Gutshot (4 page)

“Hey baby,” he said to the girl beside me.

She ignored him, fussing with an exposed bra strap.

A silver chain strained his neck and another one, linked flat, held steady on his big wrist. Shaved hair stubbled his arms. His nails were groomed and perfect save for the one on his left index, which was missing, the naked nailbed pink as a cat’s tongue.

He repositioned his bag. “You have a great smile,” he said. He smelled like a fresh meatball sub. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

“No,” the girl said.

“Who made you so beautiful, though? Did heaven make you that way?”

She turned to the window but her smile was visible in the reflection. Outside, a woman barred from the boarding area lay facedown on the sidewalk and screamed.

The man kept on down the aisle and the girl exhaled sharply through her nose.

I closed the book I was reading and held it on my lap. “That guy’s a loser,” I said.

She turned to see where he had found a seat. “I don’t know anybody in Long Beach.”

“He doesn’t want to be your friend.”

“He was nice to me.”

The bus swayed gently as if we had rolled into a shallow pond and become buoyant. We would be going for the rest of the day, with one meal and two smoke breaks. I picked my book up again.

The girl sat with her back to our shared armrest, frowning as the scenery greened. “Do you think he likes me?” she asked after a while.

“I’m sure he does.” I was reading a story about children with special powers. Their friend had become lost in the forest and when the other two went to find him, they learned of their own nuanced powers of sensation: the girl felt heat in the earth and knew that creatures were nearby, and the boy saw through dense trees and found a congregation of wild animals meeting on the horizon. The children walked bravely toward the beasts, holding hands.

“Do I look okay?” She looked in her compact mirror and handed it to me like it might still hold her reflection.

I caught the sour smell of her palms, which she had licked before smoothing her hair. “You look good.”

With every step the children took, their bravery waned until it was like a tightrope under them. They shivered on the line but kept moving forward, sensing the importance of the gathering of animals.

“Really, tell me.”

I held my page. She was skinny in cutoff shorts. Her polo shirt, likely designed for a child, was snug and ripe under her pits. Her hair was limp as if it had been taped on. Concealer caked around her lips, tinting her blemishes orange, while mascara gave her lashes the look of suspension-bridge cables.

“It doesn’t matter how you look,” I said. “His goal is to take advantage of you, with or without your consent, and he will not be your friend when it’s over. You have to protect yourself from these men.”

I went back to reading, satisfied that I had stopped an advancing storm. The girl sniffed her displeasure and traced patterns in the seatback. “I know what I’m doing,” she said.

*   *   *

She accepted the cigarette he offered on the shady side of the McDonald’s. They talked about the weather and how the back of the bus smelled like garbage wrapped in wet garbage. He told her she looked like a movie star, but he couldn’t figure out who exactly.

“You need to watch it,” I said.

“I’m watching everything,” he said, smiling, so close to my face that I could have pressed my cheek to his.

“Me too,” I said. “Everything.”

“Come on,” the girl said.

The driver called us to go but the man didn’t break his gaze.

“Old bitch,” he said in a convivial way.

“Not another word.”

He put his hands up in mocking assent. His half-stripped finger bulged.

She was at me before I sat down. “Jesus Christ,” she said, drawing it out.

“Trust me,” I said. “I’ve been where you are now.”

“I thought he was gonna kill you.” We were rolling out of Quartzsite. The man had found a new seat behind the driver and was clapping his big hand convivially on the back of a teenage boy.

“Attention is the most worthless currency on the planet,” I said. “When you treat it like it’s precious, you’re blinding yourself to the possibility that you might find it elsewhere. And it’s everywhere, attention is. You’re a beautiful girl. You have fine features and kind eyes and a good line to your body. See, and now you’re acting like nobody’s ever complimented you before.”

“Well,” she said.

“I’m saying you may as well assign a high value to yourself. You should consider all the angles. His attention is a penny placed on a monument. Give the monument your prayers, not the coin.”

