The Worst Years of Your Life (40 page)

Even when I didn't have a fractured pubic bone, our living room couch was my favorite place to be. From our living room we had a view of the whole street, and especially of our left-side neighbor, because Bobbie had the couch placed right in the nook between two big picture windows at the front corner of our house. And since every house on North Willamette and North Amherst between McCrum and North Woolsey had the exact same floor plan, all the windows of our houses matched up perfectly, with only about eight feet in between. When Oliver Grevitch was alive, he had kept his curtains closed twenty-four hours a day, not like the Bongaards on the other side of us, who never close theirs, ever. The Bongaards were the reason Bobbie had Dale put our satellite dish up in front of her bedroom window, because she said she wanted to be able to let in some light once in a while and not have disgusting Karl Bongaard leering in at her constantly with his moon face.

By the time Denny was tucked in, my pelvis hurt so bad it felt like it might crack in half all over again, so Bobbie gave me an extra pain pill like Kevin told her to, and sat with me for a while on the couch. She held my hand, and we looked through some of her beauty-contest picture albums together. Most of them were of her winning, and not expecting to, and screaming, and having her eye makeup streak down, but tonight there was one I'd never seen before stuck in with all the rest. Instead of being up on a stage with a bunch of other girls, in this one she was totally alone, standing on a stepladder under an orange tree and reaching up to pick one. There wasn't any makeup on her face, and her bangs fell straight down into her eyes without curls. She had on a dirty white tank top with cutoff jeans, and the mosquito bites on her legs were scabbed over from too much scratching.

“What's that one?” I asked.

“Just me on a picnic,” she said, turning the page, but I turned it back.

“With who? You look messy and nice.”

“I don't even know with who,” she said, smoothing down the plastic page where it was bubbling a little around the edges. “Let's check what's on TV.”

After Mrs. Linkabaugh let in her Doberman, Bobbie went next door to get the bill from
I'm Eddie—May I help you?
, but nobody answered her knock. She came back after a while, and I lit her three cigarettes before she threw up her hands.

“What should I do?” she asked. “Call a tow truck to tow a fucking tow truck?”

Then Denny came back out wearing only his pajama bottoms, so Bobbie got her five dollars back and said we could both watch
Rat Patrol
reruns until midnight. She didn't go out with Dale, either, and we got to eat as many bowls of Honeycomb as we wanted, until my stomach pressed way out like a fist. Halfway through the second episode, Bobbie went into the kitchen and had a phone fight with Dale because he wouldn't come over. She told him to kiss her ass and then sat on the receiver.

“Go ahead, you prick! Come on,” she said.

But when she put her ear back to the phone, we could tell from the look on her face that he'd already hung up.

Most of the time Dale doesn't spend the night over here because he has to be at the Coronet putting prices on things by nine
A.M
. He says he likes it better when Bobbie spends the night at his apartment over on Germantown Road so he can know exactly where all his stuff is and use his own shower and towels. Denny and I have never been over to Germantown Road, but Bobbie says the only thing Dale's got over there that we don't is a Water-Pik, and that his shower is probably where she got ringworm.

I was allowed to stay on the couch for the whole night and take one more half of a pain pill just in case. After I'd swallowed it with orange juice, Bobbie emptied the whole bottle onto the coffee table, chopped the rest of the pills in half with a butter knife, and locked all of them in the same drawer of her dresser where she keeps the pills Denny takes for his attention span.

Our old babysitter Crystal was the one who figured out he was hyperactive. One night when Bobbie was gone, she was talking to her daughter Crissy long-distance in California, and while she wasn't looking, Denny climbed up on the couch and started jumping so high he flew up and cracked his head open on the ceiling. Crystal hung right up on Crissy, and we screamed and screamed at him to stop, but Denny kept bouncing up and down, up and down, with the blood running into his ears until we pinned him to the carpet. Then, when Bobbie got to the emergency room, Crystal explained to her that Denny was at least as hyper as her son Ray used to be, and that we had better give him Ritalin. I know for a fact my father was the one who paid for all of that.

It was late by the time Eddie left Mrs. Linkabaugh's. By then everybody was asleep but me, because I like to watch the raccoons come up from Mock's Crest Marsh and go through the garbage cans in the back alley. Sometimes whole families come. I've seen them eat cake mix and raw eggs and Tender Vittles cat food. Usually, I get to put out a bowl of water for them, too, because we heard they like to wash their food. But tonight the alley was empty except for Eddie, who spit on Mrs. Linkabaugh's grass before he got inside his truck and peeled out, on his way to another accident.

On regular nights, I wake up two or three times, but because of Kevin's pill, I slept the whole night on the couch without waking up once. When I opened my eyes, Bobbie was sitting in the La-Z-Boy with Denny on her lap. She was smoking and staring out the window with the tow-truck bill in her hand.

“There's living proof that the
Penthouse
letters are true,” she said, pointing the burning end of her cigarette at Mrs. Linkabaugh's driveway. “Bad timing for
you-know-who
.”

“You-know-who doesn't want to live with us,” said Denny, swinging his legs back and forth and making the chair bounce. “You-know-who wants to live in Coos Bay.”

Bobbie reached up in the air and grabbed one of his ankles. “What did I tell you, Denny,” she asked, “about sitting still?”

“You told me to try it.”

“That's exactly right,” said Bobbie, dropping his leg and looking back out the window. “So practice what I preach.”

When my father moved to Coos Bay, Bobbie put all his
Penthouses
in a Hefty bag down in the basement next to the pup tent Denny and I got from saving Green Stamps. She said he only read them to torture her because of her small chest. Besides the
Penthouses,
my father also read
Hustler, Roadie,
and
Big on Top,
so I'm sure Bobbie was right about him liking Mrs. Linkabaugh.

