Bones & All (18 page)

“Come on. You mean to tell me he came halfway across the country to offer you moral support?”

“I've heard of unlikelier things,” I said. “Like, oh, I don't know … trolls under railway bridges feasting on babies? Tomato sauce made out of drunken rednecks?”

Lee shoved his fists in his pockets and kicked at a cigarette butt in the grass. “I'm not kidding around, Maren.”

“Okay. Seriously, then. If he were up to something, he'd have done it the first time I saw him. Right?”

Lee cocked his head, still eyeing me with that doubtful look. He wasn't going to concede that easily. “This wasn't a coincidence,” he said. “There's something about him, Maren. Like he
knows
you.”

I shrugged. “Of course he
knows
me. We talked for hours.”

“You're not putting this together. How did he know you were going to be here?”

I rolled my eyes. “He didn't, Lee. Come on. I want a home-cooked meal and a nice soft bed, all right?” Until I said it I hadn't known how much I needed it. “We'll lock the bedroom door. It'll be fine, I promise. Now what do you want to do next?”

He let out a defeated sigh. “How about some snow cones?”

“Why did you say yes if you didn't want to go to the cabin?” I asked as we got in line at the snow cone stand.

“Just to buy us the time to talk about it.”

I rolled my eyes.

“And here's another thing, Maren. What's with the chewed-up ear and the missing fingers?”

“He's only missing one finger. What, you think you can judge someone for having missing pieces?”

“It depends on how it happened, doesn't it?” He shot me a pointed look. “Did he lose it in a farming accident?”

The little boy in front of us in line turned around and looked up at me with an air of childish curiosity, walleyed behind a pair of Coke-bottle eyeglasses. What boy's ears
don't
perk up at the mention of severed fingers? I tried to smile at him, but I probably wound up looking like I had a toothache. “We'd better talk about something else,” I said.

We ate our root-beer snow cones over by the game booths watching kids waste their parents' money on balloon darts or the Wheel of Fortune, which never, ever landed on the number where they'd stacked their chips. A few feet away we found a Lucky Toss booth, where you had to lob a baseball into a grid of milk cans and hope it didn't bounce off the rims. There were shelves all around the booth, and only one sort of toy you could win: an ET softie.

No one was playing. The girl working the booth sat on a stool reading a magazine, looking so bored her expression seemed almost angry. The boy who'd been in front of us in line for snow cones tossed his paper cone into a trashcan and went marching up to the Lucky Toss booth. “How much?” he asked.

“Three tickets, three tries,” the girl replied. “You feeling lucky today, goggle-eyes?” She couldn't have been more than sixteen, but there was too much experience written on her face. It wasn't the eyeliner. Someone had been very cruel to her, not just once but over a period of years, and now she was going to pay it forward.

The boy didn't answer her, just pulled three tickets out of his jeans pocket and laid them on the counter. “You're wasting your money,” she said as she tossed him the first ball. It skimmed over his fingertips and he went scrambling over the pavement after it.

A moment later Lee dipped his toe under the moving ball so it came up gently into the air and landed in the boy's hands. He gave Lee a grateful look—which fell on me instead—and hurried back to the booth.

The first shot went awry, and so did the second. I felt Lee cringing beside me. We wanted him to win.
Come on, kid. You can do it.

He tried a different tack on his final toss, underhanding the ball so it nearly touched the roof of the booth before it landed with a satisfying
thunk
at the bottom of a can in the center of the grid. He jumped and whooped and clapped his hands. “I won! I won!”

The girl folded her arms and glared down at him. “You couldn't have.”

“But it's in that can over there, see?” It was a little bit heartbreaking to hear him say this, still believing she would play fair with him. “I made it. I won.”

“No, you didn't,” sneered the Lucky Toss girl. “Touch your nose and see if you don't miss.”

I could see on the boy's face that he'd been taunted like this every single day at school, and also that he'd never get used to it. He reached for an ET doll on a low shelf along the side and clasped it to his chest. “I won it fair and square.”

