She walks to the store. She can’t get her driver’s license yet, and even then she won’t have a car. She buys candy in town and it feels like she’s gotten something accomplished. She’s walking home, eating a Tootsie Pop, when Trey pulls up beside her for the second time. One action means something to her and something entirely different to him.
“Where’s your wheelbarrow?”
With a fingernail she dislodges the candy glommed onto her teeth. “I didn’t need it today.”
“So you just left it at home.”
“That’s right.”
Stupid stuff, like he’s speaking in code. “Wheelbarrow” stands for something else he can’t say. But how is she supposed to know that?
“It’s a hot one.”
“Yes, it is.” Heat waves rise off the road up ahead.
“You have any interest in heading down to the quarry for a swim?”
“I don’t have a bathing suit on.”
His stomach sours because now he absolutely, definitely has thought of this young girl standing before him naked.
“I could stop at home and grab one.”
“All right.”
“Wait here though. My mother didn’t like your car the other day.”
* * *
At the quarry Trey pulls off his shirt. He wears a pair of running shorts the same color as his car. They are cut higher than the surfer trunks boys her age prefer. Trey’s shorts are the kind that sometimes accidentally expose a man. The first time she ever caught a glimpse was one of her mother’s boyfriends in a pair of running shorts. She thought there was something wrong with him. What she saw looked tortured and red, wrinkled as a turkey’s snood.
Trey’s hands are ruddy from working. That triggers a feeling inside, like she can see him using those hands to battle a woolly mammoth, drag it home for her supper. He has hair on his chest, at least one curl for every year he’s been alive. Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight. She can’t count them all. He dives into the quarry with his baseball cap still on his head, hiding something underneath.
They are trespassing, but all the kids do it. All the kids and Trey. Below the surface of the water there are broken beer bottles, brown shards coated with scum.
“Come here, little mouse.”
The words he uses. She slouches her back and stares down at him from the rocks. He has tufts of dark hair on his knuckles. A few longer mustache whiskers poke into his mouth. Trey has a mustache. She dives into the quarry after him.
* * *
Since she was seven she’s kept a white pocketbook filled with special things, a treasure purse. There’s a Kennedy half-dollar and a stick with a worm pattern eaten into it. There’s a small rubber monster for the end of a pencil. There’s a half-gone pack of Merit cigarettes. She found some of the treasure along the road into town, things that had flown out of people’s open car windows as they went speeding past. Some of the treasure came from a burned-down house. Some of the treasure is stones with bits of mica inside. Once, she found a blue Mylar balloon that had lost its air. She took it home. She put it with the other treasures. There is a piece of fake tiger skin in the purse. There are some seashells and old acorns and a tiny plastic bull another boyfriend of her mom’s brought back from Spain, where he was stationed. When she spreads this collection on her bed it feels like she owns lots of things: she’s rich. Her mother says, “Why do you hold on to all this junk?” But then her mom will finger a rusted thimble or a rubber-band ball. The purse makes the girl happy, the same way she used to feel after baking mud pies all afternoon. She’d made something of value from nothing and all she had to do was wait for the right person to come along and ask for it. “Two mud pies? That will be three stones with flecks of mica in them. Thank you.”
At first, everything Trey touched went into the treasure purse, even if it was just a pen or a lighter. But then he started touching too many things and she had to become more selective.
* * *
Her mother’s not very religious. Her mother went to college. Still, someone convinced her to join a group going on a three-day Christian retreat. A weekend up by Winamac Lake, three and a half hours away. Her mom thinks maybe she’ll meet a nice man. “A new father for you,” she says. The girl’s already had two new fathers plus the original one. Her mother registered for the retreat and they sent a brochure. Brothers and Sisters, it said. Today, perhaps more than ever, it is necessary to remind ourselves that without God we are nothing, bereft of value, incapable of doing anything. Her mother decided to go anyway. For three days.
