“This shouldn’t take more than an hour,” she said, leading me to the front of the house. “Come wait inside.”
We stepped up onto the rickety wooden porch, steps bowing and creaking beneath my feet, then Jenny knocked. No one answered, but the door opened when she pushed and then we were in a dark living room with an old couch and two chairs set up around a coffee table. The walls were barren expanses of plaster and our footsteps echoed as we moved toward the slant of light that fell out of a doorway.
“Hello?” Jenny called.
“In here.”
We walked through the dark living room and into the kitchen where a woman sat smoking at a table with a jug of wine and a coffee cup. She was facing away from us but I knew her by her hair—Chelsea, Svenson’s sister. Dirty glasses and empty beer cans littered the counters and the windowsills, a banner hung across the kitchen wall: HAPPY 18TH BIRTHDAY!
“Is he around?” Jenny asked.
“Upstairs,” Chelsea answered. “Did you bring this one for me?”
Jenny pointed to the table and I sat, then she walked across the kitchen, through the doorway that led to the staircase.
“Hello, Shane,” Chelsea said. “Would you like some wine?”
I nodded and she rose to get another mug.
“So how goes the job?” she asked. “You like working with Leon?”
“It’s good,” I said. “And I do like Leon. He’s a very generous guy.”
I took the mug from her. She sat in the chair next to me and moved her hands to her hair, running her fingers over the bristles of the shaved side of her head before tying her long hair into a braid and tossing it over her shoulder. I sipped my wine and looked her over.
“You know what she’s doing up there, right?” Chelsea asked. She made a circle with her thumb and fingers, held it up to her mouth, bobbed her head toward and away.
“No,” I said.
“Ask her yourself when she comes back down,” she said. “What else do you give your man on his birthday?”
Her man. Jenny’s plan was working, but I’d never get used to that. I took down my mug of wine in one long drink.
“Where is everyone, Chelsea? There are at least five cars out there.”
“They all left around eleven when Gramma got tired,” she said. “Those vehicles are my brother’s, he fixes them up. Five more out back. My other brother’s got a couple around too, but he doesn’t live here anymore.”
An extended moment of silence passed as I thought about Svenson’s grandmother. Had she seen him on the news with his flag? Was she proud of him? I guess even real members of the Ku Klux Klan had grandmothers that they invited to their birthday parties and helped up and down the stairs.
“I hate those cars. It’s like a graveyard out there—he parks them wherever he wants. Fucking slob. Just like in the house. He does what he wants and expects me to clean up after him. I don’t know why he has to buy every beat-down piece of shit he sees on the side of the road.”
Chelsea squinted as she spoke, ground her teeth between sentences. She hadn’t been awake as long as Jenny but she had taken some speed.
“I shouldn’t talk like that about my brother,” she said, before lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke into the air above us. “He’s a good guy. He does what he can to help me with my daughter. You should see him with her, really, I don’t think you would believe it. And he doesn’t have to do that—he could leave at any moment and live an easy breezy life by himself anywhere; his brother did it. Still, I wish he would listen once in a while.”
She took down the rest of her mug of wine, then poured herself another full cup and stood.
“This pan here,” she said, lifting a cast-iron pan off the stovetop and turning it to me so I could see the mess of grease and gristle inside. “This pan has been here for months. Sven made himself a steak sometime in April and this has been here ever since. I refuse to clean it because he dirtied it before I moved back in. I tell him that but you know what he says?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“He says it’s women’s work,” she said. “That washing dishes is women’s work. And it’s true, I know. I’ve washed every dish that has been dirtied since I moved back in but I’ll tell you one thing—I’m not going to wash this.”
Chelsea took the handle of the pan in both hands and swung it like a tennis racket a few times before she lifted it up over her head and brought it down before her like she was chopping kindling.
“Someday I’d like to crack him over the head with it,” she said without a smile. She set the pan back down and took her seat. “That’d teach him a lesson.”
A sleepy-eyed child walked into the kitchen dragging a limp stuffed bear by the back leg. She was very much Chelsea’s daughter, her face an exact replica—had her hair been dyed bright red and half shaved, she would’ve been a shrunken version.
“Mommy,” the girl said, “why are you still up? It’s late.”
“I’m talking to my friend, dear,” she said, standing up and walking toward the child, then picking her up. “Let’s bring Paddington and you back to bed now.”
“But I want to play Intenno,” the girl said.
“We can play your Nintendo for a bit,” Chelsea said. “But then you need to get some sleep.”
“O-key,” the girl said and dragged Paddington into the living room.
Chelsea stood and waved at me to follow them. The girl switched on a lamp and sat cross-legged on the floor before a television in the corner with Paddington’s head in her lap. Chelsea’s shoes clacked across the old wood, the odd echo bouncing back, and after pushing a few buttons near the television Super Mario came on the screen. Her daughter started up the game, dodging walking mushrooms and flying turtles, while I took a seat on the antique couch and Chelsea sat down next to me, a bit too close, her hand settling strongly on my knee.
