She knew what to do. I had already gotten her to take drags off a cigarette. I snuck as many as ten cigarettes a day out of my mother’s pack of Salems.
He put his hand behind her knee. They sat on the hill like that, with their butts in the grass, and their knees crooked up. He tucked his hand right there, in the hot crease behind her knee.
Here, he said. You know how to work a lighter?
I watched her wriggle her round, bare shoulders, flirty. I ain’t a baby, she said, and flicked. The bomb, on Nudie’s own lip. The smell, ash and hair. The sound, a boom so deafening, it was a while before we could hear all the screaming.
They were worried about Rayelle. What she had seen, what had been done to her eyes, her ears, being so close to the blast.
When Carleen tried to clean out her hair, she had no choice but to cut it.
The clothes she had on, covered in bits of blood and skin. Around her in the grass, pieces of bone, and teeth.
They asked me not to talk to her about it. She seemed, for the weeks following, not to really remember what had happened. She understood he was dead, that there’d been an accident, but didn’t recall the actual blast in her face. Not that she said, anyway. So they told me—all of them, one at a time, Carleen, Chuck, my own mother and father—not to talk to her about it.
Let it go, my mother said. If she doesn’t remember, it’s for the best.
When she had nightmares, sitting upright in bed and sweating, crying for no reason, I tried to comfort her. I would stroke her and tell her she didn’t do anything wrong. And when we slept, she curved close to me, silent, drawing solace from our skin.
twenty-seven
RAYELLE
He’s in the midst of giving me a new identity when he tells me about the truck.
Why do I have to pose as someone else, I say, just to talk to her?
Because you don’t know what she knows, he says. Because I don’t know what we’re dealing with. But I do know, he says, that we’re in the right place.
We sit at the kitchen table, where Couper puts his hands on my face, holding my hair back, my whole face exposed. Round, naked. He wants me to wear it up, the way I never do. Underneath, my hair is darker, kinkier, the curls in long ripples.
How do you know? I ask him.
I thought I saw her in a truck, he says. And then I saw another woman driving the same truck.
Was it her? I say. Was it Khaki?
I couldn’t tell, he says. So I ran the plates. He takes his hands away from my face, and my temples are warm from his fingers. It’s not her truck, he says.
I wind my hair into a bun, and clip my bangs back, away from my face. He gives me a pair of fake glasses to wear.
It’s registered to and insured by Jeff Henderson, he says.
He looks at me. I feel different with the glasses on. Ugly. And liberated. I feel like I’m breathing for the first time, like I’m coming up for air from a depth I didn’t think I could swim my way out of.
You should pick a new name for yourself, he says.
We decide on Rebecca. I can’t come up with anything that’s not white trash. Carly, Daisy, Sunny. Couper says it should be usual, but not too common.
Rebecca what? I say. We sit in the living room while he goes through the records. I expect him to find a name there. Davis. Monk.
Gale, he says.
Were you ever married to a Rebecca? I ask.
Not yet, he says.
I leave for the coffee shop armed with a book.
A book? I say to Couper.
You have to look like you’re doing something, he says. He gives me an old paperback copy of Eudora Welty stories that I’ve never heard of, and don’t intend to read.
Shouldn’t I have protection? I ask. I hold the book over my chest like a shield.
He sighs and fidgets a little in a way that makes me nervous.
Just be careful, he says. He takes my shoulders, and when I want him to kiss my mouth, to tell me he loves me, he only says, Be careful, and kisses my forehead.
When we were kids, we collected crickets and kept them in shoe boxes. I don’t know what kids do now, and I’m not getting misty-eyed over some bullshit nineties childhood, but we spent long days outside. When my mother still worked at the canning factory, putting up jars of sauerkraut on the assembly line, I spent my days at Khaki’s. Teddy would send us outside at nine in the morning with a bag of potato chips and a two-liter bottle of orange soda.
Go play.
