I hear Penny’s tags jingling as she limps across the broken pavement, and her shoulder leans into my side. Whatever kind of dog she is, she has a head like an Irish setter, soft and silky and deep red on top. Around the muzzle, she’s gray.
Hey, Penny girl, I say and her sore old tail swishes back and forth.
You can look, my mother says, pointing at the bags, her eyes small when she squints into the sun. Her arms, with loose skin. She’s shrunk to nothing except a hard little body under her clothes. But, she says, it’s mixed in with regular trash. I did some cleaning, she says. And when you didn’t come back, I took it upon myself to move you out.
Does Chuck know? I say.
Does Chuck know what? she says.
That you did this? That you threw me out in trash bags, I say.
It was his idea, she says.
Bullshit it was, I say. You just said it was your idea.
She leans on the edge of the deck, against the rail where there’s a partial awning, and she lights up a long, minty Salem. Look, she says, waving her cigarette fingers at me. If you want.
Couper comes up behind me. Don’t worry about it, he says to me.
Who’re you? my mother asks.
He does his thing where he leans out with his hand, striding up to meet her. Couper Gale, ma’am, he says.
Well, Mr. Fancy Pants, she says. Why don’t you take her shopping.
There’s a tallboy of Lite on the picnic table. I wonder how long she’s been at it. I can’t believe beer does anything for her anymore.
Come on, Couper says to me. He pats my shoulder. I’m standing stock-still, staring at my stuff in bags, at my mattress, facedown in a puddle, the sides muddied and soaking, and my broken bed frame. A bag that has books, probably my yearbook, books that were mine as a kid, maybe even photo albums, just thrown onto the grass. The bags take up most of the lawn, right up to the road.
Just don’t get her pregnant, my mom says. She ain’t no good at that.
I ball my hands into fists, and that’s when Couper comes around the front of me. In the car, he says before I can charge her. Come on, he says. He has me by the arms, and he walks me backward until I’m sitting in the passenger seat again.
He bumps it out of there, five miles an hour, maybe ten, over every speed hump, through all the shitty-ass trailers, past poor Penny, whimpering as we pull away.
She is the meanest motherfucker I know, I say to him. When we’re out on the main road again, he turns back the way we came, past all the other parks, Grovewood, King’s Park, Long Acre. He stops at the four corners, where down the block there’s another cemetery and, farther up, a corner store with penny candy and glass bottles of Boylan’s, and turns to me.
How old are you? he says.
I see the fear in his eyes, but I laugh at him. I’m twenty-three, I say. I just moved back home, I say, and that’s when I break up in front of him, all at once, my face crushed and wet and hot. Last summer, I choke out.
Hey, he says. He pets the back of my head, smoothing his hand over my dirty hair. Hey. It’s okay.
I point for him to turn left down toward the corner store, where I can get a paper bag full of Goetze’s caramels and a black cherry Boylan’s. Inside, he strolls the aisles and buys fishing line, a ball of twine, a package of bungees. It’s nowhere I can get clothes, or panties, or even a toothbrush, but all I want is that bag of candy, the sweet soda, like I could get when I was a kid, riding to the store on my bike with Khaki.
You ever get a feeling about someone, Couper says in the car. My mouth is wadded out with caramel. You know, like you did about the dad?
Yeah, I say, and I think he’s going to say something about my mother.
I got a feeling about you, he says.
Yeah? I say. Is it a hard-on?
He laughs. Sometimes, he says. Come with me, he says.
Where you going? My face is scrubbed red and raw from crying, from pressing my hands into my eyes. My lips, where they’re chapped at the edge, will stain black red from the soda.
I got a list of places, he says. Other crimes.
What kind of crimes? I say.
Missing girls.
I’m a missing girl, I say.
Not anymore, he says. I found you.
He shows me how to pack up the Scamp. How to hitch it to the Gran Torino, the two lined up and ready. He says, Make sure the coupler latch is open, and guides my hands over it, And then, he says, use the tongue latch to lower the coupler onto the ball.
I start laughing, bent over, and backed into him, and that’s all it takes.
