The Worst Years of Your Life (41 page)

“Then what are we supposed to eat?” I yelled after her. “If you're always going out and leaving us here?”

A cupboard door slammed, and another one opened.

“Tell your sister she's having Potato Buds and a green vegetable, Denny,” she called from inside the refrigerator. “And that she had better stop rattling my cage.”

Dale honked when the Potato Buds were still lumpy, and by that time, we had made Bobbie feel bad. She turned up the burners, dumped in the rest of the milk, and gave Denny a bigger spatula to stir with.

“Whip them, precious. Whip them!” she said, digging through her purse for the number of the pay phone at the Billiard Club. She leaned out the screen door and held up three fingers to Dale, which meant to wait three minutes before honking again.

“What you can do is call information for the number after I go,” she said. “You know what to ask for—it's in St. John's.”

She handed me each of our pill halves and twelve dollars for a cab fare in case of an emergency, but I didn't even look at her.

“Doors and windows are to be locked by ten,” she said, reaching back to zip up the rest of her dress. “But I'll probably be home long before then. Okay?”

I stared out the window and whispered that I didn't care. I might be calling Coos Bay.

“Excuse me, madame,” Bobbie said, cupping her hand around her ear like she was hard of hearing. “Is that a threat?”

But I only shook my head and concentrated on the dirt patch in the front yard where my swing set used to be.

Dale leaned on the horn.

“Don't test me, either of you,” Bobbie said. “Because Coos Bay is a fucking joke.”

Denny stirred the potatoes without looking up, and I peeled a flower sticker off one of my crutches.

“Well, this is just great, isn't it?” Bobbie said, slamming a new stick of butter down in the center of the table. “I guess the sooner I go, the sooner he can bring me home.”

“Yep,” said Denny, continuing to stir. “And then Bill Linkabaugh can come over and kill us.”

Bobbie marched over and grabbed her open purse off the coffee table. “I can promise you Bill Linkabaugh isn't going to be killing anybody, Denny,” she said, checking the contents before she snapped it shut. “The swamp thing next door only wishes he was that desperate.”

Denny brought dinner over to the couch, and we ate without mentioning Bill Linkabaugh or even looking at his poster. After dinner he got us water for our pills, rinsed the dishes, and made sure all the burners were off. I had him put some leftover Potato Buds out for the raccoons and was about ready to have him lock up early and turn on all our stand-up fans when we heard Otis Redding coming from next door. It was one of Bobbie's favorite songs, “(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay,” and it floated in through Mrs. Linkabaugh's wide-open bedroom curtains, where she was sitting on the edge of her furry red water bed with a man.

Both of us could see that she was listening very carefully to him, nodding at whatever he said, understanding him perfectly. In fact, the strength of all her yesses was even rocking the water bed a little, making it seem like the two of them were riding in a boat.

Denny ran to lock the doors and brought the Bill Linkabaugh poster in from the refrigerator, but from the back of the head, we couldn't tell a thing about the man on the bed at all except that he slicked back his hair.

I slid down on the couch as far as I could go, and Denny crouched next to me with his chin on the sill. “Screw Coos Bay,” he whispered, “we're calling the cops as soon as he turns around.”

I nodded. “As soon as he turns around.”

I stared down at the poster until my eyes started to swim, trying to memorize everything about Bill Linkabaugh's face and ignore the red words printed beside his left cheek:
MAY BE ARMED.
There was a buzz inside my ear, as if someone had turned on a tiny blow dryer. And I remembered Kevin's pill that was probably going to make me fall asleep long before the police could even get their squad cars to our house.

Denny closed one eye and aimed at the man's head with an imaginary gun. “If that's Bill,” he said, “he's gonna be sorry he was ever born.”

I covered Denny's mouth with my hand. “Stop talking,” I said, “or I'll kill you.”

Mrs. Linkabaugh was wearing the same shorts she'd had on earlier, but with a new halter top made out of yellow bandannas. Right near the end of the song, when Otis was sighing and breathing and humming, she grabbed the man's head, pushing it against her chest, and the two of them stood up and started dancing, swaying back and forth on each other like they'd had too much to drink.

“How tall does it say he is?” Denny asked, grabbing the poster out of my hands. “I think he's too short to be Bill.”

“Bill is five-eleven, one-eighty,” I said, grabbing the poster back and giving Denny a charley horse. “We have to look at him from the front.”

The man flipped Mrs. Linkabaugh around and started dancing with her from behind. He reached around and put a hand across her eyebrows and pulled her head back to rest on his shoulder, burying his whole face in her hair.

Her neck was bent back at a bad angle, like maybe he was about to break it, but then, right after “Midnight Train to Georgia” started, Mrs. Linkabaugh said something to the man that made him let go, and they both started to laugh out loud, quietly at first, then deep from the belly, like what was happening in that room had to be the most hysterical thing in the whole wide world.

“We better do something,” Denny said, but neither of us moved. All we could manage was to watch without breathing, pressing our faces closer and closer to the window screen until I was sure we were both going to smother.

