Living Things

by Landon Houle

  There’s a tea you can drink, Lonnie said. She’d heard some of the pretty girls talking in the bathroom. They hadn’t known she was in the stall or else they would have zipped up their makeup bags and cartwheeled away from that yucky girl who was always trying to make the team, who was always following them around like some kind of stalker. And it was sad that her dad was dead and her mom, the lady who took their cheerleading picture, was crazy, batshit crazy, they said, but that didn’t mean you could act however you wanted. That didn’t mean you could walk around looking like a slut.

  Herbs, Lonnie said, or something.

  Moto didn’t know what she would do, and it turned out, there wasn’t enough time to find out because a few weeks later, they’d found her in the swamp. They found her floating on her back in the creek, and if a person didn’t know better and didn’t look close, she might think the girl had just went in the water. Maybe she was just floating there, so intent on finding faces in the clouds that she didn’t answer when they called. She didn’t even blink.

  After they’d found her, after they’d pulled her out of the water, the cops had come around Quinby Place. And some lady from the newspaper. They had all sorts of questions, but Moto had made Lonnie promise not to say, and after everything, it seemed it was the least Lonnie could do. She said she didn’t know anything, and for once, Sarah understood something in Lonnie’s face, something about the situation, and told them to go away, to leave her daughter alone, to let them grieve in peace.

  I just want to scare him a little, Lonnie told Dots that day they were on the roof, the day of the memorial. I just want to rattle his cage.

  Yeah, Dots said. Dots himself spent a lot of his stoned time developing intricate and alternate revenge plots. He rubbed his chin. Sure thing.

  The man—David was his name—lived on Quinby Place, just a few houses down from Lonnie and her mother. Quinby Place was at the edge of the swamp, and most of the houses were surrounded by encroaching thickets of bushes and vines and junk trees that people spent a lot of time trimming and cutting and shaping into what they called wind breaks. They weren’t fences exactly, but they separated the houses, and so afforded each neighbor a friendly measure of privacy. It was in this thicket that Lonnie and Dots hid.

  The curtains were closed at the front of the house, but on the side, they could see right through to the kitchen table where David hunched over a small piece of wood and a thin paintbrush.

  He builds planes, Lonnie said. The air conditioner came on, and the leaves in the trees moved around them. David’s windows were closed, but all the same, Lonnie was careful to keep her voice down.

  Dots sniffed and raked a hand under his nose. Planes, he said. Like jets?

  Lonnie shook her head. No, like toys.

  Dots blinked. He squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them again. He did this twice, like it was something he couldn’t help, like he couldn’t focus. Models, he said. Model planes.

  Yeah, Lonnie said. Those.

  Dots snorted, and Lonnie thought he was laughing, but when Lonnie looked—she could see Dots in the other-world haze of the streetlight—he wasn’t smiling. She said, Something’s wrong with you.

  Dots shook his head. Then he looked at Lonnie and said, I’m fine.

  Whatever was wrong with Dots was always wrong with Dots, but he’d done something, taken something to make it even worse. The muscles in his neck jumped, and beside Lonnie, he felt very nearly electric.

  Twisted freak, Dots said. He was talking about David, about the story Lonnie told about David and Moto and what happened between them and then what might have happened between them because really, she didn’t know. Really, Lonnie didn’t know any more than anybody else because Moto had drowned, that much was certain, but they couldn’t figure out exactly why or how. They thought somebody might have drowned her, but then they also thought she might have drowned herself, and when Moto went missing, Lonnie was so caught up in herself, so worried about what she was going do and why that she couldn’t say for sure one way or another whether her best friend would have done something like that. There was a time when she would have said her mother wouldn’t have, that her mother had something to live for, but that hadn’t stopped her from trying.

  It’s time to set things right, Dots said. Nobody’s doing it for us. Isn’t that what you said?

  Through the glass, David looked like a big bald baby working on some art project. His tongue was stuck out and wrapped around his upper lip.

  I don’t know, Lonnie said. She’d been sure before, but now she wasn’t.

  Huh?

  I said I don’t know.

  You don’t know what?

  It’s just—

  Dots was watching her. His face was close to her own, and Lonnie could hear, she could practically feel his teeth grinding.

  Maybe we shouldn’t, Lonnie said.

  Sure we should. We are.

  We’re not yet.

  I am.

  Lonnie looked at him. The streetlight made shadows of his face, the jaw which worked and worked. She’d started something in him, and she couldn’t turn it off.

  You know how old I am, Dots said, and he pulled the mask down over his face. And I’ve been working at this my whole life.

  Lonnie told Dots that story about the parade, the candy, her shoulder out of place. Her father, like Moto, was dead. Her mother had tried to die. Lonnie herself almost got run over while a marching band, in near-perfect formation, played “Jingle Bell Rock.”

