Warped

by Rick Ochre

  My apartment was just a room half underground with a window up near the ceiling. It looked out on the shrubs in front of the building. Those shrubs were tangly and overgrown, but I didn’t mind because it meant people couldn’t see in. I don’t like people looking at me. Mama always said Don’t let folks look at you Francis, it isn’t safe and I guess that’s a habit that stuck.

  Miss Regina’s window looked on the parking lot. She tried to cram in all this furniture until there wasn’t hardly any place to sit, but that didn’t stop her asking me over every day when I got home from my shift at the Stop ’n Go.

  She served me the same shortbread cookies Mama liked. She had a cameo ring on one little finger like the one Mama had. She had a way of saying her a’s that sounded like a sigh, like Mama used to do, so if I closed my eyes it seemed like it was my mother’s voice coming out.

  #

  Mama said the Lord turned away when I was born—how else could the devil have put his mark on me?

  I remember being little and sitting on the floor in the middle of summer with long socks pulled up over my knees. Mama told every teacher I had don’t ever let Francis take those socks down. She told them I had a skin condition.

  In a way it was a skin condition, I guess. The birthmark was jagged and brown and shaped like an upside-down cross, the devil’s sign if there ever was one.

  #

  Dad took off and Mama had trouble getting work after a while ’cause she’d forget to show up or talk to herself too much or tell the boss the other workers were stealing from him.

  So we were home a lot together.

  When I was six, she decided to cut out the birthmark. She gave up halfway. But where she cut, the skin healed with a raised-up line to it. So it looked like the cross had its own shadow.

  A couple years later she decided to burn it off. By then she was spending her afternoons smoking and sipping on her special tea she mixed up in a Big Gulp cup. She tied my leg to a chair when I wouldn’t sit still enough and when it didn’t work she decided to make a right-side-up cross higher up my leg. That one took, anyway, though it was crooked and looked like a connect-the-dots.

  It was that second cross that made me do what I did.

  I was twelve and looking at my leg one day. I only looked at myself late at night when Mama finally drank enough tea to sleep. Only then did I take my pants and socks off.

  I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. Maybe it was working so hard to make sense of what Mama said all the time. But I looked at my ankle and it hit me that the first cross, the one I was born with, it was actually right-side-up for me—looking down, the cross looked proper.

  And I thought what if it wasn’t the devil’s mark at all? What if the Lord had marked me special so I could be reminded of Him whenever I looked down?

  And if that was true, then was it the other cross—the one my Mama put on me—that called out to the devil?

  I’m not the type to get mad. But that day some kind of dark fury wrapped itself around me and smothered me and I couldn’t get clear of it until I’d made sure my mother wouldn’t confuse me no more.

  #

  I watched Miss Regina making the bubbling little words that didn’t sound like words, and suddenly I wanted her to know it was all right.

  But time was running out because her eyes were starting to roll up a little, and I knew it wouldn’t be long. I’d been trying to tell her but the words weren’t connecting together the right way.

  I had to show her. I put my foot up on that old saggy bed and I rolled my jeans up to my knee. I pulled off my sock and showed her my ankle, so she could see the Lord’s mark on me.

  But it wasn’t there.

  I looked at my leg and my gut did a sort of flip-over and I rubbed my fingers over the spot but it was smooth and plain.

  And then I understood. It was the devil’s work I’d done. It was him confused me and guided my hand and now he’d won and the sign of the Lord was gone from me forever.

  ##

  YOU’LL BE A WOMAN SOON

  Girl, you’ll be a woman soon

  Soon, you’ll need a man

  - Neil Diamond, 1967

  Fifteen hours to Florida, and the sky started out gloomy and grew angrier the whole way. Scudding clouds at dinner in Knoxville turned to a thick roiling stew by the time the last of the light left the sky.

  They were in Heather’s dad’s car, a solid two-year-old Buick he’d agreed to let them use only after reminding them that gas wasn’t cheap and to take turns filling up the tank. Even then he didn’t seem to approve of any of them. Trish could understand with Destinee, but the rest of them? Clean with the sheen of virginity on them like sizing on cheap calico, frosted lipstick and Farrah Fawcett hair—it was 1981 and virtue was still something you tried to preserve.

