Citrus County (11 page)

The clerk sniffed.

“How much is this humidor?” asked Shelby.

“With the green trim? Two-twenty.”

“Really?” said Shelby.

“If you have your parents’ credit card, I can’t accept it. You could have stolen it. The charges will be unauthorized.”

Shelby didn’t get the feeling the clerk was doing anything in particular that was keeping him hidden in his fortress of cases. He was back there picking at his sweater.

“I have cash,” Shelby told him. “I have a pair of hundred-dollar bills and then another hundred bucks in smaller denominations. It’s rolled up in my pocket.”

“I cannot sell you that item. It comes with sample cigars; they have to be sold together, per the manufacturer.”

“This isn’t an easy store to shop at,” Shelby said.

“Not an easy store to own.”

Shelby left. She walked the remainder of the mall, her determination melting off like Florida frost. It was a silly notion, she supposed, that you could communicate something important through a gift from the outlet mall. There were pet stores and stores that sold suits and a store full of pianos, and Shelby didn’t want to step foot in any of them. She crossed over to the food court, where she ate a frozen yogurt, listening to a shoe salesman dole out compliments to a woman who did people’s nails. Shelby didn’t want to be in the mall for another minute. The mall couldn’t help Shelby. Her mother and her sister were gone and her father was broken and the boy she liked was afraid of her. Shopping wasn’t an answer.

Shelby went back through JC Penney and out into the parking lot. The cab was still there, the driver slumped behind the wheel. Shelby hopped in the back and pressed her legs down onto the warm vinyl seat and the driver sat up straight and got them speeding down Route 19, wind whipping in the window. Shelby turned her face to the fresh air and shut her eyes, but soon enough the driver was at it again—roasted lamb, beer with character. Again with the women.

“Let me out here,” Shelby said.

The driver squinted in the mirror. “Sorry if I’m boring you, princess.”

“You’re not sorry. You would’ve stopped.”

“Is that a fact?”

“This’ll do,” Shelby said. “Right next to this expansive field.”

The driver took his foot off the gas pedal.

“How much do I owe you?” Shelby asked.

“I wouldn’t take money from a little princess like you. I knew you were stuck-up the minute you got in my cab.”

“You’re not charging me anything?”

The driver didn’t respond. He looked straight ahead. The car rumbled onto the shoulder and came to a halt. Shelby got out and shoved the door shut and strode past the cab in the direction of her home, the sun bright but not heavy on her. The cab stayed put. Shelby didn’t look back, and the noise from the engine was soon too faint to distinguish.

Another flashlight broken. She was doing it on purpose and it wasn’t a battle of wills that Toby would let her win. He wasn’t going to leave her in the dark. He wasn’t going to let her believe that her behavior had any effect on anything. She was banging up her elbows and knees, making them bleed and scab. She had dumped all the water out on the floor and Toby had stolen towels from the house and mopped it all up. He acted like it was a game, like it didn’t bother him. It was nothing but work, and Toby was okay with work. What he was doing wasn’t supposed to be easy. It wasn’t supposed to be simple. He’d done easy and simple all his life.

The old woman’s grandbaby wasn’t with her. She was with her mother, Toby was told. Without the child, the old woman was listless. She was doing a word search of Mexican cities.

Toby handed her the flashlight he’d chosen, a big rubberized one this time.

“Other one didn’t work?” the old woman asked.

“No, it was a dud.”

She made a face. “Well, I won’t charge you for this one. The owner says no returns, no refunds, no mercy, but there’s right and there’s wrong.”

“I appreciate that,” said Toby.

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” she said. “This doesn’t mean you’re a regular.”

