Quite Contrary

by Richard Roberts

  Scarecrow peeked her head past the door behind me and asked, “Do you think we should be in here?”

  “He’s not coming back.”

  That was enough for Scarecrow. She walked right in and started prying a broken chain link out of the wall by the bed.

  The guy sure had been in a hurry to die. His dirty brown suitcase sat unopened on a dresser. His wallet and keys sat beside it. I couldn’t drive, so his car key didn’t do me any good, but I scooped up his motel room key just in case, then pried open his wallet and pulled out the cash. Twenties, tens—well over a hundred dollars. How much? I didn’t care.

  “What’s that under the bed?” Scarecrow asked.

  Not a good question. But I didn’t smell blood. Scarecrow was on her hands and knees on the far side of the bed, so I peeked under this side. The bed frame was low, really low. I could fit my hand in, but not my arm. That black shape—“I think it’s his gun.” I thought about that. Rat could go get it, but, “—I don’t want it anyway.”

  I straightened back up, which gave Rat an excuse to crawl the rest of the way up to my shoulder. “Come on. Maybe we’ll come back later, but right now I’ve got some money and I want real food.” The chocolate was already making my stomach crawl.

  I locked the door behind us and wandered around to the motel office. I could ask where there’s a restaurant. The little bitty brightly lit room was empty, so I slid the glass door open and banged the bell on the counter.

  Nothing happened.

  While nothing happened, Rat crawled down my arm and reached out to snag a road map off a display rack. Those were standard in motels, right? Like the little ‘Welcome To Peaceful’ pamphlets next to it. The sign over this place had been Peaceful Inn, right?

  Rat started to unfold the map, but he needed three legs to hold onto my sleeve. I helped him, but road maps are always a pain in the butt. Scarecrow helped me, and we spread out a map of most of the middle of the US.

  It was the first real map I’d seen since getting lost, but—“This doesn’t give me a clue where we are now.”

  “We could be anywhere. This town isn’t marked,” Rat said.

  Of course.

  Nobody’d answered. I banged the bell on the counter harder. Still nobody answered, but a middle school girl slid the door from the street open and looked inside. She held a little boy smaller than me by the hand, and they had the exact same black hair, so he must have been her brother.

  “Hey,” she asked nervously. “This may seem like a dumb question, but you haven’t seen our parents, have you? They were dressed up real nice, she had on a blue skirt and sweater. Anything?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry.”

  “Thanks anyway.” The girl tried to keep smiling for her brother as she left.

  I banged the bell on the counter one more time, loud. Not a peep from the curtained door on the other side of the counter. There was no point in going back and looking.

  “An ugly story just started here, and I think it came into town with us.” Rat said. He sounded grim about it.

  I pulled the door open and walked back out. Scarecrow tried to fold the road map as she followed me back to the intersection. That ought to keep her out of my hair for a year.

  Things had changed fast. There hadn’t been much traffic before. Now there was none. I didn’t see any adults, but besides the girl and her little brother, I saw four more kids down the street, standing around with the same confused expressions.

  Forget the stoplights. I walked straight across the intersection and looked into the candy store again. The perky young woman from the desk had disappeared. Being female was no protection, apparently.

  The store wasn’t completely empty. A girl slightly younger than me in a skirt, stockings, and a sweater covered in pony silhouettes had made a bag out of her sweater and stuffed it full of more chocolate bars than I’d dreamed of stealing. I about wanted to kick her outthrust rear just to punish her for the sweater, but that box perched on her hip was an old fashioned walkman, one of the ones that played CDs, and it connected to a pair of cheap pink headphones over her ears. My heart tightened. An old CD player. I might know the songs. I could get lucky. She could have Les Miserables in there. This whole suburb seemed to be stuck about twenty years behind the times, didn’t it? So, her walkman fit in. I didn’t care what it played. I could turn it up so high I wouldn’t be able to hear Puzzle screaming. That would help get me out of here.