“No.” She snatched the toy out of the boy's hands and put it on a shelf high above his head. “You cheated.”

“I didn't!” he cried.

She made a face at him, turned and leaned over the grid of milk cans, plucked out the winning baseball, and dropped it in a bucket. “What're you gonna do about it, huh? That's it. Go and cry to your mommy,” she said as the boy hurried away from the booth.

Lee threw his paper cone in the trash. “Keep an eye on that kid,” he said. “I'm gonna win that toy for him.” He went up to the counter and the girl flashed him a smile that turned my stomach. She hadn't noticed us watching her. I wondered how she'd have treated that little boy if she had.

I watched the boy walk up to a woman in line at the funnel cake stand, head hanging, and when she draped an arm across his shoulders I saw him look up into her eyes and tell her what had happened.
Fight for him,
I thought.
Don't let her get away with it
.

“You trying to win something for your girlfriend?” the Lucky Toss girl was saying, lifting her chin in my direction.

“She's just a friend,” Lee replied. I knew he didn't mean anything by it one way or the other, but it still made me crumple to hear him say it.

Now the boy was in tears. His mother stepped out of line, led him by the hand to a park bench out of the chaos of the carnival, and let him hide his face in her soft pink blouse. She had no intention of coming over here. Petty disappointments to better prepare him for the big ones—she had a kind face, but she was that sort of mother. Mama would have done the same.

Lee underhanded the ball the way the little boy had done. He missed the first try and made the second. “Can I win twice with the third toss?”

“You're not supposed to,” she said, “but no one will know if I let you.” (Nor did anyone see me roll my eyes.) She gave him the third ball—letting her fingers linger on his—and it too landed at the bottom of a can.

“Hey,” he said as she handed him two ET plushies. “What's there to do for fun around here besides this dumb-ass carnival?”

“I get off at eleven,” she said.

I turned away in disgust. For a moment people passed in colorful blurs across my vision, and all the music and chatter of the carnival dwindled to a distant hum. Then I felt something soft at my ear. “ET phone home,” Lee was saying. “Nah, he changed his mind—he wants to go with you instead.” He pressed the doll into my hands and looked around. “You said you'd watch him for me, Maren. Now where'd he go?”

I pointed to the park bench behind the funnel cake stand. “He's over there with his mother.”

Emboldened by Lee's success, a group of boys went up to the Lucky Toss counter, so the girl didn't notice him heading for the boy on the park bench. I followed a few steps behind him, holding the ET toy with cold and sticky root-beer fingers.

“Excuse me,” I heard him say. “I believe this belongs to you.”

The boy's face lit up, and he held out his hands. In a moment his mother had sized Lee up, and she flushed because a stranger had done the thing it had never occurred to her to do.

Lee reached out and ruffled the boy's hair. “Someday you'll be big enough to give it back, and you won't be taking any crap from anybody, will you?”

The boy shook his head vigorously. “What's your name?” his mother asked.

“Lee.”

“Thank you, Lee.” She caught sight of me over Lee's shoulder and smiled. “Look, Josh—Lee won an ET for his girlfriend.” She cupped his cheeks, brushed the tears away with her thumbs, and nuzzled him close. “You both won tonight, didn't you?”

*   *   *

We waited in the truck until the carnival closed. After Lee gave the ET doll to Josh he'd circled back to the Lucky Toss booth and arranged to meet the girl in the park across the road from the carnival.

Finally it was eleven, and from the truck we watched the bright lights on the rides all blink out at once. “You can go meet up with your ol' pal Sully,” Lee said. “I'll see you back here.” He took the keys, hopped out of the cab, and strode across the empty soccer field.

Yeah, right. I waited a couple of minutes, and then I got out and followed him. There was a chain-link fence around the playground, and I hid behind a sign by the gate marked
GILDER COMMUNITY PARK
. The fairground across the street was dark and silent, the steeple turned blue by the moonlight.

The girl was sitting on one of the swings, her back to me. She'd changed out of her red carnival uniform into something two sizes too small and covered in rhinestones. Lee sat down on the swing beside her.