It took them forever to get over laughing, but when they finally did, Mrs. Linkabaugh grabbed the man by the arm and dragged him out onto the back patio. She hooked her screen door to the side of the house, and a giant pool of buttery light spilled onto the lawn. Then she jumped down the steps and backed farther and farther out onto Oliver Grevitch's thick summer grass, gesturing for the man to follow, holding out both hands. But he didn't move an inch.

“Charlotte,” he called to her from the top of the porch steps. “Charlotte, c'mere.”

But Mrs. Linkabaugh ignored him and kept on going.

“Her name's Charlotte,” Denny whispered, and we both ducked our heads below the windowsill for a minute and said her name out loud. “Charlotte Linkabaugh.”

And in the fuzzy shadow glow that surrounded her, from the streetlight and the porch light and the light of the moon, Mrs. Charlotte Linkabaugh reached down and slipped off her sling-back sandals, tossing them over her shoulders out into the dark, one at a time.

Once the man saw that, he came down the porch steps right away, but before he could get even halfway across the yard, she ran up in her bare feet and jumped on him, wrapping her legs around his waist and letting him dance her around and around in circles. The man arched his body backward to hold up all the weight, turning her faster and faster and faster like an ice skater, until everybody lost track of the time except for Oliver Grevitch's automatic sprinklers, which blasted out of the ground right on schedule.

Then, in the middle of the water that seemed to be spewing everywhere, in the middle of Mrs. Linkabaugh's terrible half-hyena scream, the surprised man froze just for a second, and he looked up at the sky as if he was very confused about where all the water was coming from, and as he stood there in front of us, with his eyes searching the air above his head, there was no disputing anymore who he was.

“Holy Christ,” said Denny. “Bill.”

I nodded. “Bill,” I said. “It's Bill.”

And while we stared out at the yard next door, trying to make our calculations about which police to call, and how many, and when, the Linkabaughs were running through their own sprinklers, illegally.

They had both started laughing again but sillier, dizzier, this time, uncontrolled. Both of them soaked through all their clothes, chasing each other around like they'd never figured out how good cold water could feel in the middle of July.

One time on the way around the yard, when Bill was chasing her with his belt, swinging it around his head and snapping it behind her like a wet towel, I saw Mrs. Linkabaugh jump through a burst of water like a track hurdler. Her hair was plastered to her cheeks and her arm was stretched way up above her head, reaching high like Bobbie in the messy white tank top, trying to grab for that orange on the ladder back in California, and as I waited for her to come back down, to land again on the slippery grass, I wished the hot night could stretch out forever, because I knew that, like Bobbie, she would probably never be up in the air like that again.

George Saunders
is the author of several books, including
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil.
He is a frequent contributor to
The New Yorker
and teaches at Syracuse University.

Jennifer Egan
is the author of several works of fiction, including
The Keep.

Victor D. LaValle
is the author of
The Ecstatic
and the PEN/Open Book Award winner
Slapboxing with Jesus.

Julie Orringer
's stories have appeared in
The Paris Review, Zoetrope,
and several other publications. Her first story collection is called
How to Breathe Underwater.

John Barth
is the author of numerous works, including the National Book Award–winning
Chimera.
His most recent book is
Where 3 Roads Meet.

Rattawut Lapcharoensap
is the author of the bestselling
Sightseeing.

Stanley Elkin
received the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, for his novels
George Mills
and
Mrs. Ted Bliss.
He died in 1995.

Stacey Richter
has won three Pushcart Prizes and a National Magazine Award, and her fiction has been published in
GQ, Granta,
and elsewhere. She is the author of
Twin Study
and
My Date with Satan.

Jim Shepard
is the author of
Batting Against Castro
and several other works of fiction. He is a professor at Williams College.

Alicia Erian
is the author of a short story collection,
The Brutal Language of Love,
and the novel
Towelhead.
Her work has appeared in
Playboy, Zoetrope, The Iowa Review,
and other publications.

A.M. Homes
is the author of several books, including the novel
This Book Will Save Your Life.

Robert Boswell
is the author of
Century's Son, Mystery Ride,
and several other works of fiction.

Kevin Canty
's most recent novel is
Winslow in Love.
He teaches at the University of Montana in Missoula.

Mark Jude Poirier
is the author of several books, including the novel
Modern Ranch Living.

Amber Dermont
's stories have been published in
Tin House, Zoetrope, Alaska Quarterly Review,
and several other publications. She teaches at Francis Macon College in Georgia.

Nathan Englander
is the author of a story collection,
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,
and the novel
The Ministry of Special Cases.

Malinda McCollum
's stories have appeared in
The Paris Review, The Pushcart Prize XXVII, McSweeney's,
and
EPOCH
. She lives with her family in Charleston, South Carolina.

Chris Adrian
is a writer and physician. His novel
The Children's Hospital
was published in 2006.

Elizabeth Stuckey-French
's most recent novel is
Mermaids on the Moon.
She teaches at Florida State University.

Holiday Reinhorn
is a recipient of the Tobias Wolff Award for fiction and the author of the story collection
Big Cats.
Her work has appeared in
Ploughshares, Other Voices, Columbia,
and
Northwest Review,
among others.