by Rio Youers
“Lou Shipp?” I asked, and thought, You ol’ cock basket.
“Who wants to know?”
“My name is Harvey Anderson.” I held out my hand. He didn’t take it. “I need to speak with Tatum. I have some news for her.”
Silence from inside the trailer as the TV’s volume was cut. The rest of the park seemed amplified. I heard three kinds of music, gun shots from the nearby range, the tap-tap of a crow knocking a snail against a broken garden ornament. Then Lou was gone, pulled out of the doorway by the woman behind him. She was in shadow to begin with—I caught the flash of her teeth and a gold necklace—then she emerged into the light and I saw the damage. If I hadn’t been so used to Dad’s disfigurement, I may have blanched. As it was, I didn’t even blink.
“I need your help,” I said.
I detected a frown amid her many scars, and—deeper still—saw Sally in her eyes.
“This can only be bad news,” she said.
* * *
It wasn’t as trashy inside as I’d anticipated, although it had its share of clichés: empty Busch cans lined up on the kitchenette countertop; Judge Judy playing on TV; a leopard-print rug on the living room floor. These were offset by several surprises: a Thomas Pynchon novel on the coffee table, for starters, and two abstract paintings I recognized, but couldn’t put a name to, on the walls.
Tatum told Lou to take a hike, which he did, slipping into his shit-kickers and exiting without a word. The door slammed behind him. Tatum turned off the TV and sat opposite me, feet on the coffee table.
“Elvis has left the building,” she said. “That big rack of shit ain’t much to look at, but he can sing like a bird.”
I had removed my sunglasses so that I could see inside the gloomy space, and noticed now, as she grabbed her smokes and struck a light to one, that the pinky and ring fingers of her right hand were missing.
“I’m something pretty myself, huh?” she said, exhaling a band of smoke into the air between us.
“I know you’re angry.” I tapped my chest, where my own anger rumbled and shook. “That might be a good thing. A usable thing.”
“I’m too tired to be angry, hon.”
“Too tired to fight?”
I told her everything, beginning with how I’d met Sally (occasionally remembering to call her Miranda), and ending with my decision to come to Tennessee. This was the first time I’d divulged the full story without having to adjust truths, and every word—floating in the open like Tatum’s cigarette smoke—felt less crazy than it had in my head.
It took a while. At least an hour. Tatum listened intently, occasionally wiping saliva from her chin with a washcloth she’d secreted up her sleeve. I tried reading her expressions, but there was too much smoke, too many scars. I heard her, though: a whimper, a sigh, always in the right place. At one point she sobbed and lifted the washcloth to her eyes. Sally had suggested that her parents only cared about themselves. I wondered if time had altered her heart.
“That poor girl couldn’t run forever,” she said when I’d finished, touching a light to yet another cigarette. “We were crazy to think she could.”
“There was only ever one solution.” I leaned forward in my seat, inhaling a chestful of secondhand smoke. “Putting an end to Lang.”
“Easier to run.” Tatum tapped ash into a chipped coffee mug.
“Easy isn’t always best.”
“You’ve got a lot of spunk, sweetie, but your head’s in the clouds.” She fanned at the smoke and loomed toward me. “This is what happens when you mess with Dominic Lang.”
She’d been pretty once, I could tell. Her hair was lined with gray, but it still had bounce, and her hazel eyes were kindly shaped. Her face, though, was a diagram of torture, cut into irregular sections, as if removed from her skull one piece at a time, then stitched back into place. There were circular scars on her throat. Cigarette burns, I assumed. Her lower lip was gone—sawed away like a strip of fat.
Miss Patches, we call her. And she ain’t no woman.
“I’m a goddamn monster,” she said.
“All the more reason to stop him.”
She said nothing for a moment, sucking her cigarette down to the butt, smearing spit from her chin. I looked around the trailer. Four small rooms divided by plywood walls. I could see into the bedroom, festooned with dirty laundry. One of Lou’s jumpsuits hung from the back of the door, its myriad sequins shimmering. A draft made the flag in the window ripple.
