The Scamp (33 page)

It's okay if you are, she says. Or if you don't know. I can help you. Her
can
sounds like
kin
.

Her bike is parked on the sidewalk out front. It's a white cruiser with a fat seat and upright handlebars and a wicker basket on the front, the one we'd seen at the train station. She hands me her guitar, to sling across my back, and then she pats the seat.

Come on, she says, I'll bike you.

Now? I say, thinking she's taking me for some back-alley abortion. I remember the feel of Khaki's hands on me. In me. My spine feels hot.

I just want to show you something, she says. Her face squinches with a smile.

I tuck the skirt of my dress between my legs and, just like Khaki used to, Tennessee stands up and pedals, her ass right in front of me. Her body small but strong, working the bike with both of us on it. I hold on to her waist, and she takes us out of town, past the green, riding into the lowering sun.

I still have the bike I got when I was eleven, at home, stashed behind the shed at my parents' house. I rarely rode it, because even then, at eleven, I was too tall for it. But I bought it with birthday money from an old Indian who lived out past the north shore of the lake, who always kept about seventy-five bikes for sale on his lawn. An orange ten-speed, a twenty-four inch.

Khaki's bike was white and silver and a twenty-seven inch, and about a hundred dollars more than mine, and from a store, not a lawn in front of an old Indian's trailer. It was too tall for her curvy little legs. No matter what, she had to stand to pedal.

We preferred to ride together. She was tough enough to stand and pedal while I rode, sitting back on the seat, my long legs hanging out and not dragging, her brown shoulders squared off and working. From her house to
the corner store. From the corner store to the beach. Me, with two packs of wine coolers, one in each hand.

We go by the clapboard church and a field with hip-high daisies and Queen Anne's lace. The road dips and rises again, pocked with loose gravel. Lines of poplars rise up on either side of the street, and we ride through the tunnel, with the light flashing in between the leaves. Not very far out, there are no more buildings, it smells sweet like a cow barn and the velvet sweat of horses, and the only sounds are the low distant moan of the train, and the clink of the little circle leaves on the poplars, blowing in the breeze.

She bikes us to
the cemetery gates, but then the road goes uphill, too steep for both of us on the bike. We get off, and I carry the guitar for her while she pushes the bike farther into the cemetery, away from the tunnel of trees. The heat of the sun is full even as it sets, hot and pink and clinging to everything.

She lays the bike down and takes the guitar from me and leans it against a headstone that says
LOOK
, in all caps, with no other names and no dates, the design just a curtain off to one side, like the show's about to end, the curtain about to close on the lousy one-act play of your life.
LOOK
.

Come look, Tennessee says, and takes my hand. We're both sweaty, and she doesn't go full-on palm to palm. Just our fingertips curl together. We walk uphill, and there are poplars and oaks all around the perimeter of the cemetery, with some low trees in the middle, spread out and knuckly with arms that nearly reach the ground. Rocks lie among the headstones, big boulders, too heavy to move. It's hot and still, despite the breeze, and it has been for days. The kind of heat that needs a huge storm to break it up. The kind of heat that causes a tornado.

Tennessee walks me down to the edge. The whole cemetery is built on a hill, the outer graves sloping toward the road, or to the side, where a stream cuts low beneath the grass. She puts her finger out, like a kid running a stick along a fence. The smaller stones all face out, and they're all children's. Whoever designed the graveyard lined them up that way, little bodies fanned out, protecting what's inside.

Do you ever think, she says, walking the narrow cement path around them, that maybe we're already dead? That this is it, the afterlife, this hell we're living? she says.

I have, I say. I have thought that.

The first grave I read just says
BABY
, not even named. I think about Couper's Couper, tiny and barely formed, but boxed up and named, buried.
BABY
has only one date. Less than one full day. Next to it, Samuel. Next to that, Harriet. Days, weeks, a few years.
Fever, measles, farm accidents, drowning
.

My mother told me kids die all the time.

