Young God: A Novel (2 page)

He leans back to squint at her.

“It’s Nikki,” she says.

“Who?”

She doesn’t have time for this. She smashes the gas and his hand snaps from the mirror.

In the rearview she watches him coming up behind. He has to stand on his pedals to climb. The last time she saw him he could barely walk. She glares at him. He must have been here all these years.

She turns the last bend. The road levels off, the trees part. She nearly screeches the brakes again.

On the top of the hill there is one yard and two houses. Crystal’s house is boarded up because Crystal’s in prison. But the big house is boarded up, too. Its doors and windows are nailed shut with plywood. In the wild yard are two trailers now. Two single-wides.

She rolls to a stop next to a plain black pickup. She sits and stares at it.

She should leave. This is the first place DSS will check. A door squeals. Coy Hawkins comes out of the trailer parked in front of the big house. He stands on the top step. Nikki gets out of the car.

He looks like he’s supposed to. He looks skinny and slick-headed. She waits for him to grin but he just crosses his arms over his chest. She remembers her pink hair.

“It’s me,” she says.

“What are you doing up here?” Coy Hawkins says.

Her face twists.

“Mama died.”

Coy Hawkins scratches his jaw.

“At the falls,” Nikki says.

“That was your mama?” Levi says.

He circles her on his bike.

“I heard they pulled a body out,” Coy Hawkins says.

She tries to think of what else to say. A girl comes out of the trailer. A girl who looks like a mouse. But with her hair bleached blond and piled on top of her head. She stands next to him on the top step and Coy Hawkins lifts his arm and drapes it around her neck.

“Angel?” Nikki says.

“What’s she doing up here?” Angel says.

AT THE GROUP HOME
Angel never said anything. She was so quiet she barely existed. She lights an extra-skinny cigarette. Nikki can’t stop staring. She looks so different.

“What happened to your glasses?”

“I don’t wear them no more,” Angel says.

“You drove that car up here?” Coy Hawkins says.

The three of them are sitting in the trailer’s kitchen. They’re sitting in folding chairs around a card table. It’s dim and dusty. There’s a skillet, a coffeepot, and three ashtrays. Coy Hawkins smokes regular-sized cigarettes. He smokes Kool Kings in a hard box.

“Yeah,” Nikki says.

“DSS was up here the other day.”

Nikki looks at him.

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them I ain’t seen you because I ain’t,” Coy Hawkins says.

He taps his lighter on the table.

“Then.”

Nikki looks at Angel.

“What did you tell them about her?”

The only thing Angel is wearing is one of Coy Hawkins’s shirts. The buttons are skewed, a few of them. Coy Hawkins smirks.

Angel scrunches her nose.

“Is she staying here?” Angel says.

The last time Nikki saw Coy Hawkins his eyes were big black beads. He was smoking crack then. Today they’re just blue. Nikki shrugs. She guesses she is staying.

She grabbed the book bag before she left.

“I got like five hundred Roxies if y’all want some,” she says.

“Do what?” Angel says.

“In the car,” Nikki says.

“Where the hell you get them?” Angel says.

“Wesley Harrell.”

Coy Hawkins leans back until his chair hits the wall.

“Well, let’s see them,” he says.

SHE EXPECTED HIM
to sell them first. Call somebody. However that works. Nikki didn’t snort any. Angel’s nodding on the couch. Coy Hawkins is slumped in a reclining chair. Nikki stands at its foot, completely alert.

THIS TRAILER
is the tube kind. It goes kitchen, living room, hallway, bathroom, bedroom. Nikki starts there.

The carpet’s green. The headboard of the bed is cut into cubbyholes and stuffed with anything: beer cans, clothes, ashtrays, hair spray, tissues. The closet is mirrored. Nikki looks at herself in it. She makes a face. She twirls her pink hair on top of her head. Then she rolls her eyes.

The closet slides open. On its floor is a pile of boots. Some trash bags. She dumps one out and dresses slink to her feet. They are bright and shiny. They have see-through parts or leopard spots or laces up and down the sides. Nikki pictures Angel trying them on and Coy Hawkins buying them. Nikki steps back to see what she’s wearing. She snaps fray off her shorts and makes a face again.

Also there are some shoe boxes but the only thing in them are poisonous packets.

