by Karen Rivers
I was always better at the dive than the swim. My swimming was always shitty, too much arm splashing and flailing, like a dog.
Tanis could swim pretty well, like a girl should. She dove into the water in her underwear, never naked. She ’d put it back on before she swam, every time, coming up with her hair slicked back. Then she did look beautiful and like the models she wanted to be. But I never said and who cared? I smoked and smoked, in the water and out.
You can’t smoke in the water.
Yes, you can. I did. A baggie tucked into my shorts, swimming to the raft and lying there, smoking, the sound of the water all around me and Tanis, and the whole time, of course, T-dot and Kate alone on the other side.
I thought they were eating chips.
I am a selfish dick and actually I didn’t think about it at all. What they were doing. And it’s none of my business.
Usually we took a Frisbee and a football and we played and the girls watched and the sun was hot and our skin burned and peeled more than once. And that’s really all that happened this summer, except when it rained and we stayed home. Except when Gary was off duty and I was on.
Then it was different.
I hate T-dot because if Kate was skinny and hot, he would have told. And I hate him more because if I was fucking her, I wouldn’t tell either. See?
Obviously.
But I thought he was a good guy. I guess I was wrong.
Anyway.
Summer. Last week. Last month. It was already a long time ago. I’ve already taken all my memories of it and edited them all together into one long scene, blurred by sunscreen on the lens and hidden behind a protective screen of smoke.
Yeah, like that.
I shoot the basketball. There is the nubby skin of it and there are my hands, my fingers finding the black grooves and the smell of the rubber is in my nose. It leaves my grip and soars into the sun, and I shield my eyes and watch it roll around the rim, once, twice, before falling, bouncing crookedly toward the girls, slap slap on the pavement.
“Hey,” shouts the new guy, Phil Stars. “I was open.”
“Sorry, man,” I tell him. I’m not sorry. He’s better than me, and I didn’t throw it to him because he’s better than me and I’m a jerk.
Tanis stands up. Throws it to me. I throw it to Stars. I am not a jerk, I’m just a guy. Just some kid. I pretend to not be me. I look at Tanis, cock my head. Sweat drips from my ear.
“I gotta get to work,” she says. “Kiss me?”
And I am not me. I am playing the part of a guy with a girl who wants to be kissed. And I kiss her like people kiss on tv, bending her backward, my sweaty shirt making marks on her clean, white, dry clothes.
The first time I went to Tanis’s house, I was pretty surprised. From outside, it looked like a normal crappy house. There used to be a mine just outside of town and there were a lot of mining houses left. Shitty little houses the company had built to house the employees. Hers was just another in a row all the same. But inside, inside it was different.
See on the ceiling, held up by wires, were these two cats. But they weren’t regular cats. They looked like bobcats.
“What the hell are those?” I said.
“Oh,” she said, looking up like she never noticed them. “Those are the cats that killed my mom.”
The cats were posed like they were about to strike. Claws out. Their faces were stretched into messed-up snarls. I thought about her mom’s dna on those cat claws. Someone had to have cleaned that off.
“What?” I said, even though I heard her.
“My dad had them stuffed.” She shrugged. “It made him feel better. It’s symbolic, you know?”
“Oh,” I said.
That is not true. That did not happen.
There are cats. Stuffed, dead cats.
They didn’t kill her mom.
Her mom left.
I don’t know the story of the cats.
Her dad is total whack job. He does security work at the bank and a couple of other places that no one would want to rob anyway. The only one worth robbing is the bank, but no one ever would. Tanis’s dad is about six foot eight. He has a scar from his ear to the corner of his mouth. He shaves patterns into his beard that make him look like a pirate. He always looks like he’s slept in his clothes, even when they’re brand-new.
He’s not, as they say, “all there.”
After Dad jumped off the grain elevator, Tanis’s dad painted it black, with skeletons all over it and a huge yellow bird at the top. He’s some kind of fucked-up artist, I guess. You never know with people.
But I still don’t understand how someone like Tanis came from someone like him.
Someone like Tanis.
There is no one like Tanis.
Sometimes she’s explaining something to me about her ratios. How the whole world and everything in it can be understood in terms of beauty and explained once you understand the numbers. I want to believe her. I want to understand what she’s saying. But mostly I just feel like a cartoon character, staring, mouth open, a huge question mark floating above my head.
Once I dreamed that her dad killed me and had me stuffed, but I was alive, and posed, claws out, over Tanis’s bed. I woke up screaming.
Tanis says, “Whoa, you’re getting me sweaty.” But she doesn’t really mind. I know she doesn’t.
“Sorry,” I say. But I’m not.
I wonder, does everyone lie?
I wonder, is there even a difference? Between lying and the truth?
I hold on to her and I can smell her hair, and it should be enough. Her hair smells different all the time. I don’t know how she does that. Today it smells like strawberries. I am looking over her head for Olivia. Does she know Olivia? Are they in classes together? Do they sit close, sleeves touching?
“Hurry up, man,” T-dot shouts. He’s breathing heavily.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say. “Just a second.”
