Weird Girl (13 page)

14

Surprisingly, Jackson kept his distance after that day. Cleo
expected him to be around every corner, behind every shadow, in every footstep
on the gravel path. He wasn’t, and it made her jumpy. The anticipation of Jackson’s plans kept Cleo on edge, which in a roundabout sort of way kept her on her best
behavior (which is relative—we are talking about Cleo here). She was an
excellent student, a stellar employee, and actually started being polite to
people. (This made them all suspicious and on edge, but life is a vicious
circle). The rest of spring term passed without incident, and finally, it was
time for Cleo to go home.

There was a mandatory one month break after the spring
semester ended, to give faculty and staff a much-needed relaxation period.
Then, students could return to campus to fit in a condensed course before fall
classes began, or they could remain with their parents until the first of
August. Cleo was hoping to convince her parents that she had reformed enough to
stay home altogether.

As exam week ended, and graduation preparations began, Cleo
decided that it was time to ask for her property back. So, she strolled into
Ms. Adams’ office at two in the afternoon, plopped down in a leather and oak
chair, and said, “I’ll take my shrunken head now, please.”

Ms. Adams was on the phone, so it wasn’t the best moment for
Cleo’s announcement. The woman ended her call, clasped her hands on top of her
blotter, and said, “No.”

“What do you mean, “No?”” asked Cleo indignantly. “He’s
mine, and I want to take him home!”

Ms. Adams pulled a slender nail file from a drawer and
leaned back in her chair. “I mean that you can’t have it,” she said. “I mean
that you don’t get to barge into my office, interrupt me on a very important
call, and demand that I do anything. In fact, I’m reconsidering having that
thing incinerated.”

Cleo gasped. “You can’t! He’s my father’s, and I have to
take him home with me!” She nearly started to hyperventilate. It was the first
time that Ms. Adams had seen Cleo lose her cool, and she found it very interesting.

Filing away a nonexistent rough spot on the edge of her
index finger, Ms. Adams smiled.  “Well, I think it would be in my best
interests to hold on to that disgusting little item until you leave my school
permanently.”

“Which is next week,” retorted Cleo. “I’m gonna make sure
they don’t send me back to this place.”

“Oh, really?” asked Ms. Adams as she carefully placed the
file back in her drawer. “I beg to differ. In fact, I think I can make sure
that you remain a student here for years to come. After all, I am required to
apprise your parents of your behavior while here. I don’t believe they’ll find
you fully reformed.”

“But I haven’t been in trouble at all!” exclaimed Cleo.
“Well, except a little bit there at the beginning, but I’ve been really good
since then! You know you’d rather be rid of me anyway.”

Ms. Adams leaned forward. “No, dear, I’d rather have your
tuition for the next three to four years. You’ll be back. You can count on
that. Now, leave my office before I set that stupid head on fire.”

And so it came to pass as Ms. Adams had predicted. Jackson drove Cleo home, neither of them speaking for the entire journey. Helen and Darwin
were in their separate studies when she arrived. Cleo didn’t even see her
parents until dinner that evening, where Darwin asked a thousand questions
about the school, and Helen pushed her peas around on her plate in silence. As
Vera brought out dessert (devil’s food cake—Cleo’s favorite), the topic of
re-enrollment came up. Cleo pled her case dramatically, but Helen would not be
swayed. Ms. Adams recommended that Cleo return to the school, so Cleo would be
going back at the end of the 4-week hiatus. For the first time in her life,
Cleo threw a bona fide tantrum. As it was a first for everyone, the results weren’t
quite what Cleo had anticipated. Darwin merely jotted down notes while Cleo
cried, thrashed, stomped, and threw herself to the floor. Helen just left the
room.

 Finally, Cleo wiped the snot and drool from her face (and
the floor) and ran upstairs to collapse on her bed. The next morning, she
called a taxi and went to see Santo.

***

A lot had changed about the place. Weeds were taking over
the driveway, the grass was knee-high, and the atmosphere stank of rotting
garbage. This, combined with a heavy silence, made Santo’s mobile home look
concave, like a malnourished child. Cleo knocked, but nobody came to the door.
She stood on a plastic bucket and cupped her hands around her eyes to see into
the front windows, but the panes were too dirty. She had started to regret
sending the taxi away when her nostrils detected another odor on the breeze.

