Little Sister (13 page)

He kicked open the door and stepped inside the house. There were two overturned crates he had left there for sitting on, and light was coming in through the holes which passed for windows. There were still his ashes in the empty hearth and a small bag of food garbage which he had left there when he discovered the place. Here it was, the secret he had arranged for her, and she was not even there to see it. He slammed the door behind him and sat down heavily on one of the crates.

“Andrew,” Francie cried gaily from outside, “come see me.”

Slowly he got up and walked out on the bridge. He heard a giggling noise coming from under the bridge, and then he saw her head poking out, gazing up at him.

“Look,” she cried, “I’m skating.” She pushed off from the underside of the bridge and began to slide around on the surface of the ice, laughing and shrieking, her arms outstretched as she made awkward turns in her rubber boots.

“Get in here,” said Andrew in a tight little voice. “I’m waiting for you.”

“I’m flying,” Francie cried, running along the ice.

“Be quiet,” Andrew ordered.

“Come down here,” she pleaded. “It’s fun.” As soon as she said it, she tripped and fell with a thud on her back. The ominous sound of ice cracking emanated around her like a starburst.

“Andrew,” she cried, “help.”

“Serves you right,” he said, turning his back on her. He went back inside the house.

“Andrew,” she wailed.

That will show her, he thought. She had to have her little game. Andrew shut the door behind him and sat down on the overturned crate. He pulled his paperback book, L.A. Gundown, from the pocket of his coat. There was a man in a tuxedo on the cover, strangling a mean-looking guy twice his size. Andrew began to read, ignoring the sound of her whimpering from outside and then her footsteps, clomping across the bridge.

Francie opened the door, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her parka. Andrew did not turn around. Silently she went over and sat down on the crate opposite him, putting the brown bag down between them. She folded her arms tightly across her chest, her mittened hands tucked under her armpits. Slowly she began to rock back and forth. Andrew continued to read his paperback.

“Andrew,” she said softly.

He did not reply.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You’d better be,” he muttered, his eyes still on the book.

“Don’t be mad,” she said. “I was just having fun.”

Andrew looked up at her. “You call me and you beg me to see you. So I bring you to this place, make this surprise for you, and then you act like a two-year-old. I do not appreciate it when you act like a two-year-old. You’re a grown woman. Why don’t you act like one?”

Francie rushed over to him and knelt beside him on the cold floor of the skating house. “This place is wonderful,” she said. “And you are wonderful. Please don’t be mad. You are everything in the whole world to me.”

Andrew tried to conceal his smile, but his face reddened with pleasure. “You don’t mean that,” he said. “That’s just something you say.”

“I do mean it,” she said. “You’re handsome and smart. I love those freckles you have.” She put a mittened finger on the end of his nose, but he grabbed her wrist and pushed it away, covering his face with his own hand, as if to hide from her. Francie laughed.

“Come on,” she said. “You know it.”

Andrew raised his eyebrows over his hand, and then peering at her with a mischievous gleam, he crossed his eyes. Francie laughed again, and he pulled her close to him, burying his face in her hair.

He breathed in the scent of her hair, his gaze at once wistful and faraway. “Your hair smells so clean,” he said.

“I washed it last night.” Her voice came up, muffled by his coat.

“Do you know that no matter how much some people wash themselves, they never smell clean like that?”

He gripped her tightly, and his heart seemed to be thumping aloud. He thought that she could probably hear it, and it embarrassed him. She would know he was thinking about doing things to her. He put his cold lips down to her forehead. She tried to struggle up, but he held her there, kissing her.

“Andrew,” she said, “I can’t breathe. Let me go.”

He released her, and she popped up beside him, her face flushed, her glasses crooked on her head. She smiled at him proudly, possessively, and then leaned forward and began to kiss him on the lips.

He clutched her arms in the doughy parka and kissed her back with awkward eagerness. The fearsome pounding began in him, flooding through him, and he felt himself at once falling away and struggling to stop it.

Gently she tried to move his hand from her arm to the front of her jacket, and helplessly he let her. But as he felt that change in the bodily terrain, even under the bulky fabric, the familiar panic filled him. He knew what was coming next, the explosion he could not control, the hideous humiliation, the spreading stain in his pants, and she would know. He had to stop it in time.

