The Small Crimes of Tiffany Templeton

by Richard Fifield

  I would destroy the evidence, and I would stay out of trouble until I could leave this place forever.

  When I entered the room, we still had ten minutes left in earth science. I chose to tune out the achingly slow tectonic plates, and instead found my eyes drawn to Bitsy, three seats away from me, who had a motion of his own.

  His name wasn’t really Bitsy, but we’d all called him that for as long as I could remember. It came from his last name, Bitzche, which was unfortunate for two reasons—first, because it meant he was the Mail Lady’s son, and second, because substitute teachers were forever mangling it. “Sounds like beach,” he was used to saying. “It’s Czechoslovakian.”

  Bitsy had grown up down the street from me, a few trailers away. I’d watched his dad train him in the yard, windups, sprints, all that. His dad had single-handedly created our high school football team, eight boys strong, the first team Gabardine had fielded in twenty years. Now his father was gone, just like mine. Except his disappeared in the middle of the night with a suitcase and his favorite truck, and when Coach vanished, so did the football program.

  For the next ten minutes, I watched as Bitsy tapped his foot, cracked his knuckles, pulled at the hairs on the back of his neck. He cut his own jet-black hair, and poorly. Today, he had combed his bangs forward, and they were so uneven that they looked like the smile of a jack-o’-lantern. He had really long eyelashes, and when I heard him speak, he had a froggy voice that creaked out like he had been talking for days on end.

  I’d never found a boy that interesting. I’d been stuck with the same thirty-one kids since kindergarten, but I was unable to look away from Bitsy. It freaked me out, but maybe I was just fascinated by what we had in common. His father was gone, too. But Coach Bitzche ran and left his family behind, along with a puzzled town. As usual, I was unlike the rest of Gabardine. It was no mystery to me.

  Most people in Gabardine are easy to figure out. I’m sure his mother caused some cracks in him, just as she had with me. She was like a terrible robot with terrible eye shadow, the same route six days a week, around and around on those perfect legs, even strides. The mail was never a mess. Always aligned on the left side of the mailbox, a stack in descending order of size. Unlike her son, she never twitched, and she never looked exhausted. She didn’t even fall apart after her husband left. She just kept walking, and never missed a day of delivery. She was meticulous, but I knew the mess she had escaped. She had reasons to keep walking. Like me, she didn’t want things to catch up with her. Bitsy tapped, the mail lady walked, and I lost myself in writing. It might have looked like grief, but the three of us did these things to avoid the truth, because our real stories are dangerous. If I didn’t know the truth, I might even feel sorry for Coach Bitzche. When you run away, but nobody chases you, it’s the saddest thing of all.

  * * *

  * * *

  WHEN WE WALKED INTO SOCIAL studies, my older brother Ronnie stood rigid and flush against the wall, wearing his stupid Forest Service uniform. We were accustomed to guest speakers in social studies because our teacher was lazy. But Ronnie wasn’t just a guest speaker. My brother was a fanatic. I knew for a fact that he ironed his own clothes, and the creases in his uniform were frighteningly exact. I expected him to salute us or something.

  “The Meatloaf,” said Becky. “Jesus Christ.”

  My brother had earned his nickname at age twelve, when he decided he wouldn’t grow up to be fat like our parents. A month after he began lifting weights, two weeks after he adopted a terrible grunting noise that accompanied every bench press, he changed his diet. A new protein fanatic, he demanded ground beef at every meal, and so began the saga of the meatloaf. Breakfast, cold meatloaf. Lunch, cold meatloaf. Dinner, freshly prepared meatloaf. Soon enough, he began to smell like meatloaf, too. He sweated garlic and onions and cheap ground round. He stunk. That, combined with the contents of his lunch box, prompted his peers to devise a nickname, one that soon caught on all over town.

  Mr. Graff, our social studies teacher, waited for the bell to ring, and didn’t bother taking attendance. We sat in our assigned seats, and watched him write across the whiteboard in giant capital letters:

  HOW TO SURVIVE IN THE FOREST

  David immediately raised his hand. Mr. Graff sighed, and pointed at him.

