Rose of No Man's Land (20 page)

Aaaaaaaah
, the dude screamed.
Aaaaaah, aaaaaah.
It was like he was on fire.

Get the fuck out!
the driver reached around him and popped the door open. Bloody Front Passenger spun toward his friend. He banged his head on the rearview again. It was bonked all out of place and the driver said,
Fuck
, and then shoved the kid in his back. He shoved him hard out the open door.

Clean yourself off, man! That’s sick! That’s sick! My fucking car!
One of the kids from the backseat leaned over and pulled the door shut. Front Passenger stood on the curb and the tampon slid out from his shirt, landing on the sidewalk. Rose dove for it, her grubby fingers wrapping around the string. The thing still had plenty of blood left in it. It was like the Uzi of bloody tampons. She could take him out again and again. I was breathless. What a genius weapon. The car peeled out, leaving their friend in a blue fog of burnt tire and exhaust. They headed in the general direction of the Palace. Front Passenger was lifting his shirt, looking at the long smears of Rose’s menstruation on his chest. He held the fabric away from the wet mess.

What the fuck?
he demanded. He looked seriously pained. He looked like Rose just kicked him in the ’nads. Like she’d done something dirty, betrayed some sort of pact we’d all agreed to. The tampon swung from her fingers. She made it sway like a pendulum. Her big eyes got creepy-big.

You are getting slee-py
, she droned, moving toward the
boy. He took a quick step backward, still holding his shirt up, and tripped off the back of the curb. He went down hard, on his ass. Rose laughed. She leaned over him with the tampon. He was shouting all sorts of shit at her, mean shit and curses. I started getting scared again. I don’t think I’d stopped being scared, but it had morphed from a bad-scared to a sort of exciting-scared and was now starting to go sour again. That kid was going to get up and punch Rose in the head. He let his shirt drape back over his torso and used his hands to help him scramble up. He was big and wobbly. He had a tattoo on his leg, Chinese writing. It probably said “Peace” or something. He was a fucked-up white kid who liked to start shit, walking around with a Chinese peace tattoo on his leg. I hated him so much. It was cramping my hands and making me feel wild and shaky.

I Fucking Hate You, Man, I said. I went and stood closer to Rose and her tampon. At least there was two of us. I didn’t know how to fight, but I bet I could scream really loud, I bet I could make help come for us. If that didn’t happen I could knock his baseball hat off and rip out hunks of his Abercrombie-colored hair, like Rose said to. I could bite him in the jugular and knee him hard in the balls. I could fight a dirty panic fight if I had to.

You bitches are crazy
, he said. He backed up, then halted. He looked around for traffic but there wasn’t any. He dashed into the street. Rose leaned in and hurled the tampon a second time. It whacked his back, leaving another crimson smudge, and tumbled to the street.

He kept screaming back at us as he ran past Spritzie’s
and down the street. Just your regulation Mogsfield trashmouth curse words, the ones specifically for females, like we haven’t heard them a million times before, like they’re practically not our nicknames by now. Like calling us douche bags could hurt our feelings, make Rose feel bad about chucking a dirty tampon in his face. We stood on the curb and watched him get smaller and smaller. Rose held her hand up to shade her eyes against the last atomic-orange flare of the setting sun. The boy turned down a side street and was gone. Rose made a wet and scraping noise at the back of her throat and spit a glob onto the sidewalk. She wiped her skinny mouth with the back of her hand. An SUV cruised by and flattened the tampon. It looked like roadkill against the pavement, like a bit of pigeon or the bloodied tail of a rat.

Another car stopped, with just a solitary man inside. Rose waved him along.
He had perv vibes
, she said. I tried to get her to tell me what the perv vibrations felt like but she couldn’t explain it.
It was an intuitive thing
, she said. I was happy to hear she had the ability to pick up on these invisible perverted rays since the driver had actually looked pretty okay to me. I wondered if it was reasonable to expect any sort of normal person to pick up a couple of hitchhikers. Isn’t it the sort of thing a normal person avoids? A blue pickup hurtled over toward us. There was a woman inside, which Rose noted and said,
Score!
poking a tiny fist into the air. The lady leaned over as far as her seat belt would allow.