  Half an hour after midnight, they were somewhere in northern Georgia. Trish was still too giddy to sleep. The farthest south she’d ever been was Arkansas. Seeing a palm tree was high on her list. Seeing the ocean—unimaginable. On a family trip to the Ozarks when she was thirteen, she squinted until the far shore blurred into the sky—pretended it was the sea, endless and beckoning. Opened her eyes and it was just a lake, squishy and weedy at the bottom.

  Destinee was driving. Lisa and Heather were asleep in the back seat. Destinee: a girl no one knew well, a girl they shied away from in the dorm, invited mostly just to help with the expenses and driving.

  “Have you been to Florida before?” Trish asked after a while.

  “Once,” Destinee said. “This boyfriend of my mom’s? He had this jacked-up Camaro, worked out at the electric plant. He got some time off and decided to take us to Disney one August when I was in junior high.”

  “In August?”

  “Yeah, nice, right? Like a fucking oven outside. And Luther, that was his name, he and my mom were stoned most of the way and he tried to grab my ass every chance he got.”

  “Oh my God.” Thrill of repulsion, thrill of something else. “What did you do?”

  “About Luther? Nothing, for a while. It wasn’t like he was moving very fast, you know? I wasn’t scared of him. But then I got tired of it so I slashed all his tires with a Denny’s knife.”

  “You did?” The image came straight and full-formed to Trish’s mind—Destinee brandishing a wicked blade.

  “Yeah. Waited until he went to the john. I knew he’d be a while because he always took forever to take a dump after breakfast. He left his wallet at the table, so I took all the money out and then I did his tires, and mom and I ended up going home on Greyhound.”

  “Wasn’t your mom…wasn’t he…”

  “Oh, I bet he was plenty pissed when he figured it out. And I had a hard time getting my mom to come with me. But it was worth it, you know?” Destinee tapped a rhythm on the steering wheel with her thumb. “Not letting him get away with it was worth a little inconvenience. That’s what I learned that trip.”

  Trish thought about that story as miles of inky black rolled by. She wanted to know more, but wasn’t sure what questions to ask. Destinee wasn’t like any of the other girls in the dorm. She’d worked for a long time, saving up for college. She was older. Harder. She knew things.

  “Hey, I’m beat. Want to take over for a while?” Destinee asked, interrupting Trish’s thoughts.

  They coasted off the highway to an all-night gas station convenience mart. One of the girls in the back seat made a clucking, mumbling sound in her sleep.

  Inside they bought coffee, Hostess pies, gum. Split it down to the penny.

  Back in the car, they switched places.

  “That thing with the truckers…” Trish said it casually as she backed slowly out of the lot.

  Heather’s dad had a CB radio in the car, and after it got dark out, she turned the thing on and got a conversation going with some trucker and suddenly it seemed like there were dozens on the air. Heather told them that they were schoolgirls on spring break. Said We’re just some girls looking for a p
arty in Florida, any big bad bears out there know the way?—and so on. The truckers liked it plenty. Hooting and hollering, more than one offer to buy them dinner, a couple offers to do other things. The one that stuck in Trish’s mind” I’d like to pull down your bikini bottoms and lick the sand out of all your cracks.” The truckers kept it up until Destinee grabbed the speaker and told them to go fuck themselves, then snapped the unit off.

  “I mean, thanks for, you know, stopping it,” Trish said. It wasn’t exactly what she meant to say.

  “No problem. You have to remember, men are dumb animals. It’s just a basic stimulus-response thing,” Destinee said, peeling the wrapper off a pie. She was studying psychology.

  “You mean like, it’s not their fault? When they’re…like that?”

  “Oh, sure it’s their fault,” Destinee laughed. “But you still have to know how to shut them down. They won’t do it themselves.”

  Trish glanced in the back; Lisa was leaning against Heather, her cheek pressed against Heather’s arm, both of them still asleep. They looked sweet, like children.

