by Jon Pineda
“It’s a dress, dumbass.”
Someone wraps rope around my chest.
“Why would she wear a dress to this?”
“Because she’s a girl.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t she wear the jumpsuit?”
“I didn’t give her the jumpsuit.”
“Why didn’t you give her the jumpsuit?”
“Shut the fuck up. She’s here, isn’t she?”
Someone loosens the rope and tells me they’re only doing it so I can change into clothes they keep pushing against me. I go to pull off the hood, and someone grabs my wrist.
“I don’t think so,” they say.
“What does she think she’s doing?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care.”
“She needs to change.”
Someone laughs.
“I’ll change her,” another voice says.
More laughter.
* * *
I try to look through the hole in the hood, but I can’t see anyone’s face. The hood smells like Italian dressing, like they’ve been sitting around eating catered food all day and using this one hood as a napkin.
“Peekaboo,” someone says. “I see you.”
“She’s trying to look.”
“Fuck her. Let her look.”
* * *
My hands are free now, but I don’t try to take off the hood. Instead, I try to take off the dress Dox made for me, and someone says, “You’re taking too long,” and rips the straps and it falls into a bunch by my ankles.
“Why did you do that, dumbass?”
“She was lollygagging.”
“He said gagging,” someone else says.
More laughter.
* * *
“Look, she’s not wearing a bra.”
“So, she doesn’t even have tits.”
“Mason said she was a good fuck, though.”
“Yeah, but I like there to be tits.”
“Listen to you.”
“Whoa, that’s a bush.”
“That’s a fucking jungle.”
“Why isn’t she wearing underwear?”
“Because she’s wild.”
“I told you. Didn’t I tell you?”
“That’s the biggest bush I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s not a bush. It’s a whisker biscuit.”
“Biscuits and gravy.”
More laughter.
* * *
I feel my way into the jumpsuit and zip it shut.
“Where are your shoes?” someone says.
I don’t answer.
“She needs shoes. Did anyone bring shoes?”
“Fuck the shoes. The jumpsuit is enough.”
* * *
Someone walks me over and makes me take a seat in the chair. It’s warm from the lights shining down on it. They tie my arms behind my back and cinch the rope around my waist and then to the bottom legs of the chair. They wrap my ankles as well.
“Who has the camera?”
“Me.”
“Turn it on, dumbass.”
“It’s on.”
“Keep it on.”
“It’s on.”
* * *
When they pull off the hood, I count four of them. They’re dressed alike, in all black, with black ski masks over their faces. They’re the same stupid person, except one of them is holding a knife. Its blade is white. There’s a tripod with a camera on top. They’ve been filming this.
* * *
“Aren’t you going to scream?” one of them says.
I don’t say anything.
“She has to scream,” another says. “Otherwise, it won’t look realistic.”
“You want it to look realistic? I can make it realistic.”
“Who brought the blood?”
“She did.”
More laughter, all eyes crinkling.
* * *
“You want it realistic?” the one holding the knife says, but he’s not talking to me. He’s talking to the others. I stare at the camera and don’t open my mouth. He stands beside me and makes the pose. My eyes glaze over.
“Look,” he says to the others, “we have an opportunity here.”
“Go on.”
“I think we started this scene too soon. We should start over. Where’s her dress?”
Someone walks over and grabs the dress.
“This is a fucking rag.”
“Are you on the rag?” someone asks me.
“Ask her again.”
“Are you on the rag?”
I don’t say anything.
“Let’s get a video of her changing back into the dress.”
They all look at me.
“You can do that, right?”
I realize they’re talking to me.
I don’t say anything.
“Mason said she’s wild.”
“She looks wild.”
“She looks like a fucking dog, but okay.”
“A bitch in heat.”
“Yeah, fucking bitch in heat.”
“Are we doing our original idea or not?”
“She doesn’t look surprised now.”
“We can splice it together. I have a shot of her face seeing the knife.”
“Are you scared?” they ask me.
I don’t say anything.
“She’s a fucking bitch.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
The one holding the knife puts the blade up to my throat.
“God, I could just do it right now. It would be so easy to take her head off.”
“We need a green screen.”
“Fuck the green screen.”
The one with the knife puts it to my neck and presses.
“Get her down on her knees. She needs to be on her knees.”
“I think you’re hurting her,” someone says.
“Am I hurting you?” the one with the knife says.
I don’t say anything.
I know it’s Wythe. He’s trying to sound like Main Boy.
“See?” he says. “I’m not hurting her, dumbass.”
* * *
I feel dizzy. All of the lights go dim at the same time. It’s as if someone put the hood back on my head, but that’s not it. The room is painted black. There are no more lights. I hear the boys scream, and I hear someone saying, “Don’t even think about it,” and I hear what sounds like things tearing and breaking apart, like fire crackling from branches being thrown into the blaze. I try my hardest to look into the darkness, but I can’t make out all of the shapes colliding into one another. I just know when the lights come back on, I see Fritter standing in front of me.
