by Chris Dennis
Regrettably, this was nothing like the celebrity role-playing scenarios she described to him after a few drinks on the patio.
He washed up in the bathroom and with a bottle in each hand misted a veil of cologne that he walked determinedly through, right out the front door, leaving behind the doomed smells of Aramis and Drakkar Noir.
She stood perfectly still at the mouth of the hall, feeling as if she were about to be delivered from the belly of the house. A small pressure could be felt. The whole place was dead quiet. The plastic flower arrangements in their fluted vases were dusty, and she could still smell the base notes of Richard’s cologne. She was thinking of that distant, dusk-lit era right before puberty engulfed her. She’d had a fantasy back then of being a DMV employee: the aseptic office, the cryptic vision-screening machine, the ladies’ glasses dangling from gold, rococo chains. A girl’s life could be filled with moments like this: longings for positions of power and beauty.
The years had passed in crooked, hurtful ways, stranding her like a bored time traveler with Richard and the children.
She decided she’d replace the fake flowers with something more interesting, feathers or shards of broken glass. But not before her walk. She surveyed the neighbor’s house again. Two shirtless hunks were spreading red pebbles down the driveway, like icing on a giant cake, while another, dopier man finagled a leather sectional through the pretentious front door.
She put on her headphones and wandered through the green fields that skirted the sun-flecked woods. The trapdoor, propped up by its stick, made a little awning for the box. Outside, it was black with decay and dappled neon with moss. It was a lovely thing, and more alive today. When she knelt down, hunching a little to clear the awning, she observed a quivering cone of fire. Below the orange fire was a city with spires and slender onyx skyscrapers. At the edge of the city was a steel mill—the same steel mill that had stood like a demon empire at the end of the road she’d grown up on. It was a tangled gathering of scaffolds and pipes that broke through a copper skyline, filling the air around with a bitter smell, like old blood. The version in the box was small enough to fit in her palms. She did not reach out. She leaned in closer to admire it. Her head cast a shadow, throwing the scene into darkness, causing a hundred little lights to blink on at once—the lights defined the shape of every building. There were violent raspings and dense billows of steam no bigger than cotton balls, all of it lit by the glow of the constantly churning flame, dripping like a cracked-open sun over the busy diorama. Near the back she noticed a cluster of sow bugs crawling across the roof of a smaller building. How did she miss this? Lonely and darkened at the edge of a tar-paved road was her very own girlhood home. Every red shingle, every painted-shut window, her own mother even, in her strapless romper, sitting on the lopsided porch, drinking Miller High Life from a microscopic wineglass. A crow the size of a housefly perched atop a thread-thin power line, and a cat in the lot next door stared up suspiciously from a canopy of folded-over weeds. Pam watched for a long time, mesmerized by the delicate movements of the weeds and the bird and her doll-like mother, even the way the light from the burning pyramid in the sky reflected in the little wineglass each time her mother raised it to take a drink. She observed her mother going in and out of the house, tugging at her revealing romper, refilling the glass, until finally the minimother walked down the steps and fell down drunk on the lawn, exposing herself to anyone passing by. Pammy knelt and listened to her mother’s piggish snore. She expected her tiny daddy to come out and carry Mommy inside. But he never did.
Pam backed away from the box to stretch a crick in her neck, causing the little safety lights of the mill to flick off. There was a quick hiss of steam and the cone of fire diminished into a willowy pipe. The whole mill contracted abruptly into itself, like a crude mechanical toy, leaving behind the smell of rust and chlorinated water.
At home she lay about in the recliner watching Top 20 Video Countdown on the jumbo TV. She awoke to the racket of night insects in the flower beds, and her daughter, Janice, saying, “Wake up, Mother. Meet the new neighbor!” Janice and the neighbor girl stood in front of the TV: two silhouettes examining each other’s Swatches before a George Michael video on mute.
“Excuse me?” Pam said, reaching for the lamp. The neighbor girl stood before her in the buttery light, wearing a pink Mickey Mouse T-shirt that stopped directly below the girl’s perfect breasts.
“Hello, Janice’s mother,” the girl said in a flippant, adult voice.
