The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (7 page)

…

October 17th
. Very sick after drinking rank juice off random stewed herbs. Nothing else, though, worse luck.

October 20th
. Can’t sleep. Dreamed of G. I was moving against him, it started to go up a little way, so I thought he wasn’t really dead. Dreadful waking to find M. there instead.

October 23rd
. Can’t sleep. Very bruised and scratched after today. They used to throw themselves downstairs to get rid of it. The trouble is the gravel pit just wasn’t deep enough, plus the bramble bushes kept breaking my fall. There was some sort of body down there, too, seething with white vermin. Maybe it was a goat or a pig or something, but I don’t think it was. I keep thinking it might have been G.

October 31st
. This baby will be the death of me. Would have been. Let’s make that a subjunctive. “Would have been,” not “will.”

November 7th
. It’s all over. I’m still here. Too tired to

November 8th
. Slept for hours. Stronger. I’ve got all the food and drink, and the gun. There’s still some shouting from down there but it’s weaker now. I think he’s almost finished.

November 9th
. Slept for hours. Fever gone. Baked beans for breakfast. More groans started up just now. Never mind. I can wait.

November 10th
. It’s over. I got stuck into his bottle of vodka—it was the demon drink that saved me. He was out mugging—left me up the tree as usual—I drank just enough to raise my courage. Nothing else had worked, so I thought I’d get him to beat me up. When he came back and saw me waving the bottle he was beside himself. I pretended to be drunker than I was and I lay down on
the wooden platform with my arms round my head while he got the boot in. It worked. Not right away but that night.

Meanwhile, M. decided he fancied a drink himself, and very soon he’d polished off the rest of it—more than three-quarters of a bottle. He was singing and sobbing and carrying on, out of his tree with alcohol, and then, when he was standing pissing off the side of the platform, I crept along and gave him a gigantic shove and he really was out of his tree. Crash.

November 13th
. I’ve wrapped your remains in my good blue shirt; sorry I couldn’t let you stay on board, but there’s no future now for any baby aboveground. I’m the end of the line!

This is the last page of my thirtieth-birthday present. When I’ve finished it I’ll wrap the notebook up in six plastic bags, sealing each one with duct tape against the rain, then I’ll bury it in a hole on top of the blue shirt. I don’t know why, as I’m not mad enough to think anybody will ever read it. After that I’m going to buckle on this rucksack of provisions and head north with my gun. Wish me luck. Last line: Good luck, good luck, good luck, good luck, good luck.

W
hen I first met James, he was a meth chef. This year he doesn’t need to cook because he has another guy to do it. The chef has runners—guys who take the city bus from drugstore to drugstore to get antihistamine for our special ingredient, one legal box at a time. Now James is our punisher, our savior, our iron-and-brass man. He gives us our worktable and our tools: pens, tape, change of address cards, Mountain Dew, cell phones, shards, and pipe.

When he’s not cleaning and cleaning, RJ Dumpster dives and rifles through cans and recycling bins for credit-card bills and bank statements, sometimes just feathers of paper, and then he dumps the pile on our worktable. Ripped to the winds, no problem, James says today, his hand heavy on Little Fry’s neck. She bows her head and starts sifting. There’s nothing a tweaker can’t do if she sets her mind to it, James says. Right, Fritzie? he asks me.

It’s blue-snow December outside and it stinks of cigarettes inside. Little Fry needs a shower. I need to get busy, James says to me. He tries to put his hand on my neck, but I shrug him off.

When I first met James, I was Melinda Renée von Muehldorfer
and I lived at 145 South Poplar. My grandma told me once that
von
means my ancestors were German royalty. James says, You’re out of your castle now, babe. After I graduated, ruined my parents’ credit rating, sold everything except my ice skates, and moved in with James at the farm, I was Fritzie, no last name, just a girl good at asking for things.

Little Fry tapes strip to strip until she finds a number or a name or both. Today she looks like a cartoon of someone concentrating, the tip of her tongue working around her lips, her hands shaking. She’s not very good with numbers and names, so she turns her creations over to me.

Look at this, Fritzie, Little Fry says. Here’s one like yours.

