The Scamp (14 page)

And even then, the view of her from behind, her narrow waist and her tiny round ass sitting on her bare feet, was enough to prick me with desire.

I was the one who touched her. Who put my hands on her head, her hips, my mouth on her.

I slammed the door and heard the scramble of feet and knees and zippers in the back room.

Henderson said to me, It's not what you think.

I said, I ought to kill you with my own hands.

And Florida stood in the doorway like a goddamn vixen, her hair over one eye and one shoulder, her soles dusting the floor with just a whisper as she walked past me and Henderson in the hallway. I stood up to his shoulder, glaring at him. She grazed my arm as she went into the room we had claimed as ours.

Brush your teeth, I said to her.

She had a gash in the back of her calf, a wound that had never closed properly and left a divot you could sink your finger, or your tongue, into. Her mother had been chasing her with a knife. When Florida tripped and fell, running in the yard behind their dirt-floor house, her mother stabbed the knife into the back of her leg.

The whole blade sunk in, she told me. Just the handle was sticking out.

What did you do? I said.

I walked back into the house like that. I could feel it wobbling. My mother was screaming.

She pulled it out herself, and wrapped her leg in a kitchen towel till the wound closed slowly, leaving a dent behind.

We lay in bed with a full moon coming through the blinds. She told me her mother said a full moon in your eye makes you crazy. It shone in white stripes across us both.

But I like it, she said.

I ran my fingers down the center of her torso, between her breasts, down her belly. Why was your mother chasing you? I said. I knew these stories. They didn't need a reason. But I wanted more, of her words, her voice, her mouth moving in the dark.

She started to tremble. I could feel it in her belly, in her thighs, between. Then she snickered.

Do you have a knife? she said, sly.

Honey, you know I have a gun, I said. I tightened my hand on her mound and she squirmed beneath it.

I slept with her husband, she said.

I let go, loosened my fingers, but left the heel of my palm there, on the pubic bone.

When? I said.

She swallowed. The tremble came back.

I was twelve, she said.

Your mother's husband slept with her twelve-year-old daughter, I said, turning it around, taking Florida out of the action, trying to make her see. And she stabbed you, I said.

I took my hand away and slid both of my hands down her arms, out to either side. The moonlight had shifted, her face in darkness, but our bodies alight. I hovered over her.

I will never, ever hurt you, I said.

Henderson made us leave. Sitting at the kitchen table with his computer open and a cigarette going and a full pot of coffee, he said, You're going to have to get out.

And go where?

He shook his head. Doesn't matter to me.

I pay to live here, I said.

You can pay to live someplace else, Henderson said.

I made her shower with the door unlocked and partway open. I was afraid she would crawl out the window, would slip down the drain without me knowing. I feared opening the bathroom door to find only steam, an empty tub, an open window. That she would disappear from me forever.

I put it out there, that fear, into the stars. Into the moonlight above our bed. And it came back around, twice as hard.

When Henderson left for class and she came out of the bathroom clean and dripping and naked, I took every hidden stash of money there was. Any twenty-dollar
bill I'd tucked somewhere for safekeeping. All the weed I had portioned out to sell. I took his grandfather's watch and pawned it. It was worth only its gold, and it wasn't all gold. They gave me seventy-five dollars for it. And I took the truck.

I figured maybe we were even after that.

For that little while, those few short months we were together, we lived in a room. One room, a block from the ocean. It was dark. It had one bed, an old heavy TV that brought in only a grainy shopping channel. The shower never drained well. The sink was out in the room, standing on spindly chrome legs. Florida ate a lot of potato chips and drank a lot of Pepsi and watched a lot of
QVC
. I would find her flipping through the Gideon Bible out of boredom. The verses she knew, she had memorized. If I pointed to a passage, she struggled through the words.

The manager cut me a deal. He sat in the office and I stood on the other side of the desk. I couldn't afford to stay long. Wasn't sure I wanted to, but I needed to bargain.

I won't fuck you, I said to him, figuring he made these deals all the time, depending on who moved through town and what he thought he could get away with. I was partially wrong.

I don't want you to touch me, he said. He had a constant sniffle. His throat, wet with nasal drip.