She pressed her lips together. Her every movement came off like a minor miracle, as it was with young women. I tried to remember myself at her age, but when I tried, I only saw a girl lost in the woods.

“Do you know what I mean?” I asked. Watching her think about it gave me a thrill. It was nice to have an interested third party. I wanted to say more but stopped myself and allowed her to flatter me with her consideration. Outside, the landscape began to bear fruit. We trundled past long lines of orchards and roadside stands. I opened my book to return to the gathering of animals dancing in unison.

“What are you reading?”

“It’s a story about magical children.”

“Magical,” she said, confused. “It’s a kids’ book?”

“Since you ask, I do feel more calm when I’m reading stories written for young people.”

“Okay,” she said. “I guess I don’t get it.”

“You certainly don’t have to get it.”

We rolled on. “You know,” she said, “I just figured he’d want to hang out.”

“Don’t you have anyone to stay with?”

“My dad’s out there,” she said. “In Lakewood I think. I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

“I don’t know.” She rubbed her eye with the back of her hand.

“You should have somewhere to stay.”

“That’s exactly why I was talking to that guy if you didn’t get the hint.” A portion of her mascara had decamped to make a wet halo around her right eye. “He seemed fine and you ruined everything.”

I tried to imagine what a benevolent character would do in my book. “You should stay with me,” I said. “You need somewhere safe.”

“With you?” She lifted one delicate corner of her lip. I could see her watching television on her belly in my living room, picking marshmallows from a box of cereal.

“Sure,” I said. “For a few nights. Get on those feet.”

She laughed. “No, I don’t know. We’ll see,” she said. “You totally ruined everything else, so you owe me.”

“You’re right, I owe you.” Without thinking, I reached for her face. Holding her chin, I wiped away the smudged makeup with my thumb. The girl allowed the movement, keeping very still and looking away. I cleaned her off, thinking about the vast system of payments and debts.

*   *   *

My apartment was just as I had left it. The sheets, stretched over the mattress on the floor, blended into the white carpet and bare white walls to lend a clean, institutional feel to the whole. The kitchen area, demarcated from the other space only by a change in flooring and flanked by white laminate countertops, was functional and airless. Taken all together, the place was immaculate—one room, but room enough for me. I plugged the television in and opened the windows. It was comforting to remember that I could keep a complete inventory of my items in such a small space. My books were stacked high in all four corners, with more on the card table. I moistened a paper towel and wiped dust from the counters.

She stood by the door, slouched under her two backpacks. Instead of carrying one on each arm, she wore one on her back and the second strapped to her chest, the overstuffed pack resting on her belly. They had a counterbalancing effect, holding her upright and steady under their equal weight.

“Take a load off. Want some water?”

“If you don’t have any beer,” she said awkwardly, as if she had read about people saying such things but had never tried it out until now. I had to remind myself that I hadn’t coerced her into following me, that she had gone willingly with me to the cab and into my home without so much as noting the street names.

I took two glasses from the cabinet and rinsed them out before filling them from the tap. “Put your things anywhere.”

Leaning, she let her arms fall forward. The pack slipped off her chest and hit the floor hard. She righted herself and deposited the second behind her in the same manner, almost going down with it. “It’s nice to stand,” she said.

“Dusty in here,” I said, more to the dust than to her.

“How long have you been away?” she asked, sniffing the glass of tap water I gave her. It was unclear to me if she was detecting odors in the water or the glass itself.

“Sorry, no ice.”

We drank our water in silence. There was something metallic about it, though I may have invented the flavor to understand what she was feeling. Empathy, I found, was a good and valuable skill and I tried to practice it at least once a day. While we drank, I glanced down to see if her name might be printed on her bag. She craned her neck to observe the junk mail piled by the door.

“I’m only around here half the year,” I said, sweeping the mail from the counter and dumping it in the trash. “Otherwise I’m in Texas with my brother.”

“Your brother’s in Texas.” She seemed very tired all of a sudden.

“That’s right. The state and I take turns caring for him.”