Uncle Neal left for a long job in Largo. For several days, Toby subsisted on corndogs, honey sandwiches, and a bin of cashews. He mixed up pitchers of punch, never finding the correct sweetness. He spent time in Uncle Neal’s rocker, waiting for the evening air to lose its heat. He went to track practice, where Coach Scolle, bored with Toby because he wouldn’t take the bait of the coach’s taunting, let him go his own way. The baby grasshoppers appeared, millions of them, black with bright stripes down their backs. They’d be everywhere for three weeks then promptly disappear, not showing themselves again until they were brown and thorny. The dishwasher broke and Toby found that he enjoyed doing dishes. He hung out in Uncle Neal’s shed for the heck of it, because he could, breathing the fumes of the hemlock.

One night, Toby dug some cans of beer out of the pantry and poured one over ice. He went to the back corner of the house and pulled himself onto the roof. He ran his palms over the shingles, took his shoes and socks off and then his shirt. He basked in the moonlight, slugging the old watery beer, until he abruptly climbed down from the roof and went to his room and dug out his mother’s hand mirror and clutched it to his chest. The mirror was the only thing of hers he had. He’d found it at the bottom of a box of his warm clothes, years after his mother had died. He squeezed the mirror in his fingers until he thought he might break it. Kidnapping Kaley, thus far, was not saving Toby from anything. He had performed a great act, but where were the great consequences? Everything was the same. Whatever had been wrong seemed more wrong now. For him
and
for Shelby. Why had he thought it would be a good idea to damage her? She could have been something good in his life. That’s why she was so scary. Maybe she still could be. Maybe Toby could manage all this. Just the day before, Shelby had walked Toby to track practice. She had dragged him around a corner, put her hands under his shirt and opened her fingers onto his ribs, had run them, prickly hot, up to his chest. She’d held him there until he had no choice but to kiss her again. They would kiss anytime it struck Shelby’s fancy. Toby supposed that was the deal. This time, he’d noticed that her thin lips did not feel thin at all. He’d pushed forward and she’d pushed back, pinning him against a wall. One of the sprinters had walked by then, and a hurdler, and Toby was relieved. Shelby withdrew her hands and backed up. Coach Scolle was approaching. She ran her hand over Toby’s buzzed head and strolled off into the dark shade behind the gym.

Toby pressed his mother’s mirror to his cheek and then stashed it back in the closet. He didn’t want to start up with the mirror again. If he needed the mirror he was in trouble, and maybe he wasn’t in trouble.

As the week wore on, Toby resorted to homework to distract his mind. He had plenty of math exercises to copy down, and a biology chapter to look at. He had to give a presentation on South Africa in Mr. Hibma’s class, so he checked an “S” encyclopedia out of the school library and lugged it home. To his disappointment, it contained nothing but straightforward facts—agriculture, population, land area. Mr. Hibma wasn’t interested in those things. He would want to know what country South Africa had a rivalry with, what illegal activity it was known for, who had been assassinated there. Toby had to incorporate food into his presentation. He had to get a South African song. Toby needed a good score, at least a B. He did not intend to fail a class or be subjected to summer school. Forging his detention slips, staring at the wall,
getting
detention at all—these were no longer part of the program. He wanted not only to continue being underestimated, he decided, but to start being ignored. He wanted to meet his obligations at school and with Kaley in the bunker and with track and field, and maybe if he did all that he’d know what to do about Shelby. He just needed to meet his obligations. Kaley would be fine. She could be somewhere else or she could be in the bunker. Toby looked at it that way: You don’t always get to choose where you are. Toby sure as hell didn’t.

Mr. Hibma had watched the half-hour loop of Headline News three times, staring at a story that had to do with insurance companies and all the recent hurricanes. He drank a glass of warm chocolate milk. He read two chapters of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. He could yawn, but not sleep. Glen Staulb had died. Glen Staulb was a New England playwright Mr. Hibma had been enamored with while in high school. Each of his plays was written according to a certain constraint; none of the characters could speak, or the lines had to be lifted from another play. Mr. Hibma, at the time, had considered Glen Staulb the height of brilliance, and though Mr. Hibma had since outgrown the gimmickry of the plays, he still valued the excitement they’d brought him, valued the time he’d spent alone with the pages feeling superior to the rest of the world because it was full of people who were lukewarm toward Glen Staulb, who hadn’t heard of Glen Staulb and didn’t care to. Mr. Hibma missed his youth in general, he realized, back when the knowledge that he was different from other people filled him with pride, not dread. Mr. Hibma was almost thirty. His mind was growing stale, his body stiff, but mostly he was exhausted by the idea of remaining in his life for another fifty years, for another five. He wished his life were a terse novella. He wished he knew how long he was destined to live. He wished he knew whether he’d be murdered or killed by a venomous snake or just waste away of old age.

