The Speed Chronicles (17 page)

John came into the kitchen, gave me a peck on the head, and grabbed his keys. “We'll get more, bigger ones, and they'll eat the coons if they come back. I gotta go pick up some things in town.” Sometimes I had a hard time figuring if he possessed boundless optimism, or he simply didn't give a shit. Either way I could admire it, and I felt the tension in my neck lessen slightly. Alexis ran to him and whined that she wanted to go too, but John did a little dance, whirled her around, blew fart noises into her tubby belly, and said, “Not today, punkin'.” He was an expert at waltzing in, both denying and delighting Alexis at the same time, with no ill consequences. After he left she lightly kicked the back door before turning her dissatisfaction back to me.

“Cocoa Puffs!” she said. She put her hands on her hips and made the pouty face her grandparents encouraged and photographed. We didn't live far from where me and John had grown up in Huntsville, so our parents had full access to their five-year-old granddaughter. They claimed we continued some kind of family legacy by building in that same narrow stretch of valley. Ancestors had banded together in one section of hills and fought off whatever discomfort and outlaws to build a life that lasted generations. I wondered what beauty they had imagined here, versus what they found. At times this gave us comfort. Other times we felt like failures for not making it outside the valley. My parents had a photograph of Alexis on the mantel amongst the stern great-great-grandparents who had named each bluff, each hollow surrounding us. They wore overalls and severe black dresses as if they were ready to work in the fields or be buried. In her photo, Alexis wore a pink tutu and T-shirt that said
Princess
(something they had never encouraged me to be), in that exact pose she now struck before me. I hated that fucking picture.

“You already had your breakfast,” I said. And then listened to the many reasons why the first breakfast was insufficient and more sugar was necessary to survive. “Nope,” I said. “Not open for discussion. Why don't you go outside and play?”

Alexis made indistinct noises, words stretched into whine, and stomped back into the living room for more cartoons. We'd purchased a slide, tire swing, monkey climber combo jungle gym and put small, rounded landscaping pebbles beneath it. “What are them fucking rocks for?” my father had asked. “For safety,” I said. “From what?” he said. Wasps built nests in the tire swing that I was obliged to hose out every week in case Alexis learned to appreciate it, and the crossbeams gave the crows a place to perch and pick at the cornbread I threw out for songbirds. Next door I heard the rumblings of Butterball's rusty Z28, a car that didn't look like it had the capacity for movement, the catalytic converter removed for added annoyance. He slung a spray of gravel with his dramatic exit.

Within ten minutes after Butterball's departure the littlest one from next door was on the porch, pretending to look at my decorative ferns. Sometimes when his brother abandoned him, the boy showed up. I didn't encourage it. His mother was none too friendly the few times she had come over to get him, smoking and tapping her foot, scratching herself and ashing on my porch like I had inconvenienced her instead of the other way around. I don't know why people act like if you have one kid it's okay to dump strange ones on you like stray kittens. All kittens are cute. Not all kids are. When his older brother would fetch him he'd linger too long, adjusting his crotch and making statements that merited no response:
You like fish
or
I seen you was planting flowers
. No one ever bothered to apologize for abandoning the child to my care without notice.

There was a faint scratching noise at the door. I opened it and stared down at the kid, who, rather than make eye contact, broke off a fern leaf and looked past me into the house like he had forgotten something in there. He was puffy, like his brother used to be, and barefoot.

“Where's your mama?” I asked.

He shrugged and stuck the edge of the fern leaf in his mouth.

“Come on in,” I said. The kid walked into the house with the halting uncertainty of a stray cat, but nosed his way straight for the kitchen. “Gimme that,” I said. I took the sodden fern leaf away from him and threw it in the trash. He tiptoed along the countertop until he saw the Cocoa Puffs. “Want some?” I asked.

His head did a slight tilt forward and back, and then he stared at his dirty feet while I poured out a bowl. Alexis heard the sound of sugar nuggets hitting porcelain and came trotting into the kitchen. She drew back when she and the kid made eye contact and hid halfway behind the door jamb. I didn't care much for her going anywhere near that house or those boys, and had told her so many times.

