The Decoding of Lana Morris (17 page)

Chet’s face goes suddenly to stone. He slams on the brakes, K.C. does the same, and for a long moment nothing happens—the cars, idling, stand side by side. Then, all at once, Chet jumps out, plants himself, leans back, and kicks the offending bare buttocks back into the car. And he’s not done. He moves toward Trina, whose face for a moment is frozen with fear, and then she yells, “Go! Go!” and the LeSabre squeals, fishtails, and speeds away.

When Chet gets back into the car and starts driving, Lana looks at him with disbelief. “Wow,” she says. “I’ve never known anyone before who actually kicked butt.”

A chuckle slips from Chet. Already he’s beginning to look normal again.

“So what was that?” Lana says.

He shrugs. “Dunno. Something just got into me.”

Lana looks at him. She likes what he’s just done but doesn’t want to be sappy about it. So she simply repeats his words: “Something just got into you.”

Chet keeps his eyes forward and keeps driving. “It was stupid, though,” he says. “If K.C. and Spink and that Lido guy had gotten out, I’d be the new grease spot on the road.”

“We’d’ve helped,” Lana says, then considers it. “Tried anyway.”

A short block passes in silence. Then Lana says, “So what happened? I thought those guys were your friends.”

“Yeah, well,” Chet says, and his eyes slide away. “Things change, that’s all.”

There’s more to this, Lana can feel it, but with Chet, it’s almost always like this. There’s almost always more to it. A few seconds later, he says, “The problem now is, they won’t be happy till they even this up. I kicked Lido’s butt and now they’ll need to kick mine.” He gives Lana a small unhappy smile and then looks forward. “It’ll be a pummeling.”

A few seconds go by, then Lana says, “How do you know that was the pony boy’s butt?”

Chet shrugs. “K.C. and Trina were up front, and Spink’s got a skinny little butt.”

Another short silence. They pass two boys playing catch with a football from one yard to another over a cyclone fence.

“F-f-football,” Alfred says from the backseat, and Lana says, “That’s right, Alfie. Football.” After another second or two, she turns to Chet and says, “If you could have one wish, what would it be?”

Something in Chet’s eyes gives way, and for a moment an odd, ardent expression forms, an expression Lana has seen before, mostly on girls gone gaga over some guy. But then it’s gone, and Chet says, “Guess I’d wish not to get pummeled by K.C. and those guys.”

Lana studies him for a long moment. “You got a girlfriend now, don’t you?”

Chet keeps staring forward, then he turns his head toward her. “What makes you think that?”

Lana laughs. “Girls just know these things,” she says. He’s not denying it, which is as good as saying it’s true, but still, she wants confirmation. “So am I right?”

He smiles. “Kinda.”

She laughs again. “Kinda. What does that mean, that you’ve got her hooked but not netted?”

Chet turns the Monte Carlo onto their street. “It means the subject is closed,” he says.

As they ride the last block to the house, a thought sneaks up on Lana, and after all the Snicks are out of the car and walking into the house and Chet is about to park the car in the garage, she leans back into the window and says, “Well, you won’t tell me anything about the girl, but I can tell you one thing about her.”

Chet looks at her. “Yeah? And what’s that?”

Lana grins. “That she’s lucky.”

A
s soon as Lana returns to the house and gets Carlito cleaned up and the food put away, she puts on a video for the Snicks and sneaks up to her room. She takes out the drawing kit. She knows exactly what she wants to do. She doesn’t count pages. She takes the pencil in hand and closes her eyes and lets the calm come over her. Then she begins to draw.

A large wooden crate appears, and within the crate four bodies with four heads are soon poking out between the slats, Trina’s head, and K.C.’s, and Spink’s, and the big head and long flowing hair of the pony boy they call Lido. In another few seconds, the crate lies on a flatbed car, one of a long line of railcars that pass across the flat plains under a bare sky. On the side of the crate is a shipping label, on which in neat letters, as a final gesture, Lana’s pencil writes the single word
Elsewhere
.

After laying her pencil down, Lana feels the same sense of exhaustion she always feels after doing a sketch and the same sense of appreciating the skill of what’s been drawn without quite feeling that she herself has drawn it. But it’s there, and it’s done, and with any luck, it’ll save Chet and
at the same time deal a little justice to K.C. and the others. A twofer.