  Back on the road, the radio played softly, edging in and out of static, country and farm reports. No sign of dawn yet. Destinee drifted off to sleep, prettily, her head resting on a rolled-up jacket against the passenger door. Trish didn’t mind driving. She thought she might never have experienced such total privacy, even all tucked tight with the others in the Buick. She was driving and it was quiet and she felt older than her eighteen years, in a good way, a mature way.

  I’d like to pull down your bikini bottoms and lick the sand out of all your cracks.

  #

  The rain started with force, drops plonking against the windshield in an aggressive staccato. It was almost six in the morning and Trish realized that she’d been cheated out of the slow burn of dawn.

  “Hey,” Heather whisper-talked from the back seat. In the rear-view mirror, Trish could see her rubbing sleep from her eyes. “You were supposed to wake me up to drive. Where are we?”

  “Woodbine, Georgia,” Trish said. “Fifty miles from Jacksonville.”

  “And it’s raining? Shit!”

  The others stirred, staring out the windows at the gloom. Trish wondered if she’d get her first palm tree, or whether it would whip by in the gloomy gray, indistinguishable from the rest of the vegetation.

  Speaking of which, southern Georgia wasn’t what she expected. There were trees everywhere, thick twisty trees that looked as though their roots plunged far below the earth. Trish knew several things about Georgia. She knew that it was poor, that people lived in shacks, that blacks and whites did not live comfortably together. From all of this she had imagined an arid, cracked land. She was from Missouri—in Missouri, drought was the worst news, the thing that could break you. Here they had water, but evidently they were still screwed.

  But it didn’t matter: they’d be in Florida in a few miles. Trish was on her way to Florida to party like college students were supposed to, and she didn’t plan to let anything get in the way. Not the weather. Not the company, though secretly she might have wished for different companions.

  In a sense they were the leftovers, the ones who weren’t going with other groups, with best friends. None of them, for that matter, were or had best friends. Trish guessed that when Heather’s dad offered the car, he had hoped his daughter would barter it for a better set of friends. Prettier, more popular girls than Lisa and Trish. Destinee was prettier than anyone, but in a flashy sexy way that made her look thirty with some exciting hard miles, rather than 22 trying to pass for eighteen.

  Well, fuck Mr. Kenny, Trish thought—they were making do with each other. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  “I think it might be clearing that way,” Destinee said, pointing out the window.

  But if anything it had gotten windier and wetter when they passed the Welcome to Florida sign. Trish spotted it only as they were streaking past; she considered turning the car around to take a picture, but decided against it. No sense reminding everyone how much of the world was new to her.

  #

  Trish meant to stay awake the rest of the way, but she drifted off and woke up with a pain in her neck as they were pulling into the motel parking lot in Daytona Beach.

  The rain had lightened, and morning had come up to meet the gray skies, but even so the building in front of them was a looming disappointment. Constructed of cinderblock with flaking paint, it resembled a giant bunker in a sea of asphalt that lay rippled and broken as if attached to migrating titanic plates.

  The musty dark registration area. An unanticipated charge for sharing the room four ways. Lugging up their things in garbage bags—only Heather and Lisa had proper suitcases. More dismay at the sagging double beds, the odor—somewhere between stale smoke and what Trish guessed might be the result of sex, or some rotting organic thing.

  By lunch time, they were all asleep, drapes drawn on the thin light outdoors.

  #

  When they woke, they walked to the other end of the hotel and stood in the cinderblock open-air alcove looking out at the ocean.

  My first palm tree, Trish thought. My first ocean.

  She wanted to be impressed, wanted a heart-skip moment, but neither looked real. The palms were small and leaned in their pots, and their leaves were ragged like the ears of a dog that fought with other dogs. The sea: well, it looked like a reproof, a scolding for getting her hopes up—a sheet of frothy gray, black in places.

  Don’t get your hopes up—it was an eleventh commandment in the Bartley house. Trish’s mom worked in a Laundromat for extra money. Her father managed a home center twenty miles away in Versailles. Trish had been required to be home after school to watch her sister Maggie. Now Trish was gone, and Maggie was nine and letting her own self in the door after school, cooking her own suppers.

