Strays (2 page)

He wore a long-sleeve flannel unbuttoned over an untucked gray t-shirt, and he held the hem of the t-shirt with the thumb and forefinger of each hand, flapping it in front of the fly of his acid-washed jeans like a matador taunting a bull.  

Somewhere deep within Sarah’s chest, a sound beyond a shriek, ugly and prehistoric as it sloughed off the last chains of sanity, was tearing its way into her throat.  Sarah swallowed hard, sucking breath between her teeth as if she had just bit into a Red Savina pepper.  She forced herself to meet the boy’s eyes.

He wasn’t a boy, not really, at least not in terms of biology.  Sarah guessed him to be maybe 19 or 20, face free of blemish and whiskers, pale and bare like her little brother’s hairless crown when he was first born.  The half-circle opening of the back of his hat was pulled high on his forehead, and the wavy tuft of beetle-black hair poured out in an oily curl.  On the sweatband was printed the word SEAHAWKS, and Sarah imagined that if he turned his hat back around the right way, the forest-green hawk’s head inspired by Northwestern tribal art would grace the cap’s front panels.  Probably a student at UW, Sarah figured, on his way to Tacoma to slum it on a Saturday, probably looking to score some cheap weed.  But my God, he could pass for any of a number of vagrants along the strip, what with that colossal mass of shadowy hair that discharged out from under his cap, down around his face, framing his round-lensed black sunglasses (at night, no less, like a bad ‘80s cliché) before at last obscuring the mass of tattoos he had imprinted on his neck. 

Sarah tried not to look at the neck tattoos—there were so many twists and knots and thorny vines in the artwork that they looked like a skin disease—but she could make out a couple of letters at the throat, what looked like an S and part of what was either an R or a P.

“C’mon, girlie,” the bushy boy said, flicking his top lip back from perfect teeth and snapping the t-shirt again in a sloppy
toro-toro
.  “Let’s play.”

Sarah peered around the C-store.  It was late, and there was no Tom Sawyer there to assume the role of hero.  Most of the truckers who waved in and out like a stream of fat army ants had retired to the cabs of their rigs, which now sat idling out on the west parking lot.  The interior of the store was empty save Sarah and bushy-boy and the red-faced clerk who was too busy listening to a late-night rebroadcast of a Seattle Mariners game that had been played earlier that evening.  He would not be of much help.  Sarah’s visual surveillance of the area lasted mere seconds, and she met bushy-boy’s eyes again.

“Going to the bathroom,” she said.  “Excuse me.  Please.”

The boy held the eye-lock, his right caterpillar brow twitching like a fly was buzzing at it, and then sniffed the air hard, rocking back and catching himself on the candy shelf. 

“What a coinky-dink,” he said.  “I’m going to the bathroom too.  We could play in there, baby.  Let’s play.”

“What I've got to do in there,” Sarah said, “you don’t want to play with it.”

The boy’s smile softened by about the thickness of a dime, and this time when he sniffed it turned into a snorting laugh.  “Good one, girlie.  I like that jazz you got goin’.”  His grin looked like it wanted to slide off his face.  “How ‘bout you and I have us a party?”

Sarah played her last card, even though it only seemed to work about half the time with drunk college boys.  “You don’t want any of this.  Fifteen will get you twenty.”

“Wha--?” cried the boy.  “No way you’re only fifteen, no way.”

“Way,” Sarah said.  “Lay one finger on me and I’ll scream.”

The boy considered this and shook his slippery locks out of his face.  He spread his hands in a gesture of mock submission.  “You got me,” he said, stepping aside and offering a sweeping bow as he indicated a clear path to the bathrooms.  “Your majesty,” he said.

Sarah bit down on the back of her tongue to keep that rabid scream at bay in her throat, then offered a thin, closed-lip smile and strode past the man-child.  She could smell the stench of cheap rum as she passed, not quite the familiar bouquet of the Cortez Silver that Big Buddy liked when he had a little extra cash, but something in the ballpark.

Bushy-boy looked up at her as she passed and winked.  “I like your style.”  He finished the sweeping bow and pulled himself back up.  “So I want to show you something.”

“Don’t want to see it.”

