Train Wreck Girl

by Sean Carswell

  I even found a new copy of that Jim Thompson book and read it, cover to cover, with no incident. So I guess five significant things happened.

  Then the summer started heating up. Hurricane season came around, and it was only a matter of time before hurricane Sophie struck again.

  I’d had a crazy night at work and just wanted to go home and sleep. It was about midnight. Bart and Sophie were sleeping in my bed. Actually, I don’t think they were sleeping. I think they heard me come in and quick pretended to sleep. The light was still on in my room.

  I walked in and said, “Sorry, guys. You gotta go.” I picked up their clothes from the floor and tossed them on the bed. I left the room to give them time to dress.

  Bart came out first. He had just his shorts on and his t-shirt in his hand. “Dude, you mind if we crash on your couch?” he asked.

  I thought about what they’d probably been doing in my bed and didn’t want them doing that on my couch while I tried to sleep. I pulled out my night’s tips. I peeled two twenties off the stack. “Listen,” I said. “Why don’t you and Sophie get a room tonight?”

  Bart took the forty bucks and nodded. Sophie walked out of the bedroom, fully dressed. She walked past me, bumping into me but not looking at me. Bart followed her. I went to bed.

  Apparently, Bart and Sophie took the forty bucks and went to a bar. They drank for the last two hours that bars were open, then came back to sleep on my couch.

  I slept through all of this. I was sleeping when, in the middle of the night, someone cuddled up behind me and started kissing my neck. I turned, half asleep, half expecting to see Helen, and saw Sophie there in my bed. I sat up.

  “What the fuck?” I said.

  “Shhh,” Sophie said. “You’ll wake up Bart.”

  “Leave me alone,” I said. “This isn’t right.”

  Sophie jumped out of bed. “You’re an asshole!” she said. Really, she screamed it. Loudly enough for Bart to hear and wonder what Sophie was doing in my bedroom, calling me an asshole. “What are you now? My pimp? Buying me hotel rooms to fuck your friends. Asshole!”

  She stormed out of the room.

  I went back to sleep.

  Another hour later, Sophie was back. I was dreaming that something was wiggling around in my belly and it hurt enough to wake me up and Sophie was kneeling on my shins, stabbing me in the gut. She’d gotten me twice already. The knife came down a third time. I grabbed her shoulders and threw her off me. She bounced into my dresser and came back. I jumped off the bed. Sophie swung the knife at me. I hopped out of the way. She tripped over the edge of the bed and fell onto it. I pulled the bed sheet over her and pulled it tight behind her back. I knelt on her back and grabbed the fitted sheet and tied Sophie up. She struggled. It wouldn’t take her long to get free, but she was caught for a while.

  I looked down at myself. I was losing a lot of blood. Every time my heart beat, I’d lose more. My boxers were soaked red. The bed sheets were covered in blood. I grabbed a pair of shorts off the floor and my wallet and a t-shirt and ran out the door.

  The hospital was only about three or four miles away, but the drive seemed to take forever. I struggled to stay awake the whole way. I just kept bleeding and bleeding. It was too much. I fell asleep at a red light. I couldn’t let that happen again. No one else was on the road, anyway, this late, so I just ran red lights and drove straight to the hospital.

  I pulled up at the hospital and parked about twenty feet from the emergency room. I can’t believe I was clear headed enough to do this, but I took my wallet out, grabbed a health insurance card that I’d swiped from my roommate Rick, just in case, put the card in my pocket, and stuffed the wallet in the glove compartment. I got out of the car and passed out before I could take two steps.

  I woke the next morning in a room with two other beds. They both had patients in them. The old white guy kept coughing. The young black guy watched a western on TV. I lay there, looking at the ceiling, trying to piece together everything. I had to take a leak, but any movement at all hurt. I looked left and right to see if they’d left me a bedpan or even a thunder mug. Nothing. So I just kept lying there. I figured I’d wait until the pain in my bladder was worse than the pain in my stomach and move then.

  It didn’t take long.

  I hoisted myself out of bed and to the bathroom. When I got back, there was a nurse there. She said, “You’re not supposed to be out of bed, Mr. Williams.”

