Things Withered (5 page)

“I’m starting a delivery business; it’s all planned out,” he said. He was sorry as soon as he said it.

Corey felt tired then, had the most overwhelming feeling of wanting to just drag his feet down the hall and fall onto his bed and sleep. It was 7:30.

Amy gave a pretty little laugh. “Delivering what, exactly? Bullshit?”

“Amy!” his mother said. “That’s enough. You two get along!”

His sister stood, as if in resignation, but even his mother must have heard it, the undercurrent in the kitchen, the subtle smile in her voice when she said it. If he could see her face, meet her eyes, he would see them twinkling. She stomped to the kitchen window.

Corey imagined himself in a cartoon lunge—
Noooooooo!
—tackling her before she got to the window, like when Homer goes for the last donut.

Doh.

“
That’s it!?
” she snarled. She didn’t even laugh. She just turned to him and shook her head in disgust. “Great. If it runs you can deliver big boxes of dork.”

This of course caused a casual stampede to the window. His mother stood up and walked over to the fridge to get the milk and on her way she glanced out the window. It was small, but he saw her face fall just a little, her cheeks slacken with a familiar disappointment, only to bounce back up with forced and customary maternal encouragement.

“Good for you, Corey. You’re taking some initiative!” she forced out. “Amy, you’re too hard on your brother.”

Madeleine, in the meantime, picked up her coffee cup and gracefully, casually, carried it over to the sink. She glanced out the window at the truck.

Corey wanted her to turn and see him looking at her. He wanted to tell her that it was a classic machine, that her grandmother had probably had milk delivered in just such a vehicle. He wanted to tell her that during the Depression when money was tight and gas was expensive, they used to drop the motors out of those trucks and get a couple of horses to pull them. He wanted her to enjoy such information.

She never even looked at him. Her even, lovely features never changed from when she lowered her mug into the sink, to when she saw his treasure. Not once.

Madeleine of Steel, studying at the School of AmyBitch.

“It’s probably not drivable,” Amy snorted.

“Amy, that’s enough!”

Corey noticed a real edge in his mother’s voice and it surprised him. Amy was the darling. To her credit, she was an actual darling: acing school, not getting knocked up, not smoking or bringing home goth-boys who smelled of despair and glue. Corey had been a disappointment even as a fuck-up. There were no drugs (except pot and they didn’t know about that, not even Amy). No girlfriends, no boyfriends, no arrests, no weird obsessions, nothing that he could even be pitied for; there was just
nothing—

That they knew of.

He was perfectly normal. He was normal, and quiet. Pleasant. The sort of
fella
the neighbours all liked.

“I’m going to take it down to Rocky’s to show the guys—”

“Oh good. Your buddies—
Mad
, do you remember that guy we saw on the way here—with the mullet?” Madeleine looked confused and vague and beautiful. She shrugged, half-smiling, bored.

Corey didn’t wait to hear what the answer would be but from the foyer he heard them laughing and as he was flinging the door shut behind him he heard Amy exclaim happily, “
That
was Rocky!”

On the front stoop he stood a moment, catching his breath. He dropped his hands down to his sides. He dropped his hand discreetly to the front of his pants and brushed it against himself. He had a boner. Well, a half one.

But not for Madeleine, in spite of that creamy skin, in spite of the endless hair, everywhere; it was not for her.

It was for
Him.

He’d gotten the boner the minute he’d got in the truck, the second he’d grasped the tall stick shift rising up through the middle of the floor and cranked it into reverse. She—no,
He
—was unyielding and balky, and when Corey finally made contact, it sounded like the bottom of the truck was going to pop rivets and drop out, but he’d made it move. The whole thing was all phallic and gay on the surface but that only popped in and out of his mind, like a notion. Because that wasn’t it. The truck made him hard because grabbing the stick was like grabbing himself and the truck moving around when he did it was like a woman, a warm, pliant, cooperative woman.

When he turned the corner at the end of the block there was a trace echo of a feminine squeal of fear mixed with pleasure.

He didn’t go to Rocky’s.

Instead he drove the truck around the neighbourhood and wished that someone would see him. He drove until it was dark.