  Plus, she was a thief and I really hated her sweater. I tried to enjoy it as I threw open the door, stomped up behind her, and grabbed her headphones and walkman. I planted one of my pile driver shoes against her butt and kicked her forward, ripping the walkman loose. Eighties music. That scratchy sound from the earphones was eighties music. It would do. My jaw tensed up at the thought of how Puzzle’s scream had cut off wetly when her ribs came open. Anything to cover that up.

  Stolen candy sprayed everywhere as the girl fell on the floor. She looked up at me. I don’t know what my face looked like, but instead of complaining or arguing or swearing she whimpered and stared.

  She’d think of something to say in a second, but I didn’t give her that. I snapped the walkman onto my skirt and pushed my way back outside again.

  The display said FM. She had the player set to radio. I turned that off and flipped it open. Unmarked CD. Did I even care what the music was?

  Rat peeked over my shoulder and opened his mouth.

  “Shut up,” I ordered.

  I didn’t want to look at him. My stomach did feel like a knot, and the candy inside would make it worse. I tucked the headphones around my neck and stomped down to the next intersection.

  “Taco Takeout. That’s such a cheap name, isn’t it? Did you want to eat there? And I bet that orange sign—” Scarecrow chirped until I cut her off.

  “Shut up!” I yelled. Didn’t she get that I wasn’t in the mood? That I didn’t want her help?

  The neon signs on that dark building—that was where I was going. Still no cars, so I cut across the street. No name on the four-leaf clover sign above the door, but once I pushed inside, I could tell. The thumping jukebox, the dark wood, and shadows everywhere, this was obviously a bar.

  The bar itself might have told me that, but I wanted this place to have tables, too. That meant there’d be a menu above the shelves full of bottles. There was. I stomped up to the register.

  “You’re going to need one hell of a good fake ID,” the barman said whimsically as he peered over the bar.

  “I just want a burger and a coke, okay?”

  “Sure. Have a seat and we’ll bring it to you, Little Red,” he quipped.

  Yes, thank you, buddy, I knew quite well I looked like an idiot.

  I found a booth in the corner and threw myself into it. Scarecrow abandoned me to go mess with the jukebox, and I couldn’t blame her. The song was awful. Some whiny woman begging a guy not to leave her, even though he treated her badly. Whatever. I could barely make out the words over the music. It was annoyingly loud, and I wouldn’t be able to listen to the walkman I’d just stolen, but random music was random music, and it blotted out memories.

  The waitress brought out my burger. There were a couple of customers, too. The adults hadn’t entirely disappeared. I took a bite from the hamburger, letting charred beef overcome the sickly sweetness of lingering chocolate. Scarecrow stabbed buttons on the jukebox to no effect. She didn’t have any quarters for it, and I didn’t care. It was an ugly brown box. If it had been one of the old-fashioned glowing jukeboxes with actual records I might have been interested.

  I took another bite, and heard several pops outside, even over the music. Gunshots.

  That got attention. Two guys and the waitress moved to peek outside. Instead of sounding fearful, one of the guys asked, “Do I really see a naked chick walking down the street?”

  “Wow. Just wow,” the other guy said.

  “No kidding,” said the waitress. Two more customers drifted up from the back ta
bles. Someone pushed the door enough to open it, and as soon as it opened, they all spilled out.

  That just left me and the bartender as the only two people in the bar. He was pretty smart, because he pulled out a shotgun, loaded it, and laid it conveniently close under the bar.

  Me and the bartender were the only two humans in the bar. If you counted Scarecrow as people, she was much more interested in the jukebox than gunshots outside, and now was having fun feeling around in the spare change slot. If you counted Rat, well, he jumped off my sleeve onto the tabletop.

  “You mean to act like this, don’t you? You know how to get home,” he asked, his voice quiet enough I could barely make him out over the whining singer.

  It would have been easier if I’d gotten the stupid rat, if he’d just been angry or unhappy. This was too calm and respectful, and I couldn’t quite get mad enough.

  “Yes, I know. I met this girl, Rose, who could answer any question. She told me what it would do to me if I went home. I don’t think she knew she was also telling me how to get there. I don’t know. Maybe.” That was more answer than I wanted to give him, and I took a long drink of cola so the acid taste would wash the words down.