“Are you okay?” he says.
“I’M OKAY.”
There are no more flies, except for Wythe, who’s off to the side. His mask has been ripped off his head, but he’s still holding the knife, waving it around like a TV remote.
“Get your punk ass over here,” Fritter says to him.
“Fuck you, man.”
Fritter laughs. “Give me the knife, boy.”
“Fuck off, coon!”
Fritter grimaces. “Give me the knife and maybe I’ll let you walk out of here with that little dick between your legs.”
Wythe makes as if to place the knife on the floor and but then charges Fritter. Fritter grabs Wythe’s wrist and tries to bend it, but the knife goes into Fritter’s side. Fritter pulls it out. The knife falls to the floor. If it made a sound, I couldn’t tell you what it was.
* * *
Fritter keeps bending Wythe’s wrist.
“You’re hurting me,” Wythe says, dropping to his knees.
“Get the knife,” Fritter says to me.
I grab it off the floor and walk over to Fritter. I hand it to him.
“No, I don’t want it.” He bends back Wythe’s arms, wrapping both wrists with rope.
“I don’t want it either,” I say.
“Yes, you do.”
“Pearl, this isn�
�t funny,” Wythe says. “We were just kidding. We were going to let you go.”
“He thinks he’s apologizing,” Fritter says, like Wythe isn’t here.
“We were going to let you go. You have to believe me, Pearl. We were going to let you go.”
“You think that’s the truth?” Fritter touches the wound. “Do you think he was going to let you go? He was never going to let you go.”
I grip the knife. The world rushes inside my body.
“Do it,” Fritter whispers. “He’s a punk ass. We’ll put all of his pieces in the river. They’ll never find him. You know they’ll never find him.”
“No!” Wythe starts crying. “You have to believe me, Pearl.”
I want to believe him, but I know he wasn’t going to let me go.
I glance at Wythe, but I don’t see him.
My head is ringing, “Princess! Princess!”
THERE IS NOTHING I WANT more than to cut away the truth, and I know where it is now. It’s made a little home inside Wythe’s neck. Just like the growth made a home inside my mother’s chest and then hid in her brain and in other parts of her body. She became someone else entirely.
Now that I see it so clearly before me, now that I have this one chance, I’m going to take the knife and cut it away. I’m going to open it up like I’m picking the lock on a door, like there’s a girl and her mother on the other side of the door, inside the boy’s neck. I need to get to the mother before it’s too late. Before her mother drifts away and never comes back.
The worst thing I’ve ever seen is my mother smiling. For just a moment, she wanted me to put the pills in my mouth. She was supposed to take me with her. Sometimes I wish I could have gone.
* * *
I go to thrust the knife into Wythe’s neck, but Fritter stops me short.
* * *
I can smell Wythe now. He’s pissed himself. He’s crying louder.
“I knew you could do it,” Fritter says to me. “I knew you could.”
Wythe opens his eyes. He laughs and cries at the same time.
I’m angry at first, until Fritter starts singing.
* * *
The flies are all gone now, even Wythe. They took their golf carts and drove away, but they left behind Mason’s camera and light stand. Fritter goes scavenging while I change back into my dress. I tie knots in the straps to keep the dress from falling down. I wonder if Dox will be able to salvage it or just change it into something else entirely.
We load the camera and the light stand into the back of the pickup, along with a box of paint and an array of brushes Fritter scores from one of the storage rooms. On the ride back, he asks me if I erased the footage on the camera, and I say I did, but I didn’t.
* * *
When we get home, I can hear Dox and my father on the pier. Fritter has stopped bleeding, but he needs stitches. He walks out there. It’s like nothing has changed.
When Dox sees Fritter, he freezes.
“How the hell did this happen?” my father says.
“I was playing with a knife,” Fritter says, and looks at me. “It was my own damn fault.”
“Is that true, Pearl?” my father says.
I run in the house and bring out needle and thread. Dox is already washing the wound with the little from what’s left in the bottle. Fritter doesn’t even wince. He just looks at his father the entire time. Even when Dox begins to close him back up. Fritter stares, and Dox weeps.
IN THE MORNING, DOX GLANCES up from a book he’s reading. He sips his coffee and says, “It’s instant, if you want some.” I shake my head, and he studies me.
I shrug.
“That’s it?” he says. “That’s all I get?”
I smile, but it’s not enough. Dox waits for me to keep going.
Fritter limps past us with the new cans of paint. I want him to summarize the night, but he’s already closed his door behind him. Dox keeps waiting. I don’t say anything.
“Oh, you should’ve seen it,” Dox says. “There were all these girls there, but my dress was the best. And Andy Warhol was there, and he couldn’t take his eyes off of me. Everyone had their eyes on me.”
Dox takes a sip of his coffee and grins.
“What did Fritter say about it?” I say.
“Nothing.”
“He’s not talking?”
“Not a word.”