Can you take us to Revere Beach?
Rose asked. She was using the voice of a different girl. It must have been her hitchhiking voice. It was softer and higher, like she’d filed
down the gravelly points of her regular, more jagged, lifetime-smoker’s voice.

I’ll take you anywhere except over state lines
, the lady smiled. Her smile and her chipper voice seemed odd and I realized it was ’cause she was crying. She was a white lady with long orangey hair and a blotchy face. Little red splotches bloomed over her cheeks and her eyes were pink and puffy.
You girls shouldn’t be hitchhiking, you know that?
she scolded us, but her snot-clogged voice was teasing. I climbed up into the cab beside Rose. The lady had enormous boobs and a tight T-shirt covered with Chihuahuas. Every time she blinked, some residual tears squirted out her eyes and she wiped them away.
I’m sorry
, she laughed. Or pretended to laugh. I mean, she was freaking out. At least it looked that way to me. I snuggled up against the door as she swerved away from the curb and onto the street, the treaded tires rolling over Rose’s tampon mash. I hoped she could see where she was going with all that water in her eyes.
Don’t be scared
, she said.
I know it’s scary to see adults cry, right?
She laughed again.
I’m a real waterhead.

Rose seemed totally unaffected.
It’s cool
, she said.
My mom cries all the time. She’s very emotional.

The lady looked at Rose and then launched into this whole story about her boyfriend and how he caught her cheating on him, only she wasn’t cheating on him, it only looked like she was but she couldn’t explain it because he’d taken her cell phone and he’d smashed it with a cinder block.
That’s how he caught me
, she hiccuped.
The phone. How he
think
s he caught me. He
thinks
he knows the whole story! He
doesn’t know shit!
This lady was giving off some serious electrical vibes. The tight cab of her pickup felt stuffed with the angry wind of her mood, dense and crackling. The floor was a carpet of trash that rolled and snapped beneath my flops. Some rap-rock was yelling from the radio. Rose offered the freaking-out lady the use of our stolen cell phone.
Oh, you are angels!
She got newly emotional and a fresh rain of tears plopped onto her splotched face. She seemed seriously unstable. It took about fifteen minutes to get into Revere, then another few to reach the water and become snared in a clot of Revere Beach traffic. Bunches of oiled-up yahoos in tight clothes cruised around trying to pick each other up. The place was a real scene and we were only at its tip. Far down the way I could see a faint sparkle of light, maybe fast-food places, maybe the carnival. The lady was punching the tiny buttons on the cell phone, she was pushing the tiny machine into her slick face.

Look for the address
, Rose hushed to me. I cranked down the window and let the beachy air whip my face. My hair swirled up in little salty hurricanes, it blew around and grew thick with the ocean grit carried on the air. I licked my upper lip and tasted tangy sweat and beach. I watched the house numbers climb as the traffic crawled and the lady freaked out into the phone. First she was sorry, her voice all curled up and soft and weepy, and then she’d really lose it and start shrieking all sorts of angry words, mostly
Fuck you
and
It’s not what you think.
You know whenever anyone says,
It’s not what you think
, they’re totally lying. Rose reached over and pinched my leg with her fingernails. She’d pushed up the raggy end of my
sweats to do it, and my body jolted with the eensy pain of her fingernails, chewed short, the polish gnawed, hurting my skin, and also with the simple and superunexpected reality of her touch. I had a friend, this girl Rose, famously a
crazy bitch
, hitchhiker extraordinaire, we were so comfy and tight we touched each other, she touched me, like it was no big whoop. She shot me a look that went with the pinch, like she was going insane trying not to crack up at the lady, munching the shit out of the inside of her mouth with all the strain of keeping her laughs inside. The truck crawled past the houses and into the realm of cruddy hotels, just one or two, ramshackle bars in between them and then nothing but the bars for a while, old-fashioned looking like the hotels, places that maybe were sort of fancy a long time ago but now were dingy and sad. I imagined the people on the insides were the same way, people who used to be okay and had hopeful sparks in their hearts but then something happened and they got dingy and sad, they began to droop on the inside and after a while you could see it in their faces, the way the skin cragged and discolored, and in their bodies too, all skeletal or else weirdly chubbed, bulging with problems. There were racks of motorcycles lined up outside some of the bars, some of them had fake palm tree insignia, hula-skirt material fringing the doorway even though there weren’t any palm trees or hula dancers in New England. The beer signs were constant neon twists in the windows. We crawled and crawled. People in the cars all around us were hollering out their windows, locating friends or harassing the various females shuffling around still in bathing suits. Bathing suits with
heels, bathing suits with tiny cutoffs yanked over the ass, the white fringe of denim unraveling dreamily down their thighs. Everyone talking loud over the bassy rap that boomed out the car windows, the bassy rap occasionally dueling with something older and twangy or younger and screamy. I felt unreal in the midst of it all, somehow invisible in the salt air. The insane chaos of music and honking, of the hordes of squawking seagulls, their sticky feathers the same color as the poop they left all over the beach, all the mania somehow creating a calm for me. I turned to Rose. The woman was still yakking her teary yak into the phone and Rose was scavenging the landfill of fast-food styrofoam cups and burger rappers and empty cigarette packs on the truck floor. She pushed with her hands, creating trash tides that turned up pens and suspicious balls of crusty toilet paper, a cracked CD cover and a single rubbery flip-flop crusted with sand.
What, baby?
The lady asked her.
What you looking for? Shut up! Just shut the fuck up! What is it darling?
She kept the little phone clamped to her cheek the whole time, bouncing back between Rose and the man on the other end.