“We want the television,” Janice said.
The girl’s jeans were high and tight, like a designer bandage. Between the T-shirt and denim her skin showed, smooth and tan as a suede coat. The TV flicked between commercials. Somewhere a cat screamed in heat. Pam felt trapped. She’d removed her pants before falling asleep and had nothing on beneath the afghan. “Tia just moved here from New Mexico,” Janice said. “She came over to roll up your car windows. Isn’t that nice? It’s about to storm.”
Pam turned to look out the window. The night was starry and still.
“Honestly, it could change in an instant,” Tia said. “I spotted a strange cloud earlier. Cumulus, or possibly cumulonimbus. It contained a shadow.” She said this dryly, seating herself on the arm of the sofa, gesturing at the window with a bony finger. Her pupils were large, and luminous as varnish, and her lashes grew forth hectically like those of a beautiful horse.
“How did you get here, again?” Pam said.
“We bought the farmhouse across from you,” Tia said, rising to adjust Pam’s blanket, politely concealing a nude thigh. “But I walked over.”
“From Mexico?”
Tia laughed, a bright, orbital laugh that caused Pam to laugh too. “From New Mexico, I flew!” she said.
Pam was not entirely conscious, she realized.
Janice looked to be in agony. She hauled Tia out of the room. “Please put some pants on, Mother. We’re coming back to watch a video in here.”
The girls returned with several empty onion bags. They cut them apart and sewed them back together again with dental floss. In the end they had two matching pairs of mesh gloves.
“Make me ralph. What a skeezer,” Janice said, referring to a girl from school. “He’s a scum. Gross me out,” she said about the handicapped boy up the road.
Tia held out her newly gloved hands. “Tell me about the preps and jocks,” she said, leaning into Janice, angling to inhale deeply from her hair. She appeared pleased by the scent, smiling intensely at Pam as she took another deep breath. The girl’s grin revealed a gold-capped canine. The tooth was shocking. Her teeth were otherwise orderly inside her stunning mouth, but the dental work was wrong. The tooth pointed down sharply, like a shiny metal fang.
The teen language was exhausting. Janice sounded like a bad actress—a young woman practicing to be a grown bitch. Tia sipped her Diet Coke and thoughtfully observed Debbie Gibson’s live performance of “Electric Youth.” Debbie was wearing an off-the-shoulder lace top.
“I find that so sexy!” Pam said.
“So do I!” Tia said, as if grateful to Pam for mentioning it.
“Mother! Go away!” Janice squalled.
“And don’t you just love all those little belts?” Tia continued, employing again her buoyant adult tone.
“So what do your parents do, Tia?” Pam asked.
Tia tapped her upper lip and sighed. “Mostly? They travel in Europe and Asia.”
Pam waited before realizing this was all the girl was offering. “Why is that, exactly?” she asked.
“The lecture circuit,” she said. “Native American culture and history. The atrocities! Other countries seem to have a greater interest in the modern Indian. Less guilt, Daddy always says. Plus they love judging the failures of Americans.”
“Don’t we all?” Pam said, not entirely certain what she meant.
It was cut off,
Tia’s Mickey Mouse T-shirt—with dull scissors it looked like. When the girl reached for her soda, Pam could see the slick undercurve of her tiny brown tits.
Richard came home from work with a mustache. Pam squirmed at the sight of it. It had a severe effect on his face. The TV-detective look, the greasy porn star of it. This, and the dramatic tailoring of his pants, was a too-obvious metaphor for the pervert that lurked below Richard’s funny face.
“You look like a skeezer,” Pam said.
“A skeezer? Is that a scum?” he asked.
Brock, their son, entered too. The whole family had swarmed like sharks to a bait bucket. “What the hell? Is this family hour?” Brock asked. He stared arrogantly. “I’m hungry,” he announced, looking at Tia. His voice pitched down abruptly, like a cassette tape played too many times.
“Take a picture,” Janice called to him, “because that’s all you’re going to get.”
“I would,” Brock said, “if my camera wasn’t so fucking hard right now.” With this he fondled at his crotch through the loose folds of his fluorescent parachute pants.