She hands me a taped library overdue notice, all of the ragged corners perfectly matched, even the split letters lined up and repaired. Richard von Behren, it says, 653 Oak. Four streets away from my old house. I picture Richard von Behren with one of those regal profiles, a sharp face like a statue’s. He’s clearly in a hurry, so impatient with his pile of mail and bills that he doesn’t save and shred.

Break time. Little Fry always lights up first because she’s the hungriest. She passes to me as we slump on the couch. James walks in to retrieve me and air comes punching into the room. He carries his own weather, RJ said one time when he was gakked.

In bed is where reputation gets iffy. It’s only as good as who’s on top of you, a girl named Share, who is no longer with us, used to say. I wonder what that means vis-à-vis James.

Oh, but James goes down, unlike most guys. When you’re made of iron and brass, I think, sliding up on the pillow, you’re not afraid of anything.

Sex is as selfish as drugs, I think, my nerves undulating inside my arms and legs like earthworms, and I like to be selfish, at least that’s what my parents used to say, screaming outside my bedroom door. James doesn’t have to work hard or long. He just
breathes on me, just shivers me, until I answer back and then James disappears in a suck of air. I don’t open my eyes until he’s in and over me. Then I come again while he watches. The sun sets over his shoulder, a red blazing that seems to start the cornstalks on fire, while the last of the light slides off the side of the barn. James always leaves me gasping. From the bed, I grab his ankles. He puts on his jeans anyway.

I get dressed and go out to the living room. RJ has turned on the light over the barn door, so we know he’s out there with the chef. Little Fry is back at the table, guzzling Mountain Dew. She solves the puzzle of the paper strips. The house shakes with James’s absence, every atom chiding us.

Merilee, she of the cheery name, is James’s wife. She lives elsewhere. Sometime in the morning she comes in her TrailBlazer with Riley, the boy she has with James. Merilee lets Riley lay on the horn until James comes out, pulling cash from his back pocket. She does all right—the bitch, James always says after she leaves. Then he laughs. Today Merilee and James talk at the car window, while Riley pulls at the ends of James’s long hair.

Fritzie, keep going, RJ says. I’m sweeping in front of his mop: double-team double-clean, RJ calls it. He’d lick the floor if he could. Little Fry continues her Good Work at the table, selfless and tireless, like a nun. James sometimes calls her Holy One, she does her one thing so pure.

Oh, Merilee, I think, how have you kept your narrow waist, your big boobs, and your auburn hair to the ripe age of thirty-five? Oh, Merilee, how do you hold on to a husband/boyfriend/father/sugar daddy/fucker like James? Merilee, how? Neither James nor Merilee use anymore. Because of Riley, Merilee says, which James claims too. But I know it’s really because James is CEO. You can’t run a business and do its work at the same time.

Riley cries in the window of the TrailBlazer as it turns around
in the yard slush. James comes into the living room, tracking. Get it, get it, RJ yells, pushing me and my broom along.

RJ, James says, you and Fritzie go to town. He gives us a card and the keys to the old Ninety-Eight.

I’m not done here! RJ yells.

James puts his hand on RJ’s neck and he calms down. I’ll keep an eye on it, James says. Get going.

RJ holds the steering wheel as if it’s made of eggs. If you let me drive, I say, we’ll get there lickety-split. Cops, RJ says.

They’ll think something is really wrong with you, you go like this, I say.

RJ ignores me and starts on the list of his DUIs, DWIs, driving while fucked up, short stints in the pokey, and I mention that these incidents always center on a wayward girl. Correct, RJ says. Women are the bane of my existence. Were.

RJ and I have this same conversation every time we go to town. Everything is always the same, right down to the number and kind of transgressions. I just go with it. RJ has been with James for a few years, so his stories and his thoughts run in the same tight circle. The cornfields finally give out and then we’re chugging through the outskirts of the city so slowly that I have plenty of time to read NO SOLICITING on at least five doors.

I make RJ go to the Hy-Vee on our side of the city proper so I won’t see anyone I know. We do a foilie in the car for courage and strength, RJ says, as if there’s going to be heavy lifting. He’s right about the possibilities, though. One day, when he was gakked and ergo superhuman, RJ sawed down a whole tree and cut it into perfect logs even though our fireplace is broken. But here, well. The city is full of people we’ve never seen and expectations that have passed us by, and we’re never sure how we’re presenting ourselves. To us, we’re just fine.