“It ain’t that,” said the boy.  “Just my tats.  Want to see my tats?”

He reached up to the locks of hair about his neck and parted them, revealing the printed body art that was intaglioed across his throat.  Sarah saw the letters—S and P—and there was an apostrophe, and then T’S and PL and then ET’S and PLA and then at last it was all revealed, inscribed across the neck and throat of the drunk boy with the fatty-black hair, his special billboard to the world:

LET’S PLAY

Sarah belched, and something that tasted like rotted milk came up in her throat, as if the scream took on solid form.  She staggered back, turning away from the boy.  When her eyes were averted, she forced the vomit back down.  It burned in her chest and it burned in her belly, for she had been without food for coming up on two days.

The bathrooms were past a thin door next to the beer cooler, along a narrow hallway leading back to the stockroom.  She knew them well enough.  She had spent the better part of three nights in the fourth stall down, sleeping crouched on the toilet with knees tucked up into a fetal position until the night clerk came in to mop the floors around 3:00 a.m.  The regular clerk, the one who was out there now listening to the ballgame, knew she slept there.  So far he hadn’t said anything, seeming too interested in listening to baseball, even though 1986 had not been kind to the Mariners thus far.  Sarah thought that maybe he didn’t care, or maybe he was the last good person on the Sea-Tac Strip, but maybe, as she often suspected, he was just waiting for the opportunity to get something in return, to offer an invite with a slurry “let’s play.”

That was her experience anyway.

Sarah entered the bathroom, went to mirror, and checked herself.  Almost a week on her own, and she still hadn’t outgrown the vanity of it.  Still, the habits were slipping.  She ran fingers through her hair, fluffing the last remnants of curls that were fading from days without a good wash, and she checked the circles under her eyes.  They made her look old; no wonder the college boy didn’t know she was fifteen, a little less than three years from being “street legal.”  Still, she still looked good … well, good enough.  She was not yet ready to use this body of hers as a last resort, but the dull ache in her belly and the soft growls that accompanied it continued to linger.

Satisfied with herself, or as satisfied as she was going to get, Sarah rubbed her face and yawned.  She tried to remember a time when the yawn was a harbinger of good things, of a restful sleep in a warm bed undisturbed by the groping touch of callused, sticky hands and the chortling breath that stank of Cortez Silver.

Let’s play.

Sarah jumped.   There were no such good memories.  For half a decade she had learned to sleep like a soldier, mind slipping barely three clicks into dream state so the senses could be on the alert for intruders.  Not that the alert had done any good.  Big Buddy was unwelcome but inevitable.  The only thing that soldier-sleep had done for Sarah is spared her the shock of a surprise attack when he came calling.  The nights with Big Buddy were terrible enough but ten times worse if you didn’t see him coming.

A crusty laugh escaped from Sarah’s lungs, another precursor to the scream she fought to control, the way the belch had preceded the vomit.  Sarah had no idea what amused her.  Perhaps it was the fact that she looked forward to sleep, looked forward to crouching like a swami trying to fit into a box, because despite the pain of awakening with an almost geriatric pain in her knees and hips, at least for those few hours it was sleep undisturbed.  She was not sure why that amused her but it did, almost as much as the fact that Big Buddy’s advances had seemed less horrific when she was waiting for them.  She imagined that if she ever stood before a firing squad, she’d ask them to remove the blindfold.

With three light steps, Sarah made her way to the fourth stall.  The door hung open about a foot on its hinges, and she pushed it back and stepped inside.  The toilet seat was down, of course; this was, after all, the women’s room.  Sarah settled into position, sliding her hips so that she sat on the far back part of the seat.  She leaned forward to push the stall door shut with her left hand and then slid the bolt lock into place.  Then twisting, leaning her shoulder to the west wall of the bathroom, she bent her right leg and then her left, hooking the heels of her sneakers just inside the rim of the toilet where they would rest.  She crossed her arms across her knees, settled her chin on her arms, and made yet another stab at a prayer before settling in for sleep.

That’s when she saw the words.  They had been printed on the back of the stall door, black permanent marker, written in thick block caps with careful deliberation:

LET’S PLAY

At last, Sarah Smallhouse found her scream.

