A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (19 page)

LIZA IS SO tired that the now is a great gray wash around her. The now is Liza alone in her room, alone with her damn leg and her half a face, swaying in her walker. She pul s pictures from the vast sea of memory that washes inside her, whole and huge, the only piece of her that feels unbroken. She finds that row of girls from the TV Christmas. Radio City girls, beautiful long legs made of shapely muscle clicking open and shut like scissors. Charlie Brown at Thanksgiving, driving a mighty kick toward a footbal that Lucy has already pul ed away. The Karate Kid, dangling his broken foot in space and then lifting straight up like a weird bird to knock someone’s teeth out with his other leg.

She shoves at her own dead leg with these pictures, straining for high and mighty and bold. Her right foot twitches, shuffles forward. Then the left one goes, thoughtless, perfect, unfairly easy. She’s sore and tired from the pool, but she won’t stop. She gathers them again: high-kicking Rockettes, determined Charlie Brown, unstoppable Karate Kid. She thrusts these things in a roaring wash of power down into her body. But they diffuse as they go, easing to a stream and then a dribble. By the time they reach the leg, they are nothing but an old man’s painful shuffle.

She accepts. Breathes in. Goes again.

Big has washed the chlorine out, and she feels her wet hair as a weight, dampening the back of her pajamas. This last step has brought her to the bed, and she wants nothing more than to ease herself down into it. Big has the cup. She got the cup to Big, and doesn’t this earn her a rest?

The answer is no, and it comes to her in salt smel of her own effort-fil ed sweat. Salt air. The beach. That baby. Melissa. The second-worst day of Liza’s whole and bloody history has resurrected itself. The past is alive, and it’s coming to eat Mosey.

The cup is not enough. Big needs more, and she begins the long, inching process of turning the walker, readying it to go back across her room.

Rockettes. Charlie Brown. Karate Kid. She creeps forward, lost inside herself now, kept company by the babies, al the babies that she didn’t steal.

The first at a grocery store in Alabama, two days after crib death took her own child in the night, and she put her keepsake trunk deep in the earth near the wil ow. She’s come in to steal fruit or maybe crackers, not a baby, but she hears it crying three aisles away, and instantly her breasts gush milk. It cries and cries, and its mother should fix it. Liza would fix it, if only it were hers. She should go and get it now and put it to her aching breast and hush it, walk away with it into the black night.

She leaves the grocery at a run, leaves whatever town she’s in, crosses another state line.

There has to be a place far enough from the wil ow. A desert place. Not like home. A place where the air is so dry it wil suck the milk out and parch her eyes and bake her slick sweat off her skin as fast as she can loose it. She heads west, hoping Nevada can cook her until she is as light as a leaf blown along the road.

The carnival she joins has excel ent pot. In the day she sleeps without dreaming, and at night she stares into a crystal bal and tel s lies. She looks good in the Gypsy clothes, saying futures when she can’t see any future at al .

Then a bearded lady joins. She has a baby. Fat legs, a shock of dark hair. Her very first night after the midway closes, the sword swal ower gets the lady on her back. The baby sleeps in an empty dresser drawer in the front room of his trailer. Liza stares at it through the window. “Oh, oh, oh!”

the lady hol ers through her beard. She would never hear the creak of the door if Liza slipped inside and lifted up that drowsy bundle.

Liza turns away as the bearded lady finishes and walks until she finds an on-ramp. She climbs up into the first big rig that stops for her.

She likes the truckers. Some have pot, and they al have speed. She sleeps in the day, so she can tel more lies and help them stay awake at night. The headlights wash the black road, and if she swal ows enough Christmas Trees, it feels like flying, high up in the cab. The truckers seem uncomplicated, or at least unkinky. She has sex and conversation, they have drugs and forward movement, and this trade is the closest thing to love that she can stand.

The seasons change, and she keeps moving. It’s very simple; no one brings babies to truck stops, so Liza doesn’t steal any.

Then she meets Buck. He’s closer to fifty than forty, and she cal s him Sugardads. Buck is sweet, likes holding her hand, and the two of them take runs al the way back and across the country, California to Vermont, Vermont to California. She’s with him six months. It’s good until he thinks that he’s in love. He wants to buy her a little fat steak wrapped in bacon from a place he knows off the highway in the smack-ass middle of the country.

