Things Withered (6 page)

His mom held up okay. And apparently that was the plan, because later he heard his mother on the phone talking about how she hadn’t made a scene and no one was going to feel sorry for her.

She didn’t scream either.

Most of the time, he tried to think of how to start his delivery business. He wrote lots of notes, filled notebooks in fact, with details of how he would pick things up, how long it would take him to get from (various) points A to (various) points B; he even had time schedules mapped out. He did this while parked in the lot. He wrote things at the top of the notebook like,
It Can Be Done!

This Will Work!

Monday!

He could make, like, fifteen bucks an hour, if he played it right.

Sometimes the truck attracted the curious eyes of strangers.

His parking every night in the lot made it somewhat of a feature and once in a while the kids hanging around smoking would wander over and look at the truck. There were a couple of young kids, about grade seven or eight, who hung around after the other ones had got bored and wanted to see the engine and stuff—even though there wasn’t much to look at. It was located in a curious position, though, and was inordinately large and so he made a deal out of popping the odd, nearly vertical hood and poking around at the tubes and wires there. He knew enough basic shit to mouth off to the kids. He liked the look of their nods, and for a minute it would seem like they were a syncopated team of know-nothings, Corey mouthing off, the short dark kid giving him an
oh
, and the other one with the thing on his chin, giving out an
ah
and passing it back on to Corey. But he didn’t like to think about that; he liked talking about his truck, whether he knew anything for real about it, or not. Didn’t really matter.

So what do you use it for?

It’s a delivery truck.

Girls came around, too.

It was just like that when these two girls came through the lot, looking for boys, other boys, not Corey who was too old for them. They were maybe, they were sixteen, seventeen. Probably. Not.

Corey was twenty-one by the time he’d bought the truck and was staring at twenty-two in the not too distant future. He felt himself, at times, a man of substance, when he drove down the nearly deserted streets of his neighbourhood, checking out Mr. Bergen walking Teepee out for her late night piss; when he saw someone from the street putting their garbage out late, muttering and stepping around carefully over the damp, cool lawns in slippers. He felt sometimes that he was
taking care of business
. Like when he had a book full of notes, schedules of how long to here, how long to there, the price of gas and the weight of materials, the
ladings
.

BOL: bill of lading. It was about transportation.

Making sure things were to rights in the neighbourhood; making sure there were no strange cars around; checking out whose sensor lights were working, checking out that Brenna Lassiter pulled the shades down on her bedroom window. And Hannah Twill. And Gina whatever, who had the kind of dark hair that he liked.

Sometimes there was an empty, hollow feel to the box behind the driver’s seat, almost an echo—a cry for help from the bottom of a canyon. It sometimes handled funny, too, when the streets were slick with rain. He looked it up on the internet and they all said he needed weight back there, something to counter-balance the weight of the engine in the front.

They suggested sandbags. 125 pounds.

This one time he picked up four discarded tires from the back of the vacant lot and loaded them on his truck. He grunted as he did this, in the dark of the night, feeling both somehow hard done by and noble. He tossed them in, then climbed in the back to stack them neatly. They toppled over on the first serious turn but he drove them all the way out to the dump, through the city.

Another time he hauled a sofa that someone had left out on the street.

And a lawnmower that someone left too close to the edge of their property. And a long rug, rolled up and tied with jute, a circular stain of unknowable origin spread from the outer edge and disappearing inside the roll. It was heavier than it looked.

He took that stuff places. Not always the dump, which charged fees. It always felt good when there was weight in the back. It handled better. It counterbalanced.

Those times, that time, he felt like a man, not a shit-kid who borrowed gas money from his ma, but a man with a
delivery service
, who worked late at night and drove home tired. He
was
tired when he got home.

He found out that the girls who hung out at the store were there to watch the boys playing scrub or smoking dope or whatever. The blonde one was going out with the kid with the thing on his chin, so Corey’s estimation of them being sixteen was probably wrong.

Didn’t matter to him, they were no one to him. They were just two girls, too young, one light and one dark. They stopped to stare at the truck, with the curious eyes of strangers. They seemed older. They seemed sly and interested.

He didn’t know them, although one of them was vaguely familiar in the features, like maybe she had an older brother or sister he might have known. He’d say that
: Hey do you have a brother?
Sometimes they did, and he would pretend to know the guy. The girls relaxed then. There was a bunch of them, heading into November when it was cold as a witch’s tit and looking like snow most days. They were all blonde or mousey brown. Except for the dark-haired girl, they all looked like they had dye jobs. So fucking young to be doing that shit to themselves. He didn’t say.

Hey
the blonde one said one time.
What’s that truck for?
the blonde said.

Delivery truck
, he answered shortly. He’d opened the hood and Corey noticed that the cap for the oil thing was gross and cruddy. He’d grabbed a paper towel to wipe it off. He’d stood there, enjoying himself in front of the truck, rubbing old oil off the threads in the cap. He’d noticed a deer carcass the night before, when he was driving around the outskirts of town. There was a bar out around there. Sometimes he drove out that way and parked at the far end of the parking lot and watched the drunks come out and get in their cars. Lots of times they’d have a drunk girl with them, and the two of them would do it in the back seat. There was now a pair of binocs in the glove box. Corey found them around the house. Probably they had been his old man’s.

He was thinking he might go get the deer carcass, get it off the road. Take it somewhere. Get rid of it. Maybe take it out to Berk’s field and burn it.

He’d spotted the girls through the break in the hood. He stood there, rubbing, watching them, waiting to see what they would do.

What do you deliver?
she said. He thought it sounded provocative, he thought she’d made it deliberately so.

Corey shrugged as though they were asking a complicated, tiring question.
Go away little bug.

They stayed.