“What do you do?” she asked. “Out here, I mean.”

“I read and go to movies, and take classes at the community center. Business typing, supply chain dynamics, things like that.”

Her eyes were lidded to the point that it seemed possible she was asleep on her feet. “Cool,” she said. “Cool.”

“Do you want to lie down?”

“I don’t want to take up any space.” She had edged herself into a corner and crossed her arms before her as if to prove her point, the empty glass pressed against her upper arm. She looked at the bed, placed in the center of the room like a low altar.

“Go on. I’ll leave you alone.”

I rinsed out her glass in the sink. She was asleep before she got horizontal. I nudged her bags into a pile next to the door and went to clean up.

The bathroom was as I left it, with its tinctures lined up in the cabinet. I chose two of the little bottles for later.

The shower sputtered rusty. The human stink of the bus had gotten into my skin and hair, the inner folds of my nose and ears. I could sense it seeping into my bloodstream. I had become the bodily equivalent of a pair of wet jeans. It was fine that she was ruining my sheets. I considered the alternative: allowing that monster on the bus to take her away, to fingerbang her in the back of some Camaro he called home. The water drove welts into my skin but I couldn’t force it deep enough, even when I tugged my earlobes down, when I opened wide and sent it down my throat. The bus had left the kind of stain that coiled around my animal cells. Removing it would require weeks of pure living. I would have to throw out the sheets.

*   *   *

My brother and I were the kind of children who could spend an afternoon entertained by games of our own invention. We played Orphan and Soldier, shouting across the backyard. Or Leaf Lottery, where the winner could create the rules for the rest of the hour, maybe that berries were to become our only food or that we weren’t allowed to call for help. He was ten years older and my only protector. Sometimes he wouldn’t come home for a few days at a time, no easy task in the country. He must have made a camp somewhere.

Once, he was gone for a week when they sent me out after him. Stickers snagged my tights. It must have been Sunday and it must have been cold. I looked for him behind the shed and by the big oak, up the stream past the flat bank, past where we had ever gone together. I shouted his name, throwing sticks so the animals would be scared away. I took off my shoes, which pinched, and let the rocks cut into my stocking feet. I sat down and waited for an hour or two after I forgot if he was lost or if we both were or if it was only me.

Branches cracked and fell and the sound froze me toward their source. The sun had just set and shapes changed in the new dark. I bit down hard on my thumb, which I hadn’t realized I’d been sucking.

He emerged from the forest, which settled back behind him like a curtain. He was naked to the waist despite the cold and was thinner than usual, his skin seeming loose on his body like a paper bag covering a pear. He asked me why I was scared. The air around me was the same as the air inside my body.

He kneeled on the ground and made a cradle from his arms. We had played Child and Cradle before. I curled up and his legs made a bough under my back. His arms were as cold as any branch. “Before we grew hair and got dangerous, we were all babies,” he said. “Did you know?”

“Yes,” I lied; I could only think of my brother as a fully formed man, even then when he was young. I knew already that he would send our mother away at last so that it could just be the two of us. The scope of our shared future was too much. His hands were hands and my body was a nursing doll.

*   *   *

She was running in her sleep. Her legs twitched. When I lay down, she instinctively rolled closer. I considered the possibility that she was dreaming of the man on the bus and the thought filled me with a flashing trill of grief and rage. I had saved her from him and she didn’t yet understand how grateful she should be for my actions. I pictured her bloody in an alley, her gut ripped with a shard of glass; or perhaps she would be scattered across a public park in parts, oozing like a bisected worm. I thought of her hair tied to a buoy, a gleam of white bone from her open throat catching a fisherman’s eye. But here she was, whole within her reliable container.

I edged closer and she cuddled up. Her lips planted on the skin stretched between my armpit and breast. I was naked from the shower. She pretended to be asleep for a while, and then her eyes opened and she looked over my shoulder to the wall. I estimated her to be one hundred ten pounds. After a while, I extracted myself and got up to make dinner.