Dime

by E. R. Frank

  “Daddy looking for you,” I heard L.A. say in my ear, and she was there, grabbing my shoulder.

  “Books,” she told Daddy, as we climbed into the car. “She was looking at books again.”

  Daddy’s D glittered. “Told you she wouldn’t never step out on us.”

  Brandy was still asleep, the seat belt still hammocking her head. I slid into the middle seat, looking around.

  “You want this?” L.A., popping gum, handed me my paperback. With a hot-pink wad stuck between the middle pages and another caked onto the back cover.

  I tried to hand it back. My fingers were still somehow, but my heart was shaking. “Clean it up.” Inside my head I apologized. Sorry, I said to Scout and Jem and to their daddy, Atticus Finch. I’m sorry, I said silently to Dill and Boo Radley and Tom Robinson.

  “You funny, Dime,” L.A. said, as if she heard me apologizing, and then she blew a bubble.

  I glanced at Daddy up in the driver’s seat. I could see the right side of his face. His angled eye cut a dark slash. I knew better than to say anything else after what happened last time when L.A. messed up my books. But I was so mad I thought if I could get my hands on Daddy’s gun, I could kill somebody.

  * * *

  When I don’t have anything to read, I feel like a tortoise without a shell or a boat without an anchor. There is nothing to hide under. Nowhere to stop and rest. When I don’t have a book, there is nowhere good or interesting to be, there is nobody to care about, nothing to hope for, and nothing to puzzle over. When I do have something to read, it keeps me breathing. It’s the reward for all the other things. It’s the thing to look forward to, the reason for doing my day.

  When I was little and living with Janelle, I knew that after the beds were made and the dishes were washed and dried and the floor was mopped and the toilet was cleaned and the laundry sorted into piles by color, I could go sit on my pillow in the corner behind the TV and read myself into other places and other times and other clothes and hair and words and people. I could melt through a page and out the other side, where nobody could find me or touch me because I was floating on a boat inside my shell, and I could just gently rock with the wavelets of the phrases.

  * * *

  About fifteen minutes after Daddy got back on the highway, Brandy woke up. She glanced back at me. “You crying?”

  I shook my head.

  Brandy wiped her mouth and her eyes. She picked up her Poland Spring from its little round cubby by her seat and took a lot of sips. Then she glanced back at me again. “L.A!” she called past me. “You mess with Dime?”

  “Who you talking to?” L.A. called back. She didn’t even sit up.

  “You: Bitch,” Brandy said.

  Daddy’s hand struck like a snake as he popped Brandy’s ear. It must have stung, but Brandy ignored the pop and looked at me again. I hadn’t even known I was crying until Brandy asked. “What happened?”

  I shook my head again and pressed my fingertips on my eyes. Sometimes you can push the tears back in. But sometimes is not all the time.

  “This is bullshit,” Brandy said to Daddy. She said it with the kind of attitude only L.A. ever gave.

  “Shut up,” Daddy told her, and he popped her again. The Escalade swerved.

  “You got to let us rest!” Brandy yelled at him. “Look at her!” She meant me. “She’s nothing but a baby, and you working her to death! You working all of us to death! We tired!”

  “See what you did.” L.A. was sitting up, and now she popped my head.

  “Get off her!” Brandy yelled. “Damn!”

  Daddy yanked the wheel and the car over three lanes and screeched onto the shoulder. The other cars and trucks whizzed past us, making zooming noises just like in cartoons. Daddy opened his door and stepped out. He gazed out at the traffic for a second and then opened the back door. He grabbed Brandy and hauled her out and then hauled me out, too. He shoved both of us down. Then he kicked us all over our hips and behinds. The next thing I knew, he hauled L.A. out of the car too and punched straight into the side of her jaw, as hard as if she was a man. Blood gushed out of her mouth. She spit the blood and spit again, and one of her teeth landed on the back of my hand and skittered off.

  “I am just about sick a all you all,” Daddy said. The traffic kept whizzing by. “We a mile from picking up our prize, and let me tell you, she going to be a breath of fresh air. She called Lollipop, and you, every single one a you, going to treat her like she a goddamn queen. Now get your asses back in my ride, and if I hear so much as a swallow out of any bitch, I’m throwing you out the window while we driving, and I am not playing.”