“I want some too,” she said.

They settled in with their bowls, far apart in separate corners of the den, and watched cartoon animals beating the shit out of each other again and again. Almost two hours later, after I guiltily looked at curtains online, and one altercation over the boy touching Alexis's coloring books on the coffee table, John came back toting bags from both Home Depot and Lowe's. He also had a bucket containing three koi, bigger than the last.

“Too big for coons to wrestle,” he said. He spotted the kid in the living room and nodded toward him, raising his eyebrows.

“Yup,” I said.

“We should call somebody,” he said.

“Yes, but you'll be asking for trouble.”

John stared at the kids in the living room, considering the balance between trouble and civic responsibility. He reached into a sack on the counter, tossed me a beer, and walked to the French doors opening onto our backyard where Lola streamed away. “Pissing in perpetuity,” he said.

I didn't hear the mother return, but noted Butterball wasn't back when she rang my doorbell. She picked at a scab on the side of her head with her pinky. “He here?” she said, smoke sliding out of her tired face as if she was too weary to exhale. I opened the door wider where she could see the boy in the living room. He looked up from a coloring book, like he'd been caught, and started to scoot over toward us.

“He's too little to be left alone like he is,” I said. “You need to see to it that there's someone looking out for him when you leave.”

“You got a pretty room here,” the mother said. “Like out of a magazine.” She said this as if it were an accusation rather than a compliment. She poked her scratching pinky at a dark chocolate loveseat sitting by a front window, lined with striped pillows in varying pale blues. I'd gotten it at T.J. Maxx. It looked to be waiting for a lady to relax there and read poetry in the soft light, or gaze out at the passing chicken trucks and Guatemalans and contemplate the sanctity of her home. I'd never sat in it since I'd put it there.

“If his brother can't see to him then he needs good day care,” I said.

The mother sighed and tapped ash onto my porch, then looked dully at her spent cigarette and flicked it into my azaleas. She craned her neck to see what was taking the kid so long. He was gathering the pictures I had forced Alexis to allow him to color in her
Sea Friends
book, a scribbled squid and great white shark, both in orange. “That's real good,” I'd said in that bullshit way everyone praises children now. He had stopped coloring, wiggled slightly, and ducked his head, pleased but uncertain what the correct response to praise was. It made me feel shitty that I didn't mean it.

“Well, come on,” she said to the boy, and lit another.

Neither of them looked at me as they turned from the porch; the boy dragged his feet as if afflicted. I watched them walk back to their askew house, her hand gripping the back of his neck, smoke trailing from behind her frizzy head. The dog barked at them, high-pitched and insistent, until the woman said something sharp and low to make it shut up. Butterball was now back and standing in the yard, gazing in the general direction of Lola, love-struck, scratching his dick. A small garbage fire burned at the edge of our borders, stinking of plastic and chemicals.

I stuck my head into the garage. John was back at his lawn-mower, but with a new pack of utility rags open beside him. “Call whoever you need to call,” I said.

The gravel started hitting the top of the roof again later that afternoon. First a single plunk, followed by a rattling drop into my flower bed, something I could have mistaken as a pine cone. Then a buckshot rain shower. I ran outside to yell at the kid, a single stone still making its rattling way to the azaleas below, but there was no one there. The dog lay limp from the heat in a burrowed-out hole, halfway under the foundation of the house. John offered to go talk to them, but I figured him making a call Monday morning was enough.

By Wednesday the new fish were dead. I found their swelling bodies, iridescent gold and white, floating sideways under the indifferent gaze of Lola. On Monday, with the help of Alexis, we had named them after Disney princesses. The sharp scent of bleach was apparent. I called John at work, and he told me to just calm down until he got home.

“And then what?” I said. “After I'm all calm and you're here, then what?”

