The Scamp (18 page)

Yep, he says. Mostly, I've only seen Couper drink beer, but when he drinks whiskey, he drinks faster than I do, and I can't keep up.

Near here? I say.

Thirty miles.

I hear his phone, and when he picks it up to check the number, he stands, his head brushing the ceiling of the Scamp.

I have to take this, he says to me. And then he goes outside.

I should be paying attention, I think, to the phone calls, to what he's saying. But with the whiskey warm in my belly, all I want to do is lay my head down, close my eyes.

When we drive to Sugarwood, I have a whiskey hangover, my head sweet and cottony, my eyes red and my mouth dry. Couper rallies on like a goddamn rock star though.

Early in the morning, a thunderstorm rolls through, pelting the sides of the Scamp with pinecones, rocking us with wind. But by the time we leave, the sky is clear, the grass shining and wet, everything a lit, light gold.

Far off the highway, hills, looming and blue, heavy in the hazy sunlight. Mostly, though, it's farms and run-down houses, weathered and gray. I bet inside, a pot of ramen noodles or mac and cheese, a thirty rack of cheap
beer and Indian cigarettes. Outside, porches slant toward front lawns of just dirt, where dogs lie in the shade, and rusted trucks or cars sit up on blocks. Cheap plastic furniture, a barbecue pit. A swing made from a tire. A kiddie pool.

We drive for an hour, even though I thought he said it was only thirty miles, me, sleepy, staring out the window, the air so heavy and warm it seems like time moves more slowly. I count porch dogs and flags, regular and Confederate, flower beds made out of truck tires, cemeteries, until we stop in a little town with a gas station called Fina. You can buy nightcrawlers out of a vending machine like cans of Coke, and the vending machine that does have soda is filled with shapely glass bottles of RC and Fanta.

Couper pumps eighty dollars of gas into the Gran Torino and then goes inside to pay with his credit card.

I wait, my body slumped, my head on my hand, my elbow out the open window.

He parks the car and the Scamp along the curb next to a village green where there's nothing but a sidewalk that cuts through, and what looks like a sundial or a birdbath in the middle. There's a tiny flag at the foot of it, the kind you buy at a dollar store and stick into someone's grave, your grandpa's or an uncle's, someone who served in a war, where sometimes there's a little metal medallion on a stake, marking the grave as belonging to someone who sacrificed something. For everyone else, all the regular people, you leave flowers and crosses.
Little lambs made of plaster. They fade in the sun and rain. Their fleece goes from white to gray. Their blue eyes washed away, only mounds left where the bright irises were.

We cross the street to a diner in the front room of an old house. There are four tables in there, blue-checkered curtains over the bottom halves of the windows, dark paneling and a counter with stools and a domed cake plate with sugared donuts on a doily. All said, you could fit about twenty-five people in there. My first job was in a place like this, in South Lake. We made sandwiches and soup. Had meatloaf on Wednesdays and meatloaf sandwiches on Thursdays.

We order sandwiches, ham and turkey, and Couper asks if the coffee is fresh.

Just made it, the waitress says.

I look at the pot behind the counter. I don't think she's lying. It's full, and not murky, and steaming. My mother went through a phase of always sending coffee back, no matter where we were. She'd order, and then send it back, and ask them to make a whole new pot for her. It made me want to crawl under the table and hide. Chuck too.

Couper looks sideways out the window. It's full of dust and cobwebs, the glass milky in the sunlight. I notice his eye has a streak of red that goes from the outer corner right up to the iris, fanning out when it hits the blue.

How far out is Sugarwood Mobile Park? Couper asks the waitress.

She turns our cups over on the paper place mats. They're lined with the names of local businesses. Rexall. McDougall Funeral Home. Jones Excavating.

It's not far out of town, she says, slow. She's about my age, maybe even younger, and real round in the hips like she's had some babies, even though her face is smooth and rosy, with teenage fat like she's still a baby herself. I wonder where her kids are.

This way? Couper thumbs behind him, the way the Scamp is headed.

Right down this way, she says. Her voice has an open yawl that is more rural than people had in Summersville. You don't even have to change roads, she says.

How long?

