The Scamp (13 page)

Where are you going? I say.

I need coffee, he says, and rolls his head around the back of his shoulders, stretching his neck. With bourbon, he says. Then mutters, Self-righteous prick.

He goes through the drive-thru and I order something ridiculous, an iced coconut frappe latte, because it sounds cold and delicious when this town is hot and still. Couper orders his coffee black.

Is that what you think? I ask him.

He holds out his hand. Let me have some of that, he says. It's so cold and sweet I have a head rush. About what? he says after a sip.

About women, I say.

We are parked in the lot, the air on, the windows up, my hair blowing from the dashboard fan.

No, Couper says. Not at all. Then he adds, I been saved by plenty of women.

I bet you have, I say.

Inside the shop on Elm, Couper has to wave his arms to get Carter's attention. He's wearing earplugs and a mask and is running a circular saw. There's sawdust all over the floor, and that warm, sweet wood smell. Couper goes through his introduction, tells him that he's looking for information on a woman he believes Carter dated. A woman who was friends with Jessa Loy.

Jordan, Carter says. Jordan McCollough.

Is she still in town? Couper asks.

No sir, Carter says.

What were the circumstances of her leaving? Couper says. I hold the pad and scribble, but I'm barely taking legible notes at this point.

She moved back home, Carter says. Her mother was ill, and her sister was having a baby.

Back home? Couper prompts.

To Virginia.

When's the last time you spoke? Couper asks.

Not long after she left, he says. She called me once, and then not again. He looks down at the floor and pushes a pile of sawdust aside with the toe of his boot.

Did you try to call her? Couper says.

Once. It just rang.

And not again?

I'm not a chaser, Carter says. He stands with his back to a project, a ladder outline of shelves made from cherry, the wood raw and sanded, the grain pink, and deep rose in the darkest parts.

Didn't that strike you as odd? Couper says.

I watch Carter's eyes rise to the rafters in the shop. No sir, he says, it struck me as hard. Cold, maybe, but no, not odd. We weren't official.

Do you know if she convinced Jessa to leave?

No sir.

Do you know if she knew the teenager, Alyssa?

Do you know I have answered these questions a hundred times? Carter says.

I don't doubt that, Couper says. I'm sorry.

Carter looks at me. His face has a hollow sadness to it, a man in his thirties, alone in a woodshop all day, breathing in the scent of wood, of lacquer, the whir of the saw a constant in his ears. His eyes, though, are bright blue, in them a recognition that only some people have. People who have seen hope pass them by.

Was your father a carpenter? Couper says.

Carter clucks a laugh at him. That's a Bible verse, sir, he says. My father was a plumber.

Are you referring to yourself as Jesus? Couper says.

Sir, I have work to do, Carter says.

I'll take the phone number if you still have it, Couper says. For Jordan McCollough.

I write down the name. I have no idea how to spell it.

If you still have it, Couper says again.

Carter takes the phone off his belt and scrolls through. He reads me a number.

You want my advice? Carter says to Couper.

I watch Couper roll on the balls of his feet. Sure, he says.

Hold on to your girl, he says, nodding my way. And get out of town.

Couper smiles at the floor. Not a chaser, he says. Then, Are there other women who've disappeared?

No, Carter says. But you don't always know, when you just breeze in, what's already going on in a place.

That night, in a Dunkin' Donuts on the outskirts of town, Couper combs through file after file, scrolling a database. We drink coffee, and long after the coffee is gone, he's still searching.

That's not a Virginia or a Georgia number, he says. It's South Carolina.

When he calls, he gets a young man on the phone. No Jordan? Couper says.

No man, I don't know who you're talking about. You got the wrong number.

Hey, how long have you had this number? Couper asks.

I don't know man, a year?

What are you looking for? I say, when he hangs up. I sit across from him with my feet on his side of the booth.

Other missing women. Other unsolved cases. Oddities.

Do you think these guys are telling the truth? I ask.

Their version of it, he says.

Did you find Jordan McCollough? I ask.

Not a trace of her, he says.