“We weren’t allowed on this furniture as kids,” Chelsea said. “I never sat here. It was a room meant only to be shown, the kind of place where you would entertain, but Ma and Pa didn’t ever have any guests.”
“This is a nice couch,” I said, squirming to get my knee out from under her, but my struggle only moved her hand farther up my leg.
The game was one I was familiar with, having owned it right up until I had planned to give it to J, right up until Rick stole it, so when GAME OVER appeared dead center on the screen I moved down to the floor and took the controller. Chelsea joined us, lifted her daughter into her lap, and echoed her excited ooohs and aaahs as I made my way through each level. They shuffled together near me as the girl grew restless and finally fell asleep with her tiny hand wrapped around Chelsea’s pinky and ring fingers.
When I dodged the final dragon and beat the game, Chelsea carried her daughter off to bed so I shut off the TV and went back into the kitchen. The clock on the wall read 1:23. I tipped back my mug of wine and sat down at the table. When Chelsea returned, she lit a cigarette and then fiddled with her braid as she told me about her husband, how he had given her scabies—“Some crank whore gave him bugs and then he gave them to his girls”—and how she had left him for a while but now he was trying to get back with her, with their daughter.
The wine jug grew empty as the ashtray filled, our mouths reddened as the windows lightened. Just before sunrise, Chelsea pulled out what I thought was lipstick but then stuck the tube up her nose and snorted. Held the contraption out to me but I refused so she put it up her other nostril and went again.
“You’re a shooter, eh? You’ve got that look.”
“I’ve sort of been off it for a while now,” I said.
“That’s good,” she said. “Stay off it if you can.”
She lit another cigarette and asked me if I minded her asking personal questions. The first few weren’t so bad. Where I was going, where I had been.
“Have you had roommates?”
“My dad, I guess.”
“One thing about living with men though,” she
said and stood up, lurching now from the speed and the wine, “is that they never clean up after themselves.”
She again staggered over to the stove and struggled to lift the cast-iron pan off the burner. Holding the greasy mess of fat and crispy meat chunks between us, I saw this time that someone had tapped cigarette ash into it and sunk the butt deep in the puddle of the white gelatinous goo.
“Do you know how many times I’ve asked Sven to wash this pan he dirtied going on four months ago?”
“Three?”
“Try thirteen,” she said, “but then try again because it’s closer to sixty. Every single day since I moved in I’ve asked him to clean up this mess, but he won’t.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Wow is what he’ll say when I crack him in the skull with this thing,” she said, swinging the pan back and forth before her as she walked it back to the stove. She sat back down and lit a cigarette before realizing that she already had one going in the ashtray. Holding one in each hand she went back to her questions and I told her my plans to go to my mother’s before coming back for school in September. After that she got up and moved her chair as close to mine as possible, then sat back down and scooted in so that our hips were touching. Hand on my knee, her line of questioning turned in the direction I knew it would.
“You mean to tell me you’ve never kissed a girl?” She leaned in closer. “Boys though, I’m sure, right?”
I didn’t answer. She took my hand and placed it on her breast.
“So you’ve never done this before either? Squeeze it a little.”
She arched her back and exhaled when I did it, then moved her hand to my neck, pulling my face toward hers, when footsteps creaked down the stairs and Jenny was back.
“Shane! I forgot you were here. Let’s go!”
Jenny stepped into the kitchen and Svenson replaced her in the doorway, shirtless. His face, pallid and uncertain, overcome by tics and spasms, told me they had gone through a lot of speed in the hours they had spent upstairs.
“You forgot your purse, doll,” Svenson said through clenched jaws, holding out the small bag.
Jenny spun and took the bag by the strap, tossing the contents onto the floor. Something made a plastic rattle as it bounced across the linoleum. Svenson watched Jenny chase after it but then his glance turned my way.
“What are you doing here?”
Jenny disappeared into the living room. I jumped out of Chelsea’s embrace and ran out behind Jenny without answering Svenson.
“Nice to meet you again,” Chelsea called after me.
The music came on loud when the car started, drowning out whatever Svenson was yelling from the porch as we pulled out. Jenny drove fast once we were out on the road, muttering under her breath, beating the dashboard with her right hand while she steered with her left, and I saw that she was wearing a glossy black ring around her middle finger.
“What is that?” I asked, leaning to point at her hand on the wheel.
“A glass ring,” she said, “clearly. This though . . .”
Jenny fidgeted in her seat, pulled the tangled purse out from behind her, and popped into my hands a small plastic box wrapped in thin cardboard.
“This’ll be Svenson’s demise,” she said.
Looking down at the disposable camera, I knew why I kept expecting Svenson’s truck to appear behind us in the mirror.
“What time is it?”
“Six thirty,” I said, reading from the clock on the dash. The sun now hung just above the horizon to the east.
“Oh shit, it’s that late? I’m so stupid,” she said. “So fucking stupid.”
“You aren’t stupid,” I told her but she wasn’t listening, rather talking to herself. Her face twitched as she wove the car through the early-morning traffic and I knew she was as far gone as Chelsea had been. When the speedometer hit ninety I put on my seat belt.
