Jennifer was reaching for something high on the wall.
“The fuck you looking at?” Arnett said. He leaned in, and I could smell beer on his breath, a gamey odor from his flesh.
“That girl,” I said. “Nothing.”
“Who are you?” he said. “And why?”
I didn’t answer.
“That’s what I thought. I classify this situation NFI: Not Fucking Important. Mommy’s little hunchy boy.”
I straightened up. “What’d you just say?”
“Put down your feathers, banty.” Arnett’s eyes wouldn’t keep still. They were wet and he pulled a rag from his pants and wiped them. He was taking in everything except me, his jugular pulsing through the skin of his neck. He held a hand in front of his face, stared into his palm, brought it to his mouth, licked it. He smiled and revealed a dark space in the side of his mouth. Teeth were missing since I’d last seen him. His bottom ones were thin and burnt-looking like used matches. All the gold in the back molars, gone. His tongue filled a gap and his eyes rolled back like something was moving inside him. “Let’s start over again, okay?” he said. “I’ll give you another chance, yes? Here’s a better question. What do you want to be?”
“That’s deep,” I said.
“Answer the fucking question, hunch.”
Maybe he actually didn’t recognize me. “I don’t know,” I said.
“That’s your problem. You need to make a decision.”
“About what?”
Arnett sucked a finger and cleaned his ear with it. “Your store. Keep an eye on it. Good old workingman boy. You do your job and she’ll do mine.”
He went to the bright wall where she stood. She seemed tiny in those baggy clothes, probably his. They talked and he threw his thumb behind his head. She glanced in my direction, then covered her face and turned away. He took her by the shoulder and said something into the hair dangling from her hood and all down her face. She shook her head. Finally he let her go and she walked straight for me over the shining floors I’d mopped that morning before opening.
“Look at you,” I said.
“Look at me.” She kept her head down until she reached my checkout counter. “What the hell’d you just say to him?” She put her hands down on the conveyor belt and it started moving, pulling her closer.
“Find everything you need, ma’am?” I said.
She laughed. She was beautiful. Then she spun away again and the color left her face. Her eyes screwed shut with exhaustion, and lines cracked through her skin. “Listen,” she said, and I turned off the belt. “He told me to tell you to quit thinking what you’re thinking.”
“He doesn’t know what I’m thinking.”
“But he knows what you want.”
“Who is he to you?”
“He’s my…Well.”
Arnett was wandering up the aisle with a quart of milk. I wrote my parents’ phone number on the back of a receipt, the numbers crossing over the print of a half-off coupon for hickory-smoked ham hocks. She stuffed the paper into her pocket and said, “What happened to your arm?”
“Call me and I’ll tell you.”
She pushed through the door to leave, before the motion sensor had time to swing it open.
There were still sweaty fingerprints on the black rubber belt. Her hands were always damp. It was something I’d forgotten about.
“What’s the holdup?” Arnett said, setting the milk where her hands had been.
I turned on the switch. “You want a bag for this, sir?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’d love a fucking bag.”
—
I waited days, but she didn’t call and I figured I’d freaked her out. Then she did, and she sounded scared, but I told her to hold on for a minute and went into my dad’s room. Standing over him, I said, “Your disability came through.” He didn’t budge. So far as I could tell, he was free of all worries. Percocet, beer, a couple joints—that’s the kind of place that helps you forget you have a wife who’ll wipe your mouth clean but won’t kiss you goodnight. I stepped over piles of dirty clothes and unplugged the phone he kept on the carpet between his bed and the wall.
I talked to her in my room with the door locked and a pillow over my face to insulate the sound. In bursts of muffled weeping, she told me Arnett was at it again only this time it was even worse. She talked until the phone got hot against my ear. “Jennifer,” I said, “slow down. What exactly’s going on?”
“A whole damn lot,” she said. “It’s all—I don’t know—everything.”
While she was busy not telling me, I heard Mom’s tires in the gravel driveway. Car door shutting. Storm door slamming. “Come over,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
She asked where I was living and I told her. “Oh,” she said, “that place.”
I told her we’d have my room to ourselves, with one parent at work and the other in bed. I could hear Mom in the hallway now, dropping her purse and kicking off her shoes. I told Jennifer I’d even pay for the gas, fill up her tank.
“I’ll be there early,” she said.
Our connection crackled when the line in my parents’ room got plugged in. “I’ll see you then,” I said.
She’d hung up by the time Mom was on the line saying, “Hello? Hello? Is somebody there? I can hear you breathing.” She sounded so hopeful, like it might’ve been someone calling from her past, when she was young and innocent, or from her future, when she would be rescued from this house and these two useless men. I didn’t have the heart to let her down, so I just listened. “I know you’re there,” she said. “Who are you?”
—
I couldn’t sleep that night, and the next morning I’d barely closed my eyes when I heard Mom calling for me outside. Early sunlight on the floor. Dizzy from getting up so fast, I jumped out the back door and limped and hopped around the house over the gravel. Mom was standing in front of her car and staring at this mutt of a pickup rumbling and crunching into the driveway, a white Chevy cab with a black Ford bed angled behind it. The whole thing rattled in disagreement with itself. Jennifer sat behind the wheel, her hair up in rubber bands just how I liked it.