He turned off the TV, set his dinner plate in the sink, threw out a tabloid he’d purchased that afternoon, and sat in front of his computer. He got himself onto the Internet and began poking around. The Internet, for Mr. Hibma, was a guilty pleasure. He missed no chance to publicly rail against computers, forbade his classes to research their presentations on the Internet, refused, no matter how heartily the other teachers urged him, to keep his grades and attendance and lesson plans on the computer, bragged about the layer of dust that blanketed the keyboard of the Gateway in his classroom.

He found his way to a site for a suntan lotion company, then a gambling site. When Mr. Hibma used the internet to masturbate, he did not allow himself to visit porn sites, finding it more rewarding to troll for incidentally sexy images. He didn’t want the women posed in ways expressly meant to make men masturbate. Mr. Hibma hit a travel site which featured a hot mother sprawled on the beach with her children. He found a site for women’s tennis. He undid his pants and slouched in the desk chair, awaiting an erection. Here was something, a French airline—stewardesses.

Mr. Hibma jumped in his chair, the breath startled from his lungs. It was the neighbor’s dog, with its piercing barking. It was like an old man hacking in your ear. Mr. Hibma’s heart was thumping, his penis as flaccid as it could be, a slick of jello in his palm. He shut down the computer, then sat in silence a minute until the dog started up again. It was a collie mix whose owners, about a month ago, had moved in two villas down from Mr. Hibma. They always left the dog on their porch, and it barked most every night. Mr. Hibma had complained to the owners, a fortyish couple who both wore flip-flops and both had dyed yellow hair. They weren’t going to do anything about the dog. The dog was something to be lived with. Like everything else.

Before each season, it was customary that the middle school and high school girls’ basketball teams scrimmage. It was thought that the high school players would receive a boost in confidence by pounding the smaller, younger team, while the middle school team, after being routed by older players, would find it easy when they played girls their own age. Little did the high school coach know, Mr. Hibma’s front line weighed a combined four hundred and fifty pounds—a wild guess—and they looked even bigger when you got them out of their sweatshirts and into tank tops. Mr. Hibma watched the other coach’s face when the girls thundered onto the court for warm-ups. The high school coach was an older fellow with a Long Island accent who wore those stretchy, snug shorts favored by PE coaches. When he saw Rosa and Sherrie, all he could do was stand there and stare at them, his whistle clenched in his teeth.

There had been two failed attempts to bribe Rosa and Sherrie onto the team. One of the cute girls who sat the bench had offered them honorary student government positions, which they declined, and the second-string small forward offered them $10-an-hour jobs at her father’s aluminum warehouse, also declined. After that, the good players began an unfocused program of sitting with Rosa and Sherrie at lunch and asking them questions about their pasts. They did this for a week, neglecting the topic of basketball, and though the humongous pair were vague about their histories, one thing became clear: These two were deeply racist against black people. At this juncture, the point guard, as a good point guard should, had an idea. She plied Rosa and Sherrie with the sweet fantasy of defeating Pasco High at basketball, of vanquishing a black school at a black sport. The Lady Spiders had not beaten Pasco in nineteen years. How much this had to do with the girls agreeing to join, Mr. Hibma did not know, but here they were, the immovable object and the other immovable object.

