A line of blonde hairs ran down his stomach into his pants and his eyes were so bloodshot she knew he was both stoned and drunk. He tipped a can of beer up to his lips and smiled, glancing back toward the bed.
“What's so funny?” Ginger asked.
“Nothing,” Steve said, looking down at the carpet and trying to contain his shit-eating grin.
“You got a girl in there?” Ginger asked.
Steve looked at her with a defiant smile and let the door swing open a few inches so Ginger could see the girl coiled under his army blanket, mascara smeared around her eyes and her face slick with tears. The inverted cross and pentacle plaque over her head, the black light poster of a wizard nearby, and that smell, dirty sheets, his blood-soaked hospital clothes, ribboned with the delicate scent of the girl's body like a single tulip dipped in salt water.
“I should go,” the girl said, shifting in the bed to wrap the blanket around her as she stood, then turned away, bending over so her ribs pressed out of her back. She slipped her T-shirt over her shoulders and pulled up her jeans.
“You don't have to go just because this prude shows up,” Steve said. “It's a free fucking country. Anybody can do anything they want.”
The girl didn't answer, just finished dressing and slipped awkwardly past him and into the hallway. Steve's long hair hung in his face, obscuring all but his green eyes and shiny forehead, the hard curve of his upper lip. “The Minister's daughter,” he taunted Ginger, “rescuing the lamb from slaughter. How touching.” He laughed as the girl followed Ginger down the darkened hallway.
“You bitches can fuck each other in hell for all I care,” Steve yelled.
The girl led the way through the darkest part of the forest, far from the condo lights and the backyard spots of the subdivision. Trash clumped in the weeds; rain ruined paperbacks and silver gum wrappers. These woods were domesticated; an old fort hung precariously in one tree, a tire swing in another. She chattered nervously, telling Ginger how on summer nights she'd snuck over to swim in the condo pool and play with the condo kids, who always had firecrackers and porno magazines and could blow smoke rings. “Once we built a hut out of branches and wet newspapers and made Indian paste out of cornflakes and water. We did a lot of stuff,” the girl said, “had wedding ceremonies and beauty contests where the winners wore necklaces made out of beer tabs.”
The path led up into a backyard, past a picnic table and a swingless swing-set frame. There was no furniture in the split-level's rec room, no light on by the garage. The girl's jaw started to tremble and she said she didn't know what made her go over there. “Come and spend the night at my house,” she begged. “Nobody's home.”
“No, you go back,” Ginger told her. “Make sure the front door is locked. You'll be okay.” She touched the cool inside of the girl's wrist, the delicate tendons and subtle pulse. The girl swung into her chest, her damp lips in the angle of Ginger's neck.
The match's flame sent a prism of fractured light over the blackbirds’ oily feathers. Orange sequined their wings as they huddled in their own shit on piles of bound newspaper. The deer's eyes like marbles dipped in mayonnaise, an earwig climbed up a nostril, and slivers of dried ligament were pasted with soured blood to the top of the TV. She felt in her pocket for the baptismal candle she'd taken from the junk drawer in the church kitchen. She'd thought she'd have to use the small Christmas Eve candles with the cardboard skirts her father kept in a box in his office closet, but the old baptismal candle was there in the drawer, meant for a baby girl with its tiny pink rosebuds and cream-colored dove. With a swivel of her wrist, she worked the candle into the red dirt, took the big tarnished serving spoon from her pocket, and stabbed it into the earth over and over until she could lever out wedges of dirt. With her fingers she picked out bits of broken glass, an earthworm, molten pebbles like tiny internal organs. Breathing through her mouth, she avoided the voluptuous stink of the deer and the blackbird droppings like scuzzy ocean foam. Dirt packed under her fingernails as she used the edge of the spoon to hack through a thick root. Chips of geometrical ice fluttered in the candle's light, first frost forming on the goat grass that grew along the inner barn walls. She coiled each half of the severed vine, like baby snakes, in the dirt. The blackbirds were upset, picked at their feathers, made subtle sounds like a lady in church searching for a hard candy at the bottom of her purse.
