by Landon Houle
How come, Jill said, you never hear about teachers killing kids?
They—Cathy and the friends—thought this was terrible, too. What was wrong with Jill? How did she come up with this stuff?
Rampaging teachers. Apartments and bees and walls made of wax. Complexes. Jill wondered if she had one.
Just now, she was painting her nails Blue Blazes. Her hands shook as they had since junior high, but the tremors were getting worse. She had to plant her palm against the stained arm of the recliner to have any hope at all, and even then, the brush trembled and bobbed. She might have dipped the tip of her finger into the bottle and got a similar, perhaps better, result.
Porky the Parrot watched from Jill’s shoulder. You’re too sexy, he said. You’re too sexy for your clothes.
The television was on—some kid show with lots of music. Cathy was dressed for work, but she was on the floor with Barbara, wincing as she shifted from one bad knee to the other. Barbara couldn’t stand up on her own, so Cathy held her little hands and bobbed her own head in a kind of dance.
Cathy blew air from between her lips. She opened her eyes and her mouth wide. Then she strung a bunch of nonsense sounds together, and smiled at Barbara as if, in the middle of their baby conversation, one of them had told a smart joke.
You’re too sexy for your hat, Porky said, and Jill said, Goddammit, because she’d jumped when Porky brushed against her ear. His wing was light, like nothing at all, like air, like breath against Jill’s skin, and now there was an ugly streak of blue down her pinky finger all the way to the knuckle.
Ha-HA, Cathy said. HA-ha, HA-ha, ha!
Jill glared, but Cathy was making faces at the baby. They’d had Barbara for nearly a month, but Jill still wasn’t used to it. She felt like she was always trying to guess who was talking to who. Cathy said something else, and when Jill didn’t respond, Cathy said, Anybody home?
What? Jill said. Me?
I said, she’ll be walking any day now.
Barbara squealed as if she understood. She held tight to Cathy’s fingers. Her dimpled knees buckled in and out and in again.
See? Cathy said.
Whatchya think about that? Porky said and jumped on top of Jill’s head. Think about that, whatchya.
Cathy’s talkie squawked. She pulled it from her belt and adjusted the volume.
Barbara frowned and reached for the talkie. She missed and, off balance, sat back hard on her diapered bottom. She looked like she might cry. From the radio came a string of words and numbers, codes.
Cathy’s face was grim as she clipped the talkie back to her belt. The navy EMS shirt and the cargo pants made Jill think of the military. There she goes, Jill said, reporting for duty. She meant to be funny. The parrot said something that didn’t mean anything.
We should watch how we talk, Cathy said, in front of the baby.
Cathy stood and swung Barbara up on her shoulder in one fluid motion as if she’d been doing such a thing all her life. Another wreck, she said. Out toward Darpo.
I didn’t say anything, Jill said.
Cathy pressed her lips against Barbara’s sticky cheek.
Porky just scared me. That’s all.
Cathy sat the baby down in Jill’s lap. She gets what you’re saying. She gets a lot more than you know.
Barbara squirmed in Jill’s lap. She made a face. Jill held her wet nails in the air. She opened her mouth to say something, and Cathy kissed her on the cheek. BRB, she said, and in a rattle of keys and boot stomps, she was gone.
Usually, Cathy worked the night shift so that when Jill was alone with the baby, most often they both just slept. Sometimes Barbara cried, and Jill would wake up and lie there listening. It was a lonely suffering sound, like a dog or something wilder, and Jill would think of her brother Boone, those times he’d go hunting and miss the clean shot. All night, she’d hear the rabbit, and sometimes she’d find its blood trail, the quiet places it dragged itself to hurt in some sort of peace.
Jill told herself that if Barbara’s crying went on long enough, she’d go check. But eventually, Barbara seemed to whimper herself to sleep, and the next thing Jill knew, she was waking up again, and Cathy was back. Time, since Jill had moved in with Cathy and particularly since they got Barbara, seemed to move differently. Through one of the windows upstairs, Jill sometimes saw the sun in one corner of the sky and a piece of the moon in the other. It wasn’t right to see both at once. She’d never thought so. It made a person feel like she was on an altogether different planet, and there were times when Jill was so tired she wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised to find her feet floating up off the ground, to find herself slipping up through the top of the house and the sky and the atmosphere which supposedly kept the world from bursting into flames.