“We were shitty parents, but we loved that girl,” Tatum said, breaking the silence. She leaked smoke like a broken machine. “I swear, putting her on that bus—knowing we’d never see her again—was the worst heartbreak. A kind of dying.”
“Really?” I couldn’t keep the edge of disbelief from my voice.
“You doubting me?”
“You deserted her.”
“We did what we had to—what we thought would keep Miranda safe. Shit, we wanted to go with her, protect her, but the truth is we’d only have slowed her down. Realizing this was perhaps our one shining moment as parents.”
“Yeah, well, Miranda didn’t see it that way,” I said. “She felt scared. Betrayed.”
“She got tough in a hurry and learned to survive. At least until you decided to play superhero.”
“I wanted to help her,” I said.
“Give that man a cigar.” Tatum could sneer just fine with one lip. “It comes down to this, Captain Clusterfuck: Miranda removed herself from your mind to keep you from following her—to keep you both safe. We removed ourselves from her heart to keep her safe. If she believed for one second that we cared about her, she would’ve come home, and Lang would’ve been waiting. I say again: We did what we had to. It was a heartbreaker, but we did it.”
“You introduced her to Lang in the first place,” I countered. “Trying to make a quick buck, right? You let him abscond with her for days at a time, and the things he made her do … I don’t know how it didn’t break her.”
“We were living in a car,” Tatum growled, pointing one of the existing fingers of her right hand at me. “I was whoring myself out. We were desperate. Some parents send their kiddies off to Hollywood, or dress them up as little dolls and have them parade around a stage. We didn’t see this as being much different, and as soon as we found out what was going on, we put a stop to it.”
I inhaled deeply. In the fresh air it would have pacified me, but the smoke and trash smell only made me feel worse. Still, I nodded and held up both hands in surrender. Nothing she could say, no excuses, could explain her actions, but I needed her help, her power. Pissing her off wasn’t a good idea.
“I took these scars for her,” she said a moment later. Her voice was softer, but still laced with emotion. “We tried running. Steve went north. I went south. They found me quickly—tranq-darted me from behind. I woke up in a small room, strapped into a chair, a plastic sheet on the floor.”
I flashed back to my own room of pain—Disneyland, compared to what Tatum had been through.
“Lang ransacked my mind, then turned me over to his goons.” She sobbed again. Her pain was as thick as the smoke. “I knew they wouldn’t kill me. As long as I’m alive, I’m a link to her. Same reason they didn’t kill you. But I took these scars, and I got some more you’ll never see, so don’t you suggest—not for one goddamn second—that I don’t love my little girl.”
I lowered my eyes.
“Doing nothing is hard, honey, but sometimes it’s the best thing.”
“We don’t have that option anymore.”
She got up, opened the door to let some of the smoke escape, then poured us both a shot of cheap bourbon. I wasn’t sure it would help with my nausea, but I took it just the same.
“To mutual pain,” she offered.
We touched glasses. I sipped. Tatum knocked hers back in one, then slid her empty across the coffee table. It clinked against the mug she’d been using as an ashtray. She ran the washcloth across her wet chin. Had to wipe
her eyes again, too.
“Sorry about your daddy,” she said. “That’s tough, sweetie.”
“Yeah, it’s…” I drummed a fist against my chest, as if this would convey everything—the complicated tangle of emotions. “He was on a different level of crazy, but his heart was gold and I’m going to miss him like hell.”
“Were you close?”
“Not especially. We could have been, if I’d tried harder. I always felt we had nothing in common, that I was more like my mom. Make love not war, you know? It’s taken all this for me to realize that I’m very much my father’s son.”
“And your mom … she still alive?”
“She died when I was sixteen,” I replied. “The worst pain I’ve ever felt. They say time heals but that’s not true. Time dulls, it softens, but it doesn’t heal. I feel as much grief today as I did ten years ago.”
“Cancer?”
I nodded.
“These?” Tatum tapped her packet of cigarettes.