We went into the woods, we walked into town, or down to the lake. No one worried about drowning, and no one worried about strangers. We got harassed by boys at the playground, older, middle-school boys who’d say they wanted to bone us both. The worst things, though, happened right at home. Under your own roof, and in your own bed.
We upturned most of Teddy’s garden to find the crickets. They lived under the big flat rocks she used for decoration between the petunias and marigolds. Crickets were big enough, and just slow enough, to catch in your hand. Some of them were plain, a solid dark brown, and some had thin, copper wings. We thought maybe that was the difference between males and females.
The males have wings, Khaki told me.
How do you know? We leaned over a box, our shoulders hunched, our heads together.
That’s how it always is, she said. The best-looking birds are the boy birds.
I had never heard this.
Think about a cardinal, she said. Or a blue jay.
I did, a bright red bird with a pointed head. Or a tufted blue jay with black on his wings.
Those are the males, she said. No one even knows what the females look like. They’re invisible.
Why? I said.
Behind us, boys were coming up on bikes, Nudie’s friends. They rode BMX bikes and skateboards, and came crashing in when they arrived. We were on our hands and knees over the bed of flowers that ran under the front window, along the cement foundation of the house. When Nudie walked by, he slapped the back of my bare upper thigh with his open hand and I yelped.
Shut up, he said, and tugged on my hair. You’re always yelling, he said. That’s why it’s part of your name.
When we found the crickets, Khaki always wanted the damaged one. She’d take the one with its leg missing, a cricket that hopped lopsided in a circle. We’d take a shoe box, poke holes in the lid with a ballpoint pen, and house ten of them in there, on a bed of grass and dirt, a few small rocks. We fed them leaves, not knowing what else they might eat, and waited until some of them turned white. We thought the white ones were pregnant, but really, they were getting new skin, the old copper-brown skin falling off and showing what was underneath, white and fragile, brand-new selves that were wet and shining. Khaki would wait, and watch, because the white cricket was vulnerable, and the others would often attack it. We’d sit on our knees and she’d make me wait with her, her arm across my chest to hold me back, our big heads looming over the box while a little damage was done: an antenna missing, a front leg torn off or broken. She’d take it out, the white one. Separate it until it turned back to the color of dirt. Then she’d return it to the fold and wait for the next one to turn.
I always thought she would save me. That she had the power, like she did with the crickets, to reach in and remove me while I was damaged, but not dead.
I went to her before I went to my mom. When I got my period, at eleven, she showed me what to do. She taught me how to shave my legs, with good cream and a lady’s razor, not a bar of soap and Chuck’s razor, and how to go all the way up, not stop at the knee. She would brush my hair out straight till it shone like corn silk. She taught me how to put on mascara, how to walk in high heels, and how to hold a cigarette so I looked mysterious and seductive and not like a trucker.
I never really got that one right.
Sometimes now, when I hold a cigarette, I put the lighter between my fingers and I can still feel it, the barrel of the cherry bomb, waxy and big, with the dent of my crooked teeth in it.
<
br /> Sometimes, back then, I would just lie on her bed and let her pet me.
When it came time for Summer to be born, I was big as a house, and the only person I wanted around me was Khaki. They kept asking who was coming with me into the delivery room, and I kept answering, No one. I thought, Unless you can find my cousin. I didn’t want Eli, and definitely not his mother. My body was bursting open, my belly so big and round it was abstract, unreal. I thought Khaki would know exactly what to do, could get me through it, howling in just the right way to work through the pain until it cleansed me, and there would be the miracle, the two of us, holding hands, and then cradling another one of us, another blond baby girl. Smooth, naked, and perfect. I thought we might people the planet with perfections of ourselves. Or at least our own little world.
When Summer died, all I wanted was to lay my head in Khaki’s lap. To have her take the broken pieces of my heart and put them back together like a puzzle. To have my hair brushed to silk. To have her pet me and say, It’s okay, you didn’t do anything wrong.
