Train Wreck Girl

by Sean Carswell

  “He is a good guy.”

  “Still,” I said. “All that time you spent without a father… imagining who he was. Hoping he was cool or, I don’t know, rich or something. And then he turns out to be me. Fuck, that sucks.” I paused, thought about what I’d just said, then checked myself. “I mean, I’m cool with it. I’m happy that you’re my daughter. Just, for your sake, I wish you had a better dad.”

  “Me too,” Taylor said. Still not kidding. And why should she be? What kind of joke would all this make?

  I didn’t know what else to say. I just kept driving and hoping something would come to mind. I thought about telling her that I didn’t know about it. I hadn’t known about it until she did. But, hell, she knew that. And what else was there to say? We drove along A1A, through the dunes of Melbourne Beach. Seven- and eight-story condos lined the ocean like so many orangutans on an African savannah.

  Finally, Taylor said, “Remember when you swore you’d beat up my father if you ever met him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, what are you gonna do now?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a pickle, kid,” I said. Because what could I tell her? I spent most of my life beating that guy up.

  30

  Still Dirty

  I still had to resolve things with Sophie. She wouldn’t just run away and not come back. That’s my trick, not Sophie’s. She’d want to talk about things. She’d want something she could call closure. It’s just the way she was.

  She called a few times and left messages, but I didn’t call her back. She showed up a few times at my haunts. I did my best to avoid her at every turn.

  She caught me on the phone, though. I’d been expecting a call from Helen. The phone rang and I answered it without letting the answering machine pick up first. Sophie was on the line. She asked me to go out to dinner with her.

  “I don’t know, Sophie,” I said. “I’m kinda busy.”

  “Busy doing what? Did you suddenly get a real job?”

  “That’s it. Pick on me,” I said. “That’s a good way to get what you want.”

  “Don’t be a jerk,” Sophie said. “You’re not busy. You love sushi. Come to dinner with me.”

  I tried to think of an excuse and decided I didn’t need one. I said, “I don’t really want to.”

  “Dinner’s on me.”

  Which did make the offer more tempting. The only thing better than a sushi dinner is a free sushi dinner. Still, I’d have to have that dinner with Sophie. “I don’t know.”

  “Bring your medical bills, too,” Sophie said. “I’ll pay them.”

  And that was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I still owed the hospital close to ten grand for that little stay after Sophie stabbed me. I had no intention of paying it, but it haunted me. I wanted that monkey off my back. Besides, Sophie would keep calling until I had dinner with her, so I figured I may as well get it over with. “Pick me up at seven,” I told her.

  Sophie showed up dressed to the nines. She had on this sheer white blouse and hiphuggers and fancy shoes. It was all so tight and close to see-through that I couldn’t help thinking about her naked. Damn. This was going to be a long night.

  Sophie said to me, “You look good.” But I didn’t. I was wearing an aloha shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. I hadn’t even shaved. So, of course, this meant Sophie was fishing for a compliment. I didn’t offer one up. I just smiled and nodded and we headed to her car.

  On the way to the restaurant, Sophie tried to get me to talk and mostly I just realized how much she knew about my life. She asked me, “Anything new?”

  “Nah,” I said. “Same old.”

  “Still hanging out with that little surfer girl?”

  I shrugged. Okay, so Sophie knows about Taylor. She knows I’m a dad. I said, “We don’t hang out. We just go surfing.”

  “Been welding at all?” Sophie asked.

  “A bit.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  I shrugged.

  “Any monkeys?”

  “A few.”

  “Doing anything with your sculptures?”

  Aha. So Sophie knew about the gallery exhibit that Helen and her ex-husband had set up for me. That’s what she was waiting for me to tell her about. I said, “No.”

  “Anyone selling them?”

  “Not right now. No.”

  Sophie pushed her hair behind her ears. “You’re impossible,” she said. She turned up the music and we rode the rest of the way without talking.