After, we make sure everything inside is closed up and put away. We put the bed back into the table, secure the dry goods in airtight bins, and bungee the cupboard doors closed. He keeps his computer and his bag of notebooks and pens in the car with us, with some water, some snacks and cigarettes. He asks me where the best place is to stop and get some clothes for me, underwear and a toothbrush.
In the next state, I say.
six
KHAKI
Depending on who you ask, I was either fourteen or seventeen, but the truth is, when I left with Henderson, I was sixteen. Just old enough to leave school, but young enough to get him arrested. Which I wasn’t interested in doing since he was my ride out. So I told him, and everyone associated with him, that I was seventeen. Age of consent.
As if consent had anything to do with it, ever.
I might have hated him. But it was Henderson who got me on my feet. Who took me out of there, speeding down the highway in a diesel BMW, the backseat filled with paperback books, No Exit on the shelf by the back window.
He got me to Florida.
Not the actual state, hanging off the bottom of America. But to her. Her face, her legs. Until then I hadn’t known what it was I wanted. Till then, I didn’t know who I was.
With Henderson, I was trying to be something. I wore my hair long, past my shoulders. I went by Kat Henderson, like I was the little wife, but I was sixteen, and Henderson was twenty-two, a master’s student. We lived together in tiny apartments rented to students for little money. He spent all his time on philosophy, all this stupid shit about God and Ps and Qs that in the end was just math, was just numbers, either adding up, or not. Mostly not. All of it, for nothing. The first two years our place was just a hallway with a kitchen and one bedroom and no common area. It was drafty and the water was weak and never hot enough. When he switched schools, he went into psychology, and would talk at me about sociopaths and narcissists.
We moved to Wilmington. Another small city. The university students occupied by their own little world of libraries and conferences. Labs and meetings. Classrooms like giant glass bowls. Outside was the real world. On the edge of town, down a rural route through some pine trees and into open flat expanses of land and miles of tobacco. A dirt road that led to a shack. People still had dirt floors, packed hard and swept clean. There were dogfights in basements and in barns. And cemeteries like mouths of crooked teeth, small as a front lawn, where everyone was related and no one was over forty.
Those were my people. That was my kind of family.
After a while, I started hustling. Henderson never made enough money, and he was always gone. Our cupboards were stocked with nothing but noodles, coffee, bourbon, and cigarettes. It doesn’t take long to figure out who knows who, and who sells what. And it’s easy to trust a little long-haired girl in a hippie skirt.
But it wasn’t the students who wanted to buy. It was the locals. A man at the farmers’ market who sold beeswax candles and scented oils told me about Tess.
Where would I go, I asked him, holding a rough-cut bar of lemongrass soap and pretending to read the label, if I wanted to buy weed?
I’d come to recognize his type. Sixty. Organic cotton or hemp T-shirt. Sandals. His candles and oil, hand-poured in his own workshop in the garage. Some of the soaps with bits of walnut in them to scrub with.
To smoke? he said.
I shrugged my
shoulder, then put the soap down. If I was looking to sell, I said.
He wrote down an address for me on the back of a napkin.
Tess, he said.
Tess lived on a dirt road with no phone lines and no cell service. Her house sat between two hills, in a valley of clover and heather. It smelled like the Middle Ages back there, sweet and heavy with flowers and cow shit. I drove a truck that we’d bought for $200 after the BMW quit. It needed rods we couldn’t afford yet, and I couldn’t drive it over thirty-five. Which on that road was fine. Faster than that, and whole pieces might have fallen off.
Tess’s husband had built their house from a kit. I thought I could picture it, living like that, even with Henderson if he wasn’t so skittish, wasn’t so unsettled in his thinking. He flitted from one thing to another, never finishing a task or, worse, a program. What’s your psychological explanation for that, Henderson? What are you so nervous about? He would get hung up on which coffee cup to use. We would never end up like Tess and her husband.
