The Scamp

by Jennifer Pashley

  We kissed and writhed in the front seat. The extended cab of the truck, bigger than most. I buried my hand in her jeans, digging with my hard hands.

  I don’t know why I didn’t see it coming.

  She had my pants off me, my shirt undone. Her face in my pussy, my feet up on the dash. And then she turned me around, my arms over the passenger seat, my face against the heated leather, and before I could catch my breath, she was way up inside, pumping away, fucking me with a dildo.

  I didn’t want to think it was great. I didn’t want to throw my head back and yowl, my hips backing into hers. But I did. She caught me off my guard. Off my game.

  Someone else might have stayed. Another woman might have been swept away by Georgia and her swagger, her truck. The cigarettes and the country music.

  After, I smoked two of her cigarettes while she leaned back in the driver’s seat, pushed away from the steering wheel, her pants still undone, her hair mussed and over her ears like a blunt bob. Like a silent movie star. With those eyes. Those lined, lovely green eyes.

  I stroked her face. You’re something else, I said. Her head tipped back under my touch.

  No one ever expects me to be as strong as I am. For there to be that much power in my hands, big, blunt, wrapped around your neck.

  I can strike too.

  I rummaged in the toolbox in the bed of the truck, wearing Georgia’s own gloves, heavy leather gloves meant for hard gardening, in thorns or brambles. In the box there were typical tools, a hammer, a ratchet set, screwdrivers, and pliers. At the bottom, I found what I was looking for. A seven-piece deer-processing kit with knives of varying sizes, the biggest, curved with a black plastic handle.

  I took the whole kit into the front seat. The truck was still running. I pushed the driver’s seat back even farther and perched on the edge of the seat, my cunt still sore from her.

  I drove a long ways. Out that far, it’s trees and ravines and river. I parked the truck, buried in thick brush at the bottom of a dirt road that led to the riverbank. I left it running with the windows closed, but it wouldn’t look like a suicide.

  Not after I took the head.

  The river never freezes. Back home, the creeks we had would come close, the ice creeping out from the shore, leaving a soft middle, the sides of the creek thick and gray with ice.

  The water was bone-aching cold, fast-moving. The edges of the river defined by the jutting of flat red rock, places to stand and fish, to lie naked on a hot summer day and brown your skin on a warm rock.

  The head lodged. The way the rocks lean out over the water like a dock, things get snagged in them. Branches, leaves. Ducks and beavers build nests in the crevices.

  I don’t know how long it sat there. Who reported her missing. When they found the truck, or where they looked for the head, or when they discovered it, licked clean by fish and animals and rapid river water.

  I took the processing kit.

  And the dildo. I couldn’t risk leaving it behind.

  The trailer wasn’t worth keeping. I’d sublet it for six months from a guy who was working construction. I gave him the name Ashley Dunn. He liked the idea of a couple of girls living there to keep it up while he built houses out of town. But the trailer was run-down when I moved in; wind blew in where the door wouldn’t shut. All around us, when people moved, they left the trailers behind, empty, sinking. Outside the park, a circle of new houses, the sounds of bulldozers and nail guns. But I’d housed Carolina in that trailer for weeks over the winter break that she didn’t want to go home for. She wouldn’t tell me why. She didn’t need to.

  I laid my hands on her small, mousy head. Her skin said dead to me. Dead already. For years. I saw the thumbprints of brothers and cousins on her. She was broken inside, unhinged and hemorrhaging.

  She slept in my bed, small, quiet, while I stroked her spine, her limbs.

  When they found her in the road, wrapped in a rabbit-fur coat, bleeding out on the icy pavement, she looked like a small deer. Hit and left to die. Under the coat, her skin was rubbed clean, shaved smooth.