Back in town, Jenny pulled the car into the parking lot of the A&W, then told me to wait ten minutes before I went to her house. She was paranoid, so I did what she said without question and got out to the whistles of an oncoming train. The engine chugged out from behind the A&W and the cars picked up speed as the train made its way out of town. I stood in the middle of the empty parking lot, immobile like in my leaden-foot dreams, with an arm up to shield my eyes from the sun as I watched the graffiti pass by—one HOPE took up an entire train car and, painted in red and white stripes, the O a giant target with three arrows sticking out of the bull’s-eye.
The front door was open so I rang the bell before I let myself in. The living room, flooded with morning light, was a disaster area. Newspapers and junk mail piled across the coffee table and, on top of that, overflowing ashtrays and prescription bottles. In the kitchen, dirty dishes piled up out of the sink, taking up most of the countertop. A second pile of newspapers and bills and junk mail on the kitchen table.
Jenny came around the corner from the bedrooms, meeting me at the top of the stairs, and told me to wait in her room.
“But don’t look in—”
It was already too late. A quick glance to my left and I saw Kristina laid out on a sheet on the floor of her bedroom, staring at the ceiling above her, wet stains spread across the inner thighs of her pants. I stepped past into Jenny’s room and sat on her bed.
“We have diapers,” she said from the hallway, “but she looks so sad when you put one on her. I try to make it home in time so she doesn’t have to wear them.”
When Jenny finished and came to her room, she emptied her pockets onto her bed, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and three small baggies of speed. Next to all that she dropped the portable camera.
“I’m going to shower,” she said. “I feel nasty.”
Jenny hurried out of the room, so I took a cigarette from her pack and made my way to the patio to smoke. My second pass through the mess stoked my worry. Thoughts of Kristina floundering each day in this dirty house alone while her daughter chased her own good feelings made me wonder aloud to the waxing morning exactly what it was that we were doing. After I flicked my butt into Jenny’s backyard, I went back to find the door to the bathroom open and Jenny, one towel wrapped around her wet hair, another around her body, standing before the mirror squeezing little patches of her face between her index fingers.
“I forgot you were here,” she said, her face speckled with red spots, many dripping blood. When she smiled a red river formed in the line of her cheek, trailing down to the corner of her mouth. “I thought I was alone.”
“You’re doing too much, Jenny,” I said. “Look at your face, look at this house. I’m worried about you and your mother.”
She turned to me with a manic smile, blood dripping from the open wounds on her face, and nodded, but then turned back to the mirror, leaned in close and brought her two index fingers together near her widow’s peak.
“Jenny,” I said.
She jumped, startled, then with her arms in the air before her, she looked to the ceiling and yelled, “Why can’t I stop picking my face?”
* * *
The photo lab at Walmart hadn’t opened yet so Jenny sealed the portable camera into an envelope, wrote her phone number on the contact line, and dropped the package into the service box. It wasn’t until we were crossing the tracks on our way back that I realized I would be gone before the photos were ready.
“That’s fine,” Jenny said. “I’ll take them to the sheriff tomorrow. It’d be better if I get some sleep before I meet him anyways.”
“You know the sheriff came to my work and told me to keep an eye on you,” I said. “He’d seen you driving around and was worried about you and Svenson.”
“Of course he did,” Jenny said, “and I’ll tell you what I told him. Svenson needs to be locked up. He’s a racist and a dog-killing, drug-dealing rapist. Do you want to split hairs here? The sheriff told me to back off, but how can I do that now? You know how Svenson talks, what he calls people. If you know what he does but don’t do anyth
ing about it, you become complicit—you become an inconsiderate, racist asshole of the same caliber. I couldn’t care less about drugs, but that’s all the sheriff is after. To me, if you don’t contradict Svenson then you agree with him, then you fly the Confederate flag with him, wear the KKK uniform with him, kill the dogs with him, call yourself a faggot with him. Silence in the face of Svenson makes you worse than Svenson himself.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Svenson may have done good for his sister and niece, but it didn’t cancel out all the awful things he’d done. I’m sure that much of his tough-guy persona was posturing. He was neither a member of the Ku Klux Klan or the Confederacy, but the fact that he could slit a dog’s throat with no remorse would be enough to convince the most forgiving of people that he was a monster.
“But more than that,” Jenny said, “I need the sheriff and my mother to get back together. I can’t take care of her and live my life. It’s one or the other.”
I was still a bit unclear how Jenny linked Svenson’s downfall to her mother and the sheriff’s reconciliation. It sounded to me a bit delusional—the type of idea that someone who hadn’t slept for a few days might believe—but she spoke of it as a sure thing.
“I know he still loves her,” she said. “When he sees her tomorrow, when he sees how she is now, he’ll bring her to the hospital and I’ll be free.”
Jenny was quick to fix up when we got to my place. I let her into my room before I went to the bathroom and returned to find her sitting on the edge of my bed, lost in the changing patterns on the wall, needle still hanging from her arm.
“Look, Jenny,” I said when she came back around, “you need to quit this shit. It’s getting out of hand.”
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