“I really need to get away.” She plays with her daughter’s hair. Her bag is packed. “You’ll understand when you’re older.” Which is a sticking point between them. The girl already thinks she is older. After all, she’s not going to get any taller than this. After all, her mother is about to leave her home alone for three days.
“I’ve got to get away, baby. Be with some people my age, you know? I mean, I really, really need this.” Her mother smiles beautifully. The girl doesn’t doubt that what she says is true, but there are things the girl really, really needs also. Still, she tries to act like an adult. Her mother doesn’t belong to her. Her mother needs this.
The car pulls out of the driveway and, left alone, the girl creeps through the house. It’s so quiet that even sitting on the sofa makes a huge noise. She moves like light, silent but not unnoticed through the hallway, into the dining room they never use, out back into the yard. No one is there.
It isn’t until much later that she starts to feel scared, once it seems certain that the sun will set and she will be alone until day breaks again. That changes everything. She locks the doors, but that does nothing to keep the darkness out. There are gaps, secret holes in the house. There are bushes right outside where anything could hide. The kitchen cabinets look sinister. She doesn’t open them. She turns on the TV in the living room to have a voice nearby. That way, if she hears something like a floorboard creaking upstairs or a man sharpening his butcher knife she can blame it on the TV even if she knows it’s not the TV.
In the morning she’s happy to find that she survived the night, but she’s not going to take any chances again. She picks up the phone.
“Remember you said if I ever needed anything?”
“Sort of.” Trey exhales, the breath amplified by the telephone line.
“You said it.”
“Okay. All right.”
“Well. Do you want to come over for supper tonight? I’ll cook it for you.”
“You want to make me dinner?”
“Sure.”
“What about your mother?”
“She’s out of town.”
There is a lot of silence on the line—space for her to imagine the room he’s standing in. Torn linoleum and a kitchen table painted to look like oak. Dog hair everywhere. A chipped china sugar bowl someone she doesn’t know anything about once gave Trey.
“What time?” he asks.
* * *
Her mother left her with plenty to eat: cottage cheese, sliced salami, some frozen dumplings, canned soup, peas. Nothing she could serve a man for dinner. She has twenty dollars, emergency money. When she hangs up the phone with Trey she’s all air. That seems like an emergency to her.
At the store she purchases chicken breasts, broccoli, white rice, and frozen pound cake. She waits outside for a guy who agrees to buy her wine coolers. He says it’s no trouble at all and starts to laugh. He enjoys holding that door open for her.
* * *
“Ding dong,” Trey says. Her or the sound a doorbell would make?
“Trey,” and then properly, “Won’t you please come in?”
She’s conscious of where he looks, though there’s nothing unusual about her house: overstuffed, windows that have slipped some from their sills, dusty rugs, and on the walls, prints of fishermen in dangerous waters.
“I’ve got to finish up in the kitchen.” And into the kitchen they both go. She takes the broccoli off t
he stove and pours it through a colander. The steam rises up around her head and Trey, as if blown by the wind, presses his body up against her back. There, she thinks, now, finally, he will kill me. He grabs on to the edge of the sink and pulls in tightly, holding on, spooning her from behind. She stills the colander. He moves his hands up to her neck. No one says a thing. He breathes behind her ear, covering and calming her the way one might an epileptic. Which is close to what she feels like.
Trey was in his twenties the day she was born. She doesn’t fight him off. She wants to see just how wrong something can get.
Eventually he clears his throat. He lets her go. The wind dies down and Trey has a seat.
* * *
It turns out not to matter much what she made for dinner. Trey stares at her while he eats, not noticing the difference: broccoli, chicken, rice. She wishes they could agree not to talk, better to just sit there looking at each other, but she can’t keep her mouth from moving.
“You all right?” she asks him when the room gets too quiet.
“Fine, fine, fine.” He doesn’t want his wine cooler. She drinks two and pours him a glass of milk for dinner. She eats slowly. She’s not sure how things are going to go afterward and she wants time to make a plan.
