I pass a driveway with a kit car under a carport, covered in a tarp—the way Gary stored his for winter—and all of a sudden, I realize how I can buy time with Mrs. Ivory’s car.
— Chapter 10 —
I walk around the campground looking for leftover wood to build a fire. I’m all alone and even though I know people just moved on into winter, it feels like the end of the world or a bomb went off and everyone knew to take cover except me.
The things people leave behind are strange. There’s an assortment of forgettable junk: hair clips, condom wrappers, bottle caps, crushed soda cans. But then there are accidentals, things that had people saying “Oh shit!” when they were halfway home. Or maybe they were just missing something, left with a vague idea they’d find it eventually under that pile of mail or in the junk drawer. Eyeglasses, a cheap charm bracelet with greening silver charms (coffee cup, teddy bear, airplane, shooting star, four-leaf clover), a set of keys looped on a soggy rabbit’s foot, a screwdriver with R.S. carved into the sweat-stained wood handle. I wonder if any of the owners were happy to lose their stuff, wallowing in the freedom of leaving it behind, a chance to get glasses that don’t have brown plastic frames.
I find more than enough firewood. At one site, someone left half a bundle when they cleared out. I try to use the cigarette lighter from the car to light it, but the wood sizzles and won’t catch. I eat the rest of the cookies from Irene’s apartment and sit in my car, wrapped in sheets like a mummy to stay warm, waiting for dark.
The sun is at the horizon when my eyes get heavy, and then when I wake up, it’s the darkest dark I’ve ever seen and my hands are so cold I can barely move my fingers. I feel like the cold has seeped into my bones and will never go away.
Margo went through this phase where she believed in visualizing what you want. She had a series of cassette tapes that talked about holding pictures in your mind until they become reality. I try to think warm, picturing a hot sun melting away icicles that are stuck in my bones like pushpins, the melted water dripping into a warm bath, steam opening my pores. I try hard. It’s clear in my mind, but the cold won’t let go.
I fumble around for my flashlight and pull every warm piece of clothing I can from the back seat. Then I head out with R.S.’s screwdriver in my bag, bundled in so many layers I can barely bend my arms at the elbows.
At ten thirty in Little River, things are dying down. Gary’s Tap Room is the one place still open and even the crowd there will start to grumble about getting home. Only hardcore loyals stay until midnight, when Gary closes.
Ithaca is alive. People on porches smoking. Music leaks from open doors. Bob Marley, Grateful Dead, and that Chili Pepper band Matty’s cousin from New York City taped for him off the radio, all swirl together, making a big stew of sound. I have to walk right past the kit car house. I can’t follow through with my plan until everyone goes to bed, so I wander up one street, down the next, looking in lit up living rooms from the sidewalk like I’m window-shopping for people.
There’s a girl perfectly framed in one window, holding a red plastic cup and spinning around. Her long hair flares like a skirt. There’s just enough light from the flickering porch lamp that I can see a guy out there smoking, staring at her through the glass as if she’s magic. She has no idea he’s watching her. She throws one arm into the air and spins faster, finally collapsing on a couch in front of the window. The smoking guy moves away like he doesn’t want to get caught.
In another window, kids crowd around a ping-pong table bouncing a ball into plastic cups. No one has any paddles. I watch until my teeth chatter, then I get moving so I don’t freeze.
Three houses down, the porch is packed with people and as I walk past, a shirtless guy yells, “Hey, you!”
I look back.
“Yeah, you!” His hairless chest is splotchy red from the cold. “I know you. Girl from lit class! I know you.”
“I don’t think…” I struggle for words. I felt invisible and it seems wrong that he can see me.
He jumps over the porch railing and stands really close to me. He has a round face and cheeks that are too chubby for the rest of him. A mane of shaggy hair like a lion. “Margaret, right?”
“April,” I say.
“Yeah, yeah, April. April,” Lion Boy says like he’s stuck on the word. “April. April from lit class.” He stares hard and I worry he might kiss me. “Have a beer!” He pushes his cup into my hand.