While his team was running layup lines, Mr. Hibma noticed Toby and Shelby in the stands, the only spectators. They sat side by side, each reading a book. Shelby’s looked like one of the Bellow novels, Toby’s like that pole-vaulting manual. Toby wasn’t really reading. He had a bothered look on his face and kept watching Shelby out of the slats of his eyes. Toby looked tired. It was surprising, these two together, but it also seemed inevitable. Mr. Hibma was struck with jealousy. It could’ve been because Toby and Shelby were reading and he had to coach a basketball game. It could’ve simply been because they were young and still capable of having all the feelings you could have when you were young.

The game commenced and the high school girls quickly scored six points. They had a way of getting themselves open from about ten feet and sinking bank shots. Mr. Hibma called a timeout and suggested to his team that it might not be the worst idea in the world to begin playing defense. He told them they shouldn’t feel any pressure because they were
supposed
to lose, and when they retook the floor they indeed hardened the soft spots in their zone. Rosa and Sherrie got every rebound. The rest of the first half, there was little scoring. Mr. Hibma’s perimeter-shooting twins threw up airballs. The fast girl with no eyebrows reverted to missing her layups, something Mr. Hibma thought she’d been cured of. Free throws were bricked, inbound plays botched.

Mr. Hibma looked up into the bleachers and Toby and Shelby were gone, off to a more secluded spot, he figured. Mr. Hibma wondered what Shelby and Toby thought of him. They probably didn’t know enough about life to feel sorry for him. They probably didn’t realize Mr. Hibma wasn’t a teacher—not like the other teachers. He was more similar to Shelby and Toby than he was to Mrs. Conner. He felt grateful that neither of them had Mrs. Conner for a class. They were vulnerable and Mrs. Conner would see that and move in and ruin them. Whatever any kid was going through, they were better off without Mrs. Conner. They had to survive their adolescences without resorting to religion or meth use. They had to remain themselves; this, for some reason, was important to Mr. Hibma. Whether or not they ever knew it, people like Shelby and Toby and Mr. Hibma were allies in the world, allies in spirit, and Mr. Hibma, despite himself, cared what they thought of him. He wanted them to feel desolate, at least for a moment, when the news reached them later in life that Mr. Hibma had passed away.

Mr. Hibma had brought iced tea and lemon wedges for halftime. He let the girls fill their cups and find places to sit, then he relayed his plan: Chapman. They wouldn’t run their standard offense, Wilkes-Booth, any longer. They would slow it down. There was no shot clock in middle school basketball, so if the high school girls wanted to ever get the ball back, they’d have to extend their defense. When they did this, Mr. Hibma’s point guard, the girl with the bowl cut, would slither around until she found an open teammate. The plan preyed upon the impatience of the opponent, who would surely not have the discipline to sit back and watch the entire sixteen minutes of the half tick away.

And it worked. The high school girls were confused. Mr. Hibma’s point guard sliced and diced. The twins hit a few three-pointers. The fast girl banked in a layup. Rosa and Sherrie got rough, sending any high school girl who ventured into the paint sprawling across the hardwood. The high school coach walked over and complained to Mr. Hibma about his decision to employ a time-killing strategy during a scrimmage. “My team’s had five possessions since halftime,” he whined. Mr. Hibma, in a low tone, asked the man to kindly return to his own bench before he found himself with a black eye, and the man, looking scandalized like an old woman in a Victorian novel, shuffled away. Mr. Hibma was shocked with himself, not for telling the guy off but for out-coaching him. Mr. Hibma was faking being a coach, but his faking was better than this guy’s real thing.

In the end, Mr. Hibma’s team lost by four points. He gathered his girls up. “There’s still one area that greatly concerns me,” he said. “Only a handful of you have made any discernible effort to improve your appearance.”

The girls looked at the floor.

“I don’t want to have to bench anyone over this, so here’s what we’re going to do. I’m appointing the three cute girls, since they have a workable grasp of cosmetics and hygiene, as beauty captains. They’re in charge of making each of you over, and you better do what they say. We have eight days until the first game, so I’m going to spring for self-tanner out of my own pocket.”

