I packed up our new 8-piece luggage set because it’s pink and I figured he wouldn’t want to use it without me. Then I went out to the deep freeze in the garage and got the shoebox I was keeping Gogo’s body in until I had some free time to bejewel a tiny dog coffin. If I had to leave, Gogo was coming with me.
“Goodbye, Ginno,” I said.
His face seized up a little. He looked like he was about to say something deep but then decided against it. He settled for the obvious. “You’re a man.”
“If you say so.” I was crying and they were womanly tears. My sobs sounded nothing if not womanly. “You know, the man who came into the alley wanted me to take your money and give it to him and I wouldn’t do it. That’s why he blackmailed me. If I’d just lied to you and had you give me the money, we’d be in bed together right now.” I hoped this confession would stir something inside him, but he just sat there glaring at my crotch.
“I think you should go,” he said. So I went out to the van and left.
My short-term plan was to reside in the conversion van. I didn’t make a long-term plan because I figured Ginno would come around. He’d miss me; he’d have to. I parked the van in front of the alley so Ginno would know where to find me when he changed his mind. The next day I watched him pull up to the alley and walk inside. He saw me but made no sign of acknowledgment.
I began a new schedule where I slept in the van during the day, when it was safer, and woke up just in time to see Ginno leave the alley and head home. Then I’d go to a dive bar, grab a back booth, and bedazzle and drink all night.
By the fourth night of doing this, depression had really set in. I stayed in the parking lot even after the alley closed. When I finally saw the little high school boy come throw that night’s unsold fried foods into the dumpster, I knew it was time to say goodbye to Gogo. The ice required to keep her body below thaw-temperature in my small beach cooler was an expense I would not be able to maintain for long. I took her shoebox into my arms; my hands were shaking as I walked up to the dumpster. To lose so much in just a week!
The newly discarded fried food made steam pour from the dumpster like fog in a horror movie.
“Gogo,” I said, “you were a great dog, for great times.” When Ginno kicked me out, I had taken his headlamp from the garage on my way. It was the kind of lamp that people wear when mountain climbing or going underneath the crawlspace of a house to investigate a smell. I wore it inside the dark bars as I bedazzled, and I wore it now. It shone down on the shoebox like a light from heaven. I felt like if there were ever a moment where I could open up and talk to God, this was it.
Let me have a second chance, I thought. Let Ginno come riding up out of the mist. Let him be in the matching pajama set I bought him; let him tell me he can’t sleep at night without me by his side. I sealed this wish by tossing Gogo into the dumpster like a penny into a well.
Ginno didn’t come. I broke my rule of not spending the night in the parking lot and drank myself into a stupor.
The next morning was very sunny and when I woke up all the gems and glitter filigree on the sweatshirts inside of the van were dazzling like a 9 a.m. disco.
I made my usual round of consignment boutiques but because of the van-living I didn’t look as put together as I normally do. I felt like a few of them could maybe tell my secret. I made it just fine through the first sad song that came on the radio. “So I have to be the woman who lives in her van and sells sweatshirts for awhile,” I thought, “but soon enough I will be the woman who lives in her apartment and sells sweatshirts, and it will only go up from there.”
Then tears came and I had to pull the van over. My life was worse than a blues album, losing my man and my tiny dog and my new life all at once. I ran to the first gas station I saw that would probably have just one little bathroom with a lock and I took my entire make-up bag inside. It was the first stroke of luck I’d had since Ginno kicked me out: there was one wood-paneled door that said “Restroom” instead of “Women” or “Men.”
Inside, I was instantly calmer. I knew I’d have to return the conversion van. I couldn’t just keep driving it, following Ginno across the US to all his tournaments like the lost ghost of a former soccer mom. No, I could not haunt Ginno. I could only keep the van for a while. A couple hundred miles, a week at the most.
After I got fixed up, I went to the bar to try and drink Ginno away. But a few too many Sea Breezes went down the hatch and I made the mistake of returning to the bowling alley parking lot on karaoke night. Sometimes Ginno will sing, and the way his timing isn’t quite right makes me realize that things don’t have to be perfect to be beautiful, like how his crooked teeth are somehow crooked in a nice way.
I could hear the people singing inside, and I sat in the van and sang along. I closed my eyes to a couple doing a bad country duet and fell asleep for a little while.
When I woke up there was a great cloud of fire soaring from the dumpster next to me. In my drunken dream-state, all I knew was to be scared. It looked as though a portal to Hell had opened next to the conversion van.
And in a way it had. A bottle hit the glass of the driver’s-side window, which shattered to reveal them: the KKK boys, the same ones that used to smile at me and comp me vodka.
Tonight they did not look so friendly. Ginno must have told them.
They were lined up in a triangle-formation, looking a bit like bowling pins themselves with their bald heads. Several had brought bats.
Then, in the background, I saw him. Ginno was standing near the entrance of the alley, watching with a distant look that let me know right away he wasn’t going to intervene. I pleaded with the boys first, then finally to Ginno. When I called his name he turned around and went inside. This seemed like a small act of kindness on his part—to not watch, to spare me having to look up and see him in the distance and know that he could ask them to stop if he wanted to. When I saw the door to the ally shut, I decided to accept this last gift from him and surrender.
“I guess you strong boys are going to kill me now,” I said. “You know you’ll kill me just dead as a real dead woman.” I laughed, mainly frightened but maybe a little bit relieved. “As dead as your wife or your mother or your sister.”
But then there was silence. Their shouting died down, their thumping bats suddenly rested in their palms. So I opened my eyes again—I still had a little hope. I looked them right in their human eyes, these boys standing in the dumpster’s firelight. Then they killed me. Their mothers and sisters, of course, are alive.
MAGICIAN
After my older brother Keith lost his arm in a car accident, I bought him a bird. I thought it might be nice, the company and its bright color. He and I go to the same college and live down the hall from one another in the same apartment complex. We’re very different, though. We did not hang out much before his accident. Keith was an athlete and an alcoholic; I prefer chemistry and yarn.
Most of the girls he and his friends hung around with were beautiful. I’m not beautiful, although he told me once that I was. “Jean,” he said, “you just aren’t beautiful in a way that people notice. It’s comfortable, the way you’re beautiful. Your face always reminds me of home.” I don’t think home was what any of his friends were looking for. They wanted excitement. My face does not remind anyone of that.