Tam-pon
, Rose sort of mouthed. She made an awkward gesture that involved spreading her legs and moving her hands around her groin area in a plunging motion.

Tampons! Yeah! I’m sorry, okay! I’m sorry, what the fuck — baby, check the glove compartment. Over there. The only tampons you’re going to find down there are dirty ones. Oh, yeah! Yeah, now I’m having an affair with a couple of twelve-year-old girls, you fucking sicko! Right! The glove compartment.
She sucked her lips into her mouth, licking away the
cry-snot residue. Rose clicked open the glove compartment and came out with a squat, linty tampon. One of the ones that don’t come with an applicator to inject it up yourself. It was sheathed in a bit of plastic Rose tore through with her teeth.

Watch the numbers
, she said, spitting the plastic onto the floor.
I bet it’s in one of those big buildings up the street.

I stuck my head back out the window. Like a dog, I thought. How they’re always so happy, with their long faces poked out from a speeding car, their ears whapping around. I seem to remember having a dog, a long, long time ago. Sticking my own face out the window above it, the fur of its ears blowing into my face. I thought maybe my dad had a dog or something, but Ma said no, not ever, she hates dogs and would never live with one, so I don’t know. Maybe it was a dog dream or maybe I’m always creating these phony memories for myself, trying to re-create the vanished dad. Give him a dog. He’s living in Louisiana with a dog. They sit together by a river, the dog slaps at the foamy waters with his fat paws and my dad, I don’t know, toots on a harmonica or something. Right. More likely he’s drugged out in some shithole bar starting fights or hooking up with crazy women like the one currently driving us down Revere Beach Boulevard. The numbers were close now, we were in the heart of it. The traffic seized and people swarmed the sidewalk. Clamoring for fried ocean grub outside Kelley’s. Workers in oil-stained hats were shoving plates of sand-colored nuggets through the pickup windows. It made me think of work, of Rose at work, and me unemployed. Maybe I could get a job at Kelley’s. Maybe it
would be cool to work on the beach, people coming to the window stinking like coconut. I locked eyes with a topless guy standing on the curb holding a paper boat of fried squiggles. He gave me a sharp nod as we passed, then slid his tongue out and licked his teeth at me.

Rose was hunched over in her seat, her ass levitating off the pleather, stuffing the tampon up inside her. She ruffled around on the floor and came up with a Burger Empire napkin to wipe her bloody finger on. Then she balled the paper up and dropped it back into the mess. It was as if it had never, ever occurred to her to give a fuck. She had no fuck inside of her to give. She was void of fuck. She scooted her ass around in her seat, getting comfortable with her new tampon.

The lady peeled the phone away from her face with a wet suck. She hit some buttons. She was answering our telephone.
Which one of you is Kim?
Rose opened her mouth.
Here take it, fuck it, you can’t talk to someone who’s crazy. You just can’t.
She took her hands off the wheel and shook them out like they were cramped. Rose held the phone to her ear.