The starters were dazed. The twins looked at their nails then hid them in their fists.

Shelby slapped at mosquitoes, observing her father as he directed his glare into the hissing grill. He seemed transfixed. It had almost suited him, becoming a single dad. He was a man who liked a challenge, who liked having his work cut out for him. Being a single dad had, in a way, settled him. He could run everything in the household just the way he wanted to. He’d been content, knowing he’d never marry again, knowing his daughters would be his life’s work. He’d done it all—grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, helping with homework, the banking, driving Shelby and her sister to doctor’s appointments and birthday parties.

“A big steer got electrocuted,” Shelby’s father said.

She sat up straight.

“Somebody left the gate open at one of those substations. The thing was chewing a vine that was wrapped around a cable.” Shelby’s father sniffed his forearm. “And then I find these kabobs on sale at that Weeki Wachee Market, in those bins at the front of the store. I wonder if there’s a connection.”

Shelby noticed all the twitchy muscles in her father’s calves and biceps. He looked like he’d gone ten rounds, puffy under the eyes, spaced-out.

“What is this we’re listening to?” Shelby asked.

Shelby’s father set down his tongs. “Lady that works in the mosquito lab gave it to me. She got the songs off the computer.”

The song that was playing was a garage-load of groggy guitars, the lyrics unintelligible but clearly longing.

“I never wanted you to be an only child,” Shelby’s father declared.

Shelby said, “I’m not an only child.”

“Only children are deprived.” Shelby’s father turned a knob on the grill, tapping it with his thumb. “All the only children I ever knew had something wrong with them.”

“Everyone ends up with something wrong with them.”

“I never see
my
sister, but we were always fond. My sister is the type of person people are jealous of.”

“I’m contacting her for my Iceland presentation,” Shelby said. She’d found a reason to get in touch with her aunt, an excuse, and now she felt embarrassed for
needing
an excuse, a ruse, a school project. It didn’t make sense to Shelby that she was still afraid of things, that anything could make her nervous. Fear was an emotion that did not add up. It was her aunt, after all. She would be glad Shelby was old enough now that the two of them could get to know each other.

Shelby’s father plopped the kabobs onto a platter. He went in and got beers, handed one to Shelby. She took a swig and the flavor was bracing. The beer didn’t smell good, but it tasted like something that could cleanse you. It was the time before night, when the air was perfectly still and didn’t want to be breathed.

Another song began. White rappers. They emphasized the last word of each line, the word that rhymed. Car horns and whistles were mixed into the music.

“Did they just call the devil a trick bitch?” Shelby asked.

Shelby’s father shrugged.

It was Christian music. Shelby hit the stop button and her father didn’t protest. The woman in the mosquito lab had outsmarted them. She’d smuggled her beliefs into their home—contraband. She thought she knew what Shelby and her father needed. This house was a place people snuck things out of and into. They snuck little sisters out and snuck music in. Maybe Shelby needed a big, obvious enemy. A specific enemy that could never be defeated.

Shelby watched her father slide a hunk of beef off his skewer and cut it into pieces with his fork. She had more of her beer.

“Are we going to move again?” she asked.

“Do you think we should?”

“I just want to know.”

“Where would we go?”

Shelby had no idea. She didn’t think it mattered. It wouldn’t matter where they were going, only where they were leaving.

“I don’t think I have the energy for it,” Shelby’s father said. “Selling the house, finding a new job, packing up.” Shelby’s father pushed his plate aside and brought his beer in front of him. “We’re buddies,” he said. “Anything we do, we’ll discuss it.”

Shelby pressed her bare feet into the wood of the porch. She didn’t know if she wanted to be buddies with her dad. She knew she wanted him to shave his beard. She could never tell what he was really thinking, because half of his face was hidden. She wondered if her father would ever go on a date, go on vacation. There were a lot of things besides moving that he didn’t seem capable of.