The Scamp (9 page)

We are headed south. A small highway with a fifty-five limit, laid out in blocks of cement that bump with every second passing. The Scamp, listing behind us.

No, I say, ready, maybe, to tell him the truth about something, and not just a story good for the telling.

Who was? he says. He looks over, his hand at the top of the wheel, his eyes crinkled with a smile.

My cousin, I say.

I did have a boy cousin, Nudie, who was older than me by a lot, and who died when I was only eight. I
remember and don't remember him dying. I remember some of the days after, a montage of staying with neighbors, of being left to play with kids I didn't know, to eat sandwiches in other kitchens, while the adults dealt with the loss, a quiet, closed-casket funeral, a private burial.

The accident happened in the backyard of their house. The lawn sloped down sharply toward the woods. Beyond that, the lake. You could sit on the hill, your legs pointed down, looking at the trees, dense elms and birches, low sumacs heavy with red flowers.

He put a quarter stick of dynamite in his mouth. As a dare, as a joke, I don't know. I remember what it looked like, the feel of it, as big around as a battery, red, waxy. The smell of the match. The smell of the barbecue behind us, charcoal smoke and charred chicken. The rest of it, black. Strange houses with different smells. Quiet. My ears, a fuzz of damage from the noise of the blast.

He wasn't my first. He might have been, if I'd been older, faster.

She was.

Khaki took my virginity, if you can call it that. There was as much taking as there was giving. I asked her to do it. I asked her for help. And she gave it.

I was eleven, and terrified of sex, of doing it for the first time. When I asked Khaki, she said she'd never been a virgin. I didn't know how that could be, but she said it again, I ain't never been. Then she told me she was born without a hymen.

What's a hymen? I asked her.

The ring inside you that keeps you whole, she said.

Sometimes, when she wasn't so hard, she'd curl against me in the early hours of morning, the room gray and cool. Before she'd get up to light a cigarette. She'd demand money or cigarettes or booze from Doe like he owed her. I tried that once with Chuck, when he'd asked me to take out the garbage.

Maybe you should pay me, I said, wriggling my fat kid shoulders, imitating her voice.

Maybe you had better shut your goddamn trap, Chuck answered and handed me a tied-up bag.

Khaki treated her father like he was a bad boyfriend. If he handed her a ten-dollar bill, she laughed and held her hand out for more. I don't think so, you pathetic piece of shit, she'd say, and he'd make it a twenty, or more. He bought her cigarettes, and booze.

She was everything I wanted to be.

I wanted to know what she knew.

You don't want to know what I know, she said to me.

No, I do. The boys at school were mean, snapping my bra, grabbing their balls. They didn't like me because I was tall. I was bigger than all of them, leggy and curvy, with a full C cup. They called me cow, or mama. I had too much body, too much hair, my teeth were big for my mouth. They wanted little, cute girls with small hands and tight pussies. Girls with straight shiny hair who came to school on Fridays in their cheerleader uniforms.

I wanted to have an advantage. At the least, I wanted to know what to do. Otherwise, I thought, some boy would agree to fuck me, and then spread it all over South Lake that he fucked the big Reed girl and she didn't know how.

Boys are assholes, Khaki said to me.

Will you help me? I said.

She tucked a curl behind my ear, sitting next to me on her bed. I will always do whatever I can to help you, she said.

She kept a dildo in a box under her bed. I don't know where she'd gotten it, or where it might have come from. I had never seen one, and there it was, between us, a big, flesh-colored, disembodied dick. Khaki took it out like it was nothing, holding it loose in her hand, and she poured clear gel on it and then started to use it. She went so slow, so gently, I didn't even bleed. She kissed my belly, below my navel. After a minute, it wasn't bad at all. She went in and out with a slight twist, and used her finger on me, so I came. Not bad for a first time. I wasn't even sure that's what it was, but when it happened—the rush of blood in my face, my limbs warm and buzzing—she said, There's my girl, like I was a dog learning a trick. Learning to sit up and beg.

I have always known what I wanted. I got that from her.

