by Haven Kimmel
* * *
“This trailer is crooked.” Cassie stood in a patch of scrubby grass, tilting her head and righting it again.
“I believe their methods of procurement were honest, all things considered,” Puck said, hitching up his pants and settling them under his belly. “I believe Misty and Leroy saw it was empty and simply took up residence.”
“She isn’t making a moral judgment about the trailer, doofus. Where’s my lighter? Puck, do you have my lighter?”
“This trailer isn’t sitting on a level foundation.”
“I don’t have your lighter.”
“Puck, if you have my lighter, give it to me. That’s my favorite. I got it for free from a Marlboro man, and it seems to have an infinite supply of fluid.”
“Do you understand,” Cassie said, kneeling down and trying to see under the trailer, “what will happen in a high wind, I’m not even talking about a tornado?”
“Why would I steal your lighter?”
“Because your life is a constant quest for fire. You scam for lighters all the time, don’t act like I don’t know you.”
“Is there even anybody here?” Cassie asked, looking at the dark windows of the trailer.
“Misty and them don’t have a car, so I’m thinking in the affirmative.”
“I’m getting a flashlight out of the car. Don’t go in there yet.” Cassie popped open the door to the wagon and felt around among the debris in the back: styrofoam cups, underwear, a spare tire, a jack, a toolbox, a brown paper bag filled with rejected cassette tapes, paperback books, and finally the handle of the strong flashlight she’d insisted Emmy carry. The batteries were fine, and the beam was wide, although the light lost definition at the outer edge. Cassie thought of something she’d read; Einstein, she thought. She walked back toward the trailer, what was it? When you widen the circumference of the light, you widen the darkness outside it.
“Take out what’s in your pockets and let me look,” Emmy was saying. “Cassie, bring that flashlight and give Puck the once-over.”
Cassie walked around the edge of the trailer, but she had been right. It wasn’t even on concrete blocks. Behind it she saw a cage made of chicken wire, maybe twelve feet square, and a makeshift doghouse. She approached it carefully. One of the preferred props of the squatter set was a vicious dog, for all the obvious reasons. There was no sound from the pen, so she shone her light inside the doghouse door. Two eyes reflected flat green, and Cassie took a step backward. But there was no growling, no threat, so she walked closer. The dog stuck its head out, right into the light, then stepped fully out with a stretch.
“Jesus,” Cassie said, kneeling down. It appeared that Leroy and Misty had gotten themselves a pregnant coyote. The pen was poorly constructed—strong enough for a domestic dog but not nearly so for any wild thing. Cassie had heard tales from friends who had tried to tame coyotes, or raise hybrid wolves, that the dogs could escape from any enclosure. They could watch a person open a complicated latch one time and repeat it themselves.
“Where oh where is the mistress of the torch?” she heard Puck call. The dog’s ears straightened, and she turned her head in the direction of the car. Cassie’s blue-jean jacket, old and washed soft, a streak of mahogany stain on the left pocket, wasn’t warm enough, even with a cardigan underneath. She felt her teeth begin to chatter. The situation with the dog was bad, it was cruel and wrong to keep a pregnant dog locked in a tiny pen outside in the cold, and whatever happened when the pups were born would be even worse. They would die of some wasting disease, and the mother, who looked wild but surely wasn’t, would grieve herself senseless and eventually die, too. Or Leroy and Misty would disappear in the night and never think of the dog again, pups or no pups; it was the way they lived. They didn’t know how to change. The night was young; the trailer was dark. Puck was looking for Dante. Cassie didn’t move. After a while Emmy came around the corner of the trailer, and the dog ducked back into the doghouse.
“Would you mind?” Emmy asked, allowing her cigarette to dangle from her bottom lip like someone she was not. She didn’t know she was not, but Cassie did.
“Yeah,” Cassie said, “okay.” And she walked away from the dog, who let her go without a sound.
The screen door on the trailer was sprung and hung open—all the evidence anyone would have needed that the place was out of plumb. Puck knocked on the thin metal storm door, then tried turning the handle, but it was locked. He knocked again.
“Hang on!” someone shouted from inside. “I’m coming!”
