The Scamp (7 page)

He twists in the chair to face me, the metal legs stressed and bending. For days I've been wearing the same underwear, the same jeans, the same top. My hair, curlier and heavier at the same time.

What do you mean? he says.

It was a dead week, I tell him. In the summer, there's always something going on, a car show, a carnival, bikers. But not that week. There weren't extra people here. School wasn't out yet, I say. I mean, maybe a couple of fishermen, or retired people staying at the lake, but nothing big.

You think it was someone here, he says.

Yeah, I say, and shrug. I pick a stray thread off his sleeve. You know. The call's coming from inside the house. It was one of us.

Do you think she's still here? he says. Her body, I mean.

Maybe. But they sure as hell never found it.

Did anyone else disappear? he says.

Other girls? No.

I mean, leave town.

Her family, but . . . they had to, I say. They thought for a while, like, unofficially, people thought it was the dad. But it wasn't.

He starts to smile, the sun warm on his legs, but his face still in the shadow of trees. How do you know? he says.

I shake my head. I got a feeling. It just wasn't.

He pokes at the brass button on my jeans. How good's your feeling? he says.

Pretty good. I laugh then. For what that's worth.

That's worth a lot, he says. He closes the laptop and stretches, shoulders back, breastbone out.

What's in it for you? I say.

A contract, he says.

For murder? I say, only half-amused, and he laughs.

For a book, he says.

Oh.

He gets up, taller than I am, even when he's standing downhill of me. I'm only half as dangerous as you think I am, he says.

I need clean clothes, I tell him. I'm twice as dirty as you think I am.

I like that, he says.

When we pull into Pine Bluff Estates in the Gran Torino, the contents of one room—not mine—are being thrown into a dumpster. There's a cop car parked to the side, dormant, lights off, with an officer inside, typing away on a laptop that's balanced on the center console.

Yikes, Couper says.

I scan the lot.

Um, I say, quickly, my car's not here.

Where did your car go? he says.

I don't know.

He parks next to the office, where we can see through the glass window that the manager is inside on the phone.

Couper gets out, he nods at the cop, why I don't know, and leans in the office door. Then the manager sees me sitting in the passenger seat with the window down.

Oh, honey, she says. Yeah, the cops came and got your car. That was a couple days ago, she says. Now, we
got this going on. She and Couper both look down the line of doors to the room being emptied. Two guys come out with a mattress and hurl it into the dumpster.

Couper turns his head to her and before he asks, she says, Dead. She waves her hand. Happens, she says.

They come out with a cooler, and a suitcase. All his possessions, whoever he was, whatever he was in trouble for, once you die, they just throw out the mattress, your suitcase of belongings, maybe all you had in the world, and chuck them into a dumpster to drag away.

She comes to the side of the car. I don't want to get you in trouble, she says, but that car was reported stolen.

I huff out a nervous laugh. It's my dad's, I say. If I was going to steal a car, I say, it wouldn't be a goddamn '94 Escort.

Couper slides in beside me, and the manager goes inside the office, the black cordless phone in her hand. From the door, she says to me, You didn't have nothing in your room.

No. I didn't.

Well, Couper says. Where to?

I'd been planning to pick up my car and drive back home, take a shower, change my clothes, meet him somewhere out, or back at the Scamp, in my best jeans, a black shirt, my hair done and makeup on my face.

So I tell him how to get to the trailer park.

It's a road of trailer parks, one after another. Some are nicer than others. Some are senior parks, fifty-five plus. There are apartments back there, too, and next to
the park my mother lives in, a huge cemetery with tall monuments, spires and angels, crosses. I point him into Cottonwood Park, on the left, and he goes over the speed bumps, down the five-miles-an-hour drive between tiny run-down trailers.

It's not the best park. We've been here since I was ten. Before that, we lived in a lone trailer on a rural route; before that, in a basement apartment; before that, in my grandmother's back room and back porch. My mom and Ray had their own trailer in another park when I was born, that I've only seen pictures of. It was yellow, a single, with a wavy edge that made it look modern, or old-fashioned, depending how old you were.