Light blinks in the windshield, bright, between leaves, and when I close my eyes, I fall asleep for a while. When
I wake up, we're someplace else, and the landscape is different, the trees lower to the ground, the grass a lighter, bluer green, rolling in the distance.

I watch it, silent for a few miles.

Where are we going? I ask.

Summersville, Couper says, like it's vacation.

Fuck you, I say.

He swerves a little. What?

Fuck you and whatever you think you know about me, I say. My brain races with what he might have found out, sitting around by the water in South Lake.
Mother Cleared of All Charges.

Sweetheart, Couper says. He shakes his head like he's clearing his ears. The speed limit slows down to thirty, and we stop at a railroad crossing where a long
CSX
goes by, and he stares straight ahead.

Why? I ask him. Is that really where we're going?

That's my next case, he says. I see his jaw set, the muscles next to his ear working.

What do you want me to say?

You could not say
fuck you
to me, he says. For nothing. What are you even talking about?

Nothing, I say. But I think about her face, her squinted eyes when she laughed or smiled. The sun coming through the trees in the backyard. About how she looked, in a tiny white casket, in a white dress, her face like she was sleeping, and me thinking,
Now when I see her sleeping, I'm going to think of her as dead.
And then collapsing when it struck me that she would never be sleeping again.

We could get to Summersville in a day if we were driving a regular vehicle on an interstate. But with the Scamp in tow on a smaller highway, going fifty, fifty-five, it takes us two days. In between, we stop at a
KOA
and spend one night in a field next to a river on the fringe of a circle of campers with cases of beer and fire pits. The smell of char and hot dogs and pine trees and beer spilt into the grass.

It's hard for the two of us to stand inside the Scamp together. We get in each other's way. In the bed it's fine, but standing, trying to do anything, is crowded.

Look, I say.

Couper waits.

Look, I say again.

He leans his hand on the counter and watches me. Are you trying to apologize? he says.

I'm bad at it, I say.

I bet the cops loved that about you, he says.

Yeah? Fuck you, I say again, and it's my mother's voice I hear coming out of me, quiet and acidic.

When he smirks, I push past him and walk out. Where to, I don't know. I don't even know what state we're in. We may have crossed into Georgia by now.

The park goes nowhere. There's no lake, just a lazy river, and no mountains. It's a flat field of trailers and campers and tents. A bathhouse, a playground. I walk with hard purpose around the outer loop of campers, and through a gathering of tents, and end up at the playground, where some girls in dresses are pushing each other on the merry-go-round.

I sit on a swing. They're the flat kind, the plank-of-wood seats, and not the U-shaped rubber ones that squeeze your ass. You can stand on these, but I sit. I light a cigarette and watch the girls. One stands in the middle, one pushes, and one leans her head backward off the side, her hair dragging in the dirt. They laugh like high-pitched, giggling devils.

I always wanted a sister. Once, I had imagined myself, slightly older, with Summer as an adult, but all I could picture was the way I was with my own mother. I couldn't see it, us as adults together, friendly, doing things. Enjoying each other.

I hear Couper's feet behind me. The soft crunch of his Converse on the gravel path.

Look, he says to me, using my own word. He's out of breath. He holds on to the rail of the swing set at first, and then leans over with his hands on his knees. Shit, he says. It's tight, and whispery.

What's happening? I say.

I watch him purse his lips and breathe slowly. His breath makes a sound, a tight whizzing. I take a drag and blow it over my shoulder, away from him.

It's not going to help if you just run away, he says finally. His voice has lost its usual sexy rasp and has, instead, a flat coarseness, a breathlessness.

Couper, I say, I am literally running away right now. With you.

I mean continually, he says, from your . . .

Do you want me to go back? I say.

Stop running from your shit, he says.

Do you want me to go back?

No.

What happens when you get sick of me? I say, because I think everyone gets sick of me and my mouth, my defensiveness, my crying, my not getting out of bed, my driving down the road drunk. My not having a job. My asking for money. My smoking at the kitchen table. My drinking all your beer when I've run out of wine and I don't have my own money to get more. Everything.

