Hick

by Andrea Portes

  “Back there.” He nods toward the bathroom, quick.

  “Nuh-uh, no way.”

  “Luli, look, I’m in trouble here, all right, and I need you to help me, can you do that? Can you help me?”

  I hesitate, looking to the floor for an answer.

  “C’mon, darlin . . . you like that? You like that when I call you darlin?”

  He picks up my chin now and starts talking quiet.

  “I think you do. I think you like it a lot. I bet there’s some other things you’d like, too. Am I right?”

  I bite my lip and nod, barely. I can’t stand it. This is a special bar trick I know by heart. He’s writing the lines now. Somehow this got turned round and he’s writing the lines. I just want him to call me girlfriend names and make nice and pull my chin up. I just want him to stay like this, protective.

  “I guess.”

  “You guess. Well, okay, then, just go back there and wait a spell while we talk business, quick, and then we’ll go for a nice drive, maybe get some ice cream.”

  Something doesn’t add up. Something doesn’t add up and I’m letting it not add up and I don’t know why. There’s something pulling me, shifting back and forth.

  Here are the gears. There’s this one about getting called sweet names. There goes that one about learning how to drive and a fantasy date with an ice cream cone. There’s this other one about some sneaky bet off to the side. There’s this one, too, about naysaying. Then there’s this one, this lumbering gear, about wanting to ride off into the sunset with Eddie, treating me nice. Can you hear them shifting? Can you hear them shifting back and forth, back and forth, jamming up, getting loose, shifting forward, shifting back and getting stuck all over again?

  TWENTY–TWO

  The bathroom in the Million-Dollar Cowboy Bar is more like a few bucks. There’s a light buzzing overhead, trapping a few dead bugs, in silhouette squares on the ceiling. The room seems painted green until, upon closer inspection, you realize there’s actually not one bit of green in it at all, but the light above bathing everything white into fishy.

  In the mirror, my face looks spooky and worn down, like some kind of broken-down ghost, left over November 1st. I’ve been waiting here for about three minutes, crunching gears, and I don’t know what I’m waiting for, but I know it’s not good.

  There’s a squeaking and a shifting and, finally, a lock into place and next thing I know I’m heading out the door because this math just does not add up and I write these lines, this is my show. But before I get there, the door opens and I find myself face to face with the ugly stranger. He stands there looking at me like a wolf looks at a sheep. He’s got a long nose, stretching too far down, almost to his lip, skinny. I decide to put my head back on my shoulders and get this thing squared away.

  “Let me by, Mister.”

  He stays put, blocking my way, staring.

  “Why don’t you take a picture, it’ll last longer,” I say, leaning against the sink, trying to act casual. If he won’t let me by straight, maybe I can sidle through sideways.

  “I wish I could, believe me. I wish I could.”

  He starts to come closer and I stand my ground, not wanting to seem scared. You got to treat lowlifes like horses, if they smell fear, they know they got the upper hand. I’m wondering when Eddie is gonna interrupt this little romance but I have a feeling, a broken-down kind of feeling, that this one is on me. The light flickers above us and if this man looked bad standing in the dim light of the bar, in the green fluorescent he looks like twenty miles of country road. I can’t believe it but he’s starting to salivate. This I’ve never seen before, so I’m real-quick lost in a strange fascination with the spit building up on the sides of his lip. I got to get out.

  “Well, Mister, it’s been nice meeting you and all, but—”

  “You ain’t going nowhere.”

  “Oh yeah, keep dreaming.”

  And with that I march right on past him, straight for the door. My plan works perfect except that he grabs me by the hair and pulls me back towards him, whispering in my ear, “I haven’t got my hundred bucks’ worth.”

  I think I can actually hear my heart cracking into bits and pieces, falling clink clink clink down the green sink drain. I muster up the courage, trying to get my soul back out the sink, and ask, “What are you getting at, Mister?”

  “You’re the bet, little girl. Your uncle lost.”