She sits thinking for a moment of Chet. His mother ran off with a guy when he was in sixth grade, Lana knows that much, and his father was too depressed to do much but go to work and come home again, and if anybody had really ever been nice to Chet, she hadn’t seen it, and yet Chet knew exactly how to be nice to Carlito, knew exactly how to take care of him. And now Chet was gaga for some girl.

Lana turns to a fresh sheet of sketch paper. A warm feeling has spread through her in the manner of liquid or light. Chet is deserving, something good should come his way, and she wants to help him have it. She takes up her charcoal pencil. Chet appears on the page, in silhouette, and in his hand is a silhouette heart and from the side of the page two hands reach in to receive it.

Lana puts down her pencil. What she sees in front of her is simpler than the other drawings, sketchier, but it seems complete. She doesn’t know who the girl is, but she’s there, whoever she is, just beyond the edge of the paper.

Thump thump thump
.

From this short distance, Lana can feel the reverberation of the thumps through the walls and floorboards, and they send through her own body three short shocks of the kind of humiliation that turns almost at once to anger.

“Okay!” she yells, but before sliding the drawing kit back under the bed, she quickly counts the remaining sheets.

Seven.

Plenty,
she thinks.

Seven should be plenty
.

“W
here were you?” Veronica says when Lana comes in.

It’s Veronica’s usual accusatory tone, but something feels different about the room, something Lana can’t put her finger on.

“I was at the market,” she says. “And Helton’s.”

Lana presents the small bag containing the prescription, along with the Rodeo Meats receipt and change, all of which Veronica takes without thanks. “I mean just now,” she says. “Where were you just now?”

“In my room, if that’s okay with you.”

“Doing what?”

“I’d prefer not to say.”

Veronica thinned her lips. “I’d prefer you did.”

Lana stares sullenly ahead.

“Speak,” Veronica says.

Lana shrugs. “Okay, then. I was taking advantage of myself.”

Veronica’s eyes go narrow and cold. And then slowly relax. “And who were you thinking about during this little exercise?”

It takes a moment for this to sink in. “You’re sick, Veronica. Truly sick.”

A quick snickering expulsion of air from Veronica’s nose. She seems amused. “Disabled, actually,” she says. With one hand, she opens the stapled Helton’s bag and slides out a boxed tube of ointment and reads its prescriptive label. After rolling back the empty sleeve to expose her pink protuberant stump, she holds the tube in her teeth to unscrew the cap and then uses her teeth to squeeze ointment from the tube onto her one hand. She begins rubbing it onto the stump’s pink nub.

Lana looks around the room. Nothing’s out of place, nothing’s different, and yet it seems changed. Less light, maybe. The sheers are all drawn. And then something occurs to her.

“Has somebody been here?” she says, and turns to see—or thinks she sees—a funny expression cross Veronica’s face.

“Dr. Gooch came to check on me,” she says, and resumes rubbing ointment onto her stump. “He thinks my case is remarkable, how I’ve coped with my personal tragedy, how quickly I’ve adapted. He’s thinking of writing a paper about me.” An odd look of pride takes hold of her face and she stops applying the ointment. “Dr. Gooch calls my resilience exceptional.”

Lana bets Dr. Gooch thinks the boobs busting out of Veronica’s nightgown are pretty exceptional, too. She turns to go, can’t wait to get out of here. “Anything else?” she says.

“Yes. A small plate of melba toast, celery stalks, and green olives and a medium glass of grape juice. Two ice cubes.”

Lana gives Veronica her most sullen stare. “Any particular shape of ice cube?”

Veronica throws her head back and lets out a gay laugh. “I don’t have many blessings to count,” she says, “but it is nice that the upstairs maid has such a rich sense of humor. I thank you for that.”

F. U.
, Lana thinks. “You’re welcome,” she says, and on her way out kicks the door closed behind her.

D
usk is the time of day Lana feels least at home. It’s something about the sunlight, the way it changes colors on the walls. It always makes her feel she’s looking for something she only has a few more minutes to find.

She goes out to the porch, sits on the swing, and rocks ever so slightly back and forth. She wonders why, just beneath the surface, she feels so wistful and sad. Yes, Veronica is horrible, but Veronica only has Veronica. Lana has Whit and the kit with its seven blank pages like seven wishes waiting to be made.

