Vernon God Little

'Hi,' she says, leading me past the octopus. 'You robbed a bank, huh?'

'Yeah – see this backpack?'

I just sound weary now, like a regular smeghead on a flat Houston day. Sweat drips from my nose. Taylor looks me over. Her deep brown eyes narrow.

'You okay?'

'I guess so.'

I just sound like I have no desire left to impress anybody, but in this new depression a curious thing happens. A life thing. What happens, I think, is that we establish a real kind of contact, like in a movie or something. She just saw me make a complete asshole of myself, and she knows I know it. And it's as if she relaxes some, and I relax along with her. Like the horse stopped having to do math on stage. It accidentally makes me genuine, I guess, and exposes me as an ole fuckaway dog, all beat up to hell. She leads me quietly into the mall, respecting the swirling ink of trouble, and other people's tears, around my soul.

'So what's up, you dirty boy?' she teases on the escalator.

'Shit, I don't know where to start.'

'I'll drag it out of you.' She slips her dry little hand into my bunch of wet finger-meats, and coaxes me through the crowd. 'We'll check for my cousin, then maybe grab a juice, get private.'

A juice. Grab a private juice. What a woman. I watch her neat little buttocks stretch the fabric of her skirt, left, right, left, without a panty-line in sight, not to the naked eye. I'm so fucken in love with her I can't even picture her panties.

We reach the lingerie store, where all this hard-core, shiny kind of underwear is displayed out front. I'm not so interested in all that burlesque kind of stuff, to be honest. Simple cotton bikinis for me, like a girl wears when she doesn't expect you to go there. I look around at the women in the store. You can tell they fucken pray for you to go there.

'I don't see her,' says Taylor, craning over the displays. 'Typical. You want to go talk? I'll understand if you don't…'

'Sure, but you'll have to keep some pretty heavy secrets. I'll understand if you can't.' Girls just love secrets.

'Whatever.' She wrinkles her bitty nose. 'Like, I don't need to know where the bodies are buried or anything.' She flashes her teeth, and walks me to a fancy-looking cafeteria across the concourse.

'Hell, there's no bodies or anything,' I say.

As she docks her ass onto a barstool, I notice she's not totally airbrushed after all – a couple of her teeth are crooked, and you can detect a recent zit under her make-up. I melt like a wad into Kleenex. She's so fucken real, so here.

'So, like – are you guilty?' she asks.

'Nah, I don't figure.'

'Is it, like, robbery or something?'

'Murder.'

'Eek,' her face crumples like she just stepped in puke. 'Don't you think it'd be better to, like, stay and fight it out?'

'Nah, the way things're stacked, I have to disappear awhile.'

Her eyebrows scrunch in sympathy. What I realize as I melt into her syrup is that I have to steer talk away from the slime, and start to build a platform of excitement to tempt her along. Order tequilas or something, kiss her on the mouth.

' Tay,' I frown, 'this might seem sudden, but – I have to ask you something real important.'

Her face stiffens, like faces do when there's an incoming choice of shit. Right away I know it's the wrong approach.

'Cash?' she goes. 'Like, if you need a loan…'

A waiter turns up. 'What can I get y'all?' Taylor and my eyes take a moment to separate.

'I'll have a guava licuado,' she says.

'Uh – make it two,' I say. Tequilas my fucken ass. After the waiter leaves, I try another angle. 'Heck, Tay, I'm being real selfish here – I didn't even ask how you're doing…'

She rattles both my hands. 'You're killing me, like, God. I'm just here, finishing this thing, I tried out for TV but didn't get casted yet – just like, whatever, you know?'

I smile, and suck warmth from the moment to mold into a platform of romance. Then she flicks back her hair and drops her eyes.

'And I'm seeing this doctor, can you believe it? He's an older guy, obviously, but I'm like sooo in love – he's the reason I'm shopping today, him and my cousin's new man are such panty-pooches.'

I start to hear her through a distant echo-tunnel, you know how you do. Then Mom's voice scurries from my mouth.

'Hey – wow.'

'God, I can't believe I just told you that! Anyway he drives a Corvette, like an original Stingray whatever, and in November we're doing Colorado for my birthday…'

'Hey, wow.'

O-so-soft-and-gentle-on-your-skin Fate now makes me die squealing for every pixel of her being, and with each turn of her smile, every token of how remote my dream is from her mind, I fucken die knowing this is barely the germ of an infection for a thousand miserable deaths.

Then Taylor stands off her stool, and waves up the concourse. 'Hey, there's my cousin – Leona! Loni!' she calls. 'Over here!'

Jesus fuck. It's Leona Dunt from back home. I don't know if Lally's with her. Fuck. I explode off my stool, snatching up the backpack. Leona stands posing by the lingerie store, she hasn't looked over yet. 'What's up?' Taylor asks me.

'I have to run.'

'But – what were you going to ask me?'

'Please, please, please, don't breathe a word of this to Leona.'

'You know Leona?'

'Yeah, please.' My Nikes fire me onto the concourse.

'Vern!' she calls, as I vanish into the crowd. I glance over my shoulder and capture her image forever; she's there like a lost kitten, lips open, eyebrows scrunched. 'Be careful,' she mouths silently. 'Call me.'

I fester and decompose in the back of a Greyhound bus bound for McAllen, under the tumor light, the twisted lava-lamp of sky, just a shell of meaningless brand names, a shelter for maggots and worms. Vernon Gone-To-Hell Little. And I didn't call my mom at all, you guessed it. I didn't even eat all day. All I did was hammer myself to a cross.

Screen One in my brain plays endless warm close-ups of Taylor. I try not to watch, I try to stay in the lobby and avoid it. But the thing's right there, doing big rotations of milky ass. Screen Two runs that other timeless classic, Mom, or, Honey I Butt-Fucked the Family. I ain't trying to watch that one either. All I watch is a double-exposure of my ole goofy face in the window, as infinite distance rolls by outside; spongy, darkened distance, like rug-lint balls on wet graham cracker. Power lines and fence posts read past like sheet music, but the tunes are fucken shit.

This is the scenario when I get the day's clincher, the one I forgot to expect. A song gets attached to Taylor. Just when you think you're dicked to the maximum extent of natural law, something always comes up that you forgot about. I know the routine from here. Everybody knows deep down there's no way to kill a Fate song once it's stuck. They're like fucken herpes. The only way to wash them out is to buy the song and play it day and night, until it doesn't mean anything anymore. Only forty gazillion years it takes. Everybody knows it, but I don't remember being taught that little pearl back in school, about the destructive power of Fate songs. Correct me if maybe I was absent that day, or if that was the day I spent cleaning the yard on account of liberating frogs from the lab. No, as I remember it, we were too busy trying to assimilate fucken Surinam to be taught anything of actual value to our lives, like Fate songs for instance.