20th Century Ghosts (22 page)

"It's for you," Finney told him.

Kensington came to work Thursday afternoon with a piercing. Wyatt noticed because she kept lowering her head and pressing a wadded-up Kleenex to her open mouth. In a short time, the little knot of tissue paper was stained a bright red. He positioned himself at the computer terminal to her left, and watched her from the corners of his eyes, while he busied himself with a stack of returned videos, bleeping them back into the inventory with the scanner. The next time she lifted the Kleenex to her mouth, he caught a direct glimpse of the stainless steel pin stuck through her blood-stained tongue. It was an interesting development in the Sarah Kensington story.

She was going punk, a little at a time. When he first started working at Best Video, she was chunky and plain, with short-cropped brown hair, and small, close-set eyes; she went around with the brusque, standoffish attitude of a person who is used to not being liked. Wyatt had a streak of that himself, and had imagined they might get along, but it was nothing doing. She never looked at him if she could help it, and often pretended not to hear him when he spoke to her. In time he came to feel that getting to know her was too much effort. It was easier to loathe and shun her.

One day, an old guy had come into the store, a forty-year-old carnival freak with a shaved head and a dog collar cinched around his neck, a leash dangling from it. He wanted a copy of
Sid & Nancy
. He asked Kensington to help him find it and they chatted a while. Kensington laughed at everything he said, and when it was her turn to speak, the words came falling out of her mouth in a noisy, excited rush. It was a hell of a thing, watching her turn herself inside out like that over someone. Then when Wyatt showed up at work the next afternoon, the two of them were around the side of the store that couldn't be seen from the street. The circus gimp had her flattened against the wall. They were holding hands, their fingers entwined together, while she poked her tongue desperately into cue-ball's mouth. Now, a few months later, Kensington's hair was an alien shade of bright copper, and she wore biker boots and haunted-house eye shadow. The stud in her tongue, though, that was all-new.

"Why's it bleeding?" he asked her.

"Because I just got it," she said, without looking up. She said it bitchy too. Love had not made her warm and expressive; she still sulked and glared when Wyatt spoke to her, avoiding him as if the air around him was poisonous, abhorring him as she always had, for reasons that had not and never would be defined.

"I figured maybe you got it stuck in a zipper or something," he said. Then he added, "I guess that's one way to keep him interested in you. He isn't going to hang around for your good looks."

Kensington was a pretty hard case and her reaction caught him off guard. She glanced up at him, with startled, miserable eyes, her chin quivering. In a voice he hardly recognized, she said, "Leave me alone."

Wyatt didn't like suddenly feeling bad for her. He wished he hadn't said anything at all, and never mind that he had been provoked. She turned away from him, and he started to reach out, thought he would snag her sleeve, keep her there until he could figure out some way to apologize, without actually saying he was sorry. But then she spun back and glared at him through her watery eyes. She muttered something, he only caught part of it—she said
retard
, and then something about knowing how to read—but what he heard was more than enough. He felt a sudden, almost painful coldness spreading across his chest.

"Open your mouth one more time and I'll yank that pin right out of your tongue, you little bitch."

Kensington's eyes dulled with fury.
There
was the Kensington he was used to. Then she was moving, her short thick legs carrying her around the counter, and along the far wall towards the back of the store. A sour-sick feeling came over him, mingled with a sudden irritability. She was headed for the office, and Mrs. Badia; running to tell on him.

He decided he was going on break, grabbed his army jacket and shoved through the Plexiglas doors. He lit an American Spirit, and stood against the stucco wall outside, shoulders hunched. He smoked and shivered, glaring across the street in the direction of Miller's Hardware.

Wyatt watched Mrs. Prezar swing her station wagon into Miller's parking lot, her two boys in the car with her. Mrs. Prezar lived at the end of his street in a house the color of a strawberry milk shake. He had mowed her lawn—not anytime recently, but a few years ago, back when he mowed people's lawns.

