“Nice place,” I said.
Mrs. Murphy sat down on a couch cushion that was wrapped up in some kinda plastic and patted the seat. “Sit down, Kate, and talk with me for a while. I could use a little company.”
I sat and kept my hands to myself. There was too much stuff in that trailer. I was afraid I’d break something.
“How have you been, dear?”
“All right, I guess.”
“You don’t go to school?”
“Not since I turned sixteen. My daddy says I had enough school.”
“I see. Your daddy says, huh.” She crossed her arms over her chest.
“My daddy likes you,” I said.
“Oh,” she replied, and she wiggled her butt on the plastic and it made crackling noises.
“He hasn’t been with a woman since Mama left. He was all broke up about that.”
“What happened to your mother, Kate?”
“She went out to California to work in the movies. She sent for me and I was gonna go out there too, but then we heard she was dead.”
“Oh dear, what happened?”
“She was murdered. Stabbed sixteen times in her own bed.”
Mrs. Murphy sucked in her breath so hard she started coughing. I got up and got her a glass of water.
“Thank you,” she said, and she drank the whole glass. When she put it down, her hands started fussing with the buttons on her blouse and the whites of her eyes looked extra bright.
“Remember what I told you last time, you know, about what’s been happening around here?”
She nodded.
“I heard he attacked another woman over in the Shady Palms Trailer Court. This one almost died. Daddy said he hoped you could protect yourself ’cuz he sure wouldn’t want to see anything like that happen to you.”
That night after dinner when he was about a six-pack and a half down, he brought it up. Daddy come to the door of my room and said he seen me go into Mrs. Murphy’s trailer.
“I want you to stay away from that woman,” he said. “You got no business going over there.”
I was lying on my bed reading one of Pattie’s books. It was about a private detective named Elvis out in Hollywood, California. “She was only being nice to me, Daddy. We just talked. She don’t have no friends.”
“She sure as hell don’t need a dumbass kid like you hanging around bothering her, probably telling her all kind of lies.”
“I’m not stupid, Daddy. Wish you’d quit calling me that. Leastwise I don’t sit around all the time drinking beer and slobbering over stuff I can’t even buy on the Home Shopping Network.”
It only took him two steps to cross my room and back-hand me across the mouth. “Shut up. You think you’re so smart reading your books now. But that don’t change nothing. Your mama was a crackhead whore and you ain’t gonna be no different.”
He left to go to Flossie’s after that and I turned off the TV and sat in the quiet night reading my book under the lamp, pretending it was me in the book, out in Hollywood, California, hoping he wouldn’t never come back, but knowing he would. I was in bed when he come in and, one more time, I watched the red blinking lights at the end of the run-way and held my breath as I floated up out of my body and counted. One hundred thirty-six flashes.
After that, I done my best to listen to Daddy and stay away from her. Shit, it weren’t no fun getting hit. Avoiding her wasn’t no big deal because she started going out and staying out for hours in the afternoons. Daddy said he wondered if she found herself another job because when she went in and out, she was carrying a black zipped case hugged to her chest.
One afternoon a couple of old boys come into the office and said they wanted to store their broke-down airboat in the dead storage yard till they could order a new engine for it. They both had shaved heads and yellow teeth but one of ’em had a gut on him that stuck out and hung low over the front of his belt. The other one wore cutoff jeans and a T-shirt about two sizes too small stretched tight cross his chest muscles with the sleeves cut out to show off his guns. They both smelled like beer and the one in the cutoffs leaned over the counter and told me that he knew of something he’d like to stick in that gap in my teeth. I went out the back door of the office and hollered for Daddy. When he come into the office, he hit it off with these two and invited them to go back to our trailer for a cold one before he opened the gate to the yard.
They’d been at it most of the afternoon, all three of them drinking beers and leaning on the old boy’s boat trailer, when Mrs. Murphy come driving up in her little Taurus. The sky had turned light blue and the last rays of sun was slanting across the boat basin. I’d stayed in the office way past quittin’ time when Pattie and Fred had all left. I told them that I had some stuff to finish and I wanted to pick out another book, but in fact I knew better than to show my face anywhere near what was going on out there in the yard. Mrs. Murphy didn’t have no choice, though, since she couldn’t get her car past their truck and trailer that was parked in front of the gate to the dead storage yard.
She stopped her car in front of Bud’s trailer and got out, holding that black case so tight she was squishing her own boobs. Them boys was on her before she took two steps.
“Yeeuuii,” the muscled one said. “Looky here, Franky. We seem to be blocking this lady’s way.”
“Shit, Jimmy, would you look at the tits on her?” the fat one said. He moved up close like he was gonna touch one.
Daddy just leaned there against the trailer watching ’em, his eyes half closed and a smile on his face.
The muscled one was trying to stand in her way like a football player ready to tackle, and she was pulling at the zipper on that bag of hers. Even in that low light I could see those eyelashes outlined against her white skin — not moving. Then she got her hand into the bag and she faked right, then ran left. The old boy got his legs tangled and fell and Mrs. Murphy run into her trailer and slammed the door before his fat buddy could help him up off the ground.
They was still laughin’ and jokin’ when the three of them backed the airboat trailer into the dead storage yard and then took off for Flossie’s.
I never did turn on any lights. I just sat by the window and watched her trailer. Every few minutes the sunflower curtains moved aside and even though I couldn’t make it out in the dark, I imagined those lashes blinking at the night, her hand inside that black bag, and I knew where she’d been all these afternoons she’d been away.
I went to bed when her last light went out and I lay there waiting for Daddy. He come in just past 2:00, and as usual I heard him whispering curses and bumping into things in the front room of the trailer. He couldn’t come home quiet when he was drunk. Didn’t matter if it was the first time or the last time, though, I always felt the same when I heard him coming. Every muscle in my body tightened up and it seemed like somebody’d sucked all the air out of the room and the saliva in my mouth started to taste real sour. I heard the noise of his zipper, then he yanked off my covers, rolled me onto my belly, pulled off my panties, spread my legs, and kneeled back there lifting my butt up and jamming himself inside me, over and over.
It hurt. It always hurt, but this time I couldn’t see my red lights, I couldn’t leave my body, I couldn’t do nothin’ but scream into my pillow.