Killing Time in Crystal City

by Chris Lynch

  “Molly? That means you can’t get back in until eight o’clock tonight?”

  “Well, church is at eight this morning. So, I thought I’d sit in there for a while. It’s a nice church. Seats are kinda hard, though.”

  Molly looks away, looks even smaller and weaker than her usual self. She starts working herself down into the dirty sand like she’s settling in, like a crab hiding in the shallows. It’s chilly now, I can feel it in my joints.

  “What are you here for now?” I ask.

  “Sleep,” she says, and works her way farther down into the ground.

  I look all around the beach, at the characters sleeping or just lying in wait, at the orangey sun rising and shining them into view.

  “Don’t you worry that something could happen to you?”

  “You didn’t worry when you slept here.”

  “I didn’t sleep, I passed out.”

  “And look at you. You’re fine.”

  “I’m lucky. You can’t always be lucky.”

  She continues crabbing herself down into the dirty sand. Then she shrugs. “I’m not new at this, Kiki. I know how to take care of myself.”

  I’m sure she does not.

  “I’m sure you do, Molly. But you can’t control everything. Or everybody.”

  “Well, I sort of can. Times before, somebody started hassling me, we just always worked something out. It’s just how it goes. It’s fine.”

  I realize that only one of us is at all disturbed by this, but the one is disturbed about it enough for everybody. Molly has her eyes closed already and she looks like a kid falling asleep in a chair in front of a TV, home, warm, and safe.

  How does this happen? How is this in any way fine?

  And what kind of guy allows it to happen?

  “My father is a poet,” I say to her quiet face, just as her helmet-head of sponge hair tips back and collects a pound of sand.

  Molly perks up, half-emerging from her little nest and looking more interested than poetry should ever warrant.

  “Really?” she asks. “Really, he is? That’s special. That is a very unusual thing, a father who is a poet. That’s something, and I bet you are like, wow, proud about it. He must be gentle, like a poet. That’s where you get it, obviously, all that gentle.”

  Nobody is gentle.

  “You want to see his book?” I ask.

  She nods wildly, vigorously, and honestly. I stand up and offer her my good left hand.

  • • •

  I take Molly along the canal route, which she says she normally tries to avoid.

  “You better be careful,” she says. “This path can be very dangerous.”

  “I know how to handle myself,” I say, not even sure whether I’m joking or not.

  Molly is sure, and laughs out loud.

  “You don’t know how to handle yourself. It’s part of your charm.”

  “No, it isn’t.” I start to pull my hand away from hers, but she grabs tight and she is shockingly strong. The cartilage in my hand crunches.

  “Well, it is. You’re just so nice. Is that your freakery, the niceness?”

  “I’m not that nice. And, what?”

  “Come on, everybody has their freakery. Their thing,” she says, accompanying the word with a shoulder-hunching, lip-snarling, tongue-dangling visual that really requires nothing more for explanation. “Hyper-niceness, some people get off on it, some people get lucky with it. Then you can nicey-nicey girls along the garden path—or the towpath—to the place where the chainsaw is waiting, is that it?”

  This is sickening me every which way and this time I do wrench my hand from her grip. She giggles.

  “Is that what you think?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know you, do I?”

  “And yet,” I say, my voice rising in frustration, “here you are, with me. On the towpath.”

  Molly smiles and shakes her head in wonder, like we are discussing some newly discovered life form rather than her own actual self.

  “I’m not renowned as a fine judge of character,” she says, slamming us both at the same time.

  “No, but you are renowned as a Godfucker,” I say, bitter nasty and instantly ashamed of it.

  Her smile drops right off her face, down to her little shoes and into the canal.

  Through it all, though, we keep walking.

  “I guess I am,” she says. “But hey, I’m renowned, right?”

  “I’m sorry, Molly,” I say, taking her left hand again. Remarkably, she lets me. Where does somebody acquire such tolerance, forgiveness? “See, I’m not so nice after all.”

  “Pffft,” she says, swinging my hand as we approach the trees by the courts and the baseball field. “That’s you being not nice? I just thought you were coming on to me.”

  She is resilient, I must give her that.

  Let’s hope I can learn a thing or two from her. Because if Sydney finds out, I’ll be ass-whipped and homeless.

  But he won’t. There’s no way he will be home for another day or two at least. And this is just a short visit, a humanitarian thing. The right thing. A fine thing.

  And I will clean every last spot.

  “That’s me,” I say, pointing up at my window as we cross the field and scoot through the hedge.

  “Sweet,” Molly says, looking up and then all around. “You have a yard and everything. A basement bulkhead. I thought basement bulkheads were outlawed after the one in The Wizard of Oz flew up and conked Dorothy in the head.”

  Feeling a bit clever, I say, “Oh no, now, would a nice guy like me have an uncle with an illegal basement bulkhead?”

  We are standing, admiring my window. It’s a one-level ranch house, but the backyard slopes away so it feels like we are looking up at something bigger.

  “Did you just say something kinky?” she asks, and does appear to wonder.

  Only about my uncle’s criminality.

  “Ah, no,” I say, and look down. The grass needs cutting. “And I don’t believe I’ve ever met anybody who thinks quite like you do.”