Dropping to her knees, she peered into the darkness
underneath the trailer. “You can come out now,” she called. A scraping sound to
her left was the only sound. She crawled a few feet and squinted at the
crawlspace. “I know you’re under there, Santo.” Still, no response. “I can
smell your perfume,” she said. Cleo sniffed the air again to confirm this, and
yes, right there—mingling with the fetid odors of rotten meat, spoiled dairy,
and who knew what else, was a distinctive note of White Diamonds perfume.

“Don’t make me break your windows again,” she warned as she
stood up and brushed off her knees. Instead of searching for cinderblock
chunks, however, she prowled the yard until she found a long, sharp stick. She
walked along the edge of the trailer, hunched over and sniffing the air every
few seconds until, suddenly, she dropped to the ground and jabbed the stick at
the darkness under the trailer. A squeak, followed by an outraged, “Ow!” were
her reward.

“See, I told you you were under there,” she said, quite
pleased with herself.

“Go away,” was the response. She poked him with the stick
again. Finally, a combination of rustling sounds and grunts heralded Santo’s
emergence from his pit.

The months of Cleo’s absence had certainly taken a toll on
Santo’s home, but the changes in the man himself were even more shocking. His
greasy hair was shoulder-length and hadn’t been combed (or washed) in quite a
while. He had a coarse, dirty, bushy beard down to his collarbone. He smelled
terrible, a combination of severe B.O. and perfume, and there were bare
remnants of red polish on his scuffed, chewed fingernails. She remembered him
being skinny before, but now his ribs showed. His cutoff shorts barely hung on
his hips. He also, inexplicably, clutched a homemade spear with rabbits’ feet
dangling from leather strands all down its length.

If Cleo had taken any other route on Santo’s property, she
would have discovered (in an unfortunate way) a variety of metal animal traps
hidden in the tall grass. The back yard contained a mountain of garbage bags,
covered in buzzing, disgusting flies. While Cleo had been at boarding school,
Santo had become a lonely savage.

The day that Cleo had been taken away by Jackson, Santo had
been expecting her for the fifth and final lesson. He waited. And waited. And
waited. And then the little voice in his head started telling him terrible
things. She had turned him in, handed over his driver’s license, spilled about
his criminal history. The police were on the way to charge him with kidnapping.
He would go to jail.

He lived in fear for a week, expecting every sound to herald
the beginning of a police raid. The S.W.A.T. team was hiding in the trees,
waiting to shoot him if he went outside. The D.E.A. was hiding in the bushes
waiting for him to pick a bud or two from his small, but well-tended pot
garden. The FBI would put him away for kidnapping. Santo didn’t eat, sleep,
bathe, or even move for seven whole days.

When the invasion didn’t come, he started to relax. He
finally went to the store for milk and cheese, got pulled for a faulty brake
light on the way home…and didn’t have his driver’s license. The officer gave
him a three day window to bring it to the station. But, Santo didn’t have it.
He panicked again.

For three days, he brainstormed ways to get his driver’s
license back. It really came down to 3 options: go to Cleo’s house and ask for
it; go to Cleo’s house in disguise and, under some pretense or another, snatch
it from her room; or break in and steal it. But it was impossible. Was he
supposed to ring the doorbell and say, “Hi, you don’t know me, but I believe
your daughter has my driver’s license and I’d like it back”? What if she had
been telling the truth about the note she had left with it? He might as well
walk in and say, “So…I kidnapped your daughter”. Breaking in was no good. What
if he got caught? All roads led to jail with this one.

So, he decided to exist without his license until Cleo got
back. He couldn’t get a money order without it, so he simply took an envelope
full of cash to the police station and paid his fines. There was plenty of meat
in his freezer at home, so he stopped by the Gas Mart for some bread and canned
goods, crossed his fingers that a cop wouldn’t stop him on the way home, and
decided to lie low for a few weeks until he could figure out when Cleo was
coming home.