After breakfast Bobbie gave me her July
Cosmopolitan
to read for the rest of the morning, and in the afternoon she taught me how to do the wave. She said the wave is the most important part of the beauty contest, twice as important as what a person says.

“The judges absolutely loved my wave,” she said, cupping her hand and fluttering the fingers up and down in her famous way. “So you've got to do it, because everybody always waves flat-handed now.”

I'd seen Bobbie doing her wave in pictures and to my father a hundred times because when he first saw Bobbie, she was riding a giant float shaped like a Sunkist navel orange in a parade through Rosemont, California. She had waved and waved at him and the big group of people he was standing with, not even knowing that he was going to follow her orange through the crowd, all the way back to the football field where the parade started, and that right after graduation, she was going to wind up in Oregon with him and me and Denny.

Because of how slow I was on the crutches, it took us a long time to get my wave right. We decided to add a wrist swing to my wave that made it more complicated than Bobbie's, and after an hour of waving at each other into the bathroom mirror, switching rooms, and alternating arms, Bobbie decided I ought to try it out on Mrs. Linkabaugh, who was outside in purple short shorts, hosing down her camper.

“Pick a point above her head to focus on,” Bobbie said, standing beside me at the window and holding on to my extra crutch. “Then go through the whole thing one step at a time.”

We tried all kinds of combinations to get her attention, but Mrs. Linkabaugh was too busy cleaning the inside of the wheel wells to notice.

“Those waves are looking totally perfect,” Bobbie said, staring out at Mrs. Linkabaugh, who was bending down to spray underneath the cab. “She's just not the type to appreciate them.”

After Mrs. Linkabaugh went inside, I thought Bobbie and I would keep working on my waves until dinner, but Denny came home from day camp, and Dale called to convince Bobbie to go out, so she took the phone into her bedroom. I figured they were talking about my pelvis money, too, because the phone cord was pulled as tight as it would go and I couldn't hear anything they were saying through the door.

Denny took off his socks and shoes and sat down next to me on the couch to wait for Bobbie, and we watched Mrs. Linkabaugh's camper drip-drying in the sun together. It was covered with hunting stickers, and a pair of mossy green antlers were bolted to the top of the cab that made it look weird and alive. It was easy to imagine Bill Linkabaugh dragging the dead owner of those antlers through the dark woods, home to wherever he and Mrs. Linkabaugh had lived.

“Check out the gun rack,” Denny said, pointing at the window right behind the driver's seat. “It was his truck for sure.”

He took off the house key on a string that Bobbie made him wear to day camp, and swung it around like a lasso. “Bill Linkabaugh is coming back to get it with a gun.”

I stared at Denny and the horned half-animal camper, suddenly remembering the possible danger we could all be in, picturing Bobbie and Dale out playing pool while Bill Linkabaugh ripped down our screen door with the butt end of a hunting rifle.

“You better go get Bobbie off the phone,” I said, keeping my eyes glued to the camper. “Now.”

Denny threw down his house key and hit the floor at a dead run.

“Bobbbbie!”
he called, slapping her bedroom door over and over again with a flat hand. “Bill Linkabaugh is coming over here tonight with a gun.”

Bobbie's door cracked open slowly, just enough to let out her head. She covered the receiver and bent down to Denny's level, putting a hand on his shoulder and talking to him very slowly, right into the face like he was deaf, too, and not just hyperactive. “Denny,” she said, nodding while she talked and looking him straight in the eye, “it only says that on a poster.”

“Well, it's a police poster, Bobbie,” said Denny, crossing his arms. “You better tell Dale that poster was made by the Oregon State Police.”

Bobbie stood up and looked at the ceiling. She took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “Dale is very aware of that, Denny, thank you,” she said, pulling her head back into the bedroom. “Thank you very much.”

Denny came over to the couch and shoved the crutches into my hands. “It's a police poster,” he said.

I stood in front of Bobbie's door for a long time and stared down at my feet. They were barely even touching the carpet at all, dangling like lead weights between the two fat rubber traction cups on the bottom of my crutches. Kevin had told us I was supposed to feel normal after the second day, but as my fist knocked on Bobbie's door, the whole top half of my body seemed way too loose and light all of a sudden, like everything on me from the waist up was rising, shooting up into the air with a rush, like a helium balloon.

“Bobbie,” I said, in my calmest voice. “Open the door.”

I heard the receiver click, and Bobbie was standing over me immediately. She was smiling, but everything on her face said that if Bill Linkabaugh or the blurry ache in my pelvis didn't kill me, then she definitely would.

“What?” she said.

Karl Bongaard's lawn mower started up outside, and I closed my eyes, listening to the horrible chopping sound it made, preparing for death.

“Bobbie!” I yelled over all the noise. “Bobbie?”

Bobbie looked over at Denny for a minute and then back at me as if we were crazy. “What?” she screamed back.
“What?”

Through the window behind her, I could see parts of Karl Bongaard's body jerking by as he followed his lawn mower from one end of his grass to the other.

“Well,” I said, focusing hard on her kneecaps. “My wave is not ready for the contest. And Denny and I think you ought to stay home tonight.”

Bobbie leaned back against the doorjamb and crossed her arms, listening to the lawn mower roar practically up to the edge of our house, then move away.

“Really?” she asked, looking me up and down and straight in the eye. “That's what the two of you think, huh?”

“Yep,” said Denny, before I could stop him. “That's what we think. Her wave sucks, and Bill Linkabaugh is on the loose, and you better stay home and get us dinner.”

“Well, Denny,” said Bobbie, walking past me into the kitchen, “you can tell your sister I'm not staying home tonight. For her information, this kind of behavior is called pressure, and I get enough of that from Dale.”