The bathroom is off the hall. It’s small and linoleum. The mirror doesn’t open. Plugged into the wall is an electric shaver. Nikki finds Angel’s stuff under the sink in another trash bag. She has a hair dryer and a flatiron. She has a whole pouch of makeup. Nikki opens a thing of glitter. She rips back the shower curtain. If she squints she sees bleached blond hairs plastered to the stall. They’re in the sink, too, and on the walls.

Nikki lifts the lid off the toilet tank and peers in.

In the living room there’s the couch and the reclining chair, a coffee table and a boxy TV with rabbit ears that says
NO SIGNAL
on the screen. The couch is plaid. Nikki flips up the skirt and pulls out mail and coffee cups. She checks the pockets of Coy Hawkins’s chair.

When she sits back on her heels Angel’s looking at her.

“Hey,” Nikki says.

Angel’s eyes close.

Nikki opens all the kitchen cabinets. She cracks the stove and microwave. She stares into the refrigerator. There’s a bag of potato chips in the vegetable crisper. The freezer has pounds of ground beef and a jar of liquor with a peach in the bottom. Nikki sips some. The moonshine burns a path down her throat to her heart. She bares her teeth.

“Uh,” she says.

She sits at the card table to think. Coy Hawkins used to be the biggest coke dealer in the county. But if there are kilos in here she can’t find them.

NIKKI BRINGS THE LIQUOR
into the living room. She flops the rabbit ears until a channel comes in. She nudges Angel with her knee. Angel cuts her teeth and bats at Nikki limply. She curls to the other side of the couch. Nikki sits down.

A phone is on the coffee table. There’s no service up here. Nikki goes to photos. The first photo is of Angel against one of the fake wood walls of the trailer, naked, with her fingers between her legs. She is shaved like a porn star. The phone clatters when Nikki drops it but they are not disturbed.

She watches TV sitting up. She watches TV lying down. She dips her finger in liquor and sets it on fire.

Coy Hawkins opens his eyes.

“Is that my brandy?” he says.

His voice is raspy, dried to a husk.

“Yeah,” Nikki says.

Angel’s cigarette ash drips in her lap. Nikki eats the peach off a fork, watching it.

Nikki smokes a cigarette in front of the mirrored closet. A Kool King. The third one in a row makes her run to the bathroom and puke in the toilet.

The hall ripples. She takes a wrong step and runs into the wall. She wonders if this is shitfaced or just drunk.

She stares at him. Coy Hawkins’s shirt is unbuttoned and he has no new tattoos and that means nobody tried to fuck with him in prison. He still has Mama’s name on his chest. It’s over his left nipple. He did it himself with a needle and ink and it’s thin and green. She rests the jar on the arm of his chair.

She pulls the blue pills out of the book bag. They’re in a Ziploc stuffed in a sock wrapped in a towel so they don’t rattle. Nikki thinks about hiding them in the freezer, behind the meat.

She sits on the couch beside Angel again.

“I’m sorry about your mama,” Angel says.

Nikki looks at her. Angel is scratching up and down her arms.

“It’s fine,” Nikki says.

Angel shrugs.

Gunshots. Hunters, Nikki tells herself.

When she closes her eyes the whole world spins.

SHE DREAMS OF NOTHING,
which is her favorite dream, and inside of her is a low buzz.

WHEN SHE FINDS THAT DOG
that shit in her mouth last night she’s going to kill it. Before she didn’t really know what that meant. She rolls her forehead in her hand. She gets up from the couch and the jar slams her toes.

“Fuck,” Nikki says.

OUTSIDE A CAR RUMBLES.
Nikki sits up. She touches a crust on her cheek. Coy Hawkins walks through the living room with a gun.

Angel’s foot is on Nikki’s knee. Nikki throws it off. She bangs out the front door after him.

Wesley’s in the yard, in front of an idling car. He’s with some man Nikki’s never seen. Probably everybody calls him Bubba. He’s tall and totally round. Coy Hawkins is pointing the gun at them. They have their hands up but only halfway.

“Man, I heard you were out again,” Wesley says.

“What I tell you?” Bubba says.

“What do you want?” Coy Hawkins says.

Wesley leans to the side.

“Nikki,” he says.

She’s behind Coy Hawkins, on the bottom trailer step. She juts her hip. She wishes she were wearing one of Angel’s dresses. Wesley leans back to Coy Hawkins.

“I been looking for your daughter. She took a stash of blues off me and my fucking car.”