Leroy opened the door, buttoning his jeans. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and Cassie noticed that he was thinner than the last time she’d seen him; his narrow chest was even more caved, his neck seemed longer. He was a tall man with curly brown hair, and his eyes were close-set over his hooked nose. Altogether he was sweet-looking, gentle and nonthreatening, a Harpo living rough. Emmy took the flashlight and shone it on her own face, then Puck’s and Cassie’s.
“Hey!” Leroy said, scratching his head. “A bunch of people I like!” He pulled them in one at a time. “I like you,” he said, kissing Emmy on the cheek.
“I like you, too,” she said, patting his back.
“And I like you, Cassie.”
“I like you, Leroy.”
“And I like you, Puck.”
“You bet, Leroy,” Puck said, embarrassed. “Where’s Miss Misty?”
“She’s here, she’s sleeping. Mist,” he called, “wake up.”
“I’m awake, Leroy, I can hear you fine.”
Leroy flipped a light switch, and the room came to life. The light was harsh, and the room was cold and humid. Misty was prone on a queen-size mattress on the floor.
“You’ve got lights,” Puck said, looking around. “How’d you manage that?”
Leroy shrugged. “Friend owed me a favor, came over and tapped in to that main line. Said he could give me phone service, too, but I was, like, who do I want to talk to?”
“That’s the truth,” Puck said, who loved his telephone.
“Man, everybody I know is hooked up in their possessions, slaved just about to their car payment and all. Ain’t for me. I’m taking it easy.”
Emmy walked over and knelt down next to Misty, speaking softly, while Cassie continued to stand in the doorway, studying the situation. Leroy and Misty were eighteen, they’d left home years before, and Cassie had seen all the places they’d lived. This was the worst. They’d started out in an old tenement in Jonah, living off the social security Misty got for her real dad being dead. There was something beautiful about that building, as if even the worst of intentions could grow subtle with age. They’d had an old sofa covered in red velvet, and a dining room table and chairs Leroy had stolen from a restaurant going out of business, and a proper bed in their bedroom. Misty’s childhood dresser, something she’d inherited from the Buells. There were teddy-bear decals on the side, leeched of color, and her collection of school lunch boxes lined up along the floor: Strawberry Shortcake, the Care Bears, Scooby-Doo. That apartment hadn’t lasted long, a few months, maybe. They were evicted when the property manager discovered fifteen people sleeping there, and Misty and Leroy had been going down ever since. Nothing was left from that first hopeful place, at least as far as Cassie could see. The sofa was gone, the table and chairs. If the lunch boxes had survived, they were nowhere in sight.
Everywhere Cassie looked, trash was tangled up in clothes and dirty blankets. There were flattened cereal boxes, spoons stuck inside plastic bowls, used Kleenex, dirty socks. And normal dirt, dead leaves stuck to the bottom of a pair of sneakers, mud, ants. Old magazines. The smell was complicated: bodies and sleep, love, smoke, grease, and mice. Puck and Leroy were talking, but Cassie couldn’t hear what they were saying. She was thinking of Belle away at school, the way she carried privacy with her when she walked around campus, the way even her letters seemed to be written in a private dead language. The attention to detail that made her a good scholar, her patien
ce, her relentlessness—Belle would faint just seeing this.
“I’m looking for Dante,” Puck said.
Misty sat up and ran her fingers through her hair. She stretched. She was pregnant, more than halfway there, from the look of things. She was wearing a faded maternity T-shirt that featured Garfield clutching a blanket and his teddy bear, Pookie, and sucking his thumb. Misty’s breasts were swollen; Cassie had to look away.
“He’s not here, man,” Leroy said, pushing trash out of the way with his bare foot. “Here, have a seat. Take the best chair, you’re my guest.” He settled back on the mattress with Misty.
“You know where he is? Seen him lately?”
“He was here,” Leroy said, looking thoughtful. “But he’s not now.”
Puck cleared his throat and carefully lowered his bulk to the space on the floor. “When was he here?”
“Hmmm.” Leroy looked up at the ceiling. “Couldn’t tell ya. You know, Mist?”
