“Nothing,” said Todd, and then it occurred to him, in fact, it wasn’t funny. Close up, the girl’s pupils, in those lovely Asian eyes, were huge. She was real stoned, almost as stoned as Hobie had been.
“You guys are fucking silly,” she said.
“Maybe, but you’ll find we’re not boring like that guy you dumped,” said Shannon.
“Yeah? You act like you’re all wired up.”
“Yeah, kind of. You wanna get that way too?”
She already was, in some kind of way, but said, “On what?”
“On this shit were doing,” said Shannon.
“What the fuck, it’s Saturday night.” Actually, it was Sunday, but no one pointed this out.
“We don’t have any with us,” said Dewey. “It’s back at Todd’s.”
“Oh yeah, you’re right,” said Shannon. “Fuck a duck.”
“Well, fuck you too then,” said the girl. This cracked up the bunch of them.
“So where are we going?”
“That depends on where the young lady would like to go,” said Shannon. “Where would you like to go? Excuse me, young lady?”
She looked dazed and didn’t respond. She leaned her head on Todd’s shoulder, put her hand on his thigh.
“Yoo-hoo,” said Shannon. “Young lady?”
“She looks passed out, I think,” said Dewey.
Todd was suddenly so horny it was like he had to take a piss real bad. “Let’s take her out to the woods,” said Todd. “Right over there.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes!”
“Okay, boss. Damn.” Shannon turned off the road.
“Hey, man, I’m not sure we oughta do this,” said Dewey.
“You don’t wanna disappoint our guest, do you?” said Shannon. “We don’t want to bore her.”
Todd noticed that she wore a bracelet on her wrist that said Lenore. He began opening her blouse. She wore, they all saw, a pink push-up brassiere. Todd put his hand under one cup of it…
Todd’s reverie was interrupted by a knock at the door.
PART
III
CHAPTER 11
JAMIE AT HOME
It was the small hours of the morning when Jaime got back to his home in the upper story of the theater. The only way to get there that he knew of was to go up the fire escape in the back, which had a missing section in its center, so that he had to reach up, grab the rung of a metal ladder to pull himself up, a bit hazardously, and scramble onto a platform that led to the unlatched window he used as an entrance. There was a staircase inside he could use—that’s how he’d discovered the apartment up there in the first place, just looking around up there one day—but he figured it was safer to just climb through the window.
The stench of the stopped-up toilet hit him in the face as soon as he came through the window, despite the cold. It wasn’t like anyone ever came to visit, but it was making him feel kind of sick, especially in the first few minutes he’d be there. Besides, he was worried more and more that people downstairs would notice it and find out he was staying up there.
Darn, he was getting that weird little pain in his chest again. Happened when he was tired out, it seemed like.
Picking up his camper’s light he left just inside the window, he stepped over to the little broom closet where the toilet was located, pinching his nose closed with his fingers. Gosh, it was rank. The mix of his shit and piss in the toilet, and some under it that was hardened and black and may have been there for years, wouldn’t go down at all, and the flush handle was missing and there hadn’t been any water in it at all ever since the renovation a few months ago. There was an old plunger on the floor of the closet, though, and out of desperation, he decided to use it to try to push the mess down the hole.
The condition of the place wasn’t really that different from the way his family’s house had been, pretty dilapidated and disordered and stinky, except, back there, he didn’t have any privacy at all. He’d always slept with his little sister, Dawnie, until she got hit by a car at age seven and a half, because they were the closest in age, and that wasn’t in a regular bed, but on the old cracked-up Bark-o-Lounger that his mother always called Pappaw Hardwick’s chair because they’d gotten it from his house when he died. After Dawnie got run over, he’d had to sleep with Bud Junior and Marlon, who sometimes would push him out on the floor, sometimes on purpose and sometimes just in thrashing around, while Maamaw got Pappaw’s chair so Mom wouldn’t have to sleep with her anymore and could have company over when she wanted to.
That was around the time things got really bad with Marlon and Bud, who tended to use Jaime as a punching bag and twist doll, at first until he’d cry “uncle” but later until he’d weep and scream, and eventually they wouldn’t even stop at that unless somebody intervened. Mom would yell because she didn’t want to hear “that fuckin’ racket” and sometimes would slap him as well as his brothers for it. If Mom wasn’t around when it happened, Maamaw would yell at them and sometimes even lock herself and Jaime into Mom’s bedroom so they couldn’t get at him.
He put the plunger in the toilet and pushed. The putrid mix of offal spurted up the sides of the toilet bowl and over onto the floor. Dammit!
Maamaw had really been the only one in the family who was ever nice to him, not only trying to protect him from his brothers but sometimes holding him on her lap, bouncing him around and saying he was “a li’l darlin’” and “my best grandbaby,” though she’d do and say the same with Dawnie sometimes too.
Even Dawnie he didn’t get along with that well. They’d play together sometimes, but she’d easily get enraged and bite him and claw his face when he had some toy she wanted to play with, or something like that.
It was bad after Bud’s accident and he was living at home. He looked so awful Jaime was more scared of him than ever. Then he died, and Dawnie got run over, and Maamaw got sick and sent to the Medicaid nursing home where, to Jaime’s dismay, she got so she didn’t even recognize him or anybody else in the family, and Marlon moved out and Cheryl Sue had a fight with her friend she lived with and moved back in. Jaime had stayed just with Mom, and though they didn’t get along and there was always some kind of trouble going on, that was the best time as far as he was concerned.
But after Maamaw died and Marlon drove into the quarry and died too, Ma got so she kept inviting people to live with them. First came Violet, who had three kids with “developmental disabilities,” according to their high-strung mother, and were no fun to be around. Then, after Cheryl Sue got mad at Mom and she and Violet and the kids left, Mom got her a new young boyfriend called Monkey who was a biker and all his buddies started living there, and Monkey kept threatening Jaime and accusing him of messing with his bike though he never went near the thing, and Mom would always take Monkey’s side, so he finally decided to go out on his own, though he didn’t exactly have a place to live. He’d really been lucky to find the apartment upstairs in the theater, but now that arrangement was threatened by the toilet problem.
Looking for something to wipe off the fouled plunger with, Jaime found there was a real fancy old-fashioned-looking faucet in the bottom of the wall beside where the plunger had been. He tried turning this and was surprised it not only moved easily but the sound of briskly running water started up. Checking the water tank behind the toilet, which itself was old-fashioned and huge, Jaime was delighted to see it start to fill.
The tank filled almost to the brim, and Jaime was about to turn it off before it spilled over, when it gurgled loudly and the toilet bowl itself began to fill. Great! He enthusiastically picked up the plunger again to help push the mess down the hole, but after a couple of hard plunges, he heard a loud crack, and all the water and much of the mess in the bowl rushed away, and the water in the tank after it. Puzzled and not entirely sure this was a good thing, Jaime turned the knob shut. There was, he thought, a sound like rain coming from outside but, checking the window, the dark sky was clear.