He had a boy to touch him. A kid. A guy who was maybe twenty, in a room like ours, with one bed, one
vinyl chair, one lousy TV. He told me to stand behind him while the kid sucked him off.

I don't want to see you, he said to me. Or hear you. Or smell you, he said.

He gave me a scarf to tighten around his neck.

What if I accidentally kill you? I said.

He looked me up and down. You? he said.

I choked him to perfection. Liked the burn in my arms when I pulled. I could do it with my eyes closed. I wondered what he was paying the boy. If what the kid got was just a free shitty room.

The third time, I cinched the scarf harder. The ends of it wrapped tight around each fist, my arms hard with muscle, and my knee propped against the back of his chair. He tapped his foot, a warning to let up, and I leaned into his ear.

You're going to have to pay me cash, I said, in addition to the room.

I watched the boy's eyes widen. He was clean, with short hair, blond and old-fashioned looking, a look I expect the manager had handpicked. He looked like a Hardy Boy, in a striped tee. A pair of faded jeans.

Well aren't you smart? the boy said to me after. We stood outside on the sidewalk, where I lit a cigarette, and he held his hand out for one.

You can do better than him, I said. I never knew what his deal was, the kid. He had a brittle look to him. Like the old-fashioned veneer could splinter and fall away. I didn't even know his name.

There are men who want to fuck you. Who want to watch you. Who want to touch or be touched, who want a pretty little thing, in a skirt and knee-highs, or a filthy whore in heels.

What I learned to spot, and to deal with, were the others, the ones who require something more. The men who are empty or aching with some invisible damage they're working out on the surface of their skin. A belt around the neck. A spiked heel in the small of the back. A pillow so tight against their face it'd take their breath away. These were the ones I didn't have to touch, except with an apparatus, a yardstick, a brand. Who wanted to be blindfolded and bound. Tied to a chair like a hostage and pissed on.

That I could deal with.

When I left him, the motel manager, three months later at the end of summer, he was bereft.

He wasn't going to find another like me.

But it was time to go. When Florida learned that her stepfather was dead, shot in the head and his throat cut, so deep, she told me, so deep it nicked the spinal cord, she collapsed into me with weeping. She was racked, her torso spasming with sobs.

I had found him right where I thought I would. Where he didn't think he was doing anything wrong, not doing any real harm. The same man who didn't think anything of plucking a twelve-year-old daughter from his own wife.

I could have waited all night. Hot and still. Crouched against a wall with the words
BONG WATER
spray-painted on the yellow brick. The pavement, stained with oil, paint, sparkling with bits of broken glass. I boiled myself down to glass, invisible until the light catches it, until the shard is buried in your foot and you're bleeding. I didn't even smoke. My breathing slowed, my body barely moving.

He came after dark. The way I expected. Not behind the building, but near it. To meet another guy, a kid really, who could have been me as a boy, a shorts-wearing, shaggy-haired kid with a bag of dope small enough to fit in your palm. I watched them exchange. And when the kid left in a loud car, I stood up.

When you're five foot two and blond, with your legs hanging out of shorts, when you put your hands in the back pockets and push your chest out and say, Hey, to a guy in a parking lot, that guy never thinks,
This girl is going to kill me.

Ever.

He thinks,
Hey
, right back at you.

He answered me, surprised.

Come here, I said, with my head cocked. I crossed my feet.

He thought I was a hooker, another druggie, looking for a quick fix with him. That maybe I'd offer my own exchange. Maybe he'd just get lucky.

I lured him with no resistance. Up close, I could see he wasn't even forty. His hair was shaved to a shadow,
his face pocked deep. He smelled like cheap, skunky beer, his teeth and lips tobacco-stained. He was missing an eyetooth.

Hey.

I thought about his hands on her. His hands were dirty, the kind that doesn't come clean. Stained with resin and spray paint. Hard and unyielding. Hands that would hurt even when he tried to be gentle. Too rough for a baby or a dog, or a little girl.

I wanted him to know who I was. I tilted my head, a come-on. His hands were out at his sides, ready to grab. If I had to guess, his dick was already hard. I thought about cutting it off, and stuffing it in his own mouth.