  So we stood up and got our asses back into the car.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  DADDY LET US out one at a time to use the bathroom. As usual, I went last. The house was wood frame, peeling yellow paint, at the end of a sandy dirt road. Tiny bits of broken-up shells, and a few bigger swirly chunks, were mixed in with the sandy soil all over the ground. They gleamed in the sunlight. Inside, I could hear the ocean all around, but I couldn’t see it. It sounded a little bit like a highway, only deeper and with more rhythm. The soap dish on the sink was actually a clamshell turned on its back. It made me think of Mandy: She had an entire cottage room made of seashells.

  As I washed my hands and splashed cold water on my face, I heard men’s voices speaking a language I’d only heard on TV and from the father and son who sold bagels and doughnuts from the truck across the street from school. The words were fast and harsh with a lot of consonants and ch sounds. It must have been Russian. I listened, wondering if it would be possible to guess the meaning of a word, but I couldn’t even figure out when one word ended and another one began.

  When I stepped out of the bathroom, I saw three females who hadn’t been there minutes earlier. Two looked about eighteen or nineteen years old. They were white and sat straight on a sky-blue couch, their pretty knees nearly touching a wooden coffee table. Except for the shadows beneath their light eyes, these two girls were more beautiful and perfect than any real person I had ever seen. Their backs were straight as ladders, and their faces had no expression at all. They were like mannequins. Opposite them on a matching couch was an amber-skinned man sitting next to one of Daddy’s cardboard boxes, and Daddy, who ignored me completely. He was looking at the girls. It didn’t seem like he could look away. I tried to notice if I cared or if I felt jealous, but I couldn’t understand what I felt. All I could think about was L.A.’s tooth skittering off the back of my hand and when Daddy washed me himself the night he turned me out and the way his voice sounded when he shut himself in his room and spoke on the phone.

  Standing behind the white girls were two other men. White men; one huge and bald and the other medium-size with shiny black curls.

  The third female was a cute little maybe-white girl with sandy-colored skin and pretty hair and a glow. She was sitting at a bar stool, up at the counter, spinning slightly right and then left, holding Daddy’s cell phone, playing Angry Birds. I knew by the sounds. She was dressed in spotless pink-and-white sneakers, pink shorts, and a T-shirt with silver glitter letters that said FRESH.

  “This Dime,” Daddy told the girl. She looked up. “Take them bags and go on out to the car.” He looked at me. “This Lollipop.” The prize.

  “Where’s Uncle Ray?” Lollipop asked Daddy.

  “He driving up separate,” Daddy told her. “We going to meet him in a few days.”

  “Okay.” Lollipop picked up a pink suitcase and a white suitcase by the handles, one with each hand. “Hi,” she said to me. She looked at the beautiful white girls. “Bye,” she said. They looked back at her blankly. One of them said something to the other in the same language the men had been using. The other one shrugged. Then Lollipop looked at the three men. “Bye,” she told them, sliding off the stool. The two Russians laughed, and it seemed like they laughed in English, but then they muttered something back and forth and that was in Russian. The amber-skinned man nodde
d slightly to Lollipop. He had a skinny nose and full lips. He looked more Native American than he looked black, but he looked black, too.

  I led her out the door and carried one of her bags to the car: the white one, since it would get dirtier than the pink. She realized pretty fast how sandy and dusty her pink would get if she continued to pull it on its wheels, so she stopped rolling and lifted it instead. “Uncle Ray carried it in for me before,” she explained.

  With her bags in the back, nobody could lie down now. L.A. wasn’t happy about moving to the front seat. But L.A. wasn’t happy about anything right then.

  “What happened to your face?” Lollipop asked her, climbing in to sit with me and Brandy.

  “Shut the fuck up,” L.A. told her. Even though her mouth was swollen unrecognizably, I could still see the new black gap on the top front.

  Lollipop blinked. “Oh,” she said. “Well, I can run back in and get ice,” she offered.

  “Ice?” L.A. asked. “Ice?”