At the table next to them, there’s a family. Mommy, Daddy, Susie, Tommy, baby, and it’s al Liza can do not to put her steak knife in the mother and grab the infant, so desperately do her empty arms want fil ing.

She smiles and excuses herself to go pee, and once she’s out of his sight, she goes out the front door instead. Her red backpack is in the truck, and it’s locked, so she leaves it. She runs to the highway and then puts out her thumb. Liza has a halter top and long red-gold dirty curls and no visible baggage—what’s not to stop for? The second truck she sees pul s over. The driver is a bald white guy, maybe forty, with kind, tired eyes.

Kind and tired, but not fatherly.

“Hey,” Liza says, smiling. “You got anything? I want to stay awake. I can be pretty good company.” He has a little something, and the truck rol s off into the black.

Two months later she’s back in Alabama, the closest she has come to home in however long it’s been. She’s wearing nothing but a filthy sundress, sitting by the washing machine with every other article of clothing that she’s col ected spinning inside it, when a twitchy little momma comes in wearing sweatpants. She’s got a crying baby in footie pajamas stuffed in a sling, and she’s dragging her laundry in a basket. She has brown circles under her eyes, and she sniffles and picks at her skin as she loads the clothes in. The baby whimpers. She doesn’t seem to notice it’s close to crying. Maybe she doesn’t even like it.

Her name is Janel e, and she can’t be much older than Liza. They talk some while the laundry swishes. They both like Björk. They both like Mustangs. They both like Pixie Stix.

“Listen,” Janel e says, “can you maybe watch the baby for a sec? Make sure no one takes my clothes? I have a errand.”

The baby is loaded into Liza’s arms, fil ing them. Liza looks at the baby. The baby looks back, solemn. It smel s like cigarettes and old milk, and under that it smel s like perfect baby.

“Do you want to come with me?” Liza asks. The baby doesn’t seem to have any objections.

Stil , she stays in the chair. She has no underpants; they are al in the washer. A mother shouldn’t be sitting in a laundry in nothing but a sundress.

If her panties were dry, she’d have walked with the baby already.

She looks at the baby, and the baby looks back.

“Thanks,” Janel e says when she returns. The twitch is gone; she obviously scored.

Fucking junkie. Liza should have taken it.

Liza moves her clothes to a dryer, goes to the bathroom. She leans on the sink, trying not to cry. Handing the baby back felt about as easy as pul ing out her own lung, passing that over. She gave it to a fucking junkie mother who likes Björk and Mustangs and Pixie Stix.

She should go out there, offer to watch it again when her panties are dry. Steal it this time. But she meets her own eyes in the mirror. She has no diapers, no bassinet, no little cotton sleepers from Kidworks, and it strikes her that these are greater obstacles than a simple lack of underthings. In the mirror she is looking at another fucking junkie who likes Björk and Mustangs and Pixie Stix.

Babies need a Big, and she’s a Little whose own baby stopped breathing in the night and turned quietly blue and died for no reason other than karma and Melissa. No reason except that Liza deserved it.

Back in the laundry, Janel e has some Jol y Ranchers. She gives Liza a cherry one. It’s both their favorite.

“Liza,” Big says. “What on earth? You have to rest. You have to stop.”

Liza blinks. Rockettes. The leg shuffles forward.

Then Big is by her being Big. Being the thing that babies need. Putting Liza to bed.

CHAPTER TEN

Mosey

WHEN ROGER GOT TO The Real Pit to pick me up, it was pouring rain, but he stil puled in to his regular place instead of driving up to the door. His car was a jet-black Volvo station wagon, like ten years old, because his mom had Googled around til she found out that this make and year had never had a driver’s-side fatality in the whole history of Earth. Safety first, or whatev, but it didn’t have a port for his iPod. He’d had to burn his playlist to CD. I could hear Cage the Elephant, and he was headbanging al oblivious while I ran across the lot to his car, getting soaked. When I pul ed open the door, the front seat was ful of crap, and I couldn’t even get in.