“Son!” Richard said, in a tone of scolding alarm and pride.
“This is too much,” Pam said.
“You’re a scum, Brock!” Janice said.
Tia lifted her hair off her shoulders, flinging it gently back so that it fell again around her face like a rippling curtain.
“Tia, honey?” Pam said. “Did you happen to see that recent television interview with Cher, the one where she discussed the struggles of her biracial heritage? I’ve often wondered if she’s an icon in your community?”
“Oh, hell,” Brock muttered.
“Mother, stop!” Janice said.
“Doesn’t she have the bravest outlook on life?” Tia said, with a sincerity that reordered the sharp pitch hanging over the room. “She’s Armenian, though, right? My dad always said Cher has about as much Cherokee in her as a box of dirt from our backyard. Which isn’t much, because we lived in New Mexico. It’s mostly Apache and Pueblo. Maybe around here there’d be more? Except they’re mainly a southern tribe. You’re a fan? Of Cher?”
“I am,” Pam said. “She had a whole song about it! About being trapped in both worlds, between her Cherokee and white heritage? Was she lying?” Pam’s voice broke. Her hands were shaking, her forehead suddenly clammy. Out of nowhere she found herself desperate for someone’s approval. It was a feeling she’d been missing in her life for far too long.
“Two words,” Richard later said, after Tia left, “illegal immigrant. From Mexico. Most likely a prostitute.”
“Wouldn’t you just love that,” Pam said. “And that was more than two words.”
Janice hid her face in the decorative sofa pillows, her shoddy gloves already falling apart across her palms. Tia had abandoned hers between the cushions. “Her family moved here from the rez in New Mexico, Daddy!”
“More like Old Mexico!” Richard said.
After everyone was asleep, Pam went back into the living room to search for Tia’s gloves. She dug them from the sofa and slipped them on. She was delighted to find they were a perfect fit.
The girl’s hair was as lustrous and dark as used motor oil. It flung off a suggestive sheen each time she turned her head. Pam wanted hair like that. She drifted unevenly, limply, back to the nights she had played the 45 of Cher’s “Half-Breed” in her bedroom as if it were the soundtrack to another, imaginary life. It hurt to hear someone call Cher a liar. But maybe, for all these years, Pam had taken the song too seriously?
During her afternoon nap, Pam dreamed of wearing Tia’s hair around like a wig. Attempting to explain this to Richard over dinner, she realized her dream implied a traditional scalping.
She recalled hearing of a case in high school, back in Indiana, of a Cuban girl who’d claimed to be Native American in an attempt to avoid deportation. What ever had happened to that girl? Pam hoped she’d married, and was still in the country, living out some titillating American dream.
Pam observed Tia waiting for the bus. She was perched on the freshly massacred stump of an ancient elm that had been sawed from the yard the afternoon before. Not a very Pueblo thing to do, Pam thought. Ritually, dumbly, Pam had stared across the street into its woven branches for over a decade, admiring its peacefully bowed head of tear-shaped leaves. Now the girl sat on the smooth pedestal of its corpse, organizing her backpack and teasing her bangs with a pink comb until the hair looked like ruffled plumage. Tia blasted the bangs with hair spray, then tucked the massive can into her purse. Pam could not make out the label, but was curious as to which brand was being used.
The front door was the ugliest affair. In the upstairs window, an enormous fuchsia dream catcher swung back and forth in perfect measures like a pendulum on its string. Perhaps a ceiling fan was on?
“You’re losing it, Mother,” Janice said, surprising Pam during an impromptu buffalo dance she was attempting in the kitchen. Pam turned the Walkman down and smiled, careful not to reveal any embarrassment, lest her daughter think she was ashamed of private joy.
During the most transcendent part of her dance Pam had encountered a muscular shaman with a crown of braided hair that extended into tightly laced pigtails across his glistening chest. Beside a yellow fire inside a grass-covered wigwam, he’d presented Pam with a sacred agate and turquoise belt so heavy and complicated her arms still ached with the thought of its power. They’d walked along a dirt path that Pam assumed was the Trail of Tears. Miles they traveled, until they’d arrived in her own backyard near the tree line of the woods. Her recliner was there, waiting for her like a cheap throne beside the trap.