  “What does this have to do with social studies? I stayed up last night reading about Jamestown. Believe me, I would have rather done something else.”

  “This is important,” said Mr. Graff.

  “No,” said David. “This is our education. We already have enough gaps in this class. You made us skip the Holocaust.”

  “I’m not having that conversation again,” said Mr. Graff. Across the room, I watched Bitsy tap his foot on the linoleum floor. He picked up speed, until his foot was a blur, but he wore sneakers and it barely made a noise. He had always been an anxious and twitchy kid, but nothing out of the ordinary. There was a girl at Dogwood with intermittent explosive disorder, and I wished Bitsy would suddenly freak out and throw a desk at the Meatloaf.

  Becky raised her hand.

  “Yes?”

  “We already know how to survive in the forest,” said Becky. “We learned that in first grade.”

  “Hug a tree,” said Kaitlynn. “Hug a dumb tree and stay there until somebody rescues you.”

  “There’s so much more than that,” said the Meatloaf, springing from the wall, and to the front of the class. “Too many trees to hug, and not enough people to find you.”

  Kaitlynn didn’t bother raising her hand. “Obviously, you don’t know who I am. There would be the biggest search party like ever.” All of David’s cheerleaders thought they were the center of the universe.

  “I don’t even go in the forest,” said David. “May I be excused?”

  “No,” said the teacher. “It’s a dangerous world. You could be dragged into the woods against your will. Look at what happened to Matthew Shepard.”

  “That’s homophobic,” said David. “And another piece of history you have gotten completely wrong.”

  Ronnie was oblivious to all of this and launched into a speech about moss and how it grew on the north side of the trees, and how you could use this as a compass. In the back row, Bitsy dropped his head to his desk. Ronnie droned on, and tried to sound important. He thought he was a cop, but he was in charge of trees, not people. The forest service made sure of that. He was hired on after high school, but kept getting transferred, because you can’t get fired from a government job. At least that’s what my mother said. He started as a custodian, but hid all the garbage cans after the secretaries refused to recycle. When they moved him to the garage, his only job was to wash down the pistachio-colored trucks, but within a month, somebody set his locker on fire. His personality was so off-putting that they reassigned him to a ranger position, where he patrolled the Stillwater State Forest, and had no contact with people, except the occasional unlucky camper. He made twice as much money in his new job, patrolling for litter and extinguishing smoldering campfires. In the winter, he watched for avalanches, and delivered boring speeches to high schools.

  After the bell rang, I approached him. He smirked, and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “The question-and-answer portion is over,” he said.

  “Nobody asked you any questions.”

  “I’m not talking to you,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re a ghost.”

  “It’s cold,” I said. “I need a ride to the gas station.”

  “Absolutely not,” he said. He looked me up and down, and the corner of his mouth raised slightly. “It looks like you could use the exercise.” It was true. The Seroquel had made me gain weight, but my pants still zipped up.

  “I just want a ride, Ronnie. It’s on your way.”

  “No,” he said. “You aren’t allowed in my truck. It’s still an active crime scene.”
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br />   I wanted to point out that there was never an investigation, and that I had served my time, but it was useless arguing with him. I would rather walk.

  * * *

  * * *

  I KNEW MY MOTHER WAS waiting for me. After school, I walked the highway again, and the asphalt was desolate for the first half mile, until Gabardine revealed itself.

  Nine hundred people, but an accurate census was impossible. It was a stubborn place, and nobody trusted government forms. If somebody wanted a head count, all they had to do was ask my mother.

  Gabardine had barely changed in one hundred years. In 1910, the Big Burn came close to us. As always, we were a year behind the trend. The Slightly Less Bigger Burn came eleven months later, but barely made the newspapers, even though our entire town burned down to the ground.

