“You used me. You son of a bitch, you used me to take advantage of these kids.”
“I used you, Guy? I fucking used you?”
Mindy Johnston’s hand snaked inside the leg of Guy’s trousers, her fingers trickling up his calf. Her voice a swoon.
“Come on, professor. Come on, it’s fun. It’s so wild.”
Guy looked across the canal and saw the old couple still fox-trotting to some melody that didn’t pass beyond their walls. He thought of Shelly, his wife of ten years, the way they used to dance in their own living room. Languorous steps, drifting around their barren house for hours at a time.
Jumpy edged to the door, slipping past Moon into the hallway. Moon slid sideways like the bars of a cell locking into place between Guy and the world he’d known.
“Hey, Guy, enjoy yourself, man. Moon’ll show you the ropes, won’t you, big fellow?”
Moon had stashed the tray and gun somewhere and now had a grip on Guy’s right biceps and was injecting some clear solution into a bulging vein in the crook of Guy’s arm. The room was bigger than Guy had originally thought. The ceiling was no ceiling. Where the roof should have been, there were stars, whole galaxies exposed, comets shooting from left and right. A cool solar wind swirling down from the heavens.
“This is what you wanted, right?” Jumpy said from the hall. “Up close and personal.”
There were bare hands on his ankles drawing him down to the quicksand mattress, down into a pit of flesh and crazy-colored lights, a world he’d written about before. But he’d gotten it all wrong. All completely wrong.
Dead storage
by Christine Kling
County Line
Mama loved to watch those old movies on TV and she used to tell me that since I was born in Hollywood, she’d named me Kate and I was gonna grow up to be a movie star. Like the dumbshit I was, I believed her. But kids are like that and after she left, when I told Daddy what she’d said, he smacked me upside of the head, called me an idiot, and told me that the movie stars lived out in California, not here in Hollywood, Florida.
So I figured that’s where she went. I’m not stupid and I knew she’d been hitting the crack pipe, but I figured they got drugs out in California same’s here. Sometimes now, I have a hard time remembering what Mama looked like. The last time I saw her she’d got so skinny her elbows looked like broomsticks and her hair had gone all patchy, but I try to push those pictures out of my head. She was gone for some long spells before she finally took off for good. That was when I was ten. Six years ago. And still being a dumbass kid back then, I believed for the longest time that she was gonna come back for me.
Daddy and me been living in this trailer at Pattie’s Ravenswood Marina and Trailer Park on a canal by the airport ever since she left. I knew even if she did come back she’d never find me in this shithole. That’s how Daddy wanted it. Besides, she was probably out in California getting high with movie stars. Daddy said we were better off without her, and I thought, yeah, sure, you’d think that.
I knew my daddy got some kind of disability check from the government, and when Mama was still with us, he spent most of his days either outside lifting his weights, the sweat pouring off him, or inside sitting in his chair watching HSN or QVC on a little TV he had connected to the cable on the pole. And he’d drink beer. I still went to school back then, and I had some friends and could go over to their houses, so I wasn’t home all that much ’cept to eat and sleep.
I used to tell my friends my mama was a movie star, that she was gone lots ’cuz she had to fly to places where they was filming, and then finally ’bout how she’d gone out to California to act in a TV show. We moved before any of her movies come out.
Now, Daddy’s got me working in the office at Pattie’s here, though there ain’t a whole lot to do and he gets my paychecks before I do. Says I owe it to him for rent. Not like he buys us much food around here. We pretty much live off Corn Flakes, powdered milk, mac ’n’ cheese, and the occasional catfish I catch in the canal. He’s got an old Chevy pickup that he drives down to Flossie’s Bar sometimes. That’s when I like it here. Nights when he’s gone and it’s quiet and I can pretend he ain’t never coming back. I pretend I’m going to take a taxi to the airport, get on an airplane for Hollywood, California, go find Mama, and become a movie star. But he always comes back. And if he ain’t too drunk, he always comes to me.
The first time, I was missing Mama so much and I cried happy tears when he come in and hugged me and touched me and told me he loved me. It seemed like the first time in my life he wasn’t calling me stupid. And then all of a sudden it was like, what the hell, and he shoved his finger up inside me. I was only ten and just this dumbass kid who didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but he was my daddy and he was telling me he loved me and I would like it, so what was I supposed to do? We was already living at Pattie’s then, and outside the trailer window there’s these tall poles in the distance with red flashing lights for the airport, and I just watched them, trying not to smell his breath, and counted how many times they flashed until he climbed off me. One hundred ninety-seven flashes.
We’d moved to Pattie’s when Daddy got the job managing the dead storage yard. If you wanted to use your boat pretty much, you put it up in the stacks and Fred over on the other side of the basin drove the forklift and slid your boat out of its parking slot in that four-story beehive. But some people had boats and they just never used them. They had broken motors, holed hulls, peeling paint, and all kinds of palmetto bugs crawling all over them. They ended up with Daddy in the dead storage yard. The rent was cheaper. Daddy showed them where to park their crappy old boats and then they paid him their rent and they never come back for months and months. Some of them never come back at all, seemed to me. I saw boats go into that yard, but I hardly ever seen any come out.
The boats in the marina, most of them didn’t look much better than the ones in dead storage. Some had people living on them and they had so much crap piled on their decks, it was like Pattie’s was some kind of big shit machine. You’d get up in the morning, and it seemed like there were more old tires and rusty boat parts and broken beer bottles than there had been the day before. Shit just came out of nowhere.
About half the trailers in the park were boarded up and abandoned. On one side of us there was this old guy. Daddy called him Bud and he just sat out on his concrete slab and drank beer every day till he passed out. He was deaf and he’d never wear his hearing aids, so even if you did try to talk to him, he couldn’t ever hear a goddamn thing you were saying.
On the other side, the trailer had sat empty for a couple of months ever since old Mrs. Jackson died. I noticed her cat was squalling one day and it didn’t smell too good over there, but I could hear the TV was on inside. She give Daddy a key to her place one time so’s I could feed the cat when she went to see her daughter. I got the key and called out her name, but she didn’t answer so’s I went into her trailer to see what was wrong. She’d died on the crapper in her nightgown with her big cotton panties down around her knees. She’d pitched forward and I found her with her neck bent sidewise on the floor, her eyes open, and her huge fat naked ass sticking up in the air in the doorway of the trailer’s little head compartment. I didn’t even like to look at her trailer no more and Daddy was talking ’bout moving it into dead storage. What was the point? The whole fuckin’ place had become dead storage.
That’s why I was surprised when I got up Saturday morning and saw a truck in front of old Mrs. Jackson’s place and some men was carrying out all the old crap and taking some nice new furniture inside. That’s when I seen Daddy out there wearing jeans and a wife beater, leaning against his pickup and talking to this short redheaded lady who was holding old Mrs. Jackson’s cat, which I ain’t seen since the morning I found the old lady dead. Somebody said it was Mrs. Jackson’s daughter what took the cat, and I wondered if that was her outside talking to my daddy.