“Don’t even tell me,” Mom said. “I don’t need to know.” She got in her car and pulled out around the truck, leaving tracks in the wet morning grass.
Jennifer kicked the door shut and checked in her purse for something. She always did this when she was buying time to think about what to say. Seeing her standing there was like watching the last half-year dissolve. Maybe everything was cool. Here she was, here I was. Nothing different, nothing new. She took a bottle from her purse. It was purple glass without a label, not much bigger than her hand. She shook it at me and said, “This could be the answer.”
I led her inside my dark place. Dad kept the blinds shut, and the window unit in the living room was surrounded with strips of cardboard duct-taped to the glass and covering up any space light might slither through. I usually didn’t notice this, but once she stepped through the door it was like I was experiencing the house for the first time. The old kitty litter in the carpet, left over from our dead cat. The smell of Hamburger Helper in the walls. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m moving out soon.”
“Why? You’ll just end up right back here.”
“Shh,” I said. “We got to be quiet.” I took her hand and led her down the hallway to my room, shut the door and pushed in the lock.
“We got to be quiet anywhere we go,” she said.
“Where you living? Are you safe?”
It took her a while to get to it. “I’m staying with that guy, Arnett, in an abandoned inn. Right at the top of that stupid mountain.”
“Which one?”
“The stupid one.” She pointed past the wall.
“They’re all stupid,” I said. “Why’re you out there?”
“Renovating. Nobody knows we’re there,” she said. “Nobody even goes up there. It’s on Nitro.” She was still wearing her sunglasses, but I could see her right eye w
as dark and swollen.
“He a lefty?” I said.
“Good thing you’re not,” she said, looking at my arm.
“I broke it the night you left me.”
“And it still ain’t healed?”
“It keeps breaking.”
“Just like your little heart,” she said.
“It’s not funny. I wrecked my truck chasing after you and Greg.”
“Greg,” she said. “He seemed like a good idea at the time. Smart guy, you know?”
“I don’t care anymore. Are you okay?”
“We been renovating,” she said. “We can do whatever we want with the building. Nobody gives a shit.”
“How long you been with this guy?”
“Since he lost his job at Misty’s. That’s about the time we met. He doesn’t know how the cops figured out what he was doing. They found cameras. They were, like, in the bathrooms or something.” She looked away when she said it.
“Why the hell’d you follow him up to Nitro?”
“The cameras weren’t his. Swears he doesn’t know how they got there.”
“So just to prove he’s not up to any illegal shit he breaks into somebody’s place.”
“It’s his,” she said. “Or used to be his dad’s. Whoever owns it’s letting him live up there. We even have animals. Dogs, pigs. You know, real animals. It’s, like, ours. He’s happy. I’m not going to spell it out for you.”
“Maybe I’m missing something. What brought you here to me?”
“You’re definitely missing something.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You.”
She took off her glasses. A bag of dark skin cradled a bloodshot eyeball. “I never see anybody,” she said. “Arnett does most of the work on the place. I just sweep things up and stay out of his path. We hooked a keg to one of the old taps, so the downstairs bar is kind of running now. We started it as a business.”
“I thought nobody goes up there.”
“It’s in case they do.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
“You kidding? Hell no. He thinks I’m running errands. Which I am.”
“Why’re you with him?”
“Because. He had what I needed when I needed it. That and he makes me think of somebody I knew one time.” She turned her head away from what she was thinking about and looked out the window. She pushed it up, and heat rolled in like she’d just opened an oven. She lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the screen and tapped her ash onto the sill.
“Does he have a crew?” I said.
“Sure needs one,” she said, and then stopped to consider the idea. “He’s working by himself right now. You ever work carpentry?”
“I’m no good,” I said, lifting my hurt arm as far as it would go.
“He needs a few bums he can pay to swing hammers. If you know anybody.”
“Me,” I said.
“Would you do it?”
“Only joking.”
“He probably wouldn’t even remember you. He was still high from the night before, that morning we came into the store. Sorry about that. I didn’t know you were working there.”
“I’m glad it happened. You need help.”
“You should shave your beard, just to make sure.”
“Like it?”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s got to go.”
“I’ll think about it.”
When she left, I lay facedown on the floor, sniffing where she’d been sitting. I didn’t think she actually wanted me working up there, and until I was certain that she did I wasn’t planning on shaving or doing much of anything.
I went to Foodville that afternoon but I was hardly there. About an hour before closing, my boss came out of his office. “It wasn’t even busy,” he told me, “but you made it busy. You had a line an aisle long. You look tired—go get some sleep.”
—
Mom was already gone to work and I was eating stale cereal from the box when Jennifer knocked. I told her to wait and went to check on my dad. He was drinking beer and didn’t look up when I came in.
“Jennifer’s here,” I said.
“Send her in.”
“We’re going to talk. Alone. You need anything before I close my door?”