“No. Mom may have tried pot in college, but that was about it. She was a health-food advocate and clean-living vegetarian. So put it down to shit luck. Or fate, if you prefer. And hey, there’s nothing you can do about that.”
“Nothing at all,” Tatum agreed.
“I guess that’s why I’m in this situation.” I lifted my arms, indicating the shit-storm my life had become. “I couldn’t do anything for Mom. Her pain—and mine—was out of my hands. But I could do something for Sally. I didn’t have to sit there feeling helpless.”
A diesel engine clattered to life outside. A dog howled nearby, followed by a man’s high-pitched remonstration: “Getchoo, you ol’ sumbuck!” The engine grew louder for a second, then faded into the distance. I heard those popping sounds from the range once again.
Tatum sniveled. She wiped her chin. Her eyes.
“They’re going to kill her,” I said with no inflection in my voice: a matter-of-fact statement. “Lang is going to weaken her coil, then crawl into her mind. He’ll be like a thief in a museum with the security system shut down. He can help himself to whatever he wants, and destroy whatever he doesn’t. Then he’ll hand her over to the hunt dogs, and they’ll do to her body what Lang did to her mind.”
“I know that,” Tatum said.
“I wouldn’t be here if I could do this on my own, or if there was any other way.”
“I know that, too.”
“Will you help me?”
She sighed, then shook another smoke from the packet. When she popped the Zippo, I saw how badly her hand was shaking.
“Look at me: living in this goddamn stinkhole with a man who doesn’t much love me, who rarely fucks me, and when he does he calls me Priscilla.” She barked a chesty, mirthless laugh. “Miranda is just about the only good thing I’ve done in life, and that was by accident. So yeah, I’ll help. You know goddamn well I will. But it’s suicide, hon. Plain and simple. We may as well head over to the range and offer ourselves up for target practice.”
“It’s a mountain to climb,” I said, finishing the bourbon, burning inside in more ways than one. “But without you it’s impossible. You’re my only hope. And Steve-O, too, if you know where he is.”
She laughed again. Louder, but equally humorless. Her upper lip flashed another sneer.
“You got twenty bucks on you?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “What for?”
“Gas money,” she said, wiping spit from her chin. “Come on, sweetie. We’re going for a drive.”
* * *
The sun had dropped into the west, burning through cobwebby cloud, and there was an edge to the breeze. I followed Sally’s mother through a maze of trailers, stepping around junk, ducking beneath washing lines and the cables from satellite dishes affixed to trees. “Miss Patches!” some dirt-faced kid yelled, and threw an empty Pepsi can at her. He howled like one of the many raggedy dogs we saw tethered to posts, then ran away, managing maybe a dozen steps before veering inexplicably left and bouncing headfirst off the window of a burnt-out cargo van. I looked at Tatum. She looked back at me and smiled.
Mom took care of them, I thought.
We came soon after to a fenced-in parking lot with some of the spaces taken up by broken appliances. Tatum’s—or rather Lou’s—vehicle was easy to spot: an old Chevy Malibu, hand-sprayed pink. A bumper sticker read: WHO DIED AND MADE YOU ELVIS?
“It’s an hour’s drive,” Tatum said. “If you’re hungry, there’s a Mickey D’s across the road from the gas station.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“Good for you, but I’m hungry enough to eat the balls off a low-flying duck. I’ll take a Big ’n’ Tasty with cheese. Go large with the fries.”
“No problem,” I said, thinking that an hour in a car with the smell of cigarettes and McDonald’s might be the longest hour of my life. “The window rolls down, right?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “Get in.”
“Where are we going?”
“Where do you think?” Tatum popped a smoke and climbed behind the wheel. “We’re going to meet the bonesnapper.”
Twenty-Five
We drove northeast toward Union City, then cut straight east through Martin and on to the town of Glowing, which was anything but. Tatum chomped her burger and fries and played one of Lou’s tribute CDs. It was awful. If there’d been a way to travel outside the car—strapped to the roof, perhaps, like a kayak—I’d have taken it.
