Hick (15 page)

The bathroom is tiny with pink tile, pink paint, pink bathtub and a pink shower curtain. There’s glitter and lip gloss and Aqua-Net and diapers and that’s what throws me off. I splash my face and wonder if Glenda’s worried about me. I tip-toe out into the room in between and there it is, sitting off to the side underneath the window, a little yellow crib. I sidle over and peer in and am surprised, no, shocked, no, disappointed, no, worried to see this little tiny baby just laying there, sleeping soft, like it don’t know it got shit for a life yet.

I stand there, looking down at this little fragile thing and wondering what the hell this world has come to and thanking my lucky stars that my mama at least had the good sense to get a husband and a house with two floors.

But then I remember something, something dark and churning that I made myself forget back when I had little arms and little legs and my mama had a blue dress. I remember something and I would
keep remembering, I sure would, if it wouldn’t make my heart fall out my chest and stop the earth from turning.

I can’t think about that. I can’t think about that part now.

I look around the floor beneath me and there’s nothing but clothes and make-up and shoes stacked on top of shoes, each one higher than the next. There’s a half-eaten pizza sitting in an open box on the table in the corner covered in what I think are olives, from first glance, and this is the part that makes you want to cover your mouth, cause those aren’t olives. Those are cockroaches, count em, six of em, having what must seem like a feast in their meager vermin existence.

I start to back out.

In the other room I can hear Sherri going on to Crystal about how she’s gonna take a pottery class and that she’s sick of this town and that it’s really time for her to get her act together and that she’s really gonna do it this time. Crystal keeps saying uh-huh, uh-huh and adding that she’s gonna go with her, maybe they could take the pottery class together. Maybe they could start a pottery store back in Jackson, cause that’s what rich folks like to buy and together they could design the store and they could make a fortune and they’re gonna do it soon, next month even, no, wait, has to be next year cause Crystal has that thing over Christmas, well, maybe in the spring then, but soon, anyway, real soon.

Eddie is listening, smoking a cigarette and gnashing his teeth. I come out of the room, the room with the baby and the heels and the cockroaches on the pizza, look at Eddie and take a stance.

“We’re leaving.”

Crystal and Sherri interrupt their grand plans, look up and look at Eddie, who just sits there, teeth gnashing.

“What’s the hurry?”

“The hurry is that I’m leaving and you can come or not but I ain’t staying.”

Sherri and Crystal look at each other like I am playing my part perfectly as the butt of their jokes. They try hard not to giggle but then Sherri can’t help it and she lets out a little snort and Crystal tries to shush her up but now they both start chuckling and trying not to and chuckling harder. And ain’t it just great when you can live your life so carefree and sexy and dressed up and high-heeled and who cares that you’ve got a baby in the back room with a pizza full of cockroaches and no hope for the future?

Eddie doesn’t look at me.

I look at the girls trying not to giggle and Eddie gnashing his teeth and the shitty wine carpet and the regal crest wallpaper peeling down the wall and Sherri scratching her ankles and I walk directly out the screen door, past the truck and down the road.

And as I’m marching off into the setting sun it starts to dawn on me that maybe my mama didn’t fuck up completely because if she had then maybe I would have been raised up in some room with flea-bite ankles and cockroach pizza in a house leaning over into the abyss. And maybe I am just a two-bit hick from the heartland but I do know one thing, my mama did not raise me to be skankin it in skanksville with the skanks.

I get about three and a half telephone poles down the road before Eddie pulls up, smiling like he just won the lottery, acting like James Dean on crack. I have had enough and I am walking without looking sideways, straight ahead, and I don’t care if I never see him again and get left out here in the middle of crap county just as long as Eddie’s out the picture for good. But now he’s driving three miles an hour beside me, yelling over the motor through the passenger-side window, not even bothering to look at the road.

“C’mon, kid, I told you I had errands.”

“Keep driving.”

“Well, fine but I thought you might wanna know that Glenda called and was asking about you and wanted us to meet her at the Motel 6 in Devil’s Slide.”

“Motel 6? Yeah, right. I don’t believe you.”

“Cause she said Lloyd was having a meeting and she didn’t want to ruin it, what with it being business and all. She said she owed you.”

