The Onion Girl (35 page)
Authors: Charles de Lint
He smiles and I smile and we both know we're never going to see each other again, unless it's like this, by accident.
Pinky caught up on her own family not long after we arrived. She didn't go looking for them, which was just as well, I reckon, since when she did run into her brother Elmer on the street one day, there wasn't even a how-do. He just up and slapped her openhanded across the face and told her not to be calling on their mother as she weren't welcome in that house no more.
“Always figured you'd end up to no good,” he says, “but even I never thought you'd sink so low as to be making the kinda movies you done.”
Pinky'd used her a fake name in her porn days, but you ain't exactly hiding much when the name you're going by is Pinky Sugah and everybody back home knows what you look like anyways. Though now that I think on it, seems strange that old Looney, so on top of everything else, didn't have something to say about it. Maybe he was just being polite..
But them Baptist boys like Pinky's brothers was always walking the high road, and I guess politeness don't enter into the story with them. Course it makes you wonder what they was doing watching them porn movies in the first place. But then I was raised Catholic my own self and I sure as hell know Catholics 'round here don't have much integrity neitherânot if my own family's any kind of example.
When Elmer hit her like that, I half expected Pinky to knife him, or at least take a swing at him her own self, but she didn't do neither. Guess the time she spent in prison taught her somethingâwhen to fight and when to walk away, if nothing else.
I asked her later if she felt bad about how things turned out.
“You and me,” she says, “is all the family either of us need.”
I knowed it was true for me, but I guess I never stopped to question how it was for her, what made her so hard and able to stand up for her own self with no never mind for nobody else. I'd always thought she got along fine with her folks and her brothers and she never said nothing to make me think different.
“It wasn't like that,” she tells me. “They taught me how to be tough, yeah, but it wasn't outta any kind a love for me. I had to go learn that on my own, just so's I could stand up to 'em. They never done nothin' like Del done to you, but they're so dumb, it wouldn't surprise me none that it just didn't never occur to 'em. Lord knows they had the morals of dogs, though that ain't bein' fair to dogs. And as for my momma and poppaâthey wasn't quite in the drinkin' league of your old lady, but they wouldn't've shamed her much neither.”
“It don't seem right, us growing up like that.”
Pinky laughs. “When you going to figure it out, Ray? The world don't turn on right and wrong. It's just what it is and you and me, we got to make the best of it how we can.”
“Seems to me, we got us a choice,” Pinky says one day.
We're sitting in the Pearl, a diner on the Ramble, early of a weekday morning, drinking bad coffee and smokingâor at least Pinky is. The Pearl hasn't changed much. It's still no better'n one step up from a pigsty. We don't actually recognize nobody, but it's really only the faces that've changed. The waitress who slops our coffee on the table could be the daughter of the old bag serving us fifteen years ago. A drunk sits at the counter, nursing a hangover. A couple of hookers are in one of the back booths, counting money. In the booth behind us some guy's snorting blow through a cut-down straw, the coke laid out in lines right on the table.
“Either we clean up our act,” Pinky says, stubbing out her smoke, “or we take it right to the bone, badasses all the way.”
I just look at her. She's lounging there on the other side of the booth, all relaxed, smiling. Her black pedal pushers are back in style and her pink tube top's never gone out, at least not anywheres we find ourselves. Pinky's still always wearing something to match her name. It was going to be her trademark, she used to say when she first started up the habit.
Like anybody was taking fashion notes. But it's the reason I had that pink Caddy convertible waiting for her the day she got outta prison.
Like anybody was taking fashion notes. But it's the reason I had that pink Caddy convertible waiting for her the day she got outta prison.
“You leaning any particular way?” I ask.
Pinky shrugs and gives her dyed-blonde bangs a fluff. She'd first gotten her that Farah Fawcett haircut back when the Angels was still running in prime-time and she's stuck with it ever since. “You don't change what works,” she told me when I asked once. Me, I used to be as fickle as an alley cat when it come to my hair. I'd wear it any which way it might happen to occur to me. But the last few years I just let it grow and tie it back.
Pinky's looking a sight better these daysâpretty much like she did when she first started in on making them porn movies way back when. Her skin's soft, she's firm in all the right places, the lines are gone from her face. I'm looking pretty good, too, though I don't spend near' as much time in front of the mirror as she does. But sometimes I catch a glimpse a myself when I'm getting in or outta the shower, and it takes me by surprise. I ain't sagging neither. The lines are gone from my face. I had some gray in my hair, but it's all gone, too.
I made mention of it to Pinky one day and she just looked at me for a long moment, then stripped down and went and stood in front a the full-length mirror in our room.
“I'll be damned,” she said. “It just never occurred to me.” She turned to look at me. “What's going on here, Ray?”
I felt pretty much the same way Pinky was feeling when the realization come to me. But I had me an answer and I gave it to her then.
“It's that unicorn blood,” I told her.
“But we're only killing them in our dreams.”
“It's like I been telling you,” I said. “Maybe we're dreaming, but someplace that forest is real.”
Pinky nodded, but she'd turned back to the mirror and was just standing there, running her hands on her stomach, hefting her breasts.
“I'd like me some serious foldin' green,” Pinky says to me now, “but I don't much feel like earnin' it.”
I smile. Like that's news.
“But not here in Tyson,” I say.
“Naw, I was thinkin' of Newford.”
“Think anybody'd remember us in the city?” I ask.
It's been a long run of years since we played out any of our scams in Newford.