His buddy jumps down next to him. Bare-chested too, shirt tied around his head like a turban. “Who’d you give your beer to, man?”
“Dude! This is April from lit class,” Lion Boy tells him, pointing at me like his friend wouldn’t know who he was talking about otherwise.
“Girls like their own beers,” the turban guy says with a smirk that gives him dimples. “Get April from lit class her own beer. She doesn’t want your cooties.”
“April,” Lion Boy says, grabbing my arm, “I’ll get you your own beer.”
I know this is stupid and I don’t even like beer, but I’m cold and hungry and lonely and they think I belong, so I let Lion Boy lead me into the house. I don’t want to be one of those girls who ends up duct taped to a chair in someone’s basement like in the articles Margo clips for me. She always says she worries no one taught me to be wary of people in the right way, but I don’t think Lion Boy and his friends count. They’re not even adults.
It’s warm inside. Stuffy from too many people breathing in too small a space, but I don’t care. I have hope of being able to feel my face again. There are broken hockey sticks mounted on the walls, crisscrossed like those swords you see over a fireplace in movies about British people. The couch is covered in NHL bedsheets, and someone is burning incense that smells like dirty feet.
Lion Boy lets go of my arm and I follow him to the kitchen. He pumps the keg and fumbles for a cup. While he’s pouring, I survey. Most of the people in the living room are guys, big ones with dopey drunk beer faces who spit when they talk. There’s a group of five girls in the corner looking around, giggling like they are among gods. Another one wears a short jean skirt and a shirt that shows her whole belly. She tries to wrap herself around a guy who is too busy cheering on an arm wrestling match across the room to pay her much notice. Other than those girls, it’s what Margo would call a sausage party, but they all seem harmless enough.
“Here, April from lit class,” Lion Boy says, thrusting a beer into my hand. It’s green-tinged and sloshes over the sides of the cup onto my boots. “Oh god! I spilled on you! I spilled on you, April! I’m sorry.” He pulls a grimy towel from the fridge handle, bending to wipe my boots.
“No prob,” I say, thinking I should shed a few shirts and try to fit in. Lion Boy is too drunk to notice, but the girls in the corner are eyeing me like they think I smell bad.
I wriggle out of two layers of flannel, tie them around my waist, and lean against the wall so I can keep a good eye on the kitchen and the living room. I am trying my best to look like I don’t give a crap about anything.
When Lion Boy is done with the towel, he loops it back over the fridge handle and pours another beer. He rests his arm behind me on the wall and leans in. His breath smells sharp.
“Why is it green?” I ask, taking a sip of beer to keep Lion Boy from getting too close. It tastes like what my father would describe as “stale piss water,” although, who’s going around drinking piss water to compare?
“Huh?” Lion Boy says, eyes half-closed.
“The beer? It’s green?”
His face lights up. “It’s a Seuss party.”
I raise one eyebrow, which is better than saying anything in most situations.
“You know,” he says, “like Dr. Seuss? Green Eggs and Ham?” He pats his head. “Wait!” He hands me his beer and runs to the living room. Fishing under coats on the couch, he finds a tall red and white striped fuzzy hat and pulls it on his head. The girls in the corner laugh.
“Yeah? Yeah? Like it?” he says, taking
a minute to bob to the music, a song about ants marching around, before he struts back to the kitchen. “Green beer and ham! Aw, yeah.” He grins, nodding like he approves of himself.
I smile because I feel like I’m supposed to. I wonder why we always thought kids who went to college were magically cool.
“So, you’re all like grunge and shit, huh?” he says, leaning into me again. He’s still not wearing a shirt and his armpits don’t smell great. He’s like radiating heat.
“Sure,” I say, nursing my beer.
That’s the end of our conversation for a good ten minutes. He stands and bobs to the music, fighting to keep his eyelids from slamming shut, the stupid hat still nesting in his curls. I watch the girls in the living room. I don’t understand the way they act like these boys are another species. They’re just boys. They aren’t worth all the giggling and lip gloss.
I ask to use the bathroom. Lion Boy breathes in hard through his nose and opens his eyes wide like he’s waking up.