“Down in Florida,” he says finally, “some people went out on their motorboat for a joyride. When they couldn’t see land anymore they stopped for a swim. One, two, three, four they jumped overboard, cannonballing, back dives from the deck, showing off. They swam about, joking, talking about the food they were going to eat, the beers they were going to drink that afternoon. Eventually one woman got cold and headed back to the boat. That was when they realized their trouble. No one had let down a ladder. At first it was funny. They were bobbing a few feet away from their potato salad, their cell phones, and not one of them could scale the side of that fiberglass boat.” Trey strokes his chin to make her wait for the rest of the story. “The Coast Guard found the boat a couple days later, floating like a phantom ship. Hamburgers and whatnot, rotted in the sun, covered with flies. The bodies washed up later.”
The girl wonders if Trey planned to tell her this story. If he’d saved up something to talk about, something he thought might make her like him, a story about dead people and flies. She feels sorry for Trey. He doesn’t understand much.
“They found a lady’s fingernail dug into the side of the boat.” Trey raises his eyebrows for her reaction.
“How’d you know what kind of dives and jumps they did if no one lived?”
He looks off over her head and laughs before taking a bite of food. He chews slowly, swallows. “Isn’t that it exactly?” He snaps his lips together. “That’s the difference between where you’re at and where I’m standing.”
“What?”
“You’ve got a clearer view.”
“Well, you’ve got your driver’s license.”
No plan comes to her and the meal is done. Trey wipes his mouth on a napkin before standing up. She doesn’t look at him. She knows he’s coming.
When he kisses her she has a strange thought: I’m kissing a water buffalo or maybe a rhinoceros, a creature foreign and large, an animal only seen in photos. Maybe it’s his mustache. He grabs on to her butt with both hands kneading and dividing. Strange new territory, and all she wonders is What’s next? What is the next thing he’ll do to me? And then, Do it now, because she needs to know what comes next.
Each move he makes gets carved into her. Not her flesh, as flesh heals, but carved like stone. She’ll have his sharpness and breath with her always now. She’ll be an old woman sitting on a porch and she’ll be able to pull Trey out, get that moment back whenever she needs it, even if he’s dead then.
Trey lifts up her shirt. Puts his mouth there. Alien blossoms, Martian fungus, her chest. She watches the top of his head, his hairs boring secret tunnels into his skull. They lie down on the couch and his weight doesn’t crush her. He fits there. He presses through her jeans over and again. Something strange that she likes. She closes her eyes. Up ahead is a gate. Trey knows the way, knows the guards, and they are almost through, but Trey stops. He stills himself, rigid like he’s heard a person calling his name.
The gate slams shut. She’s back in her living room, eyes wide open, fourteen years old.
Their damp skin sticks together. “Here’s to old Kentucky,” he says.
She has no idea what that means. They don’t live anywhere near Kentucky. A car passes on the road and it sounds like everyone who stayed young is out having a good time. Fine. Let them go.
She doesn’t know whether or not Trey and she did it. Her pants are still on. She thinks that means no, but there’s a lot she’s unsure of and would feel foolish to ask, embarrassed to learn she’d left the deed undone, like a little girl. “You want to see something?” she asks.
Trey sits up, releasing her. It takes him a while to answer, staring through the small window over her mother’s chair, wincing. The first stars are coming out and Trey’s communing with them. “Well,” he says, as if making a really tough decision.
“It’s no big deal,” she says. “Hold on.”
“All right.” Trey rakes his fingers across the thighs of his jeans.
For one moment upstairs, hands on the purse, she thinks this might be a bad idea.
She pushes their dinner plates off to the side of the table. “Come here.”
“What have we got?” Trey asks, genuinely surprised.
“Treasure.” She unzips the bag and dumps the contents out onto the kitchen table.