“Owed me what?”

“I dunno. She just said she did.”

“Hm. Sounds weird.”

“Well, look, she said to be there. You can come or not, but, if you don’t, she’s gonna take it out on me, so you can see my dilemma.”

I stop in my tracks and ponder the sun setting yonder over the horizon. I’ll be double fucked if I have to spend the night out here in a ditch with not even my bag for a pillow. The truck idles next to me and I take a deep breath. There’s something inside me whispering whatever you do, don’t get in that truck, don’t get in that truck, don’t get in that truck, but I am kicking myself knowing that in just a split second I am gonna sigh and throw my hands up in the air and get right back in that truck.

Eddie doesn’t look at me as we scratch out onto the road towards Devil’s Slide. He doesn’t look at me and he doesn’t say one word about Glenda or what she owes me.

I guess you could say my feelings towards Eddie are balanced somewhere between fear and want. There’s a feeling I have, when I look at him, that he’s about to vanish before my very eyes, like some magic cowboy trick conjured up to scare me but keep me on the edge of my seat. And I am. I cannot get off my toes for a minute for fear that he’ll be gone for good and I’ll be an all-alone girl. it’s that feeling of impending abandonment that keeps me clinging to him like he’s the last train out of crapville.

He’s an ugly man. No doubt about it. He’s crooked on the inside and on the out, like his mind warbled in on itself and his body just followed suit. But there’s something in his eyes, something rough and cunning, that keeps me from opening that truck door, tumbling out onto the gravel and running back to Jackson.

There’s a wish I have, when I close my eyes. I pray that he’ll fall for me. And it’s just cause I know he won’t that I want this so bad. There are no spells I can cast, no webs I can weave, no magic words
and candles burned. it’s like he can see right through me, straight to the core and has it on fact that I ain’t worth it.

Two miles outside Devil’s Slide, we pull into the Motel 6. Not my dream date. I twiddle my thumbs in the car while Eddie checks us into the furthest room from the road. I look around for Glenda’s car but I guess she’s not here yet. Makes sense, she had farther to drive and maybe got a late start. The moon hangs silver in the sky, waning. There’s a few stars turning on, one by one, but mostly they’re just getting warmed up.

We walk into number 12 and it’s like the room is made of cork. There’s a silence while the two of us stare at the double bed, made crisp.

“That’s all they had, kid, don’t complain.”

“All right.” I nod. “But how’s Glenda gonna find us?”

“Don’t worry bout it.”

“Wull, should we leave a message?”

“Already did.”

He turns on the TV and some long-haired man with a tan starts screaming at us, from the box, telling us we better not miss out on the last chance to buy his brand new-fangled exerciser. Eddie lays down on the bed and starts flipping through the channels, all the way through and then back again, all the way through and then back again. He settles on the crime channel, talking about some lady found on her kitchen linoleum, half-rotten, her dogs and cats, flea-infested, pissing and shitting all over the floor, and this is the part where the nice-looking cop gets choked up and quiet, real concerned, telling us about how the dogs and cats were feeding off her corpse. that’s how he put it. Feeding.

Eddie makes a face and grabs a bottle of Jack Daniels out the sack by the side of the bed. He’s a long man. His legs go from one end of the bed to the other, one folded on top, not even straight out. He starts switching channels. Switch. Wait. Switch. Wait. Switch.

I go to take a shower, wanting to get the old geezer and the cockroach pizza and the dog-and-cat-eaten lady off me and out of my skin. I take off my clothes in the steam, wondering if I look good. I don’t even remember what looking good looks like. But I want to. I want Eddie to look at my shiny new body and be rendered helpless. I want him to lift my chin and call me honey.

But that’s a long shot.

When I was little I used to watch Tammy play dress-up. She would twirl around in front of the mirror, looking herself up and down, quiet, contemplating with two small wrinkles furrowed into her brow. That serious squint, that need and desperation, increased ten-fold with age. The older she got, the less fancy-free dress-up became. She went from twirling to turning to standing still to frowning silent.

