I offered it to Dakota in trust, in another town, another house, coaxing her to come along with me, to let me care for her the way she had never been cared for. My hands open, palms up, on top of hers. I can’t tell you anything else about me, I said. But that’s my real name.
She looked at me with her one eye, soft and dark brown, her lashes thick and black. Her skin, like copper velvet. I don’t need to know anything else, she said.
Virginia, with her perfect manicure and pedicure, wanted to know everything. Eyeing the walls behind me while she stood in my doorway. Not a split end on her head. Not a chipped tooth.
I could be your best girl, she said.
I don’t have a best girl, I said.
I made her sleep in the basement, on the velvet couch, where, during the day, I saw clients. At night, it was cool and dark, clean. It was safe, when safety was not what she needed or craved.
I never meant for her to stay.
I took her out after I caught them together. I told her to come with me for a ride. She kept saying, It’s not what you think. Her eyes wide and her skin bare in an oversized shirt that hung off her shoulders.
She’s pissed, Tennessee clucked at her.
I stared hard at Tennessee’s round baby face. You mind your own, I told her, and put Virginia in the truck.
It’s not what you think, she said again. I lit a cigarette, let the smoke fill the cab.
A humid summer night, wet with dew. Fog in the low valleys.
Parker, she said. It’s not anything. Me and her.
You’ll have to show me, I said. I don’t know what to think.
I’m not even, she started.
I drove to where the road dipped and rose, past the cemetery, between the canopy of poplars. At the treetops, in the twilight, bats, pinging out blind, circling back.
Not what? I said.
I’m not that way, she said. She squinched her tiny nose, her lip curled. I don’t like girls in that way, she said.
Then what were you thinking, coming to my door? I said.
She huffed, her arms crossed over her chest, her delicate wrists tucked into her armpits. It wasn’t cold. She was feeling exposed. I didn’t think there was sex attached, she said. Not with you, she said. Or with her.
I stopped the car at a T. The bank in front of us, striped with layers of rock. The road curved down to the river one way, out into the flats the other.
With who? I asked.
Clients? she asked.
Who told you that?
Oh please, she said.
I had the hatchet tucked in the side of the driver’s seat, its rubber handle where my fingers could reach around. I felt it, and kept driving.
Where are you taking me? she asked.
You know what they do, I said, when they catch pests? Rodents? And relocate them? They take them to the other side of the river, I said, so they can’t smell their way back to town.
She gave a hard little clinking laugh.
Your father ought to be ashamed of you, I said.
He ought to be ashamed of himself, she said.
We pulled off, into an access point for fishermen, where there was a dirt parking circle beside willow trees, and a spot where the river was wide and slow. Kids went swimming there. People took their dogs to fetch sticks and tennis balls in the water. Some fallen trees had made a still spot. A pool you could swim in and not be swept away in the current. Beyond it, the river dipped down over rocks, a loud rushing, under a bridge, out, into thicker trees.
Past ten, it was empty. It was dark, except for the dashboard. You could hear the small waterfall around the bend, the water rushing over rocks and along the shoreline. There were frogs and crickets. An owl, high above.
What happened to you? I asked her. Something I would sometimes ask of the others, who came on their hands and knees, who came running, who still had wounds in their bellies, their backs, had black eyes, or no eye at all.
You happened to me, she said, coy.
It felt like frost moving in, down my limbs, over my face. If she could see it she didn’t say. But she did back out of the truck.
I ain’t happened to you yet, I said.
After, I buried the hatchet, literally, in my own yard. I washed it in a moving part of the river, wading in barefoot and ankle-deep to the waterfall and submerging the head of the axe in the water. I’d begun to tail her but she ran through the river and up the bank on the other side, scrambling.
I’d said, I’ll show you what you’re missing. By not being with me. By not being my best girl.
I can be, she said.
You’re not that way, I said. Are you. I shimmied her out of her skinny jeans and her silk panties, threw them in the back of the truck. She was down to the shirt only, sloping off her shoulder, and I took a long, slow moment to run my fingertips on her skin, my lips near her ear. I wore a black tank dress, straight and simple, and nothing underneath. When I felt her tremble at my breath on her neck, I lifted the dress off.