Inside the store, RJ grabs a cart; I stand on the back and he pushes me. We have a list. We like lists and tasks, but we’re never
very hungry. Uck, RJ says too loudly, looking around at all the food. I know, I say, but whisper, man. What’s first?

When Little Fry eats, it’s always bananas and milk because she heard somewhere that it’s the perfect combination of food. I point out that there’s no protein there, but my opinions on diet don’t carry much weight anymore. So RJ and I load up on bananas and the kiwi James likes, then fruit leather for RJ. We tour meat for James’s chicken parts, then zoom to dairy for Little Fry’s milk and RJ’s string cheese, then over to cereal for Cheerios. I’ve eaten them since I was a baby; my parents have a picture of me sitting in my high chair, those little oaty lifesavers on the tray. Now I like them in a red bowl, one by one, while I work. The last thing for the cart is cigarettes, different brands to please everyone. On the way up to check out we swing by the drug section, and even though I didn’t plan it, I grab some cold medicine and head back to the bathroom. A surprise for James. I put the foil sheets of pills in my pocket and bury the box under paper towels in the trash. RJ rolls us up to the registers. The checker slides our stuff over the reader, but she also takes some time to look us over. She’s seen photos on billboards of guys like RJ, all skinny and snuffly and with that new kind of acne, teeth sprung. I can feel her thinking about calling the manager, but for what? We haven’t done a thing but ride the cart. RJ hasn’t noticed any of this; he’s just holding out the shaking card. I sign in the swiper window—Jacqueline Zingle—and then, thank God, we’re out in the parking lot loading bags. We progress at grandma speed back to James’s.

When we get there, the football players’ Jeep is in the yard. The team is going to a bowl game, and everyone in the city is in a fever. Part of the proceeds from the sale of RJ’s string cheese goes to a fund for the new stadium.

Four huge men stand around the living room, slushing up RJ’s clean floor. Hey, he shouts, and drops the bag he’s carrying.

Let’s keep it moving, James says, hustling RJ and me into the
kitchen. I go back out, though, just to get a gander at all that healthy flesh. The players are ruddy, thick. Veins pop out on their hands. They fill out their team jackets, and their feet are as big as oars in their matching shoes. One of them looks in my direction, but he stops at my hair and frowns. Little Fry couldn’t keep her hands still one night, so I gave her a pair of scissors and closed my eyes. Now my hair is like little blonde eruptions all over my head.

There’s a new guy this time, the biggest one of the group, wearing a hemp necklace and a small gold cross. You take checks? he asks James.

RJ, James, me, even Little Fry crack up. What? the guy asks, looking around.

Don’t be a dipshit, the one black player says. He’s the only gentleman of color, as RJ always calls him, who ever comes around, and he tries hard not to look at anything.

The player who looks like an oversize cowboy, down to the Resistol covering his crew cut, pulls out the cash.

They turn to leave, but Player #4, a mammoth redheaded sad sack, looks at me again, this time giving me a morose stare. I gasp. It’s Jorge, my conversation partner from junior year Spanish. I can’t remember his real name.
Buenas noches
, Marita, he says, before heading toward the door.

Shit, James says, looking first at me and then at the wide back of Jorge.

Marita, Little Fry says after they go. Marita! Marita! she calls, picking up the pipe. RJ, Little Fry, and I retire to the sofa. James goes into his room and slams his door.

When I first moved in, James said, No way do you go upstairs. Of course I go.

There are four freezing bedrooms and an old bathroom with the sink torn out and a shower that drips. The bedrooms are all the same size, one in each corner, but in each one the windows
look out on something different: barnyard, road, clump of trees, pasture. You can go from room to room, as I have, and get a 360-degree view of where you are. It’s the opposite of how all of us downstairs live, in our closed fist of work, and that’s why James doesn’t want us up here.

I figured I’d find old stuff up here like newspapers from World War II or tickets to a county fair or receipts for horses and cows, but the place looks as if RJ’s been at it. Not a nail or a shoelace, but I did find a honey-colored curl of hair in a closet once. If I were a different kind of girl, I would have kept it.

I’m up here during a day sometime after the football players’ visit, after break time.
Dormitorio
, I say to each bedroom;
ventana
to each window;
árboles
, I say out one window, then
camino
out another one,
pasto
where the cows would be. Translate “barnyard,” Marita,
por favor
.