The Scamp (2 page)

Outside, the light is weird. Heavy and warm. And, lately, there's a feeling in my gut anytime I leave my room, or the trailer, or sometimes when I sit still in my car. It's like someone cut the last cord that tethered me to shore and I'm just out there, spiraling into the deepest water, and I don't mean in a boat, or even a canoe, something you could reasonably use to get somewhere. I mean it's like I'm in a goddamn inner tube, floating in circles away from anything solid. Arms and legs, useless. Dangling over the side. Good only for sunburns, and the occasional sip from the bottle I brought with me.

For a while after I moved back home, I crept, reaching for the walls of any room I walked into. I couldn't walk without bracing myself. But you can't even get to the walls in my mother's trailer. The baseboards are crowded with boxes full of papers and photos, laundry baskets of clean things that were never put away, cartons filled with beer bottles to take back, stacks of magazines and old newspapers. There's nothing stable to hold on to, and I end up like a kid in the center of a pool, treading water, with her neck stretched, her breath fast, anxious to grab on to the side.

Drowning
.

My cousin Khaki used to know the ways that people would die, just by looking at them. She'd see someone and get a flash, a feeling, and without much speculation,
she'd blurt it out:
Car accident. Pneumonia. Cancer
. She said it came to her in a full-frame picture in her head. It started when we were small, Khaki just a pudge-faced six-year-old. She slept at our house when Teddy's new baby was born. My mother always liked to see us girls together. We stayed out of her way, playing by ourselves, in the living room, in the backyard with the pines leaning over us, shushing.

In the morning, when the phone rang, Khaki said, The baby's dead, before my mother even said hello. My mother slapped her clean across the face.

Don't you ever say such a thing about your baby sister, she said. But Khaki was right. Dead of an infection, four days old.

My mother will tell you now, She was right. That little witch was right.

I wonder what Khaki would say if she saw me now.

I sit in the car. My head has a faint spinning feel to it, twingy at the temple. I can't stay home, and I don't want to go out. I follow the road out of the trailer park, to where it curves around the east end of the lake, the sunset coming off the water in blinding diamonds. I have all the cash with me. I go to find a motel.

I think of a motel as a happy place, a vacation spot where I stayed with Chuck in the summertime, sleeping in a strange bed and swimming in an in-ground pool, the room chilled with air conditioning, the bathroom stocked with tiny soaps. But the only place to stay in
town is no longer a motel. It's been converted into shitty apartments and efficiencies rented mostly to drunks and felons, deadbeat daddies out on parole.

If I worked a little, I could swing a place of my own. But I can't even try. The only things I'm qualified to do, bartend and waitress. And every day now is a blur of recovery, for me and my mother both, a long hangover and a daytime nap, which is the only time I can sleep soundly, in the hot afternoon sun, legs stretched longer than my old twin bed, the rattle of a fan going.

Right down the line on Lakeshore Road, there's a sign in the window of a one-room omelet place that says
HELP WANTED
. A stainless-steel griddle, the air heavy with butter. They open at five, and close at one. Not my usual hours.

I park outside of Pine Bluff Estates, the sign with the silhouette of a running horse, mane free. The building is mustard yellow with painted black doors that burn your hands when you touch them. The whole thing sits sideways, perpendicular to the road and the lake, with the room closest to the water already taken. A man lounges out front of the last door, his feet splayed on the sidewalk, his chair tilted to look at the lake.

The woman at the desk wears a salmon-pink velour tracksuit. Next to her, a brass birdcage with a huge parrot who bobs around on his perch. The office is done up like Hawaii, with palm tree wallpaper, coconuts on the desk, the parrot. The manager's hair is dyed that sort of old-lady burgundy, even though she doesn't
seem that old. I ask if she can prorate me a room for half a week.

She looks over her glasses, bright blue readers that she wears on a chain.

You alone? she says.

At first, I take it to mean she can't believe that a girl like me, young, blond, full of promise and bounce, would walk in here without a guy, without a boyfriend in a hot car, or on a motorcycle. And then I realize that she wonders about the other tenants, the addicts, the child molesters who aren't allowed to live closer to the school. She doesn't know if it's safe for me to be alone.