But Couper starts to smile. If I get sick of you, I'll buy you a bus ticket, he says.

Funny.

I'm not sick of you, he says. We just started. He sits next to me on a flat swing. I swing slowly, and he just sits, his feet planted, pushing a little, like he's in a rocking chair. I notice that the girls have gotten quiet. That they're turning slowly, listening, and watching us. Above the trees, the sky is white, settling. Between the tops of the trees, the sun burns like fire.

What happened to your cousin? Couper says.

Khaki? I say.

Yes.

She left.

Moved away? he says.

I think about the shape of her leg, taut, tan, smooth as glass, pulling into Henderson's
BMW
. The car was loud, stunk with exhaust and cigarette smoke from inside. Go
play, she said to me, something Teddy would say to us on a nice day, shooing us outside. Usually, she'd lock the door.

She left with her boyfriend after her dad died, I say.

Do you keep in touch? he says.

That sounds sweet, doesn't it? I say to him. No, we don't. A normal family might, I say, but no. I don't know where she is, I say.

I just wondered, he says. You don't have a sister.

Nope.

Another woman, he says.

I know where he's going. June Carol tried to get me to go to a mothers of preschoolers group at the church. I went twice when Summer was four months. They put the babies in the nursery, and the moms gathered in a big room and did crafts and drank coffee and talked about the Bible. I hated it. I spent the three hours wanting a cigarette, feeling underdressed and foul-mouthed, not wanting to glue glitter, or arrange flowers.

After Summer died, June Carol suggested another group, a mothers' Bible study. She was hell-bent on saving me.

I wouldn't go. What I did do was paw at Eli, to try to get him to want me, anything. I thought maybe we could make some sense of it, wordlessly. That maybe we could just pare down to our bodies, where it all began, and start over. He couldn't even look me in the eye.

I mean, Couper says, you have all these men to talk to.

What do you mean, all these men? I say. Who told you there were all these men? My mother? Did you talk to my mother?

No, he says, and shakes his head. Never mind. I just thought another woman might be beneficial to you. I just wondered, he says.

How do you know? I say. I look down at my feet in the dirt. The girls have gone, walking shoulder to shoulder across the field. Their mother, a thin woman in a pink shirt, with a low ponytail, stands at the edge of the playground, calling them to dinner.

I read the paper, he says.

When we walk back, we continue around the loop, through a tent city, past a sandy volleyball court and a kickball field. At first, we walk close, our shoulders bumping, and then he holds my hand.

I laugh.

Don't laugh, he says.

No one holds my hand, I say.

Not your husband? he says.

You didn't read very closely, I say. We weren't married.

We walk like that, though, my hand in his, his hand around mine, big and warm.

My cousin held my hand, I say, looking down at my feet on the gravel path. I remember the feel of her hands better than anything. More than the feel of my mother's hands.

He grips.

Tell me about Summersville, I say.

Summersville had two murders in the same week one spring. One, a seventeen-year-old girl, Alyssa Mitchell, was found naked with her throat cut in the abandoned part of a town cemetery. Couper shows me her picture. A cute girl, with dark hair swooped across her forehead, a black rock-band T-shirt on.

Borderline student, Couper says. Didn't have a boyfriend. Had moved recently to stay with her dad while her mom was in jail.

And this woman, he says, showing me a picture of a woman a little older than me, holding a baby. The picture cropped so that only the arm of a kid sitting next to her shows. She has reddish hair, long and pulled around her shoulders. Her face with that pale generic American pattern of freckles.

Jessa Loy, he says. Who was never found. They questioned her husband, but he had alibis.

How do they know she's dead? I say.

They don't, he says.

I mean, I start. Someone could think I'm dead. But I'm here, with you.

True, he says. We have the light on over the table in the Scamp. Couper with an open bottle of Blue Light, me with a cup of ice and chardonnay.

But you think she's dead, I say.

He moves his shoulder, looking down at the picture, but doesn't answer.

You don't think it was the husband, I say.