He did some zippo tricks with it and lit his cigarette. I did some too, so we have that in common now. He told Lana that I was cool, that it was cool with him if she brought me around now and then. It wasn’t a creepy thing to say—it was more like, the three of us can talk without other people messing it up, so let’s keep doing that.
He doesn’t go to school. Hal thinks school is a waste, and I could not fucking agree more.
I want to describe my dad’s lighter to you.
It is a zippo, so it is made up of several parts.
There is an outer shell, a metal case. That holds the parts together. The shell is rectangular, but it is curved at the edge, almost slightly beveled. The top of the case has a true curve across it. Even with all this curving that I’m describing, the main impression you get from the zippo is flatness. All the sides, even the top, they’re all pretty flat. It is intensely comforting. Some lighters seem like they’ll jump out of your hand. The zippo is the opposite of that. The tricks and things that you can do with it are evidence. The zippo likes to be in the hand—it isn’t trying to flee the hand. You can pop it open, make it do a somersault—whatever you want. It isn’t trying to escape to the ground.
That’s the case. Inside the case, there is a sort of spring attachment that flips the top up or down. This spring attachment is connected to the body of the lighter. The body of the lighter consists of: the wick, the flint, the striking wheel, the cloth-like part that holds the fluid. Essentially, the zippo is always releasing gas. If you keep one in your pocket, your pocket will smell like gas (or it will smell like what they make gas smell like so you can smell it).
The outside of a zippo can look a number of different ways. Sometimes it will have a Vietnam kind of POW you are not forgotten thing going on. Sometimes it will have a USMC thing. Sometimes, just a skull. Some of them are mirrored. Others are matte silver. Some are dull black. Like other blue-collar things they will often feature gambling elements, like dice, cards, pool balls, or flags. My father’s is matte black and has a white dot in the center. I haven’t seen another like it. Years ago, I thought about asking him if he had done it himself, but I realized, and this was kind of a big deal for me to be smart enough at that point to realize something like this—I realized that I didn’t want to know. I liked not knowing. So, I still don’t know. The only thing that will make it clear is if one day I see another exactly like it. To be precise, that won’t make it 100 percent clear. But, it would make it likely.
Other things that can vary about zippos:
1. Some are smaller—I don’t know why. Maybe those are marketed to women, or to men with small pockets.
Often, people want to say that things are “for men” or “for women,” but I think that many of these items just share the property that they can or can’t fit into the shitty pockets women get. Of course, if girls were less focused on their appearance, maybe they would wear carpenter’s pants and carry whatever they wanted. Who is to say? It is inarguable, though, whomever’s fault it is, that having small pockets is terrible.
2. Some are looser or tighter in the way they snap open.
3. Some leak like crazy.
4. The inner cartridge on some slips around, so that when you go to shut the zippo, it doesn’t shut properly. This was happening with my dad’s, so I put a little sand into the case, and it is tighter now.
MY AUNT
was in the middle of beating me six times in a row in cribbage. They call it a skunking or something like that. I was getting skunked. That’s when someone tapped on the door. I figured, it is the landlord, since no one else ever comes to the house. My aunt knows nobody. I know nobody. There isn’t anything left to take. Why would someone come?
But, when I went to the door, Stephan was there.
Stephan, what are you doing here? How do you know where I live? It’s eight o’clock. I said something like that to him.
He said it was on the emergency contact card we had to fill out that day. He got the pile of cards for a second and he has a photographic memory.
I thought to myself that this explained why he sometimes seemed smart and sometimes not. I didn’t say that to him; maybe I should have. Sometimes people need to know what other people are thinking.
Mostly, though, I was just embarrassed about him seeing where I live, and then I was ashamed for feeling embarrassed about it, because it is a shallow thing to be embarrassed like that—and certainly not a way of behaving that I could feel proud about.
So, I said, come inside. You can meet my aunt.
Aunt, I said, this is Stephan. He is a convicted child molester. He wants us to know that he lives in our garden now.
My aunt laughed in a congenial way that put Stephan at his ease despite my awkward joke.
Do you go to school with Lucia? she asked.
He said he did.
She has a very foul mouth, don’t you think? Sit down and have some tea with us, she said. We’re just playing cribbage. Do you play?
Stephan took a gander at the room. I could see he was repulsed a little and when he looked at me, maybe he pitied me a little. I try not to be good at identifying pity in people’s eyes. It is mostly better not to.
Anyway, he sat down, and my aunt explained the rules of V_I_C (veritably improved cribbage) to him, and then she beat us both really badly a few times and went to sleep in her chair.
Do you want to go for a walk?
Okay.
We went outside and walked for a while.
I heard what happened, he said.
About the pencil? It’s nothing. He was an asshole.
Not that. Of course that’s nothing. I mean—about your parents.
How did you hear about that.
Jay Lesso.
Oh. Jay, he’s okay.
Yeah. Anyway—I’m sorry about that.
There is a really dirty canal that is near my aunt’s place. We went to it and threw some paving stones into it.
Stephan told me that he was going to set a fire.
I said that I doubted it, he seemed kind of like a pussy to me.
Stephan repeated that he was going to set a big fire. He was planning it. He wondered if I would help him.
I said it is better to do those kinds of things by yourself.
He said, for this he would need a little help.
RUTTING
I think Stephan definitely wanted something else. A couple of times he seemed nervous as if he couldn’t think of what he was trying to say, which is stupid, because he is smart enough to have a conversation without tripping up. He did this weird thing where he would take off his watch and put it back on. So, I knew.
It wouldn’t be so bad. There’s nothing objectively wrong with him. But, since he was someone I could talk to about setting fires, I figured—if you are a young woman, there are many people who want to do things to you that they enjoy doing to young women, so if someone is interesting for other purposes, it can be good to use them for those other purposes and avoid the things that anyone could do.