The Speed Chronicles (16 page)

It smells great in here!

How are my cold cuts looking? I'm about to fire up the hot pots and get the fondue going. I decided I am like some kind of cat. A wildcat!

Are you okay? Your cheeks are flushed
.

Don't let Walker kick you off the piano so quickly this year!

I'm going to take a shower
.

I'm in the middle of my recording.

So call me crazy for this next one, but I feel like the bathroom is a very important place to be thorough. Think about it: a fabulous open house in a charming and well-appointed home at the height of the frenetic holiday season. It's the kind of home you pass when you're out for your evening constitutional and think,
I wonder who lives there. That sure does look like a warm and inviting place to live. Some very creative, lovely people must be inside right now doing something interesting
. And suddenly, you're there! In the middle of the whirl and swirl of guests and chatter and activity and carols around the baby grand and then, boom, you've got to tinkle and/or check your lipstick. When you do, I want you to say hello to your own little sanctuary.

I like a scented candle. I like to play with lighting. I like to do my towels two ways. Plush, vibrant terry ones, of course, but also a high-quality disposable for those who would rather take that route. I'm not judging. The main goal is to make everyone feel comfortable. Now, how do I put this delicately? Because I'm taking this warts-and-all approach, let's get past the bullshit. I want to point out that it is advisable to take a quick peek inside the medicine cabinet and get a gander. Whether you'd like to admit it or not, some people, and I'm not going to call them cretins—though I'm sure Tammy Two-Tone, who gets that special name because of her horrible hairstyle—are bound to check out what's cooking inside the cupboards. Generally, the only things I relocate to my dresser drawers are Jim's fungal powder and any prescription medications that may be around. Am I right? You don't want every Tom, Dick, and Harry, and TAMMY, knowing who's on what for why.

Did you hear that? I think it was a knock at the door. Here we go scurrying down the hall, slipping into the red patent-leather pumps on the way there. Goodbye! This has been fun! Showtime!

12/20, 4:02 p.m. Audio Recording #7

Oops. My bad. I thought I heard something. No guests yet, but I am going to turn you off anyway because I still have to make the mix for the pomtinis. So perfect that pomegranate juice is red this time of year. That doesn't make sense, but you know what I mean. I couldn't resist. This is amazing. This is my night.

BETH LISICK
is the author of four books, including the
New York Times
best seller
Everybody into the Pool
. She is also an actor, filmmaker, and the cofounder of San Francisco's Porchlight Storytelling Series.

pissing in perpetuity

by rose bunch

I
never saw the coons that ate my koi. At least, I never saw them do the eating. What I saw Sunday morning as I lay belly-flat on the mossy river stones surrounding the hole me and John dug, lined with black tarp from Lowe's, was empty, clear water. The only movement a rippling from my water feature: a serene, concrete woman constantly pouring from an urn cradled against her naked breast. I nicknamed her “Lola” because she had a mannish jaw. “It sounds like someone taking a perpetual piss in our backyard,” John said when I first plugged Lola in. I got up, poked around, and saw the coons had left behind tail bits—a fin here, a scale or two there. I imagined them washing their nimble, little hands in the empty pool at my feet. Lip-licking satisfied.

“Goddamnit,” I said, and felt myself welling up a little bit, about to squirt like Lola. I named the fish after two of my favorite dead uncles, which was shortsighted of me if Winfred and Ransom had to be buried all over again should the aeration pump break down or coons come for blood. I fingered the golden flakes of their remnants and sprinkled them back into the water. A partial sea burial.

I now saw Butterball next door, watching me, pissing in my general direction. A stream of urine shooting from a small pink knob of flesh pinched between his fingers. He had lost a ton of weight in the past few months, but his frame still looked built to hang meat on, lanky and misshapen even for a teenager, with hunks of clinging lard deposits. He removed a cigarette slowly from his lips, ashed, and shook his dick, eyeballing me from behind reflective Bassmaster shades.

This was a hill trick I knew from childhood: don't stand and stare, but don't be the one to look away too quick either. A glancing square-off. From inside the old stone house behind him I could hear the keening wails of his younger brother, a six-year-old. Their mother's car was gone again, and when she was away the boys often spent too much time in their yard, worn bald by a chained dog, staring at ours. The six-year-old played in the dirt and a growing junk pile, while the former fat kid paced back and forth talking on his cell phone and smoking cigarettes, out of reach of the skinny Rottweiler pressing full chain for affection. He flicked the butts toward our house, and I had to police the yard to pick up the ones that made it across the border. I washed my hands immediately, because they had grazed what he had suckled.

I wondered what they ate when the mother was gone for long, up to several days by my count. What the inside of that house must have looked like, the darkness and stink of it. Some days I thought I could literally smell a stink coming off it, and I wondered what they did inside there, what poison they might have taken or produced.

“They seem too stupid and disorganized to be cooking,” John would say whenever I brought this up. “Taking, but not cooking.”

“You think it takes real smarts to cook meth?” I would say back. And we would watch on the news the ugliness unfolding night after night in the hills surrounding us, the broken and blank-eyed faces in mug shots and wailing, filthy children taken by child protective services.

My mother used to bring me to the homes of the needy families when I was a kid. We delivered donated clothes or canned goods from the church to people up in the remote hollows who squirreled their lives into whatever passed for a house. Velveteen couches and cigarette-charred La-Z-Boys, collections of Avon perfume bottles on every surface, plastic flapping on windows. They were grateful for the canned peas, the used coats, the fresh pears from our tree. Old, isolated communities in these Ozark hills were once sustained on this type of charity. They were just poor, either by bad luck or accident, but that wasn't a crime. Lots of people were poor then. It didn't mean they had to be assholes too.

