The Heart is Deceitful above All Things

by J. T. LeRoy

  ‘Kenny doesn’t got one of those stickers.’ I say got, not have, like Milkshake does, like Sarah says sometimes, like Aaron and the others would never say in front of my grandfather.

  ‘I tole ya,’ she says, and nods.

  ‘Your mom’s a lizard?’

  She nods. ‘So am I,’ she says, and turns away to look out the window. ‘Frosting up,’ she says, tapping on the window. ‘You’re lucky I found you.’

  We fall asleep in the backseat. I wake up before her. Her head is cradled between my feet, and her bent legs are on the seat. I don’t move, even though I feel stiff.

  When she wakes up, she pulls herself quickly off my legs and sits up. I pretend to wake up slowly. ‘Gotta piss,’ she says as I sit up. ‘No condo in here.’ She digs in the back and turns around with toilet paper, boots, and a jacket. She puts the boots and coat on. ‘Be right back.’ She goes behind the car. The sky is lightening with blue slashes, and the mountains in the distance look like purple humps. ‘Your turn.’ She jumps back in and hands me the toilet paper. ‘Wanna get breakfast?’ she says, opening a small mirror. ‘Yuck, what a mess.’ She spits on a finger and rubs at the black under her eyes.

  ‘I haven’t got . . . I ain’t got no money,’ I tell her.

  ‘No kidding. Didn’t think you hid it up your butthole, now, did I?’ I feel my face redden, and I look away. ‘My treat, but we gotta put you in some clothes.’ She climbs in the back and unzips bags. “Here . . .” She tosses a pair of jeans over, and a sweatshirt. ‘Put ’em over your PJs and they’ll fit, OK?’ She tosses more stuff around. ‘Here . . .’ She hands me a pair of sneakers and two pairs of socks. ‘Put ’em both on and try ’em.’ They’re a little big but will stay on. I hold up my foot and show her. ‘Now you’re set cowboy.’

  We leave and head to the restaurant, the only one open twenty-four hours. A sign at the entrance says ‘Truckers,’ and an arrow beneath it points one way, then ‘Everyone Else’ points the other way. We head opposite ‘Truckers’.

  We eat eggs, and steak, and French fries, and coffee and hot chocolate, and she points out men walking by. She tells me who have no teeth and who cry like a baby when they come. She explains it all to me, coming, white goo, and how much it’s all worth. ‘I make a lot,’ she says. ‘A lot of ’em like little girls. And if I tell ’em I’m a cherry bomb . . . a virgin . . .’

  ‘Like Mary,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah’––she laughs––‘like that. They’ll pay big bucks.’

  ‘Then why don’t you get a house or a truck?’

  ‘More coffee, baby?’ The fat waitress smiles over us and fills Milkshake’s cup.

  ‘Thanks, Cilla.’ She opens and pours in ten half-and-half containers. ‘My momma smokes it all,’ she says, looking into her white coffee. ‘It’s my fault. I always believe her, then the money’s gone.’ She blows on the coffee. We watch it ripple. ‘But if I leave her, she’ll die . . .’

  ‘I know,’ I tell her.

  We both look out the window and watch truckers pull out and disappear.

  We stop at Kenny’s truck after breakfast, but nobody answers my knock. So we go back to Milkshake’s car.

  She pulls out a tiny battery-run TV, and we watch her stories and game shows. I want to watch cartoons, but I’m embarrassed to ask. I really haven’t seen any since before being at my grandparents’. We didn’t watch TV there. Once when I was preaching near a TV shop, I gave in to temptation. I went in and watched Rainbow Brite and The Smurfs. I sat on the floor in the corner until it was done. I was afraid I was going to hell, and two days later I confessed to my grandfather. I didn’t sit for a week, but I was relieved of my sin.

  We eat more doughnuts, then go see if my mom’s back yet. I’m afraid to go, scared that there’ll just be an empty space instead of a truck. ‘My mom’s probably very worried,’ I tell Milkshake.

  I hear yelling inside the cab. Milkshake stands off to the side. I hold my breath and knock. The yelling inside continues. I knock louder. Sarah opens the door, dressed the same as she was last night, similar to Milkshake.

  ‘What?!’ she says.

  ‘I’m back,’ I say.

  ‘Not now,’ she says, and turns back inside, slamming the door. The shouting continues.

  I don’t want to look at Milkshake. I stand staring at the closed truck door. I feel her hand in mine. ‘C’mon,’ she says, ‘All My Children’s on.’ I let her lead me back to the car.