  Rat sat there not saying anything.

  “What was home like for you, Rat? You had to grow up somewhere.”

  He tugged on one of his ears. I didn’t know what that meant this time. “Home was someone else’s fairy tale. My family and I were rats living in a blacksmithy. The blacksmith’s badly treated apprentice was actually an orphaned princess, and she shared her food with us, so one day we brought her the key to let her out. That was that. I never saw her again, and I wanted my life to be more interesting than that. I left the smithy looking for more stories.”

  “So you had a thing for princesses right from the start.”

  “I suppose. It was more like the story she represented,” he lied.

  “What was Elizabeth like when she wasn’t drunk? I never really got to meet her,” I asked.

  He hesitated, but he couldn’t duck a direct question. “At first, ‘drunk’ is mostly what she was. When the fairy drugs wore off and the fairy magic started pulling at her, she got even worse. She needed my help just to survive. I had to find her an inn to stay at and pay the innkeeper with a trick and find horseshoes to nail up to keep the fairies from catching up to her until their spells let go. No matter how much pain she was in, she was always kind. She always thanked me, and thanked other people. “

  “You got her to the City of Iron and Yellow Smoke somehow,” I pointed out.

  “She shook off the spells faster than I’d have believed,” he said, “After two days, she could walk, and after that she hardly needed my help. On the first night, she stopped and fixed an old woman’s rocking chair without being asked, and the old woman let her stay for the night. The next morning we were standing in the road looking around, and with the sun shining through her hair, a carter said he knew she was a princess in disguise, and gave us a ride.”

  God, his voice sounded light. Talking about her made him so happy. Did he have any idea how obvious it was? “Do you think about her a lot?”

  He’d stopped paying attention. “Sometimes,” he said without thinking.

  Yes, of course he did. Sometimes.

  My hands shook, and my eyes hurt. I tried to freeze my face, but I couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down onto my cheeks. “Why did you come back to me, then? Do you think it isn’t obvious you loved her more than me? Are you so stupid you wanted to settle for second best? Did you think I’d be flattered by that?!” I yelled at him.

  A distraction saved him from answering. The door of the bar opened just enough for the gray-eyed blonde from the truck to poke her head inside. Maybe the bartender had been properly cautious, or had been worried by my shouting. He had his shotgun out already. It didn’t do him an ounce of good. She winked, and he left the gun on the counter and hurried right out the door after her.

  Rat watched him go. He thought he’d gotten out of this. Was I stupid enough I’d forget he practically wrote a love poem to a princess in front of me thirty seconds ago? I shoved my chair back as I climbed to my feet, braced my foot against the edge of the table, and kicked it over. It smashed against the floor, scattering Rat and my food and glass.

  That got Scarecrow’s attention. Forget Scarecrow’s attention. I’d been putting this off and putting this off. I was a stupid little girl who’d known what I needed all along. I wrestled myself up onto one of the high bar stools, crawled over the bar itself, and dropped down on the other side.

  I needed a drink. That’s where this was going. That’s where it had always been going.

  Whiskey, scotch, rum, brandy, tequila, vodka, wine, more stuff I didn’t recognize, all lined up on mirrored shelves behind the bar to catch the eye. It didn’t really matter, did it? I grabbed an ugly green bottle of gin. It would taste like crap, and I didn’t want to pretend I was doing this because I liked the taste.

  I wrenched off the cap, tilted it back, and took a big swallow. At my size, that ought to get me drunk right there.

  It did taste nasty. Mouthwash would have been tastier. I didn’t know about drunk, but it left the back of my throat burning, and my stomach. The heat spread out. My arms and legs felt wobbly, which was better than shaky. They didn’t give out on me, my body just started to relax.

  I needed to relax so badly. I pulled up the barkeeper’s stool, climbed up onto it, and took another swallow.

  It felt so good to relax and let the heat seep over me. Maybe a third swallow—but not yet. Probably in a few minutes, but this stuff had barely hit, and another drink might knock me out before I was ready.