  “No,” she says flatly, “you haven’t. Now, am I gonna get to see your window from the other side, or is this it?”

  I lead her around to the front of the house. I whip out my key and wave it in front of her, as if a mere house key is something mystical and precious to anybody else.

  “Um, okay, I get it, Kiki,” she says, then goes all brighty. “Oh, right. Kiki. Key-Key, very cute, very amusing, very sad.”

  I hadn’t thought of that at all, but I don’t have an explanation that’ll make me look any better for getting all excited over having my own key, so I leave it alone and open the door.

  “This place is amazing,” she says, rushing through the door and doing a dancer’s twirl in the hallway. She flits through the living room and kitchen, doing another spin at each stop. “I have never seen a place so sparkling clean. And it looks like a diner. This place is killer.”

  “Ah, well, thanks,” I say, happy to take any credit available.

  She scuttles along, checking all the rooms, and goes for Syd’s bedroom before I can stop her.

  “This one’s locked,” she says.

  “Yes,” I confirm.

  “Is it your room, you ol’ kinkster? Does that magic key of yours open this one?”

  “No. And no. That’s my uncle’s room.”

  “Right, then, all the dungeon stuff is in there, and your doghouse and choker collar and stuff, right?”

  I don’t know how to stop her, but I can at least not encourage this.

  “No, Molly. Those things are not in there.”

  “They’re in the basement, then? Behind the bulkhead of screams?”

  I sigh. “There is no bulkhead of screams.”

  She giggles crazily at th
e sound of me saying the things she made up. I suppose it does sound funny when I say it.

  She walks to the bathroom, flips on the light, and reacts as if Jesus himself is squatting on the throne in there.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she says, so maybe it’s the whole family.

  I scoot over to where she stands. “What is it?”

  “It’s so . . . white. It’s like, glowing.”

  “Well,” I say, looking around, nodding, “it is porcelain and tile.”

  “Well, I myself have never seen such clean. It even . . .” She takes a good long inhale. “It even smells better than regular air, never mind toilet air. I think this is a dummy, and the real bathroom is somewhere else because I seriously doubt any assness has ever been done in here.”

  I laugh. “It’s a clean place. The proprietor takes it seriously.”

  “Well, my compliments to the proprietor. Or I’ll tell him myself when I see him.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I snap, edgy enough to draw an arched eyebrow from Molly.

  Suddenly, she grabs my arm and starts pulling, pleading. “Oh, Kiki, can I take a shower? Please, please? I would die to have a shower here. The ones at the hostel are old and grotty and the mold doesn’t come away no matter how hard we scrub. I feel just as germy coming out as I did going in. And there are no locks on the doors so anybody can come in whenever they want to and I just can’t relax because I have the spooks about that and feel the whole time like I’m the star of one of those shower slasher horror movies and I am about to get it in the neck any second. I mean it, I wash myself so fast and furious that sometimes the soap shoots right out of my hand and up and over the curtain rod and I hear it bounce on the floor on the other side. And then, of course, that’s it, because no way am I going out after that soap when you-know-who with the big slasher knife is waiting for me to do just that because that was his plan.”

  I just stand there, watching her blink and hyperventilate as if she is in fact exactly that slasher shower horror actress.

  “Have a shower, Molly.”

  I go over and slide the glass door open, work the taps and get it going just right, when I turn back to find her standing naked and staring excitedly, right past me to the glory that is Uncle Sydney’s antiseptic temple of clean.

  “Molly,” I gasp, like somebody’s great-aunt.

  “Oh, please,” she says, brushing, nakedly, past me and stepping in, “you’re family.”

  She smacks the shower door closed and immediately and audibly begins appreciating the moment of bliss.

  “Don’t get your cast wet?” I say in a voice suddenly unrecognizably high as I step over the small mound of Molly things on the floor.

  “Don’t get yours wet either,” she says, giggling. Giggling.

  I rush out and slam that bathroom door, as confused and conflicted as I have been since I was thirteen. Only then I was slamming from the other side of the bathroom door. And actually I wasn’t anywhere near this conflicted.

  • • •

  I am in the kitchen, chopping up apples, nectarines, and kiwi into a bowl, about to pour yogurt over it all, when Molly strolls in. It’s been about forty-five minutes. She has a big thick white bathrobe on and the shower has done something remarkable to her skin that makes it look like she’s generating her own soft amber light from inside her chest somewhere.

  “I hope you don’t mind. I found this in that bathroom cupboard. My clothes disgusted me by the time I got back to them.”

  Not sure how my voice is going to perform, so I just wave the knife around in what I hope is a recognizable, no-problem manner.

  “Well, as far as knife-wielding shower slashers go, I don’t think you’ll be giving me any nightmares.”

  “Ha,” I say, and that one syllable sounds reliably me enough to go for speech. “I’m making you a little something. . . .”

  “Oh,” she says, “that is so kind. I think, though, that I’m not going to be able to eat anything before I sleep. I just can’t . . .”

  “Oh, that’s fine,” I say. “I’ll just keep it in the fridge for you.”

  She shakes her head at me, smiling warmly. “If this is your freakery, boy, you do some pretty fine freakery.”

