The Scamp (31 page)

But I am sorry, I think, and I don't know how not to be sorry. I don't know how to get out of my own way. I pay her, and she gives me a bookmark with last month's calendar on it, the Sunday dates in June all in red ink.

I hear the pigtailed musician talking in between songs. Her voice high-pitched and drippy. A real rural Southern drawl. Like molasses and sunshine. Like bourbon with honey.

In front of Schweitzer's, I grab Couper's elbow, but he just nods at me, at his side, and doesn't interrupt their conversation. Mr. Schweitzer is thin, not as tall as Couper, and neat, his hair cut with a hard part, the way a barber does. He wears a short-sleeved shirt tucked into tailored pants, and a slender leather belt. The cigars are still going, pungent and strong up close. Schweitzer wears shiny shoes with tassels. He tells Couper the story of the fountain. From the sidewalk we can see only the backs of the girls. He says when he first came to Delta, in the sixties, the statues were plain stone, and a committee had them painted in the early seventies, to give the girls a fleshlike color. Part of Delta's first revival. But a group of church ladies—Presbyterians, he says—thought it was obscene, that the color on the girls made the flesh too real-looking. So the town voted to have them painted over. For a while, he says, they had blue sashes painted on. He motions with his hand, up over his shoulder, down around the pelvis. But they painted over them.

The poor fountain girls, Mr. Schweitzer says. They've been dressed and undressed. No one knows what to do
with them, he says. I can't place his accent. He doesn't sound like the other people around here. No one really wants them, he says. But no one will let them go, either.

He has a mustache that I didn't notice right away, thin, right above his lip, and gray. He wears glasses with black frames. A gold tie with tight checks.

I wait for Couper to introduce me with my full name, my whole backstory, but all he says is, Mr. Schweitzer has a place for us.

To stay?

Upstairs, Couper says, and nods. Above the store.

Couper, I say, wagging his arm, but before I can say anything to him, about the books, about the musician, he takes me upstairs.

The apartment is laid out like the set of an old television show. Schweitzer has it furnished with items from the store, a living room set from the sixties, square and avocado, with an oval coffee table and two-tiered oval end tables that are maple but look space-age. There's a pole lamp in the corner, brass from floor to ceiling with two yellow plastic globes hanging off it. The kitchen has a table from the fifties, a white laminate top that looks like cracked ice, and curved chrome legs, red vinyl chairs. Everything is in good condition. Not perfect, but well cared for. There's just the living room and the kitchen, with a counter and pass-through between, one little bedroom with a queen-size bed and a low cherry dresser with an oval mirror, a bathroom with pink and black
tile. The medicine cabinet, arched like a church window with scrolls in the corners and, inside, a slot for a razor to drop into the wall.

Schweitzer stands in the open doorway while we look around, and then says he'll be downstairs.

It's extraordinarily neat, as though no one had lived here since the furniture was new. It's clean from not being touched, like a showroom, but fifty years old. Couper opens the heavy avocado-and-turquoise drapes on the windows that face the street. There's a record player on a low square table, and a milk crate of records tucked below. Three windows all together, touching. Outside, the sidewalk, the green.

I think I might cry if he doesn't take it. If we can't sleep in a real bed with a full-size open window, or fry an egg on a real stove in the morning.

What do you think? Couper says, and then slowly turns from where he was looking out at the green. When he sees me, standing with my face scrunched against crying, and my fingers, nervous and twisted together, he says, Sweetheart. I'll take it. It's ours, he says.

Couper, I say. It's her.

Who? he says.

Haylee, I say.

He looks out the window again. We can hear the faint strum of her guitar, but can't see her from here.

Are you sure? he says.

I put my hands on my gut. Yes, I say.

I don't know how other kids played. We were exclusive, our families intertwined; we spent our time with each other. Sometimes, at other kids' houses, I'd see their play kitchens and their Barbie houses and it seemed boring to me, babyish.

When we got tired of playing nightclub, she made me her pet. She'd put a belt around my neck like a leash and make me crawl down the hallway, into her room. I'd pick things up with my teeth. Sometimes she'd dress me as a man instead of herself, and she'd tie my hands, or spank me.