Flight

She waited for someone to come—the shaggy college boy, a trucker, the young man behind the counter.  Certainly, the scream had been loud enough to shatter the mirrors, and Sarah could have sworn it echoed for almost half a minute.  But there were no footsteps of heroic men bursting in the door to save her.  Maybe they didn’t care, or maybe a screaming girl in this particular C-store bathroom late at night was a common thing.  Whatever the case, Sarah was very much alone in the fourth stall with those awful words on the door, and she leapt up at once and threw her shoulder squarely between the
LET’S
and the
PLAY
to force herself out.

When she retired to third stall down a few moments later, she discovered it was much less comfortable than the fourth had been.  The toilet was farther apart from the partitions, and Sarah had to lean hard to one side or the other in order to brace herself.  Her shoes kept slipping off the rim of the toilet, and even when she did find what passed for a sweet spot, nestling into a reasonable pose that might allow her to shut her eyes, the thought would come to her of those words written on the door just one stall down …

LET'S PLAY
.

It was impossible to sleep.  It was impossible to think.  All that was left was something just beyond generic fear, just below real terror, like a scar on your soul that used to hurt like hell all the time and now is just
there
, a constant throb. 

Sleep was futile in these conditions.  Sarah slid her legs off the edge of the toilet and stood, feeling the muscles in her calves howl.  She rubbed her eyes and stepped out of the third stall, ever mindful to avoid looking in the direction of the fourth.   She even avoided looking in the mirror lest she catch a glimpse of that now polluted toilet stall, fearful that once it had caught her eye it would swing its doors outward, flashing those hateful words in reverse in the mirror, words that would have somehow grown larger.

LET'S PLAY.

LET'S PLAY.

LET'S PLAY.

Sarah moved to the bathroom door, slid it open an inch, and peered out into the C-store.  It was empty now save the young man behind the counter, still listening to his baseball game on the radio.  She glanced down the rows of processed groceries … sugar-filled snack cakes, small cans of Vienna sausage, bags of chips the size of a princess satchel, shrink-wrapped sandwiches.  Her stomach growled.  She fought it back down.  It was very dark now, that latest of late-night hours when every living thing in the time zone caught what little sleep it could, and the C-store, as well as the bathroom stall that had sheltered her for the past week, were no longer safe.

It was time to make her escape.

With light steps, Sarah made her way down the aisle toward the front door.  The sight of the cheap foodstuffs on the shelf made her queasy, and the growling in her stomach returned.  For a moment, she considered grabbing something—a packaged pastry, a candy bar, anything—and tucking it into her coat pocket, but even now, in this place of unbearable hunger, she knew this was wrong.  If there was a God, he was already frowning on her, and if karma was real, it was surely coming around fast to blind-side her for being a disobedient child and running away from home in the first place.  Better not to tempt fate any more by breaking one of the Commandments.

The young man by the counter did not see her, or perhaps he did not want to.  Sarah made her way to the twin glass doors and peered into the parking lot.  The front dock of the C-store was empty.  No cars sat at the gas pumps.  Only on the west lot, that open gravel track reserved for trucks, did rows of Kenworths and Peterbilts sit idling as truckers slept in their warm cabs. 

She opened the door and slipped onto the dock.

“… hair, brown eyes.  That’s the one.”

Sarah started at the voice.  It was coming from somewhere to her left, and she let the glass door ease back a bit, holding it open just enough to hear.

“Fifteen, yes.  She said she was fifteen.  Had a mouth on her, indeed she did.”

Sarah ventured to push the door out far enough to take a peek.  Standing just down the dock next to the twin Pacific Bell pay phones stood the tattooed drunk guy with the heavy black hair.  He propped himself with one elbow against a 50-gallon trash can with an orange lid, and with the other hand he pressed the receiver of the pay phone against his head.  He still wore those stupid sunglasses, which could barely be seen jutting from the folds of his ample hair. 

“Yes, she’s still here,” the shaggy-haired boy said in the phone, suddenly not sounding so drunk anymore.  “I saw her go in the john myself.”

She felt that scream again, the one thought to be played out in the bathroom.  He was talking about her.  Of course he was talking about her.