  Some winters are worse than others.

  fifteen

  RAYELLE

  I try to imagine who any of them might have been, before. A kid, abused by her dad, or her mom, even, running as fast as she could from the home that hurt her, and failed to protect her. A woman with a baby, living out in rural Indiana, with a husband who was rough on her, and not enough money to pay the bills each month. A woman misunderstood. A woman alone. A woman looking for company. For love. For recognition. I get it. I might have run too. And nearly did, more than once, in the middle of a blue-black night, leaving a screaming, colicky Summer in her rocker seat on the living room floor. I might have gotten in my car and just driven, crying, down a dark rural road toward something, who knew, that might have killed me. Might have left me in pieces on a riverbank, my head miles away, lodged in the water. Rinsed.

  I think about their pictures, posed with babies, or beside a car. Alyssa’s teenage face, blue already, mottled in death.

  And Florida. She might haunt me the most. Just the word, typed in the middle of the page. Not a picture left of her. Just the word. Florida.

  She sounds to me like a dark-haired beauty, the kind of hula girl you put on the dash of your car, who swivels her hips and dances. Flowers in her hair. Nothing on her feet. Her belly curved like a little fairy’s.

  On the way to Sugarwood Park, we hit a blank spot of straight, flat road where nothing goes past except one old wood-paneled station wagon. There’s no phone service, no radio stations. Just miles of hot white concrete.

  How do you know when you’re on the right track? I ask Couper. With anything, I think. The girls, the story. Me.

  I don’t, he says. I watch the sun come through the trees, dappling his face. I love so much the way his eyes crinkle in the light, the way his mouth curves up in a smile. The way his cheeks go slack when he’s sleeping. Sometimes, when I think about Eli, the guy I was with the longest, and the only guy I lived with, I can’t remember a thing about his face, his smile, the way he smelled.

  Sometimes I have to just see when I get there, Couper says. It might be nothing.

  I imagine an empty lot, a vacant field. And worse, no connections. Just a random scattering of dead girls.

  What will we do then? I picture myself, dropped off at my mom’s, with no room for me anymore. No job waiting, my car towed. Couper pulling away, headed to another state, another case.

  When my lungs constrict, I try laughing. Doesn’t that make you crazy? I say. It feels like we’re driving in slow motion, but I know he’s going sixty. On either side, ancient-looking trees, cows clustered in the shade, or near a low pond. Houses that are white turned gray, peeling to reveal raw but dried and brittle wood siding, with deep front porches piled with burlap couches and rocking horses, dirt yards.

  We stop at the train track, like the waitress said we might have to, and wait ten minutes while a long CSX goes by, car after car, empty and see-through, or filled with barrels, cable, steel beams. It blinks, the space between cars a flash of light as each one chunks past.

  No, Couper says, answering me finally. Then he smirks. Sweetheart, that’s not what makes me crazy.

  Sugarwood Mobile Park sits, low, flat, and awful, in the middle of a newly developing area. One deteriorating road through the last few rickety trailers and, all around it, land that has been bulldozed and dug out. The movement of cranes and backhoes, earthmovers and men in hard hats with trailers of their own that they disappear into to get coffee or have lunch, to run paperwork or print out invoices. Their work trailers, better than most of the trailer homes.

  The foundations for new homes gape open like graves of cement, poured and left waiting for houses to be plopped on top of them, and beyond that, nothing but a row of trees they’ve left between the new houses and the little circular track of trailers. The guys look up, they tip their hard hats to see. We must look like we’re moving in.

&n
bsp; Maybe there’s an open spot for us to park the Scamp and stay, instead of a KOA or a Walmart parking lot under bright lights. And maybe this is the kind of place I’ll find Khaki finally, in a row of tin homes, where we can go back to being girls again, running in the grass, wandering down to the creek to catch snakes or frogs, a shoe box full of crickets. Sneak off into the trees to smoke a cigarette, or sip from a plastic bottle of vodka or bourbon.

  The movement of the car is like a big-hipped woman’s; I can feel it there, in my waist, swiveling as the car navigates potholes in the dirt road. My hips rise and fall, the weight of the car, of the Scamp in tow behind, like my own body.

