The Scamp (3 page)

Sometimes, a girl dissipates like smoke rising up into the air. So thin, you can't see her anymore. She becomes a cloud. You breathe her in.

I am a safe house for women. I have a reputation for kindness.

When they learn who I am, where I live, they come to me, sometimes in the night, sometimes in the full light of day. Sometimes with only the clothes on their backs. And sometimes, even those are gone.

Who will love you at the end of everything? Who will take your face and hold your temples, wash you clean and kiss you to sleep?

I will.

I will love you harder than anything has ever loved you, even your mama. And it will be the last and best thing you'll ever know.

I had taken a new name and rented a small house on the edge of a field, with huge trees that lined the narrow road. The house had been for farmhands, on what was left of a farm that was no longer worked—just an outbuilding was left, a big square kitchen and a front room. One bedroom upstairs. A small, slanted porch. The owner, a woman in her eighties who had moved in with her son out in the suburbs. I rented cheap, and paid her in cash. I told her I was an artist and needed just a small space for myself, to paint and make sculptures.

A sculpture of bone. A painting in blood.

An installation only ever seen in pieces, never in its entirety. A bunch of clues too loose for the locals—too stupid, too lacking in vision and empathy—to really see.

There were near misses. A hitchhiking girl I picked up and drove to the bus station. I trailed her long hair on my finger as she got out, barely letting go. Or a woman who came to me for one night only, and never told me her name. I gave her my bed, ran her a bath, made her breakfast with eggs from the couple of brown hens who roamed the yard. She had skin like coffee, her hair, matted and dull. She stared at me with a desperation I knew I could soothe, but I never laid hands on her. I never read what ate her insides, what was looming, burgeoning beneath her skin, and threatening to kill her. She left, running. The same way she came.

There were others. An Oregon trail of girls, set adrift down a river, scattered in a ravine. Clean bones along the roadside, where anyone might mistake them for any other kill.

And then Montana came. Wild and free and big-hearted. Montana had eyes like the sky, and hair like corn silk. I loved her like no one had ever loved her. I gave her a new name, and a new soul. And let her die with that rapture in her heart, in her thighs. Because nothing but water and sky comes after that.

I just want to disappear, she whispered at my table, her hands outstretched to mine.

Disappear into me.

Montana had left behind a baby. She ran in the night, the baby asleep in his crib, his chapped face turned toward the light coming from the open door.

I'm the worst kind of woman, she said.

Her belly was scarred around the navel, a thin smile above her pubic hair, where the baby had slid his way out.

The worst kind.

I'd seen the worst kind of woman. It wasn't Montana.

Her husband wasn't even home when she left the baby alone in the house. Weeks before, she'd thought to kill them all. Might have set the house on fire. He don't wake up, she said. Then, I might have stayed. I could have gone that way. Sleeping, she said, breathing in the smoke. All of us just gone. In the end, she said, she was just running. Once her feet hit the pavement, she gained a momentum she hadn't known she had.

He's not mean to the baby, she told me.

He's not anything anymore, I said.

Her hands were hot with the fire she never started, the heat of anger and disappointment under her skin, waiting to burn its way free.

The baby was a boy. Blond and blue-eyed and big-boned like Montana. He was two, and wild. He threw things at her, toys, a bottle, rocks aimed at her head, because he'd seen his daddy do it. Knew to point at her crotch and say
beaver
, and would slap her breast when he was mad.

What will they say about me? she asked.

They'll say you got out alive, I told her. In her hands, I felt the fire that would have consumed her. Her own work. Her own escape. I gave her another.

It didn't matter. In my house, in my bed, under my care, she became something more than a mother, more
than a wife. She was mine. Newly named, loved hard, and fed well. I put her together only to take her apart. I came just short of baptizing her, which I did, in a way, washing her in the river. She just wasn't there to know it.

At first, there were layers and layers for Montana to fall through. Lying on the bed and letting it happen, coming for the first time, after all the sex in cars and beds with boys and men. A teacher, she told me. Some girls are marked up with an invisible script over their bodies, inviting touch. I had to peel her down to a tight, tiny core. There was a long, languid week in between when she went slack. When no one said the baby's name. And no one threw a rock. I watched her open wet eyes after a bath, coming to the surface.