  I don’t know what they said next because Daddy was calling me, and I had to get back out of the car and go see what he wanted.

  “This my brother,” Daddy told me, while I stood by the bar stool where Lollipop was just sitting. “Bird, this Dime.”

  Daddy was dark and Bird was amber and their features didn’t look at all alike, but I was wise enough by then not to say so. “Nice to meet you.”

  “See?” Daddy smiled. “She polite.”

  “She skinny,” Bird said.

  “She going to grow. Also, she look better bare-assed.”

  Bird laughed. “That right?”

  “She smart. And she obedient,” Daddy said.

  One of the Russian girls said something, and the enormous bald man said something back. Then he spoke to Bird, or to Daddy, or maybe to both.

  “These girls believe they will owe to you nothing after they earn and pay to you two thousand dollars.” He spoke with that accent.

  Daddy’s gold D flashed, and Bird smiled too. His teeth were tiny, and his gums were big. Like the way the mouths of some small children look. “That’s real entertaining,” Daddy said.

  The Russian man shrugged.

  Daddy watched the shrug, seeming to think about something for a quick minute. Then his face froze over the way it did sometimes when he was mad on the phone or at L.A. “They was supposed to come turned out already.”

  The bald one shrugged again and spoke over the other one, who was jabbering in Russian to the girls, who were jabbering back. “You don’t want, I sell to someone else.”

  Daddy sat back, staring. “Well, you ain’t getting what got guaranteed, then.” He pulled up one flap of the cardboard box sitting between him and Bird and pulled out cash. Handfuls of cash. I was shocked to see him handle money in front of me. Was it everything we had earned? Three girls and we’d been working every day for eight days. Each of us earned close to a thousand dollars a day, so was that twenty-four thousand dollars’ worth of cash?

  He gathered the cash into his lap, guarding it with his palms domed over the pile. Then he nodded at the cardboard box. “You want to count it, go ahead. Going to take you a while.”

  The black-haired man threw a warning look at his friend and then walked over to pick up the box. “We will count,” he said, and they both went into another room, closing the door behind them.

  The Russian girls began talking rapidly again, to each other, to Daddy and Bird, to me. I didn’t have to understand their language to know they were worried.

  “Ten grand.” I heard Daddy mumble to Bird, ignoring the beautiful girls.

  “Word?” Bird seemed impressed.

  “Twenty and . . .” Daddy lowered his voice so I couldn’t hear what else he was saying.

  If ten grand was in the box, where was the rest? Where was Daddy keeping fourteen grand? Or was there twenty in the box? If so, where was the other four?

  “You break them in and train them up correct, they going to bring us ten times that.” Daddy eyed them while they tried to tell us or ask us something. “You ever seen hos so fine?”

  “Nah,” Bird said. He glanced over at me. “What she staring at?” I guess Daddy forgot I was standing there.

  “Shit, Dime,” he said.

  I was quiet. Now the girls were, too. We—all three of us—were nervous. They were nervous because the truth was hovering in the salt air, and they could taste it and almost see it. I was nervous because Daddy could read my mind, and even though I wasn’t planning to take any of his money, it wouldn’t be good if he knew I was even thinking about his money.

  Daddy laughed. He looked at the Russian girls and at Bird. “She love me,” he told them, pointing his thumb at me as if he were hitch-hiking. “This bitch here looooove me.”

  It was a belly punch. Leaving my gut seared and empty. Because all of a sudden I knew it wasn’t true anymore. It hadn’t been true for days, maybe even for weeks. I hadn’t known it a minute ago, or maybe it was that I had, back on the shoulder of the highway, or even before that, only I hadn’t let myself admit it. But then, now Daddy said, This bitch here looooove me, in that ugly way he had of speaking to me or about me, and it was like I woke up or I opened my eyes or my heart started beating again. My belly burned. He doesn’t love me. Scorched. He never loved me. Hot lava and laser beams. I have nobody.

  I used the internal tricks Brandy had taught me about how to make my face lie. Because I was scared of what might happen if Daddy realized my insides had just imploded.

  “Don’t tell L.A. or any of them nothing you heard just now,” Daddy warned me. “You tell them I had you unpacking shit before we left out a here.”