  As soon as we got to the restaurant, Sophie went to the bathroom. Of course, I was suspicious. Years of dating Sophie made me suspicious every time she went to the bathroom. Especially at a joint like this sushi restaurant, because the bathrooms were the kind that only one person went into at a time, so Sophie could snort whatever she wanted in private.

  I took the table and waited. I told myself, you’re gonna eat, you’re gonna be polite, you’re gonna hand over your medical bills, and you’re gonna leave. That’s it.

  Sophie came back from the bathroom. I couldn’t tell if she’d taken a bump of coke or not. We ordered our food and Sophie started chatting. She told me about her job. She’d been working at this fancy French restaurant in Cocoa Beach. Chez Jean’s Bistro. “My friend Gretchen called me in Atlanta about the job. She said I just had to come down and work for her.” So Sophie waited tables there and made a lot of money. She wanted to be clear that she’d come down to Cocoa Beach for the job and not because I was back in town. I wasn’t sure I believed her. It didn’t matter. She said, “I’m moving back to Atlanta, anyway. I’m cleaning up my act.”

  “I didn’t know your act was still dirty,” I said.

  Sophie glared at me. “Don’t be a jerk,” she said. And she kept talking. She told me about her mom and living in Atlanta and on and on. I listened and tried to figure out if she was so chatty because she was nervous or if she was coked out. It was hard to tell with Sophie.

  When the sushi came, she picked up her chopsticks and arranged all of her rolls and nigiris in a half-circle around her plate. There was a definite order to it. The arrangement started with California rolls and made it’s way up to the raw fish nigiris.

  “What is that?” I asked. “A ranking system?”

  “I like what I like,” she said.

  She started eating the California rolls. And to watch her do it… There was something childlike and vulnerable about it. Something very cute. But sincere, too. She had a definite pattern. Eat a roll. Take a little bite of pickled ginger. Put down her chopsticks. Sip her green tea. Pick up her chopsticks. Repeat.

  She didn’t seem to notice me watching her. She just ate. I looked at those slender fingers on her chopsticks, the bare shoulders I could see through her white blouse, that soft face ready to break into a smile any second. I’ll admit it. I wanted to have sex with her so badly. I wanted to forget the past and the future and everything and take her into the bathroom and lock the door and just…

  I bit my lip hard. Almost hard enough to draw blood. I looked back down at my plate. Forget it, I told myself. Just eat your damn food and get out of here.

  After dinner, Sophie went to the bathroom again. That convinced me. She was snorting coke in there. Everything added up: working a job where she made a lot of cash, planning to go back to her mom’s in Atlanta, talking up a storm, going to the bathroom twice in thirty minutes. Her act was still dirty.

  When she came back, she said, “Hand them over.”

  I reached into my back pocket and pulled out an envelope. I hadn’t even opened it. It had come a few days earlier. Usually, I just threw those bills away. I hadn’t gotten around to tossing this one in the trash. Lucky, I guess.

  Sophie picked up her fork, which she hadn’t used when she ate, and used it to open the envelope. “Is this going to give me a heart attack?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Probably.”

  Sophie’s lips got tight. She exhaled through her nose. “Here goes.” She pulled the bill out
of the envelope. I watched her eyes flicker back and forth as she skimmed down it. “Wow,” she said. “That’s a lot of stitches.”

  “Yeah.”

  Sophie flipped through the pages that itemized everything in my hospital stay. She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. She mumbled, “So fucked up. So fucked up.”

  I nodded.

  Sophie took a deep breath, gave me the smile that she’d give one of her tables when she was just about to take their order, and said, “Well, that’s doable. I thought you really had ten thousand dollars worth of bills. This is barely over nine thousand. And you probably didn’t have insurance, did you?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “See, and the hospitals charge more if you don’t have insurance. My dad can call them up, spout off some legal precedent or something, and get this down to six grand.” She sighed. “Not so bad.”

  And, for her, it wasn’t. Her dad would pay for it. He was a lawyer. He told me once that he charged two hundred and fifty dollars an hour. I did the math. He could have this covered in three days’ work. As opposed to the months it would take for me to earn that kind of money. Plus I’d have to pay full price.