  Now, as I walked farther into town, all I could see were haggard buildings and a brand-new casino. I passed the DVD rental store, crucial because we didn’t have broadband internet. I knew the rest of the civilized world could stream their entertainment. We used to have a pet-grooming business, but it shut down five years ago. My favorite store was also a ghost—I think it must have been a hardware store, but now it only had a sun-bleached sign in the window: Everything Must Go! If you turned left at the store, it brought you into our town, where we had a First Street, and a Second Street, but no need for a Third. The highway was supposed to bring us people, but it only brought drunk-driving accidents and Canadians.

  Chapter Two

  THE READER BOARD OUTSIDE OF the gas station was what I saw first—the gas prices, with the tiles you could flip as the prices rose and fell. Unleaded, Premium, Diesel, and then the fourth number, which anybody in Gabardine knew was my mother’s current weight. I’m sure tourists were confused. When she started losing weight to qualify for the bariatric surgery, she added that last row of tiles, because the surgeon suggested she find a team of people who would be encouraging. Instead of a team, my mother had an entire town. After her surgery, the number plummeted, dropping at alarming rates, and she changed the tiles daily.

  It had been three months, and I actually wanted to know the number. Today, it was 187.

  Next was the Bad Check List. Taped to the front door and replaced monthly, my mother kept a list of customers who’d behaved badly. She believed in public shaming for bouncing checks. When I was a kid, I thought it was a normal part of adulthood, that when you did something wrong, your name was scrawled in Magic Marker and posted in public. My mother caused people to hide from her inside the walk-in cooler at the grocery store, my mother caused one divorce, and my mother caused two families to pack up entirely and move eighteen miles away, to Fortune. Not that it stopped her. She followed them to Fortune to warn the other gas stations, just in case. The Bad Check List was her leverage. Names were removed after debts were paid, but more likely, after my mother had traded their notoriety for really good gossip or manual labor. Sometimes, both. Regardless, the Bad Check List was the closest thing Gabardine had to local news—read between the lines and figure out pretty quick who fell off the wagon, who gambled away an entire paycheck, who finally got garnished for child support.

  My mother said nothing when I entered. She was a short woman, five feet exactly, and when she was at her heaviest, she was a cannonball. After she lost the weight, she was the size of a child who could barely reach the cash register.

  I wasn’t sure where I was allowed to stand anymore, but my mother answered the question by pointing to the black utility mat where customers stood when she rang up their purchases.

  Silently, we watched a woman step down from a giant RV. Alberta plates. Canadians were reverse snowbirds.

  “It’s so charming here,” said the woman.

  “Sure,” said my mother. The customer was always right, even if they were Canadian.

  “Is it a town, or a village, or a hamlet?”

  “We have a zip code,” said my mother. “That’s all I know.”

  It felt strange to stand in front of the counter, and not perch on a chair behind it, but these were the new rules. The woman paid for a carton of wine coolers, and as my mother counted back change, her words were nearly lost in the sound of my brother’s arrival, his stupid diesel engine roaring into the parking lot. As the woman departed, I watched through the window as she coughed in the wake of the black smoke that belched from his truck.

  Ronnie pretended to be shocked when he entered the store, even though he’d just seen me.

  “Tough Tiff is on the lam,” he said. “I never thought she’d be smart enough to pull off a prison break.”

  “They shut her school down,” announced my mother.

  “Whatever,” he said, and removed his leather gloves. “I’m still not talking to her.”

  “Understandable,” said my mother.

  “Are you in any danger?” The Meatloaf whispered this, like he had stumbled into a bank holdup.

  “No,” said my mother. “I got rid of all the silverware. What do you want?”

  Ronnie, the Meatloaf, dug into the back pocket of his pants and removed a rectangle, a stack of raffle tickets, waiting to be serrated, pulled apart. Not this again. The Meatloaf belonged to a weird church, across the state line in Idaho. His church didn’t do anything cool like handle snakes or speak in tongues, but he remained devout to the only religion that would have him. The Meatloaf was so hated in Gabardine that he had to worship in a different time zone.

  “I don’t want the speech,” he said. “Just buy five, and I’ll leave you alone.”

  “What’s the prize this time? Is it another goddamn quilt?”

