The Animal Girl (6 page)

“Not just. It was more than that, too.” The truth of these words was in the sudden enthusiasm and fullness of her voice, and his smile and the lift in his face told her that he had heard it. For a moment, she wondered if he deserved to be this happy given what would soon happen to her. But the moment passed.

“I'd rather you not come back,” she said. “I'm going to get worse, and I'd rather you remember me as the woman you took to bed and not the woman with an eye patch.”

“Sure,” he said. She wished he'd struggled more before saying that.

“I'm tired,” she said again. But she wasn't prepared for how quickly he kissed her forehead and then turned around and left.

Her heartbreak continued. When she was especially lonely, in the long hours of daylight, she thought again of his lanky nakedness, his surprising competence at killing, his melancholic voice on her answering
machine asking to speak to her. How odd to be heartbroken at this time in her life. How odd to be left with desire. It was a relief and a luxury to know that she did not want the actual man. Not now. She liked him best in her thoughts. He was more vivid, more alive that way. She could spend hours thinking of the soft, contemplative way he'd touched his mustache from time to time, and the way he'd told her, “Always stand behind the shooter,” making it clear with his paternal tone of voice that her safety was his foremost concern. She would see them making love and be surprised again by his athleticism, his volume, his surprising confidence in bed. She would see years into an imaginary future with him; how annoying his passivity and meekness would become, annoying and also endearing. She would exhaust herself protecting him from those who'd take advantage of him: his son, his business partners, even herself. She would think of him as a hunter, too, a gentle hunter with great respect for his prey. How quickly he got to his wounded bird and snapped its neck. She would think of how he had lifted his wine above their small feast of grouse and toasted to her success, to their many hunts to come; and how he had lain beside her that night, his hand—the same one he had killed with—touching her scar in a darkness that was, for the time, easier to bear.

Holly Morris was thirteen and not behaving herself at her grandmother's funeral. She made the few children in attendance—only there because the counselor from the school district had advised it—play patty-cake with her on the couch while the adults lined up in front of the large, glossy black coffin. Everybody knew that coffin had cost a lot more than the Morris family could afford. And because a funeral home was too expensive and Bethel Mount Chapel, the church where the Morrises and my family and every other family at the funeral went, was no more than a room with gray metal chairs, the Morrises had moved their TV out of the way and put the casket, with its upper lid open to the dead woman, in their living room. Everybody on the front porch and back patio was whispering about the cost of the coffin, not to mention the reconstructive work done on the old woman. The coffin was polished metal and wood with what Larry Truman, a carpenter in Wilford, knew was cherry trim. “Precious,” one woman said about the interior fabric and cushions. People seemed to agree that the expense must have nearly destroyed the Morrises and would not have been necessary had Holly's grandmother died in a more peaceful way. But they also had to agree that they might have done just the same had it been their tragedy.

Jack Rogers and I tried to understand the cost in our terms—the number of trick boards and soft-wheels with Speedo bearings and Tracker trucks that kind of money might buy. We both had Kmart specials, plastic held together with rusty bolts. You could have bought twelve or thirteen flexwood-fiber fat boards for what the Morrises had spent on that funeral. “At least that many,” Jack whispered, and I didn't argue. From the back of the living room, we had both glimpsed, through the throng of adults, the long, narrow box. The three Morris men were kneeling over their mother, weeping, and doing something
desperate and inward—praying, talking to the dead woman—while Holly and Belinda Green, who even at eight must have known better, clapped hands and sang out from the back of the room, “Say, say, oh playmate! Come out and play with me!” Finally, Mrs. Morris seized Holly's wrist and led her away. But as soon as Mrs. Morris returned to her sobbing husband, her daughter was back, recruiting every kid she saw for a game of carpet tag, in which you take your shoes off and drag your socked feet over the shag carpet and shock the hell out of another kid. Holly also rounded up Jack, the Watkins brothers, and me, though in our early teens we were all too old for nonsense. So we stood back while the little kids tore their shoes off and began motoring around that part of the living room to fill themselves with electricity. By that time the adults were no doubt questioning the wisdom of bringing the few children who had come—the ones who'd witnessed what happened to old Mrs. Morris. Never mind that the woman counselor from the school district had advised it, had asked our parents to talk to us, listen to us, let us decide whether we'd like to come to the ceremony. “It might help give you closure,” Jack's father had told him earlier that day, though “closure” was not a word we'd heard our parents use before. And now the Hedge and Bibs and Scott parents grabbed their kids and hauled them down the street and into their homes.