Misty yawned. A strand of her stringy hair got caught in her mouth. “What day is it today?”
“It’s Halloween,” Emmy said.
“Wow. Whoooooo,” Misty made a ghost noise, then yawned again. “Wow, that late.”
Cassie leaned against the wall. The light switch had no faceplate. She glanced up at the ceiling, the suspended acoustical tiles in which a cheap globe was mounted. The tiles around the light were darker, a tan fading into white. “Leroy, what kind of bulb do you have in that overhead, do you know? It seems kind of bright.”
Leroy laughed. “Cassie, man, you crack me. You ask the weirdest questions. So who brought what?”
Emmy reached in her jacket pocket. “I’ve got a doobie or twelve. Ooh! And there’s my lighter.”
“Apologize to me. Apologize swiftly, Emmeline.” Puck pointed a thick finger at her.
“I won’t,” she answered, unrolling the bag. “You didn’t steal this one, but you stole a hundred others.”
“You bring any food with you?” Misty asked.
“I need to find Dante, Leroy, I get the feeling he’s in these parts somewhere.”
“Dante’s a free spirit, dude. He’s cool.”
“I’m partial to Tater Tots these days, seems like I can only eat Tater Tots and cold cereal.”
“I’ve got a message for him from LeeLee.”
“That his older sister? They have the same daddy?”
“I don’t know his paternity. His mother has cancer all through her. She’s on morphine, he needs to know.”
“Mmmm,” Misty said, laying her head in Leroy’s lap. “Morphine and Tater Tots.”
“Dante loves his mother,” Emmy said, lighting a joint.
“He loves everyone.”
“You got any music in here?” Emmy squeaked out the sentence around the smoke.
“Nawhh. I can sing, though.”
“French fries will do when I can’t get ahold of some Tots. Fried potatoes is what I’m talking about.”
“What about that dog out back?” Cassie asked.
“Woof! Woof!”
“That’s Nomad, she just wandered up one day.” Leroy rubbed his fingertips over his chest.
“She pregnant?”
“I reckon. Puppies! I love puppies. It’s going to be fun to have those little fellas around.”
“Will you keep them in that pen all winter?”
“I’m thinking we’ll let them stay in here with us until they get big enough, and then we’ll let them go. Be free! Freedom for all living things!”
Something skittered in the kitchen, knocking over a bag of trash. An empty Pepsi can rolled through the doorway. In the kitchen they put the trash in a bag, in the living room they threw it around. Emmy passed the joint to Misty, who took a giant hit off it. She and Leroy belonged to a group, mostly boys, who called themselves the Army for Hemp Liberation, as if hemp were being held in a dingy prison in a third-world country. Leroy and Misty already had one baby, but nobody seemed to know where it was.
Cassie considered the darkness in the kitchen, the skittering, Tater Tots baking in a blackened oven. “I’m gonna go get some snacks,” she said, feeling in her back pocket for her wallet.
“Whoo-hoo! Snacks!”
“Here’s my keys, Cass.” Emmy pulled the ring from her jacket pocket and tossed it.
“Halloween snacks!”
“Oh, that’s right,” Emmy said, already stoned. “It’s Halloween.”
Cassie had her hand on the doorknob when Puck said, “Hey, Cassandra.” She turned and looked back at him.
“Boo.”
The Ford ran rough. There seemed to be a problem with the fuel filter, the air filter, and the plugs. Cassie drove into Jonah and went to a strip on a side street. At the Pizza King she ordered four large pizzas with everything—the Royal Feast—trying to imagine how much a group of stoned people could eat. A lot. While the pizzas were being made, she drove down to a convenience store and bought what she could there: white bread and bologna, a gallon of milk, a gallon of orange juice, eggs, cheese, four liters of Coke, and a bag of candy corn. They didn’t have vegetables, but there were some apples and bananas, so she bought those and a box of chewable vitamins. She also bought three cans of wet dog food with pull-off lids, a bag of dry food, a gallon of bottled water, and sixty-watt lightbulbs. She filled Emmy’s car with gas, then picked up the pizzas and drove back.