But instead, I moved quick. I crooked my arm like I was going to put it around him, like I was leaning up for a kiss, to whisper something in his leathery ear. The only light back there was from above the store, shooting up into the trees, and leaving us in shadow. When I reached for him, he came right in, and I pushed his head back with the nose of the gun in his temple, before he could say anything, before I told him who I was. I held it so tight, I could feel my own pulse in my fingertips.

It wasn't enough. My head was clanging, deaf from the shot, my mouth tasted metal, and my teeth were vibrating against each other.

He lay there at my feet, empty, and I wanted to kill him again. Right then, I understood every gruesome hate-filled murder I'd ever read about. The woman who shot her husband not once, but fifty times, his gut like
a sponge. Dead over dead over dead. I didn't feel bad. I wanted more.

But I couldn't risk another bullet. I pulled a folding knife out of my pocket instead, and slashed below his Adam's apple. In the dark, I couldn't tell how deep it went. I only knew how it made my arm feel: the pull of my own strength through his flesh. My arm ached into my shoulder socket. I tucked the gun in between my shorts and my underpants. I held the knife in my right hand. And walked.

It was nothing like Holly.

I killed Holly with my own hands, with effort that left me sore for days. My body raging with endorphins and then slack. I slept hard after Holly. I was hungry.

I left him on the pavement and walked up over a grassy hill behind the store, past dumpsters, and out onto a different street. I wore sneakers that I would discover the faintest spots of blood on. I'd been careful, but not careful enough. I cut down an alley between a barbershop and an apartment building, where I dropped the open knife, point down, through the hole on the top of a rain barrel. I heard it plunk in, sinking. I checked my hands. Clean. My shirt, black, and clean to my eye. I would burn it later with the sneakers.

On the sidewalk, out of the alley, I passed an older man taking garbage cans to the curb. He nodded at me in the yellow streetlight. I said hello, lowered my eyes, smiled. I saw a woman walking a small dog who sniffed my bare knee. I watched their mouths for talking. My ears, a fuzz of white noise.

I had left my truck a mile away. On a side street by a church whose yard was fenced with white pickets. I got in and drove, back to the water, but again, left it a mile or so away on a side street by a closed flower shop. In the window, arrays for a funeral, a wedding.

I walked to the ocean and sunk into the sand. I put my feet in, and then my hands, my arms. I went down to my knees and leaned my face in, the surf creeping up around me, salt burning my eyes and the insides of my nose. No one else was out there, not a couple making out, not a stray dog. Nothing but the sound of the water, muffled to me, with the static in my head.

I waited to tell her. And before I did, she heard.

Why? I said. Florida, I called out over her crying, in that dingy room, the TV just a crackle of noise, the single light missing one of its two bulbs.

I felt her kiss me when she left, but it wasn't enough to wake me, not enough to get me out of that swayback bed to follow her, to grab her, to save her.

When I left that motel, I left three bodies behind. One back home. One in a parking lot. And one in the ocean, where I never intended to lose her, my own mermaid, floating, singing, with her hair like a halo around her baby face.

By the time I left there, I could feel my own veneer splitting. I was becoming transparent, harder and harder to find.

eleven

RAYELLE

We leave Summersville in the morning, headed for the site of another girl found, this time on the banks of a river. They found only parts of her, Couper says. A femur, a mandible.

Just a mandible? I say.

Sometimes, that's all that's left, he says. Animals.

Who was she? I say.

Well, he says, there were a few possibilities at first, a woman, a child. A hunter missing from a few towns away. But the mandible points to the woman. Caitlin, he says. From dental records.

What if it's someone else's femur? I say.

He rubs his brow, squinting into the sun. It could be, he says.

We'd stayed out by the creek until almost dawn. The closest camper, to the right of us, had left while we were in town, and we came back to an empty spot of land in the trees, a fast-moving creek, sun in hot circles on the grass and bits of cool, damp shade underneath the pines. We lay on a blanket, listening to the creek, eating sandwiches, drinking beer from cans. I lay stretched out, my head and feet were off into the grass. Couper curled on his side next to me, leaning over, looking down.