Rose of No Man's Land (23 page)

Why don’t your friend leave?
Paulie said to Rose. He had his full-throttle monster voice back on.

I’m Right Here. My head snapped up and I shot a glare at his haggard head. Monster Paulie had been through some real monster living. It was carved into his cheeks and forehead. His nose was red putty, lumpy and crooked and glowing. It was inflated with hard times. I Can Hear You, I said to him. Do You Think I’m A Moron?

Why don’t you buy us alcohol?
Rose changed the subject. Her nightgown outfit had drifted back over her body, and I could look at her again. I looked at her and I breathed. It was like Rose’s nakedness had sucked all the air from the room. Now that she was all covered up, oxygen had returned. Paulie’s bedroom had settled back into its base level of creepiness and bad vibes. It was a range I could handle.

Why would I buy you alcohol?
Paulie pouted.

C’mon
, she said. Monster was flapping the Polaroid in the air. He’d peek at it, chuckle, and start blowing on it.
C’mon, where is there a liquor store? Just a six-pack. We can’t do the crystal without it.

Yeah, C’mon, I chimed in. I didn’t know shit about crystal but I wanted a drink so badly. I suddenly was able to pinpoint the exact feeling I’d had inside my body since the second we walked into this grim apartment, the feeling of needing a beer. What About Beer, Do You Got Any Beer Around Right Now? I knew I sounded like a beggar.

You owe me twenty-five dollars
, Paulie said, and passed a little plastic sack of something to Rose. I guess since I wasn’t going to leave him alone with my friend, he was just going to ignore me. That was fine. That was a good thing about looking more like a boy than a girl, dudes like Paulie tended not to want much from me. It’s always good to be invisible around monsters. Rose put the baggie in my backpack, zipped it back up, and tucked it beside her. She had her roll of swiped money in her hand, she pulled out some crumpled dollars, and passed them to Paulie.
There’s extra, for drinks
, she said.
Just a six-pack. We really need it.

Out in the TV room Old Harry Chester watched endless replays of helmeted men hurtling through the air. They were slowed down, their dives made graceful, the oblong ball willfully sailing into an outstretched palm. The television’s glow caught the old man’s smoke, strobed it so the room looked like some weird-ass dingy sports disco, all dry ice and flashing lights. It was disorienting.

All right, Harry
, Paulie said. He clapped his swollen hands together.
You want something while I’m out? A little
Seven and Seven? I’ll buy you your cigarettes if you do me a favor and smoke out on the balcony. Huh? Sit on the balcony, look at the ocean. Sound nice, Harry?

Can’t see the TV out there
, Harry Chester grumped.

That’s true
, Paulie said. He started for the door, and Rose yelped,
Our bag
, and dashed back into the bedroom. The TV moved to a commercial. A car shaped like a giant silver turd was zooming through a mountain, high above an ocean. Then it was in the desert, weaving around those big green cactuses with all the arms. Then it was in a blizzard.
That’s like us, huh Harry? Last winter, huh?
Harry Chester grunted. I got a definite feeling that Harry Chester would love it if Monster Harry Paulie just dropped dead. Rose bopped back into the TV room, my backpack slung over her shoulder. It started out innocent, my backpack, but since then it had acquired a stolen phone, a wad of stolen cash, now some mystical-sounding drug. Soon alcohol would be added. There would be little room for anything else illegal.

It Was Nice to Meet You, Chester, I said. I hoped I wasn’t disrespecting him by using his first name like that, all familiar.

You too, kid
, he said. He looked at Paulie.
What’re you doing, Harry? What’re you thinking? You don’t think, do you? You’re a friggin’ box of rocks.
He shook a cigarette out of the hole in his pack. His match cracked and filled the room with sulfur.
You girls.
He set his cloudy blue eyes on me and Rose, bouncing between us.
You girls. You better watch it.
It sounded sort of threatening, but I think it was Old Harry Chester’s way of looking out for us. Warning
us against his son.

Yak, yak yak, Harry.
Paulie had his hands going like a couple of little mouths, puppet hands.
Yak, yak, yak. I’ll see ya later. Stay out of my room.
Paulie held the door open and we were in the hall. He was laughing.
I tell him, “Stay out of my room,” but he can’t, right? ’Cause it’s his room too.
I thought about that old man sleeping forever in that room with Monster. The dancing girl shining in the lamplight like a little sun. It was too much. I wanted to set him free. I was glad we were out of there. We still had Monster Paulie with us, but at least we were off his turf. We were in the humming elevator and then the downstairs hallway and then we were free.

