BABY FOR A PRICE

by Kathryn Thomas

  “What is it?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”

  “You don’t know?” I sneer. “You don’t fucking know!” I scream the last two words, turning away from him.

  “Daisy!” He’s at my shoulder, following me as I pace from the house.

  I throw open the front door, surprising Miss Stone and causing her to drop her cigarette. “Did you get a good look at—”

  “We’re done here!” I snap. “Goodbye!”

  “Oh! Okay!” Miss Stone takes a stunned step back as I barge past her toward the jeep.

  I reach the jeep when I realize my mistake. Hound has the only car. Hound has the only car! I turn back and pace to Miss Stone, who’s climbing into her car. (Everyone has a damn car, I reflect. Everyone but me, the person who needs to get home.) “Where’s the bus station?” I ask her. “I need to get home—to Austin.”

  “The bus station is quite a walk,” she says. “But there’s a car rental place just down the road.”

  She gives me the directions, and right away I’m walking down the street, ignoring Hound who walks beside me.

  “Daisy, will you stop?” he says. “Will you stop for just one second and talk to me? Just talk to me. Fucking hell, woman. Just stop.” He touches my arm.

  I wheel on him. “Don’t you fucking touch me!” I scream. “Don’t you dare lay one finger on me!”

  Lifting his hands to show he won’t touch me again, he says, “Fine, but just tell me what’s going on. Who was that on the phone?”

  I stand on my tiptoes so I can almost look him right in the eyes. “All this time, I’ve been in your bed, fucking you, screwing you, and I’ve poured my heart out, and you’ve done the same, and all of it, Hound, all of it is a sad fucking joke! All this time, you’ve been trying to hurt my dad, and now you’ve succeeded. But it’s my fault, isn’t it? I never should’ve been stupid enough to trust you! What’s wrong with me!”

  “Hurt? What’re you talking about?”

  “Dad is at the Shack, bleeding, beat up. Tooled up. Isn’t that what you call it?”

  “If that’s true, I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Of course you did!” I thump him in the chest, annoyed that he just stands there, like I haven’t hit him at all. “Of course you did!” I thump him again. This time he steps back, a wounded look on his big stupid face. “I heard what you said to him. Collect your teeth. The way you said it, so casual, and then I…and then what I did with you in that alleyway. Why would I do that? What’s wrong with me? I’ve been—I feel sick, you’re making me feel sick. Looking at you is making me feel sick!”

  I turn away from him, belly churning, and continue down the street. Hound walks a few paces behind me, like a dog following its owner. This sends me over the edge. Wheeling on him, I scream, “Will you just leave me alone? Even if you didn’t do it yourself, you’re part of it, Hound! You or one of your friends! You didn’t stop it, like you promised you would! This is the point of these, right?” I gesture to the engagement and wedding ring. “Isn’t that the tradeoff? So what happened? You failed, Hound, that’s what happened. I want nothing to do with you! Just leave me alone, please. Just get away from me.” I start shivering, the anger making my teeth chatter. When did I start crying? “Just get away from me before I scratch your eyes out!”

  He opens his mouth to speak, thinks better of it, and then turns and walks slowly away, fists clenched at his sides.

  I don’t stand here and watch him go, afraid if I do that that I’ll be tempted to follow him. I turn around and continue toward the rental place, thinking about Dad how he was the last time I saw him, jittery, panicky, angry at Hound and angry at myself. I threw myself into Hound’s arms, I threw myself into bed with him, I threw myself into this—into this what? Into this relationship? Can it even be called that? Whatever it is, I threw myself into it and now look where I am, walking toward the man I’ve spent my life trying to protect whilst walking away from the man who may very well have had something to do with harming him. A mess.