There was little conversation because of the music and the rush of air through the open window. During the few quieter moments, Tatum told me more about herself. She was orphaned at three; her entire family—both parents, her grandmother, five brothers and sisters—were killed in a house fire, and she went to live on a farm where her “new daddy” made her feed the chickens and collect the eggs, which was fine, but also parade naked for him on occasion, which was definitely not fine. Tatum realized she had a special gift when, at eight years old, she made this sorry excuse for a human being place both his arms in the wood chipper. “It’s like this,” she said, taking her hands off the wheel to light a cigarette. There was a bend in the road and I instinctively reached across and steered us through it. “You got it, sweetie,” she said, blowing smoke over the scar tissue where her lower lip used to be. “You’re not driving, exactly, you just steer for a second or two. And I steered that ol’ cocksucker’s arms directly into the chipper.” She nodded, took the wheel again. “We had pigs used to scream when they were taken off to slaughter. They knew what was coming and rightly opposed. Sometimes the farmhands had to break their legs and drag them on the truck. And that’s what he sounded like in the last minutes of his life: a broke-leg pig.”
Tatum explained that she felt different, not powerful. “Alone,” was another adjective she used. She moved from the farm to a new family, kinder in all ways, although they never treated her as their own. At school she was an outcast, behind in her studies, relentlessly bullied. By thirteen she was dependent on antidepressants, and then it was cocaine.
“It’s a constant battle,” she said, “between wanting to express your power, and wanting to hide it. The coke numbed both sides. It allowed me to walk down the middle, but for all those years I was walking dead. I got pregnant at nineteen—gave birth to a boy as still as stone. That was when I decided to turn my life around, but first I needed to make some peace with this thing inside me.”
After writing the parapsychology departments of several universities, Tatum was put in touch with Dominic Lang. He ran his tests and told her about the psychic coil. “He made me feel kind of special,” she said. “Something I’d never really felt before.” A few years later, Lang invited her to the Coil In Harmony support group, where she met a certain bio-PK by the name of Steven Farrow.
“I know the rest,” I told her.
This conversation used up seventeen of the sixty-three minutes we were on the road. The rest of the time I had my head out the window, entranced by the rush of air over my skull. We fina
lly stopped a mile outside Glowing, beneath a neon sign that flashed POOL BEER MUSIC, with an arrow pointing at a single-story building with mesh across the windows and a sign at the door requesting that firearms remain holstered at all times. The several exclamation marks suggested this was a zero-tolerance policy.
Inside, it was grim and beer-smelling, a chain of old TVs showing blood sports, Waylon Jennings drifting from speakers I couldn’t see. There was a darkened wooden stage with a Tennessee flag backdrop and a bed of red-felted pool tables at the far end of the room. Tatum walked toward the bar with her boot heels clicking—a little extra sway to her hips, I thought. If she was at all self-conscious about her appearance, she didn’t show it.
“Tate!” the bartender exclaimed. He was a strip-thin man with flamboyant red sideburns. It looked like someone had set fire to his cheeks. “Christ alive, how you doin’?”
“Fair,” Tatum said. “Is he here?”
“He’s always here.” The bartender gestured toward the pool tables.
Tatum nodded, kept walking. She said to me, just above a whisper, “That’s Rusty—Steve’s half brother. He sued an insurance company after he got stuck in their elevator. Claimed psychological damages, even though there wasn’t a whole lot to damage in the first place. Anyway, he got a chunk of change and bought this shithole outright. Steve lives here rent-free. I think he does a little work around the place, but not much.”
“Lucky Steve,” I said.
“You’re about to see how lucky he is.”
Three of the six tables were in use. We weaved toward one where a middle-aged man in a wheelchair hoisted himself onto the rail and shot a striped ball into a corner pocket. “Hoolah!” he shouted. He had bull-thick, tattooed arms and no legs. His jeans had been cut off at the knees, tied into knots. He scooted to where the cue ball settled and lined up his next shot.
“You’re supposed to have at least one foot on the floor when shooting,” Tatum said, and the guys around the table jeered, except for Steve-O, who looked up from the tip of his pool cue with narrowed eyes and teeth showing.