Paulie walked us down the boulevard. He seemed to know bunches of people meandering the beach. Dudes in baggy shorts, their T-shirts hanging from their back pockets like tails. Craggy beachwomen who looked like they’d fallen asleep in the sun for about forty years. Girls our age who looked embarrassed when he said hello to them. I wondered if their naked boobs were pinned to his wall too. I would not have thought it so easy for someone like Paulie to get a girl to take all her clothes off for a photo, but what did I know. Apparently it was a cinch. We halted at a market called Mickey’s. A stack of
Boston Globes
sat damp and windblown in the doorway and a clock just inside said it was just past nine. I could smell its milky corner-store smell. We stood in the blue and red glow of the beer sign behind its window.
What’s it called again?
Paulie asked.

Yikes
, Rose repeated.
Yikes. It comes in bottles. Big bottles.
She held her hands apart, suggesting the size of a really big
bottle.
It’s not beer. It’s vodka plus energy drink. Got it, man?

Paulie was nodding.
I got it
, he said.
I got you, right? Don’t I got you?
Ever since he took Rose’s picture, everything that fell out of his mouth was a lousy innuendo. I think he was trying to be sexy. He was a lot less intimidating outside in the real world. Now he was just another dude. They were all around us, dangling their arms out their car windows, sleazing by us on the sidewalk.

Yeah, you got me
, Rose said.
What are you going to buy for me?

Oops
, said Paulie. His eyeballs were a kaleidoscope of colors eyeballs shouldn’t be. Red, yellow, maybe a bit of purple. If Paulie wasn’t an actual monster, then he was dying. His planetary stomach, the raw stretch of his inner arms. I took him in. There on the street, like a regular beach guy. Paulie was totally dying. He was going to wake up dead some day in that little bed. Old Harry Chester would surely outlive him, Old Harry Chester in all his clouds of cigarette. He would find his son beneath his gallery of underage nudie girls. Maybe he’d tear them up and flush them down the toilet. But Polaroids are hard to destroy.

Oops
, Paulie grinned, shooting a fat finger at Rose, shotgun-style.

Yikes
, Rose corrected.
Yikes!

Yikes
, Paulie headed into the store.
I might like to try something like that. Sounds interesting.

Get your own
, Rose said.
I mean it.
We ducked around the corner while Paulie did our shopping.
This is crazy
, she laughed, shaking her head.
What a crazy night. Do you always
have such crazy nights?
I just looked at her. How odd that she didn’t understand that the crazy night was all her fault.

I Don’t, I told her. I Never Have Crazy Nights. I Don’t Hang Out With Anyone.

What do you do?

Nothing. Steal Beer From My Mom’s Boyfriend. Watch Television. Sit On The Front Steps And Look At People. Rose opened the backpack and pulled out her cigarettes. She lit one up and took a deep gulp of smoke. Weren’t You Scared? I asked her. What If He Puts Your Picture On The Internet?

Rose laughed.
Him? He’s practically brain-damaged. His brain is mush. He can’t talk full sentences. I doubt he even knows anyone with a computer.

All Sorts Of Stupid People Use Computers, I told her. Or, He Could Send It To A Magazine —

Stop tripping
, she said.
Look.
She dunked her hand into the pack and plucked the Polaroid from inside. There was Rose, smiling hugely. A smile so big it ate her face. She was naked, malnourished, her arms stiffly outstretched. Oh My God, I said.

Look, look
, she was gushing breath and laughter. She pulled the corner of a heavy picture frame from the pack. It was the cousin in the canary yellow leotard. Her hands were stretched the same way Rose’s were in her Polaroid. Same deranged, impossible smile. She held the two pictures together.

I Can’t, I covered my eyes. It’s Too Much. I Can’t Believe You Did That.

Rose zipped the bag shut just as Paulie rounded the corner, a heavy paper bag resting on his giant belly-mound.
At least it had a utilitarian purpose.

Ladies
, Paulie crouched with a gasp and a grunt, depositing the bag with a clank beside us.
Are you smoking?
he asked Rose. His haggard face got all bunched up.
Don’t smoke, whattaya crazy? You kids today know better than that. What, you gonna sue the government when you get cancer? ’Cause you will get cancer. What are you gonna do then, huh? When it’s all your own fault? Who you gonna cry to?

Wow
, Rose said. She stood up, shook the sandy beach sidewalk from the back of her dress.
Don’t you think it’s weird that you’re, like, a drug dealer and you’re getting bent out of shape over smoking? Don’t you think that’s hypocritical? That you use teenage girls to make pornography and lecture them about smoking? You don’t think that’s sort of fucked-up?
I just wanted Paulie Monster to go.

It’s your lungs
, Paulie said.
You ever see a cancer death? It’s not pretty.

Death generally isn’t
, Rose smirked.
And speaking of, we’ll give your regards to Kim Porciatti.

