by Jackson, Meg
For the rest of my life, that smell would conjure up the same sickness, the same nausea, the same need to get rid of everything inside myself.
As though that were the only way to rid myself of the memories I could never, ever escape.
Trigger
She was screaming again. My feet hit the floor before my eyes even opened, and moments later I had folded myself in close to her, burying my nose in her hair, which smelled vaguely of shampoo and gasoline. Clutching her tight to me, I felt her heart, a frantic sparrow, beating harder and faster than seemed humanly possible.
“Shhh, Cass, shhhh,” I murmured against her, until finally she calmed down, her breath evening out to a slow, steady draw. It was only then that our bodies relaxed against each other, and I slipped back to sleep, my job done.
When I woke up, I would feel the round curve of her against my crotch, would have to groan myself out of our position, our bodies stuck together like two parts of a yin-yang. More often than not, I was hard as a rock in the mornings, and could only thank God that I rose before her so she wouldn’t feel it. I can’t tell you how hard it was to peel myself away from her warmth and feminine curves, but I did it faithfully.
We’d been living in the trailer together for three months. It was a two bedroom, and we each had our separate beds, but three or four times a week Cass’ nightmares would break the silent and still night and I’d be compelled to calm her the only way I’d figured out how.
At first, I’d just woken her up, but the sight of her crying, her apologizing, each time I did so was unnerving. Then, I’d gotten into the habit of sitting beside her and stroking her hair, which worked slightly but not very well. It had taken, mostly, my inability to stay awake one night, to figure out exactly what would calm her best. She knew, and thanked me every time, blushing. The thanks were unnecessary. The blush was an added bonus.
I knew what the nightmares about. Boys are pretty dense, but not that dense. They were about her father, the hell he’d put her through. They were about Jennie, who she talked to every week – and about whom she talked incessantly. They were about Steel, his hands on her virgin skin. She’d told me that, at some point, in the first week we’d spent together after it all went down. I’d gotten her a little drunk on red wine, thinking it might help her. I don’t know if it helped or not, but it helped her open up to me, and me to her.
We’d liked each other on those school afternoons spent poring over the rise and fall of the USSR, but now that we only had each other, we’d gotten to know each other a hell of a lot better. So much so that I trusted her implicitly with things I’d never told anyone. Her eyes, so smart and deep, wells of compassion, soaked up all my sadness and reflected it back to me in brilliant blue. Still, I guess, there were some secrets that I did keep, after all. For her own good.
She’d gotten a job as a gas station attendant in the little New Hampshire hamlet we’d finally settled on. The rent was cheap, but that was good because the pay was dirt. Me, I’d found a job fixing cars at an auto shop the next town over – one of the only classes I’d aced at our school was shop.
The car I’d driven to New England – an ancient Cadillac – was one of the many that the club kept for emergencies, parked behind the strip club we used as a front, and it was most assuredly stolen. But we’d somehow managed to cross state lines without being pulled over. I’d lifted a pair of clean plates, and in the nearly lawless New Hampshire countryside, there was little chance of being pulled over on my drive to work. Still, I spent most of that drive back and forth with white knuckles.
Cass hated her job, I knew, but she put on a brave face. She said she didn’t mind because the walk there took her right past the library, and she’d come home with an armful of books to keep the idle hours filled. She even got me reading some of them. I took a real shine to Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, anyone who put a good dose of humor in their stories. And Bukowski, of course. What kind of 19-year-old low life can resist Bukowski?
The guys at my shop were good to me, but I never really felt at home there, either. They were good old fashioned Christian men, for the most part. I didn’t ever doubt that their opinion of me would change mighty quick if they knew what I’d been doing with my life before coming to them. I was always on guard, couldn’t really join in on story time when business was slow. All my stories were dirty. I mean, they loved a dirty story, but not my kind of dirty. My kind of dirty was successfully framing another man for murder.
Cass’ father had written; the letter had been forwarded to us by the broads who were taking care of Jennie, the only people who knew our current whereabouts (at least, for the time being.) He’d apologized, fed her a whole lot of bullshit about how he deserved punishment, how he knew he was no good, but didn’t she think he’d served enough and shouldn’t she come forward with the truth? He was her old man, after all. I had left the decision up to her.
She’d spit on that letter and put it right down the trash compactor.
That, for the record, is the moment I knew I could love this girl.
If, that was, I ever felt like loving anyone ever again.
Which I didn’t foresee happening anytime soon.
See, the total and honest truth was, I wasn’t doing much better than Cass. Except I didn’t have bad dreams. I had a bad reality. Cass, she could bury herself in her books and her thoughts and writing in her journal – me being too dumb for all that, I just had to deal with my thoughts…my memories…just deal with them.