FOR THE NEXT WEEK, it’s a feast of quiet. My father keeps the door shut. I check the traps, but nothing gets stuck. The river keeps doing its thing. The fish that live within it pay no attention to the flies I cast. I walk the woods and call for Marianne Moore, but she doesn’t answer. She’s gone. She was the smartest of all of us.
* * *
I expect the sheriff to come out here at any moment, whether to arrest Fritter for what he did or to hammer up a NO TRESPASSING sign. When I come back from my walks, there’s Dox on the back porch drinking another cup of instant coffee. That’s it. He’s tired of the chicory, I suppose.
* * *
In the evening, the window is a speaker for the song coming from the pier. Dox slides the notes, and my father punctuates them on the refrain. I wait for Fritter to blast the chorus, but he’s stopped singing. The rest of the song stops as well. I hear a splash. I poke my head out the window. I can only see Dox glowing there in the darkness. I can’t see my father and I can’t see Fritter.
“Come here, Pearl,” my father’s voice says, but it could be the river talking.
* * *
I rush down the stairs. Dox is alone.
“Where are they?”
He points down at the water.
I can’t see anything. They’ve both gone under. When they surface, they’re each holding an end. I don’t want it to be true, but it’s true.
“It’s still alive?” I say.
My father looks up from the river. He is smiling. “Did you miss me?” he says, moving the fish’s mouth.
* * *
Dox says we shouldn’t eat it because who knows what diseases have bored into the meat. Fritter says we can’t eat it because it fought and deserves respect, that it’s the second-toughest fucking thing he’s ever seen. He winks at me.
* * *
The blue cat is still as big as it is in my memory. Even though they’re pretending like it’s alive, I know it’s not. Everything has been feeding on it. It’s been at the mercy of the river for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” I say to my father.
“Why are you sorry?” he says.
I reach down and place my hand on the fish, but it doesn’t move at all.
* * *
Fritter cradles the blue cat to him and floats on his back. He is singing, but it’s not singing. It’s something else I can’t quite name. I just feel it. It takes being alive to sing the way he does. He is guiding the thing back to where it came from. He is going home into the darkness, and he will make it back. He has already shown me it can be done.
THE NEXT MORNING, MY FATHER says it’s about time we pawned the camera and the lights we brought back, and while we’re at it, the rod and creel, too. I ask him how he knows about the camera, and he says nothing ever gets by him. He wants it all gone. He thinks we’ll get so much money that we can take a vacation. I tell him I thought we were already on vacation. Dox hears this part and laughs.
* * *
The traps are full, but I haven’t brought any empty cans to carry the crayfish back. I drop the canisters of chicken wire and they bubble as they descend back into the river. I take the path and find the long net reset. The posts twitch. I wade out and find it’s a bunch of pumpkinseeds that are tangled up. They are bright-striped aqua and yellow faces with black dots tattooed behind their gills. I unwrap the lines of monofilament from their bodies, and they dart away like I’m flinging cards across a room.
“You’re welcome,” I say.
* * *
When I get back to my room, the camera and the lights are gone. A horn is honking. I stare out over the
yard filled with washing machines. My father is sitting behind the wheel of the pickup. A tarp is in the back. He waves me down.
I climb in the cab. “Where’s my stuff?”
“Your stuff. Listen to you.”
“It is my stuff.”
“You took it, Pearl.”
“So what?”
“So, it’s not yours.”
“It’s not yours either.”
“That’s right, it’s not mine. But it’ll get us some money.”
“We don’t need money.”
We both laugh.
I study the side of the boathouse. He follows my eyes.
“That’s something else we’ll need to fix,” he says.
* * *
We’re going to give it all back. This was his plan all along. We pass the speed-limit signs that are blown off their posts. The ones still standing are riddled with buckshot. The river is so faithful. It runs alongside us. The water looks clear to me now, but I know it’s an illusion. It’s there when it’s not there, no matter whether I can envision it or not.
“Turn here,” I say.
“Here?”
“Yeah, where the fountain is.”
“The marble seems a bit unnecessary.”
“I think it’s all supposed to be an oasis.”
“An oasis from what?”
* * *
We make the turn into Main Boy’s neighborhood and follow around the traffic circle. Our pickup rattles. We have to slow to let a number of bloated men in golf carts zip across the road to reach the green on the other side. I keep watching my father’s face. We pass house after house, each one a larger river-rock-and-cedar-shake monstrosity than the last.
My father says, “You know, I could’ve been a golfer. Dox sometimes talks about the game. He used to work at a golf course. Did you know that?”
“Not here?”
“God no.” My father grins. “No, when he was younger. Back when he was with Fritter’s mother.”
“But Dox didn’t stay to raise him.”
“He came back.”
“Like that means something.”
“It does in my book.”
We pass more houses.
People are living their lives.
“Would you ever want to play golf?” he says.
My father slows to let more golf carts cross.
“It seems kind of stupid.”
He smirks. “Why stupid?”