  You want to get yourself killed? her father said. See what happens. See what happens when you don’t listen.

  But Lonnie was listening. She’d heard the squawk of the trumpet. The horns of the clown cars. The horse clatter and the crack of thrown candy. There was something else though. There had to be something she’d missed.

  He was angry, but in the hospital, he touched her face, he touched her hair, and his fingers were so light, she could barely feel them, the way they shook, the pounding in his chest when he held her so long, so tight, the nurse told him to leave, to wait outside because, she said, children didn’t do as well when their parents were around.

  There was a narrow window in the door, and through the glass, Lonnie watched her father. She saw him mouth words, something else she couldn’t hear. There was so much she didn’t understand. Dots said she wasn’t stupid. She just didn’t know anything. She was just a kid.

  Didn’t she get it? Didn’t she see the way that once something broke, you couldn’t put it back together?

  And Lonnie, trying to calm him down, trying to talk sense, said, Nothing’s broke, Dots. It’s all together. One big circle, right? No beginning, no end.

  And Dots nodded, but it wasn’t anything that made anybody but him feel better. That’s the problem, he said. That’s it exactly.

  And then Lonnie saw the gun, and she wanted to believe the gun, like the planes, like the models, was a toy, something that, like everything in Lonnie’s world, was completely unreal, and how was it that she felt for David? How was it that she and Dots both saw in him their own fathers? Not the day he’d pulled her shoulder out of socket, but another time in the hospital, years later when he was full of cancer, and the night before he died, while Lonnie studied for a Spanish quiz, while she memorized words in some meaningless chant, his face changed, like he was seeing something. Like he was accepting whatever it was he saw.

  And Dots was running and so was Lonnie. She was running before she knew she was running. Out from the bushes and down the street she’d walked so many times with Moto because there was nothing to do. There was never anything a person could do. She saw that now.

  Her house, up the stairs, to the room, her heart beating like any other heart, a thing in a cage that can be measured and timed by a machine, a beep-beep that somehow equals life until it doesn’t.

  Dots was right. She didn’t know anything, so what could she tell her mother? Where would she even start on a Saturday morning when Sarah was getting her o
ut of bed, when Sarah was so obviously trying to get her shit together, and saying, Come on. Let’s go. Hurry up.

  Where? was all Lonnie could say.

  And Sarah said, I know a place. I’ll show you.

  As it turned out, where they were going didn’t matter as much as how they were getting there. At the edge of town, by a string of warehouses and shut-up businesses, Sarah pulled over. She didn’t cut the engine, but she got out, walked around to Lonnie’s side, and opened the door.

  Your turn, she said.

  Lonnie was nearly sixteen, and it was time. It was past time, Sarah said.

  Lonnie moved mechanically, automatically. Her body was a bundle of wires.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t think about David and what might have happened to him as much as it was this very thought, the vision of him in the window and Dots and the gun, that had appeared and then exploded, shutting out, shorting out everything else.

  The engine idled as Lonnie walked around the back of the car and slid behind the wheel.

  Sarah was in the passenger seat, and she said, The first thing you do is adjust your mirrors. Make sure you can see all around you.

  Lonnie moved the mirrors. She caught sight of herself and looked away quick.

  Sarah said, Put your foot on the break when you change gear.

  Lonnie did what Sarah said, and Sarah said to press on the gas. Slow, she said. Easy.

  And like that, they were moving.

  Keep both hands on the wheel, Sarah said. At all times.

  Lonnie stared ahead.

  It’s scary at first, Sarah said.

  Yeah, Lonnie said.

  For years, she and Moto had talked about all the things they’d do, all the places they’d go when they got a car, when they could finally drive. Lonnie held the wheel. She felt the engine through the plastic, the power of it. She felt a part of the car and the space it cut through the swamps.

  For a while, they were quiet. Black Creek was behind them, and yet it was in all the mirrors. It was everywhere around Lonnie, and in some way, it always would be even if all she heard was the sound of the road against the tires, a kind of low roar that Dots said was the beginning and end of everything.

  Where is it? Lonnie said. You were gonna show me a place.

  She didn’t look at her mother, afraid as she was to take her eyes off the road and afraid, too, that if she looked at her mother, she might really see something, and so, even now, when her mother is gone, and Lonnie is alone, she sees the swamps and the road out, but it’s her mother’s voice saying, It’s here. It’s everywhere.

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  Landon Houle’s writing has won contests at Black Warrior Review, Crab Creek Review, Dogwood, and Permafrost. Other work has appeared in Baltimore Review, Crazyhorse, Natural Bridge, Harpur Palate, River Styx, The New Guard, and elsewhere. Landon was born in Brown County, Texas, and currently lives in Darlington, South Carolina. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Francis Marion University, and she is the fiction editor at Raleigh Review.