With a fierce push he unloosed himself from her and began to gasp for breath. Francie’s elbow slammed against the edge of the wooden crate as she fell, and she landed on the floor, where she sat, rubbing the elbow with a resentful pout. “If you don’t want to kiss me, just say so,” she said.

Andrew jumped up and walked around the skating house, pretending to be looking out the window as he pressed his body against the cold stone walls, as if he could freeze and deflate the agitation that had mushroomed within him. “Of course, I want to kiss you,” he said irritably. “But there will be plenty of time for that when we’re out of here.”

“Out of here?” said Francie, unzipping her parka and shaking her sore arm out of the sleeve to make sure there was no blood on her elbow coming through her sweater.

Andrew glanced over at her. It looked as if there were two tiny eraser heads poking up her sweater from the small swell of her breasts. “Put your coat on,” he said angrily. “It’s cold in here.”

“Okay, okay,” Francie grumbled, shrugging the sleeve back on and zippering her jacket, but she was pleased by his concern, and she smiled at him. Then she got up from the floor and sat down on the other orange crate.

Andrew exhaled with relief.

“What do you mean, ‘out of here’?” she repeated.

Andrew came back and sat down on the crate opposite her. “Give me a sandwich,” he said.

Francie dutifully reached into the brown bag and handed him a packet wrapped in aluminum foil. Andrew tore it open and began to wolf down the bologna sandwich, Francie watched him tenderly, waiting for a compliment on the lunch.

“It’s time we were making our plans,” he said, crumpling the wrapper.

“Plans for what?”

“You know what,” he said. “I’ll take another one.” Francie made a face. “They’re good,” he said. She reached in the bag again. “What have I been telling you right from the start?” he went on. “It’s time for us to get out of here.”

“Run away,” she said quietly.

“That’s right,” he said. “Split, leave. Get out of this place. Just you and me. We get on the road and we go.”

Francie sighed. “I don’t know. I’m so—I don’t know, crazy, right now.”

“What was that all about last night?” he demanded.“‘Andrew, my sister won’t stay. She’s makin’ me live with those old people,’” he mimicked.

“I know.”

“You call me up, crying, yelling how much you hate her, and them, and everybody. You know this is a stinking town. What is there to stay for? We gotta go,” he said urgently.

“What about school?”

“School?” He looked at her incredulously. “Who cares about it? What are you? A brain.”

“You finished school,” she said accusingly.

“You can go somewhere else. Wherever we end up.”

“But where would we go?”

“That’s easy,” he said, snapping his fingers and making her smile. “We head for the Coast.”

She frowned.

“California. My old man lives out there now. Yeah, I got a few cards from him. My mother doesn’t know anything about it, but I did. He’s got a nice place out there. And he says I could get a job easy. He’ll help me.”

“What does he do?”

“I’m not sure. He’s kind of closed-mouthed about it. I think he might have something to do with the casinos or maybe the government. He says he goes to Vegas a lot.”

“Do you think he’s a gambler?”

“How do I know?” said Andrew impatiently. “We’ll find out when we get there.”

Francie huddled on the crate, her hands squeezed between her knees. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Oh, Andrew,” he crooned in a high, singsong voice, “you’re so wonderful. I’d do anything in the world for you.” He sneered and shook his head. “Sure,” he said in his normal voice.

“It’s not something you can decide just like that,” she said indignantly. “How come you never ran away before? You could have run away plenty of times, I’ll bet.”

Andrew stared at her for a long moment. Then he said in a quiet voice, “Because I was waiting for you.”

It didn’t make sense, and some part of Francie knew it, but it gave her shivers all the same, the way he said it. “I just can’t decide like this,” she said in a plaintive voice.

Andrew scowled and turned away from her. She watched him for a minute, feeling as if she were floating alone in the blackness of outer space. “Can we have a fire?” she asked in a meek voice.

“No,” he snapped. “All the wood is wet.”

“Andrew, don’t be like this. Please.”