I wonder if she's real. Carter described her to Couper, small with light brown hair, greenish eyes. Pretty, he said, dainty. When Couper asked if he had a picture of her, though, Carter said no.

No pictures? Couper said.

No. He shook his head like it was a silly thing to even ask.

We sit there with empty coffee cups until after dark, above us, a TV in the corner of the ceiling, with a Fox News interview show and a headline ticker across the bottom. I keep reading it for clues. Floods, hail in the Midwest. But all I can think about is a small dainty woman showing up in town alone, and then leaving alone, without so much as a ripple behind her.

ten

KHAKI

Florida was the one I took home. She was the beginning, and the end, of everything. She'd never been inside a house in a city, with an upstairs and a sidewalk out front. I learned she'd never been to school, ever, that her mother listed her as homeschooled, but she was really just unschooled. That she could read only a little, taught by her grandmother, but that her mama couldn't read at all. She'd spent all of her fourteen years on that dirt floor, in that back field, with different men in and out of the house, in and out of her.

I left her standing in the kitchen, her knees together, her toes turned in, her hair in her eyes, her hand near her mouth, almost giggling. She was nothing but a goddamn kid, and I was enthralled with her. She was the light of
my world right then, in a pair of cutoff jean shorts. Henderson grabbed my arm above the elbow and pulled me down the hall.

Khaki, he whispered at me. What the fuck?

I wrenched my arm free. I don't care for manhandling.

She needs a safe place, I said.

She's like twelve, he said. He thrust his arm out, pointing back at the kitchen. Her safe place is with her mother.

Well, that's how much you know, I said.

I thought about what I might have been if it had just been me and my mother. With no father, no brother. No uncles, no cousins. Just me and Teddy, alone, in her big car, with me driving. Living anywhere. In an apartment, or a seaside motel, ordering takeout and feeding seagulls off the boardwalk. I imagined myself taking care of her. I imagined her well. Her body with the curves it was meant to have, not the gaunt boniness she was left with.

I thought about the things my mother taught me. How to fill in my eyebrows with a pencil and shape them to an arch. How to write in cursive. To sign a check. To drive. To leave a conversation before a man has the upper hand.

And Rayelle's mother. She would spout off things like, Keep your goddamn legs together, Rayelle, I can see clear up your twat. I could hardly believe my mother and her mother were sisters.

It wouldn't do any good. You could tell Rayelle the same thing twenty times and it wouldn't sink into her thick skull.

Florida was not Rayelle. She was my tiny hurt puppy that I picked up off the street, that I saved from being kicked again.

We cannot have a child living here, Henderson said.

I cocked my head. Why not? I asked. I was a child when I left with you.

You were not, he hissed.

The fuck I wasn't, I said.

He waited while I stared at him. The hallway, crooked, the floor slanting toward the stairs, toward the back of the house into the bathroom, which was the low spot. The floors, a slick dark brown, varnished too many times. The walls, white and dirty and hung with movie posters, unframed.

What else have you lied about? he said.

Wouldn't you like to know.

I could feel it ending, the thing between me and Henderson, which had never been more than a convenience. Love wasn't what put me in his car, wasn't what made me follow him into the South, from college town to college town, apartment to apartment.

That's desperation. That's gnawing your way out of your own cage.

He liked a companion. To have a girl to take to parties who could talk and drink with the guys. To talk to at night. To fuck.

If he'd been smarter, or half as good at lying as I was, we might have gone somewhere. We might have really
made something. But right then, with a fucked-up, dirty-footed child in our apartment, it was pretty much done.

I'd told her to meet me at the gas station to pick up her mama's weed. I put twenty dollars of gas into the truck and waited, parked to the side, smoking a cigarette with the windows down, watching the light fall over the fields, and the clouds of mosquitos coming out, listening to the call of the killdeer, even as the dark came on.

When she leaned in the passenger window, her face was the moon to me. She had nothing with her but what she wore, a pair of shorts and a peasant top that fell off her shoulders, the twenty-dollar bill that would never be used to buy drugs.