  “What? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Where’s Eddie?”

  “You’ve been traded.”

  He chuckles, pulling my arms behind my back and swinging me into the nearest stall. I struggle against him, squirming in and out of his reach, lashing out, but it’s no good. For a skinny little fucker he can fight. He forces my head back into the metal stall, cupping his hand over my mouth. I bite. He cackles out, pleased.

  “I see we got a live one here.”

  He grabs my wrists with his other hand and lifts them back behind my head. I am waiting for Eddie and sinking into the realization he’s not coming. I am squirming and fighting and clawing and squirming, but he’s wearing me down. He and his breath and his skinny long nose and his gritty teeth and his gray stubble chin. Each little outburst is leaving me more and more exhausted, panting, trying again, panting again. He’s stronger than me and it’s not a fair fight. But we all know about fair in this life. that’s something for movies with courtrooms.

  I go to kick him between the legs but he blocks me. He stops my leg with his knee and then forces my legs apart with his body. He’s holding me down now, pressed up against me. He’s looking directly into my eyes, not two inches away, like he’s getting off on how much I hate him. You may think this is the part where I’m supposed to cry, but I ain’t letting that happen. No sir. He ain’t getting that outta me. He leans in closer and whispers into my ear, “You know what I like to do to little girls like you?”

  I look at him, waiting for his answer, about as defiant as a girl can be with her mouth gagged, her arms pinned and her legs spread wide open by a toothless stranger.

  “I like to break em in.”

  He smiles a derelict little smile and traces his tongue on my neck. He bites the bottom of my shirt and pulls it up with his teeth, keeping me gagged and pinned. He starts working his way all around my neck and chest with his mouth, looking up at me like I’m supposed to like it, grinning a degenerate grin like this is his Christmas. He starts concentrating on the pink part of my chest.

  And this is where the strange thing happens. This is where the thing that’s not supposed to happen, that no one ever talks about, happens. There must be something wrong with me, some screw loose in the back of my head, because even though this is a sick old dirty old toothless old man, ugly as the day he was born . . .

  I start to like it.

  There’s something going on, new and tingly, that is somehow on the other side of justice and reason and everything my mama told me about what you should and should not do. I know now that I am a wrong dirty girl, the kind that ends up sleeping in an alley somewhere by the truck stop and waiting for the next batch of truckers to come in. I am the kind of girl who ought to be ashamed and curse herself and not worth living. And I am, I am ashamed of myself, right here, in this moment, blushing and sweating and feeling about five thousand different things at once. I know, in this moment, that I am my mama’s daughter and that I am rotten to the core.

  And I think there’s something to my flushing or my shortness of breath, because this sweaty old drunk, pinning me down, takes a moment, stops for a moment and looks at me, real deep breathing, like he’s seeing the back of my head. And he catches me and he reads my mind and he, slow and mean, breaks into an ugly little satisfied grin. And in this moment, this moment that feels like a dare, the door slams open and there he is, fucking finally, Eddie.

  He flattens the stranger, grabs me out the stall and pushes me through the back door of the Million-Dollar Cowboy Bar, hurling me into the cab of the truck.

&n
bsp; He rushes around, gets in the driver’s seat and takes off, looking back like he’s worried our little degenerate is gonna round up a posse to collect on his bet. But I know he’s not. He’s not.

  He got what he wanted.

  TWENTY–THREE

  Just cause you’re a loser don’t give you the right to sell me off like some two-bit hooker.”

  I don’t tell him the shamey part. I don’t tell him about the part when I started to turn into all the bad things you’re not supposed to be.

  Part of me is thinking that this fucker sitting next to me is some kind of knight in shining armor come to rescue me from a green bathroom but the other part is thinking, Well, if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have been pinned down there in the first place.