She placed the small plastic cross against the granules of dirt and pulled the flare out of the deer's head, ripped it off the top of the television. Its expression seemed to have changed; maybe it was a trick of light, but the stoic stare was tempered now by the mouth's smirky angle, the wry tip of the deer's head. There was a drapery panel of paisley material in a pile of rain-soaked clothes out in the dump, near the ash trees and the earth balls where she'd once seen a black snake, and she hoped to use the cloth as a burial shroud. Candlelight sparked the frosted sumac berries, the kudzu leaves. She walked out of the barn among skunk weed and fisted ferns, a baby's cracked car seat and water-wasted Playboys. The flame blew sideways and dimmed. She cupped her hand around the flame, felt the fire's heat in the soft part of her palm. She heard a sound in the trees and terror quivered through her. It wasn't the furtive moves of squirrels or the sneaky sound of rats gnawing into garbage, but the sting of electrified flesh, like a belly flop, or a slap across the face. The toe of her tennis shoe caught on a kudzu vine and as she went down, five warm fingers wrapped around her ankle. Leaves flew up as she flung her arms out and kicked with her free leg. A blackberry briar ripped across her cheek and a star zigzagged like white neon.
Eight: SANDY
With every thrust of his hips, soft pubic hair and balls hit Sandy's chin and she let out a gasp, her tongue a rag carpet, her chapped lips stretched into an O, the cracked corners stinging. Worms moved inside the earth, inching their fleshy bodies through the dark; they met and whispered like French lovers, twisting themselves into knots and bracelets. She kept her eyes closed, relaxing each part of her body like when the gym teacher played the wave tape and the girls learned yoga and stress management. Worms needed oxygen when their muddy tunnels slogged full of water, so on rainy days they sprawled out pink and obsequious onto the sidewalk, letting their ridged skin breathe. The rounded shadow of her umbrella fell over their pink bodies, and Sandy, in her yellow rain slicker with the ducks on the pocket and little yellow boots to match, crushed each under her plastic sole. Gray globulars glistening on the cement, usually a sliver kept its wits and squirmed for cover in the damp blades of green grass.
For fishing, you dug them up in the backyard, pulled them out of the earth and dropped them in a coffee tin with clumps of moist dirt. Her father showed her how to run the sharp metal up through the worm's body, so the whole hook wore a flesh-colored coat. If you got out of bed at night an Indian might grab your ankle and if no one left the night light on, then you'd stay in bed. Sometimes she dived headfirst under the covers, where there were colored fish like in the dentist's salt-water aquarium. He likes me because I lie still. Her brother put slugs in a jar, sprinkled salt on them, and watched as they blistered in the sun. He'd cut green tomato caterpillars with his Swiss army knife into tiny bite-sized pieces and helped their father pour gasoline on the Japanese caterpillars’ webby homes in the backyard trees.
All morning the caterpillar bad-mouthed worms, how they lay around on the forest floor smelly and lazy as drunks. He felt superior because he had a hundred legs and a velvet coat of shiny blues and greens.
“But it's not nice,” the bear said, “to be so uppity. What about ‘all God's creatures great and small?” They both leaned against a big maple, listening to rain slap at the highest leaves and watching the turtle open her stonelike mouth and press out her gray tongue to the beads of water that dangled off tendril ferns.
“It's easy for you to say.” The caterpillar was always touchy about his genealogy. “You come from an old family, one known for its lack of common sense and lyrical appointments.”
“I admire your Socio-Marxist tendencies,” the caterpillar said, stretching out on the collar of the bear's evening coat, as if he might nap. “But the most important thing to remember is not to take anybody else's toys.”
“You make it sound so easy,” he said sleepily, shifting his rump off a jagged rock and tipping his hat down over his eyes. “If only it were so.” The bear sighed as if he were made out of caramel, a quivering baritone that intermingled with the prickly static moving in and out of the troll's lungs. Sandy opened her eyes. His belly rested on her forehead like a fat cow and she could see up the tunnel of his loose shirt to where chest hairs grew like ocean grass around his nipples. Each of his kneecaps pressed against an ear, magnifying the back-and-forth rub of his khaki pants. His hands gripped the headrest, pelvis repeatedly flattening down, then tipping up over her face.