Standing alone at the back of her living room, Holly Morris swung her arms in circles, as if about to start jumping an invisible rope. “That is entirely enough now,” Mrs. Wills, a close friend of Holly's mother, said fiercely. But Holly just smiled and wore this I-can't-hear-you face. Feeling stiff in our hand-me-down suits and ties, Jack Rogers, the Watkins brothers, and I stood there, waiting, knowing something had to happen. “That child needs to be hit,” we heard Mrs. Wills whisper. Under normal circumstances, with all the families present going to the same church, living in the same neighborhood, working similar jobs, someone might have done it and let Mrs. Morris grieve. But there was something manic and unapproachable about Holly Morris—her openmouthed smile, her loud, hard giggling, her shouts, moments ago, of “You're it! You're it!”—that made her glee
unstoppable and challenged any authority so completely that the adults seemed to back away from her and doubt themselves.

Finally, Mrs. Morris came away from the coffin again. She grabbed her daughter's wrist, twisting until Holly bent with pain, though the girl didn't stop smiling the whole time her mother dragged her down the hall. Mrs. Morris was a large woman with thick ankles and a fleshy round face, not at all like her thin, blond daughter, all sleek tan arms and legs. Even at thirteen, she had real tits that stood out from the rest of her, a fact that had not at all been lost on Jack Rogers, me, and the Watkins brothers, since she was one of the few girls at Wilford Junior High with a woman's body. The mother tossed her in a room and locked it with one of those old-fashioned keys that she put in her pocket. On the way back down the hall, Mrs. Morris was crying hard. “God bless you,” Mrs. Tucker said. Like many of us, Mrs. Tucker had been there the day of the death, had seen everything, and had some idea of the uncertain rage Mrs. Morris might feel toward Holly. Those who had not seen the event had heard about it, and even as Pastor Lamb took his place at the head of the old woman, straightened the flower in his lapel, and began to speak, I couldn't help imagining how the part that I hadn't seen had happened: how Holly and her grandmother had just gotten into the Buick and were off to Holly's soccer practice when the old woman remembered she'd left her purse inside. I saw it all take place then as Pastor Lamb said a eulogy for the joyful elderly lady who'd so willingly driven neighborhood children from event to event, who'd kept the Morris garden up, who'd fed the stray cats of Wilford, who'd had an inspiring passion for the lost and needy. I imagined how surprised the old woman must have been when, right after stepping out of that car, she'd turned and seen the Buick rolling slowly down the slight grade of the driveway—so slowly that the eighty-three-year-old grandmother thought she could catch it, get inside, and stop it. She'd taken hold of the handle and been about to open the door when she somehow fell and ended up under the car, which kept rolling even as Holly sat in the passenger seat watching it happen. She no doubt saw the panic in her grandmother's face as she went down, perhaps heard something
like a scream and felt the give-and-take of the car as it rolled on for a moment before settling, unimaginably, in place. How quiet the inside of that car must have been for Holly Morris. Mrs. Scott had seen the event from her kitchen window as she scrubbed a plate. Her husband had called 911 and rushed outside, but he couldn't get Holly to unlock her door. She stared right through him, then looked the other way when he knocked on the glass. As soon as he headed around the car—which he'd wanted to avoid doing because he'd already seen the old woman over there once and didn't want to have to see her twice—the girl reached over and locked that door, too. They, Mr. and Mrs. Scott together now, shouted at her. When their efforts failed, they even enlisted a policewoman, who had just arrived and was a mother herself, to say in a really nice voice through the window that Holly needed to unlock the door, sweetie, and come out now.

