I should’ve taken my own car to see the cabin instead of riding with Ricky. I knew that the minute I started talking to him, my mouth would be leaking honey. I hated that about myself — used to be if there was an attractive man around, my whole everything changed. My voice got softer, I held my body differently, I said the stupidest shit. I had just learned to get ahold of myself and I didn’t want to ruin things.
Then Ricky opened the car door for me and Marta put a jade plant on my lap and I started to fall apart, ever so slightly.
The cab of his Chevy was tidy. I remember the carpet on the floor was freshly vacuumed in those long professional-detailer strokes, first one direction and then the next. He had a cup holder attached to a sandbag laid across the hump below the stick shift and an air freshener with la Virgen on it. He kept his eyes on the road, even when I couldn’t stop thanking him. I was so grateful to be given this fresh start, yet I was probably giving off a vibe of wild desperation.
We wound back onto the country roads, past orchards, getting farther and farther from the ocean. It was only about twenty minutes away, but it was rural, and I didn’t have a sense where I was at first. He pulled off the road and we dropped down into a driveway. The cabin was a bitty thing, surrounded by brush and fallen branches, but it had two windows in the front with window boxes underneath them. I imagined I would fill them with flowers, maybe herbs — buy a bright yellow watering can and even learn to cook. I didn’t have any furniture, but I did have a welcome mat. For some reason I’ll never know, I had grabbed it from me and my old man’s place when I stormed out the door. I think it was my way of saying, Now you gotta wipe your feet somewhere else, asshole. Dave probably hadn’t even noticed it was gone.
Ricky walked around to the back and I followed him. He climbed up on a pile of wood, hoisted open a small window, and went through it, headfirst. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he popped up from the other side of the window, like, Ta-da! It was the first genuine smile I’d seen from him, and I laughed.
I started to climb in myself and he was saying, “No, no,” and motioning toward the front door, but I dove in right after him. He helped pull me all the way through by my armpits and the minute my feet hit the floor, it was on. We were going at it. We were kissing and pawing each other, we wrestled ourselves into the main room, and then we were peeling our pants off and rolling around on that filthy, disgusting floor. God, it felt good.
It wasn’t until after that I could see what a real mess the place was, and boy did it smell bad too. Garbage and animal turds and big holes in the walls. It looked like whomever had been squatting had vacated awhile ago.
I tried to make a joke and said, “I’ll take it!” and grabbed at his crotch, but Ricky didn’t seem to like that.
He put his arm around my shoulder when we walked back out to the truck, though he had turned quiet again. I took a swig out of the bottle he offered from under his seat. We stole looks at each other. Or maybe he was checking to see if I was still staring at him? Honestly, I tried to be cool, yet it wasn’t my nature.
When he said he had to make a quick stop, I knew I should get back to Marta, but I didn’t say anything.
“It’s fine,” he said, “I’m fast.” And it was. We drove to this residential neighborhood in Freedom, boring but nice, and left one of his coolers on the doorstep and brought what I assumed to be an empty one back. And that was it. I didn’t think anything of it.
He dropped me back off at work and Marta was really weird to me right away. I apologized for taking so long, but it was like she could tell I’d just bagged Ricky in the landslide cabin.
I slept one more night in my car out at the beach, and then Saturday I bought some cleaning supplies and went up there to see what I could do. Ricky came by just before nightfall and we screwed again. At least this time I had made a bed of sorts out of my sleeping bag and some blankets. The candlelight softened the dankness. I tried to make some small talk with him afterward, but he wasn’t having it.
Instead of seeming hot and mysterious, it just seemed rude. Do I feel used? I asked myself. And then a few minutes after he left, I remembered that I had wanted and enjoyed the sex, and I now had my own place to live for the first time in my life. Be that way, I thought. I’d be fine.
When I came to work on Monday, Marta was standing on the porch waiting for me. She said that she didn’t need me anymore. “Go,” she said. “You’re finished.” I hated how cold she was. I tried to talk to her, but she walked in her house and shut the door and I knew that was it. The kids would start showing up any minute and I couldn’t make a scene. There’d been enough of that in my life anyway. Marta had so much dignity that it made me want to leave with some of my own. But what was it? Had she been in love with Ricky? Weren’t they related?
Marta wasn’t returning my calls. Ricky wasn’t stopping by. I needed a new job quick if I was going to stay at the cabin for another month. I started working at a “private entertainment” company, promising myself it would be temporary. Twice while I was driving around I thought I saw Ricky’s truck, once taking the on ramp toward Monterey, and once in the bakery parking lot.
That second time, I circled around and parked on the opposite end. I got out with no plan. As I drew closer, I saw the old coolers in the back. My hands were shaking when I reached for them. I could hear Ricky yelling from the bakery. I lifted the Styrofoam lid and pushed back the bag of ice, and there were shiny vials full of dark liquid. The fuck were these things? Ricky was walking right at me. “You whore!” he shouted. “Get away from my life, you whore!”
I turned and ran back to my car while he stood there, arms folded across his chest, watching me. I should have let it go, but I rolled past him on the way out, slow enough to look him in the face. I kept my voice calm, the way I did when I was working. “I wish I had a dollar for every man who’s called me a whore,” I said.
I drove off and grabbed everything I needed from the cabin in three minutes flat. I found a new spot at a new beach. That look in Ricky’s eyes? I never wanted to see him again.
Almost a year later, the story came out. I was working in a real day care by then, a licensed place, living in a nice house near Struve Slough with one of my coworkers and her girlfriend.
It was in all the papers. Marta and Ricky had been arrested for trafficking.
They’d been extracting the kids’ plasma and blood and urine, and selling it to a research start-up. Some tech crew over the hill had formed their own biotech company and needed raw materials. How they found Ricky and Marta, I’ll never know.
The case didn’t end up going to trial. The children didn’t matter. That company is listed on the NYSE today.
I had to quit my job after that, stop working with kids. Marta had been the only contact on my resume and my employers couldn’t risk it. Oh well, there’s always “private entertainment.” I don’t live by the ocean anymore — but I always go to sleep where I can hear it.
The Shooter
by Lee Quarnstrom
Watsonville
I’d picked out the shooter’s car by the time I hopped out of my Plymouth and crossed the dusty parking lot toward the front of the two-story building. It was the rust-speckled Studebaker, backed in against the head lettuce field dotted with thousands, maybe millions, of tiny, shiny green shoots sprouting from the chunky black soil of the fertile fields just outside Watsonville.