She shrugs a soft shoulder. Twenty, twenty-five minutes. Depends if the train is coming, she says.

Our sandwiches come on mismatched plates, mine heavy and white with a gold edge, and Couper's a finer white with blue flowers in the middle. I eat all my potato chips first, like a deer at a salt lick. It'll make me feel like shit later, waterlogged and thirsty. The waitress keeps busy behind the counter, filling saltshakers, wiping down the counter, even the tops of the stools. There's a cook in the back, a young guy in a baseball cap, and I wonder if they're a couple, if he's the owner, or the owner's son, and what that's like. How other people work. If her mother-in-law takes care of the babies for her. If she shames her for drinking or smoking, or not looking after the baby when she goes crawling toward the river out back.

Couper's halfway through his sandwich when he takes out his notepad and says, I'm going to say some names for you.

Okay, I say. And what?

Tell me if they seem familiar at all. Jackson McGraw, he says.

Never heard of him.

He was found dead behind a Dollar General in Carolina Beach.

A guy, I say.

Yes. He was shot, Couper says, but his throat had also been cut. Small-time drug dealer. Had a record. Nothing too crazy.

When? I say.

Six years ago.

Why is that significant?

He was married to a woman named Cora DeLaurentis, he says, who had a daughter, Florida.

I think of what I know. She was fourteen, which I imagine as small, a kid still. None of the strength required to kill a man, even one who has been mean to you. But I ask anyway, Do you think Florida killed her stepdad? And then killed herself?

I don't know, Couper says. I guess it's possible.

I thought Florida was out of this, I say.

I can't let her go, he says.

When the waitress comes back, she takes our empty plates and offers us dessert, something for the road, maybe? But
then she just leaves the paper check, her handwriting big and round, like her eyes, her cheeks.

Couper leaves a twenty on the table, even though the bill is only about ten dollars.

Maybe it's me, slow in the limbs today from a night of drinking, a morning of driving, but Sugarwood is sleepy. Outside, there's no movement. There are no cars in and out of the Fina, no kids on bikes, no mail truck. We walk down to a Rexall on the corner. The door opens on the diagonal above a set of brick steps, the angle of the building lobbed off. There are things in the windows, a Styrofoam cooler, some suntan lotion, a tinfoil pinwheel, and a beach ball. They look like they've been there thirty years.

Couper says another name to me: Jessica Stark.

Nope.

Melissa White.

No.

Ashley Dunn?

No. Jesus, Couper, I say. Are there more girls?

No, he says.

Who are these women?

Jordan McCollough, he says.

Was Jessa's friend.

Yes. There's frequently a friend, he says. I'm having a hard time locating the friend. She seems to move on, out of town, take a different job, and then I can't find her.

Are they fake names? I say.

I don't know, he says.

Why would you pick such a normal, ugly name? Melissa White? I say. That could be anyone.

Exactly, he says.

We always played games with different names. We played house, and then we played school, and then we played club, which we would do only when Khaki's parents weren't around, in the kitchen, with the bar behind us, the beer light lit, the clock with its bubbles in the face, like champagne. Sometimes I'd be a cabaret singer, sitting on the bar with my legs crossed, lip-synching to Shania Twain, while Khaki, in a suit jacket, lit a cigarette and pretended to count money at the glass table.

I always picked a good name. Victoria Lee. Violet Paisley. Rainy Day Blues.

Khaki would go for the butch names, names that were hard and sexy. Shawn. Gray. Carson.

When the game was good, I was her girl, and she managed me with a hard hand. Sometimes, there were other customers, played by her, guys who came in to hit on me, guys who drank a lot. Guys who kissed sloppy and tasted like vodka.

Shawn wore her hair back in a newsboy cap. Black trousers with heels and a blazer, often without a shirt. She could save poor old Rainy Day Blues from the meanest of men. Whisk her out of that shitty honkytonk bar to her own white bedroom, for a soft bed, and a sweet drink. A kiss on the neck, or lower. She took care of me good.

Couper says, You ever get a feeling about a place?

This town looks like a movie set to me, like there's nothing behind the buildings, and if you did look back there, you'd see the fronts held up with two-by-fours. There's not much beyond the main street anyway, a few backyards, most of them not even fenced, and then fields. Way back, the railroad track. A river.