  I put the bottle on the counter and laid my arm next to it, and my forehead on my arm. I tried to stop sniffling and just feel the booze creeping through me.

  Maybe it was time for another drink after all. I grabbed the bottle again, but Scarecrow grabbed it too.

  She sat right across the counter from me. She only had that one expression, but her voice wobbled as she begged, “I’m scared. Please stop doing this.”

  I yanked the bottle out of her grip and threw it at her face. Barely three feet from me, and I still missed. It smashed against a table behind her.

  “Shut up!” I screamed.

  She fell back off her bar stool, and I screamed again, “This is none of your business! You should be grateful someone’s willing to put up with you at all, because even made of wood you’re too stupid to survive five minutes on your own!”

  She scrambled for her footing, and missed and fell on her butt instead. Sitting on the floor wasn’t far enough away from me. She flinched back, almost lying down, turning her face away.

  Oh crap, Mary.

  I didn’t try to stop the tears, and they burned down my cheeks over and over. I prayed I wasn’t as drunk as I thought I was. Maybe I wasn’t. I climbed over the counter okay, and stumbled over to Scarecrow, and reached down to grab her hand. She weighed a ton, but I pulled her to her feet and hugged her wooden body tight.

  “Please forgive me. I know you can’t, but I’m sorry. You’re right. Not another drink. Never again. I never want to taste alcohol again.”

  “I don’t know what to do to help you,” Scarecrow sounded like she was crying, too. I felt a pull on my skirt. Rat was climbing up it. Oh, thank goodness, he’d forgiven me.

  “There isn’t anything. There just isn’t. I can’t help myself, either. I’m going to keep trying anyway,” I said.

  I let go of the hug, but wrapped one of my arms around hers. When I started walking towards the door, she didn’t make me pull her. She wanted to leave more than I did.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I muttered.

  I pushed the door open and stepped out into the late afternoon sun. Still no traffic. No adults. I couldn’t see a single one. Other shops in the center had lights on, but were empty. Plenty of children stood around looking confused, and a couple of them were crying.

&nb
sp; The pink sweater couldn’t be missed. There was the girl I’d robbed. I pulled the headphones off from around my neck and unbuckled the walkman from my waist. I still had no idea what the CD inside was. I dragged Scarecrow over to her and shoved the walkman into her hands before she could run away. From the way she flinched, the girl really wanted to run away.

  “Here,” I said as I grabbed her shoulder, and pushed her towards the biggest knot of kids. “Listen! I think your parents are dead. Even if they’re not, they can’t help you. That naked woman wandering around? She’s a monster, or alien, or I don’t know what. She’s taking your parents, and she makes adults stupid and they can’t fight her. You can run away if you want, or try and fight her if you want, but she’s going to be much, much stronger than a regular person.”

  A couple of kids heard me. Some more grabbed the sweatered-girl’s arms and she repeated my words for them. I wasn’t getting involved in any of it. I turned and started walking up the street.

  “I’m going to walk home,” I whispered to Rat and Scarecrow. “I don’t know if I can get there. There’s nothing else I can do anymore. I’m going to keep walking, and either I’ll get across, or the Wolf will catch me.”

  I tromped through an abandoned intersection. Right past it was an on-ramp leading up onto a freeway. At the top, I saw a sign: ‘Lexington, 10 Miles.’

  I knew where I was. No, not yet, but I knew how to get there. Pulling Scarecrow along, I climbed the ramp.

  walked along the side of am abandoned freeway. On and on. The only difference between this freeway and the last one was that trees soon swallowed up the sides of this road. They looked very, very familiar. Drive five minutes out of town back home and I’d have been drowning in trees. I didn’t recognize this road, but it led home.

  The walking must have been clearing my head, because there was a problem with that fact. I stared at a chopped off stump by the road as I wrestled with it. Finally, I just had to turn around and say it.

  “Rat, take Scarecrow and go back. Take her back to fairy tale land. Help her become alive. If I make it to the end of this road, you’ll turn into a regular stupid non-talking rat. Scarecrow will just die.”