The Decoding of Lana Morris (16 page)

A sound behind them, a snickering sound, and when Lana glances back, she sees Trina and Spink leaning against the magazine stand, staring at Lana and the others, grinning with the kind of malicious keenness they might direct at a circus sideshow.

Lana turns quickly back around. It feels suddenly hot here toward the front of the store. Her legs are sticking together.

Francine turns to Alfred while Lana is counting money from her wallet. “And how are you, young fella? Did you get everything on your list?”

Lana can feel the eyes of Trina and Spink swarming all over them, as clammy as the heat.

“Yeah,” Alfred says, thickly but without stuttering.

“No Baby Ruth bar today? Aren’t you the king of the Baby Ruths?”

“I d-d-don’t like ’em anymore,” Alfred says. “They make my poop not come out.” He gestures behind him to demonstrate, as if she might not otherwise know what he’s talking about, and at once they are pelted with the hard derisive laughter of Trina and Spink.

Francine shoots a glance toward the magazines and then turns to Alfred in a nice unruffled way. “Then don’t you buy them, sugar.”

“I w-w-won’t,” Alfred says, “I’d rather p-poop,” and this sends Spink and Trina into another dimension of hard, raucous laughter, their bodies rocking, beating their thighs, gasping for air.

Lana, face reddening, hands over the money and waits for the change, but Francine is looking tensely away from her. She’s staring at Trina.

“G’wan, git out of here,” she says. Which, if anything, seems to heighten the amusement of Trina and Spink. They stand grinning back at Francine. “I mean it now,” Francine says. “I’ll call Griff Terwilliger over here and I mean right now!”

Griff Terwilliger, Lana knows, is the local sheriff and not an especially terrifying figure.

Still, Trina and Spink stumble out the door laughing, and Lana watches them disappear. By taking four bags herself and giving one to each of the Snicks, she’s able to move all the groceries out the glass doors. The drugstore’s
a half block off, and Lana wants to re-form the conga line, but she sees that Trina and Spink have joined up with K.C. and another kid she’s never seen before, and they’re leaning against the post office, in the shade, across the street, waiting.

F
ly away home,
Lana thinks.

Like the ladybug rhyme about the house on fire. But she has to get Veronica’s prescription.

“Okay, behind me, single file, no stopping,” she says, and begins to lead the line of Snicks through the glaring sun toward Helton’s Drugs. She can feel the eyes of Trina’s group on them, but Lana looks straight ahead, like a horse with blinders.

“Hey, is that Foster?” It’s K.C.’s voice, loud, pretending to talk to the others.

“I do believe,” Spink says, “it’s Foster and her spaz cadets.” Then slowly, loudly, with perfect enunciation: “The wisdom of the mothers who have abandoned these humatoids cannot be overstated.”

Lana hopes the Snicks can’t understand what Spink is saying, but she can feel them slowing behind her, and she turns to take Carlito’s arm and press him forward. “Straight line,” she says. “No stopping.”

Across the street, Spink gives the boy she’s never seen before a friendly shove, which for a moment moves the boy out into the sun. He’s short-legged and rumpish,
with a big upper body and flowing blond hair. He reminds Lana of a Shetland pony.

“Make way for ducklings!” K.C. yells, and then revises: “Make way for ugly ducklings!”

It’s Tilly who stops first, and then the rest have stopped, too. Tilly stares with theatrical petulance across the street and Alfred without emotion says, “Th-th-they’re mean,” and hugs his grocery bag to his chest.

“C’mon, c’mon,” Lana says, and the line again begins fitfully to move.

Spink says, “Spaz cadets on parade!” and K.C. lets fly with a wolf whistle.

Tilly stops, plants her white sneakers, and points her finger at Trina and the group. She’s wearing multi-pocketed pink clam diggers and a pink floral blouse, something somebody’s great-aunt would wear on a bus trip. “You can’t call us spazzes,” she says. “No, you can’t. I learned that in school. You go home and sit in your room. You go right now.”

Which is of course exactly the kind of entertainment K.C.’s group has come to see, and their laughter and hoots are loud and flinty. Trina is leaning against the brick wall. She puts one hand nonchalantly in the pocket of her tight denim skirt, and when the laughter dies, she says, “I won’t be going to my room just yet, spazter child, but when I do, I won’t be heading back to a home chockful of spazter kids who are just as weird as your spazter self.”

“Come on, Tilly,” Lana says. “Don’t talk to them.”