Montana, I said.

I made it a point not to remember their real names. To let the details of their previous lives fall off of them like dead snakeskin.

When I knew she had let it go, the baby's cry, the possessive hand on her cunt, the fear that breathed in and out of her skin, smelling like acrid oil and sweat, if only for a moment, a long day in the sun of my backyard, naked, and pink, and new—I set her free. In every direction. I loved her till she was empty, and I let her go with that.

I had set myself free, walking away from a deserted beach. The sky gray and the water green, and my heart
a swirling wreck of loss. I pieced myself together after that. Dead, stitched. I was parts of everything I'd lost. A hollow shell, empty and white gold.

I tipped Montana back on the grass and did it quickly, with a garrote made from a silk scarf, and no resistance. Not for me. I'd given her nothing but a hot bath, a soft bed, the tip of my tongue along the tender inside of her thigh. Montana's eyes, so round and blue, bruised and popped. New freckles appeared under the flesh, like black stars. Her tongue, purple, protruding. I left no other marks on her. Not a cut, not a bruise. Not a hard hand on her face or her bottom, telling her what to do. Just the welts from mosquitoes in the woods, the scratch of low thorns on her ankles.

I used a long, curved boning knife and worked the joints. One hand, cut at the wrist, I washed in the water, the beautiful skin gleaming, and I let it go, rumbling through the rapids, sinking. Other parts I left out as bait. There were fox and coyotes in the woods, bears, and huge circling turkey vultures. By morning, everything was gone, carried off to dens and thickets, licked clean by animal tongues. A rib cage, a pelvis, the knuckles of spine.

I did the head last. I'd thought about snipping a long piece of that silver hair, but it wasn't Montana's hair I wanted. I washed her face and head in the river, my arms aching, dunking it under, the blood trailing downstream in ribbons, dissipating in the fast water, over rocks, feeding the fish and crawdads.

In the end, I didn't take anything.

I wasn't sentimental. And I wasn't looking for trophies.

Years ago, I stood at the tip of South Lake, where it comes together like the point of a heart. I had cast another body far out into the deepest parts. Small and weighted. The water so deep it couldn't be measured, the middle green like jade, or emerald. In the full sun, it didn't reflect, only absorbed, glowing from within like a jewel.

I crawled out of the lake naked, new. I padded through the pines on my hands and knees, up a rocky path and into the backyard of my own empty house. My childhood home, dark, without parents' voices, or a brother's. Not a soul left but a cousin too stupid to see the gifts laid out at her feet. She slept in my bed. Curly-headed and dumb.

Outside, I'd washed my feet, my knees and hands in gasoline, rubbing at the sap. I rinsed off the lake water, the dirt from the trail, with the garden hose, the water aching cold and metallic, running downhill to a public drain. Inside, over the toilet, I cut my nails so short my fingertips throbbed, beating with my heart. Any blood left behind, flushed away. I showered the heat back into my body in the downstairs bath, but by then, there was nothing left to wash away.

Upstairs off the hallway, the bedroom my mother died in.

In the kitchen, the floor where my father fell, so drunk he choked on his own blood and never woke up.

The backyard, where my only brother blew his face off with a cherry bomb.

Death surrounded me like a fog.

I wanted my own ending.

When I slipped into bed behind sweet, drowsy Rayelle, she pushed back into me, and I gave her what she wanted, what she expected between us. Her body slow and opening beneath my hands. She tried to talk, but I didn't want to hear her voice. I wanted the white silence of sleep.

I thought about the same upturned nose, the same look of dumb trust on the face of the kid in town.

I want to show you something, I had said to her.

You were gone a long time, Rayelle mumbled, but I hushed her with my own mouth.

Go to sleep, I said.

For Montana, I wore a dress, high-waisted and soft, something she might have worn herself, covered in blue cornflowers. When we went down to the water, I lifted it over my head. I was naked underneath, shining in the moonlight. She gasped, but I was so used to being naked, so used to my own hard body, that it felt like nothing to me. I hung the dress on a low branch where it blew in the breeze. I knew what she wanted. I would give it to her.