  Still, it was good of her dad to cover it. I told Sophie that. I asked her about her dad, too. I said, “I bet he liked to shit when you told him you stabbed me.”

  “I don’t know if he shit, but he wasn’t happy.”

  I smiled. I liked her dad. He was a character. I said, “How is old Hank, anyway?”

  “Henry,” she said. “He’s good. He asked about you.”

  “Yeah? What did you tell him?”

  “I told him that you were all in one piece.”

  I rubbed my belly. “Is he still in Orlando?”

  “Yeah. He’s doing stuff for Disney over there. Last time I visited, maybe two, three weeks ago, he took me with him to see a client. The guy lived in this town called Celebration. Ever heard of it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Dude, it’s crazy,” Sophie said. “Disney owns the whole town. They built it. It almost looks like a cartoon suburb. No cars in front of the houses. No trash cans. Everything matches. Even all the doorknobs were exactly the same. I felt like I was on acid. Like Mickey would come by in a wizard hat and sweep me up into the stars at any second. You should go over there.”

  “To Celebration?”

  “No. To Orlando. To see Dad.”

  “Is he still dating that floozy? What was her name? Starshine or something.”

  Sophie wiped the polite smile off her face. Her lips got tight again. She said, “Just Star. And no. They broke up.”

  “Did he find someone younger?”

  Sophie picked up the bills, folded them, and stuck them in her purse. “Yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact, he did.”

  “Is she younger than you?”

  “Don’t be a jerk.”

  I tried not to laugh, but I didn’t try too hard. A little one squirted out. “She is younger than you, isn’t she?” Sophie’s tight face answered me. I said, “That sucks.”

  The waitress came back with Sophie’s credit card and the bill. Sophie tipped the waitress, signed off on the credit card slip, put her card back in her wallet, and stood up. “That’s enough, Danny,” she said.

  And I hoped to hell she was right.

  31

  Picking Up Stiffs

  The stiff was at a condo in Cape Canaveral. I knew the building well. I’d helped build it more than ten years earlier. It was one of the first jobs that I actually welded on.

  We took the gurney to the elevator and rode up. I told Bart, “It’s weird. I don’t think I’ve ever been inside something I built. Not when it was finished.”

  “Really?” Bart said. He couldn’t care less.

  Probably because of this, I said, “It’s weird to think that, if that weld I laid down ten years ago isn’t still holding, this elevator shaft could crumble below us.” I smiled. “It’d be an ironic way to die, huh?”

  “Sure would,” Bart said. This kind of shit didn’t creep him out at all, I guess. We just rode up to the dead guy’s floor.

  There were a few cops still hanging around the dead guy’s condo. Two of them were outside on the balcony, watching the moonlight shine down on the ocean. One cop was inside. It was Dante Jones. We all said our hellos. He pointed to the recliner in front of the TV. “There’s your man,” he said.

  “Who found the body?” Bart asked.

  “His wife,” Dante said. “We got her out of here a while ago. She’s with the neighbors.”

  Bart nodded. I walked over to the corpse. I hadn’t noticed at first because his back was toward me, but when I walked around in front of the recliner and caught a glance of the guy, I kinda laughed. “Oh, Jesus,” I said.

  Bart came around and stood next to me. He pointed at the dead guy and said to Dante, “Did you guys do this to him?”

  Dante was all grin. “He did it to himself.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Bart said.

  “You don’t know how right you are,” Dante said. Because the dead guy was sitting in his recliner, facing the television, with his pajama pants down around his ankles. He still had an erection and his hand was holding on tight.

  Bart said the obvious. “Went down beating off, huh?”

  “You could be a detective,” Dante said.

  Bart pointed at the VCR over the television. “Looks like someone already took the porn. Evidence, huh?”

  “How the fuck can you tell?” Dante asked.

  “I have the same VCR at home. There’s a little thing that lights up when a tape is in.”

  “Damn,” Dante said. “Maybe you could be a detective.”