Mrs. Prezar got out and moved briskly towards the doors of the Hardware. She left the car running. Her face was thick and heavily made up, but not bad-looking. There was something about her mouth—she had a plump, sexy underlip—that Wyatt had always liked. Her expression, as she went inside, was a robotic blank.

She left a boy in the front seat and another in back, strapped into a baby seat. The boy in front—his name was Baxter, Wyatt didn't know why he remembered that—was skinny and long, had a delicate build that must've come to him by way of his father. From where Wyatt was standing, he couldn't see much of the one in the baby seat, just a thatch of dark hair and a pair of chubby waving hands.

As soon as Mrs. Prezar slipped into the store, the older boy, Baxter, screwed himself around to look into the back. He had a Twizzler in one hand and he held it out for his baby brother. When his brother reached for it, though, Baxter jerked it out of reach. Then he held it out again. When his brother refused to be goaded into making a second grab, Baxter swatted him with it. The game continued along these lines for a while, until Baxter stopped to unwrap the Twizzler and pop one end into his mouth for a lazy taste. He had on a Twin City Pizza cap—Wyatt's old team. Wyatt tried to figure if Baxter could be old enough to play in Little League. It didn't seem it, but maybe they let them in younger now.

Wyatt had good memories of Little League. In Wyatt's last year with Twin City, he almost set a league record for stolen bases. It was one of the few moments in his life when he had known for sure that he was better at something than anyone else his age. By the end of the season he had nine steals total, and had only been caught once. A doughy-faced left-handed pitcher got him leading off first, before Wyatt had a chance to get his feet under him, and all at once he was racing back and forth in the middle of a rundown, while the first baseman and second baseman closed in from either side, softly lobbing the ball back and forth between them. Wyatt had tried, at the end, to burst for second, hoping to drop and slide in under the tag ... but almost as soon as he made his decision he knew it was the wrong one, and a feeling of hopelessness, of racing towards the inescapable, had come over him. The second baseman—a kid Wyatt knew, Treat Rendell, the star of the other team—was planted right in the way, waiting for him with his feet spread apart, and for the first time Wyatt could ever remember, it seemed that no matter how fast he ran he was getting no closer to where he was headed. He didn't actually remember being called out, only running, and the way Treat Rendell had been there in his path, waiting with his eyes narrowed to slits.

That was almost the end of the season, and Wyatt was hitless his last two games, missed the record by two stolen bases. He never got a chance to find out what he could do in high school. He didn't play in a single game, was always on academic or disciplinary probation. Midway through his junior year he was diagnosed with a reading disability—Wyatt had trouble connecting things all together when a sentence got more than four or five words long, had for years found it a struggle to interpret anything longer than a movie title—and was dropped into a remedial program with a bunch of mental deficients. The program was called Super-Tools, but was known around school by a variety of other monikers: Stupid-Drools, Super-Fools. Wyatt had come across some graffiti in the men's room once that read
I em in Sooper Tules & I em reel prowd.

He spent his senior year on the fringe, didn't look at people when he walked by them in the hall, didn't try out for baseball. Treat Rendell, on the other hand, made varsity as a sophomore, hit everything in sight, and led the team to two regional championships. Now he was a state trooper, drove a souped-up Crown Victoria, and was married to Ellen Martin, an ice-white blonde, and undoubtedly the best looking of all the cheerleaders Treat was rumored to have banged.

Mrs. Prezar came out. She had only been inside a minute and hadn't bought anything. She was holding her jacket tightly shut with one hand, perhaps against the gusting wind. Her eyes passed right over him a second time, no sign she recognized him or even noticed he was there. She dropped into the front seat, and banged the door shut, backed out so fast she squealed the tires a little.

She hadn't ever looked at him much when he mowed her lawn, either. He remembered one time, after he finished in her yard, he had let himself into the house, through a sliding glass door into the living room. He had been cutting her lawn all morning—she was rich, her husband was an executive with a company that sold broadband capacity, she had the most yard on the street—and Wyatt was sunburned and itchy, grass stuck to his face and arms. She was on the phone. Wyatt stood just inside the door, waiting for her to acknowledge him.