I hold on to Tanis tighter, and I don’t know what I’m holding on to because she’s pushing me away. Over her shoulder, I finally see Olivia slip out from under the shade of the oak tree that fills the whole parking lot with acorns and leaves. She climbs into a car that peels out of the parking lot on burnt rubber. I don’t see who’s driving.
And I shouldn’t care, but I do.
chapter 9
I get home to find that Dad has fallen. Again. He sometimes forgets. He sometimes falls asleep and then when he goes to get up his legs don’t work. That’s what he says. He forgets. His head is bruised, a lump like an ostrich egg stretches purple and blue on his forehead.
“What the fuck?” I say.
“I fell,” he says. “Don’t make it a bigger deal than it is.” His hand is shaking just enough to make him look old. He’s holding on to a tiny pink bed. Tanis loves his dollhouses. He has the ratio right. The bed is made of wood. He’s painted on the pink and even a few wrinkles in the sheet. I feel like the bed is growing in his hand. It’s Chelsea’s bed, of course. From when she was little. The bed is getting bigger and filling the room. I can’t breathe. I look at Dad’s head.
There’s a rule about Chelsea: she cannot be mentioned. She doesn’t see Dad. Ever. It’s in the court documents. Never.
No contact.
I’m not allowed to know why.
I don’t want to know why.
“It is a big deal,” I say. “Where was Gary?”
Gary is a shitty care aide. I don’t believe for a second that he even is one. He’s a dealer, a biker, tattoos all the way up to his eyes. No kidding. Black and purple and blue and red and yellow and green. So much ink, you can’t even tell what it is. He looks like a comic-book villain.
“Downstairs,” Dad says. “Gary was downstairs. I’ve asked him to take over the processing. You’re getting behind.”
“What the fuck?” I say.
“I asked him to,” he says. “It’s a business and you’re behind. He knows the business. It makes sense and you know it.”
I am not the father.
Dad sighs. “Nice language,” he says. “What would your mother say?”
“She’d say, ‘Fuck you,’” I say.
Gary wanders in. Gary lumbers in. His arms are pulling the fabric on the sleeves of his shirt so tightly that the shirt looks like a bandage. Gary looks at me slowly. Everything about Gary is slow. He’s been smoking. His eyes are pink and dilated.
“What’s up, kid?” he says.
“How’s the basement?” I say sarcastically.
He shrugs. I hate him.
“Hey,” says Dad. “Hey now. It’s business. You’re too busy and you have school.” Glob takes a few steps toward me and nudges her head hard into my crotch. I pat her. She stinks like a wet wool sweater.
“Hey,” says Dad again.
I glare at Gary and he glares back, and for a few seconds that’s all there is. The shimmering heat waves of us glaring. Then something inside me collapses, and I just go, “Yeah. Whatever.”
I stomp up to my room. The stairs that Dad can’t climb make it so that the whole upstairs is mine. There are rooms I don’t go in up here. I use only this one and the bathroom. If I go in the others, I’ll have to clean them, and I can’t be bothered. One of them is full of wet mold from a hole in the ceiling. At night, I’m pretty sure I hear things scampering.
My room isn’t much better. I don’t know who used to live in this room when Our Joe lived in this house. Someone who liked heavy metal. The old posters are curled around the edges. The tape has turned yellow. I leave them up because I figure it’s kind of vintage cool. And I’m too lazy to take them down anyway.
Tanis says that Our Joe used to have foster kids. They got taken away.
She doesn’t say why.
She does say why, but when she talks, her words come out garbled, like an old tape being eaten by the machine, and I try to hear her, but I can’t, and I can’t explain why I can’t, so instead I just nod. I nod and nod.
Who loses foster kids? I hate Our Joe. I hate Gary. I hate my dad. I have so much hate I want to scream or vomit or tear the head off a chicken like the cartoon Ozzy is doing on the poster on my bedroom wall.
I can’t stay in my room for long—it makes me antsy. Besides, Gary is here for a few more hours and I don’t want to occupy the same space that he does. My muscles are twitching under my skin and I want to punch someone or something, so I switch into my running shoes and I go down the stairs again in one solid jump, landing so hard on the landing that the floor gives.
I don’t want to think about floor rot. I am seventeen years old. I don’t want to worry that our house is full of mice and, god knows, probably rats and the floors are rotting and the roof leaks and it’s almost winter again and then what? It’s cold.
I don’t want to scream, “WHAT IS ALL THE MONEY FOR?”
We could buy a house. A real one. Somewhere else. I want to move to suburbia. Somewhere pretty, with green lawns and trees and kids playing hockey in the street.
Dad is back at the kitchen table. He slowly places a tiny couch in a tiny living room. He has to special order all this tiny furniture, but he paints it and decorates it. He sews these tiny cushions for the tiny chairs. He has really big hands. It’s hard to see how that works, but it does. When he works, he sticks his tongue out slightly, like a kid learning to write.
Glob is at his feet. She is asleep, as she always is these days. Glob has cancer. Dad cannot have her put down because Glob saved his life, so Glob is as medicated as the rest of us, only she can’t stay awake through it. Sometimes she snores. If you press on her belly, you can feel the lump.