Tess had goats to trim the grass, and free-range chickens that were often scattered in the road. Sometimes she had puppies to sell, terrier mixes from her own dog. There was an A-frame chicken coop, a garage, and a sunny greenhouse where Tess grew her plants. Row after row of tall stalks and beautiful buds, long and red-haired. She packed them into bales of triple-wrapped plastic, like loaves of bread. I’d pick them up and squeeze them, feel their weight in my hand, smell them. I carried them home in canvas grocery bags, back to our kitchen, where Henderson studied. There, we worked across from each other, him from a textbook, and me with tiny zippered bags. Like a woman doing crafts.
I sold them, mostly in one- or two-gram baggies, to vendors at the farmers’ market, hippies running organic farms way out of town, to an artist who’d turned his whole yard into an installation of birdbaths and wind chimes. I’d walk up the path to his front door, and when the wind blew, my hair lifted, the chimes going. It felt like magic.
I was in the country when I saw Florida. Her mother tried to rob me with a kitchen knife, not knowing—how could she—that I carried a small, snub-nosed .38 in the back of my shorts.
I’d traded with the artist for it. I gave him half of one of Tess’s bales; he handed over the gun. It was in good working order, small, concealable, and he took me out back to show me how to shoot it.
I know how to shoot a gun, I told him.
Have you ever shot this gun? he said.
I stood on his back porch, looking over an acre lot of lush mowed green, crab apples and cottonwoods to either side, and in the back, tall poplars and oaks. I held the gun steady with two hands and fired, the kick aching all the way up my right arm. I hit a wind chime, the metal clanging and the whole piped piece swaying from the crab apple, jingling away.
Well all right, he said.
When I was delivering, I always assessed the situation first, left the goods in the car, nested the gun in the small of my back. I liked the feel of it there, heavy, an anchor. The woman I would come to know as Florida’s mother stood in the doorway with her shoulders squared in a terry tube top and gym shorts, smaller than I was, and when she stepped over the threshold, she pushed a paring knife to my collarbone.
I grabbed her wrist, pressing on the tendons of her thumbs so that she dropped the knife to the porch floor.
You have got to be fucking kidding me, I said.
Give me your cash, she said, twisting. She was itty-bitty, but strong, and I stepped on the knife, pushing her with one hand on her breastbone, back onto the dirt floor inside. I pulled the .38 from my shorts.
Sit down, I said to her, and she backed up onto a brown plaid couch. Behind her, the whisper of bare feet in the kitchen. A girl, young, with hips like a boy and breasts like a little mommy, skittered into the doorway, half hiding.
Here’s how this works, I said to the woman. You give me the cash, then I deliver. The only cash I carry is what you’re about to give me.
I don’t have any cash, she said.
Then you wasted my time. I held the gun, not really pointed at her, but ready. How were you planning to pay me? I asked.
She pointed with a weak hand and the girl giggled.
I thought you were a man, the woman said. How’m I supposed to know.
The girl nibbled a fingernail and looked up from underneath a fringe of heavy bangs, her hair parted deep to one side, long, wavy, down her back. She smiled a little sideways, and then let go of the doorjamb, and disappeared through the kitchen. I heard a screen door slam.
I told her mother to meet me herself, at the gas station, and pay me with cash, not underage pussy.
Outside, I saw the girl, throwing a stick to a brown dog who bounded through the weeds and brought it back to her with such force he somersaulted at her feet. Her cutoffs were so short the pockets hung out. Her shoulders shone in the sun. I stood and watched as long as I could without her knowing. Without me knowing, either, that within a month’s time, it would be her in the truck beside me. That once I started, I wouldn’t stop touching her, that I would do anything, give up everything and everyone—stealing the truck in the night and rumbling out of town—just to have her with me.
We were two sides of the same coin. Me and Florida. Both of us beyond our years, damaged and outside of ourselves with mourning over what had been done to us.
No one wants a girl who’s been touched. We all have ways of hiding it, but the truth is, once they know, they don’t want you.
The first boys, boys in seventh grade, with their loping arms and smelly feet, they’re grateful that you’ll do anything. That you know anything at all about how they work, what they’ll like. Your mouth is a goddamn blessing to them.