  And I wonder if this is the way love goes. You put some fella on a pedestal and then little by little they chip away at that little personal fantasy, chink by chink, until one day you realize they’re just a regular old shitbag like the rest. But by then, you’ve been workin so hard to keep the dream alive that you’re not about to chuck the whole thing altogether, like you’re just sticking around cause you’re too stubborn to admit you made a mistake.

  I’d bet twelve bucks that’s what happened to my mama. One day she just looked at my dad and thought, “What the fuck did I settle for you for?” Can’t say I blame her, trying to raise up one kid on nothin but Saltines and Halloween candy, after losing the other one. You might just start fucking the neighbor yourself.

  “What? You think I sold you off?”

  “Uh. Yeah.”

  “Well, you’re wrong, Luli, you’re just plain wrong about that.”

  “Yeah, right, listen, I wasn’t born yesterday so you can just—”

  “Look, that was all part of my plan.”

  “Oh, this is gonna be good.”

  “It was, see, I was just buying time, is all.”

  “Yeah, right, you must have me confused with some Okie if you think I’m trying to buy that song and dance.”

  “There are a lot of nice people from Oklahoma, Luli.”

  “What?”

  “I said there’s a lot of nice people from Oklahoma that probably wouldn’t like it if they heard you say what you just said . . . about being an Okie.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? You just threw me in a shitbar bathroom with some gap-toothed retard and you’re talking to me about manners?”

  “Retard is also not a very nice thing to call someone.”

  “Oh my Lord. You are bonkers. You really are.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Let me out.”

  “Look, Luli, you ever stop to think that maybe you don’t know everything? You ever stop to think that maybe someone twice your age might maybe know a little more about getting out of a hundred? Huh? it’s called strategy.”

  “Hmph. Wull, maybe next time you ought to run it by me first, how bout that?”

  “Well, maybe next time you’ll stick in the truck like I said.”

  We pull up to a creamy peach ice cream stand with a sign from the Fifties. There’s a charcoal little patch of a parking lot with a family of four standing in front of the window going back and forth about sundaes and maybe sprinkles and vanilla or chocolate or what about a banana split. All four of them are wearing shorts with fat pink ankles coming down like they’ve been eating ice cream for three weeks straight. There’s no fence or anything between the rickety stand and the wide open plain behind it, heading off into the Tetons and the sun burning down, turning ankles red and melting ice cream off the cone.

  They’re so caught up in the complexities of sprinkles and syrup and how much is too much and how much is not enough and maybe a Diet Coke, too, that they don’t even see us, engine idling, behind. If Eddie thinks some dumb ice cream cone is gonna wipe this pout off my face he’s got another thing coming, that’s for sure.

  “You can get out, Luli, but then you don’t get an ice cream.”

  “I don’t want a dumb ice cream. I don’t even like ice cream.”

  “C’mon, Luli, everybody likes ice cream.”

  “No, they don’t. I don’t. Ergo. Not everybody likes ice cream.”

  “Ergo?”

  “Yeah. Ergo. Therefore. Hence.”

  “Where you learn all that?”

  “My World Book Encyclopedia, thank you very much.”

  “Well, next time look up strategy.”

  “Tsh. My middle name is strategy.”

  “Oh, well, then, you must be smart. Smart and pretty, that’s a deadly combination.”

  “Hmph.”

  “Deadly.”

  “You think I’m pretty?”

  “Guess.”

  “Wull, do you or don’t you?”

  “I think if it wasn’t for that horrible mouth of yours . . . some people, not me, of course, but some people might find you kinda somewhat attractive . . . in a furry little animal sort of way.”

  The family of four waddles past us, stacked full, over to the plastic picnic bench, white and cream, taking too long adjusting, readjusting, big arms and legs, in and around the too-small bench. I guess people got fatter somewhere between then and now, or that bench shrunk, either way. They’re content, though, now that they got their banana split and their sundae and vanilla soft-serve swirl. You can lap up sprinkles and look up at the mountains and never think once to maybe venture up. You can sip a Diet Coke and talk about the weather if you have to talk about anything but why bother when you’ve got that fancy vanilla swirl spelling out happiness in a sugar cone.