  “Watch it now,” I say, menacing her with the knife in an unmenacing way.

  I lead her to my sofa-bedroom. “That shower was the best, best thing that ever happened to me, Kiki. Thank you. I think I might want to take another one when I wake up.”

  I see on the way past that her Molly mound is still on the bathroom floor.

  “I can throw your things in the wash if you like,” I say.

  She sits down on my bed, then lies down, all fluid motion and purr.

  “You want to keep me company?” she says.

  “Oh,” I say. “Oh, I would love . . . I think, though, that maybe you should . . .”

  “You just, if you don’t mind, if you could be quick about it because I’m really exhausted and everything.”

  “What? No. What? No. I wouldn’t . . .”

  “It’s only fair,” she says calmly. “You don’t want to?”

  Oh dear God, I do.

  “No,” I say, “I don’t.”

  She is puzzled, and quite rightly, too.

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  This is wrong.

  “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just, I want you to know that everybody’s not like that. I’m not like those other guys.”

  I am, though. I am, damn. I am.

  “Sure you are,” she says, smiling and nestling down catlike deep into the covers. “But that’s okay, it’s not your fault. You can’t help it.”

  “I’m not.” I am. “You’re wrong.” She’s right. “Now, sleep.”

  I walk briskly toward the door.

  “Aren’t you going to read me a poem?” she calls.

  Hell shit anyway. Almost got away.

  “You know,” she says in a voice sleepier by the second, “the poetry book. That your father wrote.”

  “Yeah, ah, about that . . .”

  “The book that you invented as a ploy to get me to your creepy lair, and the basement bulkhead of screams and all that?”

  I almost prefer to tell her that she’s got it exactly right and I did all that vile stuff, rather than confess that my father’s book is here, and if I read from it, I could well burst into tears. She would probably find this endearing and I would be further mortified and humiliated and not at all the man I wanted to be when I arrived in this life, thus destroying everything. He’s between those covers, hiding inside to trap me. I haven’t been able to open the thing, never mind read out loud from it to a girl. Kiki cannot do that.

  “I’ll be right back,” I say, and walk the long mile to the living room and coffee table and book, then the long, long mile back again. By the time I return to my room I still haven’t cracked Mind Monkeys open to even the title page, and I swear I can feel the binding actually buzzing in my hand.

  “Right, Molly, here’s the thing,” I say, and look across my room to find her sleeping soundly. Way to go, poetry, the one art form that can put you to sleep before it even enters the room. I lay the book down next to the bed, and slip back out again.

  I feel kind of parental as I go quietly about and collect Molly’s things from the bathroom floor, but parental has me all conflicted again so I’ll just think of myself as the help for now. I empty out the pockets of her cutoff jeans and dump the contents on the top of the washer. Cell phone, Halls Mentho-Lyptus extra-strong throat lozenges, only two remaining. Enough small-change coinage that if she went out swimming she would sink and her petite self would never be found.

  I stuff the stuff into the washer, throw in some powder, and set it off to the races.

  I am a good guy. I can think about somebody else for a change. So there, Jasp
er, you missed it. I did all that despite nobody even watching. And I didn’t do anything else, either, no overhandling the girly merchandise or any of that kinkster malarkey, despite nobody even watching.

  There, I went and did it now. Thinking about what I didn’t do. Girly merchandise. I should go to the bathroom now if I’m going to congratulate myself any further.

  • • •

  I’m catching a few badly needed winks myself, sitting in Syd’s wingback reading chair with my feet up on the ottoman, when I hear the alarm beep saying the clothes are dry. There has been no sign, through washing and drying cycles, that Molly is stirring at all. I go out to the kitchen, take the things out, along with a couple of kitchen towels that had already been sitting in there.

  Would a gentleman fold? Which would be more noble? To be manhandling her things by folding? Or to hand them over all balled up, which sounds bad but preserves modesty?

  I realize the reason I even have the clothes is that she shed them right there in front of me. Somehow it doesn’t help me decide. Doesn’t help me form thoughts at all, in fact.

  Molly’s phone goes off, making me jump and drop the white blouse on the floor before I can do anything with it. Her ring tone is “Ave Maria,” and lying on top of the washer’s metal skin, it reverberates like a washer-dryer-size phone, rumbly. I snap it up to quiet it and see on the screen that the call is from Stacey.

  Should be fun.

  “Hello,” I whisper, partly out of respect for the sleeper, and partly to be all deceptive and sultry.

  “You were not at church, bitch,” she says. “And you didn’t come home last night, which means you needed church all the more.”

  “God?” I say. “Is that you, God? How did you find me here? Right, it was the omnipotence thing again, wasn’t it?”

  Stacey’s voice drops two octaves and about forty degrees. “Who is this? Is Molly all right? Where is she? Cocksucker, if you did anything to harm that girl, I’m gonna slice your—”

  “Stacey, Stacey,” I say, in a little bit of hysterics and a lot of fear, “it’s me. Kiki.”

  There is a pause that is long enough to make me think we’ve lost the connection. Then her voice comes back just about the same depth and temperature as before. “She was with you last night?”