The worm strained to multiply and even though she didn't really have breasts, she didn't want the little girl T-shirts anymore. She wanted a training bra and had snuck over to the lingerie department to look at them. Weary of the salesgirls and suddenly embarrassed, she fled to the toy department, the far counter where they kept the expensive baby dolls locked up behind glass. His pelvis cracked against her skull and the troll swung his knee over her face and knelt beside her, trying to catch his breath. She tipped her head sideways and gagged up warm Coke laced with come. The sky behind the windshield was a green-blue cellophane. He stood, hunched over, squeezed between the front seats, got his cigarettes from the glove compartment, his glasses from the storage shelf, and a beer from the cardboard twelve-pack on the floor. They didn't stay in motels anymore. He'd taken to sleeping beside her on the mattress, spreading the afghan over them both, curling up behind in a parody of marital bliss. He opened the driver side door and the harsh overhead bulb lit up the van, attracted a pair of tiny moths, made her feel like a girl in the water-stained porno magazines she found in the woods behind the house. He left the door ajar and walked out into the trees to smoke his cigarette, finish the warm beer, and pee inconsolably into the roots of a maple. Last night she'd seen the troll, sitting on a stump, wiping his eyes with one of his cloth handkerchiefs, shoulders heaving.
Turning her head away from the little puddle of puke, she saw the file folder where he kept his love letter. It must have fallen when he'd pressed himself between the seats. Her wrists were secured together with tape, but she managed to lift the folder into the light and open it to the first page.
Michael Jackson told me he never liked Lisa Marie, but he had to marry her because the king came to him in a dream and demanded that he be her second husband. If he has on white, then it’s the real king, the Love Me Tender king and you should listen to him. But if he has on green sequin trousers and a silk shirt then it’s the fake king and you should disregard everything he says. You may wonder why I took girl, that’s very secret and only for the king to know himself, it may have to do with office politics in a certain giant corporation and that the board of directors wants me dead. This is because I read the secret documents and found out about my non-person status. I challenged this 666 man to prove to me he had not tampered with the weather map and I warned the world about this christ killer in 1978. People don’t know, but Jesus once had a girl he kept tied up. He did many things to her, like sprinkle whisky on her forehead and feed her plums. Even though she was heavy he carried this girl on his back like a baby and he’d test her to make sure she was real. The Las Girl is a white cat with a pink tongue. Anyone can fuck her anytime they want. The magazines are filled with girls and no one seems to realize you can take one whenever you want.
The pages flew out of her grasp and there was the troll's face. Orbiting bugs reflected in his glasses and a soft blue vein swelled above his eyebrow. Why hadn't she heard the door open? The troll heaved his weight up into the driver's seat. His jaw trembled and she smiled to assure him it was all right. Already he turned his ring around so the ruby was palm up and he swung his arm up over his head. She closed her eyes; there were reasons. Before all this, whenever the light fell a certain way across her bedspread, she'd think of herself as a girl in a movie, watching rain beat against the window, the subdivision houses snaking off like a necklace into the horizon.
Sometimes she wrestled her brother down to the ground, sat on his chest, and dangled a drop of spit over his face while he twisted his head back and forth screaming for her to stop. She complained about unloading the dishwasher and taking out the garbage and sometimes she said hateful things to her mother that hinted at the reasons Dad left her. A desperateness came over her, a feeling of knowing the limits of her own mind, and she'd say sneaky things to everybody aimed at making them feel bad about themselves. She lied too, told strangers that she lived on a farm, that her mother was a lawyer and her father away in New York City on business. She'd lost a lot of friends because she lied; they got suspicious of everything she said, then started avoiding her in the hallways at school.