  Only Destinee seemed unfazed. “This is okay. We’re here, aren’t we? Together?”

  She said they had to look their best early in the evening because that was when they’d be trolling for dinner. She had brought only enough money for her share of the gas and hotel bill; she’d had to pull extra shifts at the Red Hen Pantry to finance even that. She was paying for every cent of her education herself. Trish was right behind her; her father had sent her two folded twenties in a safety envelope with a note that said “don’t tell mom.”

  Heather and Lisa had some money, but they went along. They all slipped single-serving boxes of breakfast cereal from the dorm cafeteria under their sweatshirts until they’d accumulated enough for the trip. The plan was to buy milk and juice, skip lunch and “work for dinner”—Destinee’s words, spoken like someone who’d done it plenty.

  She turned away from the ocean and was halfway back to the room when the others, cutting each other glances, followed. Destinee got the shower first, the hair dryer and the mirror.

  #

  None of them brought umbrellas. As a substitute, they took the pillowcases off the pillows and held them above their heads as they ran down the strip.

  One miserable block after another. Pancake houses, waffle houses, biscuits and gravy for $1.99. Motels even uglier than their own, smells of mildew and garbage wafting out to the street. Paint stores, tire stores, package stores, check-cashing outfits, but most of all bars. Bars, and more bars, all windowless, squat, flat-roofed affairs.

  There didn’t seem to be much to distinguish one from another, but Destinee pulled up short in front of a brown-shingled place called The Rocket. They followed her in: dark and close and humid. Smell of stale beer and men’s cologne. Oh! Trish knew that smell—knew it from the few fraternity parties she’d gone to—places she’d felt exposed and out of place. But here, maybe here was different.

  “Why this one?” Heather wanted to know.

  Destinee pointed above the bar, where a short menu was scratched on a chalkboard. “They serve food. Aren’t you hungry?”

  Forty-five minutes later they were eating: onion rings, fries, burgers. Their ben
efactors, three thickish boys from Tennessee State, watched with calculating concentration, and Trish wondered which girl would be the extra. Well, it wouldn’t be Destinee that’s for sure—with her bleached hair like Lonnie Anderson in WKRP, her tits too big for her petite frame, she lit up the place like a hundred-watt bulb.

  Trish licked ketchup from her fingers and looked at her friends. Lisa, lean and bony with a perm that needed updating. Heather with hips as rounded and soft as buttered rolls. Some guys liked that. But, Trish thought she might be second-best, and the knowledge burned inside her along with her third draft beer, and she licked her fingers again, experimenting, seeing if she could get the guys to look.

  She could.

  #

  Rain every day. The sun came out after breakfast and tried to hold on through lunch, but the effort seemed to exhaust it; rolling lusty clouds arrived from the ocean and splatted down a fresh assault.

  They went to the mall. They went to a matinee. Lisa got her textbooks out and Heather quizzed her. Trish sent Maggie postcards, writing “you should see this place!!” in big, loopy letters.

  Destinee plucked her eyebrows, filed her nails, and read magazines, and didn’t seem to mind. Destinee never wore down. Her spirits were high whether she was telling you how to give a blow job or how her mom had a couple of veins collapse and spent last Mother’s Day at the county clinic. She sent her own post cards, to aunts—one her mother’s sister in Washington State, and one who wasn’t an aunt at all, but an old friend of her mother’ who’d married money. Destinee said the postcards were insurance—she kept in touch so the aunts would continue to send things on her birthday, Christmas. For proof she held up her wrist; she wore a delicate gold chain bracelet with pink stones scattered through.

  Trish spent her time with Destinee and she noticed the curious glances Heather and Lisa gave her. Yes, all right: she was the one who hadn’t wanted Destinee to come in the first place. So sue her.

  But Destinee wasn’t what she expected. “This is the good part,” she said when they raised the first beer of the evening and clanked their mugs together, just the four of them, no matter who bought the round. “To friendship, and to hell with everyone else.” And at the end of the evening, saying good nights in the dark, she never missed anyone. “Goodnight, Lisa. Goodnight, Heather. Goodnight, Trish.”