Around ten-thirty he parked in the lot by the store, with the engine running, the whole machine thrumming under his feet on the textured steel floor. It was like singing, soft singing. One of those oldies stations on the radio that were hard to get during the day, but sometimes drifted in at night.

The interior was as interesting as the outside of the truck.

The cab was built for a driver only—there was no passenger seating, but there was a safety bar that went from the middle of the top of the cab to where the sliding door opened. There were also four hanging straps in the back. The right side of the truck was almost all door, the panel split in half, the door sliding open with a satisfying rumble, smoothly slipping into a fastener so you could ride with the side wide open if that was the kind of day it was.

Or you could keep it closed, snap the lock, squeeze silicon into the workings so it couldn’t be opened from the inside. If it was that kind of day.

It was nice in the truck, with the lights out and engine running. Gusts of warm air leaked up through the floor from the engine, smelling faintly of gas. Corey parked outside of the ring of lights that still protected the store. If the cops drove by they would take particular interest in a delivery truck parked outside a store that had been closed for nearly ten years. The front was boarded up, the plywood planks long since covered with graffiti of the lowest order: tags and
fuck
s and
Dani’s a
slut!

Even the padlock had been spray-painted over in black. He wondered if the paint had gobbed up inside of the lock, but supposed it didn’t matter.

(When he went to pay the guy for the truck, guy stood there on the stoop, eyes glued to the stack of bills as Corey counted them out with forehead-scrunching math, ones and fives and tens and twenties; guy held the money in his palm with his thumb like it was covered in fleas and he said, “Delivery business, huh? Make sure you hose it out real good.” It had the same effect on his dick as getting in the cab seat—
you bet your ass I will
he’d thought but hadn’t said, not sure why he’d thought it.)

They used to buy caramels and Oh Henry!s and Good & Plentys and in the summer they’d have Creamsicles and grape Popsicles. Larry Beems wore braces and he couldn’t have anything sticky, no taffy, no Kraft caramels, so he always had Dairy Milk.

(There were perennial rumours of a grow-op being in the basement of the store, but Corey had never seen any evidence of that and he’d spent a lot of time in the lot. If the cops came around snooping, he guessed they’d think he was a part of that.)

He kept the side door wide open. Air passed through and it smelled like the first day of school, especially when he had his eyes closed. Now and then, as if to spoil it all for him even when she wasn’t around, his sister’s hateful voice broke through the silence in his head.
You can deliver huge loads of dork!

“She’s awful,” Corey said. The radio played something soft and sad, with lots of horn.

Corey’d had the truck two weeks the next time he saw his sister. And something was up with her. He thought she might be bumming cash off their mom.

When he walked in on them their heads were together, his mom’s purse on the counter. Amy looked up at him when he said
hey
coming in and she smiled instead of sneering or cracking wise and then he knew
something
had to be up, right?

Hey
, he’d said. And she smiled at him. That was why he knew.

Whether or not he’d ever seen that expression on his own face was up for debate, nobody runs to the bathroom and checks their mug after bumming twenty off the old lady, but surely he’d felt the way Amy looked. Her eyes widened first and then looked away and narrowed. But her cheeks got red and if she’d had skin like Corey’s, he knew you would have been able to see the red creeping up from his neck, bleeding into his hairline. He knew how it went.

I’m just a little short this month, Ma. I’ll make it up next cheque.

Oh don’t worry. That’s what a mother’s for.

I’ll pay it back.

Be a good girl. That’ll pay me back.

But at the time,
he’d just caught them both unawares, feeling like he’d walked in on a conversation about maxi-pads or something. He went to his room and got his jacket—it was colder, the end of September, especially if he drove around with the side door open—and it wasn’t until he caught his face in the mirror that he realized what was familiar about Amy and his mom, in the kitchen. It didn’t cheer him. Not like it should have.

In fact, what the hell: the day before he’d bummed a ten off his mom for gas.

I’m driving around trying to find delivery work, eh Ma? I’ll pay you back.

Be a good boy. That’ll pay me back.

