The Scamp

by Jennifer Pashley

  Sometimes, early in the day, I walk into a bar a complete mess, like an open wound, guts falling out and trailing. Not ready for the small talk of flirting, not even made up. My lips dry and my hair knotted and blown from driving with the windows down. Sometimes, I want to say to the guy next to me, Hey thanks, I’m having a double bourbon. Last summer, my daughter died because I wasn’t paying attention.

  It would stop him cold. A quick tangle in the car, in the men’s room, on the beach, isn’t as enticing when the girl he thought was all legs and sunny curls begins to self-destruct right in front of him. When she becomes more than the curvy blond veneer that drew him in. When her backstory is death and mourning, and more drinking. When he finds out that the only thing worse than a girl with a baby is a girl with a dead one.

  He’d run. I would, if it were someone else’s story.

  But again, I meet a guy in a bar. He comes in just after I do, which is early, even on a Sunday. There’s no football in June, and the working guys aren’t in at five. No one is, except this one big guy, coming through the door with the light behind him. He sits right next to me, even though the whole bar is empty. He has a flip-top spiral notepad in his shirt pocket, and a pen next to it. He wears a button-down cargo shirt, soft and brown, with blue jeans and Converse sneakers. I wonder if he’s taking measurements, or taking notes. The way he sits on the stool, our knees touch. He asks me what I’m drinking.

  I’m not sure I’m in the mood. What are you drinking? I say.

  He smirks and orders two shots of Cuervo, for himself. Then he orders beer and points at my wineglass and nods to the bartender to get me another. When the drinks come, he orders dinner, right there at the bar, burgers and fries for both of us, and we eat side by side, elbow to elbow, and no one else comes in.

  He has a face like a Saint Bernard, big and handsome and sad at the same time, even when he smiles. His cheeks, bigger than my hands. His hair, going gray. He seems familiar and yet not like anyone I’ve ever met in town before. He’s older than my usual delivery-truck-driving single daddy, and his eyes are different colors, different shapes. One is dark and muddy, the other steel blue. The blue one is near me. It’s only when he turns to face me that I notice the other one. It’s slightly lazy.

  When the bartender, who wears a bolo tie like an Indian’s, but is round and pink and bald like a baby, takes his plate, the guy leans over to eat the rest of my french fries. I swivel toward him, my knees against his thigh.

  Tell me your name, I say. I can’t remember if he already said it.

  He swigs. Leans on his elbow. Couper, he says. Couper Gale.

  I pull my hair around to one side, stretch out a curl, and let it spring back. I washed it with motel shampoo right before I left, and it’s still wet underneath, the curls kinked up at my collarbone.

  How do I know that for real? I say.

  He slides out a credit card to pay and shows me the name on there: Couper A. Gale. Chase Visa.

  You? he says.

  I try quick to think of something fake, but all I come up with are stripper names: Candy, Crystal, Starla. I think, Chase Visa. He raises his eyebrows, waiting, moves his tongue around his teeth. His face breaks into a smile. Breaks. Not spreads, not eases. It cracks. Like it hurts him a little.

  My name’s Rayelle, I tell him.

  He says it back to me. I’ve never heard that name, he says.

  It’s white trash, I say, the way you might say, It’s Polish, to explain an ethnic name. He rolls into a laugh.

  How’d you get that name? he says. He taps a fingertip on my forearm, but he’s already got my full attention.

  My dad’s name was Ray, I say. And he loved his Chevelle.

  You were named after a car?

  I told you it was white trash.

  Goddamn, he chuckles.

  How’d you get your name? I ask. This is not a bar conversation I’ve ever had. By now, we ought to be talking about my legs, and how they’ll look wrapped around his neck. When the bartender comes back, I watch Couper sign the receipt with big loopy writing, loose and upright.

  It’s my grandmother’s maiden name, he says. Then he cups his hand on my knee and jiggles it. Come outside with me, Rayelle, he says, trying it. He drags it out a little. A little hard on the yelle.

