 on the floor. It was the very same novel I’d been reading when Sophie freaked out all those years ago. I picked up Clay’s copy. “I love this book,” I said.

  “It’s Thompson’s best,” Clay said. “Trust me, I’ve read them all.”

  And, with that, my nemesis became my buddy.

  My plan was simple: get Clay drunk at Sully’s, get him to confess who he was working for, and, when I knew for sure it was Libra’s parents, call them and tell them to get him the hell off my trail. It was so simple, it was almost retarded. Well, maybe not “almost.”

  Clay and I took a table at Sully’s. I went up to the bar and ordered a pitcher of beer for the two of us. We sat together and drank and talked about books and football and shit like that. I didn’t ask him why he was following me and he didn’t volunteer. We didn’t talk about any personal stuff. We just drank and chatted about shit that didn’t mean anything. Just like men normally do at happy hour.

  The first pitcher dried up. I purchased a second. I thought about getting shots, just to expedite the process, but really, I wasn’t in a hurry. I kinda liked Clay. I didn’t mind drinking with him at all. And, anyway, he made his big mistake halfway through the second pitcher. He went to the bathroom, which in and of itself isn’t a mistake. But he left his cell phone on the table when he went.

  As soon as he’d wheeled around the corner and out of sight, I picked up the cell phone. I wasn’t very good at working those things—I’d never had one myself—but it was all logic. Just point arrows and follow directions. I got into his list of recent calls, and, sure enough, there was the 520 area code and Libra’s mom’s cell number. I figured, why not give it a shot? and hit the call button.

  Libra’s mom picked up on the second ring. She said, “Hello, Clay.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Fulton,” I said, my voice cracking like a teenage boy’s. “This is Danny McGregor.”

  The line went dead.

  I put the phone on the table and looked around Sully’s. The scene never changed. The same few regulars sat at the bar, drinking their regular drinks. The bartender played solitaire in a lonely corner. Bart’s basketball machine sat unused while he drank at Duke’s. The ghost of Joe took an empty stool, ordered an empty beer, faded away. I waited for Libra to join him, but no such luck. I put my hand on my glass of beer, and it started shaking. My whole body shivered. Hearing Libra’s mother’s voice again, having her hang up on me… There was a time once when that happened all the time. “Hello, Danny, Libra home?” “No, she’s…” Click. No chit chat. No time for me. Which was fine. I never really wanted to get to know her anyway. But when so much of my past was turning to ghosts and I heard the voice of a ghost from the past, it put something in my blood and gave me the shakes.

  Clay wheeled back from the bathroom. I set his phone on the table and slid it over to him. He picked it up and pushed some arrows, then looked at me all scared and betrayed.

  “I think I just got you fired,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

  Clay set his phone on his lap. “If you were sorry, you wouldn’t have done it,” Clay said. He wheeled back from the table and out the door.

  I let him wheel away for a second and forgot that he was the guy who’d been following me for months, taking pictures of me, getting me fired from Duane’s, all that.
I felt bad for him. I also remembered that my bike was still in his van, and I couldn’t let him get too far.

  For a few awkward moments, I made empty apologies and pulled my bike out of his van and locked it up against the handicapped parking sign. Clay lifted himself into his van and got situated behind the steering wheel. I waved to him. He waved and backed out of the parking lot.

  This would be the end of Clay, but I knew Mrs. Fulton wouldn’t give up that easily. Sure enough, within a week, the Samoan would be on my trail.

  In the meantime, I went back into Sully’s to finish the beer and wrestle with the latest ghost coming to life: Sophie Dunn.

  24

  Run Away, Danny

  Rewind four years.

  The stabbing.

  Four significant things happened between the summer when Sophie and I broke up for good and the summer when she stabbed me.

  First, she went off the deep end. She’d been bluffing in that backyard when she told me she was really in love with Bart and sick of me. A part of her still felt like she needed me. Our breakup was bad news for Sophie. She sold her car and bought enough cocaine to kill a normal person. It almost killed her. Her dad stepped in just in time, fronting her the ton of dough to go to rehab.

  Second, Sophie came out of rehab six months later. She came out sweet as could be. It seemed like she’d finally taken care of her shit. She acted like an angel. Bart started dating her.

  Third, Bart still hadn’t taken care of his shit. He spent most of his time living at my pad. Since I was spending most of my time at Helen’s, I didn’t mind. When I wasn’t around, Bart slept in my bed. When I wasn’t around and he and Sophie were dating, they both slept in my bed. I didn’t care. Or, to be honest, I did care, but I did my best to convince myself I didn’t care.

  Fourth, things went well between me and Helen. I switched over to night shifts at the bar so that we could hang out together more. Helen bought me an acetylene welding unit and let me use her garage to weld metal together. She sold the sculptures. I wouldn’t take the money she made from them, so she saved it. When she had enough, she bought a longboard to replace the one that Sophie had ruined. I surfed a lot.