I let her see me. Naked, the way I work best. Hard and shining. Strong like an animal. She was unmoved.
There was nothing there to be redeemed. Nothing to fix because nothing had ever been broken. She was a blank slate. I could lay my hands on Tennessee and read the damage on her skin, could hold Dakota’s head and stroke her broken mouth, her punctured eye. But Virginia? No text at all. Just a brittle slate I could punch my fist through.
When she detected the cold hatred in my closed hand, moving up her thigh, she ran. She looked at my face, hard, closed, dead inside to whatever plea she might make to me, and she ran. She didn’t scream, she just scrambled on her bare feet, slipping in the dust while she backed away.
I threw the hatchet, overhand, and it hit her in the thigh. I was aiming for her neck.
That’s when she screamed, all along the riverbank, up toward nowhere civilized. I picked up the axe, slick with blood and caked with dirt, and stood listening to the sound of her voice getting smaller, farther away. I waded into the river naked under the moon, a small blond woman holding an axe covered in blood. I didn’t know where she would end up, or who she might run into.
Risky. But I’m not a chaser.
I caught them, not tangled up in sex, not even kissing. They were fully clothed, in my kitchen, giggling, drinking, sharing secrets like long-lost sisters.
Tennessee behind the counter, pouring the drinks. Telling the stories. She put her hands in Virginia’s long dark hair, twisted it around her hands.
Virginia, asking all the right questions about who liked what. How you tied up a man, or whipped his dick till it was swollen twice its size and throbbing.
Tennessee couldn’t be trusted not to tell.
Virginia was disposable.
I’d been a lone wolf for years. Sunbright. Christiansburg. Lebanon. Sugarwood. Summersville. Wrightsville Beach. Delta. A small house on a quiet road. A backyard with a fire pit, a slope down to the river. Deer in the early morning, picking at a row of berry bushes and eating up the flowers. Big wild turkeys nearly as tall as me, coming through to pick up the deer shit.
That’s where I found Dakota, before I brought her here. When I was living as Melissa. Before I became Parker.
Dakota found Tennessee sleeping in the open, her belly stretched and distended.
Virginia found me.
I get harder with every girl. Every step away from the last, every new town, every new state, every little girl who runs to me in the middle of the night, running from a boyfriend, a father, a pastor, an uncle.
Women don’t run from each other.
They find me with the radar of the heart, with the divining rod in their bones, they come to me. Carved hard and white in the middle of the woods, waiting for them. Calling out to their needs.
How come you don’t get in trouble? Tennessee asks me. I watch while she pokes her ass out, leaning over the counter, playing with a ball that she rolls around the way a kitten would.
Because I got this town
by the balls, I tell her.
Literally, she snorts.
Impudent little snot, I think.
I’d spank her if I didn’t think she’d enjoy it so much.
Carey, the sheriff, patrols the kids out of the A&P parking lot. He pulls over drunks. He busts small-time weed dealers, checks in on domestic disputes, sometimes cuffs a rough husband and puts him in the back of his patrol car for a few minutes to cool off. He’s got a square face and blond hair, a broad torso, two daughters who were high school cheer captains. The local wives like it when he tips his hat to them. He plays Santa in the Christmas parade, riding on the back of the fire truck, and he plays stand-up bass in a bluegrass trio that performs at the policemen’s picnic, the firemen’s field days, the VFW.
He works himself into a frenzy if I pee in his mouth. I have to let it dribble first, which takes a lot of control. The slow drip is what gets him, my feet on either side of his head, my bared crotch above his face. By the time I get to full stream, he’s done, his face covered in piss, flushed in ecstasy.
That long line of restored Victorian houses on Main Street? You don’t know what goes on behind their polished mahogany doors. What their daddies want. What their little girls go looking for in the dark of night.
The postmaster, painkillers. I send Dakota for them, to an unmarked house up north. No one fucks with Dakota.