  My mother always warned us about dusk. You can never believe anything you see. Dusk is when you could hit a deer with your car, or a kid on a bike. Twilight makes things look one way that then turn out to be another. The way my mother made it sound, all cars were actually trains, barreling toward you. All men, actually wolves, waiting to devour you. What did we know? Dusk was magical, and scary like a fairy tale. You might slip through to someplace else. You might disappear forever.

  My mother would stand on the step and call out to where kids stood in the street, on roller skates, on bikes. Gathered at the stop sign, sneaking a smoke, or a swig from a plastic bottle of booze.

  Rayelle Christine, she would call. It is dusk. Get your ass inside.

  But lost and never found is pretty appealing right now. I might go far to lose this shadow. To walk out of my dead skin.

  I light a cigarette just outside the bar door. This place belongs to a motel, a different one, not mine. A happy one with kids and aqua-blue doors. The parking lot is full of yellow streetlamps, big like buckets, where bugs gather. They look like snow, like when you look out at the streetlight at night to see if it’s still coming down. The bugs just hover there, like a haze of snow. Couper walks off through the parking lot. It curves in front of all the rooms, nothing but beach and sky behind the motel. He walks backward for a bit, waiting for me to catch up. Then he turns and steps up onto the grass around the swimming pool.

  The parking lot is fresh with blacktop and paint. The curbs sharp and white. A few cars are parked around the outside of the pool, and each room has a gold number on the door and a pair of circular plastic chairs out front. No one’s in the pool, or outside at all. At the other end of the grass, there’s a white gate with a chained lock on it and a hand-painted wooden sign: POOL CLOSES AT DUSK. Couper lays both hands on the top rail of the fence.

  I start to laugh. Really? I say.

  Nine out of ten times, he says with a shrug, they don’t catch you.

  It takes only a minute for the sky to get dark. Just like that, it’s over. The dangerous in-between of dusk. The pool is built into a mound of grass higher than the parking lot, but when you walk up the side, you can see it, a big kidney bean of water mirroring the sky, the moon, and the lights from all around. The low drone of a motor.

  You’ve done this ten times? I say.

  He hooks the toe of his sneaker on the chain link fence and, with more grace than I’d expect from a body that size, swings his leg over to the other side.

  Not here, he says. Plus, it’d have to be more than ten times to be statistics. He unbuttons his shirt, his belly broad but taut, thatched with hair. Then he undoes his pants. He lays his clothes over a lounge chair while I finish my smoke with the fence still between us.

  Come on, Rayelle, he says. He holds a hand out, still in his shorts.

  I’ve never been good at resisting a dare.

  two

  KHAKI

  What does it mean to be first? Like if you traced a line back through all the remembering, and found me, standing, still, at the very beginning. The first one. Everyone says, Well, who was your first?

  I am the first. The first one to love you. The last one to see you alive.

  When girls don’t exist, they disappear. They become non-people, people’s wives, and mothers. People’s slaves. They sell their pussies out of the backs of vans like stolen goods. Nothing about themselves is their own. And no one looks them in the face, or tells them he loves them.

  Sometimes, a girl dissipates like smoke rising up into the air. So thin, you can’t see her anymore. She becomes a cloud. You breathe her in.

  I am a safe house for women. I have a reputation for kindness.

&n
bsp; When they learn who I am, where I live, they come to me, sometimes in the night, sometimes in the full light of day. Sometimes with only the clothes on their backs. And sometimes, even those are gone.

  Who will love you at the end of everything? Who will take your face and hold your temples, wash you clean and kiss you to sleep?

  I will.

  I will love you harder than anything has ever loved you, even your mama. And it will be the last and best thing you’ll ever know.

  I had taken a new name and rented a small house on the edge of a field, with huge trees that lined the narrow road. The house had been for farmhands, on what was left of a farm that was no longer worked—just an outbuilding was left, a big square kitchen and a front room. One bedroom upstairs. A small, slanted porch. The owner, a woman in her eighties who had moved in with her son out in the suburbs. I rented cheap, and paid her in cash. I told her I was an artist and needed just a small space for myself, to paint and make sculptures.

  A sculpture of bone. A painting in blood.