They were Coral and Diane, they told him. He told the blonde one she looked familiar and it turned out she had a brother. Brett some-such-shit. Corey nodded as if he knew him, and that put everyone at ease. They talked about what Brett was doing (he was working for their dad at the glass shop, cutting glass to order and slicing his hands up real bad) and they talked about the neighbourhood. They didn’t remember when the store was open, but they remembered playing in the lot.

Coral was a year older than Diane and remembered something about when the store had been open. They all agreed it was a long time ago, but only Corey had any memories of it.

Pop rocks.

Pixie sticks.

Twinkies. Of course, they were still around.

Coral’s hair was black like licorice jelly beans. They all remembered licorice jelly beans, too.

Diane wanted to go for a ride. She widened her blue eyes and bitched about the guy with the thing on his chin—all he cared about was goofing and smoking pot with his loser friends. She dropped her head back in disgust and shook out her long blonde hair, grabbing it with her hand and pulling it forward over one shoulder. Coral looked away when she did that.

“Some other time,” he told her. “I got to go pick something up.”

The two of them walked away, sharing a smoke.

He drove out after that, to the place where he’d seen the deer carcass. It took him a long time to find it again, and by the time he did, it was dark. He drove around town after that, passing the houses he usually watched, feeling the thrum of the engine under his feet, that vibrated up through the shocks under his seats, letting his cock get hard and waiting while the stiffness faded away. It always did, if you waited.

The weight of the deer in the back was good, the truck handled nicely. But it smelled. He did his thing, taking it out to the field. By the time he got home he reeked of smoke and gasoline. He took a shower and dropped dead into bed.

While he lay there, just before sleep, he remembered that Madeleine had moved out of his sister’s apartment. He asked her out, after that. He thought he did. He spent the moments before sleep grabbed him trying to remember if he did—if he really asked her out or if it was just something he thought about while he drove around.

His brain was getting fuzzy. He had to start writing that shit down. Take pictures of himself doing shit. Like he took pictures of the loads he carried in the back of the truck. He’d taken about six of the dead deer in the back of the truck, different angles. It must have been hit by a car because its neck was broken and twisted to the side surreally. There was little blood, most of it was on the muzzle, the rest was on its skinny front legs, where it had fallen maybe when it got hit. He dragged it up into the box by grabbing all four of its legs, and when he dropped there and jumped out, they were still in a little elegant bundle all together. He took a picture of that. And of its neck, up close and far away. A spot where the thing’s fur and flesh had been stripped away.

In all, he figured he had six pics of the dead deer.

There was a picture of Madeleine on the phone, too. He saw it when he was scrolling through. He couldn’t remember when he took it.

The dark-haired one, Coral, lived on Washington in a crappy little house. He saw her sometimes at night when she was walking home from whatever basement she spent her time in. Sometimes he drove past her in the truck. But he never looked out at her. Once she waved, but he didn’t wave back.

Ignore to score.
Amy always said that, whenever a boy phoned the house for her when they’d been in school.
Ignore to score.
Now that she was back living at home, no one called.

He started parking the truck behind the house. He could see it from his bedroom window, when the streetlight caught a corner of the window, it would gleam. He took to looking at it in the dark at all times of the night, sometimes checking to make sure it was there, sometimes to see what it was doing.

Every time, it would just be sitting there, light glinting off the edge of the window. He couldn’t see inside the windows, not from where he was, not at night, not with the light bouncing off the glass, and he was always glad. He didn’t want to look inside.

Some mornings he got up and would sit around with coffee thinking,
I’m going to see a movie today
, or
I think Ma said Benedicts was hiring in the stockroom
. It was on the surface though, what he was really thinking was
not getting back in the truck
. But every morning he did. Sometimes it would smell bad, like odd things burning, or the way it smelled in an old cottage that had been boarded up. Like something had crawled in there and died.

He googled the serial number #31081.

At one time

(
old as the hills, kid this fella’s old as the hills
)

it had actually been a milk delivery truck. That didn’t surprise him. He found a couple of old handwritten sales slips—like the one he had, now kept in his underwear drawer under a couple of old
Playboy
s from the ’60s—one was a bill of sale for
One 1911 flat truck ceriel nummer 31081
AS IS
sold to C. R. Starkweather this day Agust 14, 1954 Lincoln, Neb.

He thought it was funny what could come up on the internet. There was a receipt for three tires from Theo & Sons Auto in Kansas City, Kansas, made out to a Richard Hickcock, K. C., dated Nov 1958. There were other things, too. Some strange. A colour photo, undated, uncredited, with no caption, of his truck (he was sure of it) in the middle of the desert. Scrawled across the side was D E A T H T O P I G S, written in what was probably paint.

It was probably paint.

He was having really bad dreams. He was thinking of selling it.

He was thinking no such thing.

It turned out that he had asked Madeleine out. Or maybe he had. In any case, she called him one night. Maybe bored. Maybe it was a joke. He drove around to pick her up.

“You’re not serious,” she said when she saw him pull up. “There’s no seat.”

He explained about the safety bar.

She said, “Uh uh, no way,” and she started yanking at the sliding door which he’d gallantly opened and closed for her, before getting back in on the driver’s side.

“Uh uh. Open this thing—”

And then because for a brief second it had seemed like things were looking up, only to come crashing down, hard
hard
, he started to cry, feeling horribly sorry for himself. She wasn’t sympathetic. She was just all
uh uh no way nope get me out of here open this door OPEN THIS DOOR.

Another disaster.

Later, feeling sorry for himself and lonely, he was turning off of Washington and he saw the girl, the blonde one, Diane. It was dark on the street, too late for a kid to be out—

He rolled up to her and said, “Hey,”
scaring the shit out of her.

She spun and saw him, alarmed for just a second. Then she laughed, “You scared me” and grabbed her chest. “I almost had a heart attack.”