I burned the garrote in the backyard fire pit.

The dress, I put on again, my body clean from the rush of cold river water.

The knife, wiped down with bleach. I put it back in the drawer with the others. It was the only one with a white handle, plastic pearl, nonporous. A blade curved in a beautiful, shining arch.

What they found of Montana was a foot. There was no flesh left on it. Just the anklebone and some of the metatarsals, not all of them. They sent it to Alexandria for testing, but before that, there was a lot of speculation—a hunter, a missing woman from Knoxville. The foot was too large to be a child's. People hiked by the river all the time. There were banks where anyone could fall, could disappear, tumbling to an unknown death. But why only a foot? Why not the entire body? What animals could have carried off such large pieces? What kind of animal could take a whole body apart?

By then, I was long gone. A different name. Another town. Another state. Nevada. Georgia. Dakota. Tennessee.

Montana bore a scar on her wrist, twisted like a snake, where she'd caught her hand in a metal screen door, trying to escape. They all bore scars. Montana had broken a shoulder. Her eye had been beaten shut. When she came to me, barefoot and running, the deepest scars were on her heart.

Her heart I could heal.

Her heart, I could have kept, but I let it go.

I tried to keep their flowers, to name their birds. For Montana, bitterroot, a beautiful bright pink burst. I
grew them from seeds in the sunny back windows, and cut them, kept them on the table in a glass bowl. Montana's bird, a meadowlark. Its belly bright yellow, and its throat open like a flute.

The day after, I took bitterroot by the handful and scattered it on the river. I looked, but nothing was left. Not a knuckle, not a joint. I went down at dusk, unafraid to be seen, the flowers tight in my hand. I lived here, a small woman carrying flowers through a field. I could be picking raspberries or wild strawberries. Not looking for bones. I stood on the shore with my feet warm on a big slanted rock, and let the flowers go, fluttering onto the water. They floated and moved south in a wavy line, like a row of ducks. One stuck. The broken branch of a tree lay across the rapids, making a triangle of water that pooled. One flower stayed there, its head open and pink. It looked up at the sky. I wondered how long it could live there, lodged, drinking in the river.

three

RAYELLE

When I was eight, Khaki, who was eleven, and fast, dared me to huff gasoline out of the lawn mower, pushing the back of my head down toward the hole, the fumes, heady and dense. After, I lay back on the grass, the whole world spinning at warp speed, until I threw up all the ice cream I'd eaten at the barbecue. I remember her watching me like I was a subject in an experiment. Her eyes squinted in observation. Huh, she said when I puked.

She was that kid. The one who could get you to do anything. I was the other kid, the one who would do it.

She ran away when I was twelve. When my body was going faster than my brain. When I needed her the most. She left with a boyfriend who had a car, was going to college. There was no one left at home for her.

She was just the first one of us trying to outrun her own dark shadow.

We swim without making noise, passing each other in the middle, with no splash. Couper goes in naked, me in my bra and panties, and I wish then that I'd put on black or lace ones, and not just plain white. I see him only from behind as he slips in, silent. The water, dark and opaque.

Music comes from one room, and the voice of a guy laughing. The thump of a back door that leads out to the beach.

Underwater, I feel like nothing, like a string uncoiling, arms and legs like electricity. I swim to the deep end, and bob up next to him where he hangs on to the side. The water feels like velvet.

What happens when they catch you? I say.

He smirks. The first time? he says. You can talk your way out of it. After that, they fine you. Trespassing.

I bob, but keep my eyes on him. What are you, some kind of pool-sneaking outlaw? I say.

I prefer to think of myself as an urban pioneer, he says, straight-faced, until I start laughing. It feels good, the laugh, the water, his foot underneath the surface, up against my skin.

What happens when they catch you? he says.

It kicks the air out of me.

There were no charges to be filed, I say, and I manage to smile, but it's hard, and if he looked close it would be
grotesque, that smile, all teeth and stretch, the tendons in my neck hard and popped. I dip my head underwater then, smooth out my hair. Think about not breathing.