When the guys get older, they want to know how you got to be who you are. What hardened you down, like cold sweet cream. What whittled away at your soul. And that’s when they’re about done. When what they want is not you. They want a you that never existed.
In the car once with Henderson, he grabbed my hand and stopped me.
How do you know that? he said. Who taught you that? That’s— He stopped himself.
That’s what? I asked.
That’s something a whore does, he said.
We were in South Lake, on a side street by the water, under the pines, where you could hear the loons. The word hung there between us. Whore. I laughed, because it was all I could think to do, the only answer that wasn’t a roar, coming from deep in my belly.
Have you been with a whore? I asked him.
No, he said, his chin lowered, his face disgusted.
Then how would you know? I asked.
For girls like us, there’s no first time, and there’s no only time. There’s nothing special, and there’s no love. It just goes on forever, like a loop in your brain, one burning infinite fuck that rips you apart so your insides are one big scar.
I would stop Doe sometimes, if only for a moment, with my foot. When I think about that, try to remember any detail, sometimes my foot is small, a tiny kindergarten foot, round and pink and soft on his thigh. And sometimes, it’s bigger, harder on the edges, with painted toes.
I’m sick, I’d say. Never enough of a deterrent.
This will make it feel better. Let me kiss it away.
Give me money, was a better one. Uh-uh, I’d say, pressing down like my foot was on the brakes.
You’re kidding me, Doe would say.
Fifty dollars, I said.
I can break you in half, he said.
Try it.
I had nothing to lose. He’d broken me so hard it didn’t matter what else he tried.
Sometimes, after, sweaty and wrecked, I’d crawl in behind Rayelle, knowing I shouldn’t, that I was a contagion, a creeping germ getting into bed with her, going where I had no business going, my hand, a snake inside her shirt, her pants. It was all I knew: how to touch someone, how to make someone do what I wanted them to do, how to make someone want me. How to make them love me.
And then t
here was Florida, in the weeds behind a house that was shifting on its frame, careening to the left like it would fall over someday. Barefoot on a dirt floor. Sick in her own bed. Our matching wounds immune to each other. Broken and put back together.
By me.
seven
RAYELLE
For weeks after Holly Jasper disappeared, the girls in South Lake were on lockdown. No one walked alone. No one swam. The beach was barricaded and laced with police tape. Along the shoreline, the backhoes and boats they used for dragging. But the middle of the lake was so deep, the divers could go only so far, and the hooks, which were meant to scrape the bottom, just floated in the black depth, feeling blindly for anything.
Beyond the lake, the midway sat empty. None of the normal family activity, the kids running from bumper cars to the scrambler. The teenagers on skateboards or bikes. People with ice cream or cotton candy. At first, the workers would come and sit by the rides, and no one rode them. Every car that came through town was suspect, even the ones that belonged to people we knew.
Normally, June shimmered with sunshine and possibilities, long days at the beach with boys, bike rides, and booze snuck into backpacks. School was ending. It stayed light until nine o’clock. Kids were out, getting popcorn and ice cream, even on a school night, the rides lit up red and yellow, the street a din of motorcycles and loud car radios.
And then she was gone.
The longer it went on, the worse it felt. The first week, the town was a scramble of searching everywhere, in the woods, in the lake, behind buildings, in dumpsters. And as weeks went on, it got quieter, hotter, and nothing felt possible anymore. I was alone the whole summer, home after a doomed road trip with Chuck. Khaki was gone. I sat in the trailer by myself and sulked. Every day on the news they’d begin with search details, and no leads. They put dogs on it. They called the state for help. Volunteers came. No one found anything. And then summer was over. We went back to school, me, in seventh grade, taller than every boy in my class, and bustier than all the girls.
I almost failed that year. I spent most of it staying behind after school, until everyone had left and the building was empty, to drink stolen vodka and fuck Tim Kriczewski, an eighth-grader with a wide Polish back and a chipped front tooth, whose father owned the quarry on the other side of the lake and whose mother never checked her liquor cabinet.
The Scamp Page 6