The turning point was his water bill. He wrote a check, put
it in the pre-addressed envelope, and…realized that he was out of stamps. He
couldn’t go to the post office, partially for fear of another ticket, but also
because that little voice in his head was back, telling him that there were
posters of his face all over the walls, posters that said MOST WANTED. They cut
off his water the next day. Three days later, the power went out.

The meat thawed and then rotted. The trailer gradually
reached a temperature equivalent to the surface of the sun. Without an
up-to-date water account with the city, the trash collectors stopped coming. He
couldn’t bathe, watch television, listen to music, cook food, or do any normal
human things. The voice in his head was his only company, and Santo grew more
paranoid by the day. He booby-trapped the yard. He duct-taped knives to the
undersides of the furniture. He made a spear for self-defense. With the
imagined sounds of gunfire in his brain, he crudely cut an escape hatch in the
floor of the living room, which he had jumped through when he heard Cleo’s
taxi.

It could all have been avoided if Cleo had been able to
contact him that day. She could have told him that there was no note, no scan
of his ID card—in fact, she had hidden his driver’s license in his house as a
joke on the second day of her pickpocket lessons. It was, and had been the
entire time, stuck between the cover and title page of the Bible in Santo’s
bookcase.

As it turned out, some of Cleo’s misery could have been
avoided if she and Santo had been able to meet that last day. They sat together
on the sagging steps and she filled him in on what had happened at Harper
Valley. When she got to the part about Mae and Jackson, Santo shook his head
and then stood and paced nervously until she finished the entire story. Cleo
had never seen Santo so agitated (the beard and spear didn’t help).

“Lesson Five!” he yelled, throwing the spear for emphasis.
It struck the trailer and bounced off, leaving a dent in the kitchen wall. Cleo
eyed him warily as he continued to pace and mutter to himself. Finally, he turned
to her and screamed, a bellow that communicated his frustrations, as well as a
general lack of oral hygiene, quite effectively.

Inching away from him, Cleo finally asked, “Ummm…are you
okay?”

Laughing maniacally, Santo retrieved his spear and ran a lap
around the perimeter, stabbing at the animal traps until they had all clapped
shut, thereby de-boobying his yard. He finally returned to the stoop and
pointed at Cleo. “This is why you need to complete
all
of your lessons.
If you had come for Lesson Five, you might not be in this pickle,” he said
sternly. “Come on, we’ve got some catching up to do,” he said before walking
into his dismal house.

“What do you mean?” asked Cleo as she followed him. He
looked over his shoulder at her, but had no time to respond before he suddenly
disappeared. The inventive string of curses that drifted up through the hole in
the floor made Cleo giggle. She helped him climb back through the escape hatch.
“You might want to fix that,” she said.

***

First, he made her prove that she remembered lessons One
through Four. This took several hours, and he was noticeably winded by
mid-afternoon. There was no edible food in the house, so Cleo decided to order
a pizza. Unfortunately, the phone was no longer connected. This meant that Cleo
was also without a means of calling a taxi to take her back home. She began to
understand Santo’s recent trials a little better.

“You’re going to have to drive me home,” she said, “so we
might as well go someplace to get some food.”

“I can’t get pulled for driving without a license again,” he
said. When Cleo immediately pulled the Bible down from the shelf and held out
his license, he managed to hold his composure for five seconds before releasing
a high pitched giggle. Then he fainted, falling directly onto the coffee table
with a sickening thud. Cleo sighed. Santo spent way too much time being
unconscious.

Slapping him awake was also more pleasant than she thought
it would be. When he finally came to, she was in a pretty good mood. She
slapped him one more time for luck and then said, “Let’s go.”

They rode to the nearest burger joint in Santo’s aging
Buick. He drove like a paranoid old man, cruising at half the posted speed
limit and hesitating at every turn to look for cops before hitting his brakes
(the light still needed to be fixed). Sensing that his appearance (and odor)
might offend certain customers, Cleo suggested that they pull through the
drive-thru and eat in the car. She told him more stories about school while
they ate, and he laughed until he was nauseous. Finally, he dropped her off
close enough to walk to her house, instructing her to come back the next
morning at the usual time.