She took her time. She was sitting at a small desk, twirling a coil of yellow hair with one finger, rocking back in her chair, laughing now and then. She had credit cards spread out in front of her and was absentmindedly moving them around with her pinkie. Even when he cleared his throat to get her attention, she didn't so much as glance at him. He waited a full ten minutes, and then she hung up and swiveled to face him, instantly all business. She told him she had been watching him while he worked, and she wasn't paying him to talk to everyone who went by on the sidewalk. Also she had heard him go over a rock, and if the lawn mower blade was chipped, she'd make sure he paid for a new one. The job was twenty-eight dollars.

She gave him thirty and said he was lucky to get any tip at all. When he went out she was laughing on the phone again, moving the credit cards around, pushing them into a pattern, the letter P.

There wasn't much left of Wyatt's cigarette, but he was figuring one more and then he'd go in, when the door opened behind him. Mrs. Badia stepped out, dressed only in her black sweater and the white vest with the name tag pinned to it,
Pat Badia, Manager
. She grimaced at the cold and hugged herself.

"Sarah told me what you said," Mrs. Badia began.

Wyatt nodded, waited. He liked Mrs. Badia okay. He could kid her sometimes.

"Why don't you go home, Wyatt," she said.

He flipped his butt onto the blacktop. "Okay. I'll come back in and make up my hours tomorrow. She isn't working then. " Gesturing towards the store with his head.

"No," Mrs. Badia said. "Don't come back tomorrow. Come back next Tuesday to pick up your last check."

It took him a moment to figure that out, for some reason. Then he got it, and felt an unwholesome heat rising to his face.

Mrs. Badia was talking again. She said, "You can't threaten the people you work with, Wyatt. I'm sick to death of hearing people complain about you. I'm tired of one incident after another." She made a face and glanced back at the store. "She's going through a hard time right now, and you're in there telling her you're going to rip her tongue out."

"I
didn't
say—it was the pin in her—do you want to know what she said to me?"

"Not particularly. What?"

But Wyatt didn't reply. He couldn't tell her what Kensington had said, because he didn't know, hadn't caught all of it ... and he might not have told Mrs. Badia even if he did know. Whatever she had said, it was something about how he couldn't read. Wyatt always tried to avoid talking about the trouble he had with grammar and spelling and all the rest; it was a subject that inevitably brought more embarrassment than he could stand.

Mrs. Badia stared at him, waiting for him to speak. When he didn't, she said, "I gave you as many chances as I thought I could. But at a certain point, it isn't fair to the people you work with, to ask them to put up with it." She stared a while longer, sucking thoughtfully on her lower lip. Then she cast a careless glance at his feet, and as she turned away, she said, "Tie your shoes, Wyatt."

She went back in and he stood there, flexing his hands in the frigid air. He walked slowly along the front of the video store, around the corner, to the side of the store that couldn't be seen from the street. He bent and spat. He tilted another cigarette out of the pack, lit it and inhaled, waited for his legs to stop shaking.

He had thought Mrs. Badia liked him. He had stayed behind late sometimes to help her close up—something he didn't have to do—just because she was easy to talk to. They talked about movies, or about weird customers, and she listened to his stories and opinions as if she were really interested. It had been an unusual experience for him, to get along with an employer. But now here it turned out to be the same old crap in the end. Someone had a personal grievance against him, an axe to grind, and there was no due process, no effort to hear everyone out and get all the information. She said,
I'm sick to death of hearing people complain
, but not which people or what complaints. She said,
I'm tired of one incident after another
, but didn't you have to judge this incident on its own merits, and all the other so-called incidents on theirs?

He flicked his cigarette away—it hit the asphalt and red sparks jumped—turned and started moving. He came around the corner at a fast walk. The windows had a lot of movie posters taped in them. Kensington was staring out at the parking lot through a gap between posters for
Pitch Black
and
The Others
. Her eyes were bloodshot, a little unfocused. He could tell from the moony expression on her face that she believed he was long gone, and before he could stop himself he lunged at the glass and banged his middle finger against it, right up against her face. She jerked back, mouth opening in a shocked O.