Lana leads the Snicks forward and pulls open the pharmacy door, props it against her shoe, and herds them into the air-conditioned drugstore, grateful for the little tinkling bell, the sudden coolness, the smell of soaps and antiseptics
and mint chewing gum. She’s just told the clerk that she’s there to pick up Veronica Winters’s prescription when one of the Snicks says something Lana can’t understand. She turns. “What?”

“ ’Ito gone,” Garth says, and he gestures toward the street.

Through the tinted glass, Lana sees Carlito crossing the street toward Trina’s group. There aren’t many cars in Two Rivers, but she’s scared for him just the same. Lana rushes to the door, but Carlito is already across the street, like a boy doing an impression of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. He moves openmouthed toward Trina, arm outstretched.

Lana knows what he’s going to do. He’s going to bless Trina.

“Carlito!” Lana shouts from the pharmacy sidewalk, wondering whether to run forward or stay with the other three. The outside air is sticky hot and smells of cinnamon gum and her own sweat. Carlito reaches out to Trina. He’s going for her shoulder, Lana knows, but Trina flinches back and his hand grazes her breast.

“Hey!” Trina says. “This freaking spazter groped me!”

K.C. shoves Carlito backward.

“Get back, mutant!” K.C. yells. Carlito is tall and solid, so the shove hasn’t moved him much.

“Stay here with them,” Lana turns to tell Tilly, and she tries to get across the street fast enough to take Carlito’s hand, but K.C. isn’t finished. The fact that Carlito is still standing, that his mouth is still open, seems to incense K.C., and he steps forward and gives another hard shove. This time Carlito is standing so close to the curb that he falls backward into the street and his head cracks against the pavement.

Francine must have been watching, because she comes running out from Rodeo Meats as fast as a fat woman can. “I’m going to call the cops on you, K.C. Miller,” she screams. “You leave them kids alone.”

“He tried to molest me!” Trina shouts back.

“I’m calling Terwilliger!” Francine yells. “I’m calling him right now!” And she goes back inside as if to show she means what she says.

Tilly, Garth, and Alfred have drifted out of the pharmacy, and when Lana turns around, she sees that they’re all in the street, and the girl from Helton’s Drugs has followed them to the door, where she stands staring.

“Get in the car,” K.C. tells Trina. “Let’s go.”

The emerald green Buick LeSabre glints in the sun in front of the market, and Lana is disgusted that she ever wished to ride in its front seat. As K.C. leads Trina by the arm past the group, Tilly says, “You’re a bully, yes, you are. I saw it. You pushed.”

When K.C. turns his handsome head Tilly’s way, his lips curl back from his teeth and he says something in a low, snarly voice that is so profane Lana can hardly believe she’s heard it.

“Suck me dry,” he says.

Tilly seems stricken.

“What?” Lana yells at K.C. “What did you just say?”

But K.C. has recovered himself, and, turning to Spink, fakes a laugh and says, “What about it, Spinko, don’t we have a policy about talking to Fosters?” and Spink says, “Indeed we do.” The Shetland pony boy gives this a big, knowing laugh, like this is an old joke he’s already in on.

Tilly’s face is contorted—she’s trying not to cry. A middle-aged woman standing outside the post office looks
on in what appears to be fright, a small bundle of envelopes in her hand. Beyond her, the sky is furred with strips of humid clouds. The asphalt of Main Street is hot enough to heat up the bottom of Lana’s tennis shoes as she crouches beside Carlito, who’s holding the back of his head. His elbow oozes crimson blood. The LeSabre squeals away down Main Street. When Lana glances again toward the post office, the woman with the envelopes has disappeared.

Lana’s hands are sticky with blood, and Carlito has begun crying, blubbering, actually, a childlike weeping that makes his cheeks, nose, and chin wet. Otherwise it’s eerily quiet, with Garth and Tilly and Alfred all standing a little back, staring.

Lana hears a single car approaching on the street, and when she turns, she sees it’s Veronica’s white Monte Carlo, and it stops mid-block. But it’s not Veronica who gets out.

It’s Chet.

“Hey, padre,” he says, kneeling right down by Carlito, who has added a whimper to his weeping. “How’re you doing?”

Carlito shakes his head miserably.

Chet’s wearing an old burgundy button-down shirt open over a ribbed T-shirt. He takes off the button-down and uses it to start soaking up the blood.

“You’ll get that dirty, Chet,” Tilly says, and Chet without looking up from his work says, “It was already red, Tilly.” Which, Lana can see, is only in the loosest sense true, because the reds of the blood and the shirt are different. When Chet has cleared away most of the blood, he
begins to daub the dirt, blood, and mucus from Carlito’s cheeks, and Carlito’s crying begins to slacken. Chet cleans the cut on Carlito’s elbow—the cut isn’t big—and Chet, to Lana’s surprise, pulls a Band-Aid out of his wallet and presses it over the cut.