There, she gets bottles of hydrocodone, Valium, Klonopin sometimes. The postmaster has me portion them out for him, folding a few into a paper packet every four days. He almost always comes back to me on the second day, sweaty and begging, full of excuses about what’s difficult, the pressure of his job. Really? I say, with a sneer. You’re the fucking postmaster. He likes me to shame him. The pain, he says, in his lower back, his legs.
When he carries on, I slap him. I bang on his hands with a flat, bamboo spoon, like a mother or a nun, reprimanding a schoolboy.
It’s the other half of what he needs.
That’s not what I mean, Tennessee says to me. Not them. The men are boring, she says. She mock yawns while she says it. Whip me, mistress, she mimics. I’ve been bad.
I wait while she pours me a tall glass of cold vodka, neat.
She wags a finger at me. I mean the girls, she says.
What girls?
How did you get away with that? she says.
The men looking for drugs, looking for punishment, for redemption in my basement follow the same invisible map the girls do. The ghostly road signs that point to need, the glowing snail trail of discarded invisible girls, dead or maimed, missing. All the way back to my own mother, my own sisters.
I don’t know how far back Tennessee has traced. But it’s a trail you should never follow.
twenty-five
RAYELLE
Delta is bigger than I expect; it sprawls. On the outskirts, houses with the paint worn off, dogs lying in dirt yards, porches with burlap couches on them. There are big working farms, farms up for auction, and smaller, organic farms with free-range chickens roaming, goats chewing down the grass. In town, the original general store, still operating, and an old clapboard church from the 1800s.
The address Couper has is a post office box.
You don’t know that she actually lives here? I ask him.
No, he says. I only know that at one point, five months ago, she came into Delta to pick up her mail. Supposedly.
That’s promising, I say.
He stops at a railroad crossing for a train that’s nearly done going by. The lights flashing, the bell ringing. Freight cars rattling past.
You don’t have to do this, he says.
Yes I do, I say. What do you mean? Are you trying to tell me not to? I say. Are you trying to get rid of me?
I think it scares you a little, he says.
I stare out the window at a red-winged blackbird, perched on a fence post. I don’t answer him.
It scares me, he says.
It’s an old, old town. The road in is a wide street with sidewalks and big houses with columns and front porches. Lilacs, past bloom, and red buds, with their flat bean leaves flapping, bending down to frame pathways, dotted with finches and catbirds. Camellias along sidewalks, azaleas that look like they’re on fire. Some of the Victorian houses have cupolas on top, a widow’s walk, my mother called them. She would know. But no one else recognized my mother as a widow. I don’t remember anyone but Chuck in our house. How would anyone know what a family was made up of, if all they saw was a man, a woman, and a baby?
How would I know?
I think about Couper asking me, Who is your mother? And think of my mother, sitting at home at her kitchen table, the TV on loud, two cigarettes going, one that she forgot about in the ashtray, one in her hand.
And Khaki, behind me at night, her hand over my hair, stroking. You’re my real sissy, she’d say. Don’t you forget it.
You can drive through the downtown in one sweep. We do it, twice. In the center, a mix of storefronts, a bookstore, a coffee shop, a sandwich place. A bistro on one corner with outdoor seating. An old drugstore with a counter. A used-furniture store called Schweitzer’s, the letters in orange plastic cursive. There’s a wig shop where the window is filled with Styrofoam heads wearing black, blond, and red wigs, long straight hair, a flip, a cap of light-brown curls. All on faceless white molds.
In the middle of town, a fountain. The roads wind around it in a tiny traffic circle. In the fountain, statues that make a cluster of naked little girls, one bending to dip a hand in the water, another upright with a hand raised, like little girls playing in the sprinkler, the water splashing up on their bellies. Their torsos all even-toned like mannequins, no darker pink to make a nipple, not even a raised bump.