Men are stupid, she'd say to me, flattening the lapels on my jacket. Stupid like sheep or dogs, she said.

I thought about the men I knew. Maybe they were. Chuck. Stupid for staying. Uncle Buddy, too dumb not to get himself cut in half on a four-wheeler. Doe seemed smart. Crafty. I thought that was where she got it from.

One time, when I had my teeth in the pink carpet of her bedroom floor, trying to fetch a lighter for her, she pressed her high-heeled shoe into my back and pushed me down. I still remember the feeling, not a pain exactly, or not on my skin, anyway. It was a deeper pain, a humiliation that ran up my spine. I was older then. The game, getting old. After she put her foot down, she knelt behind me, her cheek on my back, and put her hand in my shorts. I remember that feeling, her squared-off nails, never very long, often painted dark red, working from behind, into my innermost parts. I jumped when she started, and she tugged hard on my hair to settle me. My cheek against the rug. I leaned my hips back into her
while she sawed her hand back and forth. Neither one of us getting anywhere.

I look at Haylee's picture while Couper brings up our things. It's hard to tell from that shot, grainy and cropped in, that she's anyone at all. Her round cheeks, her baby-fine hair, seem so familiar. But it was her voice that pulled my gut strings. The tinny chime of her laugh, her syrupy singing out over the crowd. It was something in her voice, an emptiness, or a cagedness, that said, I am disappearing. I am this now. I am gone.

I know that sound like I know my own voice.

I ask Couper who we should call.

No one yet, he says.

But we should, right? I say. Her picture is probably up in a Walmart with an 800 number to call. You're supposed to call when you see those kids, right?

He shrugs, putting a few simple groceries away. Milk. Coffee. Bread. Eggs. Well, technically, he says. But that's not what we're going to do.

Why not?

For one, we don't know it's her. But once we turn her in, or return her to her sister—whom she was running from, remember—she's useless to us.

What do you think we should do? I say.

He pours me a glass of chardonnay from a cold bottle and puts it down on the table. A real glass. Sweating.

I think you should talk to her, he says. Befriend her.

twenty-six

KHAKI

I thought maybe my own brother was with me. We had lived through the same shit. But it turned out he was soft. Maybe Doe had broken him. All those times he'd hit him. I'd seen Doe break his arm. Crack a bottle on Nudie's head. Beat his back with a broomstick. Maybe it was too much. The pain to the flesh had broken the spirit.

He was fifteen when he died. It took two days. I'd never seen a death that was quick. My mother had been dying slowly for years. When the baby died, she was sick first and then dead. I wanted to see instant death. Death that happened while you watched it, like water down a drain. Gone.

When Nudie died, it was because they unplugged him. His face was gone. His brain, dead. They fed a tube
through his mouth into his lungs to breathe for him. His heart kept beating. They told our parents to let him go.

The doctor said, It's amazing that it didn't kill him instantly. But he's not really alive.

I thought about his heart, still going.

That's one tough bastard
, I thought.

Afterward, my mother wouldn't talk to my father, and I saw my father cry.

He was at the workbench in the garage. The overhead light buzzing. I lingered around the sides of the room. I liked the smell, the oil and rubber of a garage. Bits of wood shavings on the floor. Doe had nothing in front of him, just his hands on the counter.

What are you working on? I asked.

Goddammit, Khaki, he said and I noticed his face. Go play, he said.

I'm sure that he blamed himself, and should have. But they both misunderstood it. Only Nudie and I knew what was supposed to happen.

I meant that bomb for Rayelle.

You know that she's one of us, I said to him.

So what? Nudie said. We're all the same. We'd all be related anyhow. Why do you care?

I cared that she had an option I didn't. Because she was untouched, and had parents who wanted her. She was whole inside. And stupid to the world around her.

I wanted to know why it was her and not me.

The fireworks store was a warehouse off the highway. There was never anyone there, even the week before a holiday, even though they had fireworks, they claimed, for every holiday, Halloween, Christmas, Memorial Day, July Fourth.