Oh Jesus, Rayelle, she said to me where I sat at her table, smoking her cigarettes and drinking her wine. Children die all the time, she said. She wanted me to get up, to go out, to get out of her house, and leave her alone.

I was probably killing her buzz.

It's not the worst thing that could happen to you, she said.

What do you know about it? I asked her.

More than I'd ever tell your sorry ass, she said. Maybe we'll talk sometime when you're done being the center of the goddamn universe.

I kind of wanted to die right there in front of her, to prove her wrong, to make a point. She probably would have stepped right over me. And asked Chuck to clean it up.

There are so many of us, Tennessee says, making the circuit of all the child graves. We're an army! she says. Then she takes my hand again, and pulls me along. We walk a line of concrete, too narrow to be a sidewalk, like a border marking.

That's not what I wanted to show you, she says.

It's like walking a balance beam, our hands curled together, both of us in skirts.

She picks a spot in the open, and all around us, the sky settles to lavender, an eerie glow behind the black trees. We sit on some sharp, dry grass in the hollow in front of a stone that says
BEAULIEAU
. She sits cross-legged, and I try not to look under the taut lap of her skirt. The sun is like someone left a light on in the next room, shining in and warming the side of my face, burning one shoulder.

I sit with my legs straight out, and she takes that as an invitation to swing over, to straddle my lap. She puts
her hands behind my head and undoes the clip, letting my hair down, and takes the fake glasses off my nose and lays them where the grass is long enough to swallow them up, invisible.

The weight of her is like nothing in my lap because she leans forward on her knees, with her hands on my shoulders, and kisses me. It's a long kiss. Not a joke or a dare, or a smack on the lips you might give your girlfriend after a night out drinking. It's deep and purposeful, like it might get us somewhere.

Then she says, Where you from?

Mm, I say, and wipe my lips with my hand. I'm afraid to lie about where I'm from, afraid I'll get the details and the sounds wrong, that my lying will be transparent. Not from here, I say.

You got an accent like someone I know, she says.

I chuckle. I don't have an accent, I say.

Everyone does, she says. You just don't know it. You would probably think she doesn't either, but she does. She sounds just like you, she says, and inches closer on her knees, her lips nearly touching mine. Right down to the way she moves her tongue, she says. She slips her tongue through the space between her teeth, and between mine.

She takes my hands then and moves them around on her till I am holding up her tits. They feel like sandbags. I can't believe how heavy they are, and how small the rest of her is. She tips me over backward, my head in the grass, and leans over me. Except for her chest, she seems
to weigh nothing, and it feels like nothing to me, her body, even her tits in my hands, the kissing. It's nothing at all like Couper flattening me out, the heft of his torso, the size of his hands, his legs, opening me up. Weeds are on either side of my eyes, tickly in my ears, and I can hear things scratching along under the brush, under the old, crooked trees, along the stones themselves.

There, Tennessee says, like she's accomplished something. But when I open my eyes and take my hands off her, she's pointing to a hole in the grave next to us. It's maybe eight inches across and goes down so far you can't see the bottom. Like you could stick your arm in there and shake hands with the dead. What do you suppose that is for? she asks.

She stands up, and in the twilight, I can barely see her. At dusk, you can see things that are far away, black silhouettes on the horizon, the lights from faraway buildings, but not what's in front of your face.

There! she says again. And there! And there! She spins, her white T-shirt ultraviolet in the weird evening light, and the more she points and turns, with the whole purple sky bearing down on us, the more I realize we're on perforated ground, like the holes Khaki and I poked in a shoe-box top. There are so many air holes here, for what underneath, I don't know, that I think for sure we will fall in before we can ever find our way out.

We follow a path back to the stone that says
LOOK
, where we left the bike and the guitar. She gets us back to
the road before it's fully dark. Country dark is no joke. You can't see your own feet walking once it's nighttime.

There are no streetlights out here, but we crunch along the gravel on the side of the road until they start up again, just outside of town, and not far after, the sidewalks begin, the buildings appear. There's the sound of traffic, the train, trucks going through on the state route.