  Mr. Williams? It took me a second. I had to remember that I was supposed to be Rick. Let his insurance cover this. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I had to pee.”

  “It’s okay,” the nurse said. She helped me back into bed. “Just ring for us, next time.”

  I nodded. I fell back asleep before anything else could happen.

  The next day, a cop showed up. This couldn’t be a good sign. He called me “Mr. McGregor.” This was a worse sign. He said, “Who stabbed you, Mr. McGregor?”

  “You got the wrong guy,” I said. “I’m Rick Williams.”

  “We spoke to your roommate, Mr. McGregor,” the cop said. “We know who you are.”

  “We want to know who stabbed you.”

  “Who stabbed you?”

  “Why are you posing as Rick Williams?”

  “Who’s your drug dealer?”

  “How much money do you owe your dealer?”

  “Mr. McGregor, we need you to answer these questions if you want us to help you.”

  I closed my eyes. I kept singing the Circle Jerks song in my head. “Innocent, till proven guilty. Deny everything. Deny everything.” I faked sleeping until I really fell asleep.

  That night, around two A.M., I woke up. No one was around. I tried standing. It worked out okay. I tried walking. That worked, too. I tried on the clothes of the old man sleeping in the bed two down from me. They fit well enough. The slacks were high-waters, but the guayabera fit just right. His shoes were too small, so I had to steal shoes from my other roommate. I felt bad doing it, but I figured that my hospital bill had to be up around seven or eight thousand dollars by now. Plus, the cops would be back in the morning. I needed to get while the getting was good.

  I moseyed down the hallway, into the elevator, out the lobby, and into my Galaxie. My wallet was still in the glove compartment. The car hadn’t been searched.

  I headed first to Brother Joe’s. It was the safest place I could think of. I didn’t want to go home because I didn’t know what Bart and Sophie were up to or what everyone would have thought when they went into my bedroom and saw all that blood and Sophie tied up in my bed sheets. Surely, they’d be able to put two and two together. The cops had told my roommate Rick that I’d been stabbed. Sophie would’ve been wound-free. Even if Sophie denied stabbing me, the evidence had to be clear. Still, I wanted no part of it.

  Joe lived in a duplex off of 7th Street South. It was far enough from my place that no one would likely be driving by and see my Galaxie out in the front lawn. It was also the apartment that Joe and I had lived in when I was in high school. I was bad about carrying keys in those days, so I’d learned how to break in.

  I didn’t want to wake Joe and figured I could still get in the old way.

  I parked the Galaxie and walked around the side of the house. I climbed the chain link fence into the backyard, popped the lock on the kitchen window the same way I’d done dozens of times, pulled a trash can around to stand on, and crawled through the kitchen window. My stitches scraped along the aluminum frame of the window as I squeezed through. One of the stitches broke. A little blood dripped out.

  I didn’t care. It was still the middle of the night and I was tired. I went to sleep on Joe’s couch.

  Joe woke me at about six A.M. “What are you doing here, Danny?” he asked. He had that tone of voice: too soft, a little high-pitched lilt, like a bad actor trying to sound compassionate. Only Joe wasn’t acting. He was trying to control his anger. I knew this tone of voice a little too well. The fact that Joe wouldn’t sit down only
made things seem worse.

  I sat up, scratched my head, and took a look at myself. Here I was, waking up on a childhood couch with my blood crusting on a stolen guayabera and my ass jammed into golf pants that obviously I’d stolen because why on earth would I buy plaid slacks two sizes too small for myself? What did I expect from Joe? “It’s a bad scene,” I said.

  “I can see that,” Joe said.

  And this wasn’t an interrogation with a cop, here. This was Joe. I needed help. So I spilled the beans, blurting it all out with no details. Just, “Sophie stabbed me and I skipped out of the hospital so I wouldn’t have to pay the bill.”

  Joe nodded like this was about what he’d expected to hear. “And what? You need money to pay off the hospital?”

  I shook my head.

  “What are you gonna do about that?”

  I shrugged.