“Jennifer’ll do. We could all of us,” he said, “just sleep like little puppies together.”
In my room she lifted up her shirt. Scars covered her belly and up toward her breasts. Not surgical-looking, just puckered things that still needed healing. I leaned over and touched one. My finger looked young next to it.
“Kind of numb,” she said.
“Can you feel this?” I traced the shape of hurt flesh. Some of the crests were still scabbed.
“Only if I’m watching.” She pushed her shirt back down. “I meant to show you yesterday.”
“What the hell?”
She told me that when she and Arnett first moved into the inn she tried to leave him, but he tied her to a board and brought her out to the pen where they kept the pigs and the dogs. All the animals lived together and it drove them crazy. He dropped her down into it and dumped slop all over her. The hogs came out of the barn and went straight for the feed. The dogs stayed back, whining and yapping. When she started bleeding, he shot a rifle into the air and sent the hogs running. Then he asked if she really planned on leaving him. “He shoots the air a lot,” she said.
I’d heard some shit about what people did to each other, but this beat all of it.
She pushed down the waist of her jeans and showed me another one. I studied what Arnett had done to her and considered my options.
“What are you going to do about it?” I said.
“Don’t know.”
“Can’t you call somebody? Make a report or something.”
“What if he tries stopping me?”
“Tries is different than stopping.” I got up.
“Where you going?” she said.
“Call the cops.”
“Please, please don’t,” she said. “Oh, please. Don’t. You can’t.” She dropped to her knees and grabbed my hands. “They won’t hold him long enough. He’ll come and find me. I mean, even after they found the cameras, he’s still out. He’ll probably end up going to jail once he’s convicted. But Jesus, it takes so long. And for this there’s no proof.”
“Your body’s proof.”
She covered her ears. “I don’t want to be anybody’s proof,” she said. “He’ll get me back. He’ll find me, and if he knows I’m even talking to anybody…Oh, God. I’m nobody’s proof.”
I turned the volume up on the TV so Dad couldn’t hear us. I sat down next to her on the bed.
She handed me the same bottle she’d shown me when she’d first arrived yesterday. “This,” she said.
“For what?”
And she said: “To kill him.”
The bottle held a homemade embalming fluid, for when Arnett shot animals. “He makes the stuff,” she said. “Swallow it just a little bit and you’ll die.” She looked at her nails. “Drink him with it.”
We looked into each other’s eyes. She sat directly in front of me in the messy nest of a sheet. Our legs were crossed, knees touching. I laid the bottle down beside us like it might explode. She filled my palms with her fists. The whole world was easily fixed. I felt more needed than I ever had in all my life.
“This is your idea,” I said.
“I was just thinking out loud,” she said. “But you look interested.”
We stayed in my room all day, watching TV and talking and touching and watching more TV and touching. I heated Chinese in the microwave. While we were eating, I asked her how she was allowed to stay gone so long, and she said he sometimes let her get made up in town. “I’ll hit the Hairport after this,” she said. “Get my hair and nails and lips and toes done.”
Some real shit was playing on Unsolved Mysteries. She turned off the TV and the noise of summertime droned and knocked against the window, the static of wings and legs and hard
knobby bodies, millions of them, all zipping around and fighting for that same old thing.
We lay close together but I was afraid if I reached out to touch her I wouldn’t be able to feel her at all. She sat up. “Grab me a beer?”
When I got back, her clothes were thrown next to the bed with the sheet across her bottom half. Another piece of hurt bloomed on her white belly. That place that had once been pure and untouched. I couldn’t stand it. She reached for the cold longneck, took a swallow and told me to sit down.
“You wanna see something?” She pulled her iPhone out of her jeans on the floor and spider-fingered through lit menus of options. The screen flipped to unfocused darkness. “Watch this.”
The sound of random noise came through the little speaker. The image now had a bright spot in the middle. I couldn’t tell what was happening but the noise eventually made sense. It was the barroom clatter of Durty Misty’s. Right here in the stupid little bedroom of my life. The screen darkened again and the image came into focus. Short tapered pillars of sitting thighs. The drawn line and darkened thatch through the middle of a lady’s ass. There was a sloppy kiss mark on one cheek, a tattoo labeled Kiss My Ass.
Rachel’s.
“Sexy-looking stuff,” Jennifer said. “Isn’t it?” She held out the phone like the video was something a person of talent had made.
“How recently was this taken?” I said.
“I don’t know. Arnett showed it to me last night. I went ahead and asked about the cameras—you know, after we talked about it?—and he just hauled it out and showed it to me. This phone’s his. He doesn’t know I took it. I’m going to throw it away.”
Rachel started peeing.
Jennifer touched my knee and walked her hand like a beetle up my thigh. “So,” she said, “maybe he was lying about the cameras.” Her hand went from my leg to her crotch. “He’s an asshole, but I do like watching this stuff. Doesn’t it kinda turn you on?”
“No,” I said. “This is serious.”
“I just can’t believe he was actually doing it behind my back. I mean, you’d never do anything like this.”
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