What's your name? she said. She had a different drawl, not just Carolina, but something deeper, something backwoods.

Kit, I said.

Like Kit Kat, she said.

Like Kit Carson, I said.

She slid up onto the bench seat. I don't know who that is, she said.

Frontiersman. Robbed a bunch of Indians blind, I told her. The way the blouse fell off her shoulders, I could see her armpit, the round side of her breast against her arm. I had a tiny dime bag of weed to sell her mama. I had nicked some off the top because I didn't like her.

Do you have cash? I asked her.

No. Then, Well, I have my mama's twenty dollars.

I looked off down the road. A pickup, with its bed full of Mexican workers coming back from the fields, rumbled toward us with one headlight out. The road was peaked in the middle, and fell off to either side; it felt like you were falling off, into the ditch, off the side of the world.

What's your mama expect me to do with you? I asked.

That's when she put her hands on my face, bold. Her fingertips at the corners of my eyes, pulling them upward, slanting them. Her thumbs at the edges of my lips.

You got a face like a man, she said.

You got a face like a baby, I said.

I ain't a baby.

How old are you?

Fourteen.

Well, I said and laughed. Baby enough.

She sat sideways on the seat, her feet tucked under her bottom, and scratched her fingernails, ragged and unevenly long, on my bare arms. Then she leaned in and kissed me, full on. Her mouth like pepper and tobacco. Her skin, like velvet.

We drove into the dark, the heat coming off the road, the dashboard warm from sitting in the sun all day. The fields on either side were corn, high enough to dwarf you if you ran through them. The truck dipped through hills and ruts on the back highway. I'd seen her only three times, twice at her house, and then on that third time I tucked her away and kept her. I drove slow, looking
over at her. We kept the windows open and the radio on. We picked up a bluegrass show and Florida rode beside me like she belonged. She asked for a cigarette, one arm wagging out the window, singing along with words that were mostly right.

I'm part Indian, she said when the song was up. She looked at the side of the cigarette I handed her, at the camel.

You are?

Uh-huh. Cherokee on my daddy's side.

Where's your daddy? I asked.

Dead, she said.

The road came to a T and I pulled off to the side by a stop sign. All the roads are the same back there, a cornfield in the dark, same as the ocean, ready to swallow you up.

Mine too, I said.

Drugs, Florida said. Dead in his own vomit. In his own bed.

I smiled. Drunk, I said. Dead on the kitchen floor.

The sound of the corn leaves was like paper chimes, like breathing.

Kiss me again, I said, and she turned and looked over her shoulder at me.

Why don't you do the kissing this time? she said. When I moved in closer, she said, How do I know you're not going to rob me blind?

I might fuck you blind, I said into her hair.

With what? she laughed.

Anything I got.

I wanted her so much I ached. I felt bones I didn't know I had, ringing like a bell, deep inside.

Well go ahead, she muttered, but then swung the truck door open, and went out into the corn, running until it closed up behind her. The moon was low and half full, yellowish, hanging over the field. I started calling, Florida, Florida, parting stalks that were taller than I was, their big leaves hanging out like tongues.

Her age didn't stop me. We lay in the long soft grass on the roadside and when I put my mouth to her she howled like something wild caught in a trap. I thought we were equal, her fourteen, me nineteen, but cut from the same damaged bolt of fabric. It was a leveler, what we'd seen. I meant to make it right for her, sucking on the wound like a witch doctor on a snakebite.

But it didn't stop Henderson either, not her age, or that I considered her mine. It never does.

When men decide they want something, when something tickles them in the darkest place, they will rationalize anything to get what they want.

She seduced me.

She looks older. Acts older. Dresses older. Knows things a kid wouldn't know.

She's emotionally mature.

Florida wouldn't have known the difference between good touch and bad touch if the bad touch electrocuted her.

When she'd been there a week, bathed in my tub, slept in our bed after I'd kicked Henderson to the back bedroom, a tiny half room with enough space for a twin bed, but not enough to close the door, I found him with his hands on her head. His knees open. Her face in his lap. Her shoulders, moving in rhythm.