  “How’d you get them to even treat you in the first place?”

  “I passed out in the parking lot,” I said. “I guess someone found me there. I had Rick’s health insurance card, too.”

  “Why’d you have that?”

  “I saw it lying around the apartment one day about a year ago. I figured it would be a good thing to have, just in case I got in an accident or something, so I stuck it in my wallet.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I was being sarcastic,” Joe said. How was I supposed to know that? He still had on that I’m-doing-everything-I-can-to-not-explode-right-now voice. He said, “And what about Sophie?”

  “What about her?”

  “Why’d you let her stab you?”

  “I was sleeping.”

  “That’s a lousy excuse,” Joe said. He gathered together a pile of books and lifted them off the recliner. I read the spines of the books as if I were going to change the subject. Ask him what he’d been reading lately. Joe sat down. “We all knew this was gonna happen. You knew it was gonna happen, didn’t you?”

  “How would I know?”

  Joe shook his head. “Damn it, Danny, it takes a special kind of stupid to live life the way you do.”

  And what could I say to that? He was right.

  Joe told me that I’d have to move on, that I couldn’t stay at his place, that I had to deal with this shit myself. He said it in that soft voice, holding back so much anger that I couldn’t be mad at him. Later, I got angry. Later, I felt betrayed by my last bit of family. At the time, though, we just handled the events of the morning. Joe called his boss and said he’d be an hour late for work. We had breakfast at Miguel’s—eggs over easy, black beans and rice, cuban bread—then Joe ran me by my place. No one was home. I ran in real quickly, grabbed some clothes, some cash I had hidden in my closet, some random cassettes, and a few books.

  Joe said, “Is there anything else you need?”

  I shook my head.

  He dropped me off at the Galaxie and left for work. I went back into Joe’s apartment and grabbed a little metal monkey that I’d welded for him in shop class in high school. It wasn’t the prettiest thing—out of proportion, squatting, holding two machetes like a little tough guy. I’d made it for Joe when I was sixteen and I was real proud of it then. Joe really liked it, too. He bragged about it to his friends. He’d get drunk and sit in his recliner and stare at that little monkey. He used to rub it for good look. Originally, I’d painted a bandana on the monkey’s head, but Joe rubbed the monkey so much for good luck that the paint had worn off. Now, the monkey was dull from the oil on Joe’s hands. I knew it was cruel for me to take that monkey from Joe. I guess that’s why I did it.

  I left his apartment and sat in the Galaxie and thought about driving down to Helen’s. I looked at my watch. It was still before eight A.M. Helen worked nights, so I knew she’d still be asleep. I decided not to go see her. I don’t know why I decided this. I’m an idiot. I started up the Galaxie and hit the road.

  Because that’s what I do when things go sour. I run away.

  25

  A Special Kind of Stupid

  It’s a bad omen when an old lady crashes her moped right in front of you. I learned this one afternoon as I rode my bike back from Helen’s.

  I’d been in her garage all morning and I was on my way home for some lunch. At about 5th Street South, this old lady on a moped whipped out in front of me, completely cutting me off. She didn’t even see me. She drove about halfway down the block and started swerving. Not big, fluid swerves or drunk driving swerves, but these short, wobbling swerves. I don’t know if she tried to right herself and jerked the handlebars too hard or if she just let go of the handlebars and they swung around on their own. Either way, the moped went down and the old lady went down with it.

  A big SUV was at the stop sign in front of the old lady. The car didn’t drive off. The brake lights stayed on and the reverse lights came on and off real quickly. Then the hazards. So I knew that the woman in the SUV was parking. I peddled as fast as I could up to the scene.

  I got to the old lady before the SUV driver got out of her car. I stood my bike on its kickstand, just so that any new cars would see it and stop before they got to us. I knelt down next to the old lady. She was passed out. I could see her stomach rising and falling in quick breaths, but her eyes were closed and her jaw was slack. I had no idea what to do. I shook her shoulder. “Hey, lady,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  Of course she didn’t answer. She was out cold. And so of course she wasn’t all right. I blew in her eyes—one of Bart’s homemade death tests. Her eyes blinked, but she didn’t come to.

