“I’m not in fourth grade,” Leilani said, pouring the warm beer into the sink. “We’re twenty-first-century Gypsies, searching for the stairway to the stars, never staying in one place long enough to put down a single rootlet. I’m homeschooled, currently learning at a twelfth-grade level.” The beer, foaming in the drain basket, produced a malty perfume that at once masked the faint smell of the hot wax from the candles on the table. “Dr. Doom is my teacher, on paper, but the fact is I’m self-taught. The word for it is autodidact. I’m an autodidact and a good one, because I’ll kick my own ass if I don’t learn, which is a sight to see with this leg brace.” As though to prove how tough she was, Leilani crumpled the empty beer can in her good hand. “Anyway, Dr. Doom might have been an okay professor
when he worked at the university, but I can’t rely on him to educate me now, because it’s impossible to concentrate on your lessons when your teacher has his hand up your skirt.”
This time, Micky resisted being charmed. “That’s not funny, Leilani.”
Staring at the partially crushed can in her small fist, avoiding eye contact, the girl said, “Well, I’ll admit it’s not as amusing as a good dumb-blonde joke, which I enjoy even though I’m a blonde myself, and it isn’t a fraction as hilarious as a highly convincing puddle of plastic vomit, and there’s no chance whatsoever I’d be making light of the subject if I were actually being molested.” She opened the cabinet door under the sink and tossed the can into the trash receptacle. “But the fact is that Dr. Doom would never touch me even if he were that kind of pervert, because he pities me the way you would pity a truck-smashed dog all mangled but still alive on the highway, and he finds my deformities so disgusting that if he dared to kiss me on the cheek, he’d probably puke up his guts.”
In spite of the girl’s jocular tone, her words were wasps, and the truth in them appeared to sting her, sharp as venom.
Sympathy cinched Micky’s heart, but for a moment she was unable to think of something to say that wouldn’t be the wrong thing.
Even more loquacious than usual, talking faster, as though the briefest interruption in the flow of words might dam the stream forever, leaving her parched and mute and defenseless, Leilani filled the narrow silence left by Micky’s hesitation: “As long back as I can remember, old Preston has touched me only twice, and I don’t mean dirty-old-man-going-to-jail touching. Just ordinary touching. Both times, so much blood drained out of the poor dear’s face, he looked like one of the walking dead — though I’ve got to admit he smelled better than your average corpse.”
“Stop,” Micky said, dismayed to hear the word come out with a harsh edge. Then more softly: “Just stop.”
Leilani looked up at last, her lovely face unreadable, as free of all emotional tension as the countenance of the most serene bronze Buddha.
Perhaps the girl mistakenly believed that every secret of her soul was written on her features, or perhaps she saw more in Micky’s face than she cared to see. She switched on the light above the sink, returning them to the silken gloom and the suety glow of the candle flames.
“Are you never serious?” Micky asked. “Are you always making with the wisecracks, the patter?”
“I’m always serious, but I’m always laughing inside, too.”
“Laughing at what?”
“Haven’t you ever stopped and looked around, Michelina Bell-song? Life. It’s one long comedy.”
They stood but three feet apart, face-to-face, and in spite of Micky’s compassionate intentions, a peculiar quality of confrontation had crept into their exchange.
“I don’t get your attitude.”
“Oh, Micky B, you get it, all right. You’re a smartie just like me. There’s always too much going on in your head, just like in mine. You sort of hide it, but I can see.”
“You know what I think?” Micky asked.
“I know what you think and why. You think Dr. Doom diddles little girls, because that’s what experience has taught you to think. I feel bad about that, Micky B, about whatever you went through.”
Word by word, the girl quieted almost to a whisper, yet her soft voice had the power to hammer open a door in Micky’s heart, a door that had for a long time been kept locked, barred, and bolted. Beyond lay feelings tumultuous and unresolved, emotions so powerful that the mere recognition of them, after long denial, knocked the breath out of her.
“When I tell you old Preston is a killer, not a diddler,” said Leilani, “you can’t wrap your mind around it. I know why you can’t, too, and that’s all right.”
Slam the door. Throw shut the locks, the bars, the bolts. Before the girl could say more, Micky turned away from the threshold of those unwanted memories, found her breath and voice: “That’s not what I was going to say. What I think is you’re afraid to stop laughing-“
“Scared shitless,” Leilani agreed.
Unprepared for the girl’s admission, Micky stumbled a few words further. ” — because you… because if…”
“I know all the bemuses. No need to list them.”
Sometime during the two days she’d known Leilani, Micky arrived, as though by whirlwind, in a strange territory. She’d been journeying through a land of mirrors that initially appeared to be as baffling and as unreal as a funhouse, and yet repeatedly she had encountered reflections of herself so excruciatingly precise in their details and of such explicit depth that she turned away from them in revulsion or in anger, or in fear. The clear-eyed, steel-supported girl, larky and lurching, seemed at first to be a fabulist whose flamboyant fantasies rivaled Dorothy’s dreams of Oz; however, Micky could get no glimpse of yellow bricks on this road, and here, now, in the lingering sour scent of warm beer, in this small kitchen where only a trinity of candle flames held back the insistent sinuous shadows, with the sudden sound of a toilet flushing elsewhere in the trailer, she was stricken by the terrible perception that under Leilani’s mismatched feet had never been anything other than the rough track of reality.
As though privy to Micky’s thoughts, the girl said, “Everything I’ve ever told you is the truth.”
Outside: a shriek.
Micky looked to the open window, where the last murky glow of the drowning twilight radiated weak purple beams through black tides of incoming night.
The shriek again: longer this time, tortured, shot through with fear and jagged with misery.
“Old Sinsemilla,” said Leilani.
Chapter 8
Less than twenty-four hours after the close call in Colorado, with the house fire and the hideous screams still vivid in memory, the motherless boy relaxes behind the steering wheel of a new Ford Explorer, while the harlequin dog sits erect beside him in the passenger’s seat, listening to a radio program of classic Western tunes — at the moment, “Ghost Riders in the Sky”—as they sail through the Utah night, four feet above the highway.
Sometimes, from the side windows, depending on the encroaching landscape, they are able to see the starry sky, low near the horizon, but nothing of the greater vault above, where ghost riders would be likely to gallop. The windshield provides a view only of another — and unoccupied — Explorer ahead, plus the underside of the vehicles on the upper platform of this double-deck automobile carrier.
In the late afternoon, they had boarded the auto transport in the immense parking lot of a busy truck stop near Provo, while the driver lingered over a slice of pie in the diner. The door of one of the Explorers opened for the boy, and he quickly slipped inside.
The dog had continued to be an instinctive conspirator, huddling quietly with his master, below the windows, until the pie-powered trucker returned and they ventured out upon the road again. Even then, in daylight, they had slouched low, to avoid being seen by passing motorists who might signal the driver about his stowaways.