You didn’t hear about teachers killing kids, but the same couldn’t be said for mothers.
Barbara squirmed, and she might have fell over backward if Jill hadn’t caught her. Jill kept her from falling, but she held the baby too tight. She felt the soft baby flesh and soft baby bones against the muscles and the points of her own arms.
Barbara let out a wail, a rabbit missing two of her feet, a ragged hole for an ear. Barbara flashed the few teeth she’d grown, and Jill said, Stop it. Just quit already.
Outside, the dog barked, and Porky hollered, You’re so sexy. You’re so sexy it hurts!
Barbara’s daddy was Cathy’s nephew, and at first, Jill didn’t think he was intellectually disabled, but now she wasn’t so sure. He’d come by the house twice since she and Cathy had been keeping the baby, and both times, he’d sat on the couch like a lug with his oily black hair over his eyes, and his mouth hanging open until Jill could see the only glimmer of anything about him—a small bubble of spit at the corner of his pale, chapped lips.
He was sixteen years old, and it was a miracle and a mystery how and why anyone had ever slept with him, but someone had, presumably. Cathy said the girl’s name was Nicole.
Who is she? Jill said. Where does she work? What does she do?
And the nephew, sunk even deeper into the crevices of the couch, muttered something Jill had to ask him to repeat.
Ralphie’s, he said.
It was unclear which, if any, of Jill’s questions the nephew was answering, but at the time, Jill couldn’t muster the energy to pry anything else out of him, and now it was all the information she had—Ralphie’s Roller Rama. She would go there. She would take Barbara back where she belonged. Jill had to do this before she did something else.
Jill drove around the square in the only direction that was legal, the streets around the courthouse being their own kind of rink where people routinely cut each other off and stopped in the middle of the road to wait on a good parking spot. Jill lived in Columbia for a while (She always said South Carolina, not South America until she realized people were laughing at her. Of course, it was South Carolina.), and it drove her crazy how country people drove any which way they wanted and at their own pace. Even now, as the Cutlass in front of Jill hesitated ever so slightly at the recently turned-green light, Jill laid on her horn and yelled, Come on!
She was in some kind of hurry.
The Roller Rama was about a mile down Vine Street. The cement block building, formerly a short-lived gym and before that, a thousand other doomed ventures, was wedged between a gas station turned car detailer and a Subway restaurant. The outside of the building was still painted with a few poorly sketched figures—a Speedoed man of obscene proportions, a girl in a karate suit with teeth like a monster’s. The paint peeled and flaked into a sad confetti, and one day, when Cathy and Jill were eating at Subway, Jill noticed that one of the karate girl’s feet was unfinished. Time, it seemed, had run out.
Ralph, a failed farmer looking to cut every corner, wouldn’t even consider repainting. He hung a homemade sign with his name stenciled on it and kept the floors concrete instead of putting in wood. Hitting hard, he said, just learned the kids to skate better.
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sp; It was the middle of the day. Kids were still at school, and the parking lot was nearly empty, but when Jill turned in, she spotted a skinny orange-haired girl out back, smoking by the trashcans. With the girl was some other boy that looked like the nephew only shorter, fatter. Even though it was sunny and almost hot, both of them wore black hooded sweatshirts.
Jill didn’t bother parking. She pulled around the building as if she were going through a drive-thru. With the tires still rolling, she hit the button and the window went down. You Nicole? she hollered.
She expected to scare the girl. She wanted to. It’d be nice to see somebody else jump for a change, but instead, the girl turned slowly, and her mouth hung open just like the nephew’s, and she closed and opened her eyes for such a duration that Jill felt the moment as if it were unfolding in a kind of slow-motion.
Nickie, the girl said, and then broke into a lethargic gurgle of thick laughter that made Jill wonder if the girl was about to vomit.