It looks like shit here. Jimmy the neighbor's trailer is up on cinder blocks because he needs to do plumbing and wire work below the floorboards. The one next door to his has a plywood window. There's a skinny dog in the street, just standing. Penny. She's a mutt and she's about sixteen years old. She always limps over to let me pet her soft head.

I don't want to watch Couper's face. I don't know where he's from, but it's not here. Even his tin-can trailer has some appeal to it, some ironic roughing-it bullshit that you can get away with when you have the money to get away with it. It's not ironic when it's your actual fucking life.

There are about twenty-five black trash bags on my mother's lawn, filled with soft material, bedding, curtains, towels, and some just half full, tipped over, with
heavier things inside, books, old cheap brass picture frames. My mother's Grand Prix is parked on the gravel drive, but not the Escort.

Must be trash day, Couper says, before I even tell him that's the one.

Stop here, I say.

Here? he says, sort of forced and surprised.

Yes. I open the door before he has the car in park. I don't totally trust her to clean out her own shit, even when there's so much of it and I know almost all of it has to go.

She comes out of the sliding glass door, tiny and red-faced, heaving another bag. Here, she says, and thrusts it at me. It's soft, but heavy. I wonder if she took the burlap cushions off the couch.

Mom, I say.

Put it out, she says, and points. She goes back in and then reappears, sliding a twin mattress on its side. Blue satin flowers, old, flattened on the edges. Mine.

Mom.

She pushes it over the edge of the deck onto the grass, where it lands in a puddle.

She starts to fix her hair, taking it out of the ponytail and redoing it. She smoothes the wispies back from her forehead. And then she notices Couper.

Mom, I say, watching the water seep up the sides of the mattress. What are you doing with my stuff?

Who's that? she asks.

Couper gets out of the car. Can I help you with some of this? he asks.

No you cannot help her, I say.

Why don't you take this box spring, my mother says, and bust it up for me, and then we can bag it. They won't take it whole, she says. She goes inside and pushes the back of it toward the open glass door, and Couper has no choice but to grab it and pull. It comes out to the deck, just a rickety frame of cheap wood, and he pushes it off onto the mattress below.

Sledgehammer in the shed, my mother says.

Mom!

She comes out the sliding door, hunched over like a kid making a snowman, rolling another trash bag that has shoes—my shoes—spilling out of the open side.

Where am I supposed to sleep? I ask.

Where you been sleeping? she says.

I hear Couper open the metal doors of Chuck's shed. Who knows what's even in there. I know he has tools, but Jesus, I half expect Couper to find something embarrassing. A stack of dirty magazines. Or weird. Fucking moonshine. I watch Couper grab an axe. When he takes a swing at the box spring, the dull blade gets stuck and he has to wiggle it out.

My mother goes down the steps to him. You're kind of delicate for a big guy, she says. Then she points at the grid. You have to work the joints, she says, and takes the axe from him, swinging hard, way above her head so that he ducks, and when she hits, the frame springs apart, loose and broken. Like that, she says.

Yes ma'am.

I watch him break it apart, hitting it with the axe and then pulling with his foot on the frame, breaking off pieces that fit into a stretchy black trash bag, and then another. He gets it into two bags, sharp bits of wood jutting out. He wipes his forehead with the back of his wrist.

I need some clothes, Mom.

You should have thought of that when you disappeared and didn't answer my calls, she says.

I didn't answer the first ones. And then my phone died. I left the charger in the motel room. Which means it's probably in a dumpster now.

I hear Penny's tags jingling as she limps across the broken pavement, and her shoulder leans into my side. Whatever kind of dog she is, she has a head like an Irish setter, soft and silky and deep red on top. Around the muzzle, she's gray.

Hey, Penny girl, I say and her sore old tail swishes back and forth.

You can look, my mother says, pointing at the bags, her eyes small when she squints into the sun. Her arms, with loose skin. She's shrunk to nothing except a hard little body under her clothes. But, she says, it's mixed in with regular trash. I did some cleaning, she says. And when you didn't come back, I took it upon myself to move you out.