  In the rental car place, a blonde woman who’s studying a crossword with a crease between her eyebrows doesn’t look up when I enter. She just keeps looking down at that crossword, making a tutting sound, whilst I stand over her. I smooth down my hair, tap my fingernails on the desk, sigh, and still she just stares down at the crossword. I won’t get angry. I’ll stay calm. I won’t get angry. I’ll stay—

  “What’s your problem?” My voice is trembling, barely restrained.

  “It’s a difficult one,” the woman says, smiling tightly. “You know how you can get sucked into these things sometimes, right? Like you’ll be doing one thing and then—”

  “I need to rent a car!” I blurt, causing the lady to sit up in her chair.

  “Oh, yes, yes, of course.” She speaks as though somebody coming in here to rent a car takes her wholly by surprise.

  “What sort of car are you looking for?”

  “The cheapest one you have. I’m only going to Austin.”

  “Well, let me see…Yes, we have one that will be quite suitable, I think. Now, total loss of hope, seven letters.”

  I laugh savagely. “Despair,” I say, taking out my credit card. “The answer is despair.”

  Sitting behind the wheel of a rackety old tin bucket that just might take me down Route 71 to Austin, I try and calm myself down. My breathing is coming in long, shaky in-drawn breaths, my hands clenched tightly around the steering wheel, my thoughts unable to turn away from two unwavering images: Dad covered in so much blood you can only make out a toothless black hole smile, and Hound leaning over me, thrusting. I relive the argument with Hound as I speed down the highway, wishing I’d slapped him across the face, slapped him across his big dumb face and told him I hated him. Maybe part of me suspected that the fake marriage was not completely honest—but no, no, I won’t go there. Because even if that’s true, even if I enjoyed our nights together, it doesn’t change the fact that he lied to me, doesn’t change the fact that he fucked me knowing full well he couldn’t do anything for Dad.

  I pull up when I reach the Pedernales River, looking down at the sun-kissed water and toying with the rings Hound gave me: the bullshit rings, the meaningless rings. I think about the sob stories we told each other, suddenly embarrassed for revealing so much about myself. I think about how he’d sometimes trail his forefinger down my spine, the tingling sensation that would go through my body, how it would drive me crazy. I hate that girl, I despise her for lying there naked giggling whilst Dad was out there, being tooled up by Hound or his friends.

  Climbing from the car, the traffic roaring a few yards away from me, I pace to the railing and wrench off the rings, looking down into the flowing water. It seems there’s something of my life in the water, the mad rush of it, the frothing whiteness, everything moving too fast for a change of course. Since Mom died…

  “Stop with this self-pitying shit,” I mutter. “Stop with this self-pitying shit!” I hold the rings in the palm of my hand, the metal cool. I’m about to toss them into the water when my years-old practicality speaks up: How much are these rings worth? You might need the cash.

  Laughing grimly, I drop them into my pocket and return to the tin bucket.

  When I get to The Shack, Sarah meets me out front with an expression on her face I can hardly begin to pick apart. These past months she’s been going in on me pretty hard with this “joking” stuff, telling me whenever I protest that, “Oh, you should be able to take a joke, since you are one.” But now she’s forced to tell me what hospital they’ve taken Dad to, she just mumbles and looks at the ground, before turning away as quickly as she can. Maybe she’s guilty, or maybe she’s just annoyed because she thought of another hilarious joke and can’t use it today.

  I drive to the hospital, which is only a couple of miles away, but the place is so busy I have to wait in line for five minutes. Some guy at the front of the line is trying to convince a nurse that he hasn’t been given his medication, even though he’s
twitching like crazy and dribbling. “Come on, Patsy, you know I wouldn’t lie to you, doll. You know I wouldn’t!”

  Finally a smiling black lady asks me, “What can I do for you, dear?”