  I go back several times and check on the truck. There’s always shouting inside, so I don’t knock. When I go back after the sun goes down, the cab is dark and there is no answer when I knock.

  ‘Watch this,’ Milkshake says, and climbs into the front seat. She’s changed into a different short skirt, a metallic gold, and her face is painted in glitter again. ‘This is a CB,’ she says, pointing to the radio box in the dash.

  ‘I know, Kenny’s got one . . .’

  ‘Bet Kenny don’t do this . . .’ She switches the CB on. Static and men talking fill the car. She looks at me and winks. She holds the mike and presses down on it. ‘Break 1–9,’ she says.

  ‘Go ahead, breaker,’ a man’s voice responds.

  ‘Milkshake here for R ‘n’ R, over.’

  ‘Calf Roper here, darlin’, where ya wanna take it?’ he says.

  ‘Twenty-eight for my 10–20,’ she says.

  ‘Is the pussy free tonight?’ a different man says.

  ‘Milkshake goin’ to twenty-eight. Visit and ya’ll find out.’ She reaches out and changes her channel. ‘Break 2–8,’ Milkshake says.

  ‘Hold a minute, Breaker,’ a woman’s voice says.

  ‘. . . suck the life outta ya, sugar,’ a throaty-voiced woman cracks over the CB.

  ‘I’m a-waitin’ over the chicken coop,’ a man responds.

  ‘Be right there, Smokestacks,’ she says.

  ‘Go ahead, Breaker,’ the first woman says.

  ‘Milkshake here, for R ‘n’ R.’

  ‘Calf Roper pullin’ you in, baby,’ the man from before says.

  ‘Can’t get enough of me, can ya?’

  ‘No, ma’am, I can’t.’

  ‘I’ll be on over.’

  ‘Milkshake, you need help with that cradle robber?’ a woman asks.

  ‘Naw, Sweet Lips, I’m gonna rob him all myself. That’s a 10–7.’ She reaches over and switches off the CB. ‘I just made us dinner and video game money.’ She leans back and laughs.

  ‘But you gotta do stuff with him?’ I ask, staring at the CB.

  ‘No big deal. I sit on his face, jerk him off, and I got me twenty-five dollars.’ She puts her high heels on.

  ‘He said he wanted all that just now?’

  ‘No, I know him, he’s a repeat, did him last night.’ She looks at herself in her little pink compact mirror. I shake my head. ‘Beats knockin’ on doors like your momma does.’ She snaps her mirror shut.

  ‘What?’

  She opens the car door. ‘You don’t know . . . your momma’s a lot lizard, too.’ She shuts the door. She waves and walks off.

  I say nothing to Milkshake when she comes back and fires up the CB again. I pretend to be asleep. She turns the CB louder. I want to cover my ears. I’m afraid I might hear Sarah. Milkshake leaves on another date, but she leaves the CB on. I raise the volume on the TV as high as it goes, but I can still hear the moans from the CB.

  In the morning we eat ice-cream sundaes at the restaurant. ‘I wanna do one,’ I tell, her.

  ‘Do one what?’ she says, scooping out hot butter-scotch fudge.

  ‘One date, like you do.’ I tap my spoon on the table.

  ‘You can’t, you’re too young, and you’re a boy.’

  ‘Am not!’

  ‘Am not what?’ She stares at me, her makeup colored splotches on her face. ‘Not a boy?’

  ‘Sometimes I’m not,’ I tell her, looking down. She reaches under the table and gropes between my legs. I jump away, my spoon clattering to the floor. ‘Damn!’ I shout, a
nd then bite my lip hard for having sworn.

  ‘You are a boy, though I’ve had my doubts.’ She laughs. I remind myself that my grandfather isn’t here, and I let myself breathe again. ‘Damn!’ I say once more, and smile.

  We take free showers at the truck stop, wearing her sneakers because the showers are too slimy to do without them.

  When Milkshake goes to her car to sleep, I walk back to the truck. I try the door, and it’s open. I enter quietly. ‘Kenny?’ Sarah calls out from behind the silver curtain.

  ‘No––no, ma’am,’ I stutter. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘C’mon back here.’

  I walk cautiously to the silver drape and pull it aside slowly.

  Sarah is in the bed and covers her eyes from the shafts of light. ‘C’mere,’ she says, and motions to me.