Does Chuck know? I say.

Does Chuck know what? she says.

That you did this? That you threw me out in trash bags, I say.

It was his idea, she says.

Bullshit it was, I say. You just said it was your idea.

She leans on the edge of the deck, against the rail where there's a partial awning, and she lights up a long, minty Salem. Look, she says, waving her cigarette fingers at me. If you want.

Couper comes up behind me. Don't worry about it, he says to me.

Who're you? my mother asks.

He does his thing where he leans out with his hand, striding up to meet her. Couper Gale, ma'am, he says.

Well, Mr. Fancy Pants, she says. Why don't you take her shopping.

There's a tallboy of Lite on the picnic table. I wonder how long she's been at it. I can't believe beer does anything for her anymore.

Come on, Couper says to me. He pats my shoulder. I'm standing stock-still, staring at my stuff in bags, at my mattress, facedown in a puddle, the sides muddied and soaking, and my broken bed frame. A bag that has books, probably my yearbook, books that were mine as a kid, maybe even photo albums, just thrown onto the grass. The bags take up most of the lawn, right up to the road.

Just don't get her pregnant, my mom says. She ain't no good at that.

I ball my hands into fists, and that's when Couper comes around the front of me. In the car, he says before I can charge her. Come on, he says. He has me by the arms, and he walks me backward until I'm sitting in the passenger seat again.

He bumps it out of there, five miles an hour, maybe ten, over every speed hump, through all the shitty-ass trailers, past poor Penny, whimpering as we pull away.

She is the meanest motherfucker I know, I say to him. When we're out on the main road again, he turns back the way we came, past all the other parks, Grovewood, King's Park, Long Acre. He stops at the four corners, where down the block there's another cemetery and, farther up, a corner store with penny candy and glass bottles of Boylan's, and turns to me.

How old are you? he says.

I see the fear in his eyes, but I laugh at him. I'm twenty-three, I say. I just moved back home, I say, and that's when I break up in front of him, all at once, my face crushed and wet and hot. Last summer, I choke out.

Hey, he says. He pets the back of my head, smoothing his hand over my dirty hair. Hey. It's okay.

I point for him to turn left down toward the corner store, where I can get a paper bag full of Goetze's caramels and a black cherry Boylan's. Inside, he strolls the aisles and buys fishing line, a ball of twine, a package of bungees. It's nowhere I can get clothes, or panties, or even a toothbrush, but all I want is that bag of candy, the sweet soda, like I could get when I was a kid, riding to the store on my bike with Khaki.

You ever get a feeling about someone, Couper says in the car. My mouth is wadded out with caramel. You know, like you did about the dad?

Yeah, I say, and I think he's going to say something about my mother.

I got a feeling about you, he says.

Yeah? I say. Is it a hard-on?

He laughs. Sometimes, he says. Come with me, he says.

Where you going? My face is scrubbed red and raw from crying, from pressing my hands into my eyes. My lips, where they're chapped at the edge, will stain black red from the soda.

I got a list of places, he says. Other crimes.

What kind of crimes? I say.

Missing girls.

I'm a missing girl, I say.

Not anymore, he says. I found you.

He shows me how to pack up the Scamp. How to hitch it to the Gran Torino, the two lined up and ready. He says, Make sure the coupler latch is open, and guides my hands over it, And then, he says, use the tongue latch to lower the coupler onto the ball.

I start laughing, bent over, and backed into him, and that's all it takes.

After, we make sure everything inside is closed up and put away. We put the bed back into the table, secure the dry goods in airtight bins, and bungee the cupboard doors closed. He keeps his computer and his bag of notebooks and pens in the car with us, with some water, some snacks and cigarettes. He asks me where the best
place is to stop and get some clothes for me, underwear and a toothbrush.

In the next state, I say.

six

KHAKI

Depending on who you ask, I was either fourteen or seventeen, but the truth is, when I left with Henderson, I was sixteen. Just old enough to leave school, but young enough to get him arrested. Which I wasn't interested in doing since he was my ride out. So I told him, and everyone associated with him, that I was seventeen. Age of consent.