  I tell her, and she replies that my father is being seen to by the doctor and nurses at the moment and I won’t be able to see him for a few hours. When I slump into the waiting room chair, a machine-made hot chocolate cupped in my hand, I let my head fall back and close my eyes, trying not to think about if dad could be dying a floor above me, and trying not to think about my baby, whose grandfather might be dead before it’s born.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hound

  I drive back to the city in a state of numbness for the first ten or so minutes, trying to disentangle all this shit in my head. I relive the moment where Daisy told me she was pregnant, wishing that Dean had showed up bloody half an hour later so we had a chance to talk about that, at least. Pregnant, with my kid, pregnant, which means I’m going to have a son or a daughter if she doesn’t decide to get rid of it. Pregnant, goddamn. I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to have a kid, no way, not when you really get down to the sort of person I am. But if she decides to keep it, I won’t have a choice. Part of me is terrified of being forced into that; the other part welcomes it, thinking maybe I’d rise to the challenge. A few hazy fantasies come into my head of me and some tall lad sitting at a table and reading a book together, me teaching him to read, or me and this girl in the library and her turning to me and saying, “Daddy, look what book I found!” I choke them back. Daisy hates me. She might run. She might tell me I’m never allowed to see the kid. She might do anything.

  Only slowly, the pregnancy revelation is pushed back to make room for Dean, bloody Dean, tooled-up Dean, who I really had no clue was back in town. Like Denton, I thought he was dead, long-dead, maybe dead before Daisy and I become fake-husband and fake-wife.

  “Hey, man,” Denton says, when I pick up my cell. “What’s good?”

  “Are you going to tell me about Dean? Because if you are, you’re too late.”

  “Shit, my man, shit.”

  “How is it that women working at a The Lady Shack know before you?”

  “He’s been hidin’ out in Austin for a minute. Hidin’ right under my nose, but the motherfucker’s got some James-Bond-type hideout or somethin’. Don’t know, man, but I’m sorry. You wanna refund or what?”

  I hang up the phone without replying, and wonder where I’m driving. I want to go to the hospital to talk to Dean—it won’t be too hard to figure out which one he was taken to, I’ll just call Denton back—but I know that Daisy will be there, and I’m worried about how she’ll react if she sees me. Maybe she’ll make a scene right there in the hospital lobby, screaming and pointing at me and telling the whole building who I am, what I am. And before I know it I’ll have some pig’s knee in my back, cuffs on my wrists. I guess I could just wait until she leaves; maybe that’s what I’ll do.

  But for now I just cruise through the city, clicking my neck from side to side, every so often images of me and some black-haired, giant kid—boy or girl, it doesn’t matter—playing catch or reading or riding on my shoulders. Maybe I’ll learn to fish and we’ll go fishing or something. Bonding shit like that. Stuff my dad never thought to do with me, since he was too busy turning me into a bullet that could be fired and then fired again.

  I go through a drive-thru and get myself a burger and fries, but I can’t eat it without thinking of Daisy and Dean and the pregnancy, so I just pull up near some homeless guy holding a cardboard sign.

  “Hungry?” I ask him.

  He’d old with open sores on his face, wearing fingerless gloves showing dirty fingernails, but when he smiles, I can see him in a suit as a younger man, maybe selling car insurance. “Thank you, young man. Thank you kindly.”

  “It’s okay, sir. Here you are.”

  I hand him the food and continue on my directionless drive. I’ve never been in this situation before, of getting close to a woman and then being pushed away. Even my mom, I was never close with her. She was always sitting at her vanity table talking about plays she had never seen and concerts she had never been to and how uptown they did things so, so, well, so stylishly, tipping her head back so that she could watch her smiling lips as she spoke. No, only Daisy, and now that she’s gone there’s this pit in my stomach even extreme violence can’t create. Even trashing my books didn’t give me this feeling. For a few moments I long for the stone-cold, dead-eyed Hound I was for most of my teens and twenties, a violent, dead-inside thug who didn’t know better. At least then I didn’t have to feel.