Behind the fountain, a green park with a gazebo and benches. On the day we arrive, the farmers’ market is set up with tents and tables, Mennonite farmers selling eggs and bread and pies, their children in awkward shirts and heavy shoes, straw hats. Hippie farmers stand across from them, in dreadlocks and Indian prints, selling organic carrots and peppers that are purple and gold.
Couper goes to the end of town. We pass a new train and bus station, a glassed-in building of streamlined traffic, transfers, boarding docks. A line of flags at the top of the building, different colors, but all limp in the still heat, none of them waving. The tracks run behind the blue glass front. Couper circles around and heads back toward the green, but takes a side street, and drives west toward the river, past the school—all three, elementary, middle, and high school, together on one campus—with old high windows and a clock tower. There’s another shopping plaza with a liquor store and a dry cleaner. The houses thin out after that, spaced farther apart. The sidewalks end at the village limits. Beyond them, another train station, this one the original brick building with a round clock, and a converted ticket window with brass bars. The train tracks dissect the town in two spots, one, right through the middle, just off the green.
Out front, a fat-wheeled cruiser bike with a basket on the handlebars. It leans against the ticket counter.
Back in town, Couper parks alongside a pizza shop. It smells heavy with garlic and frying oil, and the air is extra hot there, coming right out of the brick building. He turns the car off, the engine ticking as it cools.
Let’s walk around, he says.
I expect to feel her in my bones, like a storm coming, a swell underneath the skin, and an ache inside. How could I not? Could I not know her after so many years?
But everyone here is someone else. A mom in capris, pushing a stroller with a mosquito net; a woman selling crafts, crocheted tea cozies and potholders; or a farmer with dark curly hair, deep-set eyes, and a purple sundress, who sells peas that Couper eats from a paper bag, pod and all. A street musician with pigtails and a tank top who sings in front of the coffee shop on Center Street. I look at her twice. She has a round face and thin lips, rounded soft shoulders and a heavy chest above the body of the guitar. Her brown legs tucked into cowboy boots. I stop and
listen to her while Couper makes small talk with the vendors. She looks like someone I know from home, someone I can’t place. A little sister. I watch her from across the narrow street, the buildings and the mountains behind her. She sings a song that makes her laugh, that cracks her clear voice with a giggle. She puts her head down and stomps one foot. Then goes on to the next one.
We walk the farmers’ market arm in arm. Couper talks to everyone. It’s all babies and dogs out there. Everyone friendly. At the fountain, he brings me a lemon ice, cool on such a hot day, but acidy in my stomach.
The statues in the fountain capture girls at their worst point, right around eleven, when your body is at its most awkward, before you’ve grown into what’s burgeoning, before you’ve stopped skipping, or playing in the water.
I spent most of eleven playing nightclub with Khaki. Dressing up in Teddy’s sparkly tops and putting on lipstick that was too dark for me, sitting on a bar with a fake microphone in my hand, sneaking sips of vodka from Doe’s bar, and getting felt up in Khaki’s bed.
I would have done anything to stay with her.
I did do anything.
I was barely able to keep up with my body, and certainly not with hers.
And these fountain girls are just like that, fleshy, awkward, and, at first, I think it’s all wrong, but the more I look at them—their faces open with glee, their bellies and thighs, the smooth Ys where their legs come together—I think whoever did it, whoever reclaimed that awful stage for them and depicted it with such unbridled joy, got it just right.
I leave Couper talking to a woodworker with a tent filled with beautiful rocking chairs and cross the street to the drugstore. Its aisles are cramped, taller than me and narrow, stocked tight with supplies. I stand for fifteen minutes in front of a shelf of pregnancy tests until a boy who is about sixteen, with dark, damp-looking hair and a pimpled forehead, asks if he can help me.
I kind of scowl. No, I say, and he walks away, straightening things as he goes. Obviously, he cannot help me, I think. There’s a window at the back for a pharmacist, who is perhaps the person I should ask which test is least likely to fuck with me, or which test is most likely to tell me what I want to hear. Questions he cannot answer. To the side of the store, a counter where you can still buy soda, or lemonade from a plastic box that is always dripping.
The Scamp Page 23