The boy standing beside her snorted. With some violence, he dragged the dirty sleeve of his sweatshirt under his nose. Then he looked back over his shoulder.
Nickie Dickey, the girl said.
Jill reached for the radio knob and twisted the volume down, but the radio wasn’t on. I don’t care what your friends call you.
Nickie’s shoulders shook. She seemed to be trying to open her eyes. Then she stuck out her tongue and said, Blahhhh.
The boy hissed. He had a vicious rash around his mouth.
The engine idled and made a snapping noise.
Nickie blinked and stumbled toward the car. Hey, she said, as if it was the first time any of them were speaking, can you take us somewhere?
Around Nickie’s neck was a black leather choker studded with a line of fake diamonds that caught the light. Seeing this, or perhaps something else, something familiar, Barbara smiled and, like Cathy had taught her, blew air through her lips. She wagged her little arms and beat her fists against the seat.
Yo, Nickie said. Whose baby is that?
As Nickie came forward, her sweatshirt fell open, and Jill saw the tight T-shirt riding up. Nickie was boney, but the skin around her belly was loose and white, like the hide around something dead.
That’s my baby, Nickie said, and she was coming closer, but the toe of her boot hung in the gravel. She lurched and caught herself on the car door. That’s my little Barbie. Before Jill could think better of it, her foot was punching the gas, and the car was jerking forward, and in the rearview mirror, she saw Nickie fall down. She was rolling around on the ground, and it was hard to tell if the girl was laughing or crying, but the claw of her hand was reaching after them.
Jill didn’t look both ways before she hit the road. She didn’t even stop. She popped the curb, and there was a terrible scraping sound, and they might have been killed, and in the back seat, Barbara just laughed and laughed.
A truck came close, and the driver—a piggish man in a straw hat—made twisted faces at Jill and yelled at her. His window was up, and now Jill’s was too, and the man didn’t honk, but when his mouth opened, she saw the white of his tongue. It was a strangely silent assault, and afterward, the man hit the gas and pulled far in front of Jill. There was an EAT BEEF sticker plastered to his bumper.
Jill slowed the car down to a crawl. She didn’t know where she was going anymore.
In the backseat, Barbara grinned and howled. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and giggled. She rubbed at her face with her fists, and by the time they’d turned onto South Main, she was licking her lips and fighting to keep her eyes open.
Cathy said sometimes a nap was just what a baby needed to turn things around. Jill wondered what would do that for her, what would be the thing that made all the difference.
She couldn’t give Barbara back to Nicole like she’d planned. The girl was just a baby herself, and that was the least of the problems. The nephew was certainly not an option, and his mother, Cathy’s sister, was a real head case. Jill hadn’t seen it for herself, but according to Cathy, who didn’t like to talk about it much, the nephew never had a chance. His mother packed the house with all manner of things from newspapers to empty milk cartons to VHS tapes she said she felt bad for because nobody had any use for them anymore. Cathy said the house and everything in it was a real fire hazard, and she wouldn’t be surprised if one day a call came in, and she’d have to go unearth her own sister’s charred and unrecognizable body.
Sometimes Jill felt that way, like the world was closing in on her. There was a time when it seemed to Jill like she could go places, like she could be someone, but every day, this seemed less and less true. On the wheel, her hands were shaking worse than ever. That, the tremors, had started when her daddy started doing what he did, and when her mother started doing nothing except calling Jill a liar. But Jill didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to think or talk about it ever again. What she wanted was for things to be like they were without Barbara. What she wanted, she realized, just about the time the light by the Presbyterian Church turned, was a strong drink.
She’d have to make a U-turn and drive five or six miles in the other direction to get to Mike’s. Foxy Lady was closer—was, in fact, almost already in sight.
Jill looked up at the mirror. Barbara was out now for sure. Her mouth was open, and a line of drool dripped on her shirt. Her arm hung down over the edge of the car seat, as if she’d dropped something important but tired herself out reaching for it.