  I look in the rear-view mirror and do something I haven’t done in years. I pretend that Dad is sitting back there, hunched over in the seat, smoking a cigarette. Only this time I don’t tell him I miss him or he would’ve laughed the other day when one of the guys fucked up a job. This time I say: “You really did me over, old man. You really fucking did me over. I loved you, would’ve done anything for you. And you knew that, so you pulled me out of school—I liked school, truth be told, even if I told you I didn’t—pulled me out of school and put me to work and even—goddamn it, even Mom knew it was fucked. Even Mom left you because of that. And now you’ve poisoned my life, made it so I can’t even be with the woman I love. Yeah, the woman I love!” I snarl, thumping the steering wheel. “If you were here, I’d smash your nose in.”

  I’m sitting at a traffic light when I come to my senses, a family of four watching me in confusion. When the light turns green, I hurry on.

  Mac’s call comes in after I’ve refilled my gas tank. “The bar,” he says, and then hangs up.

  I’m really starting to get sick of him talking to me that way.

  But even if that’s the case, I don’t have any choice but to head toward the bar. When I get in there, Nora calls over to me.

  “He’s in a meeting,” she says. “Do you want a drink, sonny?” As she speaks, she wipes down the bar with the rag wrapped around her stump.

  “Sure, Nora. Whisky.”

  She serves it up and I drink it down. She serves another, and I drink it down.

  “Autumn’s coming. Seems yesterday summer started. Now autumn’s coming.” As she speaks, she polishes glass after glass with her stump. “You eyeing my goods, boy?” She winks at me, her wrinkled skin creasing.

  “Maybe I am,” I say, smiling. “Just impressed with you, Nora. Always am.”

  She giggles, and all at once she isn’t an older-than-old crone, but a twenty year old girl working her first shift at a bar. “I’ve seen thousands of men come and go,” she says. “Even before Mac, when this wasn’t a—well, you know.” I nod. She doesn’t want to call Mac illegal. “And then before that, when it was owned by some Italian-Americans. Oh, I’ve seen all sorts, Henry. All sorts.”

  “Henry,” I echo. “You’ve never called me Henry, not since I was a kid, anyway.”

  “You’re Henry again,” Nora says. “I can tell.”

  I want to ask what she means, but then one of Mac’s goons calls from the doorway. “Boss’ll see you now.”

  I take some cash from my pocket and put it on the bar. “Have a good day, Nora,” I call, before moving into the back.

  Ripper and Hitter are grinning when I walk into the room, but the grins die when they see me. Hitter, who’s always been the less prickish of the twins, looks slightly embarrassed. Mac, as usual, is counting money and looking over documents. Part of me wants to reach across and tear those documents apart. There probably isn’t even anything on them, anyway, probably just a bunch of gibberish so he can keep men like me waiting on him. Arrogant ass.

  “Take a seat,” he says, after what seems like an eternity of rustling papers. I drop into the seat and Ripper wriggles his bent, broken nose, smiling again. One day I’d love to crack that bastard’s teeth into his skull, stop the prick smiling. Mac leans forward, and now he starts smiling, too. “We’ve heard what happened to Dean, showed up hardly a
ble to walk, the poor fucker!” Mac lets out a coughing laugh, the sort of laugh that makes me think of a very old man looking at a young woman, a seedy laugh. A laugh that makes me wonder why I once worshipped this man as a would-be father. “I can take it this was your doing, right?”

  There’s something odd in the way he’s speaking, Ripper has that smile on his face again, and Hitter is glancing at me strangely. Was it Ripper and Hitter? Did they attack Dean, does Mac know, and now are they trying to get me to lie so they have an excuse to…It sounds far-fetched, but then, Mac has been sending me out on more and more jobs, almost the same way you’d use a saw that you knew was getting replaced in a few weeks: not caring about maintaining it, not caring if the handle snapped, not caring…Just not goddamn caring. I can’t say yes, but I can’t say no, either, because if I say no, I’ll be admitting to something worse: that Dean is in town and I had no idea.