He opened the paper bag and looked inside. Pulling out the remaining sandwich, he threw it on the ground by her feet. Then he began to gather up the other garbage and put it in the bag, as if he were getting ready to go. He picked up his book and put it in his pocket.

“Look,” she said in an anxious voice, “how can we go anyway? We don’t even have a car or any money. You can’t get anywhere without money. We couldn’t even get anything to eat. Maybe we should just save up for a while. I’ve got some baby-sitting jobs, and you could work, and then we could go. When we get some money. Otherwise, I don’t see how we possibly could go.”

“I’ve got some money saved,” he said, “from my job.”

“Oh,” said Francie dejectedly, “but we don’t have a car.”

“We’ll take my mother’s car,” he cried. “I got an extra set of keys she doesn’t even know about. Remember the key chain you gave me?”

Francie’s eyes widened. “We can’t do that,” she said.

“Of course we can,” he said.

“But she might need her car,” Francie stammered.

“No, she won’t. She’s a pig, I told you. Pigs don’t drive cars.” He laughed aloud at his joke. “Oh, it will serve her right. I wish I could just get someone to go there with a camera and take a picture of her face when she sees we’re gone with the car.” He wheeled around and looked at Francie. “Do you think Noah would do that? I would love to see that.”

Francie shook her head slowly.

Andrew shrugged. “Fuck it then. Just as long as she suffers I’ll be happy.”

Francie squirmed on her seat. “That’s stealing really,” she said.

“Stealing? That old wreck? That was my father’s car. He probably left it for me anyway,” Andrew cried. He slid over to where she sat, grabbed her arms, and held them tightly. “Besides, I have that coming to me. She owes me that car. No. She owes me more than that.” His eyes suddenly took on a kind of dazed, faraway look.

“It takes a lot of money to get to California,” said Francie.

Andrew suddenly came back to life. “We’ll have it,” he said. “No problem. We’ll get it along the way. There’s lots of stores and garages. People’s houses even.”

Francie stared at him. The look in his eyes made her stomach drop like a roller-coaster car. “People’s houses?”

“Because we’re gonna have a gun, little girl. And with a gun you can get anything you want. We’ll just go in when there’s nobody around, and when we get what we want, we move on.

“It’ll be easy,” he said. “So easy. We say, ‘Give us your money,’ and they give it over. Nobody says no to a gun. And if they do, blam, we blow them away. And we’re off to the next town before you know it. We take what we want when we want it. Don’t you see? It’s our turn to take what we want. We deserve it. The fucking world owes it to us. All our lives we’ve been kicked around and pushed down. I’ve been thinking about this. That’s why you and me are so perfect together. Everybody holding us down, telling us what to do.”

He rose to his feet as if uplifted by his image of the future. “Let them come after me. I can run faster than they can. And if they want to catch me, they can kill me first. I mean it, Francie. I’ll shoot them down. I don’t care if the blood is washing over my feet and your feet. They won’t stop us when we get going. I think about this every day. You and me out there. Free of all of them. Nobody stops us; nobody hurts us; nobody dares to even come near us.”

Francie put her hands over her ears. “Don’t talk like that,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”

Her words seemed to bring him up short, like a dog on a leash. The glow faded from his eyes, and he looked at her anxiously. He gave a jerky laugh. “Don’t be such a baby,” he said. “I’m just kidding.”

“How can you talk like that, about killing people and things?” she cried.

He came over and, sitting down beside her, ran his hand over her hair. At first she pulled away, but then she let him stroke her head. “I didn’t mean it,” he said. “I was just talking.”

“You meant it about stealing,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll think of a way to get some more money. I will.”

But she continued to look at him warily, her eyes clouded.

“I think I know where there’s some dry wood,” he said. “I’ll bet I could find some and make that fire.”

Francie sat stiffly on the edge of the crate, looking away from him. Andrew watched her anxiously, and he took his hand off her hair, but he could feel the irritation rising in him as she continued to avoid his eyes. Finally he stood up. “Yes or no?” he barked.

Francie jumped at the sound of his voice and looked up at him with wide eyes. “What?” she asked.

“The fire. Yes or no?” he asked in an angry voice.

Francie pushed her glasses back up on her nose and stared at him. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you,” she added in a whisper.