Parked out alongside the church, an old white Malibu like Chuck had. We must have seen thirty-eight states together, just driving and eating sandwiches, the windows down, the radio up. I spent whole summers in that car. I grew up there.

I peer down the alley between the church and the real-estate office, and a chunk of light comes through, blasting my eye. A headlight, or a train, coming right at us.

Around the corner, we go past an old, converted gas station that's now Yellow Dog Café, with tables outside and music coming from the open door. The old firehouse, which is now a community theater, with posters up for
Our Town
and
Seussical
. Beyond that, the old train station, quiet and stately. Redbrick with barrel planters on the sidewalk.

Come on up, Tennessee says. I'll make you a drink.

It doesn't look like anyone lives there. It's well cared for, like a public building would be, with pink petunias and a swept-clean and white sidewalk. There isn't a leaf out of place. Not a car out front. No sign of people. The front door opens to a hallway filled with more doors, painted
satiny black with gold knobs, and no nameplates or numbers. Tennessee leaves her bike in the hallway and takes me through to a back stairwell that's all windows, looking out on the black field behind. What I imagine is nothing but flowers, and grass, and, somewhere, train tracks. There are stairs up, to a black door, and down, to another black door.

A sound from the basement like an industrial fan, whirring.

She takes me up.

There's another woman there, huge with black, bobbed hair and an eye sewn shut. She watches TV, sitting in a leather recliner with an open bottle of beer, but gets up when we come in.

Dakota, Tennessee says. This is Rebecca.

But she doesn't look at me. She nods at Tennessee and then goes up a set of metal suspension stairs to the room above, which has a mesh floor, like threads of wire, bouncing under her weight.

I think that I've never seen a woman so tall, so strong in her shoulders, and yet so wounded, and then remember that I have. That, probably, there are copies of all of us, somewhere. Another me, in another state, living another life.

A woman like Dakota ran a motel we stayed in once. I was nine, the summer after Nudie. We stayed in Colorado Springs for a full week, at the foot of Pikes Peak, the mountain always in view. The woman was tall, tough,
and muscled with no chest to speak of, her hair dark like Dakota's but long, always pulled back into a severe ponytail. Her face, flat and unlined, from sun or smoking, and not made-up. She was alone there, running the motel, which felt strange to me. A woman without a man. Even though my mother worked, she wouldn't have made it without Chuck. They barely made it on two incomes. But I couldn't imagine her alone, without Chuck, without me. Who would she be, on her own? It was just the motel woman and her smoke-gray cat, hunting mice from the field. I remember sitting on her front step, a low cement slab covered with green outdoor carpet, waiting for the cat to come back with a mouse dangling from his jaw. He'd present it to her, and then crunch through it. That sound, the bone crunching, like nothing I'd ever heard before.

We usually spent most of a trip driving, not staying in one place for a week. The states I'd seen, a blur from the window as we drove through them, cornfield, sunflower field, mountain range, plains. I don't know what happened in Colorado Springs. The motel was nice, it was cheap, they liked the town. Maybe they thought they could see themselves there, someday, living a different life, with different names.

My mother spent most of that vacation by herself. She drank, she went down to the motel office to sit and smoke with the owner, she wandered off on her own. Chuck and I went into town; we drove up the mountain, the view outside the Malibu nothing but fog. We walked
in the Garden of the Gods, all orange dust and weird needly sculptures that looked like they'd been dropped from the sky.

Of course I sent a postcard.
Love you. Miss you. xoxo Rainy
.

I caught my mother sitting with the woman. My mother, drunk as sin and uglier than it too, her eyes narrow with gin glaze. Her hair, loose, with its perm growing out so it was straight and flat, darker at the roots. They sat on a bench by the pool, leaned together, their foreheads and knees touching. She held my mother's hand and stroked it.

I wish I could remember her name.

Tennessee pours me a drink. There's a bar, against a brick wall, with top-shelf liquors and a wine rack built in. I'm used to Early Times and chardonnay, or maybe a little Knob Creek if Couper splurges, but she's got a tall bottle of Booker's, so I take that.