  Couper parks half on the grass at the top of the street and we walk to the first trailer. The road in a loop like a suburban cul-de-sac, but dusty and closer, with cars and kiddie pools and a cluster of mailboxes all together in one bank on the grass in the center. All at once it makes me long for home. Not my mother’s trailer, with its broken appliances, its empty beer bottles and piles of old mail and newspapers. Something older, from longer ago. Something the color of an old photograph, pink and yellow. It smells like a sprinkler, and feels like summer dusk on your skin, warm, misty, sweaty.

  Where I come from.

  I ask Couper, Did you ever live in a trailer?

  Ha, no, he says, which annoys me.

  You do now, I say.

  I do, he says. He pulls the notepad from his pocket while we walk up the side of the road.

  You always lived in a full-fledged, free-standing house, I say.

  No, he says. I lived in an apartment, in college. And after too.

  Where? I say.

  Seattle, he says.

  Washington is a state we never made it to. It seems a world away, high in the mountains, all pine trees and ocean and weed.

  How did you end up here? I say.

  Here? he says, and points to the grass. Here is a long story. I ended up on the East Coast for work.

  Detective work? I say.

  No, he says.

  What, then?

  Newspaper work, he says. He tips his head and smiles at me. I was a reporter, he says.

  Crime? I say.

  Some. I did some beat writing. Some regular news, and then longer projects, investigative stuff. That’s how I started doing book-length projects.

  This is not your first, I say.

  No.

  I push his arm. Are you fucking famous? I say.

  He laughs. Not so much, he says.

  It’s about ninety-five degrees in the sun. My feet cover over with red dust. When I take my shoes off later, it’ll leave a pattern, like you see on Indian girls. I saw them one time, in Niagara Falls, with Chuck. All these girls with their long black braids and pink and red and gold silk, their hands and feet painted in a pattern just slightly darker than their skin. They giggled in the spray by the falls while a man took pictures of them. He had a white suit that buttoned higher than usual, and a fancy red turban.

  Don’t stare, Rayelle, Chuck said.

  But I wondered about them, because they didn’t look much older than me. Because the man took their picture together, and wasn’t posing with them. Because I wondered what it was like to be married off to a man you maybe didn’t know, wearing red instead of white, your body painted and your hair dressed with jewels.

  At the first trailer, a little mommy—a girl with a ponytail high on her head and a couple of toddlers who wander in and out of the front door—slides a plastic baby pool into the sun and lays a running hose in it, leaving it to fill and warm up before she lets the kids get in. The hose makes its own whirlpool, moving in a swift circle around the plastic sides. It would pull you in, that vortex of moving water; you could never fight that. You would just get lost in the current, spinning around with your face against the imprint of blue plastic cartoon fishes.

  I grab Couper’s hand, cold and sweaty at the same time. My back, dripping, and my arms all goose bumps. He looks at the pool, the twisting water.

  Do you want to wait in the car? he says, but he’s distracted by the activity of the woman, another car pulling into the park. Couper shakes his head. No, you should come, he says. You can do this. He grips my hand and then lets go, walking ahead.

  I watch the slope of his shoulders, the breadth of his back as he walks away. I have to fight not to let the image darken from the outside in, my eyesight fading and my head light enough to faint.

  Couper sort of waves before he approaches her. She tries walking away, looking over her shoulder. She probably thinks he’s summoning her, serving her papers, coming from the state or from child protective. He has to call out to make her stop.

  Sorry to bother you, he says. Can you just tell me which one of these is number seventeen?

  There’s no number on her trailer, and no number on the one across the street. There’s no mailbox on the house, only the metal bank of them in the middle green. In front of the trailer, the steps are warped, untreated pine. They look unstable, dry, splintery.

  She walks back and bends down to swish her hand in the swirling pool water, her ponytail swaying to the side. There’s more than enough water in the pool. When she stands upright, she’s tiny in front of Couper, not even to his shoulder. She wears white sweatpants that come to her knee, and a stretchy white tank top with no bra, even though she needs one. She has so many freckles on her shoulders, chest, and arms, they seem to overlap in places. When I get closer, her face is the same.