“Okay, so you go up the stairs and then you make a—” He holds his hands up, trying to figure out which is right and which is left. “I’ll show you.” He grabs my hand, threading his sweaty fingers between mine, and leads me across the living room. We walk up creaky, crooked steps. It’s the second door on the left.
I close the door behind me and have to push hard to get it to stay shut. There are porno mags on the back of the toilet and a hair clog in the bathtub drain so big it looks like it could grow legs and run away if it wanted to. I pee hovering as far above the seat as possible and wash my hands with hot, hot water. I wish I could run every part of me under hot water. I’m still not thawed.
When I open the door, the room across the hall is open. There’s a black light and someone painted a drippy skull and crossbones on the wall with Tide so it glows. Lion Boy sits on the bed strumming an electric guitar that isn’t plugged in. Thin metal chords sound vaguely like November Rain.
“You play?” I say.
“Yeah, you?”
“A little.”
He’s wearing a shirt now. A white one with a face on it that looks kind of like one of the statues from Easter Island. The stupid Seuss hat is on the bed next to him. He hands the guitar over. “Play something,” he says. Suddenly he doesn’t seem like such a lame-ass bonehead. He plugs the guitar into a small amp and turns the volume down.
I’ve never played an electric. The strings are thicker and feel like they will leave my fingers bruised, but I don’t mind. I play the song I wrote about my dad, the angry one, and I almost cry, but I don’t. I bite my cheek and strum hard like it’s just part of the song, until I can pull it together and sing again. I don’t care that Lion Boy is watching; it feels like being me to play this guitar. I finish the song and he asks me to play another one. I play Lay Lady Lay.
“Did you write that too?” he asks when I’m done.
“Dylan did,” I say, laughing.
“Does he go here?”
“He’s in our lit class,” I say, because I don’t know how to explain Dylan to someone who doesn’t know.
Lion Boy slides his fingers under my hair and kisses me. I don’t even know his name. His mouth tastes like sour beer and something burnt, but it’s actually kind of nice to be kissed. He grabs the guitar from me and lays it in its case. We lie on his bed and kiss for ages. It takes him forever to work through all my layers of clothes. It’s hot and sweaty and my skin sticks to his. He falls asleep before we really do anything. We’re just lying there in our underwear groping each other and he drifts off, lips still pursed, arm over my waist. He snores a little, wrinkles his nose a few times. He looks so peaceful. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that peaceful in my life.
When I’m sure he’s not going to wake up, I lift his arm and sneak out from under it. I throw clothes on and sprint to the bathroom. On the way, I peek down the stairs. Everyone is gone except for the girl in the belly shirt and her boyfriend. He’s holding his hand to his forehead. She’s crying hard.
I decide I can probably get away with a shower. I wad up like twenty sheets of toilet paper to remove the hair from the drain. I make the water so hot that my skin feels like it’ll burn up and peel off. Use someone’s Head & Shoulders and wash the bar of soap hard before sudsing up my body. When I’m done, I realize that touching any towel in the bathroom will interfere with my clean state, so I use one of my flannel shirts instead. I poke around and find a hair dryer under the sink. Use my fingers as a brush and do the best I can to untangle all the knots and blow my hair out straight, so it won’t look messy in the morning.
Lion Boy is snoring away when I get back to his room. I layer on the rest of my clothes, leaving my wet shirt hanging over his desk chair. There are two rolls of quarters on his desk. I take one, telling myself it’s fair payment for the shirt. His guitar is just lying there in its case, shiny and clean. Can’t be more than a few years old, so there’s no great history. But you can’t do that. You don’t take someone else’s guitar. It’s like a code.
When I walk downstairs, the fighting couple is gone. I dig my screwdriver out of my bag so I won’t have to fumble for it in the dark, snake it up my shirtsleeve, and slip out the door.