Before she carried the groceries into the trailer, she went back to the dog pen with the food and water. Someone—she couldn’t imagine it was Leroy—had devised a gate of two-by-fours and chicken wire that closed with a hook and a ring. Cassie stepped inside, but the dog stayed in her doghouse. All three cans of wet food went into a corner of an old rusted cake pan, then Cassie emptied half the bag of dry, filling the rest of the pan. She found a metal bowl, completely dry, and poured the water into it, then stepped outside the gate and watched the dog, a shadow among shadows, slink from the doghouse and eat the wet food desperately. She ate some of the dry, then drank water until she began to cough. Cassie opened the gate wider, as wide as it would go, headed toward the car. When she looked up again, the dog was gone. Cassie took the groceries into the trailer.
“I’m driving,” Cassie said, still in custody of the keys.
“You bet you’re driving,” Emmy said, standing like a soldier outside the car. “I can’t even make my knees move.”
“Are those your real knees?” Puck asked, pointing at them. “Or are those your Lee Press-On legs?” He and Emmy collapsed on the ground, panting with dry-mouthed laughter.
“Ho,” Emmy said, wiping her eyes and struggling to her feet.
Puck sat down heavily in the passenger’s seat. “I ate, Jesus Lord, like a lot. Was anyone watching me? I can literally feel my gallbladder at work.”
“Where are we going?” Cassie asked.
“You know what I hate?” Emmy asked from the backseat, where she was trying in vain to locate a seat belt. “Awareness of my tongue.”
“Where to now?” Cassie asked, pulling out on to the dark country road.
“Puck, have you ever been so stoned you started to pee and then couldn’t remember whether you were in a bathroom or, like, sitting on the couch?”
“I pee standing up, Emmy, it’s an anatomy issue. So I can look around and gather whether I’m in a parlor or whatnot.”
“Where do you want to go now, Puck?”
“One thing I hate is feeling like a great deal of time has passed and then discovering it’s been, oh, four minutes. Try listening to a Led Zeppelin song stoned sometime, you’ll see what I mean.”
“Ooooh, you know what I hate—”
“Could someone please tell me where we’re going?”
“West, dearest.”
“We’re already headed west.”
“How convenient, then.”
“Puck,” Cassie said, trying hard to remember the days she’d been on the interesting side of this conversation, “I need a destination.”
“Well, I
’m thinking you’ll take exception to the destination.”
“You still have to tell me.”
“Cassandra, master of the craft—”
“You know her name’s not Cassandra, right? Do you have my lighter?”
“Cassandra, I wish to visit the abandoned, what shall we call it, the institution that formerly served the mad, broken, and neglected of our fair county.”
The old state hospital was tucked away in what passed for a valley in rural Indiana, back a long lane; the spread of buildings had been condemned. It was possible Dante was there; it was possible that Puck’s reasons for searching so fervently for a person whose way of life was missing were not what he had stated.
“I’m worried about your car, Emmy.”
“I know. But my dad will give me five thousand dollars toward a new one if this one makes it two hundred thousand miles.”
Puck had rolled his window down a few inches and was sticking his nose out like a retriever.
“Why are we really looking for Dante?” Emmy asked. “Why are we not at some party, safe and warm?”
Puck rolled the window up, then tilted his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. “We’re looking for him because he is a beautiful child.”
Cassie glanced at Puck, but he didn’t say more.
“Do you have my lighter? Cassie, could you put on some music, for the love of God? Is this a holiday or not?”
Cassie pushed the tape in, and Robert Smith began to sing; she could see him in her mind, as she was certain Puck and Emmy were seeing him. A man in shadow, his eyes ringed black as crow, red lipstick smeared across his mouth. Oh oh oh I want to change it all, he sang, and Puck and Emmy sang with him. Oh oh oh I want to change.
* * *
Puck kicked the rear tire of Emmy’s car, not like a man who intended to buy it, then stomped on the ground. Kicked the tire again. “Two hundred thousand miles my ass, Emmy. We could have been in my Camaro, the gorgeous Camaro my dear widowed mother bought for me, but no. We always have to ride in this piece of—”
“Puck,” Cassie said, from under the hood, “that’s enough.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose, doofus.”