And I was used to dealing with them with drugs, with MDMA and booze and coke. But outside of some beers with Cass after we got out of work, or the occasional night at the bar with the guys from the shop, there wasn’t exactly a rave scene for me to get lost in. Hell, I hadn’t even been able to find a dealer for weed, and I didn’t reckon Cass would appreciate seeing me all fucked up on drugs, anyway.
It didn’t help that I’d been celibate since we moved in together, though I never wanted to hold that against her. She didn’t owe me anything, not her body or her heart or any part of her. Still, it was enough to drive me up a wall, living with her and wanting her and knowing she’d never take me.
Why would she, anyway? She deserved someone who could keep up a good conversation, and I could barely stand my own thoughts those days. I kept thinking of my brother, of my parents running off on us, leaving him to raise me. I kept thinking of Steel, too, and the way my finger had curled around that trigger and changed everything in that one big bang…
I tried to hide it from her. She had her own worries without having to add mine into it. But I felt a little bit like I was breaking apart, like every day a little piece of me chipped off and floated away off into the ether. I was starting to shake in the mornings, found myself messing up at work, snapping at customers over nothing. And then it started happening at home, too. And that was the worst.
First time it happened, I was already in a shit mood. I’d done something dumb at work – nothing major, nothing that wasn’t fixed in a jiff, but still. A mistake I knew better than to make. A mistake that I couldn’t believe I’d made.
So as I stomped up the stairs to the trailer, all I could think was how I wanted a shower and a cold beer – and a fucking line of white lightning. Of course, the shower and the beer were the only realistic goals. I smacked my boots against the little cement step leading to the front door, mud season making each step you took a squelching mess, the dirt hardening around the grooves of your shoes ‘til you were damn near walking on a platform of muck.
Fuck this state, I thought.
Fuck this door, I thought as the screen door squealed in protest at my opening. I oiled that thing once a damn week, I figured. And as I stepped into the living room, I heard the shower running.
Fuck this girl, I thought, blind stupid angry, thinking of how I wanted to shower. That last thought scared me, though, and I knew it wasn’t fair. So I pushed it aside, kicking my boots off and collapsing onto the ratty yellow sofa in the living room. The b
athroom was next to my room, Cass’ room on the opposite end of the trailer. I sighed loudly, as though I could expel all my bitterness and bad feelings with the right sort of breath.
When the sound of water falling ceased, I could only offer up a little thank you to the gods of good timing; I wouldn’t have to wait long, after all. Cass’ clear voice suddenly came through; she was singing, too softly to be heard over the falling water but loud enough to be heard now through the thin wooden bathroom door. Janis Joplin.
I smiled expectantly at the door; she didn’t know I was home. She was always too shy to do things like sing around me; I only ever heard her singing when she thought I wasn’t home. She’d come out and blush fire engine red seeing me on the couch. And that was so darn cute that I knew it would turn my day right around. I leaned forward as the door slid open, sticking on its rollers the way it always did, Cass’ song interrupted for a breath moment as she muttered a curse of frustration. And then she was there.
Naked.
All peach and pink and still shimmering with wetness. Her blonde hair clung to the sides of her face and neck. Her blue eyes were bright and clear.
“Holy shit,” I said as she stood staring at me from the entrance of the living room.
“Oh,” she said, her mouth forming a perfect circle. “I forgot my…”
As though suddenly realizing that she was totally buck naked in front of me, she covered herself as best she could with two hands, one cupping her pussy while the other spread across her generous breasts. The slightest roll of her stomach, a perfect coffee bean curve over her pale hips. I was immediately hard, harder than I could ever remember being.
“Trigger! Stop looking!” she squealed, starting to rush past me across the living room. And I exploded. I don’t know why; I don’t know what it was. And I guess I was good at hiding just how much I felt like a volcano erupting, since she didn’t cry immediately.
“What the fuck are you doing prancing around in the damn nude?” I growled, louder than my speaking voice. There must have been enough ire in my voice to catch her by surprise, though, because she turned to me wide-eyed, once more forgetting that her derriere was on display.
“I…I told…”
“Put some fucking clothes on! Jesus Christ!” I bellowed, lifting myself off the couch and pretty much vaulting into my room. I could feel rage and – something else – sparring inside me. I knew what the something else was, of course, though I tried to convince myself it wasn’t that.
Just like I tried to convince myself that my morning wood was just a normal dude thing, and had nothing to do with her warm body pressed against mine.
The rage though – that was even less explicable. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She’d forgotten her towel, hadn’t even known I was home…what right did I have to get angry at her?