  I move to her heavily, like I’m walking through peanut butter. She’ll want to know where I got the clothes and where I’ve been. She pats the bed for me to sit next to her. I do carefully. ‘Lie down,’ she says. I blink at her. Her makeup’s smeared like Milkshake’s. ‘Lie down,’ she repeats. I can’t read her tone. It’s not angry, not even annoyed. I lie down stiffly next to her, my head half on her pillow. ‘You’re all I got,’ she says. She throws an arm around my waist. I stare wide-eyed around the cab, at the white toilet glowing like a fluorescent moon and the tiny humming fridge filled with iced coffees and Cokes. ‘No one can take you away from me,’ she says. I stare at a used syringe on the floor and the cotton ball next to it, laying there like a fallen cloud. ‘You better not leave me,’ she says, and her hands move sloppily to my crotch and rest there lazily. I notice a thin trickle of blood running from her arm like a sink leak. She breathes in heavy, a partial snore. I reach my hand to her arm and wipe up the blood with my fingers. She snorts, then moans. I put my fingers in my mouth and clean the blood off them like I’ve seen a cat licking her newborns do.

  ‘I’m yours,’ I whisper, and lean into her dead weight and try to sleep.

  I wake up feeling the truck rumbling beneath me. Sarah doesn’t stir as I pull myself out from under her arm and go up front. ‘Where ya been?’ Kenny says, sitting in the driver’s seat and starting to pull out of the truck stop.

  ‘We going now, sir?’ I ask, looking back at the lot, searching for Milkshake’s station wagon.

  ‘Goin’ now? Shoulda gone yesterday.’ He reaches in his pocket for a Marlboro.

  ‘Please, can we not go yet, sir?’ I grab on to the back of his seat as we pick up speed, following the interstate signs.

  ‘Not go yet?! Hell, no! Boy, I just tole ya, we shoulda done been gone!’ He lights up. ‘What were ya doin’ back there that ya don’t wanna go? Where d’ya get them clothes at?’

  ‘I met a family and they took care of me, lent me clothes and these shoes. And I really should give ’em back and say thank you or something, sir.’

  ‘Well . . .’––he laughs––‘you just got yourself some new clothes, you needed some anyways. We ain’t goin’ back.’ He waves at me. ‘Lean over here and I’ll let you pull my new train horn.’ My mouth feels dry as I move to his side. ‘This here is a brass lever.’ He takes my hand and puts it on a golden chain hanging from the cab roof. ‘When I tell you pull down on it . . . you pull down on it.’ The truck enters the interstate ramp and heads into the stream of traffic. ‘Now, pull it now.’ My arm jerks down, and Kenny smiles. ‘Isn’t that the most beautiful sound?’ he says as the wah-wah cry of the train horn echoes around us. ‘Seventeen hundred dollars that cost me!’ We speed past the truck stop, and I yank the horn’s lever once more and put my good-bye into it like a smoke signal floating in the air.

  I hear Kenny’s train whistle for the last time while eating alone in a truck stop diner outside Orlando, Florida. I look up and around me, but it all continues, the haggard waitresses in dirty white sneakers, glittering gold hairnets, and short pink skirts, tending to the big men and their bigger wives packed into the orange plastic booths with their dull-eyed children.

  Nobody notices the train horn. A train horn on a truck, and no one looks up to wonder who was in the way and if they moved fast enough.

  I bury my spoon under the milk in my Cheerios mix. Sarah showed me how to make Cheerios. ‘Just Cheerios, no milk . . . Milk’s on the table, don’t need to pay for what they’re givin’away.’ She dumps the silver container into her cereal and points to me to grab the container off the empty table behind us and do the same. ‘Jelly’s free . . .’ She spoons half the jar of sugary strawberry jam in, then does the same on my Cheerios. ‘Butter’s free, too.’ She opens five little plastic packages and pushes out the bright yellow blobs into the bowl and motions for me to do the same. ‘The classier places leave out the maple syrup . . .’ She pours half the slow amber liquid into her bowl, then mine, pouring it on the table while traveling between her bowl and mine. ‘Now this rounds it out . . .’ She reaches for the red plastic ketchup bottle and squirts a big mound of red squiggly lines in our bowls, and again she doesn’t stop squeezing the bottle in the space between our bowls. ‘Now, if ya got a extra fifty cents, you order yourself a cottage cheese ball.’ She grabs a fork and begins to stir the mixture. ‘Then you’re really stylin’. More cream,’ she tells the waitress when the waitress asks her too loudly if that’ll be all. ‘White trash, cunt,’ Sarah mutters as the waitress walks away. ‘Here . . .’ She reaches out, gripping the glass sugar container like a machine gun, and dumps half of it into our bowls and on the table.