Coy Hawkins looks over his shoulder. Nikki bunches up her face.

“No, I didn’t,” she says.

Coy Hawkins sighs. He looks at Wesley again.

“Grab them pills,” Coy Hawkins says.

Nikki has to think about this. She thinks she’s still drunk. There is a long pause.

“Do what?”

“Did I stutter?” Coy Hawkins says.

Inside Angel’s up on her knees. She’s splitting the blinds with her fingers.

“What’s going on?” Angel says.

Nikki pulls the book bag from under the couch.

Down the stairs the sun beats her head. It makes her feel sick. When she tries to hand the bag to Coy Hawkins he flicks the gun at Wesley instead. Briefly Nikki closes her eyes and then she opens them again.

She walks up to him. She wants to die.

“Here,” she says.

Wesley doesn’t even look at her. He unzips the book bag. He unwraps the towel and pulls off the sock. He looks over her head.

“It’s light,” Wesley says.

“Is it?” Coy Hawkins says.

Wesley sniffs. He chins at the car that’s parked beside the black pickup.

“The keys in there?” Wesley says.

“Car’s staying,” Coy Hawkins says.

Wesley stares at Coy Hawkins. Then he nods. He nods for a while. He looks at Bubba.

“All right,” he says.

Bubba nods, too.

“Fucking Coy Hawkins,” he says.

Squealing off they kick up grass. Around the bend trees swallow them. Nikki turns to him. He drops the gun to his side.

“You can always use another vehicle,” Coy Hawkins says.

He goes up the steps.

In a daze Nikki looks at the yard. She looks at Levi on his bike, and beyond that to the trailer in front of Crystal’s house, where in the living room window two blinds are slit.

ANGEL’S FACE
is like somebody switched on the light. She has cat’s eyes and red lips. She is wearing one of those dresses that laces up the sides. It sucks to her. It makes her nipples pop out like two buttons.

Her hair is huge. She walks from the hall in a pair of rickety high heels. She leans over to grab her stupid cigarettes and a sugary cloud of perfume blows at Nikki on the couch.

“What?” Angel says.

“I can see your titties,” Nikki says.

Coy Hawkins comes out of the hall, too. He snaps at Angel.

“Get in the truck,” he says.

“She ain’t coming?” Angel says.

Coy Hawkins says nothing. Angel crosses her arms over her chest. She has to bend her knees to walk. She glares at Nikki until the door slams behind her.

“Where are y’all going?” Nikki says.

“Out,” Coy Hawkins says.

“When are y’all coming back?”

“Later.”

“What if they come back for the car?” Nikki says.

“They probably won’t.”

Coy Hawkins is standing in front of the coffee table. He’s buttoning his shirt.

“You ain’t like you used to be.”

He stops for a second. He looks at her.

“Neither are you,” he says.

After he’s gone she stares at the blank TV. She listens to the engine struggle to rev on the truck and finally catch.

LEVI SKIDS
in front of her. He yanks his handlebars to pop a wheelie and smashes on his side. His bike clanks on top of him.

“Ow,” he says.

Nikki steps around him. The big house is gray though it should be white. It looks skinny. It looks like a place the fire department would burn down for practice. She climbs onto the front porch and her foot falls through dry rot.

“Fuck,” she says.

“You’re Nikki,” Levi says.

Nikki says nothing.

“My mama’s your daddy’s sister.”

Over her shoulder Levi is rubbing his elbow. She pulls her foot from the porch.

“Half sister,” Nikki says.

“We’re cousins,” Levi says.

“Half cousins.”

Behind the big house is random trash like toilets and mattresses. Nikki weaves through it. As she walks the grass grows. White moths fly at her face and she slaps them away. When she gets to the far edge of the yard it’s up to her waist. Woods hide the very top of the hill. The only way up is the deer cut.

Nikki wheels around.

“Quit following me,” she says.

“I ain’t,” Levi says.

Its mouth is overgrown. It’s a mess of brush and giant weeds, like all the deer left when Nikki did. Up the deer cut is where her money’s buried.

She wanders back toward the big house. The plywood is loose on one of the back windows. A single board hangs from a nail. She swings it with her finger. She wonders what’s still in there. She looks at Levi. He is right behind her.

“See?” she says.

“What?” he says.

He squints the other way. Nikki puts her hands on her hips.