After pacing my room for another half hour, hard as a rock, I’d calmed down enough to grab my towel and head into the shower myself. On the way, I saw her sitting on the couch, hair still wet, now dressed in a big sweatshirt and leggings. When she heard me approach, she looked at me, eyes all big and sad gorgeous. If there was any of that anger left inside me, it dissolved quickly, and I found myself feeling nothing but regret. Those eyes of hers had a way of making a man feel like an asshole, that’s for sure.
“I’m sorry, Trig,” she said softly. “I didn’t know you were home, honest…”
“No, Cass, it’s my fault. I just…I had a rough day, you know? You didn’t do anything wrong. It was me. I should be apologizing to you,” I said.
She smiled, a thin smile, and nodded, swallowing hard. It made my heart drop a little lower in my chest. You’re just like her father, I suddenly thought, and felt the rage enter me again; this time, though, it was directed at myself alone.
“I’ll make dinner, huh?” she said, clearly trying to cheer us both up. “I wanna hear about this rough day. Um…I think all we have is frozen burgers though. I could run down to…”
“Burgers sound great,” I said, ducking into the bathroom and sliding the door shut behind me. I just couldn’t bear to look at her so sad anymore. I tried to tell myself that the little muffled squeak I heard after slamming the bathroom door shut was just my imagination, wasn’t Cass stifling a cry at all…
The next time it happened, it was even worse.
It was about two weeks after my first outburst, and my mood had gone from shifty to straight up unstable. I was finding it harder and harder to sleep at night, even on those nights when I held Cass to stop her nightmares.
As bedtime got later and later, I was waking up earlier and earlier. In between sleeping and rising, I wasn’t dreaming. I was so exhausted, emotionally and physically, that it was as though I blinked and two hours of sleep went by. I was losing weight, even though I ate like a pig, everything I could get my hands on. Anything to occupy my hands, my mind, my body. I kept seeing the blood on Steel’s shirt, kept hearing my brother’s voice, his pride when he talked about the club, his pride in me…
It was movie night. We still had a VCR, hooked up to a grainy old TV that had a perpetual green line running across the bottom of the screen. I forget what movie it was; some dumb kids movie about a guy turning into a fish. It starred that thin guy with the annoying voice and stupid lips, Don Knotts. Cass had come home one day with an armful of VHS tapes from the thrift store and we’d been slowly but surely making our way through them.
At any rate, I was zoning in and out, barely able to follow the plotline. I had a beer in my hand but the effort of raising it to my lips and sipping it seemed tremendous. I wasn’t feeling anything. Just tired – not even sleepy, but tired in this way I couldn’t fix with a solid eight hours.
Tired of being a human, maybe. Just like the guy in the movie, who wanted to be a fish. Cass was sitting with her feet curled up underneath her, and I noticed that she kept twisting herself this way and that. It seemed like she was constantly wiggling around. There was a loud bang on the screen, and suddenly all that twisting she was doing seemed insufferable.
“What the hell are you moving around so much for?” I heard myself snap. “Just watch the movie.”
“Sorry,” she said, giving me an apologetic smile. “My back is just killing me. I took a spill coming home on some ice…”
“Why aren’t you more careful, then? What the hell am I supposed to do, walk you home every fucking day? I’m not your personal masseuse, you know!” I suddenly let loose in a loud voice, so loud I probably woke the neighbors. Cass stared at me wide-eyed again, the same way she had coming out of the shower that day.
“I never said…I don’t want a back rub…Christ, I’m sorry, Trig,” she said, and those wide eyes filled with tears. “I’ll be more careful…”
“Oh, shit, Cass,” I said, the rage immediately flowing back, replaced by a tide of regret. I covered my eyes with my hands. The beer I’d been holding clattered to the floor. “I’m sorry. You know I’m sorry…ah, shit…”
“It’s okay,” she said, leaning over and grabbing my hand away from my eyes. “Another rough day? You seem like you’re having a lot of those. What’s wrong, Trigger?”
“Nothing,” I hissed, pulling my hand away. I didn’t want to feel her soft, warm palm around my rough, calloused fingers. “Just tired. Just tired…”
“Trigger, you think you’re hiding this but…”
“I don’t think I’m doing anything, Cass,” I growled, my eyes falling to hers, heat probably radiating from my pupils onto her face. The room was dark, the slight fuzzy light from the TV the only means of vision. It made her look washed out and greenish. Or maybe it was me, my words, my tone, that was making her look that way…
“I’m just…trying…to live,” I finally said. Suddenly, in a wave unlike anything I’d ever experienced, I felt my desire for her peaking. I wanted to rub her aching back. I wanted to move my hands down her sides and up again, wanted to feel her breasts in my palms, my mouth nestled into the curve where her neck met her shoulder, h
er thighs sliding open for me, her flesh shivering and coming alive for me.