Gary keeps giving me one of his slow looks. He is cooking something in the kitchen that smells like socks. He means something by the looks. I don’t know what. I don’t want everything to mean something. I know I am meant to know exactly what he is saying, but I don’t want to know.
I just want to run.
I can run.
I step outside. The weather is ambivalent. I take a few steps and stop, and then start again. The gravel is slippery. I run down toward the corn. I have this weird feeling that I’ll only be able to run so far and then the chain will snap and jerk me back, strangling me in the process. I rub my neck with my hand.
Nothing. I run faster.
I have weed in my pocket. Wrapped up tight. Processed by Gary. I stole extra this time. What the fuck kind of “processing” does weed need? You dry it, you bag it.
What else, Gary?
I run all the way back to the school, just to have someplace to go. I run hard, sprinting until I can’t and jogging until the air comes back and sprinting again. Ugly, my feet hitting the edge of the road hard and avoiding broken glass and fast-food wrappers and a carton of milk tipped on its side in a white puddle, like someone threw it out the window of their car.
I get to the school and it’s deserted. I’m too hot, my caged breath rasping out of me, full of spit and sweat. The sun is setting, and the sky is suddenly burning with the cold colors of orange sherbet.
I shiver.
I am looking for Olivia because if she isn’t real then she is as likely to be here as not, right? If I am making her up, then I can make her be here.
Now.
But she isn’t here. The air is still; it feels like there is about to be a thunderstorm. There is no one around but me. No one in the town, no one on the planet. I am so goddamn alone, and I wish I had a guitar and a microphone so I could sing something or scream it and someone would hear it. Somewhere.
The basketball court has dark shadows tipping over it, from the tree, the flagpole, the clouds starting to gather in the sky. The net hangs crookedly off the hoop.
My hands are empty. No guitar. No ball. I don’t know what to do with them. I stare at them. Smack them together. Veins pulsing on the backs. My nails are dirty and too long. I sit on the cement steps and let the coldness of them seep through me until I’ve cooled off enough to shiver, my heart still pounding so hard in me that my eyes feel like they’re vibrating. I watch cars pass and a lady with a dog, jogging. You don’t see much of that here, so I watch her until she’s gone.
Jiggle, jiggle.
And then I can breathe again.
I walk home. Slowly. Scuffing my shoes through the gravelly shoulder of the road that broadens to four lanes. The highway that cuts through the town. The trucks roar by and try to pull me into their slipstream.
Our Joe’s farm is yellow in the sun. Green. It rolls around for miles. His ugly new house is up at the front, topping the gravel driveway like a bad, seriously-not-funny joke. A suburban palace, columns and glass. And he has no idea how ugly it is. He thinks people stare because it’s amazing. Joe himself is on his front steps, and I’m relieved that he’s dressed. He raises his hand in greeting and shouts, “TOUCHÉ!”
I have no idea what he means by that, but it pisses me off.
“Shut up,” I shout back, and he laughs like I’m the funny kid I used to be. Did he know me then? I can’t remember. I want so bad to hit him. I’ve never wanted to hit someone like I want to hit that old, pathetic, fucked-up, weird man.
Goddamn it.
My legs feel wobbly. I need to lie down.
I veer away, left, right. I stumble. I spin around. Then I’m there, in the corn.
Again.
Lost.
I like the way it feels, the randomness of a row. Like diving into the water from a different place each time and always ending up the same. T-dot once told me that diving into the water felt like coming home.
In the corn, I know what he means. I walk and walk.
And maybe the part that is so familiar is the
fact that I can’t see my way, and a part of me is scared. The corn is high and thick. I turn in circles like a little kid, around and around and around, and way above my head a plane passes on its way to Vancouver. No one can see me. I spin until the corn tilts and then I fall, hitting my head on a stalk that doesn’t give, the stalk leaving a claw mark on my cheek. I want it to puncture. I want it to go right through me. Threaded like a needle.
The dirt catches me. It’s cool and damp. I lie still and the world tilts and swirls above me. The corn moves and bends. I light up and close my eyes and then open them again and pull all that sweet smoke deeper inside of me than anything ever goes.
And hold it.
If I could hold it forever, I would.
But eventually I have to exhale.
I wait.
And wait.
And wait.
And then.
chapter 10
EXT.—CORNFIELD—EARLY EVENING, SUNNY WITH CLOUDS GATHERING
And…
SCENE:
Dex Pratt is on his back in the cornfield.
He is alone.
No, scratch that. He is not alone. Maybe.
Dex Pratt is on his back in the cornfield. He is waiting. While he is waiting, he is smoking a joint from Gary’s batch. Wheelchair weed, it’s called. (Spot the irony.) It’s strong. Somehow show that it’s strong. Impossible. Never mind.
Show the wheelchair.
Show the plants.
Show that it’s strong. How?
Dex is forgetting how to use the camera to show things.
Show Dex forgetting.
CUT TO:
INT.—X-RAY LAB
Show a picture of Dex’s brain. Show how areas are being blurred out. Somehow connect that to this. Zoom in close to his whorls of gray matter and show that very close up they look like clouds. Show that very close up they look like smoke. Show that very close up they look like paths cut into the field of corn. Show that closer they are a map of the maze.