The Stud Book (41 page)

Could AKA be in the car?

The car slowed, as though looking out into the dark. What if an ax murderer drove down that empty road and saw her stumbling along?

She froze, like a deer.

The car sped up again, kept going, and left the night darker than before. If it had been a murderer, Arena would be dead. That’d show her mom faster than anorexia, which was the way most girls at Maya Angelou called out for attention. It’d be faster than alcohol poisoning even, and more decisive than teen pregnancy.

Her mom would love a teen pregnancy! She was nuts about babies.

Arena walked on trembling legs down the pitch-black driveway, where it was covered with the tangle of branches, leaning trees, and vines. Leaves had fallen, thick on the ground.

The house, when she reached it, looked diseased, with black patches against pale paint. There was a car in the driveway. Something moved. Arena froze.

She saw the movement again. It was so slight—like somebody who didn’t want to be seen, the shoulder of a crouched man. No, it was a tire swing on a thin and frayed rope. The screen door was half off its hinges.

“Hello?”

A window was broken. Something had happened here. A fight? The house looked beaten up. “AK?” she called. She stepped onto the porch, reached past the broken screen door, lifted a knocker, and let it fall against the wood.

She jumped at the sound, even as she made it.

When she stopped knocking, there was only the song of the invisible bugs in the grass, frogs, crickets, or the electric hum. The windshield of the car was dark with the rot of fallen leaves. Arena put her hand around the brass doorknob and turned. It gave in. The smell of the house came out to meet her.

She broke a law; she stepped inside.

An open magazine sprawled on the couch. A pan of water waited for a dog, or for the roof to stop leaking, or both. Arena stepped over matted socks and a dirty carpet. A few more steps and she saw the kitchen. The fridge was pulled away from the wall. And there he was—AKA.

He was in a photo under a Disneyland magnet. He was a boy, then older.

A house is a box for a family. She opened bedroom doors. There was a room with a sliding closet door, and the closet was open, crowded with plastic hangers and women’s clothes.

Two more doors and then she found a room with a short bookcase, a mess of T-shirts, and blue and yellow wallpaper. A boy’s room. The bed was narrow and cheap and broken.

This had to be his.

There was a watch on the floor. Arena picked it up. It was the kind with a clock face, not digital, and it had a rotating sun and moon, to show day and night. In an old movie a watch would be a clue—she’d seen that before, in
Chinatown
. Here the only thing it meant was a dead battery.

But something violent had happened; the house was ashamed. The family was gone. Einstein was wrong. Energy was both created and destroyed in that place—she could feel it—and the history of a family was trapped in decay.

Nobody marked off the crime scene because the crime didn’t happen all at once. A house was a horrible thing.

She was in that closed-off part of AKA’s brain, the home that would haunt him in dreams. There was no bus back to the city until morning. The night was pitch-black, and the light switches did nothing. Arena picked her way over the cluttered floor, stepping around the shimmer of puddles. She went deeper into the smell, to the kitchen. She took AKA’s school portrait photos off the refrigerator. She took the picture of him happy in the backyard. She held the photos in her palm and pressed them into a tight stack, each one cut to the same size. She collected the photos the way people bury the dead, because maybe if she got his pictures out of that house, it’d help his spirit.

Her arm hurt from fighting off the hippie. She was so far from Portland, in an awful corner of a forgotten world. There was no way home.

Nyla sang as she limped the halls of Dulcet’s apartment building. She sang anything—parts of songs, words, “Good day sunshine,” “Think I can make it now”—with one hand to her hip, bearing her second Bundle of Love. The long, yellow hall reeked with cat urine. She passed one apartment door, then another, swimming her way to France, to that metaphoric further shore, a place of forgiveness.

She’d lived in only one apartment in her life. As soon as she was married, they’d bought their old house and torn it down to the studs. They were young. And when her husband died, she kept working on that house, forever. She actually envied Dulcet’s cheap digs: Why was she, Nyla, devoted to the temple of her home? She was a servant to her house, a place for her babies.

She knocked on Dulcet’s door.

“Christ!” somebody barked.

Did it come from Dulcet’s room, or down the hall?

Nyla knocked again then put her ear to the door.

A man came in through a back door marked
EMERGENCY EXIT
. He stopped farther down the hall, looked at Nyla, and said, “Didn’t I see you on TV?”

There was a crash inside the apartment. Was Dulcet okay?

The man down the hall pointed a fat finger. He said, “D’oh! Better get in my apartment! You could be dangerous.” He raised his hands and crouched, in a sloppy kung fu posture. “Ha!”