  An installation only ever seen in pieces, never in its entirety. A bunch of clues too loose for the locals—too stupid, too lacking in vision and empathy—to really see.

  There were near misses. A hitchhiking girl I picked up and drove to the bus station. I trailed her long hair on my finger as she got out, barely letting go. Or a woman who came to me for one night only, and never told me her name. I gave her my bed, ran her a bath, made her breakfast with eggs from the couple of brown hens who roamed the yard. She had skin like coffee, her hair, matted and dull. She stared at me with a desperation I knew I could soothe, but I never laid hands on her. I never read what ate her insides, what was looming, burgeoning beneath her skin, and threatening to kill her. She left, running. The same way she came.

  There were others. An Oregon trail of girls, set adrift down a river, scattered in a ravine. Clean bones along the roadside, where anyone might mistake them for any other kill.

  And then Montana came. Wild and free and big-hearted. Montana had eyes like the sky, and hair like corn silk. I loved her like no one had ever loved her. I gave her a new name, and a new soul. And let her die with that rapture in her heart, in her thighs. Because nothing but water and sky comes after that.

  I just want to disappear, she whispered at my table, her hands outstretched to mine.

  Disappear into me.

  Montana had left behind a baby. She ran in the night, the baby asleep in his crib, his chapped face turned toward the light coming from the open door.

  I’m the worst kind of woman, she said.

  Her belly was scarred around the navel, a thin smile above her pubic hair, where the baby had slid his way out.

  The worst kind.

  I’d seen the worst kind of woman. It wasn’t Montana.

  Her husband wasn’t even home when she left the baby alone in the house. Weeks before, she’d thought to kill them all. Might have set the house on fire. He don’t wake up, she said. Then, I might have stayed. I could have gone that way. Sleeping, she said, breathing in the smoke. All of us just gone. In the end, she said, she was just running. Once her feet hit the pavement, she gained a momentum she hadn’t known she had.

  He’s not mean to the baby, she told me.

  He’s not anything anymore, I said.

  Her hands were hot with the fire she never started, the heat of anger and disappointment under her skin, waiting to burn its way free.

  The baby was a boy. Blond and blue-eyed and big-boned like Montana. He was two, and wild. He threw things at her, toys, a bottle, rocks aimed at her head, because he’d seen his daddy do it. Knew to point at her crotch and say beaver, and would slap her breast when he was mad.

  What will they say about me? she asked.

  They’ll say you got out alive, I told her. In her hands, I felt the fire that would have consumed her. Her own work. Her own escape. I gave her another.

  It didn’t matter. In my house, in my bed, under my care, she became something more than a mother, more than a wife. She was mine. Newly named, loved hard, and fed well. I put her together only to take her apart. I came just short of baptizing her, which I did, in a way, washing her in the river. She just wasn’t there to know it.

  At first, there were layers and layers for Montana to fall through. Lying on the bed and letting it happen, coming for the first time, after all the sex in cars and beds with boys and men. A teacher, she told me. Some girls are marked up with an invisible script over their bodies, inviting touch. I had to peel her down to a tight, tiny core. There was a long, languid week in between when she went slack. When no one said the baby’s name. And no one threw a rock. I watched her open wet eyes after a bath, coming to the surface.

  Montana, I said.

  I made it a point not to remember their real names. To let the details of their previous lives fall off of them like dead snakeskin.

  When I knew she had let it go, the baby’s cry, the possessive hand on her cunt, the fear that breathed in and out of her skin, smelling like acrid oil and sweat, if only for a moment, a long day in the sun of my backyard, naked, and pink, and new—I set her free. In every direction. I loved her till she was empty, and I let her go with that.

  I had set myself free, walking away from a deserted beach. The sky gray and the water green, and my heart a swirling wreck of loss. I pieced myself together after that. Dead, stitched. I was parts of everything I’d lost. A hollow shell, empty and white gold.