Every summer, babies fried in cars, usually in the Walmart parking lot. But it wasn’t that hot, Jill thought now as the wind came in the window. Just a little warm. Barbara would be okay. She’d be just fine. It would only be a minute or two. It’d be more likely for her to get kidnapped than to burn up. Jill laughed to herself. That’d be one way, she thought. But she didn’t really believe in kidnappers, not in Black Creek anyway.
Jill pulled off the road, and when the car stopped, she half-expected Barbara to wake up, but Barbara didn’t. She kept right on sleeping even when Jill rolled down the rest of the windows and cut the engine and got out of the car and shut the door. She slept through it all like some kind of princess who, one day, will wake up and see that everything has changed.
Jill took one last look, and then she headed on inside.
The Foxy Lady was Black Creek’s only strip club and calling it a club was a bit of a stretch. It was really just an old house with a few walls knocked out and a bar in the living room. The floor was still carpeted, and you had to pass through the kitchen—which was grimy but still furnished with all the appliances—to get to the bathroom, and if you sat on the toilet, you stared into the tub, and if you stood over the toilet, you could read a framed copy of the Christian poem “Footprints.”
The owner and sole proprietor of The Foxy Lady had inherited the property from his mother, and there were things he’d changed and things he hadn’t. The tub, after all, sometimes came in handy. Everyone, even the cops, seemed to know that The Foxy Lady offered a wide range of services.
One of Jill’s exes—not the construction guy or the porno watcher but one prior—had been a regular, and when Jill and Cathy first got together, Jill made Cathy take her. Cathy didn’t like going to Foxy Lady much, but Jill got a real kick out of it, doing what her ex had done. She experimented with wearing flannel shirts and large gold belt buckles. She smashed her fist against things—the wall mostly, just for the hell of it. She even ordered the drink he liked to drink, rum and coke.
Just now, though, she asked the bearded bartender for vodka with anything, and anything turned out to be Tang, which was just fine. Jill sat at the bar and drank it down and asked for another. While the bartender poured, Jill said, You know anybody wanting a baby?
A what? the bartender said.
A baby.
He made a face like he’d smelled something bad, and Jill said, Never mind. She told him she was just kidding. It was a joke. Then she laughed in a way that wasn’t so different from the sounds Cath
y made when she was playing with Barbara. Ha-HA, ha-HA, ha-HA!
Why couldn’t she be funny? Maybe if she could tell a good joke the world would turn right again. Being funny might make all the difference. There wasn’t anybody else there, at least in the front part of the house, but Jill thought she heard something. She looked over her shoulder, toward the screen door, but it was coming from the back of the house, where the bedrooms were.
When she turned back, the bartender was eyeing her. He set the second drink down. Then he pressed the button on a stereo, and there was music.
Jill took her drink and went over to the couch that was printed with scenes from the English countryside. She sipped, and on the arm, she traced the outline of the woman’s big blue skirt, the lacy trim of her bonnet. Her mama used to say things were better when ladies stayed at home and men were soldiers. People still had their values, her mama said. Jill was tracing the edge of the bonnet and getting to the round cheek when a girl in a neon green bikini came through a curtain beaded to look like the Mona Lisa.
Hola, the girl said.
She wasn’t Spanish. Or Mexican. Nothing about her, Jill thought, could be more white, more pale. Her long flat belly. Her crimped hair. Even her eyelashes, Jill saw when the girl sat down beside her, were white.
Bet you burn, Jill said. The drink was leaving a film in her mouth.
The girl stared. Her eyes were a dull blue.
In the sun, Jill said. When it’s hot.
Oh, the girl said. She sat back from Jill and dusted something like crumbs off her chest. Yeah, Mama always made me wear Coppertone.
Jill nodded and took a drink. It was strong, and it was helping. The edges of the room spun a little. That’s good, she said.
The girl sighed.
No, Jill said, as if the girl was arguing with her. It’s good that your mama cared like that.
The girl ran a thumb under the waistband of the bikini. There was a red mark where the elastic cut at her skin. She wanted me to be in the movies, the girl said.