But who would I have with me? I don't have a husband, or a boyfriend. My daughter is dead. I say, It's just me.

Maybe it'll be the end of me.
Strangulation, strange bed.
Maybe that'll be okay.

I fall asleep sitting up, with all the lights and the TV on, and wake up like that, sweating, with my back against a vinyl headboard that is screwed into the wall. The chintz-covered bed sways low in the middle, and I have to grab on to the nightstand to get up. I light a cigarette and pour wine from a cheap box of Chablis that sits on top of the air conditioner. The cup, flimsy and white, was in the room. It says
BEST WESTERN
on the side. The box is cold. The wine, room temperature and sweet, coats my teeth. My heart, so loud in my ears it takes a few swallows of wine and a few drags of
cigarette to get my breathing right again. I down the cup and refill.

This is why I go out. Because alone, I wake up in panic, shaking and racing inside. I'd rather wake up in someone else's bed, with the someone else still there. I turn my phone over to find the time. 3:00
AM
. No messages.

I'll sleep when it's light.

There's always a guy. A guy who will buy my next drink, who'll have another of whatever I'm having. Who will offer to walk out back to the deck or the beach, or even to lock the door of the men's room while we're inside.

Sometimes, early in the day, I walk into a bar a complete mess, like an open wound, guts falling out and trailing. Not ready for the small talk of flirting, not even made up. My lips dry and my hair knotted and blown from driving with the windows down. Sometimes, I want to say to the guy next to me, Hey thanks, I'm having a double bourbon. Last summer, my daughter died because I wasn't paying attention.

It would stop him cold. A quick tangle in the car, in the men's room, on the beach, isn't as enticing when the girl he thought was all legs and sunny curls begins to self-destruct right in front of him. When she becomes more than the curvy blond veneer that drew him in. When her backstory is death and mourning, and more drinking. When he finds out that the only thing worse than a girl with a baby is a girl with a dead one.

He'd run. I would, if it were someone else's story.

But again, I meet a guy in a bar. He comes in just after I do, which is early, even on a Sunday. There's no football in June, and the working guys aren't in at five. No one is, except this one big guy, coming through the door with the light behind him. He sits right next to me, even though the whole bar is empty. He has a flip-top spiral notepad in his shirt pocket, and a pen next to it. He wears a button-down cargo shirt, soft and brown, with blue jeans and Converse sneakers. I wonder if he's taking measurements, or taking notes. The way he sits on the stool, our knees touch. He asks me what I'm drinking.

I'm not sure I'm in the mood. What are you drinking? I say.

He smirks and orders two shots of Cuervo, for himself. Then he orders beer and points at my wineglass and nods to the bartender to get me another. When the drinks come, he orders dinner, right there at the bar, burgers and fries for both of us, and we eat side by side, elbow to elbow, and no one else comes in.

He has a face like a Saint Bernard, big and handsome and sad at the same time, even when he smiles. His cheeks, bigger than my hands. His hair, going gray. He seems familiar and yet not like anyone I've ever met in town before. He's older than my usual delivery-truck-driving single daddy, and his eyes are different colors, different shapes. One is dark and muddy, the other steel blue. The blue one is near me. It's only when he turns to face me that I notice the other one. It's slightly lazy.

When the bartender, who wears a bolo tie like an Indian's, but is round and pink and bald like a baby, takes his plate, the guy leans over to eat the rest of my french fries. I swivel toward him, my knees against his thigh.

Tell me your name, I say. I can't remember if he already said it.

He swigs. Leans on his elbow. Couper, he says. Couper Gale.

I pull my hair around to one side, stretch out a curl, and let it spring back. I washed it with motel shampoo right before I left, and it's still wet underneath, the curls kinked up at my collarbone.

How do I know that for real? I say.

He slides out a credit card to pay and shows me the name on there:
Couper A. Gale. Chase Visa.

You? he says.