  Are you fucking kidding me? she says to Couper, and leans back on her heels, open and confrontational. She eyes the long-haired toddler on the grass, dressed in only a diaper, who picks up a stick, ready to run with it, and all she does is snap her fingers at him. He stops as soon as she snaps. Doesn’t look back at her, doesn’t even lift his head. He just drops the stick and moves to a pile of pebbles by the steps.

  No ma’am, Couper says.

  The kid grabs a handful of pebbles and peppers her leg with it.

  Tyler! She snaps her fingers again. Go in the house and find Lexi, she says. Have your cereal. You can’t get in the pool yet. When he doesn’t move she lunges like she’ll chase him and he toddles up the steps. Then she sizes us up, her head moving up and down, the pool filling right to the top.

  You all the cops? she says, and kind of laughs. You don’t look like cops.

  No ma’am, Couper says. My name’s Couper Gale. I’m an investigative reporter. This is my associate, Rayelle Reed.

  He keeps saying my name to everyone, without asking me. Without consideration for my own anonymity. Why does she need to know who I am?

  What are you looking for in seventeen? she says.

  I was hoping to find the woman who lives there, Couper says.

  She smoothes her hand from her forehead back to where the ponytail starts at the crown of her head. Then she clucks and shakes her head. Too late, she says.

  She’s not there? he says.

  She waves her hand around. We’re dropping like flies out here, she says. Nah, they don’t live there no more.

  He glances back at me before he goes on. There was more than one person? he says.

  Yeah. I mean, the main one, she says, and then dangles her fingers down. And a few others.

  A few other . . . women? Couper says.

  She snorts. There weren’t no men in that house, if you catch me, she says.

  I don’t know if I do, Couper says. How many women?

  Just one, she says, impatient, but there were always others hanging around. I don’t know who all lived there, off and on.

  Did you know them?

  She looks at me before she answers. No, I did not know them, she says.

  Is there anyone left here who might have known them? Couper asks. He looks down the line of trailers. All of them on a tilt, facing the dirt drive, stacked like dominoes, ready for their own demise.

  Darlene might, she says, slow. Then she holds up a finger and asks him to wait while she goes to turn the hose spigot. The pool i
s uneven. Water sloshes out one side. And why not? If a teaspoon is as dangerous as a gallon, why not give a baby a whole deep pool to drown in?

  Darlene. Couper jots down.

  Is the manager, she says, and points at the trailer across the way. But she don’t have time to talk to you all, she says. We got a bit going on here, you know? She waves her hand around at the construction, the constant drone and pound of so many heavy machines. Dropping like flies, she says again.

  I’m sorry to hear that, Couper says. He eyes the row of open basements in the hot field. Are they forcing you out? he says.

  They don’t give a rat’s fucking ass what happens to us, she says.

  Behind her, the little one comes back out the front door, leaving it wide open behind him, the sunlight shining in on a living room filled with toys on the rug, a big TV going loud against the wall. A shaft of bright light catches dust floating down. He comes down the front steps barefoot, undoes his own diaper and walks out of it, leaves it on the grass, his fat little legs working him toward the pool with purpose. He steps right in over the side, slips and lands hard on his bottom, the water up to his armpits.

  It’s too cold, Ty, she says. I told you.

  He crawls, his butt up in the air and his nose skimming the water. It doesn’t seem to faze him.

  Anyone else? Couper says.

  She looks down the street. Some are nicer than others, with birdbaths and hanging flowers. Some of them with just dirt lawns, a broken step, the aluminum sides of them rusty or dented. One has a window knocked out, and the curtain blows through from the inside.

  Crystal, she says. She picks at a fingernail. The kid puts his face in the water and she stoops real quick, even though her back is to him.

  Not your face, Ty, she says. Sit up.

  These your little ones? Couper asks.

  If I were the babysitter, she says, I’d get paid for this shit.