Sure, I say.

Like, you want to stay? Couper says.

I wouldn't go that far, I think. It's too dead. What would you do here? They must drink a lot, or beat their wives. Who knows what goes on in those silent houses. White and gray. Like a town of old people. One front step is covered in bright green indoor-outdoor carpet. In one driveway, an old Edsel, immaculate and eggshell white. Maybe everyone is dead. Maybe they read. But there isn't even a library.

Or maybe, Couper says, like you shouldn't leave it? His voice has a funny tentativeness to it. A waver. In the sun, I can see the crow's-feet gathered at the corners of his eyes, wrinkled up as he squints at me. Nothing in the town moves. I close my eyes. Listen. There are birds. The birdy bird, close by in a tree, or on the village green, calling
birdy birdy birdy
, and some magpies, cackling, farther back, behind the diner, picking at the trash. Nothing else. Not the sound of a sprinkler, the bell on a bicycle, the bark of a dog following a boy down the street. Couper takes out his pad and reads me an address. The motor kicks on in the air conditioner that is
propped in a window above the Rexall, and water drips down onto the sidewalk.

Who are we looking for there? I ask.

Ashley Dunn, he says. The friend.

fourteen

KHAKI

You ever watch a kid come? See her face light up with surprise and then flush with pleasure? Men think it's not possible. Think it happens only when you're grown, when it's their dick inside you that makes you moan. Not true. I've done it loads of times.

Rayelle would get herself up on the bar in the kitchen. Our parents out for the evening, and us girls home alone. The house was a fucking morgue mixed with a bar. All dark and red, the lamps in the living room dim and amber or smoke, the one in the corner with a naked lady in the center and cords of dripping oil around her. I'd turn on music and Rayelle would hold an old broken karaoke mic and pretend to sing.

Her hair was still short then. Still growing back from the explosion she barely remembered. The backyard.
Nudie. Afterward, Rayelle's hair was littered with ash and bits of skin. For years after it was cut off, it was just a curly round mess on her head, not long enough to pull up. I'd put glittering barrettes in, flowers behind her ear, drape her in a low-cut top that exposed a flat plain of fat down the middle of her chest, nothing there yet of breasts, just a padding of flesh.

And then I'd slip into character. Shawn, with her hair combed back under a hat. I wore a jacket, cheap menswear that I'd bought at Ames, with nothing underneath. I liked the feel of my nipples against the lining of the blazer when I walked across the shag carpet in heels.

Why is Shawn a woman? Rayelle asked. Why isn't Shawn a man?

Because that's cooler, I said. There's nothing cool about one man coming in to harass you and another man coming to save you. That's lame.

I lit a cigarette. I knew that when I leaned over, my hand cupped around the flame, she could see my tits.

Because that's the truth about life, I told her, straightening up. It's the guys who fuck you over, I said, and your girls who save you.

Shawn, she'd say to me in bed, wriggling. Shawn, fuck me.

I don't know where she heard it. It wasn't from me.

I was thirteen and hard across the belly, along the hips and ass, even though my face was still round like a kid's.

My brother was dead.

My mother was dying.

I'd been pregnant once already, by my own dad.

I wrecked little Rainy Day Blues in bed because I liked to watch her face squinched closed and then opening up with a gasp, a pant, her cheeks red and her hairline sweaty. She clawed her hands into my hair, into my shoulders, into the small of my back.

After Georgia, no one ever topped me again.

I went to a bar called Layla's. It was a thing out there, a dyke bar in the country outside of Sugarwood, something everyone knew about and understood and let go. It wasn't advertised, you just knew. It looked like a general store, with a front porch where a hundred years ago men hitched their horses while they went in for goods. Now, the parking lot was filled with pickups and Jeeps.

I felt cocky. I felt alone. So I went out.

Days before, I had smashed Carolina's skull and torso with the hunk end of an icicle that had come from the roof of the post office. The porch of the rural post office sat close to the county highway. I swung and hit. And when she staggered into the road and a truck came, it looked like a hit-and-run. The icicle melted away to nothing in the morning sun. People were looking for the truck.