  The truck’s train horn sounds again, farther away, three quick fuck-you-I’m-out-of-here blasts. ‘Gotta let the hearts know when to start a-breakin’,’ Kenny would say every time he would pull the horn chain when we left a truck stop. ‘More like their wallets to start a-achin’,’ Sarah would say, laughing.

  The train horn echoes through the diner, but nobody even looks toward the big mirrored plate-glass window. If you stare for a while, you can make out the huge black box outline of trucks in the night, like some hidden underworld nobody wants to remember exists. I hear Kenny’s horn long after it must have stopped, long after he must be on the interstate and finally getting to play his country tapes, the ones Sarah didn’t toss out the window.

  A teenage girl with frizzy red hair she keeps combing and holding down with her hand as if it were a hood in a windstorm has watched me prepare my Cheerios from a table across from mine. She picks at her fries, then frowns at me when I pour something free into my bowl. When I pick up the ketchup her face goes sour. I pretend to only be examining the container, and I put it back down. I wait till she turns to her mother, and I squirt my ketchup in fast. We do this dance for a while, her even faking me out, not really going for her fries, making me panic and squirt a red slash line across my chest. I expect her to laugh. She only looks more lemonish. I feel disappointed and ashamed. I don’t start to eat until she and her mother leave.

  The horn sound is still ringing inside my head. It’s not a surprise; I thought it would happen sooner, I thought I’d feel relieved, relieved that I wouldn’t keep waiting to hear the hollow bellow of it every time I left the truck.

  ‘I hate punk rock,’ Kenny had said, and pulled her tape out of the cassette player.

  ‘Only faggots call it punk rock, Kenny. How many times I have to tell you, you ignorant, country-listening, white trash, cocksucking, hillbilly, motherfucking . . .’

  He grabs a handful of her tapes and tosses them out the window. She screams and attacks him, whaling at him with her fists so violently, he almost hits another truck. He pulls over and runs along the interstate like a jackrabbit, returns an hour later, holding up three tapes, his face cut from her fingernails. He cradles one tape, its guts roped and glittering around his fingers. ‘Maybe we can rewind it, baby,’ he says, looking down as he enters the cab.

  She grabs the broken tape. ‘The Subhumans, you fucker!’

  They don’t speak until they get to the truck stop. She dresses in her wig and shiny dress. He says he’ll listen out.
She leaves, telling him he’d damn well better. He doesn’t get dressed up like usual. He asks me if I want another comic book. He gives me $5 and tells me not to spend it all in one place. ‘Go on now, before the gift shop closes up.’

  I don’t go to the gift shop. I go to the diner. I don’t buy a burger like I could, I don’t even get a cottage cheese scoop.

  And I feel the bill in my jeans pocket, the jeans Milkshake gave me and I keep up with Kenny’s belt, doubled around me. I run my palm along the smooth leather of the belt and reach my hand in my pocket past the five-dollar bill, like I do at night sleeping on the foam bed in the front of the cab when I snake my belt out from my jeans loops and guide it gently under the fuzzy polyester blanket. It’s Kenny, holding me from behind, breathing out in my ear, pressing into me, draping the belt over me, like I wish he would but never does, my grandfather preaching, his minty breath stinging and his face set like a stone carving so solid, so absolute, you know there’s something between you and the bottomless pit. Every package of candy and comic book I’ve stolen from truck stop gift shops is laid out, and I whisper, ‘Please punish me, please,’ and I rub, so hard it’ll hurt when I piss the next day. I rub with the belt, wrapping it and squeezing. I dig my nails deep into the tender skin of my thing until I cry, until I feel that point of breaking, but there’s no one to fall into. I hold the belt close until I finally sleep.

  ‘Daydreaming at night’s bad for your health,’ the blue-haired waitress says above me. My eyes jerk open, and I pull my hand out of my pocket. ‘Waitin’ for your momma?’ I shake my head. Children are always eating alone at all times of night at truck stop diners. Some kids get dropped off before their parents go honky-tonkin’. There’d usually be a few kids sleeping in a booth in the back. Some truck drivers ride with their whole family. I’d seen seven or eight kids tumble out of one cab. Some waitresses smile at you for being alone and bring you free milkshakes and burgers. Some tell you they ain’t no goddamn baby-sitter, and tell you kid or not, she’d better get a goddamn tip. Most just treat me like a non-truck-driving customer, relaxed and with indifferent friendliness. I eat another spoonful of Cheerios and imagine Kenny laughing and pulling on the chain, the brass chain he polished every day. I can’t be sure Sarah isn’t with him; to think about that makes it impossible to swallow. Her hand on his, pulling the brass lever together. I pay for my Cheerios and run to where the truck was parked.