“I feel Debbie Gibson has too small of a face,” Pam said to Janice. “I wonder how I’d look as a blond?”
“No,” Janice said. “You’d look like shit. You’re more of a Cher anyway.” This was in no way a compliment, and it injured Pam. Janice didn’t appreciate Cher. She didn’t understand the brazen bewitchment—Cher’s ability to conjure rolling fog and animal power and black leather, to stroke with her voice the tired heart like a shy hostage about to be set free.
To be fair, Pam mostly pretended to appreciate the children. It wasn’t something she was proud of. When she was visibly overwhelmed, Richard would say, “Kids are people too, Pammy. They just want to know you’re on their side.” But Pam wasn’t so sure. Most people she knew didn’t stomp out of supermarkets when they couldn’t purchase the expensive shampoo. Kids were always demanding more. Sneaking all the chips and dip before Pam got any herself. She badly desired a thing spared of their animal greed.
After lying around all afternoon on account of a headache, Pam hid in the bathroom, enjoying one of her secret cigarettes, blowing smoke into the exhaust. She had to shade her eyes even inside the house. Her allergies were severe and there was a whine like a distress signal happening in her inner ear. Janice had sliced her thumb on the new shards of glass Pam installed in the vases around the dining area—fat, brutal-looking pieces procured from a crate of broken frames that had once contained the children’s most asinine school photos. The effect of these glass bouquets was that of frozen crystal fires. Pam was entranced. Her daughter’s dramatic whining, and the gross gash, sent everyone running. Brock was holed up in his room with the door locked, blaring Run-D.M.C., ignoring all requests to lower the volume. After a couple of drags Pam extinguished the cigarette into an empty beer can Richard had left on the soap tray. Outside, in the drive, Richard was screwing on his new license plates. Pam could see him through the bathroom window. His sneakers were as white as the clouds above the bean fields—whiter, even. His new license plate, she could see, said 2themax. He’d already fastened hers on. 3themax, it said.
Richard really could be such a dick.
She snuck out the back door. The bean plants flicked their fuzzy leaves. Through the noise-canceling headphones Cher sang about wishing for a heart of stone
. Pam did wish this, frequently. The drumbeat was a hand smacking a paper bag. Cher’s voice trembled like hot rubber. The sunlit stage of the trap sat neatly along the viny edge of the woods. Pam’s pulse roared. The kudzu tangled. At the back of the box, curled in a corner, was a tiny hairless donkey. Its skin was blue, nearly transparent, slick and shiny as plastic wrap. She could have counted each bone in the cage of its ribs. The donkey was no bigger than a fist. She was sure it was dead. Always there had been a certainty that whatever appeared in the box arrived through a weak slit in reality, like a wound that had rotted through to the invisible world. This emaciated, bald animal, though, could have walked from somewhere. It could have gone inside for shelter and died. It had to be the tiniest donkey ever—with darling, folded ears, a ropy tail, stunted horse head, and the most unsettling part, a long, kinky head of hair, just like Cher. Just as Pam thought she would reach in and scoop it up, its frail hindquarters twitched in a hypnic jerk. It took a spasmed breath. His bony chest rose, and a whistled rasp escaped his wet nostrils, the breath jostling the gorgeous curly locks that fell before its face. The precious little ass was alive and dreaming. She had never put her hands in the box. It was a decision she’d made at the beginning. The contents were untouchable. She feared the consequences, despite any desire to interact. Before she could touch it though, the thin-skinned little ass brayed, causing a chartreuse ball of fire to pop from its lanky mouth. The donkey blinked at the fireball, then brayed again, releasing a second, bigger blaze that rushed forth, blackening the wall of the box before bouncing off in an audible backdraft that engulfed the shivering creature, burning the baby to a crisp, leaving only its charred skeleton wrapped in steaming skin. The whole abrupt scene was made even more terrible by the goofy horror of the donkey’s two teeth jutting from its scorched jaw. Somehow the wig was unharmed, plopped crookedly atop the sizzling bag of bones.