“Better?” Lana says.

Carlito nods. When he breathes out, a mucousy bubble forms from one nostril; when he breathes back in, it disappears. He lets Chet and Lana help him up, and they guide him to the backseat of Veronica’s car with the other Snicks following. As Chet and Lana gather up the plastic sacks of groceries and set them into the trunk, the girl from the drugstore brings out a small paper bag and hands it to Lana. “It’s the prescription,” she says. “Mr. Helton says you can just pay for it next time.”

“So what happened?” Chet says once they’re on their way, with Lana scooched next to Chet, Garth beside her but not touching her, and the other three in back.

“What didn’t?” Lana says. “The final straw was Carlito trying to bless Trina. She moved and he touched her boob or something. She screamed bloody murder and K.C., her big freaking hero, beat up on poor Carlito for her.”

Chet is quiet for a few seconds and then he says, “Some people just don’t deserve to be blessed.”

Lana thinks about telling him what K.C. said to Tilly, but the words are too horrible to say out loud. So she says, “There was somebody I’ve never seen before with K.C. and them. A buff kid with a big head and long blond hair. He reminded me of a Shetland pony.”

This gets a good laugh from Chet. “That’s some guy they call Lido, a big steroid freak. He wants to go to L.A.
and be in porno movies.” Chet makes a wry grin. “And to think some people just want to be president or go to medical school.”

As they turn off Main Street, a sheriff’s car turns onto it, traveling at a leisurely pace. Griff Terwilliger, behind the wheel, doesn’t even flick their packed Monte Carlo a glance. He’s working a toothpick in his mouth, fussily, like there’s something back there in the molars that’s really giving him trouble.

“Guess that’d be your Crime Scene Investigative Unit,” Lana says, which gets another laugh from Chet. She likes sitting next to him. With his smooth tanned arms flowing out of his white sleeveless T-shirt, he reminds her of one of those young farmhands or work-project guys she sometimes sees in old photograph albums.
Winsome
pops into her head, and she nearly says, “In that shirt you look winsome,” but what would Chet do with a compliment like that? Probably just be embarrassed.

Garth is holding his Popeye up at window level so they can both stare out, his body pressed close to the door to avoid Lana’s legs and arms, so Lana decides to risk a question about Mrs. Stoneman. “So how’d it go with … your last passenger?”

“Fine. She sprang for my lunch, actually.”

This is news. “She gave you money for lunch?”

He shakes his head. “No, she took me to lunch. We went to the Fryin’ Pan.” He grins. “Had me a patty melt.”

“Did she talk?”

“Not much. Some, though.”

“What about?”

Chet shrugs. “The house, mostly.”

Lana lowers her voice even further. “And the person the passenger came to see?”

“Not so much, to be honest.”

The house, though. “What about the house?”

“Just Whit and Veronica and the other kids and stuff like that. She was interested in what had happened to Veronica.”

A faint alarm sounds within Lana. “You didn’t tell her that Veronica had been drinking, did you?”

Chet doesn’t answer, and Lana says it again. “Did you?”

“I think she already knew it,” he says in a small voice. And then, defensively, “Besides, if you didn’t want anybody to know it, why’d you tell me?”

They drive a block or so in silence. In the backseat, Tilly says, “You’re wet,” to Carlito. “Not supposed to wet yourself. It smells bad.”

It does smell bad, even with all the windows down. Lana is staring past Garth out the window trying not to smell, trying not to think, when Chet says, “Oh God.”

Lana turns.

A car has drawn up beside them, K.C.’s LeSabre, and sticking out of the rear window nearest them is a large set of white bare buttocks. Trina is riding shotgun, and her shrieking laughter seems to stretch her face in all directions. Beyond her, K.C.’s face is red and fierce and he yells something that Lana can’t understand.

“Speed up,” she says, but when Chet speeds up, the LeSabre speeds up, and when Chet slows down, so does the LeSabre. Lana feels a mix of revulsion and fear—the bare buttocks are like a huge eyeless face staring an eyeless stare. Alfred and Tilly are laughing, Carlito is crying again, and Garth doesn’t make a sound. In the other car, K.C.,
red-faced, screams unintelligible insults and Trina is hysterical with laughter. Fingers appear on the sides of the bare buttocks and begin to pull them apart to expose what lies between.