When I was ten, my dad and I sat at the kitchen table still while she knocked bottle after bottle of Wind Song and Shalimar and Charlie onto the floor. For her grand finale, she threw a bottle of Jean Naté at her reflection, shattering the mirror into thousands of mite-sized pieces, shining out like diamonds in the orange shag rug. My dad and I sat there, contemplating the tabletop, waiting for the show to stop.

When her number was up, she passed out on the bed and he got up, quiet, quiet going up the stairs, quiet, getting down on his
knees, quiet, picking up the little mini-diamonds, one by one. Then he walked to the bathroom, threw them out, quiet, walked to the bathroom, threw them out. He wouldn’t let me help, wouldn’t even let me in the room, even though his hands were bleeding at all ten fingertips and even though it was an endless job that never did get done.

The next morning my mama woke up, came down the stairs and asked, “What the fuck happened to the mirror?” It was the kind of thing you would laugh at, if it wasn’t your mama. My dad didn’t even look up from his cornflakes. He just took the blame, said he broke it and promised to buy her a new one straightaway. She walked out into the hall, shaking her head and mumbling about what kinduva idiot husband she had who’d be so clumsy as to break a mirror, seven years’ bad luck and all.

That happened when I was ten. So I reckon I got four more years in payment.

I inspect my reflection. I’m starting to look like her. My body is starting to make the same shapes her body makes, bubbling up. I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to look like. I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to be. With Eddie in the other room I feel off my game and peculiar, like I’ve done something wrong, but I don’t know what. He makes me lose my courage. He makes me feel like I wish I was better or prettier or just plain not me. He makes me feel like I’ll never be good enough and he’s right.

“You gonna be in there all night?” he yells out over the TV.

I put my clothes back on and walk out to find him sitting on the bed in nothing but his underwear, the bottle of Jack Daniels leaning against the headrest and a make-shift drink in a see-through cup resting where his belly’s supposed to be. His body is angled and
disjointed like one of those paintings where the people are made up of circles and cubes. His hipbones cut through his skivvies, razor-sharp, and you can count his ribs from the front. He looks up at me.

“Jack and Coke. Cures what ails ya.”

He takes a drink. “What the hell you put those dusty ol clothes back on for?”

“Cause I don’t have nothin else.”

I try to position myself out from under the green fluorescent light. None too flattering. “it’s not my fault you decided to drive off into the sunset.”

But Eddie’s back to flipping channels. My head could catch fire and he wouldn’t notice.

“When’s Glenda supposed to get here?”

He ignores me. Switch. Wait. Switch. Wait. Switch.

“Eddie, when is Glenda supposed to get here?”

Nothing.

“Hello?”

Eddie hits the mute and lets out a huff.

“Well, that’s the thing, kid, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

And I know right then and there that I am never gonna see Glenda again.

“You see, me and Glenda had a talk, well, actually, she came to me first and . . . well, she asked me if, well, she asked me . . . to take you.”

I am trying not to hear what he’s saying. I am trying to pretend that it’s a few minutes before. I am trying to make it come out different.

“Whattaya mean, take me? Take me where?”

“I don’t know, wherever, she just said she couldn’t keep you around, cause of Lloyd and all, and that she wanted me to take you . . . off her hands.” He shrugs. “Sorry.”

“I don’t believe you. She wouldn’t do that.”

“Oh yes she would. She would and she did. Look, she even gave me a grand to take care of you.”

Eddie takes out a wad of bills from the bag next to the bed, showing it to me. it’s the other wad of bills from Custer’s Last Stand. Her half. “She said she felt bad but that she wanted me to take care of you, make sure you stay out of trouble.”

I am looking at myself in the middle of this cork-pile room, wood-paneled and cubby-holed, in the middle of this Motel 6, two miles outside Devil’s Slide, Utah, and realizing that this is it. This is all there is for me.

“Look, kid, I know you think I’m some kinda freak and Glenda is little Miss Perfect, but let me tell you something, she’s trouble and you’re better off without her. Besides, I ain’t so bad. I don’t bite.”

And I am watching him swigging his Jack Daniels, getting surly and meaner with each swig, till I can see something else, something that does bite, cueing up behind his eyes, some demon sent from drunkville to drown the Devil’s Slide Motel 6.