I called the sheriff's office and got the same tired woman I had spoken to before about the Guatemalans. “Honey, we'll try and send somebody out to look at it,” she said. I went to the pond and turned Lola off. There was something about her pouring that didn't seem right while the bodies were still there, bobbing lightly, floating only for John to witness. I took photographs of the fish for evidence before burial, digging a big hole over near the neighbor's yard by their burn pile. The skinny Rottweiler about to strangle itself to get at me, barking hoarse. A darkness could be seen behind one of the windows. No one came outside. The dog twisted and strained against the chain, its barks no more than raspy air.

“Want one, shithead?” I said, real sweet and soft, and threw him Ariel first. The fish body, rigid, smelling of chemicals, landed with a thunk in front of the startled animal. The dog leaped back, withdrawing closer to the crumbling foundation of the house. “How about Belle then?” I said. “Sink your teeth into that.” I could hear the muted sounds of Alexis calling for me, louder as she stepped out on the back patio. I reached for Cinderella's stiff body and paused to look at the delicate beauty of her scales up close. As the dog crept toward the two fish, gaining interest, the back screen door of the stone house flung open. The mother came tottering out, followed by Butterball and the kid.

“What are you doing?” she said.

Butterball didn't have his usual reflective shades on, and without concealment his eyes appeared small with dark circles, his face more childlike. He looked more like a scared, misshapen old boy than a misshapen young man. Little brother hovered behind older brother's sagging jeans. I held Cinderella and saw them standing there as uncertain as creatures disturbed under a rock and began to feel ashamed for all of us. The kid reached up to touch his brother's ass, at which the teenager snapped a hand back to slap him away, like he was waving away a fart. “Yeah,” Butterball said. He stepped forward.

“Giving your dog old fish,” I said. “But if you got a reason he shouldn't eat it …”

“Fuck you and your fish,” the mother said. She kicked at either Ariel or Belle and knocked off her flip-flop. “Keep your goddamned fish to yourself and mind your own fucking business.”

Alexis called for me again. I turned around to see her edging closer. She was wearing the pink tutu outfit her grandparents had given her. I hadn't yet told her the princesses were all dead. I chucked Cinderella in the hole and turned away.

“Stay away from my house,” I said. I picked Alexis up and held her to me, walking quickly toward our home. I didn't look back at the neighbors, but heard muttered curses and the thump of what turned out to be Ariel, or maybe Belle, falling close behind us. Alexis didn't ask about the fish, as if fish-throwing was a given around here. She put a knuckle up to her mouth and gnawed lightly on it, like she used to when she was a baby, squinting back over my shoulder with an expression I didn't quite recognize, neither fearful nor sad, as if thoughtfully plotting some dark revenge. “How about some Cocoa Puffs?” I said.

John lectured me briefly about engaging with the enemy when he got home. “Stay the fuck away from them. Especially when I'm not here. What if they had done something more than throw a fish?”

“They did do something more!” I said. “They killed them, to start with.”

“Guess they heard from child services.”

Alexis liked to draw wiggly figures she called fish princesses. One blobby, gold and pink creation she gave to John to hang on the refrigerator. The Fish Princess was wearing a tutu.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, and tore it down before dinner.

A policeman came to take a dead fish report the next morning. When I saw the squad car in the drive, I felt a momentary chill inside, the way I always feel around cops. Like I should run up into the woods and hide further in the hills even if I haven't done anything wrong. The biggest sons of bitches I ever knew from high school had become policemen. Bastards with badges. He had a country-cop saunter, a walk that said he could give a shit, was even vaguely amused, as he came up to the front door. I led him through the house to the backyard. He smiled and winked at Alexis, who stared back at him, unmoved.

“You say it was bleach?” he asked. “Can't really smell it.” The officer stood a ways back to admire the fish pond. “Nice water feature.”

“And then when I was trying to bury the fish, they threw one at me,” I said.

“Who did?”

“The ones that did this,” I said. “Over there.” We walked to the edge of the yard and stood beside the freshly dug earth.

“You saw them poison the fish,” he said, “and then they come over and grabbed them up?”

“Well, no, but I know it was them. Their dog wouldn't shut up so I threw one at it.”