I’m not sure which one of us is so good at it, at attracting each other, but we are drawn together, like magnets, instantly, at the coffee shop. The little pigtailed guitarist, the street musician who sings with her case open for tips, works here, making lattes and cappuccinos. Inside the shop, velvet chairs and purple walls. Shelves with books and music playing that she sings along to.
She has a nasal Kentucky drawl. Different from Deep South, like June Carol’s and her sisters’. There’s something else present in a Kentucky drawl, something hanging, like egg yolk at the back of your throat.
She talks pretty slow, high-pitched and tinny, like her singing voice and her guitar strings together. She wears a short triangle skirt that flares above her knees, red cowboy boots, and a white T-shirt with a red bikini top underneath, which you can see right through the thin fabric of the shirt. The red ties up around her neck. Her hair in tiny curled pigtails like a baby. A little girl, with hair mouse-brown and fine. I know exactly what that hair feels like, how to coax just the slip of a curl into a tie. Her long bangs sweep to one side, tucked behind her ear. She has squinty eyes, and full rosy cheeks, puffed like she’s out of breath.
How you doing? she says. She asks me what I’m reading, what I’m drinking.
I order green tea—something I would never drink—and sit in a red velvet chair with the Eudora Welty book. The spine already cracked with use.
She rubs my shoulder before she sashays up to the counter to get my tea. She makes herself a frozen coffee drink swirled up with caramel, which she pronounces with all three syllables: care-a-mell. She brings me tea in a cup wide enough to be a soup bowl that sits in a saucer the size of a dessert plate.
I been watching you, she says, and winks when she sits across from me, a round table between us, with a board of Chinese checkers.
That so? I say.
She sips, but never takes her eyes away. Her lips, with a fine line of foam along the top. Since day one, she says. I watched you roll into town.
I want to call out to her, to say her name, Haylee. To call her sister, and tell her she’s okay.
She says, My name’s Tennessee, and holds out her hand, cold, from cupping the drink.
Rebecca, I say.
Tennessee’s shift ends while I’m sitting there not drinking the green tea because I don’t like the bitter planty taste of it.
I couldn’t drink it neither, she says, nodding at the cup. I couldn’t drink nothing, not even water, until after. She rubs her stomach down the front.
Oh, I say. I’m not, I say. I can’t be, I think.
It’s okay if you are, she says. Or if you don’t know. I can help you. Her can sounds like kin.
Her bike is parked on the sidewalk out front. It’s a white cruiser with a fat seat and upright handlebars and a wicker basket on the front, the one we’d seen at the train station. She hands me her guitar, to sling across my back, and then she pats the seat.
Come on, she says, I’ll bike you.
Now? I say, thinking she’s taking me for some back-alley abortion. I remember the feel of Khaki’s hands on me. In me. My spine feels hot.
I just want to show you something, she says. Her face squinches with a smile.
I tuck the skirt of my dress between my legs and, just like Khaki used to, Tennessee stands up and pedals, her ass right in front of me. Her body small but strong, working the bike with both of us on it. I hold on to her waist, and she takes us out of town, past the green, riding into the lowering sun.
I still have the bike I got when I was eleven, at home, stashed behind the shed at my parents’ house. I rarely rode it, because even then, at eleven, I was too tall for it. But I bought it with birthday money from an old Indian who lived out past the north shore of the lake, who always kept about seventy-five bikes for sale on his lawn. An orange ten-speed, a twenty-four inch.
Khaki’s bike was white and silver and a twenty-seven inch, and about a hundred dollars more than mine, and from a store, not a lawn in front of an old Indian’s trailer. It was too tall for her curvy little legs. No matter what, she had to stand to pedal.
We preferred to ride together. She was tough enough to stand and pedal while I rode, sitting back on the seat, my long legs hanging out and not dragging, her brown shoulders squared off and working. From her house to the corner store. From the corner store to the beach. Me, with two packs of wine coolers, one in each hand.