He couldn’t help but wonder why Miss Perfect needed to supplement though. Maybe she lost her job. Maybe things were getting real for Miss Bitch.

Rocky said he should put a sign in the window. Rocky sucked back a whole reefer, telling him this. They stood in the driveway by the truck, hanging out.

“You should make a real good . . . sign,” he sucked. He held the smoke, eyelids drooping. “Something cool. ‘I’ll Take Your Shit.’” He laughed. “Or ‘Devilivery.’ Oh yeah,” he said, nodding.

“You have to call it that, no matter what you put in front of it: you have to call it:
Devilivery
.” Rocky repeated it a few times and Corey had to admit that it rolled off your tongue pleasantly.

By then he had spray-painted the truck black. It had come to him one day while he was driving around. Little kids kept pointing at the truck. It gave him a weird feeling, so he went over to the hardware store and put the last of his cash down for rental of one of those sprayers and did it in an afternoon. Turned out not bad. No worse than the green job, there were still dried ribbons of paint in rivulets from the top. He’d thought about painting them red.

“Awesome,” Rocky said. They sat on the steps to Rocky’s mom’s house. “Or like ‘Hell’s Devilivery,’” he added, nodding.

“Hell’s
Angels
,” Rocky whispered, without purpose.

Corey didn’t make a sign. He drove around the neighbourhood with his side door open, even after it got so cold that he had to wear a scarf around his neck. He found an old one of Amy’s, an orange, yellow and brown thing from the Gap. He wrapped it around his neck and let it hang around his crotch. When he caught a glimpse of himself in his bedroom mirror, coming or going, he looked good.

He looked good in his rearview mirror.

It got to be a habit, stopping in the lot at night, sitting there while his mom’s money exhaled out the tailpipe. He imagined loading and unloading the truck, figuring out the best combinations of layouts, like a game of Tetris. He’d been good at Tetris. He’d played a lot of it while he was supposed to be writing papers in school. It came with the computer.

He didn’t like computers much.

Whatever.

Corey’s dad had worked for the railroad from the time he left school until the time he left them all, moving in with this woman named Wanda, who had two other kids, about the same ages as Amy and Corey. It was weird, like a JJ Abrams movie or something, going over there to see their “other selves” in their dad’s life. Wanda’s kids were a boy and a girl, the only difference being that they were reversed, with the boy being older and the girl younger.

The girl had an old-school View-Master collection, and Corey and her hung out in her room, checking out the View-Master whenever they had to go over there, which wasn’t that much. She had
The Jetsons
,
Thundercats
,
The Ninja Turtle
s and the Transformer series, including the one where Optimus Prime is killed. She was Vonna.

You and Vonna were making out
, Amy would tease when their mom would come and get them. The best Corey could do was to protest. But Amy would
you were so
and then their mom would tell them to shut up. He didn’t even know if Amy played with the boy, Cliff, or if they all sat around in the kitchen or watched TV or what. They four of them weren’t around each other often enough to fight.

His dad got run over by a train when he was moving loads from one car to another in the yard. He was crossing to have a smoke with a buddy when one of the cars thought his dad was signalling for him to go and pulled forward. His dad didn’t even scream.

He took it like a man
, one of the guys from work said to them all, they were standing around in the living room, not in the kitchen that night.
Didn’t scream. Not once.

I woulda screamed,
he added, when none of them said anything.

By then his dad hadn’t been living with them for at least four years, and if he thought about it, he would have said that his dad had been living with Wanda
for at least two years and he had a vague memory of an apartment complex with a pool with yellow, sad-looking water from the months just after his dad left.

His mom cried. At the funeral the other family sat in the front row opposite his dad’s urn full of his ashes.

Wanda sobbed loudly with Vonna on one side and Cliff on the other, kind of holding her up. Corey and Amy had cried too, but from closer to the back of the funeral parlour. Their mom didn’t cry
that
much. She cried just enough for the back of the funeral parlour. Their Auntie Meg got up and talked—their dad’s sister—apparently their dad had taken up
golf
; Corey had enough trouble with that, that he didn’t even spend any time thinking about it, just once in a while he would think,
golf?
—and that was it.