— Chapter 11 —
The screws on the license plate are rusty. I can’t see well, but I smell the breakdown of old metal and feel rust in the way they turn. It makes me think of pulling nails from scrap wood with my dad, back when he had illusions of building us that house. He’d yell at me if I bent the nails too much so they broke before they came out of the boards. And I remember that he didn’t yell at me when I stepped on one. It went right through the sole of my old ripped sneakers into the middle of my foot. It hurt so bad I stopped feeling the pain. I tried to hide it, because I thought he’d be mad and scream something like Damn it, Ape! We’ll never get this house finished if you don’t stop fucking around! But the blood soaked through my sneaker and it was impossible to hide. My dad turned white when he noticed. We couldn’t get my shoe off because the nail was still stuck in my foot and neither of us could stomach the pull, so he scooped me up in his arms and we went to the ER.
When he carried me in through the automatic doors, everyone in the waiting room looked at us, and I felt more important than I ever have otherwise. The tetanus shot hurt like hell, but my dad held my hand, and the nurse gave me apple juice and way more tissues than I actually needed. That night, my dad tucked me in and checked my bandage, smoothed my hair, and played Cat Stevens songs on his guitar until I fell asleep.
* * *
I hum Wild World under my breath while I work the second screw. When I get to the chorus, I whisper the words to myself because they’re the only lyrics I remember. My hands are raw. R.S.’s screwdriver sucks ass. The metal part is bent at a funny angle and the handle is full of splinters.
I get the third screw out, but the plate sticks in place. When I rest the screw on the ground, the plate swings down and splits my knuckles open. My whole hand throbs, but I keep going like it didn’t even happen. I can’t stop now, and I need both hands to get the last screw to turn. By the time I’m done with the front license plate and move to the back one, my fingers are sticky.
I take off a flannel, use it to wrap my hand, and work the screws on the back plate hard to get the job done fast. I’m careful to use my good hand to pull the car cover down as far as it will go, so no one will notice what I’ve done.
When I walk back to the campground with the icy plates stuck under my shirt, I have a lump in my throat that feels like it could kill me. For once, I wish I could cry, but it’s just not happening. The pain in my hand is so far beyond tears.
I do the best I can to clean the wound in the campground bathroom, ripping strips from the boy’s sheets for bandages. Then I get back to work before my fingers can stiffen, swapping the plates on my car. I hide the old ones with the spare tire in the trunk and vow that I’ll put everything right again as soon as I can.
— Chapter 12 —
When I wake up, there’s a note on my windshield. A blue half sheet of paper stuck under the wiper right in front of my face, reminding me that I have to leave tomorrow. It freaks me out to no end that the campground guy came over and put it there while I was sleeping. I didn’t wake up and he didn’t think to knock on the window or announce himself or cough or anything. I wonder if he watched me sleep. I wonder if he got something out of watching me sleep. Like those businessmen Matty told me about who buy dirty underwear, or the agnostic guy on the flyer at Cafe Decadence. I suppose if you have a thing for watching people sleep, working at a campground is a good place to get your rocks off. To each his own, as Margo would say. And I don’t guess anyone ever got hurt from someone just watching them.
I walk to the bathroom, relieved I don’t have to get in that awful shower, but when I catch myself in the mirror, I scare the shit out of me. Blood, streaked down my cheek, wiped along my jaw. I must have slept on my hand. I bled through the sheet strips. I do the best I can to clean my face with freezing sink water and realize that I can’t exactly go serving people at a coffee shop with a horror movie bloody stump.
Back in the car, I wriggle into my cleanest flannel, pull Margo’s hand-me-down leopard-print leggings on under my long skirt for extra warmth, and gather my hair into the most professional ponytail I can manage with one hand. I wrap a new strip of sheet around my knuckles and walk into town, even though it’s only eight a.m. and I don’t have to be at work until ten thirty.
I stop at the pharmacy, buy a bottle of peroxide and a roll of gauze, and take care of my hand in the employee bathroom. Then I go to a funny little shop that sells bulky sweaters and blow eight bucks on fingerless gloves to hide the bandage. They smell like incense even after I’ve left the store. I wonder if anything in Ithaca just smells like normal, or dryer sheets, or nothing.
The People We Keep Page 8