  “This whole fucking country is going to the dogs.”

  We sit and watch the lappers lapping.

  “it’s changing, Luli, it’s changing, and once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

  He takes off his hat and squints at the brim. I wish you could see the bright blue sky behind him and the sun beating down and hear the movie music start to play. I have been looking for my leading man since my dad walked off the set in Palmyra, and, ladies and gentlemen, I have found him. He’s an Elvis-style cowboy with complicated ideas about how the West was lost, how the country was bought and sold, how the calf was fattened. You can’t see it now, but let me put him in hair and make-up and dust him off and shine the light. Let me set him up top of a white patch horse and cue the music and you just wait, you just wait, you’ll see it then, you’ll see it then.

  He can ride up to the tippy-top of the wedding cake and I will meet him, I will meet him, I will climb up, tier by tier, and meet him smack-dab on top of the fifth layer of frosting and he’ll dip his Stetson and call me sweetheart and darlin and sugar-pie and you may not see it yet, but believe me, just wait, it’ll hit you like a ton of bricks.

  “You want some ice cream or what?”

  We stare at the lappers and the creamy shack, the gold Tetons in the distance, pulling up towards the sun.

  “Nope.”

  “Me neither.”

  He guns the engine back and next thing you know it’s just him and me on the two-lane blacktop and I have a feeling that at any moment the wheels of the truck are gonna fly off the pavement and we’re gonna drive off into the clouds and leave this whole vanilla swirl carnival behind, pop bang swoosh, and into the big blue sky.

  TWENTY–FOUR

  We pull up to a run-down old shack, hidden behind some trees and a gutted white Impala, sitting there in the front like it’s gunning to take off.

  “I thought you said you were gonna take me driving.”

  Eddie cuts the engine and gets out, “We’re driving, ain’t we?”

  “No, but I thought you said you were gonna teach me.”

  “I am. Just gotta run some errands first. Real quick.”

  He winks and walks towards the screen door, barely hanging off the hinge. I stick to my guns in the truck.

  “Ya coming?”

  “No.”

  “Suit yourself.” He shrugs and walks in.

  I sit there staring at the shack, some
shade of ancient aqua faded down to gray, chipping off the sides. The whole thing is leaning off in one direction, like it’s fixing to run south, just waiting for its shot.

  Eddie peeks his head out.

  “Look, you might as well just come inside. I got some friends I want you to meet.”

  “Whatta you care?”

  “Well, it looks weird, you just sitting out here and all.”

  “So.”

  “Well, I think it’s rude.”

  I don’t want nothing more to do with him and his stupid bets and his whiskey smoke drinking all night long and who cares anyways.

  “Don’t you wanna be nice?”

  He gives me a look like I ought to know better and I think back to what my dad said on the stairs about how a girl’s supposed to be sweet, don’t get mean.

  Well, what am I gonna do, sit in the truck all afternoon?

  I get up, follow him inside and right away I get it.

  There’s two girls, actually, girls is stretching it, how bout women dressed like girls, sitting on the bed. The bed is in the front room and they are perched there in their miniskirts like they’ve been there for weeks. Both of them are wearing tube tops, one pink, the other white-and-black stripes. Both of them are wearing plastic chunky heels and they look like they’ve been up for five years straight. One of them has short dark hair like a boy and the other has short red hair like a boy. They look like matching salt and pepper shakers.

  But the thing that you get the most off them, the thing that just drips off the bed and into the room, is that they’ve seen it all and don’t care about any of it anymore.

  They look up at me when I walk in and one of them looks at the other like they’re in cahoots. The other one looks at Eddie.

  “Who’s the jailbait?”

  “She’s my niece.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Eddie throws some money on the bed and the brunette grabs it, counting it out. She goes into the back room and the redhead looks up at Eddie, her upper lip swirling up into a smile.

  “Aren’t you gonna introduce us?”