  “Did you steal the tape?” I asked Dante.

  “Fuck, no. I don’t want to watch white people fuck.”

  I looked at Dante. He was smiling, but I could tell he was serious. The other two cops came in from the balcony. Dante introduced us. The two cops hung out. As Bart and I wrestled with the corpse, I caught occasional glances of the two cops, standing there, grinning, laughing. Telling jokes about the guy who died beating off, but stealing the dead guy’s porno so they could beat off to it. It’s a strange world we live in.

  As I pulled the van out onto A1A, Bart said, “Hell of a way to go, isn’t it?” This was our little ritual. We always talked about the corpse and the way the dead person went down. These conversations were my doing. Obviously, death spent a lot of time on my mind. Whenever I went to pick up a stiff, I’d check out the room and try to figure out what they’d been doing right at the end: what their last meal had been, if I could tell, if the dishes were still in the sink. Or I’d look to see how much dirty laundry they had amassed before dying. Weird little things like that. I was most interested in what they’d been reading in the end. I’d heard somewhere that Elvis went down reading Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins. Not a bad last book, I figured. And, since we were in Florida, a lot of the old guy’s had copies of Carl Hiaasen or Randy Wayne White books on their nightstand. For some reason, those books depressed me. I don’t know why. I hadn’t read anything by either of those guys. Sometimes I’d flip through them while Bart steadied the gurney, but that was about it. The last book Libra read was Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. I remembered because she was really digging it. She kept saying to me, “You gotta read this when I’m done.” I tried a few times, but I couldn’t get through it. Not that it’s not a good book. What I read was pretty great. It’s just too painful for me to read. I hope Libra got a chance to finish it, though.

  Bart wasn’t interested in this stuff. Instead, he and I talked about the means of death. It was like we were trying to figure out the best way to die. The best ways not to die were easy. You don’t want to go out in a crash of any kind: motorcycle, car, plane. You don’t want something to hit you and kill you: a train, a car, the sidewalk. Or, basically, you don’t want any accident or violent death. If your body is working fine and some outside force
takes you down, that’s the worst. We agreed about that. The best way to die was still a mystery, though. That’s what we debated.

  I said, “I don’t know. I guess it’s not so bad.”

  Bart looked at me. “Are you kidding me? How embarrassing would it be to die jerking off? You wouldn’t be ashamed?”

  “I’d be dead,” I said. “Look at this guy in the back. Does he look embarrassed?”

  “What about his wife, though?”

  “What about her? She had to know it was going on. She found the body by midnight, which means she wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes and goes out into the living room to check on her husband. And he dropped his pants all the way down to his ankles and watched a porn with his wife in the other room. She had to know what was up. And if she was really so embarrassed, why didn’t she take his hand off his dick?”

  “I guess,” Bart said. “I’d just like to have a little more dignity. I’d like to think a bunch of people aren’t standing over me, making jokes when I’m dead.”

  By now, I was driving down State Road 528 over the Banana River. The moon was a day away from full, and you could see the lights of the Space Center up north. The VAB all lit up. The islands in the Banana River. The water sitting still and flat as glass. I’d actually been thinking about the dead guy from the moment I saw him sitting there, hanging onto his last dead erection. Because I kinda envied the guy. He had a steady, long term relationship with a woman. He had furniture that wasn’t fancy, but it all matched and it obviously hadn’t been pulled off of a curb somewhere. He had a decent pad with a balcony that overlooked the ocean. He was obviously retired. I thought, shit, if I could get to that point: where I wake up in the morning next to a woman I love enough to swear I’ll spend the rest of my life with her, and I don’t have to go to work that day, and I could walk out onto my balcony and look at the beach and the waves rolling in and read a book and hang out and do whatever the fuck I want, I’d take it. I’d probably even be happy about it. I wouldn’t necessarily want to go out with my dick in my hand, but shit, that old guy was probably eighty years old. If I could still get it up at that age, if I was still beating off to pornos at eighty, well, what the hell? I guess it ain’t so bad at all.