Momma slept in the next morning. There wasn’t anything to eat in the house, so I walked down to the convenience store and bought orange juice and pancake mix and made myself breakfast. After that I cleaned the living room, straightened the furniture, removed fast-food cartons and ladies’ magazines and empty diet pill bottles, and vacuumed the rug. It was still a slum furnished with sprung sofas and patched easy chairs, but I felt accomplished. I watched TV for a while, surfing through a mix of get-right preachers and cartoons. Long about one o’clock I heard the toilet flush.
— Don’t look at me, said Momma, coming into the room, carrying a glass of juice and wearing a robe with a design of winning poker hands. She closed the blinds all around until the room was half dark and plunked herself down in the recliner.
— I must look terrible, she said.
I wanted to tell her she was a female version of Dorian Gray’s portrait, because whenever I saw her, I saw myself in about twenty years, but she would have asked was this Dorian some boy I was fooling with. Actually, she was a pretty woman yet, despite the pills and booze.
— You could at least lie to me, she said.
— You look fine, Momma.
A sigh. What’d you do last night?
— Nothing. I ran into Everett.
— Did you tell him I wanted him to call?
— Forgot.
— Jesus, Louie!
— Elle, I said.
— Whatever. Don’t you listen to a word I say?
I turned up the volume on the TV.
— Here! Let me have that. She pointed at the remote. There’s a real good movie on. We can watch together.
The movie had started. It concerned two girls in a nuthouse — they didn’t appear to like each other and took lots of meds. I tried not to relate it to my home life.
— That Angelina Jolie’s so pretty, Momma said. I wish I could get my hair like hers.
The telephone rang.
— Can you grab that?
I answered and a mellow voice said, How you doing, sugar britches?
— It’s for you. I passed Momma the phone.
— Hello. She sang the word.
After a few seconds of giggling and going, Uh-huh, uh-huh, Momma got up and said to me, I’m gonna take this in the bedroom. Fix me a piece of toast, sweetie. Okay?
I showered, put on cutoffs and a T-shirt, and went out, walking down the middle of the street barefoot, seeing how long I could take the hot asphalt before I had to hop onto a patch of grass. The parked cars were thousand-dollar shit boxes with smeared windshields that made the reflected sunlight look dirty. Every house was the same sort of rat hole; some had Tonka toys and Big Wheels half buried in the yellowish grass. A kid in a diaper stared at me from a doorway, holding an empty Coke bottle in his grubby fist, the TV jabbering in the gloom behind him. It was the fucking Third World.
The guys at Toby’s would sneak me out a beer in a paper sack, but I didn’t feel social and went to the park instead — a scrap of shade with some big azalea bushes and diseased palms and a fountain that gurgled like someone dying. I sat on the retaining wall, digging at a sand spur I’d picked up in the pad of my foot. Ants were scavenging a squashed beetle on the sidewalk. A gleaming black car with smoked windows breezed past. Two women talked in front of the grocery store, both shielding their eyes from the sun, as if saluting each other. A tabby cat emerged from under an azalea bush and stared at me with moderate interest.
— What’s up? I asked.
Nothing, bitch, he said in cat language, and walked off, his tail straight up, showing me his ass.
The black car again — it slowed and stopped beside me. The window rolled down and Johnny Jacks peered out. I wondered how a loser like him had copped such a sharp ride.
— What’s your name? he asked.
— Now that would have been a terrific follow-up question last night. Did it just occur to you?
No response.
— Are you on a holy quest? That would explain your minimalist style. You must be focused on prayer all the time, right?
Nothing.
— Do I still smell nice? I asked.
He tipped his head back — his nostrils flared. Dial soap, he said.
My detectors started beeping. Momma’s favorite movie was Silence of the Lambs. I’d caught Hannibal Lecter’s act.
— Okay, I said. Good-bye.
— Let’s go for a drive, he said, climbing out of the car.
— Are you crazy? Fuck off!
I moved away along the wall.
He came after me, and I said, I’ll scream.
— Why? I mean you no harm.
The words “I mean you no harm” weirded me out even more — he seemed to have learned his English from a phrase book.
He stepped close, and I felt heat streaming off him. Please, he said.
— Leave me the fuck alone!
I crossed the street, glancing behind me to make certain he wasn’t following, and nearly got splattered by a panel van.
— Hey! What’s your problem? The driver stuck his head out. Your life not worth living?
I drank a couple of beers out front at Toby’s, letting the geezers eye-fuck me, and that’s when I began putting together Johnny Jacks and the Djadadjii. Once I started thinking about it, I couldn’t get it out of my head, and by the time I arrived at Sandrine’s, I was busting to tell her. She was nowhere to be seen, and I knew she was hiding because I hadn’t visited the night before.
— Sandrine, I called.
The river made chuckling noises, rubbing against the bank. Clouds hedged the moon, but it sailed clear. The shack held only moonlight and mirrors. I studied the foliage, trying to find her outline among the tangles of leaves.
— Don’t be pissy, I said.
— I know everything you’re thinking.
I still couldn’t find her.
— You think because you don’t visit me one night, two nights, I won’t mention what I need. What you promised me.
I whirled about, thinking she was behind me, and said, I didn’t promise anything. I said I’d try.
— How can I expect such a stupid girl to understand what I’ve endured? You tell me how alone you are, how much you hunger for life, yet every day you talk to people, you fill your belly, you taste life.
— Everything’s relative.
— You could have more life with me than you can possibly imagine.
— Don’t go there! You tricked me. You made me feel things.
— Oh! Now you’re going to pretend you feel nothing for me? That I put those feelings into your head? All I did was unlock a door you never realized existed. I’ve seen how you look at me.
She melted up from the chokecherry, a paring of a woman seeming no thicker than onionskin, drifting toward me on the breeze — she touched her gauzy breasts, caressed almost imperceptible hips and thighs. A firefly danced behind her forehead, hovered for an instant in one eye.
— I see you looking now, she said.
Frightened, I backed away from her until my shoulders touched the wall of the shack.
— I’ve been patient with you, she said. I could be patient forever and it wouldn’t do any good.
— The Djadadjii, I said. Do they feel hotter than normal people?
Her face emptied.
— I met this guy, I said. He’s new in town. Super good-looking, but a retard. He can barely talk and his skin feels like an oven door. Sound familiar?
I’d meant to warn her about Johnny Jacks, but she had frightened me, and now I wanted to tell her in a way that made her heart race.
— First thing out of his mouth was he liked the way I smelled, I said. Think he smelled you on me?
— Lou. Elle. You have to help me!
— What can I do? Bring you five people? I doubt there’s time.
Fear sharpened her indistinct features. She looked this way and that, agitated, searching for an out.