Doe drove a black '92 Grand Prix. It was loud, like all Pontiacs. It had a moonroof. It smelled permanently of cigarettes. When we went inside the warehouse, my mother waited in the car.

Go on, she said, and waved my father away. She wore a fitted T-shirt and back then, when I was eleven years old, she was still filled out, her waist small and her boobs big. Even her arms were fleshy. She wore a small pink kerchief around her neck, to cover the hole. If you didn't know, you'd never suspect until you talked to her. Black cat's-eye sunglasses. Lipstick even.

She was the most beautiful woman I've ever known.

Here, Khaki, she said to me as I climbed out of the backseat around her. She handed me a ten-dollar bill. Get something for Rayelle, she said. I hate to see her left out.

I tucked the bill into my shorts pocket.

Inside, row after row of different explosives. There were ones that sat on the ground, spinning, throwing off different-colored arcs. Snakes that burned up on the driveway and smelled like gunpowder. Roman candles. Bottle rockets. And cherry bombs.

I filled up my paper bag like a kid getting penny candy. Nudie got strings of firecrackers, blacks and reds, and some screamers. I led him toward the M-80s.

Dude, he said, that's a quarter stick of dynamite.

Right? I said. I put a couple in his bag and a couple in mine.

All they are is loud, he said to me. They're not pretty.

I don't give a shit about pretty, I said.

I saw Doe along the back wall, looking at pinwheels.

Is it going to scare you? Nudie asked me.

I thought he smelled like the car, like smoke and gas and leather up close. I thought that was the way all men smelled, and that they started to smell that way at about fifteen.

Hell no, I said. I smiled. I don't know if he believed me or not.

Outside, my mother leaned on the car and smoked. She looked like a movie star to me, with her hair to her shoulders and flipped up, her cuffed jeans and platform sandals. Another car had pulled in, and I watched a man get out and nod at my mother, who held her throat and blew out the smoke in a straight line into the air. She didn't acknowledge him.

Nudie and I got into the back with our bags, and our father got in the driver's seat.

In or out, he said to my mother.

She started to walk away, I think just to put her cigarette in the can of sand at the edge of the lot, and not on the pavement, but he flew out of the car then, right up behind her, with his hand on her arm, hard, steering her toward the passenger door.

Get in the goddamn car, he said. I don't know why you insist on making such a spectacle of yourself, he said.
We know you need attention. We get it, he said. We're all watching.

He slammed it into gear.

But you're fucking thirty-nine years old, he said. No one gives a shit anymore.

We hadn't played together in years. Mostly, we stayed out of each other's way. But I lured Nudie through the kitchen, where my mother sat at the table, smoking and peeling potatoes for salad; out back it was sunny and early, the grass wet. The trees beyond, heavy with green.

He wanted to know why.

We sat on the steps of the deck, hot, red-painted wood, leading down to the backyard, which sloped down toward the woods, and farther to the lake. Our house, the top of the hill. The deck, the upper floor of the house.

He had ink and resin on his hands. Resin never comes off. It was caked right into his thumb from smoking weed. On his wrist, a deep scratch from helping Doe pull wire fencing out from under the deck. On his face, the slanted cut next to his eye from a left hook. On his back, faint scars from a belt buckle, over and over.

I pointed to his eye.

That's why, I said.

That's not her fault, he said.

It's not your fault, I said.

She's just a kid, he said.

I had the paper bag between us, and he took out the cherry bomb, turned it over in his hands, the barrel waxy and red. The wick, an inch and a half long.

Nudie, I said, she annoys the piss out of you.

He laughed.

I stood up to go down into the yard.

I want them to know, I said, that they gave the wrong one away.

It'll kill her, he said.

Nah, I said. Just some permanent damage.

I couldn't understand the bond between them. My mother, and her sister, Carleen, sitting out on the deck. Like two completely different creatures. My mother in a leopard-print tank top and white pants that stopped just below her knee. A pair of black heeled sandals. A black kerchief around her neck. And Carleen, in a gray American flag T-shirt and jean shorts. Her hair in a curly ponytail. Her arms skinny and long like a teenage boy's. She was half the size of my mother, like a half-drowned runt.