Trey’s eyes move from a hunk of quartz to a pencil nub, from her Mexican postage stamp to a small bead with a peace sign carved into it. “What have we got?” he asks again, barely breaking a whisper. His jaw firm with disbelief. He fingers some of the objects: a few wildflowers pressed between wax paper, a dead bumblebee in a magnifying box. “Treasure?”
“I’ve had it since I was young.”
“Since you were young.” He picks up a tiny, empty bottle of perfume that makes his hands look giant. The night starts to tick. Trey lifts a button of red glass, then puts it down. “I’m going to ask you something and I think I want you to tell me the truth.”
“All right.”
“How old are you?”
She draws her index finger across her neck where a heat is rising. Trey has cracked open. This question makes her angry. “Let me sit on your lap,” she commands.
He presses his thumbs hard into the corners of his eyes before shoving back from the table to make room. She takes a seat on one of his knees, trying to be light. “Shit,” he says. They look at the treasure spread before them.
“I’m fourteen and you already knew that.” A lens cap without a camera. An old retractable pen that says CHAMPION on it. “I found this on Brannah Street.” She’s being nice, trying to stop him from ruining everything. “And this I pulled off a chair my mother was getting rid of.” She passes him a brass upholstery tack.
Trey’s face tightens. He doesn’t deny knowing her age, but the lie he’d told himself about fourteen has dissolved. Fourteen is a girl.
Back in high school things had been going so well for him. She watches him finger a pull-top beer tab, a bit of coal, a scratch-n-sniff sticker, a small golden bell. Then he sees it. He lifts it from the pile. YUMA TRACK, it says on a pink cigarette lighter she’s stolen from him.
“What’s this doing here?”
The miniature head of a Japanese doll. A boll of cotton. And that lighter, because Trey is treasure to her.
“Let me keep it.” She turns her body toward his. “I’ll trade you.”
Trey spins his lighter head over tail, head over tail. “Oh.” He pulls back from what he’d started. “That’d be a very bad trade on your part.” She can hear him breathing, slipping away. “No.” His leg is unforgiving and every bit of strength she had over him vanishes, a switch clicking off.
They sit there a long while in the quiet until she finds the thing she’s loo
king for: What would happen to him if she called the cops? It’s a funny question, interesting. It makes her smile, so she rubs her face to hide the grin. He’d learn how old fourteen is.
“I’ve got to go.” Trey slides her off his lap like she has cooties. Fine. If she has cooties, she got them from him. What would he do if she called the cops? She studies the kitchen linoleum.
“Bye.” Just on his breath. “See you,” he says.
“When?” Breath sours swiftly. She rolls onto the sides of her feet. The night keeps swinging, Trey to her, Trey to her.
“I don’t know. Sometime. You all right?” he asks.
“Sure.”
And then he tries to hand her two twenties. She can smell him. She doesn’t take the money.
“What?”
She stares a hole in his chest. “This is all I’ve got,” she says, knowing it’s not true. Knowing that when she looks to her treasures, Trey’s lighter will still be there along with his finger bone, maybe his sternum, his kneecap, his lips and lungs, even that lady’s torn-off fingernail, and later, after he’s gone, she’ll pack them all back up into her purse.
Sometimes it can take years and years to say who got the better end of a deal. Who made out like a bandit. Her mother or God. The Europeans or the Indians. Trey or her. The people on that boat or the ocean. Maybe, she thinks, something really, really awful had just been about to happen to those people and they avoided it by drowning instead. Though of course it’s hard to think of something worse than clawing for your life in the middle of the ocean.
The phone is on the wall. It would be so easy to describe his car to the cops. Her mother might see the blue lights flashing all the way up in Winamac Lake. Maybe even her dads would see the lights.
She makes tight fists, hoping to steer the night. Come closer, she thinks, but Trey walks from the room. He swears quietly in the hall. Closer. The cops and the phone wait. The front door latches behind Trey on his way out, and night comes down around her older and colder than it’s ever been before.
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