He was a human enactment of the throbbing ache in Nyla’s side. Her palms broke out in a pain sweat.

She found a pen in her handbag. She leaned into the wall and wrote on the card she’d brought along, “Love is all there really is, and I love you. Love, your friend, Nyla.” Then she drew hearts, which was a way of saying love, without saying it. Could she get any more love on that card? At the bottom she put an asterisk, and a PS, and a little note: “See you at Arena’s art show!” and one more heart, and hugs and kisses.

The man down the hall said, “You use a half nelson on that scum sucker?” He fell into a coughing fit that sounded like he needed an inhaler fast.

Nyla took her phone out to call Dulcet, and as she dialed, another call came in.

Arena.

There was another crash inside Dulcet’s place. Something was wrong. Nyla could call her daughter back.

Mr. Latex scurried to put his Dockers on even as Dulcet tugged them away. She hissed, “Shhh—we’re okay.”

She wore her superhero anatomy suit, complete with thigh-high boots and a length of unspooled rubber intestine meant to serve as a whip.

The knocking didn’t stop. Mr. Latex said, “Cops?” He threw a crocheted afghan over the Volcano, where it stood like a major erection.

She said, “Why would it be cops?”

He said, “You’re in this with me.” He was high and paranoid, on the verge of flipping out. It turned out part of his game, what he wanted, was a booty bump from a latex doll. Yes, Dulcet was his doll, in her plasticized body, and he had asked for an anal administration of meth. At the time she’d said, “You’re insane, sir. That shit can kill a person.”

It’d destroy a life.

“Once,” he said. “I want to try it once. I’ve never done it.”

By the beauty of his good teeth and ordinary, unscathed skin, she believed him. She said, “The future might deviate from the past, you know. I don’t want to start something—”

He was a strange bird clawing at the ragged edge of his existence, wanting to find a genuine sensation in life before it was over. Dulcet could relate. She wasn’t there yet, but she could glimpse his pain on a distant horizon. He was an adult. He had his drugs. He’d done the legwork, if you could call it that.

There was the knock on the door again.

Mr. Latex Lover was so jumpy! Dulcet wasn’t on steady ground herself. Yes, they were high, and who was that at her door?

But the money. “We can finish,” she said.

She’d had him half-convinced to stay, even after the third knock, until a man’s voice outside the door cut in: “… use a half nelson on that scum sucker …”

Latex ducked, like they could see him. Dulcet froze. They watched the door.

She whispered, “You still owe me for the hours.” Her phone started to ring. She silenced it.

“You owe me for the pot,” he said and pulled a T-shirt over his head.

“You said you had pills.” The latex squeaked as she moved. She poured herself a whiskey.

He couldn’t leave yet. She said, “They’re still out there.”

He nodded, his teeth clacking together like a party skeleton, Day of the Dead, thinly cloaked in a temporary human casing.

Arena spoke into the phone. “Mom!”

How was there no answer? She’d run away, and what, her mom didn’t care? The house around her was a family destroyed. It was awful. There could have been a chalk line around an invisible body in every room of the darkness. She couldn’t get her words together, didn’t know where to start. She said, “Did you even know who he was?” Her hands were shaking and she hung up.

S
arah and Ben lay across their bed in a mix of postcoital tristesse and elation. She had a pillow under her ass to help the sperm swim deep and fast. Her stomach was sweaty. Her thighs were still wet with Ben’s spew. The only sound now in the room was their breath and the dog on the floor lapping loudly.

That dog! Sarah burst out laughing. She was happy, sated, and maybe even on the way to pregnant.

Ben lifted a hand and touched her hip bone, lifted as it was by the pillow underneath. He turned toward her. It was a beautiful moment, not yet dark in their room, the two of them, except the dog, Shadow, and his ceaseless lapping.

Then the lapping did cease. Shadow gagged instead, and vomited on the floor.

Ben said, “Oh, dog,” and again they laughed. They’d put up with that dog for years. Dogs are beautiful and disgusting, worthy of love and tolerance.

“Total buzz kill!” Sarah reached to turn on the lamp.

Ben got up, still naked. He said, “There’s blood in it. A lot, actually.”

When Sarah looked, there was blood pooled in Shadow’s vomit, and the dog was drooling. He wasn’t usually the kind of dog to drool, but now it hung from his lips in a stream of bubbling white spit.

“Hey, baby,” Sarah called.

Shadow walked like he didn’t know where his own legs were. He walked like some kind of clown, like he was stuck in glue. Sarah’s heart broke at that walk. “He’s messed up,” she said, and wanted to cry. He’d been fine just a little while earlier. He was old, but fine.