“I never got your name,” I heard her say.
Like it matters.

“Mike. What's yours?”

“Lauren. So, like, who was that girl you were with?”

“I told you, she's just a friend.”

“Where is she now?”

“She went home.”

“So, like, you're just visiting?”

“Yeah. So where's all this fun you were promising me?”

I saw her point to a deluxe jungle gym at the far corner of the playground. It was made of wood and shaped like a castle, with towers linked by rope-suspension walkways. “There's a tire swing under that tower. No one will see us there.” So she led him by the hand to her doom. Part of me wanted to follow them and watch him do it.

I heard soft footsteps in the grass behind me and turned around. Sully stood there with his hands in his pockets. I couldn't see his face in the darkness, but when he spoke his voice was gentle. “Come away from there, Missy.” I rose from my heels, and together we walked across the soccer field.

There was another pickup truck parked beside ours, older and red and half rusted over, with a miniature hula girl dancing from the rearview mirror. I peeked in the passenger's-side window and noticed that the seat was covered in navy blue oilcloth printed with lemons and limes. I smiled. “This is your truck?”

“My truck or my castle, dependin' on how you look at it.” He chuckled.

For a few minutes Sully showed me around his moving castle, the stash of beef jerky in the glove compartment and the Hawaiian-print curtains and the blue ceramic jar of pipe tobacco hidden under the seat—trying to distract me, I guess—but Lee took much less time than it would have taken me. I watched him emerge from the darkness under the jungle gym, and as he strode across the soccer field I saw he carried a water bottle and a grocery bag stuffed with the shreds of her clothing, the heel of one shoe poking through the plastic. He tossed the bag into a trashcan and paused for a drink of water. I watched him as he gargled and swallowed. Then he pressed the back of his hand to his lips, to wipe away the last trace of her.

Finally he came over to join us. “You ready?” Sully asked. “Cabin's not much more than an hour north of here.”

“Sure,” Lee replied. “We'll follow you.”

Sully hopped up into his cab, turned the key in the ignition, and gave me a wave. “Talk to you in a while, then.”

When we pulled back onto the road I half expected Lee to drive in the opposite direction, but he didn't. In the warm summer night we caught the strains of bluegrass coming through Sully's open windows. “How do you do it, when it's a girl who likes you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you kiss her first?”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters to her, doesn't it? For a second or two at least.”

He shot me a mocking look. “What, are you jealous?”

I rolled my eyes. “Don't be ridiculous.”

For a while we sat in silence, and I tried to pick apart this feeling I was having. How could I be jealous of Loathsome Lauren the Lucky Toss girl?

I wasn't jealous. Not really. I just wanted Lee's attention—if not forever, then at least for the seven and a half minutes it would take him to polish me off.

“You were awfully neat about it,” I said. It was easy last time; he'd done it in the bathroom.

“I'm not, really. I took off my shirt and threw it in the grass. Then I used hers to clean off my face.” He paused. “I haven't eaten that many girls.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Why is that surprising? Women don't give me so many reasons to hate them. They're more honest. Not always, but most of the time.”

I thought of Samantha, who'd left me stranded in the Walmart parking lot, and of Lauren the Lucky Toss girl. I thought of Mama. “I don't know about that.”

“All right, so I eat the exceptions.” He paused. “Did your mother lie to you?”

I folded my hands over the ET plushie in my lap. “I guess not. Not exactly. But she hid things from me, and isn't that almost the same thing as lying?” Lee shrugged. “What?” I said.

“I'm not gonna agree with you just because you want me to.”

“You don't have to disagree just for the sake of it either.”

He flicked me a smile as we pulled onto a wooded dirt road, Sully's bluegrass still tickling at the midnight silence. I wanted to talk about something else, so I said, “I've never had a stuffed animal before.”

“No? I thought every girl had loads of them.”

“Not me. My mother never let me have any, because if I got one then I'd want more, and she said it would be too much to pack.” Jetsam. That's what you call the stuff they throw off a ship into the sea.