But the girl didn't hear a word of it. She turned the radio on to a high volume, so high that the Browns and Meyers and Jensens, who had come out to help, could hear the evening news, the weatherman predicting in his too-perfect radio voice that the Indian summer—the blue skies and mild temperatures that seemed so wrong for a day like that—would continue into the first week of October. When the fire truck arrived and a team of rescuers—all local men, amateurs from Wilfred, who quickly saw that there was no one to rescue—began lifting that Buick off the old woman with a hydraulic jack, Holly turned her grandmother's AM radio up still higher to a top-ten pop song countdown to which, her eyes closed, she swayed slowly as she mouthed the familiar words of a song she had danced to many times at one of the Wilford Junior High stomps. When finally, after more than twenty minutes of trying, a rescue worker managed to jimmy the lock on the driver's side, Holly simply reached over and slapped the lock down again before he could open the door.

By that time half the neighborhood was out there, including me and Jack Rogers and the Watkins brothers, all on our boards and trying to get a glimpse of Holly locked in that deadly car and moving to Cyndi Lauper's “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” We walked around to the opposite side of the car and, along with other neighborhood kids, all younger than us, saw what was left of the old woman, her legs
extending from beneath the Buick with a pair of clean, brand-new, bright red tennis shoes—she'd always worn loud, youthful shoes—on her dead feet. The little Brian girl with strawberry-red hair and her friends, Carrie and Shana and Belinda, who'd been jumping rope in the Johnson driveway, as well as Ricky Hedge and Martin Bibs and a bunch of kids on their tricycles and Big Wheels with rainbow-colored tassels streaming from their handlebars, were there and witnessed that sight too. Most backed off and wandered down the street in a daze. Others lingered, staring, transfixed until an emergency worker said, “They shouldn't be here. Somebody get rid of the kids!” A few parents came, covering their children's eyes with a hand, and a cop shooed the unaccompanied ones away. The cats remained, though. She'd fed them for years, and no doubt they recognized her, even became hungry at the sight of her, which might have explained why the rescue workers, kicking and yelling at the twenty or thirty scraggly strays, could not scatter them or quiet their repetitive mewing. The animals dashed at the old woman's legs and darted under the car, where they crouched, just out of reach and close to their provider.

We were smart enough to stay back, just within eyeshot across the street, where Gary Watkins threw up in a bush while the rest of us watched Holly swaying to that music. We had all told lies about this girl with tits and a tight ass and a soft child's face. She and I had locked ourselves in the janitor's closet in the school basement, where I'd held onto a mop handle while she gave me a very slow, torturous hand job, licking her palm just to make it better for me, I'd told Jack Rogers, who'd told the Watkins brothers, who themselves had received what they called “twin blow jobs,” pushed up against her picket fence one midnight. We'd taken her through every motion we could imagine in our lies. We'd made her body the target of a pointsystem game we played. A piece of Holly Morris's ass—a caress or pinch or feel—was worth ten points, the highest by far at Wilford Junior High, where copping a feel from any other girl would get you only five at most. (And because points could only be earned when all of us, Mark, the Watkins brothers, and I, were present to witness the act, our lies didn't count.) I'd scored 200-plus on Holly, and Jack Rogers was just behind me with 180; the Watkins brothers were
slower, more shy and scared, though that obviously didn't stop them from lying about blow jobs. The last time I'd touched her, slipping my hand on her butt as I stood behind her in the school-bus line, she'd turned with rage in her face and jabbed a mechanical pencil at me. “Get your little pussy fingers off me, Billy Munroe,” she said. I'd never guessed at the fury she'd had in her, and when I got home that day I couldn't help but look at my hands and feel a little disgusted at what she'd called my “pussy fingers,” even though I knew that I was out in front in our game, that point-wise Holly Morris was mine.

But she didn't seem to belong to anyone that day as we watched the unpracticed Wilford rescue squad, who just weren't used to dealing with disasters, fumble their efforts to retrieve what was left of Holly's grandmother. The car, a huge sky-blue American cruiser, slipped off the jack twice before they recovered the old woman and began the messy task of putting her away. “Someone get the girl out of the car,” a worried neighbor—it looked like Mr. Brown—shouted at the men. But the workers didn't budge; they'd already tried and failed. She wasn't bothering anyone. At least she hadn't been until her father returned from work, parking his old Ford truck across the street, to witness the aftermath of the accident.