We go by the clapboard church and a field with hip-high daisies and Queen Anne’s lace. The road dips and rises again, pocked with loose gravel. Lines of poplars rise up on either side of the street, and we ride through the tunnel, with the light flashing in between the leaves. Not very far out, there are no more buildings, it smells sweet like a cow barn and the velvet sweat of horses, and the only sounds are the low distant moan of the train, and the clink of the little circle leaves on the poplars, blowing in the breeze.
She bikes us to the cemetery gates, but then the road goes uphill, too steep for both of us on the bike. We get off, and I carry the guitar for her while she pushes the bike farther into the cemetery, away from the tunnel of trees. The heat of the sun is full even as it sets, hot and pink and clinging to everything.
She lays the bike down and takes the guitar from me and leans it against a headstone that says LOOK, in all caps, with no other names and no dates, the design just a curtain off to one side, like the show’s about to end, the curtain about to close on the lousy one-act play of your life. LOOK.
Come look, Tennessee says, and takes my hand. We’re both sweaty, and she doesn’t go full-on palm to palm. Just our fingertips curl together. We walk uphill, and there are poplars and oaks all around the perimeter of the cemetery, with some low trees in the middle, spread out and knuckly with arms that nearly reach the ground. Rocks lie among the headstones, big boulders, too heavy to move. It’s hot and still, despite the breeze, and it has been for days. The kind of heat that needs a huge storm to break it up. The kind of heat that causes a tornado.
Tennessee walks me down to the edge. The whole cemetery is built on a hill, the outer graves sloping toward the road, or to the side, where a stream cuts low beneath the grass. She puts her finger out, like a kid running a stick along a fence. The smaller stones all face out, and they’re all children’s. Whoever designed the graveyard lined them up that way, little bodies fanned out, protecting what’s inside.
Do you ever think, she says, walking the narrow cement path around them, that maybe we’re already dead? That this is it, the afterlife, this hell we’re living? she says.
I have, I say. I have thought that.
The first grave I read just says BABY, not even named. I think about Couper’s Couper, tiny and barely formed, but boxed up and named, buried. BABY has only one date. Less than one full day. Next to it, Samuel. Next to that, Harriet. Days, weeks, a few years. Fever, measles, farm accidents, drowning.
My mother told me kids die all the time.
O
h Jesus, Rayelle, she said to me where I sat at her table, smoking her cigarettes and drinking her wine. Children die all the time, she said. She wanted me to get up, to go out, to get out of her house, and leave her alone.
I was probably killing her buzz.
It’s not the worst thing that could happen to you, she said.
What do you know about it? I asked her.
More than I’d ever tell your sorry ass, she said. Maybe we’ll talk sometime when you’re done being the center of the goddamn universe.
I kind of wanted to die right there in front of her, to prove her wrong, to make a point. She probably would have stepped right over me. And asked Chuck to clean it up.
There are so many of us, Tennessee says, making the circuit of all the child graves. We’re an army! she says. Then she takes my hand again, and pulls me along. We walk a line of concrete, too narrow to be a sidewalk, like a border marking.
That’s not what I wanted to show you, she says.
It’s like walking a balance beam, our hands curled together, both of us in skirts.
She picks a spot in the open, and all around us, the sky settles to lavender, an eerie glow behind the black trees. We sit on some sharp, dry grass in the hollow in front of a stone that says BEAULIEAU. She sits cross-legged, and I try not to look under the taut lap of her skirt. The sun is like someone left a light on in the next room, shining in and warming the side of my face, burning one shoulder.
I sit with my legs straight out, and she takes that as an invitation to swing over, to straddle my lap. She puts her hands behind my head and undoes the clip, letting my hair down, and takes the fake glasses off my nose and lays them where the grass is long enough to swallow them up, invisible.
The weight of her is like nothing in my lap because she leans forward on her knees, with her hands on my shoulders, and kisses me. It’s a long kiss. Not a joke or a dare, or a smack on the lips you might give your girlfriend after a night out drinking. It’s deep and purposeful, like it might get us somewhere.
Then she says, Where you from?
The Scamp Page 25