  “Don’t tell them I met your brother?” I asked. That’s not his brother. It didn’t matter. He doesn’t love me. It didn’t matter.

  “Don’t tell them I got a brother.”

  I wanted to fall down, but I had to show him the same self he thought he knew.

  “You my best,” Daddy said. “Why I’m going to tell anybody but my best all my business?”

  He never loved me. “But isn’t L.A. . . .” I have nobody. “I mean. . . .”

  “L.A. staying back home,” Daddy said. “You the one coming down here. After we get Lollipop and indoor set, you coming down here to run my down south Russian stable.” He looked at the Russian girls and then back at me, grinning. “You got your work cut out for you if you going to earn more than these bitches and stay my Bottom.” He chuckled, smirking with Bird. “Better find you some game.”

  I thought I heard him wrong.

  He could tell. “L.A. going to be my Bottom Bitch up north. You going to be my Bottom Bitch down south. When I’m gone, Bird going to be your Uncle. You answer to him.”

  Two stables? Two Bottoms? An Uncle instead of Daddy? I have nobody. My stomach was melting nails. I looked at the new girls. “But they’re older than I am.” I have nothing.

  “You more seasoned. You going to make more money.” He grinned. “Until you don’t. Then you might just find your ass replaced.”

  Atticus Finch spoke to me then from inside my gummy paperback, lying on the floor of the Escalade, parked on thousand-year-old seashells. “Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. It’s knowing that you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.”

  “Two thousand,” the girl with the brown eyes told Daddy. She looked at him with her chin held high. I half expected him to punch her.

  Daddy shook his head. “Sorry, sister,” he told her. “I don’t know why your man wasn’t straight with you, but it ain’t no two thousand. It ain’t like that.”

  “Two thousand,” the other girl said. “We clean house many house many day, we earn two thousand, we pay to you for that airplanes ticket, we pay to you for sleep and for finding job, then we continue clean house, we hold money, we have American life, we finish you, we do not give to you more.”

  I stayed still and quiet, hoping Daddy could not hear the heat screaming inside m
y belly. He never saw me.

  The Russian men returned from the other room with the cardboard box. How much of the money L.A. and Brandy and I made was in that box?

  “What bullshit you told them?” Daddy asked the men.

  “Money good,” the black-haired man said, ignoring the question.

  “You better communicate to these bitches on what they in now.” Daddy was getting agitated. I could tell by the way his eyes angled downward more. By the way the scar got covered over by the two unharmed halves of his eyebrow. By the way he started breathing through his nose, his nostrils flaring. He never saw me. He never loved me.

  The bald man sighed. The black-haired man shook his head at the girls.

  Suddenly I wondered what was happening in the car outside. L.A. and Brandy must have opened the doors for a breeze. Maybe with Lollipop they even scattered out of the car to stretch their legs. L.A. could have already popped Lollipop a few times. It was even possible they were picking up sparkling bits of shells or walking toward the smell of the southern ocean.

  “Courage is not a man with a gun.”

  The black-haired man kept shaking his head as he explained something that took a long minute. The girls began yelling. They stood up. They were not mannequins anymore. They were angry girls, like any angry girls anywhere. They were scared girls, like any scared girls anywhere. They were panicked girls.

  “Mine mother!” the gray-eyed one screamed at the Russians and at Daddy and Bird. “Mine mother!”

  And the blue-eyed one was crying and shaking her finger, just like we did, we black girls back in Newark, New Jersey. “No!” she shouted, slicing the air. “No, nyet, no! We will not!”

  “This how you do business?” Daddy yelled over them, to the Russian men. “Bitches was supposed to come broken in!”

  The black-haired one shrugged. “Give to us the money you removed, and we will break them for you,” he offered. “We do here now. Few hours. Finish.”

  “Shit,” Daddy said. “Fuck.” He shook his head at Bird, nostrils wide. Then he handed over his pile of bills.

  The black-haired Russian added the money to his cardboard box and then punched each beautiful, angry girl on the side of her head, almost faster than I could see. They fell quiet and down, caught by the sky couch and by the coffee table. The bald Russian yanked the blue-eyed girl around and then tore her shirt.