I hurled a pile of blankets and two pairs of his mom’s gardening gloves into the back. Under al that I found some big-ass wire clippers with wicked-looking blades, thick and curved like Toucan Sam’s face if he went serial kil er.

I slammed the door and dripped at him, glaring and holding up the clippers I’d almost sat on, giving him “WTH?” eyebrows.

He total y missed the point, saying, “In case we have to go through one of those fences.” He was so excited about this spy-vs.-Duckins outing he was practical y vibrating as he drove out of The Real Pit lot.

I put the wire clippers down on the floorboards, rol ing my eyes. It was true that big pieces of Ducktown had chain-link fencing as high as my chest, some even with lines of barbed wire over the top, but we weren’t going to crouch in the weeds and try to hack through the links at three in the afternoon on a school day.

“We’re not ninjas,” I said, sour.

He laughed and said, “I swear, Mosey, you could suck the fun out of a puppy.”

“Anyway, we don’t need to be ninjas. I have a plan,” I said. I rummaged in my backpack and unearthed a textbook covered by a homemade grocery-store-bag cover. “Behold. Patti Duckins’s remedial math book. She
misplaced
it today. You and I are so very sweetly going to return it to her.”

“How convenient. For us,” Roger said. He gave me a sideways smile. “Did she
misplace
it down your pants?”

“Something like that,” I said. I’d spent half my day ghosting around behind Patti, waiting for her to take her eyes off her army-surplus duffel. Final y, at lunch, she dropped it by an empty table in the cafeteria and went to pee. When I’d unzipped it, this weird, dry smel had puffed out at me, like if a bear used to live inside there a long time ago. A bear who liked pimento cheese. I’d grabbed the top book, my heart booming in my chest like it was made of a thousand firecrackers, but not scared. It was more like when I was little and used to run everywhere for the sheer fun of fast moving.

Roger said, “She’s a bus kid, right? We might as wel go get a Blizzard. She won’t be home for half an hour.”

I said, “Nah, I have no idea where she lives in Ducktown anyway. Let’s head on over, so we can see where she goes when she gets off the bus.”

“Hey, if we beat her home, we’l have to ask the other Duckinses where she lives. Duckinses? Is that right? How do you pluralize a Duckins?”

I said, “I think they’re like moose: one Duckins, two Duckins, a thousand Duckins.”

Roger nodded, and then his eyes lit. “We can pound on doors and ask them al about Noveen, too.”

“You are insane,” I told him. “I heard last year one of them shot a Jehovah’s Witness in the butt with a .22.”

Roger seemed to think that was hilarious. “Oh, come on, Mose, that’s a completely reasonable response. Would you like a copy of the
Watchtower
? Blam! Cap in the ass!”

Just then Snow Patrol came on, and he leaned in and jacked the volume.

“Very stealthy!” I yel ed, but he grinned and cranked it even higher.

We got outside Immita in about ten minutes, and then Roger banged his foot down on the gas, wailing along with the CD. He had a good voice, pitched so deep it didn’t even sound to me like it real y belonged to him. We both cracked our windows, and soon I was singing, too. I couldn’t stay mad with us both singing good and loud and the rainy wind zooming through the car, making my hair be one big, wet tangle. I didn’t care. We were hunting Noveen Duckins, not headed for prom. I looked good enough for Ducktown, and Noveen had known my mom when she was my age.

Back then the other Mosey Slocumb had been a teeny, secret shrimp, something Liza toted around from geometry to English and no one knew.

That was weird, to think that baby hadn’t been me. If it had been, I’d be sitting through Mrs. Bload’s world-history class for the second time now. I guess that was too much for the universe to ask of any human being.

We turned on Nickerjack, a two-lane road so old that even wet and darkened down by rain the asphalt was ash gray. For a couple of miles, Nickerjack went straight through some woods. It would have no doubt been a kegger hot spot if it wasn’t for al the il egal traps and the very real chance of getting total y shot, even off season. The Duckins didn’t own al of it, but they sure hunted it, and they didn’t much care about seasons and licenses; word at school was they’d eat roadkil .