  The SUV driver called out to me. “What’s going on?”

  I couldn’t see the driver. I felt like an ass just yelling to the back of a vehicle, but I said, “This lady passed out. Must be the heat.”

  The driver finally got out of her SUV. I didn’t look up at her. I kept my eyes on the old lady.

  I didn’t know what to do. The moped was lying across her legs. I stood it up and parked it behind the lady, right by my bike. I knelt beside her. She was a strange looking old broad. Make-up caked on her face. Crazy orange plaid pants and a homemade shawl that should’ve been unraveled and turned back into yarn. Combat boots. A strange sight all around. She was breathing. I looked at her mouth. She didn’t seem to be choking on her tongue or anything. I didn’t have anything with me. No water, nothing. It was as hot outside as, well, Florida is in June, so I didn’t have a jacket or anything to put under her head. I thought about taking off my sweaty t-shirt and bundling it up and putting that under her head, but that seemed kinda gross. I thought about talking to the lady, too. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  The driver, meanwhile, had been rustling around in the back of her SUV, looking for something. I glanced up at her a couple of times. I could only see her legs and ass. I kinda wanted to stare, to see the way those seams stretched in her polyester slacks, see the way those legs reached all the way to the ground. I told myself to focus; stay in the now. I had no idea what the driver was doing. A car cruised past, but didn’t slow down or help out. The SUV driver found what she was searching for and ran up to me. She handed me a bottle of water. “Give her this.”

  I looked up at the SUV driver. I’d know those small ears and that smooth brown neck anywhere. Her face was older and her body was rounder, but it was unmistakable. She even rocked the same soft afro that she’d worn back in high school. Things suddenly got that much stranger. I said, “Rosalie?”

  “Yes, Danny,” Rosalie said, like I was an idiot and like it wasn’t weird that, after not having seen each other since high school, this was how we should meet again. “Give her some water.”

  I looked at the old lady. “Her mouth’s closed,” I said.

  Rosalie grabbed the water out of my hand. “Just hold her head.”

  I cradled the old lady’s head in my hands. Rosalie squeezed the lady’s nose. The lady opened her mouth and let out a quick breath. Rosalie poured a little water into the lady’s mouth. She gave the la
dy a second to breath, then poured a little more water. And just like that, the lady woke up. She swatted me away. I let go of her head. It didn’t drop. She pushed Rosalie out of the way and stood up.

  “Hold on a second there, sister,” Rosalie said. She handed me the water.

  “Get away from me,” the lady said.

  “An ambulance is on the way,” Rosalie said.

  “I don’t need an ambulance. I’m fine.” The lady walked over to her moped. Rosalie followed. The lady waved her off. “I’m fine,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

  “You’re not fine. You passed out. You need help.”

  “I’ll sue you,” the lady said. “I’ll sue both of you. Don’t ever touch me again.” She got on her moped and started peddling.

  “Look, at least drink the water. You’re dehydrated,” Rosalie said. But by now, the engine of the moped had kicked back on. The old lady started driving away.

  I pulled my bike over to the curb, parked it there, sat down, and drank some of the water. Rosalie turned to me and said, “We should go after her.”

  “Fuck it,” I said. “She knows what she’s doing.”

  Rosalie walked back over to her car and grabbed her cell phone out of it. She called the hospital back and called off the ambulance. Explained the whole situation. Then she sat on the curb next to me. “What’d you do to that old lady, Danny?”

  I handed her the water. She took a sip. “You know me,” I said. “I make women swoon.”

  “That was nuts,” Rosalie said.

  “Yeah.” I looked at the pavement where it had all gone down. It was just pavement. Nothing of that little drama remained.

  Rosalie stared ahead, too. After about a half a minute, she said, “Hungry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Want to get some lunch?”

  “Yeah.”

  Rosalie stood. I locked my bike up to the stop sign. We got into her car and took off.

  We had lunch. We talked about the old lady. We caught up on old times. We ate tacos. We told jokes. At the end of it, Rosalie said, “Come on, I’ll drive you back to your bike.”