  I tipped Montana back on the grass and did it quickly, with a garrote made from a silk scarf, and no resistance. Not for me. I’d given her nothing but a hot bath, a soft bed, the tip of my tongue along the tender inside of her thigh. Montana’s eyes, so round and blue, bruised and popped. New freckles appeared under the flesh, like black stars. Her tongue, purple, protruding. I left no other marks on her. Not a cut, not a bruise. Not a hard hand on her face or her bottom, telling her what to do. Just the welts from mosquitoes in the woods, the scratch of low thorns on her ankles.

  I used a long, curved boning knife and worked the joints. One hand, cut at the wrist, I washed in the water, the beautiful skin gleaming, and I let it go, rumbling through the rapids, sinking. Other parts I left out as bait. There were fox and coyotes in the woods, bears, and huge circling turkey vultures. By morning, everything was gone, carried off to dens and thickets, licked clean by animal tongues. A rib cage, a pelvis, the knuckles of spine.

  I did the head last. I’d thought about snipping a long piece of that silver hair, but it wasn’t Montana’s hair I wanted. I washed her face and head in the river, my arms aching, dunking it under, the blood trailing downstream in ribbons, dissipating in the fast water, over rocks, feeding the fish and crawdads.

  In the end, I didn’t take anything.

  I wasn’t sentimental. And I wasn’t looking for trophies.

  Years ago, I stood at the tip of South Lake, where it comes together like the point of a heart. I had cast another body far out into the deepest parts. Small and weighted. The water so deep it couldn’t be measured, the middle green like jade, or emerald. In the full sun, it didn’t reflect, only absorbed, glowing from within like a jewel.

  I crawled out of the lake naked, new. I padded through the pines on my hands and knees, up a rocky path and into the backyard of my own empty house. My childhood home, dark, without parents’ voices, or a brother’s. Not a soul left but a cousin too stupid to see the gifts laid out at her feet. She slept in my bed. Curly-headed and dumb.

  Outside, I’d washed my feet, my knees and hands in gasoline, rubbing at the sap. I rinsed off the lake water, the dirt from the trail, with the garden hose, the water aching cold and metallic, running downhill to a public drain. Inside, over the toilet, I cut my nails so short my fingertips throbbed, beating with my heart. Any blood left behind, flushed away. I showered the heat back into my body in the downstairs bath, but by then, there was nothing left to wash away.

  Upstairs off the hallway, the bedroom my mother died in.

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sp; In the kitchen, the floor where my father fell, so drunk he choked on his own blood and never woke up.

  The backyard, where my only brother blew his face off with a cherry bomb.

  Death surrounded me like a fog.

  I wanted my own ending.

  When I slipped into bed behind sweet, drowsy Rayelle, she pushed back into me, and I gave her what she wanted, what she expected between us. Her body slow and opening beneath my hands. She tried to talk, but I didn’t want to hear her voice. I wanted the white silence of sleep.

  I thought about the same upturned nose, the same look of dumb trust on the face of the kid in town.

  I want to show you something, I had said to her.

  You were gone a long time, Rayelle mumbled, but I hushed her with my own mouth.

  Go to sleep, I said.

  For Montana, I wore a dress, high-waisted and soft, something she might have worn herself, covered in blue cornflowers. When we went down to the water, I lifted it over my head. I was naked underneath, shining in the moonlight. She gasped, but I was so used to being naked, so used to my own hard body, that it felt like nothing to me. I hung the dress on a low branch where it blew in the breeze. I knew what she wanted. I would give it to her.

  I burned the garrote in the backyard fire pit.

  The dress, I put on again, my body clean from the rush of cold river water.

  The knife, wiped down with bleach. I put it back in the drawer with the others. It was the only one with a white handle, plastic pearl, nonporous. A blade curved in a beautiful, shining arch.

  What they found of Montana was a foot. There was no flesh left on it. Just the anklebone and some of the metatarsals, not all of them. They sent it to Alexandria for testing, but before that, there was a lot of speculation—a hunter, a missing woman from Knoxville. The foot was too large to be a child’s. People hiked by the river all the time. There were banks where anyone could fall, could disappear, tumbling to an unknown death. But why only a foot? Why not the entire body? What animals could have carried off such large pieces? What kind of animal could take a whole body apart?