“We're unforgettable,” Pinky tells me. “That's just the cross that you and me, we got to bear. But it's a big city.”
I nod. I've been looking through the paper while we're talking and something stops me dead. I have this moment when everything just goes cold and hot at the same time. I want to tear that paper up and scatter the pieces. I want to grab somebody by the hair and just ram their head against a wall until there ain't nothing left of their face. But I force myself to breathe. To calm down.
When I'm feeling more myself, I look up at Pinky, but she hasn't noticed nothing.
“Do you believe in fate?” I ask her, surprised at how calm my voice sounds.
She shrugs, likes it's no never mind to her, one way or the other.
“Look at this,” I tell her.
I turn around the entertainment section of
The Tyson Times
where it talks about a Newford artist being hit by a car and show it to her. Pinky studies the picture of the woman they're talking about.
The Tyson Times
where it talks about a Newford artist being hit by a car and show it to her. Pinky studies the picture of the woman they're talking about.
“That's your sister?” she asks.
“There sure as hell ain't two of her.”
“She went and changed her name.”
“Yeah,” I say. “She tried to change a lot a things, I guess, but she's still gonna be Hillbilly Holler trash when it's all said and done. How we all growed up, that's something that never goes away, don't matter how slick we try and make ourselves out to be.”
It's the reason that, in the end, I let everything pretty much ride. What's the point of fighting who you are, or how the world's going to look at you? I coulda had me a million dollars and people'd still know I was just a Carter from the other side of the tracks.
“She looks a lot like you,” Pinky says. “I mean, give her some tits and you could be sisters.”
I let out a sigh. “We are sisters.”
“I meant twins.”
“I guess we do share a resemblance.”
It's funny. I hear Del's living in that Indiana Road trailer park and it touches me some, but only with curiosity and a scraping of my old fears. He could die tomorrowâhell, he could die this minuteâand it wouldn't worry me none. But that sister of mine, I just got to think on her and I'm in a rage.
I guess it's that Del was always bad, so anything he ever done to me never come as no surprise. But she, she betrayed me, and that cuts the heart deeper than anything I can imagine, and I can imagine plenty. It's a hurt that just don't go away.
“I'm thinking maybe I should pay her a visit,” I say.
Pinky gives me a look. “You ain't thinkin' of doin' nothin' foolish, now are you? 'Cause let me tell you from personal experience, prison ain't worth it.”
“That's only if you get caught.”
Pinky just keeps on a-studying me, then finally she nods.
“I guess if there's anyone can get away with it, it'd be you,” she says. “You always was too smart for your own good.”
“I'm not planning on hurting her,” I say. At least not yet. “'Sides, read what it says. She's in some goddamn coma.”
Pinky nods. “Sure. Time we was doin' somethin' new. Tyson was gettin' old anyways.”
NEWFORD, APRIL
So that's how we find ourselves parking the pink Caddy just off of Yoors Street and walking back down the block to where my sister's apartment is, one of them studio lofts across the street from a Chinese groceteria.. There's three other apartments in her building and I guess there was some stores on the ground floor, but they're all boarded up now, the windows papered up, and I can't tell what they was selling. But there's a coffee shop coming in on one side, according to the “Opening Soon!” sign, and something called Whispering, which could sell just about anything, having a name like that. The door to her place has a couple of bells with names beside them. Hers is number two.
I gave the hospital a call afore we come out here, but my sister's still flat out in her comaâtwo and a half days now and counting. As we turn down the alleyway beside her building, I'm trying to decide whether I want her to ever wake up again, or maybe go ahead and stay that way until she just kinda wastes away into nothing. I want to tell her to her face what I think about what she's done, but one more funeral I'm not going to attend'd probably suit me just as well.
“If her place is on the second floor,” Pinky says, pointing, “that window's lookin' into her place. The fire escape can take us right up to it.”
I nod. “Here, put these on.”
I pull out a couple a pairs of surgical gloves I picked up at a drugstore earlier in the day and hand one over to her. Pinky gives them a look.
“What're these for?” she asks.
“We don't want to leave no prints, what with the both of us being on record and all.”
“I thought we wasn't goin' to do nothin'.”
“We're breaking in, ain't we?”
“There's that.”
I can tell she don't know why we're doing this and I'm not so sure I do neither. I guess I just have a need to be in this place where she's been living all these years, see what was so important that she could abandon me to Del and just take off on me like she did.
It's midafternoon as we go climbing up that fire escape, but I'm not worried. All I can see is the rear of buildings and maybe they're gentrifying the front of the street, but back here it's still catch-as-catch-can. Nobody going to be paying a whole lotta attention to a couple of women going up a fire escape. Still, I take a good look around afore I break the window. We wait a breath after the glass breaks, listening in the silence that follows the shards as they fall inside and drop to the asphalt below. No one appears to be paying us any attention, so we clear away the rest of the glass and step over the window frame, inside.
And then I know why I'm here.
It's those damn paintings. All them fairies of hers, transplanted from the woods around the holler and put here in the city.
“She's kinda messy,” Pinky says, looking around.
I suppose Pinky's right. It's one big room that's a jumble of art gear and scattered clothes and things piled up in stacks every which way you happen to look, but I'm not really paying much attention to any of it and I hardly hear Pinky. I'm just focused on this dark place inside me, thinking of all them fairy tales my sister told me and how they come true for her, maybe, but she sure didn't leave me living in no fairy tale. Where was my happy ending with Del coming into my room, night after night, and me just a little girl?
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