We stand in the doorway and I say, “You want to bust it up?”
And Lurlene says, “I want to.”
I start to walk in. “Then let’s—”
She pulls me back. She sags into me. She says, “No,” in a sad crush of a voice.
I hold her as we wander around some more and eventually work our way back downstairs to the kitchen. There’s a staircase off the kitchen, kind of tucked away by the pantry, and we follow it down. We find a bedroom down there with a tiny bathroom and its own small kitchen. About the only small things I’ve seen in this whole house. The walls in the bedroom are bare, but there’s women’s clothes in the closet. Not the kind of clothes you expect to see in a house like this, kind of threadbare, Woolworth labels and the like.
The bed is small too, and we lie down on top of the covers, and for some reason, I feel comfortable for the first time since I entered this monster. I lie there with Lurlene and after a while she says, “How come we couldn’t do nothing?”
“I don’t know.”
“How come we didn’t even try?”
I say it again: “I don’t know.”
“She talked trash about me at school,” she says. “Told people I was cheap. Made fun of my clothes. Said I was common.” She slides an arm across my chest and holds on tight. “I’m not common. I’m not shit.”
I kiss her forehead and hold her.
“You still gone beat up Lyle?”
“No,” I say.
“Why?” She gives me those green eyes and they seem bigger as they look down into mine.
I get a picture of the jungle for some reason, a world of green leaves, dripping. I see John Wayne telling that little yellow kid in The Green Berets, “You’re what this is all about,” and I think how I don’t have no fight left in me. I think how John Wayne is full of shit.
I pull the gun out from behind my back and place it on the bed beside me, wonder what’ll happen if we hear the sudden turn of a key in the front door lock upstairs, the rich family coming home and us down here hiding in the bed like a pair of big bad wolves waiting for Goldilocks. I wonder what I’ll do then. Make that pudgy man in the picture go get one of his shotguns maybe. Make that pudgy man draw. I don’t know. I know that at the moment I hate the pudgy man more than I hate Lyle.
And, yet, it was Lyle’s house I fucked up. And I know I ain’t going to do nothing to the pudgy man’s house except wait down here with his gun. Why that is, I can’t rightly tell you. But I feel ashamed.
I see my daddy out in the backyard, his face leaking, and I see my mother with that hand over her eyes, and I see the red sky I chased in that shitty truck. I see John Wayne in the jungle and LBJ in that picture and Lurlene standing up on the fridge, ballerina-like, and I see Lyle dropping that ball on the one, and those stands gone empty of fans under the black sky, and I think how it would have been nice for someone besides my dumb, drunk daddy to have told me that this is it. This is the whole deal.
“Maybe we should go down to Corpus,” I say.
Lurlene curls into me. “That’d be nice.”
“Just go down,” I say. “Disappear.”
Lurlene’s hand runs over my chest. “Disappear,” she says.
But we don’t move. We lie there, the house quiet all around us, the quiet of a sleeping baby’s lung. We listen for a sound, a click, a generator’s hum. But there’s nothing, not even a bed creak as Lurlene shifts her body a little more and places her ear to my chest and pulls my hand between her breasts. I can’t feel her heartbeat, though. Can’t feel my own, either, my chest gone still as the house as she lies against me, listening for the sound of my heart. Waiting and listening. Listening and waiting. For the steady beat, I guess. The dull roar.
Mushrooms
Her boyfriend, KL, is driving, and she and Sylvester are packed beside him in the front seat of the Escalade, sucking down Lites as they drive through the rain from Dorchester, Massachusetts, to Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. Every twenty miles or so, KL reaches over her shoulder and taps Sylvester’s neck and says, “Sylvester, you know my girlfriend, right?” until Sylvester finally says, “Hey, KL. Okay. We’ve met.”
She and KL dropped two hits of GHB just before they picked Sylvester up, and she thinks it’s starting to show. She keeps touching her face with sweaty hands and giggling because they’ve forgotten the bullets and it’s been a long time since she’s seen the ocean and here it is raining and because KL keeps flinching every time a puddle explodes against his silver rims.
“KL,” Sylvester says, “this girl is fucked up.”
She says, “Sylvester, your nose is weird. Anyone ever tell you that? One nostril is tiny. And the other is, like, jet-engine size.” She tries to touch his nose.
“Serious, KL,” Sylvester says. “Fucked up.”
KL says to him, “Relax. Find something on the radio, look at the scenery, do some fucking thing.”
Sylvester rests the side of his forehead against the window and stares out at the rain snapping off the highway, boiling in puddles.
When they reach the beach, it’s empty, even the boardwalk, just like KL figured. They sit on the seawall and KL gives her his pissed-off glare. She can’t tell if he’s pissed off because she left the bullets in her other jacket or if he’s still part-pissed about the whole situation in general. Eventually, he gives her a smile when she raises her right eyebrow. He kisses her and his tongue tastes like metal because of the GHB and then he says, “Sylvester, come smoke this with me.” He and Sylvester walk down the beach in the rain and she sits on the wall in the cold and watches while they walk into the ocean and KL holds Sylvester under the water until he drowns.
He hands her the gun when he gets back, tells her to hold on to it.
She says, “That’s kind of risky, don’t you think?”
He puts his thumbs under her eyelids and pulls them down, looks into her eyes. “Drugs making you paranoid. That’s a good gun.”
They walk the beach for a bit as KL tells her how he did it, how he bluffed with the gun, put it against Sylvester’s head and forced him down into the water. “I tell him I’m just going to teach him a lesson, hold him down for a minute because he fucked up with Whitehall and that Rory thing too.”
“He believe you?”
KL smiles, kind of surprised himself. “For a few seconds, yeah. After that, it didn’t much matter.”
She watches the water to see if Sylvester pops up anywhere, but the waves are cold and gray and high, like whales, and KL tells her there was a pretty strong undertow out there too. Clams, a few inches below the wet sand, spit on her feet as she stares at the sea and KL wraps his arms around her from behind. She leans back into his chest, the heat of it, and KL says, “I had a dream about killing him last night. How it would feel.”
“And?”
He shrugs. “Wasn’t much different.”
She wasn’t always old.
Not long ago she was a girl, a girl without breasts, with a little boy’s body really. She walked back from school one day in a skirt she hated — an itchy, woolen thing with pleats, black-and-gray plaid, a chafing thing. She walked alone — usually she was alone — and the streets she followed home were tired, like they’d had a flu too long, the buildings leaning forward as if they’d topple onto her braided hair, her nose, her little boy’s body.
She cut through a playground, and there was a man sitting on the jungle gym, drinking a tall can of beer. He wore an army uniform that had sharp creases in the pants even though the shirt was wrinkled. He stood and blocked her path. She met his eyes and saw that there was a kindness hiding in them behind the rest of what lived there, which was good, because the rest of what lived there was hopeless, as if all the light had been vacuumed out. She never knew how long they stared at each other — a day maybe, an hour, a year — but everything changed. Her little boy’s body disappeared forever, sucked into those blasted eyes, replaced with a new body, a body that ached, that tingled as he watched her, a body covered with skin so new and thin it felt raw.