Three months ago, Butterball and family had moved into the house that the realtor claimed was condemned when he sold us our land. The houses we could afford in town were all on small lots in cow pastures out by the interstate. No sidewalks or trees. No privacy from your neighbors who were close enough to piss on. No charm either in any of them advertised as such, their gold-flecked linoleum and taupe-carpeted floors felt as dull and cheap as the interior of a shoebox. We constructed our own charm then. Here in Wesley, Butterball and family were the only neighbors close enough to holler at, and the next home over was a bunch of Guatemalans in an old trailer who worked the chicken trade and kept to themselves. I'd suspected the Guatemalans of dealing because of the traffic coming and going at the trailer, but when I called the sheriff's office a tired-sounding woman said, “Honey, they'll see if they can get around to it.” Later I thought maybe all the traffic was partly because there were so many of them living there, but nobody ever came out to check. I called the sheriff again and the same woman said: “No telling what they're up to, we got so much of that we can't keep up. Whatever it is, they'll probably stick to themselves.” If they weren't going to do anything I was glad nobody had pulled up in a squad car mentioning drug-trafficking complaints from the nosy white lady up the road. Still, I watched them closely looking for signs. The men, and a few women, drove past packed in an old Dodge every morning and night, a steady rotation of shifts at the poultry-gutting plant in Lowell where they all worked.

“This'll be paved in no time,” the realtor had said, looking at our curve in the road, rocking back and forth, sucking on something leftover in his teeth from lunch. “You got yourself a real deal here. Everything is shifting.”

Our view to the right was open fields and distant construction of gigantic homes in a subdivision, The Vineyard. There, the stones on the homes were imported, rounded and gray, like something in New England. To the left, a potpourri of crankheads, Butterball and family's old river stone house, slumped on one side as if burdened, and past it the Guatemalan village's single crusty trailer and a dried-out hillside striped with silver commercial chicken houses. I'd dreamt of living out somewhere far away from the chicken farms I'd grown up around.

“All that'll be coming down soon,” the realtor had said. He had waved his hand at what was disagreeable, including the stone house.

Butterball's mother hadn't invited me inside the two times I'd gone over. Each time, I had stepped around a hole in the porch, something growling, menacing and low beneath my feet. The first visit was to introduce myself and bring a chess pie, my grandmother's recipe, and the second to ask her to tell her youngest boy to quit slinging gravel at our roof. I'd never seen him do it, but I noticed a small chip or two in a window I blamed on him. Both times she kept the door tight to her shoulder and responded roughly the same to the greeting as the complaint. “Huh,” she said. “Yeah, okay.” I never got the pie plate back, and didn't want to ask for it either. Anticipating this, I had used a shitty one that had a big chip in it. Sometimes I wished the sinking pile of rocks would burn to the ground to improve our view, and the family with it. I don't have an endless supply of Christian charity and goodwill like my mother.

Turkey buzzards circled in the sky, spiraling down lazily into something rotten, probably improperly discarded carcasses cleaned off of commercial henhouse floors, waiting to be burned or turned into the litter dumps. The August heat was cranking up, the scent of chicken manure shifting with the warming breeze off fertilized fields. Inside our French Country Model #809 home (inspired by the elegant but simple lifestyle of Provence, it had said on the plans), I could hear shrill whistles and crashing, wonky noises of morning cartoons. John banged on something in the garage. I brushed the remaining scales from my fingers and walked around to the opening.

“Coons ate the fish,” I said. My voice lifted and cracked the way our daughter's did when she announced a new disappointment in life.

John, bent over a riding lawnmower, looked up from under his armpit. “What?” he said, like I had asked him what he wanted on a sandwich rather than announced a tragedy.

“They just took 'em,” I said. I felt the heat of a tear slide from one eye, then another, and was immediately ashamed. John stood up, his hand cradling a socket wrench, and looked at me. He politely ignored my weeping over missing fish—he taught middle school biology and was accustomed to random outbursts of emotion.

“You sure?” he asked.

“Yes, I'm fucking sure!” I said, wiping my face. I hated it when he questioned me, like I had gone stupid since I became a stay-at-home mom. I had a graphic design degree from a softball scholarship at Arkansas Tech I was going to put to real use as soon as our daughter started kindergarten. “I know their ways.”

“Their ways?” he said, and laughed. He pulled a piece of material from his back pocket and twisted the oily wrench in it. I saw it was one of the fancy napkins my aunt had given us for our wedding. She said it came from India. I kept these in my grandmother's antique buffet and used them only twice a year, at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. John looked down at the napkin in his hand and shoved it back in his pocket. I got gut-sick and sadder right there, felt the hate building in my neck where it liked to live, and turned and went into the kitchen.

Our kitchen was designed “family friendly” with a mud/ laundry room off the garage and an open bar looking out into the living room that made me feel like a fry cook. It seemed like a good plan originally, but now I saw it was designed to trap me in one area for labor. Alexis, seeing me in the work zone, yelled that she wanted more Cocoa Puffs. “Now!” she said. Being a mother wasn't as fulfilling as advertised, not that I didn't experience a raw ache in my guts when she genuinely hurt herself or was feverish, or melt at her sudden affections. Not that I wouldn't defend her to the death from a rabid, koi-thieving coon attack. But whenever I was bored and numb from demands, her tears just another task to be addressed, I experienced a flagging doubt that I was contributing anything all that much by being there all the time. I looked at the side of her ponytailed head, her eyes glowing from reflected TV, mouth slack, and tried to remember the last time she was sweet.