You just keep your regards to yourself if you don’t want that picture of you hung up on telephone poles all over Massachusetts
, he said. He shook his head.
Listen, you crash, you start feeling bad, don’t be stupid. Give me a call. I’ll hook you up, anytime. But you gotta come here. I don’t deliver.
He turned on his shit kickers and shit-kicked himself around the corner and away from us. His splitting was a relief we could feel. In our bodies, in the air all around us. The world felt wide open and sweet again. I relaxed and breathed more air, could detect all the parts of the world in every huff, part fried scallops and part cigarette, part yummy
beachy smell and part piña colada tanning lotion, part Rose’s baby powder and part my own stinky scalp blowing in the breeze. It all smelled great blended up together in the air. Rose stuffed the bag of Yikes into the backpack and handed it to me.
Your turn
, she said, even though it was all her shit in it, all of it hers and all of it somehow against the law. I thought of my room and the stacks of stolen car batteries piled up against my wall. Down the road a tremendous twinkle rose and fell, rose and fell against the starless night sky. One of those rides that spin you every which way inside a rusty old cage. It flips you up into the air and twirls you upside down and in dizzy circles, all your change tumbling from your pockets and you hope the other people in the other tumbling cages don’t barf on you. You Really Don’t Want To Go? I jabbed my finger at the glow. You Really Don’t Like Rides?

We have crystal
, Rose said. She sounded personally offended, and I guess she did go through a lot to get it, but she never even asked me if I wanted any. I didn’t even know what the fuck crystal was.
We can go on rides later. We should go do some crystal and drink. It’s still early.
She tugged out the evil cell phone and glanced at the time.
We’ve got all night to ride rides. We got to get out of here in case Paulie comes looking for his pictures.

And so we were back on the side of the road, trapped in that cheesy pose, thumbs out, looking for a ride to Route 1. Rose wanted to break into the miniature golf course to use the crystal. The thought of it made her so happy she spun around on the sidewalk, her soft nightgown fluttering around her. She hopped in her sneakers.
Inside, at night?
she gasped.
You will love it!
I liked that Rose was so quick with an agenda. I wasn’t used to making plans, and really, if it had been up to me we probably would have aimlessly wandered back to my house and sat out on Donnie’s lounge chair, bored out of our minds. We passed up the ride offers of about twenty different cars of men and accepted a ride in a beat-up little Toyota with a lady who barely looked old enough to drive but insisted she was thirty.

Nuh-uh!
Rose gasped.
You look like a kid! What’s your beauty secret? Do you have any?

Clean living
, the driver said.
I make pottery. I don’t stress out. When you stress out it creates all these hormones and chemicals in your body and they really wear you down.
She gave us stern looks.
You should probably not hitchhike if you want to stay young. I’m sure it produces stress hormones.

We’ll consider it
, Rose said. She told the woman to drop us off at the gigantic Chinese restaurant on the strip, a ways down from the golf course. The restaurant was superhuge and red and I’d never eaten at it because it was some big-ass expensive deal, not like your regular pupu platter take-out job. It sounded magical. I wanted to go inside but figured they’d take one look at my shabby shorts and Rose in her nightgown and boot us right out. Instead we crossed the zillion lanes of zooming traffic heading every which way up the freeway. In the distance was the golf course, we aimed ourselves toward it, jogging, beating oncoming traffic, sprinting down the street, so close to the cars it made my heart jumpy, scrambling up a slight landscaped hill ’til we reached the length of chain-link. Behind it was the dark and gnomey garden of T-Rex Miniature Golf. I’d seen the
T-Rex for as long as I could remember, always driving by it on Route 1. When we were little me and Kristy would sit excitedly in the car as it whizzed toward the giant safety-orange dinosaur that was the spot’s mascot. The dinosaur’s strong orange neck craned out over the chain-link fence and its jaw was a cranked-up menace, flashing fake metal teeth, jabby and dripping in white paint. Beyond the T-Rex were clusters of smaller, less threatening dinosaurs, and little troll families and a windmill, a frog pond, all of it scattered across fake plasticky grass. I got to go to the T-Rex once when I was wicked little, so little I can’t remember much, just climbing on the dinosaurs while Ma and my dad smoked cigarettes and smacked the little colored balls around with the clubs. The T-Rex had a little ice-cream hut with machines that crapped out swirls of soft serve, and a batting cage where you got locked in a swear-to-god cage with a sinister machine that spit baseballs at you. The batting cage always scared me. I have a vague memory of my dad inside it, the balls coming too fast for him, and the swings of his bat struck me as violent or something. He was cursing the balls, hollering
Fucks
and
Shits
and embarrassing Ma, who was hissing
Sssshs
at him, which he could not hear over the machinery whir of the demonic baseball contraption. That’s probably why I don’t like the batting cage so much.