Except Whit isn’t here, and the wishes seem to have minds of their own—they head off in directions she can’t guess at. Lana touches her ear and wishes she had her two-dollar bill back, but she’s pretty sure that if she uses one of the pages to draw it back behind her ear, it will happen, if it happens at all, in a way she doesn’t expect and might not like.

Where is Whit anyhow?

Why can’t he just paint till five and come home?

From inside the house, the Snicks suddenly whoop and laugh. They’re watching a video because Lana’s too tired to organize board games or anything else. Lana has
had it. She’s absolutely had it. She did an early supper of tuna, noodles, and peas because it was easy to make and easy to clean up, and then she let the Snicks fight for a while over which video before she chose for them, a cartoon Robin Hood that, she knew, would keep them in their seats and out of her hair for an hour or two. She served Veronica her dinner and after two extra trips for first butter and then parmesan cheese, she was done, and she came here, to the porch, to be alone and to think.

And, to be honest, to wait for Whit.

To see him and greet him and let him make her feel better than she feels right now.

The crickets have started and across the street Mrs. Harbaugh steps down from her porch, gives a look Lana’s way, then uses her garden hose to tug a green sprinkler to a dry spot in the yard.

No activity at Chet’s house, not a light, not a sound. But she has to smile. For a few seconds there today, Chet was like one of those superheroes who goes around like a nerdy citizen and then when peril presents itself takes off his shirt and assumes his super-role. And then he’d come back into his old nerdy-citizen self, and she’d had to help Carlito shower and change and wash his peed-upon clothes, and while she’d wiped down the backseat of Veronica’s car, a memory came to her of herself as a little girl. She’d wet herself and her mother hadn’t known why Lana was crying, so she picked Lana up. Probably Lana was five. Her mother smelled of squashed, spoiled fruit, which was really the smell of wine that had moved through her mother’s blood for so long in those days that it had begun to seep out through her pores, and when she held Lana to her, she must have felt the wetness of Lana’s
urine soaking through her own clothes. She couldn’t put Lana down fast enough and her face was a mask of disgust. “Go take a bath,” she’d told Lana. “You’ve gotten me all dirty.”

Their bathtub was pink that year, and the water that came out of the tap smelled of rust.

A faint thrum, growing closer. A diesel, Lana thinks, and then she sees it: Whit’s green pickup.

He doesn’t glance her way as he turns up the dirt driveway, so she darts from the porch and jumps onto the rear bumper and rides with the truck into the garage. When the truck stops, she lifts her head over the tailgate and peers forward. Up in the cab, Whit smooths his hair and collar.

When he gets out and begins to pass by her, Lana in a quiet voice says, “Boo.”

It gives Whit a start, but it’s a brief one, and he falls into happy laughter and steps forward and, slipping his hands into her armpits, actually lifts her into the air, twirling her in a circle, which floods her with feelings of giddy, childlike pleasure. As he sets her down, her breasts slide against his chest, and that’s a pleasure, too, but neither giddy nor childlike.

“Where’ve you been?” she says, and with a mild shock realizes these are the same words Veronica greeted her with when she came back this afternoon.

“Painting,” Whit says. “Bringing home the bacon.”

“Yeah? So where’s the bacon?”

“Careful what you ask to see, little girl,” he says, and follows it with a laugh that’s looser than his normal laugh, slacker, wider, rowdier, a laughter most at home, Lana guesses, in a barroom, which is where she’s betting he’s
recently been. She leans back an inch or two, which reins him in a little. There’s something not right about him, Lana can feel it, just like she could feel there was something not right about Veronica’s room when she returned to it this afternoon, and this is like that—it’s something Lana can’t quite put her finger on.

“So how’re things at Snick House?” Whit says.

“Okay,” Lana says.

“Hey, it’s Whit you’re talking to. I can handle an honest answer.”

Lana’s eyes and voice both drop. “Horrible.”

“Horrible how?” he says, and in the next two minutes it all spills from Lana in a great rush, all the day’s little trials with the Snicks, and what happened with Garth’s mom, and what K.C. Miller did to Carlito in the street, and even what K.C. said to poor Tilly.