I try quick to think of something fake, but all I come up with are stripper names: Candy, Crystal, Starla. I think,
Chase Visa
. He raises his eyebrows, waiting, moves his tongue around his teeth. His face breaks into a smile. Breaks. Not spreads, not eases. It cracks. Like it hurts him a little.

My name's Rayelle, I tell him.

He says it back to me. I've never heard that name, he says.

It's white trash, I say, the way you might say,
It's Polish
, to explain an ethnic name. He rolls into a laugh.

How'd you get that name? he says. He taps a fingertip on my forearm, but he's already got my full attention.

My dad's name was Ray, I say. And he loved his Chevelle.

You were named after a car?

I told you it was white trash.

Goddamn, he chuckles.

How'd you get your name? I ask. This is not a bar conversation I've ever had. By now, we ought to be talking about my legs, and how they'll look wrapped around his neck. When the bartender comes back, I watch Couper sign the receipt with big loopy writing, loose and upright.

It's my grandmother's maiden name, he says. Then he cups his hand on my knee and jiggles it. Come outside with me, Rayelle, he says, trying it. He drags it out a little. A little hard on the
yelle
.

My mother always warned us about dusk. You can never believe anything you see. Dusk is when you could hit a deer with your car, or a kid on a bike. Twilight makes things look one way that then turn out to be another. The way my mother made it sound, all cars were actually trains, barreling toward you. All men, actually wolves, waiting to devour you. What did we know? Dusk was magical, and scary like a fairy tale. You might slip through to someplace else. You might disappear forever.

My mother would stand on the step and call out to where kids stood in the street, on roller skates, on bikes. Gathered at the stop sign, sneaking a smoke, or a swig from a plastic bottle of booze.

Rayelle Christine, she would call. It is dusk. Get your ass inside.

But lost and never found is pretty appealing right now. I might go far to lose this shadow. To walk out of my dead skin.

I light a cigarette just outside the bar door. This place belongs to a motel, a different one, not mine. A happy one with kids and aqua-blue doors. The parking lot is full of yellow streetlamps, big like buckets, where bugs gather. They look like snow, like when you look out at the streetlight at night to see if it's still coming down. The bugs just hover there, like a haze of snow. Couper walks off through the parking lot. It curves in front of all the rooms, nothing but beach and sky behind the motel. He walks backward for a bit, waiting for me to catch up. Then he turns and steps up onto the grass around the swimming pool.

The parking lot is fresh with blacktop and paint. The curbs sharp and white. A few cars are parked around the outside of the pool, and each room has a gold number on the door and a pair of circular plastic chairs out front. No one's in the pool, or outside at all. At the other end of the grass, there's a white gate with a chained lock on it and a hand-painted wooden sign:
POOL CLOSES AT DUSK
. Couper lays both hands on the top rail of the fence.

I start to laugh. Really? I say.

Nine out of ten times, he says with a shrug, they don't catch you.

It takes only a minute for the sky to get dark. Just like that, it's over. The dangerous in-between of dusk. The pool is built into a mound of grass higher than the parking lot, but when you walk up the side, you can see it, a big kidney bean of water mirroring the sky, the moon, and the lights from all around. The low drone of a motor.

You've done this ten times? I say.

He hooks the toe of his sneaker on the chain link fence and, with more grace than I'd expect from a body that size, swings his leg over to the other side.

Not here, he says. Plus, it'd have to be more than ten times to be statistics. He unbuttons his shirt, his belly broad but taut, thatched with hair. Then he undoes his pants. He lays his clothes over a lounge chair while I finish my smoke with the fence still between us.

Come on, Rayelle, he says. He holds a hand out, still in his shorts.

I've never been good at resisting a dare.

two

KHAKI

What does it mean to be first? Like if you traced a line back through all the remembering, and found me, standing, still, at the very beginning. The first one. Everyone says, Well, who was your first?

I am the first. The first one to love you. The last one to see you alive.

When girls don't exist, they disappear. They become non-people, people's wives, and mothers. People's slaves. They sell their pussies out of the backs of vans like stolen goods. Nothing about themselves is their own. And no one looks them in the face, or tells them he loves them.