This summer her mother kept asking her brother if he'd packed, if he had everything ready. She'd taken a bath, put on a new dress and red lipstick, then sat at the kitchen table flipping through a magazine, glancing up every few minutes at the clock. He'd come into Sandy's room and sat on the edge of the bed, told her how weird it was that Mom hated Dad, because he didn't even think about her that much. His relief at going home was so palpable it infiltrated everything he said, made him flushed and talkative. He told about the video arcade in the mall and how they rented movies and watched them in the basement. Sandy felt pressure building up around her heart; she couldn't look at her brother and finally picked up the picture he'd drawn her as a good-bye present, a depiction on tracing paper of two white horses drinking from a stream.
“Anybody can copy a horse out of a book,” she said.
“You're probably right.” He took the picture back and went into his room with the red truck wallpaper and Snoopy bedspread.
The troll cut the black electrical tape with his pocketknife, pressed a strip down over her mouth, climbed into the front seat, and started the engine. She told her brother the drawing was beautiful and tacked it up on her bulletin board between her Winnie the Pooh postcard and the one of leaping dolphins. Her brother took her hand and said you couldn't touch dolphins because they got head colds and sore throats from the germs on your fingers. Dolphins liked people and wanted to come up on the land and get married, eat cheeseburgers, sleep in warm beds. Her brother said their dad was getting sick of his new wife and soon they'd both be coming back home. The troll was talking too, as he backed the van. But Sandy only half-listened, lying as she was in the grass behind the mess hall at camp, reading the letter her mother sent from home. The bear was over in the raspberry bushes, complaining about the thorns, picking nubs in his striped silk vest, and eating all the biggest berries himself.
“The caterpillar,” he said, “wasn't feeling very well. His symptoms are quite exotic: winged hallucinations and a longing for an Indian headdress. But to be honest,” the bear said sheepishly, “I'm afraid I've stepped on him. This happened once with a rather congenial cricket. One misstep and the most satisfying friendships are gone forever. It makes you think about God,” the bear said sadly. “It's so annoying leaving everything up to him.”
Nine: GINGER
Ted spread his wool army blanket on the ground, picked up glass shards and sharp rocks, though he couldn't stop the razor-tipped leaves of the kudzu from snaking closer. Through the blanket she felt bent grass, stiff weeds, and underneath cold damp dirt. He slipped his hand under her shirt, pushed her bra up so the underwire dug into flesh above the nipple, coned and flattened her breasts so they felt like animal teats. Above them a blurry drunkard's star was framed by gray branches. Trapped between that heaven and this earth, they were like the sinful Adam and Eve, Ginger thought, but instead of being cast out, God confined them t
o the polluted garden, to these fouled and fucked-up woods.
“You scared the hell out of me,” Ginger said as he undid her jeans, the metal button, the tingly silver teeth. This was a repentant fuck, so he treated her delicately and with great reverence like the common cup. Gently, he pulled her other tennis shoe off and pitched it into the kudzu near a rain-soaked sweater, then wriggled her pants down and crouched between her legs. By her head, a plastic grocery bag spilled out a roast bone, old spaghetti, yogurt cups, paper diapers that smelled of ammonia and melted butter. Junk mail and slimy plastic wrap were intertwined with the vines of kudzu.
Ted flattened his tongue and she felt his rough taste buds against her labia and looked down, watching how he moved his head like a dog drinks. And this thought was the raft that floated her over to pleasure. Sometimes it took a vision of herself, butt up, back arched, breasts hanging. Sometimes it was a rhythmic bar of his tongue strokes that pushed her out of this material world into the pure purgatory of sensation, that moment when the dirty words—clit, cock, and pussy—filled up with blood and became the language of desire. This reversal cast the fetid garbage, Ted's own palpable body odor, cigarette smoke, and sour milk into a metallic lick, the tangy taste of death's cock. The planet's gravitational spin swung her hand off the blanket into what felt like dry rice and wilted bok choy, ancient Chinese food in a splayed white paper carton. Ants ran from the scene, each holding a white kernel on their backs. Ted's voice box crackled like a jag of radio static. She put her hands into his long hair, cupped his scarred cheek against her lifeline, felt the stretched skin, the sinewy knots. Stray light from the condominium complex snagged in Ted's hair, his shirt fell open, exposing his bruised nipples; between them a crucifix, the minuscule body of a dying man nailed up on a tiny silver cross.
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