— I swear to God, I’ll kill her, Ann Jeanette said. I’ll kick the shit out of her.
I asked again how they had done.
— We come second and third. Carmen lit a cigarette. I thought there was gonna be a riot, people were so pissed.
She seemed ready to let go of her anger, and I explained that Sarafina had recently lost her job and like as not Ted was trying to help her out.
— Fuck her unemployed ass! Ann Jeanette scanned the lot. That don’t mean she can take money out of my pocket.
— We get this sometimes, Carmen confided. There’s a lot of jealousy, you know. We realize we’re not gonna win all of ’em, but this was fucking ridiculous.
— There they go! Ann Jeanette shouted.
Ted, a runty guy with a Mohawk, was hustling toward the rear of the lot, accompanied by a dark-skinned girl shrouded in a beach towel. They had their heads down and kept close to the wall. Ann Jeanette made a beeline for them, with Carmen at her heels. Ted turned at the last second, too late to prevent Ann Jeanette from spinning Sarafina around and decking her. Carmen leapt onto Ted from behind, riding him piggyback style to the ground, and Ann Jeanette began kicking him.
It was the first serious fight initiated by women that I’d seen, and I was impressed. A crowd closed in around them, cheering the girls on and blocking my view. Between bodies I caught sight of Ann Jeanette rifling Sarafina’s purse. The cops would be coming soon, and reluctantly I headed for the highway, hoping to catch a ride with someone pulling out of the lot. Somebody wrapped me up from behind. I squirmed about and saw Johnny Jacks.
— Let me go, I said.
Something surfaced in his vacant, beautiful face, a flicker of emotion gone too quickly to identify.
— Let me go, fucker!
I managed to wriggle free of the bear hug, but he kept hold of my wrist. His grip was tight and hot like an Indian burn. I tried to pull away and said, I’ll scream if you don’t let go.
— I like you, he said.
The idea that he liked me was suddenly scary.
— Let her go, dude, said a rumbly voice at my shoulder.
It was Everett, my favorite of Momma’s exes, a lanky muscular guy with a gloomy, bony face, gray hair tied in a ponytail, a motorcycle helmet in his right hand, a trucker wallet chained to his jeans. He planted his left hand, big as a frying pan, on Johnny Jacks’s chest and gave him a hard shove — Johnny released my wrist, but the shove didn’t move him as far as I might have expected.
— Yeah? Everett inquired of him. There something you want?
— I like you, Johnny Jacks said to me.
He walked off, his eyes on me, and merged with the crowd.
— What was that? Everett asked.
— Another Friday night at Cracker Paradise. Can I catch a ride?
— C’mon.
I locked my hands around Everett’s waist, tucked my head onto his shoulder, and listened to his flathead growl, to police devils whining like sirens, the wind ripping my hair, wishing the ride would wind up somewhere anywhere different from a crummy Florida bungalow with a weedy patch of grass enclosed by a chain-link fence. The windows were dark when we arrived, and Momma’s car wasn’t in front. A yellow streetlight buzzed overhead and the moths were out in force.
— Thanks, I said, climbing off the bike.
— Somebody ain’t always going to be around to protect you, said Everett. You aware of that?
— Yeah, I guess.
He stared at me gravely — he was the only one of Momma’s boyfriends who looked me in the eye and not about a foot, foot and a half lower.
— You know I bought into that custom parts shop over in Jacksonville?
— Momma told me.
— Whyn’t you come on up? I’ll give you a job in sales. You can stay with me ’til you get a place.
— Everett! I batted my lashes. I didn’t know you cared.
— Least there’d be somebody looking after you. You ain’t doing nothing here you can’t do there.
— You serious? I don’t know anything about bikes.
— Ain’t that much to know. It might give you a chance to get your bearings.
— I’ll think about it. I swear I will.
— Don’t think too long. We need people now. He gunned the engine. You’re a smart girl, Louie. How come you treat yourself like you do?
I started to tell him my name was Elle, but it didn’t seem important right then.
— I got self-esteem issues, I said.
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.