  “Alpaca wool,” he said proudly. “Straight from the flock. Fifty pounds.”

  “That’s not a prize,” said my mother. “That’s a curse.”

  “Five bucks,” he said. My mother released the cash drawer, and the bell rang out, a sound I had missed. She slid a five-dollar bill across the counter. The Meatloaf began to pull the tickets out of his booklet, but my mother put a hand up.

  “No,” she said. “Once again, your church raffles something that nobody wants. Keep the tickets, give them to your wife. Maybe she can build a nest or something.” This was something I could actually imagine, the Meatloaf’s idiot wife, Lorraine, in a giant nest of a hair ball, slack-jawed in the living room, smart as a baby bird, just waiting for somebody to feed her.

  Lorraine was dumb and meek, but not enough to join Ronnie’s weird church. Sweets rarely crossed state lines, even the Sweets who were legally allowed. When they met, she was just another single mother in a town with a surplus, but I think she looked past his crappy personality and saw government pay and health insurance.

  Lorraine came from a clan of white supremacists out by the dump, always on the police scanner. She looked like the rest of the Sweets, squished features, stumpy bodies in sweat suits, their skin darker than most of us. In Gabardine, we all came from Northern Europe, but the Sweets were ruddy and tanned well, maybe from years of passing out in the sun.

  Ronnie glared as he backed out of the door, keeping his eyes on me, suspicious as always.

  “You can have a hot dog,” my mother declared. I guess she was concerned about my nutrition or something, and I was starving. Outside, Ronnie fired up his stupid diesel truck, and the roar shook the metal carousel of the hot dog machine. My mother watched me intensely as I ripped a plastic ketchup packet open with my teeth. Her eyes followed my every move, like I was going to shoplift a bunch of hot dogs, shove them into the pockets of my leather jacket.

  She never liked my jackets, black and oversized, hanging to my knees and swinging like a trench coat. According to my mother, each jacket I brought home had its own particular scent, always horrific. My father assured me that they all smelled the same. I honestly thought my mother would be pleased when I brought the first jacket home. Instead, she told me that I looked like a “sailor on leave.�
�� I didn’t understand the phrase. She only wore black because she said it was slimming. I chose to wear black for other reasons, but to tourists, we must have looked like twins behind the gas station counter. Every July, motorcycle tours came through Gabardine and refueled, and they could eat six hot dogs in one sitting. I didn’t care about their appetites, I only saw the jackets, and I knew I wanted one of my own. I saw the uniform as built for travel, built for leaving, armor for tough men who could roar out of town as fast as possible. I wanted to leave, too.

  I don’t know why my mother watched me so closely. I knew I had to be on my best behavior, that a leash was now yoked around my neck. I could feel it. She would double-check everything after I left. My mother kept an internal inventory of all the merchandise in the gas station, something she could control, I guess. I was the one thing she was unsure of.

  * * *

  * * *

  I RETURNED TO THE TRAILER park, still hungry. When I opened the refrigerator door, I saw the same things it had contained since my father died: one jar of cold cream for my mother’s stretch marks, and a carton of neon-yellow wine coolers. After he died, she stopped keeping groceries in the house, and I think she was relieved. The freezer, as always, was stocked with Lean Cuisines. These were acceptable food, an exact 380 calories. I chose one without looking, and put it in the microwave. I ate it with a plastic fork, and I was halfway finished before I realized that my consequences now included Beef Stroganoff. I carried it to the back porch, and when I opened the door, I could tell nobody had been in there for months. Even though Ronnie moved out years ago, it still smelled like meatloaf. Now, he lived three trailers down, and it probably smelled like frankincense and myrrh. Admittedly, my biblical knowledge was sparse.

  Against the wall stood a row of pots, the dirt spiked with the remnants of plants. My father had loved his African violets. We had seven when he died, and it had been an art for him, finding the exact right light to make them flower. We had no other houseplants, and I was fascinated at how his violets had to be watered from the bottom. His flowers did not follow the usual rules, and now they had been punished, abandoned. I could identify.